US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has come to China and in the Telegraph this morning, Malcom Moore writes about the debate over China’s military capabilities.
It has been a month to remember for the top brass of China’s People’s Liberation Army. While other armies fret about their funding, China’s generals have unveiled three major new weapons that could challenge the military supremacy of the United States and provide the firepower to underline China’s superpower status.
Stealth fighters that may or may not be all that stealthy with pilots of dubious quality, a killer land-sea anti-carrier missile that may or may not be flying blind, gauging the state of the Chinese military these days seems more Ouija Board than Jane’s Defense Weekly, but one asset which has been fairly well documented is the former Soviet wannabe aircraft carrier Varyag, purchased several years ago for the low low price of $20 million and towed to China after a close out sale by the Ukrainian navy.
(Hmmm, which would I rather have: a luxury apartment in Beijing or an aircraft carrier…?)
The carrier now is in Dalian and, if rumors swirling since at least last year are correct, has been dubbed the
The New York Times today has a story on a joint project between the Beijing and Taipei Palace Museums to retrace the routes by which the imperial collection of art and antiquities was moved from Beijing in advance of the Japanese Imperial Army in the 1930s. (David Barboza, “Rival Museums Retrace Route of China’s Imperial Treasures,” NYT, July 6, 2010) Their research took the team to Chongqing:
“They were stored right about here,” Hu Changjian, a local [Chongqing] museum official, said of the artifacts, an unparalleled collection of more than a million objects from the Forbidden City in Beijing, including fine paintings, calligraphy, jade and porcelain dating back centuries. He added, “We think they dug caves in the hills behind us to store some of the treasures.”
The article also looks into the significance of the imperial treasures in legitimizing 20th century Chinese governments:
David Shambaugh, who with Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott wrote “The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures,” said Chinese leaders had long viewed them as a means of validating their power, even under Communism. During the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards tried to destroy anything associated with tradition, Mao ordered the museum protected.*
“Every successive regime used the
In Tuesday’s Pearl Harbor post, I appended a little shout out to my home state’s role in ending the Russo-Japanese War. Well, just when you thought China had a monopoly on specious historical claims, here comes Maine and their splittist propaganda:
Really enjoyed your recent post on Pearl Harbor and historical absolutism. It’s somewhat difficult for me to hear anyone even suggest that the number of historical absolutists in America is fewer than elsewhere, because as an American living in the UK essentially all I hear about is how skewed our view of this or that historical event is. It breeds apologists of my fellow American expats, which I don’t love (when do Brits ever apologize for the situation they had such a hand in creating in Africa, to pick an atrocity out of a hat?).
I’m writing to note, however, that in fact you New Hampshire people–well, you can try to claim the Treaty of Portsmouth all you want, but the site of its signing in fact is in my home state across the border from Portsmouth. It’s somewhat confusing, but the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, located in Kittery, Maine.
I know, I know,
On April 17, 1895, Japan and the Qing Empire signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the Sino-Japanese War which had been a disaster for the Qing from start to finish. The war began when the Qing court and the Japanese government vied for the role of “protector” of Korea, a longtime tributary state of the Qing but who in recent years had become a much valued prize for Japanese imperialist expansion. If you want to think of this as China and Japan playing the “No, she’s MY BFF” game so beloved by 12-year old girls the world over, go ahead, I won’t stop you.
The vaunted Beiyang Fleet and Beiyang Army, products of a decade-long effort in local military modernization by Li Hongzhang, failed to live up to their promise (Artillery shells were filled with sand, cannons exploded backwards…let’s just say the relationship between corruption and product quality isn’t exactly a new problem in China) and Japan routed Qing forces in a number of key land and naval battles before finally bottling up and destroying the remains of the Beiyang Fleet at the Battle of Weihaiwei.
The Qing sued for peace, and the Japanese presented a list of demands
Among the very cool history resources available on the web are the online exhibitions of historical photographs. An increasing number of museums, universities, archives, and private collections are putting old photographs on the Internet, and as I hear about these through listservs and other means I’ll post the links here.
The first for today is a new online collection of Xinhua News photographs from the Cultural Revolution era. Compiled by Thomas Hahn, these arresting photographs fill a necessary gap in our visual history of China’s 20th century.
Two other online exhibtions feature photographs from colonial Taiwan.
The Gerald Warner collection hosted by Lafayette College contains 340 photographs and postcards gathered between 1937 and 1941 by Warner, a US consul on the island. Most striking about this collection is the diversity captured, “a snapshot of Taiwan’s hybrid culture of Chinese, Taiwanese, Austronesian, and Japanese influences.”
Finally, another collection on colonial Taiwan, also hosted by Lafayette, contains 59 sepia photographs from Taiwan from the period 1933-1938 digitized from a Japanese book edited by Yamaki Kinichiro.
Enjoy.
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h/t H-Asia
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