whatever7 posted:

A couple things about the modernization efforts by the gun powder empires (Qing and Ottoman). Both empires were ruled by a minority ethnic group holding for their dear lives. This kind of government is easiest to be influenced by foreign imperial powers， because the upper structure is very fragile. They would give up a lot of sovereign rights to let the external powers to help them stay in place.

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Gun powder empires also didn't care about sovereign rights that much because they were pre-Westphalian. Modern countries that are still ruled by minorities are Bahrain and Syria.

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As far as industrialization goes China has no good quality iron ore but a lot of coal. And didn't find any oil until the 50s.

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

BEAR GRYLLZ posted:

lmao these people are so loving depraved

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I mean Ieyasu was literally decrepit. He was bedridden when Perry showed up the first time, and it paralyzed the government.

christmas boots posted:

"Eat at Joe's"

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

HK protestors that fled to Taiwan are now laying siege to their migration office with 3 demands (right of resettlement/given jobs, sanctions on Hong Kong police who want to visit, and passage of laws opening the floodgates to HK rioters who want to move to Taiwan). Obviously this is not going over well with the public.

Typo posted:

They also did distinctively better than the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned between western imperial powers and despite the attempts at reassembling the Arab parts of it by various by Arab Nationalists it never worked. Whereas the Qing Empire, which by default would have being partiioned between the imperialists, survived intact into the 20th century. Indeed, from the entire period of 1840-1949, the only significant piece of territory China lost was Mongolia and the amur basin. The result was there is currently a country covering the vast majority of the core population and territorial parts of the Qing Empire whereas the same isn't true for the Ottomans.

Ardennes posted:

Also, there is the simple fact that (Anatolian) Turks were really only a strong majority in Central-Western Anatolia. This is in obvious contrast to China, where a single ethnicity remained dominate in the central regions of the empire despite certain expections (also Xinjiang was a quasi-satellite of the Soviets during the inter-war period).

Modest Mao posted:

And basically before the league of nations the ideas of borders and passports and entry permits etc didn't exist as they do today

nations, as they function in their current form are ~100 years old and basically because nations didn't want folks from their ex-colonies coming to the mother country during decolonialization after WWI

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3niyiyOijoY&t=35s

Darkest Auer posted:

Are you implying that China wasn't a nation 5000 years ago?

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You say conservative estimates, I say transparent lies of a goverment that unwisely founds its legitimacy in unlimited growth, but

Typo posted:

A single ethnic majority dominating the majority of modern day China came as the result of decades of Nation-Building on the part of both the Nationalist, Communist and even Qing government starting in the late 1800s. A good way to think of it was that China in the 19th century resembled the Arab world today: A Tunisian and an Iraqi both self-identify themselves as Arabic, but do not identify with each other the same way a Chinese person from Hunnan would a Chinese person from Shanxi in 2019.

Without a centralized state conciously pursuing a nation-building project, the Chinese ethnic conciousness would have being a lot weaker. Ethnic-linguo fragmentation along regional lines would be al ot more pronounced and the geopolitical consequences quite obvious. We have a tendency of thinking about ethnicity and nationality as organic outgrowth of the 19th century in the transition between feudalism and capitalist modes of production. When in reality modern ethnic identities were often constructed by states in nation-building projects. It's just that when said projects are particularly successful, we tend to forget that said nation-building occured at all.

Ardennes posted:

The issue is that Han peoples had far more in common than Anatolian Turks (who were also divided) with the rest of the Ottoman Empire. Arab nationalism is a whole other ball of wax.

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It is true nation building in the 19th century is very much a state project, it is just in China there was far more to work with than the Ottoman Empire. (Also, an attempt at creating an "Pan-Ottoman" identity never really worked for a variety of reasons.)

Typo posted:

The Manchu rulers of China also started out with limited similarity to the rest of China, yet they did a lot better job of assimilating themselves into a traditional Chinese imperial framework and Chinese culture than their Turkic counter-parts into Arab culture. Even by the mid Qing dynasty, high court officials of Manchu decent would often not be able to actually speak Manchu. Going by memory, even some of the later Qing emperors could not speak Manchu. By the late 19th/early 20th century, the vast majority of Manchus only spoke Chinese. There's no equivalent of this w.r.t Turks in the Ottoman Empire.

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By the 1800s the Arab world had spent a significant amount of time under a single political unit. There's also Sunni Islam as a unifying force. It might be that the Arab world was always destined to be more fragmented, or it could simply be that China is more unified today because it avoided a sykes picot style partition of its core territories sometime in the 1800-1900s.

Ardennes posted:

By the 19th century, Ottoman sultans were also speaking French, which spoke of the culture ambiguity of the empire. The Qing largely assimilated into Chinese culture, while at least during the mid-19th century, the Ottomans were assimilating more into European culture. That said, Abdulhamid II did a bit of a u-turn on that trend.

This was compounded by demographics since Anatolian Turks themselves were largely lost in the shuffle until the end of the 19th/early 20th century.

Ardennes posted:

The issue most likely was there wasn't a single polity that could unify the Arab in the same way as the Republic of China could. At one point in the early/mid 19th century, it might have been Egypt, but obviously it didn't work out.

Also, despite ethnicity, China perhaps was simply too large and distant for a full occupation like what occupied in the Arab world. Western states could easily control its ports and settlements with fairly minimal investment and recieve most of the benefit (also for the British control of India came first).

Typo posted:

And a significant reason for this was that sykes picot delimited hard borders on the map, the Arab world outside of specific spots like Egypt also did not receive direct western occupation until after WWI. The borders only existed in the first place because the Ottomans miscalculated and chose to enter WWI on the losing side when they didn't need to enter the war at all.

gradenko_2000 posted:

very "not political" of her

whatever7 posted:

At least she is still not an adult (right?) What excuse does Joshua Wong have? Went to a Hong Kong university?

barkbell posted:

are people calling china fascist in this thread

Lambert posted:

I kinda enjoy that we've been getting this steady stream of "the coming China collapse"-type articles for literal decades now.

pointsofdata posted:

What makes it a "China collapsing" article? Seems sustainable.

quote:

Chinese prosecutors are dropping criminal charges against business owners in a desperate effort to rescue the country’s ailing private sector.

The decision to offer private sector executives immunity from punishment for criminal activities, including assault, hints at the extent to which Beijing is prepared to go to help companies grappling with one of the country’s worst debt crises.

In the past decade, there have been a record number of bond defaults while economic growth fell to a 30-year low in the third quarter of this year.