Very superstitious
Above is a charm carried by a Chinese soldier in 1938, re-printed in the journal Youth Front in 1938. It seems to be a Communist publication, although this bein...
Author: Alan Baumler
National Library of China- A fine place to do research
Most of our readers who might care already know this, but the National Library in Beijing is a fine place to do research on Republican China. It has it&#...
Celebrate the working class
So, today is Labor Day in the U.S.A., which means that you can celebrate the achievements of the working class without being a Communist. The rest of the world,...
Zhong Kui comes to Sunnydale High
Sigh… I try to keep my posts to this blog to at least a minimal level of scholarly-ness. At the very least I try to avoid doing too many posts on weird Ch...
30 seconds over Taihoku
On February 23, 1938, the Russians bombed Taipei. Given how worried the government was about Taipei being bombed by communists when I was first there in the 80&...
War cartoons
I’ve been doing a class that deals with cartoons, and Feng Zikai is a major part of it One problem with teaching popular art is that a lot of the work of ...
Life imitates The Office
As someone who is a member of an academic department and of two University-wide committees I think a lot about bureaucracy. Since I am teaching Modern China thi...
From all the junks, the one I need more is music
Slate has a piece up on the Asian-ization of Western classical music. It’s more historically informed than you might think for a Slate piece, although it ...
Wukan as history
Ho-fung Hong has an interesting post up on the Wukan protests and the history of popular protest in Imperial China.1 While in the Western media protests like Wu...
Syllabus blogging
There is something of a tradition here of posting draft syllabi and asking for advice. It’s too late for advice to do me any good (although criticism alwa...
The good old days of empire
My local paper ran an editorial (version here) by Rich Lowry which gave readers more Qing dynasty history than they normally get. As an American conservative h...
Those who keep remembering the past
I just got an e-mail asking me to subscribe to The Current Digest of the Chinese Press. Given the prices I don’t think I will, but you might want to consi...
Managing History in China
Historic Preservation is the process of preserving historic stuff, mostly building and sites. China has lots of history. 5,000 years of it, in fact. Historical...
Make it Just So, Mr. Fukuyama
I have been reading Francis Fukuyama’s new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. It is, as the title suggests...