Things seen and noted: Sunday Telegraph edition

A joint project between the Harvard-Yenching Library and the National Library of China plans to digitize nearly 51,000 rare books and manuscripts, some dating back to the Song Dynasty, from the Harvard collection.  Once completed, the texts will be publicly available for free on the Web.  Given the division of labor involved here, I think it might be fair to say “the government of China has hired the Harvard Library staff to digitize the collection,” but that doesn’t sound quite as “cooperative”in drafting press releases. (h/t CDT)

Workmen in Jianxi uncovered an ancient tomb on October 2, containing a remarkable well-preserved and well-dressed female corpse.  With little but clothes and a few simple tomb decorations, archaeologists are having trouble dating the body, but agree that it is likely from the Ming or Qing eras and that the tomb was not a royal one.  I love the level of research that went into this.  The same archaeologists are also close to confirming that the body is in fact, not Jimmy Hoffa and the woman had not been treated by Michael Jackson’s doctor prior to her demise, but they have not ruled out the possibility that the remains may be the rapidly

October 11th, 2009

Morning Tea: Things read and noted

Time reviews Founding of the Republic. I confess, I still haven’t seen the film out of protest over SARFT’s rejection of my suggested translation, The Birth of a (Chinese) Nation.  Unsurprisingly, the film reveals just as much about the contemporary concerns of China’s current crop of politicians as it does about the founders of the nation.

The Taipei National Palace Museum weighs in on the Yves St. Laurent/Yuanmingyuan disputed relics.  The same week that Taipei unveiled a new joint exhibition on the Yongzheng Era, a cooperative effort with the Palace Museum in Beijing and featuring pieces from both the Beijing and Taiwan collections, the Taipei Museum has refused to exhibit two bronze sculptures looted from the Old Summer Palace in 1860.  The bronzes were put on sale in a contentious auction earlier this year.

Finally, from last week, The Guardian has a piece on the struggle by author Xiao Jiansheng to publish a simple book of history during this time of memorials and celebrations of, well…history.

October 8th, 2009

WSJ on Manchu language and identity

Running between classes today, but wanted to call everybody’s attention to an excellent article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Ian Johnson on recent efforts to revive the Manchu language and Manchu identity in today’s PRC.  Be sure to check it out.

(Ps. The comment section on the accompanying article is also exhibit A for why I can’t be bothered with comments anymore.)

October 7th, 2009

It’s not “Who do you love?” that matters, but “What do you fear the most?”

In class two weeks ago we were watching the documentary series China From the Inside when one of my students asked, with some reason, that if there was so much hardship and discontent why does the CCP enjoy such broad support?

It was a good question, and like all good questions it depends on whom you ask and how you phrase the question.   A middle-class manager in a multi-national company in Beijing is likely to have a more favorable view of current policies than, say, a farmer living next door to a factory that blatantly ignores environmental regulations while making the products sold by the middle-class manager in Beijing.

This stands to reason.  But I think on a more fundamental level there is something which brings the farmer and the yuppie together: the question of what do you fear the most?

In Western Europe and North American our dystopian nightmares, those of science fiction and political thrillers, as well as in our history books, involve tyrants who acquired too much power and used that power to brutalize people. Hitler. Stalin. Darth Vader.  (Even) Mao.   The United States was founded on a profound paranoia over anything that has a whiff of “tyranny” about it.  And in the past few

October 4th, 2009

60th Anniversary Hangover

So it’s October 2nd and Beijing is waking up with a bit of hangover.  I went to a parade-viewing party yesterday morning and when I arrived, at 9:00 a.m., the assembled gathering of translators, bloggers, and professional snarkers was already searching for their second collective bottle of vodka.  It went downhill steadily from there.

But more than just a day off and excuse to start drinking at breakfast, the day was also a moment to celebrate the triumph of the CCP’s will in taking an impoverished nation and building a 21st century powerhouse.  The  message yesterday: “Hu’s the man?”  And it was delivered with the sledgehammer subtlety of Kanye West attending an awards show following three hours of blowing bong hits in the back of Jay-Z’s Maybach.

Now that the biggest event in the PRC this year is out of the way, I thought I’d try to work my way back through the celebration with this summer’s funniest movie, The Hangover, the kind of movie that is monumentally stupid-funny in a “DVD you would put on if you had spent three hours blowing bong hits in the back of your buddy’s hatchback” kind of way.  And since that really kind

October 2nd, 2009
 
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