This week, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are delighted to host Jeremiah Jenne, Director at the Hutong, Beijing’s premier cultural exchange center, for a conversation that picks apart China’s obsession with “Chinese characteristics” and asks whether this is empty rhetoric, or something that actually matters. In the process, we wade back to Imperial efforts to reconcile the “essence” of China with “practical” Western technologies and ideas.
Recommendations
- A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2014)
- “A Controvertial New TV Series Awakens China’s Historical Ghosts,” by Rachel Lu, Foreign Policy, August 12, 2014
- The Company, by Robert Littell (Overlook, 2002)
- TV series Towards the Republic（走向共和）
- Photo of great granddaughter of Zhang Zhidong “中学为体，西学为用”
- New Deng Xiaoping TV series (历史转折中的邓小平)