Menzies and the problem of the "Smoking Gun" document
Menzies’ thesis won’t die. Just when it seemed to be fading out (unless Menzies’ argument about Mongol exploration is really his next focus), ...
Category: Historiography
Par for the course…
I never thought I’d be citing Sports Illustrated here (Alan started it!) [via], but a Chinese historian has found references from over a thousand years ag...
Lumpy Chinese History
There are a few places to go for archived syllabi — H-Net, ExEAS, I had a printed collection at one point, as well, then there’s the GMU Syllabus Fi...
Gang of Four is Gone
Yao Wenyuan, the last surviving member of the Gang of Four — the others were Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, and Zhang Chunqiao — has die...
Cheng-Zhu or Chengs v. Zhu?
I didn’t make a big thing of it in class, and nobody seems to have noticed the discrepancy, but there’s something of a disparity between my World Hi...
Revision and Revisionism
Deep in the middle of a roundtable about constitutional revision and neo-nationalism in Japan, comes a bit of discussion of historical revision and popular beli...
Boundaries within Asia
Interesting article on the problem understanding Central Asia: the first problem is that nobody agrees on what or where it is. Apparently, East Asianists —...
Windschuttle on Mao
I am feeling very remiss for not having posted since Konrad gave me a log-in. I am a PhD student at Cambridge looking at China and Southeast Asia. My dissertati...
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...