Chinese Nationalist Quotes

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.

It isn’t a coincidence that skepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right. You rarely see left-wing socialists tweet that “climate change is a Chinese hoax.” Since there is no national answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.15

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

He lost that command because he made clear that he thought the commander of the America-backed Kuomintang, Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, was simply a corrupt warlord fighting not the Japanese but his great rival the Communist Mao Tse-tung. In the end, Washington sided with Chiang and Stilwell was recalled.

isn’t a coincidence that scepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right. You rarely see left-wing socialists tweet that ‘climate change is a Chinese hoax’. Since there is no national answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.

The sum of Henry’s Japanese friends happened to be a number that rhymed with ‘hero’. His father wouldn’t allow it. He was a Chinese nationalist and had been quite a firebrand in his day, according to Henry’s mother. In his early teens, his father had played host to the famed revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen when he visited Seattle to raise money to help the fledgling Kuomintang army fight the Manchus. First through war bonds, then he’d helped them open up an actual office. Imagine that, an office for the Chinese army, right down the street. It was there that Henry’s father kept busy raising thousands of dollars to fight the Japanese back home. His home, not mine, Henry thought.

Lin Piao’s forces had averaged twenty-four miles per day, on foot. In Shensi Province, far removed from the Nationalists and the eyes of the world, the Communist Chinese began to rebuild their base of power. They began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists. They were led by men who were now hardened soldiers, men who wanted above all else for China to be again a great power

But the Viet-Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun.

Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet. The Soviet Union, with its megalomaniac Five Year Plans, was as obsessed with growth as the most cut-throat American robber baron. Just as Christians and Muslims both believed in heaven, and disagreed only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method. Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key for realising their disparate goals.

The RSS was helpless because of the ideological power equation. Socialist secularism was the dominant ideology, while Hindu nationalism counted as politically incorrect. Those who swore by socialist secularism could afford to kick its alleged opponents around at will. The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-1947, when they informed the British government(a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim league by propagating economic and often secular-sounding arguments for Partition, once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razakar militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that "China's chairman is also India's chairman" and accused India of having started the war with China. But, they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses. Even worse(at least from a Hindu nationalist viewpoint) then the treatment which the Hindu nationalists received, was their own record as policy-makers.

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade.

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade. Japan’s prime minister, the nationalist Shinzō Abe, came to office in 2012 pledging to jolt the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. His aggressive and somewhat unusual measures to achieve this have been nicknamed Abenomics. Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city-state, they pursue this line of thinking even further, and peg ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about.2

Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Mao Zedong battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year Radio Beijing announced: ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan.’ Mao centralised power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing’s influence into Mongolia. In 1951 China completed its annexation of Tibet (another vast non-Han territory), and by then Chinese school textbook maps were beginning to depict China as stretching even into the Central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life, but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified.

In reality, two factors often tied to the emergence of nationalism in the early modern West, general education (as distinct from specialized training) and commercial printing, already existed in China by the eleventh century.20 Under such circumstances, one might expect the appearance of a new form of collective consciousness in Northern Song China as well. The relationship between the Song nation and the modern Chinese nation is, however, complex. Besides adhering to a very different ideology of political legitimacy, Northern Song Chinese differed from modern nationalists in how they defined the boundaries of their state. Contemporary China is conceived today to be a multiethnic state composed of fifty-six “nationalities.” Its “natural” territory extends deep into Central Asia. In its Song iteration, as will be clear in a later chapter, China was imagined to be a monoethnic nation that controlled neither Manchuria, nor the modern peripheral provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.

But it seems fairly evident that the operative Chinese strategic culture does not differ radically from key elements in the Western realpolitik tradition. Indeed, the Chinese case might be classified as a hard realpolitik sharing many of the same tenets about the nature of the enemy and the efficacy of violence as advocates of nuclear war-fighting on both sides in the Cold War, or late nineteenth century social Darwinian nationalists.7 While it does not represent the breadth or complexity of the realist tradition of statecraft, hard realpolitik is in essence one of the three Western traditions in international relations as identified by Martin Wight (the others being revolutionism and rationalism) (Wight 1991: 220-21). It is characterized by positions at the high end of the three dimensions that comprise the central paradigm of a strategic culture (see fig. 4.2)

Yet by mid-year, the Party had combined apparent military invincibility with a monopoly of hope regarding China’s future. Mao and the men around him had fashioned a master narrative of national salvation, something the Nationalists failed to achieve throughout their long, bitter struggle against communism. The CCP promised the Chinese people ‘liberation’ – land for the peasants, an end to widespread injustices, of bullying at the hands of foreigners and of poverty and backwardness. There was to be a ‘new China’: a modern, industrialized country that the world would never look down on again. Such a powerful message overcame misgivings many might have about the Party’s recourse to violence in the countryside and the new curbs on individual freedoms it imposed in the cities. China needed to change; that was undeniable. It was also widely accepted. Thanks to the Communist Party, it was at last going to happen.

The scale of what Taiwan had accomplished, in just six post-war decades and under extremely straitened circumstances, was astonishing. In 1952, 42 per cent of Taiwanese were illiterate. Fifty years later, nearly 60 per cent of Taiwanese went to university. (Tellingly, the illustration on Taiwan’s 1000-dollar note was four schoolchildren studying a globe, though it wasn’t apparent whether they were learning their foreign capitals or plotting Chinese missile trajectories.) Taiwan’s 23 million diligent, dogged and courteous people had built the seventeenth-biggest economy in the world, and accrued the third-largest foreign reserves. Their tiny island boasted six domestic airlines, trains you could set your watch by and, in the shape of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building. And they’d made their transition from military dictatorship to pluralist democracy without getting any blood on the carpet. For a country that didn’t formally exist in the eyes of most of the world, this was decent going. Having visited many broken-down, violent dumps where everybody insisted that The Struggle superseded all other considerations, like picking up the rubbish and teaching kids to read, and invariably blamed someone else for all their problems, I fell hopelessly in love with the place. Were I a George Soros-style billionaire eccentric, I’d establish a program under which the world’s nationalist crazies, idiot warlords and dingbat terrorists would be sent to Taiwan, to see what can be accomplished when people stick the grievance schtick on the back-burner, put in a day’s work and behave in a civilised manner. Taiwan

In October 1947, the Nationalist government in Nanking informed the Indian Embassy of its wish to modify such agreements as were entered into between Great Britain and Tibet, including the Simla Agreement, 1914, that defined India’s frontier with Tibet. In the same month, the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had also addressed a letter to India’s Prime Minister seeking the return of ‘all our indisputable Tibetan territories gradually included into India’, which included parts of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan.

Gao Jianfu came to India at a juncture when many Indian nationalist leaders and personalities like Gandhi and Tagore were sympathetic to China under the notorious Japanese aggression. Gao was an ardent reader of Rabindranath’s poetry. However, it is hard to trace, from the available data, the extent of his exposure to contemporary art in Bengal since he did not visit Santiniketan and look up its artistic activities. But many of his drawings and sketches bore evidence of some interactions. It is interesting that while the artists of Bengal were eager to assimilate certain elements of Japanese and Chinese art, a celebrated Chinese artist and intellectual visited Bengal almost in the same trajectory, and we do not have enough record of this event. Gao Jianfu, during his long trip to India, also visited the Ajanta caves and made a large number of copies of the Ajanta murals. From these copies, he did a great many sketches and drawings as if he were putting together a visual travelogue interspersed with narratives and footnotes. Fascinatingly, some of his drawings of ruined stupas and Buddhist sites that he visited in India were evidence of their impact on him, working behind his growing inclination to Buddhism and spirituality during the later phase of his life.

YOU LEARNED ABOUT this period in high school: The standardized global curriculum calls for a month focused on it. Those decades just before the establishment of Shareholder Government, when we brought ourselves to the verge of a global breakdown. The system of economic interdependence created after World War II and reinforced after the Cold War had succeeded, more or less, in its original goal: keeping countries’ fortunes so intertwined that they could no longer afford major wars. Other benefits emerged as well. Fewer people were poor than ever before. Fewer infants died, fewer mothers. More children were enrolled in school, more young adults in universities. So many people in once-poor countries—China, India—were becoming rich that inequality between countries had fallen for the first time since the 1820s. This would seem like a positive development. But then why, the question had emerged forcefully at the turn of the twenty-first century, did people seem so upset, so convinced that the whole setup was bad for them? It had to do, it turned out, with fast-growing inequality within countries. If you were an Indian citizen who wasn’t among the newly rich, you weren’t gladdened by your countrymen’s suddenly acquired wealth. If you were an American or European who had always been poor, learning that children of Chinese peasants were becoming billionaires didn’t charm you. The defining sentiment of this late capitalist period was disaffection, and it began to take alarming forms. Mass murders became so frequent that they no longer trended on Social. Sure, you could go through the exercise of psychoanalyzing each killer in an attempt to classify him, as they used to, terrorist or psychopath, but what good did that do at this scale? The only useful conclusion was the broadest one, which was that the world order itself was making people murderous. But then, the politicians most equipped to address the unrest were those least invested in ending it. Race-baiting nationalists from oligarchical families began winning elections all over the world. It was the oldest trick around, promising the poor members of your own ethnic group that you’d help them become as rich as yourself, in large part by making sure that the poor members of other ethnic groups stopped stealing your group’s opportunities, thus dividing the poor so that they wouldn’t rise up together against the rich.

Indian Nationalist's support means nothing. They will support anyone who is against Muslims. Heck they support China when it comes to Xinjiang, even though Indian soldiers have died in conflict with the Chinese in the recent past

It is certainly true that, as Chinese nationalists like to point out, the signing of treaties and the opening of treaty ports in China were achieved at gunpoint, the stronger forcing the weaker to submit. That acknowledged, open markets had become such a basic principle of international relations by the mid-nineteenth century that it could be said that Britain was simply demanding that the Qing meet international standards, and not attempting to encroach on Chinese sovereignty. Britain wanted to shore up conditions for the benefit of private British trade, not set up more colonies to manage.

Three years after Liang’s execution, the Nationalist Government fled to Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party claimed its inheritance as China’s postwar successor regime. The postwar era lasted longer in some places than in others. In China, arguably, it hasn’t ended.

What China cannot ignore is how the narrative of the CCP as the champion and redeemer of a victimised China could dangerously narrow China’s options if an accident with the US or Japan should occur. War is not in China’s interest, and Beijing may for all the reasons I have earlier set out, want to contain the incident. But Beijing could be trapped by its own historical narrative, and the highly nationalistic public opinion that the CCP both cultivates and fears may force China down paths it does not really want to travel. I think Chinese leaders are aware of this danger but cannot abandon or tone down the narrative they have chosen to legitimate their right to rule because they have no convincing replacement.

Globalization – characterized by roving capital, accelerated communications and quick mobilization – has everywhere weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international actors, from English and Chinese nationalists, Somali pirates, human traffickers and anonymous cyber-hackers to Boko Haram.

But history tells us that, in the early stage of their development, virtually all successful countries used some mixture of protection, subsidies and regulation in order to develop their economies. The history of the successful developing countries that I discussed in chapter 1 shows that. Furthermore, the history of today's rich countries also confirms it, as I have discussed in this chapter. Unfortunately, another lesson of history is that rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves succesfully used in the past. Even the newest member of the club of rich countries, my native Korea, has not been an exception to this pattern. Despite once having been one of the most protectionist countries in the world, it now advocates steep cuts in industrial tariffs, if not total free trade, in the WTO. Despite once having been the world piracy capital, it gets upset that the Chinese and the Vietnamese are producing pirate CDs of Korean pop music and pirate DVDs of Korean movies. Worse, these Korean free-marketeers are often the same people who, not so long ago, actually drafted and implemented interventionist, protectionist policies in their earlier jobs. Most of them probably learned their free market economics from pirate-copied rock and roll music and watching pirate-copied videos of Hollywood films in their spare time.

The first Chinese star, they call her, and it's the qualifications that are crucial. First. Chinese. A star may play only him- or herself, but she is supposed to play a race. How can she be herself and represent millions, both at once? And who does she represent them to? To themselves or others? "Who does she thinks she is?" an outraged Nationalist critic has demanded. She wishes she could say. Not a star, then. A star gives off its own light. Another celestial body, a moon, reflecting others' light.

When the Communist Party under Mao came to power in 1949 in China after defeating the Nationalist Chinese, it almost immediately annexed both Sinkiang and Tibet. Almost overnight, the military equation on the border changed dramatically, but the Indians failed to grasp the impact it would have on the subcontinent’s security. As events unfolded over the next decade, they failed to understand not only China’s long-term geopolitical ambitions, which were blatantly expansionist, they also severely underestimated China’s operational capabilities.

In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a unified barrier. In any case, it was hard to set the record straight in a country with no academic tradition of studying the ancient structures. Finally it was as if the Chinese threw up their hands and accepted the foreign notion.

What is known is that monetary crashes invariably leave people in fear, despair, and anger. This is an explosive social mix that irresponsible demagogues can and do exploit, even today. What started as a monetary problem in the former Yugoslavia, for example—exacerbated by the IMF readjustment program in the late 1980s—was swiftly transformed into intolerance toward “others.” Minorities were used as scapegoats by ethnic leaders to redirect anger away from themselves and toward a common enemy, providing the sociopolitical context for extreme nationalist leaders to gain power in the process. Within days of the 1998 monetary crisis in Indonesia, mobs were incited to violence against Chinese and other minorities. Similarly, in Russia, discrimination against minorities was aggravated by the financial collapse of the 1990s. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, it could be argued that the identified archenemy of the United States has now been supplanted with a new foe, immigrants and the poor.

The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India.” Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill’s ravings:

Carl Schmitt was a member of the Nazi Party and based at Berlin University (now Humboldt University) from 1933 to 1945. He has been described as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” and for decades after the defeat of Nazism, his ideas were widely regarded as beyond the pale. But in recent years, there has been a global revival of interest in Schmitt’s work. Chinese legal scholars, Russian nationalists, thinkers of the far right in the US and Europe are all drawing upon the work of the premier legal theorist of Nazi Germany.

By 1956, the wages of the highest-ranking party and government personnel were set at 36.4 times those of the lowest rank.3 (By way of comparison, the highest wage in the “corrupt” Nationalist government in 1946 was 14.5 times that of the lowest wage.)4 Officials enjoyed special housing privileges based on rank, as well as household staff, cars, office furnishings, health care, food provisions, and even exclusive summer resorts.

The Chinese memory of national humiliation is really the key to understanding China’s foreign policy,” says scholar Zheng Wang, who believes that the strident voice of the young nationalists, magnified by the Internet, has become a factor in foreign policy decisions. “This government is finding itself the victim of its own patriotic education campaign. It has very limited choices. Backing down becomes weakness or even a new humiliation. The government is the guardian of China’s national face, so being tough and strong is the only choice.

thousands of soldiers dressed in the Chinese Nationalists’ khaki colors, with German-style helmets and stick grenades swung across their chests.

In the post-Korean War era, one crucial strategy the island-based Chinese Nationalists devised was to blend the conceptually still-unfinished Chinese Civil War and its corollary, the mainland counteroffensive, into the international Cold War landscape, thereby linking the fate of Taiwan and the legitimacy of Nationalist rule on the island closely to America's geostrategic interests in East Asia.

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

the Chinese Communist Party played only a minor role in battling the Japanese. It was the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] that bore the brunt of the heavy fighting and was significantly weakened in the process. Without the Japanese invasion, it seems improbable that the CCP could have won the “Nationalist-Communist” Civil War in 1950. But historical memory is rarely gracious, self-deprecating, or forgiving, especially in a police state.) The

I realised then that Hotan isn’t just the unofficial capital of Uighurstan; it is the current front line in Beijing’s battle to subjugate all Xinjiang. Not long after my visit, eighteen people died when the police station close to the bazaar was stormed by a group of Uighurs armed with petrol bombs and knives. They tore down the Chinese flag and raised a black one with a red crescent on it, before being killed or taken prisoner. Uighurs said the attack was prompted by the city government trying to stop women from wearing all-black robes and especially veils, an ongoing campaign by the Chinese across all Xinjiang. They claimed, too, that men were being forced to shave their beards. The Xinjiang government said the assault was an act of terrorism and that the attackers had called for a jihad. But no evidence was produced to demonstrate any tangible link between Uighur nationalists and the militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia.

On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao’s China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. “That’s humorous,” said Kennedy’s national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. “We’ll give the President another U-2 disaster.” And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked. Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao’s forces shot down a U-2 over China.

During the Korean War, our State Department and other Government agencies have served the Communists more effectively than could any openly registered Communist agents or spies. The order that was issued by the Navy to the 7th Fleet, to patrol Formosa Strait and bar any attack by the Nationalists on the Communists on the mainland, has served to protect the flank of the Chinese Communists and left them free to employ their forces in butchering our troops in Korea. It also enabled them to proceed to take over Tibet, Indo-China and other points.

offers of 500,000 South Korean troops were rejected just as were the offers of Chinese Nationalist troops. The conspirators, for reasons of their own, insist that American blood must be shed in Korea

Like most Americans,” McNamara remembered many years later, “I saw communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and the Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony.” To him—and to Kennedy and most of the men closest to him—it seemed clear that the “Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines….We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements—as they largely appear in hindsight—but as signs of a unified communist drive for hegemony in Asia.

Though different from the Khache, many Uyghur, Kazakh, and Hui Muslims from northwest China fled China and settled in Saudi Arabia after the fall of the Nationalist Chinese government in 1949.

They did not know that when faced with the threat of French domination at the end of the nineteenth century, the Vietnamese had set aside their ancient suspicion of Chinese domination and pleaded with Beijing to come to their aid. American policymakers were conditioned so much that even if someone came to them with such information, they did not pay attention to it or discarded it as irrelevant. The atmosphere of Cold War America did not encourage such attention and awareness, or the perceptions and distinctions that went with them, so government decision-makers in Washington—for not the last time—remained dangerously ignorant and therefore seriously overestimated ideological factors and seriously underestimated historical and nationalistic ones.

Diệm’s sense of entitlement was so great that he did not view the 1954 Geneva Accords as binding on him because he had not signed them. In 1956, he thwarted the promised election leading to reunification, citing the absence of free voting in the North (yet Diệm himself had rigged a plebiscite ousting Emperor Bảo Đại the year before with more than 98 percent of the vote*). Eisenhower endorsed Diệm’s decision,* suspecting the South Vietnamese leader would be crushed in a legitimate contest. As Ike candidly remarked in his memoirs, “I . . . never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Hồ Chí Minh as their leader.”18 By acquiescing to Diệm’s decision to abort the 1956 election, however, the Eisenhower administration effectively sealed Vietnam’s political division. Eisenhower and most other Americans in the 1950s simply could not imagine a Third-World Communist independent of Moscow and Beijing. Through this filter, Hồ was not a Communist nationalist wary of traditional Chinese domination of Southeast Asia and eager to establish and protect Vietnam’s independence, but a cunning and obedient acolyte of the Sino-Soviet camp serving its larger purpose of aggressive expansion. They did not know that Moscow and Beijing had actually counseled Hanoi against supporting armed struggle in South Vietnam out of fear that it might draw the United States directly into the conflict, and continued to do so through the early 1960s.19 Yet even without that intelligence, it was remarkable how easily America’s leaders ignored knowable history.

Pilgrimage to Plurality (Sonnet 2499) Forget the canon, you can't even make sense of my titles, bleating like nationalist livestock, and chanting like brainless bacon - you have to have a certain amount of multicultural tendency, which in a way, is your first test of pilgrimage, moreover, it's the key to the Naskar Canon. If you have no desire to step outside your culture, there's no point in grabbing any of my text, you might as well pick up a chinese or arab text, and expect to be an expert while speaking only English. My script may be English, my language is not - remove your assumptions, transcend your disciplines; it is only through pilgrimage to plurality, that an ape ascends into humanity. My goal is not to replace white supremacy with colored supremacy, or christian supremacy with muslim supremacy, or blind faith with dispassionate logic, I am a stateless weaver of human plurality.

Forget the canon, you can't even make sense of my titles, bleating like nationalist livestock, and chanting like brainless bacon - you have to have a certain amount of multicultural tendency, which in a way, is your first test of pilgrimage, moreover, it's the key to the Naskar Canon. If you have no desire to step outside your culture, there's no point in grabbing any of my text, you might as well pick up a chinese or arab text, and expect to be an expert while speaking only English.