Morning Tea: Kim Jong-Il’s son in Macau, Dell and Chinese Exceptionalism, Rebecca MacKinnon on thinking globally

If your father was the secretive dictator of a pariah state, where would you go? Well, first you might try Disneyland and if that doesn’t work….why not hang with your buddies in Macau? Tim Johnson at China Rises has a great account of Kim Jong-il’s son Kim Jong-nam as the latter parties it up in the Asian gambling mecca. Apparently the 35-year old Jong-nam is on the outs with the family Kim back in Pyongyang and has also had a little recent financial trouble with some Hong Kong banks. Seoul newspapers report that now Kim Jong-nam has “hooked up with Chinese ”princelings,’ or offspring of Communist Party bigwigs, namely former President Jiang Zemin, in business deals. The group is colloquially called Taizidang, or the ‘princeling’s clique.’” Now that’s a KTV party, pass the cognac and kimchi. Silicon Hutong blogs about Kevin Rollins’ problems at Dell and argues that Dell’s problems started when their “business model” of ever increasingly efficient supply chains failed in the China market. Silicon Hutong says that right there, Dell should have known it was in trouble but nobody saw it (or saw the possible lessons to be learned) because “everybody knew that China was different.”

February 1st, 2007

The travels of Zheng He revisited

From the TLS, Jonathan Mirsky reviews Ming historian Edward Dreyer’s new Zheng He book, China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty 1404–1433. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read it yet but based on Mirsky’s review, I’m looking forward to doing so as soon as I can. If nothing else, it appears that Dreyer puts a few more nails into the coffin of Gavin Menzies’ career as a serious historian of China. Discussing Zheng He’s intentions as well as his legacy, Mirsky writes: In more modern years, especially after the humiliations of foreign dominance in the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalists contended that if China was once the mightiest naval power on the planet, it could be so again. In recent years, Beijing has claimed that Zheng He’s benign voyages, and contacts with rulers throughout South-East Asia and along the east coast of Africa, parallel the People’s Republic’s slogan of “China’s peaceful rise”. Dreyer dismisses such “sentimentalising” that prefers, he says, Chinese tranquil history to the violent expansion of the West. Although here, I think, he is unfair to the late Joseph Needham, who in Volume Four Part Three of Science and Civilisation in China, suggested that

February 1st, 2007

This Date in History: Koxinga and the liberation of Taiwan

Today marks the 345th anniversary of the liberation of Taiwan from the Dutch by the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong, better known in the West as Koxinga. (The latter name derived from the Hokkien pronunciation of his title, “Bearer of the Imperial Surname” 国性爷: guo xing ye in Mandarin and approximately kok-xing-ah in Hokkien/Min Nan hua.)

Born in Nagasaki, Zheng was the son of a Chinese merchant (and occasional pirate) Zheng Zhilong and a Japanese woman named Tagawa. The younger Zheng moved to Quanzhou in Fujian when he was a child and spent his youth preparing to enter the official service of the Ming.

All that would change in 1644. After the fall of Beijing to the Manchu invaders, Zheng Zhilong came to the aid of one of the Ming pretenders/contenders to the throne, Prince Tang, who at the time was in Fujian. After the Prince was captured by the Qing armies, Zheng Zhilong, despite his son’s pleas, went over to the Qing side. Zheng Chenggong, however, continued to resist the Qing. After a series of defeats by the Qing banner troops fighting to consolidate Manchu rule, Zheng Chenggong fled across the Taiwan straits to Formosa, then under the control of

February 1st, 2007

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