二零一七年舊文更新：

https://yitianshijie.vercel.app/2017/07/24/open-letter-to-the-academics

橫排版：https://blog.yitianshijie.net/2017/07/24/open-letter-to-the-academics/

【十三邀 第六季】第 7 期：许知远对话葛兆光 站在历史的远处

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw2ECJK86Io

01:11:45 葛兆光认为，新一代历史学者做的研究题目太小、太碎，年轻的历史学者不太关心大的政治命运。他举了两个研究晚清笑话和毛皮的例子，大概是下面这两本书：

Rea, Christopher. Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520283848.001.0001.

Schlesinger, Jonathan. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804799966.001.0001.

我不否认有这样的问题，但这跟研究范式相关，也与许知远所说的「对上一代的逆反」有关。另一方面，没有这些具体的物质或对象，思想从何而来？

Fix every runtime bug on macOS.

https://github.com/Lakr233/FixTim

祝大家新春愉快，顺心如意！

Happy Lunar New Year！

▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 11%

Ni, Jiaqian, Mengqiao Wang, and Kai Quek. “The Sources of National Pride: Evidence from China and the United States.” Nations and Nationalism (February 9, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.13007.

National pride relates to nationalism, one of the most powerful forces in modern politics. Many surveys have shown that most citizens are proud of their countries, but few have directly examined the underlying reasons for why people are proud of their countries.

Using parallel national surveys in China and the United States, we investigate the sources and contents of national pride in the two most powerful nation-states in the world.

Our results reveal clear differences between citizens in the two countries. While the sources of American national pride are largely ideational, the sources of Chinese national pride tend to be material.

The evidence provides a first set of insights into the sources of national pride and challenges conventional depictions of nationalism as a monolithic concept.

Lee, Myunghee. “Authoritarianism at School: Indoctrination Education, Political Socialisation, and Citizenship in North Korea.” Asian Studies Review (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2023.2300631.

It is well known that North Korea uses political propaganda to elicit popular support, and this article focuses on how primary and secondary schools play an essential role in conveying the regime’s messages.

The article asks how this process shapes North Koreans’ perceptions towards citizenship and how their perceptions of ‘democracy’ differ from those in other parts of the world. School education, I argue, socialises North Koreans and shapes their everyday political attitudes and citizenship perceptions.

This study examines 32 North Korean Socialist Moral textbooks and identifies four core regime messages embedded in these texts: Personality Cult education in relation to the Kims, promoting socialism, fostering nationalism, and cultivating communitarianism and collectivism.

I propose that these regime messages positively and negatively affect perceptions of democratic citizenship. Messages that promote communitarianism can encourage North Koreans to engage in democratic politics, but messages about political leadership, nationalism, and collectivism can hamper North Koreans’ understanding of democracy and their capacity to develop democratic norms.

This study has implications for research into how North Korean defectors are integrated into democratic South Korea, suggesting that these defectors’ longstanding exposure to authoritarian education in North Korea will necessarily influence how they conceive of democracy.

如何為人民服務？中國 700 萬公務員的升遷法則

這其中的共性是，每個人都不能把話說得太明白。

不能直言的原因之一是，系統內的大家需要「保持團結」來共同為人民服務，即使身處其中的眾人都清楚這只是浮於淺表層的團結。

為逆天改命、躲過反腐這一「劫難」及獲得更好的升遷，求神拜佛代替共產主義成為公務員的主要精神依託。正所謂「公務員的盡頭是玄學」。

在中國現行的國家制度下，對公務員群體而言，黨紀在國法之上。因此，這一群體只要遵守黨內規則，踐行系統默許的為官之道，黨紀便可以為他們的仕途保駕護航。

在民營企業做會計時，她被同事形容為「沒心沒肺」的人，每天只知道瞎開心。成功當上公務員後，她反而變焦慮了。「事實證明，每個人都是有心有肺的」，她說。

在他眼裡，黨就是一個巨大的幫派組織，具有極大的掌控能力和完全的資源壟斷能力，如果幫派真想找他麻煩，他根本躲不掉，他在意的戶口、社保以及將來的孩子教育都會被波及。

https://theinitium.com/article/20230907-mainland-civil-servants

AAS 2024 Prizes

https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-2024-prizes/

列文森图书奖：

Joseph Levenson Prize (China, pre-1900)

Susan Naquin, Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000 (Brill)

Honorable mention: Christian de Pee, Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800–1100 (Amsterdam University Press)

Honorable mention: Lawrence Zhang, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center)

Joseph Levenson Prize (China, post-1900)

Ho-fung Hung, City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule (Cambridge University Press)

Honorable mention: Joseph Esherick, Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China (University of California Press)

嘗試新鮮的生產力工具是一件很值得做的事

1. 嘗試新的工具能夠拓展「知」的邊界

2. 拓展知的邊界後，就更有機會知道自己要什麼、不要什麼

假設能夠在嘗試新工具時，持續研究自己好奇的地方，詢問自己的偏好與理由，得到一點結論，慢慢累積起來，一定會非常棒的。因此我認為嘗試新鮮的生產力工具是一件很值得做的事。

https://world.hey.com/mimir/a-letter-from-pj-c7ec139a

The Real Roots of Xi Jinping Thought

Key to Xi’s thought is pairing Marxism with Confucianism: in October 2023, he declared that today’s China should consider Marxism its “soul” and “fine traditional Chinese culture as the root.”

In The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, his magnum opus, Wang Hui, a scholar of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University, returns to the late-nineteenth-century thinkers who worked to reshape Chinese philosophy.

Wang analyzes the connections between political theory and more concrete issues of governance over a millennium of Chinese history. But he notes that “explanations of modern China cannot avoid the question of how to interpret” the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912.

In one sense, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought makes Xi’s attempted synthesis of Marxism and Confucianism seem less implausible. It has a history; serious thinkers have tried it before.

But Wang’s analysis also reveals where the CCP is going astray. The party expresses its new ideology in simplistic, brassy terms, drawing on unsubtle readings of classics and disallowing critiques.

Wang argues that the problem that bedeviled the late Qing empire was not just a geopolitical one in which other states had secured material advantages over China. It was a crisis of worldview. Scholars have long asserted that the ways in which Confucianism was applied to nineteenth-century Chinese politics had left the country sclerotic—unable to engage with modern Western ideologies such as capitalism, liberalism, and nationalism.

Chinese thought has always best contributed to China’s flourishing when it has been free and disputatious, not closed and sterile. This is the aspect of Chinese tradition that today’s CCP cannot afford to ignore.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/china-real-roots-xi-jinping-thought

汪晖. 2004. 现代中国思想的兴起. 4 vols. 北京: 生活·读书·新知三联书店. https://book.douban.com/subject/1038736.

Wang, Hui. 2023. The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. Edited by Michael Gibbs Hill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674293021.

OpenAI? CloseAI!

https://x.com/untitled01ipynb/status/1760295781615935797

From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation 算命 masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

Homola, Stéphanie. 2023. The Art of Fate Calculation: Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng. New York: Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738126.

Love letter to Obsidian

https://fixupx.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456

柴静谈《三体》人物原型叶企孙：科幻和现实，哪个更残酷？

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8YW3wN9Fpw

看了这个视频，我想推荐一篇论文和一本书：

Wang, Zuoyue (王作跃). 2002. “Saving China through Science: The Science Society of China, Scientific Nationalism, and Civil Society in Republican China.” Osiris 17 (1): 291–322. https://doi.org/10.1086/649367.

胡大年. 2006. 爱因斯坦在中国. 上海: 上海科技教育出版社. https://book.douban.com/subject/1863621.

Mother Tongues

Yiyun Li 李翊云, the Chinese-born writer of fiction and memoir, left in 1996 and has moved on to other settings in her work. But can a writer ever fully escape her motherland?

“I think graduate school was just an excuse to leave China,” Li told me in an interview on the campus of Princeton University, where she now teaches creative writing. “I didn’t actually like China, or at least, I couldn’t really see a future in China. I didn’t think China had any future at the time … so that’s why I left.”

“I don’t think America is such a good country,” she told me, “but it’s more endurable than China.”

Li’s husband is Chinese (they met in college in Beijing), and while she still speaks to him in Mandarin, they switch to English if they are trying to ensure clarity. English, rather than Chinese, is their language of precision.

While she does not reject her Chinese identity, part of why Li has intentionally turned away is because of what she described as China’s insistence on “claiming” people. “Once you’re Chinese, you’re always Chinese” she said. “They put a mark on you. There’s something about China as a country or a group of people where they really want to own you. And I don’t want to be owned.”

Political executions are mentioned matter-of-factly, the Cultural Revolution is never far away, and inequality and injustice punctuate characters’ lives.

Until recently, Li did not allow her works to be translated into Chinese. Now, a translated version of her novel Must I Go (2020) awaits publication in China. She chose Must I Go, which follows a California-based octogenarian, to be her first book translated into Chinese in part because it has nothing to do with China.