China
China – Propaganda
Liang Qichao founded the newspaper Shibao in Shanghai in 1904. Propaganda is central to the operation of the Chinese system of government. Aspects of propaganda—in particular the formalization of imagery and language—can be traced back to the earliest period of Chinese history, but propaganda has been most effective in the twentieth century thanks to the mass media and a powerful…
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Major military engagements of the Taiping Rebellion
The Xiang Army recapturing Jinling, a suburb of the Taiping capital, July 19, 1864. The Taiping Rebellion devastated the landscape of southern China, causing widespread bloodshed and famine. Detail from The suppression of the Taiping Rebellion. Imperial troops during the Taiping Rebellion, China the wounded musketman is a Taiping rebel.…
THE TAIPING REBELLION
The Xiang Army recapturing Jinling, a suburb of the Taiping capital, July 19, 1864 Taiping soldiers, male and female, outside Shanghai The Taiping “Rebellion” (1851–64), or “Revolution,” was a religious-based domestic uprising with ethnic—Han versus Manchu—overtones. Fought mainly with traditional Chinese weapons and tactics, it corresponded and overlapped with the…
Battle of Talas River – Redux
In 751 a Tang (T’ang) dynasty army commanded by Gao Xianzhi (Kao Hsien-chih), military governor of Anxi (An-hsi) in the Western Regions, met an Arab army in battle at Talas River near Samarkand. The Chinese were defeated. Although this was not a major military confrontation, it had great consequences. Tang…
Imperial China: War and the Military I
There was a persistent military, cultural, and political conflict between various nomadic and semi-nomadic groups living in the steppe, and the sedentary, agricultural Chinese for most of imperial Chinese history. Steppe people were dependent upon their horses, which they used to drive their herds from pasture to pasture as the…
Imperial China: War and the Military II
The Opium War between Great Britain and Qing dynasty China began because the Chinese prohibited the sale of opium by foreign, mostly British, merchants. European demand for Chinese goods—silk, porcelain, and tea—which had begun in the seventeenth century increased dramatically in the eighteenth century. The British came to dominate this…
THE DEMISE OF JOLLY ROGERÂ I
The Suppression of Piracy in the East Indies and the South China Sea, 1855–69 As trade between Europe and the Far East developed, so did piracy, on a scale that dwarfed the activities of the Caribbean buccaneers of the previous century. It has been suggested that the pirates of the…