Roy Berman, the MutantFrog himself, will host the next Asian History Carnival at Mutant Frog Travelogue on the 18th. Get your nominations in to him directly (roy dot berman at gmail dot com), through blogcarnival.com or with del.icio.us tags. Remember, if you don’t submit anything, we may pick the worst thing you ever posted publicly….
A few other news notes:
Pandas are cute particularly when they move
China establishes new rules for News services, and they’re not liberalizing them, either.
“No surprises”: Korea-China History Wars Continue, in anticipation of the collapse of North Korea. Or just because.
Jeffery Wasserstrom reviews Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, and finds it superior to Kristof and WuDunn among others. It’s going on my shortlist for next semester’s “Issues and Problems of Contemporary China”.
In regards to the Korea-China history row, I think a key question is how modern territorial boundaries are being used to define the ‘nationality’ of people from centuries past. In Yonson Ahn’s article on HNN this past spring (“The Korea-China Textbook War–What’s It All About?” March 6, 2006), she argued:
“The official Chinese position regarding the proper historical place of Koguryo is a reading back of contemporary Chinese views of the unifying multiethnic nation that is composed of Han Chinese and fifty-five other ethnic minorities rooted in antiquity, as Mark Byington (2004-b) maintains. In other words, the way minority nationalities are today conceived as forming part of a “Greater Chinese nation” has been imposed on the remote past.”
Further on:
“A second problem in the dispute is that it projects the modern nation-state onto ancient times, reconstructing ancient history within the framework of national history. The modern concepts of national territory and nation-state are applied retroactively to the ancient period. Lim Jie-hyun (2004) finds such projections anachronistic. Contemporary views of the ancient past shaped by present needs are often self-serving.”
I wonder if others have thoughts on this subject or Ahn’s article. The idea of China possibly using the disputed origins of the Koguryo as a pretext for a post-DPRK land grab is intriguing, if a bit alarmist.
The link for the article is: http://hnn.us/articles/21617.html