Pigs
How many pigs were there in China during the warlord era? I came across the wonderful site Strange Maps, and one of their offerings was a 1922 map of world hog ...
Category: Social History
Working like a slave
I have been to busy to post much of late, as I have been very busy. Not quite working like a slave however, as the slave contract below shows. I use this in cla...
My Great Helmsman is Charlton Heston
In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920’s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument ...
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&...
Taiwanese Heroin
It has been rainy rather than snowy around here of late, which is very unusual for this time of year. While walking in a cold wet rain I began to try and think ...
Par for the course…
I never thought I’d be citing Sports Illustrated here (Alan started it!) [via], but a Chinese historian has found references from over a thousand years ag...
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...