I meant to link a different NYT article instead of this one which has been shared last time. But here is the new NYT gift article.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/u...

A typo. Should be Han Zheng.

An interesting followup. The Chinese government has agreed to send Vice President/Chairman Han Zhen to attend Trump’s inauguration ceremony—a gesture of goodwill and a "meet-in-the-middle" approach. Trump just had a seemingly positive phone conversations with Xi. It’s a wait-and-see situation now.

When I read the news, my first thought was: Isn’t this just another way of currying favor with Trump by gifting him $15 million? How is this any different from bribery? :)

Typo: "Given Trump's love of personal diplomacy."

The reason offered for rewarding their persistence is also interesting.

How dedicated were late imperial Chinese literati to the civil service exams? Many failed 10 times (about 30 years), but how old could they be? Even the emperors felt compelled to give honorary degrees if they failed again, say, in their late 80s, as seen in the 1852 request for a xiucai, aged 89.

Another NYT gift article, on another tactic China has borrowed from U.S. practices on int'l trade: ban on transshipment of exported products by foreign companies to a 3rd country (U.S.). The U.S.-China trade war may escalate quickly if Trump does go all in next year.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/b...

One of my favorite books in the modern China field, not necessarily because we read chapters of her book manuscript in one of my first doctoral seminars at Columbia before it became an award-winning book :).

In the Qing period, these two-, three-, or even four-register page formats were used quite often in treatises on the Qing Code or forensic examinations (Xiyuan lu) due to their efficient and convenient allocation of the limited space, even in well-printed commercial editions for muyou & officials.

Pictures from the western end of "China proper" as famously noted by the Tang-era poet Wang Wei: "I urge you to drink another cup of wine/For beyond the Yang Pass, there will be no old friends."劝君跟进一杯酒/西出阳关无故人.The first one shows remains of the earliest (Qin-Han) Great Wall from over 2000 years ago.

Added you to Late Imperial China SP.

But the problem with ✘ may be precisely because it has too much political information, esp. all kinds of misinformation, as Trump and Musk like to call it :).

China has been surprisingly restrained in its responses to the many U.S. trade/high-tech bans and sanctions over the past eight years, possibly because the current PRC leadership does not want to add international crises to its already very serious economic woes at home.

This is what I warned about before: Other countries, once they gain their competitive advantages, can and will borrow the U.S. playbook to arbitrarily impose trade or high-tech restrictions, also claiming "national security/interest" or "dual-use" as the pretext.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/w...

I should have mentioned this earlier (but was constrained by the word limit): these two registers include royal pets exclusively from the period of 1822–1850 (the Daoguang period).

This's a late 18th-century scroll painting of pets allegedly of the Qianlong emperor (Cf. www.burninghou.se/p/the-empero..., a link from@bokane.org). If the naming practice was true, Qianlong liked the Chinese character 狸 (wildcats/civets), but the names didn't sound more majestic or masculine.