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This is a subject near and dear to my own heart and research.
On this date in 1856, French missionary Auguste Chapdelaine (1814-1856) was executed in Guangxi province on the orders of the Xilin County magistrate. Prior to 1860, missionaries were forbidden to travel outside of the ‘treaty ports,’ an injunction that many routinely ignored at their own peril.
In 1856, Father Chapedelaine traveled illegally to Guangxi where he ran afoul of Qing officials. The French priest and 26 of his followers were rounded up by the local constabulary and on February 29, County Magistrate Zhang Mingfeng ordered Chapdelaine and two of his followers put to death. (Another account says that Chapdelaine died in custody, a result of having been beaten and locked in a small iron cage following his arrest. A stickler for details, the magistrate had the body beheaded anyway.)
Needless to say, the French were not amused.
The French used Chapdelaine’s execution as a pretext to join with the British (who would later in 1856 find their own, sketchier, excuse) to shake China down for more treaty concessions–including the right for missionaries to travel freely and build churches in the interior provinces.
Needless to say, the Qing
Liu Bang becomes Emperor Han Gaozu
On this date in 202 B.C.E., Liu Bang was named emperor of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) following the defeat of his chief rival, Xiang Yu. Previously Liu had used the title “King of the Han,” but after consolidating control over all the territory of the fallen Qin dynasty (221 B.C.E.-206 B.C.E.), his vassels decided to give their leader a little title bump: Emperor Han Gaozu. Not bad considering Liu had been born to a peasant family, worked for a time at a postal relay station, and then rose to prominence in the rebellion against Qin rule. I believe he was one of only two commoners* to found a major dynasty in the Imperial Period, and he was certainly the only former postal worker to do so. (Be nice to the mailman, I’m just saying…)
Bai Juyi birthday
Today is the birthday of the Tang Dynasty poet, official, and scholar Bai Juyi (772-846). A member of the prestigious Hanlin Academy, Bai was also the author of over 2,800 poems including “The Pipa Player”《琵琶行》and “The Song of Eternal Sorrow”《长恨歌》which told the tragic story of Yang Guifei, the famous consort of the Xuanzong Emperor.
I have a new post up at The China Beat on Chinese reactions to foreign criticism, “Prejudice Made Plausible: Foreign Criticism and Chinese Sensitivities.”
Why does concern about the Olympics, criticism of Chinese government policies, or even a news story about the effect of air pollution on athletes, provoke such a visceral response from many Chinese?
Obviously no one set of reasons can cover the gamut of reactions, everybody perceives issues in different ways, but in perusing the comments section of China blogs and the threads on Chinese BBSs, I sense three main themes: the close integration of state/nation/party in both PRC ideology and the minds of the Chinese people, genuine pride at China’s rise in the world and a belief that many countries in “the West” seek to undermine China’s development to satisfy their own selfish strategic goals, and finally, barely smoldering resentment born out of a history of foreign imperialism in China.
Enjoy and let me know what you think.
(Mainland link)
“People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.” – Somerset Maugham
“As a scientific truth, Marxism fears no criticism.” – Mao Zedong
Like so many other hasty marriages, by 1956 the relationship between Mao and the Party had begun to suffer from a seven-year itch. Still only in their first decade of rule, the CCP were shocked by events in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s legacy vexed the aging Mao, while the Party leadership (more concerned with maintaining order and control in the “here-and-now” than protecting their legacies in the forever after) listened warily to the news out of Hungary and Poland.
At the same time a lot was actually going right in the PRC. It’s easy to forget this now: but between the end of the Korean War and the start of the Great Leap Forward, there was a period of increasing prosperity, economic recovery, and a certain relaxation of ideological and social controls. It was all relative of course–this was still Mao’s China–but compared to later periods of PRC history, the mid-1950s had much more in common with the early years of the Deng Xiaoping regime than with the dark days which lay just around the
I have another post, based also on an observation by Liang Qichao, over at The Peking Duck which will likely generate a bit more commentary than this brief meditation on the joys of urban parks, but after a pleasant post-brunch stroll through Ritan Gongyuan, I thought parks to be worth a post of their own:
As with the passage at TPD, this was recorded by Liang during his 1903 trip to the United States:
“Everywhere in New York the eye confronts what look like pigeon coops, spiderwebs, and centipedes; in fact these are houses, electric wires, and trolley cars.
New York’s Central Park extends from 71st Street to 123rd Street [eds. note: in fact, 59th to 110th], with an area about equal to the International Settlement and French Concession in Shanghai. Especially on days of rest it is crowded with carriages and with people jostling together. The park is in the middle of the city; if it were changed into a commercial area, the land would sell for three or four times the annual revenue of the Chinese government. From the Chinese point of view this may be called throwing away money on useless land and regrettable.
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