The CCP has no idea how much they will miss this incarnation of the DL when he’s gone, because the 14th incarnation is their Arafat.
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The CCP has no idea how much they will miss this incarnation of the DL when he’s gone, because the 14th incarnation is their Arafat. This is a longish post… A long time ago, self-congratulatory citizens and academics of Western Europe and the United States would explain the ludicrous assault on Qing Imperial sovereignty in the 19th century as the simple and sad story of the emperor who said no. Poor deluded Qianlong missed an opportunity to liberalize his trade policies and join the ‘comity of nations’ when he dismissed the noble, upstanding diplomat MacCartney with a sniff, a wave, and a haughty letter to His Royal Majesty King George III which boasted that, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.” Of course this narrative was a poppycock fairy tale to justify the armed expansion of trading and other privileges by the North Atlantic powers in the 19th century. The Qianlong Emperor wasn’t declaring a new policy, rather he was describing an economic reality: The Qing Empire at the end of the 18th century was a continent-sized trading network of markets and hubs, mines, farms, plantations, factories, merchants, banks, guilds, and relatively sophisticated systems of finance and This is the last of an informal three-part series on violence and historical memory in China. It wasn’t my original intention to write a series, but the past week or so has seen several anniversaries of great significance in Chinese history. Last week was the 110th anniversary of the Qing government’s tacit declaration of war against the foreigners during the Boxer Uprising of 1900; last Friday was the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War; and 170 years ago this week the British launched the first major offensive of the Opium War against the Qing Empire. While there were land and naval skirmishes starting in 1839, it was on June 28, 1840 that an expeditionary force of 16 warships and about 4000 troops reached the China coast and began to bombard the area around Guangzhou before turning northward to other, less well protected, cities. The fleet took the island of Zhoushan and threatened Tianjin before the Qing court dispatched the Manchu official Qishan to parley with the British forces. Negotiations broke down and the war continued until finally the Treaty of Nanjing was signed by Qing officials — quite literally at gunpoint from British ships parked in the adjacent On this date in 1915, the Japanese government submitted a list of “21 Demands” to the government of Yuan Shikai. As is well known, Yuan Shikai had esteem issues and he needed money, basically the two reasons anybody becomes a stripper, but unlike Candi at Crazy Girls Yuan had a whole country to sell out not just his charming physique and delightful company. You can see a list of the demands here, as well as an ultimatum from the Japanese government giving Yuan and his cronies until 6:00 p.m. on May 9th to respond and accept the terms or face the consequences. For the purposes of visualizing this historical moment, it might be helpful to picture Yuan Shikai as Ned Beattie and the Japanese government as a group of moonshine-soaked demonic hillbillies. And…scene. 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 |
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