Rüdiger Breuer and Heiner Roetz (eds.): Worüber man nicht spricht. Tabus, Schweigen und Redeverbote in ChinaOlivia Kraef-Leicht

ASIEN – Nr. 152/153 (2019) pp. 161–63

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018 (Jahrbuch der Deutschen Vereinigung für Chinastudien, 12). 242 S., 50 EUR

The ‘unspeakable’ in a Chinese cultural context is the focus of the recent conference proceedings “Worüber man nicht spricht. Tabus, Schweigen und Redeverbote in China”. Edited by Rüdiger Breuer and Heiner Roetz, the volume presents an innovative collage of the “unspeakable” in China’s past and present. As Roetz notes in his introductory chapter (11), the so-called “Braga incident” in 2014 and its far-reaching consequences for the public perception of China’s influence on international scholarship reverberated among German sinologists. It also reiterated certain sentiments that had shaken the German sinological world just a year earlier, when Gao Yu, a former journalist with Deutsche Welle, leaked an internal Chinese document on the “seven unspeakables” (qige buyao jiang) to international media. The XXVI. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Vereinigung für Chinastudien at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in November 2015 thus convened authors whose presentations feature in this volume. The contributors’ aim is to create a sinological stance on current Chinese political discursive practices and their influence on research on China…