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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 for tomorrow night at a small restaurant in Beijing’s CBD. The last dinner was great. Leave a comment on Richard’s site if you wish to attend. 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 (see top right). Other writers have stepped into the breach with far more insight and ability than I could have mustered, most notably Ben Landy at China Redux, who has written a fine retrospective on the event. Frankly, my specialty is the 19th century, and even 35 years later I think the full legacy of Nixon and Mao remains to be seen. But if nothing else, the rapprochement between the USA and the PRC paved the way for China’s opening to the world. This in turn brought the foreign investment, capital, and access to markets necessary for Deng Xiaoping and the CCP to embark on a series of spectacular reforms that have transformed China–and the world–over the past three decades. While not without serious problems, these policies and the integration of the PRC into the global economic community have lifted millions out of poverty and 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 the books mentioned in the Danwei post is the Ray Huang classic, 1587: A Year of No Significance. It has its flaws (not the least of which is the translation of the Ming court diaries used in the English title) and the anti-CCP subtext is hard to ignore. (Huang belongs to that school of historians that views history as an effective tool with which to whip contemporary governments into shape. Sima Qian is somewhere smiling.) All that said, it is one of the most accessible books on Chinese history for the non-historian, well-written and full of information about a fascinating period: the end of the Ming. The division of the book into biographical sketches (another homage to the historians of China’s past) also makes it a great book on a plane or train. I feel the Ming gets overlooked a little bit by historians 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 that “the Gojoseon Kingdom, believed to be the first in Korea’s history, was firmly established by Dangun in 2333 B.C.” Some believe the changes to be a direct response to claims made by China’s Northeastern Project that called the Goguryeo (Koguryo) Kingdom (37-668 AD), “a part of Chinese history.” These claims were also at one time posted on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s web site. I don’t see a truce coming any time soon. 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 source for the quirky nugget of information spun into a larger essay that can birth new ideas and turn old ones upside down. The new site is only three posts old, but knowing Dave that number is likely to grow quickly in the near future. Check it out. |
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