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VOICE_OF_CHINA

                                             June 03, 2013

   From Peter Kwong's
   "The New Chinatown", p.17:

                                          This was a
                                          green tab...     TABS


"As early as the seventh century Canton was an
important international port for Arabic, Jewish,
Singhalese, Indonesian and Persian traders who
came to buy Chinese slaves as well as silk,
porcelin, and other goods.  In the sixteenth
century, European traders began to arrive.  Later
the Ch'ing government (1644-1911) restricted all
foreign trade to the port of Canton, in order to
keep foreigners as far as possible from Peking."


Something about that strikes me as funny:
the reason that a voice like Jackie Chan
has come to represent China to the world    But then, if my idea
is their decision to hide from the world    here is that China is
to protect their own purity.                isolated and insular from
                                            The World, that's
   Whatver it's intent, the                 increasingly looking like
   Ch'ing government certainly              a parochial view in
   did not intend to boost                  itself: it would be easy
   Canton's prominence...                   to argue that China is
                                            The World, and I'm off in
                                            a little bubble called
                                            The United States.







    In any case, it's a
    question, like many other
    questions, I leave for
    future work: was the
    Ch'ing government being
    simple-minded in their
    isolationist policy, or
    did it in some sense
    "work"?  Was Chinese
    culture preserved by
    keeping the connectivity           CONNECTIVITY
    tuned down by using Canton
    as an intermediary?

                                           This might be compared to the
                                           strategy of using obudsmen/
                                           mouth-pieces/lieutenants,
                                           though "saving time" is not
                                           the primary goal.




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