Interesting talk by Dai Jinhua and He Guimei at CCCB. Good job by the consecutive interpreter–especially during the Q&A. The crowd, quite impressive for a rainy Friday evening in Barcelona, reminds me of Lisa Rofel’s opening of her editor’s introduction in After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke UP, 2018):
Dai Jinhua is the equivalent of a rock star in China. Students, intellectuals, and the general public flock to hear her searing, radical insights into the enormous transformations in contemporary life—and the injustices and ills they have wrought.
At one point, Dai refers to the powerful sentence that I remember closes her own introdution to the same volume:
The imagination of an alternative future is already under way. For China, this topic is especially urgent, because China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future.