Poor image of the Chinese people depicted

I always have to grit my teeth and bear it when watching movies of China set in the early 20th century, like, "Inn of the Sixth Happiness" (excellent movie), "The Sand Pebbles", "The Good Earth", and now, this "Children of Huang Shi".

The Chinese people are typically portrayed as living in extreme poverty, culturally and socially backwards, technologically deficient, undereducated, and worse, xenophobic and opposed to new ideas and methods.

It's a terrible image of the Chinese people...and it's all true. This was the sorry fate of the Chinese people in the early 20th century after just over 360 years of living under barbarian Manchurian rule. The Manchurian emperors and their courts had every reason to keep the vast Chinese lands and its overwhelming numbers of people suppressed with brutality, superstition, and backwardnesss. It was the only way the outnumbered Manchurians could maintain their iron grip on China, by keeping its people down.

The sophisticated and advanced Chinese peoples of the dynasties T'ang, Song, and Ming would have been horrified to see what the Chinese people of 1937 had degenerated to. The British entered China at the end of the 18th century and by the 19th century were stunned to see the supposedly once great empire of Cathay as described by medieval Marco Polo, mired in cultural and technological backwardness. Sensing great weakness everywhere, the British Empire promptly declared war and won.

There was substanital racial bigotry between the white British and the Manchurian court and Chinese subjects. But in the end the British got the last laugh by rubbing the Chinese face in the mud. The lesson learned from the Chinese and the British is that before you declare yourself ethnically or racially superior to someone else, you had better have the superior military power and technology to back it up, because genetics and DNA don't. You don't want to be like the Manchurians and Chinese - talking trash about the hairy, smelly white British barbarians and end up getting their a$$ kicked and later disparaged as oriental, slant-eyed, pig-tailed, opium-smoking savages for the next 80 years. The victorious British would later become infamous, along with the white Americans and white Europeans, for their extreme bigoted views of the Chinese people and the Chinese didn't help matters by telling the white peoples just what they thought of Caucasians. Here's a lesson from Star Wars grandmaster Yoda for all races. Bigotry leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger to leads to hate. Hate leads to violence. Violence leads to pain. It's all true.

Thank you all for listening to my soap box. Pay no heed. I'm sure you'll understand.

The Chinese people had their moments of shining glory of civilization, culture, innovation, technology, and even military prowess. Few people knew that the T'ang dynasty would rank as a superpower by today's standards. But it was all in the past. The Chinese have been trying to escape this cycle of rise and humiliating decline and fall for the last two thousand years. The present Communist government can't escape the past of the Chinese people. The government tried at first to regain Chinese glory through military strength. But in the last two decades, they've come around to the obvious fact that the ancient Chinese always knew. Power doesn't come from the bow and arrow or the barrel of a gun, but from the almighty dollar. That is, economic success means economic power, which feeds military power and national and ethnic pride. Is there anything we Americans use today that's not made in China? And now the Chinese are subsidizing the American way of life. The Chinese have invested something like a trillion dollars in the United States. And just recently, that gave the Chinese government reason for pause. The U.S. has so much Chinese money locked up in American financial institutions and markets that we have the Chinese by the literal cajones. Remeber the old adage? If you owe the bank ten thousand dollars, the bank owns you. But if you owe the bank one million dollars, then you own the bank. (Why? The bank can't let you fail for fear of losing a huge sum of money they can't afford to lose)

China is coming back onto the world stage again. I hope though, that China doesn't base its entire resurgence on just money, manufacturing, and the military. I would like to see China re-emerge on its culture and technological innovation. But China will have to leave behind it's residual anger and outrage over its unjust treatment by the Western powers one hundred and sixty years ago. That will only hold the Chinese back.