Over at the Gweilo Dairies, Conrad goes off on Premier Wen Jiabao’s warnings to Taiwan not to use democracy as “a cover” to pursue “separatist” goals and Beijing’s never-ending b.s. that China has never colonized other countries in the past. Writes Conrad:
Wen then told an enormous porkie:
“Throughout history, China has never colonized any other country’s territory.
Please tell that the Vietnamese, whose entire history pretty much consists of fighting off China’s attempts to conquer and assimilate it. Then there’s the pesky matters of Tibet , Inner Mongolia and the Uighurs . And what about the Spratly Islands and Mischief Reef?
Could you imagine Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi going to Washington and saying that his nation has “never colonized any other country’s territory”? Jesus, they’d be burning Japanese flags (and perhaps Japanese people, too) in most East Asian capitals, while the rest of the planet laughed their asses off at Tokyo. Being, as I am, the significant other of a Mongolian, Chinese denials of their imperial past piss me off immensely - Mongolia spent nearly 300 years as a Chinese colony, and to the extent that the outer regions of the nation enjoy freedom as an independent state (excuse me, Chinese readers, I meant “to the extent that the outer regions of the nation have been prevented from being reunited with the Motherland by Soviet-Russian hegemony”), the Mongolians sure as hell don’t have Beijing to thank. You’d have thought that getting the crap kicked out of them by the Western powers and Japan for much of the previous century would have sensitized the Chinese to the fears of their neighbors. Apparently, that’s not the case - just as Japan refuses to honestly confront their past, the Chinese continue to pretend that their history is without sin.
China has never colonized any other country’s territory? My ass, it hasn’t…
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I thought the Marmotess (sp?) would have set you straight on this one. Mongolia (at least present-day “Outer” Mongolia) was never colonized by the Chinese. Rather it was colonized by the Manchu Qing Dynasty which also happened to rule over China at the same time. When an ethnic Han Chinese Dynasty like the Ming tried to attack and conquer the Mongols (as under the rule of the Zhentong Emperor (r. 1436-1449), the Mongols promptly destroyed the Ming armies, kidnapped the Emperor and held him hostage for several years. Present-day Mongols I have spoken with affirm that they have never been subjugated by Chinese.
Many other of the most egregious cases of ???밅hinese??? imperialism were also the result of the conquests of Qing Emperors (Kangxi and Qianlong) in the 17th and 18th centuries. And in the late 19th century, the Qing imposed a semi-colonial informal empire in Choson Korea with all the modern trappings of imperialism??р쓊xtraterritoriality, self-governing concessions, gunboats, troops in the capital, tariff and customs control etc. etc.
The big question is, of course, whether these should be described as cases of ???밅hinese??? imperialism or of Qing (Manchu) imperialism. The PRC (and the Guomindang before it; some GMD maps of ???밅hina??? in Taiwan have, until recently included all of Mongolia!) has gone to great efforts to blur this distinction in order to maintain the integrity of the present-day borders but it remains an open question whether this is historically justified.
God, I wonder how many people started coughing and gagging in the audience after that little gaffe.
The Chinese have nukes, the Japanese don’t. That “entitles” them to their own particular delusions. Come to think of it, the Japanese aren’t particularly forthcoming about their history, either.
Strangely enough, there’s only one major world power I can think of that it’s perfectly safe to bash anywhere in the world.