Six Dynasties blogging
One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968...
Author: Alan Baumler
Mao vs. Hitler
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...
Thank you for not smoking
Today is 6-3 anti-opium day in the Nanjing period and Anti-Smoking Day on Taiwan. It commemorates Lin Zexu’s destruction of the British Opium at Humen. In...
My Great Helmsman is Charlton Heston
In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920’s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument ...
Chairman Mao is like Jesus to us
Not really related to anything, but I found it interesting. Chinese students in New Zealand have been protesting this image of Chairman Mao from a student newsp...
Visualizing cultures
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...
Text Slang
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...
Japan's war guilt
As is being discussed elsewhere, the Dower exhibit on Visualizing Cultures has become controversial, as it contains images that some people find offensive, spec...
Imperial Self-Images
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...
Local democracy in China (Special finals week edition)
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...
Moral Panic
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...
Oracle Bones
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 ...
China at war
Via Gusts of Popular Feeling I found this site by John Dower where he uses Japanese woodblocks to teach a number of things about the Japanese history of the war...