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The speaker in that TED talk, Martin Jacques, wrote a book called "When China Rules the World" which, according to the Amazon reviews, is exactly as terrible as it sounds. He's literally the only person in the world who uses the term "civilization-state" and has some pretty absurd reasoning to back it up. There's a review of a panel discussion with him here. Such insights of his include:quote:"We [the West] believe the government's reach should be restrained. The Chinese have a completely different view, they view [government] as the head of the family." That point about Taiwan is so absurd. There are a multitude of good reasons why China won't give up their claim on Taiwan; a wildly different conception of sovereignty isn't one of them. Are there books that help unpack the orientalism towards the East? Edward Said's "Orientalism" seems to be focused on the Middle East primarily.
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Jul 9, 2013 22:06
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I think he must have missed the part where the Chinese government and propaganda machine leaped headfirst into ethnic nationalism (yes, the Western kind) after Communism fell apart in the early 80s. Chinese people talk about legitimacy and sovereignty very much in terms of the Han nation state, whether they realize it or not. That's why you get claims about ancestral territory; those claims never would have made sense, indeed never would have been advanced under previous iterations of the Chinese state. The territorial claim would have been advanced in terms of a vassal people failing to recognize how great and awesome the Emperor was and foolishly refusing his protection. I think one of the reasons it's so hard to talk with Chinese people about Chinese territorial claims is that they've been propagandized into this ethnic nationalist position without really understanding its underpinnings, so you get the problem of reasoning someone out of an opinion they never reasoned into.
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Jul 10, 2013 02:20
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I think he missed the part where the Chinese state was set up as a perfect transplant of Marxist-Leninist Democratic Centralism, complete with all the European trappings and you have to be a complete loving moron (or a smart guy trying to sell books) to believe the modern Chinese state is some kind of super fancy xenophile nerd porn geisha fantasy. I don't know why I suddenly got so mad about this. I mean seriously listen to this poo poo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6icFnCSF2yA This is European as all hell.
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Jul 10, 2013 02:42
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Also, plenty of historical and even modern European states self-consciously aped the Roman empire and Greek thought, and considered themselves part of "Western civilization" and/or "the Christian world" descended from those origins, often with the stated goal of preserving Western civilization or restoring it back to its glory days. They used the latin alphabet and spoke latin as a court/religious language. Hell, the Holy Roman Empire had an unbroken line of imperial succession for over eight centuries starting with Otto I, longer than any Chinese dynasty, and it only ended in the 1800s with the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of the modern nation-states, which just happened to be followed fairly quickly by the establishment of the first Chinese nation-states because east and west actually did interact and only interacted more as technologies improved. Not to say that the HRE was really directly comparable to Imperial China or anything, but I'm not being any sloppier than Jacques when I talk like this. Meanwhile, half the stuff he lists as critical components of "Chinese civilization" don't even exist in the modern Chinese state and were often actively stamped out by that state. I mean China is a big place and it's impressive they were able to unite it the degree that they did intermittently throughout history, but the rule of China was never that continuous. When some other ethnic group that doesn't even speak the same language or have the same social structure comes in and conquers your empire, that really shouldn't count as continuity of rule unless you define "Chinese" to be whoever happens to live in China. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 03:18
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Cream_Filling posted:Hell, the Holy Roman Empire had an unbroken line of imperial succession for over eight centuries starting with Otto I, longer than any Chinese dynasty, and it only ended in the 1800s with the Napoleonic Wars Cream_Filling posted:I mean China is a big place and it's impressive they were able to unite it the degree that they did intermittently throughout history, but the rule of China was never that continuous. When some other ethnic group that doesn't even speak the same language or have the same social structure comes in and conquers your empire, that really shouldn't count as continuity of rule unless you define "Chinese" to be whoever happens to live in China. Koxinga was a great Chinese hero who resisted the evil Manchurian invaders who attempted to wipe out our culture. Kangxi was the greatest Chinese Emperor who defined our language and culture and spread Chinese rule to its rightful borders. The westerners were so mean to the poor Qing who were the legitimate Chinese government and we are the successors to that rule. It's so delightfully 
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Jul 10, 2013 03:42
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That criticism seems unfair because WE say that Historic Figure X did both good and bad things at the same time. You're complaining that they're not viewing the past like children, with people either perfectly good or perfectly evil. It also presupposes a single historiography when what culture doesn't have a dozen conflicting ways of looking at its past?
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Jul 10, 2013 03:57
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Bloodnose posted:Can you source that? I learned from video games that the Holy Roman Emperor was an elective monarchy and I also remember like Salians, Carolingians and Habsburgs. Just a warning, I'm no expert on this area and I had to do some cursory research to support this claim that might not be very authoritative. But I know the Carolingians predate Otto. The other successor houses were I believe all or nearly all patrilineally descended from Otto I in some way, just from different branches of his lineage. Though the degree to which most of European royalty became related to each other might complicate this. And I think succession became elective around the 13th century, but it still remained unbroken until the last of the Hapsburgs. Obviously, this was in part because the HRE was relatively stable and managed to not disintegrate instantly into warring rivals during power transitions or be invaded by various foreign powers like in China. But still. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Emperor
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Jul 10, 2013 04:02
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tractor fanatic posted:That criticism seems unfair because WE say that Historic Figure X did both good and bad things at the same time. You're complaining that they're not viewing the past like children, with people either perfectly good or perfectly evil. It also presupposes a single historiography when what culture doesn't have a dozen conflicting ways of looking at its past? All very true, but the core of that criticism is that often the past is presented by the Chinese as if it is for children, and historiographical perspectives are chosen based on whatever is most convenient for the modern interests of the state with little interest in consistency or an honest examination of historical China and its relation to the modern Chinese state, which is undeniably far more tenuous than it's made out to be. Obviously, all mainstream historiography serves the state, but as with many other aspects of state control in China, it's the lack of finesse and general shamelessness that attracts criticism and not just the mere fact that they do it.
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Jul 10, 2013 04:12
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Cream_Filling posted:All very true, but the core of that criticism is that often the past is presented by the Chinese as if it is for children, and historiographical perspectives are chosen based on whatever is most convenient for the modern interests of the state with little interest in consistency or an honest examination of historical China and its relation to the modern Chinese state, which is undeniably far more tenuous than it's made out to be. Bingo. And it is for children, they get them early and then aren't interested in developing a more nuanced appreciation of history in their citizens.
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Jul 10, 2013 04:17
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tractor fanatic posted:That criticism seems unfair because WE say that Historic Figure X did both good and bad things at the same time. You're complaining that they're not viewing the past like children, with people either perfectly good or perfectly evil. It also presupposes a single historiography when what culture doesn't have a dozen conflicting ways of looking at its past? I definitely agree with what you're saying and this is the way that it works in Hong Kong. In the mainland, though, academia either less free, corrupt, or outside of the mainstream (foreign professors). What I'm talking to is the narrative presented by the [civilization-]state, which is yeah for children. As in, taught to children and internalized by the general public.
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Jul 10, 2013 04:49
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Cream_Filling posted:Also, plenty of historical and even modern European states self-consciously aped the Roman empire and Greek thought, and considered themselves part of "Western civilization" and/or "the Christian world" descended from those origins, often with the stated goal of preserving Western civilization or restoring it back to its glory days. Hmm. I am pretty sure a Roman would never have said this: Warren Hasting, 1st Governor General of Bengal posted:Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion, founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state … It attracts and conciliates distant affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence… Every instance which brings their real character will impress us with more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own… But such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive when British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance. And Warren Hastings wasn't unique. The Empire was a very different place after 1856 as more pluralistic ways of "doing" Empire went out of the window. I am not an apologist for the Raj by the way, I just don't like an overly partisan interpretation of its history (from either camp). [edit] Actually, I suppose a Roman would have said something a bit like that and then gone off and carved a statue of a noble Gallic warrior, but that attitude was much more in the minority then, than the thinking of people like Hastings umpteen hundreds of years later. GuestBob fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 10:39
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Arglebargle III posted:Bingo. And it is for children, they get them early and then aren't interested in developing a more nuanced appreciation of history in their citizens. This is true of the US, too. And Japan to some extent. And though Korea hardly ever invented anything and surely didn't invent this practice, they embrace it so wholeheartedly I'm willing to credit it to them. I have no idea about the rest of the world. Anyhow, not uniqely Chinese or anything.
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Jul 10, 2013 11:26
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VideoTapir posted:I have no idea about the rest of the world. Well, in Europe we have had history for longer so we have a more mature perspective on it. We tend to use history socially, with a meal or on a sunny afternoon; we rarely, if ever, binge on history during festivals or holidays. If you want to see for yourself then I think that Simon Schama is pretty representative of what's in British high school history textbooks these days - only not quite so effete (in life he is suuuch a duckie, they must have camp filters on TV or something).
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Jul 10, 2013 12:51
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One thing that drives me crazy about how China presents its history is (you guessed it!) how they streamline shaosu minzu into Han historical terms. My work involves Tibet and I'm stuck reading pretty much everything that China prints about Tibet, and if I have to read one more thing about how the Guge kingdom developed during THIS chinese dynasty, or the Pelkhor Choede was built during THAT dynasty, I'm pretty much gonna lose it. We're talking about a people with their own distinct historical periods, and the people building the Pelkhor loving Choede probably couldn't have cared less about what was going on a thousand miles away in China. There is no Tibetan history, or Uyghur history, or Mongolian history, there is only Chinese history, and that is very specifically and exclusively Han history. Oh, but China is a multi-ethnic state, not a Han-only kleptocracy!
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Jul 10, 2013 14:39
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VideoTapir posted:This is true of the US, too. And Japan to some extent. And though Korea hardly ever invented anything and surely didn't invent this practice, they embrace it so wholeheartedly I'm willing to credit it to them. Media control isn't uniquely Chinese, but the heavy-handed and often inept way it's implemented in China is pretty distinct. State monitoring and suppression of domestic dissidents isn't uniquely Chinese but the way the FBI does it and the way the Chinese do it are pretty different and arguably one is more heavy-handed, abusive, and occasionally more lethal than the other. Similarly, the way the Chinese state goes about presenting and rewriting history to suit its interests is arguably more harmful and worse than the way other nations do the same thing. All mainstream historiography tends to serve the interests of those in power (such as the state), but some is still better than others. And ultimately, China's practices harm not only the study and understanding of its own history but also the education of its people and the credibility of the state, both internationally and domestically.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:08
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I found "When China Rules the World" so horrible I could not finish it. On the other hand "1587: A Year of No Signifigance" has a pretty interesting background theme about "rule of law" in which he is contrasting the traditional Chinese system with the western conception of rule by law. Honestly, I have had trouble completely understanding this, but I think this is mostly because I am so indoctrinated to think in terms of rule by law.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:40
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GuestBob posted:Hmm. I am pretty sure a Roman would never have said this: I'm not sure what you're getting at exactly, but as the empire emerged, Romans were plenty happy to integrate cultural features and people from other cultures into their own. Chieftains from Gaul were members of the senate as early as the days of Claudius. Jews, Greeks, Spaniards, etc., pretty commonly held military commands or became wealthy romans. Many of the later emperors were celtic, syrian, or gallic in ethnicity. Want to worship your old god? Okay, integrate him into the roman state system somehow and it's all good. Even public inscriptions and legal oaths were usually presented bilingually or translated to local languages. More generally, the idea of "romanness" (romanitas) in the later empire was arguably not considered a matter of lineage, ethnicity, or language as it was in, say, the Greek world. Instead it was more about politics, religion, and customs. It was specifically an identity based on cultural and institutional factors like common values, morality, and lifestyle. Definitely still imperialist, but pretty different from the racialized modern version of imperialism from the late 19th century and seemingly more in line with the quote you have there.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:44
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I recently learned that Basketball is popular in China because it was brought here very early on by friends of the inventor who worked at the YMCA in Tianjin. People in China actually played basketball before Europeans ever did, before it was popular in America, even.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:17
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Cream_Filling posted:Definitely still imperialist, but pretty different from the racialized modern version of imperialism from the late 19th century and seemingly more in line with the quote you have there. Yeah my example wasn't very good (although the Romans went through phases, just like the British Empire) but the kind of "Roman Empire" which the British cited wasn't based on a direct historical claim - it was much more nuanced than that and, at least early on, it was open to others (as you point out yourself, the Romans were also this way inclined). Recent scholars have really pushed the idea that the early British Empire in the East was actually run by culture-crats and not populist politicians (until the latter half of the C19th) and I would tend to agree with that view. It's all very different from the notions one finds in China (which is what began this discussion, I think). It's also what you might expect from a maritime Empire which the average British person never experienced directly - even military parades were rare, outside the Napolenoic period, because everything happened "over there". Teaching Western history in China is bloody difficult by the way because the textbooks are often nothing but a list of dead white guys punctuated with irrelevant statistics - I actually force my students to read some Engels to gain a more accurate picture of the industrial revolution (and no, I am not an idiot who is somehow doing this for his own gratification). I get on well with my kids, so I can take the piss a bit sometimes and I do like to ask one of the senior party members in class when the Communist Manifesto was published and where it was published - no-one has ever got it right yet. Oddly enough, pretty much everyone knows when Richard Arkwright invented his loom (because that exact date is when the Industrial Revolution began - no, no, not a period of time, an actual date). The Chines education system is my own personal heart of darkness. GuestBob fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 16:21
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Sogol posted:I found "When China Rules the World" so horrible I could not finish it. Europe's tradition of rule by law really is an anomaly, the Greeks and Romans were somewhat obsessed with legislation but it really exploded in the medieval period under the Church, which acted as a sort of quasi-supernational authority, and Salic law, so you end up with wars not over who gets to be the next ruler like you do everywhere, but you get wars over legal interpretations. They may be realistically fighting over the same thing, but in Europe legalistic arguments become the key to legitimacy by the High Middle Ages. I'd be curious to know how the Caliphate and a shared adherence to Sharia law affected Middle Eastern concepts of legitimate rule.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:41
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Arglebargle III posted:...but in Europe legalistic arguments become the key to legitimacy by the High Middle Ages. Unless you happened to be an antisocial middle aged lesbian who liked cats.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:48
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Arglebargle III posted:Europe's tradition of rule by law really is an anomaly, the Greeks and Romans were somewhat obsessed with legislation but it really exploded in the medieval period under the Church, which acted as a sort of quasi-supernational authority, and Salic law, so you end up with wars not over who gets to be the next ruler like you do everywhere, but you get wars over legal interpretations. They may be realistically fighting over the same thing, but in Europe legalistic arguments become the key to legitimacy by the High Middle Ages. My favorite new thing from the medieval history thread was all the trials they had for animals and stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial GuestBob posted:Unless you happened to be an antisocial middle aged lesbian who liked cats. I was under the impression that witch trials were usually illegal and condemned by the church.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:53
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GuestBob posted:
Huh. I had the location right and was only 13 years early, off the top of my head.
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Jul 10, 2013 17:16
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Be Depressive posted:I recently learned that Basketball is popular in China because it was brought here very early on by friends of the inventor who worked at the YMCA in Tianjin. People in China actually played basketball before Europeans ever did, before it was popular in America, even. I was under the impression it was because Mao banned pretty much all western sports except basketball because he REALLY LIKED BASKETBALL and the Lake People  I know this is probably unheard of in D&D threads but, Source. SB35 fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 18:13
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Cream_Filling posted:I was under the impression that witch trials were usually illegal and condemned by the church. They were also more of a Renaissance/Reformation thing than a medieval thing.
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Jul 11, 2013 01:12
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Silver2195 posted:They were also more of a Renaissance/Reformation thing than a medieval thing. Witch hunts were a radical Protestant quirk so they are a product of the Reformation. Chinese students are taught to see the world in a very black and white way. I was told once that China is helping African nations because China is a good country and wants to help Africa. Mineral and energy resources have nothing to do with it. Meanwhile every other nation is bad for whatever reason, usually because they were told such. These were third year college students too so age isn't really an excuse.
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Jul 14, 2013 16:26
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Just when we thought all this locust business was over... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToGqN2M5NrY
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Jul 15, 2013 03:08
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Bloodnose posted:Just when we thought all this locust business was over... The appearance of the old colonial money with Queen Elizabeth's likeness was both hilarious and nostalgic.
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Jul 16, 2013 15:35
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gently caress.quote:China said Friday it is ending controls on bank lending rates in a move toward creating a market-oriented financial system to support economic growth.
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Jul 19, 2013 14:25
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Who wants to bet that this is only going to drive interest rates further down? Because that's actually a thing you can do if you have money to invest.
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Jul 19, 2013 14:39
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Y-Hat posted:gently caress. "wealth management" products ain't credit card debts. They tend to be a part of the whole shadow banking game though.
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Jul 19, 2013 14:42
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Does this follow from the spike in the SHIBOR or are the two unrelated? Uncle Pooh seems to be making a real attempt to clean things up.
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Jul 19, 2013 15:13
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GuestBob posted:Does this follow from the spike in the SHIBOR or are the two unrelated? Related in that China is currently trying to way to keep inflated growth going on through increased lending, and having floating rates and penalizing savers is going to be part of that plan. I think they realize that that the banking party is sicked with bad debt, so the hope they can "work past it" making easier to lend to non-state actors in order encourage growth and force savers to spend their money to provider consumer demand. Basically, banks will be allowed to make a higher degree of profit from savers by charging them low rates while charging borrowers whatever they want. The issue is that those banks already have a ton of bad debt and will likely continue to build on that bad debt, and Chinese savers probably won't be spending that much and will instead be desperate for something else to invest in.
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Jul 19, 2013 15:27
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My current blunt instrument understanding is that the pointy end of growth and change is managed by the NDRC and provincial DRC functioning as a project mangement office informed by and informing the five year planning process. How do these changes effect that? I am not sure yet, but I think I just received an invitation to go and do several weeks of capacity building in Beijing in the fall. Edit: for anyone in Beijing with an interest I have found these folks pretty interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_Stone_Community_Action You can find their Chinese website searching for them, but I didn't want to post the Chinese in the thread. Sogol fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 18:38
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quote:A man in a wheelchair detonated a home-made explosive in Beijing airport on Saturday evening, injuring himself and sending smoke billowing through the exit area of the international arrivals section of Terminal 3. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/20/us-china-explosion-beijing-idUSBRE96J04F20130720 How likely is it that this is just an isolated incident like the article says?
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Jul 20, 2013 13:54
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Xandu posted:http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/20/us-china-explosion-beijing-idUSBRE96J04F20130720 Reasonably likely given the level of incompetence. Likely some poor depressed sod who has lost his job or something.
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Jul 20, 2013 14:09
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Apparentlyquote:Chinese media quickly named the alleged bomber as Ji Zhongxing, from Heze in Shandong province and gave his date of birth as 1979. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10192343/Explosion-in-Beijing-airport-as-man-appears-to-detonate-wheelchair.html
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Jul 20, 2013 14:11
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Heze is a pretty dull place. It's also where Xi Jinping's wife was born. [edit] Also I am not surprised that they had problem raising comment from the government offices because Prefecture goes above County - Heze is the head of Mudan District, which is a Prefecture level division. I'll be honest, I knew it was a Prefecture level administrative center, but I didn't know the name of the division. It would be like trying to phone the town hall of a Midwestern crossroads town at 8pm. GuestBob fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jul 20, 2013 |
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Jul 20, 2013 14:28
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What are the odds of more lone desperate people taking things into their own hands as the economy cools and conditions get worse on the fringes of society? I mean, you know, when society is like 6x larger than America, statistical anomalies can be more frequent. EDIT: I read about this guy's grievance, but things are rarely as simple as that report and, in any case, corruption extends much further, with more scope than simple police impropriety.
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Jul 20, 2013 14:30
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ReindeerF posted:What are the odds of more lone desperate people taking things into their own hands as the economy cools and conditions get worse on the fringes of society? I mean, you know, when society is like 6x larger than America, statistical anomalies can be more frequent. Total certainty. There's a number of similar incidents already, this one is just more visible because it's Beijing airport.
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Jul 20, 2013 14:36
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