Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 （氒/厥/攸）

Is Thucydides Trap a Thing? My post: "The Trap of the Thucydides Trap" open.substack.com/pub/yashenghua…

I feel a cold fury whenever I open a pdf of some paper to read and Adobe is like "Hm, this looks long. Would you like me to just summarize it for you?" No, fuck you, Adobe. The paper is long because it contains a lot of details that matter. Why wouldn't I want to read them?

Individuals named with numbers are a common phenomenon in Chinese history, but the underlying reasons and meanings remain subject of debate. We invite you to explore these numerical names via our “Database of Names and Biographies” to discover more. newarchive.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/sncaccgi/sncac…

Jobs: Early‑career researcher for the PNRR project LIVEDIE – "Living and Dying in the Tarim Basin". Experience with early Chinese documentary sources and solid competence in Classical Chinese are essential (apply by June 3): tinyurl.com/3bb8z7rd

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

@egasmb Thanks for the kind shout-out, Egas. Also watch out for a forthcoming paper by Laurent Sagart et al. who will present an interesting alternative to my story for the enigmatic 从羽能聲 character, arguing that it is a Chu 楚 dialect loanword INTO Tai-Kadai.

The numeral "1" is usually written with the simplest possible Chinese character: 一. But in Warring States texts, there were some more super complex characters for 1, namely ⿱羽能 and 𫜢（⿰鼠一）. Why? Read @behrwolf 's mindblowing article 🤯🤯

1/ 🚨🚨 My new article in The China Quarterly arguing that Xi Thought is not a coherent doctrine. Rather, it is a rhizome - unity is an effect of distributed institutional labour, not a property of the texts themselves

2026 Berggruen essay competition announced: This year's theme "A new axial age?" (submit by August 17th, 2026): tinyurl.com/wmw7uf27.

Just out: ONE big ONCE in a blue moon feast on virtually every aspect of "ONEness" in East Asia: "Conceptualizing ‘One’ (一): Working Towards Unity?" (343 pp.). Congratulations to Andrea Bréard, Thomas Crone and Valerie Kiel for making this possible: degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/as….

Lovely farewell tribute to Stephen Owen: "Chinese readers ...recognized him as ... a man who had strayed into a kingdom not his own, sat down, and lived inside its cadences long enough to change how they heard them." thechinaacademy.org/farewell-to-st…

造語症患者の新作漢字、AI感がすごいな （塚本嘉壽『中国古典と漢字の精神病理学』195頁）

江聲, who is contemporary to 畢沅 went even further. Not only did he publish his 尚書集注音疏 fully in seal script, he even wrote his letter in seal script ! (source: 小莽蒼蒼齋藏清代學者書札).

Academician Yuen-ren Chao was both a linguist and composer, producing music for mass education. You’re invited to listen to his composition "The Great Wall and the Great Canal" recorded on an aluminum disc preserved by the Archives, IHP. archives.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/en/features/it…

第一届古文字与出土文献研究生论坛征稿启事 mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i1pKfu4H10IA…

@wllmpan @egasmb Very nice find, continuing the folksy trisyllabic metre of the 'stomping songs' in the "Chengxiang pian" 成相篇 of the Xunzi 荀子.

三字集, a taiwanese communist publication in verse from 1931 contentdm.lib.nccu.edu.tw/digital/collec…

Quem putas perisse praemissus est (Seneca; 子以為亡者，實先遣也) -- he will be dearly missed! (9/9)

Fritz-Heiner was a persistently curious, always cheerful, deeply social and institutionally dexterous colleague, central for the development of "global antiquities" in China and the development of Sino-Western studies in Europe. (8/9)

This is to break the sad news of the passing of Fritz-Heiner Mutschler (4.I.1946-13.IV.2026), classicist and comparative historian of Ancient Rome, Greece and Early China. For some time in the late 80ies, he was the only other German citizen apart from me in Jilin province. (1/9)