04-28-2025, 08:59 AM
Hello DI!
I suddenly wanted to study the modern irrational hatred of Americans towards the Chinese. And as a result, I think I found the historical roots of this phenomenon. I want to share with you.
In fact, there are many smart and educated people in the United States. For example, the University of Southern California has a center for the study of China that seriously studies one of the main strategic opponents of the United States. On the site of this center there is a clear presentation of an extremely important phenomenon - China's Century of Humiliation.
I believe that if American politicians who are now attacking China read the presentation prepared for them by experts, they would avoid a number of costly mistakes.
Here is a brief summary of the document, translated first into Russian, and then for you into English.
And now, when China is the world's number one economy and the main trading partner for most countries on the planet, American politicians are trying to talk to China from a position of strength, and they do it publicly, showing off, with a demonstrative intent to humiliate...
Perhaps, it was impossible to come up with a better way to unite one and a half billion Chinese, charging them with patriotic enthusiasm.
Thank you.
I suddenly wanted to study the modern irrational hatred of Americans towards the Chinese. And as a result, I think I found the historical roots of this phenomenon. I want to share with you.
In fact, there are many smart and educated people in the United States. For example, the University of Southern California has a center for the study of China that seriously studies one of the main strategic opponents of the United States. On the site of this center there is a clear presentation of an extremely important phenomenon - China's Century of Humiliation.
I believe that if American politicians who are now attacking China read the presentation prepared for them by experts, they would avoid a number of costly mistakes.
Here is a brief summary of the document, translated first into Russian, and then for you into English.
Quote:"The Century of Humiliation" is what they call the period between the First Opium War of 1839 and the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It all began when the British Empire, seeking to balance its trade deficit, flooded China with opium. When Beijing tried to stop the import of drugs, London resorted to military force. The defeat in two Opium Wars forced China to open more than seventy so-called "treaty ports" and served as a prologue to a series of "unequal treaties." Over the course of a century, 19 powers, including the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan, forced China to sign 21 unequal treaties. The country lost its customs sovereignty, suffered territorial occupation, and saw foreign soldiers roaming the imperial palaces.
The external defeats were followed by internal disintegration. Opium undermined health nations, missionaries were shaking up the traditional order, and peasant and religious rebellions — from the Taiping to the Boxer — flared up one after another. China lost a dozen tributaries and dependent lands: Vietnam went to France, Burma to Britain, Ryukyu and Taiwan to Japan, Mongolia and Tibet gained independence. The fragile imperial system collapsed in 1911, then came the war of militarists, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and then a nationwide civil war. By the end of the era, the country was on its knees — without control over its borders, without a single authority, without a sense of self-worth.
A special place in Chinese memory is occupied by the "American humiliations." Already in 1844, the Wangxia Treaty gave US citizens immunity from prosecution and free access to five trading ports. In the decades that followed, Washington became involved in the opium trade, banned Chinese immigration, sent in the Marines to suppress the Boxers, and set up its own court in Shanghai. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, the Americans supported the transfer of German concessions to Japan, undermining Chinese faith in Wilson’s Fourteen Points and sparking the May Fourth Movement.
The century of humiliation formally ended in 1949, but the list of grievances continued to grow in the decades that followed. In 1993, the United States thwarted China’s bid for the Olympics by seizing the container ship Yinghe on the high seas on suspicion of carrying chemical weapons; an inspection revealed nothing, but there was no apology. In 1999, an American bomb hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists; Beijing still believes the attack was deliberate. Two years later, an EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet off Hainan Island; pilot Wang Wei died and became a “martyr.” And in 2020, the Wall Street Journal dubbed the country “the sick man of Asia,” resurrecting a racist trope from the colonial era.
The memory of a century of humiliation has become a cornerstone of modern Chinese nationalism. Since the 1990s, the Communist Party has consciously replaced Marxist rhetoric with a narrative of “national renaissance,” in which the West plays the role of the eternal offender and the CCP is the protector capable of “making China great again.” The slogan “勿忘国耻” — “Never forget national humiliation” — is emblazoned on memorials, in textbooks, and on social media. It feeds mistrust of any foreign pressure, easy readiness of society for a "countermeasure" and a stable conviction in the need for a strong state and a powerful army.
So the past lives on in politics: pain turns into ambition, and humiliation into a global project that Beijing calls "the great national restoration."
And now, when China is the world's number one economy and the main trading partner for most countries on the planet, American politicians are trying to talk to China from a position of strength, and they do it publicly, showing off, with a demonstrative intent to humiliate...
Perhaps, it was impossible to come up with a better way to unite one and a half billion Chinese, charging them with patriotic enthusiasm.
Thank you.
Remember when you were young you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Pink Floyd 1975
Shine on you crazy diamond
Pink Floyd 1975
