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Xi Jinping's Empire of Tedium Appendix LVIII 蠅營狗苟 In 2024 it will be a hundred years since Lu Xun published 'The Shadow's Farewell' 影的告別, a darkly mesmeric prose-poem about the dilemmas of the age. The somnolent narrator of the piece rejects the compromises demanded of everyday tedium, while
Explore the literary brilliance of Cao Xueqin! Dive into captivating tales of love, society, and drama in the best books by this iconic Chinese author.
It is hard to fit Henry Kissinger’s latest book, On China, into any conventional frame or genre. Partly that is because the somewhat self-deprecatory title conceals what is, in fact, an ambitious goal: to make sense of China’s diplomacy and foreign policies across two and a half millennia, and to bring China’s past full circle in order to illuminate the present.
The I Ching has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe, a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state. It was an organizing principle or authoritative proof for literary and arts criticism, cartography, medicine, and many of the sciences, and it generated endless Confucian,
Last year I got a call from Abbess Yin, an old friend who runs a Daoist nunnery near Nanjing. I’ve always known her as supernaturally placid and oblique, but this time she was nervous and direct: a group of Germans were coming to spend a week learning about Daoist life; could I travel down from Beijing to help? To translate, I asked? No, she said impatiently, to mediate—to