Da Chen’s My Last Empress is a mixture of fable and reality, viewed through the imperfect perception of its characters rather than the crisp clear view of an omniscient narrator. While not perhaps the “hallucinatory realism” lauded by the Nobel Committee in their…
While talk of a ‘G2’ may have been overblown, the Washington-Beijing relationship may now be the world’s most important bilateral relationship. As China continues to grow, some have called for a harsher policy; Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan told a crowd…
The emergence of China as a major economic and political power is perhaps the most important development in the global system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this change is sometimes manifested through the launch of China’s first aircraft carrier,…
With the breakdown of talks and the protest march last Sunday, the national education issue has reached an impasse. It is now a political argument to be won, rather than a policy question to be solved. The risk is that…
When trying to discern Asia’s future, perhaps the group whose viewpoints should be most sought after are those of Asia’s young. This is the group, after all, who be living that future. (I admit, in full disclosure, to being one…
The joy of reading detective fiction needn’t come from the crime—at least, not directly. The details of any crime, from the methods used by the criminal to his or her motivations, are often interchangeable between different detective stories. What an unsolved crime…
“Tattered sandles.” This was the judgment of Xu Guangqi, the official collaborating with the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s effort to bring Euclid’s Elements to China, on the state of contemporary Chinese mathematics. These sentiments were repeated by later academics and historians, who created…
Narratives created to explain trends of national power often falter when tested against history. No sooner had the narrative of liberalism finally winning its long struggle against totalitarianism been postulated that the emergence of a successful yet authoritarian China started…
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