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This paper examines translation and transcultural remembrance of the 1918-19 Great Influenza or the more often yet mistakenly called "Spanish flu" for lessons to combat COVID-19 in Chinese online media. It presents a case study of "covert transediting" in the "Shanghai Observer," i.e., a journalistic opinion that interweaves Chinese renderings of selected excerpts from four British and American media texts. With an integrated approach to travelling memory (Erll, Astrid. 2011. Travelling memory. "Parallax" 17(4). 4-18) via transediting, our analysis shows that the transeditor does not only choose source texts in terms of media and content, but also selectively reframes the "Spanish flu" memory for lesson learning in conjunction with the mainstream Chinese discourse and practice of COVID-19 control. It unveils how the Great Influenza is thus transculturally remembered in more simplified and ideologically agreeable manners through omission, summary translation, and transformation, while faithful transference is not sheerly dispensed. We contend that transcultural remembrance via transediting is a purposive, socio-culturally shaped practice involving interrelations and interactions of manifold factors, and we need a more complex approach to the politics of memory in translation. Journalistic translation, which is mostly covert and transediting, is among different genres of translation that shape transcultural memory; more research in their interplay is called for.

This paper explores the development of religious traditions in the Neolithic and Bronze Age of northern China. It applies the cognitive anthropological theory of Divergent Modes of Religiosity (DMR) for the first time in this part of the world. DMR theory frames ritual behavior in two distinct modes, one that is more traumatic/emotional and occurs less frequently (imagistic rituals) and another that is more placid and occurs more frequently (doctrinal rituals). Various archaeological and historic sources indicate that violent imagistic rituals involving human sacrifice and feasting began deep in the Neolithic; but religion did not become more tame when societies entered the Bronze Age, as predicted by DMR theory. Instead, violent imagistic rituals continued and became arguably more brutal. The application of DMR theory here is a useful means to explore the challenging topic of religious violence and to reveal biases in the treatment of ritual and religion in Shang studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the scar literature of the early 1980s, fiction and fictionalised autobiography have played an important role in bringing to light the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution. However, these texts remained within a well-defined framework in which the political system itself was not questioned. Over the last decade, by contrast, the Chinese literary field has focused more specifically on the 1950s, with works such as Yang Xianhui's Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Tianjin, 2002), and Yang Jisheng's Tombstone (Hong Kong, 2008). This paper focuses on Yan Lianke's Four Books (Hong Kong, 2010), a full-fledged fictionalisation in a fantastic mode of the famine of the Great Leap Forward in a village on the Yellow River. Considering literature in the context of theories of the public sphere, it suggests that Yan's book aims to broaden decisively the discussion on certain previously out-of-bounds aspects of the Mao era, an aim only partially thwarted by its failure to be published within mainland China. Four Books, like Yang Jisheng and Yang Xianhui's works, thus represents an attempt to call into question the original legitimacy of the PRC polity and to create debate within the Chinese-speaking public sphere on the foundations of the current regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]