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How Bo Xilai might emerge as a Latter Day Confucian Hero 23 Aug 2013 | 09:18 pm
OK, this is a bit far-fetched, but bear with me.... I have been absorbed these past two days with the Bo Xilai trial (an 18 minute video backgrounder by WSJ here). On Wednesday night (Thursday mornin...
What Does the Ideological Crack-Down Mean for China's Confucians? 20 Aug 2013 | 08:08 pm
The old Twitter feed lit up yesterday afternoon with links to Chris Buckley's story in the NYT: "China Takes Aim at Western Ideas." The lede: Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around ...
Han Feizi on why Xi Jinping must destroy Bo Xilai 19 Aug 2013 | 08:49 pm
So it looks like Bo Xilai's trial will start on Thursday. His is a long and sordid story: an ambitious and powerful politician looking to climb to the very top of the CCP pecking order, who ran a dee...
Book News: Earlier Publication Date and Excerpt 19 Aug 2013 | 02:11 am
And now for a spot of shameless self-promotion... It looks like my book - Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chnese Thought in Modern American Life - will be coming out next month, as opp...
Additional Thoughts on the China-Egypt Comparison 18 Aug 2013 | 08:55 pm
Following up on the post below, I notice that others have commented on the differences between the horrendous violence in Egypt in the past few days and the "Beijing Massacre" of 1989. Matt Schiaven...
Egypt is not China 15 Aug 2013 | 09:29 pm
Let me put on my contemporary Chinese politics cap for a moment to comment on the horrible events unfolding in Cairo. I notice, on Twitter, that comparisons are already being drawn between the violen...
Daoism as the Core of Chinese Culture 13 Aug 2013 | 11:16 pm
"Confucianism" is often taken as a metonym for "Chinese culture." It's easy to see why: the educated elite in imperial China, who themselves had to master the Confucian classics, had a material inter...
East Asia is not a Confucian Region: The Survey Research Evidence 7 Aug 2013 | 11:25 pm
I am closely reading Doh Chull Shin's book, Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia, for a review that will emerge later this year (or early next). It's quite good: deeply researched with a com...
Daoism and the Diffusion of Trauma 5 Aug 2013 | 08:58 pm
The title of this piece in yesterday's NYT Sunday Review caught my eye: "The Trauma of Being Alive." After wondering if it was a riff on the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism (it wasn't), I ...
"An Era of Lost Faith"? 1 Aug 2013 | 08:19 pm
A piece in Caixin about a questionable qigong "master," brings up a larger point, one that provides some insight into China's current cultural climate. In considering why successful business people an...
