A reading list on Xinjiang
After writing these two posts on Xinjiang, I did some more searching for a comprehensive introduction into the history, geography and culture of the region. I can’t say I found what I’d set out for but I came across this:…
Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
After writing these two posts on Xinjiang, I did some more searching for a comprehensive introduction into the history, geography and culture of the region. I can’t say I found what I’d set out for but I came across this:…
At the Vereshchagin retrospective in 2018, I spent some time staring at a painting of a ruined Chinese theater somewhere in Central Asia. After posting these notes on Altishar and Kashgaria, I wondered if had Vereshchagin found his theatrical ruins…
In a text to accompany an exhibition of visual works by the artist Mikray Pida, Edward Luttwak wrote: Mikray Pida’s art is her own transcendental creation, yet it is not irrelevant that she is an Uighur, that being a rather…
Back in 2014, more than two years before Trump’s elevation to the presidency, Edward Luttwak summed up his thoughts on grand strategy in application to the Napoleonic wars: In retrospect the fight against Napoleon seems to have engendered a new…
As reported by CNN Business: The United States is “looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday. Pompeo suggested the possible move during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, adding that…
There’s new evidence that an outbreak of an infectious disease closely and suspiciously resembling Covid-19 occurred in Wuhan months before the officially recognized beginning of the coronavirus epidemic. Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet…
To quote myself: Vietnam’s quarantine, I imagine, was much facilitated by the people’s apprehension of threats and dangers coming from the north. That is, from China. Back in 1979, China invaded Vietnam, devastated the borderlands and withdrew in the face…
OK, if you insist that COVID-19 is just like the flu, I could agree if you dropped “just.” It’s like the flu, sort of – but much deadlier and, in all likelihood, more contagious. I’ve seen the COVID-19 mortality rate…
A Chinese college student living with his family in Wuhan was unwell on January 17, became seriously ill by Jan. 21 and started feeling better after a life-threatening crisis on Jan. 26. He had been treated by doctors from a…
It has been reported that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people have taken to the streets in Hong Kong to protest against a law that would make the city’s residents extraditable to China. A huge turnout for a city…
I first came across this finding by Prof. Goodman in a Kommersant opinion piece (Victims of Sexual Inequality, that is, Chinese men with low prospects of finding a female partner). It was a revelation; I couldn’t believe it at first.…
This paperback, Xǐnǎo Means Brainwashing, was published in the Soviet Union in 1977. The name of the author, “M. G. Stepanov,” sounds pseudonymic. The book is a highly critical review of Maoist ideology, propaganda and repression in China in the…