#clarification that i am thoroughly neutral in the balance of blame on british greed or chinese incompetency

[inkonsistentsky]

so opium wars and the emergence of tensions...as most know, the glorification or fetishisation of asian cultures is not a recent phase that has cropped up in history. this is more relevant for this period of british aggression against the chinese people, no i will not be correcting the wording of this because again i'm not going for nuance. anyway i thought it was interesting just how thoroughly they switched from idolising and presenting china as a pinnacle of morality and intelligence ( i think it was a french philosopher who upheld the chinese for this perception of them being greater than many other nations, he was super popular at the time but i can't quite recall his name? i think the research paper was 'search for modern china' under obviously, johnathan d. spence, i want nobody to tell me how generic of a choice that was, or i will cry:< I THINK IT WAS VOLTAIRE BUT I CAN'T REMEMBER PLS TELL ME IF SOMEBODY ELSE KNOWS THIS PAPER)

anyway kinda forgot where i was going with that but yes they went from this sort of idealisation of china and saying like "AWW CHINA scrunkly guy i like your art and culture:>" to "dude what are your policies lmao, cancelledddddd". essentially french philosophers? decided that china's policies achieved little to no progress and that they were ruled by pointless fear instead of reason when establishing a law or a societal norm. i'm not saying whether or not i agree with that...but i'm just saying europe had a lot of greed in their policies so i'm not sure if they're ones to talk. anyway yeah fun lil tangent thing! this is by no means a comparison of voltaire's idealisation of china's cultural climate as equal to the modern day's fetishisation of east asian cultures and her peoples. (it was more prominent or, at least, more obvious during the? mm i wanna say 1940s-1960s, like somewhere between world war two and the vietnam war but i haven't gotten into much of film or cultural impacts of the cold war and the prior wars, or quite frankly the relationships between anything other than the big three and china/korea so i'll say it's a tentative time period)

anyway yeah. :/