Author: Alan Baumler

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 ...

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...

The importation of new professions into China has always been something that has interested me a great deal. Perhaps the most interesting of these is academics,...

Qi Fang, China’s contestant for the Miss Universe pagent, has resigned. (abdicated?) The China Daily story linked to above gives most of the sordid detail...

From IHT via some blog I forgot, here is a little review of a book on “Chick Lit” Chick Lit is a marketing category full of books about young women ...

From Granta via Reason here is a little thing by Lindsey Hilsum on Chinese businesses in Africa. It’s really just a little journalistic squib mostly about...

Reading Mote’s Imperial China 900-1800 I came across an interesting quote (p.45) On the (rather irregular) death of Emperor Zhuangzong of the Later Tang i...

K.C. Johnson calls our attention to a post by which discusses the state of military history. K.C. is mostly interested in getting military historians the repres...