Six on China: Completed 600 years ago, China’s capital was to serve as its ruler’s legacy – big, bold and gaudy; The history of the world – as the Chinese see it; In the US, China-bashing is rooted in myths of Western superiority; beware US ‘sabotag

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 Six on China: Completed 600 years ago, China’s capital was to serve as its ruler’s legacy – big, bold and gaudy; The history of the world – as the Chinese see it; In the US, China-bashing is rooted in myths of Western superiority; beware US ‘sabotage’, Beijing warns Southeast Asia; Washington's disinformation campaign; US is militarily & economically impotent [vs. China]

 Completed 600 years ago, China’s capital was to serve as its ruler’s legacy – big, bold and gaudy

"Six centuries ago this year, in the 11th lunar month of the 18th year of his reign, the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty announced the completion of his brand new capital, Beijing.

The city had been built on the site of the Mongols’ Dadu, from which those northern invaders had ruled the Chinese for nearly 100 years, and out of which Yongle’s father, the Hongwu emperor, had driven them only a few decades earlier.

By 1420, Yongle had pulled down not only the Mongol-built palace, but the rest of the alien capital, with the discarded rubble piled high outside his brand new palace’s north gate. Longevity Hill protected the new construction’s principal occupant from baleful northern influences while at the same time publicly demonstrating Confucian filial piety: the man-made hill emulated the naturally occurring high ground protecting his late father’s palace in Nanjing, and was given the same name.

But early in 1421, the new palace’s ceremonial centre­piece, the immense Hall of Revering Heaven, was struck by lightning and set ablaze, as were two companion halls.

To lose one brand new building might be regarded as misfortune; three, however, augured supernatural disapproval: a smouldering reminder of how Yongle’s emperorship had begun 19 years earlier in the most un-Confucian of ways, when his troops entered Nanjing and sent its imperial palace up in flames, with the Jianwen emperor, Yongle’s 24-year-old nephew, still inside.

Yongle removed all mention of his roasted relative from historical record and used all available means to establish his own righteousness. These often involved construction.

Like many a great dictator, he built on a scale designed to awe his subjects, to establish his legitimacy through sheer presence, and to persuade posterity of his right to rule. He built temples to ingratiate himself with heaven and to establish relationships with senior religious figures on Earth. He built with an innovative simplicity that sent Chinese architecture in a new direction, and which enabled him to put up halls rapidly and economically, but with an emphasis on using materials of the highest quality.

Six hundred years on, this often overlooked architec­tural legacy is being reassessed. Yongle built to communi­cate, and while there are fewer of his buildings remaining than is often claimed, there’s rather more to see in them than is commonly noted.

Yongle’s Beijing served as a metaphor for the emperor, says Aurelia Campbell, a professor of Asian art history at Boston College and author of What the Emperor Built (2020). The buildings of his new capital “had a sense of order and uniformity that communicated the message of a strong centralised power controlled by a capable moral ruler”, she writes.

Yongle is commonly connected with Beijing’s Forbidden City, where visitors are drawn straight to the vast spectacle of what is now called the Hall of Supreme Harmony – Yongle’s Hall of Revering Heaven. Its dizzyingly compli­cated bracket sets support the vast yellow sweep of a main roof and secondary eaves. Gaudy red-and-gold screens and pillars compete to dazzle while beams in green and blue feature hundreds of golden, writhing dragons.

It all fizzes and buzzes its way aloft, sitting with its two smaller but equally hubris-laden companions on a triple-layered carved marble terrace that lifts all three halls still closer to heaven.

Magnificent as it is, the Hall of Supreme Harmony visible today is not Yongle’s creation, and general claims that today’s Forbidden City is the world’s largest and best-preserved example of medieval architecture are not to be taken at face value, although visitors are often encouraged to think so. The burned-out hall was not even rebuilt in Yongle’s lifetime, but there’s much to be learned about him from it nonetheless."

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3092492/chinese-emperor-who-built-beijing-his-honour-and

SCMP - The history of the world – as the Chinese see it

The history of the world – as the Chinese see it

The history of the world – as the Chinese see it China’s meteoric rise is restoring the country to a position it considers the normal and proper state of affairs...

In the US, China-bashing is rooted in myths of Western superiority

• Across the centuries, Europe propagated anti-Chinese stereotypes as a response to the perceived threats to European might
• 
  
• In the US today, dehumanising myths about Chinese continue to drive the cultural belief that China is the enemy

In the United States, if the right and left agree upon anything, it is that China is the enemy, at a deep, cultural level.

Liberals do not condone violence against Chinese people, but they may accept as fact the same 

dehumanising myths

 used to justify 

racist bullying

: Chinese people have a collectivist mentality; are blindly obedient, and so on.

As a historian with years of research on China myths, I believe a deep history of China-bashing can help explain its tenacious hold on the American mind.

THE CHINA THREAT

In his preface to the most influential 18th-century book on China, J.B. Du Halde said European explorers saw themselves as superior to everyone they encountered, but in China they found a populous nation with prosperous cities and a society so tolerant that religious wars were unknown.

At first, these reports were dismissed as fiction: “We could not believe that beyond so many half-barbarous nations, and at the extremity of Asia, a powerful nation was to be found scarce inferior to any of the best governed states of Europe.”

The Chinese were white – until white men called them yellow

3 Feb 2019

The Chinese were white, until white men called them yellow Europeans referred to East Asians as white until the end of the 18th century. But as the Chinese and Japanese re...

These accounts challenged traditional presumptions of European superiority, but they turned out to be largely true. Worse yet, global demand for Chinese commodities such as tea, porcelain, and silk, had created trade deficits all over Europe.

François Fénelon accused the Chinese of being sneaky on the assumption they could not have achieved all this on their own, but because Europeans also made fortunes trading those commodities, the threat was not so much to the economy as to European face.

Face, it turns out, was serious business. Louis le Comte openly admired China’s meritocratic society; his book was burned. In a Europe torn by religious wars, Christian Wolff admired China’s secular morality. He was ordered to leave town in 24 hours or be hanged.

Another threat was China’s post-aristocratic society. Anonymous civil service exams reduced social class, religion, or ethnicity as factors in official selection. This made participation in government more egalitarian than in Europe.

Dutch, French, and English reformers seized on this to attack aristocratic privilege, arguing that China’s economic success was a product of its meritocratic system. Montesquieu recognised this as threatening to aristocracy and launched an all-out offensive in The Spirit of the Laws .

Our textbooks tell us the Baron was a champion of “liberty”, but fail to mention that “liberties” back then meant aristocratic privileges. We also learn he was opposed to “despotism”, but are not informed that “despotism” referred to stripping the nobility of their “liberties”.

Certainly, China was guilty of that. In China, any educated man could hold office, but Montesquieu insisted that commoners should never hold office. Genuine reformers like Abbe Raynal continued to promote China-style equality right up to the American and French Revolutions, but Montesquieu’s disinformation persisted as well."

In the US, China-bashing is rooted in myths of Western superiority

In the US, China-bashing is rooted in myths of Western superiority Across the centuries, Europe propagated anti-Chinese stereotypes as a response to the perceived threats to Europ...

SCMP - South China Sea: beware US ‘sabotage’, Beijing warns Southeast Asia

South China Sea: beware US ‘sabotage’, Beijing warns Southeast Asia

South China Sea: beware US ‘sabotage’, Beijing warns Southeast Asia Diplomatic spats in the Philippines and Myanmar show the superpowers’ jostling for regional influence is likely ...

Commentary: The Procrustean bed in Washington's disinformation campaign - Xinhua | English.news.cn

"BEIJING, April 27 (Xinhua) -- While the raging COVID-19 epidemic continues to rattle the nerves of the American people amid mounting calls for a more committed and effective federal response, some U.S. politicians are racking their brains for new ways to spread rumors and scapegoat others.

Their relentless disinformation campaign, mostly directed at such convenient targets as China and the World Health Organization (WHO), features a brazenly arbitrary distortion of facts that is reminiscent of the horrors of Procrustes, a robber in Greek mythology who forced his victims to fit into his metal bed by either stretching their bodies or chopping off their legs.

Just as indicated in a recently revealed 57-page memo sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to GOP campaigns, those rumormongers are doing to facts what Procrustes did to the bodies of his victims, and their Procrustean beds are the predetermined narratives in their heads.

In the strategy playbook titled "Corona Big Book," disclosed by U.S. news outlet Politico, Republican candidates are advised to address the COVID-19 pandemic by aggressively attacking China, and provided with detailed guidelines on everything from how to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to how to deal with accusations of racism.

And just as Procrustes did not care about the lives of those travelers falling into his hands, his modern-day avatars, bent on muddying the waters to help themselves escape responsibility, do not bother with the truthfulness of the "truths" coming out of their mouths.

But there is a big heart-wrenching difference in this analogy: The onslaught on facts in a real-world pandemic is deadly on a far greater scale than Procrustes' murders.

In fact, the Procrustean practice of manipulating facts by U.S. politicians with preconceived beliefs or preset agendas long predates the ongoing global public health crisis. The Iraq War is a lesson too bitter to forget. But the COVID-19 outbreak has exposed it more clearly to the world as well as the enormous danger it can potentially cause.

As Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based nonprofit think tank, with rich experience in U.S. foreign disaster assistance and the WHO's outbreak responses, said in an interview with Intelligencer, part of New York Magazine, when trying to make the case against Iraq, the U.S. administration back then pushed "the intelligence community to cherry-pick whatever information they could to make that case on the thinnest of grounds." Today with the coronavirus pandemic, "you see a very parallel dynamic here," he noted.

The mind-numbing propaganda by some U.S. officials at the highest echelons -- particularly the likes of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House trade advisor Peter Navarro -- to smear China over the coronavirus disease serves as a telling example. As Konyndyk said, "You have an administration, or at least figures in the administration, who really want the intelligence to give them a particular outcome and they disregard any evidence that runs against that outcome."

Amid jaw-dropping revelations of what mainstream U.S. media outlets have described as "denial and dysfunction" in the federal response, those U.S. politicians, already viewing China through an increasingly confrontational lens, are going to extraordinary lengths to thrust China into the narrative they have forged to help them divert growing domestic pressure and shirk responsibilities.

For example, in their version of the story, China must not be seen as transparent; otherwise they would have no grounds to blame their own failures on a "cover-up" by the Asian country. So they just axed the part that on Jan. 3 China began to regularly inform the WHO and relevant countries and regions, including the United States, about the outbreak of a respiratory disease later known as COVID-19.

And in their alt-reality, China helping other countries combat the common threat must not be cast in a positive light; otherwise the United States would lose more of its already waning credibility as a global leader. So they just stretched some isolated quality problems in the medical supplies some countries purchased from China through unofficial channels to keep smearing the entirety of China's assistance.

Compared with Procrustes, his real-world incarnations are more innovative. In order to fit China perfectly into their template, they have been inventing what they cannot find and then patching it onto China. For instance, their narrative cannot allow China to act as a responsible major country dedicated to global good, so they just keep alleging that its helping hand in the global battle against COVID-19 is intended for geopolitical gains.

Compared with Procrustes' bed, the one in those politicians' mind, although not used to mutilate bodies, is costing more lives, because it is churning out distorted facts and outright lies and adding fuel to the firestorm of an "infodemic" that, as public health officials and scientists around the world have pointed out, is no less deadly than the coronavirus itself.

In the face of a cunning and lethal virus that threatens all human beings regardless of countries, regions, races and political systems, only with global cooperation can humanity beat the common enemy while saving more lives. It is high time that the Procrustean bed in the heads of those smear-mongering U.S. politicians was dismantled, because it only breeds disinformation, distrust and division.

A crisis like the ongoing pandemic, devastating as it is, also offers opportunities. Not least, it is a moment to ponder what can be done to better protect lives and prepare the world. Among the must-dos are cementing international solidarity, improving global coordination, and putting best practices available to use through mutual learning.

Every one of the more than 200,000 lives already lost to COVID-19 stands for a reason and adds to the urgency for the world to be clear-eyed about who are fighting the virus and who are feeding it. Those fact-manipulators in Washington need to heed the warning that in the mythological story, Procrustes was killed on his own bed."

Commentary: The Procrustean bed in Washington's disinformation campaign - Xinhua | English.news.cn (official gov't CCP site)

Commentary: The Procrustean bed in Washington's disinformation campaign ...

The US is militarily & economically impotent [vs. China]

"China has been for years now seeking to strengthen its economic and security ties with the ASEAN bloc, much to the consternation of the US. Indeed, one of the major obstacles faced by the US in confronting China in the South China Sea is the reticence among the very nations Pompeo sought to court in his statement to alienate relations with China, whose status as the region’s most economically powerful trading partner most ASEAN nations cannot ignore.

Here, President Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2018 has come back to haunt US policy makers – void of any viable US-led economic alternative, the ASEAN nations have no choice but to gravitate toward China.

The TPP Is Dead. Long Live The Trans-Pacific Trade Deal The U.S. pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership last year. But the remaining 11 signatories carried on, cob...

By putting down a marker that it views the totality of China’s South China Sea claims as legally impermissible, the Trump administration is seeking to influence the diplomatic arena where the various disputes China has with the South China littoral states will be handled for the foreseeable future.

Other than words, however, the US has limited leverage that it can apply – freedom of navigation exercises are an irritant to China, but have done nothing to halt its expansion in the region, and in the aftermath of the collapse of the TPP, the US has failed to put forward any coherent regional economic development strategy to counter that of China.

The critical question is to what extent the South China Sea littoral nations are willing to rally around the new US declaratory policy regarding China’s ambitions in the South China Sea. Lacking either the military muscle to compel Chinese change or the economic wherewithal to offer a meaningful alternative to China’s economic influence, Pompeo’s statement is little more than empty words masking growing US impotence.

The fact that the sole meaningful response to China’s stance in the South China Sea being pursued by the US is a radical restructuring of the Marine Corps solely designed to engage China militarily in the region should be worrisome to all; by failing to back up strong rhetoric with meaningful policy options, the US is in danger of backing itself into a corner for which the only solution will be the military tool offered by the marines. The entire world should hope and pray that it does not come to that."

 The US is militarily & economically impotent

Opinion - The US is militarily & economically impotent Now the US has lined up against China in a dramatic manner. The timing of Pompeo�s statement did not take place ...