Spectres & Souls The 23rd of December 2022 will mark thirty years since ‘Santaland Diaries’ featured on Morning Edition on National Public Radio. In 1992, I split my time between Canberra, where I had a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian National University, the People’s Republic of China, where friends flourished once more in the midst of a phantasmagoria, and Boston, where I was working on a film about the 1989 Beijing Uprising.… Read

Spectres & Souls I announced the launch of China Heritage at the end of a keynote address — ‘Living with Xi Dada’s China — Making Choices and Cutting Deals’ — presented on 16 December 2016 at a conference on Chinese intellectual history held in Melbourne Australia.… Read

Spectres & Souls In the northern summer of 2018, a spark from a rancher’s steel hammer pounding on a rusty stake in a bone-dry field ignited the largest wildland fire in the history of California. … Read

Spectres & Souls Shortly after the demise of Mao Zedong in September 1976, Simon Leys observed that: ‘…in a normal everyday situation where “his giant’s wants prevent him from walking”, any Great Leader worth his salt has a strong tendency to stir up artificial gales in order to get some wind back under his pinions.… Read