Jottings from the Granite Studio

A Qing historian reads the newspaper…

Jottings from the Granite Studio header image 4

Translation: Lost

June 26th, 2008 · 19 Comments

The always whimiscal Beijing Review this month extolls the importance of translators in bridging the cultural gap between East and West.  Given the stilted nature of the Review’s English-language articles, we were all wondering when they’d notice how important a good translator can be, but I digress:

The harmonious coexistence of different nations owes much to [...]

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Tags: Chinese History

China’s academic blacklist

June 26th, 2008 · 1 Comment

It’s a disturbing trend that shouldn’t come as any shock to anyone in the circle of foreign-based China researchers: step over the line and risk losing your access.
Paul Mooney writes in The National (h/t CDT) about the problems certain academics face when they run afoul of the anti-intellectual hacks generally in charge of such things here [...]

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Tags: Chinese politics

Bernard-Henri Lévy on the sins of the political left in Darfur

June 26th, 2008 · 6 Comments

From a speech given at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, on April 29, 2008, at Flourence Gould Hall in NYC, and republished in the June issue of Guernica:
In a few words—and maybe we will discuss this more deeply in the conversation later—we are here facing a sort of perverse effect of three great [...]

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Tags: Chinese politics