Category: China
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LA Review of Books: Driving Toward the Chinese Dream
How to get me to pick up a book about golf: make it about golf in China. At the LA Review of Books main page, I have a review of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, an excellent new book by Dan Washburn (who used to work down the hall from me at…
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Look Like a Shanghai Girl in Six Easy Surgeries
Go into any antique market here in Shanghai and you’ll find plenty of reproduction posters featuring the famous “Shanghai Girls” of the 1920s and ’30s. These were calendars and advertisements for products like alcohol, cigarettes, soap, and so forth that featured qipao-wearing beauties with pale skin, pinned-back wavy hair, and a gentle demeanor. The Shanghai…
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LA Review of Books: China’s Forgotten World War II
I wound up doing a sort of sequel to my China’s Forgotten WWI post for the LA Review of Books China Blog, this one looking at—no surprise here—China’s forgotten WWII. The new post is a Q&A with Oxford historian Rana Mitter, author of Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945. I’ve used this book a…
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Visualising China: On Child Poverty in China
For anyone who would prefer not to read the 225-page version of my dissertation (and who can blame you?), the 500-word version is now up at the Visualising China blog. Visualising China is an online photo archive run by Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol (who also wrote one of the China in…
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Wall Street Journal: Denying Historians: China’s Archives Increasingly Off-Bounds
Before I came to China to do research for the first time, I worried about how I would get access to the archives. I had heard plenty of war stories from historians who had done their dissertation research in the 1980s and early ’90s, when the archives had been opened to foreigners (unlike the Mao…
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Writing, New and Old
No blogging here recently because I am in full-on DISSERTATION MODE as I careen down the home stretch. Ten days to go before I have to deliver the finished product to my committee—I’ll make it (I hope!), but working full-bore on the final chapter and editing the ones I’ve already written hasn’t left me with…
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The Billfold: The Cost of Living in Shanghai
I’m a loyal reader of The Billfold, which describes itself as simply “a site about money.” There’s some personal finance stuff—how to save for retirement, why you should know your credit score, what goes in to buying a house, etc.—but most of the articles are less predictable, and some are downright quirky (last week they…
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LA Review of Books: City of Reinvention
I took a short break from the LA Review of Books China Blog this spring, as I had conferences to attend and a dissertation to write, but I’m back now and returning to my schedule of posting there once every month or so. My latest post, a review of Amy Tan’s recent novel The Valley…
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Bookshelf: And the City Swallowed Them
Late one night in July 2008, a 22-year-old Canadian model named Diana O’Brien died in the stairwell of her Shanghai apartment building after being stabbed more than 20 times. O’Brien’s assailant was Chen Jun, an 18-year-old migrant worker from impoverished Anhui Province. Like O’Brien, Chen had traveled to Shanghai without proper papers, hoping to wedge…
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Five Photos from the Tiananmen Vigil in Hong Kong
There are some amazing photographs at Business Insider from last night’s candlelight vigil in Hong Kong commemorating the June Fourth anniversary. Mine aren’t quite that good! But I did my best with the tools I had (a Canon PowerShot and my iPhone). I arrived at Victoria Park at 6:30, with the vigil scheduled to begin…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 