History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Pigeon ‘Milk’ Contains Antioxidants and Immune-Enhancing ProteinsScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2011) — Production of crop milk, a secretion from the crops of parent birds, is rare among birds and, apart from pigeons, is only found in flamingos and male emperor penguins. Essential for the growth and development of the young pigeon squab, pigeon ‘milk’ is produced by both parents from fluid-filled cells lining the crop that are rich in fat and protein.
Feathered Friends Help Wild Birds InnovateScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2011) — Larger groups of great and blue tits are better at solving problems than smaller ones, Oxford University scientists have found. The researchers believe that this is probably because the larger the group, the more chance there is of it including a ‘bright’ or ‘experienced’ bird that can solve a particular new problem: in this case operating lever-pulling devices to receive a food reward.
Board Dominated by Corporate Execs, Lawyers, Lobbyist
Corporatizing the Post Office
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
The United States Postal Service Board of Governors is dominated by corporate executives, lawyers, and lobbyists. And according to consumer advocate Ralph Nader, that’s a key reason why the Postal Service is in trouble.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/27/corporatizing-the-post-office/
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/featherstone-protesting-wall-st-s-riches-1.3205702
Featherstone: Protesting Wall St.’s riches
September 27, 2011 by LIZA FEATHERSTONE
Liza Featherstone, a writer who lives in Brooklyn, joined an Occupy Wall Street march last week with her family [husband Doug Henwood and their son Ivan], and plans to participate in a rally protesting police treatment of the occupiers on Friday evening.
Wall Street is under “occupation.” A menacing word, perhaps, but in this case it means that hundreds of peaceful protesters — from adolescents to self-identified “grannies” — from all over the nation have been living in Zuccotti Park since Sept. 17. When not marching down Wall Street, they talk with one other and with the countless people walking through one of the busiest neighborhoods in the world, about why they are there.
Why indeed?
There’s been much confusion on this point in the media. As the occupation began, New York Magazine complained that “what the protesters are asking for [was] far from clear.” Gothamist laid on the snark: “Protestors Want to ‘Occupy’ Wall Street, Not Quite Sure Why.” A Fox News pundit was indignant that the protesters said they were inspired by the Arab Spring protest: “Let’s remember,” he fumed, “people were killed in Egypt, Yemen and Syria for something.” These editorialists seemed anxious to deny that this protest could possibly be about “something.”
But is it really any mystery why people would be protesting against Wall Street? Bystanders at one march last week — sympathizers, tourists, office workers taking a break — looked pleased to see fellow citizens finally objecting to the kleptocracy that’s been ruining so many lives.
Everyone knows why the occupiers are there. The financial markets helped drive the housing bubble, the collapse of which led to the Great Recession. Income inequality is at or near record levels. If the occupiers have a slogan, it’s “We are the 99 percent” — referring to the fact that the richest 1 percent of Americans has been gorging itself at the expense of nearly everyone else.
Most Americans endure staggering unemployment, foreclosed-on homes, worsening work conditions and languishing public services — while our politicians coddle the biggest winners of our recklessly unregulated casino of a financial sector.
Like those who gathered in Tahrir Square, those occupying Wall Street are disgusted with the elite and its ownership of the political and economic system — and they want a better future.
To be sure, the protesters themselves haven’t always helped to clarify matters. While some have expressed their demands eloquently, others have made a mishmash of their public communications, with rantings about the Federal Reserve and writings that reflect often-conflicting belief systems, ranging from the populist to the socialist to the libertarian. At Zuccotti Park, a manifesto-in-progress is taped to the wall, and anyone may take a pen and add comments. Next to a list of woolly ideals, someone has scribbled an apt if misspelled critique: “Vauge.”
But the long lists — whether of fuzzy abstractions or eclectic specifics — are beside the point. With so many out of work, and tax policies that treat rich people as if they were rare birds in need of environmental protection, the only surprise is that it’s taken so long for the citizenry to take to these particular streets.
One young woman said last week that she had traveled from St. Louis. After spending four days watching a live feed of the event on the Internet, she said, “I just had to be here.” Those who can’t travel to New York are not merely tweeting (though they do a lot of that): Protesters in Chicago and Denver have set up their own occupations, while others are planned in many other cities.
Well-wishers from around the globe have ordered so much pizza for the Wall Street occupiers that they’ve had plenty of extra food to donate to the city’s growing homeless population. Despite some rough police tactics — one video shows an officer using pepper spray on peaceful female demonstrators — the protesters plan to stay, and expect their movement to grow.
And grow it may. As one young man exhorted bystanders last week, “Are you a billionaire? No? Then you should join us.”
“Vauge”? Perhaps, but it’s a good start
Sue Sturgis: Nationwide Rallies Aim to Save US Postal Service
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/27-10
Ed Pilkington: Wall Street Protests Reveal Slice of America’s Barely Tamed Brutality
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/27-7
Peter Van Buren: The Only Employee at State Who May Be Fired Because of WikiLeaks: Me
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/27-6
Lisa Romero: What the Media Aren’t Telling You About American Protests
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/27-2
Occupy Wall Street — Police Brutality, Arrests, MSM Blackout
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/09/27-1
Michael Moore @ #OccupyWallStreet
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/09/27-0
EU Climate Chief ‘Shocked’ at US Debate
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/27-2
US to Sell Bahrain $53 Million in Military Equipment Following Brutal Crackdown
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/27-3
Israel OKs 1100 New Buildings in East Jerusalem
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/27-7
Austerity: The Human Cost of a Global Crisis
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/27-4
Better Lithium-Ion Batteries Are On the WayScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2011) — Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, in smart phones, laptops, an array of other consumer electronics, and the newest electric cars. Good as they are, they could be much better, especially when it comes to lowering the cost and extending the range of electric cars. To do that, batteries need to store a lot more energy.
Resolution of Kant’s challenge
Scientists have missed the many hints in Kant as to the extension of science into larger domains than physics, as they cling to reductionist universalism.
By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/south-africa-dalai-lama-desmond-tutu-visit_n_981448.html?ir=Religion
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa officials may block the Dalai Lama from celebrating the 80th birthday of his friend and fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, amid fears that Chinese pressure is trumping the country’s much-vaunted policies on freedom of speech and human rights.
South African newspapers are already drawing parallels between the situations of Tibetans under Chinese rule and black South Africans under the racist apartheid regime that ended in 1994. The tensions over the Dalai Lama’s visa application also are a sign of how powerful China’s influence has grown in Africa.
Inconsistent Nature: The Enigma of Life’s Stupendous Prodigality
James Le Fanu
September 27, 2011 6:00 AM
By the latest reckoning we share this planet with more than 8 million species of fish, birds, mammals, insects, fungi, plants etc., etc. — with 6,500 new species being described every year. The more notable of recent discoveries include the Eternal Light Mushroom (mycena luxeterna) from Brazil, which emits a bright yellowish light, and the impressive 6-foot-long Golden Spotted Monitor Lizard that had eluded detection in the dense forests of the Philippines.
The prodigality of these forms of life is, of course, stupendous — where, as broadcaster David Attenborough points out, those spending just a single day in the tropical rain forest may encounter hundreds of different species “moths, caterpillars, spiders, long-nosed bugs, luminous beetles, harmless butterflies masquerading as wasps, wasps shaped like ants, sticks that walk, leaves that open their wings and fly…”
Naturalists have identified 81 different species of frog in a single square mile of the forest in Ecuador and 27 species of woodpecker in Borneo. When beetle expert Terry Erwin spread plastic sheeting on the ground in the Panamanian jungle and sprayed the nearby trees with pesticide, he recovered the bodies of more than eleven hundred novel species.
But that prodigality is also — as the late Robert Wesson of Harvard University points out — deeply puzzling, for every seemingly plausible law of biology that might account for it proves, almost whimsically, to be contradicted by numerous countervailing examples. There is no more self-evident imperative than that living things should be fruitful and multiply so as to generate those random genetic mutations that the evolutionary process reputedly requires. And indeed most do on a fantastical scale: the oyster spews out millions of eggs, trees shed countless seeds, and rabbits breed like rabbits.
Yet many species seem reluctant to procreate. Pandas are notoriously uninterested in the joys of sex so their human keepers seeking to breed them in captivity must resort to giving them Viagra or artificial insemination.
Our primate cousins, the chimpanzees, would be much more numerous than they are were it not, as Jane Goodall describes, that they give birth on average just three times during their 21-year lifespan.
Several types of bird (the albatross and golden eagle) and mammals (the rhinoceros and grizzly bear) have far fewer offspring than they might, while, remarkably, the lizard-like reptile Tuatara indigenous to New Zealand has survived for two hundred million years to become a “living fossil” — despite taking two decades to get round to reproducing and then laying just a single egg every other year.
Or again, the considerable energy and complexities involved in becoming sexually mature should be a prelude to protracted fecundity, but famously many species expire after just a single shot at procreation. It seems distinctly odd that butterflies should undergo the miracle of metamorphosis from one form of life to another (with all that entails) to produce just a single batch of eggs. And, on a much grander scale, the same applies to the salmon and eel whose migration across thousands of miles proves so exhausting that they die after relieving themselves of their sperm and eggs.
Then, while for the most part the cardinal rule of adaptation holds where all living things are beautifully adapted to their way of life (birds and insects for flying, fish for swimming), it seems merely perverse that the fairy wasp and water spider should have opted instead to spend their lives under water or that birds such as the ostrich and emu should have lost the power of flight.
Many species that might seem exceptionally well adapted for “the survival of the fittest” are surprisingly uncommon. The scarce African hunting dog has the highest kill rate of any predator on the savannah, while cheetahs may have no difficulty in feeding themselves thanks to their astonishing speediness — but are a hundred times less common than lions.
Contrariwise many creatures do much less than they might to defend themselves. “The Tarantula lives by seizing and feeding on insects,” writes Robert Wesson. “But when a spider-killing wasp appears it makes no effort to discourage its nemesis from injecting its paralyzing sting.”
Perplexing too are those inconsistencies of nature where the powerful instinctive drives for food, shelter and sex become perverted for futile ends — as with the species of beetle, described by naturalist E.L. Grant Watson, that is powerfully attracted by the sweet scent of nectar but quite unable to satisfy its desire to taste it.
This small creature laboriously climbs the flower stem before positioning itself on a petal facing towards the honey cups at its base. But its mouthparts are not designed to reach the nectar so instead it bites through the petal with its mandibles. “The petal falls off, with the beetle, to the ground. Undeterred by this failure it proceeds to creep up the flower stem once again only for the whole process to repeat itself. It never learns by experience or gets to taste that sweet smelling nectar.”
The purpose of such inconsistencies, if there is one, must be to remind us that Nature is too profound to be readily accessible to the finite human mind. And while many aspects of the diverse being and ways of life are more or less well described, hardly anything is really understood.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/09/inconsistent_nature051281.html
Intelligent Design Creationism is not Science By JAMES WILLIAMS – JAMESDWILLIAMS.WORDPRESS.COM
Added: Monday, 26 September 2011 at 12:32 PM
I’m just back from the BBC studio in Brighton having done 9 regional interviews/debates on the issue of teaching intelligent design creationism as science in schools.
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/643253-intelligent-design-creationism-is-not-science
Fossil of an Armored Dinosaur Hatchling: Youngest Nodosaur Ever Discovered
ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2011) — Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with help from an amateur fossil hunter in College Park, Md., have described the fossil of an armored dinosaur hatchling. It is the youngest nodosaur ever discovered, and a founder of a new genus and species that lived approximately 110 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous Era. Nodosaurs have been found in diverse locations worldwide, but they’ve rarely been found in the United States. The findings are published in the September 9 issue of the Journal of Paleontology.
Deep Brain Stimulation Studies Show How Brain Buys Time for Tough ChoicesScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2011) — Take your time. Hold your horses. Sleep on it. When people must decide between arguably equal choices, they need time to deliberate. In the case of people undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson’s disease, that process sometimes doesn’t kick in, leading to impulsive behavior. Some people who receive deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease behave impulsively, making quick, often bad, decisions.
Salty Water and Gas Sucked Into Earth’s Interior Helps Unravel Planetary EvolutionScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2011) — An international team of scientists has provided new insights into the processes behind the evolution of the planet by demonstrating how salty water and gases transfer from the atmosphere into Earth’s interior.
War By “Lethal Autonomy”
As the Drone Flies
by RALPH NADER
The fast developing predator drone technology, officially called unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, is becoming so dominant and so beyond any restraining framework of law or ethics, that its use by the U.S. government around the world may invite a horrific blowback.
http://www.marxmail.org/msg95840.html
The Militant
talking about this for years, and here from another source:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/09/zero-authors-statement-on-gilad-atzmon.html
Zero Authors’ Statement on Gilad Atzmon posted by lenin
We are writing to express our concern that Zero Books, a vibrant, radical
publisher, has made a terrible error of judgment in publishing a manuscript
by the Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. The book, entitled *The Wandering Who?*,
is a discussion of ‘Jewish identity’ in the light of global issues such as
Israel-Palestine, and the financial crisis. But the nature of Atzmon’s
political engagement on ‘Jewish identity’ makes him at best a dubious
authority on such matters. His central concern is to describe and oppose
“Jewish power”, as he sees it. Thus, in one piece complaining about the
presence of Jews in the Clinton and Bush administrations, he argues:
“Zionists complain that Jews continue to be associated with a conspiracy
to rule the world via political lobbies, media and money. Is the suggestion
of conspiracy really an empty accusation? … we must begin to take the
accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very
seriously … American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the
elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant.
American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy.”[1]
This ‘control’ is, Atzmon argues, quite extensive. “Jewish power” is such
that legitimate research into the Nazi judeocide (by which he means
Holocaust denial) is impossible. The established history of the Holocaust
is a “religion” that “doesn’t make any historical sense”. But Jewish power
has “managed to prevent the West from accessing one of the most devastating
chapters of Western history”.[2] Moreover, he blames the global economic
crisis on Zionism and Jewish bankers:
“Throughout the centuries, Jewish bankers bought for themselves some real
reputations of backers and financers of wars [2] and even one communist
revolution [3]. Though rich Jews had been happily financing wars using their
assets, Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United
States, found a far more sophisticated way to finance the wars perpetrated
by his ideological brothers Libby and Wolfowitz…”[3]
Elsewhere, he relates that Marxism is merely an expression of Jewish
tribal interests, “a form of supremacy that adopts the Judaic binary
template”.[4] Thus, Jews are held responsible by Atzmon for war, financial
capitalism and communism. Being born to an Israeli Jewish family, he does
not identify the problem, as he sees it, in terms of blood or DNA. Rather,
he identifies a “Jewish tribal mindset”, a “Jewish ideology”, as the animus
behind Jewish attempts “to control the world”. Yet, racist ideology has
never been reducible to its ‘biological’ variants. It has often taken a
‘cultural’ form, predicated on an essentialist reading of its object (Islam,
‘Jewishness’) which is held to represent a powerful, threatening Other.
Atzmon’s assertions are underpinned by a further claim, which is that
antisemitism doesn’t exist, and hasn’t existed since 1948. There is only
“political reaction” to “Jewish power”, sometimes legitimate, sometimes
not. For example, the smashing up of Jewish graves may be “in no way
legitimate”, but nor are they “’irrational’ hate crimes”. They are solely
“political responses”.[5] Given this, it would be impossible for anything
that Atzmon writes, or for anyone he associates with, to be anti-Semitic.
This shows, not only in his writing, but in his political alliances. He
sees nothing problematic, for example, in his championing of the white
supremacist ‘Israel Shamir’ (“the sharpest critical voice of ‘Jewish power’
and Zionist ideology”[6]), whose writings reproduce the most vicious
anti-Semitic myths including the ‘blood libel’, and for whom even the BNP
are insufficiently racist.[7]
The thrust of Atzmon’s work is to normalise and legitimise anti-Semitism.
We do not believe that Zero’s decision to publish this book is malicious.
Atzmon’s ability to solicit endorsements from respectable figures such as
Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer shows that he is adept at muddying the
waters both on his own views and on the question of anti-Semitism. But at a
time when dangerous forces are attempting to racialise political
antagonisms, we think the decision is grossly mistaken. We call on Zero to
distance itself from Atzmon’s views which, we know, are not representative
of the publisher or its critical engagement with contemporary culture.
Owen Hatherley, Douglas Murphy, Alex Niven, Nina Power & Richard Seymour.
(Others to follow).
[1] Gilad Atzmon, ‘On Antisemitism’, *Gilad.co.uk*, 20th March 2003
[2] Gilad Atzmon, ‘Zionism and other Marginal Thoughts’, *Gilad.co.uk*, 4th
October 2009; Gilad Atzmon, ‘Truth, History and Integrity’, *Gilad.co.uk*,
13th March 2010
[3] Gilad Atzmon, ‘Credit Crunch or rather Zio Punch?’, *Gilad.co.uk*, 16th
November 2009
[4] Gilad Atzmon, ‘Self-Hatred vs. Self-Love- An Interview with Eric Walberg
by Gilad Atzmon’, *Gilad.co.uk*, 5th August 2011
[5] Gilad Atzmon, ‘On Antisemitism’, *Gilad.co.uk*, 20th March 2003
[6] Gilad Atzmon, ‘The Protocols of the Elders Of London’, *Gilad.co.uk*,
9th November 2006
[7] See Israel Shamir, ‘Bloodcurdling Libel (a Summer Story)’, *
IsraelShamir.net*; and Israel Shamir, ‘British Far Right and Saddam :
responses of Robert Edwards and LJ Barnes of BNP’, *IsraelShamir.net*,
January 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/02/opium-war-julia-lovell-review
The Opium War by Julia Lovell – review
Julia Lovell gives a mythbusting account of a shameful episode in British-Chinese relations
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China
by Julia Lovell
reviewed by Rana Mitter
The newly refurbished National Museum of China opened in March 2011 in Tiananmen Square, adorned with groundbreaking technology and architecture. But the story it tells is far less innovative than the design. In the museum’s narrative, China’s modern period of history opens with the opium war, the original sin of western imperialism in East Asia that forced China to open itself to a century of humiliation, conquest and exploitation until Chairman Mao came to sweep all that away. It’s titled “The Road to Rejuvenation”, but it could just as easily be called “1842 and all that”. This version of the past says more about contemporary Chinese politics, still drawing on China’s history as a victim of western imperialism, than it does about the reality of the clash between the 19th century’s greatest land and naval empires. Even in a 21st-century museum, the stain of a history more than 150 years old is central.
Yet not all the simplified views are on the Chinese side. One of the most persistent excuses for the British invasion of China, when it is discussed at all, was that it opened up a closed, xenophobic empire to the outside world. Actually this was never true. The China of the Qing dynasty was at the heart of an international system looking west and east, expanding its territory by conquest and by treaty in central Asia, and building contacts with Korea, south-east Asia and even Japan (never quite as closed as its shogun rulers would have liked to believe). China also took part in an intellectual and commercial network that went beyond Asia, as the influx of blue-and-white pottery in English country houses in the 18th century easily demonstrates. And long before the British arrived, China was even ruled by outsiders, the nomadic Manchus who had galloped in from the north-east. By the time of the opium war, they had spent nearly two centuries combining traditional Manchu culture at court with the Chinese traditions of governance across the empire.
Julia Lovell’s new history of the opium war is a welcome piece of myth-busting. It uses a wealth of Chinese and British sources to tell, in her words, a “tragicomedy” that is “far more chaotically interesting” than the ideological positions on both sides might suggest. The tragedy part is as simple as it was in 1839. British opium from East India was brought into China in huge amounts from the early 19th century. In the 1830s, concern about the drug’s effects on the population and economy led the Qing dynasty to ban it, and they ordered a senior official, Lin Zexu, to blockade British opium ships in Canton harbour until they agreed to hand over their cargo. In Britain, this was seen as an insult to the Crown (much of the opium was produced by the East India Company), and a fleet under Admiral Charles Elliot was sent out to teach the Chinese a lesson. British military technology soon smashed through Chinese defences, and after three years of coastal fighting, the war ended with the Nanjing treaty of 1842 which handed over Hong Kong island and opened up the interior to trade and Christian missionaries. For the next century, China would be subject to further invasions and humiliations, which ended only with the termination of special western rights in China in 1943 under Chiang Kai-shek (not under Mao in 1949, as the Chinese Communist party tends to suggest).
The comedy part lies in the characters whom Lovell paints with affection and a dry wit. Lin, the upright official tasked with destroying the opium he had seized, had “self-belief” and a “passion for freight management”. Lord Palmerston, who sent the fleet, is described as “Free Trader, libertine, arch-villain of Chinese historiography”. The gulf in diplomatic niceties between the two sides was shown particularly starkly in the run-up to the signing of the treaty, when one high official insisted that he must first feed sugar-plums directly into the mouth of the British negotiator Sir Henry Pottinger, who showed, in the words of a witness, “determined resignation after he found remonstrances were of no avail”. The book also paints the many shades of grey: for instance, voices such as William Gladstone, who declared “a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated … to cover this country in permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of.” And the Chinese officials, from Lin to the high Manchu official Qishan, come over not as arrogant xenophobes but as worried, sincere men faced with their civilisation in existential crisis.
The opium war did help to bring about the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty, a fact worth remembering in 2011, exactly a century since the revolution that deposed the last emperor. But their significance was to hasten violent changes already under way. The expansion of China’s territory and population, without any increase in the size of the bureaucracy (shades of current debates about austerity versus spending in the west), meant that government functions had become less competent and more corrupt. And while the opium war itself had a direct impact on relatively few Chinese, one of the results of the opening up of China demanded by the 1842 treaty was the Taiping war of 1856-64, when a lunatic inspired by Christian missionary theology managed to spark off one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, which killed some 20 million people. Throughout the 20th century, the opium war has remained a rallying-cry for Chinese nationalists seeking to overcome “national humiliation” and restore China to its rightful place in the world.
Lovell’s book is part of a trend in understanding the British empire and China’s role in it. Earlier this year, Robert Bickers’s The Scramble for China gave a compelling account of the aftermath of the opium war, which saw such a heightened presence of British missionaries and adventurers that the Shanghai lifestyle was nicknamed “the Mock Raj”. Niall Ferguson’s recent Civilization revived the argument that there was a distinct western imperial modernity that was more successful than any other system from the 18th century onward, but he framed the book as a comparison with China in the 17th century and in the early 21st, a device that would have seemed unlikely just two decades ago. Lovell’s major contribution is to remind us of the different worldviews involved: not so much a clash of civilisations but two sets of incompatible software, as we read, over and over again, a British politician give one view of events, and a Chinese official define it in completely different terms. The sense of an unfolding tragedy, explicable but inexorable, runs through the book, making it a gripping read as well as an important one.
The opium war is capable of creating waves in China even today. One academic, Mao Haijian at Peking University, recently had the temerity to question the official Chinese narrative of the opium war in his book The Collapse of the Empire, rehabilitating the Qing official Qishan, generally regarded as the weak villain of the piece who failed to stand up to the British, and criticising Lin, traditionally regarded as the upright hero of the story. His book was subjected to a storm of criticism, but the debate did not result in the purging of the dissident scholar, as it would have done in an earlier era. The signs of a livelier debate among Chinese academics make the account of the war in the new national museum even more disappointing. Britain may have forgotten the history of its Chinese empire, but the Communist party also continues to be highly selective in what it chooses to remember. The conquest of China by Mao in 1949 was not an endpoint to the story started in 1842, but brought its own horrors of history with it: the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed millions of people (described in Frank Dikötter’s recent Samuel Johnson-prizewinning book), the cultural revolution (officially repudiated and hardly mentioned in the new museum), and the killings of non-violent students and workers just a few hundred metres from the site of the museum in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. This book serves a crucial purpose in reminding Britain of a shameful episode in its past that still shapes relations with China today. But official China could also learn from it that reconciliation with the past comes by understanding its complexities, rather than turning it into a simple morality tale.
Rana Mitter’s Modern China: A Very Short Introduction is published by Oxford University Press.
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