How things work (in China)
I have been reading a really interesting book on Chinese tools. Well, actually the most interesting thing about it is the title: Hommel, Rudolf P. China at Work...
Category: English
Perennial Question: Martial Arts in Chinese Militaries?
I got a query from a reader which echoes a question I’ve gotten in class1 many times: With China’s long history of martial arts, how prominent can i...
Cool Taiwan election stuff
From Michael Turton.
Shanghai and Modernity
I am currently working on a paper about Shanghai and modernity – obviously a lot of work has been done on that from the perspective of Chinese modernity b...
Racial harmony in China's North-East
In honor of Black History Month I thought I would post something on W.E.B. Dubois and China. I knew that DuBois had dabbled in almost every radical movement ima...
Darwin the Confucian
As today is Darwin Day I thought I would post something on China’s reception of Darwin’s work. He tended to be confused with Spencer at first, and E...
Upcoming Events at the Donald Keene Center
If you are in New York city in the next few months, you might want to check out the spring schedule for the Donald Keene Center for Japanese culture at Columbia...
Obama for Minister of the Left
Some historians have gone so far as to endorse Barak Obama for the office of President of the United States. Lots of people who seem to have very little affinit...
Germans and China
I have been reading Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of Total War in Imperial Germany Cornell, 20051 I was mainly in...
Korea: Better than Vietnam, anyway
Thomas C. Reeves, perhaps my least favorite HNN blogger, is arguing that the success of South Korea justifies our Middle East policies, especially Iraq. The com...
Zhou Enlai and The Chinese Omelette
The lively and informed blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio, January 8 has a well turned piece “This date in history: The Death of Zhou Enlai.” The piece sho...
Yang Tianshi on the Chiang Kai-Shek Diaries
Jonathan Benda reports on a talk by the historian Yang Tianshi on Chiang Kai-Shek’s diaries given at Tunghai university in Taiwan. Professor Yang is a ver...
A tame civil society in China?
Via Kevin Drum (where the comments so far are better than you might expect) a link to an article by Christina Larson in the new Washington Monthly about environ...
Comparing Taiwan to ….
I’m going to be teaching my 20th century China class for the second time in the Spring, and I still haven’t figured out how to handle Taiwan to my s...