Visitors to China might be forgiven for concluding that history carries more weight here. For whatever the reason, even the far-off ghosts of the Opium War, the Scramble for Concessions, and the Treaty of Versailles still haunt contemporary politics, causing many observers to see echoes of the past in the present.

Today on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo hosts a special Christmas episode of Sinica with two of Beijing's resident academic experts: David Moser, Academic Director of CET Beijing and popular essayist on all things China, and Jeremiah Jenne, Dean of Chinese Studies at the IES program in Beijing. You may also know Jeremiah as the force behind the popular history blog Jottings from the Granite Studio.

New to Popup Chinese? Sinica is our regular podcast focusing on economic and political developments in contemporary China. If you enjoy this podcast, we encourage you to subscribe through RSS to get new episodes downloaded to your mp3 player automatically. Just open iTunes, click on the "Advanced" menu and select the option "Subscribe to Podcast". When prompted copy the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica into the box. If you'd like to listen to this podcast on the go, you're also welcome to download the show as a standalone mp3 file. Enjoy!
 said on
December 28, 2010
A bit off-topic, but what is the song used for the intro to the podcast?

-Cheers from Yunnan
 said on
December 28, 2010
@bkelsey10 - The artist is Chunqiu (春秋, Spring & Autumn), which is my (Kaiser's) band. The song is called 猎人, The Huntsman, and it's available with the other eight songs on our first album on iTunes. Hopefully you're asking because you like it!
 said on
December 30, 2010
Here's a link to the Caixin article mentioned in the podcast, "The Revolution of 1911"

http://english.caing.com/2010-12-21/100209405.html
 said on
December 30, 2010
@stevendaniels88,

Thanks for adding the link, Steve.

--dave
 said on
December 31, 2010
I am in love with Sinica. Thank you!

-joanna
 said on
January 9, 2011
Excellent discussion -- I always enjoy listening to the podcasts put on by Kaiser. Particularly enjoyed observations on Chinese nationalism & liberalism, as well as Jeremiah's insights on the nature of ongoing reform and how to perceive intra-party democracy, etc. How long can we expect "experimental reform projects" to go on, especially in light of the historical parallels drawn here? Great questions to think about.
 said on
October 5, 2011
The Long arm of history

The Chinese are the most historical people in the world because they alone enjoy a historical superiority over all other contemporary civilizations. While all the latter emerged on the ruins of the first civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus, the Chinese tradition alone survived from the age of the first civilizations to the modern times. This explains its long arm of history and its echoes in the present of the Chinese people, for in fact they are the oldest civilized, urbanized living people on the earth. That is why they seem to be in such a rush for industrialization and urbanization.

This un-interrupted history gives the Chinese a great edge over the contemporary civilizations, for the disruption experienced by the latter, which led to their condemnation of the past and their ancestor civilizations, did not occur in Chinese experience and for which reason it bears the echoes of the oldest humans sounds. In this way it awakens great insights into the nature of man and civilization.

Its implications, though, are most profound. For until now it has been the Greeks, at least in the Western religious tradition which inherited them, who have been considered the philosophical model of antiquity, or the philosophical representation of antiquity. But in spite of all its sophistication, it suddenly falls pale in front of its contemporary Chinese thought, represented by Lao Tzu and Confucius and in Indian thought by the Buddha. From Pythagoras to Socrates and Plato, indeed all Greeks, as both Plato and Xenophon, the two great sources of Socrates, testify, believed in gods.

But both Lao Tzu and the Buddha discovered a language of emancipation spoken purely from the human reference point, which does not assume any reference to gods as a necessary condition for human discourse and emancipation. In this way Trevor Ling is right in calling them humanists, though he is speaking strictly of the Buddha. The truth is they were more humanists than ever produced in the Greco-Roman tradition, right through the Renaissance till the modern times, which has remained deeply under the deep shadow of the gods.

The Chinese are therefore the freest people in the world, if ever they come to know it. But once they know it, they will rein in modernity and turn their attention to the health of the planet. For I have no qualms in supporting John Gray’s prediction, an exercise in social forecasting, that this planet cannot bear the burden of more than eight and half billion people and that is soon to come in fifty years time, that is, in the sway of next two generations. Thinking fifty years ahead is not a big deal in these times. We can even dream it today and if can do so, we are faced with the interpretation of this dream and this immediately reminds of Joseph.

Remember Pharaoh’s dream that spanned the next fourteen years, divided into equal halves of seven years! Shmuel Kogan has written a brilliant piece on the methodology of the Joseph’s interpretation of the dream (
 said on
October 5, 2011
(http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/557137/jewish/Why-did-Pharaoh-accept-Josephs-dream-interpretations.htm). Applying this methodology we can interpret this dream as spanning the next hundred years. We have to prepare for the fifty years of famine that are going to follow the next fifty years.

Here we see the demonstration of the universality of the methodology, for it immediately recalls the Dao principle of yin and yang, and together they explain the nature of reality. As Kogan has put it, Joseph answered the million dollar question posed by the dream, that is, how can the good and bad times, or present and past, the prosperity and destitution live or exist at the same time. It defies logic, but just in the way that quantum, and I will argue, relativity too, defy logic, the foundation of modern science and rationality. And there, in the history of science, marking a colossal, Copernican revolution, we find the greatest affirmation of the nature of reality as discovered by the oldest surviving texts in both the western and eastern religious traditions.

 said on
September 23, 2012
Is it possible to obtain a poster of this depiction of the May 4th movement?