Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

'09 a “very bloody” year, predict Taliban fighters

This as the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban agree to join forces in the face of the upcoming American troop increase, reports Carlotta Gall in today's New York Times.

As it happens, we're releasing a new paperback edition of Crews and Tarzi's The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, a collection of essays in which leading scholars explore the ins and outs of the Taliban in an attempt to show how the movement, far from representing pure anachronism, in fact constitutes a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics. Essential reading for those who wish to understand the region beyond the necessarily here-and-now picture established by even the best current affairs reporting.

||| The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan

Disappointment city

Population: Chinese national soccer team.

Or so it would seem from a New York Times article that appears today, upon the team's exit from the Olympic tournament with an 0-3 record.

The jokes have already begun to circulate among Chinese soccer fans bemoaning another underwhelming performance from the men's national team: "The Chinese team just won two red medals" (referring to the two red cards received for unsportsmanlike play); "Our soccer team won the gold medal in martial arts"; and "China has had a weird year, with a freak snowstorm, the Tibetan riots and an earthquake, but the performance of our soccer team shows that some things never change" (funnier, we're guessing, when delivered in the original language).

The article quotes Xu Guoqi, author of Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, explaining how corrupt management has hobbled the team's efforts to rise to the top tier. Xu wrote an op-ed last month in the Washington Post on the state of Chinese soccer, comparing its long-suffering fans to those of the Chicago Cubs (ouch). Professor Xu is the authority on the intimate ties between athletic achievement and Chinese national self-image, and his thoughts on the soccer team are illuminating for those not familiar with the backstory. Xu also shared his thoughts on the Olympics more generally on an episode of NPR's "Only a Game" that aired last Saturday--listen here.

Still there, even if you can't see him

The character chai ("demolish"), now often found on the side of older Beijing buildings. Detail of a collage by Wang Jinsong.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, noted China scholar Geremie Barmé detects the hand of Chairman Mao in the Olympic opening ceremonies, even if us Westerners can't see him through the smog and the (digitally enhanced) fireworks. Avoiding the temptation, all too common in today's journalism, to view modern China as somehow sui generis, scholars like Barmé, author of a book on the Forbidden City, and Michael Dutton, author of Beijing Time, remind us of the continuity that exists even in a city that seems to have demolished and rebuilt itself before our very eyes. Watching the fireworks explode over the old north-south imperial axis, designed, as Dutton notes, to maintain the balance of qi in the city, it's hard not to marvel at how seamlessly the old insinuates itself into what appears to be wholly, terrifyingly new.

Now actually Beijing Time

As the Olympics kick off (at 8:08 Beijing time on 8/8/08, no less), The Independent delivers a nice endorsement of Beijing Time, the book that takes us all there even if we couldn't get off work for two weeks and afford the monumental airfare to China. "This engrossing book merges travel writing, sociology and streetwise reportage," says the paper. "From Mao's tomb to designer malls, karaoke bars to 'Pandaman', who parodies Olympic hype, these intellectual sleuths search for clues to the hidden city beneath the headline stories. Their Beijing hums with ghosts of the past, as well as with every kind of futuristic dream."

Precisely!

||| Read an excerpt from Beijing Time.

Goodbye hutong

A lovely endorsement of Geremie Barmé's The Forbidden City from The Economist:

Until very recently, numberless hutong ran around the Forbidden City like the ramshackle castle town huddled against the surreal, claustrophobic Gormenghast. Indeed, one of Geremie Barmé’s many services is to show how Beijing served as inspiration for Mervyn Peake, who was born in China. “The Forbidden City” is the latest in an excellent series from Harvard University Press and Profile Books. A compact volume, it is an ideal and elegant history, good for keeping in the hand while visiting the vast extraordinary complex, which has at least been preserved. Mr Barmé, a noted Australian scholar of modern China, is as good at describing the Communists’ imperially-derived impulses as he is at banishments from the medieval court.

||| Learn more about The Forbidden City and the Wonders of the World series.

It's (nearly) Beijing Time

"Beijing Time will not suit those who are after clear answers to city problems or those who desire a precise guide to iconic buildings for a tourist itinerary," says co-author Michael Dutton. "Instead, it is designed for those people who want to linger in a place and to dream a little about what the quotidian might hold for larger questions of life." We asked Dutton to expand upon how Beijing Time unveils a metaphysical city that doesn't exist for the average Western tourist. Instead, the book reveals the city as "a cosmologically informed machine"--a series of passageways designed by ancient planners to properly regulate the flow of qi, or spirit, so that harmony between the elements is maintained. It's impossible to see without the proper mindset (or an experienced guide like Dutton), but it's there, exerting its pull on the minds of residents and perhaps on your own, even if you don't yet know it.

Below is what Dutton had to say about Beijing Time.

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Beijing Time is for the cerebral tourist. It’s for a person who wants to wander through Beijing, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin or jump into the imaginary as Italo Calvino does. It offers a slightly quirky and somewhat offbeat look at the Olympic host city and takes the reader from an examination of the symbolic nature of city space through to the daily enchantments of backstreet life. Along the way, it explains how trash contributed to the development of a punk sub-culture, how rag-pickers and ghost markets constituted signs of a city constantly recycling "things" and ideas. It looks at how graffiti is more often than not a form of guerrilla advertising in a society obsessed with degrees and certificates and how Beijing came to have its own subterranean city beneath its streets and boulevards.

Beijing is a city of paradoxes and contradictions.  At 798, the leading contemporary art market in Beijing, avant-garde and dissident artists pay premium rents that prop up the last vestiges of an ailing socialist enterprise. At an ‘authentic’ traditional Beijing restaurant, the very idea of tradition is being re-invented, while in the downtown neighborhood of Jiaodaokou, a Maoist style campaign is underway to clean the streets in order to attract more foreign tourists to a self described "Old Beijing." Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, bulldozers tear down some of the last vestiges of "Old Beijing" to ensure that the city looks like the future by the time the games arrive. Beijing Time examines these things as part of the many layers of city time that exist simultaneously in this complex and often contradictory place. Winding its way through such contradictions, paradoxes and problems, Beijing Time attempts to speak to the question of what it is that makes this city tick.

Hong Kong--City Between Worlds

A superbly thorough review of Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong in PopMatters today. Michael Buening hits all the right notes in his characterization of Lee's approach to his adopted hometown, a city whose myriad identities require an equal variety of analytic techniques if one is to even come close to capturing what it's like to be in Hong Kong, or to be a Hong Konger:

Uncertainty and transience is part of [Hong Kong's] character and in City Between Worlds Leo Ou-fan Lee uses a variety of techniques—travelogue, revisionist history, cultural deconstruction, and personal essay – to pin down what he calls this “confusion and contradiction” while uncovering the deep communal roots that often go unnoticed by outside commentators.

[...]

The very writing of this book is another way Lee gives voice and creation to “his” Hong Kong. City Between Worlds balances probing intellectual analysis, fierce criticism, and gentle warmth, all imbued with the frustrated love any city dweller will immediately recognize as the elusive grasp to define where one lives.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. As an added bonus, don't miss Leo speaking about his book at the Harvard Coop this coming Monday (June 23) at 7pm. The Coop is located in the heart of Harvard Square--it's pretty hard to miss. Hope to see you there.

"...should be required reading for any journalist bound for Beijing"

So says China expert Jeff Wasserstrom in a review of Geremie Barmé's The Forbidden City, the latest entry in our Wonders of the World series. The China Beat, the blog Wasserstrom helps to edit, should probably also be required reading for anyone putting pen to paper on contemporary China, given that its authors, like Barmé, are able to distill sound scholarly thinking about China and its history for the layman in understandable and frankly enjoyable prose.

Also not to be missed is Barmé's web-based supplementary material for the book, including extra graphics and notes that didn't fit in our pocket-sized format, hosted at his China Heritage Project site.

Tibet and the torch

Superbly insightful commentary on the Olympic torch relay fracas from Geremie Barmé, author of The Forbidden City, the latest offering in HUP's Wonders of the World Series. Barmé, an expert in 20th century Chinese intellectual and cultural history, puts the protests and the Chinese reaction to them in context with a level of detail you just won't get from the newspapers.

To be a friend of China

At a time when many focus on how to combat China's rise as a world power, there are others who wonder what it might mean for us to enjoy a cooperative relationship with the newly ascendant nation. Among them is Lindsay Waters, HUP's Executive Editor for the Humanities, who for ten years has been traveling to China to forge links with those Chinese scholars who truly have their fingers on the pulse of the transformations shaking their country. The Boston Globe's "Brainiac" blog interviewed Waters on his efforts, and why being a "friend of China" does not mean giving the Chinese government a pass on the human rights issues that shock many here in the West.