Extra Credits
Published on 6 Oct 2018When Islam arrived in Indonesia, life changed — except within Majapahit, where court drama kept them focused on themselves and unaware of the visits and alliances between Admiral Zheng He and the Sultanate of Malacca — forming new powers in the southern seas.
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As we finished this episode, an even more devastating earthquake and tsunami struck the island of Sulawesi. Once again we’ve linked two fundraising efforts—one international aid organization, and another for a local effort. Any help would be deeply appreciated.
https://secure2.oxfamamerica.org/page…
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October 9, 2018
Kingdom of Majapahit – Changing Winds – Extra History – #5
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October 7, 2018
Poland Falls and China Rises – WW2 – 006 October 6 1939
World War Two
Published on 6 Oct 2018In the West, the sun sets on Poland as the last forces surrender, but her defenders are already regrouping abroad. In the East, the sun rises on China as Japan meets yet another defeat.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Ben Ollerenshaw & Spartacus Olsson
Trainee Editors: Sarvesh and Ben Ollerenshaw
Colorized Pictures by Spartacus OlssonColorized pictures by:
Mikołaj Kaczmarek – Kolor Historii https://www.facebook.com/KolorHistorii/
Olga Shirnina – Klimbim https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com
NormanStewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Spartacus OlssonArchive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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September 25, 2018
China’s anti-Japanese attitudes
From the time that Japan broke out of its self-imposed isolation in the late 19th century, China has been one of its main targets, first for military action and more recently for economic expansion and competition. Japan’s reputation in China would have been bad enough even without the Japanese Imperial presence in large portions of China from 1937 through 1945, but the wounds from the Second Sino-Japanese War have never healed.
Last week, Nick Taber reported on some surprisingly intense anti-Japanese sentiments he encountered in China:
In 2017 in a rust-belt city in Northeast China I hopped in a taxi and began chatting with my driver who, when the conversation turned to politics, nonchalantly told me that he wished that the Chinese Government would kill every single Japanese person on the planet. I found this extreme to say the least, so I double-checked just in case my Chinese was failing me, “You mean kill every single Japanese man, woman, and child?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said.
Guessing by his apparent age I wrote my driver off as a fringe extremist whose possibly restricted worldview was likely shaped during the throes of the Cultural Revolution. I presumed that the vast majority of Chinese people today would decisively denounce this kind of violent sentiment of genocide. This presumption was wrong.
Chinese genocidal hatred against the Japanese simply cannot be dismissed as the bigotry of a nationalist fringe movement. Anti-Japanese sentiment is in fact so engrained in Chinese culture that it has become not only a political utility and form of patriotism but even a solid go-to branding opportunity.
The CEO of a major company in Hebei province sets his username on Weibo (China’s Twitter) to “killer of Japanese devils” and likewise a news anchor of a regional TV station sets his Weibo username to “destroy Japanese devils.” Weibo also has hundreds of users with the phrase “bomb Japan” in their username, and after a devastating 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck Osaka in June, the natural disaster began trending on Weibo with a large number of Chinese netizens lamenting that more Japanese people had not been killed. As one user put it, “The whole nation of Japan should perish as soon as possible. It’s an evil race that has infuriated god.”
Certainly not all Chinese hold such genocidal or hateful views. There is a sizeable minority that even frown upon these views and a growing number of more internationally-minded Chinese who have Japanese friends or study in Japan so are at the very least suspicious of this hate. Some Chinese even see this sentiment, in part, as a product of government propaganda and brainwashing. As The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages uncertainty over the future of its leadership, it exploits nationalism to boost its popularity and the painful memories of WWII anti-Japanese sentiment provides a relatively low-cost, high-yield opportunity for this purpose.
Chinese citizens who do openly support Japan in any way, shape, or form also risk being seen as traitors. Another user commenting on the Osaka tragedy remarked, “Any Chinese people in Osaka right now travelling or shopping? They should be buried together with the Japanese”.
In 2017, the China Badminton Super League told their own Lin Dan, the number one badminton champion in the world, that he would be forbidden from competing in the playoffs because he had a sponsorship contract with the Japanese sports brand Yonex. In 2012, the Chinese actress Li Bingbing refused to travel to Japan to promote her film, Resident Evil 5, saying that she “personally cannot handle it emotionally”.
The origin of China’s anti-Japanese sentiment lies in the Chinese theater of World War II when the Imperial Japanese Army committed scores of harrowing war crimes on Chinese soil including the mass killing of civilians, sexual slavery, human experimentation, and cannibalism that resulted in the deaths of 10 to 20 million Chinese people.
Bodies of victims along Qinhuai River out of Nanjing’s west gate during Nanjing Massacre.
Detail of original photo by Moriyasu Murase, 村瀬守保 via Wikimedia Commons.
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September 23, 2018
How to use the stock market as a scorecard during a trade war
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains how even the financial journalists at Fortune are misunderstanding what the changes in stock market values mean during Trump’s ongoing trade disputes with China:
… how stock markets react is not a good guide to the positive effects of tariffs. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s a much better guide to how we’re all getting screwed by tariffs. That is, the better the US stock market does the more evidence we’ve got of the bad effects of tariffs and a trade war.
Think on it. Why is Trump imposing tariffs? To protect American business from competition by those dastardly foreigners. Who loses in the absence of competition from the Yellow Peril? Those American consumers who would have bought those better/cheaper Chinese goods if they were able to. Who gains from tariffs? American businesses who can now gouge the American consumer a little more in the absence of those items imported from East Asia.
So, a rise in the US stock market is a guide to how much more profit American business can screw out of the American public. It’s a measure, a reasonably good and precise one too, of how much we the people are losing from the trade war and tariffs. More exactly, it’s the capitalised value of the ongoing losses we’re suffering from this restriction of our choices, the competition those who supply us face.
That is, the better the stock market performance the higher those costs and the more we’re losing the trade war. That is, as long as you accept that it is consumers, not producers, that matter, but then that’s the standard economic assumption ever since Adam Smith even if it gets lost in Washington DC often enough.
The US stock market rising in response to US tariffs is evidence of the losses from tariffs, not the gains.
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September 18, 2018
Kingdom of Majapahit – Wrath of the Khan – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 15 Sep 2018The Mongols came to the island of Java — the King of Singhasari had defied them for too long. But by the time they got there, the king had died, and instead someone claiming to be his stepson, Raden Vijaya, promised to be their vassal. The Mongol forces were in for quite a surprise.
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September 6, 2018
Feature History – Chinese Civil War
Feature History
Published on 25 Jul 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring a civil war that done happened in China.
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I do the research, writing, narration, art, and animation. Yes, it is very lonely
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August 23, 2018
It’s quite possible to spend too much on infrastructure
Tim Worstall on the recent cancellation of two large Chinese infrastructure projects in Malaysia:
A working mantra of our times is that we should all be building much, much, more infrastructure. And that it should be government telling us where and what should be built, even going and building it. All of which rather runs into that brick wall of what is happening with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Yes, it’s entirely true that the old Silk Road was a useful and enriching trade route. It’s equally obvious that other trade routes have had the same effect, enriching. That is not though the same as the statement that building a trade link enriches. A trade route which is used does, one that is built still has to be used to enrich anyone other than the constructors who make off with their pay. The measure of whether the Belt and Road Initiative enriches is whether it is used, not whether it is built.
This being something that the planners in China have forgotten. Just as our own home grown ones fail to note our own past problems. The Humber Bridge never even paid back the cost of building it, let alone the interest upon it. Infrastructure doesn’t, necessarily, pay for itself. It is that upon which grand plans fail.
[…]
That it’s too expensive means that it’s not going to make money, not even meet its construction costs. And therefore it shouldn’t be built anyway, should it? Why spend more to build a railway than the benefit to be gained by having a railway? That’s just a waste of resources.
All of which is useful for our own infrastructure fetishists. It’s only if the new stuff is used that it can be worth building it. So, only build that which will be used, not whatever crosses those pretty little synapses of yours. Why, we might even insist that private economic actors put their own money at risk in order to concentrate minds on that very issue, of whether what is to be built will get used. Leave government planning out of it that is, in order to see what is worth building.
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August 20, 2018
The Opium War
In Quillette, Jeffrey Chen reviews Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War:
The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the ‘Opium War,’ was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald; within months it would be echoed across the benches of Parliament and across the carronades of the fleet sent to punish the Chinese crackdown on British trade.
The war’s nomenclature revealed from the beginning the multivalent views the British public held towards the war: it was at once the “unjust and iniquitous” Opium War — to use Gladstone’s well-known phrase — as well as the patriotic ‘China War,’ as its proponents wanted it to be called. The historiography of the war is similarly divided among varied lines. Some see the war as reflective of China’s failure to catch up to Western technologies; others emphasize the British desire to avenge their slighted national honour as the prime motive for the conflict. A wide array of scholars have placed a central focus on the role of opium, while some prefer to see the war in the context of imperial and economic expansion. Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War is a worthy addition to these voices.
Chen’s portrait of the Opium War places the role of British traders and their lobbying efforts in the foreground by arguing that it was British knowledge of China, as transmitted via the merchant class, that contributed to the ‘making’ (in the sense of both manufacture and execution) of the war. Chen asserts that it was the decade-long campaign of bellicose editorials and pamphlets on the part of the Canton merchant intelligentsia, as well as an accumulation of knowledge on the details of China’s coastal defences and overall military strength, that made it possible for Britain to both conceive of and win the war. The book casts, as its main actors, the ‘Warlike Party,’ a group of British merchants in Canton who lobbied for military intervention to expand the Canton System of trade, and the ‘Pacific Party,’ who opposed the war and criticised the diffusion of opium as an illicit and immoral drug. By narrowing his focus towards the production of knowledge, Chen also elevates the importance of language. A chapter of the book is devoted to a summary of the ‘Barbarian’ controversy – the disagreements and narratives spun around the British choice in translating the Chinese character 夷 (Yí) as ‘Barbarian,’ rather than ‘Foreigner.’
Chen’s account is thus of a battle as much between China and Britain as an internal conflict within the British public sphere. Though Chen is careful to nuance his depiction of the war by overlaying the many causal factors detailed by existing scholarship, his book makes two main arguments, which, in the words of the author, are new to the field: firstly, that the decisive factor in the war’s escalation was due to the machinations of the Warlike Party; and secondly, that the Canton System represented a ‘soft border’ through which the British were able to secure intelligence on the Qing state, without a reciprocal exchange of knowledge.
Written in engaging, lucid prose that presents its ideas clearly, if repetitively, Chen’s monograph is studded with riveting selections of his primary source research, drawn from the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge’s Jardine & Matheson archive. These quotations are often reproduced at generous length from the Warlike Party’s Canton Register and the Pacific Party’s Canton Press, and they provide a revealing account of the vigorous rhetorical strategies employed by the two camps.
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July 27, 2018
“Tariffs are the classic example of government interventions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs”
Robert Higgs on what he describes its supporters as “waging the trade war to end all trade wars”:
… even as Trump spouts venerable fallacies to justify and seek support for his destructive trade policies and related ad hoc actions, he and his supporters have sometimes offered a strange defense of their tactics: they purport to be seeking, at the end of the game, universal free trade, a world in which all countries have abandoned tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and other government intrusions in international exchange. In Wilsonian terms, they claim to be waging the trade war to end all trade wars. The idea is that by raising U.S. tariffs, they will induce other governments to lower and ultimately eliminate their own.
Of course, this rationale may be nothing more than wily claptrap, tossed out as a rhetorical bone to Republicans who favor freer trade. The administration’s actions to date certainly give no indication that it is aiming at global free trade. On the contrary. So the Wilsonian gambit may consist of nothing but hot air.
But if Trump and his trade advisers actually take this tactic seriously, they are deluding themselves.
First, and surely obviously, U.S. tariff increases will not induce other governments to lower their own, but to raise them, as the EU, China, Mexico, Canada, and other trading partners have already demonstrated. That’s why it’s called a trade war — because the “enemy” shoots back. History has shown repeatedly, most notably in the early 1930s, in the wake of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, that such trade wars only spiral downward, choking off more and more trade, despoiling the international division of labor in accordance with comparative advantage, and thereby diminishing real income in all the trading countries.
Second, the prospect of the U.S. government’s ever abandoning tariffs is slim to none. Tariffs are the classic example of government interventions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. This character makes them attract great support from protected special interests and little opposition from the general public — including other producers — when they are enacted or extended. They are easy for politicians to put in place and diabolically difficult for anyone to eliminate. Although the costs are great — much greater than the benefits for the economy as a whole — hardly anyone’s costs are great enough to justify mounting a potent political attack on the tariffs.
People who get tariffs put in place to protect them in the first place are well positioned to marshal strong opposition to any political attempt to eliminate these taxes on consumers who buy from competing, foreign suppliers. Consumers rarely know anything about why foreign goods are priced as they are, and producers, in general, are usually not affected enough by tariffs on imported raw materials and components to justify well-funded politicking against them.
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July 9, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Emergence – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 7 Jul 2018Between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population died in 18 months when the flu first tried to take over the world. In today’s episode we explore the flu outbreak’s origins from military camps across the United States and Canada.
The flu was the first modern plague — turning our interconnected world against us by spreading through shipping lanes, rail lines and the arteries of industrialized war. Yet it was also the first pandemic of the scientific age, where doctors could to some extent understand what was happening and stand against the infection, though they lacked the tools to stop it. Also, say hello to the voice of “professor” Matt!
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June 13, 2018
May 22, 2018
The Fightinest Marine – Dan Daly I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 21 May 2018Dan Daly was one of only two Marines to be awarded Medals of Honor in two separate conflicts. The first, for his actions in 1901 during the China relief. His second, for his actions during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915. But he wasn’t done yet and after the U.S. entry into WW1 in April 1917, he was close to receiving his third one on the battlefield of Belleau Wood in France.
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A variant factor in Chinese economic statistics
I’ve long been on the record as not trusting Chinese government statistics (some examples here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but this is a twist I hadn’t previously noticed:
A useful and basic rule of thumb about international economic statistics. Never, but just never, believe nor pay attention to anything about the Chinese economy for the first quarter of the year. No, this isn’t because our inscrutable bretheren dissemble more or less at this time of year, it’s not because their statisticians spend January drunk or hungover (unlike our own), it’s because the Chinese New Year obeys its own little calendar.
The modern Chinese New Year begins on the first new moon between January 21st and February 20th. Earlier calendar systems were more complicated:
Chinese five phases and four seasons calendar, used during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 BC-256 BC).
Image by Orienomesh-w, via Wikimedia Commons.
Well, OK, so if this was a western country that really celebrated the New Year (say, Scotland) then everyone would be back at work 48 hours later. However, the Chinese New Year is also the start of the two week holiday. Sorta a mixture between American Thanksgiving (you WILL eat at your mother’s table or a close simulacrum of it) plus a Wakes Week (English industrial towns would shut every single factory so that all could get away to the beach for a week. Well, beach not so much, Skegness maybe). The combination of the two means that near every factory in the country shuts for a couple of weeks as the largest migration in history takes place. All those migrant workers heading back to Mom’s dumplings.
If this all took place at the same time each year then our economic statistics would take account of it just fine with our seasonal adjustments. Just like we do with Christmas. We know very well that hundreds of thousands get hired for temporary jobs packing and delivering just before, get laid off immediately afterwards. We don’t see that reflected in the unemployment numbers because we’re not interested. We want to see trends, not known seasonal variations. So too with output and all that – many European factories do close in that week after Christmas. We don’t measure a drop in GDP then because we know about it therefore ignore it.
So Chinese official economic statistics are even less likely to correspond to reality during the first quarter than at any other time of the year.
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Feature History – Opium Wars
Feature History
Published on 19 Oct 2016Welcome to Feature History, featuring the Opium Wars, western imperialism, and this fancy new intro and vignette.
The super sexy stuff like animation, voice, and script are all by the super sexy me.
The music is Anamalie and Clash Defiant, both by Kevin MacLeod
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Feature_History
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May 14, 2018
China launches the second Type 001 aircraft carrier (Type 001A)
In the New York Times, Steven Lee Myers reports on the newest People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) aircraft carrier departing from Dalian to undergo its initial sea trials:
China’s Type 001A aircraft carrier shortly after launch, 17 August 2017.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
China launched its first domestically built aircraft carrier to begin sea trials on Sunday, reaching another milestone in the expansion of the country’s navy.
The aircraft carrier, as yet unnamed, left its berth at a shipyard in the northeastern port of Dalian after a blow of its horn and a display of fireworks, according to reports in state news media.
The Chinese Navy — officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy — already has one operational carrier, the Liaoning, which it bought unfinished from Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That ship joined the Chinese fleet in 2012 and began its first operations four years later, putting China in the small group of seafaring powers that maintain aircraft carriers, led by the United States, which has 11.
The Liaoning, which appears to serve as a training vessel as much as a combat ship, was the centerpiece of a naval parade of 48 ships attended last month by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The following week, it led a carrier battle group in live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait and in the East China Sea.
Since taking office, Mr. Xi has driven an ambitious effort to modernize the country’s military, reducing the traditional focus on readying the ground forces of the People’s Liberation Army to defend against an invasion of the mainland and increasing the emphasis on technology-dependent naval, air and missile forces.
The new carrier, built by the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company, has a similar design to the Liaoning but has been modified and expanded, according to Chinese and foreign experts.
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