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...
Category: China
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...
Define "Successful"
There are signs that China’s government is going to resurrect Confucianism as a source of social ethics and harmony [via Simon World]. It was, after all, ...
51st State?
From a formal legal standpoint, the United States never ceded possession of Taiwan [via Simon World], which it took from Japan in 1945, to the Nationalist gover...
"Big Eyes" and Chinese Children
This is a fascinating essay about a famous Chinese picture known as Big Eyes [Via Simon World]. The followups are fascinating: a bit uncontextualized, but histo...
Self-introduction
Hi, Everyone, To belatedly introduce myself, I’m Matthew Mosca, currently a doctoral candidate in the program in History and East Asian Languages at Harva...
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...
7/7 and a Wartime Dictionary
While I’m spending the summer studying Korean in Seoul, one of the books I brought with me for some recreational reading is a Chinese wartime dictionary (...
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...
ASPAC Notes: Demographics and States
Historian of Empires Niall Ferguson [via Ralph Luker] recently wrote: Since 1989, the Russian mortality rate has risen from below 11 per 1,000 to more than 15 p...
One-Child Policy as History
I just finished teaching 20th century China, and the three biggest issues in the last section of the course were clearly economic growth, political liberalizati...
Self-Intro: Vincent S. Leung
Hi, everyone. This is Vincent Leung, a PhD student in Chinese history at Harvard. I just finished my third year in the program, and hopefully after my general e...