I’ll admit it. I’ve been remiss about writing. Just know that my time has been well spent teaching history and writing dissertations. But when historians go on blogging vacation, it’s history that suffers. Really.
In the US we have the wingnut brigade comparing President Obama’s health care reform plan to the Nazi Holocaust.
Not to be outdone, PRC historian-on-the-job Qin Gang decided that with President Obama not feeling the love at home, he’d welcome him to China by comparing the PLA’s ‘liberation’ of Τibet in 1951 to President Lincoln freeing the slaves. I had to check twice to make sure this wasn’t some kind of Onion story that got accidentally mixed up in the wires.
Nope, he was serious.
I’m the first to admit that Τibet in the early 20th century was hardly a paradise on earth and, like many places in what is today the PRC, people suffered from the depredations of warlord armies, acquisitive foreign powers, and avaricious local elites BUT…
…to compare it to the systematic and brutal enslavement of the African people by European and American slave traders is just preposterous. It is also sadly representative of the kind of tin-eared and muddle-minded approach to history commonly employed by representatives of the CCP.
Frankly, I’m looking forward to President Obama’s response if/when Hu Jintao brings up this same analogy during their talks this month.
In the meantime, it seems that one historian’s hiatus from blogging is over. Get some f—–g perspective people.
[...] analogy is nonsensical on so many levels, but if I may ask Qin one question that puts it in its appropriate place: when [...]
[...] will say, not so much in defense of Qin Gang but so as to avoid the appearance of piling on after the play has been whistled dead, that there IS a worthwhile history lesson to be drawn between CCP policy and the American Civil [...]
[...] human rights issues? Of course this will not happen, no more than Hu will elaborate on the new theories of the Liberation of Tibet. But it is interesting for the sake of [...]