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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brian h who wrote (4713)	3/7/2006 5:37:18 PM
From: brian h	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217701

a blog about the issues at hand in "Freezing Points" incident. zonaeuropa.com [007] The Historical Battle of Freezing Point (03/03/2006) One condition for Freezing Point to return is that there shall be a critique of Yuan Weishi's Modernization and History Textbooks (You can see the blogger's translation) - zonaeuropa.com The critique is Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Feudalism in Modern Chinese History - zonaeuropa.com by Zhang Haipeng. What is the response so far? From the Chinese public, it is hard to tell for a good reason. The last sentence in SCMP's report by Vivian Wu is: "Chat-room posts critical of the article on Sina.com were quickly deleted, leaving only positive responses online." From the subject of the critique, the response of Yuan Weishi is actually quite positive. In Ming Pao, Yuan said Zhang Haipeng's essay stayed within an academic discourse about history and did not resort to the smearing in the original Central Publicity Department statement. It was therefore a welcomed step forward. Yuan intends to write his own response and plans to submit it to Freezing Point. The printed Sing Tao had some comparisons between the two: - Yuan said that the Boxers were ignorant, backwards and xeonophobic and they were anti-civilization and anti-humanity; Zhang said that the Boxers was a loose peasant organization which represented the primitive way that the Chinese people fought the invasion, and that destroying the railroads was a battle tactic. - Yuan said that the Boxers hated foreign people, foreign religions and foreign objects; Zhang said that the Boxers hated the foreigners because they hated the foreign imperialist plot to partition China for themselves. - Yuan said that the Second Opium War broke out because some Chinese would not let the foreigners enter Guangzhou freely and they broke the treaty by killing foreign missionaries; Zhang said that the sole cause of the war was that the imperialists wanted to maximize their benefits and all specific issues were merely pretexts. As for me, I have two general thoughts. First, I read this sentence at the end of Zhang's essay: "It was based upon personal preferences and then citing a few historical facts to make a historical commentary according to those personal wishes." Zhang applied it to Yuan's essay, but I am inclined to apply this sentence to both essays (and, more generally, any historical essay). To misuse the idea of Harold Bloom, there are no right or wrong histories; there are only strong histories that can move and affect us. Second, Zhang's essay has a very strong nationalistic overtone. This troubles me because I think of myself not as a Chinese citizen but a citizen of the world. You can re-read that essay and see if you feel the same way.