Part 5:
1945 to 2020: The Big Picture
#80 China's Long History
It is important to understand that China has a long-written history of economic and political development. Unlike the USA, France or Britain, China has a very long history of administering the huge landmass which makes up China today.
Chinese politicians in the 21st century have been able to draw on the wisdom from ancient antiquity. Records of developments in China were written down. In the 13th century, Marco Polo, a traveller, a nobleman and trader from Venice, described a city of a million people. We know from a large cache of historical records, that traders had been moving and writing to each other for at least 1000 years. These written records were first discovered in the 20th century. They were found in a repository in a Jewish synagogue in Egypt in the early 20th century, having survived so well due to the dry air of the region.
#64 Controlling the Peace: The Re-establishment of World Power
Readers of these blogs will know that establishing world power has always required sophisticated ideology to justify action across the world. The centre of ideology in the hundreds of years after 1492, up to 1945 centred on race and racism; that European and then American invasions were by ‘superior’ peoples. Race was always a flexible tool and the exact variant varied over time determined by who were the perpetrators of the invasions and the moment in history.
The ideological story that followed 1945 would be determined by the USA. This blog discusses the new ideological tale told by the Americans and the old European colonial powers who had lost all their colonies as a consequence of the wars that ended in 1945.