Notes from the classroom: Papers and benevolent dictatorships

I usually have two exams and two papers for my courses.  This semester, for reasons passing understanding, I decided on three papers and two exams.  I think somewhere in a brain addled with Olympic enthusiasm, I wanted to shorten the exams (eliminating the essays) and make up that material as part of a “paper.”  Not sure why I wanted to do that.  The students weren’t thrilled about an extra paper and it takes me about five hours longer to grade 25 papers than to grade 25 essays on an exam.

So, I greeted the students ths Monday with the following message. Looking back now, I’m struck by how punchy I can be right after my morning tea:

Fellow historians of the Qing Empire:

I was walking around Beijing this weekend, pondering what it meant to have a “Restoration,” and it occurred to me that one feature of past restorations was a demonstration of imperial benevolence, whether in the form of tax holidays or the pardoning of prisoners.  Since I am  unlikely to ever have my own small- to mid-size empire, restored or otherwise, my opportunities to show benevolence sadly tend to be few and far between.  This is one of

November 10th, 2008

Jeff Wasserstrom: Linkages and Protests

This morning I attended a talk “Tale of Two Cities” given by UCI’s Jeff Wasserstrom.  Professor Wasserstrom is a historian and prolific author, online at The China Beat and The Nation as well as in the real world of books, most recently China’s Brave New World and the forthcoming Global Shanghai: 1850-2010.

I admire the way Professor Wasserstrom engages in the larger discourse on China, both as a serious academic as well as a communicator of ideas to the thinking public at large. The term ”public intellectual” is a bit nebulous and the line between ‘popularizing’ and ‘communicating clearly’ is a fine one, but Professor Wasserstrom walks it nimbly, and he has become a role model of mine in this regard. 

The talk today was on the historical and contemporary relationship between Beijing and Shanghai, long time rivals to be sure, but Professor Wasserstrom suggests that the two cities share a number of historically significant connections, and used the topic as a segue into the lecture’s main takeaway: the importance of these urban linkages in terms of political opposition and popular protest. Professor Wasserstrom, who has also published a volume on student protests in 20th century China, argues that the government is less concerned about the numbers of local protests than they are about

November 10th, 2008

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