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Recommendations For Obama: V

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We asked China watchers from a variety of backgrounds to answer the question “What should Obama be reading about China?” While we’ve already run four installments (I, II, III, and IV), new suggestions continue to arrive. For a few of the cinematic variety, read on… Jan Berris is Vice-President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and has worked with the committee since 1971.

I suggest that President Obama recover from the lousy week he just had by chilling out in his private movie theater and watching the following movies. None will give him a complete, or even, necessarily, …

When The Past Catches Up, Lauri Paltemaa

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In December, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the 30 years anniversary of reforming and opening up policy that became possible in the now almost legendary 3rd plenum of the 11th Central Committee where Deng Xiaoping defeated his “Whateverist” (read Maoist) rivals in the Party leadership. This coming March, however, we will celebrate another thirty-year anniversary of one of the key policies in reforms. It was then, on March 30, 1979, that Deng Xiaoping announced that the Party would continue to uphold the “four cardinal principles” of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, proletarian dictatorship, party leadership, and socialism. This laid the …

Starbucks In China: A Top Five List

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Starbucks has been a glowing beacon of capitalism-on-Chinese-soil (some might say…) for years now, and many took glee in the opening of a Starbucks outlet at the Forbidden City as quiet proof of communism’s impending demise (though the outlet is now closed). Here, a top five list of articles that together tell the story of Starbucks’ development in China from international interloper to home-grown coffeehouse. Read on for more.

1. China is major potential market for Starbucks: “Starbucks Soars in China” (Asia Times Online, June 15, 2006):

In Starbucks’ headquarters in Seattle, a group of company executives meet regularly, but …

Obama Recommendations: Iv, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The search terms “Obama China” have brought a lot of readers to China Beat over the past two months. We are by no means the only ones experiencing an Obama-related reader boost (though we are the second hit on Google, right behind the BBC for a search of “Obama China”!), nor the only ones getting an Obama-related content surge. If you are looking for smart commentary on the recent Obama administration’s China snafus, for instance, check out James Fallows’s analysis from last week (hat tip: kuluyi). Those interested in live (as in right now) discussion of Sino-American relations under Obama …

"Big Pants" Unveiled

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Alex Pasternak has written a couple pieces for China Beat in the past (such as “Beijing’s Olympic Forecast“), and so we were interested in his piece published a few weeks ago at The National, “Strange Loop: Is Rem Koolhaas’s gravity-defying Beijing monument the world’s most important building?“

Here is a snippet from the article, well worth reading in full:

It was only after the design emerged in public that the nicknames surfaced, and they were starkly devoid of any references to traditional Chinese culture. At the beginning, wei fang, meaning condemned building, was one oft-heard option. Later, “twisted doughnut”, “drunken …

Obama Recommendations: Iii, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We aren’t the only ones with advice in regards to China for President Obama of late. For instance, Rebecca MacKinnon recently recommended to the President that he make sure to communicate with regular Chinese folks, as well as government leaders.

Meanwhile, book recommendations to kick off the new year are cropping up elsewhere as well — Jeff Wasserstrom, for instance, listed some of his favorites atFar Eastern Economic Review.

Here are a few more responses to our question, “What Should Obama Be Reading About China?” If you haven’t been following this feature, check out the first andsecond installments.

Howard French …

Incense Power, Incense Peace

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Chapter 1: Lines 1-2, 11-12

Taiwan’s pilgrimage season, which tends to peak around the third lunar month (Chaucer’s April) has long been a time of intense religious devotion, with moving scenes of worshippers (especially elderly women) walking for days from one sacred site to another. There are also mammoth processions, fireworks, dramatic performances, etc. Pilgrimage season is also big business for the island’s leading temples, …

Faq#8: Was There A Master Plan To Use The Olympic Games To Promote A Positive Image Of China To The World ?

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

(And What was the Strategy for Dealing with the International Criticism on Human Rights)?

(This is a shortened version of a paper presented at the conference on ““The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: Public Diplomacy Triumph or Public Relations Spectacle?” organized by the Center on Public Diplomacy, US-China Institute, and Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, January 29-30, 2009.)

There was a common perception outside China that the Beijing Olympic Games involved a master plan to promote a positive image of China to the outside world and that this was one of the major goals of hosting …

The Talent Of Shu: Qiao Ami And The Intellectual World Of Early Medieval Sichuan, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Portrayals of the intellectual scene of the early medieval Chinese “Sanguo” or “Three States” period (220–280) generally privilege major figures associated with the state of Wei, such as He Yan and Wang Bi, over those who made their mark in Shu (modern Sichuan) and Wu, the other two states contending for the right to rule “all under Heaven” after the demise of the Han dynasty. Michael Farmer sets out to redress this imbalance through a study of the Shu statesman and historian Qiao Zhou (c. 200–270). The book thus harbors a dual purpose, reflected in its title, for in presenting …

Coming Distractions: The Annual Aas Meeting

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Robert Buswell, Association for Asian Studies President, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies (and a China Beatnik, of course, who regularly contributes to this blog), have released a joint letter that may interest those who will be or are considering attending the AAS annual meeting in late March (or who simply like to follow the organizational goings-on of AAS and its flagship publications).

In the letter, Buswell, a U.C.L.A. specialist in Korean studies, and Wasserstrom lay out changes to this year’s and future annual meetings, including efforts to expand the scope of the association to …

A Bible For Beijing, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A few weeks ago my mother learned at her Greenwich, Conn., church that, beyond church grounds, Bibles cannot be purchased in the People’s Republic. Her informant was a man from the Bible Society of Singapore who gave an evening talk on the state of Christianity in China at my parents’ mainstream Protestant parish. My mother soon asked her son in Beijing, me, about this fact over the phone and I couldn’t say either way: a Chinese-language Bible was not something I’d been actively looking for yet I could have sworn I’d spotted one in a shop a while back when …

Everything Old Is New Again

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

One year ago today, I posted an essay entitled “What Shall We Do with the Dead Dictator?”, which discussed the DPP government’s efforts to further the cause of transitional justice (轉型正義) by reexamining the legacy of former ROC President Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). A number of related policies ended up sparking considerable controversy, included renaming the CKS International Airport asTaiwan Taoyuan International Airport, and especially changing the name of the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall.

The KMT regained power just two months later, following which things began to move in reverse. Most recently, the Ministry …

The Past And Present Of The Ccp First Congress Memorial, Shanghai, Samuel Y. Liang

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

2009 is a year of anniversaries for China, with the 90th birthday of the May 4th Movement coming in the spring and the 60th of the PRC arriving in the fall. With this in mind, we’ve asked Samuel Liang of the University of Manchester, a specialist in Shanghai’s built environment, to provide our readers with background on a locale that has special significance for both of the just-mentioned anniversaries. Namely, the building where an early meeting of the Communist Party was held in 1921, which stands near the recently built shopping and entertainment district known as Xintiandi.

This structure, often …

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 …