Before We Go: Vacation Reading Suggestions

China Beat will be taking a holiday break until January 3. Before we move on to 2011, though, here’s a short round-up of pieces from 2010 that you shouldn’t miss: • We’re still doing a bit of catching up as we recover from the end of the fall academic quarter, so please forgive us for being a bit behind on covering both the recent tensions between North and South Korea and also the controversial release of documents by WikiLeaks. On North Korea, read Evan Osnos, “Lips and Teeth,”and listen to Mary Kay Magistad of PRI’s The World. For a China angle on WikiLeaks, Andrew Leonard at Salon examines “The WikiLeaks China-Google Connection.” • Evan Osnos also wraps up the “Top Ten China Myths of 2010” at the New Yorker’s News Desk. • At the London Review of Books blog, Nick Holdstock has an interesting post entitled “Love the motherland” featuring images of several propaganda murals in Turpan, Xinjiang. • The Economist takes a look at how the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 is remembered in China today: In East Zhangwu Village, close to the railway line between Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, the village doctor is a Boxer fan. Sitting behind his desk in the clinic, he recounts, as if he had seen the action himself, how one sultry June local Boxers tore up the line to stop a trainload of foreign troops from heading to Beijing to break a siege of the capital’s embassy district by pro-Boxer imperial troops. “The foreigners had a couple of interpreters who said to the Boxers, ‘Don’t fight, we’ll give you some money, OK?’ The Boxers replied, ‘We don’t want money. We want the foreigners’ heads’.” He shows off a copy of the scores used by the musicians whose flutes, cymbals, drums and pipes accompanied the Boxers into combat. He and a group of fellow enthusiasts have formed what they call the Boxer Band. It performs at ceremonial send-offs for local army recruits