The central story of China’s economic reforms and the resulting economic miracle has been the move from a centrally planned to a largely market economy, and the emergence of a market-based and mainly private sector alongside the old state-owned sector. Most quantitative trends are still in that direction, and legal and institutional reforms, notably stronger property rights within a situation of limited rule of law, have provided some support. Nevertheless, China has maintained its distinctiveness from other varieties of capitalism, both in rhetoric (“socialist market economy”) and in reality. The Communist Party state retains a more powerful role in the economy than is the case with most capitalist countries, and the trend has by no means been unidirectional from state to private or from planning to market.

Indeed, over the past several years there has been a lot of discussion in China over a counter trend, that is “the advance of the state and the retreat of the private” (guo jin min tui). On the one hand this reflects the on-going perception in the Chinese leadership that only the “national champions”—the massive state-owned companies—are likely to be able to compete on the international stage. Moreover, the nature of the 2008 stimulus package—heavily weighted to large-scale infrastructure—meant that many of the resources went to state-owned companies. At the same time, the trend also involves struggles for power and wealth between different groups in society. Thus as the Economist reported, state interests were successful in the mid-2000s in seizing some 4,000 privately run oil wells in north-west China.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (L) talks with Vice President Xi Jinping as they leave after the closing session of the National People’s Congress on March 13, 2009 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Guang Niu)

One of the main arenas of contention between state and private interests has been the coal industry. Of course this is an arena where genuine claims of public interest can be made. China is critically dependent on coal as a source for its energy (coal provides around 70% of China’s total energy needs), a dependence that causes major environmental problems, and in that situation the state could be expected to pay close attention to the industry in any society. Moreover safety, or rather the lack of it, has provided a major reason and pretext for state intervention. Up to the early 2000s China’s coal safety record was an international embarrassment, with far higher levels of fatalities and fatality rates per million tons of coal produced even than other developing countries. This became a matter of concern both for the leadership and for the educated public in general. Wen Jiabao’s history as a geologist contributed to making this issue a major focus of the more “populist” agenda of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership. The worst safety record was found among the smaller rural and private mines, and therefore provided the pretext for a series of attempts to curtail or control such mines. It also allowed the state and the press to paint the small mine owners as “black-hearted coal owners,” and they received public sympathy.

The two trends—a general extension of state power in the economy and concern for coal safety—came together in the attempt to consolidate and rationalize the coal industry in the late 2000s. This happened most famously in Shanxi province, until 2008 China’s largest coal producer, and similar policies were then extended to other provinces, though with some variations. In Shanxi, the policy took the form of empowering State-owned mining enterprises to take over the resources of small mines within an area allocated to each of the large mines, thus ruling out any competition over resources. This was widely perceived, though not official described, as the (re-)nationalization of coal resources.

Private enterprises and owners not surprisingly felt bitter at the implementation of this policy, and argued strongly that any compensation that was paid was entirely inadequate. Owners among the local rural population were angry at being forced to sell below value, with dark rumours about bribes paid to local officials. But many of the targets of the policy were extra-provincial investors, and thus people for whom the provincial government would feel no particular responsibility. The largest group was from Wenzhouin Zhejiang, whose investors had sunk tens of billions of yuan into the Shanxi coal industry in the 1990s and 2000s. The overall trend towards the strengthening of property rights was shown by the fact that the Wenzhou owners felt able to fight the takeover, using media campaigns to denounce the nationalization and the state’s encroachment on private rights. They also attempted to call on the rule of law, hiring lawyers, who held workshops and conferences in Hangzhou to protest the policy, arguing that it contradicted the principles of the socialist market economy. Nevertheless the trends towards stronger property rights and the rule of law were only incipient, and it would appear that the mine owners’ protests had limited effect, and the nationalization went ahead.

Private owners were not the only interests adversely affected. By concentrating ownership in the hands of state owned enterprises at the provincial level, the policy also deprived local governments of the major part of their revenue streams and local populations (and migrant workers) of many employment opportunities. Thus there was much less enthusiasm for the policy at the county level and below than at the level of the province, though outright opposition was limited by the heavy weight the central state was giving to the improvement of work safety in assessing officials for transfer and promotion: the policy does appear to have very substantially reduced the accident rate, and resistance could be made to seem irresponsible. In addition to generating tax revenues, local governments had previously been able to pressure private mine owners into contributing to a wide range of social expenditures. As one local official complained, although they could get the private owners to build roads or schools almost at will, they couldn’t even get the new province-level owners to construct a public toilet.

One must be careful in extrapolating the experience of the Shanxi coal industry to the national economy, but at the minimum this episode shows that the state retains levers and the willingness to use them to impose its will on the enterprise sector to a far greater extent than in most other capitalist countries. While private owners appear to have a greater ability now to articulate their interests in public, they are still not able to roll back the advance of the state at the expense of the private where the state—or key elements of the state—sees its core interests involved.

Tim Wright, Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK.  His research focuses on modern Chinese economic history, in particular natural and economic shocks to the economy, and on the political economy of contemporary China. His publications include Coal Mining in China’s Economy and Society, 1895–1937, The Chinese Economy in the Early Twentieth Century: Recent Chinese Studies, and The Political Economy of the Chinese Coal Industry: Black Gold and Blood-stained Coal.

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By Joseph M. Siracusa

Any discussion of North Korea’s nuclear program should begin with an understanding of the limited information available regarding its development. North Korea has been very effective in denying external observers any significant information on its nuclear program. As a result, the outside world has had little direct evidence of the North Korean efforts and has mainly relied on indirect inferences, leaving substantial uncertainties.

Moreover, because its nuclear weapons program wasn’t self-contained, it has been especially difficult to determine how much external assistance arrived and from where, and to assess the program’s overall sophistication.

That said, what is known is that Pyongyang has tested three nuclear devices: in 2006, 2009, and, of course most recently, on 12 February 2013. They have all had varying degrees of success, and North Korea has put considerable effort into developing and testing missiles as possible delivery vehicles.

February’s detonation of a “smaller and light” nuclear device — presumably, part of the plan to build a small atomic weapon to mount on a long-range missile — was the first test carried out by Kim Jong Eun, the young, third-generation leader, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. And while it always intriguing to speculate on who is running the show in North Korea, the finger generallyseems to point to the military.

Many foreign observers have come to believe the otherwise desperate, hungry population (and failing regime?) that make up North Korea’s secretive police state is best symbolized by its nuclear and missile programs. Which gives rise to the basic question: what, then, is Pyongyang’s motivation for its nuclear and missile programs? Is it, as Victor Cha once asked, for swords, shields, or badges?

In other words, are the programs intended to provide offensive weapons, defensive weapons, or symbols of status? In spite of prolonged diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang officials over the past two decades, the question of motivation remains elusive.

Pyongyang’s interest in obtaining nuclear weaponry, beginning around the mid-1950s, has apparently stemmed in part from what it perceived as the US’s nuclear threats and concerns about the nuclear umbrella that protects South Korea. These threats, in turn, have pervaded North Korean strategic thought and action since the Korean War.

These actions may be gauged as offensive or defensive, but Pyongyang officials were at one point fearful of South Korea’s nuclear ambitions and later uncertain about the US emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons and its nuclear “first use” policy in defense of the South. These nuclear-armed additions included 280mm artillery shells, rockets, cruise missiles, and mines.

Against this backdrop, all of North Korea’s nuclear activities tend to focus on a single goal: preservation of the regime. Possessing nuclear weapons would diminish the US’s threat to the nation’s independence, but it could also reduce Pyongyang’s dependence upon China for its security.

North Korean officials, too, may feel that a small nuclear force offers some insurance against South Korea’s dynamic economic growth and its eventual conventional military superiority.

Pyongyang undoubtedly views its burgeoning nuclear arsenal as a symbol of the regime’s legitimacy and status, which would assist in keeping the Stalinist dynasty in power. Additionally enhanced status would, of course, assist in gaining diplomatic leverage.

Although the North Koreans have boasted about their nuclear deterrent’s ability to hold the US and it allies at bay, it is fairly clear that North Korea has vastly overstated its ability to strike, in part because of the limited amount of fissile material available to Pyongyang and also because of its inability to field a credible delivery option for its nuclear weapons.

The North Koreans have launched long-range ballistic missiles in 1998, 2006, 2009, and 2012, with limited success. By comparison, the US test fires its new missiles scores of times to ensure that they are operationally effective. North Korea would need many more tests of all the systems, independently and together, at a much higher rate than one every few years, to have confidence the missile would even leave the launch pad, let alone approach a target with sufficient accuracy to destroy it.

This was dramatically demonstrated on 13 April 2012, by the failure of the much-hyped effort to employ a three-stage missile, which would send a satellite into space. If the missile was, as Washington and Tokyo believed, a disguised test of an ICBM, the fact that it crashed into the sea shortly after launch illustrated that North Korea’s development and testing of missiles as possible delivery vehicles had miles to go.

Joseph M. Siracusa is Professor in Human Security and International Diplomacy and Associate Dean of International Studies, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Among his numerous books are included: Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction (2008) and A Global History of the Nuclear Arms Race: Weapons, Strategy, and Politics, 2 vols., with Richard Dean Burns (2013).

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Growing up with no special interest in China, one of the few things I associated with the country was mix and match meal creation. On airplanes and school cafeterias, you just have “chicken or beef” choices, but Chinese restaurants were “1 from Column A, 1 from Column B” domains. If only in recent China debates, a similar readiness to think beyond either/or options prevailed!

I thought of this when Reuters ran an assessment of Xi Jinping’s first weeks in power last months that in some venues carried this “chicken or beef” sort of headline: “China’s New Leader: Reformist or Conservative?” Previous Chinese leaders have often turned out to have both reformist and conservative sides. Even Deng Xiaoping, considered the quintessential reformer due to his economic policies, held the line on political liberalization and backed the brutal 1989 crackdown. Mightn’t Xi, too, end up ordering from the reformist and conservative sides of the menu?

A Valentine’s Day for the books: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Vice President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China and members of a Chinese delegation in the Oval Office, Feb. 14, 2012, several months before Xi became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize win last fall, which continues to generate controversy, led some foreign commentators into a similar “chicken or beef” trap—or, rather, an “Ai Weiwei or Zhang Yimou” one. The former is an artist locked into an antagonistic relationship with the government, the latter a filmmaker who has been choreographing spectacles celebrating Communist Party rule, including both the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Games and a 2009 gala staged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Since they are two of the only internationally prominent Chinese creative figures, some Westerners assumed Mo must be like one or the other.

In fact, the novelist shares traits with each but isn’t all that similar to either.  Like China’s best-known artist, Mo has a penchant for mocking the powerful. And like the renowned filmmaker turned state choreographer, Mo works within the system, serving as a Vice-Chairman of the official writer’s association and recently agreeing to be a delegate to the Chinese People’s Consultative Political Conference. Unlike Ai Weiwei, though, Mo skewers only relatively safe targets, like the kinds of corrupt local officials that the central authorities don’t mind seeing satirized, and instead of railing against censorship, he has likened it to an inconvenience akin to airport security protocols. And unlike Zhang Yimou, one of whose best films was based on the novelist’s story “Red Sorghum,” Mo has consistently produced iconoclastic works.

If Column A choices signal compliance and Column B ones criticism, the artist and filmmaker now stick to opposite sides of the menu, while Mo Yan keeps choosing from both—and he’s not alone in this. Yu Hua, an author whose political choices I find more admirable, does this as well. He belongs to the official writer’s association and his novels, like Mo’s, generally satirize relatively safe targets.  But Yu also pens trenchant essays on taboo topics, including the 1989 massacre. He’s frustrated that these can only be published abroad, but glad that they end up circulating on the mainland in underground digital versions.

A third debate, centering on the competing predictions made by “When China Rules the World” author Martin Jacques and “The Coming Collapse of China” author Gordon G. Chang, makes me think not of the value of combining Column A and Column B choices but of a different feature of Chinese restaurants that I only learned about as an adult. If you don’t like the options on the English language menu in some Chinatown eateries, you can ask to see a Chinese language one that lists additional dishes the proprietor doubts will interest most customers.

My problem with the Jacques vs. Chang debate is that I find neither pundit convincing.  Jacques’ vision of China moving smoothly toward global domination glosses over the fissures within the country’s elite and the many domestic challenges its government faces. Chang continually underestimates the Communist Party’s resiliency and adaptability.  His 2001 book said it would implode by 2011. Late in 2011, he told Foreign Policy readers that he’d miscalculated and they could “bet on” his prophecy coming true in 2012.  In 2013, the Communist Party is still in control and somehow Chang’s still being invited onto news shows to make forecasts.

When asked whether Xi Jinping is a reformer or a conservative and whether Mo Yan is a collaborator or a critic, I can craft an answer that draws a bit from both Column A and Column B  Being asked whether I side with Jacques or Chang is different. I’m left feeling like a hungry vegetarian who has been given a list made up exclusively of chicken and beef dishes—and hopes desperately that there’s another menu hidden in the back with some acceptable choices.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at University of California at Irvine, is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010), an updated edition of which will be published in June.

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The “Silk Road” was a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of deserts and mountains — not a real road at any point or time. I previously examined the historical documents and evidence of the silk road, but here are a few more facts from camels to Marco Polo on this mysterious route.

When were the peak years of the Silk Road trade?

The peak years of the Silk Road trade were between 500 and 800 C.E., after the fall of the Han dynasty and Constantinople replaced Rome as the center of the Roman empire. The Tang dynasty stationed troops in Central Asia and many Iranians came to the Tang territory at that time.

Who were the most important traders on the Silk Road?

Government officials were very important. Rulers strictly supervised the movement of people and trade, and played a major role as the purchasers of goods and service. During the periods when the Chinese stationed troops in Central Asia — primarily during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) and the Tang (618-907 C.E.) — trade boomed. When they did not, trade declined. Most of the private traders were peddlers who traveled on small circuits, selling many locally produced goods.

Westerner on a camel, Chinese Tang Dynasty (618-907). Shanghai Museum. Photograph by PHG. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

No, donkeys and horses always outnumbered camels. Camels could carry loads across the desert, but they were difficult and irascible, and most travelers preferred to ride horses and donkeys or to travel in carts drawn by them along dirt roads.

How far did most people travel on the Silk Road?

Most individual travelers moved in small circuits along the Silk Road of perhaps a few hundred miles (around 500 km) between their home and the next oasis. The Silk Road trade was a trickle trade mainly between adjacent towns, and almost never involved large camel caravans crossing great distances. The most famous exception — if not the most reliable traveler — was Marco Polo (1254-1324) who claimed to travel all the way from Europe to China by land and to return home by sea.

What is the legacy of the Silk Road?

The Silk Road provided an avenue for the transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic motifs, and not simply trade goods. Silk Road oasis towns didn’t engage in “trading” so much as translating, absorbing, and in many instances, modifying the belief systems that passed through them. Religious practitioners, scholars, and a number of remarkable linguists in these Silk Road communities contributed to the accessibility of Buddhism, which originated in India and enjoyed genuine popularity in China, but Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and the Christian Church of the East (based in Syria) all gained followings. Before the coming of Islam to the region, members of these different communities proved surprisingly tolerant of each other’s beliefs. Individual rulers might choose one religion over another and strongly encourage their subjects to follow suit, yet they permitted foreign residents to continue their own religious practices.

Valerie Hansen is Professor of History at Yale University. Her books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276, and, with Kenneth R. Curtis, Voyages in World History.

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The “Silk Road” was a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of deserts and mountains — not a real road at any point or time. Archeologists have found few ancient Silk Road bridges, gates, or paving stones like those along Rome’s Appian Way. In fact, the main defining features of the Silk Road are not man-made at all. They are best seen from the air — converging valleys, desert oases, and river chasms among towering mountain peaks. Although a physical road doesn’t exist, it is still a subject ripe for examination and study.

Foreign merchant in northern China, Tang Dynasty, 7th century. Musee Guimet, Paris. Photograph by PHG. Source: Wikimedia Commons

What we know about the Silk Road isn’t mainly from ancient books or stone inscriptions, but from trash. The dry climate of the Taklamakan Desert has preserved different types of documents written on wood, paper, and cloth. Many of them survive because paper had a high value and was not thrown out. Craftsmen also used recycled paper to make paper shoes, statues, and other paper-maché objects to accompany the dead on their journey to the afterlife. The original documents have to be pieced together before anyone can make sense of them. Written in multiple languages and found in many different places, these documents contain an enormous amount of information about the Silk Road trade.

What goods were traded on the Silk Road?

Silk wasn’t the only good traded on these routes. Metals, spices, medicines, glass, leather goods, and paper all moved across Eurasia. Paper became the primary writing material for all of Eurasia, and surely had a far greater impact on human history than silk, which was used primarily for garments. Invented during the second century BCE, paper moved out of China, first into the Islamic world in the eighth century, and reached Europe via its Islamic portals in Sicily and Spain. People north of the Alps learned to make their own paper only in the late fourteenth century.

When was the term Silk Road coined?

The term “Silk Road” didn’t exist at the time of the Silk Road trade and there was no single route across Central Asia. The peoples living along different trade routes never referred to any particular route as the “Silk Road.” They referred to the different sections of the road as the “Road to Samarkand” (or whatever the next major city was). They did call the different routes around the Taklamakan either the “northern” or “southern” route.

In 1877, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905), a prominent geographer and the uncle of the World War I flying ace, produced a five-volume map of China. One map showed a single line connecting Europe and China, which he called the “Silk Road,” and the name stuck.

Which countries did the Silk Road connect?

The Silk Road connected China with the Iranian world, specifically the city of Samarkand (in today’s Uzbekistan) and the surrounding communities. This was the homeland of the Sogdians, who spoke an Iranian language called Sogdian, and many observed the teachings of the ancient Iranian teacher Zarathustra (ca. 1000 B.C.E., called Zoroaster in Greek), who taught that truth-telling was the paramount virtue. Some of the most exciting finds in the past decade have been the tombs of Sogdian leaders found in the main cities of interior China. The most common long-distance travelers, in fact, were the Sogdians who lived in and around modern-day Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan.

Did the Silk Road connect China and Rome?

No. At least there was no direct traffic during the years of the Roman empire that we know of. Romans didn’t exchange their gold coins directly for Chinese silk. The earliest Roman gold coins found in China — so far only 48 gold coins (many are fakes) have been discovered after a century of intense investigations — are Byzantine solidus coins dated to the sixth century, several centuries after the capital shifted from Rome to Constantinople (modern Istanbul).

Valerie Hansen is Professor of History at Yale University. Her books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276, and, with Kenneth R. Curtis, Voyages in World History.

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“You have made a grave error in deciding to focus on the history of the Silk Road. The most important, and the most interesting, period in all of Chinese history is the third century, after the overthrow of the Han dynasty, when China was divided into three major kingdoms.”

The Beijing taxi driver was dead earnest. Like many other drivers he listened regularly to radio broadcasts about Chinese history. At that moment, he was listening to a storyteller perform The Romance of Three Kingdoms and there was nothing I could say to persuade him that newly discovered documents made the history of the Silk Road more exciting to me.

Other drivers also liked to talk about history. When one driver told me that his favorite Chinese emperor was Nurhaci, the father of the man who founded the Qing dynasty in 1636, I asked if Nurhaci could count since he ruled in Manchuria but not all of China. “Of course,” the driver replied. “He was the real founder of the dynasty,” and he then proceeded to narrate the major battles that Nurhaci had won. His source? A multi-volume survey of Chinese history that he had read during the Cultural Revolution as a young factory worker.

Another driver was a Manchu who remembered me from a ride I’d taken four years earlier. (Foreigners don’t all look alike, I guess.) He drove just long enough every day to make 350 Renminbi (about sixty dollars) and then went home either to hunt migratory birds (he assured me that multiple varieties survived if you knew where to look for them) or to participate in a barter market that he and his Manchu friends had organized. With his cheery, relaxed attitude, he could easily have been the descendant of one of Lao She’s opera-loving Manchu relatives that he wrote about in his engrossing memoir of Manchu life in pre-1911 Beijing, Beneath the Red Banner.

Other taxi drivers tried to teach me some Chinese. As we debated which route to my destination would have the least traffic, I often heard local expressions like “whether you hug it in front of you or carry it behind you, it’s equally heavy,” which meant “six of one, half dozen of the other.” (Read: don’t get your hopes up, lady. All routes are equally awful.)

One driver recounted so many jokes whose punchline involved weird contortions of the expression niubi that my face turned red. Niubi literally means “cow cunt,” but nowadays the young and hip use it (or just niu) as a synonym for ku, the Chinese pronunciation of “cool.”

Conversations could turn serious, especially when drivers learned that I’d been in Beijing in Tiananmen spring. One driver refused to say anything about 1989 on our first meeting, but, several months later, when he picked me up again, told me about a cousin serving in the army who had cleared students from the square and a classmate of his sister who had been killed that night.

Even though I have been talking to Beijing taxi drivers since 1983, on my first visit, I was surprised this past year by how often and how openly drivers complained about corruption and the government. All the taxis have a listening device on the dashboard on the righthand side of the window, but the drivers explained that they could turn the devices off and spoke freely.

This is one of the funny paradoxes of modern Chinese life. You can express your opinions anywhere no one is watching or listening, and for the poor drivers breathing in Beijing’s air all day long in creeping traffic, why not open up to a total stranger?

Valerie Hansen is Professor of History at Yale University. Her books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276, and, with Kenneth R. Curtis, Voyages in World History.

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Beijing skyline and traffic jam on ring road, China. Photo by coryz, iStockphoto.

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Do North and South Korea belong to the same country? Are they the same race sharing the same history and language? The answers to these questions are far from clear even to the Koreans themselves. It depends on the day really or the Olympics. In the 2000, 2004, and 2006 Olympics the two countries joined together at the games’ opening ceremonies and marched in matching uniforms behind the Korean Unification Flag.

Not surprisingly it was easy for Scottish officials to put up the South Korean flag when North Korea’s women’s team played a match against Colombia at Hampden Park in Glasgow. The team refused to play until their flag with the red star was replaced on stadium screens. On Thursday, North Korea’s Olympic team accepted repeated apologies, including one from Prime Minister David Cameron.

Even so everyone has continued calling the country North Korea, even though the country should be referred to as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) while South Korea is the Republic of Korea (ROK). In reality the DPRK does not officially recognize the ROK’s existence as a separate country but regards it as part of the DPRK under American control. The South Korean government is therefore a puppet regime and an enemy of Pyongyang which should be destroyed if necessary by an attack.

The North Koreans don’t in fact believe they are still the same people. The founder of the DPRK, Kim Il Sung, is believed to have created a new nation, loyal to him and his family. Every effort has been made since 1946 to create a separate history and culture which has little in common with either pre-1946 or the culture of the South. The North Koreans don’t even use the vocabulary or write with the same alphabet. If they are ever unified under the rule of the Kim family, the South Koreans would be forced to undergo a complete brainwashing and learn to become obedient subjects of the Kim dynasty.

During the heyday of constructive engagement under two South Koreans left-wing presidents, relations between the two halves were relatively friendly. After Kim Dae-jung introduced his ‘Sunshine Policy’ in 1998, Pyongyang allowed the two teams to march together. Ten years later the South Korean electorate, wearied by a policy which delivered too few gains, elected President Lee Myung-Bak in February 2008. Bilateral relations worsened and the North made a series of military attacks and has continued to threaten to turn Seoul into a sea of fire.

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the two countries refused to march together, a move International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge called a “setback for peace.” There were no talks of marching together in 2012 either. But this is where the story gets interesting.

Kim Il Sung’s Swiss-educated grandson, Kim Jong Un, is now in power and has just ousted the military chief Vice Marshal Ri Yong-ho. Many are now hoping that the 28-year old leader, who has been showing himself in public with his new wife, is going to abandon the military first policies of his father. Surely by now, he must realize that Pyongyang will have to change if the Kim dynasty is to survive as more than a tool of Chinese foreign policy.

The fact that it was so easy for the Olympic host nation to put up the wrong flag it will be another reminder of how few friends the North Koreans now have. The country is only being kept afloat with Chinese money. As one commentator in the Daily Telegraph wrote, they team might as well be walking behind the Chinese flag. A series of recent diplomatic blunders such as the attempted missile launch earlier this year, in defiance of the whole international community including China, has only deepened its isolation. Sooner, rather than later, Pyongyang will have to start rebuilding its ties with Seoul, Tokyo and Washington. But many in the Korean Peninsula are hoping that Kim Jung Un will be willing to start a whole new game.

Jasper Becker, an award-winning author, has worked as a foreign correspondent for twenty-five years, including fifteen years based in Beijing. He is author of Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, Hungry Ghosts, The Chinese, and City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China. An expert on East Asian history and politics, Becker’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New Republic, The London Review of Books, National Geographic, and Time Asia.

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Napoleon’s famous remark about China — “There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world” — has achieved a new lease of life in the context of China’s remarkable growth since the death of Mao in 1976. Since then, China has registered a real GDP growth of more than 2,000%, it has some $2 trillion in foreign reserves, a million Chinese emigrants now work in Africa on behalf of Chinese economic interests there, China’s military power (land, sea, and air) is growing at around 12% annually, and its non-financial overseas direct investment is currently in excess of $330 billion, to mention just a few of the statistics that usually appear on this topic.

But over and above such facts and figures, some observers detect more assertive Chinese foreign and defence policies. At the same time that China engages in joint naval exercises with Russia, those two states are blocking Security Council resolutions on Syria. Increasing naval patrols coincide with aggressive acts by its fishing fleet around islands in the South China and East China Seas, where it has ongoing territorial disputes with the Philippines, Japan, and other states. All such moves are backed by more oppressive policies against any signs of internal dissent and “punishments” ranging from diplomatic snubs to economic sanctions for states daring to receive the Dalai Lama as a visitor or criticise China’s human rights policies. Amongst other consequences, such manoeuvring has prompted a stronger response from the United States, including more naval excursions to the region and a clear statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the US has “a national interest in freedom of navigation … in the South China Sea.”

Another aspect of China’s rise that concerns some Western commentators is the possibility that China has developed a politico-economic approach that, for the first time in 500 years, poses a fundamental challenge to the foundations of Western dominance — so-called state capitalism, where, as Chinese premier Wen Jiabao put it in 2008, the “complete formulation of our economic policy is to give full play to the basic role of market forces in allocating resources under the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the government.” Fukuyama’s End of History rhetoric assumed that the combination of capitalism and Western political values, including democracy, the rule of law, and civil and political liberties had finally won the day over all alternatives. In effect, China is saying, especially to developing states, that there is in fact an alternative, one with a particular appeal to elites. It brings prosperity without the need for troublesome attempts to build “good governance” along Western lines, a policy that tended to accompany Western economic aid after the end of the Cold War.

So are we facing as some in the West fear a threat that, like the Soviet Union in the Cold War days, possesses formidable military power, but unlike the Soviet Union, has discovered a politico-economic model that poses a fundamental challenge to the West? Might that challenge include the possibility of a major conflict in the next few decades over issues like China’s claim to Taiwan or its territorial disputes, a conflict that China would probably win?

While China will always defend its interests robustly and its economic and military power will continue to grow, there are several reasons for being cautiously optimistic about both questions. First, China’s prosperity is heavily dependent on its trade and it has therefore been careful not to allow its disputes to damage that. Taiwan is more valuable to it as an independent entity, although China will always resist the possibility of a sovereign state of Taiwan emerging. Similarly, Beijing has recently begun negotiating a free trade pact with Japan and South Korea, while in the case of another potential regional foe, China is India’s largest trading partner. Secondly, China’s version of state capitalism has begun to encounter significant problems. There is massive corruption amongst the officials charged with administering the system and there have been mounting difficulties with the various technological and environmental risks that inevitably accompany rapid expansion. China has also gone from having one of the most equal distributions of wealth in the world to having one of the worst, with more than 100 million people living in extreme poverty. If it maintains its ban on families having more than one child, China faces a demographic timebomb by 2065, when current estimates anticipate that 54% of the population will be over 60 and only 22% working.

Thirdly, economic growth has produced a growing middle class whose demands for better educational facilities for their children, more freedom, and possibly, much greater democracy will increasingly dominate the political agenda. Until recently, when issues relating to the transition of power this year led to a crackdown on dissent, Chinese leaders (especially Premier Wen Jiabao) have tended to call for greater democracy and other political reforms. Finally, although China has attempted to build up its “soft power” by various means, including its sponsorship of Confucius Institutes around the world, it is not, in this respect, in the same league as the United States, nor is that a foreseeable possibility for many years. For all the unpopularity of some of its recent military ventures, the United States still has some ten times the military might of China and retains in its political system, the dynamism of its form of capitalism, the attraction of its language and culture, and its global dominance of the internet, factors which all amount to vastly greater soft power resources than China.

David Armstrong has held academic positions at Birmingham University, where he was co-founder and first Director of the Graduate School of International Studies; Durham University, where he was Research Director; and Exeter University, where he was Head of Department. He is founder/editor of Diplomacy and Statecraft, editor of the Review of International Studies, and Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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21 June 1900

Chinese Empress Cixi declares war on foreigners

On 21 June 1900, in the midst of anti-western attacks in China, the Dowager Empress of China, 65-year-old Cixi, tried to seize the chance to restore Chinese authority and declared war on all foreigners.

The conflict had been decades in building. Throughout the nineteenth century, western powers and Japan had carved up China, creating their own zones where they effectively ruled and where their nationals enjoyed privileged status. Weakened by obsolete technology and its own internal problems, China could do little to resist. China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in the middle 1890s underlined the nation’s weakness.

Thousands of frustrated Chinese joined a secret group called the Yihequan (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”). The Boxers (as this group was called in the West) became more aggressive against foreigners, attacking westerners. As they abandoned another of their goals (overthrowing the imperial dynasty) and focused on anti-western attacks, the government edged toward accepting them.

Chinese nianhua painting of Eight-Nation Alliance officers being captured by Chinese General Dong Fuxiang during the Battle of Yangcun in the Boxer Rebellion. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In January of 1900, Cixi ended the policy of suppressing the Boxers, an action that drew foreign protests. In June, Boxers and imperial troops began attacking foreign interests in Beijing and elsewhere. On 20 June, Boxers stormed the German embassy and killed the German ambassador. Other western diplomats huddled for safety in their legations in Beijing, besieged by hostile Chinese.

The next day, Cixi issued her declaration of war. Foreigners were not the only target of the Boxers — thousands of Chinese Christians were killed across China. Unfortunately for the imperial family, the effort to expel the foreigners failed as some provincial governors refused to cooperate.

In the middle of August, a foreign military force finally reached Beijing, defeated the Boxers, and liberated the trapped diplomats. The foreign troops then rampaged through the city, seizing valuables and destroying property. Cixi and the imperial court fled for safety. The fighting finally ended and the empress was forced to accept the foreigners’ conditions for peace the following year.

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6 June 1984

Indian forces massacre Sikhs in Amritsar

After months of standoff between India’s government and Sikh dissidents, the Indian army attacked those dissidents who had taken refuge in the holiest Sikh shrine — the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, India — on 6 June 1984. The fighting left hundreds dead and more captured. The attack also enraged many Sikhs across India, which would have fatal consequences for Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had ordered the assault.

Sikh man at the Golden Temple. Created by Claude Renault. Used under Creative Commons license.

Sikhism is a faith that had its origins in the Punjab more than 350 years ago. Persecuted over the years by both Indian Hindus and Muslims, many Sikhs have dreamed for centuries for more autonomy. Those hopes were dashed when British India was portioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947 as the Punjab was divided between the two new nations. In the 1960s, India made some concessions to Sikhs, but to some Sikhs it was not enough.

Among these dissidents was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who led a group of militant Sikhs. In 1983, they moved to the Golden Temple, setting off a confrontation with the government.

The government had refrained from moving on the temple for months, fearing the backlash that would result. Finally, Gandhi ordered the attack, code-named “Operation Bluestar.” After a week of fighting, around 1,000 were dead including about 800 Sikhs, Bhindrawnwale among them.

Months later, in October, two Sikh bodyguards shot Prime Minister Gandhi during a morning walk in her garden. She died soon thereafter. The two guards had no time to explain the reason for their action. They were immediately killed by other guards. It is generally assumed, though, that they had been angered by the attack on the Golden Temple.

Unfortunately for India’s Sikhs, the attack on the prime minister prompted attacks on innocent Sikhs across India, in which more than a thousand people lost their lives until order was restored.

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May 29, 1953

Hillary and Tenzing climb Mt. Everest

On May 29, 1953, at about 11:30 a.m., New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Tibetan Tenzing Norgay stood on top of the world. They had spent more than two hours straining every muscle against ice, snow, rock, and low oxygen to reach this point. But they were atop Mount Everest, more than 29,000 feet above sea level, the highest peak in the world.

Relieved that the climbing was over, Hillary looked at his partner. As he later wrote, “In spite of the balaclava, goggles and oxygen mask all encrusted with long icicles that concealed his face, there was no disguising his infectious grin of pure delight.” The two men embraced.

Hillary took some photographs of the view and of Tenzing waving small flags representing New Zealand, Nepal, Britain, and the United Nations. Hillary left a small crucifix while Tenzing deposited some food as a Buddhist offering. After 15 minutes, the two decided that, with oxygen running low, they should descend.

View of the majestic Mount Everest from the Rongbuk valley, close to base camp and the terminus of the Rongbuk glacier at 5,200m. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Mt. Everest had long loomed as perhaps the most daunting physical challenge on Earth. Two climbers — George Mallory and Andrew Irvine — had died in a 1924 attempt. Many others had simply failed. Hillary, a skilled mountain climber, was determined to conquer the mountain. He took part in a 1951 British expedition that found a promising southern route up the slope. The 1953 trip followed that route.

That expedition reached its highest camp by the middle of May. Preparations began for the final ascent. One pair made an attempt on May 27, but failed. Two days later, Hillary and Tenzing succeeded in their joint attempt — and captured the world’s attention.

Hillary was soon knighted by Britain’s newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. Tenzing was given medals by Britain and Nepal. While others have followed their path to the top, no one can diminish their achievement. They were the first.

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As NATO leaders gather in Chicago to garner international support for an Afghanistan drawdown and stabilization strategy, they should also consider the overlooked toll that the campaign has taken on the adjacent Central Asian states. Western security assistance has made the Central Asian states more authoritarian and more corrupt, while these trends are only likely to deteriorate as the drawdown of US and ISAF forces accelerates.

From the very outset the United States treated Central Asia instrumentally, as a region in support of the coalition effort in Afghanistan. The US established supply bases in Karshi-Khanabad (K2) in Uzbekistan and at the Manas airport, near Kyrgyzstan’s capital of Bishkek, and secured overflight rights and refueling agreements from all of the Central Asian states. US defense officials also launched a host of cooperative programs to provide training and resources for counterterrorism and border management for Central Asian security services.

Growing tensions about Western regional motives — prompted by the Color Revolutions that replaced pro-Kremlin regimes in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan — came to a head in the summer 2005 after the Uzbek government killed hundreds of anti-government demonstrators in the eastern city of Andijon. As US officials joined international calls for an investigation, Uzbekistan restricted US military operations and soon after, in July, formally evicted US forces from the K2 facility.

The K2 eviction prompted Western officials to accept the Central Asian governments’ insistence that engagement on security issues was now antithetical with promoting political freedoms. Thus, when the regime of President Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2007 escalated its attacks on journalists and political opponents, US officials toned down their criticism fearing eviction from its remaining vital Manas base. International human rights organizations now complain that US diplomats won’t even raise rights-related issues with certain Central Asian governments for fear of jeopardizing these precarious security arrangements, while EU officials, having lifted a post-Andijon sanctions regime against Uzbekistan in 2009, now seem satisfied to address human rights issues within special dedicated EU-Central Asian dialogues rather than at higher levels.

On the economic front, large sums of money poured into the region in an attempt to secure these Central Asian basing access and transit rights, but these payments usually have lined the pockets of narrow private interests and the region’s elite. For example, between 2003 and 2011 the US Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency awarded nearly $2 billion in sole-source fuel contracts for its Manas operations, most of them no-bid extensions, to two fuel companies registered as offshore companies with no public corporate profiles. A US Congressional investigation of possible corruption in these contracts concluded that the Pentagon and the State Department, “turned a blind eye to glaring red flags.”

The issue of possible systemic corruption in Western logistic contracts grew even more pressing after the US in 2008 established the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a set of air, rail, and road routes that span the Eurasian landmass before entering Afghanistan through Central Asian border points. Designed to offer alternatives to the embattled Pakistan supply routes that later became untenable as US-Pakistan relations deteriorated, the NDN was predicated on providing Central Asian governments with “economic incentives” to support the Afghanistan effort and the surging of US forces.

In fact, the NDN has encouraged more local rent-seeking than it has generated new entrepreneurship or increased regional trade. Central Asian officials have collected a windfall in fees through local subcontractors and demands for informal payments at the border, while the amount of commercial goods procured locally has fallen far short of the levels US logistics officials had hoped.

With planning for the NATO withdrawal now underway, these problems are only like to be magnified. As Western militaries prepare to pull out heavy equipment, they expect Central Asian agencies and border officials to extort even greater payments as reverse transit takes place through the NDN network.

Politically, too, Central Asian governments are demanding higher profile partnerships and official visits and a total of cessation of Western political criticism. And as a seeming precondition for securing the government of Uzbekistan’s acquiescence to the NDN the Obama Administration in January of this year lifted a ban on providing military assistance and its financing to the Uzbek government, opening the way to transfers of material that is as likely to be used to target domestic opponents as it is for its publicly stated purpose of guarding these supply lines.

Accounts of the Afghanistan campaign already point to a host of Western strategic missteps and missed opportunities. A fuller reflection on the last eleven years should include the perverse twist about how in its almost single-minded effort to promote state-building, political tolerance and good governance in Afghanistan, just next door the West has left a trail of repression, graft and unfulfilled commitments to Central Asia’s fledgling civil society.

Alexander Cooley is the Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University and author of Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, forthcoming with Oxford University Press (July 2012).

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May 20, 1498

Da Gama reaches Calicut, India

On May 20, 1498, sailing for the Portuguese crown, Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, India. Having successfully sailed around the southern tip of Africa, da Gama had pioneered a sea route from Europe to Asia that bypassed the Muslim nations that controlled the overland spice trade.

In his late thirties at the time of his voyage, da Gama was the son of a minor Portuguese nobleman. Why he was chosen by Portugal’s King Manuel to lead the expedition to India is unknown; his only achievement to date had been carrying out a mission for Manuel’s predecessor a few years earlier. Nevertheless, he was named to head the historic voyage.

Vasco da Gama's ship with gods above by Ernesto Casanova (ca. 1880). Source: Library of Congress.

The voyage posed many challenges. The trip across the southern Atlantic left the ships a worrying three months without sight of land, and the expedition met hostile natives in southern Africa — who gave da Gama an arrow wound — and Muslims in eastern Africa. The long voyage also took a serious toll of the crew; around two-thirds died during the voyage, most of disease.

Once he reached Calicut, da Gama’s reception was not very warm. The goods Manuel had sent as gifts were of poor value, infuriating Calicut’s ruler. Still, da Gama was able to leave India with some spices. After a long and harrowing return trip — which included the death of his brother — da Gama reached Portugal in September of 1499, more than two years after having set out.

He was greeted as a hero and richly rewarded by the king. With his voyage, the Portuguese overseas empire was born.

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May 5, 1260

Kublai Khan Becomes Mongol Emperor

Khubilai Khan on the Hunt (1280). National Palace Museum in Taipei

When he took the throne, Kublai was in his forties. He was the fourth son of the fourth son of Genghis and had only about a decade’s experience in military and political leadership. But he proved his worth and justified the name given him by Mongols, Setsen Khan, or “the Wise Khan.”

Shortly after taking the throne, Kublai returned to his efforts to complete the Mongol conquest of China. The Mongols’ superb cavalry had easily overrun other lands across Central Asia, but that type of force was less effective in river-crossed and highly-urbanized China. Following the advice of Chinese advisors, Kublai built a fleet that navigated the rivers and made it possible to defeat the towns. By 1279, he was fully in control of China.

Ironically, Kublai’s focus on China cost him control of the larger empire. During the conquest of China, regional leaders in the western parts of the Mongol Empire broke away, creating rival states.

The Great Khan was probably quite content with China and Mongolia, however. In 1264, he moved his capital from Karakorum to Beijing, making it the capital of China for the first time. That capital was magnificent — as attested to by Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who reached it a few years later. Polo called the Khan’s palace “so vast, so rich, and so beautiful, that no man on earth could design anything superior to it.”

Kublai ruled until his death in 1294. While his rule was a time of prosperity for China, his Yuan dynasty he founded lasted less than a hundred years.

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May 2, 2011

Osama bin Laden killed

In the middle of the night, 2 May 2011, a brief message was radioed from Pakistan to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia: “EKIA.” “EKIA” is military shorthand for “enemy killed in action.” The enemy was Osama bin Laden. After a manhunt of nearly 10 years, the United States had found and killed the al Qaeda leader who had ordered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

Bin Laden’s death came in a raid by about two dozen Navy SEALs on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The previous year, intelligence officials had tracked a known bin Laden courier to the compound. The complex — with high walls and tight security measures — became the focus of months of intense study as a possible hideaway for the elusive al Qaeda leader. Meanwhile, two versions of it were built so the SEALs could train for a possible raid.

Aerial view of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad made by the CIA. Source: Department of Defense.

Despite the scrutiny, officials could not be certain that Osama used the compound or that — even if he did — he would be there on May 2. Gambling, President Barack Obama ordered the SEALs to strike.

The raid was not perfect. A helicopter flown to the compound was damaged in a hard landing. The noise of the crash ruined the element of surprise and forced the SEALs to blast their way through several walls to enter the home inside the compound. There, they found bin Laden and quickly shot him dead.

Bin Laden was not the only casualty. Two guards, a woman, and one of his sons were also killed, and two of his wives were wounded. They and about ten others were left tied up in a room. Less than an hour after entering the compound, the SEALs left with bin Laden’s body — and a treasure of computer hard drives and other intelligence data. They destroyed the downed helicopter before leaving.

Later that night, President Barack Obama addressed the nation on television to deliver the news. Paying tribute to the SEALs who carried out the operation and recalling bin Laden’s role in the 9/11 attacks, the president said, “Justice has been done.”

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April 19, 1770

Captain Cook sights Australia

“What we have as yet seen of this land appears rather low, and not very hilly, the face of the Country green and Woody, but the Sea shore is all a white Sand.” Thus James Cook concluded his log entry for April 19, 1770 — the day Europeans first sighted the eastern half of the continent of Australia.

Cook, a naval officer and the most famous oceangoing explorer of the eighteenth century, had been sent from Britain in 1769 to carry a party of scientists from the Royal Society to the Pacific Ocean. His apparent goal was to carry the scientists to Tahiti, where they could observe the passing of Venus across the face of the sun. He also carried secret orders that he opened at sea to look for the long-suspected but as-yet-elusive Terra Australis — the supposed southern continent.

Captain James Cook by William Hodges. Source: National Maritime Museum, London

Cook and the scientists sailed on H.M.S. Endeavour, a coal-ship outfitted for the journey. Officers, crew, and scientists totaled 94 men. Heading the scientific party was Joseph Banks, a wealthy and respected botanist intend on learning more about the plant life of the Pacific islands.

After leaving Tahiti, Cook explored the rest of the Society Islands, of which it is a part, and then set out to the southwest. He explored New Zealand — which had been sighted on a previous expedition — discovering that it consisted of two islands. While taking six months to chart their coasts, he claimed the islands for Britain.

From there, Cook sailed to Australia. He made the landfall nine days after first sighting land, entering a body of water he called Botany Bay (south of modern Sydney) for its rich plant life. Cook sailed north along the Great Barrier Reef, where coral ripped a hole in Endeavour’s hull. Makeshift repairs kept the ship afloat until it could be beached for more thorough reconstruction. With the ship at sea again, Cook traced 2,000 miles of Australia’s coast before heading home. Before leaving, he claimed the land for Britain.

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March 21, 1739

Nadir Shah enters Delhi and captures the Peacock Throne

On March 21, 1739, Nādir Shāh, leading Persian (modern Iranian) and Turkish forces, completed his conquest of the Mughal Empire by capturing Delhi, India, its capital. He seized vast stores of wealth, and among the prizes he carried away was the fabled Peacock Throne.

Nādir Shāh Afshār. Source: Victoria & Albert Museum.

The new ruler was bent on conquest. He built a navy and captured Bahrain and Oman before launching himself overland against the Mughals. His conquest of that empire went quickly, giving him the prized throne. Built originally by the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan, it reportedly had silver steps set on golden feet. The back showed two open peacock tails. The whole was studded with precious gems.

The throne became the symbol of the Iranian monarchy, though it only remained in Nādir Shāh’s hands for a short time. He was defeated in battle by the Kurds, who seized the throne and apparently dismantled it. A modern Peacock Throne was made in the early 1800s. That splendid but less spectacular model served as the throne of Iran’s Shahs until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Nādir Shāh did not fare much better than his magnificent throne. He continued his warring ways, building an empire that was plagued by financial problems and frequent revolts against his cruel rule. In 1749, he was killed by members of his own army.

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March 19, 1279

Song Dynasty falls as Mongols complete conquest of China

The Song Dynasty ruled parts of China for more than three centuries. That reign ended on March 19, 1279, when a Mongol fleet defeated a Song fleet in the Battle of Yamen and completed its conquest of China.

The Song began ruling China in 960, but the Song state was constantly under pressure from non-Chinese peoples to the north and west. After years of fighting, the Jurchen people overran the Song in 1127. The Jurchens set up a new dynasty, the Jin, in northern China while the Song remnant fled to the south, creating the Southern Song.

Kublai Khan. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After obtaining Xiangyang (modern Xianfan) in 1273, the Mongols gained access to the Yangzi River — and the chance to penetrate deep into Song territory. More and more Song land fell into Mongol hands, and the government moved further south. It took refuge in Guangzhou and eventually fled the mainland by boat to offshore islands.

Finally, in March 1279, the Mongol navy engaged the Song fleet and defeated it. The last Song prince drowned in the battle, perhaps because he was thrown into the water by a despairing Song official. The Mongols quickly ended remaining resistance, and China — for the first time in its history — was entirely in foreign hands.

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March 11, 2011

Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster Strike Japan

Japan, situated on the Ring of Fire on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, has suffered some major earthquakes over the years. However, nothing before compared to the triple disaster of March 11, 2011: a massive earthquake followed by powerful tsunamis which led to a serious nuclear accident.

The horrors began shortly before three in the afternoon local time with a 9.0-magnitude earthquake. Its epicenter was nearly 20 miles below the floor of the Pacific Ocean about 80 miles east of the Japanese city of Sendai. The quake was one of the most powerful ever recorded, and the strongest to hit this region of Japan.

Map prepared by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration depicting the tsunami wave height model for the Pacific Ocean following the March 11, 2011, earthquake off Sendai, Japan. Source: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research.

The quake unleashed several tsunamis, or tidal waves, that moved as fast as 500 miles an hour in all directions — most destructively to the nearby northeastern coast of Japan’s Honshu island. Waves as high as 33 feet high crashed into towns and cities along the coast, washing away anything in their path. One wave reportedly reached as far inland as 6 miles.

Several nuclear plants are located in northern Honshu. Most shut down automatically when the quake occurred, but the powerful tsunamis damaged the backup power systems at a plant in Fukushima. As a result, cooling systems shut down, and nuclear fuel overheated and later caught fire. The fire released radiation in the air, and the use of seawater to try to cool the reactors led to radiation contaminating the sea. Japanese officials had to ban people from a zone up to 18 miles around the damaged reactors, scene of the second worst nuclear accident in history.

In the end, the triple disaster cost Japan nearly 20,000 dead — mostly from the tsunamis — more than 130,000 forced from their homes, more than $300 billion in damage, and a severe jolt to the economy.

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February 22, 1784

Empress of China Becomes First US Ship to Trade with China

Carrying a full load of goods, including 30 tons of ginseng, and finally free of the ice that had choked the harbor for weeks, the Empress of China set out from New York on February 22, 1784 for China. Just months after the British had finally evacuated the city after the Revolutionary War, American merchants were seizing the opportunity afforded by independence to enter the China trade.

The Empress voyage was the brainchild of John Ledyard, who had sailed to the Pacific with British explorer Captain James Cook. He hoped to trade for furs in the Pacific Northwest and carry them to China. He found backers including Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, financier of the American Revolution. The group found the copper-plated ship that became the Empress under construction in New England. Ledyard backed out when the fur plan fell through, but Morris suggested ginseng as a valuable replacement cargo. The Chinese prized the root as a cure for all manner of ills.

The Empress needed six months to make the 18,000-mile trip to Canton (modern Guangzhou) and four months to trade its cargo for tea and export porcelain. Returning home in five months, reaching New York in May 1785. She was greeted with superlatives. One city newspaper believed the voyage ushered in “a future happy period” in which “burdensome” trade with Europe could be replaced with profitable navigation “to this new world” in the east. The cargo was sold at a 30-percent profit, a substantial return.

Soon dozens of ships each year were plying the seas between the United States and China, helping build fortunes in New York and New England. The desire for speed in this trade gave birth in the 1830s to the magnificent clipper ships that were the fastest sailing ships ever built.

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February 11, 1889

Emperor Meiji Issues New Constitution of Japan

On February 11, 1889, Japan’s Emperor Meiji furthered his plan to modernize and westernize his nation by promulgating a new constitution. The new plan of government created a western-style two-house parliament, called the Diet, and a constitutional monarchy — though one with a Japanese character.

When Prince Mutsuhito became emperor and took the ruling name Meiji (“enlightened ruler”) in 1867, he was determined to break with his late father’s traditionalist policies and embrace western ways. He took several steps in this direction. Along with creating a public school system and enacting land reforms, the Meiji emperor created government ministries.

The crowning governmental reform was the new constitution, which embraced the idea of citizen participation — though no plebiscite was held to give the public a voice in the document either as a whole or in detail. The emperor declared that the new constitution arose from his desire “to promote the welfare of, and to give development to the moral and intellectual faculties of Our beloved subjects.”

The constitution was modeled chiefly on the Prussian constitution, a fairly conservative document that subjected parliamentary rule to the power of the monarchy. Thus, the Meiji constitution began by declaring the emperor to be sovereign and “sacred and inviolable.” The emperor was named commander of the armed forces and given the power to declare war or make peace without needing to consult with the Diet.

The constitution was chiefly written by Itō Hirobumi, one of the elder statesmen who effectively ran the Japanese government. Itō and his colleagues assumed that they would be chiefly responsible for running the government and making policy and the emperor would not become involved except occasionally.

The Meiji constitution remained in force in Japan until after World War II, when a new constitution creating a stronger parliamentary system was adopted.

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February 8, 1904

Japanese Attack Port Arthur, Starting Russo-Japanese War

On February 8, 1904, just before midnight, Japanese destroyers entered the harbor of Port Arthur (now Lü-shun, China). Soon after, they unleashed torpedoes against Russian ships in a surprise attack that began the Russo-Japanese War.

The conflict grew over competition between Russia and Japan for territory in both Korea and Manchuria, in northern China. Japan had won Port Arthur, at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula, from China in an 1894–1895 war. Russia joined with other European powers to force it to relinquish the port, however — and then three years later had compelled China to grant the city to it. These actions rankled Japan, as did Russia’s refusal to honor a promise to withdraw troops from Manchuria. Japan decided to go to war.

The attack on Port Arthur resumed in the late morning of February 9, when bigger Japanese ships began shelling the Russian fleet and nearby forts. The Russians put up more resistance than expected, however, and the Japanese ships withdrew.

The attack on Port Arthur was inconclusive, but the rest of the war went largely Japan’s way. The Japanese enjoyed several victories in 1904, seizing Korea in March, and defeating Russian forces twice in Manchuria during the summer. More success followed in 1905, with the surrender of Port Arthur in January, a victory over a large Russian army in Manchuria in March, and a decisive naval battle at Tsushima Strait in May that destroyed the Russian fleet. Russia’s government, facing unrest at home, was forced to seek peace.

The Russo-Japanese War marked the first victory of a non-European nation against a European one in modern times. It also contributed to unrest in Russia that would lead, more than a decade later, to the Russian Revolution.

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January 30, 1948

Mahatma Gandhi is Assassinated

The 78-year-old man was walking to a prayer meeting with the support of two grandnieces. A man stepped out of the crowd and greeted him. The old man returned the salutation when, suddenly, the other man pulled out a pistol and shot three times. Half an hour later, Mohandas Gandhi—the leading figure of India’s independentce movement and the leading exponent of nonviolent resistance—was dead.

Born in India, Mohandas Gandhi was trained as a lawyer and first began a movement for social change in South Africa, where he had lived and worked for a time. That campaign aimed at overturning laws that limited the rights of Indians living in South Africa. The effort, based on his belief in nonviolent resistance, won some concessions from the government in 1913.

He launched his first civil disobedience movement in India in 1919, protesting a British law that required military service of all Indian men. For most of the next three decades, Gandhi was the spiritual and political leader of India, pushing for reform, boycotting British goods, protesting violence between Hindus and Muslims, and eventually pressuring Britain to grant Indian independence.

That campaign finally succeeded in 1947, though Gandhi’s hope for a united India was dashed when Britain, bowing to pressure from the Muslim League, split the area into two states—the chiefly Hindu India and the mainly Muslim Pakistan.

Religious violence followed, as members of the two faiths attacked and killed each other. Gandhi pleaded for an end to the violence and for the Hindu majority to grant tolerance to Muslims. That plea led his assassin, a Hindu fanatic, to kill the Mahatma, or “Great Soul.” A reporter who had been Gandhi’s friend wrote, “Just an old man in a loincloth in distant India: yet when he died, humanity wept.”

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In Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk, James Carter traces the life of Tanxu, an unknown but extraordinary Buddhist monk. Defined by a desire for a desire for an activist Chinese nationalism that maintained the nation’s cultural and social traditions Tanxu’s life story portrays twentieth century China from empire to republic, through war, famine, and revolution.

A century ago, Tanxu used his temples to establish physical links between Buddhism and Chinese nationalism. At the same time, though, he was guided by the belief that the physical world was illusory. The title of his memoir, “Recollections of Shadows and Dust,” uses a common Buddhist phrase meant to convey the impermanence and illusion of the material world, hardly the theological emphasis one might expect from a man who transformed cityscapes with his work in brick and mortar. I tried to understand this apparent paradox as I researched Tanxu’s career, but my connection to him remained impersonal, even distant, and strictly academic.

This all changed with the unexpected series of events that led me to the Bronx. My research turned up a commentary that Tanxu had written on the Heart Sutra (a Buddhist sutra is a sacred text, usually purporting to record the spoken teachings of the historical Buddha). This brief and very popular text includes the famous construction “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Tanxu’s commentary was translated into English and widely read by Western Buddhists. One morning from my office in Philadelphia I emailed the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA), in New York, to request a copy. They were happy to comply, but more interesting was this aside in their response: “By the way…[our] Master Lok To is a dharma heir disciple of Master Tanxu.”
…
Tanxu and Lok To worked together closely during the 1950’s and Lok To came to North America with Tanxu’s encouragement. He settled in the Bronx at the invitation of local Buddhist laity, and established the Buddhist Association of the United States there in 1964. Ten years later, he moved to his current location, on Davidson Avenue and founded the Young Men’s Buddhist Association as a center for his translation work. There he has been for nearly forty years.
…
Sitting with Lok To, Lu Bin (a young nun), and Hoi Sang Yu (a lay Buddhist who would become one of my most important guides through Tanxu’s world), I share my interest in Tanxu, and what I know about him. I’ve been to Harbin, and Yingkou, and Changchun, places they’ve never visited. Had I been to Qingdao, they wanted to know? Not yet. But that was the Master’s most important temple – I had to visit there: they could arrange it. They could coordinate my travels to most of the important stops on Tanxu’s itinerary, including Ningbo, where Tanxu studied to become a monk, and Tiantai Mountain, where his sect of Buddhism was established 1,100 years ago. Lok To was formally the abbot of Chamshan Temple in Hong Kong, where Tanxu’s remains were interred. I was welcome there anytime.
…
The moment was exciting, but also unsettling. I am by training and disposition an academic: keen to observe, less eager to participate. Journalists are warned to report, not to become, the story. Was I not risking just this by accepting invitations to temples and posing before Tanxu’s memorial shrine? And there was the question of faith. I make no claims for or against the beliefs that Tanxu, Lok To, and the other monks shared. Did I belong here?

Five months later, I stand in a mountainside clearing overlooking Clearwater Bay in Hong Kong’s New Territories. A white stupa housing Tanxu’s earthly remains gleams in the tropical sun. It is a beautiful scene of green cliffs plunging into the azure waters of the South China Sea. As I contemplate the view, a monkey emerges from the forest and, with barely a glance my way, walks to the plate of offerings on the altar in front of Tanxu’s stupa. Taking an orange form the plate, it saunters casually back into the forest.
…
My immersion in Tanxu’s world is most complete as I follow the story of his ordination in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai. Ningbo teems with an easy going affluence. Centuries ago it was one of the largest ports in Asia. Today, less hurried than Shanghai, less uncertain than Hong Kong, and less paranoid than Beijing, it is no longer one of China’s great cities, but seems to have found a comfortable rhythm being past its prime. And, like almost all Chinese coastal cities, Ningbo is in the midst of an explosive construction boom.
…
The day I arrived, the temple appears shabby and dark, but active. A handful of monks move among the pavilions. The temple’s abbot, Master Yixang, less than five feet tall with a long gray beard, greets us. He did not know Tanxu personally, but he is familiar with one of the temple’s most famous students, and he is happy to meet visitors who know about Tanxu, for it is a rare occurrence. He shows me where Tanxu prayed, studied, and slept. In the gathering twilight, the abbot leads us from these faded buildings to his office, where he brings out the architectural drawings for renovations to Guanzong Temple and the Ningbo Buddhist Association: it will be a grand, brightly colored compound with marble floors replacing the worn wood that creaks under my feet as I look over the plans. It will be an impressive complex, but I feel fortunate that I arrived before the renovations and can tread the very same boards Tanxu walked decades before.

As Tanxu studied in this monastery in the 1910s, approaching his fiftieth birthday, he no doubt reflected on all the brutality and deprivation he had observed in his life. The first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths declares, “All existence is suffering”: Tanxu had suffered, and had dedicated much of his life to the path that would enable humans to transcend that suffering. My travels with Tanxu had taken me across the world, several times, but the only way to get to the start of the story was to travel back in time. This story begins neither in New York nor Hong Kong nor Ningbo, but in the poverty and political turmoil that was North China in the late nineteenth century.

James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China and the author of several books and articles on modern China, most recently Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk.

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December 29, 1911

Sun Yat-sen becomes first President of Republic of China

Nearly four dozen delegates gathered in Nanjing, a city in east-central China. Representing seventeen Chinese provinces, they were supporters of the Wuhan Revolution against the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China. On December 25, Sun Yat-sen, the spearhead behind the revolution, returned to China after sixteen years of exile to join the meetings. Four days later, he was elected the provisional president of the Republic of China.

Educated as a doctor, Sun Yat-sen developed strong interest in China’s political situation. He resented the domination of Chinese affairs by western powers—and also the unwillingness of the Qing rulers to adopt modern, Western ways. With his ideas spurned by the ruler of one of China’s provinces, he formed a group in 1894 aimed at promoting reform. By the next year, he was planning revolts against the regime—all from abroad, as he feared capture.

While several revolts took place starting in 1900, the 1911 rebellion had the longest lasting consequences. Qing power was crumbling, and intellectuals and local warlords had both grown restive under the dynasty’s rule. Following Sun’s election, he pressed Yuan Shikai—a powerful minister—to join the revolt. By February, the emperor recognized he could no longer control China. On February 12, he resigned. Two days later—after Sun had resigned the presidency—Yuan Shikai became provisional president of the republic.

The fall of the Qing did not mean the end of conflict in China. Sun and Yuan had a falling out, and fighting resumed. Sun regained power in 1923, but his rule was shortened by his death two years later. He was succeeded as leader of the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), with the nominal support of Chinese Communists. That ended soon after, and by the 1930s China was plunged into another civil war, as the Communists, under Mao Zedong, sought to stage a revolution that would unseat the Guomindang government.

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