From China it was tea and porcelain. Lucy Worsley, Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls III: Act Three: At Work and at Play, BBC 2012
Off the coast of China British traders made fortunes from ships freighted with addictive drugs. Jeremy Paxman, Empire IV: Making a Fortune, BBC 2012
The Opium Wars were about to begin ... China had been forced to enter the modern global economy. ibid.
China is the new bad guy because they are building a new power station every four days. But a quarter of that energy makes stuff for us; western companies pay Chinese workers crap wages to make crap plastic toys then ship them to Europe and wrap them in more plastic. The Age of Stupid 2009 starring Pete Postlethwaite & Jehangir Wadia & Layefa Malin & Al Duvernay & Fernand Pareau & Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud & Piers Guy & Mark Lynas & Mohamed Nasheed & David King & George Monbiot & Richard Heinberg & Ed Miliband et al, director Franny Armstrong
Plastic toy and plastic wrap goes into plastic bags. ibid.
China is the new frontier for fossil discoveries. David Attenborough's Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates, BBC 2013
More than a hundred and fifty different species of dinosaur have been found in the rocks of China alone, and over a thousand worldwide. ibid.
China: The intriguing link between dinosaurs and birds. ibid.
China: In recent years spectacular fossils have been unearthed here. Planet Dinosaur 2/6: Feathered Dragons, BBC 2011
The Forbidden City in Beijing, built by the Ming dynasty in the early fifteenth century – these awe-inspiring buildings are a reminder of the last time China was a global leader. They remain as relics of one of the greatest civilisations in all history. But they are also a reminder that no civilisation lasts for ever. Within a century of their construction the decline of the East and the rise of the West had begun. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation I: Is the West History? Competition, Channel 4 2011
The birth of the nation state and the rise of capitalism would lead to a remarkable reversal of fortunes ... How it was that Europeans, not Chinese, came to run the world? ibid.
When the intrepid Venetian Marco Polo had visited China in the 1270s he had been astonished by the volume of traffic on the Yangtze. ibid.
China’s failure to exploit its advantages left the path of overseas expansion wide open for the West. ibid.
The Forbidden City in Beijing is just one vast monument to the unity of imperial power. ibid.
Harmony harmony harmony – it’s a kind of code-word for undivided imperial authority. ibid.
In China imperial rule was implemented by a Confucian bureaucracy. ibid.
The Ming Dynasty had been born in 1368. And as we’ve seen for a century after that China was the most sophisticated civilisation by almost any measure. But then in the mid-seventeenth century the wheels came flying off. Political factionalism, fiscal crisis, and famine opened the door to rebellion and invasion. The results were devastating: conflict and disease reduced the Chinese population by as much as 40%. In 1644 the last Ming emperor hanged himself out of shame. This dramatic transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy had taken little more than a decade. ibid.
Competition, markets, profits, capitalism. These are the things China once turned its back on. Well not any more. ibid.
The English got better stimulants too: they got the coffee house. While the Chinese got the opium den. ibid.
A billion pairs of matching pyjamas ... China had become the world’s drabbest society. Gone were the last vestiges of imperial silk. Gone too was the western dress favoured by the nationalists ... What a difference three decade of reform were to make to the way a society looks. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation V: Is the West History? Consumerism
China’s began with a massive investment in textile manufacture. ibid.
Judging by what I’ve seen in Chinese cities, they are getting there. ibid.
Hong Kong created a quasi-Christian society of God-worshippers, that attracted the support of tens of millions of Chinese. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation VI: Is the West History? Work
China’s experiment with Christianity had been a catastrophe ... Churches were closed down. Some were turned into factories. ibid.
The Protestant work ethic has come to China. ibid.
American borrowers have come to rely on Chinese savers, a symbiotic relationship between China and America that I call Chimerica. Professor Niall Ferguson, Ascent of Money: Chimerica, PBS 2009
On August 23rd 1840 British gun-ships landed here on Hong Kong Island. The Ching empire was about to feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state. ibid.
With south-western China under British control the opium trade was given free rein. Drug addiction exploded. ibid.
The People’s Republic is poised to become the biggest economy in the world. Niall Ferguson, China: Triumph and Turmoil I: Emperors, Channel 4 2012
Is all this the achievement of capitalism or of communism? Of the Western free market or of traditional Chinese values? ibid.
Chin was the first person to find a way to hold two million square miles together. His solution: autocracy. ibid.
A fifth of humanity now lives here. ibid.
Autocracy that values order over choice, secrecy over openness, unity over democracy. ibid.
It was Confucius who provided the value system which is the very foundation of China’s civilisation. ibid.
Violent popular revolts against a corrupt political system repeatedly swept through China. ibid.
The People’s Republic is poised to become the largest economy in the world. Niall Ferguson, China: Triumph and Turmoil II: Maostalgia
Is Mao worship mass delusion? Or was Mao really the man who built modern China? ibid.
Mao killed more of his own people than either Hitler or Stalin. And yet here in China he is widely popular. ibid.
Mao installed his own ruling class creating a system of state control. ibid.
In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward ... The result was a calamitous famine. ibid.
Between 1958 and 1961 at lest thirty-five million people, nearly all of them peasants, died of famine or famine-related diseases. Some say it was forty-five million. ibid.
The personality cult of the great helmsman himself. ibid.
The Cultural Revolution just looks like madness. ibid.
With Mao gone, a new and very different revolution was about to begin ... The revolution that made China what it is today. ibid.
Low taxes, free trade and the cheapest labour in the world. ibid.
The events of 1989 remain so sensitive today that almost no-one wants to talk about them. The airbrush strikes again. ibid.
Will this hybrid capitalist-communist model continue to work? ibid.
Can it aspire to rule the world? ibid.
Everywhere you go in China today you see a country in a hurry. There’s a headlong rush to build roads, factories, airports and tower blocks, entire cities, in record time. China’s industrial revolution is the biggest and the fastest in history. Niall Ferguson, China III: Triumph and Turmoil: Superpower
We are living through a massive historical shift of economic and political power from West to East. And it’s going to affect all our lives. ibid.
American levels of income inequality. ibid.
All that economic growth is causing an environmental disaster. ibid.
This is the beginning of a new world empire. ibid.
It’s we who are becoming dependent on China’s economic dynamism. ibid.
Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs – we entrepreneurs – have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger p4
China is not only formidable, it is also aggressively building its own economic infrastructure. Just a few years from now China will rival the US and the European Union in global market power. It already has surpassed us in population. Jo Ann Emerson