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.
