Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

by Humphrey Hawksley

Is this a nation unable to confront its own history, an accusation that China so readily levels against Japan, and that the United States levels against China? Or is this what all nations do—lie and forget in order to succeed? In my own school classes, teachers not only failed to tell me about the Opium Wars but also omitted mentions of a raft of other methods Britain had used in its control of other countries. I was taught about the 1415 Battle of Agincourt and the 1860s American Civil War, but not Britain’s 1814 burning of the White House. There was no mention either of the 1919 massacre of civilians in Amritsar, when Colonel Reginald Dyer ordered the continuous shooting for ten minutes of civilians, resulting in the murder of 379 people; and nothing of atrocities against Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2013 Britain agreed to pay $30 million in compensation to a trust set up for the victims’ families in Kenya for carrying out “unspeakable and horrific gross violation of human rights,” including “massacres, torture and sexual violence.”23 And when Mao Zedong is condemned for the famine of the Great Leap Forward, there is usually no reference to the famine in Bengal in 1943 when, under British rule, three million died.24