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Still Reading Mishra…This Time On Yu Hua

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Just over a year ago, in one of the first posts that appeared on this site (and one of the very first commentaries I had written for any blog), I directed readers to five short pieces worth checking out that had one thing in common: they were about China but not by China specialists per se. One was a London Review of Books essay by Pankaj Mishra, who we’ve gone on to link to or quote often and who will be represented in our China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, via a commentary on Tibet that first appeared …

Presidential Reading Recommendations: Ii, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A few days ago, we ran the first installment in a feature that posed the question “What Should Obama Be Reading About China?” to prominent China watchers. While Evan Osnos at the New Yorker pondered Chinese responses to Obama’s inauguration, our contributors mulled over which five readings on China would give the new president the essential knowledge he will need to navigate one of the U.S.’s most critical relationships. Here are few more of the recommendations we’ve received this week…

Pankaj Mishra is the author of, most recently, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, …

Self-Promotion Saturday: Upcoming Events

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There will be three China Beat contributors participating in an upcoming conference at the University of Southern California. On January 30, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Susan Brownell, and Kate Merkel-Hess will all be speaking at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy’s conference, “The 2008 Beijing Olympics: Public Diplomacy Triumph or Public Relations Spectacle?” In part, our participation at USC is an outgrowth of the things we have been writing at China Beat this year, as well as the content of our forthcoming volume, China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.

There are a lot of China-related events in Southern California these …

In Case You Missed It: Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A Review of Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

With China’s export-centered economy looking increasingly unbalanced and unsustainable, there has been growing public support for state involvement in the interests of rural development.Yasheng Huang, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, provides a powerful economic rationale to this emerging movement with his new book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Huang argues that urban biased government policies over the past fifteen years are the cause of skewed proportions of China’s economy and have tremendously hindered stable private sector growth. Huang debunks the consensus view that …

China At The World’S Fairs, Susan Fernsebner

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The city of Shanghai will be the official host to Expo 2010, an international event celebrating the theme “A Better City, A Better Life,” with an opening celebration next May. As the event’s website and preview videos below reveal, Expo 2010 is intended as an example of a new and shared urban modernity. Visitors will have the opportunity to tour the site personally and, if lacking an opportunity to visit Shanghai next summer, also to take a virtual tour of its grounds online.

As the videos note, Expo 2010 is intended as an event that will fulfill and expand upon …

A Few Readings Around The Web This Week…

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. Rebecca MacKinnon yesterday posted a marvelous wrap-up of Charter 08, with many links included. We usually use a rather light touch with these recommendations, but this time…head on over. If you read one thing on China today, it should be this.

2. To follow up, there are a few related readings that are worth a jump, early writings by some of the figures MacKinnon mentions in her piece: “That Holy Word, ‘Revolution’” by Liu Xiaobo, and “Thirsty Dragon at the Olympics” by Dai Qing. For another take on Charter 08, check out the piece we ran at China Beat …

Remembering John Defrancis, David Moser

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Legendary sinologist, linguist and educator John DeFrancis passed away on January 2, 2009 at the age of 97.

For any student of the Chinese language and writing system working in the latter part of the twentieth century, DeFrancis was simply a titan. Prior to his arrival on the scene, major China scholars researching the Chinese script, such as Bernard Karlgren, Arthur Waley and Herbert Giles, tended to communicate mainly with other experts, while the popular press, under the spell of figures such as Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, reinforced notions of the Chinese script as exotic, ineffable, mystical or even …

Presidential Reading Recommendations, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There are many people just now wondering what Barack Obama’s China policy will look like, and many eager to advise him. For instance, the National Bureau of Asian Research’s journal, Asia Policy, has published a lengthy roundtable that does just that. I was curious too—what would a learned group of distinguished China watchers, including academics, journalists, and public intellectuals, propose as the new President’s information sources? Here was the note I sent out:

The United States has a new President who seems intellectually curious, will definitely have to deal with many issues relating to China, and is likely to take …

China Beat: A Reintroduction

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China Beat has just celebrated its one-year anniversary, and while a few of you have been with us since the beginning, the majority of our readers have tuned in somewhere along the way. For that reason, we thought it might be worth a little recap of who China Beat is and what we are about. In the spirit of brevity (of sorts), let’s do it as a top-five list…

1. China Beat is based in the U.S. (in Irvine, California, specifically) and while many of our contributors also hail from the United States, we also regularly publish pieces by writers …

In Case You Missed It: Cape No. 7, Peter Zarrow

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“Cape No. 7” (海角七號) is an energetic bon-bon of a film that is Taiwan’s official entry for the Oscars this year, in the “best foreign film” category. Who was it who first compared a certain type of movie to the bon-bon? The Taiwanese film sensation “Cape No. 7” fits the description perfectly. Light romantic comedy with an edge of tragic love lost. And above all, let’s all rock together—Hoklo, aborigines, young and old, Japanese—even an energetic Hakka!—invited into the mix. Not a corrupt politician or political judge in sight. The film even had, now that I’m thinking of confectionary, an …

The Sky Is Not All Grey, Xujun Eberlein

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. A proprietary approach I use to help assess English journalism books about China is to measure how much they tell me, a Chinese, that I don’t already know. This, needless to say, lacks objectivity, and it can easily undervalue an otherwise excellent book. As an example, Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip Pan consists essentially of stories I had already read from the Chinese media or the internet. Not new to me, but that doesn’t mean the book is not worth reading for Western readers (in fact, it is).

On the other hand, this approach raises a high bar …

China Beat Turns 1!

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China Beat has been in operation now for a full year. And what a year! We started this blog with the inkling that 2008 might be eventful, if only because of the Olympic Games. But the past year turned out to be one of China’s most eventful and traumatic in modern history.

It’s been an honor for us to be able to add our thoughts and ideas into the mix. We’re enormously grateful to our many contributors, as well as you, our readers, for stopping by regularly and letting us know your thoughts and sharing your own knowledge.

Here are …

Magic Lanterns

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In the midst of this year’s bitter winter, a glimmer of hope shines through: the Lunar New Year is rapidly approaching: New Year’s Eve (除夕) is on January 25, followed by New Year’s Day (初一) on the 26th. In Taiwan, one of the main events marking this holiday is the annual Taiwan Lantern Festival (台灣燈會), which is now entering its twentieth season. This year’s Festival is timed to start on February 9, which also happens to be the date of the traditionalLantern Festival (元宵節, also known as 上元節 or the more popular 小過年), celebrated on the fifteen day of the …

The 10 Best Books About Chinese Women In 2008

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Note: these books appear in no particular order since all are excellent.

1. Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford University Press. Focusing on the so-called “woman question” (funü wenti) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Judge re-examines China’s turn-of-the-century pursuit of modernity through analysis of biographies of notable women that illustrate Chinese approaches to their own history and to the Western world as mediated through Japan.

2. Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. University of California Press (2007). Mann cleverly reconstructs the lives …

Looking Back, Looking Forward

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The last year is gone, and 2009 predictions are rolling in. Here are a few of our favorite 2008 wrap-ups and 2009 predictions from the past few weeks. Looking back…

1. China Beat’s Jeffrey Wasserstrom has posted a few of his own reflections on 2009. At the Christian Science Monitor, Wasserstrom wrote about “the two big China stories you missed this year” (though regular China Beat readers likely won’t have…!). The subheading should tip you off to these two stories: “The brief yet radical shift of patriotic fervor into criticism of the government after the Sichuan earthquake and the official …

Ying Ruocheng, Claire Conceison

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

During the final three years of his life, I collaborated with Ying Ruocheng on his autobiography in English. Sitting by his bedside, he captivated me with stories from his imprisonment, education, childhood, and his careers on stage and screen as well as in political and cultural diplomacy. His resulting autobiography, entitledVoices Carry, is an unusually witty narrative that includes vivid accounts of the events listed below and many more…

1. He was chosen by Bernardo Bertolucci to star in his film The Last Emperor after Bertolucci saw him play the role of Kublai Khan in the 1982 NBC miniseries Marco …

In Case You Missed It: Big White Lie, Peter Zarrow

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I want to share some impressions of a book that the sinologically inclined (like me) might otherwise ignore. Big White Lie, by John Fitzgerald, is most importantly a polemic about Australian history—subtitled “Chinese Australians in White Australia”—but it also has a lot to say about modern Chinese culture, politics, and business. What follows is not a systematic review but a few xinde: somewhat random and incomplete notes on what I got out of the book.

The study of overseas Chinese has always seemed to me like an orphan field—an interesting and important area of research that has long produced major …

China Beat At The Aha

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Several China Beat contributors have just returned from the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held this year in New York City from January 2-5. While there was normal association business aplenty (including presenting historical research, catching up with colleagues from other institutions, and for some of us hearing Eugenia Lean give a stimulating talk after the Conference on Asian History’s luncheon, in which she explored the interplay between science and gender in the Republican period), the meeting also gave the editors of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance a chance to sit down with Rowman & …

More China Writing In Surprising Places: Japan Focus

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For quite some time, the online journal Japan Focus has been moving toward covering Asia more generally, and recently it made that shift official with its new name, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. In our series of lists of “surprising places to find great writing on China,” this is perhaps not the most shocking as it is coordinated by Mark Selden, whose first book, The Yenan Way, is on every China specialist’s exam reading list (and who has published widely in the last thirty years on China, Japan, and Asia).

So here is a list of five sample pieces from …

Global Shanghai’S Futuristic Side

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I’m writing this in 2008, but when you read it, the calendar will tell you it is 2009. That wouldn’t ordinarily be particularly noteworthy, since many blogs, including this one, alternate between running things just as they are written and scheduling them to appear a few days hence. It just seemed relevant to mention because two pieces I’ve recently had go up online that are linked to and provide teasers for Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 deal with time and forward-looking issues.

One is the concluding segment of a Danwei.org two-parter on Shanghai and visions of the future. This installment focuses on …

2008 Retrospective: Olympics In Taiwan, Jennifer Liu

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China Beat will be running a series of 2008 retrospectives over the coming weeks–pieces that both look back at events of the year (some well-trod ground, others largely unnoticed) as well as tying those earlier events into on-going trends and situations. In this piece, Jennifer Liu reflects on Taiwan’s 2008 Olympic experience, memories of which take on a different hue in light of Taiwan’s tumultuous autumn.

Olympic fever still hasn’t waned in China (especially in Beijing), but when I was living in Taiwan this summer, it seemed Olympic excitement had already run its course or maybe it never even took …

Human Rights And China’S Public Diplomacy, Hongmei Li

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

While the Tournament of Roses is busy preparing for the Pasadena Rose Parade on Jan. 1, 2009, it is interesting to revisit a controversy over a Beijing Olympic float for the 2008 parade for at least three reasons: (1) the controversy, largely provoked by FLG practitioners and other human rights groups, attracted huge media attention and the Pasadena city government and its human relations commission held several meetings to consider its position; (2) some analogies can be drawn between the controversy and the protests against the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay; (3) the controversy also indicates the …

The International Law Of Outer Space And Consequences At The National Level For India: Towards An Indian National Space Law?, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

The discussion on a forum on the famous web-based LinkedIn networking site has already taken off: should India, as party to the four most important international space treaties, also develop a national space law, as other states increasingly are doing? That India is currently one of the leading spacefaring nations in the world is beyond discussion. In itself, however, that does not necessarily necessitate going through the trouble of drafting and implementing a national space law.

This article, however, argues that indeed, following the examples of a growing number of spacefaring states around the world discussed in some detail as …