“Telling The Story of China” in Six Hours is Futile, But Give BBC Credit for Trying,” Radii China
Telling “The Story of China” in Six Hours is Futile, But Give BBC Credit for Trying [Read More...]
Reviews
“The Secret Sexual Life of Zhou Enlai and the Limits of Historical Knowledge,” LA Review of Books China Blog
Retroactively outing a historical figure remains problematic, not because of the sex — Zhou Enlai may well have had erotic relations with other men — but because such studies are often methodologically flawed. Too often, contemporary understandings of romance and sexuality, gay or straight, are read into texts from another time period. But doing so can prejudice the data and lead to shaky conclusions. It is an error of perception when we use present-day standards to judge or categorize evidence of past behavior. [Read More...]
“Out of Autocracy, Off the Shelves”
It is an unfortunate axiom of publishing in China that the best way for your book to gain international attention is to have the Chinese government make it unavailable to domestic readers. Such is the fate of Out of Imperial Autocracy (Zouchu dizhi), the latest book by the eminent public intellectual and economic historian Qin Hui, published earlier this year. [Read More...]
Wealth and Power at Capital M
Historian John Delury gave an excellent talk at Capital M today about wealth and power as defining recent Chinese history, but how to fit a search for modernity into that equation? [Read More...]
Bad History: Modern Marvels – The Great Wall
Downloaded the "Great Wall" episode of Modern Marvels for a class. Wasted $1.99 on a History Channel fail. [Read More...]
Five Books about Qing History
Five great reads about the Qing Dynasty. [Read More...]
Review: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know
I know that when writing reviews it’s [Read More...]