The year 2016 was the Year of the Monkey, and no monkey is more iconic in China than Sun Wukong 孙悟空, the mischievous and beloved Monkey King of Chinese mythology. A central character in the sixteenth-century classic Journey to the West 西游记, 'Monkey' was born from a stone, and enjoys tremendous powers thanks to Taoist practices and a magical staff. When he creates havoc in the Jade Emperor's heavenly palace, the Buddha sends Monkey on a journey across the seemingly infinite expanse of his palm,

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... inally trapping him under a mountain, where he remains for five hundred years. The Buddha promises Monkey his freedom if he agrees to protect the monk Xuanzang 玄奘 on his journey to collect the Buddhist classics from India and bring them back to China. But knowing Monkey's capacity for mischief, the Buddha gives Xuanzang a headband that once placed on Monkey's head can never be taken off, teaching him a magical incantation that enables the monk to painfully tighten the headband. The pain -or the threat of it -keeps Monkey under control throughout the long journey. 'Control' is the theme of the China Story Yearbook 2016. Each year, surveying the official and unofficial discourse from China, we choose a Chinese character that illustrates an overarching theme from that year's political, economic, social, and cultural events. The character zhi 治 is our keyword for 2016. While it can be translated as control, this is only one of its many meanings. It also signifies to manage, govern, supervise, or take care of; to harness; and to arrange or put in order. It can also mean to pun- Sun Wukong Source: othree, Flickr ish, to cure (an illness), to exterminate (an agricultural pest or disease, for example), to research (zhi shi 治史, for example, is the study of history), to pacify and settle, and to stabilise. In historical times, it indicated the seat of local government. (See Information Window 'Between Order and Chaos' above.) Its most common antonym is the word for chaos, confusion, and disarray: luan 乱. Since his ascension to the presidency and leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012, Xi Jinping 习近平 has steadily expanded his personal control over the Party, the Party's control over the state, and the state's control over its citizens. This trend continued in 2016. Xi has personally assumed the leadership of so many commissions and 'central leading groups' that in the China Story Yearbook 2014: Shared Destiny, founding editor Geremie R. Barmé dubbed him the 'chairman of everything'. In April 2016, he added a powerful new role to the list: Commander-in-Chief of the People's Liberation Army's newly formed Joint Operations Command Centre. In October, the Sixth Plenum of the Eighteenth BETWEEN ORDER AND CHAOS, by Nathan Woolley Governing a large country is like steaming small fish. -Laozi in Daodejing, 60, translated by Edmund Ryden A dictionary of the second century AD refers to the character 治 as the name of a river in Shandong province, but puts forward no explanation for how it came to mean 'control', 'bring order', 'govern'. The common use of this character in reference to the legendary sage ruler Yu 大禹 (c. 2200-2101 BCE), who 'regulated' the waters of China in an ancient time of great floods, suggests that it derives from the act of controlling water. While this ostensibly explains why the radical (the graphical component of the character that may, but doesn't always, have some connection to the character's meaning) of 治 is the water radical 氵, the evidence is far from solid. By the Spring and Autumn period (eighth to fifth century BC), the character 治 commonly appeared in one graphic form or another in political discourse and has done so ever since. Monk Xuanzang Source: Wikimedia Commons Fifty Shades of Red Linda Jaivin and Jane Golley xiv xv Fifty Shades of Red Linda Jaivin and Jane Golley xvi xvii ital sphere more broadly, of course, has long been an area of active government control, with a vast army of censors constantly patrolling the Internet to exterminate everything from 'rumours' to cyber loan-sharking, as seen in the essays by Lorand Laskai and Nicholas Loubere in the Forum 'Computer Says No'. Trying to control (govern, supervise, harness) the Internet, is, as Lorand Laskai suggests (quoting a Bill Clinton phrase), like 'nailing jello to a wall'. Yet the Chinese government is clearly managing to do this better than most. In 2016, China earned the title of the world's 'worst abuser of Internet freedom' on the independent watchdog Freedom House's annual scorecard, while US officials labelled China's Internet controls a 'trade barrier'. In early 2017, Luo Fuhe 罗富和, the vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, acknowledged that Internet censorship in China was impeding both economic development and scientific research. This is a high price to pay for a government intent on sustaining long-term growth and lifting the economy out of its middleincome status. Internet control also featured in some of the biggest stories in Chinese arts and culture in 2016. In the cultural sphere, over the decades of reform, a de facto compromise has been reached. The Party implicitly acknowledges that not all artistic products must serve ideology (you can have, for example, abstract art or rom-com films). Those working in the arts, in return, understand that they are not to challenge either the Party or its ideology (at least if they want to show or sell what they are making). Xi is trying to reassert the Party's control over cultural production. But it's not that simple in the age of social media, commercial filmmaking, and