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 wings 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

The Best China Pierre Ryckmans, better known to readers under the pen name of Simon Leys, valued Jacques Pimpaneau as ‘a colourful character, original, a non-conformity, an oddball, cultivated, generous.’ (As quoted in Philippe Paquet, Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds, p.230.)… Read

Spectres & Souls In the late 1980s, Dai Qing (戴晴, 1941-) reintroduced both the word and the concept of the independent or liberal intellectual 自由派知識分子 to the Chinese reading public. It featured prominently in ‘Chu Anping and The Party Empire’ 儲安平與黨天下, her lengthy investigation into the case of Chu Anping (儲安平, 1909-?),… Read