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If the British takeover of Hong Kong was the moral equivalent of three guys kicking in the back door and at gunpoint turning your suburban home into a crack house, then the Portuguese in Macau were more like a couple of shady dudes who wanted to rent out your old tool shed, hoped you’d forget they were there, and when you reminded them that it was time to pay up and that you’d strongly prefer they NOT set up a craps game on your property or pimp out your children they decided to stiff you on the rent and declare squatters’ rights in your backyard.
On the evening of December 19, 1999, the flag of Portugal was lowered for the final time in Macau and at midnight on December 20, the tiny former colony officially became a part of the People’s Republic of China…more or less.
I say more or less because, unlike its glitzy neighbor Hong Kong, the nature of Macau’s sovereignty and even its status as a “colony” has frequently been open to debate and interpretation.
The Portuguese first showed up in the early 16th century, using the waters around the peninsula and islands as an anchorage and
I’ve said it before, but nothing makes the CCP look more like a bunch of insecure moonbats than their fixation on “guiding public opinion” (read: censorship and propaganda). The 2009 SCIO Internet News Work training session recently wrapped up in Beijing, and over the next few days China Digital Times is publishing translated notes from the meeting.
I strongly encourage readers to check out the full posts on CDT, but I couldn’t resist commenting on two sections.
The first comes from Li Wufeng, Bureau Chief of the State Council Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau. In Mr. Li’s opening lecture he criticized “Small newspapers and websites republish each others’ stories, creating media hype. For example, the Deng Yujiao incident and the Hangzhou street race case.” For those of you not following “small newspapers” in China, Deng Yujiao was a woman arrested after defending herself from being raped by a local official (the official died) and the latter case involved a young man in Hangzhou who attempted to use his family’s money and influence to protect him after he killed a pedestrian while drag racing his Nouveaurichemobile.
Yes…how truly horrible, if newspapers spend all of their time exposing corruption, how will they
Never ones to miss a chance for unintentional comedy, the boys at The People’s Daily this week are engaging in a little Freudian wish-making with an article that reads like it was cut straight from The Onion.
(The last line alone is priceless.)
Nowadays, there is a popular saying among Japanese girls that goes “What we want is Chinese food and men, not French lovers or American houses.” This means Japanese girls have lost their interest in French and American men.
In Japan, men from China are becoming more popular with Japanese girls. More than 1,500 Japanese girls married with Chinese men last year, an increase of 30 percent, which is the highest in history.
A representative from Japan’s China information research institute told the reporter that the quick development of China’s economy and Chinese people getting richer are the most important reasons for Japanese girls changing their appetites. Also because Japan has more women than men and Japanese men compared to Chinese men are generally less capable when it comes to being both a considerate family man and a breadwinner.
Today’s Japanese men feel much more inferior compared with men from China because they found what they are lacking
December 16 is an interesting day for Tang history. On this date in 705, Empress Wu Zetian died in Luoyang at the age of 82 sui. Founder of her own dynasty, the Zhou, and a strong wielder of personal power throughout the latter half of the 7th century, Wu Zetian is one of the more complicated figures in Chinese history. Variously labeled a despot, a usurper, and power-hungry bitch who had no problems with stepping on or over her own children to get what she wanted, other historians regard her time in power as one of great prosperity, equal perhaps even to the reigns of Tang Taizong and Tang Xuanzong. Frankly, I think the negative aspects of her rise to power have been a bit overstated, traditional Chinese histories tend to be unkind to women who seize power, and the late 7th century was a time when society became more complex, trade expanded, and culture flourished. So….maybe she doesn’t completely deserve the rap she gets.
Of course fifty years later the Tang Dynasty faced a different kind of crisis, when An Lushan, a Tang general of Sogdian/Central Asian ancestry, launched a rebellion against the dynasty on December 16, 705. Those
The Onion is running a feature on “The Top Ten Stories of the last 4.5 Billion Years” with important and noteworthy sections entitled “Industrial Revolution Provides Millions of Out-of-Work Children with Jobs” and “Conquerors you may have missed.” Naturally, you can’t have such a comprehensive historical rundown without including China, right?
Either Ming Or Yuan Dynasty Seizes Control Of Mainland China
In one of the most important events in all of Asian history, either the Ming dynasty or the Yuan dynasty seized control of mainland China during the eighth, 12th, or maybe even the third century. “The rise of one of these two dynasties, at the turn of whatever time it was, ushered in a bold new age of either unity, feudal infighting, or perhaps both,” said historian Robert Grossman, who has devoted his career to parsing out China’s incredibly rich and convoluted history. “Not since the days of the Shang dynasty—unless I happen to be thinking of the Qin dynasty—had China undergone such radical change.” According to Grossman, either the Ming or the Yuan dynasty is a perfect example of why the other failed to work.
See also “Thomas Edison invents marketing other people’s ideas” and
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