“Some scholars have argued that far from clinging to the past until they were overwhelmed, the Qing dynasty created modern China in 1644, by establishing a previously unseen level of centralized control, and by wiping out the northern border problem. The Qing dynasty is hence, in the words of William T. Rowe, ‘a constantly moving target,’ only passing from living memory in the twenty-first century.

“We might equally argue that the period of ‘humiliation’ began not in the 1840s, but two hundred years earlier, in 1644, when the first and most successful foreign element, the Manchus themselves, swept in from the north-east to form a lasting, exploitative aristocracy.

“Or, if we accept, as all modern Chinese books do, that the Manchus were simply another sector of the Chinese world, and that they were hence not really foreign, then surely their regime, with its wars of conquest in Central Asia, its self-assurance of its racial and cultural superiority, and a military mission that doubled the size of Chinese territory in the space of 150 years, was an immensely successful imperialist power, not all that different in attitude from the outsiders that would bring it down.”

From A Brief History of China by Jonathan Clements, and hopefully shedding a little light on the politicised arguments behind the shelving of The Battle for Penghu.

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I update my entry on China with details of the relatively new sub-genre of stories in which time-travelling boffins try to make China great again.

My voice sneaks onto the Lost Rivers documentary by my old Route Awakening cohorts in Singapore. I pop up on a couple of occasions, and sadly they didn’t use the takes where I tried to perform in the voice of David Bowie.

“One gets the sense with The Art of War that Sun Tzu saw it as a vital part of his own strategy for personal survival, offering dire warnings to belligerent princelings that war was never to be taken lightly, and only considered as the last possible resort. There is an entire chapter on ‘Espionage’, not merely in a tactical sense for reconnaissance, but in terms of embedded assets within rival kingdoms, misinformation campaigns and double agents. Sun Tzu would do literally anything to prevent a war, and is not above sending a suicide mission to off an enemy leader before trouble begins. It will, he notes, save lives elsewhere.”

From my chapter on Sun Tzu, which opens Iain Dale’s just-published volume on military leaders, and draws, of course, on my own translation of The Art of War.

“Nobly deciding to film in the location where the original novel was set, Zhang Yimou was disappointed to discover that the locals had stopped growing sorghum altogether, instead preferring more lucrative cash crops like peanuts. In order to match the novel’s descriptions of tall, waving gaoliang grass, he would have to pay the locals to actually plant some, and so as the script was being written, farmers in Shandong were being paid to sow sorghum seeds on sixteen acres of waste ground.

“Shooting was delayed by almost a month, when Zhang and his crew returned to the area to find that the farmers had neglected to water the fields – sorghum can be a fast-growing crop, but it is thirsty, and the crew had to spend several weeks tending to it, while the production money bled on a daily basis.

“Mo Yan’s original novel ends in the present day of its composition – the 1980s – with the narrator visiting his family graves, and fuming at the sight of a new, modern form of sorghum. He angrily berates the locals for bringing in ugly, squat hybrid sorghum from Hainan far to the south.

“Hybrid sorghum is a high-yield crop, but tastes awful, causes constipation and, most importantly isn’t red. To Zhang Yimou’s great horror, his tame farmers had sown eight acres with the wrong kind of grass…”

From my video essay in the new Blu-ray of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, coming in July from Whole Grain Pictures (US).

Over at the Subject to Change podcast, I return to talk about my book on the First Emperor of China and the man who was sent to kill him: facts and fictions in Zhang Yimou’s movie Hero (2002), the evil mirror-universe version of Confucianism, an impossibly well-endowed “eunuch”, the construction of the Terracotta Army, the politics of archaeology, and how to spend a slave labour dividend.