We did it. We finally found a place to live. YJ and I will NOT be sharing a cardboard box in Ritan Park this winter and we’ll be in Beijing starting tomorrow. Also, for the few readers of this blog who don’t also read The Peking Duck, Richard has organized another bloggers’ dinner [...]
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I guess I’ve been shirking my responsibilities as a blogger lately. This past week marks 35 years since Nixon traveled to China to shake hands with Mao in a meeting that “shook the world.” Up to now, I’ve relegated this monumental event to a series in the “Image of the Day” section of the blog [...] Danwei has a great post on why the Ming (1368-1644) is so hot these days. (And they’re not talking about the hobbled Yao, either.) Joel Martinson asks, “Has the Qing been mined to exhaustion as a source for popular culture, or have people simply grown tired of historical teledramas featuring costumed characters wearing queues?” One of [...] Korean textbook writers have fired the latest salvo in the ongoing history wars between the ROK and the PRC. The textbooks have been revised to describe the Korean Bronze Age as starting 1000 years earlier than previous claims. The new textbooks date the beginning of the Bronze Age to about 2000 B.C.E. Further revisions state [...] Davegonetochina, a frequent commenter both here and at The Peking Duck has (re)started his own blog called Mutant Palm. Dave is one of the best writers and certainly one of sharpest historical minds in the Chinese blogosphere. That said, he has a wide range of interests beyond history and is always a good [...] One of THE BEST blogs currently in the Chinese blogosphere is China Dialogue. Its excellent collection of Chinese and English articles (with translations) on environmental topics make it the very definition of a must-read blog. In today’s edition, Jiang Gaoming, professor of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Science and vice secretary-general of the UNESCO [...] Brilliant post on Danwei yesterday in keeping with the theme of Spring Festival. It is an annotated translation of interviews about Spring Festivals of years past collected by oral historian Sang Ye. The stories tell not only of the great hardships (floods, starvation) but also of the little joys (roasting a pig in the communal [...] I’m still busy with Spring Festival matters so I’m taking the lazy way out and cross-posting between The Granite Studio and The Peking Duck. In a week, I’ll be back in Beijing and on a more normal schedule.———————— In the journal First Things, David Gress reviews the new book What is the West? by [...] Via CDT: Letters from China blogs about an article in the magazine China Review by Fudan University professor Ge Jianxiong. The CDT brief and the Letters from China post both feature the title “Tibet not always a part of China: Chinese Historian.” Taken in context, Professor Ge’s comments are not quite so shocking. While he does [...] At the risk of slipping into what China Law Blog refers to as a “noodle” blog, I had some thoughts while wandering around Tianjin the last couple of days before the Spring Festival. YJ’s mother is the sweetest human being on Earth. She really is. But like an evil genie, when you are in her presence [...] In the United States, February is Black History Month: that last bastion of separate (blacks aren’t part of US history in November?) and unequal (the shortest month of the year). But it did get me thinking about African-American influences in China. One notable example was Robert F. Williams, the civil rights activist and “militant revolutionary [...] Chow Yun-fat is starring in the third installment of Pirates of the Caribbean as Chinese pirate Sao Feng. (Whose name refers to the classical Chinese poem: “The Asian market, he whispered/at a board meeting for Disney/how best to capture it/hire a Chinese guy/said the marketing rep softly.”) Piracy in China has a [...] 1.) Richard at The Peking Duck sticks his head in the dragon’s maw and asks: “How many years does Chinese civilization go back, and what criteria are applied to come up with the famous claim of ‘5,000 years’?” Well, the comments came fast and furious and are well worth checking out. Sam, from The Useless [...] A new textbook flap is brewing on Taiwan, this time over the omission of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre by one publishing house and other publishing companies making only brief references to the event. This latest incident, involving as it does the always sensitive issue of the Japanese atrocities at Nanjing, has added new energy to [...] Yeah, this post is a little out of character and a bit too long but it’s….cathartic. YJ and I just spent four days in Beijing apartment-hunting. It did not go well. After trying to decide between two apartments (the cozy love nest or the mack daddy shack) we decided to stall a bit and look some [...] |
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