World Historical Trends: Valentine's Day Surgery?
My father sent along this article about the rise in Shanghai of plastic surgery being marketed to couples as a Valentine’s Day celebration/present. I don&...
Category: Post-Mao
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...
Happy Birthday China! Happy Birthday Freedom!
According to People’s Daily English Edition China has turned 5,056 years old today. 5,000 years of timeless Chinese civilization, plus 56 years of New China. Al...
Nourish the people with cheap diesel
In the post below Jonathan asked how a Confucian China could really be in the future. One possible bit of data comes from this article (From Brad DeLong). NYT r...
Define "Successful"
There are signs that China’s government is going to resurrect Confucianism as a source of social ethics and harmony [via Simon World]. It was, after all, ...
"Big Eyes" and Chinese Children
This is a fascinating essay about a famous Chinese picture known as Big Eyes [Via Simon World]. The followups are fascinating: a bit uncontextualized, but histo...
ASPAC Notes: Demographics and States
Historian of Empires Niall Ferguson [via Ralph Luker] recently wrote: Since 1989, the Russian mortality rate has risen from below 11 per 1,000 to more than 15 p...
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...