AMA - I’m the author of China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read. Ask Me Anything about how US Politics connects with China!

tl;dr - I just published a book, China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read, looking at the history behind the hottest China-related topics that are driving US politics discussions: Will Beijing invade Taiwan and push Washington into a war with China? Why did the US Congress essentially ban trade with Xinjiang? Is there really a genocide occurring in Xinjiang? Why is Congress, with HR Bill 733, considering the repeal of Hong Kong’s special trade status? The book discusses all these things, and does so in a way that makes it understandable to normal people, without all the academic mumbojumbo. AMA. Hey reddit, my name is Lee Moore, I have a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Oregon, I worked as an adjunct professor there, teaching Taiwanese and Chinese literature and film, and I occasionally write for The Economist. I also host the Chinese Literature Podcast. I just published a book called China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read. The book does a deep dive into the history of the four China-related topics driving US politics discussions: Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy and Hong Kong. How did Taiwan become the Pentagon’s biggest headache? Why did Congress ban imports from Xinjiang? The book looks at these four topics and how they became the hot messes that American politicians are struggling to figure out. And I do it with a shit-stirring sense of humor that is meant to reach readers who would never normally pick up a book about China. The book has a chapter titled, “The Most Important Motherfucker in Taiwanese History,” discussing the 1670’s sex scandal that rocked the island and may lead to a war between the US and China. In the section of the book detailing Xinjiang’s bloody history, the book has a drinking game where, every time someone is beheaded, the reader is encouraged to do a shot. The book discusses the China-related topics driving US politics. Here are some of the things I discuss that touch on US politics Taiwan: The US has hinted that it will defend Taiwan if China decides to invade. Beijing says that Taiwan has, since ancient times, been Chinese. China’s claim is nonsense. No power in China controlled Taiwan before 1683, two years after Pennsylvania, its 12th of 13 colonies, was established. China’s claim to have owned Taiwan in ancient times has zero historical evidence supporting it. Today, the US Marines are training to invade southern Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion. This is not the first time they were there. In 1867, the US Marines twice invaded Taiwan. One of the two official languages of America’s 50th state is distantly Taiwanese. Five millennia ago, a group of Taiwanese people left the island and conquered the Pacific and Indian Oceans. After several thousand years, they arrived in Hawaii. Indigenous Hawaiians are the descendants of a people who left Taiwan five thousand years ago. Taiwan and Hawaii have a connection that few Americans know about. From the 1680’s to the 1850’s, Taiwan was largely cut off from international trade because of the rules of the Qing Chinese government. Who opened up Taiwan? A drug-dealer from Oregon. In 1855, Nathaniel Crosby Jr. sailed from mainland China to Taiwan with a boatload of opium and secretly re-opened up the island to international trade. Taiwan’s second largest city, Kaohsiung/Gaoxiong, was set up as an international entrepot by another group of American capitalists, the Williams-Nye-Robinet company. Above the city, on Monkey Mountain, Americans built the city’s first fort. American politicians are worried about how to protect Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, the crown jewel of the Taiwanese Miracle. In fact, the Taiwanese Miracle was partially the creation of American politicians. Eisenhower pushed Chiang Kai-shek to enact the “Land to the Tillers” program, which helped jumpstart the Taiwanese economy in the 1950’s. From 1951 to 1965, the US doled out $1.5 billion in economic aid. In the 1960’s, Washington told Taiwan it needed to graduate from aid, the Stanford Research Institute cooked up a plan that would shift the Taiwanese economy from agriculture to high-end tech products. Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance is a direct result of American government investments in the 1950’s. Taiwanese democracy is also a product of American politicians. In the 1980’s, America grew tired of supporting despots just because they were anti-communist. American politicians like Congressman Stephen Solarz turned the screws on funding for Taiwan as it refused to democratize. The event that precipitated Taiwan’s democratization was an assassination in Daly City, California. Dry Duck, a Taiwanese gangster, walked up to Henry Liu, a China-born American citizen, and shot him in the driveway of his suburban California home. American politicians were pissed that the government officials deep in the Taiwanese authoritarian government had authorized a hit in the US. The assassination in California was the moment that Taiwan’s authoritarian government began to unravel, and Taiwan began the transition to democracy. Xinjiang: In 2021, the US Congress banned all products coming from Xinjiang. Officially, this was driven by concerns that Uyghurs and other Muslims were being used as forced labor in factories in Xinjiang. It was also driven by the fact that Beijing is attempting to conduct a genocide in Xinjiang. The government is forcing many Uyghur women to become sterilized. In 2019, in Khotan, a city that is 96% Uyghur, the government budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations, meaning that the government was going to try to sterilize about one third of all women of marriageable age. From 2015 to 2018, the birthrate in Khotan and Kashgar, another mostly Uyghur city, dropped by 84%, from 1.6% to .26%. In the concentration camps that the government made for Uyghurs, women were frequently injected against their will with Depo-Provera, a birth-control shot. In 2018, 80% of all IUDs in China were inserted in Xinjiang, a province with 1.84% of China’s population. What are the origins of this genocide? The Uyghurs claim that the Chinese are outsiders who colonized the region. That is all true. What the Uyghurs never admit is that they are not indigenous to the region either. The first Uyghur empire appears in 744 in the middle of what is today Mongolia, far from Xinjiang. Uyghurs today claim to be indigenous to Xinjiang, but that is false. The genocide is the result of competing claims as to who ought to own Xinjiang when the region’s history is too messy to point to one group and say, these are the people who can claim to rightfully own Xinjiang. Economy Beijing says that American values like freedom of speech, liberal economic policies and checks and balances don’t jive with China and its ancient civilization. In fact, the biggest economic catastrophes in Chinese history were when Chinese leaders abandoned these “American” values. In 1269, Emperor Shenzong and China’s leading liberal, Wang Anshi, pushed a government takeover of the economy, eliminated the relative freedom of speech that had previously been allowed and spiked the checks and balances of Song Dynasty China. The economic results were a disaster and caused Song China to almost collapse and split in half. In the 1950’s, the Chinese Communist Party took over the government, but initially allowed the old economy to hum along as it had before. In the latter half of the 1950’s, Mao eliminated the relative political and economic openness of the first half of the decade. First, in the Hundred Flowers campaign, he slammed those who criticized him and made it so that no one was willing to call Mao out for his nonsensical ideas. Then, in the Great Leap Forward, the government ditched its relatively liberal economic policies for hardcore collectivization. The result was the world’s most deadly famine. Starting at Noon, April 27 EST ask me any question you want about the connections between China and US politics. submitted by /u/agenbite_lee [link] [comments]