Jottings from the Granite Studio

Via ESWN, James Fallows is blogging from China this week and post #1 involves that old expat grumble of “public manners.”
You can work up all sorts of historical or anthropological explanations behind every-man-for-himself behavior. It’s a survival imperative when there are too many people for too few resources. It’s an effect of big, anonymous city [...]

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The media and the blogosphere have been alive this week with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chariman Ben S. Bernanke’s trip to Beijing. Washington still feels the best way to quiet the clamor over the trade imbalance with China is to pressure Beijing to raise the value of the yuan. This week’s Economist [...]

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Interesting back-and-forth in the British magazine Prospect between Will Hutton, the author of The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, and Meghnad Desai. a former director of the Centre for Global Governance and an emeritus professor of economics at the LSE and a Labour peer.
Hutton leads off:
It is a [...]

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Bowdoin College has devised a interactive website that allows viewers to explore an illustrated scroll painting of “A Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace” from the Tale of the Heiji Rebellion (heiji monogatari emaki). Visitors to this site are taken on a tour of the scroll, revealing both its artistry and its historical significance. The [...]

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A multi-national team of biologists and ecologists just completed a six-week search of the Yangzi River looking for the Chinese River Dolphin (白鱀豚 Baijitun). After an exhaustive search, the team concluded that after 20 million years in the Yangzi, the Baiji are now extinct.
The dolphins were among the rarest of all mammals. Numbering [...]

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Today is the 69th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre (”Rape of Nanking”). Perhaps no other event in the Pacific Theater of World War II has been more controversial. Japanese accounts figure as few as 100,000 non-combatants were killed and there are those still in Japan, and elsewhere, who deny the incident ever took place. Contemporary [...]

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Rather fascinating op-ed piece in today’s Shanghai Daily. In it the author argues that the spirit of interaction with the world, so essential to China’s recent development, was part of a long tradition of openness that predated the rise of Europe as a global center.
However, one question needs to be asked and answered clearly: What [...]

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This month’s installment of the Asian History Carnival is being hosted at Westminster Wisdom and I have to hand it to those guys, this latest carnival is chock full of great links. If you haven’t checked an AHC out, I highly recommend doing so. They are a great place to get all the [...]

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Via The Peking Duck and CDT: A moving 10 minute+ video showing the victims and families of China’s multiple coal mining disasters. Economic progress marches on, but I think the faces in this video tell a far different story than the images of New China rising in Shanghai and Beijing ‘08.
According to CDT, the images [...]

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I’m putting in my plug for the exceptional China Law Blog, nominated in the category of “Best Asian blog” in the 2006 Weblog Awards.
Without question, the CLB is the one-stop source for all that is going on in business and law in Greater China. Their posts are always timely, insightful and–best of all–written in such [...]

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