Asia’s past unmasks PRC hegemony
By Jerome Keating
In 2013, when China first promoted its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and later its Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI), there was a haunting deja vu feeling about it. There still is.
The world, but especially East Asia, needs to look back to June 29, 1940, when Japan made a similar announcement of a grand, idealistic plan for the region: the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
On the surface, the plan seemed perfect for the needs of the region. It would free East Asia from Dutch, French and British colonialism, and all the newly formed nations would prosper under the guidance of Japan.
SPEAKING ON THE CLIMAX of his 1984 period piece Shanghai Blues, which ends on a Hong Kong–bound train from Shanghai, the Saigon-born, Hong Kong–based filmmaker Tsui Hark offered that the Chinese “are caught in something like a migrating curse, moving from one place to another.”On the face of it, Tsui’s cinema, with its staccato editing and pop sensibility, might seem to have little to do with that of Jia Zhangke, who has been the most prominent Mainland Chinese filmmaker on the festival circuit since his first feature, Pickpocket, played the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998 the title
The Kinmen and Matsu challenge
By Jerome Keating
Chiseled into rock in Kinmen County’s Jinhu Township (金湖) are the Chinese characters for one of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) favorite memes. Translated they read: “Remember our days at Ju” (毋忘在莒), referencing the Warring States period when the armies of the state of Qi were forced to retreat to the city of Ju. Once there, they regrouped and returned to regain their lost territory.
That meme serves as an important yet also an ironic reference in understanding the “limbo state” of Taiwan and why it needs to break its nebulous past with Kinmen and Matsu.
By Sam Jacobs web posted May 24, 2021
“It can’t happen here” is a political cliche in the United States. Regardless of your personal viewpoint, there is a vast swath of the American population who simply do not believe in the possibility of any kind of totalitarianism in the United States.
It’s worth noting that throughout history, in virtually every place that totalitarian regimes have arisen, the residents of these countries felt the same way. Russia was seen as too traditional and backward, the power of the Czar too entrenched to be defeated. Germany had been viewed throughout most of the modern period as the home of