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| 1915. Japan's demands on China under Yuan Shikai. |
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| 1905. Under Cixi and Yuan Shikai, done as a reform. Not well received. |
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| 1957 & 1959. Responses to Hundred Flowers and Peng Dehuai (Great Leap Forward private letter critic) respectively. |
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| 1910. The modernized army of Yuan Shikai's government. Set the stage for numerous warlords when it breaks up in the following decades. Instrumental in the fall of the Qing empire. |
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| 1899-1901. Anti-Christian, -foreign, -imperialist uprising. Quelled by an Eight-Nation Alliance which favored Guangxu. Ended in Boxer Protocol, which weakened Cixi's regime further. |
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| 1760-1842. All European trade restricted to Canton, and foreigners forbidden to reside there outside of trading season. Ended with the Treaty of Nanjing (after the Opium Wars) |
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| 1950s, 1960s. A term describing reactionary elements that supported capitalism. I.e. Deng Xiaoping or Khrushchev. |
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| Leading figure in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and 1919 May Fourth Movement. Later, first chairman of the new Communist Party (formed 1920). |
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| Leader of the KMT after Sun Yat-sen's death. Led the Northern Expedition troops in defeating warlords. |
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| Ti-Yong (Chinese Essence and Western Function) |
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| 1861-1895. Primary principle of the late Qing Self-Strengthening Movement: China should maintain its own style of learning to maintain societal "essence", but adopt western learning for "practical application" in developing infrastructure and economy. |
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| Provisional capital of Chiang's nationalist government during world war 2. Bombed heavily during Second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945). |
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| 1985-1982. Central unit of economic and political organization in the countryside. Introduced in the Great Leap Forward and repopularized in the Cultural Revolution. All needs were provided for Work Groups. |
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| 1966-1976. Social upheaval as Mao turned on the party and encouraged students and others to purge reactionary party members. Prompted creation of Red Guard. |
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| 1978. A wall in Beijing on which messages of political dissent were posted, initially against the Gang of Four. Deng shut it down in 1979 when criticism started being directed at his government. |
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| 1904 – 1997. Joined the Communist party in the 1920s. A veteran of the Long March, he rose to high positions in the Central Committee during the 1950s and early 1960s. After the antirightist campaigns he became general secretary and then gained influence during the Great Leap Forward. He proposed some economic reforms that Mao deemed rightist/capitalist. Returned to power after a period of persecution for being a capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution and he became premier in 1980. He was instrumental in implementing the Four Modernizations and crushing the 1989 democracy protests. He introduced Chinese economic reform and partially opened China to the global market. |
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| 1937-1945. Name of the Communist Red Army division led by Zhu De, placed under nominal GMD control during the Second United Front against Japan. Infiltrated Japanese lines during WW2, and later incorporated into PLA. |
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| 1861-1908. A powerful and charismatic figure who became the de facto ruler of the Qing Dynasty in China for 48 years from 1861 to her death in 1908. She installed her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor in 1875. A conservative ruler who refused to adopt Western models of government, Cixi rejected reformist views and placed Guangxu under house arrest in later years for supporting reformers. An opponent of Self-Strengthening and most other reforms. Supported Boxer Rebellion and later became subordinated to the Eight-Nation Alliance when the rebellion was quelled. |
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| State of being exempt from local laws, usually as a result of diplomatic negotiations. Imposed on China's port cities (esp. Shanghai) after the First Opium War (1839-42). |
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| 1953-1957. Intensive program of industrialization and socialization. This period was the closest collaboration between China and the Soviet Union. Thousands of Soviet technical advisers came to China to help with factory building, industrial planning, the development of electric power, etc. The Chinese followed all five basic elements of the Soviet technique for rapid industrial growth. Although it was a great success there were some problems with quality control. By 1955 China had abolished wholly private enterprises. In terms of economic growth the First Five-Year Plan was quite successful, especially in those areas emphasized by the Soviet-style development strategy. |
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| 1923. Communists and Nationalists embarked on the joint Northern Expedition to defeat the warlords. Partway through the expedition (1927), Chiang turned on the Communists and purged them, starting the civil war which lasted until the Second United Front in 1936 (Second Sino-Japanese War) |
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| 1976. The four officials (including Jiang Qing) blamed for the Cultural Revolution. Arrested in 1976 after Deng took power from Hua Guofeng in 1980, tried and convicted in 1980. |
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| 1958-1961. AKA Second Five-Year Plan. Attempt launched by Mao Zedong to heighten economic productivity dramatically in China through mass organization and the inspiration of revolutionary fervor among the people. Exaggerated reports of the success of policies such as the radical collectivization of peasants into large “people’s communes” and the decentralization of industrial production temporarily masked the actual economic disaster and widespread famine brought by the Great Leap. It was an attempt to use China’s vast population to rapidly transform China into an industrialized, modern nation with a productive agriculture sector. Millions of people starved to death during this period. |
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| The Nationalists. A political party that controlled the Nationalist Government in China from 1928 to 1949 and then moved to Taiwan in 1950 and still rule there today. It was founded in 1912 from a collection of several revolutionary groups that helped to overthrow the Qing, including the Revolutionary Alliance. Sun Yat-sen was the leader of this party and they won the 1912 National Assembly election. Yuan Shikai then dissolved them in the end of 1913. Sun Yat-sen resurrected the party in 1920. It fought against warlordism, communists, and the Japanese from 1928 to 1949 and were run by Chiang Kai-shek. |
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| Leader of the 1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion. Believed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ. He believed that he was entrusted by God to drive the Manchus out of China, so he formed the society of God worshipers in Guangxi province and proclaimed himself emperor of the “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”. |
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| 1982-1987 Secretary General of the CCP. Dismissed in 1987 for supporting 1986 student democracy protests. "More than any other leader, he seemed to be in touch with ordinary people." Questioned party ideology. His death served as a rallying point for the 1989 demonstrations that led to the massacre. |
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| 1864. An army of Hunanese peasants that helped defeat the Taiping. |
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1898. An ultimately failed 104-day cultural, political, and educational reform movement undertaken by the Guangxu emperor and other reformers. Co-captained and based on the ideals of Kang Youwei. Sought to modernize the education & exam systems, eliminate useless “iron rice bowl” jobs, incorporate democracy & constitutional monarchy, apply principles of capitalism to strengthen the economy, reform the military, and rapidly industrialize. View was that China needed more than “self-strengthening”: innovation had to be accompanied by institutional and ideological change.
Ended in a coup led by ultraconservatives Yuan Shikai and Empress Dowager Cixi. Chief reformers either fled or were executed, and Cixi took over as regent.
In the decade that followed, the court did end up instituting certain gradual reforms, such as the abolition of the Imperial Examination as well as other educational, military, and political modernizations, incl. the New Army. However, overly slow and ineffectual reforms proved to be an impetus for revolution later in 1911. |
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| 1957. Brief period in which Mao called for intellectuals to criticize the CCP. The resultant outpouring of expression was swiftly cut off by the end of June, when an antirightist campaign was launched against those who spoke out. Mao believed that after discussion it would be apparent that socialist ideology was the dominant ideology over capitalism, even amongst non-communist Chinese, and would thus propel the development and spread of the goals of socialism. To save face, Mao responded with the first wave of Anti-Rightist campaigns. |
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| Third wife of Mao Zedong, a former movie actress who rose in the late 1960s and 1970s to become a major political figure of the Cultural Revolution. She was arrested in 1976 after the death of Mao on charges that as the leader of the Gang of Four she was personally responsible for directly persecuting hundreds of party members and indirectly causing the suffering of millions of Chinese. Her death sentence was commuted to life under house arrest. |
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| As the "core of the third generation" of Communist Party of China leaders, serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002, as President of the People's Republic of China from 1993 to 2003, and as Chairman of the Central Military Commission from 1989 to 2004. Jiang came to power in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, replacing Zhao Ziyang, who was purged for being too conciliatory towards the protestors, as General Secretary. With the waning influence of Deng Xiaoping due to old age, Jiang effectively became "paramount leader" in the 1990s. Under his leadership, China experienced substantial developmental growth with reforms, saw the peaceful return of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom and Macau from Portugal, and improved its relations with the outside world while the Communist Party maintained its tight control over the government. |
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| 1928-1934. (Place with the caves in the documentaries). Experimental rural Communist government led by Mao, centered in the town of Ruijin on a mountainous border. Established in 1928 it lasted until the Guomindang blockade of the area forced the Communists to escape north in 1934 on what became the Long March. |
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| He led movements to establish a constitutional monarchy and was an ardent Chinese nationalist. Led a failed coup d’etat in 1917, died 10 years later. Ideals also a large part of the 1898 Hundred Days' Reform. |
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| 1950-1953. The United Nations, particularly the United States, came to the aid of the South Koreans in repelling the invasion. After early defeats by the North Korean military, when a rapid UN counter-offensive repelled the North Koreans past the 38th Parallel and almost to the Yalu River, the People's Republic of China (PRC) came to the aid of Communist North.[23] With Communist China's entry into the conflict, the fighting took on a more dangerous tone. The Soviet Union materially aided North Korea and China. The threat of a nuclear world war eventually ceased with an armistice that restored the border between the Koreas at the 38th Parallel and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a 2.5-mile (4.0 km) wide buffer zone between the two Koreas. North Korea unilaterally withdrew from the armistice on May 27, 2009, thus returning to a de jure state of war. |
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1946. The thorough land reform launched by the Communist Party of China in 1946, three years before the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), won the party millions of supporters among the poor and middle peasantry. The land and other property of landlords were expropriated and redistributed so that each household in a rural village would have a comparable holding.
In the mid-1950s, a second land reform during the Great Leap Forward compelled individual farmers to join collectives, which, in turn, were grouped into People's communes with centrally controlled property rights and an egalitarian principle of distribution. This policy was generally a failure in terms of production.
1970s. A third land reform beginning in the late 1970s re-introduced the family-based contract system known as the Household Responsibility System, which had enormous initial success, followed by a period of relative stagnation. |
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| Enacted by the Empress Dowager in 1902, they were an attempt to appease her political foes. She promoted reformist officials and sent envoys to Japan and Europe. This movement culminated in the abolition of the exam system in 1905. |
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| A decorated army general who worked to end several rebellions, including Taiping and Nian. Final legacy was in signing the Boxer Protocol in 1901 -> viewed as a traitor. |
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| 1988-1998. Fourth premier of the PRC. Advocated a conservative approach to economic reform. Also a visible representative of the government in backing the use of force to quell the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. |
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| A progressive thinker involved in the Hundred Days' Reform, whose proposal asserted that China was in need of more than "self-strengthening", and called for many institutional and ideological changes such as getting rid of corruption and remodeling the state examination system. |
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| Died 1971. Military leader who helped to transform the PLA into a conventional modern army; became minister of defense in 1958. A strong supporter of Mao, he compiled the influential “Quotations from Chairman Mao” and was named to be Mao’s successor in 1969. Supposedly he died two years later in an airplane crash after having escaped a failed coup against Mao. |
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| Series of treaties in which China was forced to concede many of its territorial and sovereignty rights. They were negotiated during the 19th and early 20th centuries between China and foreign imperialist powers, especially Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan. The first of these was the Treaty of Nanjing signed in 1842 at the conclusion of the Opium Wars which made China open 5 treaty ports, pay a 21 million tael indemnity and abolished the Cohong monopoly. |
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| The Warlord era in modern China was 1916 to the late 1930s. A warlord is a person with power who has military control over a subnational area due to armed forces loyal to the warlord and not to a central authority. The person generally uses far more power than their rank entitles them. Many of the most powerful warlords came from the dissolved Beiyang Army. |
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| 1936. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT was suddenly arrested and kidnapped by Marshal Zhang Xueliang, a former warlord of Manchuria, then Japan-occupied Manchukuo. The incident led the Nationalists and the Communists to make peace so that the two could form a united front against the increasing threat posed by Japan. Some facts about the incident still remain unclear as most of the parties involved died without revealing in detail what happened during those chaotic few weeks. Resulted in the Second United Front (1937-1945) being formed. |
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| 1936-1947. The center of Mao's CCP activities from the end of the Long March (1934-1936) until the Communist victory over the Nationalists. The place with all the caves. |
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| Chinese General and Politician who was famous for his influence during the late Qing dynasty as well as his rather autocratic rule as the first President of the Republic then his declaration of himself as the great Emperor of China. Abdicated in 1916 and died the same year. Opportunistic and awful, siding with the Qing, then the Nationalists, and then working with the Japanese on the 21 Demands. |
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the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. Zhou was instrumental in the Communist Party's rise to power, and subsequently in the development of the Chinese economy and restructuring of Chinese society.
A skilled and able diplomat, Zhou served as the Chinese foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. Advocating peaceful coexistence with the West, he participated in the 1954 Geneva Conference and helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Due to his expertise, Zhou was largely able to survive the purges of high-level Chinese Communist Party officials during the Cultural Revolution. His attempts at mitigating the Red Guards' damage and his efforts to protect others from their wrath made him immensely popular in the Revolution's later stages.
As Mao Zedong's health began to decline in 1971 and 1972, Zhou and the Gang of Four struggled internally over leadership of China. Zhou's health was also failing however, and he died eight months before Mao on 8 January 1976. The massive public outpouring of grief in Beijing turned to anger towards the Gang of Four, leading to the Tiananmen Incident. |
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| was an eminent Han Chinese official, military general, and devout Confucian scholar of the late Qing Dynasty in China. Zeng raised the Xiang Army to fight effectively against the Taiping Rebellion and restored the stability of Qing Dynasty along with other prominent figures, including Zuo Zongtang and Li Hongzhang, setting the scene for the era later known as the "Tongzhi Restoration"（同治中兴）. |
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| Opened to foreign trade by the Unequal Treaties. The first treaty ports in China were British and were established at the conclusion of the First Opium War by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. |
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| Tiananmen Square incident |
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| 1989. . Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world. Following the conflict, the government conducted widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press. |
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| Three People’s Principles |
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| Nationalism, democracy, and livelihood. The political philosophy of Sun Yat Sen. It called for the creation of a free, prosperous, and powerful China. It became the cornerstone philosophy of the Guomindang, especially after they took up residence in Taiwan. |
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| Believing that the revolution could not be carried on without the reform of the people, the CCP launched a massive campaign to change China's entire psychology as part of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The Four Olds campaign was launched to eradicate old ideas, habits, customs, and culture. The Three Anti's movement was directed at officials, with the aim of eliminating corruption, waste, and bureaucraticism. |
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| 1860-1874. An attempt to stop the dynastic decline of the Qing dynasty of China by restoring the traditional order. The harsh realities of the Opium War, the unequal treaties, and the mid-century mass uprisings caused Qing courtiers and officials to recognize the need to strengthen China. The Tongzhi Restoration was named for the Tongzhi Emperor and was engineered by the young emperor's mother, the Empress Dowager Cixi. The Tongzhi Restoration was an explicit effect of the Self-Strengthening movement led by Li Hongzhang to improve cultural and economic conditions in the current Chinese civilization. Implementing a number of different reforms such as the development of an official foreign ministry to deal with international affairs, the restoration of regional armies and regional strongmen, modernization of railroads, factories, and arsenals, increase of industrial and commercial productivity, and institute a period of peace that allowed China time to modernize and develop all were intended to contribute to the betterment of Chinese society. |
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| Talks on Literature at Yenan |
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| The "Yan'an Talks" effectively dictated the approved style in art and literature in China from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 until after the death of Mao in 1976. It found its apotheosis in the cultural dictates of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution, as exemplified in "revolutionary operas."Key quotations from "Yan'an Talks" form the basis of the section on "Culture and Art" in the bible of Maoist doctrine, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong.[1] One prominent Chinese social critic, Liu Binyan, summarized the essence of the "Yan'an Talks": Writers should 'extol the bright side of life' and 'not expose' the darkness. |
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| 1979. US congress act establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC and breaking them off with the ROC. |
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| 1850-1864. Hong Xiuchuan's civil war. The rebels attempted social reforms and the replacement of Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese folk religion by a form of Christianity. The Qing government defeated the rebellion with the eventual aid of French and British forces ("the ever-victorious army"). |
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| First provisional President of the Republic of China in 1912 and founder of the Guomindang. Died 1925. Known as the father of a nation, he was always a uniting figure in post imperial China. |
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| Early 1980s. Geographical regions that have economic laws that are more liberal than a country's typical economic laws. In the People's Republic of China, Special Economic Zones were founded by the central government under Deng Xiaoping. The most successful Special Economic Zone in China, Shenzhen, has developed from a small village into a city with a population over 10 million within 20 years. |
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| Small-Scale Rural Farming |
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| After Mao's death, agricultural system moved towards breaking down communes into smaller groups that were more accountable for production. |
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| The gradual worsening of relations between the PRC and USSR, since about 1956. In 1961, the PRC denounced "The Revisionist Traitor Group of Soviet Leadership." Culminated in 1969's Sino-Russian border conflict. US capitalized on this rift by befriending China. |
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1894-1895. Fought over the control of Korea. Complete annihilation by the Japanese. After continuous defeats, the Qing sued for peace. Demonstrated the extent to which the Opium Wars and other conflicts had weakened the empire’s military strength. Japan had modernized significantly in the Meiji Restoration, but the Qing’s Self Strengthening Movement was shown to be insufficient. Another blow to the Qing and another impetus for the 1911 Revolution.
Ended by the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which granted Korea full independence and Japan several territories (including Taiwan) and Most-Favored Nation status. |
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| 1937-1945. Although the two countries had fought intermittently since 1931, full-scale war started in earnest in 1937 and ended only with the surrender of Japan in 1945. The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy aiming to dominate China politically and militarily, and to secure its vast raw material reserves and other economic resources, particularly food and labor. At the same time, the rising tide of Chinese nationalism and notions of self-determination stoked the coals of war. In 1931, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria by Imperial Japan's Kwantung Army followed the "Mukden Incident" (a section of railroad owned by Japan's South Manchuria Railway was dynamited). The last of these incidents was the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, marking the beginning of full scale war between the two countries. |
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| 1972. an important diplomatic document issued by the United States of America and the People's Republic of China on February 27, 1972 during President Richard Nixon's visit to China. The document pledged that it was in the interest of all nations for the United States and China to work towards the normalization of their relations, although this would not occur until the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations seven years later. The US and China also agreed that neither they nor any other power should "seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region". |
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| Privileged urban youths sent to the mountain or farming areas to learn traditional skills during the late 1960s and early 1970s under China's Down to the Countryside Movement. |
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| Self-Strengthening Movement |
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| 1861–1895. A period of institutional reforms initiated during the late Qing Dynasty following a series of military defeats and concessions to foreign powers. Unsuccessful.. |
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| 1937-1945. The second KMT-CCP alliance, against the Japanese invasion. |
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| 1894-1895. The epoch that ensued after the defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) was commonly acknowledged as the 'scramble for concessions' during which the western powers created their respective 'spheres of influence' in China. |
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| 1905. A secret society and underground resistance movement organized by Sun Yat-sen and Song Jiaoren in Tokyo, Japan. A seminal piece of KMT formation. |
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| 1945. An address by Mao building up support through the promising of increasing production and reducing rent. |
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| 1966-1967. A mass movement of civilians, mostly students and other young people in China, who were mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the Cultural Revolution. By February 1967 political opinion at the centre had now decided on the removal of the Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution scene in the interests of stability.[15] In February and March the People's Liberation Army (PLA) forcibly suppressed the more radical Red Guard groups in Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan, Fujian and Hubei provinces. Students were also ordered to return to schools, student radicalism was branded 'counterrevolutionary' and banned.[16] However, in the spring, there was a wide backlash against the suppressions, with student attacks on any symbol of authority and PLA units. As a result, on September 5th 1967, an order from Mao himself, the Cultural Revolution Group, the State Council and the Central Military Affairs Committee of the PLA instructed the PLA to restore order to China.[17] |
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| 1942. The Yan'an rectification saw Mao consolidate a position of preeminence in the CCP. To do this he undertook a "thought-reform campaign" from 1942 to 1944. The effort was partly a reflection of Mao's wish to eradicate Soviet influence, and under the conditions of separate base communist areas and incessant warfare, he could not rely on discipline alone to guarantee obedience in the CCP ranks. Thus, the techniques developed to implement thought reform ("washing the brain," as it is called in Chinese) included isolating individuals in "study groups." The communists established numerous schools, formulating a new type of educational system. |
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| 1937. The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937. During this period, hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered and 20,000–80,000 women were raped by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. |
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| Died 1959 in Cultural Revolution. A prominent military leader of the Communist Party of China, and China's Defence Minister from 1954 to 1959. Peng was an important commander during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese civil war and was also the commander-in-chief of People's Volunteer Army in the Korean War. He fell from favour after privately criticizing Mao's policies in the Great Leap Forward and suffered greatly through the Cultural Revolution. |
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| 1839-1842 and 1856-1860. Each resulted in military defeat and further subjugation of China to foreign influences, particularly the British. |
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| 1926-1928. A military campaign led by the Kuomintang (KMT) from 1926 to 1928. Its main objective was to unify China under the Kuomintang banner by ending the rule of local warlords. It led to the demise of the Beiyang government and the Chinese reunification of 1928. |
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| 1934. Chiang and his wife's attempt to counter Communism ideology with a mix of traditional Confucianism, nationalism and authoritarianism that have some similarities to fascism.[1] It rejected individualism and Western capitalistic values. It also aimed to build up morale in a nation that was besieged with corruption, factionalism, and opium addiction. Some goals included courtesy to neighbors, following rules set by the government, keeping streets clean, conserving energy, and so forth. |
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| New Citizen of Liang Qichao |
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Definition
| The journal covered many different topics, including politics, religion, law, economics, business, geography and current and international affairs. In the journal, Liang coined many Chinese equivalents for never-before-heard theories or expressions and used the journal to help communicate public opinion in China to faraway readers. Through news analyses and essays, Liang hoped that the New Citizen would be able to start a "new stage in Chinese newspaper history. |
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| 1919. an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919 protesting the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Shandong Problem. These demonstrations sparked national protests and marked the upsurge of Chinese nationalism, a shift towards political mobilization and away from cultural activities, and a move towards populist base rather than intellectual elites. For many years the orthodox view in the People's Republic of China was that after the demonstrations in 1918 and their suppression, the discussion became more and more political. People like Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao shifted more to the Left and were among the leading founders of the 1921 Communist Party of China |
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Definition
| 1950. Gave women legal equality with men. |
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| The Mass Line (from the Chinese qunzhong luxian) is the political, organizational or leadership method developed by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist (CCP) during the Chinese revolution. Mao developed it into a coherent organizing methodology that encompasses philosophy, strategy, tactics, leadership and organizational theory that has been applied by many Communists subsequent to the Chinese revolution. Chinese communist leaders generally attribute their conquest of power to the faithful pursuit of effective "mass line" tactics, and a "correct" mass line is supposed to be the essential prerequisite for the full consolidation of power. |
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| A traditional Chines philosophical concept concerning the legitimacy of rulers. It is similar to the divine right of kings in Western philosophy in that both sought to legitimize rule from divine approval; however, unlike the divine right of kings, the Mandate of Heaven is predicated on the conduct of the ruler in question. The Mandate of Heaven postulates that Tian (heaven) would bless the authority of a just ruler, but would be displeased with a despotic ruler and would withdraw its mandate, leading to the overthrow of that ruler. The Mandate of Heaven would then transfer to those who would rule best. |
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| 1931-1945. A puppet state in Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. The region was the historical homeland of the Manchus, who founded the Qing Dynasty of China. In 1931, the region was seized by Japan following the Mukden Incident and in 1932, a puppet government was created, with Puyi, the last Qing emperor, installed as the nominal regent and emperor.[1] Manchukuo's government was abolished in 1945 after the defeat of Imperial Japan at the end of World War II. |
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Definition
| 1792-1794. A British embassy to China, whose goal was to convince Emperor Qianlong of China to ease restrictions on trade between Great Britain and China by allowing Great Britain to have a permanent embassy in Beijing, possession of "a small unfortified island near Chusan for the residence of British traders, storage of goods, and outfitting of ships", and reduced tariffs on traders in Guangzhou. The embassy was ultimately not successful. The Macartney Embassy is historically significant because it marked a missed opportunity by the Chinese to move toward some kind of accommodation with the West. This failure would continue to plague the Qing Dynasty as it encountered increasing foreign pressures and internal unrest during the 19th century. |
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| one of the major Chinese writers of the 20th century. Considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese literature. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the Chinese League of the Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai. Though sympathetic to the ideals of the Left, Lu Xun never actually joined the Chinese Communist Party - like fellow leaders of the May Fourth Movement, he was primarily a liberal. |
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| 1934-1936. a massive military retreat undertaken by the Red Army of the Chinese Communist Party, the forerunner of the People's Liberation Army, to evade the pursuit of the Kuomintang (KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party) army. The Long March began the ascent to power of Mao Zedong, whose leadership during the retreat gained him the support of the members of the party. The bitter struggles of the Long March, which was completed by only one-tenth of the force that left Jiangxi, would come to represent a significant episode in the history of the Communist Party of China, and would seal the personal prestige of Mao and his supporters as the new leaders of the party in the following decades. |
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| Chairman from 1959-1968. A Chinese revolutionary, statesman, and theorist. He was Chairman of the People's Republic of China, China's head of state. He implemented policies of economic reconstruction in China. He fell out of favour in the later 1960s during the Cultural Revolution because of his perceived 'right-wing' viewpoints and, it is theorised, because Mao viewed Liu as a threat to his power. He disappeared from public life in 1968 and was labelled China's premier 'Capitalist-roader' and a traitor. He died under harsh treatment in late 1969. |
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| Scholar official from Fujian province, appointed in 1838 as imperial commissioner to end opium trade. Led a moral campaign aimed at stopping domestic users and at same time attempted to stop foreign importation. Confiscation and destruction of 3 million pounds of opium in British warehouses in Canton (1839) outraged British traders and helped trigger Opium War. |
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