Harris, Rachel. 2024. “The Aesthetics and Imaginaries of Uyghur Heritage, Chinese Tourism, and the Xinjiang Dance Craze.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2342289.

In parks and town squares across China in 2023, amateur dance enthusiasts engaged in a nationwide ‘Xinjiang dance’ craze, a phenomenon reflected and amplified on social media. For outside observers this might seem a bizarre development following the Chinese media discourses of terrorism, and the intense securitisation of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which so recently preceded it, but it aligned neatly with new initiatives across Chinese government, media and heritage to promote the region’s burgeoning tourism industry, to fundamentally shift perceptions of the region in the national imagination, and to counter revelations of mass incarceration and cultural erasure in international media.

This article highlights the ways that Uyghur heritage, music and dance have been harnessed in government projects to remodel the region’s history and situate its peoples more firmly within the sphere of the Chinese nation, thinking through the ways in which the aesthetic formations and imaginaries of Uyghur heritage articulate the links between tourism and territory, colonialism and desire.

Opinion | What Students Read Before They Protest

That approach survives: The Columbia that has become the primary stage for political drama in America still requires its students to encounter what it calls “cornerstone ideas and theories from across literature, philosophy, history, science and the arts.”

Some Comments:

I don’t know about Ivy League schools, but at the big state school where I teach, most students won’t read anything anymore. A handful of students might read something that’s short and easily digestible, but that’s about it. This is the legacy of smartphones and the attention economy.

It isn’t merely what students read in University.
It is what you read over an entire lifetime, starting with The Cat in the Hat at age 6.

Nuanced, thought-provoking article. Thanks. As a former college professor I witnessed the phenomenon Douthat describes--the trend away from of a common core canon (“the best that has been thought and said”) toward a focus on identity politics and grievance studies.

But I think the bigger problem may be (based on my experience teaching at a large state University) that students just don’t want to read anything. Many students are unprepared and unmotivated for the rigors of university study, and administrators exacerbate the problem by pressuring faculty, who are now mostly adjuncts, to make courses easy and give A’s, since students are now viewed as customers and continuing employment for professors is based in large part on student evaluation scores.

I think one of the reasons campus performative activism is so prevalent these days is that for many students it’s easier and more exciting than knuckling down and doing the hard work to learn about the world so they can go out into it and influence it in strategic and constructive ways.

The “core curriculum” at Columbia is shockingly limited.

The traditional liberal arts consist of grammar, logic and rhetoric (the trivium), followed by arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (the quadrivium).

Human knowledge has advanced since the time these definitions were written. Grammar and logic are now realized mostly in computing science and its applications. Rhetoric has been turned to the service of advertising and so on.

But note the importance of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. These are essential disciplines for those who seek to understand humanity’s place in the natural world. Anyone who cannot prove the basic theorems of differential and integral calculus does not possess a genuine education in the liberal arts.

For those of us asking ourselves why the demonstrators at Columbia seem so morally and intellectually naive, Ross Douthat has provided some helpful information.

The students have been “diseducated”. Told that they were getting Liberal Arts and “learning how to think”, they got dropped off in the Rhetoric Department and left to find their own way out.

Some of these people might turn out to be the future leaders of America, but they’ll have to complete their educations first. They need to do better than reciting scripts prepared by others.

Why Xi Jinping is afraid to unleash China’s consumers

China’s seeming reluctance to rebalance its economy is one of the great challenges facing global financial systems, threatening to worsen Beijing’s trade and diplomatic relations not only with western countries but also with developing nations.

According to analysts, the reasons for the lack of more radical action on consumption range from a need to generate growth quickly by pumping in state funds.

Ideology and geopolitics also play roles. For Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, the greater the control his country exerts over global supply chains, the more secure he feels, particularly as tensions rise with the US, analysts argue. This leads to an emphasis on investment, particularly in technology, rather than consumption.

“China is responsible for one-third of global production but one-tenth of global demand, so there’s a clear mismatch,” US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in Beijing last week.

“They are locked into this system,” Pettis says.

https://www.ft.com/content/35471cfb-79a6-42c1-8e41-447bfaad2c36

Adults, not students, are America’s problem

Adults are mishandling campus protests in America, showing hysteria and dogmatism. Students have the right to protest peacefully, even if their views are controversial. The confusion and hypocrisy in handling protests may lead to a call for calm reflection among adults.

https://www.ft.com/content/19890269-fe64-429d-994a-e2002bac3443

Japan’s China Reckoning

Beijing and Tokyo’s friendly relations in 2008 soured due to escalating tensions, with China encroaching into Japanese waters and airspace. Japan grapples with balancing economic reliance on China and the need to strengthen alliances to deter aggression. Efforts to bolster Japan’s defense capabilities and alliances with the U.S. and other partners are crucial in facing the challenges posed by China.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/japans-china-reckoning

五四青年节快乐

https://twitter.com/chenchenzh/status/1521715712368287744

Qin Hui (秦晖), public intellectual and historian, will give a talk on Tuesday, May 7, titled “启蒙的异化：五四再反思,” “Alienation of Enlightenment: Rethinking the May 4 Movement.”

https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/alienation-of-enlightenment-rethinking-the-may-4-movement-featuring-fairbank-center-visiting-scholar-qin-hui

柴静访谈前美国驻成都总领事夫人庄祖宜

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnD8fpdFSSk

Authoritarian Privacy

Central to China’s privacy turn is the party-state’s use of privacy law to shore up its legitimacy amid rampant digital abuse. China’s whiplashed transition into the digital age has given rise to significant vulnerabilities and dependencies for ordinary citizens. Through privacy law, China’s leaders have sought to interpose themselves as benevolent guardians of privacy rights against other intrusive actors—individuals, firms, and even state agencies and local governments. So framed, privacy law can enhance perceptions of state performance and potentially soften criticism of the center’s own intrusions. The party-state did not enact privacy law despite its surveillance state; it embraced privacy law to maintain it. This Article adds to our understanding of privacy law, complicates the relationship between privacy and democracy, and points toward a general theory of authoritarian privacy.

https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/authoritarian-privacy

Pang, Laikwan. 2024. One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty. Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=37147.

Focusing on political theory and cultural history, the book demonstrates how concepts such as popular sovereignty, territorial sovereignty, and economic sovereignty were constructed, and how sovereign power in China was both legitimized and subverted at various times by intellectuals and the ordinary people through a variety of media from painting and literature to internet-based memes. With the possibility of a new Cold War looming large, globalization disintegrating, and populism on the rise, Pang provides a timely reevaluation of the logic of sovereignty in China as power, discourse, and a basis for governance.

Sung, Wen-Ching, Chen-Pang Yeang, and Zhixiang Cheng. 2024. “Demarcating a Pure Land: CFido as a Cyberspace for Computer Amateurs in 1990s China.” Isis 115 (2): 267–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/730229.

The bulletin board system (BBS) significantly changed the production and transmission of knowledge in China’s information technology (IT). Launched in 1991, Chinese FidoNet (CFido) provided a virtual space for hobbyists to explore technology-for-fun and aggregated many future Chinese digital entrepreneurs, enabling them to experiment with business models and pursue open-source software with Chinese characters. CFido’s short history (1991–1998) also encapsulates the fast-changing dynamic between knowledge and its social context. CFido participants first perceived the BBS as a utopian “pure land” where grassroots intellectuals could develop software and digital technologies, free from outside interests and interventions. Yet the beginning of government control of cyberspace, the boom of the IT industry and e-commerce, and the transition from the dial-up BBS to the Internet led the CFidoers to diverging positions about amateurs and ultimately brought CFido to an end.

这篇论文追溯了 中国惠多网 的历史。CFido 是计算机网络通讯爱好者自己创立并维持运行的业余网络系统，它起源于 1991 年，随着计算机和网络通讯技术的发展和普及，高峰时期在中国国内有上百个站点，使用者达上万人，是一股推动社会向信息化进步的力量。CFido 的网友可以算是中国最早的网民，后来多个 CFido 网友成为中国互联网名人。

如果有朋友有下载这篇论文的权限，欢迎分享 PDF，谢谢！

GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data contains spam and porn phrases, causing concerns among users. The tokens used by the chatbot include inappropriate content, affecting its ability to understand Chinese prompts accurately. Experts suggest better data cleaning and filtering to improve the chatbot’s performance.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/17/1092649/gpt-4o-chinese-token-polluted

https://gist.github.com/ctlllll/4451e94f3b2ca415515f3ee369c8c374

Why Is China Producing So Many Export Goods, Anyway?

Theory 1: Economic stimulus

Theory 2: Overcapacity/underconsumption

Theory 3: Comparative advantage

Comparative advantage explains balanced trade — I give you soybeans because I’m good at growing soybeans, you give me cars in exchange for soybeans because you’re good at making cars, and so on. It can’t explain unbalanced trade — you give me cars in exchange for IOUs. Trade surpluses and deficits require ideas that go beyond comparative advantage.

Theory 4: Forced deindustrialization

Theory 5: Xi Jinping’s techno-historical theories

This might sound like a bunch of Marxist mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually not very different from how other countries think about technology, industry, and the national interest.

Theory 6: War preparation

All of these theories could be true at once. Or perhaps only some subset of them.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-is-china-producing-so-many-export

高华的后二十年（上）：《红太阳》是怎样升起的

18 年后，高华在接受独立导演胡杰采访时，披露了彼时心境。「我感觉到，我应该写。第一，我认为这件事很重要。第二，我自己有些想法。第三，我是学历史的研究历史的，似乎也看了很多东西，可以把这部分感受先写下来，至于写得怎么样，将来能不能出版，当时都没有考虑。」

「写这个过程，时间很长。我当时给自己一个想法，就是你应该写，你要摆脱一种内心的恐惧，摆脱各种各样的禁忌。」

这种恐惧，后来被景凯旋称为「一种存在意义和形而上的恐惧」。「这是我们这一代人普遍具有的状态，80 年代我们读卡夫卡，90 年代接触《正午的黑暗》、《1984》之后，就很能够理解这种恐惧感。」景凯旋说。

这是一部后来被海外学者看作「高华教授受个人痛苦经历刺激，以及思考国家巨变有所感触的发愤之作，酝酿二十载，辛勤七个寒暑而成的著作」。该书凡 705 页，参考文献长达 31 页，分档案文献集 6 种，年谱、文集、资料汇编 136 种，报刊、期刊 19 种，著作、论文、传记、回忆亲历资料 338 种，英文论著 6 种，为第一部全部利用大陆公开资料，系统梳理延安整风运动前后过程及其影响的专著。

这本书通过对延安整风运动的起源和过程的深刻剖析，解释了毛泽东如何根据其理念将「马克思主义中国化」：毛泽东在整风中运用思想改造和审干、肃反两种手段，全面清除了中共党内存留的「五四」自由民主思想的影响，彻底转换了中共的「俄化」气质，重建了以毛泽东为绝对主宰的上层结构，奠定了党的全盘毛泽东化的基础，其间所产生的一系列概念、范式，在 1949 年后改变了亿万中国人的生活和命运。

https://dasheng.media/articleDetail?id=72

Ma, Chicheng. 2024. “Classicism and Modern Growth: The Shadow of the Sages.” The Journal of Economic History 84 (2): 395–431. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050724000111.

This paper examines how the worship of ancient wisdom affects economic progress in historical China, where the learned class embraced classical wisdom for millennia but encountered the shock of Western industrial influence in the mid-nineteenth century. Using the number of sage temples to measure the strength of classical worship in 269 prefectures, I find that classical worship discouraged intellectuals from appreciating modern learning and thus inhibited industrialization between 1858 and 1927. By contrast, industrialization grew faster in regions less constrained by classicism. This finding implies the importance of cultural entrepreneurship, or the lack thereof, in shaping modern economic growth.

秦晖教授 2024 年 5 月最新演讲：关于五四的再思考（哈佛费正清研究中心）

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30GhAT63o08

前几天读到这篇文章，我想起之前读过的一篇博士论文致谢中关于高华的内容，但当时没找到。今天看到这条 Tweet 中「现在的上海展览馆，建造于中苏交好时期」，突然就想起了那篇博士论文《上海中苏友好宣传教育运动研究（1949–1965）》。