Roland Boer's Blog, page 62

Conference celebrating 120 years since Engels’s death

A conference celebrating 120 years since the death of Friedrich Engels has just come to a close here at Nanjing Normal University. We even had a representative from the CPC discipline committee welcoming us to the conference. It was sponsored by the Marxist Research Centre at Nanjing Normal University, the Marx-Engels Research Society and the CPC Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. We had scholars from Japan, Belgium, France, Germany, Australia, USA, UK, China, and a good contingent f...

Stalin era cartoon: How to get a passport

Organic positive energy?

On our recent 9,000 kilometre rail journey, on one of the trains we were given a little bag with lost of interesting items. One such item had this on the back:

The long list of items are fair enough, but ‘positive energy’? I couldn’t help wondering if it too is organic.

Highlight of the Gulf Country in Australia?

On our journey across the Gulf Country – the Gulf of Carpentaria – we happened upon this intriguing piece of art amongst the graffitti of a rest stop:

One cannot help wonder what situation generated this one.

Disappearing for a couple of weeks

We’ve begun a journey on the largest rail circuit in Australia and will disappear for a couple of weeks from any regular internet or telephone networks – still possible in the vastness of Australia. This entails The Ghan from Adelaide to Darwin, driving from Darwin to Mt Isa (no rail for this part), The Innlander from Mt Isa to Townsville, the Spirit of Queensland from Cairns to Brisbane, and then the XPT back to Newcastle.

Between Auckland and Beijing: Marxism, Religion and Sinification

Apologies for the shameless self-promotion, but I have been in Auckland for a couple of days and then Beijing. Let me begin with the Beijing events, the main one of which was the preliminary ‘conference of experts’ for a funded project called ‘Chinese Marxism: On the Sinification of Marxism in Chinese Academia’. I had to front up before some senior and well-known Chinese scholars, each of whom gave a detailed response to the project. This is something of a ritual in Chinese projects, after wh...

Preliminary Announcement: China Road Conference 2016

Having completed a meeting with the Academy of Marxism here in Beijing (a subdivision of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), I am pleased to provide the following preliminary announcement. It will soon appear with more details on the University of Newcastle website.

CHINA ROAD CONFERENCE

The China Road conference focuses on China’s distinct path in the modern world. This path has also been called ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ and the ‘Beijing Consensus’. The conference will ex...

The pleasure of Chinese measure words

In my long journey of learning Chinese, one the greatest pleasures concerns the myriad measure words. Every time you use a number with an object numbered, you need a measure word. The ones to use have an internal logic that defies me.

For example, long narrow things like rivers, snakes and trousers use:

条 tiao

‘Two snakes’ is: liang tiao she

However, when you want to speak of a section of something long, you use:

段 duan

‘The northern part of the canal’ is: yunhe de bei duan

On the completion of reading Stalin

I have at last completed my careful reading of the published works ofIoseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (Stalin). On the way, I have found that few actually do so, for the attitudes to Stalin seem to be set. This is especially so among the many on the Left, for whom Stalin is the great betrayer. The assumption is that he was not a socialist at all, so one may conveniently neglect any serious engagement. The problem is that one simply misses the rich history of socialism in power, with all of it...

Stalin’s reply to Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech

On 5 March, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his infamous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, United States. Soon after Stalin was interviewed concerning his response to the speech. He was, understandably, somewhat taken aback, since there had been a number of agreements made for post-war peaceful cooperation. In particular, Stalin observes:

Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory,...