樱花真美

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4auehJl9sRA

Professors were arrested in Emory University

https://fxtwitter.com/middleeasteye/status/1783599259650002973

Lessons from Tiananmen for today’s university presidents

Today’s students at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, Brown, USC and other campuses are mounting an antiwar movement, calling on their institutions to divest from Israel in light of the unprecedented levels of civilian death in Gaza, and for the US government to stop supplying Israel’s offensive war machine.

Here is a solution. It requires compromise, but also offers benefits to both university administrations and student protesters: Form a committee.

Students, you don’t want to slow things down, and may fear being co-opted by such a process. That is a valid fear, and you should resist committee stalling. Had Chinese leaders not panicked in 1989 that the Communist Party itself would split, they might have coopted Beijing students into the system, just as past emperors sometimes granted rebel leaders official posts to bring them into the fold.

https://jimmillward.medium.com/lessons-from-tiananmen-for-todays-university-presidents-0ae41a034513

Leaves, Silkworms, Yue Fei: Ways of Imagining the Territory in 1930s China

During the Nationalist period (1928–1949) in China, the notion that China’s territory mirrors the shape of a begonia or a mulberry leaf gained wide recognition. This analogy ingrained itself into public perceptions of modern China’s boundaries and was often assumed without question. As foreign forces—symbolized by silk-worms—encroached upon the leaf-like territory, the leaf trope emerged as a platform for various patriotic appeals during wartime. This research explores the evolution of the leaf trope for China’s territory in the 1930s, probing the historical and cultural connotations embedded in it. The discussion expands to incorporate intellectual resources associated with the Song-era military commander Yue Fei and the leaf trope, as they jointly influenced the portrayal of China’s territory across textual and visual mediums. In this light, territorial conceptualizations in modern China were shaped by ideological constructs envisioning a future rooted in the past.

Chang, Yu-chi. “Leaves, Silkworms, Yue Fei: Ways of Imagining the Territory in 1930s China.” Twentieth-Century China 49, no. 2 (2024): 89–110. https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2024.a925422.

Yuan Yang, the former Financial Times China correspondent, has written an engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women from her own generation as a lens.

Private Revolutions takes care to keep Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue’s individuality in focus without forgetting the broader stakes. As Leiya reminds herself: “I’m not the only one in this situation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/private-revolutions-by-yuan-yang-review-an-intimate-account-of-how-china-is-changing

What became of Rahile Dawut? 热依拉·达吾提 راھىلە داۋۇت

In the late 1990s, Rahile became the first Uyghur woman to gain a doctorate in folklore studies from Beijing Normal University.

Academics in Xinjiang were exquisitely aware of the omnipresence of the Chinese Communist party. Racism towards the Uyghurs was prevalent. Foreign academics visiting the Xinjiang capital saw how their local friends, esteemed scholars, “couldn’t get a fucking taxi at night”.

She was fastidious. She made sure her students did not engage with banned books, that they obtained consent for recordings, saw that they cut personal opinions and avoided direct criticisms of government policy from their dissertations.

Her greatest gift as an ethnographer, colleagues say, may have been her ability to “meet people where they are at”. This meant not just putting local, usually poor, worshippers, farmers and craftsmen at ease, but always giving face, due respect, to officials, and seeking the proper permissions for her travels, interviews and recordings.

Rahile had often jokingly told her female students to think of the frequent and invasive body searches they encountered travelling in and around Ürümqi as a free massage.

Another student came to her torn over whether to pursue her studies overseas or stay in Ürümqi to be closer to her family. “Just go,” Rahile told her. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

In 2017, just months before she disappeared, a colleague warned Rahile: “You and your students are all so interested in religion. Just be careful, religion is sensitive.”

Rahile responded firmly: “Any religion is sensitive, and it is not about religion. This is about how Uyghur life is intertwined, embedded with religion.”

https://www.ft.com/content/ca036415-7ded-4384-ac2d-33825f1a82c3

Revel, Jacques. “History and the Social Sciences.” In The Cambridge History of Science, edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, 7:391–404. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521594424.022.

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