New Graduate Student Orientation: Li Hungchang and "Self-Strengthening", and Other Topics
Few things are more mortifying than going to the new graduate student orientation, talking to three students fresh from China, and trying to say the name of the late nineteenth-century Qing statesman "Li Hungchang." There was animated discussion as to what I was trying to say--I suppose I sounded as though I was speaking half-Cantonese, half-duck.
And Chiang Kai-Shek--Jieng Jieshi--don't try to go there. Just don't.
The most interesting thing I learned is that there is as much horror inside as outside the Brookings building that Ken Pollack is still the public face of Brookings Institution foreign policy studies.