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...
Category: Sino-Japanese Wars
Wartime Dog Killing Squads
The Chinese Communist campaign against animals that is most talked about is the Four Pests campaign of the late 1950s launched against various pests and sparrow...
A Farmer Learns his Chinese Characters
I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dis...
Working to Protect Your Human Rights
In Communist controlled “liberated districts” of Japanese occupied China, your local treason elimination squad was directed to safeguard your human ...
Newspaper Digitization at Shandong Provincial Library
I am currently spending my days at a microfilm machine in the basement of Shandong Provincial library, looking through old wartime newspapers from occupied and ...
Beware of Female Spies
I decided to bring you a little Friday night clipping from the archives where, as always, I have my eye open for treason and treachery: In the Chinese national ...
Between Nanjing and Chongqing
I posted a piece on Asia Media (July 10 2008) which reviews Steve MacKinnon’s new book, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Univer...
Stop malingering
Some time ago Stefan Landsberger1 sent me some images of propaganda posters from the War with Japan. I have not blogged about them as yet due to laziness, but a...
Eighth Route Army POW Policy
Frog in a Well welcomes a guest posting from Sayaka Chatani, who is a PhD student in the History Department of Columbia University. Her research interests are i...
Yang Tianshi on the Chiang Kai-Shek Diaries
Jonathan Benda reports on a talk by the historian Yang Tianshi on Chiang Kai-Shek’s diaries given at Tunghai university in Taiwan. Professor Yang is a ver...
The crucibe of Revolution
One of the nice thing about studying modern Chinese history is that Chinese states have gone to gone to great lengths to collect oral histories and other accoun...
Our Japanese Comrades
I’ve been paging through 抗战漫画 a book re-printing lots of wartime cartoons. Although some work has been done on these, one thing I have not seen commented ...
Ding Mocun, Lung Ying-tai and Lust, Caution
Ang Lee‘s (李安) new movie Lust, Caution (色，戒) is apparently being released later this week in the United States. The movie won a Golden Lion at the Venice ...
The Buddha goes to war
Xue Yu’s new book Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle against Japanese Aggressions, 1931-19451 is the first major work I have fo...
Poverty and Prison Camps
I recently finished reading Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China, 1895-1949 by Frank Dikötter. You can find pictures from the book posted on his we...