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It's 5/5/05 today!
May. 5th, 2005 05:30 pmI finally just saw the Banquet photos from about a month ago. Needless to say that as usual, I am squinting in all of them.
May. 5th, 2005
I don't know what to think
May. 5th, 2005 09:34 pmhttp://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=570&e=1&u=/nm/20050505/sc_nm/china_japan_war_dc
The thing that scares me the most about this article is how so many people don't know about the Japanese war crimes in China during World War II. Japanese agression in China itself has been largely ignored by most Westerners; face it; how many people know about the rape of Nanking? When I first saw this article and a series of other articles about flaring Japanese-Chinese tensions over past war atrocities, I was pretty damned pissed at Japan. It's partly personal for me because they killed some of my relatives and caused the rest to flee elsewhere.
And then I'm even more disgusted with Chinese conduct. Does Japan deserve blame for taking so bloody long to even recognize that they had committed these attrocities? Bloody hell, yes. But the Chinese are hardly acting as the moral superiors with the recent wave of anti-Japanese riots that come and go. I then think about all of the human rights atrocities that the Communist government (the Chinese government's only interest in the West is commercial; they'll pander and milk out Western favor to get all of those contracts. The communist economy totally died out some time ago.) has committed against its own people in peacetime and then become more disgusted, if that's possible. What about the Cultural Revolution? Still today few Westerners know the full horrors of what the Communist Party members under Mao Zedong did to those who didn't support the regime. Even today in China if your grandparents owned a shop you won't be able to get a government job unless you want to work as a janitor. It took twenty years for my oldest half uncle to get a teaching position at the Beijing University because he was branded "child of capitalist." The Communists seized huge amounts of property and then killed off the owners. Even more of my relatives were murdered by the Communists than by the Japanese because my grandfather was a cloth factory owner. Not all of my family was able to flee; those who had to stay in Hanzhou have led very difficult lives. It's no wonder that so many of my relatives have scattered to the various corners of the globe because they couldn't take it any longer. They were the lucky ones.
It's at times like these when I really wish I wasn't from a long line of people who have a tendency to kill each other off when they don't think anyone is looking. I never wanted to belong to a race that's so backwards when it comes to basic human freedoms.
Culturally I'm not from China, though. I will slap the next person who claims that I'm from China. I'm from Hong Kong, the old British colonial Hong Kong. I spent my early years divided between the old Hong Kong and California; it was only when I turned nine when I officially stepped foot on Chinese soil. And even Hong Kong now-it's not the same anymore after it's been taken over by China. We've got a puppet Chinese government protecting Chinese interests. Nobody gives a damn about what the natives of Hong Kong want for themselves. I don't call that a "special autonomous region."
I'm not even going to talk about Taiwan. This supposed detente brought on by the Chinese president and the Taiwanese opposition leader disgusts me beyond measure. Taiwan is an independent nation and always has been. Taiwan is so politically and culturally separate from China that it is impossible to unify the two nations. We'll only have another civil war on our hands, and China has had enough of those. I have never met anyone from Taiwan who claimed to be Chinese. China has enough land and capital pouring in from the West; it doesn't need Taiwan, too. Neither does it have a legitimate claim to Tibet. Who the hell besides the Chinese government doesn't want a free Tibet?
I will save my rant about the Asian educational system for another time. I'm normally not this angry, really, but these sorts of issues always make me very touchy. I'm oversimplifying stuff, too, which is a bad habit of mine.
The thing that scares me the most about this article is how so many people don't know about the Japanese war crimes in China during World War II. Japanese agression in China itself has been largely ignored by most Westerners; face it; how many people know about the rape of Nanking? When I first saw this article and a series of other articles about flaring Japanese-Chinese tensions over past war atrocities, I was pretty damned pissed at Japan. It's partly personal for me because they killed some of my relatives and caused the rest to flee elsewhere.
And then I'm even more disgusted with Chinese conduct. Does Japan deserve blame for taking so bloody long to even recognize that they had committed these attrocities? Bloody hell, yes. But the Chinese are hardly acting as the moral superiors with the recent wave of anti-Japanese riots that come and go. I then think about all of the human rights atrocities that the Communist government (the Chinese government's only interest in the West is commercial; they'll pander and milk out Western favor to get all of those contracts. The communist economy totally died out some time ago.) has committed against its own people in peacetime and then become more disgusted, if that's possible. What about the Cultural Revolution? Still today few Westerners know the full horrors of what the Communist Party members under Mao Zedong did to those who didn't support the regime. Even today in China if your grandparents owned a shop you won't be able to get a government job unless you want to work as a janitor. It took twenty years for my oldest half uncle to get a teaching position at the Beijing University because he was branded "child of capitalist." The Communists seized huge amounts of property and then killed off the owners. Even more of my relatives were murdered by the Communists than by the Japanese because my grandfather was a cloth factory owner. Not all of my family was able to flee; those who had to stay in Hanzhou have led very difficult lives. It's no wonder that so many of my relatives have scattered to the various corners of the globe because they couldn't take it any longer. They were the lucky ones.
It's at times like these when I really wish I wasn't from a long line of people who have a tendency to kill each other off when they don't think anyone is looking. I never wanted to belong to a race that's so backwards when it comes to basic human freedoms.
Culturally I'm not from China, though. I will slap the next person who claims that I'm from China. I'm from Hong Kong, the old British colonial Hong Kong. I spent my early years divided between the old Hong Kong and California; it was only when I turned nine when I officially stepped foot on Chinese soil. And even Hong Kong now-it's not the same anymore after it's been taken over by China. We've got a puppet Chinese government protecting Chinese interests. Nobody gives a damn about what the natives of Hong Kong want for themselves. I don't call that a "special autonomous region."
I'm not even going to talk about Taiwan. This supposed detente brought on by the Chinese president and the Taiwanese opposition leader disgusts me beyond measure. Taiwan is an independent nation and always has been. Taiwan is so politically and culturally separate from China that it is impossible to unify the two nations. We'll only have another civil war on our hands, and China has had enough of those. I have never met anyone from Taiwan who claimed to be Chinese. China has enough land and capital pouring in from the West; it doesn't need Taiwan, too. Neither does it have a legitimate claim to Tibet. Who the hell besides the Chinese government doesn't want a free Tibet?
I will save my rant about the Asian educational system for another time. I'm normally not this angry, really, but these sorts of issues always make me very touchy. I'm oversimplifying stuff, too, which is a bad habit of mine.
