Turning points in history – extract

[from radio program – link to transcript below – a fascinating insight into a turning point in history. I hope it’s of interest to some here.]

Robyn Williams: You mentioned the Japanese in China. We now see China as a collusus. But in fact, just a few decades ago, in the ’30s, it was completely disastrous wasn’t it. You cannot overstate the horror and the misery that was existing then.

Simon Winchester: You’re absolutely right and this had really begun earlier than that. It’s a long story because technically it began in 1792; after the loss of the American colonies, George III had decided to send a mission to China, under a man called Lord McCartney. McCartney arrived at this haughty magnificence of the Chinese court. Who are you? said the emperor, there was this vulgar man with lots of hair and a big nose and smelled of an old wet dog. Well you’ve come to see me? Well go and stand alongside the Burmese and you can wish me a happy birthday. And of course we gave a few presents to the emperor, the chairman, and he didn’t want any of them. When we gave him Wedgewood china, he said this was impertinent, we’ve been making much better china than this for thousands of years. And when they gave him a beautiful carriage from London, he noticed instantly, that the two coachmen, if riding on it, would have their heads higher than his, the emperor. He couldn’t possibly accept that. So he said very grandly, we have no use for your country’s manufactures. Be gone! And so the McCartney expedition was sent back with their tale between their legs, And this really peaked the anger of the British. Lord Palmerston in the early part of the nineteenth century, which is why essentially we went to war over opium in 1839, which resulted in the succession of Hong Kong because we had much better weaponry than the Chinese. So the British took Hong Kong and the other treaty ports, then the French, we all have Hainan Island in the south, the Germans took Shandong in the east then the Japanese took Manchuria, and then the Japanese said to heck with this, we’re going to take all of east Asia, and blend into this huge co-prosperity sphere, as they called it in Tokyo, and launched a major attack on a China, which was already internally weakened, because the empire had fallen in 1911. Warlordism was rampant, corruption was all over the place, Mao, the communists and Chiang Kai-shek the nationalistists were battling, so as you quite rightly it was a complete and total shambles.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2459164.htm#transcript