C&c Generals China Quotes

Type for type, ships in general, and warships in particular, have always been bigger than their land-bound equivalents, often representing by far the largest and most complicated movable machines produced by, and at the disposal of, a given society at a given time and place. This was true in regard to the junks of pre-modern China, the galleys and sailing ships of the ancient Mediterranean, and the cogs of medieval Europe. As even a casual glance at a nuclear-propelled aircraft carrier of 90,000 tons burden will confirm, that still remains true today.

By 2001, however, India was decoupling from its long rivalry with Pakistan. India’s economy was booming. Its generals and foreign policy strategists professed to be more concerned about China than about their dysfunctional sibling neighbor to the west. Yet the Pakistan Army used fear of India as a justification for dominating Pakistan’s politics.

But to refer to these nations as “Afro-Asian” is conspicuously absurd, and the whole concept of Afro-Asia is actually meaningless from every point of view. The general idea of Eurasia, however, does make a good deal of cultural as well as ecological sense, not only because it recognises the obvious importance of Europe, but because of the cultural links that went to and fro across it, so that the early navigators of the fifteenth century were using the Chinese inventions of magnetic compasses, stern-post rudders, paper for their charts, and gunpowder, and were making their voyages to find sea-routes from Europe to China and the East Indies rather than relying on overland trade.

AS A NATION-STATE, Vietnam is younger than the United States. The S-shaped region we now know as Vietnam—stretching more than a thousand miles from China’s southern border to the Ca Mau Peninsula in the Gulf of Thailand—was not effectively united under a single ruler until 1802. In that year, a general who called himself Gia Long emerged from thirty years of civil war and established the Nguyen dynasty.