Author: Jeremy Wallace
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Kentuckization of Xinjiang
Eurasian Crossroads, an extremely readable history of Xinjiang by James Millward of Georgetown University, discusses the ‘Kentuckization’ of Xinjiang. Perhaps it is necessary to take a step back. The most prominent American fast food chain in China is KFC. It should be noted that KFC tastes better here than in the States. I have heard…
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Ant Power
On the back of the airline seat on our flight to Urumqi was this advertisement: It reminded me of this story: A Chinese business executive was sentenced to death for swindling $385 million from investors in a bogus ant-breeding scheme, a court official said Thursday. Unfortunately, these are otherwise unrelated stories.
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Brief interruption – for PORK
Normally when political scientists write about ‘pork,’ they are referring to the pet projects that legislators wiggle into budgets. I am a literalist. When I talk about pork, I mean pork – pig meat. (Actually, the Chinese for most types of meat follows this pattern: name of animal + meat. Pork is different. It is…
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Slideshow
Here is a photo slideshow of our adventures in Xinjiang. Link to the pictures here. A substantially larger set of pictures, taken by Jessica who was not addled by altitude sickness on the Karakoram Highway, is here. As is perhaps unsurprising, there is a substantial amount of political content in the photos. Propaganda slogans and…
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Cross-Currents
A list of the websites that I accessed during the brief writing of the previous post. From Kashgar to Taxkorgan: the Karakoram Highway | China ExpatGoogle remembered how to spell the highway, even though I didn’t, and after politely suggesting this spelling, offered me the above link which is very similar to our escapades in…
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The Wild, Wild West
From the 26th of May until the 3rd of June, I have been traveling with friends in Xinjiang. China’s northwest is dominated by Xinjiang, excuse me for the informality, by the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Xinjiang is a majority minority district. According to the 2000 census, 59.4% of Xinjiang’s 18.5 million people are non-Han. Han…
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Cliche Research Techniques
It has literally become a joke that foreign correspondents or others writing about China base all of their observations on taxi drivers. In fact, sometimes it is even funny. From Sinocidal: You’ve just arrived in your 5-Star room at the Shanghai Hilton and unpacked your fancy new Apple laptop. As you pull the top off…
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More Vanilla Will Not Turn the Flotilla
Richard McGregor of the Financial Times has an interesting piece on China’s macroeconomic situation. Brad Setser of Roubini Global Economics dissected the piece thoroughly here from an economic perspective. The time-worn analogy of turning around a supertanker is often used to illustrate the government’s policy task. It might be more accurate to liken the Chinese…
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Welcome Back to Chinese Society
I have just returned from a productive but exhausting research trip to the countryside of Heilongjiang, China’s most northeasterly province. In one county, I was 200 km from the Russian border. More on the adventures will come. I just had to repost this incredibly amusing piece that I found at Prof. Brad DeLong’s blog on…
Jeremy Wallace 