The last days of Sun Yat-sen: Part 1 of 3

December 2, 2014

In October 1911, a revolution in China overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ended more than two-thousand years of imperial monarchy.

After the revolution, the Republic of China was founded but warlords still controlled much of China.

The leader of this revolution was Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), and he served as the first president of the Republic of China.

The Chinese Communist Party persuaded Sun that if his Nationalist Party formed an alliance with the Communists, Sun would gain support from China’s peasants and industrial workers to help end the anarchy in China. Time Asia

But, by 1924, Sun Yat-sen’s health was not good. He was so sick he had to turn command of the Nationalist navy and army over to Hu Hanmin, who would later be a rival with Chiang Kai-shek for control of the Nationalists (Kuomintang) in the late 1920s.

The reason that Sun Yat-sen gave command of the navy and army to Hu Hanmin was because he wanted to go to the Baiyun Mountains of Guangzhou to recover from his illness.

However, Sun Yat-sen was invited to Beijing instead—the reason was to meet the warlord that controlled Beijing.

At the time, The Nationalists only held power in Southern China.

When he arrived by train, about 20-thousand people met him at the station.

The warlord had invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing to talk about how to end the chaos and anarchy that still raged throughout much of China.

Continued in Part 2 on December 3, 2014

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Chiang Kai-shek, an American ally and a Brutal Dictator

November 25, 2014

Anyone in the United States who reads and/or listens to the news has probably heard of Mao’s brutality and the alleged brutality of the Chinese Communist Party, but what about Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT, an ally of the United States during and after World War II. In fact, you might be interested to discover how much the United States has spent just from 1990 on Taiwan’s defense from the Congressional Research Service to learn how much the U.S. is willing to spend to support a brutal regime.

The Taipei Times published a piece on the front page of the paper on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, and said, Former dictator Chiang Kai-shek was a murderer, and President Chen Shui-bian said Taiwan’s former authoritarian regime and its leaders were responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians slain in 1947.

On a site that lists the death tolls for the major wars and atrocities of the twentieth century, Chiang Kai-shek was given credit for 10,214,000 democides from 1921 to 1948.

Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as “the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder.”

In another post about Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, enotes.com says, “From 1927 to 1949, Chiang’s troops used murder, torture and other brutal tactics to wipe out the communists.”

Then Scaruffi.com lists a century of genocides from 1900-2000 and Chiang Kai-shek was credited with the deaths of 30-thousand during popular uprising against his regime in Taiwan in 1947.

The Boston Examiner reported that several thousand protesters marched in Taipei on February 28, 1947 against the brutality—that took place the day before—but were met with bullets. Martial law was declared and even though things had settled down by the time the Nationalist soldiers arrived, the massacre began almost immediately.

East Asia posted an Austrian Perspective by Christian Schafferer, who said the infamous 1947 “2-28 Incident” resulted in ten-to-thirty thousand civilians killed and Taiwan’s governor executed.

In addition, I discovered a book on the topic, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan, The 2.28 Incident and the White Terror by Sylvia Li-Chun, who is the Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame.

The most powerful evidence comes from the monument in Taiwan to the incident, which says, “Within a few months, the number of deaths, injured and missing persons amounted to tens of thousands.  Keelung, Taipei, Chiayi and Kaohsiung suffered the highest number of casualties. It was called the February 28 Incident.”

Then from the Asia Times, “They slaughtered civilians at random to terrorize the Taiwanese into submission, and carried out a targeted campaign to wipe out the Taiwanese elite—local leaders and intellectuals —who represented the biggest threat to KMT rule. To this date, the numbers killed are uncertain, but historians estimate 30,000.”

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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13 Comments | America, China, Chinese history, military spending, politics, propaganda, Taiwan, United States | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
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The Private and Passionate Poetry of China

November 19, 2014

The Golden Age of Poetry in China was during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD).  One book of Chinese Love Poetry edited by Jane Portal (© 2004) was published by Barnes & Noble Books (ISBN 0-7607-4833-0).

I’m sure that most people outside of China don’t think of love poems when they think of China. However, there has to be a reason for more than 1.3 billion people, other than the Great Wall of China, the Pacific Ocean and the biggest mountain range on the planet, the Himalayas, which helped shelter China from some of the violence that rocked the rest of the world for centuries—at least until the Opium Wars.

For poetry lovers, Chinese Love Poetry imparts a sense of the private passion that beats in the Chinese heart. The three arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting, the Triple Excellence, are represented on the pages.

The following painting, lady weeping at parting from husband, 17th century, comes from the Qing Dynasty and the book says it is a color woodblock print on paper.

Chinese poetry is frequently personal and often linked to a particular occasion (page 9).

Deeply in love, but tonight
we seem to be passionless;
I just feel, before our last cup of wine
a smile will not come.
The wax candle has sympathy ­­–
weeps at our separation:
Its tears for us keep rolling down
till day breaks.

by Du Mu (803-852 AD)

As you can see, the Chinese are a passionate people—they just don’t dramatize these passions publicly as many Westerners do—at least until the West invaded China to force—if possible—a different set of values on China’s collective culture.

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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China’s Long History with Burma/Myanmar: Part 3 of 3

November 13, 2014

Enough said about The Economist, Christianity and differences between dictatorships, democracies and republics, and back to the long history between China and Burma/Myanmar, which started during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.).

Due to deposits of jade in Burma/Myanmar and that region, Chinese merchants have been involved in mining and trade there for more than two thousand years.

Then during the Qing Dynasty, there were four major invasions (1765-1769) of Burma by China’s Manchu leaders. In 1784, the long struggle between Burma and China ended and regular trade started up again.

In November 1885, Sir Robert Hart favored a proposal that China, as Burma’s overlord, stand aside and allow the British Empire to pursue her own course there provided that Britain allow Burma to continue her decennial tribute (once every ten years) missions to China. Source: The I. G. In Peking, Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs 1868-1907, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, page 614, 1975.

Instead, the British Empire made Burma a province of India in 1886.

Since independence from the British Empire, Burma has generally been impartial to world affairs but was one of the first countries to recognize Israel and the People’s Republic of China.

Territories such as the autonomous regions of Tibet, Xinjiang and countries like North Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Burma, Vietnam and others along China’s long borders were considered vassal states by some Chinese dynasties, and these vassal states often sent lavish gifts and delegations to China’s emperors on a regular schedule.

Return to Part 2 or start with Part 1

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_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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China’s Long History with Burma/Myanmar: Part 2 of 3

November 12, 2014

What does the Beijing based unnamed critic writing for The Economist expect—that China adopt America’s evangelical, neo-conservative/neo-liberal role to spread “democracy” and “Christianity” to the world through nation building?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the critic writing in The Economist suggest that he or she expects China to spread “democracy” to countries like Burma and North Korea, which are by definition dictatorships, which the U.S. has a long history of supporting. See Cold War Origins of the CIA Holocaust to learn more.

If you haven’t read this opinion piece in The Economist, I suggest you do before going on to Part 3. Did you know that at the same time that the United States sells or gives weapons to dictatorships and authoritarian governments, it also has programs through the U.S. State Department to support religious freedom in many of the same countries?

For instance, Saudi Arabia, a country that prohibits any religion other than Islam and has a long history of human rights violations (Human Rights Watch World Report 2013) . On October 20, 2010, the US State Department notified Congress of its intention to make the biggest arms sale in American history—an estimated $60.5 billion purchase by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The IAGS says this about Saudi Arabia: “Much has been reported about the complex system of terrorist financing and the money trail facilitating the September 11 terror attacks. Individuals and charities from the Persian Gulf—mainly from Saudi Arabia—appear to be the most important source of funding for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda.”

Continued on November 13, 2014 in Part 3 or return to Part 1

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_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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