Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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Karn
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Karn »

A good reading i had on this topic was when i came across in understanding the Chinese outlook is the book "The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era" by Liu Mingfu. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N7 ... UTF8&psc=1

There is a strong emphasis of ethnic identity, historical glory, and an urgent need to restore a dominant position of prominence to China on the global stage. While the author argues that as the next hegemon (or Champion Nation) China will build a world order, he remains vague as to how the order will work. The roadmap to get there is also mostly military and economic development but the purpose is to stay out of conflict while developing leadership role.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

Interactive map of China and its dynasties

http://archive.artsmia.org/art-of-asia/ ... p.cfm.html
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by venkat_kv »

ramana wrote:Interactive map of China and its dynasties

http://archive.artsmia.org/art-of-asia/ ... p.cfm.html
Ramana Saar,
Is this an accurate portrayal of the chinese dynasties. it says essentially that the last dynasty of Ching was controlling China from mid 1600 - 1912. this map shows all the claims of modern china. Wasn't China defeated by European powers and shouldn't they have to make concessions to the same Europeans for areas.

And also I believe Tibet was allied with the Chings, not overtly ruled by them when the British went through with their boundary claims. or is this a confuscious institute claim of modern china's territorial ambitions.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Shwetank »

Student leaders with the aura of CCP officials; Militarized educational model get popular in China.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Shwetank »

This channel has two western guys who have lived and bike around in China for years, glimpses of everyday life but also lots of stuff from rural areas and underground stuff you don't see in mainstream media. Had good video on ghost cities before, this is a followup with Evergrande failure.
Lots of shoddy construction and out of control real estate speculation plenty of footage of crumbling recently built development. Even expensive high end villas start crumbling within 3 years and people never moved in. Having to constantly move from apartments every few months because prices would go up and owner would sell, real estate agents showing up at mid-night to show clients without heads up every day of the week.

When govt. comes to knock down decaying buildings in land reclamation, the more stories you have the more compensation you get so put as many additions as possible when you know that will happen then move a short distance and repeat building and demolition cycle. Also interesting comments from people with construction experience discussing the quality and corruption problems with building materials.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Rudradev »

Shwetank wrote:Student leaders with the aura of CCP officials; Militarized educational model get popular in China.
While in the West, institutions of higher education compete to turn out the most nauseating of Woke flag-burner aandolanjeevis.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Cyrano »

The quality and durability of public works and private construction are generational wealth. Evergrande collapse is just a ponzi scheme going bust. The killer blow comes a bit later when all those tofu houses collapse and bankrupt people have no where to live.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by sanjaykumar »

If a Muslim stubs his toe in India it’s front page NYT.

But I have never seen coverage of tofu dregs buildings i. That hallowed paper. But then RSS doesn’t pay them to print their news.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Cyrano »

Property prices are falling since several months now, if the outstanding liabilities of RE co.s fall well below their asset value, negative cashflow cannot be overcome, defaults will create a spiral domino effect and the whole industry will go under. The assets themselves are of very poor quality construction and most will fall apart in a few years.

RE sector pulls the construction sector, which in turn pulls cement, steel and a whole bunch of other mfg. So the ripples will be felt across the economy.

For common Chinese, lifetime savings gone, a mountain of debt remains, the property itself will be worthless to live in. Given the demographics, the effects will be disastrous on the whole population.

Comparing to India, RE bubbles are never this huge since market forces are not manipulated by Indian govt. Property is owned perpetually, not on a 70 year lease on Govt land.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by hanumadu »

Watch this video in conjunction with the article below.



https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/S ... logy-slows
"Our mainstay lithography machines are 90 nanometer models. Our 28 nm and 14 nm models have room for improvement in terms of yield rates," said an engineer from Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, which is almost the sole Chinese semiconductor equipment maker that has come to commercialize lithography machines.
U.S. research firm IC Insights in January predicted that China's self-sufficiency ratio for semiconductors would be only 19.4% in 2025. This was a slight downward correction after the firm in 2020 predicted the ratio would rise to 20.7% by 2024. It also noted that over half of the ratio was accounted for by mainland China units of overseas manufacturers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), and South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, with the self-sufficiency ratio that involves only Chinese manufacturers estimated at around 10%.
The government now seldom mentions the 70% self-sufficiency target laid out in its Made in China 2025 industrial policy.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by vijayk »

https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1 ... mp4?tag=14

A major leak from Beijing has exposed Chinese President Xi Jinping. Files bearing the classification "secret" and "top secret" reveal how the Chinese president ordered the genocide against Uighurs in #Xinjiang.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by sanjaykumar »



A deeply embedded part of Chinese culture is the organised enslavement of women and children. Deeply disturbing viewing. There is no schadenfreude here. This has made me lose regard for China more than the man-made famines, the mass robotisation of a people, the genocidal expansionism.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

In East Asia since the Empire days, debtors' children would be kidnapped and sold into slavery. Worse after the death of the master sold back into slavery.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ricky_v »

ft article
https://archive.ph/vL0b4
The male beauty rebellion in China
Chinese president Xi Jinping has tried to halt the rise of niang pao, a slur meaning “sissy boys”, as he attempts to reform the country’s youth culture and encourage masculinity.
But as Xi approaches his second decade in power, he might have to get used to Chinese men with a penchant for smoky eyeliner and fake eyelashes — and the companies catering to them.
He now uses Xiaohongshu — a Chinese super app that is a blend of Pinterest, Instagram, Amazon and TripAdvisor — to post videos on topics such as the “benefits of wearing press-on nails at [the] workplace as a dude”. Xi Er rates a clutch of new Chinese brands among his favourites.
Men’s beauty is still a fraction of the broader Chinese market, yet it is expanding quickly, in line with other Asian markets including South Korea and Japan. Goldman Sachs has forecast total cosmetics spending in China will hit $120bn by 2026, from about $82bn in 2021.
Chinese brands including DearBoyFriend and Make Essence are booming, reports Jing Daily, a specialist publication covering China’s luxury market, in part because they directly market to first-time make-up users, initiating them into the beauty world.
Mark Tanner, managing director of China Skinny, a Shanghai-based market research group, pointed out a paradox: younger Chinese consumers are increasingly patriotic but “toe the line less”. This means many prefer to support local brands but shrug off the “sissy boy” crackdown.
“The post-95s are among the most nationalistic of the consumers we’ve seen in a long time. At the same time, they are much more independent . . . and not being too conforming,” Tanner said.
“Korea, in particular, was ahead of the curve for the ‘effeminate men’ craze . . . It is not just a case of showing up any more with a ‘Made in Korea’ sticker on the back. But it is like this with just about every category, and every foreign brand . . . you’ve got to work a lot harder.”
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Rudradev »

ricky_v wrote:ft article
https://archive.ph/vL0b4
The male beauty rebellion in China
...
“Korea, in particular, was ahead of the curve for the ‘effeminate men’ craze . . . It is not just a case of showing up any more with a ‘Made in Korea’ sticker on the back. But it is like this with just about every category, and every foreign brand . . . you’ve got to work a lot harder.”
This makes absolute sense.

The feminization of East Asian countries was attempted first in South Korea (a common test bed for Western social engineering experiments in the PRC). We have been seeing evidence of this worldwide.

If you have (or know) any young children or teenagers, you may very well have heard the terms "K-Pop" and "BTS". This is a genre of Korean pop music that has become unbelievably popular worldwide among that cohort. It is curious because there is nothing musically unique about it, it's inane bubblegum, and it's not even in a language most people can understand.

How then did it happen?

Did deliberate hyper-promotion through YouTube, Google, Instagram and other algorithms have a role to play?

The answer becomes clearer if you do an image search for these K-Pop stars. See what they look like. They fit the 'effeminate men' East-Asian look to a T. They are in fact both the aesthetic and aspirational models for this craze.

Aspirational because, like many postcolonial Asian countries, the Koreans LOVE being recognized by the white West for their cultural (including pop-cultural) contributions. I don't need to tell you how true this is of most Indians, too, by the way.

This is how it works.

1) Use the marketing of "male beauty" products to middle-class and rich citizens of Asian countries, to encourage experimentation with an "effeminate men" look.

2) Pretend at one level that it's purely an aesthetic style. But use it, in effect, to subvert native social norms with those of Critical Gender Theory developed in US universities. You can read Rajiv Malhotra's "Snakes in the Ganga" (or many other sources) to find out what those are, and why they are extraordinarily dangerous for societies.

3) Next, take mediocre local singers/actors who adopt the "effeminate men" style and use social-media algorithms to turn them into international superstars.

4) This produces a snowball effect.

Firstly, the citizens of the Asian country where these pop-stars hail from feel "proud of the international recognition" in that typical post-colonial effect. If something in our country is "impressing the West", we should embrace it and do more of it, no? Never mind where it comes from.

Secondly, because of the sheer commercial success of the first wave of K-Pop bands, thousands of other aspiring Korean musicians imitate the same style. Whole industries in Korea (clothing, makeup, marketing, media) embrace or come up with major investments in fueling and continuing the craze. So-- by weight of sheer monetary incentive, what was once a fringe phenomenon of youth experimentation becomes THE dominant, mainstream modality of male self-expression in Korea (or whatever Asian country is targeted).

5) Effectively, an irrepressible gateway has been created for Critical Gender Theory to poison and subvert a whole generation of Korean society. Irrepressible both because of national pride ("oh, look how famous these fem-boys are making Korean music worldwide!") and because of commercial incentivization.

No one realizes until it's far too late what kind of damage is being done.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ricky_v »

Rudradev wrote: If you have (or know) any young children or teenagers, you may very well have heard the terms "K-Pop" and "BTS". This is a genre of Korean pop music that has become unbelievably popular worldwide among that cohort. It is curious because there is nothing musically unique about it, it's inane bubblegum, and it's not even in a language most people can understand.
It is an interesting thing, chinese men have insane levels of competition and yet many of their females marry outside their ethnicity, it is not strange to observe older white men with relatively younger asian females quite regularly in anglo countries, the haste with which younger anglos are swarmed by the chinese female horde is like gazing at the serengeti migration, the chinese men have, imo coped by finding solace in homolust and by posting in r/aznidentity.

Now, draining your balls in another man's rectum does not do much for society, save for the fact that such demographics have historically been voracious shoppers and help the government of the day by moving gewgaws and shiny trinkets and in taxation, but are of not much use otherwise. I am reminded of the writings during weimar germany, when one italian writer who was visiting berlin wrote that one could find establishments where in one setting, one could sodomise a duck, torture and strangle it and have it cooked according to his tastes.

We have not reached such situations in the east, by many reports, berlin has reverted back to such form, and it would depend on Xi's vision to see where the chinese are headed, stable families do not make good consumers, the perpetually adrift who seek identity in material goods do; yet, for all his talks of romance of three kingdoms, the populace is permanently broken, and such feminisation would continue apace.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by sanjaykumar »

There is also a meme that the dumpy white man who would otherwise be an incel hooks up with an Asian. It’s complicated.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by S_Madhukar »

So the K-pop effeminate boys craze is justified as a soft rebellion in a country where hierarchy is strong and for women who generally rank bottom this is a way of being entertained before the boys go to the army service and come back as the hierarchy abiding drones for the corporates. Does wonders for the cosmetics companies and plastic surgeons who have a firm clientele in Asia now and helps cement American culture gradually replacing the native Buddhist/Shinto/Confucian norms which were on the decline anyway due to rising capitalism. Nobody uses social media better in Asia than Korea and they swamp YouTube etc once you watch them. Also America is considered more of a protector than ruler like China is so permeation of American culture specially through non traditional media like social is spectacular.(note India!)

I think the Chinese are trying hard imitating Japan/Korea usually with their Wuxia dramas (and plastic surgery)and also allowing Chinese to be part of K-pop etc but it usually backfires when they start making nationalistic statements and the language itself doesn’t lend itself to become popular. But they have a large diaspora so who knows what impact they will have in the future once the K craze dies down a bit.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

Harvard Uty has many courses in Chinese Studies at UG, Graduate, and PhD levels.
Here is a course catalog.

https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/news/f ... t-harvard/

Now can someone post course catalogs at the various China studies centers in India?
For example JNU and IITM?
ramana
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

I plan to post course descriptions for the non-language courses to get a window into China.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

JNU Center for East Asia

https://www.jnu.ac.in/sis/ceas

List of courses offered: https://www.jnu.ac.in/sites/default/fil ... es2021.pdf

List of courses offered in Monsoon: https://www.jnu.ac.in/sites/default/fil ... se2020.pdf
#10 "Development and Inequality in India and China"
is the only comparative study of India and China and is a dummkopf course.

Where is any course that looks at China through Indian eyes?
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

IIT Madras claims to be a premier China studies center.
Its website is down for maintenance!
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Denis »

The Hill: Ten years ago, we got Xi Jinping wrong. On his coronation, we should reflect on why.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-se ... ct-on-why/
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

Denis, That hill article is posted in the 20th Congress thread and was discussed there.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

ramana wrote:Harvard Uty has many courses in Chinese Studies at UG, Graduate, and PhD levels.
Here is a course catalog.

https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/news/f ... t-harvard/

Now can someone post course catalogs at the various China studies centers in India?
For example JNU and IITM?
Some courses are being taught at Harvard. I am ignoring the language ones
Authoritarian Superpower: The Political Economy of Modern China
David Yang, ECON 1133

The rise of China is undoubtedly one of the great dramas of the 21st century. This course provides an overview of China’s economy and its politics, as well as China’s relationship with the world. We aim to understand modern China with an appreciation of China’s past and its connection to other parts of the globe.

The course offers insights on a number of puzzles of a rising authoritarian superpower, and overturns several conventional wisdoms in political economy. In the course, you will learn about topics such as: (1) What drives China’s economic development? What explains its rise? (2) What are the key forces of stability and forces of change in modern China? (3) How does China engage with the world, and what are the implications of China’s rise for the world?

The objectives of the course are three-fold: (1) to learn about important institutional and contextual knowledge of China; (2) to use China as a lens to understand authoritarian regimes, as well as basic political economy frameworks that are more generally applicable; and (3) to learn about empirical methods through exposure to big data on China, frontier academic research, and occasionally case-study style discussions.

The Political Economy of Globalization
Lawrence Summers, Robert Lawrence, GENED 1120, BGP 625

The rise of China is undoubtedly one of the great dramas of the 21st century. This course provides an overview of China’s economy and its politics, as well as China’s relationship with the world. We aim to understand modern China with an appreciation of China’s past and its connection to other parts of the globe. The course offers insights on a number of puzzles of a rising authoritarian superpower, and overturns several conventional wisdoms in political economy. In the course, you will learn about topics such as: (1) What drives China’s economic development? What explains its rise? (2) What are the key forces of stability and forces of change in modern China? (3) How does China engage with the world, and what are the implications of China’s rise for the world? The objectives of the course are three-fold: (1) to learn about important institutional and contextual knowledge of China; (2) to use China as a lens to understand authoritarian regimes, as well as basic political economy frameworks that are more generally applicable; and (3) to learn about empirical methods through exposure to big data on China, frontier academic research, and occasionally case-study style discussions.

How can a globalizing world of differing countries – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – best promote inclusive growth and human security by meeting the challenges of inequality, climate change, rising populism, war, and global disease?Why is populism becoming pervasive – and is there a revolt against global integration? What is the right balance between national sovereignty and international integration? Is the US equipped to sustain its role as a global leader? How does international trade affect prosperity and inequality? Should we regulate multi-national companies who move their factories to countries with lower labor standards? How should the IMF respond to financial crises in Europe and the developing world? How will the rise of China change the world system? This course uses basic economic logic to illuminate the choices – and trade-offs – faced by governments, international institutions, businesses, and citizens as the global economy evolves. Our course is based on the premise that passion without careful reason is dangerous and that reliance on solid analytics and rigorous empirical evidence will lead to a better world. Policy issues are debated in class by the professors and guest speakers, and students will participate in simulated negotiations on US climate policy and the US-China economic relationship, experiencing the issues firsthand, as well as illustrating the importance of decisions made by individual actors for the evolution of the global system.

Modern China: 1894-Present
Arunabh Ghosh, HIST 1602

This lecture course will provide a survey of some of the major issues in the history of post-imperial China (1912- ). Beginning with the decline of the Qing and the dramatic collapse of China’s imperial system in 1911, the course shall examine how China has sought to redefine itself anew over the past one-hundred years. The revolutionary years of 1911, 1949, and 1978 will serve as our three fulcra, as we investigate how China has tussled with a variety of ‘isms’ (such as republicanism, militarism, nationalism, socialism, and state capitalism) in its pursuit of an appropriate system of governance and social organization. In so doing, we shall also explore the social, economic, cultural, and scientific changes wrought by these varied attempts at state-building.

The United States and China: Opium War to the Present
Erez Manela, HIST 89J

This research seminar will focus on the history of Sino-American relations and interactions since the Opium War (1840s). It will examine major episodes such as the Boxer intervention, the first and second world wars, the Korea and Vietnam wars, the Mao-Nixon rapprochement, and the post-Mao transformations, and explore central themes such as immigration, trade, culture, diplomacy, and security.

Engaging China
William Alford, HLS 2650

This one unit course will examine the role that China has been playing in a world order in flux. Models of development, trade, and rights are among the areas likely to be addressed. We will consider, inter alia, China’s engagement of existing global norms, ways in which China may (or may not) now or in the foreseeable future be shaping such norms, and their impact on China. The intention is to hold three of our likely six 2-hour sessions of the class jointly with a comparable class at Renmin University of China, via electronic means — hence, our evening meeting times. Each session will cover a specific topic. In past years topics have included trade, law and development, rights (through the prism of disability rights), the legal profession, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, climate change, foreign investment, and the roles of the US and China in Africa – with the precise configuration from among these to be determined closer to the start of the semester. We have each year done with a mock negotiation jointly with students from Renmin University School of Law and hope to do so again in AY 22-23.

Tibet and China
Lobsang Sangay, HLS 3182

This Reading Group will focus on the question of and solutions for Tibet. It will look at the historical status of Tibet and the current situation of the Tibetan people. The class will examine the guarantees and practices of national minority rights under the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China in light of international human rights standards. Do China’s guarantees respecting national minority rights meet international standards regarding the right to self-determination or the protection of minorities? Might reference to the rights of indigenous people be helpful? The approach of the seminar will be to interrogate the best ways to address these issues and find solutions. We will look at the evolution and major changes in the stand of the Dalai Lama from seeking independence, to what he has described as a zone of peace for Tibet, and finally to “genuine autonomy for Tibetan people” within the framework of the Constitution of the PRC. His efforts have included nine rounds of dialogue between envoys of the Dalai Lama and the PRC government. We will also explore comparative issues of Hong Kong and Xinjiang to understand PRC approaches toward regional autonomy. The Reading Group will also explore the unique approach of the Dalai Lama in developing a democratic polity in exile, as well as complex religious issues relating to reincarnation and religious freedom. Finally, we will examine the US Tibetan Policy and Support Act of 2020 to understand the role of the US government in respect of political, diplomatic and legal obligations relating to Tibet and its people.

Real Estate and City Making in China
Bing Wang, ADV 9127

Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the construct of vital urbanism: from conceiving an idea to constructing complex structures; from sourcing funding to creating master-planned communities; and from negotiating design forms to implementing urban public realms.

A country like China is at once experiencing rapid urbanization while undergoing unprecedented transformation in the mechanism of city making: the forces of real estate and the shifting roles played by public and private sectors are constantly challenging conventional city building models, while defining and redefining their positions in the production of the built environment.

This course focuses on the interdependence between real estate and city making. It addresses both theoretical and empirical investigations on the concepts and paradigms that have shaped and are still shaping real estate practices and their impact on contemporary Chinese cities. It analyzes emergent real estate and urban development strategies, their respective financing structures, underlying domain expertise and urban organizational hierarchy. Thus, the pedagogical approaches of the course are as following:

1. to introduce students to frameworks in approaching an unfamiliar real estate market

2. to familiarize students with many aspects of real estate issues, especially those intersected with physical urban design and planning methods and perspectives

3. to expose students the linkage between real estate and city making parameters using China as a case study

Students will work independently and in teams on selected themes to identify critical forces in real estate development and investment: how key real estate players, domestic or international, have formed their central business strategies, interacted with capital markets, and participated in the city-making process to facilitate and drive the formation of the built environment; and how emergent private sector leaders are integrating human capital, financial capital, and design intelligence, to reshape the form and composition of urban centers within China and beyond. With the investigative research framework set at the beginning of the semester and guided by the instructor’s lectures each week, students will proceed to examine the city making process through the lens of real estate, design, planning, finance, and land ownership structure, in parallel with readings and class discussions, to anticipate the trajectory of contemporary real estate development and city making.

Seminar: Unpacking the US-China Rivalry
Andy Zelleke, HBSMBA 1515

The US-China bilateral relationship is in its worst shape since the two nations normalized diplomatic relations in 1979. The deterioration in Sino-American relations, and the intensely competitive rivalry that has developed, have important implications for the rest of the world, including the business sector. This module-length course has two principal goals: (i) to leave students with a significantly better understanding of this most consequential bilateral relationship, and of the multiple dimensions of the rivalry; and (ii) to expose students to a range of perspectives, encouraging them to challenge and refine their own.

Among the rivalry dimensions on which class sessions will focus are the competitions (i) of economies and political systems; (ii) for national security; (iii) for technology leadership; and (iv) for “global leadership” (as each principal conceives it). The course will be reading-intensive. It will not be case-based. It will emphasize practitioner-oriented readings (e.g. articles from Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy; Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, RAND and Belfer Center reports; book chapters; speeches, transcripts and official policy statements); along with a few articles from scholarly journals. The course will also feature guest speakers (1-2 of whom may need to be scheduled outside class hours to accommodate speaker schedules/time zones). Assigned readings and guest speakers will represent a diversity of views. The course aims to help students further refine the substantive world views they will have been developing at HBS, while enhancing capacity for perspective-taking and empathy.

Students will likely find that the course will afford them an opportunity to productively draw on concepts and frameworks from multiple HBS courses they will have taken.

A broad range of students should find this course interesting and relevant. Among them: those for whom the subject matter is intrinsically fascinating; those who expect that Sino-American geopolitics may significantly impact the broad context of their professional lives; and those whose careers (e.g. in strategy consulting, corporate leadership, equity investing) may be still more directly shaped by the evolution of this pivotal bilateral relationship.

Readings in Modern Chinese History: Proseminar
Arunabh Ghosh, HIST 2638

This Pro-Seminar will examine developments in the field of modern Chinese history, with a particular focus on the twentieth century. Our principal goal is to gain some familiarity with the historical debates and methodological approaches that have given shaped to the field. Readings will aim to achieve a balance between classics in the field and contemporary scholarship. Topics covered include empire and semi-colonialism, rebellion and revolution, nationalism, civil society and public sphere, economic development, war, science and technology, foreign relations, and foreign relations. This Pro-Seminar is particularly recommended for students planning an examination field in modern Chinese history. Reading knowledge of Chinese is recommended but not required; students must have some prior coursework in Chinese history.

Early Chinese Ethics
Seth Robertson, PHIL 109

Early (Pre-Qin era) China was a hotbed of philosophical activity: scholars developed careful and fascinating ethical views in the context of serious philosophical debates between major schools of thought. This course focuses on some of these ethical debates between Confucian, Mohist, Daoist, and Legalist philosophers in early China. We’ll read both classical texts such as the Analects of Confucius, Mengzi, Xunzi, Mozi, and Zhuangzi and important contemporary scholarship on these texts. Several moral questions will be of particular importance: What is the relationship between etiquette and morality? What are the most important virtues to acquire? Should we think of morality and moral development as something natural or artificial? Are we justified in caring more about some people (our closest friends and family) than others? We will have a special focus on three important interpretive themes for the course: (1) How can understanding the particular contours of the debates each scholar is engaged in help us understand their overall views? (2) How does each philosopher’s view of human psychology and epistemology constrain, guide, and support their moral theorizing? (3) How can an understanding of early Chinese ethical thought, theory, and debate help enrich contemporary discussions in ethics and moral philosophy? No previous experience or coursework in Chinese philosophy is required for this course.

Central Challenges of American National Security, Strategy, and the Press
Graham Allison, David Sanger, Derek Reveron, GOV 1796, IGA 211

From the rise of China and resurgence of Russia, to the ongoing war in Ukraine, and North Korea and Iran’s advancing nuclear weapons programs, challenges in the Middle East, Central Asia, East Africa, and emergence of cyber conflict, this course examines the central challenges to American national security. Through a series of mini cases, students address these issues as if they were professionals at the National Security Council working for the President or an assistant to the Secretary of State or Defense. In response to specific assignments, students write Strategic Options Memos that require analyzing the challenge, assessing the current strategy, and identifying alternative strategies for protecting and advancing national interests.Assignments require strategic thinking: analyzing dynamics of issues, formulating key judgements, and developing feasible strategies. In the real world of Washington today, this means thinking clearly about what the US is attempting to achieve in the world in the midst of a swirl of a government whose deliberations are often discombobulated by leaks, press reports, tweets, and fake news. A sub-theme of the course explores ways in which pervasive press coverage intrudes, sometimes informing, sometimes distorting, national security decision making. In addition, the course will include several related side bars where we will discuss Applied History, “behind the veil” at a major newspaper, strategy (as taught at the Naval War College), structured analytical techniques, and basic numeracy. This course is open by instructor consent. Students interested in taking the course should email Chris Li (christopher_li@hks.harvard.edu) and Michael Miner (miner@g.harvard.edu) with a copy of their resumes to request the required student information form.

And my favorite:
Modern Ink Landscape
Eugene Wang, HAA 184G

Ink painting, a distinct pictorial medium of East Asian art, had its moments of crisis in the 20th century. How to modernize it became a pressing concern and contested matter for generations of artists and theorists. This course traces the historical trajectory of the modernization of ink painting in the Sinosphere. It examines how 20th century painters engaged and negotiated the burden of tradition, and how their own circumstances affected and inflected the disposition of their works. Comparisons are drawn among artists based in different parts of the Sinosphere, who approached the matter differently. Special focus is on the group of artists or artists-to-be who migrated from mainland China to Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1949. Questions raised include: How does the medium take on “modernity”? How does ink landscapes map out a mindscape? Is it a language of thought? Can the “ineffable” medium acquire a “voice” and how? Conducted in the Harvard Art Museum study center, the course aligns the first-hand close-looking of artworks in the museum collection with historicizing and theoretical perspectives. Enrollment limited to 15.
The last course is my favorite for it gives a fascinating window into the non-verbal Chinese mind.

While reading XJP speech he was referring to the willow garden and the symbolism was lost on the Western audience. So garden paintings are a mindscape.

Harvard should also have a course on the Four great novels: the settings, the themes, when they were written down, and why?
Pratyush
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by Pratyush »



An interview with Shyam Saran about the historical view of Indian from the Chinese.
ramana
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ramana »

RUSI Podcast on Sun Tzu:
https://www.rusi.org/podcasts/talking-s ... ic-thought

The transcript is also there.

Talking Strategy Podcast – Season 2

Episode 1: Sun Tzu - Classical Chinese Strategic Thought with Dr Peter Lorge

Beatrice Heuser. We are joined from the U.S. today by Dr. Peter Lorge. Dr. Lorge is an associate professor of pre-modern Chinese and military history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently The Beginner's Guide to Imperial China that came out in 2021, and perhaps most famously so far, the Asian Military Revolution From Gunpowder to the Bomb, which came out with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Peter Lorge has two forthcoming books: ‘Documents from Early Chinese History’, which is a sourcebook for pre-modern Chinese history, written with Scott Pierce, and ‘Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War ', which explores both the writings of Sunzi and the impact it had on Western thinking, especially in the last half-century.

Now, just about everything that I know about Sunzi I know from Professor Peter Lorge. Let's start with your foreseeably shocking answers to my question. Did Sunzi exist? When did he exist - if he was just one person? Over to you!

Peter Lorge. Well, he did not exist. Modern scholarship is absolutely certain about this, but premodern scholarship also recognized that this was not an individual and it's not an author. If you read the text in classical Chinese, you can see very different language. Some chapters are composed clearly by piecing together from other chapters, other pieces of work, and a lot of the ideas were pre-existing. So, we have a text, some say of the third century BCE. It seems to be a compilation of aphorisms and bits of wisdom. Notice the numbered lists and those of you who are in the military, you're very familiar with the notion of a checklist: there are seven kinds of this, or three kinds of that, or nine things that I need to do. And so what you'll see is the markers of what was presumably an oral tradition; of a school of thought that developed over time, and then was organised and redone and redone.

But from the third century BCE, we start having actual archaeological digs where we're finding fragments or significant chunks of the Sunzi text which are pretty consistent with what we have now. So, what we have is a good transmission for over 2000 years from what it originally was. But there was no “Master Sun”. Or if there was, he's not some guy who sat down at one point in time and wrote it down. There might have been a school of thought certainly by the third century and before people knew about Sunzi as a text and early Chinese concepts of authorship are a whole other field: it's not sort of our notion that we have now of I am sitting in my office writing a text. It's much more fluid. With Confucius, “Master Kong”, it’s the same thing: he becomes a very famous person, and then there are actually something like hundreds, if not thousands of stories using Confucius (as a character). There was, in fact, an actual man in that case. But in the case of Master Sunzi, there might have been some guy at some point, but not the author of the text.

Beatrice Can you just enlighten us for a moment about the pronunciation?

Peter In modern Mandarin, it would be “Swindze”. Sunzi comes out of Romanisation. That is really not used anymore, except from some very old scholars who are still clinging to it for reasons which escape me.

Beatrice You realise that anybody who will listen to this podcast in future will say ‘Swindze’, so we can always identify the people who listen to us. Brilliant. Okay. Tell us more about the military, the war context of the period in which this the first evidence for this text actually appears.

Peter So, what we're what we're looking at with Sunzi is the result of a transformation in society, in warfare, from an aristocratic system of warfare; of aristocrats riding chariots, fighting other aristocrats with chariots, and then backing them up with fairly small groups of not that well-trained infantry. And what happens in the Spring and Autumn Period, we have a transition to the Warring States Period where the army size gets larger. The chariot forces become much less important. And we have the rise of professional generals as opposed to aristocrats who happen to have a chariot. And so, if you ever read Mark Edward Lewis’ classic account of this ‘Sanctioned Violence in Early China’ is really the best source for that.2 And when you read Sunzi, you will see him talking about how you shouldn't wage war in that old-timey fashion: you don't wage war because the ruler just wants to wage war. You start getting notions of raison d’état [reasons of state]; that there is a higher strategic value for states that goes beyond just the feelings of the ruler, and that fighting, and war, needs to be done rationally. And this is, of course, why Sunzi actually makes a lot of sense when he gets [translated into] French in 1772, because it keys into this Enlightenment notion of rational warfare.

As you start getting larger armies, of course, where you're fighting more extended battles, you have to start having logistics. You have to march tens of thousands of men. You have to supply them with weapons. You have to move them across the land. You have to keep them fed. And this is a radical change from the Spring and Autumn Period aristocrats; this transition to professional generals, is very profound. It also is a radical difference in what happens in China, in Chinese political development, as compared to Europe., because Chinese emperors, the first emperor is usually a general, may be the second, but Chinese emperors don't usually go to warfare, and there's no concept that they really should. And that comes out of this early Chinese shift in ideology, which comes out of this shift in warfare. Whereas In Europe, you still have rulers actually on the battlefields for centuries more; in China generally, emperors usually don't go to war. And that's a very big difference. You know, the generals are professionals. And Sunzi feeds into this intellectual tradition and this ideological concept of professional generals.

Beatrice When you were talking about how to pronounce the name itself, you were already doing something which I particularly respect you for. Namely, why one should really read the texts in the original Chinese. And this means that one should know ancient Chinese. And I personally trust nobody who claims to know something about Sunzi who does not actually read ancient Chinese. So please tell us why there are so many problems with translating Sunzi into modern English.

Peter Okay. So, we run into multiple layers of problems here. If we set aside the archaeological, you know, technical, epigraphy issues. Our concepts don't map directly onto ancient Chinese concepts. Over the last 2000 years, the commentarial tradition has disagreements about what certain passages mean. There's antiquarian issues, there's linguistic issues, and then there's sort of strategic and conceptual issues. You know, did this character change and if it did, why? What did that term mean in its time? And then we get into people reading passages differently, and then we go back and we read a text in which the terms do not map directly onto modern English terms. And we are trying to simplify that meaning down to one meaning. And the commentaries are arguing about what this passage means. The translator, for at least the popular audience, (and I generally don't write for the popular audience) has to choose a meaning out of a set of meanings that don't map directly onto our concept. And of course, the obvious one here is the Zheng-Qi issue, the orthodox-unorthodox or direct-indirect. I just had someone sent me a translation that they did and they tried to use linear-nonlinear. This concept of what it means to be orthodox or “direct”, versus unorthodox or “indirect”, is basically insoluble. This is very much [the influence of the ideas of] B.H. Liddell Hart3, not really Chinese. And so, if you read modern Chinese interpretations of these passages, they were again different from the Western readings of it. And so we have a text that has many, many meanings. And if you ask a translator to simplify it down to one meaning, it doesn't work very well.

Beatrice Could you unpack that a little bit more? What's the story about direct-indirect, linear-non-linear, orthodox-unorthodox?

Peter We run into a conceptual issue here where we have a lot of baggage that we bring to it in the West and it's very hard to get away from it, both because of all the business concepts of using “strategy”.

One of the points that Sunzi makes (and it comes out of other Chinese concepts as well), is that we're not talking about an absolute fixed designation of something being orthodox and something else being unorthodox. So, if let's say, I trick you in some way in whatever conflict we're in, the first time I do, it might be unorthodox, it might be trickery. The second time I do it, it starts to become orthodox. So, if I start doing something the same way, something which starts out as unorthodox, can become orthodox. Something that starts out as indirect becomes direct, because then I keep doing it. Our concept seems to be much more a sense of orthodox or direct, which is to say force on force clash, which our modern military spends a lot of time trying not to do: we want deep strikes, we want to go around the flanks. And to anyone who’s read Jomini or Clausewitz4, this is not unfamiliar. And so, the argument is: what is effective? The late Peter Boodberg made an argument of a slightly different version of the term Zheng as to fix in place. And then Qi is to topple. So, you make a conventional attack that fixes your opponent in place and then you swing around them - that's the unconventional. But that's not unconventional, right? Because we know that we're doing that. So, our translation runs into a serious problem, which is how do we make clear what he means?

One of the things I was always taught when you do martial arts is you “train” your opponent: you do something a several times, so the opponent begins to expect something, and then you do something else. And now the question is, “is that a Zheng strategy because I was taught it?” So now it's an orthodox strategy to use a Zheng technique to set them up and a Qi technique, an indirect, technique to defeat them. Even from a teaching perspective, I had someone who told me they had Oh, somebody colleague came into the class. They taught this wonderful class. Through the students off completely on what they did. They all had this wonderful learning experience that, you know, that works once. The second time you try that, it's orthodox. The students have adapted. It doesn't work again. So, if you're always trying to disrupt someone's learning cycle in order to make them learn in a different way, it's very difficult to do something new every time. And in fact, there are costs involved with that as well.

Beatrice Tell us about another idea of his that is particularly important. And again, give us the context and how it can be interpreted in different ways.

Peter Well, the overwhelming majority of people who discuss Sunzi in the world today don’t read it in the original. But even of the people who read it in the original, very few are actually people who do strategy or who do military history or are generals. So, the fundamental concept is that war is something which can be rationally approached. When I said that Sunzi was written by multiple hands. I want to emphasise that; I think that the multiple edits and the many people who went through it did an excellent job of creating a coherent and logical text. The text makes sense, it has an order to it, and that's one of the reasons why I find it very strange when people start sort of wandering into Chapter 9 and pull a line out and say, ‘This is the core!’

The beginning of the text says ‘war is a matter of vital importance to the state. You can’t not investigate it.’ And one of the fundamental concepts of Sunzi is that war is a rational process. You can evaluate things ahead of time. Sunzi attempts to argue that you can know ahead of time how things are going to go. And I think that's probably the key concept. And it's in the first line, and that often gets passed over because people don't want strategy to be something where they say, “stop and think before you get involved with the fight. Don't fight and then find out whether you’re going to win.” You should know beforehand whether you’re going to win. And in fact, if you do your job right as a general, you’re not going to get the glory. Everyone’s going to say, ‘that was easy, you just beat those guys easily’. Well, the reason why you beat them easily is because you had prepared ahead of time, you shaped the battlefield to use our modern terminology for that, set it up so that you would have all the advantages and he would have all the disadvantages. And that's why it looked easy.

The general, though, who usually wins with glory, is someone who screwed up and gets to the battlefield and then desperately pulls success out of the jaws of defeat. Sunzi is saying, look, that's a bad general. But that's a very hard argument to make, even to a ruler, let alone a country where you have a political system. People want the glorious battle where we defeat the bad guy, not the ‘what didn't happen’.

Beatrice What you've told us is very, very different to some extent from what's happening in the West. In the West, in classical antiquity and beyond, there were many strategists who said, ‘stop and think, evaluate the situation, and don't go to battle if you don't think you're going to win’. However, there is a very strong tradition from classical antiquity all the way to modern times, which also is part of an Islamic tradition, namely that there is a very large element of chance, of accident, the things you cannot foresee. And what you're telling us is that Sunzi is somebody who says you can foresee it, you can plan it all, you can press it all into an overall plan that you have prepared in advance. I mean, he's not different at all in saying, you must prepare. But it seems to me radically different to say all this can be prepared.

Peter He's very much arguing against a certain mindset. So, if we look at the text as an argument, the text is arguing against a certain way of going to war. To the extent that we can make the argument Clausewitz was describing warfare in his time rather than trying to universalise based on what he had seen, and Sunzi in a certain sense was universalising, arguing for a view of the world, or for a way of doing things.

A lot of generals, many of whom for most of China's history, were illiterate, grew up in the army. They knew how to fight. They knew how to win a battle. They knew there was chance. And they probably knew sort of basics of strategy, but they weren’t really being asked to make the kind of strategic decisions that Sunzi is talking about. Sunzi is addressed to a literate audience. And most generals probably said, “well, you know, I’ll get out to the battlefield, and I’ll have more guys than the other guys and I’ll be up on the hill, he’ll be down the hill and then we’ll fight. But sometimes, you lose.” Sunzi doesn’t give you that out. You could argue that what he's doing is arguing against what people usually do, confident, perhaps, that it will only be partially successful. So, perhaps Sunzi is making an abstract argument for doing it (war) a certain way, and maybe the people following this know for certain that there's no perfection in war. There's going to be contingency.

Paul O’Neill. For whom is Sunzi writing? If he's got illiterate generals who aren't going to read his work, is he writing for the political leadership about reasons of state, as you describe, and therefore the decisions of statespeople? People much like Machiavelli would be writing something like The Prince?5 Is this an early Chinese equivalent of that, or is this intended to influence how rulers were shaping the conduct of military operations?

Peter I presume a lot of texts were memorised. I work in primarily the 10th and 11th century, and when we get there, we start having printing and people start actually having books. But for most of time there's a lot of memorisation that goes on, so partly this is a tradition that is transmitted orally. It would be educated people, which is to say to this transition from the aristocratic to professional generals. For the most part, even these professional generals were coming from the aristocracy. It's only (in the) Third Century, we start getting the rise of the Qin state, where there are people who can rise up, in theory, from the bottom of being a farmer to becoming a general by success in war but there aren't that many people who make it from farmer to leading general. You still have a lot of, essentially, aristocrats, people of consistent military families, of military men, who would have had traditions of war. And (Sunzi) is aimed at them. And you're trying to tell these young men who are sort of all fired up, they've got their sword, they've got their spear, let's go kill someone: ‘Okay, stop! Try to be a little more thoughtful.’ Once it becomes written down, it becomes an object of non-military officials and emperors, and rulers who are not emperors, kings and dukes being able to access this. It’s place changes in Chinese history because for a long time it is seen as a very disruptive and contrary to realist or Confucian ideas. It ultimately becomes part of the Confucian concept. It gets sort of absorbed into it and it gains an intellectual value.

Let's say you were a government official. You were a civil official, you have no military experience, so what do you do? You pull out this military text and you cite that text when you're at court arguing with the general.6 And a lot of times what you’ll see in the debates is the general comes in, they say, ‘I'll take a bunch of guys and will go beat them up.’ And some official says, ‘Well, you know, Sunzi says: you should do this, you should do that.’ And there's always this kind of conflict. Do you listen to the guy who's read the book or the guy who has actually gone out to the field? So that's where [the work of Sunzi] has its power. But, there are lessons in there for the ruler. [Sunzi] is trying to tell rulers, you know, don't interfere with the general while he's out in the field. So, you can break the text down and see messages to different audiences There are lines in there which are clearly directed to the ruler, you know, “Don't do this, don't do that”, “Choose a good general”. There's a line about “If you have someone who follows my precepts, they'll be successful. Choose that guy. If he doesn't follow my precepts, fire them”. There are other lines that are clearly directed toward a general, so it’s a multifaceted text in that sense.

Beatrice Could I bring you to discuss an idea that is very often associated now with Sunzi, which is the idea that the ideal is to win without a battle? We find that taking up again in the 18th century without any attribution and just a wheel reinvented by Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750).

Peter Sunzi’s ideal is that, if you set things up correctly, you will achieve what you want without having to fight. But what he understands is, in this notion of manoeuvring for advantage, you actually have to have an opponent who understands what's happening. So, if we are manoeuvring, we are doing our political things we're military, we're forming alliances, we're positioning troops. I get into an advantageous position. My opponent in this has to understand enough to go, Ooh, I don't want to fight this guy because - we're going to lose. So ideally, I have an intelligent interlocutor.

Beatrice It's like a game of chess where somebody throws over their king because they realise that in the next five moves that opponent is going to defeat them.

Peter Yeah. The goal, that's easy, the hard part is to get into the position to do it. The problem, of course, is what happens when the person doesn't concede.

Beatrice This presumes an agonal type of war; a type of war in which both sides are actually fighting according to very well-defined rules, respecting those rules and not with the terrible passion of, say, the French Revolution, or with the terrible passion unleashed by, say, Hitler's wars. So, it's a particular sort of war, and hence the importance of understanding it in its own historical context.

Peter Yes. It’s this intellectualization which really appeals to intellectuals. And this is why, for most of Chinese history, the Sunzi tradition is a very literate tradition, and it is very self-referential; it's very Talmudic. You'll get this sort of commentary on commentary, and disagreeing with other commentaries.

This is an important aspect, by the way, that people don't really know what the other guy's thinking. And so, if you have some notion of deterrence through signalling, but the other guy either doesn't understand what you're signalling or he doesn't care – or you're trying to tell him something, or he doesn't believe you, that's one of the issues. A lot of great generals were not chess players, because in chess, you have perfect understanding of the strategy. The board is in front of you. You can see all the pieces. You can look at it completely rationally. But in war, we don't know all the things that are going on. And there’s just so much fog of war (to go back to Clausewitz): how do you plan for the opponent that you don't understand what they're thinking or they what they want to come out of the conflict with? What is the goal? And we talk about strategy without that reference to goals all the time.

Paul You've highlighted that you have to understand ancient Chinese, that the interpretations of it have all of these problems associated with it; the cultural, the linguistic, the conceptual, because some of the concepts don't apply in the Western context. Beatrice was mentioning about having to understand the rules and the rules are different, perhaps. And yet Sunzi has this enormous reputation. To what extent is this enduring relevance, or credibility afforded to Sunzi, justified, and to what extent is this actually something we ought to be challenging?

Peter Well, I think actually we should be challenging it at a very fundamental level. The biggest problem I have with this apotheosis of Sunzi in the 20th century/21st century is that it's generally used in the West as a substitute for actually doing Chinese history, and knowing anything about Chinese military history in particular. So we'll have a bunch of people who will talk all sorts of details about Western military history. They will skip over Clausewitz because, you know, he's too hard and too complicated. And then you get to Sunzi. So, suddenly what you have is this bunch of people who say, ‘I understand all of Chinese military history because I have read this very short translation, and I'm now going to compare that to my knowledge of Western military history as distinct from Western strategic history, Western strategic thought’. If you look at Chinese history, you will actually not see an enormous amount of Sunzi in military and strategic discussions at court. It's not some dominant theme. So, then we run to the problem of what is actually going on in Chinese wars. And that takes an awful lot of research; look at David Graff's work, or Ken Swope’s7. The Chinese tradition of military history is different. The Chinese tradition of writing about military strategic thought, military thought is different (from that of the West).

So, I would say that we overemphasise Sunzi, because it's a cover for our ignorance of what's actually happened in Chinese history and where it becomes critical. We in the West read Sunzi differently than the current Chinese military does. And so, when our people in the West make generalisations or try to predict what the Chinese military will do, or is thinking, based on a Western reading of Sunzi, we are wildly off track. We are completely wrong. We should at least read what the Chinese military says about Sunzi and then engage the question of whether the Chinese military is, in fact, influenced by Sunzi. And these are much different questions than we get. And we usually approach these issues like, ‘well, I just read Sunzi, and the Chinese are going to be indirect, going to try to win without fighting. Don't we try to win without fighting? Don't we try to come in and buy people off and try to influence things?’ But is it good when they do it and bad [when we do]? I mean, none of those strategies show up in either Sunzi or Clausewitz.

So, is Sunzi operational? And I think that's a very big question. I think Sunzi is much less operational than we give it credit for. And I think Sunzi has been much less important on the battlefield for all of Chinese history, than we are comfortable with.

Paul Are there [other Chinese] authors that you would suggest we engage with? Or is Sunzi merely indicative of the fact it's culturally so different, that unless you have that deep understanding, any Chinese author that you read, particularly an ancient author, will be liable to that kind of misinterpretation, and we will come away with a completely different reading of it from the way it's influencing the Chinese.

Peter I am a middle period Chinese historian. Things that I read mean certain things in my time period with my authors. Three hundred years before, it was different. Two hundred years afterward, it was different. So, there isn't a monolithic Chinese culture. And so, we should read more than just Sunzi. One needs to read military history. You need to read more than even the Seven Military Classics8. But the Seven Military Classics, which are developed in the period I work in, was a military curriculum for military education. That was not an abstract statement of fundamental Chinese strategic beliefs. That was constructed by officials in the 11th century to assert a Confucian set of values about warfare, about education. They were trying to say, look, we will get better generals if they read these books. Yet we actually have no indication of generals who got their military degrees and then went on to become great generals. So, we have this huge problem. How do you connect the text to the battlefield? And so, if you say to me, you know, which texts should I read to understand Chinese martial behaviour I'd give you a very long list and most of it would not be in English. Sorry.

Beatrice I would just like to sum up a couple of points, because I think they’re so important. First of all, for understanding Sunzi, you need to understand the period in which that was written and put together and the purposes for which it was written. And then you can't simply assume that because something was written 2,300 years ago, it still dominates thinking today. You have just explained to us that people might refer to it in this sort of ritualistic way. But that is no guarantee at all that any of the things that are said in this text would now be dominating Chinese thinking. So, on the one hand, this devalues to some extent the importance of this text, but on the other hand, it gives this text a much more general and much more enduring relevance on a completely different, more general, level on which one should try to come to grips with the text with a better knowledge of what the original text actually says. So, we are looking forward to reading your book about this and having more of an understanding of how his text was interpreted, not only in China but in the West. Peter Lorge, thank you very much for joining us today. It's been a great pleasure talking to you.

Peter Thanks for having me, this was great fun.
The enigmatic Chinese text that took its definitive form in the third century BC was not discovered in Europe until shortly before the French Revolution and, significantly, by a French missionary. The document’s thoughts on strategy – such as the ideal of winning without giving battle – diverged strongly from those of the battle-obsessed West. Barely remembered for centuries, Sun Tzu’s ideas went through a staggering renaissance in the 20th century, inspiring Mao Zedong and strongly impacting Western thinkers who were struggling to come to terms with the Chinese Communist insurgency’s triumph in China and the US defeat in Vietnam.

Sun Tzu’s approach is that of rationalization and planning of warfare. His text advocates evaluating a conflict ahead of time, supposing that one can know its dimensions with reasonable accuracy, and largely excluding contingency. Famously, it says that one should know oneself and one’s enemy, by implication also foresee the outcome of all military exchanges. The text thus falls into the category of those, like Christine de Pizan’s and Machiavelli’s works, that argue in favor of prudent planning in the belief that this can minimize risk and uncertainty.

Dr. Peter Lorge is an Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently The Beginner’s Guide to Imperial China (2021), and perhaps most famously The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (CUP 2008). Dr. Lorge has two forthcoming books: Documents From Early Chinese History, a sourcebook for premodern Chinese history written with Scott Pearce, and Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War, which explores both the writings of Sun Tzu and the impact they have had on Western thinking, especially in the last half-century.
vera_k
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by vera_k »

One of the free books available from the WSJ this month.
Great State: China and the World
China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, has maintained them for the eight centuries since. China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders as well as foreign traders and imperialists. Its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese.

China became a mega-state not by conquering others, Timothy Brook contends, but rather by being conquered by others and then claiming right of succession to the empires of those Great States. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic, and the People’s Republic, have perpetuated. Yet a contemporary Chinese idea of a ‘fatherland’ that is, and always has been, completely and naturally Chinese persists. Brook argues that China, like everywhere, is the outcome of history, and like every state, rests on its capacities to conquer and suppress.
ricky_v
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by ricky_v »

https://archive.ph/78PYi#selection-1343.53-1343.303
Image
Among China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions, 13 reported more deaths than births last year.
Those 13 comprised the wealthy regions of Shanghai, Jiangsu and Tianjin; the central provinces of Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan and Hubei; Hebei, Shanxi and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region in the north and northwest; and the northeastern rust-belt provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang.

This helped drive China’s national birth rate down to 7.52 per 1,000 people in 2021 – the lowest rate since record-keeping began in 1949.
Official data shows that China’s population grew by just 480,000 to 1.4126 billion last year – the smallest population increase since 1962, and a sharp decline from the 2.04 million increase in 2020.
Chinese mothers gave birth to just 10.62 million babies in 2021 – an 11.5 per cent decline from 2020.
expects China’s population to peak this year, then begin falling next year.

At the end of last year, about 267 million Chinese were aged 60 and above, accounting for 18.9 per cent of the population.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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Chinese food culture: Influences from within and without
By Ken Hom the BBC chef
Chinese food culture: Influences from within and without
Ken Hom


In Food in Chinese Culture (Yale, 1978), Michael Freeman writes that any cuisine worthy of the name comes not from a single tradition, instead it “amalgamates, selects, and organizes the best of several traditions.” While sampling foods in restaurants and homes throughout China, I have been impressed by how many commonalities there are between “Chinese” foods and the cuisines of other parts of the world. On the one hand, there are foods, dishes, and recipes that I believed were imported into China long ago but which are, in fact, of Chinese origin, such as rice. On the other hand, there are “traditional” Chinese dishes that, it turns out, were adopted into the canon from foreign sources. Tomatoes, for example, are to be found everywhere in China, indeed I saw them in all regions I visited. My assumption was that they have always been a part of Chinese cuisine; yet tomatoes are a recent introduction (by Chinese standards), arriving from the Americas barely one hundred years ago. The same is true of such standards as corn (maize), squash and chili peppers, all of which entered China comparatively recently.

Farther back in time, during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), Near Eastern foods such as spinach, lettuce, almonds, sugar beets, and figs were adopted. However, the balance sheet of these borrowings is more than matched by China’s contributions to others’ cuisines. Food across Asia, for example, bears a strong Chinese influence, including the cuisines of Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam, Malaysia and Thailand.

All of this is to be expected. Chinese traders and emigres arrived with their customary foods and cooking techniques. Those who later returned to China brought with them new foods and recipes; foreign traders entering China did the same. Thus, over the centuries there has been a weaving back and forth, sometimes very slowly, sometimes quite rapidly, of the fabric of Chinese cuisine. The theme is clearly Chinese, the essentials having already been established by the end of the Song Dynasty (1279 A.D.), but there are always variations on the theme. Indeed, much of the history of China and its neighbours is reflected in the migrations of people within and without the country, and in the amalgamations that make up their various cuisines.

China is bounded on all sides by barriers of ocean, desert, and mountains. Where natural barriers were inadequate, the “Great Wall,” extending over 3000 miles from the Bohai Sea to the Gobi Desert, was erected and effectively blocked invasions and alien influences. And thus China was, by official decree, sealed off from the outside world from the “barbarians” and “foreign devils” whom, it was presumed had anything to offer the Imperial civilization. Or so it might seem.

In actuality, China has been open (if usually on her own terms) to the outside world for two thousand years. Her culture–and parts of her cuisine–have been influenced by “foreigners” since the beginning of recorded history. Nor has this been a one-way street. Like some distant, mysterious, pulsating star, China through the centuries has sent out her own influences–not only to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, but, comparatively recently, to the West as well.

For, through the centuries, the oceans were as much gateway as barrier; the deserts and mountains were threaded with caravan trails, especially the appropriately-dubbed Silk Route; and even the Great Wall had openings through which commerce flowed. For example, during the Tang Dynasty, (618-907), traders from many areas and nations–Japan, Korea, Arabia, India, and Persia–thronged the ports of China, delivering their goods and trading for the many rich products of Asia.


Later, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the merchant and naval fleets of China far exceeded in number and commercial importance those of any other Asian or European fleets. By the thirteenth century, Chinese merchants had established regular commercial links with India, their vessels being the largest on the seas even though the trade involved a long and hazardous voyage. Until the nineteenth century, Chinese junks were the backbone of Asian sea-borne commerce: only the advent of steam and Western imperialism forced the decline of Chinese merchant shipping. Today, however, once again, China ranks among the top ten fleets of the world in tonnage.

For millennia, heavy commercial, religious, and, unfortunately, military traffic has passed to and from China. Even before China’s first consolidation under centralized rule in the third century, A.D., the Han Dynasty had opened the fabled Silk Route. Running from Lanzhou (Gansu Province) to Yumen (near the western terminus of the Great Wall) and then across desert plateaus and mountains to Samarkand, this route and some parallel and subsidiary pathways provided China’s main contact with Central Asia and beyond until the thirteenth century. Even traffic with India flowed along the Silk Route, by way of Afghanistan.

The original function of the route was military: to guard China’s expanding western border and to maintain contact with potential allies against mountain nomads of the northwestern frontier. But then Buddhism and, rather quickly, commerce began to flow along the protected route. It was thus that Chinese silks and other products eventually reached Roman cities and other remote places as far away as Siberia. Until the nineteenth century, most of China’s commercial contact with other societies was by way of this great route.

As for the north, even the Great Wall could not seal off China completely. Commercial traffic to and from Korea and Manchuria was allowed to pass through it. The nomad tribes the Wall was designed to keep out traded their only real commodity, horses, for Chinese products at the markets set up on the “wrong” side of the Wall. Military forces penetrated the Wall as well. In 1271, for example, the Mongols under Kublai Khan swept into China and established a dynasty that lasted until 1368. This was a unique interlude, for Mongol chauvinism did not allow assimilation into Chinese culture. They retained instead most of their own customs, including their culinary practices. When the Chinese successfully rebelled against Mongol rule, the Mongols retired to their central Asian steppes, leaving behind not much more than the culinary imprint of their passion for yogurt, game, goat, mutton, and the mare’s milk derivative, koumiss. In fact, while it is probably true that the Mongols did not by themselves introduce mare’s milk, butterfat (from mare’s or cow’s milk), and mutton to China, scholars generally define these three foods as differentiating the Mongol from the Chinese cuisine. From Beijing to Kunming, I experienced this non-Chinese influence in many places. In Kunming, for example, restaurants serving mutton and goat cheese — pan-fried in a wok — reminded me of how it could have been served in the time of Kublai Khan.

China, always open to outside influences, has, in turn, influenced those cultures from whom she borrowed, and the impact of Chinese culture on the cuisines of her neighbors is clear and substantial. This was largely the result of “overseas Chinese,” those entrepreneurs whose reputations as shrewd and efficient businessmen were already well established hundreds of years ago.

Although Japan, Korea, and Thailand have unique systems and ideas about food, the Chinese influence in undeniable. Possibly the most important gift of the Chinese traveler was rice. The basic food of the East, perhaps its most valuable and useful plant, rice was first cultivated in China some 3000 years before it spread elsewhere. It was from Chinese technique and fare that the Koreans learned to apply such spices as garlic and chili pepper to strong meat dishes, usually pork and beef. In Northern China, I saw many food stalls in markets offering distinctively Korean style foods — serving their unique pickled vegetables heavily flavored with garlic and chili peppers. It is believed that the cultivation of soybeans, a staple food in most of Asia, began in China. Chinese influences also deeply affected the development of Philippine cuisine. It has been said that Chinese cuisine left an indelible mark on Philippine cooking and that Chinese gastronomy was the midwife of Philippine haute cuisine. In fact, no family meal of importance is ever complete without dishes of Chinese heritage.

Likewise, in terms of cooking and eating implements, both spoons and chopsticks, universal in Asia, are of Chinese origin. Similarly, the wok, that marvelously adaptable cooking implement found in many Asian kitchens, is of Chinese origin. Even in India, the great authority Madhur Jaffrey has written, “the ancient Chinese may have come here [Kerala, India] for black pepper but, in fair exchange, they left behind their woks, cleavers, plates, pickling jars and design for roofs and river-craft.” In many ways, then, the influence of the great “Middle Kingdom” radiated out into the world.
{However the Indian wok is unique without handles, unlike the Chinese woks. Chini chattai as called in malayalam/}


One point always to remember: the Chinese are neither nationalistic nor xenophobic when it comes to food or techniques. While the basic Chinese diet grew out of those animal and vegetable foods that are indigenous and plentiful in China itself, over the course of millennia to the present day the scholar Andersen has written: “foreign foods, spices, herbs, techniques, and culinary concepts have been used to expand and enhance that diet.”

During the Han Dynasty (205 B.C. to 220 A.D), Chinese cooks adopted foreign methods and reworked native wheat flours to make the first noodles and wheaten cakes: “It was the ingenuity of the Han Chinese in experimenting with the most common eating materials, coupled with a willingness to learn from other cultures, that eventually led to the opening of an entirely new chapter in Chinese culinary history.” (Ying-shih Yu)

The Tang Dynasty (618-907) –the Golden Age of China– was one in which a taste for the exotic could be indulged. Thus, “the golden peaches of Samarkand” and many other foods entered China — grapes, spinach, lettuce, figs, kohlrabi, sugar beets, leeks, and shallots. There are references to pine nuts, almonds, and pistachios as well, and it is no accident that the first known cookbook and the first nutrition textbook appeared then. And, although it was known long before the Tang, it was during that dynasty that tea attained the popularity it has never lost. The growing influence of Buddhism and its emphasis on vegetarianism led to innovative uses of wheat products; in the form of dumplings and fried dough strips, of which I still saw everywhere in China — from street food stalls to restaurants to homes. The Tang period was less an age of innovation than one of consolidation and integration of new foods into the culinary tradition, but by the close of the Dynasty, Chinese cuisine was prepared to take its definitive shape.

It was during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) that “Chinese cuisine” crystallized into its distinctive, enduring form. Over those three hundred years, China — her cooks, food writers, nutritionists, elite consumers, merchants, and food vendors — brought together the ingredients necessary for the creation of any cuisine. That is, they deliberately created a style of cooking and eating, applying a well-defined set of attitudes about food and its place in society to an abundant and varied supply of ingredients, relying on venerable techniques but always remaining open to new foods and methods. This is when the Seven Necessities were set forth: firewood; rice; oil; salt; soybean sauce; vinegar; and tea. After this extraordinary effort, China, by the end of the Song Dynasty, had established a cuisine of great sophistication, with high standards which were nevertheless permissive, allowing for maintenance of tradition and for experimentation and innovation, only demanding that new dishes are appealing to eye and to the palate. And even after this “foundation” period, new foods and techniques were pervasive, for how can people’s tastes be legislated?

While the Mongol influence was felt during this time, the next significant stage of integration of “foreign” foods came during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when the earliest influences from the West came from Southern Europe. New World food, especially peanuts, sweet potatoes, and corn (maize), were introduced as the Portuguese and the Spanish explorers made their way to India, China, and the Philippines in the early sixteenth century. Chinese traders probably carried in Mexican sweet potatoes purchased from the Spaniards in Manila; the peanut is first mentioned in Chinese sources in 1538; corn (maize) is noted in 1555. The white potato arrived in the eighteenth century, possibly in the baggage of French missionaries. While peanuts and corn (maize) very quickly became staples in the diet of Chinese living in the coastal areas, potatoes and sweet potatoes had a hesitant start. Used first only as “famine foods,” only later did they become acceptable and sustaining secondary foods. By the end of the Ming period, even the Yao people, who live in the remote mountain fastness of southern China, were relying heavily on potatoes and sweet potatoes.

China’s population, stable at about one hundred fifty million for centuries, almost quadrupled in the period from about 1700 to 1850. Corn (maize), peanuts, sweet potatoes, and Irish potatoes were by then basic crops, providing the necessary calories and other food elements to impel and sustain an astonishing population increase. These “new” foods were consumed almost entirely by the poorer classes, that is, the great majority of people, and we can speculate that the amalgamation of Western foods was instrumental in this increase in population. Indeed, until recently, there has been in China the greatest disparity between the diet of the rich and the poor than in any other country in the world. The masses experienced a sustaining but limited diet; the elite, great in numbers but a small minority of the population, enjoyed gourmet fare comprising an astonishing variety of foods, and it was this class that maintained what we define as Chinese cuisine. That cuisine was based on a vast array of native animal and vegetable ingredients.

By the first century B.C. — two thousand years ago! — Chinese agriculture and animal husbandry were already the most efficient in the world, and already more productive than medieval European farms were to be more than a millennium later. Agricultural manuals from the period list the “Nine Staples” in addition to the “Seven Necessities” that were the basis of the Chinese diet: wheat, barley, millet, glutinous millet, spiked millet, soybeans, rice, hemp, and small beans. Hemp provided seeds for food and oil. Millet was the preferred grain for both eating and brewing, only gradually giving way in the popular taste to wheat and rice. Wheat, and, more recently, sorghum and corn (maize) were northern grains, with rice predominant in the south and central parts of China, and this regional variation exists today.

These staples provided the Chinese people with their essential calories, carbohydrates, and protein. By themselves they would have constituted a sustained but rather insipid diet. However, even two thousand years ago, the Chinese refused to submit passively to nature when something could be altered: “Human resolution can overcome Heaven’s destiny,” as the ancient saying goes. To these staples they added mustard greens, leeks, scallions (spring onions), watercress, and other light and tasty vegetables and sauces. Other standard items were lychees, cinnamon, bamboo shoots, magnolia buds, true oranges, grapes, chestnuts, sugarcane, honey, fagara (Sichuan pepper), and a variety of flowers and buds.

By the end of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.), pickled and salted foods were commonplace, the art of fermenting soybeans had been perfected, and wheaten noodles had been introduced. Domesticated and game animal and fish were also available and in demand, at least in the diet of the upper classes: horses, sheep, deer, ducks, geese, carp, and other fish and game. These joined the company of the venerable chicken and pig. Domesticated dogs, as both food and pets, long precede all other animals. The wok was in universal use: stir-frying and its accompanying food preparation techniques (slicing and cutting, evenly and thinly) was a standard cooking method.

The evolution of the cuisine within China has grown more gentle and gradual. The “definitive shaping of the food system,” as one scholar puts it, was accomplished almost one thousand years ago: “The elite and the middle-class developed the greatest cuisine the world has ever known; even the poor benefited from it.”

It is this cuisine, this taste of China, with its home-grown as well as its exotic influences, that I experienced in my visits to my ancestral homeland.

Ken Hom OBE is an American-born Chinese chef, author and television-show presenter for the BBC. In 2009 he was appointed honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire for “services to culinary arts”. Image Credit: CC by Alpha/Flickr.
Very useful summary of influences on Chinese cuisine.
One takeaway for me is the short Mongol interlude. Mongols were foreigners to China and due ot their insularity they did not meld into Chinese society and hence withered away despite their fabulous wealth and great territory described so vividly by Marco Polo and written in poetry as Xanadu by S.T. Coleridge.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan

My takeaway on Communism in China

Communism in China consolidated by Mao Zedong is an aloof foreign ideology and is insular in the sense it did not pervade Chinese society which is still based on Confusican order. Hence it has every liklihood of getting banished like the Mongols.

Hence the Xi JInping drive to Sinicise Marxism or reform Marxism with Sinic Characteristics.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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Columbia Uty has a site on Asia For Educators.

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/


Lots of educational materials for school teachers and hence us!
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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Aldonkar
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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ramana wrote:Columbia Uty has a site on Asia For Educators.

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/


Lots of educational materials for school teachers and hence us!
Actually only covers "East Asia". I looked at some of the info in the section on China. I seems to be following the CPC theme,; the maps seem to include Indian territory such as Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai chin in China. Seems that Columbia Uni has fallen to the CPC!
ramana
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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A youtube video about XuFancheng - The Xuan Zang of modern times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=deskt ... e=youtu.be

Quite informative.

Can someone locate the book on essays in his memory released in Dec 2018 by the late Sushma Swaraj and Wang Yi?
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/ ... mmydkmbzmy
Analysis: Jack Ma downfall spells end of China's golden age
Alibaba founder was blown off the scene like a cloud in the sky
KATSUJI NAKAZAWA, Nikkei senior staff writer, JANUARY 19, 2023

China's meager 3% growth for 2022 signals the end of a three-decade-long golden age for the country's economy.
With the exception of 2.2% growth for 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is China's worst economic performance since 1976, when the Cultural Revolution dragged growth into negative territory.
The abrupt abandonment of the zero-COVID policy -- and the explosion of cases that followed -- is not the sole reason for the lackluster growth. Economic policies championed by President and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping were another factor. For the past decade under Xi's rule, philosophy has come before economic rationality.
An incident that happened last week was symbolic.
On Jan. 10, a convoy of cars belonging to the municipal government of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, entered the campus of the Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant co-founded by Jack Ma.
Among those stepping out of the cars was Liu Jie, the Hangzhou party secretary. That day, the Hangzhou government and Alibaba agreed to restart their long-shelved strategic partnership.
About three weeks earlier, Yi Lianhong, the newly appointed party secretary of Zhejiang province, had also visited Alibaba. He had returned from a trip to Beijing, where he attended the Central Economic Work Conference of the Communist Party, a meeting that discussed China's economic policies for 2023.
Immediately upon his return, he headed to Alibaba's headquarters.
At first glance, the visits seem to signal a warming of relations between the government and Alibaba, a shift from the tech clampdown and a desire by the central leadership to work with the platform to revitalize China's ailing economy.
"This is a complete misreading of the situation," a Chinese source familiar with business affairs in Zhejiang said.
The context of the visits becomes clearer when taken together with another development. On Jan. 7, Alibaba-affiliated financial company Ant Group announced that Jack Ma, its founder, would give up control of the company.
The restructuring left Ma with a little more than 6% of Ant's voting rights; he had previously held more than 50%.
It can perhaps be compared to the bloodless fall of Edo Castle in Japan. The 1868 incident ended the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, returned power to the imperial family and ushered in the Meiji era. Edo was renamed Tokyo.
Now Ma has surrendered Alibaba Castle without putting up resistance. He has been staying in Japan since before the Chinese Communist Party's national congress last October, unable to return to China.
......
Gautam
Long article, please read entirely if possible. The bit about Ma and the horse is interesting.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

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A point to note is Jack Ma in earlier times would never be allowed to leave China.
In Mao Zedong's time would be sent to a re-education camp in rural areas.
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Re: Let us Understand the Chinese - II

Post by g.sarkar »

Ramanaji,
Jack Ma could not have existed during the time of Mao, and now in the time of Xi, he has to fade away. He is already a non person in China. I am sure that other millionaires have read the writing on the wall and moved to safer havens with their fortunes.
Gautam
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