井底之蛙

How is “common knowledge” different in China than elsewhere? At present of course things are increasingly the same, but that is due in part to years of education and government propaganda, but it is hard to figure out how the propaganda connects to the later popular knowledge

Ethan Persoff has posted a nice set of Chinese anti-American cartoons, which he dates to 1958-60.

I think a lot of these are coming from Russian models, since while they have a few on the Japanese as America’s evil allies there is a lot more on Germany, as above. And, there are a lot of atom bombs and H bombs. Making sense of the atom bomb took a while in the West (Orwell, for one, never seems to have gotten his head around them) but here they are everywhere and seem to be the ultimate marker of American depravity and power. Mao of course famous for valuing the power of peasant militias over modern technology, and even atomic weapons did not change this calculus for him, as the many militia pictures during the Cultural Revolution show. These cartoons were intended to convince Russians and other Europeans that the atom bomb had ushered in a new age, but they do not seem to have had that effect in China at all.

Some of these cartoons do show Russian positions that will be picked up on by later Chinese propaganda, like the importance (and existence of) the toilers of other lands

Has anyone done anything on Chinese popular understanding of the nuclear era? I’m drawing a blank.
Via Mutant Palm, which has a nice set of links to Chinese image sites.

A whole website full of picture of Sleeping Chinese I found it via Fallows, who adds a caveat  (specifically for Chinese readers) that he is not trying to call Chinese people lazy by posting these. Oddly enough, I think that the perpetually indignant Chinese of the internet might not be as offended by these shots as Fallows (and the site owner) seem to think. Fallows presents these pictures as a counterbalance to the western image of a relentlessly rising army of Chinese worker-automatons. Obviously they can’t be working that hard if they fall asleep in public. Nobody in the West ever falls asleep in public unless they are under 1 year old or really drunk.

Of course these Chinese people are not sleeping. They are xiu xi-ing (休息). One of the many ways Chinese culture is superior to many others is that taking a quick nap is always considered a good idea, especially right after lunch. So while these pictures may not tell you much about the rise of China, they are a nice slice of Chinese life.

The December History Carnival is up, and it includes a few China bits. Even a few from elsewhere! Also lots of other neat stuff.

I found a couple of cool language tools. Both are hosted by the Russian site Tower of Babel, which appears to be run by some serious linguists who have complied a huge number of etymologies.

One site will give you the pronuciation of Chinese words in any of the archaic pronuciations. Want to know how to pronounce a word in Eastern Han Chinese, or what the Shuowen gloss is, this site is for you. It only has about 4000 entries, but a lot of the basic words seem to be there.

They also have a dialect version, so if you want to know how to say something in Fuzhou or Jinan dialect this is the place to go.

For both of these you need to know the wierd linguist romanizations, [UPDATE I think it is IPA] and I’m not sure I have any practical uses for this, but it is still pretty cool

Google now has a lot of old pictures from the archives of Life magazine. Lots and lots of cool China stuff, like this skater from 1946. They seem, not surprisingly, to have a lot of pictures from the war years.

h/t HNN

While I’m sure there are a lot of similar resources that deserve equal mention, I wanted to post a link while it is fresh on my mind. There are a great collection of online maps of China available for direct viewing via the website of the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. They include a number of contemporary maps and many maps from earlier in the 20th century, in particular, especially from the U.S. Army Map Service. The only criticism I have is that the date of the maps is not always clear.

China Maps
Historical Maps of China

See also its wonderful Japan topographical and city plan maps from the US army occupation period.

If you agree that this is a great resource, consider leaving them a comment thanking them for making it available online via the U of Texas library comment page.

Imagethief has been discussing the Virtual Forbidden City. Basically this is something that looks a lot like a Second Life site but you have to download the whole thing. You get a little avatar and you can bop around the Great Within and look at stuff. Imagetheif’s readers seem to mostly be divided on whether or not lack of crowds is a good thing or a bad thing.

Frankly I think it is a pretty bad thing, in the sense that visiting the Virtual Forbidden City is simply not a substitute of any sort for visiting the real Forbidden City, reading a book about the Forbidden City, or even looking at some photos of the Forbidden City (hereafter FC).

This is not something that all of my colleagues would agree with. Some of them are real big on the value of new technology like Second Life for teaching. Oddly enough, despite the fact that I have one of those blog things, I am not sold on this. Virtual Forbidden City (hereafter VFC) is a good example of the weaknesses of all this gab about new paradigms of virtual learning. (more…)

China Beat asked me to pull together some thoughts on “WIKIPEDIA, the Free Encyclopedia.”

With help from several friends, including Alan Baumler and Konrad Lawson, I posted “Living With Wikipedia: It’s Here to Stay” (October 7, 2008). I invited comments here at Frog, though, and we would welcome tricks, thoughts, or indignant denuncations.

If I have set this link right (which is a big “if”), Chayford Wikipedia bookmarks will take you to my Delicious bookmarks. This is better than searching Delicious for “Wikipedia,” which gives you 529,036 hits. I don’t want to think about how many hits you would get Googling “Wikipedia.”

Speaking of Delicious (formerly Del.icio.us), it’s one of the social bookmarking sites (the link is to the Wikpedia article). Delicious describes itself as “a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.”

In other words, it’s a cousin of Wikipedia. Whether Delicious too is “here to stay” is another question. By now, searching Delicious generally gives you an overwhelming number of hits. Maybe there’s a better way of handling the problem of sorting and classifying websites.

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I have been spending a few days looking at one of the important early postwar newspapers in Taiwan, 臺灣新生報, using the microfilm collection on the 6th floor Taiwan resource center of the National Taiwan Library (國立中央圖書館臺灣分館). Yesterday, I happened to catch a glimpse of someone viewing some old copies of another important postwar Taiwan paper, 民報, using an online database, which I will offer some comments about below, following a brief opening rant.

I’m not a big fan of microfilm newspapers. The advantages of this medium over providing access to physical copies or bound printed copies are obvious. Among them include: 1) preservation 2) space conservation 3) the ability to zoom 4) ability to print zoomed in articles from microfilm machines onto various sizes of paper, etc.

However, from the point of view of the historian, the disadvantages soon become apparent: unlike the bound printed copies of, for example, 中央日報, 申報, or 大公報 that I can find in various libraries, which sometimes shrink the original size of the newspaper such that the characters in the articles are barely legible – it is actually possible to browse these through these collections quite fast. It is in fact faster to turn the pages of a book and scan a page of a newspaper for interesting articles than it is to operate the knob of a microfilm machine and zoom in and out on interesting looking pieces.

More importantly, the higher contrast of black text on the printed white of paper makes the experience of looking at bound volumes far more pleasant than a microfilm machine. With the exception of some digital microfilm readers that artificially boost the contrast, the vast majority of microfilm readers I have used in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and the United States are extremely hard on the eyes. If you have to sit at the reader for 4-10 hours, with some short breaks, for even a few days in a row, the impact on one’s eyes is noticeable. The sick yellow background (or black with white text, as the default is for many newspapers I viewed in Korea’s national library, hardly much better) of the microfilm reader, desperately trying to transfer light to the viewer through its lenses always seems to fall below the expectations of my eyes, which yearn to look at real paper, or even the greater contrast of a computer screen!

Digital databases of newspapers are always welcome. In addition to the power of database searching, they offer some of the benefits of both paper bound and microfilm collections but also some more serious defects. It is not all one glorious march towards progress. In my experience, I have found that digital newspaper collections (as well as many library OPAC databases and other online resources) often are designed by people that appear to greatly underestimate the importance of browsing. It isn’t just about what is there in that article or even on that page; historians often want to know what can be found near that article, page, or issue. Sometimes we aren’t looking for a single article about a single topic, but trying to get a feel for the kinds of things being written on the days and weeks surrounding a particular historical event. It is all part of the task of surveying the discursive environment of a time or place.

Now, having made these comments, let me turn to the database I discovered completely by chance yesterday: 舊版報紙資訊網. Read on below the fold…
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Via BibliOdyssey an exhibition of the prints of the 1911 revolution from Princeton.

The prints are great, if a little small. One thing that struck me was the disclaimer at the bottom of the first page. “The Princeton East Asian Library in no way supports the rhetoric or depictions that are presented on the prints.”

What is that supposed to mean? I can think of two possibilites.

1. As a notoriously conservative institution¹ Princeton is opposed to the overthrow  of the Qing dynasty and is still hoping for the return of the Manchus.

2. Something other reason. But what could it be?

1. How many Princeton alums does it take to change a lightbulb?

   Four. One to change the bulb and three to point out how much better the old bulb was. [↩]