Here’s a modern-day Confucian morality tale from the NYT: The three brothers quickly gathered in their small town’s empty fire station to compare notes on the photographs they had happened across on the Internet. In horror, the three… Continue reading

    Not much more to add to the Hwang Woo-Suk stem cell disaster that The Marmot has not already covered.  In a way, though, the whole thing illustrates just how simple and straightforward Chinese philosophy really is. Take this… Continue reading

    Here’s a story from yesterday’s China Daily: A high-priced class for high-flying businessmen, teaching Confucianism for moneymakers, will enroll its first students in Beijing next month. It has been dubbed "the boss class." The two- to three-day course… Continue reading

    The news that Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, who appeared to be stem cell researcher extraordinaire, cheated, has cast a shadow over science generally (how could such fraud not be caught earlier?) and Korean science in particular.  I have… Continue reading

     The Tao Te Ching is not a very good guide for contemporary politics.  The notion that "it’s impossible to govern once you’ve filled people with knowing (65)" is just too prone to authoritarian abuse (maybe Bush and company… Continue reading

    ..Twelve days after the Dongzhou killings, the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, has published its second story (the first had been rescinded shortly after it ran, suggesting uncertainly among propaganda officials on what spin to put on the… Continue reading

    I am focusing on the Dongzhou killings of late to the exclusion of some of my usual blogging features (Friday I Ching; Sunday "Modern Love") because I feel a certain political urgency.  We bloggers need to do what… Continue reading

    The powers that be in the PRC are paying people in Dongzhou to change their stories about the killings.  They are inducing villagers to say that people were killed by the homemade fire bombs wielded by the crowd,… Continue reading

      Chinese Party leaders continue the news blackout on the Dongzhou killings.   They are likely betting that the Western media will turn its attention elsewhere (voting in Iraq; spying in the US), which will give them more leverage over… Continue reading

    The just-completed East Asian Summit should remind us of just how little political commonality is to be found in a diffuse historical notion of a "Confucian Commonwealth."  Usually that notion, or something like it, is deployed to represent… Continue reading