Fighting Crickets of Peiping, 1937

The world of 1937 Peking cricket fighting as captured by John Dorsett for National Geographic magazine

The Ultimate China Bookshelf #46: Ma Bo’s Blood Red Sunset

#46 is up – A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, published in 1995. Blood Red Sunset (translated by Howard Goldblatt) is the memoir of a former Red Guard, a Beijing boy who heads to Inner Mongolia to help the peasants in 1968. However, the Cultural Revolution he supports turns against him. He is arrested, tortured, jailed, and betrayed by his best friend and branded a counterrevolutionary before being sent into internal exile in Inner Mongolia during the last years of the Cultural Revolution. There are side plots about the author’s martial arts prowess and his infatuation with a girl. It’s fair to say that not everyone liked Blood Red Sunset. It divided opinion among readers with many finding it too personal, and too divorced from history.

The China Ultimate Bookshelf is now available fortnightly on Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica Substack….

Fleming’s Thrilling Cities – a New Edition

Just noticed there’s a new edition of Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities (inc his trips to Hong Kong, Macao & Tokyo) from The Ian Fleming Publications….

Richard Hu’s Reinventing the Chinese City

My author Q&A column for this months China-Britain Business Council‘s Focus magazine – Richard Hu’s Reinventing the Chinese City (Columbia University Press) on the work being done in China to urbanise its cities in recent years – & looking ahead to the next 10… click here…

Victoria City, Hong Kong Harbour – Mid-19th Century

Mid-19th century naïve oil on board of Victoria City, Hong Kong Harbour. Unknown artist but clearly got back to England and was sold through Cronshaw’s of Blackburn (who I don’t think are in business anymore)…

John Westwood’s Island Stories (1905)

A very rare copy of Island Stories (1905) subtitled, Extracts From The Papers of Mr John Westwood, Mariner of London and Shanghai, with Original illustrations From Descriptions Supplied By The Author. The book was printed and published by The North-China Herald. The book is mostly reminisicences of travel to the South Seas.

Seeking News, Making China – Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society

John Alekna’s (Assistant Professor of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Peking University) Seeking News, Making China – Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press)….

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In China, radio first arrived in the winter of 1922-23, bursting into a world where communication was slow, disjointed, or non-existent. Less than ten percent of the population ever read newspapers. Just fifty years later, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, news broadcasts reached hundreds of millions of people instantaneously, every day. How did Chinese citizens experience the rapid changes in information practices and political organization that occurred in this period? What was it like to live through a news revolution?

John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth-century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and politics were heard and felt. Scrutinizing the flow of news can reveal much about society and politics—illustrating who has power and why, and uncovering the connections between different regions, peoples, and social classes. Taking an innovative, holistic view of information practices, Alekna weaves together both rural and urban history to tell the story of the rise of mass society through the lens of communication techniques and technology, showing how the news revolution fundamentally reordered the political geography of China.

Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps cap badge circa 1931-46

Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps cap badge circa 1931-46. Die-cast brass crowned pair of facing dragons.