China Quotes
“Liberalism” was a catch all Chinese term at the time which was very derogatory in Communist vernacular very much like the negative connotation of liberalism to American Conservatives at the turn of the millennium 1990-2010.
This is a very important quotation. It is often cited by preventive war hawks to show that deterrence might not be a sufficient inhibitor against an extreme ideological enemy. In this case it was political philosophy that would make the enemy willing to have the majority of its population die to reach the ideological objective. More fearful is the prospect of the Theocracy of Iran where the leaders may believe that nuclear jihad is a commandment of God. More critical is the Islamic theology which says that if most of the Iranian Muslim population die in a nuclear war that they start all those people will be martyrs and immediately go to God’s Paradise. Thus, even the dead Muslims are not victims and the nonbelievers should be killed. For extremely fanatical Muslims nuclear war can be a logical and holy course of action.
By 2012, the Chinese population had reached 1.2 billion despite some very strong and aggressive population control programs which brought down the fertility rate.
The great wall of China was built just as much to keep the Chinese in as to keep the barbarians out.
The Chinese 1st Emperor had unified China by brutal war. His troops and government were more sophisticated than the others and they were particularly sophisticated about drafting soldiers, forcing the civilian population to manufacture weapons for the huge military and to levy and collect taxes. Many people in the conquered provinces fled from China. The Emperor responded to the outside ‘barbarians’ and the fleeing Chinese by connecting the many walls that existed on the Chinese border into one unified wall as much to keep his labor force in China as to keep others out.
Those landlords who had killed peasants were sometimes executed as prior to the Peasant Uprising, there was no law enforcement against landlords in rural areas like Hunan. In 1927 there was a Peasant Uprising in the Hunan Province of China. Young Mau went there and wrote a report. Many years later when Mao was a major revolutionary leader, the landlords were often executed and not just humiliated.
This was the lesson we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, American leadership at the time knew little of this quotation.
This was in response to English Emissaries who wanted to establish trading businesses in China. The Emperor would not even meet personally with Lord McCartney, the first British envoy because McCartney would not kow-tow to the Emperor. The “hongs” were special businesses set up by Chinese businessmen who had paid the Proper fee, for the purposes of being traders with foreigners. Canton, now Guangzhou, is 150 years later still the major international trading center in China although there are no longer restrictions. At the time, the British paid for their Chinese good with Opium that they had purchased in their Indian Colony. English cloth and other goods would be sent to India, traded for opium, which was brought to China and traded for tea, silks and porcelain which were returned to England and turned into cash than was worth much more than their original purchase and the cost of the voyage.
The major problem at the time was not the capitalist in the industrial revolutionary sense of the word as there was little industry. China as an agrarian society but the vast majority of the land was owned by relatively few wealthy families. It was close to a feudal system and that was the target for the Communists and their revolution. There was a very small proletariat. Their methods were brutal, but they executed the landlords and the class warfare ended quickly. Sun Yat-sen was not able to solve the land problem, nor was Chiang Kai-shek as most of his major supporters were landowners of warlords who controlled the landowners.
