{"id":110,"date":"2006-04-17T16:01:18","date_gmt":"2006-04-17T21:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/2006\/04\/chasing-emperors\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:41:12","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:41:12","slug":"chasing-emperors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2006\/04\/chasing-emperors\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing Emperors"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My wife found this pin in her collection, and has no recollection of how we got it. I did a little digging and found that the “Civil Air Patrol<\/a>” was an airline which operated out of China — mainland and Taiwan — from 1946 to at least the mid 1960s. It was founded<\/a> by Claire L Chennault and Whiting Willauer and purchased by the CIA in 1950. This pin was a souvenir item<\/a>. The text on the backing reads<\/p>\n

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This is one of the famous Oriental symbols of CAT (Civil Air Transport)..the five-toed dragon. In olden days only the Emperor could wear this symbol; those of lesser rank wore dragons with fewer toes. We like to think that all of our passengers on CAT’s colorful Mandarin Jet — truly a flying Oriental palace — receive hospitality and cordiality beffitting an Emperor and his Lady.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Wonderful bit of orientalist marketing, I think. My wife’s family was in Asia in the late 1960s, so it’s possible that they might have traveled via CAT at some point.<\/p>\n

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The other chase<\/strong>: I’m using Ray Huang’s 1587: A Year of No Significance; the Ming Dynasty in Decline<\/em> as the final text in my China to 1600<\/a> course, but I would really like to have a timeline to go with the book. The cast of characters and back-and-forth narrative is a bit confusing, honestly, and so I’d like a dramatis personae<\/em> and chronology. Obviously, I’ve been looking on the web, but haven’t found anything. If anyone knows of a good source, and would like to share, I (and my students) would be deeply grateful. If I don’t hear of anything, I’m going to have to produce my own….<\/p>\n

Elsewhere<\/strong>: Andrew Meyer is comparing China today to the Qing dynasty of a century ago<\/a>: tottering, on the verge of vast social and economic changes, but without a strong reformist clique to take control. I like his analysis of China today, and I’ve got no quibble with his description of China at the end of the Qing, but I think he doesn’t take his own point — that China has a long history of extended fin de dynasty<\/em> crisis eras — seriously enough. I have a sneaky suspicion, actually, that a better analogy might be to China two<\/strong><\/em> centuries ago: weak popular support for the monarchy\/party, while the government tries to reassert increasingly irrelevant moral authority; growing but uneven economy; rising integration and tensions with international markets and diplomacy; increasing awareness of technological differentials but unwillingness to acknowledge power differentials…. maybe. Will Microsoft or Starbucks be the new opium?<\/p>\n

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My wife found this pin in her collection, and has no recollection of how we got it. I did a little digging and found that the “Civil Air Patrol” was an airline which operated out of China — mainland and Taiwan — from 1946 to at least the mid 1960s. It was founded by Claire…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[100,165,119,126,129,141,144,161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-china","category-english","category-general","category-historiography","category-maoist-era-1949-1976","category-ming","category-taiwan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5069,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/5069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}