The Useless Tree

Sam Crane

  • Chinese Intellectuals Need Freedom: Zhuangzi Anticipated This…

    Louisa Lim has a report on NPR this morning that reminds us that Chinese intellectuals and artists continue to press for freedom of expression, speech, and thought.  She presents the work of artist Yang Weidong: A deceptively simple question has… Continue reading

  • Remembering 1989

    Twenty three years ago today (with adjustments for the time difference with China), I awoke in my apartment at Nanjing University to the news that the military had opened fire on people in Beijing.  Live ammunition shot into crowds of… Continue reading

  • Confucius for thee but not for me

    Thanks to CDT for posting this cartoon by Dashixiong:  The children say: "Grandpa Confucius, we want to study, we want to eat a healthy lunch. We beg you to come back home and teach us…” This is an element of the critique… Continue reading

  • Some Confucian Compassion for Bei Bei Shuai, Please!

    I just caught wind of this story, a sad tragedy:  On 23 December 2010 [Bei Bei] Shuai became so depressed after she had been abandoned by her boyfriend – a married Chinese man who broke his promise to set up… Continue reading

  • The Porosity of Culture

    Just want to add my voice to those others (on Twitter) who have called out the nice little piece in the NYRB on translator Red Pine (aka Bill Porter).  For me, it demonstrates some of what I have been blogging… Continue reading

  • The Dao of Inter-Cultural Commensurability

    I've been thinking more about the possibilities of inter-cultural commensurability since my last post on the topic.  A thought has come to me that I want to posit and explore here: The entire topic of commensurability/incommensurability is, essentially, a Western… Continue reading

  • Confucius Institutes are not about Confucius

    There is a bit of a dust up over Confucius Institutes, those Chinese-government sponsored organizations that promote Chinese language teaching in US (and locations all over the world). But before we get to the details of this kerfuffle, a word… Continue reading

  • Daoism is not a Strategy

    A rather odd blog post over at Huffington Post College, by Keith Weigelt, a Professor at the Wharton School, gets off to an incongruous start: I am a strategist in the Daoist tradition. One tenet of Daoism is that individuals… Continue reading

  • On Global Cultural Influence in Modern/Post-Modern Times

    In a comment on a recent post of mine about the potential universalities of Chinese culture, a reader writes: All this talk of imposing or importing outside values on China but there is little talk I hear of importing Chinese… Continue reading

  • Chen Guangcheng, Mozi, and Daoism

    This just in from a Reuters profile of Chen Guangcheng: From Chinese history, Chen said he admired 5th-century BC philosopher Mo Tzu, and Taoism founder Lao Tzu, the works of which had also been read aloud to him. I must… Continue reading