Latest Posts
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So…What is “Oriental Civilization”?
Here we go again (or, perhaps, I should say, here we keep on going): another example of the Chinese government trying to claim Confucius as a means of legitimating their regime. The story starts out without fanfare: an… Continue reading
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Sunday “Modern Love” Blogging: Just Another Divorce Story
For regular readers of The Useless Tree, let me apologize for missing my usual Sunday blogging of the NYT’s "Modern Love" column last week. Work just swamps me sometimes and I am behind in some grading (which is… Continue reading
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Friday I Ching Blogging: Peace Between China and Japan
Relations between China and Japan have been deteriorating of late. Although they are bound together economically, politically and militarily they seem to be moving away from one another. Tokyo’s announcement earlier this year that Taiwan was a strategic… Continue reading
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Credit Where Credit is Due
Hooray for the Shanghai Daily, as reported in China Daily, for pressing against corrupt officials: China has to find a way to make disobedient and defiant local officials accountable to the public interest if there is ever going… Continue reading
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Is That What They Meant by the “Superiority of Socialism”?
From today’s China Daily: The richest on the Chinese mainland are getting richer: there are 10 billionaires this year in Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the nation’s wealthiest people compared with three last year. From the… Continue reading
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Wolf Totem
Howard French has a piece on a new book, Wolf Totem, that has taken China by storm and will soon be in an English-print bookstore near you (and maybe even a movie theater). I have not read the… Continue reading
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Reconstructed lives
Oliver Sacks has a beautiful piece, "Recalled to Life," in last week’s (October 31) New Yorker (sorry, the story is not on line!) about people who, usually through stroke or other traumatic neurological insult, lose the ability to… Continue reading
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Barbarism and Civilization
Danwei, a great blog about Chinese media, has an important post, a translation of a short article by sociologist Li Yinhe about the Taishi incident (a crackdown by PRC police on rural people trying to legally recall local… Continue reading
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Christianity or Confucianism: Which Engenders More Honesty?
A reader emails with a question that emerged in a discussion she had with friends about the relative merits of the moral systems of Christianity and Confucianism. Her friends say that Confucianism relies too much on "face," or… Continue reading
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Chinese Culture: “Speedy”?
I’m sure this NYT article, about how Chinese universities are trying to lure top-flight academics to build up their international standing, is being linked to around the web. But the thing that struck me about it was this… Continue reading
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