Why go to college?
Tea Leaf Nation has a post up on a micro-trend of Chinese kids not going to college, or at least one parent not being willing to pay for it, on the grounds that...
Category: Qing
Chinese youth defending their rights
My historical methods course for the Fall will be looking at the Boxers, and I have been reading Jane Elliott’s book on the Boxers.1 It’s a really i...
Nationalism sucks
A very sad post from the Economist on the problem of the zodiac heads. Basically, a wealthy Frenchman has agreed to donate two of the bronze heads stolen from t...
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...
Daiyou Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...
Life imitates The Office
As someone who is a member of an academic department and of two University-wide committees I think a lot about bureaucracy. Since I am teaching Modern China thi...
The good old days of empire
My local paper ran an editorial (version here) by Rich Lowry which gave readers more Qing dynasty history than they normally get. As an American conservative h...
Boxers and history
Via Jeremiah Jenne, a link to an Economist article on the legacy of the Boxers. It is without a doubt the best article on Chinese history I have ever seen in a ...
Hoping for charity, without getting faith involved
The New Republic has an article by Gordon Chang on the lack of philanthropy among China’s rich. As he points out, one of the things blocking the emergence...
Revolution in pictures
Here, from Stapleton’s Civilizing Chengdu is Yang Wei, Chinese Revolutionary, in prison, November 25, 1911. Below is a picture of Yang as superintendent o...
In hot water
Some of you may know that Old China Hand James Fallows has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about frogs. Specifically he has been waging war against the common trop...
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
Common culture
China Gateway has some pictures, with translation, from The Dianshizhai Pictorial the famous late 19th century Shanghai illustrated paper. I say famous because ...
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...
Happy Birthday New Policies!
2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the New Policies (新政) reforms of the late Qing. Well, not really. The Late Qing reforms are increasingly seen as more import...