Unearthing the Nation
Grace Yen Shen’s Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China is a really good book. Shen says that at first “it took a lot o...
Category: China
Chairman Xi serves the people
Offbeat China has some official cartoons showing Xi Jinping as an ordinary guy who can sit cross-legged just like folks. I guess now that Gary Locke has officia...
Digital resources
I have been looking through two really useful digital resources lately. One is the Hathi Trust website. They have been digitizing stuff for some time, and the s...
Contradictions among the critics
The Maoist International Movement’s movie archives are on-line. They are really fun. You feel kind of silly when you realize that you have never thought o...
When China was a Great Power
Recently I was Google-ing to find a picture of the statue of Liang Qichao that is, I think, in his hometown. No better way to show that someone made it big than...
China's Museums
I have been reading China’s Museums, part of the Cambridge University Press series Introductions to Chinese Culture. I am finding the table of contents pa...
History and tourism in China
China File has been following the attempts of the town of Bishan to make itself into a tourist destination. Tourism is a rapidly growing industry in China, and...
Boxers and Saints
I did a class that focused on the Boxers last semester, and one of the things I talked about was Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints. This is a two volume ...
News from the City of Five Rams
Everybody on this blog is publishing stuff lately. The scholar formerly known as Gina Russo, now known as Gina Russo Tam, has a nice review up on the archives o...
Universal Crime
All of you no doubt remember the drafts sections of his dissertation that Konrad posted here. Well, the first dead tree article out of the project is on newssta...
Opium warlord dies
If you study the history of drugs in Asia1 the period right after 1945 marks an important divide. Down to maybe 1840 (or in some contexts much later) drugs (mos...
American contempt for China
As it is the beginning of the semester, I went to dig up the famous quotes from Emerson and Adams on what is wrong with China. If you find yourself needing thes...
Underage drinking in Southeast Asia
Apparently the Mint Museum of Toys in Singapore is worth seeing. Although I have not been, it seems that they currently have an exhibit up on “Guinness by...