A Book on Chinese Propaganda About World War II

World War II is bubbling up in Chinese popular culture — and the understanding of the War among the Chinese, particularly with regard to Imperial Japan, is changing along with it. https://t.co/mhP2f97ogD

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 27, 2021

So Bourgeois

Tang > Han

Not enamored with the Yuan.

Industrious and Family-Oriented

But that sort of "natural conservatism" is not enough, when the host population is not put on the same level as other ethnic Chinese, and there is no real integration into the host society. The Chinese diaspora is envied and regarded with suspicion by host populations, and for good reason. When the Chinese disapora gains too much control over commercial wealth, things can get deadly, and there is a good reason why one of the 16 Points of the Alt Right addresses this. (It is not applicable only to the Pharisee diaspora.)

The Chinese in Southern Vietnam by Linh Dinh

No Chinese Republicanism Here

Why shouldn't the Chi-Coms make use of historical movies depicting loyal servants of the empire in a good light?

Linked to the Dragon?

From Peter Lee's review of The Great Wall: Crouching Tiger, Leapin’ Lizards! the Great Wall Comes to America

One last note: a fumbled grace note in the movie was the name given to the monsters: Tao Tei.

In Chinese, the name is spoken taotie, a kinda cool reference to the ubiquitous taotie monster masks incised on the most ancient of Chinese bronzes.

infogalactic
Cultural China
China Knowledge

A Qing Dynasty Novel in English Translation

The Scholars (儒林外史), cited by Steve Sailer in It's Just Tiger Mothers, All the Way Down!, referring to a post in Marginal Revolution. A criticism of Chinese meritocracy and the examination system.

Castiglione

From the Society of Jesus FB page:
"Trailer of our Giuseppe Castiglione filming in China: Giuseppe Castiglione was an Italian Jesuit lay brother who served as a missionary in China, where he became a painter at the court of the emperor (1715)."

Zia, "Dream on You"

Soompi: Zia Releases "Dream on You" MV for "Jang Ok Jung Live for Love" OST

장옥정, 사랑에 살다

Misc.
John Woo's Flying Tigers will be a two part feature film and six hour miniseries

A book on the Church of Shanghai after the Communist takeover

This afternoon, Fr. Paul Mariani, S.J. gave a brief presentation on his new book from
Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai at St. Clare's for the older students in the SJCCC. He was singing copies afterwards, but the extra copies were sold out rather quickly. I'll pick one up sooner or later. I haven't visited the website for the Cardinal Kung Foundation for some time.

The book is mentioned here.

Something on Fr. Beda Chang

Fr. Paul was on an episode of an EWTN series, but I can't find any video for that.

From 2010: Paul Mariani, SJ, Final Vows on Candlemas 2010 @ Santa Clara Mission at SCU

Items of Interest, 20 November 2011

Energy:
Kurr Cobb, Emperor Vespasian has a solution for unemployment (EB)

Of course, much of the manual work which used to be performed in the United States is now done in the Far East, particularly China. And, the kind of work that most factory workers do there might very well be considered drudgery by many people. Hall's point, however, was two-fold. First, impending declines in available energy to society will likely force such work closer to the markets it serves. This is because rising transportation costs will diminish the advantage of worldwide manufacturing webs in favor of regional and local ones. Second, manual labor often requires skills that we in the United States do not teach as widely as we used to. We aren't ready to make the things we once made. And, all of this remains true even as the ranks of the unemployed swell and energy costs continue to climb.

Certainly, Vespasian's attitude would have prevented the immense advances in productivity of the modern age. But since those advances are largely premised on the growing availability of cheap energy inputs, we may need to re-examine our attitude as those energy inputs become constrained and thus are no longer cheap.

Moreover, continued policies that lessen opportunities for manual labor will, of necessity, doom an entire group of people to the unemployment rolls just because their intelligence shows through in what they make with their hands rather than what they say or write.

I am not here romanticizing backbreaking labor. The one place that mechanization has failed to progress very much in the last few decades is the picking of fruit. Researchers had been looking for ways to harvest fruit mechanically. But an onslaught of cheap immigrant labor into the United States from the 1980s onward pushed real wages down for farm labor so far that mechanized fruit picking did not seem worth the effort. Even in the exploitative world of farm labor the laws of supply and demand apply. An avalanche of new workers depressed wages and doomed the mechanization effort.

Biggest Find in Decades Becomes $39 Billion Cautionary Tale

Farming:
Young Farmers Face Huge Obstacles to Getting Started

Relocalization:
Outline of the "Transition Companion" by Rob Hopkins

Economy:
via KG: The Coming Chinese Crash: Every Chinese Province is Like Greece

OWS
John Robb, OCCUPY NOTE 11/20/11: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement

Shikha Dalmia Gives Reason’s Game Away: Leftism Before Libertarianism!

History:
Louis Daguerre and the pioneers of photography
The Importance of Tang Dynasty Mothers to the Family Education
Maimonides: an early but accurate view on the treatment of haemorrhoids

Anatoly Karlin's review of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

The Power Of Contingency: Why China Didn’t Rule The World

Courtesy of Harvard's online extention program

HIST E-1825 China: Traditions and Transformations
Peter K. Bol, PhD, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.
William C. Kirby, PhD, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor.

Another movie about Sun Yat-Sen

A Twitch post about Jackie Chan's 1911. The other movie of which I was thinking is Bodyguards and Assassins, which was released in 2009. (Twitch review)

Woman Knight of Mirror Lake

My post last year about Qiu Jin. There is now a Chinese movie about her, apparently more fantasy than fact. Twitch has the trailer. The HK movies of the 80s and 90s with Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Khan, and Cynthia Rothrock and those that followed were transpositions of the heroines of wuxia/kung fu movies that came before to the modern era. The heroines were more of a fantasy for males than an ideal for females, probably. But when you couple the image of a woman kicking-ass that is possible only in movies with a historical figure who was arguably China's first feminist, what is the result but ideology for the masses?

The Beginning of a Great Revival

I didn't know they were making more CCP propaganda disguised as Chinese history: The Beginning of a Great Revival.



I see the trailer and think about how it is the force of the masses that makes for political change in China, but the nature of the constitution stays the same for the most part. True republicanism remains something foreign to the country, despite what the revolutionaries named the various governments since the fall of the Qing.

Apple
movieweb
altfg

Twitch: Is Tsui Hark Back On Form? The Trailer For DETECTIVE DEE Says Yes.



I don't know what Detective Dee's name is. Is there any connection with the fictional Judge Dee? After some seraching... Detective Dee is a fictional account of Di Renjie, upon who Judge Dee was loosely based.

30 Images from Tsui Hark's Detective Dee
Carina Lau

More on Judge Dee.
Judge Dee-A Homepage
Information on Di Renjie, Robert van Gulik, and Judge Dee
Rechter Tie / Robert van Gulik

Qiu Jin

Even if I had remembered, I might not have gone to the showing of Autumn Gem at Saratoga Public Library last Sunday. Once I was a supporter of the Chinese Revolution and the founding of the Chinese Republic. Now, not so much. Chinese nationalism was tainted with too much of modernity, and in embracing the modern nation-state, it exacerbated the centralizing tendencies of the Chinese Empire. If Qiu Jin was a feminist, what did she believe and advocate? How much of it was a normal and justified reaction to the real oppression of women?




Apparently someone has drawn a pseudo-icon:

Elsewhere she is advertised as the Chinese "Joan of Arc."

When the Chinese assimilate into contemporary Anglo-American society, they really assimilate to the worst of liberal excess. Everything traditional is measured by the standard of modern egalitarianism, even if Qiu Jin was "traditional" in comparison to contemporary Chinese-American feminists. I suppose I'll have to watch the movie to determine if this suspicion is correct or not.



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Related:
The China Beat
Raffi's Wushi Notes
Chi Am Circle
Film explores the life of China's first feminist | ASU News
Qiu Jin
A Martyr for Modernity: Qiu Jin, Feminist, Warrior and Revolutionary

Matteo Ricci lecture, May 8, 2010

(source)

St. Anthony of Padua Institute: The First Father Matthias Lu Memorial Lecture and a Manhattan Forum lecture: "Confict and Accomodation: Matteor Ricci's Approach to Catholic Evangelization in China," by Dr. Anthony E. Clark

Saturday, May 8, 2010 at Father Kozina Hal, St. Margaret Mary Church

In hindsight which was the more feasible approach, evangelizing the literati or the masses? And what sort of cultural, social, or political obstaces to evangelization existed in imperial China that did not exist in imperial Rome?

flyer (pdf)

A portrait of Fr. Ricci.

On Fr. Matthias Lu:
The Catholic Voice
De La Salle Institute District of San Francisco

Francesco Sisci reviews Military Culture in Imperial China, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo -- A culture at ease with war.

The book dispels the easy notion of any conflict in Chinese culture between wen (culture, literature) and wu (military affairs), in which wen is superior to wu, and as if wu were the last resort of the weak, uncultured mind.

From ancient times, the Chinese had a passion for stratagems and ruses that minimized the full brunt of combat. Nevertheless, war was considered "a matter of life or death for the state" and everybody took it seriously, as Sun Tzu (722-481 BC), the influential author of the book The Art of War, wrote.

That the civil service was more highly regarded than the military service is a standard trope one hears in Chinese history courses. (Even if a civil officer held the same nominal rank within the imperial bureaucracy as a military officer, his de facto rank was actually higher.) Is it accurate?

Confucians would not be opposed to all war -- just war as a means of expanding empire, instead of using moral persuasion.

Still, those who seek an explanation for Chinese military defeats in the 19th and 20th centuries by attributing weakness to a Chinese culture that was too effete should probably read this book.