Category: China
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Shanghai Event: History in the Headlines
Next Thursday (March 13), Jeff Wasserstrom and I will be speaking at lunchtime event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Shanghai. In “History in the Headlines: How Does China’s Past Inform the Present?”, we’ll be putting current events in a long-term perspective, which is something that both of us do in our respective writing…
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Lei Feng and the Chinese Dream
A few months ago, I was talking with a Chinese history professor here and somehow came to mention the name Lei Feng in passing. “You know Lei Feng?!?” he exclaimed, laughing. Well, any China history nerd worth her salt knows Lei Feng, “the yeti of Chinese Communist history,” whose brief life became fodder for one…
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Bookshelf: Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
One of my Fourteen Books for 2014 I’ve always heard that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but I was not fully aware of how much treasure is out there until I spent the weekend reading journalist Adam Minter’s lucid and engrossing new book on the global scrap and recycling business, Junkyard Planet: Travels…
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LA Review of Books: Missing the Harmony Express
I’ve been in the United States for the past month, and during that time I’ve spent a lot of mental energy comparing China and the U.S. In terms of air quality, ease of accessing information online, and presence of Wawa convenience stores, Philadelphia definitely beats Shanghai. But in other areas, China has the edge, and…
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I’ve Become a Talking Head
I’m spending the weekend in the very, very, VERY cold city of Washington, DC, attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. I will have more to say about that later, but for the moment, a quick link to a video interview with me that History News Network just posted. HNN’s editor is taping…
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Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945
One of the nice things about going to UC Irvine is that during my coursework years, I had the option of taking classes at any other UC campus at no cost beyond a little bit of paperwork and administrative hassle. For one reason or another, though, it never worked out before my third year as…
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Holding My Breath
Just after noon on Saturday—three hours behind schedule—China Eastern Airlines Flight 721 broke through the clouds on its ascent from Shanghai Hongqiao Airport. From my seat in the middle of the plane, I turned my head left and looked out the window. For the first time in five days, I saw blue sky. Shanghai doesn’t…
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Fourteen Books for 2014
I acquire a lot of books. My mother receives all my Amazon packages in Philadelphia, so I’m sure she’ll confirm this statement—and those are only the physical books that I buy! My Kindle gets fed on a regular basis, too, and book publishers often send me review copies of new titles so I can write…
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Postcard from Hangzhou
I spent the weekend in Hangzhou, a pleasant “small” city of almost 9 million people, which sits an hour away from Shanghai by train. I had been to Hangzhou before—during the summer of 2006, I attended the CET language program there to work on my Chinese—but this trip was far better for several reasons. Two…
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Nanjing in One Day
I lived in Nanjing for two years, from 2006 to 2008. During those years, the best thing that happened to the city, as far as I was concerned, was the introduction of high-speed rail service that cut the travel time between Nanjing and Shanghai in half. Nanjing is a fine city, and there are certainly…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 