What if it's a fake? What if it isn't?
Jeremiah Jenne pointed me to this most wonderful bit of French nonsense: Jean Levi’s claim that the terracotta army is a modern forgery. These famous clay...
Category: China
Credentialism and Other Modern Traditions: It's a Post-Authentic World
A note to those who are imprudent enough not to follow the Japanese side of Frog in a Well: Jonathan Dresner has a smart, witty, and informative piece, Credent...
War cartoons
I’ve been doing a class that deals with cartoons, and Feng Zikai is a major part of it One problem with teaching popular art is that a lot of the work of ...
Who's Afraid of Chop Suey? Or, The Politics of Authenticity
I humbly report that I have a piece — “Who’s Afraid of Chop Suey?” — in the most recent Education About Asia (Winter 2011)...
Life imitates The Office
As someone who is a member of an academic department and of two University-wide committees I think a lot about bureaucracy. Since I am teaching Modern China thi...
From all the junks, the one I need more is music
Slate has a piece up on the Asian-ization of Western classical music. It’s more historically informed than you might think for a Slate piece, although it ...
Wukan as history
Ho-fung Hong has an interesting post up on the Wukan protests and the history of popular protest in Imperial China.1 While in the Western media protests like Wu...
Dragons, Dragons Everywhere! But They Don't Shake the World
This week you run across dragons just about everywhere. President Obama welcomed the Year of the Dragon from the White House (here), while Paul French did likew...
Syllabus blogging
There is something of a tradition here of posting draft syllabi and asking for advice. It’s too late for advice to do me any good (although criticism alwa...
Dragons in the News: Is a Long a Dragon?
The Year of the Dragon is upon us – should we be afraid? Around the English speaking world, magazine covers and editorial writers rely on the dragon as a colorf...
The good old days of empire
My local paper ran an editorial (version here) by Rich Lowry which gave readers more Qing dynasty history than they normally get. As an American conservative h...
Those who keep remembering the past
I just got an e-mail asking me to subscribe to The Current Digest of the Chinese Press. Given the prices I don’t think I will, but you might want to consi...
Names and Dates In English and Chinese
I recently discovered Beijing Time Machine, run by Jared Hall. His recent piece Time over Place: Naming Historical Events in Chinese (ironically, it is not dat...
From Hirohito to Chiang Kai-shek
I posted this on Frog in a Well Japan. — Earlier this month, I met a descendent of the Taiwanese aboriginal group, Sysiyat tribe (賽夏族), and his wife. The ...