Asian History Commons^™

Sun Yat Sen, A S’Pore Icon? Hardly, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Assistant Professor of Law Eugene Tan discusses if we are unwittingly overemphasising the role of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore's path to nationhood.

Silence Is Still Golden: Women And The Metropolis In Early Chinese Cinema, Yap Soo Ei, Ji Xing, Nicolai Volland, Yang Lijun, Paul Pickowicz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Feng Xiaogang’s blockbuster Aftershock is making headlines these days, setting new records at the box office in China. We cannot say yet if the excitement is justified—Aftershock has only just hit the theaters here in Singapore. It is clear, however, that the current cinema craze in China is not at all a new phenomenon. In fact, new releases on the silver screen created similar sensations in Shanghai as early as eighty years ago. And many of these old films continue even today to fascinate. Films by pioneering Chinese directors of the 1920s and 1930s still dazzle, with their opulent sets, …

An Interview With Deanna Fei, Author Of A Thread Of Sky

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Deanna Fei is author of A Thread of Sky (Penguin Press, 2010), a novel about three generations of women in a Chinese American family. Here, she talks with recent UC Irvine graduate Mengfei Chen.

Mengfei Chen: What were some of your inspirations in writing the book? How did it begin? What experiences informed your writing?

Deanna Fei: A Thread of Sky is the story of a family of Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home. It was inspired by a trip through China’s “must-sees” that I embarked on ten years ago with my mother, my …

“We Are Not Machines:” Teen Spirit On China’S Shopfloor, Mary E. Gallagher

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This spring, a series of well-coordinated and successful strikes in foreign-invested enterprises in China made headlines all around the world. Young migrant workers openly and forcefully articulated demands for higher wages, better representation, and more consideration of their “spiritual” and mental well-being. These demands have led to increased speculation that China’s current economic boom is winding down, as its growth strategy founded in part on cheap migrant labor from rural areas faces domestic and international difficulties.

This is not the first time that Chinese workers have openly protested for higher wages, better treatment, and more job security. What makes this …

Reading Round-Up: China Now The World’S Second-Largest Economy

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This week came the not-unexpected news that China has passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Here, we’ve rounded up reactions to and analyses of the story:

• At his New Yorker blog, Evan Osnos asks “Why the Long Face?”, explaining that “While the story has rated front-page treatment in the U.S., it has sent China into a frenzy of self-flagellation, in the hope of reminding people that it is still home to a lot of very poor people.”

• Yoree Koh at the Wall Street Journal reports that Japan is taking the news of its third-place status with …

An Image

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There were 12 minutes and 28 seconds remaining.

I had never bid on eBay. It takes too much energy, too much attention to follow the vagaries of an online auction. And there never seems to be anything I want that badly. But I wanted that propaganda poster—a reproduction of an oil painting, mid-1970s—depicting, with the imagination and rhetorical power possible only in socialist realism, the May Fourth movement of 1919.

In the painting, the sky is clearing and clouds are dissipating behind the imposing presence of Tiananmen, which dominates the scene. The students, young men and women, are marching at …

Panic Room

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On my (continuing) walk across China, I have occasionally come across the kind of construction featured in the attached image — a farmhouse with a door half way up the wall, no stairs attached. I have previously assumed the house was still under construction, or perhaps they ran out of money before doing the stairs. But as I passed his one, in Guang’an county in the middle of Sichuan, last Saturday, it struck me that this is in fact a “panic room”, a way to seal off and protect the family and its assets in the top room, safe from …

Frivolous Friday: The Red Army Learns To “Just Beat It”

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” were performed by a Cultural Revolution-era musical troupe? Perhaps not. But thanks to this video on Tudou, the question you never thought to ask has been answered.

The video has been making the rounds on Twitter this week (follow us at@chinabeat!); thanks to Kaiser Kuo for bringing it to our attention.

Sodden Anniversary, Paul Katz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

August 8, 2010 marked the first anniversary of the Siaolin Village 小林村 tragedy, when torrential rains caused by Typhoon Morakot triggered a massive mudslide that swept this idyllic community off the face of the earth, taking 474 lives. Conditions one year later were eerily similar, with rain drenching the disaster site and another threat (Tropical Storm Dianmu 電母) lurking off the east coast (happily it did not make landfall). Southern Taiwan has suffered heavy rains during the past month, but there has been little destruction and loss of life (so far), unlike the terrible flooding that has ravaged so much …

Hong Kong’S Glass Ceiling, Reenita Malhotra

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Hong Kong’s women have the power of their purses, are freer and more educated, and enjoy more legal protection than they did 20 years ago. And since 1996, when Hong Kong signed CEDAW, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women—which calls for 50 percent representation of women in government leadership, political parties, trade unions, professional and other representative groups—women’s participation in managerial positions has risen from 22 percent in 1998 to 29 percent in 2008. In the civil service, women held 31 percent of directorate officer positions in 2008, compared to 21 percent in …

An Interview With Chinese Underground Rock Musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Tim Hathaway

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A quick listen to Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s (左小祖咒）music would not be enough to explain his fame. His trademark is singing off key.

In spite of the odd sounding vocals or perhaps because of its contrast to the saccharine sweet sounds of Chinese pop and rock, Zuoxiao has become one of China’s most successful rock musicians.

He started his career in 1993 and has since produced ten albums. He has also published a best selling novel and created sculptures and artistic photography. He was a founding member of the avant garde artists residence called Beijing’s “East Village” in the early 1990s where …

Teaching Vietnam War, Duong Van Thanh Phd, Academic Director

Fostering Multicultural Competence and Global Justice: an SIT Symposium

The purpose of the segment on Teaching Vietnam War for undergraduate American students who join the SIT-Study Abroad on Vietnam: Culture, Development & Social Change is to understand and analyze some key elements of the origins, development, consequences, and legacies of war and revolution in Vietnam from the early twentieth century to the present. After some readings and introductory session, the main part will be spent discussing the meaning and causes of revolution, the relationship between revolution and war, and the tactics and strategies of both revolutionaries and those who want to stop them from winning power and achieving their …

The Freshest Kids In China, George Zhi Zhao

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

R16 at the Shanghai World Expo

June 19, 2010 I hear the voice of the late James Brown shouting over the booming speakers, and I watch a crowd of dancers move and contort to every minute rhythm and sound that is being controlled and manipulated by the DJ. The energy in the air is tense, as different b-boys (breakdancers) take turns stepping inside a circle of bodies, all asserting themselves in back-to-back solo performances of gravity-defying sequences of dance movements. The competitive performance of breakdancing happens all over the world, in metropolises ranging from New York City to Tokyo, from …

Where’S Haibao? Help Us Find Him!

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Shanghai seems to have turned into a massive game of “Where’s Haibao?” as the image of everyone’s favorite Expo mascot pervades the city, in places both expected and not. Gina Bock, an entering student at Pomona College, recently returned from her first trip to China and shared a few photos of her Haibao sightings with us. They’re now in a Picasa album (link below, and also accessible through our “Media” page). If you have Haibao photos of your own to add (the more unusual, the better!), let us know by writing to thechinabeat[at]gmail.com. Though we suspect Haibao will be only …

Anthologize: A New Tool For Bloggers

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We wanted to alert readers who are fellow WordPress users to the arrival of a cool new WordPress plugin that has just been unveiled. Anthologize is the product of the “One Week | One Tool” program, a summer institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The plugin — conceived, developed, and released in just one week! — enables bloggers to grab online content, edit and organize it, and produce an electronic book. Read more about Anthologize, and some ideas about how it can enhance …

A Q-And-A With Scott Tong Of Marketplace

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As regular readers of this blog know, I spent late June and much of July in Shanghai, with brief trips to other parts of China. One aspect of this sojourn in the PRC that proved memorable was the opportunity it afforded me to finally meet several people whose reporting or commentaries I’ve admired, but whose paths had never crossed mine before, including Kaiser Kuo (whose Sinica podcasts we’ve talked up here before), David Barboza of the New York Times (whose day-in-the-life of a South China worker I singled out for praise in a recent commentary), freelancer Adam Minter (who has …

Reading Round-Up, 8/2/2010

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Before we fully embrace the arrival of August, a bit of housekeeping from July . . . some stories that we noticed during the past month and wanted to share with our readers:

• Xujun Eberlein has been busy lately, and two of her recent pieces of writing have overlaps with topics we’ve discussed here at China Beat in the past few weeks. On the matter of Wang Hui and plagiarism, see her post at Inside-Out China; for her review of the “social science fiction” novel Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013, head over to Foreign Policy.

• If you’re in Beijing and …

Peace In His Time, Ananya Vajpeyi

History Faculty Publication Series

A history of India under British rule highlights the significance of Mahatma Gandhi's radical new politics, which transformed the struggle against empire.

(Re)Imagining Taiwan: Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism In Film And Literature, 1970-1990s, Keith Goodwin

History

The study of Taiwan's history is permeated by questions of identity. Since 1600, the island has been, among other things, a Dutch colonial outpost, a refuge for Ming loyalists, a provincial frontier of the Qing Dynasty, a Japanese colony, and, since the end of World War II, the home of the Republic of China (ROC). However, sixty years after Taiwan's "retrocession" to the government of Chiang Kai-shek, questions of Taiwan's cultural and national identity persist.

This paper takes the 1970s to be an important turning point in Taiwan's identity discourse. Beginning with a discussion of the various political and diplomatic …

Conflict And Accommodation--Matteo Ricci's Approach To Catholic Evangelization In China, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

Saint Anthony of Padua Institute Lecture