CANTONESE ELECTRIC GODS

When she was a girl San-min saw her father explode. It was the moment he kissed the neon. A shower of sparks – flames all across the corrugated rooftops of the urban village. Old Cantonese walls, alleyways where girls waited for business, roads clogged with tangled-together bicycles, networks of the rubber tendrils of the power... Continue Reading →

SHORT FICTION – SUNKISSER

They had taken a human prisoner, which at once Vya was interested in, too interested in, she knew, perversely so, everyone else knew, but there was no helping it, for long ago she had devoted herself to the Almighty Vhod, who had decreed that knowledge was the first objective, and so it was, wasn’t it,... Continue Reading →

THE GHOST OF TSINTAU

It is half past seven in the evening, Nanking time, and Captain Hans von Kaulbach stands near the stern of the SMS Lettow-Vorbeck, surveying the dismal fog that wreathes the Bay of Tsintau, his arms stiff behind his back and a cigarette between his teeth. The ship sits uneasily, a grey silhouette as calm as... Continue Reading →

THE FIRST WAR

I tried as hard as I could to save them. You understand, that was the urge they’d given me – they had filled me with the right kind of chemicals and given me the meat to match, and told me to go out and bring our lads back alive. So that was what I did.... Continue Reading →

The Cult of the Patchwork – Chinese Modernity (1978-2012) and the Holy Roman Empire

What was so great, exactly, about China before Xi Jinping? We live in an era of widespread political nostalgia, from misplaced American or British fantasies about the civilised, sensible pre-Trump or Brexit eras, to the nationalist dreams of pre-immigration pristine nationhood of the European pseudo-fascists. Cosplay politicians, dressed as past successes, seek to square fleeting,... Continue Reading →

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