Sinology and Simon Leys
New York Review of Books Classics has re-printed Simon Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness: Selected Essays. This makes him the first Sinologist to crack the NY...
Category: Intellectual
Mixing water with water
Here is a dialogue (from the Zuozhuan) I used in class this week. The Duke declares “It is Ju alone who is in harmony with me.” Yanzi replied, “Ju is in f...
What Do Lin Yutang and Lin Biao Have in Common? They Were Both Memory Holed
Global Voices, a quite useful and smart blog, on January 30 posted Two Versions of Mao’s China: History Retouched as Propaganda, which has an set of uncanny ...
Thurify yourself
One of the things we have read for the May Fourth class I am teaching is Liang Qichao’s On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the Peop...
"China and Christianity": Hu Shi's 1927 View of Nationalism and Rationalism
Over at the invaluable Danwei, Julian Smisek’s “Hu Shi, missionaries, and women’s rights” (July 15, 2010) does a valuable service in tr...
Ueda Akinari translation
PMJS has published William Clarke and Wendy Cobcroft’s annotated translation of Ueda Akinari’s Tandai Shoshinroku, available as a free PDF and also ...
Productive Procrastination
The Journal of the Historical Society has put five recent articles up for free, including a four-year old essay by Herman Ooms on the state of Tokugawa intellec...
May 4th is irrelevant
May Fourth is here and one of the things that makes the 21st century great is that if you want to read some May Fourth writers you don’t have to go to you...
Need a dissertation topic?
There is a very interesting review of Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book, and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (sold in America as The Ma...
Japanology….
One of my general exam advisor/examiners has passed away: Donald Fleming who was Harvard’s preeminent intellectual historian for many years. I studied Eur...
First, kill all the Legalists
Sam at Useless Tree draws our attention to a really interesting website called 新法家(in English the New Legalist) I’m not quite sure who these people are, b...
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...
Diasporic Remnants
I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research...
Chairman Mao’s teacher
A nice article in Modern China on Mao’s teacher Yang Changji. The article draws on Yeh Wen-Hsin’s work on the provincial background of many of the second group ...
Ancient Chinese sex advice
One scholar who has had a lot of influence on my teaching on Early China is Mark Edward Lewis. I sometimes assign Sanctioned Violence in Early China, and if I h...