Morning Tea: Currency, Reforms, and Obama as a model for Japanese ESL students

The Guardian has posted a stunning collection of photographs entitled The Fish in the Road: Luo Dan’s China.

China and the recently crowned installed anointed sworn in (x2) Obama administration are already in a currency tiff.  I get paid in US dollars, so steady as she goes if you please…

At The China Beat, Eric Sezekorn reviews Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State.

Interesting counterpoint to Huang’s economic analysis of 1980s rural China: The Paris Review has anther excerpt from The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, a collection of Liao Yiwu’s encounters with people on the margins of Chinese society. In this episode, Liao talks with a peasant named Zeng Yinglong, who in 1985 declared his hometown in Sichuan Province an independent kingdom and proclaimed himself emperor. (h/t Reflections in a Chinese Eye)

Finally, via FT Passport, Obamamania has reached the big time: ESL textbooks for Japanese learners of English.  “His speeches are so moving, and he also uses words such as ‘yes, we can,’ ‘change’ and ‘hope’ that even Japanese people can memorize!”

January 24th, 2009

Things I’m Reading: Live-blogging the Boxer Rebellion

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 towards China in an earlier age.  What might be just as instructive, in the case of the Boxer series, would looking at the parallels between media coverage of this event in 1900 and media coverage of similar recent events in China.  There are sure to be tropes which have had remarkable staying power.

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*Yep, you guessed it, like all wordpress.org blogs the link is blocked in China. Set your proxies to “evade.”

January 24th, 2009

At the risk of stating the obvious…

…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 that our little pingfang lacks a significant source of warmth, relying solely on two moderate-sized space heaters (one per room).  Suffice to say that I can see my breath as I write this and the cat has spent the afternoon buried under the eight layers of blankets which cover our bed.

Taking a shower this morning was…an experience.  The small bathroom (located across our courtyard from the main house) heats up quickly once the hot water gets going but the before/after can be a bit chilly.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t trade our little home for anywhere else (at least in our price range).  Now if only spring would come and we can get the garden in and the barbecue grill up and running…

January 23rd, 2009

Things I shall never understand…

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 barreling down the road carrying  KTV Communists to meet their ernai from the drama academy. Plus there was yet another full-on street squabble over a fender bender.  When we walked by, “Driver” A (I use that term as a convenient definition, in no way am I testifying to the man’s actual ability to operate a motor vehicle) was bending down in front of “Driver” B’s car, trying to take a picture of the license plate as “Driver” B and “Driver” B’s…girl friend (she was a woman, about three decades younger than her companion, so I’ll be charitable in my description) were smacking “Driver” A on the head and neck whilst a crowd of looky-loo’s (including your correspondent) stopped and gawked. Fun times in the hutong.

It seems so simple, given the nature of the road, to ban non-essential traffic, private automobiles, and taxis

January 21st, 2009

George W. Bush, Qianlong, and the end of an era

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 modern history class, Jonathan Spence writes of Qianlong:

“One can trace, running through many of Qianlong’s pronouncements and actions, an undercurrent–faint yet disturbing.  It is that of a man who has been praised too much and has thought too little, of someone who has played to the gallery in public life, mistaken grandeur for substance, sought confirmation and support for even routine actions, and is not really equipped to make difficult or unpopular decisions.”

Despite vastly differences in times and circumstances, it is hard not to think of W. when reading those words.

Both were scions of powerful families who realized early on they probably were never going to live up to the past even though we must admit that  Kangxi and Yongzheng are a helluva lot more intimidating and imposing figures to follow than George H.W. Bush.  But the need for redemption

January 20th, 2009
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