Everything Under the Heavens Quotes

“As an empire built upon a succession of dynasties, China had never had a fixed name as a country, nor anything like a universally shared national language, nor for that matter anything remotely resembling a national history. Here again, Liang Qichao played a leading role, in essays like his 1901 “Introduction to Chinese History,” helping formulate an idea of the nation for the first time. “What I feel most shameful of is that our country does not have a name. The name of the Han or people of Tang are only names of Dynasties, and the name ‘China’ that foreign countries use is not a name that we call ourselves.” From Hawaii two years earlier, Liang had written, “The Chinese people do not even know there is such a thing as a national people [guomin]. After several thousand years, there have been the two words guo jia [state, family] but I have never heard the two words guo min [state, people] ever uttered.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

“Beijing’s creation of three thousand acres of new land in the South China Sea between 2013 and 2015 has placed China on a trajectory to dominate the entire body of water by 2020. “They will control the South China Sea against all the militaries out there with the exception of the U.S. military in all scenarios short of war,” he said.*2 Here again, China was pushing the envelope in at least two ways. The first was by claiming a range of rights over what goes on within an EEZ that exceeds what most countries recognize. Conventional interpretations of the international law of the sea allow “innocent passage” of vessels from other nations through any state’s two-hundred-mile EEZ, including military vessels, which should neither pause or linger nor “launch or recover aircraft, collect military intelligence, distribute propaganda, launch any kind of watercraft, fire weapons, fish or take any action that is not involved in the direct passage of the ship through the territory of the coastal state,” according to an article published in September 2015 by the U.S. Naval Institute.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

“to own the sea, China must own islands, which are the only things under international law that confer ownership of surrounding waters. This fact makes these formations, however insignificant they may appear from above, key. If existing law were to form any part of China’s grab, it can be assumed that its strategy until recently was a kind of game of hopscotch that begins at its southernmost province, the island of Hainan, and proceeds formation by formation, feature by feature, through the Paracel Islands, disputed by Vietnam, and down through the Spratlys and their surrounding waters, which are claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan, as well as in part by Malaysia and Brunei. Under this theory, China had reckoned that control of anything deemed to be an island along the way would confer China control of a two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of surrounding seas.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

“in mounting its push into the South China Sea, Chinese cartographers have adopted a trick from digital photography, where many cameras can change their display ratios, or “aspect,” from square to rectangular to panoramic. In China’s new cartography, its north-south dimension is emphasized. This has the effect of making the South China Sea appear to hang from the southern coastline like an enormous blue banner. Almost magically, it begins to look more or less like a natural extension of the country and less marginal or incidental as it did on the older, more familiar maps. To complete the trick, Beijing has mounted an unrelenting campaign of domestic propaganda instructing the Chinese people that the waters the world identifies today as the South China Sea—a name introduced by Europeans in the nineteenth century—indisputably belong to China. In 2015, one of the most striking examples of this was a promotional video for the People’s Liberation Army Navy that was reportedly shared online more than one hundred million times in the first week after its release. “China’s oceanic and overseas interests are developing rapidly,” it said. “Our land is vast. But we will not yield a single inch of our frontiers to foreigners.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

“in April 2014, President Obama publicly confirmed that although the United States took no position on the merits of China’s and Japan’s rival claims to the islands, the United States would defend Japan’s long-standing control of them if it came under attack, under the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, which was first signed in 1952. Privately, the two countries had been making contingency plans for just such a situation since 2012.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

“North Vietnam had long played patron to Cambodia’s revolutionaries, often under difficult circumstances. In the early 1950s, in conformity with the strong spirit of the Marxist internationalism that still existed then, Mao encouraged Ho Chi Minh and his cohorts to oversee the creation of Communist parties in Southeast Asia, a task that the North Vietnamese undertook with enthusiasm. The North Vietnamese cadres sent to Cambodia in the 1950s were virtually obliged to start from scratch. As late as 1944, only five hundred Khmer students completed primary school each year, and nationwide there were not more than a thousand secondary school students.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: how the past helps shape China’s push for global power