While the sun and moon endureLuckโs a chance, but troubleโs sure,Iโd face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good. โA.E. Housman, “Terence This is Stupid Stuff,” (1896) THE WORDS of Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, delivered on the 3rd of June to the assembled […]
Category Archives: The Middle Kingdom
The Real Reason Chinese is “So Damn Hard”
The Tropical MBA podcast is one of the few I listen to religiously. Theirs is the premier podcast produced by and for ‘location independent entrepreneurs,’ which I’ll define here as entrepreneurs who have built businesses that allow their owners to operate from just about anywhere on the planet–or at least anywhere on the planet with […]
In Hong Kong, Your Clothes Matter
I have not had much time to devote to blogging this week, but I would like to forward a report I suspect most readers will find as fascinating as I have: the Asian Productivity Organization‘s APO Productivity Databook 2015. I have been slowly leafing through it over the last month; on every page there is a […]
Chiang Kai Shek’s Gamble–Reviewing Shanghai and Nanjing 1937
Today Strategy Bridge published my review of Peter Harmsen’s two books on the upper-Yangtze campaigns that kicked off Asia’s World War II: Shanghai: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City. Here is an excerpt: ….Books focused on individual campaigns [of China’s WWII] are just now being written and published. Peter […]
The Asian Productivity Race
Over the last year Financial Times has produced an interesting series titled โThe End of Chinaโs Migrant Miracle.โ Those interested in the topic can read the full list of dispatches here, but today Iโll call your attention to a video they have put together echoing some of the seriesโ themes: What makes this video worth […]
Why Do We Know So Little About China’s WWII?
Japanese soldiers approach the walls of Nanjing By Sweeper tamonten,China Incident Photograph Album, Vol 2, published in 1938 by Asahi Shimbun., Public Domain, accessed at Wikimedia Commons. In a recent column Peter Harmsen asks “Why do we know so little about China in World War Two?” To quote: We know hardly anything about the war in […]
Taiwan’s Problem is Not the Communist Party of China
Sometimes I wonder: do those on the mainland realize just how despised they are? Meet Chou Tzuyu (ๅจๅญ็). She is 16. She is a part of the K-Pop group TWICE. One of these days I will have to write about what one must to do to succeed on the Korean pop scene. Today I’ll be […]
East Asian Military History โ A Few Historiographical Notes
Recently the Samurai Archives devoted a few episodes of their podcast to dissecting the relationship between military history and Japanese studies. The lead discussant on the program is Nathan Ledbetter, who blogs once a year or so at Sengoku Field Manual but comments regularly at the Samurai Archives forums. In these episodes his focus is […]
Darwin and War in Ancient China, Sengoku Japan, and Early Modern Europe
What does Darwin have to do with terracotta warriors, samurai armies, or Napoleon’s conquests? Quite a lot. Or at least this is what I argue in a paper I finished back in April. I anticipated refining it with extra research in the months since then. This hope was not realized. Other projects have consumed my […]
Wanted: A Stupid-Proof Strategy For America
. “Hadrian’s wall at Greenhead Lough” by Velella,Image Source: Wikimedia In a recent War on the Rocks piece Iskander Rehman argues that the United States should not favor a foreign policy of retrenchment because United States policy makers are simply too daft and out of touch with the world to play the part of a modern day Castlereigh: […]