China, the Hobgoblin of Small Minds
I had a student ask me in class, recently, about whether China, among other countries, was planning to take advantage of our coming collapse to move into a posi...
Category: Current Events
Hoping for charity, without getting faith involved
The New Republic has an article by Gordon Chang on the lack of philanthropy among China’s rich. As he points out, one of the things blocking the emergence...
Restoring China's past glory
Via CDT a report on gated communities for the poor outside Beijing. In theory the purpose is to protect residents from crime, but of course the main goal is to ...
Knitting with steel
NYT reports (via CDT) that China is offering to help California build a high-speed rail network. The Times’ take is that the worm has certainly turned if ...
China Rises? China Wakes?
“Beware of China, for when the dragon wakes she will shake the world.” Napoleon? Although there’s no evidence that he ever said it, the quote ...
What do you really think Mr. Jiang?
Chinese museums are one of the best places to look at the changing interpretation of historical figures and events. Last weekend I went to Famen temple outside ...
PRC National Anthem
In honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1st, my friend Carsey Yee has sent another video: The Two Chinese...
Looking behind the curtain
Inside the Archives One day after lunch when I returned to the Shaanxi Provincial Archives one of the employees asked if I would like to see the documents they ...
ASPAC Blogging: Change in Rural China
I heard a few China papers at ASPAC and, though they weren’t all on one panel, they might well have been, because they all dealt with the rural response t...
Tehran, Tiananmen, Taiwan?
There was a post up, briefly, At Edge of the American West Dana captured some of the emerging themes of the discussion [link added] on Iranian democracy, includ...
The twentieth anniversary
I have, as it turns out, very little to say that I didn’t say five years ago, but I’ll reproduce it under the fold. Reading this year’s crop o...
Shanghai gets ready for its close-up
If you are tired of reading about the past, you could read about the future instead. Gina Russo has a great pair of posts up at China Beat on Shanghai’s p...
It was twenty years ago today
If three times is a trend then there is now a trend of historical liveblogging about China. CDT is doing a liveblog of the Tiananmen demonstrations for the 20th...
Cultural critique today and yesterday
Feng Zikai rides a grass mud horse It’s not his work, I think, but it looks a lot like it.
I may never have to teach again
As the Chinese movie industry gears up for a biopic on Confucius I get closer and closer to my goal of never having to do any work. Soon I will be able to just...