Cool new blog: An Imperfect Pen

Readers of this blog might not know that one of my hobbies is music.  I’ve played piano all of my life and (mis)spent a portion of my high school and college days bashing around in a series of bands which ranged from cow-punk to Grateful Dead covers.  I still play a bit, though as with all things when in graduate school, the amount of time one can devote to outside avocation suffers.

Nevertheless, it’s a subject in which I remain intensely interested and so it was my great pleasure to learn of a new blog that combines both my vocation and avocation together: An Imperfect Pen. It’s only the first month, but he blows me away with the quality, focus, and regularity of his posts.  It helps that the site fulfills one of my basic rules for online writing: Good blogs are about SOMETHING and use that theme as a foundation to then explore other ideas and subjects.

The author, Peter Micic, describes his mission thus:

I am a specialist in Chinese music history interested in a vast range of topics, ranging from exploring the complexity of gender relations among music-makers in late imperial China, the revival of musical styles

December 28th, 2008

The ghost of Zheng He…

In a new phase of China’s reemergence as a naval power, a 3-vessel anti-piracy task force set sail from Hainan for the waters off of the Horn of Africa.*  It’s been over 600 years since the eunuch admiral Zheng He began his series of amazing voyages from the Ming Empire through the Indian Ocean.  Some historians have argued that the decision by the Ming court to end the expeditions and dismantle the armada created a naval power vacuum in the Indian Ocean which allowed small and aggressive ships from Western Europe to force their way into long-established patterns of trade along the South Asian and African coast. 

While China certainly has a stake in keeping the shipping lanes open in the region, there’s also a strong whiff of “let’s test our mettle” to the expedition.  PLAN commanders have already suggested that the mission serves to provide combat experience for China’s sailors and marines, and after thirty years of military modernization, there must be a strong temptation in the PLA brass (shared by boys across the world this day after Christmas) to stop dreaming, take the toys out of the box, and let ‘em rip. 

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There’s apparently some sort of

December 26th, 2008

Happy Holidays from the Granite Studio

Happy holidays to you and your family from Jeremiah, YJ, Chairman Mao, the ghost of Zeng Guofan, a couple of hutong cats, and the rest of us here at the Granite Studio.  Enjoy the day!

December 25th, 2008

The Historical Record for December 24: The Christmas Eve Rape of Student Shen

Around 8:00 p.m. on December 24, 1946, a group of American marines including 23-year old Corporal William Pierson and Private William Pritchard snatched Beijing University student Shen Chong off the streets near Dongdan in Beijing, dragged her to the adjacent Polo Grounds (what is today the Dongdan basketball courts) and raped her.  A group of workers heard her cries for help but –intimidated by the American soldiers — they didn’t intervene and instead ran to report the crime to the joint Sino-American Police Force tasked with keeping order in the city.  Pierson was arrested later that night.

The crime electrified the Beijing intelligentsia. The fact that the two soldiers were tried in an American military court with limited Chinese involvement recalled memories of colonial extraterrioriality.  Moreover, the assault raised the question of why American troops were continuing to occupy key Chinese cities a year after the Japanese surrender.  Many students, academics, and intellectuals, already predisposed to sympathize with the CCP and leftist groups at the expense of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, used the case of Shen Chong’s rape to call for immediate US withdrawal from China, accusing the Americans of being in league with Chiang and possibly planning to return China to colonial

December 24th, 2008

The Historical Record for December 23, 2008: The Death of Hideki Tojo

60 years ago today, eight Japanese officials convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East were hanged at Sugano Prison in Tokyo.  Among the eight were wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō and General Seishirō Itagaki (like Tōjō a veteran of the Kwantung Army) who was convicted for his actions in Manchuria and China.

Whatever there is to say about the fairness of the International Tribunal, I don’t think enough is said (outside of China) about the atrocities and hardships inflicted on the Chinese people by the Japanese imperial armies.  Every once in awhile I get emails from this wingnut group based in Japan who wants to tell “the real story” of what happened in China between 1931 and 1945.  They spout off about things like the Nanjing Massacre was a myth, the comfort women “volunteered” (as if separating the word ‘forced’ from the word ‘prostitution’ matters anyway), or that Japanese ‘atrocities’ were fabricated by Chinese nationalists, etc.

Now Chinese museums, no strangers to fabricating history, do have a tendency to histrionics whenever possible.  But many of the atrocities of the Japanese against China have been pretty well documented and independently confirmed (to the extent

December 23rd, 2008
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