China’s place in world history. The past; the future

China’s transformation over the last three or four decades into the second greatest economy in the world has been nothing less than sensational, an achievement that will be applauded by Smart phone owners made in China  but bearing a non-Chinese brand name. Chinese civilisation is very ancient and predates the late flowering of the West. Chinese cultural memory is strong. Their recent humiliations of the nineteenth century, such as the Opium wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 [Qing Dynasty], when the West deployed recently developed technology, are unforgotten and a more assertive response to the West has been hinted at in the past. These include the anti-Japanese History book riots of 2005 and now the ‘air defence zone’ in the South China Sea [23 November 2013]. The Chinese population burst with energy, more than the Islamic Fundamentalist surge, and talk in the Sempringham eLearning office is to direct that energy not into scheme for military action but into rejoining and extending the fabulous glories of Chinese ‘high culture’, a culture indicated in the V&A exhibition, Masterpieces of Chinese painting 700-1900 [26 October 2013 – 19 January 2014]

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham eLearning. [ehistory.org.uk]