User:Petunia

From Chinwiki

Hello, my user name might be Petunia, but I actually am a human being (not a flower).

Real Identity

Name: Jonathan Reiter

Majors: History, Chinese, Asian Studies, Political Science

Chinese Name: 李文狼 (I'm told it's a gruesome name, but it's better than the ubiquity of "Jon")

Occupation: Undergraduate, University of Oregon (08)

Hobbies: Computers, reading, drinking, running, nouns (gerunds).

Favorite Chinese Food: 过桥米线 I love hot pot wherever it may exist, and Yunnan's famous "Crossing-Bridge noodles" are the best.

Favorite Chinese Tea: 平水珠茶 Gunpowder tea is amazing. I normally prefer all things dark -- stout, scotch, and black tea -- but gunpowder tea takes the bare nature of green tea and gives it the smoky power of darkness. Definitely worth trying.

Academic Identity

Chinese Varieties: I am versed mainly with Traditional written and Mandarin spoken (would love to learn Cantonese and Shanghai kouyu), and I can read a lot of Simplified Chinese.

Chinese Proficiency: I am currently taking my fourth year of formal Chinese, and have taken about a year of Literary Chinese.

Undergraduate Focus: My undergraduate focus, especially for this year, has been with marginalized people in China, and what practices serve to marginalize peoples. I have taken this approach into two different disciplines and three different avenues. With Political Science, I attempted to see the effects internet censorship had upon people, namely in affecting national power as a function of soft power (vis-a-vis human rights); I unfortunately had to stop this project, but relish the thought of restarting my research. For History, I have employed this topic for both my 407 capstone project as well as my Honors thesis. With the former, I sought to anticipate the lack of memoirs detailing personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang Uyghur; by contrasting its history with Tibet, as well as the personal experience of Tibet during the movement, I hoped to fill in for this dearth of narrative accounting Han chauvinism. Finally, for my honors thesis, I am currently researching Xinjiang, with special care placed upon how it went from Dzungaria (an enemy of the Qing throne) to Huijiang (a latitudinally divided territory) to Xinjiang (a part of China), and what motivated the Qing elites to incorporate Xinjiang.

Graduate Focus: I applied to graduate school with the goal of pursuing Law and Asian Studies simultaneously, due to personal interest vested in intellectual property rights and the international relations driving it. I wish to utilize my growing expertise in Chinese history and politics, combine it with a professional education in the discipline of law, and seek the seed of "intellectual property" within the tradition of Chinese law. The significance of this is twofold: (1) current practices in intellectual property is rooted deeply in history, especially European history and the economic conditions that made this part of law necessary. Studying Chinese history as a portion of this legacy will create the precedent to negotiate China in the midst of a tradition that generally leaves out the East. (2) China's contemporary economy is becoming, like other globalizing powers, a "knowledge economy" where individual benefits, as well as the public's wealth that can be extracted from this pool, are greatly defined by IPR. China and IPR, in a sense, forms the nexus of an up-and-coming actor and academic sphere, lending an exceptional amount of profundity to studying the crossroads.

Eventual Vocation: ...???