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Chris Chien reviews Florence Mok, Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97

Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97. Florence Mok. Manchester University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781526158192. Price: £85.00  | Reviewed by Chris Chien

Florence Mok’s monograph Covert Colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97 is an important study of how the British colonial regime aimed to foster a sense of local identity as a strategy to subdue the threat of revolutionary anti-colonial movements that swept through the Third World during the Cold War. Mok examines why Hong Kong stood apart as a bastion of relative colonial stability amongst the decolonizing tumult of the early Cold War through case studies of political flashpoints in the period after the city’s twin anti-colonial uprisings of 1966 and 1967. The book’s central contention is that British colonial statecraft of this period centered on impeding domestic political ferment by creating pressure valves for grievances through the creation of avenues for Hong Kong people to communicate directly with the government.  

This is what Mok calls “covert colonialism,” which took the form of surreptitious measurings of public opinion on controversial social issues and government policy by MOOD (Movement of Opinion Direction) and Town Talk survey programs, which were successful in re-instilling colonial state legitimacy as the guarantor of social stability in the eyes of the Hong Kong people. This bureaucratic instrument allowed the state to project the appearance of genuine responsiveness to public opinion, which generated a distinct and local civic identity that transformed encroaching revolutionary fervor, incited by both PRC Maoists and KMT Nationalists, into a largely subdued political culture that often took the form of stability-seeking conservatism. Mok argues that the creation of informal avenues for political participation contradicts the traditional sociological characterization of Hong Kong as a “minimally-integrated social-political system,” where the colonial regime was largely unimpeded in its governance and society was composed of apolitical “utilitarianistic familism” dominated by self-interest and family interdependence rather than reliance on the state (11). In encouraging Hong Kong Chinese to engage with the colonial state, covert colonialism, in Mok’s rendering, created the conditions for a more confident and outspoken Hong Kong political culture. 

The foremost strength of the book is Mok’s archive: a newly declassified trove of government records centering on a largely ignored covert colonial domestic surveillance program. The book’s introduction and first chapter establish the framework of covert colonialism and explain how Mok understands it to relate to Hong Kong political culture through the construction of the concept of “public opinion.” Mok’s focus on the 1970s in Hong Kong political culture, less analyzed than the sensational riots of the 50s and 60s, results in a unique set of case studies through which to explore covert colonialism in the subsequent seven chapters. While Mok engages popular episodes such as the movement for Chinese as an official language, she also eschews well-documented events such as the 1966 Star Ferry and 1967 Riots so as to focus on more subdued developments in the city’s political culture at large, such as the 1973 campaign against telephone rate increases. This is a valuable collection of lesser-known histories of resistance in Hong Kong history that, in Mok’s rendering, demonstrate how “covert colonialism” was a central mechanism through which colonial officials could sincerely consider public opinion and Hong Kong people could influence the outcome of government policy. Rather than coopting social struggle, covert colonialism, Mok argues, was a more effective avenue for affecting colonial decision-making in contrast to overtly political practices such as rallies, sit-ins, and hunger strikes that were unacceptable to officials and in a society largely allergic to the tumult of the 1960s.

Issues arise with two central concepts to Mok’s analysis: decolonization and democratization. Mok adopts the historiographical framing common within Hong Kong Studies and forwarded by scholars such as Leo Goodstadt, John Darwin, and Chi-kwan Mark that characterizes the city as having been “decolonised” at various points in the Cold War because of the British “loss of means and will” to exercise power or the slow but formal “devolution of power” from the imperial core to the local government (7). Throughout the text, Mok describes covert colonialism’s effect of opening more direct avenues for communication between state and society as reflecting the colonial regime’s genuine willingness to be influenced by the opinions of the populace. She characterizes this as indicating “some degree of ‘decolonisation’ in the bureaucratic mentality” (26; quotation marks in original). The unqualified use of the quotation marks suggests that she is deploying a different conception of the term decolonisation, one that is unique to Hong Kong and which describes more of a top-down “decolonising” initiative compared to the bottom-up revolutions elsewhere in the Third World.

The concept that colonial rulers make political calculations based on maintaining stability and not angering too large a portion of its subjects is not particularly novel for colonial contexts. This consultative mechanism—or even the notion that officials included public sentiment in their political calculations more generally—does not indicate that Hong Kong people became a “part of the policymaking process” (25) and certainly does not necessarily indicate a “decolonising” of or by the colonial state. Given that Mok intends to examine, in part, why Hong Kong was not swept up in the wave of radical decolonizing movements of the Cold War period, it might have been better for Mok to clarify how this concept is being used in the context of the book.

For instance, in Chapter 2, which covers the Chinese language movement, Mok suggests that covert colonialism’s ability to absorb select public opinions to inform policy indicated “widened channels of political participation and the potential for ‘decolonisation’ of the mentalities of bureaucrats” (78; quotation marks in the original). In this way, she attributes decolonisation to the reformist colonial state’s flexibility in accommodating equity and inclusiveness. Acceding to the movement’s demand for Chinese language equality in governance made it so that, according to Mok, “more Chinese-speaking could now serve the government,” which was a precondition for “a more open political culture” (78). To be sure, one could understand this as the success of a specific political campaign by Hong Kong people but it is certainly not clear that it is decolonisation by any measure. Mok’s focus on Hong Kong’s unique ‘decolonisation’ that eschewed the forms of revolutionary nationalism more familiar in other parts of Asia and Africa also gives short shrift to radical groups of working class organizers, youths, and students who were engaged directly with the radical decolonization movements of their times such as the 70’s Biweekly group.[1] Mok only gestures to this broad gathering of Maoists, anarchists, and Trotskyists (who frequently enacted staunch anti-colonial and decolonizing actions) twice in passing during her discussion of the anti-corruption movement (Chapter 3) and the campaign against telephone rate increases (Chapter 4).[2] A more thorough meditation on what decolonization means in the book and how it is being deployed would help to avoid a demand for more coverage of actual anti-colonial forces in Hong Kong in this period.

A similar slippage occurs when discussing the concept of “democratisation” in Hong Kong. Mok notes that the covert solicitation of public opinion constituted “a substitute for representative democracy, enabling the undemocratic colonial government to widen the channels of political participation for ordinary people in a state-controlled manner without provoking China’s resistance nor politicising the Hong Kong Chinese” (17). Taking the British at their word—that they wanted to democratize Hong Kong but they were hamstrung by the PRC and that a wide swath of Hong Kong society said in surveys that they were against the potential chaos of such a process—suggests an implicit trust in the good intentions of the colonial regime. At base, Mok argues that British-initiated consultative governance in the form of covert colonialism, when it ignored popular opinion, did so largely against its will: “The wider interest of the British government and the state of Sino-British relations outweighed the importance of shifting popular sentiment in the policymaking process” (256). And, even as it developed from surveillance programs into the creation of local advisory bodies, in essence covert colonialism “pave[d] the way for further democratisation” (234).[3]

While it is valuable to understand the ruling elite’s view of these political episodes and how they evolved over time, such characterizations should not be taken at face value, as is often the case throughout each chapter. Moreover, even sections on political culture and grassroots actions still rely largely on characterizations from colonial reports rather than the political actors themselves. This citational practice has the effect of centralizing an understanding of the events through British bureaucratic perspectives. This is especially troublesome since Mok helpfully goes to great lengths to detail the logistical and methodological difficulties and unscientific nature of these qualitative, covert surveys in the first place. For instance, in the discussion of the anti-corruption movement in Chapter 3, Mok implies that changes in social attitudes towards speaking out directly to colonial officials was possible under a flawed but more open system of British liberalism. Thus, a development in Hong Kong political culture required a relatively straightforward path out of the “fatalism inherited from traditional attitudes formed by experience under successive Chinese governments…” under which [middle-aged and elderly groups] did not question “the wrongs of officialdom, or contest its actions.”  These are phrases Mok pulls directly from a colonial MOOD report, which takes at face value colonial officials’ sweeping, racialized generalization of Chinese social relations to the state. These merely echo the narrative of “Oriental tyranny” that Chinese must transcend, or out of which they must be benevolently lead. A more critical stance towards characterizations made in colonial surveillance reports, along with a broader array of secondary sources, would add depth to an analysis that is largely dependent on the subjective perceptions and renderings of whichever colonial bureaucrat assembled the report.

What I find most provocative and useful in Mok’s book is the subterranean contention that covert colonialism was, on balance, a net positive for Hong Kong society. She crucially traces an understudied period in the development of Hong Kong’s historical identity (the liberal faction of which rose to prominence in the protest movements of the 2000s and 2010s) and thereby provides another missing piece in the fuller picture of Hong Kong’s sometimes puzzling political culture. Assessing “positive” outcomes of European colonization is not novel: Arif Dirlik, in one of his last writings, discussed the way in which Taiwan was “the land colonialisms made.” He argues that for Taiwan and Hong Kong, the experience of successive colonialisms as a “source of historical identity” is largely antithetical to the anti-hegemonic impulses of postcolonial studies, which often obscures how “the colonizer’s culture did indeed transform the colonized, setting them in new historical directions, even if the directions taken were not what the colonizers had expected them to be.”[4]  For Hong Kong, this has often manifested as colonial nostalgia, but as Dirlik notes, the struggle against colonialism itself is also part of this potential wellspring of colonized historical identity. The study of the development of political culture under colonization, as with Mok’s book, has the potential to prepare a people to put robust democratic and other liberatory practices into action.

Though contemporary politics is beyond the purview of her book, Mok does gesture to the present in her conclusion. In Hong Kong’s current era of intense political repression and social movement abeyance, her work encourages us to adjust our gaze toward the way in which political cultures can and do develop outside the familiar containers of political parties, rallies, and riots. As many in Hong Kong are now forced underground to recuperate, read and collectively build political consciousness (whether through the study of histories of Third World decolonizing radicalisms or not), Covert Colonialism is a welcome reminder to look beyond recognizable forms, and that no matter the repression, political culture is not dead in the city after 2020—just transforming.

 

Chris Chien is a Postdoctoral Associate in Transnational Asian Studies at Tulane University and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University. His book project examines commodities, logistical infrastructure, and visual regimes across the transpacific in order to critically assess the continuities and disjunctures of the Cold War with today’s so-called “New Cold War” between the U.S. and China. His writing has appeared in Amerasia, Verge: Global Asias, positions: asia critique, The Funambulist, The Nation, and Jacobin. He is an organizer and editor with Lausan Collective.

Notes

[1] Lu Pan’s recently released edited collection on 70’s Biweekly (along with her earlier articles about 70’s) provides a powerful history of grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-colonial activism in the city. See: Pan, Lu, ed. The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. 1st ed. Hong Kong University Press, 2023 and Tam, Gina Anne. “Gina Anne Tam Reviews The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong.” positions politics: praxis (blog), November 27, 2023. https://positionspolitics.org/gina-ann-tam-reviews-the-70s-biweekly-social-activism-and-alternative-cultural-production-in-1970s-hong-kong/.

[2] Scholars such as Au Loong-yu and Promise Li have also chronicled the activities of 70’s Biweekly. These sources could have helped to supplement an understanding of the development of anti-colonial political culture in Hong Kong’s tumultuous 70s. See: Au, Loong-Yu. Hong Kong in Revolt. London: Pluto Press, 2020 and Promise Li, “The Radical ’70s Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left.” The Nation. April 17, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hong-kong-leftists-1970s/

[3] An interesting comparison, in this respect, would be the former democratic centralism of the Cold War PRC as well as the contemporary PRC’s system of consultative democracy and “whole process people’s democracy.”

[4] Dirlik, Arif. “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made.” Boundary 2 45, no. 3 (August 2018): 3. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-6915545

 

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Fan Yang, Back to the Future: A Walk through Huaqiangbei in 2025

As someone who grew up in Shenzhen in the 1980s-1990s and has lived in the US since 2000, I’ve come to see returning to the Special Economic Zone today as a journey “back to the future.” During my last trip there, I walked down the “memory lane” of Huaqiangbei (Huaqiang North Road, or HQB), the place once known for Shanzhai (or “knockoff”) cell phones back in the early 2000s but that was re-branded around 2015 as China’s “No. 1 Electronics Street.” To many, HQB emblematizes the city’s 40-year history borne of China’s post-1978 Reform and Opening Up. As I found my way there just after the Chinese New Year in 2025, the comingled notion of time – simultaneously captured in the “back to” and “the future” – was precisely what I experienced. 

It was one of those warm winter afternoons in southern China, now designated as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). I took the East Rail Line from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) (where I had been a visiting scholar) with an old friend from Shenzhen, a CUHK alumna who now works at Amazon Web Services in Hong Kong. We were going to Shenzhen to have dinner with friends from our elementary and high schools. Arriving at Lok Ma Chau, we joined the crowd heading “up” – what the Hong Kong locals would say, referring to the geographical movement up north to the mainland. Back when I first arrived in Shenzhen in 1986, visiting Hong Kong (or even purchasing goods from there at duty-free stores in the city) was an encounter with the more modern, the more advanced, the more “developed” world – “the future.” These days, however, more people regularly travel from Hong Kong (including Hong Kong natives and residents originally from mainland) to Shenzhen for leisure, entertainment, and consumption in general. As friends in Hong Kong have repeatedly told me, everything is “half-price” once you cross the border, and the service is better and choices more abundant. Many have opted to live in Shenzhen and commute to Hong Kong to cut the costs of living, hailing the GBA into everyday being. 

At the Futian customs, we helped two Korean youths who spoke some Chinese with translation; they had to turn back and get their 10-day visa-free entry – newly installed by the central government to attract foreign tourists – at another checkpoint in Huanggang instead of the one at Futian. After getting through the busy customs fairly quickly, we arrived at the Shenzhen metro right at the exit. I helped my friend reconfigure her Hong Kong Alipay to take the metro and a few stops later, we arrived at the Shenzhen Civic Center. We stopped at Gaga (Gaga 鲜语, with no relation to Lady Gaga, to my knowledge). With over 20 branches in the city and a dozen more elsewhere, this woman-owned Shenzhen chain inspired by street cafés in Europe was established in 2010 and had become my go-to spot for salads, previously hard to find in China. Offering a wide variety of light fare, elegant décor, and a come-at-any-time atmosphere, Gaga has a bold mission – “to provide high-quality lifestyle solutions for China’s 400 million middle-class people.” 

Fueled by my Sangria-inspired fusion tea made with fresh fruits, I decided to pay a visit to HQB before dinner time. Friends had warned me that the stores might not be open, as most migrant workers in Shenzhen typically return to their hometowns located elsewhere in China during the New Year period. But I decided to try my luck. When I arrived at the Northern end of the HQB road, I recalled that back in 2015 the street was still a site for the construction of the subway before it was transformed into a pedestrian street in 2017. Upon exiting the HQB station, the first thing that caught my attention was the busy DJI (大疆) store at Manha Electronics Plaza, packed with customers checking out the newest line of products released by the world’s leading manufacturer for consumer drones. A friend working as a partner at the law firm representing DJI had recently told me that the company also acquired Hasselblad, the premium brand-name camera maker from Sweden, in 2023. With the slogan “The Future of Possible,” the Shenzhen company founded by the Hangzhou native Wang Tao, who got his degree in Hong Kong, is now the symbol of the so-called “low-altitude economy” being promoted since 2024, highlighting drones and electric Vertical Take-off and Landing aircrafts (or eVTOLs) as its “new-quality productive force” (新质生产力). Sure enough, right outside the DJI store were rows of festively decorated stands with signs proclaiming “Huaqiangbei New-Quality Happy New Year” and slogans promoting a “state subsidy” supporting upgrades of electronics and appliances. In the economic downturn that was seemingly on the minds of just about everyone I had met in the past two months, attempts like this to stimulate domestic consumption can come as no surprise. 

I then came upon one of the Steinway pianos stationed on the roadside for anyone interested in playing. When a little girl traveling with her dad finished her song, I took my turn. Another woman patiently waited to play for her male companion. As I said goodbye to the English tagline on the piano — “I love Huaqiangbei. Play me, I’m Yours” — I remembered that the world-famous pianist, Li Yundi, the youngest to win the International Chopin Piano Competition, originally trained with a Shenzhen-based music teacher. Moments later, I saw one of those “Public Welfare Piano Rooms” where you can book a 30-minute slot via WeChat and practice for free. I have yet to encounter anything like this in the Euro-American cities that I have visited, and would be curious to see if they might appear sometime in the future…

Next to the piano parlor is a vending station called “Robohub” advertising an appetizing Caramel Macchiato. The density of places where one can get coffee or milk tea in Shenzhen has been part of my amazement on this trip. (Intrigued by the ubiquity of Luckin Coffee, a Singapore-originated chain that is now a major rival of Starbucks at least in the number of branches, I tried some of its specialty drinks and understood why several of my friends have come to like it better than Starbucks. Not only does it provide varieties unavailable at Starbucks at a fraction of the latter’s price, like many other stores it’s 100% integrated with AliPay and WeChat Pay, allowing customers to locate branches and pick up orders super-fast and on the go.)

Not far from the piano room and the Robohub were some delivery workers in Meituan yellow vests and helmets resting on their e-bikes, waiting for orders. Part of living in China’s highly efficient platform economy entails at once being awed by the speed with which orders can appear at one’s doorstep and lamenting the tremendous pressure that the algorithmic regime exerts on the riders. I was reminded of a film I saw on the plane, 《逆行人生》（Upstream）, about a middle-aged computer programmer getting laid off and becoming a delivery worker to support his three-generational family. Directed by the comedian XU Zheng and starring himself and the actress XIN Zhilei (famous for her role in the wildly popular TV show Blossoms Shanghai in 2024), the film has brought the daily struggles of delivery workers – previously a topic of scholarly research and investigative journalism – into cinematic visibility. To me, the film’s apparent effort in injecting a kind of “positive energy” into an economic depression was less interesting than the plot twist that, while clumsy at his new job at the beginning, the programmer later developed an app to help riders navigate the city streets. To help him perfect it, another high-earning rider gifted him a notebook filled with sketches of secret “fast routes” – arguably a subtle tribute to the embodied intelligence of delivery workers, often under-recognized by “knowledge workers” like the programmer.    

Soon after, I found myself at the door of the HQB Museum, established in 2020. Upon exiting the elevator on the fifth floor of the “Modern Window Commercial Plaza” – translated from its Chinese name “现代之窗商业广场”) – that houses it, a giagantic lit-up circuit board on one side of the wall immediately caught my attention.

As colorful lights appear on the circuit indicating paths toward different directions, I thought of anthropologist Max Hirsh’s point that special border zones like Shenzhen tend to orient themselves spatially around infrastructures of mobility. The circuit wall immediately brought to mind this heightened attention to infrastructural linkages, given HBQ’s status as a key node in the global network of digital production. The more recent GBA (Greater Bay Area) discourse has also emphasized fast-improving connectivity via railways, highways, ports, bridges, and tunnels between Shenzhen – the “core engine” – and another eight Southern cities along with the special regions of Hong Kong and Macao.

 If the circuit wall resembled a map, its adjacent ceiling, also lit with bright lights, was more reminiscent of a Computer Processing Unit (CPU), with sparkly transistors of various sizes protruding downward. It also looked quite like a city’s urban planning model turned upside down and shown in night mode. On the floor, the reflective black surface with crisscrossing white lines extended this digital “feel” to the three-dimensional space of the entire room – properly named the “Impression Hall.” I was for sure impressed by the apparent attempt to enact “the city as a medium” metaphor discussed by theorists such as Fredrick Kittler. More precisely, it is the “city as a computer” vision that has seemingly informed the design of the museum in ways that also reflect the aspiration of Shenzhen to evolve toward a “smart city” with an even deeper integration of information technologies with the built environment, as may be seen in the use of AI to map out traffic routes for drones.

Just as I sensed that there was something missing, I was drawn to the various panels on the wall opposite to the circuit board, titled “Memories of HQB (我，在华强北)” featuring pictures taken at HQB of workers, pedestrians, politicians, students. The central panel highlights footage ranging from elementary schoolers’ speech contests about Shenzhen’s technological development to construction workers playing the pianos at HQB. I noticed that some of the clips showcasing a worker disassembling a circuit board seemed to have come from another “main melody” (state-sponsored mainstream) film I saw on the plane, 《奇迹·笨小孩》(Nice View), a heart-wrenching worker-turned-entrepreneur story based in HQB, starring youth favorite 易烊千玺 [Jackson Yee]. After much struggle, the main character and the group of “lumpen proletariats” (such as a laid-off worker with hearing impairment and a veteran boxer) that have come to his aid succeed in launching a company specializing in e-waste processing and recycling.

It suddenly dawned on me that what was obscured in the narratives of both the film and the HQB museum was the memory of Shanzhai as a cultural practice. Back in the early 2000s, as communication scholars such as Jack Qiu and Cara Wallis have observed, HQB was full of small shops selling knockoff brand-name electronics, especially cell phones, that boasted features such as low costs, long-lasting battery, striking aesthetics (take “iPhome,” for example), and even subwoofers, that were popular among rural-to-urban migrant workers. This distinctive manifestation of the globalizing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Regime has been subsumed in a nation-branding discourse of “From Made in China to Created in China” (从中国制造到中国创造) that seeks to transform Shanzhai culture into economic value.

A similar kind of absorption is arguably at work at the HQB museum. As I followed the moving images to “enter the past” through a “Time Corridor,” I walked through four rooms, dedicated to Dream of Development, Dream of Entrepreneurship, Dream of Innovation, and Dream of the Future  (发展梦, 创业梦, 创新梦,未来梦), respectively. In the “Entrepreneurship” room, I saw a family posing for pictures in front of a mock HQB stall from the Shanzhai era, with a sign above saying “Store of a Future Billionaire” and a variety of phones that would have been characterized as Shanzhai phones displayed in the counter below. Just like in Nice View, there was a nod to HQB’s Shanzhai past, but the emphasis was without a doubt placed on the future prospect of entrepreneurship.

It was in the “Innovation Dream” section that I came upon “From Made in China to Created in China” again, though the Chinese for “Created in China” was no longer “中国创造” (“Created in China,” in terms of brands) but “中国智造” (or “Made in China Intelligently”). “Learning is Our Way (学习是我们的方法),” reads another sign on the same wall. Below, families with kids picked up optical lenses through which to view the inner make-up of five objects: a color TV, a mobile phone, a drone, a robot, and a 5G base station, under the labels “Assembly and Processing,” “Innovation and Creation,” “Product Development,” “Innovation and Creation,” (again) and “Intelligent Upgrade.” It was not until I accessed the online exhibition after I’d left the exhibition that I noticed the second label was originally “模仿制造(Imitation and Making),” referencing the Shanzhai phase that was rendered invisible in the physical space.

In many ways, the HQB museum has told the story of HQB – and in turn, Shenzhen – through a linear frame: once a major site for manufacturing and distributing electronics, it later became the birthplace of tech giants like Tencent and Huawei, and has now risen as an innovation hub for drones, robotics, and electric vehicles. It is perhaps understandable that the Shanzhai moment had to be left out, because it was simultaneously a moment of “backward” copycatting and “forward” technological tinkering. Its mixture of different temporalities defies the strict progression characterized by “From Made in China to Made in China Intelligently.” 

After browsing through more demonstrations of robots and videos of their creators, I arrived at the restroom which had a similar décor to that of the Impression Hall. The design was even carried into the interior of the ladies’ room, with the wall above the toilet filled with old-school game consoles and the walls next to the sink painted with colorful circuit boards. On my way out, I noticed the Conclusion panel describing a “new historical starting point” for Shenzhen, with the combination of the GBA development and the city’s status as “a pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” I picked up a brochure with the tagline, “Link the Future with Memory (用记忆链接未来)” and pondered on what it might mean.

Shannon Mattern reminds us in “A City is Not a Computer” that the computational city metaphor can obscure “the countless other forms of data and sites of intelligence-generation in the city.” Even though the HQB museum has made an attempt to capture the memories of the place, I couldn’t help but wonder about an alternative storyline that does not so readily subscribe to an entrepreneurial future but pays closer attention to the meanings of Shanzhai, its shifting cultural valences, its vast appeal among migrant workers, and its negotiations with the global IPR regime. How might its aesthetics differ from that of the circuit board wall, CPU ceiling, and futuristic bathrooms?

Back on HQB road, before I used my Alipay app to hail an electric taxi to go to my dinner, I saw several fenced-in areas displaying some smart-looking eVTOLs, with signs announcing “low-altitude economy exhibition halls coming soon.” My trip back to “the future,” as it were, will have to continue upon my next return.

 

Fan YANG is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is Affiliate Faculty at the Asian Studies Program and the PhD Program in Language, Literacy, and Culture. Author of Disorienting Politics:  Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (2024) and Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016), she is now working on a new book entitled Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South.

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Seuty Sabur, This is not my Revolution: Aspiration, Erasure, and the Political Field in the Post-July Uprising Bangladesh

On the morning of July 18, 2024, our phones were suddenly flooded with images of injured students – our campus was under attack. Students protesting the nationwide escalation of police brutality against the quota-reform movement were being met with tear gas and bullets. Soon, locals and students from other private universities rushed to their aid, fighting back the police and Awami League (AL) goons; a mass uprising was unfolding before our eyes. Attempts to suppress the rebellion led to grotesque violence, turning the tide against the 15-year-long regime that would finally topple on August 5, claiming over a thousand lives and leaving some 11,000 injured along the way.[1]

Looking back, walking with my comrades amidst the mayhem alongside thousands of injured but defiant students feels like a surreal fever dream. To this day, it is hard to believe that we survived that war zone unscathed. Private university students must have been either remarkably brave or foolish to join a battle where they had nothing to win and everything to lose, given how few aimed to join the civil service. Their courage compelled us to stand by them and against the brutality of a regime that was quickly spiraling beyond all control.

As an activist and academic writing about gender, class, and social movements for over a decade, I am familiar with the ‘transversal’ nature of contemporary movements (Yuval-Davis, 1997). It is crucial to recognize the fluid nature of the ‘political field’[2] in which these forces battle, capable of pushing these movements from left to right at any time. The road from the ‘Anti-Discrimination Student Movement’ to the July Uprising was no different. These fields are contoured by the uneven distribution of power, capacities, opportunities, and everyday interactions among actors – civil society, donors, parties, the state, and transnational forces – setting limits on ‘legitimate’ ways of doing politics.  This essay explores these interactions, addressing the aspirations behind the July Uprising and the inevitable erasures they entailed.

It all began with the demand to cut back on the 56% quotas in the Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) exams, in particular the 30% reserved for the 1971 war veterans and their descendants, which many saw as a ‘loyalty scheme’ for the AL. Students had been pursuing quota reform since 2013, with the movement gaining momentum in 2018 and reigniting in June 2024. Unable to quell the protests, the High Court eventually ruled in favour of reform in a desperate attempt at appeasement. However, that ‘victory’ came at a hefty price: reserving only 5% for freedom fighters, 1% for indigenous communities, and 1% for third gender people and people with disabilities. Women and minorities were excluded altogether, a concession to the majoritarian sentiments that underlay the movement from the beginning, with many young protestors still spellbound by the neoliberal illusion of ‘meritocracy.’

To understand how it could all go so far, we must recognise that Bangladesh was established on the principle of liberation from economic deprivation. By the turn of the 20th century, an educated Bengali Muslim middle class had entered the wage economy, whose aspirations and struggle for recognition necessitated a new social contract, ultimately leading to widespread support for the Pakistan movement. Over the next two decades, that support dwindled in the face of what could be called Pakistani ‘internal’ colonialism, giving birth to secular Bengali nationalism as an “antisystemic political programme” and a radical mobilizing tool until the liberation war of 1971, after which it was quickly appropriated to legitimize the new state elite (Van Schendel, 2001). Stagnant industrial development under successive colonial regimes had failed to cultivate a ‘homegrown’ capitalist class, and it was the civil-military-bureaucratic alliance that would dominate the political process in the new nation (Ahmed, 2009). Tertiary education, burgeoning employment opportunities, and social networks within civil-bureaucratic circles enabled a convergence of capitals (Sabur, 2014), paving the way for the Bengali Muslim middle-class to hegemonize the right to articulate the nation, marginalizing those who lacked access to the state (Sabur, 2020). Fifty years later, the quota-reform movement was powered by a similar narrative of deprivation. This was a struggle for recognition by a new aspiring middle class, seeking a new settlement that can only be established on the ruins of the old.

Once again, middle-class aspirations turned to education and the state. Amid skyrocketing inflation and years of ‘jobless growth,’ the BCS offered a lifeline for the thousands of aspiring graduates without the necessary social, cultural, and economic capital, striving to enter a precarious wage economy; the 56% quota system stood in their way. However, this was not the only point of contention. The all-consuming rage of July was also fed by visceral memories of repression, juxtaposed against the selective nationalist history parroted by the AL regime for 15 years. For these students, 1971 was a story in textbooks that they had come to mistrust. One-party rule was all many of them had ever known. They did not witness the 1990 mass uprising that toppled autocratic rule, nor the brief period of functional democracy under the BNP.[3]-AL cycle. However, they did see the co-optation of Shahbag in 2013 and the brutal suppression of the quota reform and road safety movements in 2018. The regime’s ability to get away with sham elections, mass incarceration and extrajudicial killings had rendered it reckless and indifferent to public opinion, gradually eroding the consent of the hegemonic middle class. Sharp divisions within civil society had impaired its ability to keep the state in check. The failure of conventional party politics bred a profound distrust of established power structures/elites, leading to a proliferation of seemingly ‘illiberal’ movements (Bilgrami, 2018; Canovan, 1999; Laclau, 2007; Mudde, 2016) that shaped the consciousness of a generation of students.

By their third term in power, the promise of a ‘Smart Bangladesh’ had grown stale, and a cascade of corruption, money laundering, and embezzlement scandals along with rampant inflation and unemployment had begun to overshadow the dazzle of ‘mega-projects’ like the Padma Bridge, which had long protected the regime’s development narrative. The government’s acquiescence to the new ‘power elite’ proved disastrous. A culture of entitlement replaced ideological politics (Comaroff 2011; Weyland 1999), undermining the political fabric of the party itself. Gone was the tradition of nurturing grassroots leaders through councils; memberships were now offered to family connections or the highest bidder. The systematic annihilation of the opposition and permissiveness towards this oligarchy represented perhaps the most significant missteps of the ‘democratic’ era, breeding political mercenaries ready to align with any cause for the right price and facilitating the rise of majoritarian politics.

Poster by Debashish Chakrabarty

The students leading the charge in July had no place in the promises of ‘nation building’ or ‘development,’ thereby finding allies in others ‘left behind’ by the nation and aspiring to become the ‘alternative’ themselves. The ‘Anti-Discriminatory Students Movement’ aimed to create a platform for collective resistance against the AL regime, fostering a coalition of students with ideologies ranging from left to liberal to extreme right, and with significant participation of women, gender-diverse groups, and indigenous and minority religious communities. However, as the euphoria of ‘victory’ subsided, conflicting narratives of the uprising emerged that began sidelining many of the key protagonists. As the OHCHR report states: “Having been at the forefront of the early protests, women, including protest leaders, were also subjected to arbitrary arrests, torture, ill-treatment, and attacks by security forces and Awami League supporters.” The frontline women coordinators and activists have been systematically excluded from the advisory boards and commissions of the interim government, as well as the post-uprising student leadership. Within a day, the recently launched National Citizens’ Party (NCP) – formed by the leading faction of the student coordinators – caved to online abuse and dropped a gender-diverse member from their leadership committee.

Many female coordinators expressed their despair during a series of dialogues held by Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP). Ipshita[4] from Dhaka University (DU) asked, “Where are our women after the movement? They were left behind in the media after the movement succeeded.” Shithi (DU) echoed similar sentiments: “Traditionally, women have been used as showpieces in major political parties […] No one provided space for us; we had to fight for it even during the movement.” Oishhorjo (DU) and Prarthona (Brac University) recalled the ‘protective’ attitudes of their male counterparts and how they were often made to work under senior male members. Along with bullets and arrest, these women also faced slut-shaming and rape-threats both during and after the movement. Alma from Jahangirnagar University said, “Coming from a conservative family, joining politics was difficult for many of us. We deserve credit. This cannot be the revolution we fought for.”

The July Uprising failed to uphold its spirit of ‘inclusivity’ within a week of toppling the government. Reports of retaliatory killings, looting, and the destruction of minority property and places of worship (including Sufi shrines) were often dismissed as ‘propaganda.’ The OHCHR report has documented the targeting of AL officials and supporters, as well as police and media, as the regime began to crumble. Hindus, Ahmadiyya Muslims, and indigenous people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts were also subjected to human rights abuses. While around 100 arrests have reportedly been made, acts of violent revenge and destruction are continuing with impunity. Indigenous students demanding constitutional recognition as ‘indigenous’ were openly attacked by Muslim majoritarian men with tacit police support. By failing to safeguard its religious and ethnic minority citizens, the state has de facto excluded them from a place in ‘Bangladesh 2.0.’

Euphoria and despair are inevitable aspects of any mass movement (Chowdhury, 2019), but we must also address how the dialectic of aspiration and marginalisation is realigning the political landscape. The political landscape of Bangladesh has never been stable, nor has the relationship between the state and civil society. Women’s organisations and civil society groups had wholeheartedly joined the post-war reconstruction effort, which had taken a socialist direction despite the disapproval of Western donors (Hossain, 2025). That nation-building alliance ended with the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, initiating the era of military-backed autocratic rule. The successive regimes of Generals Ziaur Rahman and Hussain Muhammad Ershad – beholden to US-Saudi diplomatic ties – oversaw rapid denationalisation and economic/trade liberalisation whilst fostering a new entrepreneurial class, the privatisation of industries, the mushrooming of NGOs, and the declaration of Islam as the state religion (Sabur, 2021). Both regimes selectively adopted progressive policies to preserve donor confidence, advocating for ‘Women in Development’ (WID) while simultaneously pandering to Islamists for legitimacy. The first decade of democracy lifted Bangladesh out of the aid trap; by the 2000s, the country was a poster child for human development, admired by donors instead of being at their mercy (Hossain, 2025).

Each reconfiguration in the political landscape prompted civil society to prioritize different survival strategies, growing less militant with the transition to democracy in a manner closely resembling the situation in Pakistan (Zia, 2009). The rapid growth of a globalized Muslim majoritarianism, continued pandering to Islamists by successive regimes, and the return to power of the ‘secular’ nationalist Awami League in 2008 muddied the waters even further (Sabur, 2025). Since then, civil society’s complex allegiance to and dependence on the state empowered the latter to fight its battles against ‘uncivil society’ on its behalf. The AL regime deployed Islamophobia as a scare tactic to stifle dissent while simultaneously rewarding Islamists and building thousands of mosques; neither could save them in the end. The depoliticisation of the party and the politicization of civil society entirely upended the political field. The interim government reflects this disturbance, peopled with ‘NGO-sourced’ advisors ill-equipped to handle pressure from above or below. Meanwhile, the inexperienced and ideologically discordant student leadership appears increasingly keen to appease reactionary forces for their own survival, ignoring the alarming rise in crowd vigilantism and sexual violence, which has prompted women to organize themselves and take to the streets again as we speak. A thousand lives is a steep price to pay for the reign of ‘might is right.’  After 54 years of bloodletting and plunder, the people of Bangladesh deserve the chance to rest, to have the bare minimum that they have repeatedly fought for – a functional democracy, fundamental civil rights, freedom from foreign interference, and a state that delivers at least as much as it takes, if not more.

Seuty Sabur (PhD) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her core research interest has been the Metropolitan Middle Class of Bangladesh – their lifestyle, changing gender role and their social and transnational networks. 

 

Notes:

[1] As per the recently released UN OHCHR Fact-Finding Report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-fact-finding-report-human-rights-violations-and-abuses-related

[2] Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the AL’s chief political rival.

[3] A ‘field’ signifies “a structured, unequal, and socially constructed environment within which organisations are embedded and to which organisations and activists constantly respond,” maneuvering forms of capital to occupy positions within this hierarchical structure (Bourdieu 2002; Ray 1998).

[4] The coordinators’ names have been changed for their protection.

References:

Ahmed, K. (2009). State against the Nation: The Decline of the Muslim League in Pre-Independence Bangladesh, 1947-54. Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press Limited.

Alam, Shamsul, S. M. 1995. The State, Class Formation, and Development in Bangladesh. Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America.

Bilgrami, A. (2018). “Some Reflections on the Limits of Liberalism Akeel Bilgrami.” Social Scientist 46(7): 3–20.

Bourdieu, P. (2002). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge.

Canovan, M. (1999). “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies 47: 2–16.

Chowdhury, N. S. (2019). Paradox of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Comaroff, J. (2011). “The End of Neoliberalism? What Is Left of the Left.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 637(1): 141–47.

Hossain, N. (2025). The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Sucess. 2nd, Bangl ed. Dhaka: University Press Limited.

Laclau, E. (2007). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Mudde, C. (2016). “Europe’s Populist Surge: A Long Time in the Making.” Foreign Affairs 95(6): 25–30.

Ray, R. (1998). “Women’s Movements and Political Fields: A Comparison of Two Indian Cities.” Social Problems 45(1): 21–36.

Sabur, S. (2014). “Marital Mobility in the Bangladeshi Middle Class: Matchmaking Strategies and Transnational Networks.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37(4): 586–604. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00856401.2014.954757.

———. 2020. “Shahabag to Saidpur: Uneasy Intersections and the Politics of Forgetting.” Südasien-Chronik – South Asia Chronicle 10: 97–122.

———. 2021. “Women’s Rights and Social Movements in Bangladesh: The Changing Political Field.” In Civil Society and Citizenship in India and Bangladesh Edited By, eds. Sarbeswar Sahoo and Paul Chaney. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd.

———. “Radical within Limits: Women’s Movements, Civil Society, and the Political Field in Bangladesh.” Melbourne Asia Review (12).

Van Schendel, Willem. 2001. “Who Speaks for the Nation? Nationalist Rhetoric and the Challenge of Cultural Pluralism in Bangladesh.” In Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World: Nations and Labour in the Twentieth Century, eds. Willem Van Schendel and EriK J.Zurcher. London and New York: I.B Tauris Publisher, 107–47.

Weyland, K. (1999). “Neoliberal Populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe Author ( s ): Kurt Weyland Published by : Comparative Politics, Ph . D . Programs in Political Science, City University of New York Stable URL : Http://Www.Jstor.Org/Stable/422236 REFERENCES Linked.” Comparative politics, 31(4): 379–401.

Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and Nation. London, California, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Zia, Afiya Shehrbano. 2009. “The Reinvention of Feminism in Pakistan.” Feminist Review (91): 29–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4.

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Pauline Fan, Beyond Redemption: Fatimah Busu and the Reckoning of Malay Literature

“On this terrible morning, everything is relentless—”

~ Fatimah Busu, “The Lovers of Muharram”

An Ordinary Tale About Women and Other Stories, recently published by Penguin Random House SEA, gathers my translations of ten of Fatimah Busu’s most searing short stories. These narratives, steeped in the rhythms and struggles of rural Malay life, lay bare the quiet resilience and fierce defiance of women caught in the grip of economic hardship, gendered oppression, sexual violence, and the unrelenting gaze of moral scrutiny. Fatimah’s fiction does not flinch—it confronts. Her stories burn with an intensity that renders them both starkly real and hauntingly evocative.

Translating her work into English felt not just necessary but urgent. Fatimah Busu remains one of the most formidable yet overlooked figures in Malay literature—an expert of the short story,her use of the Kelantanese dialect, her fearless dissection of gender and power, and her audacious narrative experiments unsettle the boundaries of the literary canon. At a time when many of her works have faded from print in their original language, this collection seeks to reignite her legacy, bringing her radical storytelling to a new generation of readers in Malaysia and beyond.

A Singular Voice in Modern Malay Literature

Born in 1943 in Kelantan, Fatimah Busu emerged in the 1970s as one of the most important literary figures of her generation in Malaysia. Her short stories won national literary prizes almost every year and it became evident that she was a writer to be reckoned with. Her literary career, now spanning more than six decades, has been marked by a fearless interrogation of social structures, gender roles, and the contradictions of the modern condition. Through her fiction, she carved a space for narratives that foregrounded the complexities of Malay society, particularly from the perspective of rural women and children. Fatimah Busu’s major works include the novels Ombak Bukan Biru (1977) and Salam Maria (2004), as well as seven short story collections including Yang Abadi (1980) and Al-Isra (1985). An accomplished scholar, she authored an important study of comparative literature, Ciri-ciri Satira dalam Novel Melayu dan Africa Moden (Elements of Satire in the Modern Malay and African Novel) in 1992.

While her fiction consistently garnered significant critical acclaim, she gradually became an outsider to the Malay literary establishment. Her novel Salam Maria—about a woman condemned by her community who establishes a spiritual sanctuary for outcast women at the edge of the forest—stirred up controversy, and was even accused of being ‘insulting to Islam’.[1] Rejected for publication by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (the national body for language and literature that had given Fatimah her early prizes), Salam Maria was eventually published independently but suffered from poor editing and limited distribution. Despite being seriously considered for the Sasterawan Negara (National Laureate) award, she was never granted this honor. For Fatimah, however, principles mattered more than literary accolades. In 2004, she rejected the prestigious SEA Write Award for regional writers in protest of the Tak Bai massacre, in which Thai security forces killed scores of Malay-Muslims in southern Thailand. This act of defiance underscored her deep political convictions and her refusal to be co-opted by institutions she viewed as complicit in injustice.

Fatimah Busu’s fiction captures the raw, unembellished realities of Malay rural life, particularly the struggles and resilience of communities in Kelantan who work on rice fields, rubber plantations, or engage in casual work. Refusing to paint a romanticized portrait of rural folk, her stories unfold within the intricate social fabric of the village, where nature, poverty, local politics, and moral scrutiny shape individual and collective destinies. Two stories included in my translated collection, “At the Edge of a River” (Di Tebing Sebuah Sungai) and “Spilled Rice” (Nasinya Tumpah), exemplify this with particular nuance.

In addition to a focus on villages and women, another defining feature of her work is her use of the Kelantanese dialect and its colloquialisms, which lends authenticity and emotional depth to her characters. The rhythm, idioms, and inflections of the dialect not only ground her narratives in a specific cultural landscape but also challenge the dominance of standardised Malay in literary discourse. By integrating Kelantanese dialect into her storytelling, Fatimah affirms the richness of regional linguistic traditions, asserting that the voices of rural Malays—especially women—are worthy of literary expression and critical engagement.

Contextualising Fatimah Busu

Fatimah Busu belongs to a generation of Malay women writers who, from the 1960s through to the 1980s, sought to portray in their fiction forms of women’s subjectivity that moved away from stereotypes such as the ‘fallen woman’ (often a prostitute) or the ‘good suffering wife’ who is a paragon traditional virtues. Writers such as Anis Sabirin, Salmi Manja, Zaharah Nawawi, and Khadijah Hashim explored themes of female agency, education, love, ambition, and social constraints within a rapidly modernizing nation. Their works gave voice to the personal and political struggles of women navigating shifting gender expectations and cultural norms.[2] While these writers brought fresh and diverse perspectives to Malay literature, Fatimah Busu distinguished herself through her raw and powerful depictions of the lives of rural women, often by exposing the hypocrisy of state and religious authorities. Like many of her peers, her work is largely out of print in the Malay language today, making it difficult for newer generations to access her radical and deeply resonant storytelling.

To understand Fatimah Busu’s literary significance, we can situate her work within the broader development of modern Malay literature. The ASAS ‘50 (Angkatan Sasterawan 1950) movement, which emerged  amid the spirit of Independence, with its slogan of “Seni untuk Masyarakat” (Art for Society), emphasized literature as a tool for social progress and national consciousness. Prominent writers such as Keris Mas, Usman Awang, and A. Samad Ismail sought to reflect the struggles of the working class, the realities of new urban life, and the aspirations of an emergent Malayan identity. By the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of writers had begun to explore more experimental forms and personal narratives, shifting the literary focus from grand nationalist themes to the intricacies of individual experiences.

Fatimah Busu’s fiction intersects with both these literary trends but stands apart in its engagement with gender and power. Unlike her male contemporaries, who often framed women’s struggles within the context of male heroism or redemption, Fatimah Busu centered women’s experiences as the primary narrative force. While male writers depicted political and socio-economic themes from a male-centric lens, Fatimah Busu speaks from the experience of women in all spheres of life. A. Samad Said’s Salina (1958)—often hailed as the supreme representative of the modern Malay novel—portrayed a fallen woman’s tragic fate within a broader social critique. By contrast, Fatimah Busu’s female protagonists challenge their circumstances with an agency that refuses victimhood. Shahnon Ahmad’s Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (1966), another classic modern Malay novel, focused on the hardships of a peasant family, yet did not probe the gendered dimensions of rural life with the nuance and urgency found in Fatimah Busu’s work.

Fatimah Busu’s literary defiance lies in her refusal to allow women to be mere symbols of suffering or virtue. Women in Fatimah’s fiction do not seek to be redeemed or rescued; they are fully realized individuals, negotiating power, sexuality, and survival on their own terms, even in the most difficult circumstances.

Non-Western Feminist Disruption

Fatimah Busu’s feminism is not rooted in Western liberal frameworks but emerges organically from the cultural and historical realities of Malay society. Her portrayal of women draws from traditional gender roles in Kelantan, where women have historically wielded significant economic and social power. Kelantanese mythology is populated with powerful female figures such as Che Siti Wan Kembang and Puteri Sa’adong, rulers who defied male authority and still command reverence in the popular imagination of Kelantan, even under present-day Islamic party rule. In Fatimah Busu’s fiction, women are never passive subjects; they are active agents in their own narrativization, in their resisting and navigating of oppressive patriarchal structures.

A crucial aspect of Fatimah Busu’s writing is her depiction of the power and vulnerability of ordinary women in rural Kelantan and elsewhere. She portrays women who bear the brunt of economic instability, domestic burdens, and moralistic judgement yet refuse to succumb entirely to despair. Her short stories and novels highlight the quiet resilience of women who must navigate a society that looks at them askance—divorced women and single mothers struggling to provide for their children, young women whose dreams and desires are constrained by rigid social mores. In so doing, she dismantles the stereotype of rural Malay women as docile and powerless. Moreover, Fatimah turns her unflinching gaze and pen on taboo topics such as incest, rape, and baby-dumping, questioning the integrity of legal institutions that punish women for these social maladies.

Fatimah’s feminist perspective is deeply influenced by Islamic thought, particularly the spiritual legacy of female sainthood. Her novel Salam Maria exemplifies this synthesis, drawing upon the figure of Rabi‘ah al-Adawiyyah, the 8th-century Sufi saint renowned for her teachings on divine love and spiritual devotion. Through this engagement, she aligns female agency with religious transcendence, countering the notion that feminism and Islam exist in opposition. Her feminism does not seek redemption: it is a force of reclamation—honoring the deep, historical significance of women in Islamic and Malay traditions while challenging patriarchal distortions of religious authority.

This disruptive feminist aspect of her work unsettles the literary establishment and certain academic circles. It defies simplistic classifications and challenges prevailing frameworks of interpretation. Fatimah Busu cannot be dismissed as a Western feminist imposing foreign ideals onto Malay society, nor can she be confined within the conservative framework of so-called “Islamic literature.” Her feminism is deeply embedded in the lived realities of Malay women, making it both radical and undeniable. The discomfort her literary work provokes is a testament to its power—she forces a deep reckoning with the contradictions and injustices that impact, and at times destroy, women’s lives in contemporary Malaysia.

Dreams and dajjal

Beyond her feminist themes, Fatimah Busu’s work is distinguished by its bold narrative experimentation. She refuses to be confined by conventional storytelling techniques, blending realism with elements of magic realism, absurdism, and satire. Her stories frequently incorporate dreams, stream-of-consciousness passages, creating a topography of imagination that is at once deeply rooted in Malay tradition and strikingly avant-garde. Her stories defy linear progression, frequently shifting perspectives and temporalities to mirror the chaotic, fragmented realities of her characters’ lives. The titular story, “An Ordinary Tale About Women” (Cerita Biasa Tentang Perempuan) is made up of a series of fragments, each one detailing sexual and social violence towards women and girls and closing with a deadpan “End of story.” There is deliberately little character development here and no neat resolutions, underscoring a sense of reportage while imbuing the story with the cyclical repetitions we usually associate with archetypal myths.

Fatimah Busu’s mastery of reimagining Malay epics and folklore is particularly notable.[3] Two stories included in the present collection are retellings of the legends of Puteri Gunung Ledang from Sulalatus Salatin (The Malay Annals) and the story of Raja Malik ul-Mansur from the Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai (Chronicle of the Kings of Pasai). Both legends are significant in classical Malay literature, both embodying themes of power, desire, and the limits of human ambition. In “The Dowry of Desire” (Mahar Asmara), Fatimah subverts the legendary tale of Puteri Gunung Ledang, transforming the mythical princess into a capricious adolescent who revels in the downfall of a vainglorious and power-hungry sultan. By contrast, “Narration of the Ninth Tale” (Alkisah Cetera yang Kesembilan), the exiled king Raja Malik ul-Mansur embodies themes of loyalty, regret, and mortality. In her introspective retelling, Fatimah explores the psychological depth of the tragic hero and suggests that possibilities of redemption lie in self-awareness and the renunciation of worldly power.

Fatimah Busu’s experimentation extends to speculative fiction and social satire. Written in epistolary form, “A Letter to Mother in Kampong Pasir Pekan” (Surat untuk Emak di Kampung Pasir Pekan) is a surreal tale in which imp-like dajjal creatures run riot in a village. In the Islamic eschatological tradition, the dajjal is the deceiver and false messiah who will emerge before the end of time, spreading deceit and chaos, leading people astray with illusions of power and sophistry. In Fatimah’s story, the grotesque and gleeful dajjalembody the chaos of moral decay, signaling the erosion of ethical and spiritual order. By the end of the story, it becomes clear that these dajjal are metaphors for political authorities deceiving the local community with their false promises.

Fatimah Busu’s fiction is often punctuated by dreamscapes and apocalyptic visions, where reality fractures, and the subconscious unfurls in dissonant, prophetic waves. The line between waking and dreaming is blurred, creating a liminal space where personal guilt and collective reckoning collide. This unconventional structure heightens the emotional and thematic impact of her work, immersing readers in a world where past and present, reality and nightmare, mundane and otherworldly, are in constant interplay. “Watching the Rain”(Melihat Hujan) and “Watching the Full Moon” (Melihat Bulan Purnama) are a complementary pair of stories (one sacred, one profane) in which a mother and son embark on visionary journeys that critique the spiritual and ethical decline of society.

“Watching the Full Moon” is where Fatimah Busu’s apocalyptic vision is most vividly realized. In this story, the moon is not merely an object of quiet contemplation but a harbinger of doom, swelling ominously in the night sky as the world below teeters on the edge of collapse. Time bends and distorts, and the narrator is drawn into a surreal, nightmarish landscape where reality dissolves into a cascade of shifting images—swarms of people copulating like beasts, the flesh of dead babies, the darkened walls of religious institutions. The sense of impending catastrophe is both cosmic and deeply personal, as if the world itself is unraveling under the weight of its own transgressions. These moments of rupture—both mystical and terrifying—underscore Fatimah’s ability to conjure a world where Hari Kiamat (The Day of Judgement) is not a distant cataclysm on the horizon, but something already written in the sky.

Unquiet Nature

 In Fatimah’s stories, the natural world is not a silent backdrop but a witness, a conspirator, and at times, a judge. In “The Lovers of Muharram”, trees whisper secrets in the wind, narrating the rendezvous of clandestine lovers and the terrible consequences that unfold. In “The Dowry of Desire”, flowers recite pantun verses and bamboo reeds sigh in longing. Birds are not symbols of freedom; they bear witness and critique society, their cries piercing through the air like unanswered questions. In “An Ordinary Tale About Women”, a family of cecawi birds (drongos)—known for their alarm calls—ridicule the absurd injustice of a legal system biased against women. Even the smallest creatures are given a voice—in “Narration of the Ninth Tale”, Raja Malik ul-Mansur confides his sorrows to the ‘Prophet of Worms’, who compels him to reflect on his life and the folly of humankind. The natural world in Fatimah’s stories does not passively exist; nature sees,  listens, speaks, and it remembers.

The stories collected in the anthology are saturated with the elemental weight of water—its presence, its absence, its power to sustain or destroy.  Imagery of fluid substances—river, blood, rain, poison, tears, flood—runs through her stories with an elemental force, unsettling daily life and unraveling hidden truths. In “At the Edge of a River”, the river is both a sanctuary and a trap, its steady flow mirroring the illusion of stability as a family settles on its banks, only to find themselves at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Blood seeps through “An Ordinary Tale About Women” not just as a mark of violence but as a lineage of suffering and sacrifice—women bound to their fates by blood spilled in childbirth and infanticide. In the “Dowry of Desire”, the  tables are turned: the celestial princess thirsts for the blood of the Sultan and his son. Poison courses through “Spilled Rice”, an unseen corruption that taints sustenance and innocence, turning the most basic act of nourishment into an act of quiet destruction. Tears in “Narration of the Ninth Tale” and “The Lovers of Muharram” do not merely signal sorrow; they are torrents of suppressed longing, shame, and loss—overflowing when words fail, dissolving what cannot be endured. As tears fall, they cleanse and strip away illusions, unearthing deeper, darker truths.

Translating Fatimah

Fatimah Busu’s fiction stands at the crossroads of bold narrative experimentation, disruptive feminist reckoning, and the echoes of Malay oral tradition. Her prose does not merely tell stories—it unsettles, provokes, and asserts experiences too often silenced.

To translate Fatimah Busu is to navigate a terrain dense with linguistic textures and cultural resonances, to bear across the weight of her truths without eroding their fire. In carrying her stories into English, I have sought not only to broaden the reach of Malay literature but to evoke its pulse, its cadences, its unspoken realities. Her words do not merely traverse linguistic thresholds; they assert their presence in the larger constellation of world literature, demanding to be heard in all their rawness and power. Translation, in this sense, is an act of witness—one that preserves the jagged beauty of Fatimah’s vision while allowing it to echo across new landscapes of understanding.

Fatimah Busu writes as if to set fire to complacency, as if each story were an incantation against erasure and forgetting. In rendering her work into another tongue, I have sought to carry forward the force of her voice—its urgency, its reckoning, its fierce and unyielding spirit—so that her words remain etched, like indelible ink, upon the canvas of time.

 

 

Pauline Fan is a writer, literary translator, and cultural researcher from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her literary translations include An Ordinary Tale about Women and Other Stories by renowned Malay writer Fatimah Busu (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024) and Tell Me, Kenyalang by Sarawak poet Kulleh Grasi (Circumference Books, 2019). Pauline is creative director of cultural organisation PUSAKA and currently serves as adjunct professor at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication at Universiti Putra Malaysia.

 

 

NOTES

[1] Koon, W.S.. (2011). Gender, Islam and the “Malay Nation” in Fatimah Busu’s Salam Maria. 124-142, in Mohamad, M., & Aljunied, S.M.K. Melayu. The Politics, Poetics, and Paradoxes of Malayness. (New ed.). Singapore: NUS Press.  

[2] Alicia Izharuddin (2018). The New Malay Woman: The Rise of the Modern Female Subject and Transnational Encounters in Postcolonial Malay Literature. In: Chin, G., Mohd Daud, K. (eds) The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back. Asia in Transition, vol 6. Springer, Singapore.

[3] For a discussion on Fatimah Busu’s feminist retelling of the legend of Hang Tuah, see Khoo, Gaik Chen, Malay Myth and Changing Attitudes towards Nationalism: The Hang Tuah/ Hang Jebat Debate, Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (2006), NUS Press, Singapore.

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Rebecca Karl, On Mao in the Philippines: Notes on a trip (January 2025)

On a recent trip to the Philippines, facilitated by old friends yet shadowed by crises stretching from Gaza to the US to Sudan and everywhere in between and beyond, I gave some talks at various venues. I had no idea what to expect from my audiences so I designed interventions that would perhaps appeal to wider publics, while remaining embedded in my many years of research and thinking about China, history, politics, and the world.

My first talk, facetiously entitled “Why Mao? Why now?,” was fashioned out of a short piece I wrote some years ago about pedagogy; I was scheduled to deliver it in the North at the Alfredo Tadiar Library. Established a few years ago by my friend Neferti in her father’s home town and in remembrance of his giant judicial legacy, the library is a bootstraps affair: run by a small paid staff and a host of volunteers on a miniscule budget, it has become a space of gathering, reading, conversation, and cultural-intellectual exchange in an area apparently not known for widely fostering such activity.

The library is housed in Neferti’s childhood home and its modest physical space is densely packed with meaning. Down a small side street off the bustling main plaza, you turn into a courtyard whose wall mural was painted in vibrant colors by a Houston-based Filipino-American artist known as Kill Joy  working with northern Luzon artists; it depicts everyday folks engaging in everyday labor in joyful, purposeful community. Stepping just inside the building, one finds a small shop, with locally-sourced crafts and a small selection of culturally and politically important books from around the world for sale at favorable prices. One can stop and linger here, in the cool of a lightly air-conditioned space to acclimate from the humid heat outdoors. There was a temporary coffee concession selling deliciously fragrant brews run by a husband-wife team of bean roasters who are passionate about their craft and their community; this concession will soon be replaced, perhaps by a local baker of northern-inspired sweets. Farther in, there is the main room of the library: a few tables now occupied by young people working on a collaborative project are interspersed among several shelving stacks of books, most volumes donated by their authors (several of mine are there) brought suitcase by suitcase from abroad by Neferti and friends. (This reminds me of the Kidlat Tahimik theory of filmmaking for the third world: a “cups of gas” process rather than a “tanks of gas” type of production). All the volumes are catalogued by those volunteers who are simultaneously learning library practices as they run the place. Today, in preparation for my talk, the space is full of folding chairs.

In the very back, there is one more distinct area: a gallery, which, at the time of my visit, was exhibiting a photography project of and by local fishermen, whose everyday labors and environments came to life in the candid portraits and composed shots of boats, sand, shore, nets, fish, light, sky, and work.  This project will soon travel into the fishermen’s own communities for exhibition and discussion.

The space fills up with friends of the library, kith and kin of Neferti, and a number of activists and academics from a wide geographical area. Eventually around 50 people are crammed into the room. My talk is informal and I meander through Mao as a revolutionary, a theorist, a Marxist in the violent imperialist twentieth-century world. I think aloud about why he was effective in his time and why something of his methods and thinking might be relevant still in today’s world of critical politics and social movements, even while contemporary China has long since dispensed with its Maoist past and most of his theory. We dwell on “speaking bitterness” campaigns – or, how early 1950s narratives of suffering created communities of social transformation before they hardened into performatively scripted rote forms – and on the problems of revolutionary necessity, Party discipline, and the scourge of bureaucracy as the death of revolution.

The Q&A is when I learn from the audience about why Mao and why now, for them, in the Philippines: what it has meant to read and act and think with Mao’s theory and practice over long years of revolutionary struggle against multiple authoritarian and imperialist regimes. “On Protracted War” emerges as a key text. A young woman stands up to declaim, in a tumbled self-conscious hybrid of English and Filipino (maybe Ilocano?), about how activists have mobilized Mao in their pursuit of political and cultural revolution; how Mao is not dead theory to them, but live praxis. She is passionate, articulate, and forceful. She is teaching all of us about why Mao still signifies now. I’m grateful for her instruction and learn as much as I can from what I understand her to be saying.

After the talk, I sign the books I had brought in my suitcase, meet a slew of young people intent on learning and practicing and thinking about struggle and revolutionary cultural-political forms, and I’m humbled by their earnest belief – even today – that a different world is possible.  If they were in charge, perhaps it would be so.

Some days later, I am in Manila at The University of the Philippines Center for International Studies (UPCIS) for two talks organized by Ramon Guillermo and Sarah Raymundo. First up is a morning panel on Palestine, convened with Neferti & Jon, our talks interspersed with video clips of Fidel, Hugo, and other Latin Americans repeatedly and in different eras berating world leaders at the United Nations and elsewhere for their supine acceptance of the decades-long sacrifice of Palestinians on the altar of fealty to Israel. In the Manila audience are Palestinians, Filipino activists, the Venezuelan ambassador, all told around 90 concerned people. There is none of the security apparatus that surrounds such events on US campuses these days, although the threat of state violence in the Philippines is never far away. None of us speaking is a specialist on Palestine, yet all three of us long have been active in our universities and other academic settings on behalf of Palestinian liberation and more recently anti-genocide protest.

Jon begins with some thoughts on Palestine and value forms (how many Palestinians are worth how many Israelis for example). He draws on his recently published exchange with Ali Musleh, in which the two dialogue about the total permeation of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians into the media ecology of thought, feeling, and affect the world over. In the intensification of what Jon calls the “semiowar” over meaning and information, none of us can be mere spectators. We all are complicit. How to navigate our complicity, to recognize and act on the fact that genocide (over there) implicates all of us (over here) becomes the challenge and the gauntlet. Genocide is financialized – no matter how it ends up, someone stands to make billions – and we are all thus enveloped into the computational warfare, since each of us lives in the mediated world and our data provides financial opportunities for the mega tech oligarchs. The complexity of his thinking is hard to convey, but it is stunning and he leaves us with a sense of foreboding: if we don’t grasp the contours of the semiowar and its computational weaponry, we will become mere fodder in its accelerated process.

Neferti does not lighten the mood. Drawing on her recent work on remaindered lives, she sketches in elemental ways how some bodies, some lives, are rendered unvaluable, unvalued, devalued in the course of contemporary warfare, whether economic or military or cultural. That Palestine is the site where this has become so incontrovertibly visible is both a function of the exceptional status that Palestinian lives have always had – exceptional insofar as they have never registered quite as human as Israeli lives – and of the normalization of this exception in the mechanisms of global capitalist accumulation and valuation. In a conversational style that is saturated with rage and erudition, Neferti also traces out how the devalued lives long embodied in Filipino labor have been harnessed to the devaluation of Palestinians in Israel, as Palestinian labor has been suffocated, bombed and destroyed while Filipino (and other Southeast Asian) labor has been imported to take their place. The Philippines is not an “elsewhere;” it is right in the middle of the genocidal process.

They are a tough act to follow.

I speak pointedly and briefly to the university activisms in the US long before and since October 2023, to the encampments and their violent suppression, to the “Palestine Exception” to academic freedom in the United States, and to the huge uphill challenges that face us now in the second coming of our fascist front. I speak as an engaged academic, an anti-Zionist Jew, and an activist on my campus at New York University– all those roles so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled. My words resonate with Jon’s and Neferti’s: now is the time for solidarity and unity against genocide and repression; anything less than that is complicity.

The talks are received enthusiastically. There is a brief intense group of questions focusing on what we can do now. We have no definitive answers. Several of the Palestinians approach me, and one is so overcome with emotion because, as he informs me, I am the first Jew he has ever met who has publicly identified with the Palestinian struggle. I point to Jon as another and mention that so many pro-Palestinian allies in the States and Europe are in fact anti-Zionist Jews. We take a picture and then we eat the lunch provided by the organizers. We talk of our different life trajectories and our common goals. He introduces me to his mother, who was in attendance and also overcome with emotion. We laugh and we cry together. We affirm our common humanity. It is so far from enough, yet such simple steps remain impossible in many venues, including at my NYU campus in New York where hostility and vindictive institutional and intellectual retribution are what is on offer for those of us who engage in anti-genocide speech and activism.

My afternoon talk at the University is devoted to China. With an audience of 60-70 people, I speak on history, narrative, and revolutionary possibility in China’s 20th century. This is adapted from a presentation I had prepared on my China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020). I begin with the early twentieth-century feminist He-Yin Zhen and her re-narration of Chinese history through the lens of perdurable patriarchy; I continue through the 20th century, from literary and historical narration to revolutionary activism and back again. Along the way I linger on Ding Ling and her “Thoughts on March 8th,” the piece that critically evaluated the possibility of female revolutionary subjectivity and that, in turn, was criticized by the Party for being too factionalist. I say something like, “Ding Ling was criticized and then sanctioned; she was sent down to live among and be re-educated by peasants.” I move on, through the revolutionary years to the denouement, which soon becomes the reversal and the repudiation of struggle in the name of class harmony, patriarchy, privatization, vast accumulations of individual wealth, national modernization, and global extraction.

The questions posed are respectful and curious: what accounts for “China’s rise,” how does China’s contemporary situation impact the Philippines today, why is the revolution’s history so completely erased in favor of nationalist developmentalism… And then one of the conveners of the event asks a question from her perspective as a long-time member of the opposition in the Philippines, an activist almost since the cradle. She asks: in my characterization of Ding Ling, I indicate that she was “sanctioned” by being sent down to the countryside. This, my friend says, is a peculiar way to think the question. When she was coming up in activism, it was a quest and a privilege to be “sent down;” one eagerly awaited one’s turn to be educated by peasants and the masses. Being sent down was a culminating prize of political education. Why, then, do I use the word “sanction?”

The question is provocative. It indicates precisely the fault-line between being a mere academic and being an activist. That faulty line of mine suddenly opens a gulf between my sanctimonious language of revolutionary discipline and her passionate revolutionary experience. It makes me rethink my articulations of the relation between intellectuals and education by the masses in the midst of revolutionary activism. It turns out that for me, this time in the Philippines has become a vital space where I can be challenged to learn again – is it too late? – how to do politics in the real time of struggle, how to move from the safe space of texts to the actual place of concrete action. Filipino Maoists have taught me, at this time in our attempts to advocate for the security of life and justice for Palestinians and others, why Mao and why now.

Rebecca E. Karl is professor of History at New York University