International and Area Studies Commons^™

Expo Readings Around The Web

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With the Shanghai World Expo opening in just a few short weeks, it’s now showing up in news stories on a daily basis. A few links to check out:

1. The team at Shanghaiist got to take a tour of the still-under-construction Expo grounds last week, and have posted quite a number of pictures from their visit; check out their galleries of Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C. Over at Shanghai Scrap, Adam Minter documents his look inside the U.S. Expo pavilion (and his underwhelmed reaction) in a story here.

2. Also at Shanghaiist, Elaine Chow has conducted a …

Before China Beat, There Was China Beyond The Headlines, Timothy B. Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For several years now there has been a close connection between China Beat and China beyond the Headlines. The latter, a series of essay collections edited by myself and Lionel M. Jensen, is designed for a general and classroom audience (Volume One was published in 2000; Volume Two, China’s Transformations, was released in 2007). In addition to some common players who have been involved with both, such as Geremie Barmé, Tim Cheek, Tim Oakes, Jeff Wasserstrom and myself, China Beat and China beyond the Headlines are fortunate to share Susan McEachern of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers as an editor. Each …

Book Talk(S)

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Finishing up work on China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, which is due out in a few days from Oxford University Press, and then more recently preparing for a series of public events that are linked in some way to its publication, set me thinking about the varied ways that books incorporate things that have gone before them. The many kinds of building blocks, from tales told to things written down, that authors use to create something new.

I’ve never written a novel, but I’ve heard that these can easily grow out of a tale told …

Socialist Cosmopolitanism: China Beat Event

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On Wednesday, April 7, the China Beat was pleased to co-host (with the Humanities Collective) a talk at UCI by Nicolai Volland, who teaches Chinese Studies at National University of Singapore. Volland spoke on “Socialist Cosmopolitanism: China’s Other ‘Age of Openness’ in the 1950s.” ReferencingFrank Dikötter‘s recent book on Republican China, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao, Volland argued that 1950s China can also be seen as “open,” if not to the U.S. and Western Europe. Volland explored cultural exchanges within the socialist world to provide evidence of China’s continued international engagement during the early Mao years. Interested readers …

Though I Am Gone

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In his review of Andrew Walder’s Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement, John Gittings discusses the July 1966 murder of Bian Zhongyun, deputy principal of the Beijing Normal Girls’ High School. Gittings mentions that Bian’s story has been told in a moving documentary that features interviews with her husband, who shares photographs that he took at the time of her death. The entire movie, Wo sui siqu (我虽死去 Though I Am Gone), is available on YouTube; below, we’ve embedded the first section of the film (in Mandarin with English subtitles).

Kabul Times (Jan. - Mar., 1979), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, January - March, 1979

Listen At Home To Peter Hessler And Ken Pomeranz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Earlier this year, UC Irvine hosted a conversation between Peter Hessler and Ken Pomeranz, centering on a discussion of Hessler’s new book, Country Driving. A podcast of that event is now available, jointly produced by The China Beat andMaking History Podcast (a site run by Jana Remy, a UCI History graduate student and friend of the blog). Check it out at the MHP website, or on iTunes.

Kabul Times (Oct. - Dec., 1979), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, October - December, 1979

Just One Child Wins Post-1900 Levenson Prize

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Though China Beat contributors come from around the globe, the blog’s editorial team is based at UC Irvine. For that reason, we take special pride in announcing that at last month’s Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, UCI Professor of Anthropology Susan Greenhalgh won the Joseph Levenson Prize for Best Book on China Post-1900. Professor Greenhalgh’s book, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, was published by the University of California Press in 2008, and attempts to answer several questions that have permeated her work as a population specialist during the era of the one-child policy:

Why? Why …

In Case You Missed It: China Dream, Christopher R. Hughes

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Liu Mingfu 刘明福, China Dream: The Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age (Zhongguo meng: hou meiguo shidai de daguo siwei zhanlue dingwei). (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2010).

China Dream, by Colonel Liu Mingfu, a professor at Beijing’s National Defense University, is the latest of several books to speculate on how China can displace the leadership of the United States after the global economic crisis. Understandably, Liu’s military background has led to conjecture over whether his views reflect the ambitions of the PLA or even China’s leaders. Yet China Dream is most interesting not …

Kabul Times (Apr - June, 1972), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, April - june, 1972

Kabul Times (Jan. - Mar., 1972), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, January - March, 1972

Missing Footage At The Aas, Timothy Cheek

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The Roundtable session at this year’s annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Philadelphia was titled “Against Amnesia: History, Memory and the Role of Public Intellectuals in 21st Century China.” A mix of scholars from China and North America were scheduled to report and discuss, but at the last minute our featured speaker, Ms. Cui Weiping (崔卫平) of the Beijing Film Academy, could not attend. She was prevented from leaving China for the roundtable even though she had been specially invited by the AAS and had her passport, US visa, and air tickets in hand. She was …

Google Bus

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Amid uncertainty regarding Google’s future in China, on March 10, 2010, a line 319 bus near the East Gate of Beijing University is wrapped in an advertisement for the company. The URL on the back of the bus still works, though it’s now being routed through Hong Kong.

—Photo by Sara Kile

Sara Kile is a PhD candidate in premodern Chinese literature at Columbia University. She is currently in Nanjing conducting research for her dissertation, “Experimenting in the Limelight: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Early Qing China.”

Kabul Times (Apr - June, 1975), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, April - June, 1975

Kabul Times (Oct - Dec, 1973), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, October - December, 1973

Kabul Times (Oct - Dec, 1971), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, October - December, 1971

Kabul Times (Apr - June, 1971), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, April - June, 1971

Kabul Times (July - Sept., 1971), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, July - September, 1971

Kabul Times (Oct - Dec, 1970), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, October to December, 1970

Kabul Times (Jan. - Mar., 1971), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, January - March, 1971

Kabul Times (July - Sept., 1970), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, July - September, 1970

Kabul Times (Jan. - Mar., 1970), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, January - March, 1970

Kabul Times (Apr - June, 1970), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, April - June, 1970

Kabul Times (Apr - June, 1969), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, April - June, 1969

Kabul Times (July - Sept, 1969), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, July - September, 1969

Coming Distractions: China Watcher, Richard Baum

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In the winter of 1994 I moved to Yokohama, Japan, to direct a semester-long U.C. Education Abroad Program (EAP) curriculum on Peace and Development Studies at Meiji Gakuin University. Because all electronic communications in Japan were controlled by the government’s telecomm monopoly, NHK, Internet access was extremely expensive, and my Compuserve subscription was costing me a small fortune —over US$250 each month — in connection charges. Since I was in more-or-less regular e-mail contact with a number of other China scholars in various countries, I decided to economize on my on-line connection charges by periodically sending group e-mailings to several …

Kabul Times (Oct - Dec, 1969), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, October - December, 1969

Kabul Times (Jan. - Mar., 1969), Afghanistan

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Kabul Times, January - March, 1969

The Pathan Borderland : A Consecutive Account Of The Country And People On And Beyond The Indian Frontier From Chitral To Dera Ismail Khan (1921), Colin Metcalfe Enriquez

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Pashtuns, Afghanistan

Pashtuns, Pakistan