The BBC reported, The Story of China – China’s Shakespeare – Du Fu “Du Fu (712-770 AD) is regarded by many Chinese as their greatest poet. He was well known in his day, and made friends with other poets such as Li Bai, another famous poet in the Tang dynasty. As a member of the elite in society he lived in the capital at Chang’an, now known as Xi’an. Later he was dubbed the ‘Poet Historian’, for writing down what he saw with his own eyes during the An Lu Shan rebellion. Du Fu saw the terrible time that war-torn China suffered, especially the pain and suffering amongst the ordinary people, and the court running away from the capital.”
Why did the BBC say Du Fu was China’s Shakespeare when he was born 851 years before Shakespeare’s birth in April 1564?
In fact, Shakespeare is often called England national poet and the “Bard of Avon.” Has anyone ever called him the poet historian of the UK?
In fact, “nothing has been found documenting the composition of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets attributed to him, collectively considered the greatest body of work in the history of the English language.” … “Since the 19th century, a roster of famous people–Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Charlie Chaplin and many others—have voiced their doubts about the man from Stratford. Thousands of books and articles have been devoted to the subject, many of which propose their own candidates for the true author of the Shakespeare canon.”
Is there any doubt that Du Fu wrote his poems? No, because anyone that wants to fact-check will discover that he was born in 712 in Henan province China and died in 770 AD on a riverboat, and many literary critics consider him the great poet of all time. – Britannica
How can anyone compare Du Fu, who we know wrote his poems, to Shakespeare when the world doesn’t know who he really was and if he even wrote the work that bears his name?
The Atlantic even ran a piece that asked, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”… “Theories that others wrote the corpus of work attributed to William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) emerged in the mid-19th century. Assorted comments by his contemporaries have been interpreted by some as suggesting that the London actor claimed credit for writing that wasn’t his.” … “Who was this woman writing ‘immortal work’ in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem ‘Venus and Adonis,’ a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales (in which the woman forces herself on the man)?”
Comparing the work of Shakespeare to Du Fu is also interesting. Absolute Shakespeare.com says, “For now at least, it is still safe to say Shakespeare did indeed write the 37 plays and 154 sonnets credited to him.”
Total History.com reveals, “His (Du Fu) best poetic works were written during his stay in Kuizhou. He was a wonderful writer and wrote almost 400 poems. The poems written in Kuizhou are amongst his greatest works. Most of his poems are based on nature. The famous poet’s work failed to be recognized in his time. It could have been because his poems were not given much exposure. Like most famous poets, Du Fu’s poems became popular and were appreciated only after his demise. Today Du Fu’s work is much appreciated and has been translated into many languages. The world regards Du Fu as a great poet. His contributions to the literature world have been immense.”
China and the United States both honor their military. The United States does this on Veterans Day (Monday, November 11) and Memorial Day (Monday, May 25). China celebrates its annual Army Day on August 1st.
Veterans Day in the United States is a federal holiday to honor military veterans that have served in the United States Armed Forces.
History.com says, “Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.”
In the United States, federal employees get the day off for Veterans Day and Memorial Day.
China celebrates Army Day August 1st, and according to China HIGHLIGHTS.com, the men and women that are active-duty troops have half a day off. Although Army Day in China is a holiday, it is a working holiday and not an official day off.
Army Techology.com says, China Military Online estimated in 2015, that 53,000 women (less than 5 percent of the total number of troops) also serve in China’s Army. In the United States, according to the Defense Department, women now make up 20 percent of the Air Force, 19 percent of the Navy, 15 percent of the Army and almost 9 percent of the Marine Corps.
The Basics explained by Chinese American Family.com: The People’s Liberation Army was founded on August 1, 1927, in Nanchang during a rebellion against nationalist Kuomintang forces. They were known simply as the Red Army during the Chinese Civil War (April 1927 – May 1, 1950). The People’s Liberation Army assumed its role as the armed forces of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Today, the People’s Liberation Army counts more than two million troops.
I think it is important to note that China’s Civil War started days after the Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927 when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had his troops slaughter thousands of Communist Party members and union workers without warning followed by a full-scale purge (executions without trials) of Communists in all areas under the KMT’s military control. Before April 12, 1927, the Communist Party was one of the political parties that made up the fledgling Republic of China started by Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
“You’re unlikely to see any public celebration of Army Day outside of China, except for perhaps a joint ceremony with a host country at a foreign embassy. Otherwise, this is a domestic state occasion marked by speeches and military demonstrations.”
AnydayGuide reports, “The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China established Red Army Day in 1933.”
Make America Great Again was Donald Trump’s misleading campaign logo. I wonder how many people know that Trump sold each hat for $25 and made a profit estimates at $8 for each hat. Millions of these hats have been sold. Trump, of course, trademarked MAGA. CNBC reports, “Trump submitted his application to trademark the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ back in November of 2012. He has profited from the decision politically and financially ever since.”
Make China Great Again is also a reality. Did Mao or any president of China since Mao trademark MCGA and earn a profit from the logo?
How does China’s current President Xi Jinping compare to Donald Trump?
To discover the answer, let’s compare what we know about these two world leaders from reliable sources.
Xi Jinping
Here is how a boy sent to the countryside to shovel sewage and feed pigs became the most powerful president in China’s modern history.
Xi Jinping is the son of Chinese Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun.
Jinping was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father’s purge during the Cultural Revolution, and lived in a cave in the village of Liangjiahe, where he organized communal laborers. After studying at the prestigious Tsinghua University as a Worker-Peasant-Soldier Student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China’s coastal provinces.
Jinping was governor of Fujian province from 1999 to 2002, and governor, then party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang province from 2002 to 2007.
Following the dismissal of Chen Liangyu, Jinping was transferred to Shanghai as party secretary for a brief period in 2007.
He joined the Politburo Standing Committee and central secretariat in October 2007, spending the next five years as Hu Jintao‘s presumed successor. Xi was vice president from 2008 to 2013 and Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission from 2010 to 2012.
After becoming China’s president, Jinping has introduced far-ranging measures to enforce party discipline and to ensure internal unity.
His signature anti-corruption campaign has led to the downfall of prominent incumbent and retired Communist Party officials, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Described as a Chinese nationalist, he has tightened restrictions over civil society and ideological discourse, advocating internet censorship in China as the concept of “internet sovereignty”.
Donald Trump
Compared to Xi Jinping, there is no shortage of information about Donald Trump. With several biographies, one official, there is too much information going back decades about the toxic malignant narcissist that became president of the United States.
Donald Trump has a history of making racially controversial remarks and taking actions widely seen as playing upon racial anxieties in the United States. Trump has denied accusations of racism by saying, “I am not a racist. I’m the least racist person you will ever interview”.
Donald Trump was born into a wealthy family. His father Fred was born in 1905 in the Bronx. Fred Trump’s net worth was estimated at $250 – $300 million. The family company, “E. Trump & Son”, founded in 1923, was primarily active in the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. Fred eventually built and sold thousands of houses, barracks, and apartments. In 1971, Donald Trump was made president of the company, which was later renamed the Trump Organization.
History of Discrimination and Racism
In 1973, Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for housing discrimination against black renters, a lawsuit which, according to Trump, he settled without an admission of guilt.
In 2011, Trump became the leading proponent of the already discredited “Birtherism” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the US, and he repeated the claim for the following five years.
He was accused of racism for maintaining, as late as 2016, that a group of black and Latino teenagers were guilty of raping a white woman in the Central Park jogger case, although an imprisoned serial rapist had confessed in 2002 to raping the jogger alone, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt.
Trump’s History of Corporate Welfare and Business Failures
The New York Times reports, “A Trump Empire Built on Inside Connections and $885 Million in Tax Breaks.”
Thought Co.com explains, “Why Donald Trump’s Companies Went Bankrupt: Details About the 6 Donald Trump Corporate Bankruptcies.
“Critics have cited the Trump corporate bankruptcies as examples of his recklessness and inability to manage …”
USA Today reports, “Hundreds allege Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills. Among those who say the billionaire didn’t pay: dishwashers, painters, waiters …”
“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will ‘protect your job.’ But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.
“At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work.”
Donald Trump’s Sexual Misconduct
The Business Insider offers a timeline of Trump’s many marriages and rumored affairs. “Trump has been plagued by allegations of affairs and sexual Misconduct throughout his three marriages to Ivana Trump, Marla Maples, and Melania Trump.”
Trump’s History of Lies
The New York Times says, “Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office. Updated: The president is still lying, so we’ve added to this list, taking it through Nov. 11, and provided links to the facts in each case.”
Politic Fact lists “All False statements involving Donald Trump.” Page 1 of 10
“BASHING America’s legacy media organizations may be Donald Trump’s most consistent hobby. America’s president has re-purposed the term ‘fake news’, which originally referred to online political-disinformation campaigns, to apply to all unfavorable coverage of his administration, regardless of its veracity. Since his inauguration, he has used the term in 258 different tweets—one out of every 16 messages he has sent on the platform as president.”
After learning about these two world leaders, it is obvious that only one of them will lead his country to become a great world power. There will be one winner and one loser. What do you think, will it be MAGA or MCGA?
If Americans count the colonial era before the U.S. Revolution as part of their history (not counting more than 15,000 years of the native civilizations that were already here when the colonists invaded from Europe), we start with the first colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. That’s 411 years of history for the United States, but China’s recorded history stretches back more than 3,000 years.
What that means is China’s history is overwhelming rich with stories and one of those stories is about the ancient Tea Horse Road.
How many of you have heard of the ancient Tea Horse Road? I didn’t know about it until I first read about it in the May 2010 issue of National Geographic Magazine (NGM).
Tea from China arrived in Tibet as early as the Tang Dynasty (618- 906 A.D.). After that, the Chinese traded tea for Tibetan horses, as many as 25,000 horses annually.
But that isn’t what struck me the most about the NGM piece. For more than a thousand years, Chinese men fed their families by carrying hundreds of pounds of tea across the rugged Himalayan Mountains to Lhasa. Some froze solid in blizzards. Others fell to their deaths from the narrow switchbacks that climbed to the clouds.
This ended in 1949 when Mao had a road built to Tibet and farmland was redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. “It was the happiest day of my life,” said Luo Yong Fu, a 92-year-old dressed in a black beret and a blue Mao jacket that the author of the National Geographic piece met in the village of Changheba.
Did you know that the British stole the secret of making tea from China? That’s another story from China’s history.
Among the many misimpressions westerners tend to have of China, sex as some kind of taboo topic here seems to be the most common, if not clichéd. Forgetting for a moment that, owing to a population of 1.3 billion, somebody must be doing it, what most of us don’t seem to know is that, at several points throughout the millennia, China has been a society of extreme sexual openness.
And now, according to author Richard Burger’s new book Behind the Red Door, the Chinese are once again on the verge of a sexual revolution.
Best known for his knives-out commentary on The Peking Duck, one of China’s longest-running expat blogs, Burger takes a similar approach to surveying the subject of sex among the Sinae, leaving no explicit ivory carving unexamined, no raunchy ancient poetry unrecited, and, ahem, no miniskirt unturned.
Opening (metaphorically and literally) with an introduction about hymen restoration surgery, Burger delves dàndàn-deep into the olden days of Daoism, those prurient practitioners of free love who encouraged multiple sex partners as the ultimate co-joining of Yin and Yang. Promiscuity, along with prostitution, flourished during the Tang Dynasty – recognized as China’s cultural zenith – which Burger’s research surmises is no mere coincidence.
In this video, “The sexual revolution in China is underway, but not without its contradictions. The ‘sexless China’ over three decades ago is long gone, but gays still enter sham marriages, some women have hymen restorations before their weddings, and some men have a second ‘wife’ or a mistress. In an interview with Xinhua, Richard Burger, author of ‘Behind the Red Door: Sex in China,’ explains the ongoing Chinese sexual revolution.”
Enter the Yuan Dynasty, and its conservative customs of Confucianism, whereby sex became regarded only “for the purpose of producing heirs.” As much as we love to hate him, Mao Zedong is credited as single-handedly wiping out all those nasty neo-Confucius doctrines, including eliminating foot binding, forbidding spousal abuse, allowing divorce, banning prostitution (except, of course, for Party parties), and encouraging women to work. But in typical fashion, laws were taken too far; within 20 years, China under Mao became a wholly androgynous state.
We then transition from China’s red past into the pink-lit present, whence prostitution is just a karaoke bar away, yet possession of pornography is punishable by imprisonment – despite the fact that millions of single Chinese men (called bare branches) will never have wives or even girlfriends due to gross gender imbalance.
Burger laudably also tackles the sex trade from a female’s perspective, including an interview with a housewife-turned-hair-salon hostess who, ironically, finds greater success with foreigners than with her own sex-starved albeit ageist countrymen.
Western dating practices among hip, urban Chinese are duly contrasted with traditional courtship conventions, though, when it comes down to settling down, Burger points out that the Chinese are still generally resistant to the idea that marriage can be based on love. This topic naturally segues into the all-but-acceptable custom of kept women (little third), as well as homowives, those tens of millions of straight women trapped in passionless unions with closeted gay men out of filial piety.
Behind the Red Door concludes by stressing that while the Chinese remain a sexually open society at heart, contradictive policies (enforced by dubious statistics) designed to discard human desire are written into law yet seldom enforced, simply because “sexual contentment is seen as an important pacifier to keep society stable and harmonious.”
This guest post by Tom Carter first appeared in China in City Weekend Magazine. Reblogged with permission of Tom Carter. Behind the Red Door was published by Earnshaw Books.
Tom Carter is married to a Chinese citizen, and he lives and works in China.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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