She stood calmly at the scene of the crime. She distributed mimeographed booklets with poetry dedicated to her parents, a thorough explanation of her actions, and an apology for splattering blood on the walls of the shrine. All of this she signed, “Female avenger, Shi Jianqiao.”
For years after the conclusion of the First Opium War, Britain felt annoyed by lingering unresolved issues with China’s Qing Empire. The British needed a casus belli, a cause for another war — and found just that in the form of a small boat manned by pirates.
Benedict Arnold. Quisling. Brutus. All traitors of legendary status, whose names are now figures of speech. But the ultimate traitor? That might be China's Wu Sangui, who betrayed not one, but two dynasties.
In 2014, Ilham Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of separatism, despite his relatively moderate stance on questions of Uyghur autonomy. But his truth was too blasphemous — intolerable for China's gatekeepers of history.
In 1926, a youth basketball game — the championship of a citywide tournament in the northeastern city of Harbin — between Chinese and Russian players ended in controversy. It was a microcosm of the times: A country on the rise reckoning with the remnants of colonialism.
In popular understanding, the Qianlong Emperor's rejection of Lord Macartney and King George III was an act of hubris, a failure to recognize the military might of Britain and the West, the last prideful act of a waning empire before a "century of humiliation." But what if our understanding is all wrong?
Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was real fear during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954 that nukes might be deployed. The conflict — including an eight-month bombardment of Nationalist-controlled Jinmen Island — is largely a footnote in contemporary cross-strait relations, though it hasn't been forgotten by the residents who lived through it.
This week, we look back to 1931, when maybe the worst of China's recent floods inundated an area the size of New England, affecting up to 50 million people.
Who was Ma Xinyi? A governor-general born to a Muslim family and one the most powerful officials in the realm, Ma coordinated the exchange of technology and methods from Western advisers to the Qing army. On the morning of August 22, he was assassinated in Nanjing — for reasons that remain unconfirmed to this day.