When the internet gives you bad historical analogies…..
From Washington Monthly using the Chinese exam system as an analogy for the S.A.T., referring to an essay from n+1. The anecdote that began the n + 1 piece disc...
Author: Alan Baumler
If we want to revere China, there is no greater reverence than to put the Chinese ways into practice
Thanks to Columbia University Press I just got a copy of David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute1 This is a very fine book, ...
Thurify yourself
One of the things we have read for the May Fourth class I am teaching is Liang Qichao’s On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the Peop...
Blood of the martyrs
The Chinese student group asked me to come out and talk at their showing of Jackie Chan’s 1911. As it was competing with the Stillers game attendance was ...
Fire and protest in China
The Atlantic has a nice set of pictures of the Great Wall up, for your teaching pleasure. The one I found most interesting is this. Is the Great Wall on fire? W...
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...
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...