Mark at the excellent blog Pinyin Info sent me this link to a lecture by Shelly Rigger in October to high school history teachers: "What Every American Needs to Know about Taiwan" to the Foreign Policy Research Institute for the conference: "Understanding China: A History Institute for Teachers."There's some highly problematic claims in here, which I'll be commenting on when I have more time.
http://www.fpri.org/education/china/
[Taiwan]
sorry to say but that bullet train will never fly. its dead in the water from day one. maybe real service will start in 2008. it's a white elephant or pink...
ReplyDeletetaipei timothea
I'm curious as to which 'problematic claims' you observed in the Rigger lecture. Seemed to me to be a pretty basic uncontroversial TWN 101 at least while I listened up to the first half hour.
ReplyDeleteMainly what struck me is how much of the second half of the talk is based around her assertion that "there's no trend toward Taiwan independence" (1:01:46) and that support for independence has already peaked.
ReplyDeleteI think a much better talk, though not one dealing directly with the topic of Taiwan, is Edward Friedman's troubling take on "China’s Democratic Prospects."
Victor Mair's "Classical Chinese Thought and Culture, and Early Chinese History" is also great. But that doesn't touch on politics at all.