Tag: The Past

  • Spence's New Book: Scholarly or Not, a Borgesian Passage

    Jonathan Spence has a new book centered around a late-Ming intellectual Zhang Dai. I have not read the book (nor have I seen it yet in Beijing), but the folks at Frog in a Well have critiqued the New Republic review and it’s an interesting meta-discussion. Most interesting to me is a passage included by…

  • 100 Years Since Taft's 'Open Door' Speech, Remembering Diplomacy

    I was delighted today to find a print edition of today’s International Herald Tribune in Beijing, a feat I thought impossible until the couple next to me drinking coffee could be seen peering over the top of their IHTs and deriding Thomas Friedman’s column (which curiously isn’t in today’s edition). I asked where they’d gotten…