David Porter

In which the shifting foci of private foundations, while noted, do not obscure what the fundamental, underlying problem is: "in contrast to mathematics and the natural sciences, humanists have never built a sustainable public funding model for their research."

(4) This leaves humanists in a bind because there is no political support for the idea of publicly funded curiosity driven humanities research. So how do we create that? How should a future Democratic administration rebuild the NEH?

(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.

(2) the Republican view of the humanities is that they should be turned into an ideological apparatus of political conservatism (see Trump's NEH). This is obviously bad.

The former can be true without the latter being true, in part because humanities academia itself is pretty culturally marginal at this point.

I think a lot of academics seem to have trouble distinguishing between certain groups/people and their cultural production being marginalized in society and the study of those groups/people being marginalized within humanities academia.

Let's go through Chinese civilization from the earliest written sources to confirm Arnaud's point. So first up, oracle bones, what are those? Records of divinations performed by rulers with special connections to the supernatural? Oops, well, so much for that theory.

I (and many others in the field) are really grateful for the investment @columbiaup.bsky.social, and you in particular, have made in supporting the publication of Chinese/Inner Asian history in recent years.

Also a good day for @columbiaup.bsky.social's ever-more important role as the place to publish in Chinese Studies, with the winner and runner-up of the pre-1900 Levenson prize and the runner-up of the post-1900 prize

Congratulations to all the winners, especially my 師弟 @jlfreeman.bsky.social for his fantastic Hanan-Prize winning translation of Tahir Hamut Izgil's Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, a really essential read for anyone who wants to understand what Uyghurs have experienced in recent years

AAS 2026 Prizes - Association for Asian Studies The AAS is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s prize competitions and offer congratulations to all honorees. Please join us at the Awards Ceremony during the AAS 2026 Annual Conference in V...

Really thrilled that Slaves of the Emperor has been awarded an Honorable Mention for the Levenson Prize in Chinese Studies (pre-1900) by @asianstudies.org!
www.asianstudies.org/aas-2026-pri...

Sadly, that's better than pre-modern Chinese history, for which there were exactly 0 North American jobs. I guess there was one job at Middle Tennessee State that was open to pre-modernists (China/Japan any period) and one at TCNJ for East Asia OR Middle East, any period. Anyway, super depressing

When I first met substantial numbers of Minnesotans as a university student, I was struck and annoyed by their obsessive (and loud) devotion to their state and total confidence in the superiority of Minnesota and its people. So it pains me to now have to admit that it seems they may have been right.

Rectifying Names, Erasing Mongols: The Unmaking of Mongolian Education in China On a clear October morning in 2025, two massive cranes rolled up to a middle school in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Workers prised off the large Chinese and Mongolian signs running along the ...

It's been slowly happening for a few years now but China's official multiculturalism is functionally dead, living on only on banknotes and some shells of ethnic state offices dominated and now mostly staffed by Han madeinchinajournal.com/2026/01/20/r...

what I didn't have space for here was 'Trump-supporting China hawks have brought an entirely predictable disaster on themselves, the absolute fucking fools'

One choice I think I don't agree with is the framing of China as a post-colonial state, but I don't think it ultimately matters much to the argument.

Think I'll be adding it to my "Borderlands of Modern China" syllabus for the fall. Unfortunately, no English subtitles for the films he discusses, so can't assign them in class, but I think the article will help students understand the analogous PRC-Tibetan film Nongnu

Re-marking Xinjiang: From Liberation to Westward Expedition Abstract. This article examines three films made by the Urumqi-based Tianshan Film Studio spanning four decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. These films encapsulate the discursive shifts surrounding ...

Really enjoyed Peng Hai's article "Re-marking Xinjiang" in November's JAS. He looks at changing representations in film of the PRC incorporation of Xinjiang, showing how narratives of Uyghur participation in their own liberation turned to glorification of a national project

Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland

After reading this article, had a conversation with my wife about the point at which we should renounce US citizenship. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/u...

Not sure about Canada as a whole, but it's definitely true in Quebec in relation to Montreal

Who deserves what is a narrative applied to justify (some aspects of) certain (maybe most) meritocratic systems, but it isn't, I think, what defines meritocracy.

Anyway, I guess this is all to say that, from the perspective of a historian interested in how systems of governance and social hierarchy develop and function, I don't find it useful to talk about meritocracy as "a constellation of claims about who deserves certain things" as the article does

So though you can reasonably assert that obvious unfairness in selection processes can undermine a meritocratic system, it doesn't make sense to suggest that the existence of unfair (dis-)advantages for certain individuals/groups means that a given system is not meritocratic or less meritocratic.

That it advantaged bannermen was essential to creating the service elite relationship between the banners and the court that I described in my book, helping the Qing avoid having to worry about the military turning against the ruling house.

That the system advantaged the wealthiest members of society was essential for maintaining the loyalty of those families (which probably helped save the Qing on a number of occasions, from the Three Feudatories to the Taiping).

The Qing system was absolutely not fair - the wealthy, bannermen, etc. had massive advantages over ordinary people. But at a basic level it was indeed meritocratic (outside the emperorship, of course). And many of the things that made it unfair in fact served the interests of the ruling house.

It's only an internal critique to the extent that a perception of fairness is key to making a given meritocratic system work (which it usually is to some degree, but it's never the only thing at stake).

Fairness for participants is certainly a worthwhile moral critique of meritocracy, but it is often an external critique (i.e. a claim about why meritocracy is a bad system) not an internal one (i.e. a claim about how a meritocratic system is failing to live up to the meritocratic ideal).

Internal critiques of meritocracy often revolve too much around fairness for the aspiring meritocrats.
Meritocratic systems aren't about rewarding people for their achievements, but about ensuring that the people chosen to hold power best meet the needs of the existing political structures.

But as a sociological phenomenon, meritocracy is really just the idea that powerholders receive their positions on the basis of evaluation+selection from above, as opposed to birth (aristocracy) or election from below (democracy).