Comments by "D W" (@DW-op7ly) on "Rise of Asia"
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The Chinese Treasure Fleet in 15th century Philippines
* It was the people of our archipelago who discovered Magellan and the Europeans in 1521, not the other way around, as most Filipinos were taught by our grade-school textbooks. Our islands and their inhabitants were well-known to a larger, richer world that of Chinese emperors and scholars and Arab traders, as early as the 9th, even 6th centuries. And certainly by 1000 A.D., our shores were regular ports of call in the trade with China, then the most powerful nation on earth.
Chinese chronicles, European archaeologists and the diggings in our pre-colonial burial grounds prove that those ancient Filipinos used fine porcelain, weights and measures imported from China, and recorded written contracts. Chao-Ju-Kua reported that Chinese traders visited Ma-I (Luzon) regularly, leaving silks, porcelain and metal utensils on the beaches of designated islands, and returning weeks later to collect payment in the form of beeswax, gold dust, carabao horn, ginger, cinnamon or garlic. It was an import-export system run on a reliable honor system with unquestioned good faith.
* When Magellan’s Spanish Armada hove into view in March 1521, the natives of Homonhon in the Visayas must have taken pity on the small black ships with tattered sails and scruffy, starving, disoriented sailors, for they sent a small rowboat packed with rice, coconuts and bananas to their rescue. On the next island, the white, bearded strangers were feted in a bamboo palace with a banquet of roast fish, pork, turtle eggs and palm wine, by a native king whose queen wore a black-and-white gown, red lips and nails, while a quartet of young, topless damsels played music on various gongs and drums.
Those early Filipinos had been more accustomed to the tall, prosperous, Chinese ships with a trio of feathery sails stiffened with battens, for the China trade had been in place for at least 500 years. During the Ming Dynasty, Filipinos enjoyed the visits of the Treasure Fleet (1405-1500) of Admiral Cheng Ho (Zhen He) a huge, 7-ft tall, powerful eunuch, who had built 1,500 massive, 500-ft ships in a giant shipyard in Nanking with the help of 30,000 workers. The luxurious ships, each manned by 1,000 sailors ruled the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
* But the Chinese were not interested in conquest or territorial aggrandizement. Their purposes were trade and diplomacy. That was what our ancestors expected when they first saw the Spanish Armada.
Filipinos had never seen white men before Magellan and never thought the strangers would be as rapacious and predatory as they would prove to be. They assumed the new foreigners to be poor and needy because they had only glass beads, a string of little bells and a red cap (Magellan’s gifts) to reciprocate the native prodigality. The white men were, in fact, so dazzled by the earrings, chains, armlets and anklets, of pure gold, worn by both the native men and women that Magellan had to warn them against showing their covetousness.
Philstar
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@storm_yu
India is a great country, but what if I tell you that Africa outperforms India when you examine absolute and intrinsic economic indicators. Do not get me wrong: India has one of the greatest diaspora models in the world which is simply amazing and truly enviable. But despite all that, India’s potentials remain latent, unlocked, just like Africa. So, as you share this plot (on click), note the following:
The population of India is 1.4 billion. The population of Africa is 1.3 billion. The GDP of India is $3.1 trillion. The GDP of Africa is $3 trillion. Did you notice something? Africa and India are just in the same pot, underperforming, despite the perception that India has higher productivity or efficiency. Indeed, the economic efficiency difference between India and Africa is the type which exists between 12 and a dozen. Sure, Africa has more natural resources. But yet, India enjoys one border which has an efficiency factor against Africa. (GDP of China is about $17.73 trillion, population is about 1.4 billion)
As I have written many times, we must look into #China, because China has the secret sauce to development. India has a literacy rate of about 78%; China has 99.8% which means every person above 15 years old can read and write in China! As you go deeper, you will see why China is supreme and totally uncorrelated with any other emerging economy.
Then, the biggest difference. When Africans and Indians graduate in American top universities, they make US permanent homes; Chinese put about 5 years, and then move back to China, and tap unlimited government-created resources to challenge the companies they worked for in the United States. That is why you hardly see Chinese at top leadership positions in leading US tech companies even as you see them running companies which challenge those firms at the global level. Like #Africa, India does not offer such pathways.
Sure, we must learn certain things from India. But India itself is learning more from China, and I think we can go straight and learn from China. China is doing the core things which transform economies. Of course #India rocks, and doing great; my point is to put things in perspective.
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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@storm_yu you have to copy and paste on YouTube
You are not allowed to post up
HTTP links
You would know that if you ever posted up a 3rd party article to support an argument you Charmaar love child
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Why was China erased from Western memory
The remarkable history of Chinese invention - Why was China erased from Western memory?
Article by 龙信明
Introduction
Joseph Needham was an English medical doctor and biologist, teaching in England in the 1930s. By an accident of fate he acquired some Chinese students, and was intrigued to hear their claims of so many medical and scientific discoveries having originated in China, rather than in the West.
Needham became fully fluent in Chinese, and eventually moved to China in 1942 to investigate these claims and to research the entire history of Chinese invention. That work led to an astonishing voyage of historical discovery.
Needham originally planned to write a book cataloguing Chinese inventions, but his first volume barely scratched the surface of his subject. He slowly gatherred many of his students into this enterprise, and they eventually wrote a collection of 26 books, to catalog the history of Chinese discovery.
Myth and Misrepresentation
It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of things invented by the Chinese many hundreds of years, and often several millennia, before they appeared in the West.
All the myths about China and the Chinese being good at 'memorising and passing exams', but being unable to think independently or to be imaginative and creative, are just that - myths. Those stories were never true, not then and not now.
This isn't a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but encompasses the entire range of human knowledge from endocrinoloy to mathematics, from agriculture to astronomy.
How could such facts have been hidden from the entire Western world for so long? And why were they withheld?
Needham made his discoveries in the 1940s, but our Western education has never made reference to them, never acknowledged them.
We Westerners were taught that virtually all inventions and discoveries arose in Europe but, thanks to Joseph Needham, we have clear documentation proving they existed in China often 1,000 or more years before the Europeans copied them.
In all of the above, Needham has published not only old Chinese texts, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these items, from texts that can be accurately dated. These are not wild claims or
supppositions; the evidence is both conclusive and striking, and is there for anyone to examine.
Where has the world been, for so many years? How could all of this have remained hidden? How - and Why - did the West so thoroughly erase China from the world's current historical memory?
MySingaporeBlogSpot
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@thecomment9489
Civilization state versus nation-state
15/01/11 - Süddeutsche Zeitung
China confronts Europe with an enormous problem: we do not understand it
Our western-centric value-judgements about China must no longer be allowed to act as a substitute for understanding the country in its own terms. This is no easy task. China is profoundly different from the West in the most basic of ways. Perhaps the most basic difference is that it is not a nation-state in the European sense of the term. Indeed, it has only described itself as such since around 1900. Anyone who knows anything about China is aware that it is a lot older than that. China, as we know it today, dates back to 221BC, in some respects much earlier. That date marked the end of the Warring States period, the victory of the Qin, and the birth of the Qin Empire whose borders embraced a considerable slice of what is today the eastern half of China and by far its most populous part.
For over two millennia, the Chinese thought of themselves as a civilization rather than a nation. The most fundamental defining features of China today, and which give the Chinese their sense of identity, emanate not from the last century when China has called itself a nation-state but from the previous two millennia when it can be best described as a civilization-state: the relationship between the state and society, a very distinctive notion of the family, ancestral worship, Confucian values, the network of personal relationships that we call guanxi, Chinese food and the traditions that surround it, and, of course, the Chinese language with its unusual relationship between the written and spoken form. The implications are profound: whereas national identity in Europe is overwhelmingly a product of the era of the nation-state – in the United States almost exclusively so – in China, on the contrary, the sense of identity has primarily been shaped by the country’s history as a civilization-state. Although China describes itself today as a nation-state, it remains essentially a civilization-state in terms of history, culture, identity and ways of thinking. China’s geological structure is that of a civilization-state; the nation-state accounts for little more than the top soil.
China, as a civilization-state, has two main characteristics. Firstly, there is its exceptional longevity, dating back to even before the break-up of the Roman Empire. Secondly, the sheer scale of China – both geographic and demographic – means that it embraces a huge diversity. Contrary to the Western belief that China is highly centralised, in fact in many respects the opposite is the case: indeed, it would have been impossible to govern the country – either now or in the dynastic period – on such a basis. It is simply too large. The implications in terms of the way the Chinese think are profound.
In 1997 Hong Kong was handed over to China by the British. The Chinese constitutional proposal was summed up in the phrase: ‘one country, two systems’. Barely anyone in the West gave this maxim much thought or indeed credence; the assumption was that Hong Kong would soon become like the rest of China. This was entirely wrong. The political and legal structure of Hong Kong remains as different now from the rest of China as in 1997. The reason we did not take the Chinese seriously is that the West is characterised by a nation-state mentality, hence when Germany was unified in 1990 it was done solely and exclusively on the basis of the Federal Republic; the DDR in effect disappeared. ‘One nation-state, one system’ is the nation-state way of thinking. But, as a civilization-state, the Chinese logic is quite different. Because China is so vast and embraces such diversity, as a matter of necessity it must be flexible: ‘one civilization, many systems’.
The idea of China as a civilization-state is a fundamental building block for understanding China in its own terms. And it has multifarious implications. The relationship between the state and society in China is very different to that in the West. Contrary to the overwhelming Western assumption that the Chinese state lacks legitimacy and is bereft of public support, in fact the Chinese state enjoys greater legitimacy than any Western state. We have come to assume that the legitimacy of the state overwhelmingly rests on the democratic process – universal suffrage, competing parties et al. But this is only one element: if it was the whole story, then the Italian state would enjoy a robust legitimacy rather than the reality, a chronic lack of it. And to explain this we have to go back to the Risorgimento as only a partially fulfilled project.
The reason why the Chinese state enjoys a formidable legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese has nothing to do with democracy but can be found in the relationship between the state and Chinese civilization. The state is seen as the embodiment, guardian and defender of Chinese civilization. Maintaining the unity, cohesion and integrity of Chinese civilization – of the civilization-state – is perceived as the highest political priority and is seen as the sacrosanct task of the Chinese state. Unlike in the West, where the state is viewed with varying degrees of suspicion, even hostility, and is regarded, as a consequence, as an outsider, in China the state is seen as an intimate, as part of the family, indeed as the head of the family; interestingly, in this context, the Chinese term for nation-state is ‘nation-family’.
Or consider a quite different example. Over 90 per cent of Chinese think of themselves as of one race, the Han. This is so different from the world’s other most populous nations – India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil, all of which are highly multi-racial – as to be extraordinary. Of course, in reality the Han were a product of many different races, but the Han do not think of themselves like that. And the reason takes us back to the civilization-state and one of its defining characteristics, namely China’s remarkable longevity. Over thousands of years, as a result of many processes, cultural, racial and ethnic, the differences between the many races that comprised the Han have been weakened to the point where they were no longer significant.
We will never make sense of China if we persist in treating it as if it is, or should be, a product of our own civilization. Our present attitude towards China is a function of arrogance and ignorance. And it threatens to leave us bewildered, confused and alienated. Our historical inheritance, and the mentality it has engendered, ill equips us for the very new world that is presently unfolding before us.
Martin Jacques
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This is the dispute between the Philippines and China
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Timeline of the South China Sea dispute
* It has been claimed by the People's Republic of China on the argument that since 200 BCE Chinese fishermen have used the Spratly islands
* Naval forces of the Liu Song dynasty (420–479 CE) patrolled the Paracel and Spratly islands.[5] In the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the islands were placed under the administration and authority of the Qiongzhou Prefecture (now Hainan Province).[5] The Chinese administration of the South China Sea continued into the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE).[5]
* Archaeologists have found Chinese made potteries porcelains and other historical relics from the Southern dynasties (420–589 CE), the Sui dynasty (581–619 CE), the Tang dynasty, the Song dynasty, the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE), the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE) and later eras up to modern times on the South China Sea islands.[5]
1876 – China makes its earliest documented claim to the Paracel Islands[citation needed]
1883 – When the Spratlys and Paracels were surveyed by Germany in 1883, China issued protests.
1887 – In the 19th century, Europeans found that Chinese fishermen from Hainan annually visited the Spratly islands for part of the year, while in 1877 it was the British who launched the first modern legal claims to the Spratlys
1902 – China sends naval forces on inspection tours of the Paracel Islands to preempt French claims.[28] Scholar François-Xavier Bonnet argued that per Chinese records, these expeditions never occurred and were backdated during the 1970s.[29][30]
1907 – China sends another naval force, this time to plan for resource exploitation.[28]
1911 – The newly formed Republic of China, successor state to the Qing dynasty, moves administration of the Paracel Islands to Hainan,[28] which would not become a separate Chinese province until 1988.
1946 – The R.O.C. established garrisons on both Woody (now Yongxing / 永兴) Island in the Paracels and Taiping Island in the Spratlys. France protested. The French tried but failed to dislodge Chinese nationalist troops from Yongxing Island/Woody Island (the only habitable island in the Paracels), but were able to establish a small camp on Pattle (now Shanhu / 珊瑚) Island in the southwestern part of the archipelago.[37][38][39] The Republic of China drew up The Southern China Sea Islands Location Map, marking the national boundaries in the sea with 11 lines, two of which were later removed, showing the U-shaped claim on the entire South China Sea, and showing the Spratly and Paracels in Chinese territory, in 1947.[28] The Americans reminded the Philippines at its independence in 1946 that the Spratlys was not Philippine territory, both to not anger Chiang Kai-shek in China and because the Spratlys were not part of the Philippines per the 1898 treaty Spain signed with America.[38]
1950 – After the Chinese nationalists were driven from Hainan by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), they withdrew their garrisons in both the Paracels and Spratlys to Taiwan.
1969 – A UN sponsored research team discovers oil under the sea floor of the island group.
1970 – China occupies Amphitrite Group of the Paracel Islands
* In 1596, the Spanish Colonial Government declared that each island in the Kalayaan Islands, now known as the Spratly Islands, had Barangay or Barrio status.
1971 – Philippines announces claim to islands adjacent to its territory in the Spratlys, which they named Kalayaan, which was formally incorporated into Palawan Province in 1972. The Philippines President Marcos announced the claims after Taiwanese troops attacked and shot at a Philippine fishing boat on Itu Aba.[
Wikipedia
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This is the Malay and Philippines dispute
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The two main sultanates in the region at the time were Sulu and Brunei. In 1658, the Sultan of Brunei gave Sabah to the Sultan of Sulu - either as a dowry or because troops from Sulu had helped him quell a rebellion.
More than 350 years later, the sultan's heirs have come to remind Malaysians that they still consider Sabah to be part of Sulu and, by extension, part of the Philippines.
"Sabah is our home," they said simply when asked why they had come.
But history is not that simple and of course Malaysia has no intention of giving up Sabah to this little band of Filipinos.
The crux of their disagreement lies in a contract made in 1878, between the Sultanate of Sulu and the British North Borneo Company.
Under this contract known as pajak, the company could occupy Sabah in perpetuity as long as it paid a regular sum of money.
Even today, Malaysia pays about 5,000 Malaysian ringgit (£1,000, $1,500) a year to the Sultanate of Sulu.
But the British and, after that an independent Malaysia, interpreted pajak to mean sale, while the Sulu Sultanate has always maintained it means lease.
"In my opinion, this is more consistent with a lease rather than a sale, because you can't have a purchase price which is not fixed and which is payable until kingdom come," said Harry Roque, a law professor at the University of the Philippines.
BBC
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