Jottings from the Granite Studio

Yeah I know…one week late. Ever since my unexpected visa detour to Hong Kong, I’ve been exactly one week behind on everything for a month. Nevertheless, now up at The China Beat (mainland link here):
Like their May 4th predecessors, the young people of China write espousing a strong Chinese nation and their rhetoric […]

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Sorry for going offline.  Had to get my visa situation sorted out here in Beijing (a subject for a future post) and in today’s climate, I thought it best to go dark for a couple of weeks.  Thank you to the many readers who emailed me wondering what was going on, it was very much […]

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I recently had dinner with a fellow blogger, and he asked me: Why a studio?
Well the recent online edition of the China Heritage Quarterly has everything you ever wanted to know about a scholar’s studio but were afraid to ask.
For a Chinese artist, a studio name is suggestive of his or her artistic persona and […]

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Given his retirement–and a handy staff of ghost writers–Comrade Fidel casts his thoughts to Chinese history with a few digs thrown in on separatism of the Taiwanese and Tibetan varieties. No real shockers here, pretty much boilerplate Party line/Marxist theoretical reductionism, though for obvious reasons Fidel focuses particular attention on US support for Chiang Kai-shek […]

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On a Sunday morning with thoughts of the role of the media and the power of the press fresh on my mind, I thought it appropriate to note this passage from one of Modern China’s early influential journalists, Liang Qichao. Here Liang is writing in the inaugural issue of his newspaper The Eastern Times (时报), […]

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As the fascinating rapproachment between historical frienemies the KMT and the CCP continues, The China Daily is citing Chiang Kai-shek as proof “Τibet has always been a part of China.”
The papers, co-released by the Hoover Institution, under Stanford University of the United States, and Shanghai’s Fudan University, comprise archival documents and telegrams from T. V. […]

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One of the more persistent myths of Qing dynasty (1644-1912) history is the hoary old story of the Manchu conquerors realizing their inherent inferiority and meekly taking on the culture of their subjects. The essence of the argument is that the success of the Qing in conquering and ruling such a large empire was due […]

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As regards the situation in Τibet, I’ve said elsewhere that history is a slippery ally when forced into the service of contemporary political disputes.
Let’s set aside the Mongols for a moment. They ruled an empire that stretched from Korea to Kiev, so one could use the Khans to make all kinds of territorial claims. Yuan […]

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In light of recent events these past two weeks and an incredibly tight schedule by your correspondent, I’m posting a few links from the Granite Studio archives.
Tsering Shakya on “Tibet: Does History Matter?”
Ge Jianxiong: “To exaggerate the size of China’s historical territory is not patriotic.”
Images of Tibet and China from 1940
Protests at the […]

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In August 1868, an angry group of Yangzhou residents burned down the home of Hudson Taylor, a British missionary who had arrived in the city with his family only two months prior and whom the local populace suspected of kidnapping children for nefarious purposes. Taylor and his family fortunately escaped the blaze, though they were […]

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