Notes from the Chinese Underworld
I appear to have been guilty of smuggling, or at least receiving contraband goods. Probably the Triads or somebody like that was involved as well. Too cool. Whi...
Author: Alan Baumler
Rice Paddies
Following Jonathan’s lead, here is my syllabus for History of East Asia, more commonly known as Rice Paddies. I suppose the first question to answer is wh...
Raise high the flag, whatever it stands for
This is a Japan/Manchukuo propaganda poster showing the harmony between the Chinese, Japanese, and Manchurians. I found it on the Hoover website and am using on...
Cantonese is Dying! (in L.A.)
A not-too well informed article from the L.A. Times lamenting the decline of lively, slang-filled Cantonese in favor of the polite and dignified Mandarin. Obvio...
Why you could not be the Son of Heaven
Late last night I found myself watching TV, and there was the World’s Strongest Man competition, taped in Chengdu last October. Apparently the competition consi...
What good is ritual?
Rites (li禮) are something that you talk about a lot when you teach Chinese history. Usually the word is translated as “ritual,” which is a pretty ac...
Drop the book and step away from the scholarship
Apparently Homeland Security is monitoring Interlibrary Loan. A UMass student was questioned for having ordered a copy of the Little Red Book. According to the ...
Do we want to judge?
Caleb Mc Daniel has a nice post on President Bush, and his recent claims that his policies in Iraq can only be judged by future historians. Caleb points out tha...
Provincialism and democracy
Everyone is talking about the protests in Hong Kong, for good reason. What I find most interesting is the official response. (All links via Simon’s World, the o...
Why didn’t Manchu women bind their feet?
It is well-known that even after the conquest of China Manchu women did not bind their feet. The Qing emperors took clothing and hair very seriously as ways of ...
Hero and Mao
I’m a little late to the Hero bashing party, but this post (Bourdieu Boy via Notes of a former native speaker) got me to thinking. I agree that Hero was a somew...
Last night I saw upon the stair a little man who was not there
Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants has a section on dragons. Specifically, why reliable, skeptical observers like Xie Zhaozhe, who published his Fivefold Misc...
Women hold up half of heaven
I recently got a postcard asking me to assign a pamphlet “Li Fengjin: How the New Marriage Law Helped Chinese Women Stand Up” translated by Susan Glosser and pu...
Gresham’s Law
The Great Yuan—how grave and dignified, Its authority by the crafty and duplicitous monopolized. ‘Repairing’ the Yellow River dikes [1351], ‘reforming’ th...
The Chairman vanishes (but is found again!)
One of the nice things about teaching modern China is that the Communists, as a text-centered party, wrote a lot of things. A lot of them have been translated i...