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Indian academic Brahma Chellaney mentioned the term "Debt-trap diplomacy at 2017 in the first time. He introduced that a creditor nation gives a borrowing nation with uncontrolled enormous dept. It is a big risk that the country´s enormous dept extends and grows bigger, if the country isn't able to follow the debt repayment obligations. The conditions of the enormous isn't often made public, and this deal with the conditions isn't normally distinct.

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Debt-trap diplomacy is a theory to describe a powerful lending country or institution seeking to saddle a borrowing nation with enormous debt so as to increase its leverage over it. The term 'debt-trap diplomacy' was introduced by Indian academic Brahma Chellaney in early 2017 and has been widely used in recent years to allege China's lending policies, though the factuality of the allegations against China has been criticized by multiple academic institutions including Rhodium Group, Chatham House and Princeton University, which have stated that the narrative of debt-trap diplomacy in the context of Chinese investments isn't true.

The theory of debt-trap diplomacy is that the creditor country intentionally extends excessive credit to a debtor country, thereby inducing the debtor into a debt trap. This is done with the intention of extracting economic or political concessions from the debtor country when it becomes unable to meet its debt repayment obligations. The conditions of the loans are often not made public, and the borrowed money commonly pays contractors from the creditor country. Although the term has been applied to the lending practices of many countries and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it is most commonly alleged towards the People's Republic of China (PRC). Bilateral agreements made as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative have particularly furthered this association, specifically with regard to Chinese infrastructure loans to developing nations and the consequent leveraging of accumulated debt to achieve Beijing's strategic aims.

Debt-trap diplomacy has been referred to by several other terms, including "debt-book diplomacy".

The term "debt-trap diplomacy" was coined by Brahma Chellaney to allege China's predatory lending practices in which poor countries would be overwhelmed with unsustainable loans and would be forced to cede control of strategic assets to China. The term was first used in 2017; within 12 months it had quickly spread through the media, intelligence circles, and western governments. It has since expanded to include other parts of the world and was further defined and expanded upon in the context of Chinese geostrategic interests in a 2018 Harvard University report.

Princeton University published an article disputing the term and quoted a March 2018 report released by the Center for Global Development, that contradicts the theory as the paper concludes that between 2001 to 2017, China had restructured or waived loans for 51 debtor nations, the majority of BRI participants, without seizing state assets.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a multi-billion-dollar expansion project of China, to expand its power through lending to countries to spur their economic growth. The BRI project was launched in 2013 by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to improve the infrastructure of countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia in exchange for global trade opportunities and economic advantage.

China's overseas development policy has been called debt-trap diplomacy because once indebted economies fail to service their loans, they are said to be pressured to support China's geostrategic interests. According to inventor of the term, Brahma Chellaney, "it's clearly part of China's geostrategic vision". In April 2019, the Chinese Ministry of Finance released a new Debt Sustainability Framework, which has been described as being "virtually identical" to the that of the World Bank and IMF.

Studies by economic experts in the practices of China found the patterns of China's bank lending purposefully trap governments to gain strategic opportunities for China. Some commentators maintain China is supporting repressive regimes in a neocolonialist manner through high-interest loans, intending to coerce these countries, once they default, to align with China on key strategic and military issues. China has been accused of requiring secret negotiations and non-competitive pricing on projects in which bidding must be closed and contracts must go to Chinese state-owned or state-linked companies that charge significantly higher prices than would be charged on the open market.

Western, Indian, and African media have criticized China's secretive loan terms and high interest rates. For example, a 2006 loan to Tonga sought to rebuild infrastructure. From 2013 to 2014, Tonga suffered a debt crisis when the Exim Bank of China, to which the loans are owed, did not forgive them. The loans claimed 44 percent of Tonga's gross domestic product (GDP). Western analysts have said China's practices hide hegemonic intentions and challenges to states' sovereignty. China has also been accused of imposing unfair trade and financial deals when cash-poor countries are unable to resist Beijing's money.

In August 2018, a bipartisan group of 16 US senators cited "the dangers of China's debt-trap diplomacy", saying: "It is imperative that the United States counters China's attempts to hold other countries financially hostage and force ransoms that further its geostrategic goals". US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that China's debt-trap diplomacy is oiled with bribes, adding "China shows up with bribes to senior leaders in countries, in exchange for infrastructure projects" in an October 2018 speech. S. K. Chatterji at Asia Times commented that China's BRI-led debt-trap diplomacy is the economic aspect of China's salami slice strategy.

A 2018 Harvard University paper claimed three strategic goals behind China's use of this technique: "filling out a ' String of Pearls' to solve its ' Malacca Dilemma' and project power across vital South Asian trading routes; undermining and fracturing the US-led regional coalition contesting Beijing's South China Sea claims; and enabling the People's Liberation Army Navy to push through the 'Second Island Chain' into the blue-water Pacific".

According to the Lowy Institute there is no evidence to support deliberate 'Debt-trap diplomacy' theory as argued by western think tanks. Since the term was first coined in 2017, various studies have shown that China was not trying to take strategic infrastructure by overwhelming poor countries with unsustainable loans. A Princeton University writer criticized a September 2018 report by the British publication Africa Confidential for alleging unsustainable Chinese loans in Africa, and for also grossly exaggerating the extent of China's impact on Zambia's debt crisis, especially when China had accounted for a small part of sub-Saharan Africa's aggregate debt sources. The 2019 Princeton article stated it was "a stretch to lay the blame for such issues on China under the "debt-trap" label, particularly when Western institutions themselves had been culpable for the very behavior they condemn". An example would be Sri Lanka's Hambantota Port, which has been portrayed as the "case par excellence" for China's debt-trap diplomacy. But Sri Lanka's debt distress materialized not from Chinese lending, but more from excessive borrowing on Western-dominated capital markets.

A SAIS-CARI report from August 2018 found "Chinese loans are not currently a major contributor to debt distress in Africa. Yet many countries have borrowed heavily from China and others. Any new [ Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC)] loan pledges will likely take the growing debt burden of African countries into account." A 2019 peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins research paper by Deborah Brautigam found that most of these countries voluntarily signed on to these loans and had positive experiences working with China, and "the evidence so far, including the Sri Lankan case, shows that the drumbeat of alarm about Chinese banks' funding of infrastructure across the BRI and beyond is overblown" and "...a large number of people have favorable opinions of China as an economic model and consider China an attractive partner for their development."

The Rhodium Group has stated China's leverage in debt renegotiation is often exaggerated and was realistically limited in power, and that the findings of their study frequently showed an outcome in favor of the borrower rather than the supposedly predatory Chinese lender. A May 2019 article in the Sydney Morning Herald said the term was being questioned by new research; an analysis of 40 Chinese debt re-negotiations by the Rhodium Group found "asset seizures are a very rare occurrence" and that debt write-off is the most common outcome. The article also reported the views of Australian National University senior lecturer Darren Lim, who, referring to the Rhodium Group study, said much of the leverage shifts to the borrower rather than the lender after the loan has been made. Lim said despite the debt-trap diplomacy claim never being credible, it been pushed by the Trump administration.

A report by the Lowy Institute said China had not engaged in deliberate actions in the Pacific that can justify the accusations of debt-trap diplomacy, at least based on contemporaneous evidence, and stated China has not been the primary driver behind rising debt risks in the Pacific but warned the scale of its lending and the institutional weakness within Pacific states would pose risks of small states being overwhelmed by debt. Other critics include Chinese state-owned newspaper Global Times and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been accused of being a predatory lender, keeping emerging economies in debt. On the other hand, the IMF has criticised Chinese Belt and Road loans as being predatory lending.

Both the World Bank and IMF have demanded Structural Adjustment Programmes as a condition to provide loans, often to governments who see these loans as a last resort. Furthermore, they have been criticised of increasing poverty by pressuring for privatizations and of having ulterior motives of gaining leverage over central banks. According to economist Michael Hudson, World Bank loans were supposed to increase lenders dependence on the US, in "a natural continuation of European colonialism". The Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt has stated that "the [World Bank] and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies." The IMF has used geopolitical considerations rather than solely economic conditions to decide which countries received loans.

In 2020, Oxfam reported that the IMF was "using its power" through COVID-19 pandemic relief loans to pose austerity on poor countries. IMF conditions have forced receipients to cut healthcare spending, hampering their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2000, African countries have rapidly increased their borrowing from China,[clarification needed ] totaling US$94.5 billion up to 2014, as they seek to end their dependence on the IMF and World Bank, who demand market liberalisation in exchange for loans. China is a major stakeholder in the economies of many African countries with a significant influence on many aspects of the continent's affairs. According to research conducted as part of the Jubilee Debt Campaign in October 2018, African countries owed China US$10 billion in 2010, increasing to over $30 billion by 2016. China's lending to African countries is part of a large-scale overseas investment boom, forming part of its quest to secure access to raw materials and become an economic superpower.

As of 2020, the countries in Africa with the largest Chinese debt are Angola ($25 billion), Ethiopia ($13.5 billion), Zambia ($7.4 billion), the Republic of Congo ($7.3 billion), and Sudan ($6.4 billion). In total the Chinese have loaned US$143 billion to African governments and state owned enterprises between 2000 and 2017.

Several infrastructure projects funded by Chinese loans are thought[by whom? ] to have had a positive impact on the economies of many African countries[who? ] via developments in infrastructure. Infrastructure improved with these loans includes roads, railways, and ports. Improved infrastructure favors internal trade, healthcare, and education systems. One example of infrastructure development is the Merowe Dam in Sudan to produce hydroelectric power.

In the 2015 and 2017 records of World Bank, several African countries have large debts with China and other creditor nations. Interest rates of about 55% in the private sector prompted some African countries to go to China for loans, which charges around 17%. The debts of African countries to China paid for the investment in sectors needing critical development and growth. In exchange, China in demands payment in the form of jobs and natural resources.

In 2018 it was reported by The Guardian that some countries in the BRI project have started rethinking the project and 8 countries were at risk of being unable to repay the loans. According to Jonathan Hillman, director of the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there is more to these projects than financial strategy; "It's also a vehicle for China to write new rules, establish institutions that reflect Chinese interests, and reshape 'soft' infrastructure".

The negative effects of Chinese loans to African economies include fear of losing local companies to Chinese companies with strong buying power. Debt from China has promoted illicit trade among China and African countries; such imports are cheap because of China's low-cost labor and are preferred to locally manufactured goods, for example, clothing and electronics. Trade between African countries and China has also affected ties between African countries and other continents, especially Europe and North America. According to Deborah Brautigam, Chinese loans are prone to misuse, and have promoted the levels of corruption and fights for power in African countries.

Over four-fifths of China's investments are spent on infrastructure projects in underdeveloped and developing countries. Forecasts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show the economic growth-rate of China will[when? ] fall to around 6.2%, which is around 0.4% less than in 2018. Reason for the decline are the increasing number of trade disputes between China and the US, and the sudden increase in debt in the past decade, which was used for infrastructure programs.

Chinese loans have been compared as an alternative to IMF loans, but differing in that IMF loans are lower cost, financed by the, often limited, government income, while Chinese loans are more expensive, but secured by profitable high-revenue projects.

Between 2006 and 2017, Kenya took out loans of at least US$9.8 billion ( Sh1043.77 billion) from China. Chinese debt accounts for 21% of Kenya's foreign debt, and 72% of Kenya's bilateral debt. China lent Kenya extensive funds to build highways and a railway between Mombasa and Nairobi, totaling over US$6.5 billion as of 2020. In late December 2018, Kenya reportedly came close to default on Chinese loans to develop its largest and most lucrative port, the Port of Mombasa. A default could have forced Kenya to relinquish control of the port to China. Kenyan media has debated whether Chinese loans are worth the risk, drawing analogies with the experience of § Sri Lanka; some commentators[who? ] have said these loans could jeopardize Kenyan sovereignty.

South Africa is estimated to owe the equivalent of 4% of its annual GDP to China. South Africa has received multiple tranches of Chinese loans, some of which have raised concerns around their opaque conditions and alleged links to corruption in South Africa. This includes a controversial US$2.5 billion loan from the Chinese Development Bank to state-owned South African electrical utility Eskom that was arranged during the Jacob Zuma government. Another US$2.5 billion loan from a private Chinese company Huarong Energy to Eskom was found by the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into state corruption to be improper, prompting Eskom chairperson Jabu Mabuza to state Eskom would not be repaying the loan due to irregularities and corruption involved in the issuing of it.

An additional R370 billion (US$25.8 billion) loan from the China Development Bank during the presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa was given to promote a 2018 economic stimulus package. The South African government initially described the loan as a "gift"; the details of the loan were not made public, causing significant public controversy. The government justified the loan by stating the interest rate was not exorbitant and that it could not be disclosed due to confidentiality clauses. The loan was criticized by the opposition Democratic Alliance political party for possibly pushing the country into a "debt trap".

Nigeria: US$3.1 billion of the country's total US$27.6 billion foreign debt is owned by China. Nigerian financial publication Nairametrics warned of falling into a Chinese debt trap given Nigeria's notable problems with corruption.

Zambia: Based on statistics presented in The Economist in 2018, China likely holds a quarter to a third of Zambia's external debt; which are comparable to other creditors such as the US and the World Bank. In 2018, Zambian lawmakers debated whether Chinese loans put Zambian sovereignty at risk. In the same year, the British specialist publication, Africa Confidential report made claims that Zesco-Zambia's state-owned national power company-has been in talks regarding repossession by a Chinese company. The Zambian government has refuted those allegations for Zesco's privatization.

Djibouti: Loans to develop a strategic port. Chinese loans total 77% of the country's total debt. Djibouti owes over 80 percent of its GDP to China and in 2017, became host to China's first overseas military base.

Republic of the Congo: an estimated $2.5 billion is owed to Chinese lenders. The exact number is unknown even to the Congolese government.

Egypt: China is financing the country's new capital. In an interview, Gen. Ahmed Abdeen, who heads the Egyptian state-owned enterprise overseeing the new capital, criticized American reluctance to invest in Egypt, saying; "Stop talking to us about human rights. Come and do business with us. The Chinese are coming-they are seeking win-win situations. Welcome to the Chinese."

An article in CNBC said Chinese investment in Latin America has been burgeoning and that the project has been heavily criticized amid allegations of debt-trap diplomacy and neocolonialism. These concerns have been pronounced, especially in Venezuela and Ecuador.

Argentina: Argentina has been denied access and oversight of a Chinese satellite tracking station on its territory.

Ecuador: In March 2019, Ecuador agreed to borrow US$4.2 billion from the IMF, at a cost of 6% of its yearly GDP, while still being indebted US$6 billion to the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. Ecuador has agreed to sell 80-to-90 percent of its crude oil to China through 2024 in exchange for US$6.5 billion in Chinese loans.

Venezuela: an article published by Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy said China's loans in Venezuela are not debt-trap diplomacy nor "creditor imperialism", but simply "lose-lose" financial mistakes in which both parties stand to lose. An article in Quartz summarized the Carnegie article; "counter to the dominant narrative about Chinese debt ensnaring other countries, the country that needs to fear excessive and unsustainable Chinese lending the most is China".

Critics allege the loan given to the Sri Lankan government by the Exim Bank of China to build Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port and Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport as an example of debt-trap diplomacy. The state-owned Chinese firms China Harbour Engineering Company and Sinohydro Corporation were hired to build Magampura Port for US$361 million, which was 85% funded by Exim Bank of China at an annual interest rate of 6.3%. Due to Sri Lanka's inability to service the debt on the port, it was leased to the Chinese state-owned China Merchants Port Holdings Company Limited on a 99-year lease in 2017. This caused concern in the United States, Japan, and India that the port might be used as a Chinese naval base to contain China's geopolitical rivals.

Other concerns included that the Chinese government might "repossess" the projects financed by Chinese loans. But a Johns Hopkins University professor Deborah Bräutigam disputed the term of "debt-trap diplomacy" and stated that such an allegation is a "misrepresentation of Chinese lending practices".

Instead, Deborah's research has shown that Chinese banks were more willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never even seized a state asset, much less the port of Hambantota. Bräutigam called the debt-trap narrative as simply a lie, and a powerful one. She noted that it was the Canadian International Development Agency that financed Canadian engineering and construction firm, SNC-Lavalin, to carry out a feasibility study for the port. The study was concluded in 2003 and had confirmed that construction for a port at Hambantota was feasible. A second feasibility report, concluded in 2006 by the Danish engineering firm Ramboll, had made similar recommendations. To justify its existence, the port in Hambantota only had to secure only a fraction of the cargo that went through Singapore. When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka had owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka had to pay in 2017, only 5 percent was due to Hambantota. The Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, were not the major source of the country's financial distress. There was also never any default on the loans

Colombo had arranged a bailout from the IMF, and decided to raise the required funds by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company just as the Canadian feasibility report had recommended.

In 2020, Chatham House published a research paper, concluding that Sri Lanka's debt distress was unconnected to Chinese lending, but resulting more from "domestic policy decisions" that was facilitated by Western lending and monetary policy, and not by the monetary policies of China.

As per State Bank of Pakistan data, Pakistan's debt to China was $7.2 billion in 2017, which had increased to $19 billion in April 2018 and $30 billion in 2020, mostly due to borrowings to fund the CPEC project. Experts have estimated that Pakistan would take nearly 40 years to pay back this debt to China. A number of scholars have stated that the CPEC "subordinates Pakistan's interests to China's" and argued that the CPEC and the resultant debt and economic dependence on China would become a threat to Pakistan's sovereignty.

China financed $22 billion worth of projects in Malaysia during the leadership of Prime Minister Najib Razak. On 31 May 2014, Razak made a state visit to China, during which he was welcomed by China's Premier Li Keqiang. China and Malaysia pledged to increase bilateral trade to US$160 billion by 2017, and to increase economic and financial co-operation, especially in the production of halal food, water processing, railway construction, and ports.

After his inauguration in 2018, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad cancelled projects worth approximately $2.795 billion with China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau for oil and gas pipelines, saying Malaysia would not be able to repay its obligations. Ninety percent of the cost of several of the pipelines in Borneo and from Malacca to Johor had been paid but only 13% of the construction had been completed. Mohamad also stated some of the funding from the Exim Bank of China had been misappropriated as part of the 1MDB scandal.

Mohamad and his Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng criticized the projects, saying they were expensive, unnecessary, not useful, uncompetitive because open bidding was not allowed, secretive, conducted with no public oversight, and favored Chinese state-owned firms and those affiliated with Najib's United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party at inflated prices. Locals in Malacca City also complained the port was unneeded and that the small company that was awarded the contract had ties to the previously-ruling UMNO political party.

When confronted with the China's String of Pearls strategy in the Indian Ocean, and China's motives in Malaysia and the Strait of Malacca, Malaysian Deputy Minister of Defense Liew Chin Tong said:

You look at a map and you can see the places where China is plotting ports and investments, from Myanmar to Pakistan to Sri Lanka, on toward Djibouti. What's crucial to all that? Our little Malaysia, and the Malacca Strait. I say publicly that we do not want to see warships in the Strait of Malacca or the South China Sea."

The loans and their terms were later renegotiated and Mahathir Mohamad pledged support for the BRI and became one of the key opening speakers of the BRI Summit in Beijing in 2019.

In December 2019, the Speaker of the Maldives' parliament, the People's Majlis, and former President Mohamed Nasheed said Maldives owed China $3.5 billion in loans, which included $1.5 billion in government-to-government loans, private loans, and sovereign guarantees. He said the Chinese debt trap was an economic and human-rights issue, and an issue of sovereignty and freedom of the island nation. Nasheed has also said that the project costs were inflated and the debt on paper is far greater than the $1.1bn actually received.

Under World Bank president Robert McNamara, the World Bank provided over US$2.6 billion in loans to the Philippines to strengthen American business interest and support the Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos.

In 2011, Tajikistan had to lease about 1,000 km ² (390 sq mi) of land to China in exchange for waiver of outstanding debt of hundreds of millions of dollars for a power plant China built.

China has made loans to Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Tajikistan, and Mongolia, and to build a national highway in Montenegro, as part of the BRI. It has also made US$19 billion worth of loans to Pakistan as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and other projects. In December 2018, New York Times reported on emerging military dimensions of the investments, which it termed a debt-trap, and stated are under poor governance and transparency. China also made a US$115 million loan to Tonga to redevelop its infrastructure, and US$2 billion in loans to Papua New Guinea totaling almost a quarter of its national debt. China has numerous work projects ongoing in Trinidad and Tobago. These include a $500 million Chinese-built drydock and $102 million industrial park in La Brea, Trinidad and Tobago.

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Debt-trap diplomacy is a theory to describe a powerful lending country or institution seeking to saddle a borrowing nation with enormous debt so as to increase its leverage over it.

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evidence = bevis, stöd ,vittne
counter-extremism= mot-extremism
proximity= anslutning
re-education camps= Koncentrationsläger
detianed= fängslade

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China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang.

Human rights groups believe China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls "re-education camps", and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms.

A series of police files obtained by the BBC in 2022 has revealed details of China's use of these camps and described the routine use of armed officers and the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy for those trying to escape.

The US is among several countries to have previously accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. The leading human rights groups Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have published reports accusing China of crimes against humanity.

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The Chinese government - speaking after details of the Xinjiang Police Files were published - said the peace and prosperity brought to Xinjiang as a result of its anti-terrorism measures were the best response to "all sorts of lies".

Who are the Uyghurs?

There are about 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

The Uyghurs speak their own language, which is similar to Turkish, and see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. They make up less than half of the Xinjiang population.

Recent decades have seen a mass migration of Han Chinese (China's ethnic majority) into Xinjiang, allegedly orchestrated by the state to dilute the minority population there.

Uyghur activists say they fear that the group's culture is under threat of erasure.

Where is Xinjiang?

Xinjiang lies in the north-west of China and is the country's largest region. Like Tibet, it is autonomous, meaning - in theory - it has some powers of self-governance. But in practice, both regions are subjected to major restrictions by the central government.

Xinjiang is a mostly desert region and produces about a fifth of the world's cotton. Human rights groups have voiced concerns that much of that cotton export is picked by forced labour, and in 2021 some Western brands removed Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains, leading to a backlash against the brands from Chinese celebrities and netizens.

In December 2020, research seen by the BBC showed that up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton in Xinjiang. There is evidence that new factories have been built within the grounds of the re-education camps.

The region is also rich in oil and natural gas and because of its proximity to Central Asia and Europe is seen by Beijing as an important trade link.

In the early 20th Century, the Uyghurs briefly declared independence for the region but it was brought under the complete control of China's new Communist government in 1949.

The UK parliament declared in April 2021 that China was committing a genocide in Xinjiang.

A UN human rights committee in 2018 said it had credible reports that China was holding up to a million people in "counter-extremism centres" in Xinjiang.

The UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the files contained "shocking details of China's human rights violations".

Earlier, leaked documents known as the China Cables made clear that the camps were intended to be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishments.

People who have managed to escape the camps have reported physical, mental and sexual torture. Women have spoken of mass rape and sexual abuse.

Anti-Han and separatist sentiment rose in Xinjiang from the 1990s, sometimes flaring into violence. In 2009 about 200 people died in clashes in Xinjiang, which the Chinese blamed on Uyghurs who wanted their own state. But in recent years a massive security crackdown has crushed dissent.

Xinjiang is now covered by a pervasive network of surveillance, including police, checkpoints, and cameras that scan everything from number plates to individual faces. According to Human Rights Watch, police are also using a mobile app to monitor people's behaviour, such as how much electricity they are using and how often they use their front door.

Since 2017, when President Xi Jinping issued an order saying all religions in China should be Chinese in orientation, there have been further crackdowns. Campaigners say China is trying to eradicate Uyghur culture.

The Xinjiang Police Files, which all date from before 2019, shed further light on Uyghurs being punished for alleged crimes that took place years ago. Many appear to have been targeted for their mobile phone use, for listening to "illegal lectures" or not using their phones enough, which is regarded as a sign the user is trying to evade digital surveillance.

What does China say?

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.

China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.

It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.

China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".

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Who are the Uyghurs and why is China being accused of genocide?

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China has been accused by the US of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Muslim minority group.

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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds if not thousands of unarmed peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Beijing and the arrest of tens of thousands of demonstrators in cities across China.

The protesters, based in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, were peacefully calling for political and economic reform. In response, the Chinese authorities responded with overwhelming force to repress the demonstrations.

Military units were brought in and unarmed protesters and onlookers were killed en masse. The Chinese government has never acknowledged the true events surrounding the Tiananmen massacre. It remains a contentious topic in China, with authorities banning all mention of the protest even today.

Events leading up to the Tiananmen protests

From April 1989 people from across China gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of the liberal Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang and share their frustrations about the slow pace of promised reform.

The gathering turned into peaceful protests which spread across the provinces of China as demonstrators, mainly students, began to call for an end to official corruption and for political and economic reform.

A million demonstrators on the streets

On 13 May, hundreds of student protesters in Tiananmen Square went on hunger strike in order to speak push for talks with Communist Party leaders. It is estimated that one million people joined the protests in Beijing to express their support for the students on hunger strike and to demand reform.

Martial law declared

Party leaders visited the student protests on 19 May. The protesters ended their hunger strike that evening. However, the next day martial law was declared in Beijing to 'firmly stop the unrest'.

In the weeks that followed the declaration of martial law, hundreds of thousands of people once again protested on the streets of Beijing, with similar demonstrations taking place in cities across China.

Military open fire on civilians

'The troops are by no means targeted at the students. Under no circumstances will [the troops] harm innocent people, let alone young students.'
Official New China News Agency, 1 May 1989

Overnight on 3 to 4 June, the government sent tens of thousands of armed troops and hundreds of armoured military vehicles into the city centre to enforce martial law and forcibly clear the streets of demonstrators. The government wanted to 'restore order' in the capital.

As they approached the demonstrations, troops opened fire on crowds of protesters and onlookers. They gave no warning before they started shooting.

'The first casualty in the square was rushed away - a girl with her face smashed and bloody, carried spread-eagled towards the trees. Another followed - a youth with a bloody mess around his chest.'
John Gittings, The Guardian

As the troops kept firing into the crowds, some of those running away were shot in the back. Others were crushed to death by military vehicles. No one knows the death toll from Tiananmen that night.

'We took the wounded on stretchers and went down [Tiananmen] Square. As we went down the side of the Square, we saw soldiers with large plastic bags. They were putting people in the bags. I could not tell how many people...
'There were also people surrounded by soldiers, being kicked by them. I could hear shouts and the odd gunshot. I thought there were around 200 young people. In early July, I heard from Public Security [police] sources that they had all been executed on 9 June in a rural district near Beijing. They included students and residents of Beijing.'
Eyewitness account from a protester

Tank Man

The Tiananmen protests were immortalised in Western media on 5 June through the image of a lone man in a white shirt carrying shopping bags, facing an imposing column of military tanks sent by the government to disperse protesters. The man is known simply as Tank Man: his identity has never been confirmed.

Tank Man would not let the military vehicles pass. He succeeded. Eventually, he was pulled out of the way of danger by onlookers. But the image of unarmed man versus tank quickly came to symbolise the struggle of the Tiananmen protesters - peaceful protest met with military might.

'It demonstrates one man's extraordinary courage, standing up in front of a row of tanks, being prepared to sacrifice his own life for the sake of social justice'
Stuart Franklin, Tank Man photographer

Stuart Franklin took the Tank Man photograph. In the short film below he talks about how he came to capture what would become one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.

Crackdown following protests

Immediately after the military crackdown, the Chinese authorities began to hunt down those involved in the demonstrations. Thousands of people were detained, tortured, imprisoned or executed after unfair trials charged with 'counter-revolutionary' crimes.

The Chinese authorities have never disclosed the total number of people detained, tried or executed throughout China since the June 1989 crackdown.

In the climate of terror which followed the massacre, the relatives of those killed were not only unable to seek justice for their loss; they were even unable to mourn openly the dead, who were officially described as 'rioters'.

Tiananmen remains a banned subject in China

Tiananmen and the 1989 crackdown remains an official taboo topic in China. There is no official death toll. Attempts to discuss, commemorate and demand justice for what happened have been forcefully curbed, with no public discussion allowed. Since 1989 many people have been imprisoned for commemorating events or questioning the official line.

Only recently a court in Changshu in eastern China found Gu Yimin guilty of inciting state subversion after he tried to post images of the post-Tiananmen crackdown online and applied to stage a protest on the 24th anniversary.

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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds if not thousands of unarmed peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Beijing and the arrest of tens of thousands of demonstrators in cities across China. The protesters, based in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, were peacefully calling for political and economic reform.

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Sri Lanka is locating outside of India as a island. This country has many ambitious projects and one biggest of those project is valued around 1.12 billions dollar in 2017. Today, Sri Lanka couldn't afford to keep this Port-project and has no other choice than hand over this Port to China. This example is a Chinese money trap.

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China's Debt-Trap Diplomacy

China is blamed for attracting developing nations and taking cash from them for economic ventures and later politically controlling them if they fail to return that money to China in time. China is also blamed for FDI (Foreign Direct Investments) in developed countries, notably with an agreement recently signed with Italy. This article explores how China's investments are deployed in the developing world and what it means for the future of countries indebted to China.

A first observation is in order: It is a fact that in numerous developing nations, a significant part of the crushing obligation or debt is owed to a single source, China.

As indicated by an investigation by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from 2013 to 2016, China's benefaction to the people's debt of intensely obligated helpless nations, multiplied from 6.2 percent to 11.6 percent.

China's loaning has grown considerably through the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI). Taking note of an absence of financial attainability of some BRI projects, numerous onlookers speculate that the activity is mostly spurred by China's desire to stimulate its economy, get vital resources, and convert its monetary access into a key political presence in the BRI recipient countries.

China has invested billions of dollars into ventures abroad, assisting the economies of numerous countries over the globe, including South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and many others.

The debt that these countries contracted with China gave them monetary liquidity and they saw this as a needed lift to become noteworthy players on the worldwide stage. Be that as it may, these nations have all experienced financial difficulties when the time came to pay back the debt. The major reason is that the loan conditions are very tough to meet.

BRI loans foresee that the recipient nation has to surrender an enormous stake in its economic framework, including ports and trade routes. This technique of trouncing or conquering is famously known as "debt-trap diplomacy". Here are a couple of examples illustrating how it works - keeping in mind that the same model is followed everywhere, from Asia to Africa.
Case Study in Debt-trap Diplomacy: Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is regularly depicted as a nation that fell into a Chinese debt trap because of the many public ventures financed by China.

One such venture was Hambantota port, which was rented to China Merchant Port Holdings Limited (CM Port) for $1.12 billion in 2017. This venture is to a great extent the only explanation as to why Sri Lanka is broadly referred to as a noticeable example of getting caught in Chinese obligations and being compelled to hand over national resources with vital significance to China.

The general conviction, by all accounts, is that Sri Lanka wasn't able to pay the loan it got from China to build Hambantota port: There was no way out but to hand over the port to Chinese control.
Case Study in Debt-trap Diplomacy: Indonesia
In 2003, Suramadu Bridge was designed and developed by a consortium of Indonesian organizations working with Chinese companies, the China Road and Bridge Corporation and China Harbor Engineering Co. Ltd. The total cost of the task, including access to the bridge, has been estimated at US$445 million.

In 2007, the coal-fired 990 MW Indramayu West Java 1 force plant was agreed to and development started in 2007. The plant, opened in 2011, was operated by a consortium of temporary workers: China National Machinery Industry Corporation, China National Electric Equipment Corporation. Assessed cost: $870 million.

Additional Chinese investments include:

In 2011, the Sumatra coal railroad, at an evaluated cost of US$1.5 billion.

In 2015, Jakarta-Bandung fast rail, at an evaluated cost of about US$5.5 billion.

In 2015, Central Kalimantan Puruk Cahu-Bangkuang coal railroad, at an evaluated cost of US$3.3 billion.

In April 2018, Indonesia and China signed five agreements worth a total of $23.3 billion, including some activities designed to switch over to more renewable and cleaner energy sources, for example, investing in hydropower plants and changing over coal into dimethyl ether, among others.

In March 2019, Indonesia and China agreed to a plan worth US$91.1 billion for 28 national activities under the BRI banner, as emerged from the main gathering of the Joint Steering Committee for the Construction of Regional Comprehensive Economic Corridors for Cooperation between the nations held in Bali.
Next Ground for Chinese Debt Trap Diplomacy? The Middle-East
A new chapter in BRI expansion is likely to open: The Middle East.

We are all aware of the Lebanon economic crisis. Recently, Hezbollah's pioneer Hassan Nasrallah asserted in mid-June that China was prepared to put billions into Lebanon's economy.

A gathering on June 30 between a Chinese delegacy and the Lebanese prime minister, alongside the ministers of various industries including public works and transport, energy and water, and tourism, additionally fed expectations that China may be prepared to invest in Lebanon and make the country a major element in its Belt and Road Initiative.

On the other hand, Xinchun Niu, who is the director of Middle East studies at China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) said and Norvergence quotes: China-Middle East countries do not follow a "political-strategic logic", insisting "it's an economic logic".

It would appear that for China, the Middle East remains on the distant back burner of China's strategic global strategies.

COVID-19 combined with the oil price crisis could dramatically change the Middle East. And this could also change China's investment plans in the Middle East. However, the good economic times of China and the Middle East are already in the past: Both China and the Middle Eastern economies have been slowing down. In the future, it is likely that the pandemic combined with the oil price problem will make the Middle East situation worse.

So, expect China's economic relationship with the Middle East to be deeply affected.

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China is blamed for attracting developing nations and taking cash from them for economic ventures and later politically controlling them if they fail to return that money to China in time. China is also blamed for FDI (Foreign Direct Investments) in developed countries, notably with an agreement recently signed with Italy.

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Emperor - kejsare
Han - dominerade etniska kineser
Subdued - dämpat
Compendium - handbok
Inadequacy - otillräcklighet
Irrigation - bevattning
Devise - tänka ut
Retrogression - Gå bakåt i utvecklingen, till en värre tid
Reckoning - beräkning

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* The very first dynasty, Xia dynasty
* Last dynasty, Qing dynasty
* The end of dynasties - the Xinhai revolution
* Another revolution in 1966 - the cultural revolution

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Lead to Republic of China era (1912-1949)

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Key Facts & Summary

Also known as the Chinese Revolution or the Revolution of 1911 was a revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing dynasty, and established the Republic of China.

The revolution consisted of many revolts and uprisings. The turning point was the Wuchang uprising on 10 October 1911, which was the result of the mishandling of the Railway Protection Movement.

The revolution ended with the abdication of the six-year-old Last Emperor, Puyi, on 12 February 1912.

The revolution arose mainly in response to the decline of the Qing state, which had proven ineffective in its efforts to modernize China and confront foreign aggression.

The Qing should have won against the revolutionaries however, the political ambitions of Yuan Shikai, the commander of the Qing forces, were greater than his devotion to the dynasty leading indirectly to the victory of the revolutionaries.

Prologue

China's Qing dynasty suffered massive defeats and hardships throughout the 19th century that led to its removal in 1911.
The sequence of events triggered, would result in the abdication of China's last emperor Puyi and the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Many plots had been devised for this to happen yet it started with an accidental bomb explosion, what followed forced the revolutionaries to take action, yet without a plan.
Sun Yat-sen, was the principal architect of the revolution, but he was thousands of miles away when the explosion happened. Over the years, Qing power and their mandate of heaven had eroded. The mandate of heaven simply implied that only one ruler could govern the country, and that this ruler had the blessings of the gods similar to the European version of the divine right of kings.

Movements such as the Rights Recovery Movement which was an effort of the Chinese people to control their railways that were completely privatized and controlled by foreigners, the Hunan Peasant Riots, the Boxer Rebellion which was an anti-imperial, anti-foreign movement and natural disasters were all signs of a dynasty in severe decline.
China suffered around 285 uprisings and rebellions during 1910, the majority of which were sparked by peasants who did not have a clear vision of what they wanted or ideological basis. However, there was one modern revolutionary movement attempting to overthrow the Qing: the Revolutionary Alliance or Tongmenghui.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen was the founder of the Tongmenghui, China's first modern revolutionary secret society. Although he instigated 10 rebellions between 1906 and 1911, all of these were vaguely planned and none succeeded.

Nevertheless, the amount of members of the Tongmenhui rose to 10.000 by 1911. Its members were from all walks of life but generally they were educated Chinese that had studied abroad, mostly in Japan. Some revolutionaries were students while others were civil servants, members of the new provincial assembly even, and several others were soldiers or officers in the New Army units.
Many revolutionaries figured that the best way to eventually spark a revolution was to infiltrate and convert Qing troops. They wanted to get the soldiers that weren't yet revolutionaries on their side. As such, revolutionaries joined the army, maintaining a low profile and recruiting other soldiers for their revolutionary cells.
Throughout China, especially around Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankou districts in Wuhan, Hubei's capital, Qing opposition blossomed. Radical young Chinese formed revolutionary cells in these big cities.

Xinhai Revolution

In 1911 big cities generally had multiple revolutionary cells. It was during this year that Sun Yat-sen embarked on a fundraising campaign to the United States. The revolution desperately needed funds if it was to succeed.
In southern China, the strategy of infiltrating the New Army units was adopted. Working with revolutionary branches active in the region, most cities had a sizeable portion of their army secretly engaged in revolutionary activity, which led to a very unstable combination.

In order to recruit new members for their movement, these revolutionaries often created an elaborate guise of book-clubs and fraternities to throw off suspicious eyes.
If the authorities indeed grew suspicious of these clubs, and decided to investigate, they would simply disband their fake clubs only to regroup under a different name after some time at a different location.
In 1911 around 5-6.000 of the Hubei's New Army troops turned out to be members of various secret revolutionary societies. This was about one-third of the total military force.

The Wuchang uprising

On 9th October 1911, a group of revolutionaries were fiddling with bombs in their safe house. This was located in the Russian concession area of Hankou. They were planning a terrorist attack but something went wrong and the bomb exploded prematurely.

While the Western powers would often bribe Qing authorities if something happened on their territory, the blast of the bomb was too heavy not to let authorities investigate. The safe house was raided by Qing police and military. It quickly became clear what transpired, and the three men that had survived the blast were identified as revolutionaries and were executed.

The membership registers in which all names of revolutionaries were written, thousands of them, surprisingly survived the blast.

The Qing authorities seized these registers and now possessed the names of most if not all revolutionaries in the city, on this list many names were that of their colleagues.

Alarmed at the amount of soldiers on the list, soldiers began rounding up all revolutionary soldiers they could find. Soldiers that were members of the secret society understood that if they did not react fast, they too would be put against the wall soon.

The first force that mutinied was a small force, the Wuchang Eight Engineer Battalion. On the morning of October 10th, ever since celebrated as "Double Ten Day", they seized the ammunition deposits of the city and were subsequently joined by transport and artillery units.

Wunchang's forts were captured and by the end of the day, three other regiments joined the resistance. After failed attempts to raise a sizeable amount of loyal troops to protect his office, the governor-general Ruicheng, a Manchu, fled the city together with the army commander.

Forces that were still loyal to Qing were routed and over 500 were killed. The next day, on October 11th, Hanyang was captured by the revolutionaries and its military arsenal and ironworks were seized. It was after the capture of Hanyang that the mutineers established the military government of Hubei yet they didn't have a known public figure to take control and lead the revolution.
The principal architect of the revolution in China, Sun Yat-sen was in the United States gathering funds for the revolution, he would not learn about the revolution until a month later, reading about it in the newspapers. When he did, instead of quickly returning to China and assume leadership of the revolution, he first went to the United Kingdom and France, in order to secure European neutrality.

He managed to sway the British government to not loan any money to the Qing anymore. Sun Yat-sen eventually returned to China, but only after 2 months after the revolution had started. In October, the revolution confined in Wuhan was still looking for its leader. The first person the revolutionaries approached was the president of the provincial assembly who declined the offer.
One of the Hubei's New Army commanders, popular amongst his troops, Li Yuanhong was the second one to receive the request.

He wasn't a revolutionary, but had played a prominent role during the railway controversy against the Qing, and was liked by those in the provincial assembly. He hesitantly accepted the offer of the revolutionaries. The next day, Hankou troops also mutinied, captured the city, and the revolutionaries were on their way to capture the rest of the province.

Offensive of the Qing

Once the imperial government found out about what was going on in their Hubei province, they did everything in their power to annihilate the revolutionaries. The minister of war, Yinchang, coordinated the counterattack on Wuhan with two divisions of the Beiyang army. In Beijing the Qing and especially Prince Chun, regent to the 5-year old emperor Puyi, was about to swallow his pride.

The Beiyang army needed a competent general that was known by senior officers and respected by his troops. Yuan Shikai was that person. He had led the Beiyang army for years and served the Qing dynasty for decades. But prior to this, Prince Chun forced Yuan into retirement 2 years before, and Yuan still held a grudge against the Qing because of it.

While he held a grudge, he was an excellent negotiator and unbeknownst to the Qing, he was ambitious and had his own agenda. For now he waited, but when he finally gave in, he would come to power on his own terms. After 10 days of the Hubei's military government was proclaimed, in both Shaanxi and Hunan province, the New Army mutinied. Massacres against the Manchu population took place and Qing commanders were killed. The members of the provincial assembly for the provinces explicitly voiced their support for the revolution.

The uprising now spread over China at a fast pace: In Shanxi, the governor and his family were killed. In the southwest in Yunnan and southest in Jianxi, students, teachers and merchants joined the army officers in revolt, declaring their independence from the Qing as well. The Tongmenghui took the central leading role upon itself in three provinces, and formed anti-Qing alliances in many other provinces.

Now that more provinces were swept by revolts, the military significance of the railways became apparent. Troops from Beijing were sent to Wuhan, only to be cut off by rebellions from Shanxi.
The supply lines of Yinchang's army were blocked and other senior commanders in the north started defying Qing orders. Instead of moving their troops south by rail, these commanders now met up and sent a telegram to Beijing containing 12 demands. The demands ranged from a functioning parliament and elected prime minister, ratified by the emperor, to amnesty for all political offenders and blocking Manchus from obtaining official positions.

The fact that the Qing agreed with these demands within a week, shows the dire situation the dynasty was in. During this time, Yuan was still negotiating both publicly and secretly on various levels. The Qing appointed him as the commander of all Qing forces. He was backed by most senior military commanders, enjoyed the loyalty of many troops and on November 8th 1911, he was elected prime minister of China by members of the Beijing provisional national assembly.

He formed a cabinet, primarily appointing his loyalists. It seemed that China was moving towards a constitutional monarchy just like Russia and Japan had. The entire month of November Yuan Shikai played a political game, pressuring both the revolutionaries and the Qing, attempting to get the most profit out of the whole situation.

The Republic of China

The Tongmenghui of Sun Yat-sen enjoyed an enormous amount of support among the Chinese. Nanking was captured by the revolutionaries in early December.

It was the second biggest city of China, and the former capital, the symbolic defeat was crushing to the already weak Qing.

It was reminiscent of Prince Fu's defeat in 1645, and of course the capture of the city by Taiping rebels under Hong Xiuquan in 1853 during the Taiping Rebellion.

In Nanking the Tongmenghui set up its provisional government. In the meantime Yuan negotiated primarily with Prince Chun, regent of Puyi, and his consorts. In December, the mother of Puyi took a leading role in the negotiations. She pushed the resignation of Prince Chun and authorized Yuan Shikai to rule as prime minister, with the emperor, her son Puyi, only retaining a ceremonial role.

It was reminiscent of the role Empress Dowager Cixi had allocated to herself the past decades and thus not very popular. Several victories of Yuan's troops over the revolutionaries followed but he realized that with the suppression of the revolution, his usefulness to the Qing would once again fade. On Christmas day 1911, Sun Yat-sen arrived in Shanghai. The Tongmenghui had set up a provisional government at Nanjing and Sun Yat-sen was just in time to be elected "provisional president" of the Chinese republic by delegates from 16 provincial assemblies.

On New Year's Day 1912, he assumed office, and the new Republic of China was born. However, this meant that China now had both a Manchu emperor in Beijing, and a republican president in Nanjing. Sun Yat-sen realized he needed an army to consolidate his power. A charismatic man and with a keen eye for political moves, he sent Yuan Shikai a telegram stating he only accepted the provisional presidency, so Yuan could later on assume the official presidency, as long as he supported the new republic.

All the while Yuan had been playing both sides of the conflict and he now realized choosing the revolutionary side was probably going to be the most advantageous to him. As such, Yuan was willing to work with Sun, but only if he could assume the presidency. He spent the next couple of weeks negotiating both publicly and secretly, with both the provisional government in Nanking, and the imperial government in Beijing.

The last emperor falls

Near the end of January 1912, 44 senior commanders of the Beiyang army, serving under Yuan Shikai, sent a telegram to Beijing urging them to create a republic. The Qing's mandate of heaven had now truly waned. Southern China had basically seceded, and Yuan Shikai now attempted to convince Puyi's regents that abdication was the only option left on the table.

Many Manchurians fled to Manchuria to lead the resistance against these demands, but the emperor's mother negotiated with Yuan and settled the issue. She managed to receive reassurance that Puyi could reside in the Forbidden City with his servants for years to come, and a generous sum to be sent to him.

Aftermath

Puyi, China's last emperor, abdicated on the 12th of February 1912. The Qing dynasty, the ancient monarchy, and Chinese empire had officially come to an end.

Yuan Shikai was granted full powers "to organize a provisional republican government." Sun Yat-sen staying true to his word, abdicated in favour of Yuan one day later. The deal was that Yuan would travel to Nanjing to set up his government, but unrest broke out in Beijing which allowed Yuan to remain in Beijing in order to keep control. It is near certain that Yuan had something to do with these episodes of unrest. And as such, ominously, Yuan Shikai was sworn in in Beijing, the imperial capital, not Nanjing the republican capital.

He was to have supreme power with loyalists appointed in crucial positions in China's military and bureaucracy. A parliament was to be elected and a full constitutional government was going to be established. As time went on, however, it became clear that Yuan Shikai had other plans when it came to both his own position, and China as a whole. The political power of the new national government in Beijing was soon thereafter monopolized by Yuan and led to decades of political division and warlordism, including several attempts at imperial restoration.

Bibliography:

[1.] Shinkichi, / edited Eto; Schiffrin, Harold Z. (1994). China's republican revolution. [Tokyo]: University of Tokyo Press.
[2.] Esherick, Joseph W. (1976). Reform and revolution in China: the 1911 revolution in Hunan and Hubei. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[3.] Baum, R. (2010). The Fall and Rise of China. The Great Courses: Modern History.
[4.] Young, Ernest P. (1977). The Presidency of Yuan Shih-K'ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Michigan Studies on China.
[5.] Yu, George T. "The 1911 Revolution: Past, Present, and Future," Asian Survey, 31#10 (1991), pp. 895-904
[6.] Fung, Edmund S. K. (1980). The military dimension of the Chinese revolution: The New Army and its role in the revolution of 1911. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press

Image source:

[1.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Sun_Yat_Sen_together_with_the_members_of_the_Singapore_Branch_of_Tongmen_Hui.png
[2.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Qing_new_army_1905.jpg
[3.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Xinhai_Revolution_in_Shanghai.jpg
[4.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Yuanhong#/media/File:Li_Yuanhong.jpg
[5.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/2ndPrinceChun1.jpg
[6.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/YuanShikaiPresidente1915.jpg
[7.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Qing_Dynasty_Map_durnig_Xinhai_Revolution.JPG
[8.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Yuan_Shikai_sworn_in_as_Provisional_President_-_10_March_1912.jpg
[9.] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Dr._Sun_in_London.jpg
[10.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puyi#/media/File:%E6%BA%A5%E5%84%80,_%E7%B9%AA%E7%95%AB%E8%82%96%E5%83%8F.jpg

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Xinhai Revolution | Facts, Summary, Uprising, Revolution & Aftermath

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Also known as the Chinese Revolution or the Revolution of 1911 was a revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing dynasty, and established the Republic of China. The revolution consisted of many revolts and uprisings. The turning point was the Wuchang uprising on 10 October 1911, which was the result of the mishandling of the Railway Protection Movement.

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Answer (1 of 9): The Xia was said to be founded by Da Yu. At the time, the area was basically a tribal coalition where leaders were elected (presumably from one of the tribal chiefs.) to lead the group. so fathers rarely pass their position to sons, the old Chinese interpretation of this was th...

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Hundreds of Chinese parents who had lost their only child protested in Beijing on Monday, demanding more compensation from the government for a decades-long "one-child policy," which they said left them without family support.

Last year, the ruling Chinese Communist Party announced it would relax the controversial policy, introduced in the late 1970s to limit population growth, allowing all couples to have two children.

But critics say the change came too late to avert a dangerous population imbalance, which has led to an aging society, a shrinking labor pool, and left some parents with no living children to care for them as they grow old.

More than 1,000 people whose only child had died gathered outside the gates of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, urging the government to give them more assistance.

"When we're old, if any difficulties arise, no one can help us, because there are some policies in China which prevent us from receiving proper conditions," said a man named Zhou Zhenlong.

"We've been going to communicate with the government, but right now, this communication has resulted in nothing," Zhou said.

Many of the protesters wore white hats with the message: "bereaved of only child".

Some said they got up to 500 yuan ($77) of compensation a month from the government but it was not enough to cover their needs having lost the sole child who would be their legal caretaker.

Some said they got nothing.

According to Chinese national law, parents have the right to monthly compensation for the loss of their only child, but the amount varies from place to place.

The gathering was peaceful, with parents singing patriotic songs, though the police presence was heavy. Protesters said it was the fifth year they had come from around the country to demand more compensation.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission could not be reached for comment.

China's population is set to peak at about 1.45 billion by 2050 when one in every three people is expected to be more than 60 years old, with a shrinking proportion of working adults to support them.

The "one-child policy" is now regarded as outdated.

"It's unimaginable. Taking care of yourself, making food on your own, there is not one person there with anything. It's a really helpless feeling," said a woman named Zhang Daohua.

(Reporting by Joseph Campbell and Kim Kyung-Hoon; Writing by Michael Martina; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Hundreds of Chinese parents who lost their only child are now demanding compensation

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Hundreds of Chinese parents who had lost their only child protested in Beijing on Monday, demanding more compensation from the government for a decades-long "one-child policy," which they said left them without family support. Last year, the ruling Chinese Communist Party announced it would relax the controversial policy, introduced in the late 1970s to limit population growth, allowing all couples to have two children.

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woowww

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The Xia Dynasty (c. 2070-1600 BCE) was the first government to emerge in ancient China and became the first to adhere to the policy of dynastic succession; thus making it the first dynasty of China. It was regarded as a mythical construct of later Chinese historians until excavations in the late 20th century CE uncovered sites which corresponded to descriptions in these earlier historians' accounts. The Xia was overthrown by the Shang Dynasty (c.1600-1046 BCE), a more historically certain governmental entity, which was in turn overthrown by the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE).

The argument claiming the Xia Dynasty is a mythological construct claims that the Zhou (and later dynasties) wanted to make clear that the previous ones lost their right to rule through immoral conduct and so created a proto-dynasty - the Xia - as a pre historic model for this. Many scholars today still maintain that the Xia Dynasty is a myth but seem to be at a loss to explain why the physical evidence uncovered argues against their claim. Those who believe the Xia Dynasty was a reality are at an equal disadvantage in that none of the sites uncovered so far positively identify themselves as belonging to the Xia Dynasty and could as easily be interpreted as early Shang Dynasty buildings.

The Rise of the Xia

According to historians like Sima Qian (145-86 BCE), there was once a great ruler named Huang-ti (also Huangdi, `emperor') better known as the Yellow Emperor who emerged from the tribal system pre-historic China to rule the region of Shandong between 2697-2597 BCE. The Yellow Emperor created Chinese culture and established a form of government which would last for centuries. He is credited with inventing musical instruments, developing the production of silk, instituting law and customs, and the development of medicine and agriculture. Upon his death, he was buried in Huangling County, Shaanxi Province in the mausoleum which is today a popular tourist attraction.

Huang-ti was succeeded by his grandson Zhuanxu, one of the famous Five Emperors, who founded the Xia tribe. After defeating their rivals, the Xia established the first dynasty in China under the leadership of the Emperor Yao. Yao ordered great palaces to be built and small villages of huts grew into urban centers. He is considered a great philosopher-king who ruled his people wisely and worked in their best interests following the precepts of Huang-ti.

Yu's rule is considered the beginning of the Xia Dynasty and he is celebrated for his victories over the flood, the Sanmiao, and the establishment of stable government.

The Flood

Yao had a serious problem during his reign in controlling the flooding of the Yellow River which disrupted agriculture as well as drowning or displacing his people. He appointed a man named Gun (revered as a demi-god in many accounts) to take care of this situation.

Gun tried for nine years to stop the flooding but every year the waters grew stronger and more lands were covered and people killed. Finally, Gun constructed a series of dykes which he hoped would hold back the water but the dykes collapsed, causing further destruction and death. Yao had relinquished rule by this time to his successor Yu Shun who was not pleased at Gun's failure to control the waters. According to some versions of the tale, Gun then killed himself while according to others he was imprisoned by Yu Shun and still others report he exiled himself to the mountains. After he was gone, Emperor Shun appointed Gun's son Yu to complete the work and stop the flooding.

Yu the Great

Yu learned from his father's mistakes: Gun had tried to do too much by himself, had underestimated his need for help, and had overestimated his own abilities. He had also acted without respect for the forces of nature and had worked against the water instead of working with it. Yu enlisted the aid of the surrounding tribes and had them construct canals which would work with the water to lead it out toward its own kind in the sea.

Yu's project lasted thirteen years and he was so dedicated to his task that he never visited his home once, even though he passed by it three times in his work. Yu's wife and young son would call out to him as he passed and his colleagues would encourage him to go home for a rest but Yu would not abandon his task until it was completed. He claimed there were many who were homeless, who had lost their own wives and children to the flooding, and he did not feel he should rest until the problem was solved. His single-mindedness and dedication to his work inspired those around him who looked up to him as a role model and worked harder until the waters of the river were contained and there were no more floods.

Once the water problem had been solved, Shun was very proud of Yu and placed him in command of his army. Yu led his men against the Sanmiao, a tribe hostile to the Xia who continuously raided their borders. He defeated the Sanmiao and drove them from the land and, as a reward for his victories, Shun declared him heir to the throne.

Yu's rule is considered the beginning of the Xia Dynasty and he is known as Yu the Great not only for his victories over the flood and the Sanmiao but for the establishment of a stable central government and the organization of the country into nine provinces to make governing such an enormous area more manageable.

Death of Yu & Decline of Xia

Yu ruled for 45 years and, on his deathbed, named his son Qi as his successor. Qi had been a young boy during the time of the great flood and many people loved him for the story of how his father refused to return home until the flooding had been stopped and how young Qi bore his father's absence so well. Yu had intended to name his minister as successor, not wishing his son to have the burden of rule, but so many people favored Qi that Yu had no choice. In naming Qi his successor, Yu initiated the policy of dynastic succession.

Qi's son, Tai Kang, was a poor ruler but many of his successors were highly skilled and numerous inventions and innovations are attributed to the later Xia, such as the development of armor in warfare and rules of chivalry in battle. The fourth ruler after Qi was the great hero Shao Kang who revitalized the country and is well known through the many legends which tell his tales. The Xia Dynasty began to decline under the rule of Kong Jia (c. 1789 -1758 BCE) who cared more for strong drink than the responsibilities of rule. He was succeeded by Gao who was succeeded by Fa, neither of whom did a great deal to improve the lives of anyone but themselves. The last emperor was Jie (1728-1675 BCE) who was known as a tyrant and who lost the mandate of heaven to rule. He was overthrown by Tang who established the Shang Dynasty.

Much of the above was considered mythology from the 1920's CE until the mid-1960's CE when archaeological evidence began to emerge to corroborate the tales of the historians. Even now, the scholarly consensus is that the history of the Xia Dynasty is largely mythological even if such a dynasty did actually exist. The scepticism grew because there were no early accounts of the Xia Dynasty and because no physical evidence argued for its existence. It was thought that historians, especially the famous Sima Qian, created the Xia Dynasty as a model precedent to explain and justify dynastic change in China. The scholar Justin Wintle explains this:

Sima had a specific political purpose [in giving credence to mythological figures and events]. In his view, as in the view of others, rulers were entitled to govern by the "Mandate of Heaven"...If they misgoverned, then that license was forfeit. The Yellow Emperor and his successors, including Yu, not only invented all the essentials of civilizations, but provided a model government. As a result of human corruption, however, this divinely instituted order soon collapsed, and thus began the familiar "dynastic cycle". A new regime comes to power, but sooner or later loses the divine right to govern, at which point it is replaced by another that does enjoy the Mandate. And this transferability of the Mandate, Sima Suggests, is the underlying principle of history (3).

The mythological interpretation of the Xia Dynasty was challenged in the 1960's/1970's CE with the discovery of palaces and four-walled homes (as distinct from earlier round homes) matching the descriptions of the historians who wrote on the Xia Dynasty centuries after its decline. Further evidence of the Xia's existence has been discovered since but no written record on any of these structures positively identifies them as Xia constructs and so the debate continues on whether the first dynasty of China was a reality or simply a politically motivated fabrication of later writers.

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The Xia Dynasty (c. 2070-1600 BCE) was the first government to emerge in ancient China and became the first to adhere to the policy of dynastic succession; thus making it the first dynasty of China. It was regarded as a mythical construct of later Chinese historians until excavations in the late 20th century CE uncovered sites which corresponded to descriptions in these earlier historians' accounts.

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The Chinese Communist Party said this week it's lifting its 35-year-old one-child policy and will now allow all couples to have two children.

While the world was aware of China's one-child policy, the actual consequences of violating it were opaque to many Westerners.

To be clear, not everybody in China had to comply with the policy.

In 2007, the Chinese newspaper China Daily claimed that less than 40% of the population was subjected to the policy.

Many minority groups were exempt from the one-child limit, according to China Daily. Moreover, many couples who were both only children were allowed to have two kids even during the era of the one-child policy.

Yet, the people who were subjected to the policy often received inhuman treatment when they broke it.

The methods used to enforce the policy ranged from the wide distribution of diverse contraceptive methods; financial sanctions; and forced abortions and sterilizations for those who did not comply, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In 2013, the Chinese government revealed that 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations had been performed since the early 1970s, when the country began moving to limit its population, according to the FT. (The one-child policy was officially put into place at the end of that decade.) The FT also reported that 403 million intrauterine devices had been inserted in women in that time, often forcefully.

A 2013 article for the Guardian by journalist Ma Jian exposes the harrowing treatment women in Bobai County in the Guangxi province were subjected to after local authorities "launched a vicious crackdown on family-planning violators" in 2007.

According to the article, 17,000 women in the county were forced to have abortions and sterilized. Local officials reportedly collected money even from families who had already been fined and looted the homes of those who did not have enough money to pay.

One of the women interviewed said officials took her from her home, kicked her in the belly, and forced her to go to the hospital - where her fetus was aborted and she was sterilized. Every women in the county was sterilized, she said.

Another woman said she was forced to have an abortion when she was over eight months pregnant.

"He was still alive after the nurse pulled him out from me. He was a tough little creature. He clutched the nurse's sleeve and wouldn't let go. She had to peel his fingers off her one by one before she could drop him into the bin," the woman told Jian.

The crackdown led to the biggest protests China had seen since the unrest in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Thousands of protesters torched government buildings in Bobai County to fight against the crackdown, according to the Guardian.

Yet, China only apparently changed its policy because its population is aging and it needs an infusion of young people to sustain its economy.

Abandoning the policy will "increase labor supply and ease pressures from an aging population," the National Health and Family Planning Commission, which enforces the policy, said in a statement cited by The New York Times. "This will benefit sustained and healthy economic development," the commission said.

The struggle for reproductive freedom in China is not over yet, though. The Chinese government still allows just two children per couple, meaning the government will still be involved in some of its citizens' most intimate choices.

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The consequences of violating China's one-child policy were sometimes horrific

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The Chinese Communist Party said this week it's lifting its 35-year-old one-child policy and will now allow all couples to have two children. While the world was aware of China's one-child policy, the actual consequences of violating it were opaque to many Westerners. To be clear, not everybody in China had to comply with the policy.

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On June 5th, a protester carried two shopping bags and was blocking the tanks from moving past. He became 'Tank man'.

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The US still has a big debt in Chinese bank, since 2011 which is around 1.3 trillions dollar.  Yuan is a reason why this enormous country chose to borrow money from China. Since 2008 (Financial Crisis), the Chinese value has almost permanently reduced from 8 yuan, peng to the dollar, to 6 yuan. Look at the website of Chinese Value: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/currency
By this way, the Chinese value seems more attractive for developing countries, and even industrialized countries. The less value of Yuan, the less money to pay back.
Words of the article
Peng to the dollar -

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The Covid-19 pandemic causes several Chinese loans into usually developing countries. 

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The Covid-19 pandemic causes several Chinese loans into usually developing countries. 

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Today, many in Africa is deeply impacted by the pandemic. Almost all of those countries are already in economic distress prior before the pandemic started, and force to take more Chinese loans for the establishment of economics.
Let´s see how much the developing countries need to pay back:
Zambia: 11.2 billions dollar in debt
Angola 20.1 billions dollar in debt
Pakistan: 16 billions dollar in debt

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Africa is experiencing its first continent-wide recession in 25 years due to the impact of the COVID-19, but many southern African states were already in economic distress prior to the pandemic - with Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe partly because of unsustainable debt burdens they owe to China.

The COVID-19 crisis propelled African debt - and repayment and forgiveness - to the top of the international agenda once again, although this time much of the debt is bilateral, non-concessionary, or commercial in origin.

In April, the World Bank's Development Committee and G20 finance ministers endorsed the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) which includes 40 African Least Developed Countries (LDCs). This G20 initiative, backed also by the IMF and G7, does not provide any reduction in the net present value of debt, but it suspended repayment to no earlier than June 30, 2021.

Although the DSSI is not offering debt relief, only postponement, the G20 and the Paris Club of creditors have now endorsed a new common framework for debt relief, which aims to allow indebted poor nations to apply for debt relief - including write-offs - while ensuring all creditors negotiate on the same level playing field.

The Paris Club has also agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding supporting the DSSI principle, and is advising how these can be translated into revised lending agreements as well as trying to co-ordinate with non-Paris Club creditors such as China - but with mixed results.

Agreement provides significant relief

There is no doubt the DSSI will provide significant savings to those participating in it, allowing these states to concentrate resources on fighting the pandemic if they so choose.

According to the IMF, nine states within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) will benefit (see graphic), but not all SADC states are eligible for DSSI, either because they are not UN-recognized LDCs - Botswana, Eswatini, Seychelles, Mauritius, Namibia, and South Africa - or they have refused to accept LDC status - Zimbabwe.

Two SADC states currently have debt levels larger than the size of their economies - Angola and Mozambique - while four others are paying more than ten per cent of the value of their total debt in debt service payments - Mauritius, Angola, South Africa and Botswana.

Several owe the equivalent of more than one-third of their debt to private creditors - such as Mauritius and Zambia which both owe above 40 per cent. And three countries are classed as being in 'high risk' or 'debt distress' with Chinese lending to them already being significant - Mozambique, 18 per cent; Zambia, 26 per cent; and Zimbabwe, 25 per cent.

In 2019, Zambia's debt reached $11.2 billion, or 48 per cent of GDP, with the IMF predicting a rise to nearly 70 per cent of GDP by the end of 2020. And it has now become Africa's first pandemic-era sovereign default after failing to pay a $42.5 million Eurobond coupon. But Zambia's $3 billion in outstanding Eurobonds is not its only debt as it owes $3.5 billion in bilateral debt, $2.1 billion to multilaterals and $2.9 billion to other commercial lenders.

China is also exposed to significant Zambian debt with $3 billion owed by Lusaka to China and Chinese entities. The lion's share of this is the $2.6 billion owed to China's Exim Bank, which agreed to suspend interest and principal payments worth $110 million in 2020 in concert with the DSSI.

Zambia is also engaging in consultations with other 'private' Chinese lenders, although these negotiations seem to be spearheaded by China's ambassador to Lusaka. This has resulted in private Eurobond debt holders suggesting Zambia will prioritize Chinese debt repayment first.

China's debt diplomacy with Angola is illuminating about how Beijing is responding, given Angola is particularly strategic for Beijing for now as the fourth largest exporter of oil to China, making up 72 per cent of all Angola's oil exports, although this is likely to significantly decline over the next decade as China reduces its demand on fossil fuels.

With 34 per cent of all Chinese debt for all 72 LDCs being with Angola at $20.1 billion - and Pakistan at $16 billion - Angola's total government debt-to-GDP ratio is currently around 120 per cent and servicing it eats up $9 billion per year.

Half of all the debt service is to China and Chinese lenders, according to data from the central bank, accounting for 45 per cent of the nation's external debt. Of the $20.1 billion, about 75 per cent - $14.5 billion - is owed to the China Development Bank with $5 billion to the China Exim Bank. It has also borrowed from China's largest lender, ICBC.

However, Angola could potentially save $3.4 billion according to the IMF and the World Bank, which led to its president João Lourenço joining a group of 19 African and European leaders including Germany, France, Italy, Kenya, and South Africa in April to sign a document calling for a moratorium on debt and the granting of programmes of economic and health assistance due to the pandemic.

China's debt exposure to Angola - and Pakistan - was a prime reason why Beijing is not opposing the DSSI and, in fact, actively lobbied for Angola to be signed up to it, as well as why LDC status was accepted as the participation criteria, as the World Bank actually classifies Angola as a Lower Middle Income state.

Angola officially asked to be part of DSSI and engaged with key creditor countries on adjusting its debt financing facilities, but Angola's renegotiation over the terms of its oil-backed loan repayments to China - especially the duration of a payment moratorium - is opaque.

China lobbied hard for Angola to be part of the DSSI but has not provided details of the two countries' own bilateral negotiations which seem to have reached an agreement for a three-year moratorium on interest payment instalments.

China seems also to have wanted compensation in return for this, suggesting a long-term concession on the strategic Benguela railway or port facilities, but this was rejected by the Angola government which instead offered extra oil equity in offshore blocks. It remains unclear if this was of interest to Beijing and what the final arrangements are but, over the last month, there has been more foreign exchange liquidity in Angola and seems to have been a halt to some Angolan oil cargoes to China.

Angola's Chinese debt burden has resulted in the Lourenço administration moving closer to Beijing again, and the negotiations also demonstrate Beijing's official ambiguity over how to respond to the growing LDC debt owed, as the Angola situation shows China seeking maximum advantage through bilateral and often opaque negotiations.

Following a virtual meeting of G20 finance and central bank governors on 18 July, World Bank group president David Malpass stated: 'For DSSI to be fully effective, there should be a standard minimum set of debt-structuring information. This will avoid the secretive rescheduling that are underway in some countries, such as Angola and Laos, often with undisclosed grace periods and terms. This fragmentation disfavors other creditors and the people in the debtor country'.

Becoming Africa's partner of preference

At the Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity against COVID-19 in June, Chinese president Xi Jinping said Chinese financial institutions should support the DSSI and consult African countries 'according to market principles to work out arrangements for commercial loans with sovereign guarantees'.

Five per cent of current Chinese lending to LDCs is interest-free and China already signalled its intention in 2020 to provide debt forgiveness to African countries with zero-interest loans under the existing Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) commitments.

China is also preparing for the next FOCAC summit scheduled for Dakar in 2021 and wants this to be a showcase about post-COVID-19 recovery and to show China is the preferred Africa partner.

Throughout southern Africa, Chinese diplomats are aggressively promoting Beijing's COVID-19 recovery response, talking up donations of medical equipment and that China has joined COVAX to supply vaccines and promising additional support and investment.

Despite the impact of such geopolitics worsening relations with Western countries, pressure is growing for China to engage more consistently with DSSI - especially by providing more disclosure about the terms of renegotiation of its loans in countries such as Angola and Zambia.

Africa's creditor landscape is changing with new entrants, such as China and private creditors, in addition to the more traditional multilateral and bilateral creditors. The COVID-19 crisis has shown why the current international debt architecture must be restructured - the DSSI and how it performs in southern Africa could be a step in the right direction.
This article draws from Afrika Süd - Dossier published in August 2020.

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China's Southern Africa Debt Deals Reveal a Wider Plan

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Africa is experiencing its first continent-wide recession in 25 years due to the impact of the COVID-19, but many southern African states were already in economic distress prior to the pandemic - with Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe partly because of unsustainable debt burdens they owe to China.

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China, a land of mystery and enchantment, is filled with many images: gods and goddesses, mythical creatures, historical characters, dragons, unicorns. Throughout its history, China has seen many conflicts, religions, and philosophies that have been interwoven into Chinese myths. In many of the well-known Chinese tales, we often find no clear distinction between reality and myth, earth and heaven, history and storytelling, past and present. China is a mosaic of divergent philosophies and traditions. And we must remember this when we talk about China's ancient mythology. Despite their many themes and variations, most Chinese myths possess one common and central element: the battle of ordinary people against great adversity. Here is a compilation of 10 famous ancient Chinese myths:

10. The Pilgrimage Mythology

The Pilgrimage Mythology primarily talks about Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy and compassion. In most of the myths, she is portrayed as a woman holding an infant, dressed in white, and sitting on a lotus. She was said to have been murdered by her own father. She arrived in hell reciting holy books and the king of hell was very angry with her. He sent her back to the world of the living where she gained spiritual insights from Buddha and later on was blessed with immortality. The temple of Kwan Yin, located at the summit of Wondrous Peak, has always attracted many pilgrims. The Pilgrimage Mythology also talks about how Buddhism was introduced and flourished in China. The mythology has it that The Monkey King converted to Buddhism but continued to use Taoist knowledge and skills to combat evil.

9. The Monkey Myth

A government official named Wu Ch'eng-en in his popular novel, Journey to the West, tells the myth about the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. Sun Wukong is the most famous monkey in China. He was said to have been born out of a stone egg that came from a magic rock on the Mountain of Fruit and Flowers. According to mythology, Sun used to be very naughty and eager to take over the world and it took Buddha a lot of effort to tame him. The Monkey King is characterized by his greedy, but joyful, curious, and extremely popular nature. Later in his life, he became a loyal companion to the monk Xuanzang on his adventurous journey from China to India and back again.

8. The Unicorn's Prophecy

The myth of the unicorn's prophecy sprang up around the life of Confucius. This story introduces the unicorn, the chi-lin, which is considered a sacred animal to the Chinese. It bears little resemblance to the unicorn of European myths, and is a mixture of many creatures including the deer, ox, dragon, and horse. The chi-lin has been depicted in myths as a peaceful and timid animal who leaves the innocent alone, but if angered, will jab evil people with its horn. It is said that loyal soldiers embroidered the emblem of the chi-lin on their clothing to show how dutiful they were. During the 14th century, a real giraffe was sent to the imperial court and many observers claimed it was the reincarnation of the mythical chi-lin.

7. The Moon Goddess

Chang-O (or Chang'e), the Chinese goddess of the moon, is the subject of several legends in Chinese mythology. The moon goddess myth revolves around Hou Yi the archer, the elixir of life, a benevolent emperor, and the moon. This popular and interesting story about Chang-O takes you to the distant past where the 10 sons of the Jade Emperor were transformed into 10 suns. The 10 suns rose to heaven and scorched the earth, threatening mankind's survival. The archer Yi shot down nine of these suns and left only one. Yi was then rewarded with the elixir of immortality. One day, when Yi was out hunting, his apprentice Feng Meng broke into his house and tried to get the elixir from Yi's wife, Chang'e. But Chang'e refused to give the elixir to Feng Meng and drank it all herself. As she consumed it, she became weightless and flew upwards towards the heavens and stayed on the moon as a refugee.

6. The Grand Archer Yi

In many ancient Chinese mythologies, we can see gods helping the people. But the Grand Archer Yi is one of the few mortals who has helped the gods. He is characterized by his great skill at archery. Hou Yi is believed to have lived between 2436 and 2255 BC. Myths about him are linked to the people of the southwestern part of China. Yi was one of the most famous archers of that time. It is believed that Yi saved the moon during an eclipse and rescued the country from a variety of outbreaks. Hou Yi is also said to have shot down nine of the 10 suns that were burning up the earth in prehistoric times.

See also:
Top 18 Ancient Chinese Inventions and Discoveries

5. Yu Rebuilds the Earth

The myth about Yu the Great is based on Chinese legends dating from 2205 to 2197 BC. Like all demigods in ancient times, Yu the Great could change himself into different shapes whenever necessary. He could transform himself into a bear, a dragon, or a human. Yu is considered to be the first to pass his status as ruler on to his descendants, creating the first dynasty, the Xia dynasty. However, due to the lack of any archaeological evidence, the Xia dynasty still remains a myth. One of the many legends about Yu tells of his extraordinary birth where a man called Gun was told to control a great flood. He stole a piece of magic soil from heaven to dam the water. Furious with him, the Shangdi, or supreme deity, issued an order for his execution. After about three years, the miraculously preserved body of Gun was slit open and a son brought forth. He was Da Yu and the one who, after years of hard work, provided outlets to the sea through dredging, with the help of dragons, thus making the earth suitable for human habitation.

4. Water War

Gong Gong (aka Kang Hui), a Chinese water god, is one of the frequently described characters in ancient Chinese mythology. He is depicted in stories as having red hair and the tail of a serpent. Gong Gong has been credited in various mythological texts as being responsible for destructive floods. He wrestled to gain control of the earth shortly after the creation of people. Before Gong, Zhurong, the fire god, ruled the world peacefully. But when Gong became the ruler, he wanted to expand his influence by increasing the amount of water in the universe, namely seven-tenths water to three-tenths dry land. So he sent heavy rains and came close to destroying the world in a fierce power struggle with Zhurong. To counteract the destructive forces of both Gong and Zhurong, Nuwa, the creator of people, appears in this myth. Gong is often seen as an ancient destroyer god and is blamed for many other cosmic catastrophes. By all accounts, Gong Gong ends up being killed or sent into exile.

3. Fushi Teaches the People

The most ancient myths involve the 10 legendary kings or gods who guided people through their prehistoric beginnings (around 3000 to 2197 BC). They were demigods (half god and half human), who lived among the people and taught them the rules of civilization. Fushi was the first ruler of this magical period. Many scholars believe that his story is based on an actual monarch who lived sometime between 2953 and 2736 BC. In all the many variations of these mythological stories, Fushi has been depicted as a beloved figure who taught survival skills to the early humans. He taught people how to use fire, how to cook, how to write, and many other skills like hunting, fishing, and fortune-telling. Some myths depict Fushi as having the body of a human while others depict him as having the head of a human and the body of a snake. In many stories, he is regarded as the husband of Nuwa and they are the creators of civilization.

2. Nuwa Creates People

Nuwa (aka Nugua), the goddess of humankind, is one of the most popular characters in ancient Chinese mythology. According to mythology, Nuwa created mankind and repaired the pillar of heaven and the broken corners of earth which Gong Gong had destroyed in a fit of anger. In Chinese mythology, Nugua is regarded as the patroness of matchmakers. As the wife of Fushi, she helped establish a model for marriage and regulated the conduct between the sexes. Nuwa is also said to have built a lovely palace that became the prototype for the later walled cities of China. The materials of the palace were said to have been prepared overnight by mountain spirits.

1. Panku (Pangu) Creates the World

The earliest Chinese mythologies contain many stories of the wondrous rulers of ancient times, but there are no creation stories. The story of Panku (aka Pangu) is probably the closest Chinese version of a creation myth. Pangu is the central figure in the Chinese Taoist legends of creation. Pangu, the first man, is said to have been created out of the cosmic egg and had two horns, two tusks, and a hairy body. According to the ancient myths, Pangu is said to have shaped the earth by chiseling out valleys and stacking up mountains. All this was accomplished using his knowledge of yin and yang, the inescapable principle of duality in all things.

See also:
Top 10 Interesting Facts About Hindu Mythology

Conclusion

When we look at the history of ancient Chinese mythology, writings seem to have begun in the Wei and Jin dynasties (220 to 420 AD). Influenced by the ideas of alchemy and Taoist and Buddhist superstitions, various writers invented tales of gods and demons. When we read their stories, we see a great imagination and mastery of the written language. The practice of storytelling has continued through the generations. Like many other cultures, Chinese mythology is entwined with history. Most of these myths date back to ancient times, and some even predate the recorded history of mankind.

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Top 10 Astonishing Ancient Chinese Mythology Stories

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China, a land of mystery and enchantment, is filled with many images: gods and goddesses, mythical creatures, historical characters, dragons, unicorns. Throughout its history, China has seen many conflicts, religions, and philosophies that have been interwoven into Chinese myths.

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Explore the mythology of China and discover the gods and goddesses, cosmology, creatures and myths of ancient Chinese civilization.

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One-child policy | Definition, Start Date, Effects, & Facts

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One-child policy, official program initiated by the Chinese government in the late 1970s and early ’80s that limited many families to one child each in order to reduce population growth. The program had many negative consequences, however, and was discontinued in 2016. Read more about China’s one-child policy here.

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What happen if developing countries couldn't pay Chinese loans back? 

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What happen if developing countries couldn't pay Chinese loans back? 

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The following counties in danger of falling into the Chinese Debts; Sri Lanka, Papa New Guinea, The Maldives, Pakistan, Malaysia, Laos, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Egypt, South Africa and not mention the poorly developing nations. Those counties are often using the Chinese loans for infrastructure projects, skyscrapers, ports or bridges. If some of those countries couldn't pay Chinese loans back, it means China has the right to take a control of those buildings for their own gain, instead for demanding their money back. After one and one will become Chinese state-own.

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What’s Actually Happening To Uighur Muslims In China?

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What’s Actually Happening To Uighur Muslims In China?

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China is facing global political criticism over its alleged persecution of the Uighurs - a Muslim minority group who live mostly in the Xinjiang province in northwestern China.

When you see drone footage of countless people kneeling blindfolded with shaved heads waiting to board trains en masse, there's only one question we're asking. Is history repeating itself?

China is being accused of allegedly persecuting Uighur Muslims and forcing them into 're-education' concentration camps, where they have been forced to eat pork and children have been separated from their families with the intention that they grow up not learning about Islam. In addition to all of this, the BBC recently reported that US Customs and Border Protection at the port of New York and New Jersey seized a 13-ton shipment of hair products worth than $800,000 of Uighur Muslim women's hair, made by forced labour from children or prisoners of the camps.

With what feels like a blind eye turned against the global accusations against China, we are going to break down what's allegedly been happening to the Uighur Muslims and how our actions can help.

Who are the Uighur people?

The Uighurs are a Muslim Turkic ethnic group, with the majority living in the Xinjiang region of China. There are approximately 11 million people. There are Uighur Muslims also in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and also living in Australia. Xinjiang has been under China's control since 1949, with many Uighurs still identifying the region as it's previous name East Turkestan. The region is influenced by a rich trade history, with towns such as Kashgar historically thriving under the Silk Road trading route.

Uighur Muslims also speak many dialects, one mainly influenced by Standard Xinjiang and Standard Soviet, depending on the proximity to neighbouring Kazakhstan. China is being accused of forcibly erasing the Uighur language (also called Uighur) and forcibly taking Uighur Muslims to camps in Xinjiang to learn Mandarin.

What's China being accused of?

In 2017, the Xinjiang government passed a law prohibiting women from wearing any kind of veils and men have not since been allowed to grow long beards. Mosques have also been demolished in this region.

According to reports, over a million Uighur Muslims have been sent to more than 85 identified camps in Xinjiang. A satellite image from 2015 has revealed vast empty land in the Northwestern region, in comparison to the 22 April 2018 satellite image revealing a large compound, an alleged concentration camp. The movement to these camps happened mainly between 2017 to 2018.

The Chinese government including the Chinese Ambassador has denied the existence of these camps, however after images of camps, barbed wire fences and watchtowers emerged, the government has now acknowledged these as 're-education' camps specifically for the Uighurs.

Uighur women have spoken out and said to be forcibly sterilised and the China scholar Adrian Zenz has also reported that Uighur Muslim women are being fitted with contraceptive devices and if resistant, they are sent to the camps. Many Uighur Muslims have said they have been detained, interrogated and beaten for their Islamic beliefs.

It's important to recognise that the region where Uighur Muslims have been living is in a 'special economic zone', i.e. it has rich oil and mineral supplies. Did we mention that the Xinjiang region is China's largest producer of natural gas and a key element to China's Belt and Road project, the most expensive infrastructure project in history?

What is China's response?

The Chinese government has justified the 're-education camps' by stating they are combating religious 'extremism' and 'terrorist activities'. This is due to violent incidents that took place in the capital's Urumqi in 2009 and knife attacks at Kunming railway station in 2014.

The Chinese Ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming has also said to the BBC, that 'Xinjiang has completely changed since 1990 because of the thousands of terrorist attacks," and denied any mistreatment to Uighur Muslims.

What has the global response been?

In July 2019, a letter was sent to the UN Human Rights Council where twenty-two countries (mainly European) condemned China's treatment of Uighur Muslims. Four days later, thirty-seven countries defended China's 'achievements in the field of human rights', including Muslim majority countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Sudan.

In September 2019, the US condemned China for the alleged treatment of Uighur Muslims at the UN General Assembly. More than 30 countries have also called out China's treatment. In July 2020, the UK warned China over potential sanctions due to the "gross and egregious" human rights abuse. However, if asked whether the Uighurs were facing genocide, the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the international community had to be "careful" before making such claims.

Why do we keep referring to the Uighurs as 'Uighur Muslims'?

Instead of it being a sweeping or lazy generalisation, it's key to state Uighurs as Uighur Muslims as being Muslim is key to why these 're-education' camp are happening. It is Islamic culture that is being allegedly erased and Islamophobia that is used as a weapon against the Uighur Muslims.

How is fast fashion connected?

Fashion Revolution has stated that "a new coalition of more than 180 global human rights groups has stepped forward to call on the textiles industry to put a stop to Uighur forced labour in Xinjiang, China."

"The coalition estimates that 20% of the world's cotton is produced in Xinjiang, where involuntary labour camps are imposed on some 1.8 million Uighur people."

This means almost every major apparel brand, from NIKE to Topshop to Primark, selling cotton products is potentially implicated, says the coalition. It's calling on these brands to cut any connection with Uighur cotton.

What can you do?

It may be easy to feel helpless but our voices still matter and are crucial in aiding those whose human rights have been allegedly taken away.

It's key to sign petitions, especially ones which call upon leaders to sanction trade with China and which asks the International Olympic Committee to not allow China to host the 22 Olympics.

As China does not allow aid and Uighur Muslims could be detained from such aid and contact, you can still donate to Uighur Muslims who have fled to neighbouring countries. It's imperative we email our local MP's and politicians to make a stand against these 're-education camps' and the alleged treatment Uighur Muslims are facing. Amnesty International has a sample letter.

Regarding fast fashion, as well as revaluation where you spend your pennies, the Fashion Revolution coalition asks that we demand fashion brand's to sign up to the coalition's demand by removing Uighur forced labour from the supply chain. We can also contact brands (whether that's on social media or via email) and ask simple #WhoMadeMyClothes. Transparency is key in realising how much of an impact our shopping habits and lifestyle choices can have on marginalised groups around the world.

Use your voice, especially to help those who can't.

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What's Actually Happening To Uighur Muslims In China? - Restless Network

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China is facing global political criticism over its alleged persecution of the Uighurs - a Muslim minority group who live mostly in the Xinjiang province in northwestern China. When you see drone footage of countless people kneeling blindfolded with shaved heads waiting to board trains en masse, there's only one question we're asking.

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The Tiananmen Square protests were student-led demonstrations in 1989 calling for democracy, free speech and a free press in China. Pro-democracy protesters initially marched through Beijing to Tiananmen Square following the April 1989 death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party leader who had worked to introduce democratic reform in China. While mourning Hu, the students called for a more open, democratic government nationwide. Eventually thousands of people joined the students in Tiananmen Square, with the protest's numbers increasing to the tens of thousands by mid-May. The protests were halted in a deadly crackdown, known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, by the Chinese government on June 4 and 5, 1989.

Background to Unrest

The protests resulted from long-simmering frustration with the limits on political freedom in China-given its one-party form of government, with the Communist Party holding sway-and ongoing economic troubles.

Although China's government had instituted a number of reforms in the 1980s that established a limited form of capitalism in the country, poor and working-class Chinese still faced significant challenges, including lack of jobs and increased poverty.

The students also argued that China's educational system did not adequately prepare them for an economic system with elements of global, free-market capitalism. Some leaders within China's government were sympathetic to the protesters' cause, while others saw them as a political threat.
WATCH VIDEO: Yohuru Williams on Mao Zedong and China's Cultural Revolution
Martial Law Declared

On May 13, 1989, a number of the student protesters initiated a hunger strike, which inspired other similar strikes and protests across China. As the movement grew, the Chinese government became increasingly uncomfortable with the protests, particularly as they disrupted a visit by Soviet Union Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev on May 15.

A welcome ceremony for Gorbachev originally scheduled for Tiananmen Square was instead held at the airport, although otherwise his visit passed without incident. Even so, feeling the demonstrations needed to be curtailed, the Chinese government declared martial law on May 20 and 250,000 troops entered Beijing.

By the end of May, more than one million protesters had gathered in and around Tiananmen Square. They held daily marches and vigils, and images of the events were transmitted by media organizations to audiences in the United States, Europe and across the world.

Tiananmen Square Massacre

When the initial presence of the military failed to quell the protests, the Chinese authorities decided to increase their aggression. At 1 a.m. on June 4, Chinese soldiers and police stormed Tiananmen Square, firing live rounds into the crowd.

Although thousands of protesters simply tried to escape, others fought back, stoning the attacking troops and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats in Beijing that day estimated that hundreds to thousands of protesters were killed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and as many as 10,000 were arrested.

Leaders worldwide, including Gorbachev, condemned the military action and, less than a month later, the U.S. Congress voted to impose economic sanctions against China, citing human rights violations.

Tiananmen Square Tank Man

The image of an unidentified man standing alone in defiance and blocking a column of Chinese tanks on June 5 remains a lasting one for much of the world of the events. He is now renowned as the "Tiananmen Square Tank Man."
READ MORE: Who Was the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square?
Tiananmen Square History

While the events of 1989 now dominate global coverage of Tiananmen Square, the site has long been an important crossroads within the city of Beijing. It was named for the nearby Tiananmen, or "Gate of Heavenly Peace," and marks the entrance to the so-called Forbidden City. The location took on added significance as China shifted from an emperor-led political culture to one that was governed by the Communist Party.

The Qing dynasty was the last dynastic power to rule China. It governed the country from the middle of the 1600s until 1912. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 resulted in the overthrow of the Qings and led to the establishment of the Republic of China.

The early years of the Republic were marked by political turmoil, however, and the country fell under Japanese rule during the lead-up to World War II. During the Japanese occupation, some 20 million Chinese were killed.

National Day

As Japan's influence faded in the aftermath of Second World War, China entered a period of civil war. By the end of the civil war in 1949, the Communist Party had gained control of most of mainland China. They established the People's Republic of China under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong.

A celebration to honor the occasion was held in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949. More than one million Chinese people attended. This celebration came to be known as National Day, and it is still observed annually on that date, with the largest events set in the square.

Mao Zedong, considered the founding father of the People's Republic of China, is interred at Tiananmen Square, in a mausoleum on the plaza.

Tiananmen Square Censorship

Today the June 4 and 5 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre continue to resonate worldwide. In 1999, the U.S. National Security Archive released Tiananmen Square, 1989: The Declassified History. The document includes U.S. State Department files related to the protests and subsequent military crackdown.

It wasn't until 2006 that Yu Dongyue, a journalist arrested for throwing paint at a portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square during the protests, was released from prison.

On the 20th anniversary of the massacre, the Chinese government prohibited journalists from entering Tiananmen Square and blocked access to foreign news sites and social media.

Still, thousands attended a memorial vigil in honor of the anniversary in Hong Kong. Ahead of the 30 anniversary of the event, in 2019, New York-based Human Rights Watch published a report detailing reported arrests in China of those associated with the protests.

The 1989 events at Tiananmen Square have also been highly censored on China's tightly-controlled internet. According to a survey released in 2019 by the University of Toronto and the University of Hong Kong, more than 3,200 words referencing the massacre had been censored.

Sources

Tiananmen Square. Beijing-Visitor.com.
Tiananmen Square, 1989. Department of State: Office of the Historian.
Human Rights Activism in Post-Tiananmen China, Human Rights Watch.
Timeline: Tiananmen protests. BBC.com.
Tiananmen Square Fast Facts. CNN.com.

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The Tiananmen Square protests were student-led demonstrations in 1989 calling for democracy, free speech and a free press in China. Pro-democracy protesters initially marched through Beijing to Tiananmen Square following the April 1989 death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party leader who had worked to introduce democratic reform in China.

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Why China Will be the Big Winner of the 2020 Crisis

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Week 5, 6

Read, watch and learn as much as possible

Search for reliable sources. Post interesting films, articles etc. here

Work with vocabulary and write vocabulary lists (or create Quizlets) and add them to your personal column.

Keep kind of a journal here by collecting the videos and texts you work with in your column.

Week 7

Monday: Prepare for writing a text
Wednesday. Write a text on Exam.net based on what you have learnt
Thursday: Continue writing

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What it was like to grow up under China's one-child policy | Nanfu Wang

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China unveiled the world's fastest driverless bullet train for the 2022 Olympics

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Why more than a million Uighurs are being held in camps in China

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China: Rise of an Asian giant | Insight | Full Episode

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The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong's bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party.

Its bewildering complexity and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to make sense of everything that occurred during the period.

However, Mao's decision to launch the "revolution" in May 1966 is now widely interpreted as an attempt to destroy his enemies by unleashing the people on the party and urging them to purify its ranks.

When the mass mobilisation kicked off party newspapers depicted it as an epochal struggle that would inject new life into the socialist cause. "Like the red sun rising in the east, the unprecedented Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is illuminating the land with its brilliant rays," one editorial read.

In fact, the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust China into 10 years of turmoil, bloodshed, hunger and stagnation.

Gangs of students and Red Guards attacked people wearing "bourgeois clothes" on the street, "imperialist" signs were torn down and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to suicide.

After violence had run its bloody course, the country's rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but "grave disorder, damage and retrogression".

An official party reckoning described it as a catastrophe which had caused "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic" in 1949.

Whose idea was it and what was the aim?

The Cultural Revolution was the brainchild of China's 'Great Helmsman', Chairman Mao Zedong.

Seventeen years after his troops seized power, Mao saw his latest political campaign as a way of reinvigorating the communist revolution by strengthening ideology and weeding out opponents.

"Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road... so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system," one early directive stated.

Frank Dikötter, the author of a new book on the period, says Mao hoped his movement would make China the pinnacle of the socialist universe and turn him into "the man who leads planet Earth into communism."

Chinese red guards during the cultural revolution in 1966. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

But it was also an attempt by the elderly dictator, whose authority had been badly hit by the calamitous Great Famine of the 1950s, to reassert control over the party by obliterating enemies, real or imagined.

"It was a power struggle waged... behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement," Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans wrote in his damning account of the Cultural Revolution, The Chairman's New Clothes.

How exactly did it start?

Most historians agree the Cultural Revolution began in mid-May 1966 when party chiefs in Beijing issued a document known as the "May 16 Notification". It warned that the party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary "revisionists" who were plotting to create a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".

A fortnight later, on 1 June, the party's official mouthpiece newspaper urged the masses to "clear away the evil habits of the old society" by launching an all-out assault on "monsters and demons".

Chinese students sprung into action, setting up Red Guard divisions in classrooms and campuses across the country. By August 1966 - so-called Red August - the mayhem was in full swing as Mao's allies urged Red Guards to destroy the "four olds" - old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture.

Schools and universities were closed and churches, shrines, libraries, shops and private homes ransacked or destroyed as the assault on "feudal" traditions began.

Gangs of teenagers in red armbands and military fatigues roamed the streets of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai setting upon those with "bourgeois" clothes or reactionary haircuts. "Imperialist" street signs were torn down.

Party officials, teachers and intellectuals also found themselves in the cross-hairs: they were publicly humiliated, beaten and in some cases murdered or driven to suicide after vicious "struggle sessions". Blood flowed as Mao ordered security forces not to interfere in the Red Guards' work. Nearly 1,800 people lost their lives in Beijing in August and September 1966 alone.

What happened next?

After the initial explosion of student-led "red terror", the chaos spread rapidly. Workers joined the fray and China was plunged into what historians describe as a state of virtual civil war, with rival factions battling it out in cities across the country.

By late 1968 Mao realised his revolution had spiralled out of control. In a bid to rein in the violence he issued instructions to send millions of urban youth down to the countryside for "re-education".

He also ordered the army to restore order, effectively transforming China into a military dictatorship, which lasted until about 1971. As the army fought to bring the situation under control, the death toll soared.

Between 1971 and the Cultural Revolution's official end, in 1976, a semblance of normality returned to China. US president Richard Nixon even toured the country in February 1972 in a historic visit that re-established ties between Washington and Beijing.

It was, in Nixon's words, "the week that changed the world".

How many victims were there?

Historians believe somewhere between 500,000 and two million people lost their lives as a result of the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps the worst affected region was the southern province of Guangxi where there were reports of mass killings and even cannibalism.

Appalling acts of barbarity also occurred in Inner Mongolia where authorities unleashed a vicious campaign of torture against supposed separatists.

Even China's feline population suffered as Red Guards tried to eliminate what they claimed was a symbol of "bourgeois decadence". "Walking through the streets of the capital at the end of August [1966], people saw dead cats lying by the roadside with their front paws tied together," writes Dikötter.

Yet contrary to popular belief, the government was responsible for most of the bloodshed, not the Red Guards.

"We read a lot of horror stories about students beating their teachers to death in the stairwell," says Andrew Walder, the author of China Under Mao.

"[But] based on the government's own published histories well over half, if not two-thirds of the people who were killed or imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution suffered that from 1968 to early 1970" as the army moved in to halt the violence.

The lives of some of the Communist party's most powerful figures were upended by the turbulence, including future leader Deng Xiaoping, who was purged in 1967, and Xi Zhongxun, the father of China's current president, Xi Jinping, who was publicly humiliated, beaten and sent into exile.

President Xi's half-sister, Xi Heping, is said to have taken her own life after being persecuted.

How were foreigners affected?

As chaos enveloped Beijing in the summer of 1966, foreign diplomats found themselves at the eye of the storm. "Earplugs became standard embassy issue," the former British ambassador Percy Cradock writes in his memoirs recalling how a cacophony of songs praising "our beloved Chairman Mao" became the soundtrack of life in the capital.

By the following year things had taken a more sinister turn. Red Guards laid siege to the Soviet, French and Indonesian embassies, torched the Mongolian ambassador's car and hung a sign outside the British mission that read: "Crush British Imperialism!" One night, in late August, diplomats were forced to flee from the British embassy as it was ransacked and burned. Outside protesters chanted: "Kill! Kill!".

Anthony Grey, a Reuters journalist in Beijing, spent more than two years in captivity after being detained by Chinese authorities in July 1967.

What was the Little Red Book?

The Cultural Revolution's official handbook was the Little Red Book, a pocket-sized collection of quotations from Mao that offered a design for Red Guard life.

"Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory!" read one famous counsel.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Little Red Book reading sessions were held on public buses and even in the skies above China, as air hostesses preached Mao's words of wisdom to their passengers. During the 1960s, the Little Red Book is said to have been the most printed book on earth, with more than a billion copies printed.

Peasants study Chairman Mao's quotations in the Little Red Book - the 'bible' of the Cultural Revolution during a break from rice planting, 1970, Guangxi, China. Photograph: Sinopix/REX/Shutterstock

When did it end?

The Cultural Revolution officially came to an end when Mao died on 9 September 1976 at the age of 82.

In a bid to move on - and avoid discrediting Mao too much - party leaders ordered that the Chairman's widow, Jiang Qing, and a group of accomplices be publicly tried for masterminding the chaos. They were known as the "Gang of Four".

Jiang contested the charges claiming she had merely been "Chairman Mao's dog" but was sentenced to death in 1981, later reduced to life in prison. In 1991, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, she hung herself.

How did the Cultural Revolution affect China?

Mao had hoped his revolutionary movement would turn China into a beacon of communism. But 50 years on many believe it had the opposite effect, paving the way for China's embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and its subsequent economic boom.

"A common verdict is: no Cultural Revolution, no economic reform," Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in their book on the period, Mao's Last Revolution. "The Cultural Revolution was so great a disaster that it provoked an even more profound cultural revolution, precisely the one that Mao intended to forestall."

Another enduring legacy, experts say, is the obsession of today's rulers with stability and political control.

Leaders such as Xi Jinping, a 13-year-old Beijing schoolboy when the cultural revolution began, had a front row seat to the mayhem, and some even partook in the violence.

"They saw a China that was totally chaotic for about two years and they saw atrocities sometimes," says Walder, a Stanford University expert on the period. "They view the loss of the party's control as something that will lead to chaos."

Dikötter believes the nightmarish upheaval also served to destroy any remaining faith the Chinese people had in their Great Teacher. "Even before Mao died, people buried Maoism."

How is the Cultural Revolution remembered today?

After Mao's death, the Communist party made some attempts to confront the horrors of the previous decade. Some were punished for the violence while those unfairly purged or persecuted were rehabilitated.

But those efforts petered out in the early 1980s as Beijing became wary of implicating itself in the killing at a time of growing opposition from Chinese youth. Academics were discouraged from digging into the party's inconvenient truth.

Experts say Beijing would seek to mark this year's 50th anniversary with deafening silence.

"They won't go there - it is just too damaging to the party," says MacFarquhar. "The party is guilty of three massive blows to the Chinese people: the [Great] Famine, the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of the environment which is ongoing now and may in fact be more deadly that the other two in the long run. And the last thing it wants to say is that we were the guilty ones."

However, a bitter public row over a Mao-themed extravaganza held in Beijing earlier this month has unexpectedly thrust the decade-long upheaval back into the headlines.

What should I read to understand the Cultural Revolution?

The seminal work on the period is Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFaquhuar and Michael Schoenhals, a blow-by-blow account of the turmoil.

An earlier book by Schoenhals - China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-69: Not a Dinner Party - contains a trove of documents, speeches and photographs, that chronicle the country's descent into anarchy.

Perhaps the most withering critique of the political mobilisation can be found in The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, by Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.

Ji Xianlin's The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a harrowing first-person account of the period. First published in 1998 and recently translated into English, the book recounts the hardship of a Peking University academic who spent nearly nine months as a prisoner of the Red Guards.

Another powerful Cultural Revolution memoir is Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, a Chinese graduate of the London School of Economics whose life was turned upside down by the Red Guards in 1967.

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The Cultural Revolution: all you need to know about China's political convulsion

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Fifty years ago one of the bloodiest eras in history began, in which as many as two million people died. But who started it and what was it for?

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great wall of china (tourist attraction)

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national geographic channel (tv station)

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National Geographic - The Great Wall of China - Documentary

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Documentaries, Documentary, Documentary Films, National Geographic - The Great Wall of China - Documentary. Documentary National Geographic, National Geographic Documentary, Documentaries. national geographic documentaries, documentaries national geographic, documentaries films, the univese, universe documentary.

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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October 2004

Citation

Department of Asian Art. "List of Rulers of China." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chem/hd_chem.htm (October 2004)

© 2000-2020 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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List of Rulers of China | Lists of Rulers | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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"A chronological list of all known emperors of China, covering all dynasties: Xia, Shang, Qin, Han, Six Dynasties, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties, Liao, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing."

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The last dynasty, 1644 to 1912, ruled the mainland from The Forbidden City in Beijing.

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The Forbidden City was the imperial palace of the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) was the last Chinese dynasty, and the longest dynasty ruled by foreigners (the Manchus from Manchuria, northeast of the Great Wall).

The Qing Dynasty had the most overseas contact, though it was mostly resisted. China glories in the prosperity of the Qing Golden Age, but remembers with shame the forced trade and unequal treaties later in the Qing era.

Quick Facts on the Qing Dynasty

The Manchu-led Qing Dynasty was preceded by the Han-led Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

The Qing capital was Beijing, where emperors continued to rule from the Forbidden City.

In the age of exploration/colonialization, China remained isolated and expanded its borders and population.

In the age of industrialization, China remained traditional and undeveloped.

The dynasty prospered initially, but became increasingly fraught with disasters and attacks toward the end.

It lasted 268 years, the fifth longest imperial dynasty, despite many uprisings against the Manchu rulers.

It was followed by the Republic of China era (1912-1947).

Qing Origins - The Rise of the Manchus (220-1644)

The Manchus lived northeast of the Great Wall, which had stopped a large invasion of theirs for the majority of the imperial era (221 BC - 1911 AD).

They were kept north of the Great Wall in subsequent dynasties, and were conquered by the Mongols of the Yuan Empire (1279-1368). The Mongols and the Jurchens were then driven north of the Great Wall by the Han Chinese of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Nurhaci United the Manchus (1559-1626)

The Manchus emerged as a people when a Jurchen tribal ruler named Nurhaci started to conquer other Jurchen tribes in 1582. They subjugated the Mongols, and absorbed their troops. In a similar way to Genghis Khan, he utilized the manpower and knowledge of the people he conquered.

Shenyang Imperial Palace. Nurhaci conquered Shenyang and made it his capital.

In 1625, Nurhaci conquered the Ming city of Shenyang and made it the Manchurian capital. The Ming cities gave his empire a greater base of population, and the Manchu empire absorbed them. You can still see the early Manchu rulers' Shenyang Imperial Palace today.

Hong Taiji Continued the Attack (1626-1643)

Nurhaci's successor was his son, who was named Hong Taiji. He continued the attack on the Ming Empire, strengthening his artillery with European technology, and Ming-technician-cast cannon. He created his own artillery corps in 1634.

His empire was called the Later Jin Dynasty at first, but in 1636, he renamed it the Great Qing Empire. The word qing (清) means clear and connotes the words clean and fresh. Perhaps, he wanted to signify that they were making a fresh start in contrast with the morass of the Ming Empire. Hong Taiji died in 1643, and his son Fulin led the Manchus.

Heavily guarded Shanhai Pass had kept out northeastern invaders for centuries.

Ming Rebels Take Beijing (1643-1644)

While facing Manchu attacks from the north the Ming Dynasty were also faced with civil rebellion. Li Zicheng emerged as the leader of the whole Chinese rebel army and took Beijing with little resistance in 1644.

Great Wall Gates Opened to The Manchus (1644)

However, when Li Zicheng sent an army to attack Ming General Wu Sangui and his army, who were guarding the Great Wall against the Manchus at Shanhai Pass, instead of surrendering to the Chinese rebels, Wu Sangui sided with the Manchus and let them through the gates of the Great Wall.

Then the Manchus swept aside the rebels and the last of the Ming Dynasty resistance, conquering Beijing in 1644.

The Beginning of the Qing Dynasty (1644)

In 1644, the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty had hanged himself after the capital was conquered, and China was in chaos for months. The Qing (Jurchen, Mongol, and Ming) army swept south.

In October 30, 1644, about 5 months after the Qing army occupied the capital, Hong Taiji's son Fulin became the Emperor Shunzhi, and he announced the new dynasty was founded.

Emperor Shunzhi (ruled 1644-1661)

Emperor Shunzhi (1638-1661) was a 5-year-old when his father died in 1643 and he was named emperor. During his rule, the main priority of the court was to conquer the rest of the empire and establish a government for the new empire.

The Regent Dorgon Led the Government (1643-1650)

Dorgon was the regent and ruled on behalf of the child emperor. When Dorgon died in 1650, Emperor Shunzhi started to rule personally when he was 13 until he died at 24 in 1661.

Qing Dynasty hair styles

His policies of reappointing the Ming officials helped the empire to stabilize and prosper. The Manchus did not destroy Beijing and decimate the population as was commonly done. Instead, they persuaded Ming officials and military leaders to surrender to them.

The Hairstyle Massacre (1645)

In 1645, Dorgon decreed that Ming men must shave away their hair apart from Manchu-style pigtails. This started the queue hairstyle that is seen in movies about the Qing Empire.

This hairstyle was humiliating, but helped him to identify resisters. According to Confucius, we are given our body, skin and hair from our parents, which we ought not to damage. Traditionally adult Han people did not cut their hair.

Dorgon said, "Keep your hair, lose your head; keep your head, cut your hair." Tens of thousands who resisted were massacred.

But opinions about the queue did change over time. After 286 years people had accepted it, and when the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1912 many people refused the new government's call to cut their queue!

Imperial Examinations Continued (1646-1911)

In 1646, Dorgon reestablished the imperial examinations, held every three years, and in this way, he gained the support of large numbers of literati and the bureaucracy.

A problem in the empire increasingly became the lack of modern education. The empire concentrated on Imperial Examinations, studying ancient philosophical and religious texts.

The Qing rulers did little to promote the knowledge of the world. Instead, they were isolationist.

Emperor Kangxi - the Qing Golden Age Begins (ruled 1661-1722)

Emperor Kangxi.

The reigns of emperors Kangxi and Qianlong was the richest period in the all Chinese feudal dynasties. It is well-known in China as the "Kang-Qian flourishing age".

After Emperor Shunzhi's death, Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722) became the ruler. He had one of the longest reigns in dynastic history. Like Kublai Khan at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, and Zhu Yuanzhang in the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, during his 61-year rule he set the policy direction for the empire and stabilized it.

Restricted Foreign Trade (1661-1840)

The Ming Empire developed a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to internal trade and industry. But under Emperor Kangxi and his successors, the court more carefully controlled commerce and industry and monopolized important industries, reverting to the economic policies of earlier dynasties. Emperor Kangxi only allowed foreign businessman to trade with Chinese in four cities: Guangzhou, Xiamen, Songjian, and Ningbo.
3 Reasons Why the Qing Dynasty Banned Foreign Trade:
1. The Chinese ruling class believed that China was the greatest empire - the 'Middle Kingdom' - and scorned outsiders.

2. The Manchu rulers didn't want the Han in coastal areas to grow stronger through trade with foreigners.

3. The Qing government was angered by foreign ambassadors' "impoliteness" - the ambassadors refused to kneel to the ruling class.

Emperor Yongzheng - The Golden Age Continues (ruled 1723-1735)

Emperor Kangxi had a lot of sons by different women, but Emperor Yongzheng (1668-1735) the fourth prince was named as successor in his will. Less well known than his father and son, he continued the Qing's prosperous period with efficiency.

Emperor Qianlong - End of the Golden Age (ruled 1735-1796)

Emperor Qianlong

Emperor Yongzheng's son was named Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). He officially reigned for 61 years as Kangxi did. But he actually reigned till his death in 1799. His court was successful early in his reign, but he later his greed set the empire on an unfavorable course.

China's Huge Prosperity and Growth

Qianlong's reign was the most prosperous in the Qing Dynasty, and the population grew quickly to about 300 million. However foreign trade was restricted to only Guangzhou (Canton) at one point.

The empire grew larger, as they subdued Tibet and the Xinjiang regions, inheriting Mongolia from the dynasties founders, and wiping out the Dzungars (a large Mongolian tribe of hundreds of thousands). The land area of the Qing empire was second only to the Yuan Empire's in size.

Huge Growth in Chinese Literature

The Qing era's main literary accomplishments were extremely large encyclopedias and compendiums of literature comprised of hundreds of volumes and popular novels.

In the middle of their dynastic era, when the empire was at its height, one of the four great classic novels was written called Dream of the Red Chamber. See more on The History of Chinese Literature.

Qianlong's Greed Brought Decline (1765-1799)

However, Emperor Qianlong grew greedy. After his victories in the west, he tried to conquer the kingdoms of Burma and Vietnam from 1765 to 1769 and failed at a great cost to the empire.

In his later years he indulged in luxuries, sex, and palaces, leaving court matters to corrupt officials. Discontent against Qing rule increased, and people arose in rebellion over heavy taxation. His isolationist actions towards Europeans kept the people from adopting technology and scientific knowledge, and set the stage for later inadequacy and invasions.

Emperor Jiaqing (ruled 1796-1820) - Qing Decline Began

During the 1800s, the dynasty seemed somewhat successful because the population kept growing and the territory stayed intact, but the empire modernized too slowly, and the ruling court dealt poorly with a rapidly changing world and numerous uprisings.

Wangfujing Church in Beijing

A Great Missionary Age (c. 1800-1912)

Protestant evangelical Christianity was introduced by Western missionaries, and tens of thousands of Chinese converted.

The missionaries set up numerous schools and hospitals, educating tens of thousands of students and educating doctors and nurses in Western medicine. They also set up colleges and universities. See more on Christianity in China.

Emperor Daoguang (ruled 1821-1851) - War with Europe

The Trade Wars and Opium Wars (1838, 1854)

In the 1800s, Europeans easily defeated the Qing army and navy, and forced the Qing to give them trading ports.

The British wanted greater Qing Empire trade, but the Qing court wanted to keep out British opium and influence. Britain defeated China twice in 1838 and 1854 (the Opium Wars) to force trade treaties, and gained Hong Kong until 1997 under the Treaty of Nanking of 1842.

Emperor Xianfeng (ruled 1851-1861) - Many Rebellions Started

From 1796 until the end of the dynastic era, the Qing court faced rebellion after rebellion, but they defeated or thwarted all of them. This was however at great cost to the population and the Qing grip on power.

The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) - 25,000,000 Died!

The leader of the Taiping Rebellion was Hong Xiuquan. His quasi-Christian movement had some forward-thinking ideals which the Qing Dynasty disagreed with (he banned slavery, men using concubines, arranged marriages, opium use, foot binding, torture, and the worship of idols, and he wanted women to have more equality in society).

He made Nanjing his capital, and his army seemed ready to attack Beijing. However, Britain and France sent troops to aid the Qing army. In 13 years, about 25 million people died. It is thought to be the second bloodiest war in history after WWII.

3 More Rebellions and Wars (1854-1873)

The Miao people also rebelled in Guizhou. It is thought that millions of people were killed in two wars around 1800 and from 1854 to 1873.

The Hakka people and the Punti people in the southeast fought a long ethnic war between the years 1855 and 1867.

The Panthay Rebellion was a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan that lasted from 1855 to 1873, in which about a million people died.

Empress Dowager Cixi (ruled 1861-1908)

Empress Dowager Cixi's son (Emperor Tongzhi) "reigned" from 1862 to 1874, and her nephew (Emperor Guangxu) "ruled" from 1875 to 1908. But it is said that she was the real ruler during this long and crucial period of time.

How Cixi Gained and Retained Power

Tens of millions in navy funds were diverted by Empress Dowager Cixi to rebuild the Summer Palace.

The Empress Dowager (1835-1908) started to rule after British and French troops attacked Beijing and destroyed the Summer Palace in 1860. It's said that Emperor Xianfeng then fell into a depression, and as a result died in 1861, making Cixi (his concubine and son's mother) an empress dowager to help his son rule.

To maintain and gain power at the top, Cixi was ruthless in a dangerous court situation where assassinations and plots were the way of life. She had to maintain the traditional system, although this cost millions of lives and kept the empire from progressing.

Muslim's Revolt in the North (1864-1877) - Millions Killed

With several other large rebellions and wars happening around the Qing Empire, the Dungan Revolt involved a large region in the central north.

It was partly a war between three Muslim sects, aiming to establish a regional Muslim kingdom. However, many Muslims fought with the Qing army, who cleared the Gansu Corridor of Muslims to prevent Muslims in Xinjiang and central China uniting. Several million people were killed.

Huge Famines (1876-1879 and 1907) - Around 35,000,000 Died

The Northern Chinese Famine killed about 10 percent of the population of several northern provinces. The great disaster and little aid provided by the Qing government made the people even more discontented with the Qing Dynasty.

The 1907 Chinese Famine killed about 25 million people. These were two of the biggest famines in world history.

The Great Yellow River Flood (1887) Killed 1-2 Million

Big floods helped to weaken the Qing dynasty. One of the world's biggest natural disasters was the Yellow River flood of 1887. It is thought that between 1 to 2 million people died.

Loss of the Mandate of Heaven

The Chinese believed that Heaven (worshipped at the Temple of Heaven) would show when a dynasty was to end, and no longer had the support of Heaven, by natural omens like famines, floods, and earthquakes. This belief caused increasing unrest in the empire.

Economic Crisis in the Late 1800s

After the rebellions and wars in the middle 1800s, and the natural disasters in the late 1800s, the survivors faced foreign economic competition with little outside scientific knowledge. Due to modernization and imports like cotton clothes, a lot of people lost their work. Railroads and some early factories made traditional (e.g. canal) work obsolete.

By 1900 it's said imports were worth four times more than exports, in sharp contrast to the Qing Golden Era when Chinese products were highly valued worldwide.

The Japanese Took Taiwan and Liaoning (1894-5)

The Japanese modernized remarkably quickly in the latter part of the 19th century, and started to attack the Qing Empire and take territories for colonies.

The Qing Dynasty lost the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), and the Japanese made Formosa (Taiwan) and Liaoning (the northeast corner of China, i.e. Manchuria, once the Manchu homeland) a part of their empire. Taiwan became an industrial colony.

Emperor Guangxu Imprisoned by Cixi (1898)

In 1898, the Empress Dowager blocked her nephew from reforming the government and imprisoned him. He died from arsenic poisoning in 1908. People suspect that Cixi killed him the day before she died. Some suspect she was poisoned too.

The Boxer Rebellion (1900)

In 1900, a rebellion started among the poor, led by people who studied martial arts, so it was called the Boxer Rebellion. At first their goal was to overthrow the government and expel or kill foreigners. But Cixi supported the movement secretly, so the leaders supported the Qing Dynasty.

Tsinghua University

It became an anti-Christian movement, with tens of thousands of converts killed and tortured. Then Cixi declared war on foreigners, and the Boxers marched against the foreigners in Beijing. Foreign armies then defeated the Qing troops and the Boxers.

The Origin of "China's Harvard"

The US sent a detachment of troops in the war against the Boxers, and the Qing court was forced to pay war reparations to the US. The US used these funds to build Tsinghua University, now China's top-ranking institution.

The Last Emperor (presided 1908-1912)

In 1908, when Cixi and the emperor suddenly died, Puyi became "the last emperor" - 2-year-old Emperor Xuantong. The empire's official ruler was a prince regent Zaifeng, Puyi's father.

The Rise of the Republican Revolution (1911-1912)

In the early 1900s, Sun Yatsen had traveled around the world to organize a revolution against the Qing Dynasty. His uprising succeeded relatively bloodlessly in 1911, and Sun Yatsen became the first president. The capital of the new government was in Nanjing.

Sun Yatsen wanted to implement a republican constitution, but this never happened. Sun Yatsen stepped down to allow a Qing general named Yuan Shikai to be president. In this way, the Qing Empire ended in 1912, and so began the turbulent Republic of China era.

Qing Dynasty Sights and Tours

Beijing was the Qing Dynasty capital for 268 years. Most of the Qing Dynasty highlights are there. These include:

There are many other Beijing tours available to suit a variety of interests, time frames, and budgets. If you can't see exactly what you want, you can customize a tour or use our tailor-made service.

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Qing Dynasty History, Key Events of China's Last Dynasty

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The Forbidden City was the imperial palace of the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) was the last Chinese dynasty, and the longest dynasty ruled by foreigners (the Manchus from Manchuria, northeast of the Great Wall). The Qing Dynasty had the most overseas contact, though it was mostly resisted.