Who is The Plen, who met Lee Kuan Yew in secret negotiations? The MCP has long faded from the public’s interest. For those still keen…
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Month: February 2026
Of Horses and Men
The year of the Fire Horse, in the Chinese zodiac, begins tomorrow on Feb 17, 2026, with big celebrations in Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,…
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Tao Te Ching—Part 2
John Minford used the received text for his translation, which dates to the Han dynasty. There are 2 earlier versions of the text. They are—…
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Disinheritance
“I have lived,” Jhabvala said, “like a cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others’ nests.” The cuckoo is a parasitic bird that deposits its eggs in…
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Departure(s)
Departure(s), a fiction based on life, is arguably Julian Barnes’s swan song. Now age 80, Barnes is again meditating on old age and death. He…
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Passing Glimpses and Questions on China
Ooi Kee Beng calls his short essays or opinion pieces creative nonfiction. This book, Passing Glimpses of the Present (2026), is a collection of his…
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Law, Religion, and Power
The main theme of The Fall of the Priests and the Rise of the Lawyers by Philip R. Wood (2016) is that religious authority had…
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The Right to Differ
Before the 2-volume biography of Lim Kit Siang by Kee Thuan Chye, there were two biographical sketches of the opposition leader based on questions and…
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Native Americans and Abraham Lincoln
Abe, in history, has been elevated to a god status by many historians. Any human failures of his are embedded in the text and not…
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Fengshui Power in Qing Governance
Tristan G. Brown is one of the emerging Western historians of late Imperial China. He is an assistant professor of history at MIT. His first…
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