You do not appease bullies who are waging a trade war and a cold war against you. The sooner we are shot of China the better. To hell with what 'exes'' has-beens, and multi-billionaires say. We should not even be discussing the madness of China and it's childish refusal to speak to Ministers. Australia is not the only country being harassed and insulted by China. We have an excellent reputation globally. We have many friends. China has many enemies.

A sensible article that should be needed.

It's all about China resisting containment of its imperial expansionism.

Australia is just its whipping boy to send a message to the other more powerful nations that there will be a price to pay if anyone attempts to block China's aims to annex parts of East Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.

If China gets it's way it will be a step towards a major war later. China must be contained forever FULL STOP

Granting a 99 year lease to a significant portion of Keswick Island off Queensland to China is the latest piece of Australian stupidity that will further convince the CCP that Australia is led by morons whom they can treat anyway they wish.

The inhabitants of the island have been adversely affected by the idiocy of allowing a country we are involved in cold and trade wars with to virtually own, certainly occupy, a piece of Queensland. The island residents have lost services and facilities, living standards downgraded, because of this madness. Their lives and well-being have been affected by Communist China. And this is happening in Australia to Australians! It is believed that the Chinese are in breach of their lease, but the Queensland government is doing nothing about it.

In the meantime, the Federal Parliament is dithering over a bill that would see it having control of this sort of nonsense, which is really a foreign affairs matter, hijacked by piss ant state governments. Who knows what will happen, particularly with our all-mouth-and-trousers Prime Minister.

Have to agree with ttbn! And something we needed to do long before this chill. Sadly our Leaders never listen save to make rebuttals. That has worked well, hasn't it?
Alan B.

The Chinese problem is Tianxia, the concept that China is the only
sovereign country. All other countries are vassal states.
We got in their bad books because we questioned the origin of convir19.
Vassal states do not question the Central Kingdom.
There is no way to fix this problem and until our politicians and
business people understand that we are just flapping around.
The only way out is to cut off China altogether.
We could start by banning export of iron ore.
Certainly that will be very painful but not as painful as giving in
to the Chinese demands.
Some months back Pres Xi Jing Ping stated that the USA is not a sovereign country.
The definition of what is a sovereign country was set in 1698 at the
Treaty of Westphalia. China was not at that conference and does not
recognise it or any of it decisions.

Looking at all the actions that China has made just in recent years,
Tibet, India, Sth China Sea, East China Sea, pressure applied to other
countries by means trade bans, financial traps etc it has the hallmark of Tianxia.

Their membership of the UN is probably against their real belief in
their view of their position in the world.

it was always obvious relying on China would be a disaster.

Whereas a university editor told me over ten years ago I was too critical of China, where were the academics and politicians calling Australia's reliance on the CCP out?

They were largely nowhere to be seen. ….heads

Something about eggs and baskets I believe.

....the latest piece of Australian stupidity that will further convince the CCP that Australia is led by morons...
ttbn,
Australian or Australian bureaucrats ? The two are vastly different ! Still, where's the Media now ? Shouldn't they tell us who these corrupt officials are who allow this ?
Anyone remember the Darwin Harbour lease ? Whatyever happened to the charge of Treason ?

individual,

This might make you happy:

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/calls-to-boycott-all-chineseowned-companies-in-australia-grow/news-story/b1e9acf88ed982da54d333038cf5d576

After seeing this I'm definitely getting away from Energy Australia. Low-life Chinese parasites!

Chris. Been arguing that very case for far longer! Made the same case when Tony Delroy ran nightline. Said I'd walk/roller skate, backwards to Burke, it's all downhill from here, if China wasn't the largest economy inside a decade. But what would I know?

Incidentally was poo-whooed by all and sundry back then for those views and advice to seriously diversify our trade partners.

As always with some folk, bag the hell outa China with the left hand while the right claw was extended for their blood money!

Now we are finding out how much it's going to cost us for the recalcitrance of quisling politicians.

There'll be the usual thundering at the dispatch box but none of the reform that would break this nexus!

It's not as I and others haven't laid all out there, while the good advice was routinely ignored in favour of rorts and welfare for the rich as opposed to the very reform I've been shouting from the rooftop!

Corrupt pollies were ignoring it, in plain sight, in favour of buying their votes with our money. Others just didn't give a rats as long as they did alright, as they and our politicians (warm and comfortable frogs in water being slowly brought to the boil) sleepwalked toward this very outcome and worse! As they played the endless power game as if that was the only game in town!?

And aided and abetted by those "mugs out there in mugsville" who've been played as if they were pianos! You'll had your chance to vote for something else, something better/real reform/future vision!
Alan B.

So, what now ? Was Pauline Hanson still so wrong & racist ? Only leftist do-gooders please reply !

The silence of the progressive regressors is deafening !

individual,

Where have all the pro-China advocates disappeared?

All on the back foot I assume.

Well at least we can say WE TOLD YOU SO.

The sad part is Soot and Dazza's gal are still intent on flooding the country with cashed up Chinese whose first loyalty will always be to their ancestral homeland.

But no use closing the gate now. All we can do now is count the days while we wait for the attack to start. You know how that equation goes:

IRON ORE = MISSILES + ATTACK

First we had Pig Iron Bob, now we have Iron Ore Scott.

Joke of the week:

A Chinese Communist Party tabloid editor has called Australia "the most unfriendly country beside the US".

Unfriendly? Even thought the Morrison government has been bending over backwards to please China, and allowing it to buy up large lumps of Australian land, industries; pinch classified information and buy up businesses and baby formula, and constantly insult us.

Nothing but total subjugation will please totalitarian China. They don't want us to be friendly. They don't know the meaning of the word.

Anyone old enough to remember how the Progressives & several Conservatives ganged-up on Hanson & her supporters when she warned us of exactly what's happening now ?

individual,

And what about poor old Mr Opinion?

How long has Mr Opinion been warning everyone not to trust the Chinese?

What if the Chinese get the Australian courts to incarcerate Mr Opinion for thinking bad things about the Chinese?

PS Mr Opinion's use of Chinese refers to the nation-state of China and not the likes of Mr Bau Wau and Miss Me Au at the local laundromat.

The Chinese aren't doing anything wrong here, some Australians are !

Here come the Chiners:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-12/australia-recognised-threat-png-vulnerability-represents-china/12974846

Come on China, come on, come on
Come on China, come on, come on

It's a catchy little number, isn't it?

The anti-Chinese mythology in this sad little echo chamber is becoming increasingly hysterical! It seems you're all trying to outdo each other with your ever-exaggerated horror stories and doomsday predictions. A little perspective would go a long way, not that I expect it to make the least bit of difference to the misinformation being peddled here!
For starters, China is not buying up the country. China is our ninth largest foreign investor and accounts for only around 2% of total foreign investment in Australia. US, UK and Belgium investment accounts for more than 50%. If anyone 'owns' our country, it's certainly not the Chinese.
Secondly, China has long suffered US military aggression and incursion and is finally and very understandably starting to push back. And now, thanks to Morrison's chumming-up to Trump and our sycophantic mimicking of America's bully-boy tactics, we're also feeling the heat of China's impatience. Very few other countries have the same problems ... the vast majority have long maintained cordial and cooperative relationships with China.
Finally, China is not interested in invading Australia. Its long history clearly demonstrates it to be a peaceful nation, something which could never be said of our US ally.
Some of you need to seriously reflect on your racist and ignorant demonising of a country you clearly don't understand. If we needed any reminder of how puerile it all is, "Mr Bau Wau and Miss Me Au" certainly provided one!

Bronwyn,

We can all see that you belong to the pro-China camp.

Your knowledge of history seems faulty and I find it difficult to believe that you have a knowledge of world history that would allow you to form an accurate picture on the contemporary Chinese nation-state. In fact I doubt you would even understand what is meant by the term 'nation-state'.

That's exactly the patronising type of response I'd expect from you, Mr Opinionated! I'd have far more respect for you if you actually attempted to rebut the points I make, instead of just telling me I'm wrong. Any lazy prat can do that!

Bronwyn,

Who are you to call anyone here racist?

AS for your brief summary of one factor, FDI, that is really a very ordinary summary of the CCP's real and potential threats.

It is you that will be on the wrong side of history, as the Western world ultimately (and rightfully) unites to check the power aspirations of the CCP

Bronwyn. I find I have to agree with Mr Opinion. And that your extremely biased, Friend to China position is fundamentally flawed! Go migrate there if you are not already posting from there? We don't understand China? What's there to understand?

China will not tolerate our critique on anything, regardless of whether our information is factual! If It thinks it is going to bully boy Australia into accepting its human rights record or allow it to turn Australia into a Southern state of imperial China. It and you are very much mistaken!

The more that this approach is used the less likely we are to kiss and make up! We will just take our trade goods and commercial needs elsewhere.

As will many other democracies just needing half an excuse for doing likewise? Stop blaming us for your's and China's shortcomings! The lack of understanding is all yours and theirs.

We Aussies will always call a spade a spade without fear or favour or just how big and powerful the new bully on the block is! Get used to it!

We will not be economically blackmailed into submission! Ain't ever going to happen!

You have a nice day now you hear.
Alan B.

I would like to add to the statements by Chris Lewis and Alan B above by saying that I caught Stan Grant being interviewed this morning and he said that China is a problem because it is reasserting itself as the centre of the world in which it holds hegemony over all other nations and peoples and demands others to be subservient to China.

He cited Thucydides' to demonstrate how the China-US power struggle is played out between the two big powers and everyone else must bow to them.

Grant alluded that Australia should go with America because to go with China Australia will have to become just a vassal state of China.

Those in The Forum's pro-China camp like Bronwyn, Foul-Mouth, Foxy, Bazz, mhaze, etc. would have us go with China because it would be an expression of anti-racism, which is in line with their humanist agenda.

I say to those people 'Wake up! China is the problem."

"as the Western world ultimately (and rightfully) unites to check the power aspirations of the CCP", that's a bit grandiose there Chris. We just may be waking up a bit to late.

With the poms gone, I doubt the whole EU defense would be enough to beat ours. I guess they could throw broken windmill blades at the Chinese, fitting as that is where they came from. The poms just might whop us, but not by much, & the US depends on China for almost the total of the electronics required for their military to function.

The yank navy may still be able to contain the Chinese at the moment, but even if it can, it will only be until the Chinese made spare parts run out.

Much as I find it disgusting, I don't believe we have any option but to bite our tongue, unless we want to rapidly return to the stone age, & I ma not sure we have the skills to survive there.

Actually do we have the skills for anything other than to tap away at a keyboard or phone?

Hasbeen,

Yes, I believe the West will prevail.

If not, the world will divide into two spheres. International institutions will capitulate as western nations leave if the CCP gets its way.

Not sure what you are saying about typing an opinion? Are you saying I, or we, cant even talk about it.

Last thing Australia needs is obedience or quiet about the CCP, and every forum counts.

Hasbeen,

I think you underestimate the longstanding leadership of liberal democracies, albeit the US and UK have shown some decline.

The CCP response to Australia shows the many advanced liberal democracies just what to expect.

And I expect that the US and UK will be amongst the leading players that can uphold western leadership and what it offers to the world, despite major policy differences between the US and UK govts and others.

Then there are other major Western powers like France and Germany, as well as Japan and India.

Do you honestly think that this collective of major powers are going to sit back and let the CCP wipe the floor of such powerful competition? Very unlikely

And I doubt there will be a military conflict, as too much risk.

But, even if Chinese military might surpasses the US, the collective opposition will be more than a match to reduce such military risk.

The CCP will never have the ideological appeal to win over the world. All the CCP has is the right ingredients to be hated, notwithstanding the power of the purse it has with no democratic accountability.

If the whingers think US leadership was bad, heaven help them if the CCP surpasses the US one day.

It is a possibility I refuse to believe will happen

I think Hasbeen paints a pessimistic picture, but a depressingly accurate one.

The Chinese have recently achieved, without firing a single shot, what the Japanese failed to do in 1943, take control of New Guinea, and position themselves on our doorstep in the Torres Straights.

I think Hasbeen is overly optimistic, with his assessment of our military capability.

All will be lost by prevaricating whether or not China is a hostile threat. The sooner Australia declares China officially a hostile force, the more advantage we may salvage.

Dan

Chris Lewis dreams.

*... And I expect that the US and UK will be amongst the leading players that can uphold western leadership and what it offers to the world, despite major policy differences between the US and UK govts and others...*

With your choice of lame duck US president, I don’t think so.

Dan

<< It is you that will be on the wrong side of history, as the Western world ultimately (and rightfully) unites to check the power aspirations of the CCP >>
You write as though the West is only just now uniting to provide a 'check' to China. This is incorrect. The West has been intent on containing China for many decades now and has aggressively tightened the screws since O'Bama's so-called 'Pivot to Asia'. The US has China surrounded with over 400 military bases. It has missiles pointed at China and regularly sends warships and military drones into Chinese territory. Just imagine the furore if China attempted to do any of this to America? China's current assertiveness is a long overdue and totally unsurprising pushback against ever-increasing and invasive provocation from the West.
China has rarely invaded another country and none at all for over 40 years. Considering its long history, its border skirmishes and territorial claims have been few and far between. The US on the other hand has only had 5 years in its 240-year history where it hasn't been at war somewhere in the world. While there was a small number of Chinese incursions between 1950 and 1979, within that same time frame the US invaded or bombed dozens of countries and overthrew or attempted to overthrow dozens of foreign governments. Numerous countries the world over have been ravaged by Western greed and entitlement.
And BTW, I'm not in any 'pro-China camp'. I'm not in any camp and certainly not in one you might attempt to place me! I look at the history and the evidence and seek out fairness and truth. I don't agree with all that China does, far from it. But equally, I refuse to jump on the band-wagon and blindly demonise all things Chinese. China is not the dangerous imperialist force intent on taking over the world that you make it out to be. The West has done far more to exploit and destabilise the world than China ever has or is ever likely to.

Bronwyn,

You are definitely in the pro-China camp.

It's undeniable.

Australian greed has significantly aided in China's rise to power !

Spare parts can be made with 3D printers and recycled waste. What we need to allow that to happen/evolve is affordable energy!

And that energy is here now in the shape of fully operational plants, MSR's built inside super tanker ships which can be towed here from the Scandinavian shipyards that are building thee double-hulled factory-built, mass-produced floating 500 MW MSR's now under construction.

Build time for these is 12 months! And towed to what section of shoreline that'll serve. To generate electricity for around 1 cent PKWH! Buy several and send some folk over as apprentices we can set up here to help maintain these power plants inside relocatable double-hulled vessels!

See thorcon and Sars Lawson.

The problematic tritium from MSR thorium can be sequestered and used as fuel for fusion reactors once the electromagnetic Tor is strong enough to contain the 12,000,000C reaction. Yes, that is the actual heat involved and yes science can safely deal with that level, surface of the sun heat, now.
Alan B.

Don't know how far away successful operational fusion is. But I'll hazard a guess at around 20 years. and where deuterium and tritium will be the fuel of chioce.

<< You are definitely in the pro-China camp. >>

10/10 for attempted labelling and pigeon-holing
0/10 for intelligent rebuttal of opposing arguments

Bronwyn,

You let the cat out of the bag. We know whose side you're on.

Chris have you been following any of the stuff Boris Johnson is now pushing?

His rubbish is totally physically impossible, even if it is desirable, [doubtful], in anything like the time frame he is pushing. He sounds very much like a dill led by the scrotum. Either that, or he is a totally delusional twit. Expecting anything from the UK today is pointless.

Incidentally have you noticed what is leading France or Canada. Do you really think they could be of any use? It is obviously a race to collapse first.

With Biden the US will be like tits on a bull, of little if any use, & we are wasting what ever money we had on WW11 toy subs. Obviously the public in Canada, the UK, Oz & the US if Biden's election was true, have lost the plot, or such people as Turnbull & the others could never have been elected.

The more proof that Global Warming is a scam is produced in peer reviewed papers, the more elites jump on the gravy train. We are shot.

I have often wondered how great empires could collapse so quickly in the past, but now I am seeing it before my eyes. Every time in the past couple of decades those in authority have been needed they have failed. The defense force is about the only thing that has proved capable, & boy aren't the elites after that with a vengeance.

Yep the West is about shot. Thankfully I was lucky enough to live through the best of it.

I TOLD YOU SO ........... AGAIN

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/major-leak-exposes-members-and-lifts-the-lid-on-the-chinese-communist-party/ar-BB1bSHmJ?ocid=msedgntp

Loud-Mouth, how many of you Chiner plates are on the list?

..... how great empires could collapse so quickly ....
Hasbeen,
We can watch our civilisation disintegrate literally by the day. My take on this is that when people have it too good for too long the outcome is inevitable.
When educated "Experts" can override & indeed prohibit pragmatism & common sense then nothing stands in the way of disaster.
We constantly hear of how important education is & how valuable educated people are yet, policy-making etc is in the the hands of those educated people & look where things stand ??
Isn't it high time these people are moved aside & let pragmatists have time at the helm ?
The electorate would be pleasantly surprised at the economic & social change !
PC was a disastrous invention by the educated, let the pragmatists exercise common sense for a while !

Here's Soot's latest sales pitch to the Chiners to get coal back on the agenda:

http://www.facebook.com/theguardianaustralia/videos/scott-morrison-brings-a-chunk-of-coal-into-parliament-video/1272461879455562/

Let's all put our hands together for Soot and let's all chip in a few dollars to send Soot and company on a holiday to Hawaii in appreciation of his great effort.

here come the Chiners:

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/federal-government-has-been-blind-to-china-s-intentions/ar-BB1bUkPL?ocid=msedgntp

I TOLD YOU SO.

trouble is that Australian policy makers live in dreamland. They think they can have best of both worlds in economic and security terms.

Hopefully that kind of thinking is over.

No matter what you think of Coalition, Labor will be much worse when it comes to CCP.

Chris Lewis,

You keep blaming the CCP instead of blaming the Chinese nation-state.

How many members are there in the CCP?

How many people are there outside the CCP who support the CCP?

MR O, I will blame who I like, as is your right.

Don't assume you know everything; you don't.

Yours is just a opinion, as is mine.

If you think it is smart blaming the Chinese people, well that is your choice.

I choose to see things differently

Chris Lewis,

How many members are there in the CCP?

How many people are there outside the CCP who support the CCP?

Well China has now cranked up the game a notch or two.
They have called in BHP & Rio Tinto and put them on the mat.
They have been told their prices are too high and as the spot
price is too high also.
So they appear to be demanding that those companies must reduce their
prices.
Now if they did that would they fall under the Competition Rules and
be prosecuted ?
The Chinese are squealing so tighten the screws !

trouble is that Australian policy makers live in dreamland
Chris Lewis,
Yes and, this takes a long time to filter through just as it does now with Whitlam's policies !

Does anyone know if China has paid for the coal on those 60 to 80 ships ?
If it is FOB, then Australian sellers can say, tough tities its your
coal, ta ta and China will receive the dumarage charges from the ship owners.
If they don't pay the shipping companies they won't get anything anywhere.

Bazz,

If they don't obey China and lower the price to what China wants to pay then I guess China will just have to invade Australia in order to protect the supply of its natural resources.

Japan justified its invasion of SE Asia on that grounds so why shouldn't China do the same.

"Run for the hills folks! The Chiners are comin'"

When I was learning English, I heard that "I told you so" was a taboo phrase. So I won't say it but "Haven't you heard so?"
The Sino-Japanese relations have a much longer history. You might not believe it but "They (the Japanese) avoid criticism of China and accept meekly Chinese criticism of Japan, no matter how harsh or unfair...the Chinese have never reciprocated the warm feelings of the Japanese, viewing them with distrust and more than a little contempt. The Japanese nostalgia for China has been a classic case of unrequited love (Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese, 1978, p. 417.)"
I'll give a few out of million lies below.

The Senkaku Isles were Japanese for thousands of years. For a few instances of a Chinese thousand lies , Chinese envoys needed Japanese pilots on their way to and back home from Okinawa. Then ex-President Grant of the US went to Beijing on a sight-seeing trip. He was asked by Li Hongzhang to mediate between Japan and China, He came to Tokyo in July ,1879. He said that Japan could easily take Taiwan, that Taiwan, the Okinawan Islands and the Japanese Archipelago would encircle China and suggested that Japan cede some of the Okinawan Islands, After much deliberation Tokyo leaders agreed that Japan cede two island group, Yaejima including the now so-called Senkaku and Miyako. The Chinese were pleased and the two governments consulted about the treaty. Both agreed to a draft. The treaty waited for being signed. Then Cheb Baochen opposeed, saying that Japan was seriously concerned about the advancement of Russian imperialism and that China should wait because Japan would back down in time.
An international conference for peace with Japan was in the air. The Chinese expected to be invited. They thought what stance to take about the islands at the conference of "the Islands belonged to Japan or Taiwan" and met to discuss it in May, 1950, barely eight months after the establishment of their government. A ten-page document was prepared for it, throughout which pages the Japanese words Senkaku were used.
To be continued.

ECQFE announced in 1969 that billions of barrels of oil lay under the seabed of the Senkaku. In 1970 the US returned Okinawa, including the Senkaku, to Japan. Taiwan and China made no protest. In 1971 they started to say that the Senkaku Islands belonged to Taiwan or China.
Zhou Enlai said in July, 1972 to the chairman of a Japanese political party that Chinese historians got interested at the ECAFE's report, etc.

You might well think that postwar China was filled with enmity against the Japanese. No, the 1950s and 1960s were filled with vitriolic anti-American animosity; as strong anti-Russian hatred filled China in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout these decades no anti-Japanese feelings were found in China. On the contrary, the CCP wanted contact , particularly economic contact, with Japan. Japan and China signed a peace treaty in 1978, which started floods of grants, low-interest loans and transfers of technology from Japan to China. The Chinese economy that had been utterly ruined began to rise in a sharp, almost vertical curve. China was internationally isolated after the Tiananmen Protest. To make a big hole in the encirclement they wanted a visit of the Japanese emperor, Hirohito's son. Miyazawa, a liberal prime minister, sent the emperor and empress in 1992. In 1992 the CCP started the irrational anti-Japanese campaign or two reasons that they wanted to divert the people's wide spread frustration with its governance. Another reason was that it could cover up its anti -status quo rise, clothing it in a peaceful rise attire.

Onya Bronwyn

Some good points by you.

Its no coincidence that almost all who criticised you have been, up until this week, rabid Trump supporters.

Just started reading a book, The Coming Collapse of China by Gordon G Chang.
Reading the foreword he indicates that China is keeping out of
internal trouble by just pushing money into the economy.
He says that the rules that govern the rest of the worlds economy will
eventually exert their fundamental rules on China.
Chang says this collapse is only a few years away.

As I read it I might report on some of the points.

Bazz: We could start by banning export to China.
China had been an autarkical society, in a nutshell. But today it is heavily and inexorably dependent on foreign trade. We should take a discriminatory trade policy toward China. There is much wisdom and circumspection in the French woman who said, "I'll buy French pork, not Chinese pork, though I have to pay extra." Why should we engage in free trade with China when it wishes to impose its authoritarian Chinese values on the world?

Chris Lewis: I expect that the US and UK will among the leading players that can uphold western leadership and what it offers to the world.
I agree. But I don't think that the Western values will always attract many non-Western parts of the world. The so-called free world needs to walk delicately. F. Fukuyama's The End of History meant that history would end in victory of liberalism. It will not. The world is culturally deeply divided, and the cultural, political and religious divide will go on. I don't mean to say by this that the West is on the losing side. The West has more than enough to preserve its values and defend itself from intrusion of aliens and enough to help those who are suffering in many non-free parts of the world.

Browny: China is not interested in invading Australia. Its long history clearly demonstrates it to be a peaceful nation.
diver dan: China have recently achieved, without firing a shot, what the Japanese failed to do in 1943....
True, China is not interested in invading Australia. If it were, it would not attempt it because of the US's military might. But it is not and will not be respectful of Australian values and those of the free world. It will disregard them any time if it finds fit or necessary.
To be continued.

Browny and diver dan,

I'm afraid both you entertain the usual, popular version of Japanese history, very much prevalent but perverted. I think I know a little bit about a small number of important events in Japanese history. If you ask me, I think I can give you some answers.
Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan: The story of a Nation is a short introduction which gives a sharp outline.
Let me ask you a question. Many Chinese, Koreans and Japanese live in your country. Do you have any impression if Japanese are different from two others? Chinese and Korean societies are Confucian, Japanese society is not. Korean culture is more Confucian than Chinese culture is.
Gregory Clark, a son of the famous British-Australian economist Colin Clark, lives in Japan. He was asked by a Japanese newspaper around 2000 what was the single most important event that the human kind experienced in the past two thousand years AD. He said it was the rise and development of feudalism. Only two areas of the world saw it, Western Europe and Japan. Reischauer was emphatic on its importance to Japanese smooth transition to modern society

It is believed, mistakenly, that democracy was introduced to vanquished postwar Japan by the victorious US. Japan's constitution was proclaimed in 1889. Japan was developing democracy since then. The law for adult male suffrage was passed in 1925. Women's suffrage was discussed in prewar Japan. You could find everything that you see in postwar Japan in the 1920s' Japan.

The pivot for Japanese foreign policy was to keep friendly relations with Great Britain and the United States. The first treaty with a foreign country for Japan was with the United States, signed in 1854, the Japan-the United States Treaty of Amity. The first military treaty was with Great Britain, signed in 1902. The US-Japanese Security went into effect in 1952. It has been kept today. I heard that there was not a military alliance that lasted for such a long time in history.
To be continued.

Chris Lewis,

The Chinese Communist Party has 91 million members.

The Communist Youth League has 130 million members.

That's 221 million just in those two branches.

Let's add another 3 million in the PLA, making it 224 million.

Now we need to guess a few numbers.

Let's assume 15% of the population rely on their employment with the State bureaucracy. That would give us 225 million bringing it up to 449 million.

Now let's assume 20% of people need the CCP for employment / business outside of the above. That's another 300 million bringing the total to 749 million.

Now let's assume that another 20% are people who support the CCP because they are related to the above. That's another 300 million bringing a grand total of 1 billion people.

That's 68% of China's population support the CCP either directly or indirectly.

This is what I would call the heart and soul of the Chinese nation-state.

It's not exactly a bunch of old codgers like you would have us believe.

You are way off the mark when you tell us that only a handful of the Chinese people is supportive of the CCP.

When you criticise the CCP keep in mind that you are also criticising a total of 1 billion Chinese who will obey everything the CCP tells them to think and do.

Mr O, that is incredible research? You must have a lot of skills to make up figures like that.

We should also be ....ing ourselves.

But I, for one, am not.

Chris Lewis,

Apart from the figures for the CCP, Youth League and the PLA, the rest are guesstimates based on my knowledge of Chinese society (which I acquired doing two of my Arts degrees in anthropology and sociology.)

But if you think that they need adjustment then I'm willing to hear what you think they should be.

So please let me know what you think the figures should be.

Mr O, I am not in the business of making figures up.

I will leave that to you.

Chris Lewis,

You know my guesstimates are spot on.

Contemporary China is more than just the CCP. It is the nation-state defined by the political culture of the majority of its people, as I have shown above.

Stop making excuses for the actions of the Chinese nation-state by trying to mislead people that it is only the CCP that is capable of social and political action.

You probably blame just the Nazi Party for starting WW2 while disregarding the actions and beliefs of the 80 million Germans who supported Germany's militarism, invasions, and war crimes.

You seem to have a habit of focusing on the Chinese political elite while disregarding the Chinese nation-state for the damage China is now doing to Australia.

Are you an agent for the PRC trying to delude us into thinking that China is not the problem and it's really all the fault of a bunch of old codgers in the CCP who lack popular support?

MR O, give it a rest. The amusement of your comments has worn off. But keep trying to be a legend in your own lunchtime.

Hi Michi

I respect your very old age mate. But you are also a systemic apologist for Japan's 1930s-1940s hyper nationalist, anti-democratic, fascism.
__________________________

More on topic:

Here are some insights from a knowledgable Western anti-China source:

"This week, the Australian, Sky News Australia, and Britain’s Daily Mail all ran stories about a list of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members in Shanghai. The list, which appears to date to 2016, is an interesting data source for researchers. But the somewhat hysterical tone of the stories shows how easily unnecessary panic can be created, even about as serious an issue as CCP influence.

The stories described a “state-sponsored spy ring,” called the presence of party members in foreign firms “infiltration,” and presented the list as a dramatic new development. None of this is true.

The presence of CCP cells in Western companies operating branches in China is unremarkable. The party’s constitution requires companies with three or more members to form a cell. Cells are much less prevalent in foreign firms than in domestic firms. In the majority of cases, cell meetings are tedious box-ticking affairs, although they’ve increasingly become a tool of direct influence inside private business under President Xi Jinping. Foreign firms have raised concerns about party cells influencing business decisions under the new regime, but their presence is well known.

Equally, consulates and embassies have always been aware that some staff are CCP members, but that doesn’t make them any more of a risk than other local hires. All mainland Chinese citizens are subject to pressure to spy from state security forces, and foreign embassies recognize that. The Australian’s story claimed as a scoop that hiring for consulates in Shanghai goes through a government-run body. But this is the case in every Chinese city—for both consulates and foreign media—as it has been since they began operating in the People’s Republic of China."

MORE TO FOLLOW BELOW

FROM ABOVE

"Treating CCP membership as a sign of loyalty to the state is also dubious. People primarily join the party as a resume booster, often in university or soon after. There isn’t a way to leave, only to get kicked out."

The English-speaking, upper-middle-class staff of foreign companies are probably more likely to be party members than most people, simply because of the strata of society they often come from.

Questions of Chinese influence are going to be a major subject of debate over the next few years. There are real issues with Chinese influence in Australia and other Western countries, but they need to be discussed carefully. Drawing clear lines about what’s important or threatening, what is merely concerning, and what is hysterical or racist will be vital. Expect similar stories in the future—and be prepared to read them critically and with an eye for context."

ENDS

Do you have any impression if Japanese are different from two others?
Michi,
I have spent the bulk of my life in one of the most racially diverse societies. The Japanese, Chinese, non Muslim Indonesians & Malays don't even give you the feeling you're talking to someone from another race. The only ones who invariably refer to their adopted ethnicity are the Pacific Islanders & Indians but only as a last resort !

Bronwyn: Its (China's) long history clearly demonstrate clearly it to be a peaceful nation.
It is apparent and no difficult to see in Chinese history that China had been imperial and expansive and imperialistic. Its history abounds in genocide and mass murder.
I said in my comment, It Is Not China's Fault, nov. 16, 2005, on Michael Pillsbury/The Hundred-Year Marathon, amazon usa, "It is not China's fault. It is an American fault" to fail to see the ugliness, which is so obvious. I wonder if it may be because some of you might feel it white supremacy to acknowledge it.
Henry Kissinger is tricky as ever like Richard Nixon. He says, quoting a Chinese saying (p. 218, World Order, Penguin Books), "China in the late Qing Dynasty had neglected its military technology partly because it had been unchallenged for so long but largely because of the low status of the military in China's Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying 'Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.' Even when under assault by Western forces. the Qing Dynasty diverted military funds in 1893 to restore a resplendent marble boat in the imperial Summer Palace."
The Qing (Manchurian) Dynasty entered Beijing and punished the resisting Korean Yi Dynasty which paid loyalty to the Ming Dynasty severely until it totally capitulated and began to send tributes. It was under the Manchurian Dynasty that Sinkiang and Tibet were ruthlessly incorporated.
"Good men do not become soldiers" tells how ruthlessly people were treated by mandarin bureaucrats. Deng Xiaoping did not ride a tank and machinegunned protesting students at Tiananmen Square; soldiers and policemen did it, namely Deng's job.
A lot of funds that went into the repair of the palace was not peace-loving. Empress Dowager embezzled them, which was normalcy; she availed herself in 1900 of the Boxers' Rebellion and started war on the Western powers including Japan.

In passing, two events most shocked the Chinese diplomatic circle in the twentieth century. After the Qing was defeated in 1901, they had to take a seat on the defeated side, and on the victors' side sat the US, Great Britain, Russia, etc. What humiliated them most was that Japan sat there, too. (Japan made the greatest contribution to defeating the Qing and Boxers. But it received the least indemnity.)
The other shocking event was that Japan was a permanent member of the Council of the League of Nations, a privilege denied to China.

This story is too long to be told in some details here; the story usually told is mistaken, due to the traditional arrogance of the West and China over Japan, so I will now tell briefly about the first Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95.
China and Korea as Confucian countries had looked down upon Japan
tremendously. But neither of them had an intent of conquering Japan and Japan did not have any on either of them. So, as far as the trilateral relations were concerned, they enjoyed peace.
This international peace was suddenly disturbed and shaken with the arrival of Western imperialism in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Great Britain and Russia were in serious imperialistic rivalry, in the Balkans (Crimea), Central Asia (Afghanistan) and North East Asia (the Korean Peninsula). The peninsula gave strategic advantage to an occupier of military dominance of the Sea of Japan and putting pressure on China. Great Britain wanted to keep its interests in central China and India. If the game was left, each country was in danger of being carved up. But China and Korea were oblivious of it as Confucian countries; they thought the Western blue-eyed barbarians would ultimately recognize cultural and civilizational greatness and kowtow.

Japan perceived the danger. In order to prevent from being divided up and carved up by the Western powers, it was essential for Japan to wean Korea from Chinese suzerainty and make it an independent country that could resist foreign pressure and intervention. China had already lost Vietnam to France and since Korea was its last tributary, adhered to holding it. That was how the war broke out.
"Isolation was the rule for Japan...(Edwin O. Reischauer, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, co-authored by J. K. Fairbank and A. M. Craig, Houghton Mifflin and Charles E. Tuttle, 1976, p. 553.)" If geopolitically situated as Norway or Switzerland was, Japan would have been saved from developing imperialism.
After the war and the Boxers' Rebellion Russian influence, not Japanese, increased in Manchuria. Great Britain felt threatened and anxious that it might be excluded from commercial activities in Manchuria by Russia. So the Russo-Japanese War was the second round.
After it Japan annexed Korea. "...the best colonial master of all time has been Japan, for no ex-colonies have done so well as (South) Korea and Taiwan...The world belongs to those with a clear conscience, something Japan has had in near-unanimous abundance (David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Norton, 1999, pp. 437,8)" The Korean population nearly doubled during the thirty-five years. The average annual economic growth rate was at least more than three percent, some scholars say it was close to four. So Korean GDP would have become at least three times bigger. In 2008 two graduates from Nagoya National University were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. Seoul National University was established before Nagoya and Osaka National Universities.
To be continued.

The British aristocracy and middle-class, for instance, were afraid of educating the working class, so they were afraid of educating colonized people. Chinese and Korean masses were left illiterate and ignorant by Chinese mandarins and Korean Yangban elite. The samurai class, if so-called for convenience sake, were not afraid of educating masses; they made very much of education. So they brought modern education in Korea and Taiwan.
Primary school had been already started in Korea but hardly spread. It took root and spread in the Japanese days. Koreans became literate, most of them could read the hangul alphabet. Middle schools and vocational schools were started as the economy developed. Life expectancy was twenty-four in 1910, it was forty-four in 1944. Torture had been used but it was abolished by the Japanese. In the museum of the Independence Hall of South Korea built in 1087, "...there is a life size wax exhibition depicts Japanese torture of Koreans that did not actually exist. The cruelty shown by the exhibition makes you cover your eyes. Students from schools all over Korea come to see the exhibition, which reinforces the lessons of their anti-Japanese education (Sonfa Oh, Getting Over It: Why Korea Should Stop Bashing Japan, Tachibana Publishing, Tokyo, 2015, p. 82.)" Oh came to Japan to study as a student. She gradually found gaps between what she had been taught and actually saw. She is a naturalized Japanese, teaching at Takushoku University, Tokyo. She is a persona non grata of the South Korean Government. When her mother died, she went back to Korea but refused to leave the airport. With the good offices of a Japanese consulate she was barely allowed to attend the funeral. When she wanted to attend her nephew's wedding, she was deported to Japan instantly on arriving at the Incheon International Airport. She says,"This book...argues that the narrow egoism and prejudice of the anti-Japanese view reflects Korea's history and racial characteristics (ibid. p. 9.)"
To be continued.

The biter bit ! TV report tonight.
Well, China suffering electricity shortages. Temperatures around zero in some parts.
It will be interesting to confirm that it is a shortage of coal.

Bazz,

Maybe the CCP is withholding coal from its people to get them angry at Australia.

"Look! There's the problem. It's Australia. They're not sending the coal to us. It's stuck on their ships and they won't give it to us."

"We have to invade Australia to secure our source of natural resources."

I will go back to 1905 or the Russo-Japanese War. Japan had picked out Great Britain in the Russo-British competition, because Russia had a territorial ambition and was likely to deceive and Britain was more interested in commercial activities and less likely to deceive.
Japan had spent 230 million yen, which it financed with much difficulty, knowing that asking for loans was risking being colonized. It cost eight times as much and could not fight Russia without getting loans. It was not victory for Japan, it was at best a draw. Japan had depleted human and material resources while Russia had its inexhaustible resources and manpower untapped yet and could go on. President Theodore Roosevelt wanted neither too strong or too weak against the other and intermediated for peace. France persuaded Russia to accept the invitation because it did not want to see its ally spend more energy in the Far East, both France and Russian facing German power on the increase in Europe, and Russia had big domestic troubles; it was only twelve years before the 1917's Bolshevik Revolution. The two countries signed the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was not victory so Japan did not get indemnities from Russia, it got only the Southern half of Sakhalin and some fishing rights. The last penny it owed was paid back in 1986. The war was a huge drain on Japanese economy, but Japan had to take chances for security.
(In passing, Americans were allowed by Japan to continue sending financial assistance during the Pacific War to Jews living in the Shanghai International Settlement. Jew living in other parts of China, Manchuria, and Japan were protected in spite of German protests. German Ambassador Ott and Germans living in Japan were angry. "The attempt (by the Japanese Government during the Pacific War) to transfer the traditional admiration for Britain and the US to Nazi Germany did not succeed, because respect for the West could not be obliterated while Germany's racism and arrogance offended so many Japanese...
To be continued.

Continued from my preceding comment.

"...Western culture, although denigrated and vilified, continued to exert a fascination, and these pro-Western feelings, which could not be erased, were soon to surface from the ashes of defeat (Ben-Amy Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan, 1981, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.176-7.)"
"Any Westerner in Japan is almost automatically assumed to be an American unless he can prove the contrary - a situation that some find intensely irritating (E. O. Reischauer, The Japanese, 1978, p.415.)"

"Then why the Pacific War?" is a good question if someone asks it. Most Westerners have not asked it. I suppose most Australians have not asked it. Why? Because there is no money to make in the question?

Kaiser Wilhelm II warned President Roosevelt of the Yellow Peril after the Russo-Japanese War. What wrong did the Japanese do to be so labelled? The answer is that the Japanese did not behave well like the Vietnamese, Egyptians, Congolese, etc.

It was the US foreign policy that most amply put the Yellow Peril theory into practice against Japan. A misplaced theory, it was.

To be continued.

Do we have to put up with an insult like this;
The world belongs to those with a clear conscience, something Japan has had in near-unanimous abundance (David S. Landes,

The very last thing Japan has is a clear conscience !
Their railway building techniques have a lot to answer for.

Dear MICHI the JAPANESE FASCIST

Where you offer excuse "After it Japan annexed Korea. "...the best colonial master of all time has been Japan,"

What SONS OF NIPPON rubbish are you spouting Pappasan!

The Koreas still bittery resent Japan's cruel invasion and occupation of that peninsula. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule#Comfort_women
__________________

Further MICHI

I assume you think the JAPANESE ARMY was merely RESTORING ORDER during the RAPE OF NANKING?

This was in 1937 when Japanese troops slaughtered more 100,000 women, children and babies!

Watch what your JAPANESE countrymen did MICHI http://youtu.be/CHO6GTMyy_U

Mich, read Slaves of the Sons of Heaven !

Soot should have appointed Gladys Liu as the new Minister for Trade.

She's a former(?) affiliate of the CCP and I'm sure she still must have a lot of friends in the CCP who would be willing to sit down with her and put the China-Australia relationship back on track.

I don't think Dan Tehan even speaks Chinese. Anyone know?

Bazz and plantagent,
I wanted to continue with my last comment.

About ten years ago a South Korean boy said on the Internet something like "The Japanese were not wrong. We were wrong." He was arrested by the police. He was thirteen years old. I said torture was abolished by Japanese. I read in the Yi Dynasty, the police and the prosecution did not hesitate to inflict it on children. A South Korean old man was talking with a young man. He was asked about the Japanese rule. He said the Japanese did a lot of good things. He was beaten to death by the young man. The northern half was much better industrialized in 1945 than the southern, which was mainly agricultural. Kim took the northern half, invaded in 1950 and took almost all of the south except the small area of Pusan. GDP of the north was much bigger that that of the south. A treaty was signed between Tokyo and Soul in 1965, a lot of money, grants, loans and technology poured into the south. I understand a considerable part of them were missing, as usually happens in a Confucian country.
The Korean in the early Yi dynasty adopted Confucianism (the Zhu Zi's version of Confucianism, which I am told is nothing but dogma) with such enthusiasm that their value system and social practices were restructured along Chinese lines more fully than ever...it may have become more uniformly and fully permeated by Confucian ideas than China was itself. In fact Korea became in many ways an almost model Confucian society...(E. O. Reischauer, ibid. East Asia, p.301.)"
It was a Great Leap Backward. "...but in the nineteenth century the downward course became more rapid (when they had to change for modernization, faced with gathering storms from the West). The tax system grew even more confused and inadequate, and the bureaucracy more corrupt, government less efficient and the populace more discontented...(Reischauer, ibid. p. 322,)"
"In Korea, however, a comparable stability of institutions produced a much higher degree of cultural stagnation, political immobility, and social friction (Reischauer, ibid. p.322."

Dear MICHI the Avoider of Responsibility

I understand you are 90+ years old and like Yoda in Star Wars your Oriental tone is quaint.

But what I want to know is why your people were so BRUTAL to AUSTRALIAN PRISONERS of WAR?!

Watch this MICHI http://youtu.be/ZyajeTKTNEo?t=3m10s

Do you feel shame, MICHI, about how YOUR people treated us? Your Japanese people broke the rules of war to work Australian prisoners to death!

Can you move out of your QUAINT-TALK, MICHI, to talk like a man?

plantagenet,

Michi is suffering from post-WW2 Japanese amnesia, which was given to the Japanese people by their government following their ignominious defeat by the Western powers.

Plantagenet, Michi if he is 90 then when he went to school the
history of the war was sanitised. The schools just wiped it all out
of schooling. It caused a really great row when the rest of the world
found out what they were teaching.
I saw bus loads of returning prisoners and they were walking skeletons.
Later I worked with a man who had one eye missing. He was not working
hard enough in a Japanese coal mine and was hit in the eye with a rifle butt.
I suspect Michi will not read Slaves of the Sons of Heaven.
It is the story of the Australian POWs on the Burma Railway.
My parents next door neighbour died on the Sandaken March.
Not even the Germans treated POWs like that.

We have been prepared to put it back into history, but if Michi's
attitude is anything to go by then maybe we will bring it out again.

Continued from my preceding comment.
Bazz and plantagenet,

I do not deny there were comfort women. That a lot of Korean women were abducted was a lie started by a Japanese.
I sent a comment, American Humanism, on Chinese Comfort Women at amazon usa. It is a very short course. You can also know something about China.

Some details by a Japanese expert are on the Internet at the following address:

http://www.seisaku-center/node/840.

Perhaps you can go there as I did at The Comfort Women Issue in Sharper Focus.
Ikuhiko Hata/Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone is a comprehensive treatise. You can read three book reviews by three experts and two comments at amazon usa. (Hata is one of the authorities on the second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945. I will perhaps quote him in the comments that I will continue.)

I will not deny, because I deny that women were abducted, that prisoners of war were not humanitarianly by the Japanese.

But Nazi Germany was different from the 1930s' Japan, which perhaps I will mention in the comments to follow. Japan was not a totalitarian country even under the enormous political and social pressures of carrying out the war with China and the US.
It seems that German treatment of Slav soldiers was hideous throughout the whole period. A. J. P. Taylor said somewhere, as I read, that they captured about six hundred thousand Russians in the first few weeks and they were so busy and anxious to get to Moscow that they left them unable to run away and starving. I do not know literally all of them died of starvation.

To be continued

Well now we see the Japanese hiding the truth, they have never pleaded
guilty to what they did. They do not even admit it in a restricted
stage such as OLO.
Railway ? What railway ? Never heard of the Burma railway !
It is quite possible that Michi has never heard about their atrocities.
Read about Slaves of the Sons of Heaven !
Don't bother coming back until you have read it. Most libraries have it.

Bazz and plantagenet,

I knew about the construction of the Thai-Myanmar Railway and the allied prisoners were made to work in miserable conditions. I saw the movie The Bridge Over The River Kway; of course it was largely a romantic fiction for money, though. I knew a lot of allied prisoners worked in Japanese mines, etc. The photos of skinny people were painful to see. At that time almost all Japanese were always hungry.
But the Japanese should not be criticized for what they did not do. Japanese development of Korea and the so-called Comfort Women have nothing or little to do with the treatment of the allied prisoners of war.
No allied prisoners were lynched or beaten after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing anywhere in Japan. In Hiroshima twelve US soldiers were killed in the bomb explosion. About thirty Dutch missionaries lived in a small city about sixty kilometers to the north of Hiroshima, no injury was done to them. Nine allied prisoners were killed in the atomic blast
in Nagasaki, They put away destroyed things in cooperation with the Japanese.

Lewis Bush, a British, wanted to fight for his country, but he did not fight long, for soon after the outbreak of the war he was captured by Japanese in Hong Kong and sent to Japan. You can read His life in Japan
on the Internet; you can go there, because I did, at "Clutch of Circumstance, Allied POWs Under the Japanese.

A little over ten years ago, I think, a group of experts of Stanford University compared high school history textbooks of Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan and the US. I read a Japanese newspaper report that said that the Japanese got the highest favorable rating.
To be continued.

Continued from above.

I said China started its anti-Japanese campaign in 1995 for domestic and for international audience. Rhee Syngman, the first president of the ROK, needed to arouse and strengthening anti-Japanese feelings to shore up his political basis. He had to do it also because South Korea had communists and communist sympathizers within. President Kim Younhsam, 1993-88, renewed and invigorated anti-Japanese feelings. Japanese politics has been divided between lefts and rights. AS President No Taewoo, 1998-1993, said to a Japanese magazine, the lefts gave cheer to the Chinese and Korean movements. All these things have had a great deal to do with the internationally held belief that Japanese have not repented of their past deeds, or that they are whitewashing their crimes.

Now the Nanjing atrocities. The Chiang Kaishek's government soon began the international campaign of three hundred thousand Chinese murdered. They knew how best they could do it. They did it through a few Westerners' mouths to make it credible.
The Chinese commander in charge of the area had fled away from the city without leaving any instruction. There was not order among the Chinese soldiers, They started some rampage on Chinese people.
The Japanese army units came, Chinese soldiers took off their military uniforms and wearing civilian clothes stole into the general civilian populace. Yet they did not stop fighting. They attacked the Japanese from behind and among Chinese people. The Japanese got panicky because they could not tell apart soldier and civilians. Then the carnage started.
The Japanese did not have composure or time to sift combatants and non-combatants accurately. No doubt a lot of innocent Chinese were killed. A lot of women were assaulted. About twenty thousand soldiers ran away into the International Settlement. It was against international law for the Settlement to take them in, but the Japanese did not chase after them, respecting the status of the Settlement.
To be continued.

Predictably MICHI

In your NIPPON NAZI parallel universe you so primitively explain away Japan's history of atrocities to Chinese.

So MICHI - where you claim in Nanking, China "The Japanese did not have composure or time to sift combatants and non-combatants accurately."

Did the 10,000s of chidren and babies Japanese soldiers unambiguously tortured then bayoneted upset YOUR "composure" MICHI?

Noting http://youtu.be/CHO6GTMyy_U .

How old were you during the 1937 Nanking Massacre MICHI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre ?

Continued from above.

You cannot enter Tibet or Xinjiang. Entry into and exist from Nanjing was not forbidden, It was free for Chinese and Westerners during the carnage or anytime. Westerners could have contact with the outside and report freely without inspection. In Paris it was reported that about thirty thousand Chinese were murdered. Life, a US pictorial magazine, said about forty thousand. Even if these numbers were correct, the number of soldiers who died in battle or who fled in civilian clothes could be subtracted from them.

The Japanese and Chinese governments agreed to set up a joint team to investigate the atrocities about twenty years ago. When they discussed how studies should be conducted, the Japanese said that they could figure out an approximate number of victims, the Chinese said it was unnecessary. The joint team ended doing nothing.

I am busy to-dye. So I will go back to my main thread next time.

To be continued.

Michi,

Why are you in a hurry to dye?

Hi Mr Opinion

I suspect ageless Michi won't by "dyeing" his last Japanese silk print any time soon.

I hear Michi was the most "misunderstood" Propaganda Whisperer in Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere history.

One of Michi's more "moderate" bosses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideki_Tojo#Arrest,_trial,_and_execution

I've altered the poem below for Australian conditions. A Hap Hap Merry Christmas to all:

T'was just days before Christmas,
And all through the town,
People wore masks,
That covered their frown.

The frown had begun
Way back last Summer,
When a global pandemic
Made life a Bummer.

They called it Corona,
But unlike the beers,
It didn’t bring good times,
It only brought tears.

Contagious and deadly,
This virus spread fast,
Like a bushfire that starts
When lightning strikes parts.

Airplanes were grounded,
Travel was banned.
Borders were closed
Across air, sea and land.

As the world entered lockdown
To flatten the curve,
The economy halted,
And folks lost their nerve.

From March to July
We rode the first wave,
People stayed home,
They tried to behave.

When Spring emerged
The lockdown was lifted.
But some became careless,
Some of us drifted.

Now it’s December
Northern Hemisphere cases spiking,
In SYDNEY as well,
Not much to their liking.

Frontline workers,
Doctors and nurses,
Try to save people,
From riding in hearses.

This virus is awful,
This is COVID-19.
And only just now
Hopeful vaccines.

It’s true that this year
Has had sadness a plenty,
We’ll never forget
The year 2020.

And just ‘round the corner -
The holiday season,
Can we be merry?
Is there even a reason?

To decorate the house
And put up the tree,
Maybe no one will see it,
No one but me.

But outside my window
The Sun shines strong,
And I think to myself,
One day Good comes along!

So, I gather the ribbon,
The garland and bows,
As I play those old carols,
My happiness grows.

Christmas is not cancelled
And neither is hope.
If we lean on each other,
I know we can cope.

Merry Christmas to All!

Including Michi :)

Mr. Opinion & plantagenet,

The wikipedia article, Hideki Tojo, is a good report for a junior & senior high school student. It's full of mistakes.
It said somewhere to the effect that Tojo was not leading the army; he was being pushed by it. This is right. And the army was composed of factions or groups of men of different thinking. And the army was one of different elite groups in Japanese politics, the influence of which varied depending on issues. Focusing on him will not bear good fruit. "But, unlike the Italian and German case, there was no dictator and the system was not the product of a well-defined, popular movement, but a more vague change of mood, a shift in the balance of power between the elite groups, and a consequent major shift in Japanese politics (Reischauer, The Japanese, p. 100)."

The wikipedia article says, "The Hull note.. strongly implied that the United States might recognize 'The Empire of Manchukuo' and did not impose a deadline for the Japanese withdrawal from China,"
The withdrawal of the army from China was one of the most contentious issues in the US-Japanese negotiations. Japan had agreed to it but Hull insisted on its withdrawal within a few months after the agreement.
Hull handed two Japanese ambassadors the note on November 26, 1941. Ambassador Kurusu was shocked and asked him if he meant by it that the US would not consent even to a modus vivendi that Japan had proposed. Hull's reply was vague and did not deny it.
Hull then called Secretary of War Stimson and said that he had washed his hand off it all and that he, Stimson and Navy Secretary Knox should step in and take over it all.
On Nov. 28, President Roosevelt was fearful if Japan might not respond to it militarily and talked with Knox and said that he wanted to know if
anything was to be done in the nature of an ultimatum again.

Robert Butow/Tojo and the Coming of War will give you knowledge if you want to know about my old boss.

Ni hao Mates! All belong China now:

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/chinese-developer-chambroad-granted-extra-two-years-to-start-project-at-kangaroo-bay-on-hobarts-eastern-shore/ar-BB1c7hg2?ocid=mailsignout&li=AAgfYrC

The proceedings to grant the Chiners an extension of time for the project was apparently determined in secret.

Well, that's what happens when you sell out to the Chiners.

And the project: a Chinese owned and operated training facility-cum-migrant coordination centre for incoming Chiners.

Trade war - phooey!

What's the message China is trying to send?

Isn't it obvious: China controls Australia's economy.

The Chinese can turn Australia's economy off and on whenever it wishes and there's nothing we can do about it.

And China will use its influence in other countries to stop Australia from redirecting its trade away from China.

But there is a way out of this dilemma. Yes, you guessed it: Mr Opinion's 10 point plan to placate the Chiners.

We just need to get Soot and the boyz down their hands and knees crawling around naked in front of Xi begging for his forgiveness.

Come on boyz, get to it. It's all for a good cause.

Interesting comments Michi- Reischauer seems to be a highly respected author in Japan. I have been surprised to learn that many Japanese are unaware of events in Japanese history- and the context of Japan and the world- you are not that person. From memory Hirohito for example came to power at 25 and was influenced by the new hawks after a period of foreign interaction. The Japanese people and nation have built a reputation of technical proficiency and have maintained their cultural integrity in contemporary times- a well disciplined people.

I wish that my people preserved Australia as much as the Japanese people have preserved Japan.

The Japan / China relationship is interesting- I've heard most of what you've said before.

We are all a product of our environment.

Calum, I don't think the Japanese understand how much they were
despised and hated for the atrocities they committed during the war.
Machine gunning the nurses in the water from the beach after their
ship was sunk was really the last straw.
Many people well after the war had difficulty dealing with Japanese tourists.

Canem Malum,

The China-Japan relationship is more than just interesting.

Japan is numero uno of China's hit list.

If China gets control of Taiwan and the Korean peninsula Japan will be gone in the blink of an eyelid.

To Bazz-

I'm not going to refer to specifics of WWII but I think that Japan viewed the "rules of war" very differently than The
West and Europe as does China and others I suspect.

To understand their philosophy vis war- In Japan the warrior code is still influential perhaps and is embodied in the documents- Go Rin No Sho, Hagakure- 'In the Shadow of Leaves'- and asks the question 'What does it mean to be a warrior'. The Samurai code gave and expected no mercy.

A tough crowd to be sure.

Despite their faults- at least the Japanese seemed to be consistent in their tough justice and were willing to have it applied to themselves.

http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/japanese-mass-suicides

To Mr Opinion-

I agree with you that China doesn't seem to like Japan.

China's historical influence on Japan...

http://www.wa-pedia.com/history/origins_japanese_people.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_people#History

http://www.ancient.eu/article/1085/ancient-japanese--chinese-relations/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_influence_on_Japanese_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samurai#Ashikaga_shogunate_and_the_Mongol_invasions

This is interesting...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusunoki_Masashige#Legend

An American official said, "We've never had this kind of experience with any country before that we're having with China."
China has developed a unique civilization compared to European, Middle-Eastern and Indian civilizations in that it had developed in isolation while the latter three had more or less contact. To add to the Chinese monumental sense of superiority complex Chinese neighbors were all dwarfs.

Henry Kissinger/On China is not a first-rate book though he wants to sound as if he were the first-rate authority. But the first chapter, Singularity of China, is intesresting. Kissinger compares the Chinese traditional tactics to the game of the wei qi, which is played in Japan, Korea and some other places. In the wei qi the player employs "the art of strategic encirclement...moves into 'empty' spaces on the board, gradually mitigating the strategic potential of his opponent's pieces."
One day you find yourself in an environment, not being able to realize how it all happened, where you have to give up or give in.
Small countries in Central Asia and Africa and small South-Pacific islands, each country or island negligible, matter a great deal in this game.

George F. Kennan, popularly known by his containment policy of the Soviet Union, said on his 1964 visit to Japan that Chinese mandarins were refined in speech and manners but that we should not be deceived by them, as I quoted in my comment, It Is Not China's Fault, dated Nov. 16, 2015, on Michael Pillsbury/The Hundred-Year Marathon. amazon usa. I hope it won't be a loss of time to read it.

To be continued.

Hi Michi

At last I can agree with you on something.

That is on China's Encirclement Strategy.

SURROUNDING AUSTRALIA

China is:
- building Infrastructure
- providing excessive unrepayable "Debt Trap" Loans
- Bribes to senior politicians, and
- Trade Deals
to a crescent of Pacific islands just East of Australia (Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomons, closer relations with NZ)

and North (PNG and East Timor (the last likes to politically/for aid associate itself as a Pacific Island nation. ASEAN nations see East Timor as too different to be really in ASEAN.)).

Also, in Australia's North, China bought ("99 year leased") the Port of Darwin and in Australia's South negotiated a de facto Nation-to-Nation deal with Victoria.

So through this subtle process China is little by little surrounding its Australian "Outer Barbarians". China can steadily convert this
peaceful geographical encirclement into an increasingly militarised blockade in the medium-term, ie. in 10+ years.

Japan tried and failed do this rapidly by using raw military power in 1941-45. China has noted Japan's failed strategy.

More see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Pacific_relations

plantagenet,

Spot on.

Did you see where China and Russia have recently confirmed that they have a defensive/offensive pact?

But nothing to fear according to The Forum's pro-China camp. Is there Fouul-Mouth?

I just ran across this post from Aljazeera:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/8/28/us-says-chinas-south-china-sea-missile-launches-threat-to-peace

Reminiscent of the lead up to World Wars 1 and 2 as belligerents struggled to outmanoeuvre and/or contain each other in an attempt to defend themselves from attack by their opponents.

Is the world now on a war footing?

There is nothing to stop China from sweeping into SE ASia, Australia and the western Pacific. Look at how successful Japan was in taking control of European colonies and expanding its empire in the immediate wake of its attack on Pearl Harbor.

How much infrastructure does China control in Australia that they could turn off at the flick of a switch and how many non-Australian Chinese are there in Australia (half a million according to Foul-Mouth)? What I call our Trojan Horse.

Hi Mr Opinion

Firstly, Joe Loudmouth, being a fellow Centrist, is saintly, like the Pope.
___________________________________

Secondly like any 2 great powers sharing a long border Chinese and Russian relations are complex, so flactuate. They are nowhere near being in alliance.

True, on 22 Dec 2020 "The Russian military said that a pair of its Tu-95 strategic bombers and four Chinese H-6K bombers flew over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea on Tuesday." http://7news.com.au/politics/russian-chinese-bombers-fly-over-pacific-c-1820089

But http://7news.com.au/politics/russian-chinese-bombers-fly-over-pacific-c-1820089 goes on to say:

"It follows Russian President Vladimir Putin's statement in [Oct 2020] that the idea of a future Russia-China military alliance should not be ruled out - a signal of deepening military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing amid growing tension in their relations with the United States.

Until that moment, Russia and China had hailed their "strategic partnership" BUT [PUTIN] REJECTED any talk about the possibility of their forming a military alliance."
___________________________________

This is noting in 1969 Russia and China mobilised 10,000s of troops against each other in a border war. A war in which the Russian High Command discussed the nuclear weapon option. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_split#Border_conflict
____________________________

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Russian_relations_since_1991

"Russian commentators have increasingly raised concerns about China's ambitions and influence in Central Asia, an area traditionally within Russian influence.[6]"

In December 2019, Rostec officials accused China of intellectual property theft of a range of military technologies.[143] In June 2020, Russia charged one of its Arctic scientists of passing sensitive information to China.[144]
___________________________________

So Russian-Chinese relations remain complicated. They are nowhere near being in alliance.
________________________________

I trust you will provide a serious, considered reply Mr Opinion.

plantagenet,

I believe Russia and China do have a pact aimed at dividing Eurasia between them.

I think one needs to watch the two leaders Putin and Xi if one wants to determine where things will go.

I think Xi is pressing for an early start to an East Asian war in which China will annex SE Asia, Australia and the Western Pacific. If that happens I think Russia will sweep into East Europe and Central Asia.

Major wars always seem to be about struggles between empires. WW1 was a clash over worldwide empires and WW2 was an extension of an incomplete WW1. The Cold War was all about containing the Soviet empire and now the West is faced with containing the ambitions of China to reestablish the Chinese Empire on a global scale.

To me all the signs are there that China is a threat and that it intends to invade Australia. But Foul-Mouth and others in The Forum's pro-China camp want us to believe that these things will not happen. The reason they think this way: I call it the Tony Abbott-Andrew Forrest Syndrome.

Watch the leaders, especially Putin and Xi if you want to work out what is coming our way. Don't be fooled by their differences. No one thought that Stalin and Hitler would see eye to eye until Poland was invaded and divided up between Germany and Russia in 1939. Putin and Xi are just as nasty a pair of low-life scumbags as Hitler and Stalin were.

plantagenet,

http://au.news.yahoo.com/dire-warning-as-risk-of-war-with-china-grows-035512228.html?

From your mate Xi (c/o Mr Opinion)

Dear Mr Op

Depends what sources you decide to think are authoritative.

I've been exposing Chinese aggression when you were in nappies AND during the years

Prime Minister Rudd "sang the praises" of China, in submissive Mandarin.

See my http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7324&page=0

Cheers

Pete

And note my article of 6 June 2017 "Chinese Intelligence Activities in Australia"

at http://gentleseas.blogspot.com/2016/11/chinese-intelligences-great-job-in.html

Where I wrote:

"Another Chinese intelligence activity is nurturing pro-Beijing political and/or economic influence via "Agents of Influence". More specifically China may influence Australian business deals or Australian politics. In this regard ALP politicians come up way too often - through fake comradely behavior often accompanied with a bit, but not too much, cash"

Likely an input in later ASIO investigations of Chinese attempts to cultivate/bribe Australian State and Federal Politicians to become Agents of Influence for China.

plantagenet,

So I assume you don't support the GLADYS LIU FOR PM campaign?

The Forum's pro-China camp will paint you as a racist for having that stance.

and?

plantagenet,

Them they're tough words mister!

Do!

I think you mean "Doh!"

Someone said Japan wanted to make an exclusive zone in East Asia and that the 1930's Japan was a totalitarian fascist country. So I wanted to say Japan wished to avoid war with the United States and that it was not a fascist country.
Readers here are concerned with China, quite naturally. So I will give up now and leave it for another time but except a few things. The truth told will shed some important light on China.

Edwin O. Reischauer, born in Tokyo, was fluent in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and some other languages. Fluency in the first three will be essential for study of East Asia.
He wrote an article in the magazine, Foreign Affairs, and said Japan was the pivotal country for American foreign policy in East Asia. The president-elect Kennedy read it and appointed him ambassador to Tokyo in 1961.
The US-Japanese relations were strengthened and Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea rapidly.
His specialty was in ancient China and ancient Japan. Perhaps good knowledge of ancient China will illuminate most of today's China, not vice versa.

Nixon and Kissinger thought China was pivotal. They went to Beijing in 1972. So, we stand where we are now in the wei qi game.

I will take up only the Washington Conference, 1921-22, and the second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-45, which led to the Pacific War.

The US had isolationist policy concerning European affairs. It had a monopolistic policy, monopolizing imperialism exclusive of other countries, in Latin America, where dictatorship or democracy did not count but pro-American capitalism mattered.

1889, the year of the enunciation of the the Open Door Doctrine, introduced another dimension to American foreign policy. "The United States blundered into the the Spanish-American War and emerged not only dominant in the Caribbean but, unexpectedly, in the Pacific...Captain Mahan ransacked history to justify naval supremacy...and President Theodore Roosevelt brandished a big stick. The piercing protests of the anti-imperialist were drowned out by the thunder of the manifest destiny (Henry S. Commager, The American Mind, Yale University Press, 1978, p. 47.)"
To be continued.

Michi,

It is obvious that you are not a scholar because your comment that fluency in Japanese, Chinese and Korean is essential for study of East Asia is absolute nonsense.

If one does not have a knowledge of a language than one is limited to using secondary sources and translations in his research in the areas of history, sociology, anthropology, etc. One does not need to know everything before one can start producing a history or a sociology or an anthropology on a topic in East Asian studies.

It is only a lack of an appropriate education and training in these areas that will stop people from conducting research in East Asian studies. Something which you seem to definitely have.

"Had the War with Spain gone no further than the crusade to liberate Cuba the change would not have been so momentous. But it did go further. It was carried beyond those continental boundaries envisioned in Washington's Farewell Address, beyond the popular conception of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny; beyond, even, the seemingly inevitable assertion of American supremacy in the Caribbean, and in the long-pending annexation of Hawaii. Amid the clashes of arms the Philippine Archipelago became an American colony...A step so unprecedented could not have failed to influence the character of American diplomacy in every quarter of the globe, and nowhere more profoundly than in that which included the Philippines (A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, Yale University Press, 1962. pp. 3-4.)"
The followings are some excerpts from the book; "Like most popular oracles, Mahan merely rationalized what he already saw in progress around him." "A few Americans - and these in high American high places - were ready to play for larger stakes than Cuba Libre or supremacy in the Caribbean when the war with Spain broke out in 1898."
Of course desire for more money played a role, but also "The church was likewise inspired. Dewey's triumph created the inviting prospect of new mission fields in the islands of south-western Pacific. American missionaries had long been active in China and Japan. In China especially their political significance was great. For nearly half a century they had been virtually the sole sole interpreters of the Far East to their own countrymen."
Don't jump to the conclusion that Japan felt challenged by all these movement. On the contrary, "For nearly half a century Japanese-American relations had been cordial, So, although Japan favored sharing in a protectorate over the Philippines in the event that the United States should give them up, she approved American annexation once it was announced. In fact, Japanese diplomats had freely urged the decision on the United State, preferring that country to any other as a neighbor in the south Pacific"

To be continued.

"Looking backward over a half-century of American diplomacy in the Far East, we see curious phenomena which which undoubtedly have their origin in our own emotional complexes. We see a distinct difference between our policy toward this area and our policy toward Europe...Unquestionably, our relation to the peoples of the Far East has been colored a certain sentimentality toward the Chinese&#65293; a sentimentality as disrespectful to them and as unhelpful to the long-term interests of our relations...(George Kennan, American Diplomacy, the University of Chicago Press, first printed in 1951, reprinted in 1981, pp. 52-53.)" This sentimentality was American infatuation with China, seeing in their own fantasy what had never existed and does not exist in China. The sentimentality or infatuation was largely bred and cultivated American missionaries in China. "The missionaries, on the other hand, ever anxious to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese, made fools of themselves Ralph Townsend, Ways That Are Dark: The Truth About China, the Barnard Review, 1933, reprinted in 1997, p. 288.)"
Kennan said, "One of our best informed diplomats, Mr. John V. A, MacMurray, retired since since several years, wrote in 1935 an extremely thoughtful and prophetic memorandum, in which, pointing to the likelihood of a war with Japan if we continued in the course we are following, he observed that even the most drastic achievement of our objectives in such a war only play into the hands of Russia and raise a host of new problems...If we were to 'save' China from Japan...[it] is no reproach to the Chinese to acknowledge that we should have established no claim upon their gratitude...They would thank us for nothing, and give us no credit for unselfish intentions, but set themselves to formulating resistance to us in the exercise of responsibilities we would have assumed (Kennan, ibid. pp. 51-2.)" In passing Hirohito and his wife visited the US. He said at the dinner held in the White House that he had long waited for the occasion, if it presented itself, to express his deep gratitude for the profuse assistance offered by America to devastated Japan.
To be continued.

Hey MOpy

Look what them thar fiendish Chinese-Chinese are up to now!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcPJkL4jqSY&feature=emb_logo

plantagenet,

Are you sure they're Chinese?

They look more like a bunch of typical Aussie larrikins to me.

All they need now is to start singing the amended Aussie anthem in Mandarin to make it complete.

I assume multicultural versions of the Australian anthem will be made available ....... Yes? No?

This ONE melded culture song "I Am Australian" http://youtu.be/KrLTe1_9zso should replace the Girt Song.

"Multicultural" baiting is for bigots like LEGO.

You don't want to be classed with such anti-Asian bigots - do you Mr Opinion?

plantagenet,

I hate that song. It's just so not me.

I'm all for the Asianization of Australia. What I am against is that it is weighted towards a Chinese component instead of being dispersed evenly among the disparate ethnic groups that an Asianized Australia is supposed to mirror.

For example, have a look at Sydney which is now a bicultural city as depicted by signage particularly Sydney Airport where signs are English (top) & Chinese (bottom). Why don't we also have French, German, Italian translations on the same signage? Because Australia is a Asianized society weighted towards Chinese.

I just can't wait until I get my Mandarin version of the amended national anthem in the mail.

Continued from the previous comment.

I must get to the finish as soon as possible not to jar 'the Great Australian Debate.' But my coming comments will not be necessarily superfluous, I hope, because they will also tell something about China's mendacity and singularity.

About Hirohito. He did not like ultra-nationalism of the 1930s. He did not like a Japanese drift toward Nazi Germany. He was personally angry with an expansionist policy of the second Sino-Japanese war. He was very much worried about the hazardous policy toward the United States.

But the truth was that he was politically impotent like his father, grand-father, great-grand father, on and on to the first legendary emperor of 663 B.C. He was made impotent by the stipulations of the Meiji Japanese Constitution. The stipulations were simply the embodiment of the traditional political culture of long history surrounding the throne. "All the way up to the end of World War II the Japanese leadership was able to combine an extreme reverence for the emperor with a complete willingness to force decisions on him regardless of his own wishes...Lacking Christianity or any other suitable religion, Ito (Hirobumi Ito, who was one of the main architects of the Constitution) felt that Japan would have to find its spiritual unity through reverence for the throne. The constitution thus called the emperor 'sacred and inviolable' and emphasized the continuity of the imperial line, 'unbroken for ages eternal.' Sovereignty and all powers of government were assigned to the emperor, but under conditions that assured that others would make
the actual decisions...This form of monarchy appears to be a congenial pattern for countries like Japan and northern Europe, which are monarchies that have achieved their democratic systems largely through evolutionary rather than revolutionary means (E. O. Reischauer, The Japanese, Charles E. Tuttle, 1978. pp.245, 248.)"

I (Yoshimichi Moriyama) sent five comments on Project Syndicate/Nouriel Robini/Global Ground Zero in Asia/April 30, 2014. They are about Hirohito.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nouriel-robini-says-that-if-the-global-order-blows-up-the-detonation-will-occur-in-asia.

Continued from above.

I'll exercise some of old men's privileges and put in a few words in the Australian Great National Debate. I think even a democratic society needs cultural or religious homogeneity whether you are church goers or not. It can't remain tolerant of cultural diversity beyond a point if it is to remain a unified democratic society.

Japan was defeated in 1945. China had the biggest reason to have trust in, and the least reason to feel resentment toward, the United States of all imperialistic powers. Did they, nationalists or communists, ever expressed gratitude? And the warning is that if ever they do so, it is bound to be tactical duplicity. Chinese deceive each other among themselves.

But "These words (John MacMurray's) need no other comment than the situation we have before us today in Korea...The Western powers have lost the last of their special positions in China. The Japanese are finally out of China proper and out of Manchuria and Korea as well. The effects of their expulsion from those areas have been precisely what wise and realistic people warned us all along they would be. Today we have fallen heir to the problems and responsibilities the Japanese had faced and borne in the Korean-Manchurian area for nearly half a century, and there is a certain perverse justice in the pain we are suffering from a burden, which, when it was borne by others, we held in such low esteem. What is saddest of all is that the relationship between past and present seems to be visible to so few people. For if we are not to learn from our own mistakes, where shall we learn from? (Kennan, American Diplomacy, p.54.)"

To be continued

Posted by plantagenet- melded culture song "I Am Australian" should replace the Girt Song. "Multicultural" baiting...bigots like LEGO.

Answer- I believe that every culture should have their own nation.

You can call me a racist or a race baiter for believing that if you like- It seems that in the 1800's- 'one culture one nation'- wasn't questioned. I prefer to take a long view of history.

The Australian people have been very generous- per capita probably the most generous in the world- now their generosity has come back to bite them- as their benefactors have gone to war against the Australian people.

The Dalai Lama says Europe should be for the European's- I agree with him.

The libertarian's have been fighting a rear guard action to protect their inconsistent arbitrary absolutist principles for some time- to such an extent that those that use terms such as 'race baiting' are now looking pretty silly. They aren't interested in discussing the issues with policy and how their libertarian global universalist (socialist/ global business) policy is disenfranchising people from their own land.

If you want to accuse me of racism, race baiting, bigotry for protecting the rights of cultures over their own property- for their Traditional rights- go for it.

I'm sure that I don't agree with LEGO on everything- but if it comes to a choice between him and you I suspect that I would favour him- and I am proud of LEGO for standing up for his people.

As I understand Plantagenet is Peter Coates-

I'd be interested if you have spent any time in the military despite your articles.

"Peter Coates has been writing articles on military, security and international relations issues since 2006. In 2014 he completed a Master’s Degree in International Relations, with a high distinction average. His website is Submarine Matters."

I can empathise with Peter Coates coming from an academic background given the highly politicised socialist environment in universities.

You call the Australian National Anthem- 'The Girt song'- you are intentionally disrespectful- and you think that you have a right to comment on Australian policy. Interesting

Michi- It appears you are saying that the way people think is based on the history of their culture and the idiosyncracies of their language- we know this in the west as 'cultural relativism'. I find that even many Japanese don't know Japanese history- but I'm sure swimming in the Japanese diaspora they absorb much through osmosis. Mr Opinion seems to have a better than average intuition on things even not of his own culture probably because of his wide reading.

An isolationist in regard to European affairs and the monopolist of imperialism in Latin America, the United States made its international debut in East Asia, and as an interventionist.

The Washington Conference, 1921-22, was the first international conference it summoned and presided over. The aim was to thwart Japanese imperialism, forgetful of and impervious to its robbery in the Pacific like the Hawaiian annexation and the occupation of the Philippines and very nervously mindful of Japan's minor shoplifting in China, and establish a system of its dominance in East Asia.

It demanded termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance because it did not wish to fight Great Britain in case of a Pacific war, which policy was supported by Canada. London was not reluctant, rather willing as Japan was, to extend it for the fourth time, which was supported by Australia. Winston Churchill said after the World War II that it was a mistake of British foreign policy not to have renewed it.

The United States wanted a naval disarmament among Great Britain, Japan, France and Italy, the last two being no problem, for its naval supremacy in the Pacific.
"The history of the attempts at disarmament is a story of many failures and few successes (Han J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, Alfred K. Knopf, 1966, p.375)" "The outstanding example of a venture in disarmament compounded of success and failure was the Washington Treaty of 1922 for the Limitation of naval armaments...Finally, at the London Naval Conference of 1930, the United States, Great Britain and Japan agreed upon parity...with Japan limited to approximately two thirds of the American and British strength...(Morgenthau, p.379.)" "During all the ensuing decades there has been only one instance of voluntary agreement among the Powers to reduce and limit armaments: the Washington treaty of 1922, summarized above (Frederick Shuman, International Politics, McGwaw-Hill, published by Kogakusha, Tokyo, 1969, p255.)"

"The record is one of deception, self-deception, endless quibbling over technicalities, hypocrisy, and fraud. Its details are at once nauseating and meaningless (Shuman, pp. 254-5.)"

To be continued.

Continued.

"The difficulties in making such a quantitative evaluation - in correlating, for instance, the military strength of the French army of 1932 with the military power represented by the industrial potential of Germany - have greatly contributed to the failure of most attempts at creating a stable balance of power by means of disarmament. The only outstanding success of this kind was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922...(Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 175.)"

Probably the most essential and most important factor for the success of disarmament overriding many difficulties is trust in the other(s). The United States lacked such trust in Japan; it had suspicion and doubt. But Japan had more than enough trust in America to outbalance it.

(In passing, as perhaps I will not have space and time here to write, various Japanese groups had began to grope for termination of the Pacific War in 1943. Kantaro Suzuki, an admiral, formed a cabinet in April, 1945. The lineup clearly showed that Japan was preparing for surrender. Hirohito had said as early as in 1942 that we had to think how to bring the war once started to an end. Tojo said at the Suzuki cabinet, "This is the end. This is our Badoglio government."

To be continued.

Continued.
At the Washington Conference, the Four-Power Treaty was signed among the US, Great Britain, France and Japan. They pledged status quo in the Pacific, with Germany gone.
The Nine-Power Treaty was concluded among China, the US, Great Britain, Japan, etc. for the status quo of China, pledging territorial integrity of China, equal opportunity for business, etc. in China. The two treaties were big victory for the US.

One big problem of the Nine Power Treaty lay with China. "While Japan, through diplomatic negotiations over a long period of years (about fifty years, Michi,) accomplished her national objectives to revise the unequal treaties, to place her finances on a sound basis, and to amend her legal system as well as to consolidate her domestic affairs, no comparable steps were taken by China. P. H. Clyde, a noted American historian, in commenting on the Far Eastern situation after the Washington Conference said: 'There is no anxiety of the powers invading China, rather is there the danger posed by China, which is fa from being an organized nation, threatening the powers' interests in China. The principles of the open door or equal opportunity could well be based on the assumption that China is a representative nation. Without this prerequisite, these principles could hardly be attained (Kajima Morinosuke, A Brief Diplomatic History of Modern Japan, Charles E. Tuttle, 1965, pp. 78-9.)"

"The same (ambiguity and complexity) was true of 'territorial and administrative integrity of China,) This seemed to Western observers, on the face of it, a plain and specific principle. But this view assumed that China was at all times a nation like others, with all the qualifications necessary essential to a neat embodiment in the national state system as it had grown up in the West. Actually, the fact was not this simple... But there many ways in which its attributes (the attributes of China a state) failed to coincide with the clear pattern of the national state in an international context, as evolved in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kennan, American Diplomacy pp. 40-1.)"

To be continued.

Canem Malum,

You wrote above:

"Mr Opinion seems to have a better than average intuition on things even not of his own culture probably because of his wide reading."

It's nothing magical. I happen to be a sociologist holding several Arts degrees in anthropology, sociology and history.

My knowledge has been gained from years of formal study and I don't make things up like shadyminister, Foul-Master, Hasbeen, etc do.

Mr Opinion said-

"You wrote above: "Mr Opinion seems to have a better than average intuition on things even not of his own culture probably because of his wide reading." It's nothing magical. I happen to be a sociologist holding several Arts degrees in anthropology, sociology and history."

Answer-

Yes- I apologize for the word intuition because it implies ethereal magic.

Most of my understanding of things of The Arts is because of extra reading- perhaps I was projecting- and because I consider actually attending University (especially Arts schools) in contemporary times as a fate worse than death.

You seem to have survived not sure how you managed to remain sane. Kudos.

Just the thought of walking onto a university campus these days makes me cringe.

At some stage one needs to look at the cost of a degree and decide if it is worth it- one can still use books and the internet "to gain knowledge"- I'm at "a stage" where I prefer to set my own hoops to jump through- but I do attempt to cover topics in a broad way from multiple perspectives similar to that traditionally embodied in university syllabus.

Michi seems to have some interesting material there- I have read some Reischauer- very dense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_O._Reischauer

Canem Malum,

You are spot on with the high cost of doing a degree.

I was thinking of doing another MA (2 years research) but now that the country is broke there won't be too many postgrad scholarships going around and the thought of having to pay $90,000 to compete with international students for a postgrad place makes it out of the question.

So with a BA and 2 MAs I'll just have to be happy with being my own teacher if I want to extend my knowledge into other areas of interest.

I'm amazed Mr Opinion that you have funded your studies up to this point. Not sure how you have done it.

Canem Malum,

I was lucky because my degrees were either free or HECS or part fees and I reckon I probably didn't spend more than about $20K total to cover all of my four degrees.

If I had to do them today I reckon I would be looking at half a million dollars to cover the four degrees.

Kijuro Shidehar was a foreign minister in the three cabinets for the total of about six years. He was plenipotentiary at the Washington Conference. The Anglo-Japanese alliance came to an end. Shidehara's policy was least imperialistic and most lenient and friendly toward China of all imperialistic powers. China saw weakening Japanese international status in the non-renewal of the alliance and adopted an increasingly aggressive attitude toward Japan instead of thankful friendliness.
I said ancient China throws illuminating light on present China. Kojiro Yoshikawa of Kyoto Universitity a distinguished student of ancient Chinese literature. He wrote, perhaps a little before October, 1949, when Mao Zedong entered Beijing as a new emperor, "Chinese communists are leaving the countryside and entering urban areas. What will they do?" Every Chinese dynasty had a political and social basis in cities, and city dwellers and intellectuals, who usually lived in cities, were supporters of dynasties.

Japan fought two wars, the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese, to keep national independence. The two wars were in defense of the fatherland or motherland.
The second Sino-Japanese war, 1937-45, which led to the Pacific War, was different. Hitler invaded Poland in September, 1939. It was not an accident. He invaded Russia in June, 1941. It was not an accident. The second Sino-Japanese started from an accident.
Fires were shot from the Chinese army into the exercising Japanese unit on the night of July 7, 1937, near the Marco Polo Bridge in the suburb of Beijing. Both Japan and China wanted to contain it, they did not want to escalate it into a big war, but it did.

Japan was bogged down in the quagmire of a prolonged, extended and exhausting war. The Japanese army had not expected anything like that. Having expected they could knock down China in one or two blows, they were embarrassed, perplexed and confounded. Japan had not intended at all to take China first and then expel Great Britain and the United States and establish hegemony in East Asia.

To be continued.

Michi,

Thanks for that very informative and unbiased and objective explanation.

It all makes sense: Japan was the innocent party and Japan was drawn into wars it didn't want.

Well, only one thing to do now. Yes, you guessed it: we have to rewrite all the history books.

Ni hao cobber mates!

Who would have guessed something like this would happen:

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/asio-red-flags-liberal-party-donor-huifeng-haha-liu-over-foreign-interference-risks/ar-BB1cqO3L

Mr Opinion, that's who!

I TOLD YOU SO.

Sorry but I've a little more to say. But take comfort I'm nearing the end of my life, oh, oops, the end of the story.

Joseph Grew was the last US ambassador to prewar Japan. He was about ten years in Tokyo. He wrote Ten Years in Japan, which I read in Japanese translation. A reader comments on it at amazon usa, "The book offers great insight into the political struggles and turmoil of Japan in the early Showa period. Many people who are familiar with World War II may think that the Japanese of the time were solely fixated on going to war with the United States to win dominance in the Pacific, but Ambassador Grew reveals that most Japanese actually wanted peace with the US." The Japanese were abysmally shocked on the early morning of December 8, 1941, to hear that Japan had started war on the US and Great Britain. They knew instinctively that the United States was a giant. My mother whose education was eight years in primary school of a provincial area was shocked, as I heard from her. The Japanese knew Japan was negotiating with Washington for peace in China, not for dominance in the Pacific. But they took consolation and heart in the thought that now they would be released from the big problem that had pestered Japan for years.

Grew said somewhere in the book that when the Japanese came to an impasse they would turn tail without facing up to it for true solution. Much of the Meiji leadership and culture was lost in the Taisho period 1912-1926. Mass elements had come, if not to the fore, to the middle of Japanese society. Meiji leaders would not have done the thing that the new generation had done.

I understand Peal Buck's The Good Earth had a big impact on the American public opinion. Prof. Seiji Imahori of Hiroshima University ,specialized in China, was strongly opposed to Japanese aggression; he was rather sympathetic with postwar Mao's regime in view of the magnitude of the problems that faced China.

To be continued.

A lot of people aren't aware of Perry's Black Ships in 1853 which led to the Japanese civil war sales of weapons to Japan by the west and the Meiji Restoration in 1890. Hirohito came to power in 1910 at 25.

Continued.

Imahori said The Good Earth was far from describing the tremendous sufferings of the Chinese peasants.
"Pear Buch and her husband escaped from that atrocity (that was perpetrated in Nanjing by Chinese in 1927) and fled to Japan. From there they wrote how good it felt to be where there was things were peaceful. Last year, Mrs. Buck published an article in the Yale Review in which she expressed her admiration for the Chinese, because, she said, when she got back to her home at Nanking (Nanjing) after the murder and looting, she found no bawdy scribblings on the wall. This article struck some of the foreigners in China as worth reflection. It did not seem strange to them that an army given over to wholesale raping of the native women, with murders of foreigners and wholesale looting going on, should neglect to take time out for drawing vulgar pictures. Mrs. Buck said further in the article such clean-mindedness 'would hardly have been true if Western soldiers had occupied it' [her home]. 'I like the Chinese as they are,' she wrote.
'The glory and the strength of the Chinese are in their humanity.' She did not relate how the British Consul at Nanking was upon that occasion shot down in his own yard by jeering Chinese troops, how an American was likewise slain for no provocation...We have lent them money and they have misused it, and defaulted. We have built schools and hospitals and they have burned them down...Our diplomatic support and general leniency have seized upon as encouragement to atrocities with exemption from punishment...(Ralph Townsend, Way That Are Dark: The Truth About China. pp.330-1.)"

No such things of these sorts happened even in the 1930s' Japan. No Japanese threw eggs or anything at foreign embassies and consulates, let alone stones, as they do in China today. An egg was a too precious thing to throw away even in my boyhood in Japan. We did not eat it except on a festive occasion or for lunch on a picnic.

To be continued.

The Japanese army's hypothetical enemy had been Czarist and Communist Russia despite a group who rose and desired strong ties with Russia. "In 1937 all Japan's military planning was predicated on the assumption that the Soviet Union was Japan's only serious enemy in East Asia. By 1935 Russia had more troops in its Far Eastern Provinces...than Japan had in Manchuria...the last thing that Japan needed was a full scale war with China. Indeed, apart from Manchuria, Japan's strategic concern in China was limited to the formation of buffer zones in North China to protect Manchuria from surprise attack during a possible war with Russia (Reischauer, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, pp. 713-4.)" Manchuria was already the most industrialized part of China.

"The 'conspiracy theory' advanced by the International Tribunal for the Far East in its Judgment of 1948 rested on very shaky grounds from the start, and has since then been refuted by historians (Ben=Amy Shillony, Myth and Reality in Japan of the 1930s, Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society, edited by W. G. Beasley, first published by George Allen & Unwin, 1975, Charles E. Tuttle edition, 1976, p. 85."
The accident happened at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937. It is thought among experts that the shots were fired by the communists that had infiltrated the Nationalist Army. As the battle escalated the Japanese army was perplexed and confounded with their initial easy expectation betrayed.

The Japanese army failed to face up to the reality of the prolonged second Sino-Japanese War. Drift is a cardinally useful concept in knowing the truth. "When we are confronted with policies of drift rather than of clear purposes, the identification of initial decisions becomes a futile game as exemplified in the sequence of events leading to the war between Japan and the United States (Joseph Frankel, The Making of Foreign Policy, Oxford University Press, 1963, p.203.)"

The Japanese army service men were far more afraid of losing face or dignity in the eyes of the Japanese public than in the eyes of international society.

To be continued.

Opinion was spreading within the army in the early months of 1940 that they could not win the war and had to give up and pull out. Just then Hitler took offensives on the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Great Britain and France in the last days of April and May. France capitulated and the British army was kicked out of the Continent at Dunkirk. A change of mood took place in the army.
"Most fundamental was the sense of frustration with the long, drawn-out war with China. The war was draining national resources and it was not resulting in any tangible benefits...The Japanese fascination and even obsession with the idea of distancing themselves from the Anglo-Saxon nations and identifying with Germany or the Soviet Union was an emotional response to the frustration of a long war, and had little to do with a specific programme for solidarity with revisionist forces in the world (Akira Irie, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, Longman, 1989, pp. 84-5.)"

Irie's book is an excellent treatise of Japan, dealing with it in broad, multinational context. But it has a flaw, and what the flaw is is well suggested by the title, Origins. It does not deal with the dis-origins and non-origins; that is, it was not a straight line from the Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor. There had always been in Japan strong forces and opinions opposing the hawks.

In passing Irie is astute and keen enough to observe that "Thus from the very beginning China identified itself with international law and order and sought its salvation through the support of other nations and world public opinion. A country which, throughout most of the 1920s, had been divided, unstable, and revolutionary, challenging the existing order of international affairs, was almost overnight transforming itself into a champion of peace and order, pitting itself against another which hitherto had been solidly incorporated into the established system but which could now be accused of having defied it (p. 11.)"

To be continued

Michi,

Of course, I now see it: Japan was pushed into the war.

And if Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbour then the Americans would have bombed it anyway.

History The Michi Way. It should be taught in every school.

Continued.

"Japan would never have entered it (the Pacific War) had the armed forces kept out of politics, or, failing this, if the army had been content to allow the Foreign Ministry - its quality was impressive - unimpeded control of the handling of Japan's relations with China and the West during the 1930s...(Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan, Penguin Books, 1968, p. 237,)"
Masamichi Inoki, professor of Kyoto University, said, "Japanese field-grade officers and those higher in rank (generals) of prewar Showa were generally much inferior to their American counterparts."
Ambassador Grew and British Ambassador Robert Cragie were of the same opinion that the Pacific War could have been avoided.
Read my two comments, one on Charles Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941: Appearances and Realities and one on Hamilton Fish, FDR, the Other Side of the Coin: How We Were Tricked into World War II, amazon usa.

Japan proposed and entered into talks with the US. One of the things that Japan wanted was that the US exercise its influence on China to sit and seriously engage in talking with Japan for peace. Ikuhiko Hata is one of the authorities on the second Sino-Japanese War. He says 60 percent of the blame for the drawn-out war was on Japan, and 40 on China. So Chiang Kaishek too had to pay the price. The communists expanded their areas of influence and ultimately took all over China. But Chiang Kaishek and Mao Zedong were brothers. Chiang did genocide in Taiwan and Mao in Tibet and Inner Mongolia.

To be continued.

Continued.

My mother knew a Kusunoki Masashige. I heard about him. He was different from the wikipedia's one.
A cousin of mine lost his mother, at the age of six months, in July, 1942. Five months later, in December, his father was conscripted. I heard from my mother how he went out to go to a camp. Suddenly at the door he burst into wild, violent, and hysterical wailing and crying. My mother said she had never seen a man cry so violently before or since. He cried through wailing and tears, "Please look after Aki, will you, please?" He walked to the station to get registered with Matsue Infantry Regiment.
He did not come back. He died about six miles off Kolombangare, a Solomon Island, at 9:30 p.m. on August 6, 1943, when the US Navy officer John F, Kennedy and his men were drowning in a sea near-by as their torpedo boat had been sunk a few days before.

I heard about the mother of another Kusunoki Masahige. An ucle-in-law of my wife's was a junior high school student. He was talking with his neighbors, a couple. The couple was doing some rice paddy work. A man came from the town office and told them that he was there officially to inform of their son's death. The mother sank down to the muddy water, speechless and unable to hold herself.

To be cotinued.

The statue and the story of Kusunoki Masashige is interesting. The impressive statue is based across from the Emperors Palace in Tokyo.

As I understand Masa means truth in Japanese.

The first twenty years of prewar Showa were not happy years, but as I already quoted, "there was no dictator and the system was not the product of a well-defined, popular movement, but more a vague change of mood, a shift in the balance of power between the elite groups in Japanese society (Reischauer, The Japanese.)" The army and the navy were two of them or two pressure groups. "The army and navy officers, for their part, constituted no Junker class holding itself aloof from the common people. The samurai coloring of the officers of early Meiji days had been largely lost...The army and the navy were among Japan's most modernized institutions, but in their ideas, many officers were closer to the peasants than were other leaders...There was thus a genuine resonance in emotional attitudes between the military and rural Japan. The militaristic and ultranationalistic reaction that swept Japan in the thirties was atavistic in that it looked back to a simpler, more harmonious, more agrarian, and more authoritarian past, rather than to the rational solution of the new problems of an industrialized society (Reischauer, Japan,)"

The middle class, the big or middle-sized landed class, big businesses, and intellectuals usually did not support the radicalism. Supporters were generally found in rural peasants and small independent farming class. But it was the movement of those who were left behind in modernization and were particularly hit hard by the 1929 Depression. It was not an anti-American or anti-Western political movement; it was resentment toward urban life-style. Americanization in the Japanese life still went on in rural areas.

To be continued.

I learned a lot about fascism, particularly Nazism, and about modern industrialized society from The State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society by Emile Lederer, New York, Howard Fertig, 1967. Lederer says as follows on Japanese radicalism of the 1930s.

"What we now have in Japan is the organization of society for the war in China, the mobilization of its resources and of its spirit. The parliament still plays a role. Public opinions is not manufactured, as there are still still independent sources influencing it. Censorship is strict, as is to be expected during a war, but magazines, even those for the wider public, are not yet deprived of their freedom of expression. The soldiers returning from China are not a passive material to be absorbed by a fascist ideology - at least not at the present time. They are disillusioned, but of just those ideals which form the ideological basis of fascism. Inasmuch as fascism breeds on the illusions of those disillusioned with democracy, the time is ripe for a Japanese movement of the Italian or German type.
These remarks serve to show states are very complex phenomena which must be analyzed carefully; abstract concepts can do great harms (p. 67.)"

"the atomization of the nation and its reduction to masses" did not happen in Japan. The ultra-nationalists, the army and the navy did not claim that they stood above the ultimate authority of the emperor or above the people.

"...a regime like the present one in Japan...is fundamentally different from fascism. For fascism is the dictatorship by masses over the masses themselves and cannot be molded or transformed except by a revolution, which is not likely to break out unless there is a defeat on the battlefield (ibid. p. 68,)"
Revolution was least likely to happen in defeated Japan. That was a very good thing. The Japanese people knew Hirohito played a very important role to persuade the leaders to bear the unbearable and tolerate the intolerable, thus leading Japan to surrender.

To be continued

"...one may discover that the wartime regime of Japan, repressive as it was, was very different from the totalitarian states of that time in other places. When one realizes how tenuous and frail democracy is elsewhere in the world, and how strong the tendency towards arbitrary rule, one may conclude by wondering not why democracy failed in Japan, but rather how, despite the undemocratic tradition and the pressures of war, a totalitarian dictatorship did not evolve there (Ben=Amy Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan, Preface, p. vii.)"

People did not disappear in Japan of the 1930s. Communists were jailed but released when they recanted their belief. Japan did not have a police like Gestapo, GPU. Politicians did not assassinate their rivals. Liberals were generally quiet but not silent. They were not arrested because of their liberalism. There was no book burning. No Westerners were assassinated.

Canem,
masa (&#27491;&#65289;in masashige means just/justice/justify/justified, right/righteous/righten/righened, or correct/rectitude/rectify/rect(angle), etc.
Parents give names to their babies, hoping they will grow happy and right.

Yes Michi- I knew it was wrong as soon as I posted it- yes I remember someone saying their name meant 'correct' not 'truth' stupid me

Canum,

Masa has often been used together with words that mean truth, sincerity, honesty, etc.
But the tendency is that young people use them less; they like to use different words for their babies. I think it is reflective of cultural change.

I've seen a change in Japanese over time through the generations- but I find them less corrupted than our generations in a sense. I greatly admire what is called in the west the "pre-war babies" that lived through the Great Depression as they avoid waste and appreciate the little things. The Japanese perhaps have this character too.

Some Japanese I've known said that their parents said to them "You are not Japanese!" A western translation of a Japanese concept. I guess they called them "gaijin". I'm sure parents of a certain generation said that to all the children. Perhaps the bitter sweet tough love of a great community.