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 ...
Author: Alan Baumler
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...
The modern Confucius
An advertisement from the 20’s or 30’s, reprinted in上海广告. 上海：上海画报出版社, 1995. This ad is for Golden Arrow cigarettes, and it announces a special contest. If you c...
Happy Birthday China! Happy Birthday Freedom!
According to People’s Daily English Edition China has turned 5,056 years old today. 5,000 years of timeless Chinese civilization, plus 56 years of New China. Al...
Yuan Shikai, Daoist
Another neat thing from Tales of Old China. They have a whole section of French Images, which mostly seem to be postcards and newspaper clippings from somewhere...
China is dirty
Many of our countless readers already know this resource, but one of the things I like to read and teach with is Tales of Old China, a website put up by SinoMed...
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...
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...