Experimental Blog # 148

Notes and quotations from "Restless Empire - China and the World Since 1750" by Odd Arne Westad

This history of modern China begins with the Qing{also sometimes called Manchu} dynasty, which ruled for almost three hundred years, from 1644 to 1912. Even during the 15th century Chinese were emigrating along trade routes to other settlements in Southeast Asia; Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Java, Malaya, and  Thailand. In the 19th and 20th centuries, besides the United States and Canada, Chinese also emigrated to Cuba and Peru. Eventually totalling about 20 million people, over 75% had gone to Southeast Asia.

Today, the author says, about 40 million people of Chinese descent live outside of China, compared to more than 350 million people of European descent who live outside of Europe.

Beginning in the 1830s several European powers began incursions into China for their commercial advantages. By the end of the 19th century these European powers were joined by Japan. "In 1911 ... an army mutiny forced the mother of the last emporer, the four-year-old Puyi, to issue his abdication. By imperial decree, China became a republic ..."

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 abruptly terminated Japan's occupation of China. However, the vigorous support of the Soviet Union gave the victory in the Chinese civil war to the Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP. There followed a very thorough "sovietization" of China, which possiblly cost an additional 4 to 5 million human lives.

However, the author calls the Great Leap Forward campaign, which ended in 1961, "the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history". Odd Arne Westad writes that an estimated 45 million people died from hunger, illness, or exhaustion.

"During the 1960s, China went through a period of isolation and increasing irrelevance in international affairs." "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was by far the largest and most intense government campaign in Chinese history. It killed fewer people than the Great Leap and it affected the economy less, but in terms of people's daily lives and of lives ruined and made meaningless it was far worse."

Odd Arne Westad writes over another one hundred pages to end his book on a somewhat more positive note.