If you understand Japanese, are in Tokyo, and interested in the history of the foreign concessions of China, you may find a conference being held at Waseda of interest that has a panel of talks on media in the foreign concessions. See this posting over at Frog in a Well Japan for more.
If you will forgive the promotion, this may be of interest to other Frogs…
Cambridge University’s humanities centre (CRASSH) recently received funding for a two-year network on China, on the theme of modernity. Most of the scholars involved are approaching this from the field of comparative literature, but also there are historians and translation scholars. There will be conferences in Cambridge (this May), Yale (later this year) and Tsinghua (2009).
Some information is online here about the May conference http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/chinaconference.html.
Yes, on September 28th Taiwan will be celebrating the 2,557th birthday of Confucius. The date may be a bit off (he is getting a bit forgetful in his old age), but to still be celebrated after all these years is an accomplishment. As in the past there will be a direct descendant to officiate, they will play the ancient music, and an offering of food will be made. (When I was there it was a dead ox carried by two rather irate Taiwanese laborers) The high point of the ritual is the dance, done by young male students carrying feathers.
The boys practice and perform the dance to show their sincere respect for Chinese tradition and the teachings of Confucius. Also, if you get a piece of one of the feathers it is supposed to be good luck on your college entrance exams. When I was there a scrum developed after the ritual as various youngsters tried to get bits of feather, I assume being one of the dancers puts you in a good opening position.
The 6th Asian History Carnival will be hosted at Frog in a Well - Korea on August 8th! We are looking for good posts on Asian history posted around the internet in the past month or two. For more details, check out the Asian History Carnival homepage.
Please nominate postings for the carnival here. If you use del.icio.us to tag your links, another way you can nominate postings is to simply tag them “ahcarnival” (http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/) and I’ll look through the tagged postings when the time comes. The deadline for nominations is August 7th.
It’s been a good week for archaeology in the news, it seems:
When President Bush cited Taiwan as a model for mainland China, though he wasn’t quite as aggressive as the headlines suggest, he raised some interesting historical specters: what if the Nationalists hadn’t lost China? Does the success of Taiwan validate the socialist Republicanism (and stages of political development) of Sun Yat-sen? And, of course, is Taiwan’s model of transition from single-party developmental state to multi-party (if still somewhat immature) democracy with flourishing high-value economy something that China could draw on?
Andrew Meyer, who’s been studying Taiwan and China for two decades or so has some thoughts on the plausibility of the president’s model.
This analysis, though [via Simon World] suggests that the Taiwanisation argument is in no small part wishful thinking to cover up the fact that we don’t like to admit the developmental success of (some) unfree societies.
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