New Ghosts, Old Dreams

by Geremie R. Barmé, Linda Jaivin

An anthology of fiction, poetry, songs, speeches, satire, and newspaper articles from the 1980s in China captures the feelings of students, scholars, journalists, and activists about the Tiananmen Square incident

Genres: China, Nonfiction, History

515 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

Geremie R. Barmé is an historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, translator and web-journal editor who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early modern period (1600s) to the present. He is Founding Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World in the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, The Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, where he also edits the online e-journal China Heritage Quarterly.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

actually, this is by Geremie and myself - it's one of the books of which I'm most proud. An anthology of writings from China of which Professor Perry Link wrote: 'this book will dwarf the dozens of others that have appeared on the Tiananmen massacre and related events... The selections are expertly chosen, smoothly translated, and introduced by Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin, whose knowledge of contemporary Chinese urban culture is unmatched in the Western world.'

[Zoë Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve found New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices by Gernemie Barme and Linda Jaivin after I leaned about Linda Jaivin when I read 《末日幸存者的独白》by Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2010, about his experience of the '89 Democracy Movement, in which Liu mentioned that he’d declined Linda’s suggestion to hide in the Australian Embassy in Beijing after he helped organize the students to withdraw from the Tiananmen Square protests on June the 4th, 1989. New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices is a marvelous book that records the Chinese views of the Tiananmen Square protests before and during the Tiananmen Square protests. It’s an anthology of fiction and nonfiction pieces and poems by well-known and little-known authors. Without the editors’ insightfulness and efforts, those Chinese thoughts wouldn’t have been spread out of China. I’m especially fond of some of Liu’s lines: “because throughout our long feudal history, Chinses intellectuals were never independent thinkers, but ‘court literati.’” It’s a heavy-hearted history and reality; however, at least some of the intellectuals have gotten themselves out of the “court literati.” Liu Xiaobo was one of them, who was definitely a dependent thinker and fought for a democratic China but died because of his dependent thoughts.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent translations.