Chinese Studies Commons^™

A Cultural Symbol Passes From The Scene: Ji Xianlin, Not Michael Jackson, Timothy B. Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It’s been moving to watch the response in China to the July 11 death of renowned scholar, Ji Xianlin (1911-2009). While Ji’s unsurprising departure at the ripe old age of 98 has not brought quite the same flood tide of emotion and cultural stock taking in China as Michael Jackson’s completely unexpected death a few weeks earlier at age 50 has in the United States and around the world, the way the venerable scholar is being remembered in Beijing is nevertheless remarkable. Long lines of people wishing to pay their last respects waited for hours to gain entrance to a …

Confucianism In Chinese Academia, Daniel A. Bell

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Over the last decade or so, there has been a revival of Confucianism. Popular books on Confucianism are best sellers, and official discourse from the government often expresses traditional Confucian values like harmony. What is less well known, however, is the resurgence in interest among academics in China.

Rigorous experiments by psychologists such as Peng Kaiping and Wu Shali show that there are striking cognitive differences between Chinese and Americans, with Chinese more likely to use contextual and dialectical approaches to solving problems. Psychologists Huang Guangguo and Yang Zhongfang from Taiwan and Hongkong advocate the use of traditional Chinese ideas …

China Beatniks Around The Web

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

After a few weeks of vacation, China Beat is back to posting (though we considered making an 8 percent reduction in our future posts in honor of the UC furlough, we’ll just be back to business as usual). Even so, it is still summer and a few contributors have been using the time to publish in other venues.

Last Saturday, Ken Pomeranz mentioned a few of his recent publications, includingthis one at the New Left Review.

Jeff Wasserstrom recently reviewed Lisa See’s new book, Shanghai Girls for Time Asia. (We ran an interview with See this spring, which you can …

Shanghai Expo: The Us Pavilion Is On

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last November, we ran a little preview of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, pointing you to a few readings about this big “coming distraction.” Last week the US finally committed to attend the Expo, prompting a new round of Expo stories around the web.

1. It’s pretty unusual for the U.S. to land on any world list between San Marino and Andorra, but that’s its position on the Expo sign-up sheet, asreported by the AFP:

The United States signed up Friday the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, officials said, making it the last major country with diplomatic ties to China to join …

Self-Promotion Saturday, Ken Pomeranz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“Self-promotion Saturday?” My mother would be appalled, but times (and media cultures) change, and I do have a few things that might be of interest to China Beat readers. In addition to co-editing China in 2008 (which regular visitors to this site might possibly have heard of), I have another co-edited volume that came out this spring, and another book I edited has just come this summer.

The spring volume is The Environment and World History, 1500-2000 (UC Press), co-edited with Edmund Burke III; it includes both regional essays (I did the one on China), and topical ones (on energy …

Reading Round-Up

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

To start, a few pieces not related to the events in Xinjiang:

1. “Edge of the American West,” a history/philosophy academic group blog, ran a piece today by David Silbey titled, “Death Preparatory to Resurrection [Boxers, July 13-16, 1900]” that reflects on Western media coverage during that time of the supposed massacre of foreigners in Beijing (later proven to be false):

This was the week that the westerners besieged in the embassies in Beijing died. They would be reborn again quite quickly, but for several days in the middle of July the world was firmly convinced that they had all …

The Xinjiang Riots: Tried Paradigms, Fresh Tensions, James Leibold

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The mainstream media, both Western and Chinese, seem to be struggling to make sense of the deadly riots that broke out in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi last week. Well-worn explanations on both sides have largely failed to grasp the complexities behind this new, unprecedented wave of mass communal violence in China. Not since the dying days of the Manchu Qing empire has China witnessed this sort of spontaneous ethnically-based violence.

With initial headlines like “Chinese riot police, Muslims clash in northwestern city,” “China in deadly crackdown after Uighurs go on the rampage,” and “Uighurs cling to life in People’s …

Reading Round-Up

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Little bits and pieces from around the web…

1. In case you missed it, David Brooks wrote a column about China in The New York Times last week. In it, he details two perspectives on China’s future presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival. On the one hand,

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica… During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. …

Though The Candles Flicker Red, Jonathan Tel

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Jonathan Tel’s collection of stories, The Beijing of Possibilities, was released last month. China Beat ran an earlier selection, “Year of the Gorilla,” in March 2009. Tel’s previous publications include Arafat’s Elephant and Freud’s Alphabet. You can learn more about The Beijing of Possibilities at the website of Other Press.

Blame it on the Olympics. The authorities are trying to clean up the city, give it a new face. Let’s fool tourists and athletes into thinking it’s always been like this. Street performers of all kinds, they’re swept out of sight. Not that they vanish, they relocate to the outskirts, …

Reports From The West

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Details are still emerging about the unrest in western China, but there are already some fabulous round-ups of media coverage of the events, such as this one at Shanghaiist and this one at EastSouthWestNorth. Here is a short video report from Al Jazeera:

Twitter is proving to once again be an important tracker for journalists and others. We recommend keeping track of these feeds if you’d like to keep up on what is happening (as well as recommendations for further reading as it is posted online):Michael Anti (journalist, Nieman Fellow); Louisa Lim (NPR reporter); Melissa K. Chan (Al Jazeera reporter). …

History, Generations, And China Stories, Robert A. Kapp

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In early May, a conference was held at Yale for retiring Chinese historian Jonathan Spence, with several China Beatniks in attendance. Here, Robert Kapp, one of Jonathan Spence’s first graduate students, reflects on the shifts in the stories we’ve told and heard about China during the time that Spence has been active in the field.

The retirement of a distinguished scholar and doctoral mentor sometimes goes insufficiently remarked, but in the case of Jonathan Spence’s recent retirement from the Yale History faculty, something better happened. Happily, several of Spence’s Ph.D. students decided to throw their efforts into a conference and …

Tehran Events And Tiananmen Analogies

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With so many references to Tiananmen showing up in the news, we wanted to take a quick break from our time away to recommend a couple of the best uses of 1989 analogies (if we weren’t on hiatus, we’d also look at some of the worst, and there have been some pretty bad ones). One powerful rumination on the relevance of China’s 1989 for thinking about Iran’s 2009 is by Andrew Leonard of the “How the World Works” blog at Salon.com:

He begins as follows:

“In the spring of 1989, the fax machine was China’s Twitter — the miracle technology …

June 4th Around The World: Notes From One Week After The Anniversary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A week (or so) after the anniversary of the “May 35th” events (as some Chinese netizens put it to circumvent automatic blocks on mention of a highly charged date), we got several more responses to our request to Friends of the Blog for word on how June 4th was commemorated, discussed, or ignored in various parts of the world. The most substantial (reproduced in full below) is a second contribution to the series (click herefor her first) by Paola Voci (an Italian-born, American-trained, New Zealand-based specialist in Chinese visual culture whose book, China on Video: Small Screen Realities, is due …

Berkshire Encyclopedia On New Media

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Berkshire Publishing has recently published its Encyclopedia of China with contributions by China scholars like Sherman Cochran, Kerry Brown, Judy Polumbaum and many others and featuring one thousand entries on a diverse range of historical, social and cultural topics.

A few of the entries caught our attention as a little unusual for a print encyclopedia—including entries on “internet use,” “online social networking,” and “blogging.” As these topics are of particular interest to us (and we’re guessing to many of you, too), we were curious how Berkshire would cover them in the encyclopedia format. Here are a few relevant excerpts (selected …

June 4 Around The World: California

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We wrote to the peripatetic Pico Iyer, a Friend of the Blog, to see how June 4th was marked wherever he happened to be this year on the anniversary date. He sent us the following ruminations, in which he alludes to the mid-1980s when he first went to Beijing and first saw Lhasa, at a time when each, in ways he’s described elsewhere, was a very different place than it is now:

On the Fourth of June–the great annual feast-day at my old English school, the very opposite of its associations for modern Chinese–I was, as I so often am, …

Looking Backwards: From 1989 To Han Times And From 2008 To 1964

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There have been many efforts during the last month, on this site and elsewhere, to bring history into discussions of the twentieth anniversary of June 4th (particularly via allusions the May 4th Movement of 1919), just as a year ago there were many efforts to bring history into discussions of the Beijing Games (especially via allusions to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Seoul Olympics of 1988). But there’s still room for this Top Five list of historically minded pieces on 1989 or 2008 that have just appeared and stand out as especially worth checking out, due to either how …

June 4 Around The World: A Letter From Lima And A Hong Kong Perspective

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In this third offering in our series, we limit ourselves to one short post, from a Friend of the Blog who recently moved from Shanghai to Peru, and a brief description of and link to what one of China Beat’s longtime contributors, Angilee Shah, has been up to lately: a podcast series on “Global Lives,” the most recent of which offers a perspective on Tiananmen from the former Crown Colony turned PRC SAR. For additional reading on June 4 from a perspective that takes you into a different part of the world, check out this piece on France’s special connection …

Historical Bafflement Of The Chinese People

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

David Kelly, researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, translated the following opinion piece by overseas political commentator Liang Jing. He has published several previous pieces at China Digital Times, including, “Trigger for an Earthquake in Chinese Society” and “Where Does Wen Jiabao’s Faith Come From?”

One of the most significant cultural phenomena in Chinese society in recent years is the growing interest in history. Everyone—elite and general populace, leftists and rightists—shows an unprecedented enthusiasm for understanding China’s past. And in 2009 a series of major historical anniversaries, including the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, have pushed China’s …

6/4 Around The World: The First Sequel

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In our second installment of the series (for part one click here), we return to Japan (via a follow-up post by James Farrer on coverage in Tokyo) and offer a view from Hanoi (where long-time Reuters China correspondent John Ruwitch is now based and sometimes writes on themes that link or divide the two countries).

John Ruwitch, Hanoi

Six-four didn’t make its way into the official Vietnamese media, of course, but reports about it on CNN, which is widely available in Hanoi, were not censored. When I told a Vietnamese friend I found that mildly surprising, given the somewhat similar …

A 6/4 Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. Su Yang has never written anything for China Beat, but a few of us get to have lunch with him occasionally as he is a professor (of sociology) at UCI. TheOrange County Register profiled Su, discussing his experiences in 1989 and after.

2. Jeff Wasserstrom’s most recent piece at the Huffington Post points out some of the good coverage on China in recent weeks (and sketches some of what was missing or wrong).

3. Friend of the blog and former student leader Wang Chaohua has completed her Ph.D. at UCLA and is graduating this weekend. UCLA Today has a …

Notes From A Non-Anniversary, Jeremiah Jenne

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I woke up this morning and took a short walk to a big square. As expected, it was pretty calm in the kind of jittery, strained, composed way one usually associates with a dinner party where one of the hosts is having an extramarital affair with one of the guests. The square looked relatively normal but with a beefed-up security detail that included a ring of young slack-jawed crew cut types in tracksuits and matching gray badges worn on unmatching t-shirts. Reports of visitors being asked to produce passports, to weed out foreign journalists, appear to be overstated. I walked …

6/4 Around The World

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last August, we called on contributors and friends of the blog around the world to send in short reports on how the Olympics were being covered and received in their neck of the woods. Recently, we sent out a similar call regarding today’s anniversary. Here are a few of the responses we’ve received so far, pulled together into a piece that we think would make for interesting reading beside the very different “around the world” survey that David Flumenbaum has done and will keep updated over at the Huffington Post. Included here are some comments by people who contributed to …

6/4/89: The Night Of No Moon

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This piece is excerpted from the manuscript of Philip J. Cunningham’s forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham’s book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to know Tiananmen was the target, but what were they going to hit it with and when? The long anticipated crackdown had been postponed so long, getting it over with might resolve the political impasse, but it wouldn’t bring justice, it wouldn’t buy back the mandate of heaven.

Being part of the teeming mass as the army approached, …

China’S Growing Cage: The Legacy Of Tiananmen, Zhang Lijia

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Whenever “1989” is mentioned, people in the West instantly think about the protesting students in Tiananmen Square. In fact, although it started in Beijing and was led by the students there, the democratic movement was a nationwide event, drawing together people from all walks of life.

Twenty years on, I remember vividly every detail of that day when I organized a demonstration among the workers from my Nanjing factory in support of the movement. It was Sunday, May 28, a week before the crackdown in Beijing.

The death of Hu Yaobang had triggered the spontaneous democratic movement. The popular former …

Another Anniversary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In Taiwan, June 4 marks another anniversary, namely the 185th day of Chen Shuibian’s detention without having been convicted of a crime. Chen was first ordered to be held in custody on the night of November 11, 2008, with actual detention beginning on November 12. Taking into account the few days during which he was released in December, Chen’s incarceration has lasted almost 200 days now, with no end in sight. In principle, he can be held in detention indefinitely due to the fact that he has been charged with a felony, and because prosecutors have expressed concerns that Chen …

Tsingtao Beer: A Complex Brew, Robert Bickers

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

‘What are we to drink?’ asked a British doctor in Shanghai in 1867, reflecting on the precautions needed to maintain health in the sweltering city. His answer, asShanghai water was too filthy a solution, was simple: beer. For ‘7 or 8 months of the year’ he wrote, bitter was ‘as wholesome a drink as we could have’. Its medicinal properties were, I rather suspect, far from the minds of the inhabitants of the new military garrisons established in north China after the late 1890s ‘scramble for concessions’, and the Boxer rising and war. They wanted the relief only a cool …

It’S So French, Paul French

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Five foreign correspondents of the past I never tired of reading while doing my research for this book:

1) JOP Bland – the man who (about 1906) complained there were too many books on China being written and then promptly wrote about half a dozen himself (can’t not feel a kindred spirit there).

2) BL Putnam Weale – who decided mocking the pompous was not enough and dedicated his life to getting involved in one warlord intrigue after another until he got himself butchered and assassinated in Tianjin in some dodgy deal.

3) Aleko Lilius – who came to China …

Do I Still Love China?, Xujun Eberlein

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In Sunday’s New York Times, Ha Jin reflected on his decision to remain in the West after graduate school and to write primarily in English:

That was when I started to think about staying in America and writing exclusively in English, even if China was my only subject, even if Chinese was my native tongue. It took me almost a year to decide to follow the road of Conrad and Nabokov and write in a language that was not my own. I knew I might fail. I was also aware that I was forgoing an opportunity: the Chinese language had …

6/4 Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A set of links to readings about 6/4 from various sources:

1. A short and straightforward documentary from Al Jazeera (in English), posted at YouTube in two parts: Part I and Part II. This documentary has notably less emphasis on the influence of Western-style democracy than the average (Western) doc on the subject, and more on the opposition to authoritarianism…

2. Mara Hvistendahl has written a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education on a well-trod topic—the shifts in China post-89, particularly among those of the 6/4 generation. Yet, Hvistendahl, in addition to getting the basics right (unlike others we …

Shanghai Girls

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A few months ago, we ran an interview with Lisa See about her new novel,Shanghai Girls. The book was released last week and See is in the middle of a series of talks and readings, including one that China Beat is co-sponsoring on June 6 in Corona del Mar.

For those interested in learning more aboutShanghai Girls or Lisa See, you can check out this link to a few of her favorite books, anearly review of the novel, and an autobiographical piece in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.

See talks frequently about the historical research that undergirds her novels. Here …