Many disagree.I am saying this as someone who has lived in HK before.So what? Hong Kong is Chinese now and arguably was even when ruled from London.
I know I am being deliberately obtuse and ignoring the real question posed, which is about Chinese military strength between oohh say 1800 and 1945, I just felt it needed pointing out that China resisted the West quite nicely thank you. Far, far better than say the Inca did.
Really? Japan was close to conquering China?, a country so militaristic it made Prussia look sane threw everything they had at China for 10 years and then were so desperate they attacked The USA to break the dead lock.
Is there anybody here who thinks Japan came close to colonising China in the 20thC?
Like I said with the usual arguments over definitions.
Can you please tone down your nationalist outburst?I am saying this as someone who is ethnically Chinese.For a country with the size and population of China,it has seriously under-performed for the most part since the Anshi Rebellion due to horrible policies and subsequent isolationism.
The Song Dynasty screwed up immensely with the policies of subjugating military command to a civilian bureaucracy.The Ming Dynasty screwed up due to it's taxation policies,imperial examination system(which produces people who talk more than they are capable of doing),ridiculously low salary for bureaucrats,isolationist policies,the caste system and over-indulgent privileges granted to imperial family members.The Manchu Dynasty meanwhile was just an apartheid colonial regime.Am I the only one that thinks that China resisted the West perfectly well and after only 100 years or so is the most powerful state in the world again ( with the usual arguments over dates and definitions of "power" and "state").
It seems to me that China did what it has always done when confronted by powerful barbarians, absorb people, ideas and inventions while hanging on to what mattered culturally. Note that Britain, Japan, America and Russia did not at anytime conquer or look likely to conquer the Chinese.
It's fair to say that while their enemies are powerful,most of the time,they just screwed up themselves.
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