Today’s discussion and last night’s reading were very interesting to me and provided a very good insight into China and its continuing imperialism.

The Chinese for a long time conquered non-Han territories like Vietnam or Korea, but the Qing dynasty dramatically expanded China to mostly similar frontiers as today. The Qing were ruled the Manchus, a minority ethnic group from northeastern China, making their rule over the mostly Han Chinese quite imperialist in terms of controlling a different people. The Qing didn’t encourage assimilation into the new territories and a good chunk of their culture survived the Qing era. Though after the 1911 Revolution, it’s leader Sun Yat-Sen encouraged assimilation among the minorities to ensure the survival of Chinese civilization. A lot of these ideas weren’t fully put through though, as Sun Yat-Sen only ruled China for a year or two. After the Chinese Civil War and the conquest of Tibet, a dilemma confronted the PRC in their new vast territory; how to treat the many ethnicities. At first they used a stalinist approach in giving them autonomy and also used western writings to scale down the number the number of ethnicities based on shared languages. However, in recent years, due to growing calls for equality and independence, Yat-Sen’s idea of assimilation has been revived, and some of the means of assimilating have garnered the justified scorn of the international community.