Week 9, Gene Expression Book Club, Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom
The armies of the Taiping and Imperial forces race to and fro, to and fro. To say that this part of the narrative does not feel linear to me is […]
China: is national greatness deep rooted, or proximal?
A recommendation from The Scholar’s Stage has finally pushed me to complete Imperial China 900–1800, a book which I first began reading over ten years ago. Like The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization this may be a work I read again and again. Unlike The Fall of Rome Imperial China is not tightly argued. […]
Manufacturing Chinese history cheaply
In Ross Terrill’s The New Chinese Empire he makes the assertion that Mao Zedong was the heir of the moralist Confucian tradition, while Deng Xiaoping’s stances looked more toward pragmatic Legalism. I don’t want to rehash why Terrill presented this strange framework as a central thesis in his book. Rather, there was an instance that […]