{"id":302,"date":"2007-09-23T20:27:43","date_gmt":"2007-09-24T01:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/2007\/09\/oy\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:39:59","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:39:59","slug":"oy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2007\/09\/oy\/","title":{"rendered":"Oy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, its sort of dumpster-diving, but there is a really dumb post on Chinese history up from John Derbyshire.<\/a> In the process of explaining why he is not quite Islamophobic as some of the other writers on NRO he points out that Islamic civilization is no more stagnant and pointless than that of, say, China. To prove this he cites this from an 1882 history of China.<\/p>\n

It might be more instructive to trace the growth of thought among the masses, or to indicate the progress of civil and political freedom; yet not only do the materials not exist for such a task, but those we possess all tend to show that there has been no growth to describe, no progress to be indicated during these comparatively recent centuries. It is the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese history that the people and their institutions have remained practically unchanged … from a very early period. Even the introduction of a foreign element has not tended to disturb the established order of things. The supreme ruler preserves the same attributes and discharges the same functions; the governing classes are chosen in the same manner; the people are bound in the same state of servitude, and enjoy the same practical liberty; all is now as it was. Neither under the Tangs nor the Sungs, under the Yuans or the Mings [i.e. from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries \u2014 these are the names of Chinese dynasties] was there any change in national character or in political institutions to be noted or chronicled. … This condition of things may be disappointing to those who pride themselves in tracing the origin of constitutions and the growth of civil rights, and who would have a history of China the history of the Chinese people … the fact is undoubted that there is no history of the Chinese people, apart from that of their country, to be recorded. The national institutions and character were formed, and had attained in all essentials to their present state, more than 2,000 years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

O.k., its John Derbyshire, who is a nut, but he is not entirely ignorant about China. He has a Chinese wife, and apparently speaks some Chinese, and appeared in a Bruce Lee<\/a> movie. Is there any way of getting the general public to realize that China has changed in the last 2000 years?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, its sort of dumpster-diving, but there is a really dumb post on Chinese history up from John Derbyshire. In the process of explaining why he is not quite Islamophobic as some of the other writers on NRO he points out that Islamic civilization is no more stagnant and pointless than that of, say, China….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"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":[165,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-historiography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s9yoH3-oy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","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\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4922,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/4922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}