Asia: China

Asia: China Images Index

<AsiaChinaLarge.html> A larger map of China. (274kb)
<AsiaChina2Large.html> The largest map of China. (573kb)
<Asia600.html> The index map for China's region: Asia.

	Asia (map)
Middle East (map, 100k)	Click here to return to the main Asia map. Click here for a larger map of China. (274kb) Or click here for the largest map of China. (573kb)
India (map)	Oceania (map)

NASA/JPL/NIMA. “WorldSRTM-noPoles-giant” Online Image. Earth Observatory. 16 May 2005 <http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/PIA03395_lrg.jpg>

Asia: China

This image was created from a larger Public Domain world map produced from data obtained by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The world map was cropped to the China and resized to 600 pixels wide using a trial version of Adobe Photoshop. Using Google's free Picasa2 program, the color and lighting were then enhanced and finally sharpened to obtain the image above. The original image can be viewed at the NASA link above.

China has played a dominating role in world affairs from the origins of its first state the Shang dynasty in 1766BC. It was overthrown in 1122BC, by one of its vassals, the Zhou dynasty; the highly centralized Shang thus gave way to the feudal Zhou rulers who lost more and more control over their vassals. The history of its successor states are recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals with all their sparring for supremacy. The scholar and teacher Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius) died in 479BC at the very end of this period. With the end of the annals, China entered the Warring States period, when the sparring of the Zhou successor states assumed a new ferocity and became an all out struggle for survival. However, the period was similar to the contemporary Classical Age of Greece in that it saw tremendous innovation, a sea change in social mobility, and the development of many of the key elements of Chinese culture. The Zhou king was tossed aside and the state of Qin eventually destroyed all its rivals for power under King Zheng in 221BC. The despotic Qin was rapidly overthrown in 202BC by the powerful Han dynasty which would survive for 400 years. The Chinese still call themselves the Han in honor of this first great dynasty, which gave way in 220AD to a period of decentralization during which Central Asian invaders conquered parts of northern China introducing Buddhism which would was a critical development in Chinese culture.

A despotic dynasty, the Sui, unified the various states in 589AD only to be overthrown by a more tolerant and long lived successor, the Tang dynasty in 618AD. The Tang conquered their way across Asia before they were turned back at the doorstep of the Middle East by the Abbasid Caliph at the Battle of the Talas River in 751AD. The Tang dynasty was China’s cultural and artistic high point. Its poets in particular, like Li Po and Wang Wei, are revered in Information Age China, just as Homer and Virgil are cherished in Europe. After the Tang’s collapse in 907AD, it was a short time before the Song dynasty emerged to reunify China in 960AD becoming the most advanced state on the planet. Chinese landscape painting, one of China's most distinctive and beautiful art forms, attained its peak at this time. Its themes and mood but not its excellence changed after the conquest of northern China in 1127 by Central Asian barbarians. However, the Song survived in southern China against all expectation. No other state survived the full force of the Mongol invasions of the 1200s as well as the Song. Whereas most empires were crushed after their initial contact with the Mongols or at most within a few years, the Song dynasty fought a bitter war against the full fury of the Mongol hordes from 1236-1279AD.

However, Kublai Khan finally subdued the last Chinese strongholds and established himself as the preeminent Mongol Khan of his day. (Kublai was the court visited by Marco Polo, whose eye-witness account is invaluable to historians, but was universally disbelieved in Europe because Chinese civilization was so far advanced.) The Mongol conquest was as grave a disaster in Chinese history as it was to the Middle East. Even after the Chinese restored their independence under the Ming dynasty in 1368AD, education, culture, and political institutions had been critically weakened and the totalitarian stamp of the Mongol warlords continued to infect the court until the Qing emperors (after their usurpation in 1644) were isolated from even their own government. Corrupt eunuchs and family members became the true power in China. Chinese successes after the Mongols were bittersweet. China’s highly successful voyages of discovery led by the eunuch admiral, Zheng Ho, 1405-1431AD made China an international superpower peacefully without colonialism and a trading titan throughout the Indian Ocean and SE Asia. However, the emperors were eventually convinced they were too expensive and adopted a nationalist and isolationist policy crippling China’s international trade, prestige, and navy. Advances in agriculture merely allowed the population to swell to the limits of ever expanding food production. The level of poverty and disaffection was highly dangerous, and Chinese confidence was shattered by disastrous losses to the Europeans in the 1^st (1839-1842) and 2^nd (1856-1860) Opium Wars. In 1900, the peasant Boxer rebellion broke out and quickly gained support from the Qing court, which saw it as a way of trying to sweep out the Westerners. European retribution was swift and terrible, sacking the Forbidden City. Even the European accounts detail mass looting of Chinese treasures and prostitutes who sat on the emperor’s throne getting drunk and leading the soldiers in ribald songfests.

The government’s weakness finally caught up with it in 1911 when the Chinese Revolution swept the Qing from power and established a republic in 1912. However, the end of World War I had disastrous consequences for the integration of East Asia into the international community. The allied Japanese fought tenaciously for language specifically recognizing the equality of races, even as they fought to keep the Chinese territory they had occupied during the war. The Chinese delegation was one of the most spectacularly led and rhetorically dead on in making its case for the return of its territory. However, unabashed racism crippled the Japanese attempt at having the equality of races recognized and so the Chinese rights were given away at the Paris conference table to pacify the Japanese. It was one of the most glaring examples of the depth of the hypocrisy between what was originally intended and what actually happened in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Pro-western parties in China were thrown into a crisis of faith and most importantly, new impetus was given to the Communist movement. World War II restored a little of the European’s reputation as they fought to stop Japanese aggression in China, but it was too little too late. In 1949, Mao Zedong defeated the nationalist forces which were forced to flee to Taiwan; setting up a local rivalry which continued into the Information Age. The rise of the Communists under Mao inaugurated a period of radical (and frequently poorly planned) reforms characterized, like Soviet Communism, by the strengthening of the Communist party’s authority. This had the effect of encouraging corruption and cronyism which has held back Chinese progress. Internal policing, censorship, and repression brought China international condemnation, but remain the only way for the government to maintain order. Like all totalitarian regimes, it is rendered livable for its population mostly by its own inability to be everywhere at once.