What is a family?
Via Reason’s Hit and Run I find this story about a Taiwanese women who wanted to harvest the sperm of her recently deceased fiancée so that she could get pregna...
Author: Alan Baumler
Seven steps to a better Sichuan. (part 1)
One of the things I came across recently is a 文史资料 piece by 杨芳毓. Yang was a returned student who was a subordinate to the Sichuan warlord Liu Xiang in the 1930s...
If you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault*
Watching the coverage of the New Orleans flood I was reminded of the 1998 Yangtze floods, and it occurred to me that this is yet another example of how China is...
Viewing Africa from Asia
(This is a comment on Tim Burke’s syllabus on Images of Africa cross-posted from his blog. I am putting it up here to see if anyone has any suggestions on image...
Eat and run
Chinese food culture There is a current series on Amsterdam on Slate where Seth Stevenson suggests that the Dutch are almost never seen walking and eating. Amer...
Nourish the people with cheap diesel
In the post below Jonathan asked how a Confucian China could really be in the future. One possible bit of data comes from this article (From Brad DeLong). NYT r...
Should grad students blog?
There was a rather nasty piece on academic blogging in the Chronicle. Comments at Bitch Ph.D. The basic thrust of it is that grad students should not have blogs...
Frog in a Well
I’ve noticed that while we call this blog Frog in a Well, we have never actually posted the story. This is from Burton Watson’s translation of Zhuan...
Mickey Mouse in China
There are some interesting articles in the current Modern China, and the one I would like to comment on at present is “Wang Luobin: Folk Song King of the Northw...
Recycling images
This picture should of course be familiar to a many of our readers. It’s from 点石斋画报, probably the most famous of the late-19th century illustrated magazines. Th...
Labor and the public sphere
Via H-Asia I found China Law Digest, which seems to have a lot of interesting stuff. One of these is a story about migrant laborers in Fujian organizing themsel...
Chinese Invasion
As summer is here soon we may be getting reports of the dreaded Chinese Snakehead fish. Invasive species are of course nothing new, but Zebra Mussels and Eurasi...
Does China exist?
The question of China’s existence or non-existence in the eyes of foreigners is an old one. At least for the early European explorers China really did exist, an...