Status Updates From The Foundations of Eastern ...

Finished with last three lectures

45: PRC. More familiar material now. It feels like this chapter is a history written by the party now: “Good Mao / Bad Mao”; Mao as a “complex figure”. It’s apparent Mao was bad for China generally. He destroyed a generation and set the country back. He was good for the party though, which is why he’s celebrated within PRC now.

43 & 44: Medieval, Tokugawa & Meiji. I have to learn more about the rise of the nationalists after the Great Depression and before the war.

42: modern Korean history. Again, much of this is new to me. Korea and Japan were really the only two E. Asian Maritime country that we’re not colonized . The kinship lasted up until the early 20th century. I knew that Japan had colonized Korea in the early 20th century, but I didn’t know how it proceeded from expansionary Japanese policy previous denials of western colonizers.

41: the Chosun. Interesting overview of a part of the world that I don’t know much about. The Koreans created their own form of fusionism that created a class of scholar bureaucrats. That class was inherited and eventually cleaned by internal factions. Women were little more than household slaves. What implications does that have for modern Korean Society? Christianity brought to Korea by converts in China.

40: misrule, conservative closing and inward turning, by the Ming & Qing, result in European colonization. What could have been? I think the “4000 years of imperial dynastic rule” is not exactly correct. First the dynasties were separate lineages, there are multiple foreign dynasties & long periods of dissolution. There’s been maybe 2500 years of Confucian/Buddhist/Taoist culture, thought

CH 40: first of two lectures on the Qing. Always fascinated by the steppe peoples. Wish more was said about the contributions from the peoples adjacent to the Han on Chinese culture. The Mongols, Jurchen, Manchu all had a big effect, but what about Tibetans, bronze age peoples on edge of steppe in the west and north, the ancient peoples in Szechuan, the Wu, the Austronesians. It all wasn't Han outward.