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...
Category: Countryside
Rustic poetry
The contrast between the center and the periphery is a common theme in Chinese literature. To be an official sent from the capital to the provinces, or a sent-d...
Why can't an economist be more like a(n) historian?
Yuyu Chen, Ginger Zhe Jin and Yang Yue are all economists and they are doing interesting work on rural-urban migration in China. Given that China has better reg...
Working to Protect Your Human Rights
In Communist controlled “liberated districts” of Japanese occupied China, your local treason elimination squad was directed to safeguard your human ...
Gone Fishin'
From a Meiji-period Japanese book on how to paint like a Chinese
Pigs Again: Li Shizhen's Ming Dynasty Map
After my posting last year of “Pigs. Shit, and Chinese History,” Sigrid Schmalzer was kind enough to share this map which she drew based on the work...
poor peasants
In Modern China class we will be talking about Communists and their analysis of China’s social classes. What is a poor peasant? I will give them the stand...
Summer must be here
People seem to be too busy doing nothing to post much, but what good is technology if you don’t use it? By a mountain path. Few guests. A huqin‘s so...
A stupid idea that will never work
Via Mutant Palm I learn that at 13-mile long dragon is being built in Henan It is being built on a hill that is supposedly the home of the First Emperor, and wh...
When is a Farmer not a Farmer? When He’s Chinese: Then He’s A Peasant
After Mao Zedong died in 1976, they put his body on display in one of those see-through coffins which Lenin made popular. Shortly after, the NBC evening news co...
Pigs, Shit, and Chinese History, Or Happy Year of the Pig
The intriguing pig map in Alan Baumler’s post, “Pigs” (January 11) reminds us that 2007 is the Year of the Pig. Wikipedia informs us that a person born in the y...