western Supremacist clown railing against Sangoku:
Emperors of the Sangoku, the "Three Kingdoms," of India, China, & Japan
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India and China </b>are the sources of the greatest civilizations in Eastern and Southern Asia. <b>Their rulers saw themselves as universal monarchs, thereby matching the pretentions of the Roman Emperors in the West. </b><b>The only drawbacks to their historical priority were that India suffered a setback, when the Indus Valley Civilization collapsed (for disputed reasons), and China got started later than the Middle Eastern civilizations. </b>By the time India recovered, it was a contemporary of Greece, rather than Sumeria, with many parallel cultural developments, like philosophy. And, curiously, China reached a philosophical stage of development in the same era, the "axial age," 800 to 400 BC. Later, when the West, India, and China all had contact with each other, it was at first India that had the most influence on China, through the introduction of Buddhism. <b>Indian influence on the West, though likely through the skepticism of Pyrrho, and possibly evident in the halos of Christian saints (borrowed from Buddhist iconography), did not extend to anything more substantial. </b>While China then made Buddhism its own, India later endured the advent of Islâm, which introduced deep cultural and then political divisions into the Subcontinent. The only comparable development in China was the application of Marxism by the Communist government that came to power in 1949. While China has now embraced a more liberal economic vision and has outgrown India, it retains the political dictatorship of Communism. India, with a successful history as a democracy, has found its growth hampered by socialist expectations and regulations (the stiffling "Licence Raj"), with some, but not enough, economic liberalization in the 1990's.
<b>The idea that there are "Three Kingdoms" (Sangoku -- we might call it the , "India, China, Japan") is a Japanese conceit, </b>placing those peripheral islands on equal standing with the great centers of civilization, India and China. Until the 20th century, there would not have been a shadow of justification for that, except perhaps in subjective judgments about the creativity or originality of Japanese culture,<b> which I am sure would be disputed by Koreans and Vietnamese. </b>However, after a process of self-transformation sparked by American intervention, Japan lept to the status of a Great Power by defeating Russia in 1905. The Empire then spent the next 40 years throwing its weight around, occupying Korea and invading China, ultimately taking on the United States in a disastrous bid for hegemony (1941-1945). Catastrophic defeat slowed Japan down a little, but by the 1980's, the country had vaulted to the highest per capita income in the world, with wealth and economic power that deeply frightened many, even in the United States. Japan remains the only Great Power, in economic terms (as the Japanese military establishment remains low profile), not directly derived from European civilization. Now, even after a decade of economic stagnation, Japan remains the second largest economy in the world (about 40% the size of the United States, more than 1.7 times the size of Germany, and finally reviving a bit in 2004), although in per capita terms declining from 3rd in the world in 2003 to 11th in 2007 [The Economist Pocket World in Figures, 2007 Edition]. This all might be thought to justify the Japanese view of themselves as unique, or at least special, certainly geopolitically important, giving us some motivation for the inclusion of Japan in a "Sangoku" page.
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Emperors of the Sangoku, the "Three Kingdoms," of India, China, & Japan
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India and China </b>are the sources of the greatest civilizations in Eastern and Southern Asia. <b>Their rulers saw themselves as universal monarchs, thereby matching the pretentions of the Roman Emperors in the West. </b><b>The only drawbacks to their historical priority were that India suffered a setback, when the Indus Valley Civilization collapsed (for disputed reasons), and China got started later than the Middle Eastern civilizations. </b>By the time India recovered, it was a contemporary of Greece, rather than Sumeria, with many parallel cultural developments, like philosophy. And, curiously, China reached a philosophical stage of development in the same era, the "axial age," 800 to 400 BC. Later, when the West, India, and China all had contact with each other, it was at first India that had the most influence on China, through the introduction of Buddhism. <b>Indian influence on the West, though likely through the skepticism of Pyrrho, and possibly evident in the halos of Christian saints (borrowed from Buddhist iconography), did not extend to anything more substantial. </b>While China then made Buddhism its own, India later endured the advent of Islâm, which introduced deep cultural and then political divisions into the Subcontinent. The only comparable development in China was the application of Marxism by the Communist government that came to power in 1949. While China has now embraced a more liberal economic vision and has outgrown India, it retains the political dictatorship of Communism. India, with a successful history as a democracy, has found its growth hampered by socialist expectations and regulations (the stiffling "Licence Raj"), with some, but not enough, economic liberalization in the 1990's.
<b>The idea that there are "Three Kingdoms" (Sangoku -- we might call it the , "India, China, Japan") is a Japanese conceit, </b>placing those peripheral islands on equal standing with the great centers of civilization, India and China. Until the 20th century, there would not have been a shadow of justification for that, except perhaps in subjective judgments about the creativity or originality of Japanese culture,<b> which I am sure would be disputed by Koreans and Vietnamese. </b>However, after a process of self-transformation sparked by American intervention, Japan lept to the status of a Great Power by defeating Russia in 1905. The Empire then spent the next 40 years throwing its weight around, occupying Korea and invading China, ultimately taking on the United States in a disastrous bid for hegemony (1941-1945). Catastrophic defeat slowed Japan down a little, but by the 1980's, the country had vaulted to the highest per capita income in the world, with wealth and economic power that deeply frightened many, even in the United States. Japan remains the only Great Power, in economic terms (as the Japanese military establishment remains low profile), not directly derived from European civilization. Now, even after a decade of economic stagnation, Japan remains the second largest economy in the world (about 40% the size of the United States, more than 1.7 times the size of Germany, and finally reviving a bit in 2004), although in per capita terms declining from 3rd in the world in 2003 to 11th in 2007 [The Economist Pocket World in Figures, 2007 Edition]. This all might be thought to justify the Japanese view of themselves as unique, or at least special, certainly geopolitically important, giving us some motivation for the inclusion of Japan in a "Sangoku" page.
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