Spring is here
A beautiful Spring day. What could be better on a day like this than grading papers? Cubs lost the opener 16-5. Spring really is here
Author: Alan Baumler
Revolution in pictures
Here, from Stapleton’s Civilizing Chengdu is Yang Wei, Chinese Revolutionary, in prison, November 25, 1911. Below is a picture of Yang as superintendent o...
In hot water
Some of you may know that Old China Hand James Fallows has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about frogs. Specifically he has been waging war against the common trop...
Education in pictures
As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known ca...
Why can't an economist be more like a(n) historian?
Yuyu Chen, Ginger Zhe Jin and Yang Yue are all economists and they are doing interesting work on rural-urban migration in China. Given that China has better reg...
Dogs again
As a follow-up to Konrad’s post below I came across something on dogs in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, where he is lamenting the passing of the old city, ...
Guest Blogger- Ou-yang Hsiu
Lots of bits of Chinese prose would make great blog entries. (A blog is basically a biji, more or less) Plus, they make great things to teach from. So, if any o...
China gets modern
A nice photo essay from Financial Times on railways in Inner Mongolia. Lots of nice pics, but the thing that amazed me was that the author was traveling with a...
Chinese incomes
Another in our long series of teaching aids from Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin via Brad DeLong
Confucius through the ages
Although the revival of Confucius in China naturally tends to emphasize a timeless vision of an unchanging Sage and set of teachings, the 儒家 have actually chang...
Oh Hell
It occurred to me that some of our readers may also have occasion to teach about Chinese conceptions of the afterlife, and specifically Chinese Hell. I got some...
Holiday reading: Murder, treachery and genocide
As I am half-heartedly getting ready for the Spring I am putting together some readings for my students. What survey would be complete without a chunk from the ...
Race in China
A pretty good discussion from the New York Times.
Brick, baby
I don’t know how many Chinese cities have these, but in Xian the buses mostly have Emergency Bricks They are set on those two pins, so they don’t mo...
China, where the future is already the past
I have tried to stay off the subject of how the internet will change the world, since there is enough of that on the internet already. I was struck by this piec...