It’s such a strange expression — as if History could take sides. A decade ago, President Clinton used these words to scold the Chinese leadership, President Obama used the same phrase last week. There’s a a couple of things that trouble me about the sentiment. For one, it assumes a single track of historical progress. For another [...]
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Run, do not walk or stop to collect your bling, and read Brendan O’Kane’s vivisection of the recent NYT article “Now Hip-Hop, Too, Is Made in China.” I saw the subject, read Brendan’s title (“[HELP], [HELP], [HELP] THE POLICE!”) and just went and got some popcorn because I knew it was going to be fun ride. [...] The Year of the Ox is upon us. YJ’s Dad and I returned from a brief trip to the front of their xiaoqu to light the obligatory string of fireworks. We hardly had need to bother…Tianjin tonight is doing its best impersonation of London during the Blitz. The evening was a festive [...] In archaeology news: A group in Kure, Japan is planning to salvage artifacts from the sunken Battleship Yamato. The ship, at 65,000 tons one of the largest of its class, sank in 1945. Via Asahi.com: Kazushige Todaka, chief of the Kure Maritime Museum, more commonly known as the Yamato Museum because it has a replica of the battleship [...] More commentary on the attempt by a team of Beijing-based lawyers to block the sale of two bronze statues looted from the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan). The group of 67 lawyers has filed suit in a French court in advance of the February 23rd auction of the items. The bronzes are part of a collection formerly owned [...] Edge of the American West (another blog with a strong UC Davis connection) is “live-blogging,”* 109 years after fact, the Boxer Rebellion via back issues of The New York Times. It’s an interesting project and past mining of the NYT archives has yielded nuggets of China’s past as well as whole veins of American media attitudes [...] …it is frickin’ cold in Beijing right now. I don’t know what it is, I grew up in New Hampshire and went to high school up in the White Mountains, but there is something about the Beijing winter that chills me to my core. Perhaps subzero temperatures divorced from snow simply feels colder. It probably doesn’t help [...] This evening we went with friends to dine at the Pass By Bar. As we walked up Nanluoguxiang to that venerable institution (a decade this year!) I wondered — not for the first time mind you — why there is any resistance to banning auto traffic on that narrow street. This evening saw the inevitable black Audis [...] I’ll admit it: I can be snarky. Even in class. And one of my favorite pieces of snark for the last eight years or so has been the occasional flippant comparison between the George W. Bush years and the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1722-1796/1799). In his Search for Modern China, the core text for my [...] 80 years ago today Liang Qichao, one of the greatest and most influential literary figures of the early 2oth century, passed away in Beijing. He died relatively young, only 55, but his career spanned an era in which the political, cultural, and intellectual currents swirled and surged, both carrying and buffeting Liang even as he doggedly [...] I just wrote a whole long thing on this subject and then WordPress decided to eat the post for lunch with a pickle and a nice shiraz. So I’m giving you the link to the NYT article and leaving it at that except to say check out the nitwit quote at the end of the article [...] Today is the birthday of Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940). A classically-trained scholar who later decided to broaden his education and study in Germany, he was Minister of Education (briefly) under Yuan Shikai and (more famously) the chancellor of Peking University during the New Culture Era. Chancellor Cai took over a campus squalid with the scions of the [...] Quirky Beijing, whose tagline is “finding the gently offbeat in a decidedly uncute city”, has posted a treasure trove of links to old newsreels of Chinese cities dating back to the 1930s and 1940s. The videos come from the Travel Film Archive, a collection of travel footage from 1900 to 1970 available on YouTube. [...] Wen Tianxiang Temple in Beijing Once upon a time historians mocked the Song (960-1279). There was this idea that after the Tang, which had always seemed a little — muscular, the Song era was too effeminate, too concerned with arts and philosophy. The territorial reach of the Song was never great, and it was surrounded by hostile neighbors kept at [...] |
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