He earned a degree from Yale, tried to fight in the American Civil War, and donated the books that became the core of Yale’s East Asian library. In the end, though, Yung Wing was still never American enough.
In October 1871, 10% of the Chinese population in Los Angeles was wiped out in a senseless spasm of violence.
In the early years of the Chinese republic, progressives looked west for political inspiration. This was how Deng Xiaoping — who would eventually lead China — came to be in France in the 1920s. He and his peers did indeed find inspiration abroad — just not the kind that his bourgeois sponsors anticipated.
Had an earlier uprising — one of many — against the Qing achieved its goals, 1911 would be just another year. But the 1911 Revolution succeeded, and catalyzed an entire series of events that led to fundamental change in China’s political system.
China enacted its one-child policy in 1980. It was met with wildly divergent opinions, and resulted in suffering and trauma on a scale that family planners never anticipated.
The Mukden Incident — when explosives detonated along the route of the South Manchurian Railway near Shenyang — was a pretext for Japanese aggression in Asia. The events of that Friday night are underwhelming, almost ridiculous, in the context of what they sparked.
Lin Biao was a principal architect of the cult of Mao Zedong. It would lead to his undoing.
In the early 20th century, Chessboard Street in Shanghai was the heart of the Chinese publishing industry. This is where our story begins: when Li Difan, a salesman for a small Shanghai bookseller, found himself in an opium den and approached by men claiming to represent a nearby province seeking textbooks…
The Treaty of Nerchinsk established a border between Manchu China and Romanov Russia. It was negotiated in a remote region between two sides that distrusted each other and with deeply different conceptions of both diplomacy and politics — and somehow withstood the test of time.
A French sneak attack in 1884 led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Qing technological prowess. It’s time to reexamine the popular — but simplistic, if not outright wrong — idea that China’s military losses to Europe (and, later, Japan) were due to its inability to modernize.