Author: Alan Baumler

One of the reasons I write this blog is to preserve things, mostly for myself. I often come across something that might be useful to teach with later, and blogg...

I’m not trying to make this blog all Mao all the time, but as we seem to be discussing him a lot, and Johnathan just brought up the issue of popular memory agai...

The M.I.T. site is back up. The most controversial part was the section on Old China, New Japan. There is a cache of the old version here The only change that I...

Via Wandering to Tamshui a post with illustrations of Taiwanese text slang I suppose there are important points to be made about this, but not this week. I only...

As is being discussed elsewhere, the Dower exhibit on Visualizing Cultures has become controversial, as it contains images that some people find offensive, spec...

This is a picture of the Empress Dowager Cixi She is shown in the guise of Guanyin attended by two of her eunuchs in the guise of bodhisattvas. 1 According to P...

On his recent trip to Washington Hu Jintao was asked about democracy in China. To the surprise of some observers he did not immediately grow horns and start eat...

Via Reason, an article on the new statue of Bruce Lee that has been put up in Bosnia. The basic idea was the that organizers wanted to be postmodern and subvert...

Tim Burke has been blogging on moral panics in the context of oral sex, rape, and children’s television. Reading his stuff I was struck by the most famous...

In Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present* I found the story of Xu Chaolong.(p.194) I found it interesting because of what it ...