Chairman Xi serves the people
Offbeat China has some official cartoons showing Xi Jinping as an ordinary guy who can sit cross-legged just like folks. I guess now that Gary Locke has officia...
Category: Post-Mao
Fire and protest in China
The Atlantic has a nice set of pictures of the Great Wall up, for your teaching pleasure. The one I found most interesting is this. Is the Great Wall on fire? W...
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...
Private views of Chinese history
Recently I went to the Jianchuan museums, which are in Anren, just outside Chengdu. It is an interesting place first because it is huge, financed by mogul Fan J...
Save the Pandas
A couple of years ago before I left for a trip to China an imperial princess told me to get a picture of a panda. I pointed out that there were a zillion pictur...
Teaching Confucianism
Guess who’s in Bejing! Well, not me anymore since I just left1 I snuck away from my conference for a bit to go to the Confucian temple and the Yonghe temp...
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...
Zhou Confucianism? Ming Quality Control?
In an absolutely fascinating article on the modern petition redress system1 focusing on attempts by regional officials to prevent petitions from reaching a nati...
Sino-Soviet Nuclear Collaboration Revisionism?
In a review of Thomas C. Reed, and Danny B. Stillman‘s new book, The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation, William Broad...
奥巴马mania
I just joined this website, but I was surprised to see no post about the American elections in China (perhaps I found it surprising because it has been so press...
Collecting Songs
In Imperial China, emperors and other high officials sometimes disguised themselves as commoners and mingled with the ordinary folk to learn what they were real...
Hua Guofeng: Hats Off!
While we wait for Jeremiah at Jottings from the Granite Studio to say something substantive, I’d like to put in another good word for Hua, the man with th...
Hua Guofeng
It is not often that a historic figure like Chairman Hua leaves us, and while I can’t possibly compete with Jeremiah in my reverence for the red, red (wel...
Authors/Books/China/Culture/Current Events/Literature/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Post-Mao/Teaching/Translation
New Chinese Literature
The New York Times has published three reviews of new Chinese works in translation: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (pen na...