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Be Afraid of Economic ‘Bigness.’ Be Very Afraid.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/opinion/sunday/fascism-economy-monopoly.html

In the 1930s it contributed to the rise of fascism. Alarmingly, we are experimenting again with a monopolized economy.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, an urgent question presented itself: How can we prevent the rise of fascism from happening again? If over the years that question became one of mostly historical interest, it has again become pressing, with the growing success of populist, nationalist and even neofascist movements all around the world.

Continue reading “Be Afraid of Economic ‘Bigness.’ Be Very Afraid.”

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Thucydides Trap

1. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? https://www.belfercenter.org/thucydides-trap/overview-thucydides-trap

2. “Prospect Of U.S.-China War Rising” After US Warships Sail Through Taiwan Strait https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-23/graham-allison-tensions-taiwan-strait-prospect-us-china-war-rising

3. History of Peloponnesian war

4. What is Thucydides’s Trap? https://www.quora.com/What-is-Thucydides%E2%80%99s-Trap

The Thucydides Trap is a theory proposed byGraham Allison who postulates that war between a rising power and an established power is inevitable:

“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Thucydides from“The History of the Peloponnesian War”

The two key drivers allegedly being “the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.”

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ChinaX Notes

Part 1   unit 1-3 Political and Intellectual Foundations: From the Sage Kings to Confucius and the Legalists

Part 1   unit 4-6 Political and Intellectual Foundations: From the Sage Kings to Confucius and the Legalists

Part 2 The Creation and End of a Centralized Empire

Part 3 Cosmopolitan Tang: Aristocratic Culture

Part 4 Literati China: Examinations and Neo-Confucianism

Part 5 From Global Empire under the Mongols to a Global Economy under the Ming Dynasty

Part 6 unit 26-27 The Manchus and the Qing

Part 7 unit 28-29 The Manchus and the Qing

Part 8 Creating Modern China: The Birth of a Nation

Part 9 Communist Liberations

Part 10 Greater China Today: The People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

 

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Inner Asian Empire and the Unity of China

EdX.org ChinaX part 6.

How do the incorporation of the inner Asian frontier, the final corporation
of this frontier into Qing shape the course of modern Chinese history?
How is it seen?
How is it reflected in politics and society in China today?
These territories, along with Tibet, which
also comes, as I mentioned earlier, under more and more direct authority
of the Manchu Emperor through the course of the 18th century.
These territories comprise a pretty significant part
of modern Chinese territory, the lands of the People’s Republic of China.
And they set the mold.
The Qing shape sets the mold then for what
will become the shape of the modern Chinese nation.
These territories also represent a continuing problem
of governance for the PRC.
And so the relevance of Manchu empire to modern China, I think,
is hard to exaggerate.
Inheritance of these territories has been very effectively naturalized
by the leaders of China under the Republic of China,
as well as under the People’s Republic of China.
And so it’s easy, in a way, for us to forget that this was the result
of an imperial expansion, a project of imperial expansion that took place
in the late 1600’s and then in the 1700’s.
But if it hadn’t been for this project of imperial expansion,
we could be pretty sure that China today would be half the size that it is now.
An awareness of the Qing imperial enterprise during the High Qing
reminds us that while much is made of the continuity of China
as the last of the antique empires to survive into the modern era,
this is something of a misunderstanding.
That is to say, China today is the successor state,
we can say of “imperial China,” but more specifically,
it is the successor state of the Qing empire
which was a vast, hybrid, polyethnic, multinational state that
brought peoples from very different backgrounds,
with different religious traditions, different languages together
in a kind of gunpowder empire of the type that is quite comparable to say,
the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal empire, the Romanov empire.
It represented the synthesis of centuries
of interaction between China and inner Asia.
It wasn’t just another Chinese empire.

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The Makings of a Leader

Just Wow!

  1. How, then, does he establish himself as a leader of his family?
  2. Well, it is not accepted right away that he will be the leader of his family.
  3. To be a leader involves struggle.
  4. You win through struggle, through vanquishing others.
  5. It’s not as if by being the oldest son of Hoelun
  6. he has the right to become the leader of his family.
  7. There’s a story that’s told of one of his half brothers
  8. who is so much stronger than him that when they went out fishing,
  9. his brother would take away the fish.
  10. When they went out to shoot birds, the half brother would take away the bird.
  11. And Temujin went to complain to his mother, and his mother ignored him.
  12. And so Temujin arranged with his four brothers
  13. to sneak up behind the half brother and to shoot him dead.
  14. At that point, he became the leader of his family.