China and the atom bomb
How is “common knowledge” different in China than elsewhere? At present of course things are increasingly the same, but that is due in part to years...
Category: English
A sinologist in Iraq
Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time has been re-issued. This is good news for everyone, and especially for those of us who got a copy for Christmas. (Thanks S...
Pinyin or bust
A recent obituary of John DeFrancis emphasized his personal desire to see the Chinese overhaul its writing system, claiming that the failure of the Communist go...
Like mixing water with water
Students often come to classes on China looking for the Timeless Wisdom of the Easttm As a historian I tend to dislike giving it to them, since the point of his...
Weird pictures
BibliOdyssey has a post up on European images of 17th century Japan. Yes, I know. Who cares about Japan? There is also a link to an older post on Athanasius Kir...
Making China democratic
Over at A Ku Indeed people have been discussing Bell’s East and West, which is an attempt to create a dialogue between Western and Eastern concepts of rig...
Liveblogging the Boxers
Military historian David Silbey is going to be blogging through the Boxer Uprising as seen through the New York Times. Though this is a little more of a distant...
A Dictionary that Could Change your Life
I see a lot of passing on of digital tools, and a fellow Fulbrighter sent along this link, a Chinese dictionary where you can write in the characters and it loo...
R.I.P. John DeFrancis
Via Granite Studio
Meet the meat
Foreigners have two contradictory images of “Chinese men”. One is the effeminate scholar with long fingernails and the other is the kung fu dude. Th...
A crack in the firewall?
The Chinese firewall seems to be acting up. On Saturday, authors of the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS and other newspapers I’m sure noted that the ...
I like sex better than bear paws
Over at A Ku Indeed people, including myself, have been discussing Daniel Bell’s East Meets West which looks at the importation of foreign concepts of hum...
Flithy Asians
One of my colleagues recently passed on his copy of The Far East by James H. Maurer Sentinel Printing, 1912. The author says that the book is not the product of...
Confucian liberalism
CDT has some information on Yang Shiqun, the Chinese professor who has been accused by two of his students of saying counterrevolutionary things in class and is...
A Gweilo's culinary opinion
A somewhat humorous article from Hong Kong cites a recent restaurant review from Michelin Guide and a complaint against it by a prominent Macau chef. The chef c...