Obama's victory last night has got me to thinking, again, about democracy and authoritarianism.  This contrast is constantly in my mind, as a student of Chinese politics, and it is infused with greater prominence when ill-founded arguments, like those of… Continue reading

That line from passage 23 of the Daodejing came to mind today, as I saw the terrible damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy.  New Jersey seems to have borne the brunt of the destruction.  The images of Seaside Heights, devastated and… Continue reading

My father-in-law died last week.  In his last few days I sat with him as he struggled to hold on to his pride as congestive heart failure brought him low.  His respirations eventually settled into a slow and steady pace,… Continue reading

    The Master said: "Only after the seasons turn cold can we truly know the resolve of pine and cypress."  (Analects 9:28)     子曰：「歲寒，然後知松柏之後彫也。」 Continue reading

It is often suggested that the most appropriate political expression of modern Confucian thought, itself a vast and varied universe of ideas, is some sort of authoritarianism.  Recently, Eric X. Li invoked Confucius when arguing that “democracy is not the… Continue reading

The Beijing flood has gotten me to thinking about the Mandate of Heaven (as my last post suggests).  To repeat: natural disasters have historically been taken as signs of the loss of imperial regime legitimacy in China.  And Bill Bishop… Continue reading

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

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

In a post last week, James Fallows raises an interesting question: "What is the Chinese Dream?"  He is, of course, alluding to the notion of the "American Dream," and wondering whether contemporary China has a similar summarizing cultural symbol that… Continue reading

There is much to blog about.  In my weeks-long absence from this space – the result of nothing but distraction – I have regularly sent myself emails of articles and ideas to blog.  But it has taken some time to… Continue reading