Rapeseed plants in Sichuan Province flowered a month late in 2008. People did not think much of it. In those days, people still believed experts and the experts said the delayed flowering season was normal. They also said the thousands of frogs suddenly jumping onto streets was normal.
They are not about Confucius. Rather, the PRC government has chosen to use the name of Confucius as a trademark of sorts for a global soft power branding project. The Institutes, most of which in the US are hosted by colleges or universities, focus on language learning, with a variety of other cultural activities: Lunar New Year parties: calligraphy; a little Peking Opera; etc. As far as I can tell - and I have been in conversation with many US academics who have CIs on their campuses (my college does not have one) - there is no systematic effort to engage with Confucian thought in any serious manner.
From their website:
Sam Crane teachs contemporary Chinese politics and ancient Chinese philosophy at Williams College, where he has been a faculty member since 1989.
Chinese President Hu Jintao has demanded senior Communist Party officials stifle tensions over the ousting of ambitious politician Bo Xilai and show unity as they prepare for a change of leadership, sources briefed on recent meetings said.
The Obama Administration’s preliminary decision to impose a 31 per cent tariff on solar panels imported from China is short sighted. The move could cause a trade war, hurt the US economy, jeopardize US security interests, and put the world further off course in terms of meeting its global climate change goals.
Imagine discovering on your first day as a new CEO that your employer is merely a shell that may be destined for a shameful delisting on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
That’s what happened recently to ChinaCast Education Corp. CEO Feng Yiyi, who is now trying to sort out what’s left of a gutted business that once attracted US$200 million from American investors and ran three Chinese universities with a combined 35,000 students.
On March 17, the Chenzhou Public Security Bureau announced Huang Bailian had been removed as head of the police department’s drug squad.
Huang offered a simple explanation for his sacking: “This is retaliation.”
Three years earlier Huang, who is forty-eight years old and a twenty-five-year police force veteran, cracked what he thought was a major drug trafficking case.
However, before the case reached prosecutors, drugs seized during his arrests went missing and a suspect was set free.
In a recent piece published in the Columbia Journalism Review, Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi assesses the early stages of China's multibillion dollar efforts to expand its domestic media empire onto the global stage. Just this year, CCTV launched two network broadcast centers—one in Nairobi and the other (called CCTV America) in Washington, DC. Radio enthusiasts around the world can now tune into China Radio International, which offers programming in more than sixty languages.
The great famine that devastated China half a century ago killed tens of millions of people—but is barely a footnote in history books. There are few open public records of an event that is seared into the memories of those who survived this largely man-made disaster.
After his controversial involvement with the Tarim mummy excavations in Western Xinjiang, Victor Mair might just be the closest thing Sinology has to Indiana Jones, assuming the fictional Spielberg character was a renowned linguist, translator, and popular blogger in addition to his standing as a historian/archeologist.
