Asian Studies Commons^™

Jesus In China—Evan Osnos On An Upcoming Frontline Documentary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The Public Broadcasting Corporation’s Frontline series has a long tradition of airing documentaries on China. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s prize-winning look at 1989, “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” was shown as part of the series, for example, as was a later Tiananmen documentary, “The Tank Man.” And thanks to the online extras, from guides to further reading to lesson plans for teachers, the PBS Frontline site has become a valuable resource for those who offer classes or simply want to learn about the PRC. Still, it is rare (probably unprecedented) for two China shows to run back-to-back on Frontline. …

What We Do When We’Re Not Blogging (For China Beat)…

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There’s a virtual version of the game tag, in which bloggers who get a cyber-tap on the shoulder have to reveal five things people don’t know about them on their blog, and then can call on five people to do the same. We enjoy it when bloggers we enjoy reading, such as Rebecca MacKinnon, get tagged and we get to learn things like, in her case, which Disney cartoon she was “obsessed” with as a child. Despite the title of this post, though, you won’t get those sorts of personal revelations here. So, I’m afraid you’ll end up frustrated if …

Mass (On)Line

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Hu Jintao participated in an online discussion today (his first) with Chinese netizens where he answered questions about his online habits (he emphasized that he uses the internet to see what Chinese people think about the Communist Party—the mass line for a new generation). When NPR broadcast a report on Hu’s online summit this morning, they noted that Hu met with Chinese “netizens,” and then proceeded to define the term. Regardless of whether “netizen” is a new term to you, or you are a netizen, here are a few additional readings and source pages about the Chinese internet.

1. A …

The Lord Of The Wolves?, Haiyan Lee

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Since hitting the bookstores in China in 2004, Wolf Totem has been a most unlikely bestseller and a phenomenon to be reckoned with. From the start, it has been riddled with paradoxes: it was written by a political science professor who had to remain anonymous because of his run-ins with authority in 1989; it went on to win ten domestic literary prizes with the endorsements of party officials, scholars, and business tycoons alike; the audio version was serialized on Radio Beijing; its sales figure is dwarfed only by that of Mao’s Little Red Book in the history of modern publishing …

A Visual Top Five

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For those seeking a little visual stimulation to perk up the mid-June doldrums:

1. A new online magazine called 1000 Words is currently featuring a set of images from Chinese artist Li Wei (follow the main link and then select Li Wei). The photographs feature Li as an irrepressible Superman with poor aim—head often buried (in the ground, through a car windshield, under ice), he appears to have hurtled forward without pause and Michael Grieves, who wrote the accompanying essay, draws analogies between Li’s captured falls and pell-mell Chinese development.

2. The Council on Foreign Relations has posted a slideshow …

The Gate Of Heavenly Pacification, P. K. Cassel

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Two weeks ago, the nineteenth anniversary of the suppression of the student movement of 1989 passed. Although the anniversary passed more quietly than usual, Tian’anmen 天安門 keeps its special place in our minds and few places in China can compete with the stature of the gate and the square that bears its name.

For five hundred years, the gate was an important site for official functions during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and following the fall of the empire, the gate has grown in prominence. When the republic was inaugurated in 1912, the first president Yuan Shikai used the gate …

Preserving The Premier’S Calligraphy At Beichuan Middle School, Richard Kraus

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The Beichuan Middle School lost a thousand students in May’s devastating Sichuan earthquake. When Premier Wen Jiabao visited the school’s temporary quarters, he wrote four characters on a blackboard to inspire the students: “distress rejuvenates a nation” (多难兴邦). After his departure, teachers and students could not bear to erase his chalk inscription, which was covered in plastic until the Sichuan Cultural Relics Bureau could devise a method for permanently preservingWen’s handwriting.

Although Premier Wen’s chalk on a blackboard may seem difficult to preserve, China has a deeply established tradition of copying calligraphy. Many of the great works of past masters …

Coming Distractions: Youth And Wealth In China

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Both Frontline’s new documentary “Young and Restless in China” (set to air on Tuesday, June 17) and Duncan Hewitt’s soon-to-be-released book, China: Getting Rich First: A Modern Social History, take as their premise the unprecedented growth and possibility in China during the past two decades. The components of this story are youth, economic opportunity, and migration. While both Frontline’s documentary and Hewitt’s book provide new details and new vignettes to illustrate the changes of the last few decades, China watchers will find the basic storylines familiar.

“Young and Restless in China” (details are available at the website, which after 9 …

Reith Lectures: English Lessons, Graham Earnshaw

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Jonathan Spence is of course one of the great authorities on Chinese history, but the value of history is in its relevance to the present, so at a time of such huge volatility in the affairs of China, there is great curiosity as to how he views current trends. We have the means to find out in his current series of Reith Lectures being given one per week in England and broadcast through the BBC’s websites, currently non-blocked in China.

The first lecture was about the role of Confucius and Confucian thought in Chinese history, and in the q&a section, …

Faq#3: Could China Stop Taiwan From Coming To The Olympic Games?

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Finally I have time to get back to the Olympic FAQ I posed several months ago:

Could China stop Taiwan from coming to the Olympic Games?

Actually, this was a trick question. Chinese leaders strongly desire for Taiwan to attend the Olympic Games and other major sports events because they are the most important venue in which Taiwan is displayed to the world as a dependent part of Chinese national territory.

Global politics usually don’t change as quickly as we would like, but they do change. One year ago I was one of many people who thought that the biggest …

Keeping Up With “The China Beat”—5 Recent Developments

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This is just a little list, for the “Frivolous Friday” feature, made up of tidbits about the site. It may have curiosity value for longtime readers, and it may serve to provide an overview of the blog to those who have just started tuning in.

1) Thanks to an off-hand remark by Don Sutton, whose insights on mourning practices appeared on this site yesterday, contributors to the blog now have an official name: China Beatniks. This has a nice ring to it and, according to Wikipedia at least, it has a special meaning for a blog that has been paying …

Earthquake And The Imperatives Of Chinese Mourning, Don Sutton

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Disasters like the great Sichuan earthquake expose not only mass suffering but also the imperative of proper treatment of the dead. Long before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, governments in China had concerned themselves with such matters. Today, ranking only behind the weighty practical matters of rescue, flood prevention, and caring for the injured and homeless, sensitivity to mourning is a key measure of the government’s performance, one complicated by ethnic diversity, rural/urban differences, and the government’s own commitment to reform those practices it regards as superstitions.

For all the simplification of death rituals, a strong Chinese …

Charles Tilly’S Influence On The China Field, Daniel Little

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Editor’s note: This post inaugurates an occasional China Beat feature in which we will look back at the lives and careers of writers whose work has had an impact on Chinese studies. Usually, these figures will be China specialists, but in this case, the influential figure in question, Charles Tilly (pictured below), worked primarily on another part of the world. There is no question, though, that via his activities as a teacher and author he had a profound influence within Chinese studies, as becomes clear from the following comments by Daniel Little, author ofUnderstanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the …

China Annals: Interview With Lijia Zhang

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Lijia Zhang, most recently the author ofSocialism is Great!, is also a freelance journalist with a great sense of style and an awesome website. Recently she entertained Nicole Barnes of the China Beat with an interview about her work. Her latest book is auto-biographical and narrates the decade that she spent working in a munitions factory, one of Communist China’s notoriously boring state-owned enterprises. Hindsight is glorious; Zhang’s beautiful writing transforms even this drab existence into an entertaining page-turner.

NB: As a freelance journalist, you seem to have a lot of control over your topics. Your articles cover the most …

Imperial Ways, Daniel A. Bell

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I am a big fan of Jonathan Spence’s works. His books bring to life some of the great and not-so-famous characters in Chinese history and they read like novels. When I was told that he had delivered a lecture on “Confucian Ways” for the BBC, I was very curious, and clicked on the link with great anticipation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to download the programme here in Beijing, but I did print out the transcript. That’s what I’ve just read.

The lecture was delivered at the British library, and the host Sue Lawley opens by noting that the …

A Writer Takes The Stage: Jonathan Spence’S Lectures, Part 1

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Jonathan Spence’s elegant writing and his creative efforts to test the limits of standard genres of historical presentation have secured him a special status within both the interdisciplinary field of Chinese studies and the American historical profession. His reputation—as many or perhaps even all readers of this blog know—is based primarily on a string of successful books. These range widely in format, running the gamut from slim volumes that try to bring to life obscure or famous figures from the Chinese past to a large textbook. And while most of his publications focus on events and individuals of the opening …

The Dirt On China Reporting, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Reporting China for a Western readership gets a whole lot easier once you master the discursive montage of cheap China associations. When discussing the Chinese state, for example, plug in Orwell. When referencing anything in the period 1949-1976, plug in Mao. If, say, your topic is changing environmental behavior among the Chinese, ascribe it only to orders from the “new emperors” above; national pride could also do. And so on. A recent International Herald Tribune and New York Times website report, “Smoke Clears, Dust Does Not in Beijing,” follows the formula to a T.

Reporting China for a Western readership …

Liu Si (6/4)–Part 2, Looking Forward

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This is the second part of our commemoration of Liu Si. Here, instead of looking backward (though some links include information about the past), our focus is on the present and the future. We point our readers to pieces that take up the contemporary meaning of the 1989 protests and the crackdown that followed, or assess the current state of Tiananmen-related issues, such as patterns of protest and human rights.

1. The latest issue of China Rights Forum, a publication of Human Rights in China, is titled “June 4/2008” and combines retrospective and forward-looking materials. All of the poem, essays, …

China: Democracy, Or Confucianism?, Xujun Eberlein

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline “China rules out copying Western democracy.” My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading Political Confucianism by Jiang Qing (蒋庆), a contemporary Confucian in China. In this book Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline “China rules out copying Western democracy.” My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading …

The Forbidden City By Barmé—Don’T Leave For The “Great Within” Without It

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“I think there’s a lack of books that serious, educated non-specialists can pick up…I’ve read a lot of great books recently by academics but few that I could recommend, say, to my father.” These lines come from an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Johnson that “China Beat” ran at the end of January, back when our site was still young (now that we’ve been going for more than a third-of-a-year, we hardly count as youthful anymore, so quickly does the blogosphere change). He was responding to a question Nicole Barnes had put to him about what he’d like …

The Chinese Press In The Spotlight, Timothy Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In recent weeks, the Chinese press has struggled to cover a series of major and difficult stories. Moreover the Chinese press itself is being watched and critiqued by the Western world with intensity and curiosity. What we are seeing in the Chinese press now is a world in transition and flux.

First was the Chinese press’ discussion of the Tibetan demonstrations, its virtual refusal to acknowledge the validity of any foreign criticism, and its exposure of a reflexive, threatening, and brittle nationalism, especially among some Chinese youth. However, that was followed by its honest and educational reporting during the hand …

Culture And Collapse, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China has shown a “dismayingly cavalier attitude toward the well-being of its people,” a British journalist turned pop historian determined recently in the pages of the New York Times. The Chinese, he explained, long ago handed over science – and by extension earthquake resistant engineering – to “the West,” leaving “themselves to become mired, time and again, in the kind of tragic events that we are witnessing this week.” The thrust of this piece by Simon Winchester (which simultaneously appeared in the International Herald Tribune and evidently stems from his latest books, The Man Who Loved China (2008), on Joseph …

Praise For China: A Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. “Can we outsource FEMA to the Chinese?” asks one reader at MSNBC’s World Blog, in response to a post on the temporary villages the Chinese government is erecting in the disaster area. Other readers also make Katrina/China earthquake comparisons. The MSNBC World Blog has been providing continuing coverage of the earthquake.

2. One of the side effects of coverage of the earthquake has been an increase in “human interest” stories on quake survivors. For instance, the story of a couple who survived together, trapped under debris, was one of the New York Times’s top e-mailed stories in the days …

Cultural Responses To Disaster In China, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A land of floods, fault lines and food crises, China has rarely been one of mercy in the Western imagination. Today, with millions of Chinese dealing with another world-class disaster on their soil, the Western press appears to be singing a different tune. For one, Tuesday’s New York Times heralded that “Many Hands, Not Held by China, Aid in Quake,” reporting that even official Chinese media sees private donations exceeding the state’s total so far of half a billion relief dollars. This “striking and unscripted public response” of “blood drives, cake sales, charity fund-raisers and art auctions” might even pose …

Self-Promotion Saturday: Brief Notes

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A few of our writers made it into the news this week:

1. NPR broadcast a brief interview with Jeff Wasserstrom on the Chinese government’s response to the earthquake on Wednesday, May 21.

2. In response to a review of Simon Winchester’s new book on Joseph Needham (the famous scholar of Chinese technology, among his other accomplishments) at Salon.com, one reader submitted a lengthy comparison of Jared Diamond and Kenneth Pomeranz. Read it here.

3. For those who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, you can read an article that quotes Caroline Reeves, who wrote a two-part piece for us …

Writing Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I started writing my book on a March morning in 2006. About fifteen minutes into it, panic hit: I am no longer earning a salary just sitting here at my desk. By mid-morning, another realization had set in: I can’t go back to being a newspaper reporter.

The book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, opens inside the world of the young women working on assembly lines in the south China factory city of Dongguan:

When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. “What year are you?” you asked each other, …

Giving Long-Term Relief, Yong Chen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

May 12, 2008, will enter the history and China and the world as a day of sadness. At 2:30 p.m. local time, a devastating earthquake, registering 7.8 on the Richter scale, hit Wenchuan near Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, and the confirmed death toll has soared to more than 41,000.

This is also a moment of perseverance. There are countless stories of surviving victims of the catastrophe—grieving parents, husbands and wives, children, coworkers, neighbors, classmates—doing all they could to rescue and help others. This is a moment of compassion and humanity. China acted swiftly, sending relief workers, volunteers, soldiers …

Rumor And The Sichuan Earthquake, Steve Smith

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

One of the intriguing aspects of the appalling crisis created by the earthquake in Sichuan on May 12—whose death toll as I write is over 40,000 and still rising—has been the role played by rumor. Just four days before the quake, the Sichuan provincial government issued a notice designed to quell “earthquake rumors.” Three days after it, on May15, Xinhua news agency announced that seventeen people had been arrested for circulating malicious rumors, and the Ministry of Public Security revealed that its bureaus in eleven provinces and municipalities had discovered more than forty messages on the internet that “spread false …

Disaster Relief: Material And Spiritual

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last night, the members of one of the Buddha’s Light International Association (國際佛光會) relief teams returned to Taiwan, most in tears due to the horrifying devastation they had witnessed. They also reported a disturbing new development: an increasing number of survivors are starting to take their own lives.

To a certain extent, this should not be too surprising. Inland earthquakes often devastate economically deprived regions, where the livelihood of most people hangs by a thin thread even before a disaster strikes. This was the case for Taiwan’s 921 Earthquake, which was also followed by a rash of suicides. Now that …

A Mid-Week Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. If it isn’t already part of your media China blog circuit (it has just become part of ours), check out the Wall Street Journal’s China Journal. Run by Sky Canaves, the blog apparently draws on more than twenty journalists, and even ran a recent entry on Beijing’s air quality (that’s a favorite Western media story that has slipped out of sight lately).

2. Tim Johnson’s blog, China Rises, has a few moving recent on-the-ground reports from Sichuan. Zhongnanhai also has reports from an individual in Sichuan. For detailed information about the earthquake and its casualities (including maps), see the …