HISTORY REVISITED FROM AN EASTERN PERSPECTIVE

I would like to consider this to be a Eastern perspective of the histories of China and the World in the last 600 years.  We ll never agree on which history is right -- the West's or this one.  But at least, we may see why we dont agree.

For background information, I borrow LGK's accurately presented historical facts.(China’s slow road to Great Power status more a self-inflicted wound and our forum exchanges with Lau Guan Kim ) And I strongly recommend that all serious students of Chinese contemporary history to start with the, most plausible,  though semi-fictional, first book on World history  -- Gavin Menzies' 1421, The Year China Discovered the World.

LGK and I started off agreeing but ended up disagreeing.  Besides the different perspectives,  being an outsider to China but always on the cutting edges of America's scientific and military technologies for most part of my life, and, as a supercomputing nuclear analyst, I can be more independent and tends to go into greater details than him.

LGK>Reflecting way back to the 15th Century, China was derelict when after 1433 it scuttled the ships of Zheng He and forbade maritime exploration. ... The cause was rivalry between court Mandarins and the eunuchs. So it left a power vacuum whereby the Portuguese and Dutch, with their pillage and plundering, portended the future imperial forays by the Westerners and later the Japanese.

Menzies>(in joe's broken english)Zheng He, a eunuch since childhood, carried his "balls" in a golden cask always around him.  He wanted to preserve them for the next life. 

joe>Zheng He, like many other eunuchs, has basically forfeited his current life.  This made eunuchs the best of fighting men and generals.  (I almost wrote to Rumsfelt that he should build a large warehouse to hold the balls of soldiers before shipping them to Iraq).  They were, in short, desperados.  Being also Muslim didnt take anything away.  What Chinese in his right mind would risk his life the way Zheng did?

joe>And who were the court Mandarins?  Most probably the real Chinese, like u and I.  And what China did at that time was what Chinese really wanted.   I strongly suspect that we still would want that if given the choice today(except may for the 10% westernized, progressive, modern Chinese).

joe>And look at how the desperado bug spreaded across the globe.  Yes, the world entered this present AGE OF DESPERATION  just about that time.  We are so imbedded in it today we even look up to the then barbaric Portuguese, Dutch and other Westerners and their top student Japan.

LGK>Japan saw what was coming and the wakeup call came from Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 that set Japan feverishly on the road to modernisation under the Meiji Restoration.
joe>Japan should put Meiji in the same basket as China's Shoong Yat Sen for the 2 abombs and the vast slaughtering, respectively.  Shoong's revolution was no different from the Tai Ping Ten Kuo fiasco, the another and earlier Christian uprising, except Shoong was smart enough to hide the Christian crusading impetus.  Instead, the KMT bunch opted to clear out the Chinese treasury -- by becoming the first billionaire in the world in Texas, and a trillionaire in Taiwan.

LGK>With the Allied victory, China’s weak contribution of ambulance corps and other non-combatant ancillary services behind the frontline hardly impressed the Western Allies that under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, instead of reverting all German possession of Chinese territories to the Chinese, these were handed to the Japanese.
joe>China was never really in both world wars.  At best, they were just insurgences, minus suicide bombers.  One distinct characteristics during the wars, however, was the insurgents seemed to have their foreigner masters all tagged out.  This tradition even last to today.  Too bad for late-comer Japan, the earlier Western masters and their clonies did an excellent smearing job on the "fish-eyed", oriental-looking little Japs.(i suspect that's probably where and how many Chinese got their inferiority complex, too).

LGK>May Fourth Movement of 1919, which presaged what were to come in China’s painful birth pang to self-respect and modernity.
joe>self-respecting enough to be another student to the West?  Let me reiterate what I stated on my post:
monkey on mao's back.  mao was the one, and only one, who insisted that chinese could all go starving, but china must never ever lose her self-respect again.

LGK>Jiang Jieshi ... had more than 10,000 of China’s best and brightest massacred
joe>very christian of him.

LGK> (about Korea war)Omar Bradley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon was to say, “We fought the wrong war with a wrong enemy and at the wrong place.” The enemy was USSR and the place Europe.
joe>a war with ussr in europe?  we need to throw the shithead Churchill into the same basket for scheming up the nonsensical cold war.  Look how evil the russian bear is now it comes out the den.

LGK>A sad epilogue to this was P eng D ehuai was incarcerated after he opposed M ao’s disastrous economic policy under the G reat L eap F oprward in 1958. M ao imprisoned him; P eng was badly beaten and suffered poor health later. He died a broken man.
joe>too bad he did not see that there was still a monkey on china's back.(shall i add, the world still dont see that there once was a gozilla, named hitler, on stalin's back).

LGK>As for the conflict in the Middle East, it is not all just war, and I doubt it was religion. ... the Euro ...a reprisal for 911 ... Oil is just incidental, ...wrong hands.
joe>israel's turning hawkish(typical of democracy) after clinton's failure to negotiate a treaty was the cause of everything. the major support for iraq war in america comes from the jesus faithfuls.  this kind of religion based conflict is a strong warning sign of the age of desperation.  the 911's greatest effect was derailing bush's scheme on china, initiated by the spy plane accident and dissipated by iraq war and smell of oil.  i wonder how many americans are aware of the fact that there is upward of 1/3chinese who are muslim-ancesteral(someone, maybe a muslim chinese, told me that).


LGK>I have just almost finished a book on New York Times’ best seller list: “Genghis Khan and the Making of a Modern World., ” by Jack Weatherford.
joe>my brother with a lot connection with mongol has very high praise for the fighting skills of mongols --
they could actually sleep on a horse during long military marches.  my reply to that was: the chinese were more powerful -- they turn the mongols into chinese.

CONCLUSION:

I truly believe it's not conclusive yet that China has done badly in the last 600 years, or even the 200 bloody years.  We resisted progress in order to protect mother nature and the people in it.  We could have risked mutual slaughtering if choosing to go down Zheng He's path, like in the European theater of the world war.  By allowing ourselves to be unilaterally slaughtered(remember my insurgence theory), we in effect preserved humanity.  Now we hold the key to wake up the rest of the world to humanity by simply proclaiming that we forgive all the barbarism that have been inflicted on us.

To this day, China has resisted the notion of MAD(mutual annahilation deterent)by letting her military capability staying below even that of israel.  China's has alwasys been going on a path of cultural unification -- that's how we got so big.  I say: keep going.





1.41 HOLLOWING OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

1.42 EQUALITY OR ILLQUALIT

1.43 IMAGINE, BY JOHN LENON

1.44 IRONY OF AMERICA

1.45 JAPS AND JAPANESE

1.46 JAPAN'S SALVATION

1.47 JEWISH ARE CHOSEN TO CHOOSE

1.48 KEY TO TECHNOLOGY FOR CHINA

1.49 PROBLEM WITH LANGUAGE IN CHINA

1.50 LANGUAGE REFORM IN CHINA

1.51 LGK, A EASTJOURNEYMAN

1.52 LEE DAN WHEY, MEIJI, SUN YAT SEN

1.53 LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD

1.54 LGK VS JOE

1.55 LOTUS OF A NATION

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