Martin Jacques Quotes
Already 2008 has proved a tumultuous year in terms of global perceptions of China, and there are still 59 days to go until the Beijing Olympics. The tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake followed hard on the heels of the riots in Tibet and the demonstrations surrounding the Olympic torch relay.
Jacques, Martin. "Global perceptions of China." The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2008.
This is radically different from most other Chinese corporations and most American or other country corporations for that matter who seek as much government business as they can get. Alibaba—the largest e-commerce company in the world, larger than Amazon.com and eBay put together--had hundreds of millions of on-line Chinese buyers and hundreds of thousands of Chinese retailers. A huge proportion of Chinese retail sales go through Alibaba.
In the 1920s and 1930s China was in chaos. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists were officially the government but there was extensive corruption and local “leaders” who fought for control of territories and resources. Chinese were slaughtering each other daily not unlike Bosnia in the 1990s. The Japanese had moved into Manchuria using the pretext that they were saving China by bringing order and security. (In reality they were trying to control additional territory to populate with their rapidly expanding population.) The U.S. opposed the Japanese aggression but privately warned the Chinese Nationalists that they had better get control of the nation. The Nationalists never did. The Japanese expanded into much more of China beginning WWII in Asia. The Nationalists and the communists joined forces to fight the Japanese and after the war, the communists won the allegiance of most of the people. The Chinese government was finally unified, but under the communists.
At the time the Permanent China Seat in the United Nations was held by Chang Kai Chek and his nationalist forces who had abandoned the Chinese Mainland and were holding out on the island of Formosa (Taiwan). The Chinese Communists who represented 800 million Chinese wanted the China Seat. Most of the world saw the solution as recognizing the two de facto Chinas and having them both in the U. N. The Communists insisted that there was only one China and they were the legitimate representatives. The Nationalists, ironically took the same one China position, deluding themselves into thinking that they would get control of the Mainland. They put pressure on the U. S. and we adopted the “One China” policy which was adopted by most of the world. Soon it became evident that Taiwan was a small island of people who represented no one else in China, and the single Chinese seat went to the Communists. Later, many in Taiwan regretted the one China policy and would have loved to be recognized as an independent country.
While the American Civil War was raging, Pinyin Hong Xiuquan started a quasi Christian religion (he claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ) in China which initiated a war of extermination with the Manchus and other religions. More than 20 million Chinese were killed in a religious war that proportionately killed more Chinese than the Nazis killed in Europeans. Though hardly noticed in America and Europe, the religious war of extermination had been so traumatic that dissident religions are the most feared problem by Chinese modern leaders—more so than Capitalists, Taiwan or any of the modern ‘enemies’. It is the Falun Gong and the Tibetan Buddhists who the leadership fear might grow into another Yellow Turban movement—the worst Trauma of Chinese History—even worse than the Japanese WWII invasion. Hence the irrational view of the Chinese leadership towards religions they cannot control. See {612649} and {612649}. In Western terms as Wiesel put it, the Chinese leadership suppression of Tibet makes little or no sense, but current Chinese leadership is paranoid as a result of its history.
This proverb was quoted by Winston Churchill in his address to Congress, January 17, 1952, Even when China was controlled by colonial powers, those same powers were changed by their contact.
China had learned to grow new crops from the Americas and their greater ability to produce food led to large population growth which was straining the other national resources and the economy, technology and government could not handle the growth, producing much unhappiness and discontent.
Martin Jacques is a British journalist and academic. Jacques was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, becoming, in his own words, "a member of its Executive Committee, probably the youngest member ever at about twenty-two". He was editor of the party's journal, Marxism Today, from 1977 until its closure in 1991.
