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Fall Sick and Die posted:Well for one that you don't change minds without forcing people to confront reality? That's what China needs, an intervention. While we are at it, can we get North Korea to move out of the basement? [edit] The BBC has given us a new toy to play with. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19630110 An interactive graph about China's demographics. GuestBob fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Sep 20, 2012 |
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Sep 20, 2012 00:30
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Fangz posted:
The Sinica podcast and this American life went over this media phenomenon where when it comes to China and bad news the media sensationalizes it and professionalism goes out the window. People just don't scrutinize bad news coming from China much because it's assumed to be true in the western world. It doesn't help that China really does do a lot of lovely things so it becomes easier to buy into everything negative. From a public policy standpoint this is a complete failure on China's part for not being more media savvy. Foreign policy wise there have been some major blunders with China as well but based on international polls i've seen elsewhere in the world (including the west) China's reputation seems to have actually improved since 2008. Which is really weird when you consider all the scandals and negative media China gets in the U.S. and probably other western media.
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Sep 20, 2012 02:35
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Modus Operandi posted:The Sinica podcast and this American life went over this media phenomenon where when it comes to China and bad news the media sensationalizes it and professionalism goes out the window. People just don't scrutinize bad news coming from China much because it's assumed to be true in the western world. It doesn't help that China really does do a lot of lovely things so it becomes easier to buy into everything negative. Honestly its kind of an East Asia thing in general. Media groups loving love just-so stories and biological essentialism when it comes to citizens of East Asian countries. You can see bits of this with the "lolol Japan so wacky" headline of the week and such. We really haven't left behind the otherization of Orientalism.
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Sep 20, 2012 08:13
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Speaking of just-so stories, you would not believe how many times I get the "Asian eyes are squinty because of snow" story. Whenever I debunk it (my old evolutionary biology teacher would be dishonored if I didn't try) I get condescending explanations about how no, really, "we" know this and I don't understand evolution. Because natural selection is a purposeful process that always leads to intuitively satisfying developments! AND natural selection is the only force that operates on evolution, because it's the only one I've heard of! 
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Sep 20, 2012 13:38
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Arglebargle III posted:Speaking of just-so stories, you would not believe how many times I get the "Asian eyes are squinty because of snow" story. Whenever I debunk it (my old evolutionary biology teacher would be dishonored if I didn't try) I get condescending explanations about how no, really, "we" know this and I don't understand evolution. I hate to ask but what's the actual reason? I never took a college level biology course and looking it up leads to either the 'snow' argument or details of Mongoloid features in the year of our lord 2012.
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Sep 20, 2012 13:44
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NO DATA It could be that there was a selection pressure from trying to see in bright snow, could be sexual selection, could be a random mutation that got promoted by a founder effect, could be genetic drift, could probably be a wide variety of other things that I don't even know about. I only took the one course on evolution. I know enough to know that finding a "why" for a change in phenotype that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago is a fool's errand. Some parts of DNA are "not highly conserved" which basically means they're not very important. If your eyelid takes on a slightly different shape and still works fine, natural selection likely won't care. I think a big reason this persists it that there is no satisfying answer to debunk it with. The only scientifically acceptable position is that the eyelid change happened and we don't have enough information to make a meaningful conclusion as to what caused the change. Just-so stories are attractive because they are intuitively satisfying. No answer at all is not an attractive alternative but it's the truth. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Sep 20, 2012 |
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Sep 20, 2012 13:54
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Arglebargle III posted:NO DATA Thanks for the info, not too surprised there with how common people are genetically.
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Sep 20, 2012 14:01
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I think this is a great article that illustrates the fundamental issue at work here. China today, like Germany a century ago is a rising great power that is managing that transition poorly. They are throwing their weight around crudely and driving their neighbors into the arms of the United States, which only increases Chinese fear of hostile encirclement. The same thing happened to Imperial Germany, their bellicose posturing drove the French, Russians and British together despite them being colonial rivals. Unfortunately it doesn't take a political assassination to start a major war, much more minor incidents have sufficed in the past, and if there continue to be clashes with Chinese fishing and patrol boats with their neighbors, one of those incidents is bound to eventually go bad. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100020173/china-japan-and-the-worlds-agadir-crisis-1911/ quote:China, Japan and the world’s Agadir Crisis (1911)
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Sep 20, 2012 15:27
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A big flaming stink posted:We really haven't left behind the otherization of Orientalism. Because that would require recognizing and discussing whiteness. The eye thing is just loving stupid. It's a genetic variation. However it is proof of the Bering Strait migration (Eskimos). Not every mutation has a practical purpose. But Eugenics never really died, it just became a pop science thing 
Mc Do Well fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Sep 20, 2012 |
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Sep 20, 2012 17:51
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BRShooter posted:Your precious loving Glorious Nippon Hey you're certainly posting in good faith! 
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Sep 20, 2012 22:23
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The Chinese are seriously a lot worse about othering and orientalist essentialism (occidentalism?) so living in China it's hard to feel too bad about it. In fact some Chinese students who come to the U.S. get a very nasty surprise when they discover they aren't the master race outside the Middle Kingdom. Having to explain "If you are rude to the black students, they will not be nice to you either." is kind of ridiculous.
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Sep 21, 2012 10:16
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Arglebargle III posted:The Chinese are seriously a lot worse about othering and orientalist essentialism (occidentalism?) so living in China it's hard to feel too bad about it. In fact some Chinese students who come to the U.S. get a very nasty surprise when they discover they aren't the master race outside the Middle Kingdom. Having to explain "If you are rude to the black students, they will not be nice to you either." is kind of ridiculous. It's a very interesting area of discussion, along with feminism, that I don't see coming up much in discussions about China. Are there any good books or articles on the subject? And side question, do the Chinese have their counterpart for "Nihonjinron" ? Like, studies about what defines China as China and therefore define what is "other" ?
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Sep 21, 2012 16:24
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Unlike Japan, China actually does have a pretty strong assimilationist cultural tendency. I would say that being Chinese merely is a matter of shared culture and history. People can become Chinese over generations by assimilating into the greater Chinese culture, which builds on the same corpus of ancient books, stories, traditions, and ideas. The extent to which some people can be Chinese and not-Chinese depends a bit, but the Chinese themselves are pretty flexible. They are willing to accept a number of their ethnic minorities as genuinely Chinese, usually once those minorities have been sufficiently thinned out to be indistinguishable in terms of language and culture from the mainstream. Also you'd be surprised at how willing many Chinese people are to believe that everyone else is already like them and are for the most part completely ignorant of how dominant Han Chinese culture is and how all the things that they take for granted as 'Chinese' are actually Han. This is good if you want to assimilate, but bad if you care about things like preserving culture or cultural sensitivity in general. I had a fun personal example of this when we were discussing holidays once and I asked my class, "Does everyone in China celebrate Spring Festival?" and every Han person said yes, while every Hui person said no. The Han kids had literally no idea that the Hui kids didn't celebrate Spring Festival, it had never occurred to them that any Chinese person wouldn't despite living with them and being friends with them for their whole lives. The 'Mongolian' kids had the same idea as the Han kids, though when you talk to them in private you find almost all of them were Mongolian due to a single Mongolian grandparent who passed down that more useful ethnicity for taking college entrance exams down the line. This is how assimilation is taking place today of course. They're preventing the transmission of the language, turning ethnicity into an uncool and antiquated part of life which is intimately tied up with dressing like your people dressed several hundred years ago and spending most of your time dancing. On paper the number of minority people in China is increasing, but in reality I can guarantee that most of this new generation of increased minorities are indistinguishable culturally from the Chinese mainstream. If you have no interest in that dancing and singing then by default you're living the 'Chinese' lifestyle, will move to a city, probably marry a Han guy and sure your kids will have 'Zhuang' or something written on their hukou, but it'll be nothing more than a memory. I don't think Chinese have as strong an idea of what the cultural Other is, because China encompasses such a wide variety of peoples and cultures and local differences, that they all just see as different ways of being Chinese even if they really represent the leftovers of previously assimilated peoples. Chinese people do have a view of themselves as different and unique but I bet if you asked most people what makes Chinese people special they would just mistify it away, especially in the PRC as they couldn't very well point to the corpus of ancient texts and philosophy that they are supposed to have rejected. Fall Sick and Die fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Sep 21, 2012 |
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Sep 21, 2012 17:18
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I don't have any sources on this, but I remember reading that the Yue/Minnan groups were only thought as "Han" right around the end of the Qing, when the Republicans wanted to push an anti-Manchu narrative. Am I right on this or no?
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Sep 21, 2012 17:21
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Arglebargle III posted:The Chinese are seriously a lot worse about othering and orientalist essentialism (occidentalism?) so living in China it's hard to feel too bad about it. In fact some Chinese students who come to the U.S. get a very nasty surprise when they discover they aren't the master race outside the Middle Kingdom. Having to explain "If you are rude to the black students, they will not be nice to you either." is kind of ridiculous. There are similar racial fracture points between african-americans and hispanics too but oddly enough when I was growing up Asian-americans and hispanics got along just fine as a co-majority minority group.
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Sep 21, 2012 19:18
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Wasn't there a really cool article a bit back about Nigerians goin' to China that went into this a little bit? Someone find this!
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Sep 21, 2012 19:30
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Deceitful Penguin posted:...along with feminism... Are there any good books or articles on the subject? Li Yinhe might be a good place to start on this topic. Not alot of her stuff is in English but she is one of a very small number of scholars in China who are actively discussing feminist and queer theory.
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Sep 22, 2012 06:22
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Fall Sick and Die posted:I had a fun personal example of this when we were discussing holidays once and I asked my class, "Does everyone in China celebrate Spring Festival?" and every Han person said yes, while every Hui person said no. The Han kids had literally no idea that the Hui kids didn't celebrate Spring Festival, it had never occurred to them that any Chinese person wouldn't despite living with them and being friends with them for their whole lives. When I assigned every student in my classes a different minzu and asked them to come back the next week ready to tell us about how this minzu is different than hanzu, what their customs and history and habits are like, etc, I had to specifically tell them not to just come in and tell me that they like singing and dancing... and like half my students still did  In some cases they're talking about people who have civilizations going back thousands of years, with their own distinct cultural heritage and intriguing histories... but in China, there's only one culture, and it's Han culture shaped by what the Communist Party allows. The only date in any minzus history is the day when they happily joined China, and the only fact we care about now is exactly what level of sublime joy they've achieved under the guidance of the Communist Party. You almost can't blame Chinese people for believing that all trouble in East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet is stirred up by outside anti-China forces, because the notion that any of these groups have legitimate grievances (or even spend enough time not feverishly singing and dancing in cheap colorful knock-off versions of the clothes their grandparents wore to even come up with some grievances) is completely alien to what you know about shaosu minzu if you grew up in the PRC.
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Sep 23, 2012 17:19
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I like it when the minorities sing and dance because it shows how happy they are but it really makes me feel uncomfortable when they do so in their own incomprehensible dialect of Chinese. Thanks to CCTV for ensuring that their songs make sense and no one ever has to feel confused or uncomfortable! - A Chinese Person
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Sep 23, 2012 17:46
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Electro-Boogie Jack posted:When I assigned every student in my classes a different minzu and asked them to come back the next week ready to tell us about how this minzu is different than hanzu, what their customs and history and habits are like, etc, I had to specifically tell them not to just come in and tell me that they like singing and dancing... and like half my students still did Did you assign any of the students Ethnic Russians? Because I'd be very amused if they came back the following week saying Russians liked singing and dancing.
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Sep 23, 2012 19:13
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Castomira posted:Did you assign any of the students Ethnic Russians? Because I'd be very amused if they came back the following week saying Russians liked singing and dancing. Only one of my classes was big enough that we actually needed to use every minzu, the dude who got Russians ended up going on some overly long thing about Russians in Russia that he took word for word from wikipedia. That class is on the list of things I really don't miss about China, it was huge and I never managed to cure them of all the bad habits that other classes eventually got over.
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Sep 23, 2012 20:50
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menino posted:I don't have any sources on this, but I remember reading that the Yue/Minnan groups were only thought as "Han" right around the end of the Qing, when the Republicans wanted to push an anti-Manchu narrative. Am I right on this or no? From what I understand they became Han pretty early. They've been a big part of the Chinese sphere of influence for a while, but I'm guessing at least since the Tang dynasty fell and they named themselves Southern Han (Changed from Yue early on, though it was 越 and not 粤) they've been considered/considered themselves as such. A more interesting tale is how the Ba and Shu kingdoms of modern Sichuan got added in just to overthrow the Qin dynasty.
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Sep 24, 2012 01:09
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Fall Sick and Die posted:I like it when the minorities sing and dance because it shows how happy they are ... - A Chinese Person I love teaching British history to Chinese students because the constant internicine violence makes them writhe with discomfort. I use the "nations" of Britain as an example of why they can't simply translate Western institutions and concepts into their Chinese counterparts. They have a choice of questions for their mid term essay, one is about the American election but the other is: "In 2014 Scotland will hold a referendum to decide whether it should once again become an independent nation. Explain why this is happening." gently caress the harmony! GuestBob fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Sep 24, 2012 |
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Sep 24, 2012 03:19
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GuestBob posted:
Let me tell you about the small Scottish separatist clique, a group which strives to split the motherland and is thoroughly rejected by the Scottish people, who have risen up as one to uphold the unity of the British Empire. Although they are being used by some foreign governments to upset the harmony of the Scottish region, their influence is very small. Allow me to quote a Scottish peasant, as soon as he finishes singing and dancing...
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Sep 24, 2012 04:08
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Electro-Boogie Jack posted:Allow me to quote a Scottish peasant, as soon as he finishes singing and dancing... My sporran is quivering with rage at the thought!
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Sep 24, 2012 04:26
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FSAD, thank you for your posts in this thread. I've been enjoying your insight into the region. You've made some points that I never really thought of before re: Chinese imperialism and the irony of their own continued protests over past imperialist actions against them as a result. I'm glad the Senkaku situation isn't nearly as dire was it was seeming for a moment, though I'm not really surprised; I doubt the PRC really wants to embed itself in a major regional conflict of any kind. Bossing around some of its neighbors isn't a big deal when they're much more diminutive powers economically and politically, but Japan (while in a recession) has rather a lot of political and economic clout, and thus a lot of friends. Creating big waves would just hurt them with the WTO which would result in a whole new and special kind of "prestige" hit at home. I suspect this "ra ra ra" will only continue until people think the Senkaku is outright under China's control again / forget about the situation, returning the ambiguous status quo of ignorance, and the PRC will be pretended this never happened. Until then, the indication of motion and action is more important than actual action, and that's what the Chinese government has been doing.
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Sep 24, 2012 05:09
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Thank you for the post, Fall Sick and Die. As a native Chinese, an outside perspective of the homogenizing effect of Han culture is refreshing. It is rather sad that the Chinese (in my case, Hong Kong) education system has never touched on the culture and customs of the minorities as well - it kind of defeats the statement that China is a "multiethnic" society.
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Sep 24, 2012 10:19
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GuestBob posted:I love teaching British history to Chinese students because the constant internicine violence makes them writhe with discomfort. I use the "nations" of Britain as an example of why they can't simply translate Western institutions and concepts into their Chinese counterparts. Do they seriously feel uncomfortable about it? China's history is crammed full of internecine violence. Do they not teach the conquests of Tibet or the conquest of Xinjiang or the conquest of the Yue peoples like at all? Seriously, I don't know, I'm not a history teacher and all I know about Chinese history classes are that they are mega boring. I just thought of an interesting wrench in the China-as-Empire idea: the modern territorial extent of China is a direct result of the Qing conquests, which as we all know are were a Manchu Empire. It doesn't make China not an empire but it does make for food for thought as to how various territories got added to this massive agglomeration called China. It's not all conquest and it's certainly not all Han conquest. Really the Han ethnicity itself is sort of the same. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Sep 24, 2012 |
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Sep 24, 2012 13:22
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But the Manchus even during their own dynasty got assimilated into Han culture. The language was scarcely used even in the palace by the fall of Puyi. The Qing dynasty was decidedly Chinese in the sense to which Han is often equated. Certainly as much as Cantonese or Min people, who traditionally referred to themselves as Tang more than Han (hence western Chinatowns being called 唐人街 or Tang Street)
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Sep 24, 2012 15:07
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Oh, good. I thought WWIII was passed due.
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Sep 24, 2012 15:51
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Eh the assimilation gets played up a lot more than it deserves for a whole long list of reasons. When the Qing was dynamic and expanding the Imperial family didn't speak a lot of Chinese and the Imperial court was pretty divided. Kangxi was 100% Manchu; Qianlong if I recall correctly spoke fluent Chinese but still preferred to conduct business in Manchu. Modern Beijing geography is the product of apartheid policies that pushed the ethnic Chinese to the south of the city. Then of course there were the famous que and a whole list of sumptuary laws directed against the Han Chinese. It's become inconvenient to remember the Qing as an invader dynasty for a variety of reasons, but they were, and there was tenacious Han resistance throughout the Qing centuries. The idea that the Manchus showed up and assimilated in the space of decades plays into the dominant Chinese narrative about their cultural unity which we have just seen in the thread is a fiction. Most Chinese probably aren't even aware that it's a fiction and believe it as fact but still, it's not really true. The reality is that the Manchu assimilation took well over a century. Kangxi and Puyi are separated by 250 years and a lot happened in that time. I'm not sure what you mean by "Chinese in the sense to which Han is often equated" but I think the modern Manchus would not agree that they are Han. I don't know much about the Yue or Min but I know their absorption is older than the Manchus by centuries, but I don't know if they would consider themselves Han. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Han considered them Han, because the Han are, as the thread pointed out, pretty ignorant about non-Han ethnicities.
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Sep 24, 2012 16:04
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Arglebargle III posted:Do they seriously feel uncomfortable about it? China's history is crammed full of internecine violence. Do they not teach the conquests of Tibet or the conquest of Xinjiang or the conquest of the Yue peoples like at all? Seriously, I don't know, I'm not a history teacher and all I know about Chinese history classes are that they are mega boring. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/world/asia/31iht-china3.2658784.html?pagewanted=all It's been six years, but I doubt the textbooks have gotten much better.
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Sep 24, 2012 16:29
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You're getting bogged down in the details of Han and Manchu as though those terms had meaning in and of themselves. Yes the Qing dynasty was a Manchu dynasty. But compare the lives, the beliefs, the culture of Nurhaci (who hated the Han completely) to the Qianlong Emperor. One was an illiterate horse lord from the outskirts of civilization, much more akin to the Mongol or Turkish tribes that lived similar lifestyles across Asia. That was what being a Manchu was at the time, a completely separate lifestyle from the farming economy, developed lifestyle, literate culture, etc, of the Han Chinese. Now as to the Qianlong emperor, look at his life. First of all, he had a policy of explicitly massacring the frontier tribes to which his own ancestor Nurhaci belonged. He had a huge art collection, none of it Manchu. He commissioned the writing and copying of large numbers of books relating to history, philosophy and literature, all of them in Chinese. Whether he spoke Manchu in court or not, the Manchu civilization as an independent culture was not on display here. This is what we mean when we say the Manchu had assimilated. It doesn't mean that they called themselves Han, because they assuredly didn't. What it means is that they had adopted what they saw as a superior culture wholesale. Yes there were Manchu administrators throughout China, but they studied the same Chinese classics as the Han, adopted the ancient institutions, followed the same religious beliefs. In every way, Qianlong's life was far more like the Ming dynasty emperors his ancestors overthrew than any actual Manchu warlord. Today, the same thing has happened. Manchu people don't start calling themselves Han, they're actually proud to be Manchu. The Han also do not consider them to be Han. But the Manchu language is dead, the Manchu themselves are an insignificant minority in their own homeland, their children study the heroes of Han culture, and in most cases they are functionally no different from Han people in terms of lifestyle, culture or ideas. They take Chinese names in the Chinese script and think nothing of the fact that the Chinese script is completely unable to accurately render their own language or names, and I doubt they care for the most part, because there is no one actively working to keep the flame alive. Any Manchu kid today will know far more about the Three Kingdoms period and the works of Confucius than he will about the Jurchen people, their fights and friendships with the Mongols, etc. The Manchu aren't an ideal candidate for discussion Chinese assimilation however because in a sense it was their own fault, they were the conquerors, not the conquered. They practically emptied out their country to serve around the empire as administrators and banner officers and when the Qing were overthrown there were large-scale massacres of Manchus around the nation in retribution, something not taught by the government here today. It's not about unity in the sense you mean Arglebargle, the Chinese don't care if you call yourself Manchu, so long as you do it in Chinese, Mǎnzú. Also glad some other people liked my posts about Chinese imperialism, hope that our thread won't cause somethingawful to get banned! Fall Sick and Die fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Sep 24, 2012 |
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Sep 24, 2012 16:46
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So Wang Lijun has gotten fifteen years, presumably because he was very cooperative with the Beijing crew. Good(?) for him, I guess. What does this mean for Bo now? If the henchman gets off (relatively) lightly on account on telling on his boss, will Bo end up in court or will they just make him vanish from view? For those of you in contact with Chinese people, how do they react to this mess? Is it a big deal or just politics?
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Sep 24, 2012 16:55
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ecureuilmatrix posted:For those of you in contact with Chinese people, how do they react to this mess? Is it a big deal or just politics? They don't know, they've never heard of Wang Lijun, they never noticed Bo Xilai disappeared, they know he was powerful and now his wife is in jail because she's bad. I asked my wife to respond to your question and she said more than I've ever heard her say about politics in China, "We know we have no power over this thing. If we talk it's just like a joke. We don't care. We are not like you westerners, you think you're a part of your country's government decisions, like we think it's none of our business, even if we wanted to control it we can't, so we don't bother to talk about it. Most common people they just care about their own life. Like, this thing is like we're watching other people's stories, it's not like we can join them in these things happening, like we're looking at the news but we never think we can do something about it, never, except maybe some social insurance issue <like social security>, maybe we care about that, but other than that it's none of our business because this is our government, you know? Like nobody knows who will be their next president you know, but we know, a long time ago, so we can't control it, it's not like our votes will control who controls this country, so why care about something you can't control? Sometimes you will be very angry but you can't do anything so it will make you even angrier, so just let it go, don't let it bother you. If you see the news, you say, 'OK, it happened, Bo Xilai's wife is so bad.' So when we hear you always talk about government, politics, laws in America, we think that thing is far away from our lives really. But something like Diaoyu islands, if the country wants you to be mad at it, then you will be angry, or something related to your real life like <a bank robber killing a bunch of people> then we care about it, but this thing? Bo Xilai's wife killed a foreigner? Sorry, she's bad, but we can't control here. Bo Xilai is corrupt, has a lot of money? Yeah, we admire him in a way or think he's bad but so what? We can't do anything. Like that... We don't feel like we have very free speech power too. If sometimes we say too much in public about something, you know, anti-anything, then it will bring trouble to ourselves, so even though some people in their heart they hate it, they want to yell out at something. Like me, even sometimes I don't dare to yell something I want, because I don't want to bring any trouble to myself, my family, so better to be a coward than to put your whole family in danger. Like sometimes you just can't say something, everyone will get in trouble, but you don't even know what will happen, it's very scary. I don't feel very free sometimes to say something, I'm just so worried, don't want to bring any trouble to my family, especially if you say something about politics, even on your weibo <twitter> or something, if you say something very aggressive, they will know, then they will do something, maybe make you the enemy of the whole Chinese people, like this is a traitor, especially since my husband is a foreigner, so I have to be super... showing I love my country so much, otherwise they will think traitor, though sometimes I think they are just jealous of me. We have a saying, "If you can't eat grapes, you'll say the grapes are sour." Many people have this idea really, if they can't have something, they will ruin something, so I think sometimes they say bad things about America too, because maybe they admire it but they will say bad things about it. I think probably it's like that." That's just her opinion as a pretty normal Chinese person.
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Sep 24, 2012 17:18
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They have no stake. Seriously that is how it is with 90% of political news. They have no reason to pay attention because it won't matter one way or the other. FSAD I'm not sure what your point is. Qianlong was definitely a sinophile but that doesn't mean "they" adopted "a superior culture wholesale." That is the Chinese narrative of the Manchu assimilation to a tee and it's not really surprising that it glorifies Chinese culture. The reality is that the Manchus assimilated, but they did it more slowly and with far more nuance than the Chinese portrayal. Qianlong may have commissioned his encyclopedias and art in Chinese, but the Imperial Court was still writing its correspondence in Manchu at the time. Writing in Manchu was important and it was a skill that the Imperial court consciously preserved until the 19th century because they didn't want Han Chinese to be able to read them. I think the narrative you've just recounted is very much a 20th century narrative as well. It's the narrative of "we won" from the Chinese, where three hundred years of foreign rule is glossed over with "they adopted a superior culture wholesale" and never failing to mention how assimilated they have become under the modern Han-dominated state. It's a narrative that is very convenient if you are the modern Chinese government, as it reinforces the "we are all Chinese now" feeling that Beijing fervently wishes everyone would adopt. So as I said, the conventional modern story is a 20th century story that is convenient and uplifting and full of omissions and half-truth. If you went to Han noble houses in the 18th or 19th centuries and asked them how they felt about the Qing, you would get a completely different story. We know that in some houses you would find Han willing to rebel against the Qing as foreign invaders, because the Han did exactly that on many occasions. edit: I have to say FSAD your wife summed up the average Chinese view of politics very well. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Sep 24, 2012 |
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Sep 24, 2012 17:23
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It is funny how at the same time you get media portrayals of Southern Ming generals resisting the Manchus in the final days of their dynasty as super heroic last stands against foreign invaders. The Chinese narratives don't add up well, do they?
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Sep 24, 2012 18:16
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Arglebargle III posted:They have no stake. Seriously that is how it is with 90% of political news. They have no reason to pay attention because it won't matter one way or the other. How did the Manchu not assimilate? In what ways have they preserved their unique culture and lifestyle? Do you really think that an entire people who took up the privileged position as administrators maintaining a secret language to communicate with one another to prevent a rebellion not so much from ethnic nationalists but rather from the displaced nobles who used to occupy those positions of power is a symbol of anything but their desire to maintain their power? The Manchu language was no more than a tool to keep the nation under their control, and had nothing to do with transmitting Manchu culture. A great deal of their time was spent actually translating Chinese books into Manchu, can you show me an example of the reverse? If you want to see what the Manchu would look like if they didn't assimilate, look at the Evenks or some other nomadic northern tribe, there's absolutely no comparison.
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Sep 24, 2012 18:21
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Miffler posted:Oh, good. I thought WWIII was past due. Wait until after the US and China have had their power transitions. Mc Do Well fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Sep 25, 2012 |
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Sep 24, 2012 21:39
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ecureuilmatrix posted:So Wang Lijun has gotten fifteen years, presumably because he was very cooperative with the Beijing crew. Good(?) for him, I guess. From the forum I go to the reaction is mixed but most people think he got a good deal. 15 years mean he will get out before 10. Consider how many high position police officials got convicted in the Heywood case, his sentense is a not that bad. Plus they only accused him of accepting 1 apartment in Beijing as bribe? Thats basically a slap on the wrist. He has been in the police system for many years and Bo used him to take out a few "dirty officials". He must be dirty as hell. The prosecution from central pretty much look the other way on that part. Fun fact, one of the "dirty corrupted officials" Wen Qiang who was put on show trails by Bo to gain popularity told Wang, "My today is your tomorrow."
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Sep 25, 2012 02:02
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