Xiyuan Meng🇵🇸

I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

And full agenda here: www.eventsforce.net/standrews/23...

As the official agenda of CA 2025 has just been published, I would take the chance to invite you to the panel of ‘Classic(ist)s at the Crossroad’ which will be taking place at 12.00 on 11 Jul. Please save the date and join with us if you are coming for the CA conference this year!

And not say us as literary scholars! We don’t even have a proper term (in one word only, like ‘philologists’) to call ourselves!

As international students we are not trusted by the Chinese government, and many see us indifferently as foreign spies, and thus we are excluded from many opportunities at home. While in the States they now see us as protégés of the CPC, which we are obviously not.

Ironically being a Chinese international student is punitive in some ways, especially if you are liberal. I am very worried to see what is going on now in the States under Trump even though I am not living in the States. I would say this is another moment of double insolation/exclusion.

A lovely wee walk in Edinburgh-

It has been such a huge pleasure to be included in this panel! Really enjoyed the discussion, especially. Not to say it is a lovely tiny wee reunion with @katexe.bsky.social

This is wild...especially it is written by a Japanesse author! (as I guess from the name?)

Every time I pass through the Dexter Gate inscription ‘enter to grow in wisdom’ I think the opposite side must be ‘leave to realise your own stupidity’—and that is how i always feel when leaving from the library. But it is actually ‘Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind’!

And please let me know if there is anything else that I can be possibly helpful! Very happy to help. But such a shame I am not on Discord at all…

Hello!!! That is really interesting but i am afraid (in my very personal opinion) the names don’t bear with themselves any significant meanings in Taoist mythology. So as you can see they are either quite general (just like what you have noted on the eng names) or quite westernised.

No worries at all!! I am very glad to be helpful!

And Kate do you have more context for the last one? I don’t think 矿羊 is a Chinese phrase as t all…but here 矿=mine, and 羊=goat or sheep

More than happy to!
So the first one 批叶巨狼 means literally ’leaf-shrouded giant wolf’; the second one 小泡泡蛙 means ‘little bubbly frog’; the third means ‘Eadred of the burning wings’ (so here it is quite epithetic; but 埃德雷德 is the chn transliteration for Eadred); the last one mine goats?

Very excited to be part of this! Not to say taking the chance to see how the myth of ages (what I am working on for my phd thesis!) is received in videogames. But most importantly, really excited to learn from the others (as I am quite an amateur myself)!

一个出于我悲催童年的回答：哪怕有些家长可能知道会这能隐约意识到自己就是很多问题的根源，他们也是能掩饰就掩饰，找到机会指责子女就指责子女，但唯独不会承认可能不少问题就是从他们自己这里来的

完全不冒犯！！！我的point也在这里，知道又能怎样呢

我生物学意义上的爹可怕这个了！以前还在国内的时候，饭桌上喝着酒就跟我非常激动地讲，“你别以后一个人死国外了我们都不知道”！

i have sent out around 50 copies of my historical slides on essay writing and exam preparation, which I was teaching in the past AY. Never thought they could be so popular on 小红书!

Once again, I totally understand that in China classics as a discipline it needs money and attention from the government to survive. Cultural interchange and learning from their international peers are both important for Chinese classicists of course, but can they only be realised in such a way?

So what really annoys me is their sought for political recognition (both as a discipline and for its apparent Straussian approach to classics on the Chinese end, and the extended practical/propagandistic usefulness) and how they abuse the platform for promoting the Chinese ‘cultural leadership’.

Not suggesting that we don’t deserve a place in classics as Chinese but I don’t think Chinese scholars (esp those at home) are ready and prepared to undertake the international leadership as they perceive it. In some a way the conference sounds very chauvinistic, especially some of its agenda.

You might have heard about the ‘first worldwide conference in classical studies’ which is now taking place in China. To be fair it just seems to me as hilarious as Qatar holding the World Cup.

It is such a huge sarcasm that I had been asked to ‘prove myself an human’ when trying to add flags of Palestine and Ukraine after my name on Twitter. Isn’t it humane to support both? Or that we have some different understandings of what humanity is?