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Chinese History Quotes

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Chinese History Quotes

“Although his log entries do not speak of America per se, a chart created by Admiral Zheng was used to make a detailed map of the world. A copy of this map, drawn in 1763, was found in a second-hand bookshop and was offered as evidence that Zheng’s fleet was the first to discover America. At the age of 61, Admiral Zheng died aboard ship and befittingly was buried at sea. The Chinese sailed on very large ships, some of which were 450 feet long and 180 feet wide, in fact larger than any other of that time. They were certainly large enough to circumnavigate the world. Typical donut-shaped stone anchors of the type used by the Chinese have been found off the coast of California, as well as the west coast of South America, substantiating their claims. Zheng’s journal states that it took 270 days to sail from China to California on his voyage across the Pacific. On another expedition, he described rounding the bottom of Africa and sailing into the Atlantic, to what could well have been South America and the Caribbean.”

MapsWorld HistoryCubaExplorersCaptain Hank BrackerChinese HistoryAdmiral Zheng
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "The Exciting Story of Cuba"
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“British colonial disdain for human rights even left its mark on the English language. The word “coolie” was borrowed from a Chinese word that literally means “bitter labor.” The Romanized first syllable coo means “bitter” and the second syllable lie mimics the pronunciation of the Chinese logograph that means “labor.” This Chinese word sprang into existence shortly after the Opium War in the nineteenth century when Britain annexed several territories along the eastern seaboard of China. Those territories included Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, Canton city (Guangzhou) and parts of Tianjin, a seaport near Beijing. In those newly acquired territories, the British employed a vast number of manual laborers who served as beasts of burden on the waterfront in factories and at train stations. The coolies’ compensation was opium, not money. The British agency and officers that conceived this unusual scheme of compensation—opium for back-breaking hard labor—were as pernicious and ruthless as they were clever and calculating. Opium is a palliative drug. An addict becomes docile and inured to pain. He has no appetite and only craves the next fix. In the British colonies and concessions, the colonizers, by paying opium to the laborers for their long hours of inhumane, harsh labor, created a situation in which the Chinese laborers toiled obediently and never complained about the excessive workload or the physical devastation. Most important of all, the practice cost the employers next to nothing to feed and house the laborers, since opium suppressed the appetite of the addicts and made them oblivious to pain and discomfort. What could be better or more expedient for the British colonialists whose goal was to make a quick fortune? They had invented the most efficient and effective way to accumulate capital at a negligible cost in a colony. The only consequence was the loss of lives among the colonial subjects—an irrelevant issue to the colonialists. In addition to the advantages of this colonial practice, the British paid a pittance for the opium. In those days, opium was mostly produced in another British colony, Burma, not far from China. The exploitation of farmhands in one colony lubricated the wheels of commerce in another colony. On average, a coolie survived only a few months of the grim regime of harsh labor and opium addiction. Towards the end, as his body began to break down from malnutrition and overexertion, he was prone to cardiac arrest and sudden death. If, before his death, a coolie stumbled and hurt his back or broke a limb, he became unemployed. The employer simply recruited a replacement. The death of coolies in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other coastal cities where the British had established their extraterritorial jurisdiction during the late 19th century was so common that the Chinese accepted the phenomenon as a routine matter of semi-colonial life. Neither injury nor death of a coolie triggered any compensation to his family. The impoverished Chinese accepted injury and sudden death as part of the occupational hazard of a coolie, the “bitter labor.” “Bitter” because the labor and the opium sucked the life out of a laborer in a short span of time. Once, a 19th-century British colonial officer, commenting on the sudden death syndrome among the coolies, remarked casually in his Queen’s English, “Yes, it is unfortunate, but the coolies are Chinese, and by God, there are so many of them.” Today, the word “coolie” remains in the English language, designating an over-exploited or abused unskilled laborer.”

RacismChinaBritainColonialismExploitationAsiaBritish EmpireHong KongBritish HistoryChinese History
Book:The Turbulent Sea: Passage to a New World
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“The national mobilization to exterminate the "Four Pests"... was the first of a series of disasters precipitated by the Great Helmsman after the Anti-Rightist Campaign. "National mobilisation" meant that all 500 million people in China stopped work in order to take up a single specific task — in this case, the extermination of sparrows, flies, mosquitoes, and rats.”

ChinaCommunismMao ZedongChinese History
Book:The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China Before Mao
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