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#Zhou Enlai
radiofreederry · 1 year
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Happy birthday, Zhou Enlai! (March 5, 1898)
Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1954 to 1976, Zhou Enlai was born in Jiangsu Province to a bureaucratic family. He spent some time during his education in Japan, where he began reading left-wing literature, and was particularly influenced by Chen Duxiu. Returning to China a left-wing activist, Zhou joined the Communist Party of China and took part in student protests. At first a member of the Nationalist Army, after the KMT-Communist split Zhou served in the Chinese Civil War on the side of the Communists, primarily working in intelligence and logistics. Zhou became a leading member of the CPC around this time. After World War II, the Communists won the Civil War and took control of mainland China, with Zhou, an ally of Mao Zedong, becoming a key government figure. Zhou had great influence on China's foreign policy and diplomacy, and helped to open relations with the United States and secure China's seat on the United Nations Security Council. He died in 1976.
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nicklloydnow · 4 months
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Heaven gained a Nobel Peace Prize winning angel yesterday
“Henry A. Kissinger, the scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so, died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 100.
(…)
Few diplomats have been both celebrated and reviled with such passion as Mr. Kissinger. Considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era, he was by turns hailed as an ultrarealist who reshaped diplomacy to reflect American interests and denounced as having abandoned American values, particularly in the arena of human rights, if he thought it served the nation’s purposes.
He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.
(…)
Mr. Kissinger’s secret negotiations with what was then still called Red China led to Nixon’s most famous foreign policy accomplishment. Intended as a decisive Cold War move to isolate the Soviet Union, it carved a pathway for the most complex relationship on the globe, between countries that at Mr. Kissinger’s death were the world’s largest (the United States) and second-largest economies, completely intertwined and yet constantly at odds as a new Cold War loomed.
For decades he remained the country’s most important voice on managing China’s rise, and the economic, military and technological challenges it posed. He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial.
He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region.
Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war proved far from over, and critics argued that he could have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives.
(…)
As was the case with Vietnam, history has judged some of his Cold War realism in a harsher light than it was generally portrayed at the time. With an eye fixed on the great power rivalry, he was often willing to be crudely Machiavellian, especially when dealing with smaller nations that he often regarded as pawns in the greater battle.
He was the architect of the Nixon administration’s efforts to topple Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
He has been accused of breaking international law by authorizing the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70, an undeclared war on an ostensibly neutral nation.
His objective was to root out the pro-Communist Vietcong forces that were operating from bases across the border in Cambodia, but the bombing was indiscriminate: Mr. Kissinger told the military to strike “anything that flies or anything that moves.” At least 50,000 civilians were killed.
When Pakistan’s U.S.-backed military was waging a genocidal war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, he and Nixon not only ignored pleas from the American consulate in East Pakistan to stop the massacre, but they approved weapons shipments to Pakistan, including the apparently illegal transfer of 10 fighter-bombers from Jordan.
Mr. Kissinger and Nixon had other priorities: supporting Pakistan’s president, who was serving as a conduit for Kissinger’s then-secret overtures to China. Again, the human cost was horrific: At least 300,000 people were killed in East Pakistan and 10 million refugees were driven into India.
In 1975, Mr. Kissinger and President Ford secretly approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor by Indonesia’s U.S.-backed military. After the loss of Vietnam, there were fears that East Timor’s leftist government could also go Communist.
Mr. Kissinger told Indonesia’s president that the operation needed to succeed quickly and that “it would be better if it were done after we returned” to the United States, according to declassified documents from Mr. Ford’s presidential library. More than 100,000 East Timorese were killed or starved to death.
Mr. Kissinger dismissed critics of these moves by saying that they did not face the world of bad choices he did. But his efforts to snuff out criticism with sarcastic one-liners only inflamed it.
“The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
On at least one potentially catastrophic stance Mr. Kissinger later reversed himself.
Starting in the mid-1950s as a young Harvard professor, he argued for the concept of limited nuclear war — a nuclear exchange that could be contained to a specific region. In office, he worked extensively on nuclear deterrence — convincing an adversary, for instance, that there was no way to launch a nuclear strike without paying an unacceptably high price.
(…)
“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”
(…)
Few figures in modern American history remained so relevant for so long as Mr. Kissinger. Well into his 90s he kept speaking and writing, and charging astronomical fees to clients seeking his geopolitical analysis.
While the protesters at his talks dwindled, the very mention of his name could trigger bitter arguments. To his admirers, he was the brilliant architect of Pax Americana, the chess grandmaster who was willing to upend the board and inject a measure of unpredictability into American diplomacy.
To his detractors — and even some friends and former employees — he was vain, conspiratorial, arrogant and short-tempered, a man capable of praising a top aide as indispensable while ordering the F.B.I. to illegally tap his home phones to see if he was leaking to the press.
(…)
To read Mr. Kissinger’s laudatory 1957 book analyzing the world order created by Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, who led the Austrian empire in the post-Napoleonic era, is also to read something of a self-description, particularly when it came to the ability of a single leader to bend nations to his will.
“He excelled at manipulation, not construction,” Mr. Kissinger said of Metternich. “He preferred the subtle maneuver to the frontal attack.”
(…)
In the spring of 1969, soon after taking office, he was so enraged by the leaks behind a Times report on the Cambodia bombing campaign that he ordered the F.B.I. to tap the phones of more than a dozen White House aides, including members of his own staff. The recordings never turned up a culprit.
He was similarly infuriated by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The Times and The Washington Post in 1971. The classified documents chronicled the government’s war policies and planning in Vietnam, and leaking them, in his view, jeopardized his secret face-to-face diplomacy. His complaints helped inspire the creation of the White House burglary team, the leak-plugging Plumbers unit that would later break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building.
(…)
Aides described his insights as brilliant and his temper ferocious. They told stories of Mr. Kissinger throwing books across his office in towering rages, and of a manipulative streak that led even his most devoted associates to distrust him.
“In dealing with other people he would forge alliances and conspiratorial bonds by manipulating their antagonisms,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his comprehensive 1992 biography, “Kissinger,” a book its subject despised.
“Drawn to his adversaries with a compulsive attraction, he would seek their approval through flattery, cajolery and playing them off against others,” Mr. Isaacson observed. “He was particularly comfortable dealing with powerful men whose minds he could engage. As a child of the Holocaust and a scholar of Napoleonic-era statecraft, he sensed that great men as well as great forces were what shaped the world, and he knew that personality and policy could never be fully divorced. Secrecy came naturally to him as a tool of control. And he had an instinctive feel for power relationships and balances, both psychological and geostrategic.”
(…)
There was something fundamentally simple, if terrifying, in the superpower conflicts he navigated. He never had to deal with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or a world in which nations use social media to manipulate public opinion and cyberattacks to undermine power grids and communications.
“The Cold War was more dangerous,” Mr. Kissinger said in a 2016 appearance at the New-York Historical Society. “Both sides were willing to go to general nuclear war.” But, he added, “today is more complex.”
The great-power conflict had changed dramatically from the cold peace he had tried to engineer. No longer ideological, it was purely about power. And what worried him most, he said, was the prospect of conflict with “the rising power” of China as it challenged the might of the United States.
(…)
Mr. Kissinger took some satisfaction in the fact that Russia was a lesser threat. After all, he had concluded the first strategic arms agreement with Moscow and steered the United States toward accepting the Helsinki Accords, the 1975 compact on European security that obtained some rights of expression for Soviet bloc dissidents. In retrospect, it was one of the droplets that turned into the river that swept away Soviet Communism.
(…)
“It’s almost impossible to imagine what the American relationship with the world’s most important rising power would look like today without Henry,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who once worked for Mr. Kissinger, said in an interview in 2016.
Other Kissinger efforts yielded mixed results. Through tireless shuttle diplomacy at the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Mr. Kissinger was able to persuade Egypt to begin direct talks with Israel, an opening wedge to the later peace agreement between the two nations.
But perhaps the most important diplomatic contribution Mr. Kissinger made was his sidelining of Moscow in the Middle East for four decades, until Mr. Putin ordered his air force to enter the Syrian civil war in 2015.
(…)
“For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horror of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse,” said Fritz Kraemer, a non-Jewish German immigrant who was to become Mr. Kissinger’s first intellectual mentor. “It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”
Some have argued that Mr. Kissinger’s rejection of a moralistic approach to diplomacy in favor of realpolitik arose because he had borne witness to a civilized Germany embracing Hitler. Mr. Kissinger often cited an aphorism of Goethe’s, saying that if he were given the choice of order or justice, he, like the novelist and poet, would prefer order.
(…)
Heinz became Henry in high school. He switched to night school when he took a job at a company making shaving brushes. In 1940, he enrolled in City College — tuition was virtually free — and racked up A’s in almost all his courses. He seemed headed to becoming an accountant.
Then, in 1943, he was drafted into the Army and assigned to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana.
It was there that Mr. Kraemer, a patrician intellectual and Prussian refugee, arrived one day to give a talk about the “moral and political stakes of the war,” as Mr. Kissinger recalled. The private returned to his barracks and wrote Mr. Kraemer a note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you in any way?”
The letter changed the direction of his life. Taking him under his wing, Mr. Kraemer arranged for Private Kissinger to be reassigned to Germany to serve as a translator. As German cities and towns fell in the last months of the war, Mr. Kissinger was among the first on the scene, interrogating captured Gestapo officers and reading their mail.
In April 1945, with Allied victory in sight, he and his fellow soldiers led raids on the homes of Gestapo members who were suspected of planning sabotage campaigns against the approaching American forces. For his efforts he received a Bronze Star.
But before returning to the United States he visited Fürth, his hometown, and found that only 37 Jews remained. In a letter discovered by Niall Ferguson, his biographer, Mr. Kissinger wrote at 23 that his encounters with concentration camp survivors had taught him a key lesson about human nature.
“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance,” the letter said. The survivors he met “had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.”
Mr. Kissinger stayed in Germany after the war — fearful, he said later, that the United States would succumb to a democracy’s temptation to withdraw its weary forces too fast and lose the chance to cement victory.
He took a job as a civilian instructor teaching American officers how to uncover former Nazi officers, work that allowed him to crisscross the country. He became alarmed by what he saw as Communist subversion of Germany and warned that the United States needed to monitor German phone conversations and letters. It was his first taste of a Cold War that he would come to shape.
(…)
But the outsider now had direction, and he found another mentor in William Yandell Elliott, who headed the government department. Professor Elliott guided Mr. Kissinger toward political theory, even as he wrote privately that his student’s mind “lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systematic thoroughness.”
Under Professor Elliott, Mr. Kissinger wrote a senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” focusing on Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. At a hefty 383 pages, it gave rise to what became informally known at Harvard as “the Kissinger rule,” which limits the length of a senior thesis.
(…)
Returning to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D., he and Professor Elliott started the Harvard International Seminar, a project that brought young foreign political figures, civil servants, journalists and an occasional poet to the university.
The seminar placed Mr. Kissinger at the center of a network that would produce a number of leaders in world affairs, among them Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who would become president of France; Yasuhiro Nakasone, a future prime minister of Japan; Bulent Ecevit, later the longtime prime minister of Turkey; and Mahathir Mohamad, the future father of modern Malaysia.
With Ford Foundation support, the seminar kept his family eating as Mr. Kissinger worked on his dissertation on the diplomacy of Metternich of Austria and Robert Stewart Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, after the Napoleonic wars. The dissertation, which became his first book, both shaped and reflected his view of the modern world.
The book, “A World Restored,” can be read as a guide to Mr. Kissinger’s later fascination with the balancing of power among states and his suspicion of revolutions. Metternich and Mr. Castlereagh sought stability in Europe and largely achieved it by containing an aggressive revolutionary France through an equilibrium of forces.
Mr. Kissinger saw parallels in the great struggle of his time: containing Stalin’s Soviet Union.
“His was a quest for a realpolitik devoid of moral homilies,” Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard colleague who later split with Mr. Kissinger, said in 2015.
Mr. Kissinger received his Ph.D. in 1954 but received no offer of an assistant professorship. Some on the Harvard faculty complained that he had not poured himself into his work as a teaching fellow. They regarded him as too engaged in worldly issues. In fact, he was simply ahead of his time: The Boston-to-Washington corridor would soon become jammed with academics consulting with the government or lobbyists.
The Harvard rejection embittered Mr. Kissinger. The Nixon tapes later caught him telling the president that the problem with academia was that “you are entirely dependent on the personal recommendation of some egomaniac.”
With the help of McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard colleague, Mr. Kissinger was placed in an elite study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the time a stuffy, all-male enclave in New York. Its mission was to study the impact of nuclear weapons on foreign policy.
Mr. Kissinger arrived in New York with a lot of attitude. He thought that the Eisenhower administration was wrongly reluctant to rethink American strategic policy in light of Moscow’s imminent ability to strike the United States with overwhelming nuclear force.
“Henry managed to convey that no one had thought intelligently about nuclear weapons and foreign policy until he came along to do it himself,” Paul Nitze, perhaps the country’s leading nuclear strategist at the time, later told Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.
Mr. Kissinger seized on a question that Mr. Nitze had begun discussing: whether America’s threat to go to general nuclear war against the Soviet Union was no longer credible given the commonly held view that any such conflict would invite only “mutually assured destruction.” Mr. Nitze asked whether it would be wiser to develop weapons to conduct a limited, regional nuclear war.
Mr. Kissinger decided that “limited nuclear war represents our most effective strategy.”
What was supposed to be a council publication became instead a Kissinger book, and his first best seller: “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.” Its timing, 1957, was perfect: It played into a national fear of growing Soviet power.
And its message fit the moment: If an American president was paralyzed by fear of escalation, Mr. Kissinger argued, the concept of nuclear deterrence would fail. If the United States could not credibly threaten to use small, tactical weapons, he said, it “would amount to giving the Soviet rulers a blank check.” In short, professing a willingness to conduct a small nuclear war was better than risking a big one.
To his critics, this was Mr. Kissinger at his Cold War worst, weaving an argument that a nuclear exchange could be won. Many scholars panned the book, believing its 34-year-old author had overestimated the nation’s ability to keep limited war limited. But to the public it was a breakthrough in nuclear thinking. To this day it is considered a seminal work, one that scholars now refer to in looking for lessons to apply to cyberwarfare.
(…)
David Riesman, the sociologist and co-author of a seminal work on the American character, “The Lonely Crowd,” suggested that dinner with Mr. Kissinger was a chore. “He would not spend time chatting at the table,” Mr. Riesman said. “He presided.”
Leslie H. Gelb, then a doctoral student and later a Pentagon official and columnist for The Times, called him “devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”
(…)
At Harvard, he began organizing meetings on the emerging crisis of the day, Vietnam. He explored the link between military actions on the ground and the chances of success through diplomacy, seemingly convinced, even then, that the war could be ended only through negotiations.
After a long trip to Saigon and the front lines, he wrote that the American task was to “build a nation in a divided society in the middle of a civil war,” defining a problem that would haunt Washington not only in Southeast Asia but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(…)
With Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House engaged in peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Mr. Kissinger was said to have used his contacts on his own trips to Paris to funnel inside information back to Nixon. “Henry was the only person outside the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiation with,” Richard C. Holbrooke, who went on to key positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations, told Mr. Isaacson for his Kissinger biography. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the United States negotiating team.”
Nixon himself referred in his memoirs to his “highly unusual channel” of information. To many who have since accepted that account, the back-channel tactic was evidence of Mr. Kissinger’s drive to obtain power if Nixon was elected. While there is no evidence that he supplied classified information to the Nixon campaign, there have long been allegations that Nixon used precisely that to give back-channel assurances to the South Vietnamese that they would get a better deal from him than from Johnson, and that they should agree to nothing until after the election.
Mr. Ferguson and other historians have rebutted that claim, though one of Nixon’s biographers found notes from H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s closest aides, in which the presidential candidate ordered his staff to “monkey wrench” peace talks.
Whatever the truth, Mr. Kissinger was on Nixon’s radar. And after the election, a new president who had often expressed his disdain for Jews and Harvard academics chose, as his national security adviser, a man who was both.
Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to run national security affairs covertly from the White House, cutting out the State Department and Nixon’s secretary of state, William P. Rogers. Nixon had found his man — a “prized possession,” he later called Mr. Kissinger.
While the post of national security adviser had grown in importance since Harry S. Truman established the role, Mr. Kissinger took it to new heights. He recruited bright young academics to his staff, which he nearly doubled. He effectively sidelined Mr. Rogers and battled the pugnacious defense secretary, Melvin R. Laird, moving more decision-making into the White House.
(…)
Staff turnover was high, but many of those who stayed came to admire him for his intellect and his growing list of achievements. Still, they were stunned by his secretiveness. “He was able to give a conspiratorial air to even the most minor of things,” Mr. Eagleburger, who admired him, said before his death in 2011.
Poking fun at himself in a way that some saw as disingenuous, he often told visiting diplomats that “I have not faced such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”
Nixon had built much of his campaign around the promise to end the war on honorable terms. It was Mr. Kissinger’s task to turn that promise into a reality, and he made clear in a Foreign Affairs article, published as Nixon was preparing to take office, that the United States would not win the war “within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”
In the 2018 interview, he said the United States had misunderstood the struggle from the start as “an extension of the Cold War in Europe.”
“I made the same mistake,” he said. “The Cold War was really about saving democratic countries from invasion.” Vietnam was different, a civil war. “What we did not understand at the beginning of the war in Vietnam,” he went on, “is how hard it is to end these civil wars, and how hard it is to get a conclusive agreement in which everyone shares the objective.”
(…)
Mr. Kissinger’s pursuit of two goals that were seen as at odds with each other — winding down the war and maintaining American prestige — led him down roads that made him a hypocrite to some and a war criminal to others. He had come to office hoping for a fast breakthrough: “Give us six months,” he told a Quaker group, “and if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence.”
But six months later, there were already signs that the strategy for ending the war would both expand and lengthen it. He was convinced that the North Vietnamese would enter serious negotiations only under military pressure. So while he restarted secret peace talks in Paris, he and Nixon escalated and widened the war.
“I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Mr. Kissinger told his staff.
Mr. Kissinger called it “war for peace.” Yet the result was carnage. Mr. Kissinger had an opportunity to end the war in peace talks early in Nixon’s presidency on terms as good as those he ultimately settled for later. Yet he turned it down, and thousands of Americans died because he was convinced he could do better.
As Mr. Kissinger sat with his big yellow legal pads in his White House office, scribbling notes that have now been largely declassified, he designed a three-part plan. It consisted of a cease-fire that would also embrace Laos and Cambodia, which had been sucked into the fighting; simultaneous American and North Vietnamese withdrawals from South Vietnam; and a peace treaty that returned all prisoners of war.
His notes and taped conversations with Nixon are riddled with self-assured declarations that the next escalation of bombing, and a secret incursion into Cambodia, would break the North Vietnamese and force them into real negotiations. But he was also reacting, he later wrote, to a Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensive early in Nixon’s presidency that had killed almost 2,000 Americans and “humiliated the new president.”
Mr. Kissinger later constructed a narrative emphasizing the wisdom of the strategy, but the notes and phone conversations suggest that he had routinely overestimated his negotiating skills and underestimated his opponents’ capacity to wait the Americans out.
It was the bombing campaign in Cambodia — code-named “Operation Menu,” with phases named “Breakfast,” “Lunch” and “Dinner” — that outraged Mr. Kissinger’s critics and fueled books, documentaries and symposiums exploring whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into a country that was not party to the war. Mr. Kissinger’s rationale was that the North had created supply lines through Cambodia to fuel the war in the South.
(…)
It took until January 1973 for Mr. Kissinger to reach a deal, assuring the South Vietnamese that the United States would return if the North violated the accord and invaded. Privately, Mr. Kissinger was all but certain that the South could not hold up under the pressure. He told John D. Erlichman, a top White House aide, that “if they are lucky, they can hold out for a year and a half.”
That proved prescient: Saigon fell in April 1975, with the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and more than three million North and South Vietnamese had died, and eight million tons of bombs had been dropped by the United States. But to Mr. Kissinger, getting it over with was the key to moving on to bigger, and more successful, ventures.
When Mr. Kissinger was writing campaign speeches for Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, he included a passage in which he envisioned “a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union.” The strategy, he wrote, would allow the United States to “improve our relations with each as we test the will for peace of both.”
He got a chance to test that thesis the next year. Chinese and Soviet forces had clashed in a border dispute, and in a meeting with Mr. Kissinger, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, spoke candidly of the importance of “containing” the Chinese. Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to make an overture, secretly, to Beijing.
It was a remarkable shift for Nixon. A staunch anti-Communist, he had long had close ties to the so-called China lobby, which opposed the Communist government led by Mao Zedong in Beijing. He also believed that North Vietnam was acting largely as a Chinese satellite in its war against South Vietnam and its American allies.
Nixon and Mr. Kissinger secretly approached Pakistan’s leader, Yahya Khan, to act as a go-between. In December 1970, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington delivered a message to Mr. Kissinger that had been carried from Islamabad by courier. It was from the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai: A special envoy from President Nixon would be welcome in Beijing.
(…)
Over the next two months, messages were exchanged concerning a possible presidential visit. Then, on June 2, 1971, Mr. Kissinger received one more communication through the Pakistani connection, this one inviting him to Beijing to prepare for a Nixon visit. Mr. Kissinger pulled Nixon aside from a White House dinner to declare: “This is the most important communication that has come to an American president since the end of World War II.”
(…)
In Beijing he made a presentation to Mr. Zhou, ending with the observation that as Americans “we find ourselves here in what to us is a land of mystery,” he recalled in a 2014 interview for the Harvard Secretaries of State project. Mr. Zhou interrupted. “There are 900 million of us,” he said, “and it’s not mysterious to us.”
It took three days to work out the details, and after Mr. Kissinger cabled the code word “eureka” to Nixon, the president, without any advance warning, appeared on television to announce what Mr. Kissinger had arranged. His enemies — the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, the Democrats, his liberal critics — were staggered. On Feb. 21, 1972, he became the first American president to visit mainland China.
The Chinese were a little stunned, too. Mao sidelined Mr. Zhou within a month. After that, no Chinese ever mentioned Zhou Enlai again, Mr. Kissinger told the Harvard project. He speculated that Mao had feared that his No. 2 “was getting personally too friendly with me.”
(…)
“That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he wrote in “On China,” referring to domestic strife in both countries and a common interest in resisting Soviet advances. But he also insisted that he had not been seeking to isolate Russia as much as to conduct a grand experiment in balance-of-power politics. “Our view,” he wrote, “was that the existence of the triangular relations was in itself a form of pressure on each of them.”
Historians still debate whether that worked. But there is no debating that it made Mr. Kissinger an international celebrity. It also proved vital for reasons that never factored into Mr. Kissinger’s calculus five decades ago — that China would rise as the only true economic, technological and military competitor to the United States.
Nixon’s announcement that he would go to China startled Moscow. Days later, Mr. Dobrynin called on Mr. Kissinger and invited Nixon to meet the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in the Kremlin. The date was set for May 1972, just three months after the China trip. “To have two Communist powers competing for good relations with us could only benefit the cause of peace,” Mr. Kissinger noted later. “It was the essence of triangular strategy.”
To prepare for the summit, he flew to Moscow, again in secret. Nixon had agreed to let him go on the condition that Mr. Kissinger spend most of his time insisting that the Soviets restrain their North Vietnamese allies, who were mounting an offensive.
By then, however, Mr. Kissinger had changed his mind about how much control the Soviets had over the North Vietnamese, writing to his deputy, Alexander M. Haig, “I do not believe that Moscow is in direct collusion with Hanoi.”
Instead, he sought to reinvigorate negotiations, which had been stumbling along since late 1969, with the aim of limiting the number of ground-based and submarine-launched nuclear missiles that the two countries were pointing at each other and curbing the development of antiballistic missile systems. Mr. Kissinger achieved a breakthrough, writing to Nixon, “You will be able to sign the most important arms control agreement ever concluded.”
That may have been overstatement, but Mr. Brezhnev and Nixon signed what became the SALT I treaty in May 1972. It opened decades of arms-control agreements — SALT, START, New START — that greatly reduced the number of nuclear weapons in the world. The era known as détente had begun. It unraveled only late in Mr. Kissinger’s life. While Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden renewed New START in 2021, once the war in Ukraine started the Russian leader suspended compliance with many parts of the treaty.
To Mr. Kissinger, there were superpowers and there was everything else, and it was the everything else that got him into trouble.
He never stopped facing questions about the overthrow and death of Mr. Allende in Chile in September 1973 and the rise of Augusto Pinochet, the general who had seized power.
Over the next three decades, as General Pinochet came to be accused — first in Europe, then in Chile — of abductions, murder and human rights violations, Mr. Kissinger was repeatedly linked to clandestine activities that had undermined Mr. Allende, a Marxist, and his democratically elected government. The revelations emerged in declassified documents, lawsuit depositions and journalistic indictments, like Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), which was made into a documentary film.
(…)
Nixon, too, was alarmed, according to a White House tape that Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archive, cited in his book “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” It quotes Nixon as ordering the U.S. ambassador in Santiago “to do anything short of a Dominican-type action” to keep Mr. Allende from winning the election. The reference was to the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.
Mr. Kissinger insisted, in a memoir and in testimony to Congress, that the United States “had nothing to do” with the military coup that overthrew Mr. Allende. However according to phone records that were declassified in 2004, Mr. Kissinger bragged that “we helped them” by creating the conditions for the coup.
That help included backing a plot to kidnap the commander in chief of Chile’s army, Gen. René Schneider, who had refused C.I.A. entreaties to mount a coup. The general was killed in the attempt. His car was ambushed, and he was fatally shot at point-blank range.
(…)
In 2001, General Schneider’s two sons filed a civil suit in the United States accusing Mr. Kissinger of helping to orchestrate covert activities in Chile that led to their father’s death. A U.S. federal court, without ruling on Mr. Kissinger’s culpability, dismissed the case, saying that foreign policy was up to the government, not the courts.
Mr. Kissinger, in his defense, said his actions had to be viewed within the context of the Cold War. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he said, adding half-jokingly: “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
Chile was hardly the only place Mr. Kissinger was accused of treating as a minor chess piece in his grand strategies. He and President Ford approved Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in December 1975, leading to a disastrous 24-year occupation by a U.S.-backed military.
Declassified documents released in 2001 by the National Security Archive indicate that Ford and Mr. Kissinger knew of the invasion plans months in advance and were aware that the use of American arms would violate U.S. law.
“I know what the law is,” Mr. Kissinger was quoted as telling a staff meeting when he got back to Washington. He then asked how it could be in “U.S. national interest” for Americans to “kick the Indonesians in the teeth?”
The columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times, “That was Kissingerian realism: the view that the United States should overlook brutalities by friendly authoritarian regimes because they provided ‘stability.’”
It was a familiar complaint. In 1971, the slaughter in East Pakistan that Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had ignored in deference to Pakistan expanded into a war between Pakistan and India, a nation loathed by both China and the Nixon White House.
“At this point, the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger only got worse,” Dexter Filkins, of The New Yorker, wrote in discussing Professor Bass’s account in The New York Times Book Review in 2013. “They dispatched ships from the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, possibly for an attack — a maneuver that could have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two Communist countries proved more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, when India crushed the Pakistani Army and East Pakistan declared independence,” becoming the new nation of Bangladesh.
(…)
Still more declassified documents revealed how Mr. Kissinger had used his historic 1971 meeting with Mr. Zhou in China to lay out a radical shift in American policy toward Taiwan. Under the plan, the United States would have essentially abandoned its support for the anticommunist Nationalists in Taiwan in exchange for China’s help in ending the war in Vietnam. The account contradicted one he had included in his published memoirs.
The emerging material also revealed the price of an American-interests-first realism. In tapes released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2010, Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”
“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that antisemitism in the Nixon White House may have partly been to blame.
“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” David Harris, the committee’s executive director, said.
(…)
Mr. Kissinger was aware of his contentious place in American history, and he may have had his own standing in mind when, in 2006, he wrote about Dean Acheson, secretary of state under Truman, in The Times Book Review, calling him “perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history.”
“History has treated Acheson more kindly,” Mr. Kissinger wrote. “Accolades for him have become bipartisan.”
Thirty-five years after his death, he said, Acheson had “achieved iconic status.”
(…)
One student asked him about his legacy. “You know, when I was young, I used to think of people of my age as a different species,” he said to laughter. “And I thought my grandparents had been put into the world at the age at which I experienced them.”
“Now that I’ve reached beyond their age,” he added, “I’m not worried about my legacy. And I don’t give really any thought to it, because things are so changeable. You can only do the best you’re able to do, and that’s more what I judge myself by — whether I’ve lived up to my values, whatever their quality, and to my opportunities.””
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ianartrev · 11 months
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Zhou Enlai  16x20  oil on Canvas  The first premier of the People’s Republic of China, and dedicated revolutionary and statesman. 
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maybeamultiverse · 7 months
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我需要他🫠
他年轻时是一个多么好看的男人
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kneedeepincynade · 5 months
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The CPC future looks bright, with many rising stars among its ranks. Today, we talk about a particularly interesting star, Ding Xuexiang
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😍 Una figura di cui si parla poco, e che meriterebbe più attenzione, è quella del Compagno Ding Xuexiang, Primo Vice-Premier della Repubblica Popolare Cinese 🇨🇳
🚩 Membro del 20° Comitato Permanente dell'Ufficio Politico del Comitato Centrale del Partito Comunista Cinese, Ding Xuexiang incarna lo Spirito dell'Espressione 后起之秀 - Stella Nascente ⭐️
🎒 Laureatosi in Ingegneria presso 东北重型机械研究所, che oggi prende il nome di Università di Yanshan, Ding Xuexiang ha iniziato a lavorare presso l'Istituto di Ricerca sui Materiali di Shanghai e - parallelamente, ha avviato la sua carriera politica nel Partito Comunista Cinese 🚩
🔬 Fortemente competente in tutto ciò che riguarda l'Innovazione Tecnico-Scientifica e la Finanza, ha ottenuto, a Marzo del 2023, l'incarico di Primo Vice-Premier della Repubblica Popolare Cinese, con un portfolio da gestire che include lo Sviluppo Tecnico-Scientifico, l'Istruzione, la Gestione degli Affari delle Regioni Amministrative Speciali di Hong Kong e Macao, la Finanza e la Statistica, e 促进人与自然和谐共生 - la Coesistenza Armoniosa tra Uomo e Natura 😍
🇨🇳 La Repubblica Popolare Cinese, tramite il 14° Piano Quinquennale, punta al raggiungimento dell'Autosufficienza in ambito tecnico-scientifico, tramite il Principio 自力更生 - Fiducia in se stessi 💕
⭐️ Il 15 ottobre, il Compagno Ding Xuexiang si è recato nella splendida Shenzhen, il Cuore dell'Innovazione della Cina, per promuovere lo Spirito del 20° Congresso Nazionale del Partito Comunista Cinese, legato al Principio 自力更生 e all'Innovazione Tecnico-Scientifica come forza trainante dello Sviluppo delle Forze Produttive 📈
😍 Il Compagno Ding Xuexiang si è recato al Centro Espositivo della Zona di Cooperazione l'Innovazione Tecnico-Scientifica Shenzhen-Hong Kong, che coniuga la Zona Economica Speciale e la Regione Amministrativa Speciale 💕
💬 Dialogando con dirigenti e ricercatori, Ding Xuexiang ha posto l'accento sulla Promozione dell'Innovazione Tecnico-Scientifica, per la costruzione di una Strategia di Sviluppo di Alta Qualità 📈
🔍Approfondimento: "Lo Sviluppo di Alta Qualità è il compito principale", di Qiu Ping, su 求是 ⭐️
🤔 Il Progetto non si ferma solo a Shenzhen e Hong Kong, ma intende congiungere anche l'intera Provincia del Guangdong e la Regione Amministrativa Speciale di Macao 😍 - 粤港澳大湾区 ❤️
😍 Attirare nuovi talenti, con studi di Matematica, Ingegneria, Fisica e altre discipline tecnico-scientifiche è un obiettivo concreto del Progetto, e l'Innovazione Tecnico-Scientifica dovrebbe essere promossa a tutti i settori dell'Economia, in modo da ottimizzare le catene industriali 🥰
🇨🇳 Nel 2022, la Spesa della Cina nel Settore R&D - Ricerca e Sviluppo, ha superato i 3.000 Miliardi RMB, con una crescita su base annua del 10,1% 📊
🇨🇳 Perché la Cina è un Paese così tecnologicamente avanzato? Perché promuove l'Educazione Tecnico-Scientifica di Alto Livello, focalizzandosi sulla Matematica e sull'Ingegneria 🧠
🐲 L'importanza dell'Educazione in Cina poggia le basi sullo Spirito di Auto-Coltivazione Confuciano (修养) e sulla prima Linea Guida del Compagno Zhou Enlai («Studia diligentemente») 📖
🌸 Iscriviti 👉 @collettivoshaoshan 😘
😍 A figure who is little talked about, and who deserves more attention, is that of Comrade Ding Xuexiang, First Vice-Premier of the People's Republic of China 🇨🇳
🚩 Member of the 20th Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Ding Xuexiang embodies the Spirit of Expression 后起之秀 - Rising Star ⭐️
🎒 Having graduated in Engineering from 东北重型机械研究所, which today is called Yanshan University, Ding Xuexiang began working at the Shanghai Materials Research Institute and - in parallel, started his political career in the Communist Party Chinese 🚩
🔬 Strongly competent in everything related to Technical-Scientific Innovation and Finance, in March 2023 he obtained the position of First Vice-Premier of the People's Republic of China, with a portfolio to manage that includes Technical Development Scientific, Education, Business Management of the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, Finance and Statistics, and 促进人与自然和谐共生 - the Harmonious Coexistence of Man and Nature 😍
🇨🇳 The People's Republic of China, through the 14th Five-Year Plan, aims to achieve self-sufficiency in the technical-scientific field, through the Principle 自力更生 - Self-confidence 💕
⭐️ On October 15, Comrade Ding Xuexiang went to beautiful Shenzhen, the Heart of China's Innovation, to promote the Spirit of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, linked to the 自力更生 Principle and Technical-Scientific Innovation as driving force of the Development of Productive Forces 📈
😍 Comrade Ding Xuexiang went to the Exhibition Center of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Scientific-Technical Innovation Cooperation Zone, which combines the Special Economic Zone and the Special Administrative Region 💕
💬 Dialoguing with managers and researchers, Ding Xuexiang placed the emphasis on the Promotion of Technical-Scientific Innovation, for the construction of a High Quality Development Strategy 📈
🔍In-depth analysis: "High-Quality Development is the main task", by Qiu Ping, on 求是 ⭐️
🤔 The Project does not only stop at Shenzhen and Hong Kong, but also intends to connect the entire Guangdong Province and the Macao Special Administrative Region 😍 - 粤港澳大湾区 ❤️
😍 Attracting new talents, with studies of Mathematics, Engineering, Physics and other technical-scientific disciplines is a concrete objective of the Project, and Technical-Scientific Innovation should be promoted in all sectors of the Economy, in order to optimize the chains industrial 🥰
🇨🇳 In 2022, China's spending in the R&D - Research and Development sector exceeded 3,000 billion RMB, with an annual growth of 10.1% 📊
🇨🇳 Why is China such a technologically advanced country? Because it promotes high-level technical-scientific education, focusing on mathematics and engineering 🧠
🐲 The importance of Education in China is based on the Confucian Spirit of Self-Cultivation (修养) and the first Guideline of Comrade Zhou Enlai ("Study diligently") 📖
🌸 Subscribe 👉 @collectivoshaoshan 😘
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plaque-memoire · 4 months
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Plaque en hommage à : Zhou Enlai
Type : Lieu de résidence
Adresse : 17 rue Godefroy, 75013 Paris, France
Date de pose :
Texte : Chou En Laï, 1898-1976, habita cet immeuble lors de son séjour en France de 1922 à 1924
Quelques précisions : Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) est un homme politique chinois, qui fut notamment Premier ministre de la République populaire de Chine de 1949 à 1976, sous l'autorité de Mao Zedong. Dans sa jeunesse, il participe à des activités révolutionnaires contre la dynastie Qing avant de rejoindre en 1920 le Parti communiste chinois, dont il devient l'un des membres les plus influents. Il effectue une partie de ses études en Europe, y compris à Paris, séjour durant lequel il rencontre de nombreux intellectuels et activistes. A son retour en Chine, il joue un rôle essentiel dans la guerre civile chinoise contre le Kuomintang (le parti nationaliste chinois) et travaille en étroite collaboration avec Mao Zedong, qui le nommera Premier ministre après avoir pris le pouvoir. Reconnu pour ses compétences diplomatiques, exerçant la charge de Ministre des Affaires étrangères de 1949 à 1958, il joue un rôle crucial dans les relations internationales de la Chine, négociant avec des puissances mondiales telles que les États-Unis (avec qui il prône une coexistence pacifique) et l'Union soviétique. Survivant aux purges des années 1960, il laisse une empreinte indélébile sur la politique chinoise du XXème siècle et est largement salué pour ses réalisations politiques et son rôle dans la construction de la Chine moderne, en particulier dans les domaines diplomatique et politique, tout en ayant contribué à façonner la politique étrangère chinoise contemporaine.
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therevereddead · 4 months
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2019: Zhou Enlai and His Adopted Son Li Peng
An article on the Zhou Enlai memorial website jointly set up by the People’s Daily, Communist Party News website and the Yan’an Party Committee and government tells the story of the adoption of Li Peng, the son of revolutionary martyr Li Shouxun (former Communist Party Politburo member and sponsor of Liu Shaoqi when Liu joined the Party). Li Peng himself became, like his foster father Zhou Enlai…
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homocausticus · 4 months
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Cadillac, Buick e Hongqi
Semana passada, a cidade de San Franciso sediou a cúpula da Apec, o grupo econômico cujo os membros são nações da ásia-pacífico. O evento era aguardado pelo encontro bilateral entre o presidente americano Joe Biden e seu colega chinês Xi Jinping. Ao final da reunião, Biden foi se despedir de Xi e se deparou com um Hongqi, o carro presidencial usado por Pequim tal como o Cadillac 01 feito…
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denimbex1986 · 6 months
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'Blink and you’ll miss it.
In a scene in the new Oppenheimer film set right after the successful 1949 atomic bomb test by the USSR, there is a brief exchange between the film’s two main antagonists. Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, asks J. Robert Oppenheimer what he thinks should be done now. “International control,” Oppenheimer immediately replies.
“You mean world government?” Strauss fires back.
It sounds like a throwaway line, or one of those accusations routinely hurled at those trying to make global institutions marginally more effective. But in this case, Chairman Strauss’ epithet was spot on.
The tremendous destruction of World War II, even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompted a radical rethinking of the world political order. In particular, the idea of world government as the solution to the problem of war was placed front and center in this country’s foreign policy debate, and argued about passionately in diners, dorm rooms, and dinner parties all across the land. Unfortunately, however, the legions of moviegoers who buy tickets to Christopher Nolan’s otherwise excellent film this summer will have no idea that one of the leading proponents of that singular idea was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Oppenheimer threw himself into working to control nuclear weapons. Like other atomic scientists, he was fully aware that the Soviet Union would likely develop its own atom bombs in just a few years, and that time was short to prevent an unrestrained nuclear arms race. The movie refers to his activities as working for “international cooperation.” But his actual ideas were much deeper and more radical than those anodyne words imply.
In 1946, Oppenheimer participated in the development of a report for the secretary of state’s Committee on Atomic Energy about what might be done to control nuclear weapons. The report, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report but which was authored chiefly by Oppenheimer himself, proposed an international Atomic Development Agency that would have the sole right to mine and process uranium and to run reactors of any kind. This was a radical proposal, but, as its authors explained, they could see no alternative.
In June 1946, Oppenheimer published an article in The New York Times Magazine explaining the proposal to the public. The article discussed the relationship between peaceful and military uses of atomic energy, evaluated a couple of other ideas for controlling atomic weapons, and then discussed the proposed Atomic Development Agency.
It is here, in a section entitled “Sovereignty,” that we come across a striking passage:
“Many have said that without world government there could be no permanent peace, and without peace there would be atomic warfare. I think one must agree with this. Many have said that there could be no outlawry of weapons and no prevention of war unless international law could apply to the citizens of nations, as federal law does to citizens of states, or we have made manifest the fact that international control is not compatible with absolute national sovereignty. I think one must agree with this.”
Similarly, in a January 1948 article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Oppenheimer wrote:
“It is quite clear that in this field we would like to see patterns established which, if they were more generally extended, would constitute some of the most vital elements of a new international law: patterns not unrelated to the ideals which more generally and eloquently are expressed by the advocates of world government.”
From the vantage point of 2023, the remarkable thing about these passages is the apparent assumption that the reader is familiar with the idea of world government, and arguments for and against it, to the point where they can just be mentioned without explanation or elaboration. And for much of the public for much of the 1940s, this was probably true—as remarkable as it might seem to us today, when this notion is entirely absent from the international affairs debate.
Even before the end of the war, world government advocacy had become a prominent feature of the political conversation in America. In 1943, the businessman and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie published a book called One World. The book sold 1.5 million copies in the four months following its release and played a key role in a blossoming of world federation advocacy—long before virtually anyone had heard of anything like an atomic bomb. To choose but one example, an organization known as the Student Federalists, founded in 1942 by a charismatic 16-year-old boy named Harris Wofford, over the next several years formed 367 chapters on high school and college campuses around the country. (Wofford went on to become a United States senator and a key civil rights aide in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.)
Then in 1945, just a few months before the Trinity test, came Emery Reves’ The Anatomy of Peace. While Willkie’s book was a travelogue describing his voyage around the world, Reves’ was an extended logical argument that only law could create peace and only a world federation—a union of nations with a government taking care of issues that could not be handled at the national level—could create meaningful law that applied to individuals rather than governments. Indeed, Oppenheimer’s passage above could have easily been a summary of Reves’ book.
It is worth noting that both of these books were published before the United Nations Charter was more than a draft. (It was eventually signed on June 26, 1945, less than a month before the Trinity test.) The activism they inspired attempted to make the UN something more than an agglomeration of sovereign states that could sign treaties with each other, but in the end were subject to no law worthy of the name. Sovereignty meant that no state could be compelled to do anything it didn’t want to, and treaties could only be enforced by sanctions or war, not through legal action against individuals. (Citizens and various organizations could also take the government to court if it is not properly carrying out its functions, as they can in the U.S.)
It wasn’t just books. Beloved children’s book author and New Yorker editor E. B. White devoted a great many of his editorials to the problem of global anarchy. (These were later collected and published in a book called The Wild Flag: Editorials From The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters.) Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, upon reading about Hiroshima, wrote a lengthy editorial for his magazine titled “Modern Man is Obsolete,” that passionately argued for immediate democratic world federation. “There is no need to talk of the difficulties in the way of world government,” wrote Cousins. “There is need only to ask if we can afford to do without it.”
In a similar vein Walter Lippmann, a founder of both The New Republic magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a key player later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote in 1946: “There are few in any country who now believe that war can be regulated or outlawed by the ordinary treaties among sovereign states. … No one can prove what will be the legislative, executive, and judicial organs of the world state … but there are ideas that shake the world, such as the ideal of the union of mankind under universal law.”
Even General Hap Arnold, the only U.S. Air Force officer ever to hold the rank of five stars and founder of the RAND Corporation, said in 1946: “The greatest need facing the world today is for international control of the human forces that make for war.” The atom bomb, he declared, presents “a tremendous argument for a world organization that will eliminate conflict. … We must make an end to all wars for good.”
And before the end of the decade, more than 50,000 Americans had joined the United World Federalists (UWF)—led for three years by a bright young man named Alan Cranston, who went on to serve as a four-term U.S. Senator from California. UWF has continued its operations to this very day and is now known as Citizens for Global Solutions.
A number of physicists also came to support world federation. “Conflicts in interest between great powers can be expected to arise in the future … and there is no world authority in existence that can adjudicate the case and enforce the decision,” said Leo Szilard, who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction. But humanity had at its disposal, he insisted, “the solution of the problem of permanent peace. … The issue that we have to face is not whether we can create a world government … (but) whether we can have such a world government without going through a third world war.”
But the most prominent and most active proponent of world government among scientists was Albert Einstein himself. He had always opposed nationalism, and supporting world federation was a natural extension. Einstein wrote articles, gave interviews, and helped found the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. The Student Federalists of Princeton, New Jersey, held meetings in his living room. And he served as the founding advisory board chair of the United World Federalists.
The type of world government that Einstein promoted would exclusively have power over security issues and a few internal circumstances that could lead to war. But this kind of limited world government was a must. “A new kind of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels,” he said. “Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. … In light of new knowledge … an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival.”
Oppenheimer’s focus in the postwar years was more near-term. He worked for international control of nuclear matters—both weapons and civilian reactors that could be used to make weapons. But that international control was to take the form of an agency with a strict monopoly on such activities. His 1946 New York Times Magazine piece says about the plan: “It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be renunciation of national sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law.”
Why would this be significant? In a lengthier article published in 1946 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oppenheimer wrote, “The problem that we are dealing with,” in seeking to prevent atomic war, “is the problem of the elimination of war.” Proposals for addressing nuclear issues were to be judged on whether they also advanced this goal. The article was titled “The Atom Bomb as a Great Force for Peace”—not because of the simplistic and banal argument that the bomb would make war too horrible to contemplate, but because its control would lay the foundation for a world government that truly could abolish war.
Even Edward Teller, accurately portrayed in the Oppenheimer film as pushing for the development of the immensely more destructive hydrogen bombs and eventually undercutting his colleague at the security hearings, appeared to embrace the idea! In 1948, he discussed the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution, written by a committee of eminent scholars chaired by the chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and aimed at establishing a Federal Republic of the World. And Teller said about this enterprise: “[America’s] present necessary task of opposing Russia should not cause us to forget that in the long run we cannot win by working against something. Instead we must work for something. We must work for World Government.”
And in his 1948 Foreign Affairs article, again Oppenheimer maintained: “If the atomic bomb was to have meaning in the contemporary world, it would have to be in showing that not modern man, not navies, not ground forces, but war itself was obsolete.”
At the end of this essay, Oppenheimer returned to the noble aspirations that so many held in the shattering initial weeks after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. “The aim of those who would work for the establishment of peace,” he insisted, “must be to maintain what was sound in the early hopes, and by all means in their power to look to their eventual realization. It is necessarily denied to us in these days to see at what time, to what immediate ends, in what context, and in what manner of world, we may return again to the great issues touched on by the international control of atomic energy. … (But) this is seed we take with us, traveling to a land we cannot see, to plant in new soil.”
Should we consider all this just a mere historical curiosity? Is anything about these conversations eight long decades ago relevant to the challenges of the 21st Century? As politically unlikely as it might now appear, might something like a genuine world republic provide humanity with the kinds of tools it will require to get a grip on existential perils like the climate emergency, runaway artificial intelligence, and who knows what kinds of new weapons of mass extermination that Oppenheimer’s heirs will almost surely invent in the decades and centuries to come?
The best possible answer to that is the same one purportedly given by China’s Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971, when asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought about the consequences of the French Revolution.
Mr. Zhou, the story goes, considered the question for a moment, and then replied: “I think it is too soon to tell.”'
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hera-the-shoggoth · 7 months
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The following are the contents of the article, including a description of the infobox, listed in succession.
(title of infobox in Chinese and Manchu languages) Chinese Imperial Air Force (English) 中華帝國空軍 (Hanzi) Chung-hua Ti-kuo K'ung-chün (Wade-Giles, the most widely used Chinese romanization system in this timeline)
(Below is the name in Manchu script, it only renders sideways here) ᡩᡠᠯᡳᠮᠪᠠᡳ ᡤᡠᡵᡠᠨ ‍ᡳ ᠠᠪᡴᠠᡳ ᠴᠣᠣᡥᠠ (Manchu) Dulimbai gurun-i Abkai Cooha (Manchu romanization)
Emblem of the Chinese Imperial Air Force:
Symbol consisting of the roundel with a blue-green-white-red dragon flying around the central red sun, vertical red and yellow banners with the name of the air force in white Hanzi and Manchu script, two outspread white bird wings, and the red imperial crown of the Great Qing Emperor
Founded: 10 August 1910; 113 years ago (as Army Flying Corps) 25 December 1929; 93 years ago (as current service)
Country: China Type: Air force
Role: Aerial warfare Airborne forces Air defense
Size: 300,000 active personnel (2023) 4,000+ aircraft (2023) Part of: Chinese Imperial Military Headquarters: Peking (this spelling remained popular in the English-speaking world) Motto(s) 盡忠報國 English: "boundless loyalty to the country" (the text of Yue Fei's famous tattoo) Colors: Blue, yellow, red (a medium cerulean blue, a slightly warm yellow, and a bright cherry red)
March: Quick: Dragon Aviators' March Slow: Five Thousand Years Anniversaries: Air Force Day (14 August) Aviation Day (10 August)
List of Engagements: Late Kuang-hsü Crisis
(Second Canton Revolt)
(Wu-ch'ang Rebellion)
(Hatchet Gang Rebellion) Sino-German War First World War Russian Civil War
(West Siberian Intervention) Warlord Era
(Imperial Protection War)
(Yün-Kwei War)
(Southern Expedition)
(Sinkiang Campaign) Outer Mongolia Insurgency Second Sino-Japanese War Second World War Chinese Civil War
(Tai-wan Strait Crisis) Korean War
(Yalu-Tumen Intervention) Sino-Indian War
(Battle of Bhutan) Tibet Uprising (1959)
(Operation Wind Shadow) Third Indochina War
(Operation Phoenix Eye) Spratly Islands Conflict Indonesia-Malaya War
(Operation Celestial Spear) Uzbekistan War
(Operation Black Tortoise)
Website: (Official website link)
Commanders: Commander-in-Chief: Jui-wen Emperor (era name 睿文, means "Forward-thinking culture") Director of the IDC: Li Kuo-t'ai Minister of War: Marshal Fan Sung-yün Chief of the Air Staff: Marshal Wei Chao-lin
Insignia: Roundel: Concentric circles of blue, yellow, and red, with a thin ring of blue on the outside, a large area of yellow inside it, and a small red circle at the center Fin flash: high visibility, Blue-Yellow-Red tricolor, low visibility yellow and red alone. Ensign: Black Ensign with Qing imperial flag in the canton. In the black field are depictions in white of the Little Dipper and the North Star, arranged in an arc from the middle fly to the lower hoist. The black field represents the night sky and commemorates the air force's famous night raids during World War II.
Aircraft flown: Bomber: Hsi-an JH-7, H-6 Electronic warfare: Russo-Balt RB-154, Shan-hsi Y-8, Shan-hsi Y-9, J-16D Fighter: Chʻêng-tu J-7, Mukden J-8, Chʻêng-tu J-10, Mukden J-11, Mukden J-16, Chʻêng-tu J-20, Samara Sa-27, Sa-30MKK, Sa-35S Helicopter: Harbin Z-8, Harbin Z-9 Attack helicopter: Harbin Z-19, CAIC Z-10 Utility helicopter: Harbin Z-20 Interceptor: Mukden J-8 Trainer: K'un-lun L-15, K'un-lun JL-8, JL-9 Transport: Hsi-an Y-20, Shan-hsi Y-9, Shan-hsi Y-8, Hsi-an Y-7, Zhukovsky Zh-76 Tanker: H-6U, Zh-78
Chinese name in various transcriptions used in this world: Traditional Chinese 中華帝國空軍 (used on the mainland) Simplified Chinese 中华帝国空军 (used on Tai-wan) Literal meaning: Chinese Imperial Air Force Bopomofo: ㄓㄨㄥ ㄏㄨㄚˋ ㄉㄧˇ ㄍㄨㄛˇ ㄎㄨㄥ ㄐㄩㄣ Wade–Giles: Chung-hua Ti-kuo K'ung-chün Cantonese Jyutping: Zung-waa dai-gwok Hong-gwan
(Below is the separate box for further reading on the Qing military that accompanies the main infobox in most such articles)
Armed Forces of the Great Ch'ing Empire Octagonal symbol known as "the Eight Corners" containing the colors of all the Eight Banners arranged to resemble the character 卐 (Wan, important to state-sponsored Vajrayana religion)
Executive departments:
Imperial Defence Council
Ministry of War
Staff:
Director of the IDC
General Staff of the Military
Works Department of the IDC
Censorate of the IDC
Services:
Chinese Imperial Military
Army
Navy
Air Force
Strategic Support
Independent troops:
Military Police Force
T'uan-lien Militia
Pao-chia Guards
Eight Banners
Special operations force:
Special Operations Department
Special Police Unit of the MPF
Snow Leopard Commando Unit
Mountain Eagle Commando Unit
Other troops:
CIM Joint Logistics Support Force
Military districts:
Eastern Theater Command
Southern Theater Command
Western Theater Command
Northern Theater Command
Central Theater Command
History of the Chinese military
Military history of China
Military ranks of China
Ranks of the Imperial Army
Ranks of the Imperial Navy
Ranks of the Imperial Air Force
(Main body of the article below here)
The Chinese Imperial Air Force (CIAF; Chinese: 中華帝國空軍; Wade–Giles: Chung-hua Ti-kuo K'ung-chün), also referred to as the Chinese Air Force (中華空軍) or the Imperial Air Force (帝國空軍), is the principal aerial service of the Great Ch'ing Empire, a part of the Chinese Imperial Military along with the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Army. The CIAF was officially established on 25 December 1929 and it is composed of five branches: aviation, ground-based air defense, radar, Airborne Corps and other support elements.
The development of the CIAF began with the creation of the Pei-yang Army Flying Corps in 1910, which flew French biplanes in reconaissance and bombing operations against rebels. With the splintering of the Pei-yang Army in 1916, elements of the Flying Corps entered the service of the various warlords vying for control of the government. During the First World War, ten bombers were shipped to Shang-hai for the Peking Government's use in dislodging the German Navy from Kiautschou Bay. The Flying Corps would participate in the Southern Expedition using primarily the Avro Avenger fighter aircraft and the Avro Aldershot heavy bomber provided by the United Kingdom, and in 1929, with the warlords brought together or defeated, the Air Staff was created as a separate branch of the military. The UK also assisted with the expansion of the Chinese aerospace industry during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Changes in the organization of the CIAF followed by modernization programs in the 1980s and increased technology development in the 21st century resulted in the J-20 stealth multirole fighter, the first of its kind for China.
The Air Force's mission is to secure the objectives of the Imperial Defence Council which are to "provide necessary security and defense of the Empire and to support the Government's international obligations". The highest-ranking military officer in the Air Force is the Chief of the Air Staff, who exercises supervision over Air Force units, while the IDC assigns Air Force components to unified combatant commands. Some units are also ceremonially affiliated with the Eight Banners, but since 1931 have been functionally integrated into the civilian command structure. The Helicopter Command contains most of the rotary-wing aircraft of the CIAF. Most of the air force is based in Mainland China, but some units do serve on foreign operations (principally over Manipur and Bukhara) or at long-established foreign bases (Havana, Ream, Djibouti, and Gorno-Badakhshan). Although the CIAF is the principal Chinese air power arm, the Imperial Navy's Fleet Air Corps and the Army Air Corps also operate armed aircraft.
Contents: 1 History 1.1 Origins 1.2 Warlord Era and Yüan Ch'en 1.3 First United Front 1.4 Second Sino-Japanese War 1.5 Chinese Civil War 1.6 Korean War to the Sino-Russian Split 1.7 1970s to 1980s 1.8 P'ing-hsiang era (平祥, Peaceful and Auspicious) 1.9 Jui-wen era 2 Personnel 2.1 Ranks and insignia 2.2 Commanders 3 Structure 3.1 Senior leadership 3.2 Headquarters 3.3 Commands 3.3.1 Transport command 3.3.2 Long-range command 3.3.3 Expeditionary command 3.3.4 Training and research 3.4 Order of battle 3.5 Airbases 3.6 Aerobatic display team 4 Aircraft 4.1 Combat air 4.2 Intelligence 4.3 Maritime patrol 4.4 Helicopters 4.5 Training aircraft 4.6 Advanced jet training 5 See also 6 References 6.1 Citations 6.2 Sources 7 Further reading 8 External links
History: (Further information: link to page "Aviation in China")
Origins:
Today's Chinese Imperial Air Force (CIAF) traces its roots back to August 10, 1910 when the government authorized the creation of the Army Flying Corps in an effort to improve intelligence and gain the upper hand on insurrections. On the same day, construction began on Peking Nan-yüan Airport as part of a program to modernize national infrastructure. Initiated in the wake of the Boxer Protocol in 1901, the Keng-tzu New Policies were ordered by the Empress Dowager Tz'ŭ-hsi to reform government bureaucracy along with the military, and by the start of the Hsuan-t'ung reign a group of preparatory departments had been organized for experimentation with new technology and administrative systems. In 1903 an imperial edict expanded the Wu-wei Corps to 36 divisions, creating the Pei-yang Army, in 1905 the Imperial Examinations were abolished, and in 1907 a new law code and judicial system were rolled out. That same year, the tax code was reformed and the rail system was nationalized, which greatly helped the empire's finances but caused significant unrest as well.
With the death of Jung-lu in 1903, General of the Right Division Yüan Shih-k'ai became commander of the Pei-yang Army. His role in the 1898 coup d'état against the Kuang-hsü Emperor made him many enemies, and when the empress dowager and the emperor died within a day of each other in 1909, he was forced to resign by Prince Ch'ün and return to his home village ostensibly for health reasons. In spite of this, Yüan remained in communication with his associates in the army. In the wake of the February 1910 Keng-hsü Army Uprising, he authorized the Pei-yang Army to found a flight school at Nan-yüan to train a group of eight pilots to fly reconnaisance using Cauldron Type D biplanes purchased from France, improving the army's ability to respond. In early 1911, the Aviation Research Institute was founded.[6]
Warlord Era and Yüan Ch'en:
(Photo labeled "Nan-yüan Air Force Academy drillmasters in front of Avro aircraft") (Photo labeled "Voisin V in Shang-hai")
In 1911, a major popular uprising began in Canton while another army mutiny occurred at Wu-ch'ang. In a panic, Empress Dowager Lung-yü convinced Yüan to come out of retirement and lead the war effort in exchange for the position of Prime Minister and the final adoption of the Hsuan-t'ung Constitution. The rebellion was crushed by the end of 1912, and the T'ung-meng-hui (TMH) revolutionary society was forced to flee to Japan once again with numerous dead. With the south pacified, Yüan feared he would no longer be of use to the Ch'ing court. In spite of the bureaucrats' protests, he brought his army into the capital in order to protect himself and his allies from execution, essentially holding the court hostage. For five years, he and his majority Han chinese cabinet ruled the country.
Reasoning that China desired a new Han-ruled dynasty, Yüan revised the constitution to make himself a dictator before announcing plans to seize the throne as the Hung-hsien Emperor of Great Ch'en, allowing his army to plunder Manchu estates as northern Chinese cities descended into racial violence. The Ch'ing court fled to Gan-su, where support for Han rule was lower, under the protection of Ma An-liang and Shaan-hsi governor Ch'ien Neng-hsün. With the divided country now in civil war, many of Yüan's closest supporters abandoned him, and the solidarity of his Beiyang clique of military protégés dissolved. The Hung-hsien Emperor was opposed by not only the Ch'ing and the minorities, but far more importantly by his subordinate military commanders, who believed that his usurpation would allow him to rule without depending on the support of the military.
A coalition of governors and officers led by An-hui governor Liang Tun-yen launched the Imperial Protection War against him, officially in the name of the Hsuan-t'ung Emperor, while the Air Corps rebelled as well and dropped bombs on the Forbidden City. Yüan's health continued to decline, and his death in 1916 paved the way for the return of K'ang Yu-wei and other anti-Yüan reformist exiles. The Prince Ch'ing Cabinet retook control of the capital, denouncing Yüan and purging his allies, while government authority was greatly damaged. Provinces broke away and the TMH returned in 1917 to start a Han-nationalist insurgency in Hunan.
The fall of Yüan Shih-k'ai created a power vacuum and fractured the army. Fearing for their lives, many of the southern Pei-yang generals revolted and took control of the provinces as military governors. Minister of War Wang Shih-chen, nominally in charge of the Pei-yang Army, abolished it and reorganized the loyalist forces into the Chinese Imperial Military. Expanding the airbases at Nan-yüan and Ta hsiao-ch'ang, Marshal Wang was able to acquire more machines from Britain and France when the new army attacked the German Leased Territory of Kiautschou Bay in 1917 and China was drawn into the First World War.
As part of the allied Operation Asher, ten Voisin V pusher bombers were produced in France and shipped to Shang-hai. In spite of having defeated the 1914 allied attack, by this time the garrison was low on supplies and the Chinese aircraft proved devastating to German morale during the Second Siege of Tsing-tao. An avid aviation enthusiast, the Hsuan-tung Emperor himself also took great interest in the development of the Air Corps, and when he assumed direct rule in 1924 he personally invested large amounts of his constitutional subsidy into it.
First United Front:
During the late 1920s, the Ch'ing Imperial Government formed the first united front with the liberal T'ung-meng Hui (TMH) party against competing warlords in a bid to reunite a fractionalized China, combining the liberal Wu-han Government with the Imperial Assembly. In this period, various airplanes were purchased and deployed by warlords in their struggle for power until nominal Chinese reunification in 1929 following the Southern Expedition which saw the use of Avro Aldershot heavy bombers to inflict serious damage on the infrastructure of several provinces in support of the government offensives. That year, the CIAF was designated as an independent branch of the armed forces. The eighteen graduate pilots of the military flight school included nine republican and nine monarchist pilots who were sent to the Russian Federation for two years of advanced flight training under the tutelage of the more experienced Russian Air Force. Two of the imperial graduates, Kuo Tzu-han and Sung Chien-yü, continued to serve in the Russian Air Force for five years until, in September 1928, they returned to Ti-hua as instructors.
At the same time, Tsai-chen the fifth Prince Ch'ing established the Bureau of Aeronautics in 1920. Subsequently, the organization continued to develop, and successively established an aircraft factory, an aviation command, and a new aviation school in Hsi-an. In May 1927, the Aviation Department of the Ministry of War was changed to the Aviation Committee of the Defense Council of the Imperial Government. By 1929, the government's aviation force was officially independent from the Army General Command and became an independent service.
Second Sino-Japanese War:
(Photo labelled "Self-developed Chinese transport aircraft during the Battle of Ch'ang-sha")
Following the abolition of many of their social privileges in the Hsin-wei Reform Act, many Banner families experienced poverty and violence. In response to perceived neglect, they became disaffected with the Hsuan-t'ung Emperor. Some sided with the northeastern Pei-yang Army generals of the Fêng-tʻien Clique, while some sought support from Imperial Japan.
A minor dispute known as the Wan-pao-shan incident between Han and Korean farmers occurred on July 1, 1931. The issue was highly sensationalized in the Imperial Japanese and Korean press, and used for considerable propaganda effect to increase anti-Chinese sentiment in the Empire of Japan. Believing that a conflict in Manchuria would be in the best interests of Japan, Kwantung Army Colonel Seishirō Itagaki devised a plan to provoke Japan into invading Manchuria by setting up a false flag incident for the pretext of invasion. The Independent Garrison Unit of the 29th Infantry Regiment (which guarded the South Manchuria Railway) placed explosives near the tracks, but far enough away to do no real damage.
On the morning of September 19, two artillery pieces installed at the Mukden officers' club opened fire on the Chinese garrison nearby, in response to the alleged Chinese attack on the railway. Chang Hsueh-liang's small air force was destroyed, and his soldiers fled their destroyed Pei-ta-ying barracks, as five hundred Japanese troops attacked the Chinese garrison of around seven thousand. The Chinese troops were no match for the experienced Japanese troops. By the evening, the fighting was over, and the Japanese had occupied Mukden at the cost of five hundred Chinese lives and only two Japanese lives, thus starting the greater invasion of Manchuria. By 1932, most of the region was under Japanese control and the Empire of Manchukuo was created, while a young member of the Hitara clan was enthroned in Ch'ang-ch'un as the K'ang-te Emperor.
The CIAF immediately dispatched combat aircraft to the Hung-ch'iao Aerodrome during the January 28th Incident of 1932, and aerial skirmishes occurred for the first time between China and the Imperial Japanese. In February 1932, US Reserve Lt. Robert McCawley Short, who was transporting armed Chinese aircraft, shot down an IJN aircraft on February 19, 1932, and downed another on February 22 before he was killed (he was posthumously raised to the rank of colonel in the CIAF). During the early days of China's war of resistance against the Japanese invasion, the Imperial Air Force participated in several battles, including attacking Imperial Japanese Navy warships along the Yangtze River and supporting the Battle of Shang-hai. By this time, the Imperial Air Force's main fighter models were the Curtiss Hawk II and Hawk III fighters. On August 14, 1937, Japanese Imperial Navy bombers bombed Hang-chou Chien-ch'iao Airport, but was defeated by the CIAF; therefore, August 14 was designated as Air Force Day by the Imperial Government. In May 1938, the CIAF dispatched two B-10 bombers to Japan to drop leaflets.
By the middle of the war, intelligence units of the Imperial Japanese Navy cracked the radio codes of the Chinese army, putting the Air Force under attack. In the middle and late stages of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the addition of Chennault and other foreign pilots, as well as the support provided by the United States after joining the Allies, restructured the combat power of the CIAF and participated in the Hsin-chu Air Attack, and air raids on Japan. After the end of World War II, in June 1946, the Aviation Committee of the Military Committee of the Imperial Government was changed to the General Command of the Air Force.
Chinese Civil War:
In January 1941, as intensifying clashes between imperial and TMH forces ended the second united front against invading Japanese forces, the government's Imperial Defense Council (IDC) established the Air Force Engineering School with Kuo as commandant and Sung as head instructor. In May 1944, just over a year before the Japanese surrender to Allied forces, the IDC established an Aviation Section in Hsi-an with Kuo as its director and Sung as deputy director. Two years later in May 1946 and after the withdrawal of Japanese troops, the IDC established the Northeast Old Aviation School in Kirin. By 1949 the Aviation Section of the IDC had 560 trained personnel (125 pilots and 435 ground support specialists), purchased 435 aircraft from the Russian Federation, acquired 115 republican aircraft, and operated seven military flight schools.
During the Second Civil War between the T'ung-meng Hui and the Imperial Government from 1946 to 1949, the Air Corps of the Republic of China participated in combat support and air strikes against the CIAF on the mainland and around the Tai-wan Strait. In October of the same year, the ACROC assisted in stopping the advance of the Chinese Imperial Army at the Battle of Ku-ning-t'ou in Quemoy, and in April 1949, the Air Corps retreated to the former Japanese colony of Tai-wan along with other government departments of the ROC. In October 1952, Marshal Chou Ên-lai and the battle-hardened army of the Chinese Communist Party broke with the T'ung-meng Hui and launched a successful revolution with the help of Indigenous Taiwanese, abolishing the National Assembly of the TMH and founding the People's Republic of China; the world's second socialist state after India. The ACROC sided with the revolution and became the PRCAAF. As relations soured between the left liberal governments of NATO and the right authoritarian governments of the Eurasian Pact, the United States intervened on behalf of the PRC and preserved the island's self-government. There have been at least 11 air battles in the area since 1952.
The real opportunity to obtain a large number of aircraft came from the Northeast Alliance Aviation School established in 1946 after the end of the Anti-Japanese War. At this time, the Imperial Government seized Japanese-made aircraft, trained pilots, and received a large number of American-made aircraft from the surrendered ROC Air Force in southeast China and Nanking during the civil war. On March 17, 1949, personnel were transferred from the Northeast Aviation School to establish the "Imperial Defence Council Aviation Bureau" in Peking. The director Ch'ang Ch'ien-k'un (the executive vice president of the Northeast Aviation School), under the Combat Education Department, Aeronautical Engineering Department, Civil Aviation Department, Information Section and Supply Section, staffed 64 people. In May 1949, the Navigation Management Office, the Secretariat, and the Imperial Office were added, and the number was expanded to 172 people. The major military regions have since successively established aviation divisions.
(end of finished part of article)
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playitagin · 1 year
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4月11日。1955年 - カシミールプリンセス号爆破事件
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psitrend · 5 years
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China is an attractive piece of meat coveted by all … but very tough, and for years no one has been able to bite into it. Zhou Enlai
New Post has been published on https://china-underground.com/2019/09/03/china-is-an-attractive-piece-of-meat-coveted-by-all-but-very-tough-and-for-years-no-one-has-been-able-to-bite-into-it-zhou-enlai/
China is an attractive piece of meat coveted by all … but very tough, and for years no one has been able to bite into it. Zhou Enlai
Origin: Zhou Enlai to the Chinese Communist Party Congress, as quoted in The New York Times (1 September 1973).
Zhou Enlai (1898 – 1976), 周恩来, was born in Jiangsu Province and was a prominent Chinese politician. Zhou was China’s head of government, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976.
“China is an attractive piece of meat coveted by all … but very tough, and for years no one has been able to bite into it.” Zhou Enlai
Original text:
“Premier Chou reaffirmed the Chinese position that relations with the Soviet Union should be normalized on the basis of the “five principles of peaceful co‐existence,” and the border issue should be settled without any threats.
But he added: “We will not attack unless we are attacked. If we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack. That is our principle and we mean what we say.”
Premier Chou declared that the United States and the Soviet Union would always contend with each other and that their “collusion” was only temporary.
“The West always wants to urge the Soviet revisionists eastward to divert the peril toward China, and it would be fine so long as all is quiet in the West,” he added. “China is an attractive piece of meat coveted by all. But this piece of meat is very tough and for years no one has been able to bite into it.”” (New York Times)
#ZhouEnlai
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onlyzhuyilong · 1 year
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Zhu Yilong as Zhou Enlai [Film: 1921]
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zhuhongs · 3 months
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just found out the lead singer of taiwans biggest death metal band is also an active parliament member since like 2015.... and is still active as a death metal singer. he's a pretty standard taiwanese center left anti communist from what i could gather. which like as a leftist i dont really agree with but i also dont know enough abt taiwanese politics to like make a full judgement. though he seems to be a standard liberal nothing remarkable, radical, or new, not overtly horrible but just bland. but that was something i definitely did Not expect. apparently he's very pro indigenous rights and self determination for indigenous people but being in a centre left mega party like the DPP does not seem like the best way to achieve that. But yea, just thought I'd share
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#chthinic collabed heavily with collage last year and ik natsuki (lead singer of collage) is very pro indigenous rights and posts abt it a#lot of instagram and i really appreciate the amount of political stuff on her platform. its all very progressive tho v much limited to tw#so idk. i kind of got the cibe of some groups that see taiwanese indigenous issues as seperate to the larger issue of colonialism and#indigenous rights all over the world to conflicts such as palestine. where some other groups have a lot more of the collective consciousnes#and idk. my view is limited and i didnt see that much but when i go back i def wanna look for more political groups in tw and learn about#the political landscape there for leftism. theres a lot of potential in tw imo#chthonic* natsuko**#edit: overall i think that like.. i get the spirit but i feel like for many taiwanese the identity of tw has been everyone united agaisnt#china which i can understand from the perspective of the indigenous ppl that had their land colonized by the japanese then had to share with#the fleeing kmt settlers. but like i dont think that its the best approach to say only china bad rather than big governments threatening to#take your land by force is bad. because idk my take on china and tw is that regardless of the historical claim or wtv. taiwans indigenous#people have been there long before the han ever stepped foot. and china isnt all good as seen in its treatment of the uyghers and tibetans#but is overall not nearly as bad as the west paints it to be. china is neither fully a communist paradise. and has many capitalist undertone#s influence the government ever since deng xiaoping came to power. personally i never fully agreed with mao. i think mao was a necessary#figure in the beginning and let power go to his head and i believe zhou enlai always shouldve been the founder of the PRC#fuck the kmt.. never liked the kmt and it seems as they are also slowly losing favor in tw also. and like... hmm#i need to do more reading tho. none of this is like 100% set in stone how i feel bc theres a lot i dont know
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