A nice piece in the SCMP by Lijia Zhang and Xia Chen has roused me to return to this blog. They offer a Daoist take on the current crisis, which, in the most general sense, recognizes root causes: human interference… Continue reading

The months-long protests and demonstrations in Hong Kong have devolved into uncompromising police repression, sporadic protester violence, and a general sense of urban insurrection. It is difficult to see any good outcome. We can just hope that, when the tumult… Continue reading

  I've made a book out of parts of this blog. With material stretching back to 2005, I concentrated on various questions surrounding the reinvention of "tradition" in the PRC today, creating a volume focusing on ancient Chinese thought in… Continue reading

Most of the usual haunts haven’t changed too much from last year. The hipsters are out and about on Gulou, the touts energetically try to pull people into the electronics malls in Zhongguancun, and the craft beers flow abundantly down… Continue reading

While this blog has been dark for a few months, I've been writing some stuff for The China Channel, a rather new endeavor sponsored by the LA Review of Books. I'm going to leave the links here, since all of… Continue reading

This past semester, on leave from my usual gig at Williams College, I've been teaching at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. The time here is now coming to an end (returning to the US next week), but it's been a… Continue reading

Beijing gets cold this time of year and the impending winter is especially hard now for tens of thousands of city residents. In the past week or so, the Beijing Municipal Government has demanded that people immediately vacate dwellings that… Continue reading

Last year, Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden penned an op-ed in the New York Times that took academic philosophy departments in the US to task for failing to take seriously non-Western systems of thought. They suggested that,… Continue reading