Yellow Peril!
For those of you who don’t follow American politics, the immigrant scourge is back. This time it is Haitian immigrants eating your pets which has gone fro...
Category: China
Swimming in the Sea of Mao’s Works
There are lots of things to keep in mind when working with texts by Mao Zedong. Many of the works that come to us today were speeches or notes on speeches that ...
The Case of the Electric Projecting Killing Machine
In May, 1939, while the Japanese military controlled the Chinese parts of the city, an “urgent report” was sent to the Louza Police Station (Laozha 老閘) in the I...
Who were the people in wartime China?
Just for fun, here is a table I found of those who jumped from the parachute tower in Chongqing between April of 1942 and April 1943. I suppose I should open wi...
The American Geographical Society’s China
In a recent posting, I took a look at the Taiwan volume in an old series of colorful books called the “Around the World Program” published by the Am...
Historical Maps of Wuhan
As may be clear from my recent postings on rumours in Wuhan, the language of Wuhan, a timeline and bibliography about Wuhan, and a post on Wuhan on the eve of r...
The Language of Wuhan
The Wuhan dialect is often described as a “southwestern mandarin variety” of Chinese. For over a century foreigners, especially missionaries who liv...
Wuhan on the Eve of a Revolution
I stumbled across the American traveler William Edgar Geil’s Eighteen Capitals of China (1911). I wasn’t impressed. Even for its time, it is particu...
Teaching with old photographs
One thing that I have started teaching with this semester is Ed Krebs and Hanchao Lu, eds., China in Family Photographs: A Peoples History of Revolution and Eve...
Too Many Men Again
There’s an article about China making the rounds: “Too Many Men” ; “In China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million. Both nations ...
The Last Supper (2012): Xiang Yu Overthrows the Qin in order to…protect Diversity?
I’ve been listening to the lectures given by Prof. Ou Fan Leo Lee (李歐梵) for his Coursera course Classics of Chinese Humanities: Guided Readings from the C...
Encountering Classical Chinese Philosophy Through Translation and a Text Adventure Game
Over winter break I usually spend a good deal of time with my nephew, codename Loke, now 11 years-old. Over the past few years, I have hidden a bonus Christmas ...
Advice from Xu Gan in the Balanced Discourses
Over the holidays I had a chance to read John Makeham’s translation of Xu Gan’s (170-217 CE) late Han dynasty Balanced Discourses 中論 (Ctext).1 The w...