Today was a busy day. Yajun is by herself in the Beijing office writing a story on new calls for a revolution this weekend even as the PSB is busy rounding up the usual suspects. I was teaching today, 90 exhilaration (for me, if not my students) minutes on Chiang Kai-shek and the Nanjing Decade. And somewhere between last night and this afternoon I finished two new posts as part of my week-long gig guest blogging for James Fallows at the Atlantic Monthly site.
Post one was inspired by a comment on twitter by Bill Bishop (of the Sinocism blog and the well-known Twitter handle @niubi) about the speciousness of comparing the last days of the Qing with contemporary China. I couldn’t resist, so I took him up on his challenge and concluded that while admittedly there are some pretty significant differences which make historical parallels difficult to make, there are sufficient similarities for Hu Jintao to keep reaching for his bottle of printers ink to keep the gray hairs away.
The second post was more of a “what’s hot in the China blogosphere today?” kind of story, this one about Ambassador Jon Huntsman “coincidentally” showing up at last Sunday’s