Contra Trump 抗心希古 Six decades ago, Li Ao, a Taiwan-based popular historian and mud-racker, published ‘The Art of Survival’, a short guide to ‘the art of living in the chaotic world while keeping yourself in one piece’.… Read

Celebrating New Sinology 左道旁門 ‘What use is Song poetry?’ It was 2010 and the questioner was a professor of social sciences. A few months earlier, with the support of my university and the Australian federal government, I had established a centre based on the ideas of New Sinology, which I had first proposed in 2005.… Read

Contra Trump 六幺四 The 14th of June 2025 is No Kings Day in the United States of America. It is also the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army and, as misfortune would have it, US President Donald J Trump’s 79th birthday.… Read

Contra Trump 呐喊   In America’s Real Cold War, an earlier chapter in Contra Trump & America’s Empire of Tedium, we used the Chinese rubric 苦迭打 kǔdiédǎ, or coup d’état, a term famously employed by Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s key military co-conspirator in the Cultural Revolution, in a speech he made on 18 May 1966.… Read

Contra Trump 十字街頭 I swear I am not making this up. Tonight Trump will go to the Kennedy Center to see “Les Miserables,” a play about a mass uprising against a tyrannical king.… Read

Intersecting with Eternity Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη,
ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep.…… Read