The Mandate of Heaven
As I've said before, the People's Republic of China, the government that still reveres Mao Zedong, numerically the worst mass murderer of the 20th Century, is a murderous abomination: Chinalink. What really caught my eye about this article is that the BBC grouped it under their ongoing, multi-year "Changing China" series. How is the oppression of minorities by the Han majority a change? If it is a change, it reinforces the old axiom: the more things change, the more they stay the same. The country we know as China covers a landmass as large as the continent of Europe; with linguisitic diversity in Europe ranging from English to Italian to Slovakian to Finnish (which isn't even in the vast Indo-European family of languages, for Pete's sake), how do you think such huge swaths of massive China came to speak one tongue, Mandarin? I'll put it this way, the Mandarin speakers didn't just ask nicely. The last imperial dynasty to rule China was the Qing Dynasty, otherwise known as the Manchus, since they originated in Manchuria, in the extreme north of contemporary China. What does Beijing mean in Mandarin? "Northern Capital." Conformity to a social order dictated from the Northern Capital has been the PRC's policy since Mao proclaimed the People's Republic, a proclamation made in Beijing, fifty-eight years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.