2,000 Years of Chinese History! The Mandate of Heaven and Confucius: World History #7
2,000 Years of Chinese History! The Mandate of Heaven and Confucius:
Crash Course World History #7
In which John introduces you to quite a lot of Chinese history by
discussing the complicated relationship between the Confucian scholars
who wrote Chinese history and the emperors (and empress) who made it.
Included is a brief introduction to all the dynasties in Chinese
history and an introduction to Confucius and the Confucian emphasis on
filial piety, the role the mandate of heaven played in organizing
China, and how China became the first modern state.
Crash Course World History is now available on DVD!
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Fushun, China Welcome Video (Subtitles Available)
Population:
Fushun has 2.14 million inhabitants, including 1.34 million in the urban area. It is now part of the Shenyang-Fushun built-up area (comprising all the urban and suburban districts of Shenyang and Fushun) which was home to 6,756,379 inhabitants in 2010. This makes Shenyang-Fushun the 8th most populous built-up area in China
Economy:
Fushun is a highly industrialized area and originally called the City of Coal. It has developed as a thriving center for fuel, power and raw materials and is also offering more and more opportunities in textiles and electronics. The world's largest open-pit coal mine, the West Open Mine, is located south of the city. Exploited from the 12th century, it was operated as an open pit mine during the 20th and early 21st Century; however, as of 2015, the West Open pit, 1,000 feet deep, with an area of 4.2 square miles, was exhausted and unstable. Total coal production in Fushun as a whole had fallen below 3 million tons, down from 18.3 million tons in 1962. Fushun has a major aluminum-reduction plant and factories producing automobiles, machinery, chemicals, cement, and rubber. New direction economy of Fushun is focusing on a shift to national industrial development policy strategy and concept of revitalization, transformation, and green development. The coal mine, while still in use, is also undergoing Greening and transformation and re-development, in part by planting and re-foresting exhausted & un-used portions of the pit and pit walls.
Resources:
Fushun is rich in wood, coal, oil shale, iron, copper, aluminum, magnesium, gold, marble, titanium, and marl resources.
Fushun is known as the capital of coal. The main coal and oil shale company is Fushun Mining Group, which produced about 6 million tons of coal in 2001, mainly blending coking coal and steam coal. The company also has coalbed methane resources of around 8.9 billion cubic meters. In addition, it owns geological reserves of high-grade oil shale, about 3.5 billion tons, of which the exploitable reserve is 920 million tons.
Industrial development:
Hydroelectric and thermal power are important locally available energy sources. Solar is beginning to make it's mark on the City as well.
Fushun has developed through the utilization of the abundant natural mineral deposits found in the area and is a nationally important heavy industrial base for petroleum, chemical, metallurgy machinery, and construction material industries. New sectors also becoming prominent are electronics, light industry, weaving, and spinning. New-Energy automotive manufacturing has also taken root and is quickly becoming a large portion of the manufacturing sector.
Transportation
Fushun is located 40 km (25 mi) from Shenyang Taoxian airport. Railways and highways connect the city to Shenyang and Jilin Province. The seaports of Dalian and Yingkou are also nearby, 400 and 200 km (250 and 120 mi) away respectively, with good highway connections.
Tourism
Fushun is a famous tourist center of northeast China. With high mountains and thick woods (40% forest coverage), the city has a developed a strong tourist industry. Houshi National Forest Park, about 55 km (34 mi) from Fushun city center, is rated by the central government as an AAAA tourist attraction. Saer Hu Scenic Area covers some 268 km2 (103 sq mi). It includes the 110 km2 (42 sq mi) Dahuofang Reservoir, the largest man-made lake in northeast China.
There are a number of historic and cultural sites within the area. Fushun's success in applying for two UNESCO World Heritage sites is expected to attract more tourists. They include a site known as Xingjing City, the origin of the Qing Dynasty, which is within today's Fushun. It was the first capital of the Late Jin dynasty, dating to 1616. The second site contains the Yongling tombs, where several members of the royal household are buried.
In more recent times, Fushun was where Lei Feng was stationed as a soldier and died, and a memorial museum telling his life story is a popular attraction. It is located at Wang Hua District in Fushun. It was also in Fushun that the last emperor, Puyi, was imprisoned after the end of World War II. The Fushun War Criminals Management Centre is converted into a museum in 1986. Another war memorial, the Pingdingshan Tragedy Memorial Hall Ruins, tells the story of a massacre of Chinese people by the Japanese in 1931. It was rebuilt and expanded in 2007. It includes a pit filled with about 800 bodies—largely infants, adults, and the elderly who were killed by the Japanese.
In addition, Red River Valley in Fushun has become an entertainment resort, especially in summer. Tourists can travel down the river on small rubber rafts through mountain scenery.
Video use permission granted directly by Fushun Government.
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.
Learning by listening is a great way to:
- increases imagination and understanding
- improves your listening skills
- improves your own spoken accent
- learn while on the move
- reduce eye strain
Now learn the vast amount of general knowledge available on Wikipedia through audio (audio article). You could even learn subconsciously by playing the audio while you are sleeping! If you are planning to listen a lot, you could try using a bone conduction headphone, or a standard speaker instead of an earphone.
You can find other Wikipedia audio articles too at:
You can upload your own Wikipedia articles through:
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
=======
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, commonly known in mainland China as the June Fourth Incident (Chinese: 六四事件, liùsì shìjiàn), were student-led demonstrations in Beijing (the capital of the People's Republic of China) in 1989. More broadly, it refers to the popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests during that period, sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement (Chinese: 八九民运, bājiǔ mínyùn). The protests were forcibly suppressed after Chinese Premier Li Peng declared martial law. In what became known in the West as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops with automatic rifles and tanks fired at the demonstrators trying to block the military's advance towards Tiananmen Square. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated variously from 180 to 10,454.Set against a backdrop of rapid economic development and social changes in post-Mao Zedong China, the protests reflected anxieties about the country's future in the popular consciousness and among the political elite. The reforms of the 1980s had led to a nascent market economy which benefitted some people, but seriously disaffected others and the one-party political system also faced a challenge of legitimacy. Common grievances at the time included inflation, limited preparedness of graduates for the new economy and restrictions on political participation. The students called for democracy, greater accountability, freedom of the press and freedom of speech, though they were loosely organized and their goals varied. At the height of the protests, about 1 million people assembled in the Square.As the protests developed, the authorities veered back and forth between conciliatory and hardline tactics, exposing deep divisions within the party leadership. By May, a student-led hunger strike galvanized support for the demonstrators around the country and the protests spread to some 400 cities. Ultimately, China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and other Communist Party elders believed the protests to be a political threat and resolved to use force. The State Council declared martial law on May 20 and mobilized as many as 300,000 troops to Beijing. The troops suppressed the protests by firing at demonstrators with automatic weapons, killing multiple protesters and leading to mass civil unrest in the days following.
The international community, human rights organizations and political analysts condemned the Chinese government for the violent response to the protests. Western countries imposed severe economic sanctions and arms embargoes on Chinese entities and officials. In response, the Chinese government verbally attacked the protestors and denounced Western nations who had imposed sanctions on China by accusing them of interference in China's internal affairs, which elicited heavier condemnation by the West. It made widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, suppressed other protests around China, expelled foreign journalists, strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press, strengthened the police and internal security forces and demoted or purged officials it deemed sympathetic to the protests. More broadly, the suppression temporarily halted the policies of liberalization in the 1980s. Considered a watershed event, the protests also set the limits on political expression in China well into the 21st century. Its memory is widely associated with questioning the legitimacy of Communist Party rule and remains one of the most sensitive and most widely censored political topics in mainland China.
The Dao of the Scholar/Practitioner
Brown Program in Contemplative Studies presents a lecture by Professors Elijah Siegler and David Palmer, joined by Louis Komjathy, on The Dao of the Scholar/Practitioner: Academic Scholarship and the Construction of Daoist Authority in China and the West.
For more info:
brown.edu/academics/contemplative-studies/
Thursday, November 16th 2017
Brown University
Chinese folk religion | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Chinese folk religion
Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.
Learning by listening is a great way to:
- increases imagination and understanding
- improves your listening skills
- improves your own spoken accent
- learn while on the move
- reduce eye strain
Now learn the vast amount of general knowledge available on Wikipedia through audio (audio article). You could even learn subconsciously by playing the audio while you are sleeping! If you are planning to listen a lot, you could try using a bone conduction headphone, or a standard speaker instead of an earphone.
You can find other Wikipedia audio articles too at:
You can upload your own Wikipedia articles through:
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
=======
Chinese folk religion (Chinese popular religion) or Han folk religion is the religious tradition of the Han Chinese, including veneration of forces of nature and ancestors, exorcism of harmful forces, and a belief in the rational order of nature which can be influenced by human beings and their rulers as well as spirits and gods. Worship is devoted to a multiplicity of gods and immortals (神 shén), who can be deities of phenomena, of human behaviour, or progenitors of lineages. Stories regarding some of these gods are collected into the body of Chinese mythology. By the 11th century (Song period), these practices had been blended with Buddhist ideas of karma (one's own doing) and rebirth, and Taoist teachings about hierarchies of gods, to form the popular religious system which has lasted in many ways until the present day.Chinese religions have a variety of sources, local forms, founder backgrounds, and ritual and philosophical traditions. Despite this diversity, there is a common core that can be summarised as four theological, cosmological, and moral concepts: Tian (天), Heaven, the transcendent source of moral meaning; qi (氣), the breath or energy that animates the universe; jingzu (敬祖), the veneration of ancestors; and bao ying (報應), moral reciprocity; together with two traditional concepts of fate and meaning: ming yun (命運), the personal destiny or burgeoning; and yuan fen (緣分), fateful coincidence, good and bad chances and potential relationships.Yin and yang (陰陽) is the polarity that describes the order of the universe, held in balance by the interaction of principles of growth (shen) and principles of waning (gui), with yang (act) usually preferred over yin (receptiveness) in common religion. Ling (靈), numen or sacred, is the medium of the two states and the inchoate order of creation.Both the present day government of China and the imperial dynasties of the Ming and Qing tolerated village popular religious cults if they bolstered social stability but suppressed or persecuted those that they feared would undermine it. After the fall of the empire in 1911, governments and elites opposed or attempted to eradicate folk religion in order to promote modern values, and many condemned feudal superstition. These conceptions of folk religion began to change in Taiwan in the late 20th century and in mainland China in the 21st. Many scholars now view folk religion in a positive light. In recent times Chinese folk religions are experiencing a revival in both mainland China and Taiwan. Some forms have received official understanding or recognition as a preservation of traditional Chinese culture, such as Mazuism and the Sanyi teaching in Fujian, Huangdi worship, and other forms of local worship, for example the Longwang, Pangu or Caishen worship.