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Chris Deng 邓健焯
@chrislovesbball
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轮子Falun Gong and it's affiliation. Credit to 火锅大王 Nathan Rich.
https://t.co/TWmeNBzqIt
@Rosemarry__vt Biohazard AKA Resident Evil
@CarlZha We were charged $1070 Canadian out of pocket when my wife was in the ER in Toronto. 2+ hours wait, 5 minutes visit from ER, said she didn't have ear infection and told us to leave, no meds.
@yifullofsin Hugs and kisses, cuz.
@RnaudBertrand I took my wife to the ER while on vacation in Toronto last week, for sinus and ear infection, as American citizens. Admission $700 USD, waited 2 hours, ER Doctor visited for 5 minutes. No prescription, no diagnosis. Total $1050 USD
This painting is older than the Quran.
Older than the Kingdom of England.
Older than every cathedral in Paris, London, or Cologne.
It has survived nearly 1,400 years of dynasties, wars, conquest, and revolution:
Emperors owned it.
A Mongol princess treasured it.
China's last emperor secretly carried it out of the Forbidden City.
Then, amid the chaos of Japan's defeat in 1945, it disappeared.
A year later, it resurfaced in Beijing's antique market.
Someone was preparing to sell it abroad. And one man sold his home to save it.
Today, it is one of the treasures of the Palace Museum in Beijing.
Its name is: Spring Outing (游春图).
The scroll measures 43 centimeters high and 80.5 centimeters wide-less than a meter across. Attributed to the Sui Dynasty painter Zhan Ziqian (展子虔), it is regarded as the earliest surviving Chinese painting associated with a named master.
So what did spring look like in China 1,400 years ago?
Unroll the painting, and the first thing that greets you is not an emperor, a battle, or some immortal realm. But a spring day.
Green mountains rise and fall across the landscape, while fresh leaves emerge from the trees and water stretches through the center of the painting.
Mist drifts between the hills and valleys, and a red temple is half-hidden among the trees (top right).
A stream winds gently downhill. To the right of a red arched bridge, a man rides a white horse, followed by two companions taking in the spring scenery along the way. Farther down, two more riders appear. One carries a long red stick, which some scholars have suggested may be a polo mallet (bottom left).
The water opens into a broad expanse. A light breeze passes over the surface, making it shimmer.
A small boat drifts across the water. Several women sit aboard, apparently deep in conversation, their enjoyment almost visible even at this tiny scale (bottom right).
On the opposite bank, two figures stand quietly admiring the flowers.
No names. No story. And yet, this painting marked an important transition in Chinese art.
Before this period, Chinese landscape painting was often relatively simple and highly stylized. Human figures could appear disproportionately large compared with the mountains around them. In Spring Outing, however, people have become small within the landscape. Mountains, water, trees, and human activity begin to belong to the same visual world.
Nature is no longer merely a backdrop. It has become the subject.
The Sui dynasty was remarkably short-lived. Its founder, Yang Jian (杨坚), had been a powerful general under the Northern Zhou (北周), a northern dynasty whose ruling elite had deep nomad roots. In 581, he ruthlessly forced the young emperor, his grandson, to abdicate and established a new empire.
Years later, Yang's armies crossed the Yangtze River and unified China. After more than two centuries of political division, China was unified once again, in 589.
Yang Jian's son, Emperor Yang of Sui (隋炀帝), or Yang Guang (杨广), was one of the most ambitious, and controversial, rulers in Chinese history.
He dramatically expanded and integrated China's canal network, linking the Yellow River, the Huai River, the Yangtze, and the waterways of the prosperous south. Grain and other goods from southern China could now be transported northward far more efficiently and at much lower cost.
Later dynasties continued to expand, repair, and depend on this north-south waterway system. Its influence on China's economic geography lasted for more than a thousand years.
The Sui also became deeply involved in the politics of East Asia. It confronted the Turks on its northern frontier and fought back against Goguryeo's invasion. Japan sent envoys to the Sui court, and Sui envoys traveled to Japan in return.
Emperor Yang also turned his attention toward the seas southeast of China.
Chinese records describe an island polity called Liuqiu (流求) that bluntly refused to acknowledge Sui authority. In 610, the emperor dispatched a military expedition to punish the defiance. After a series of battles, the Sui forces defeated the local ruler, captured several thousand people, and returned to the mainland.
The records describe Liuqiu as lying east of what is now Fujian and reachable in roughly five days by sea.
Where exactly this ancient Liuqiu was located remains debated. Traditional Chinese scholarship has often identified it with Taiwan, while other scholars have argued that it may have referred to the Ryukyu Islands.
When Sui warships were sailing toward Liuqiu in 610, Muhammad was beginning his prophetic mission in Arabia, and England did not yet exist.
This was the world in which Spring Outing was created.
But Emperor Yang's enormous military campaigns and massive canal projects placed an extraordinary burden on the population. Rebellions spread across the empire, and in 619, the Sui dynasty collapsed.
In 623, Tang dynasty defeated the rival regimes and reunified China, once again.
But here's the strange part. The Tang didn't overthrow the Sui the way a foreign conqueror would. They overthrew their own cousins.
The founder of the Tang, Li Yuan (李渊), was related to the Sui imperial family: his mother and the wife of Yang Jian were sisters. In other words, the founders of the Sui and Tang dynasties belonged to the same aristocratic family network.
What happened to Spring Outing during the Tang dynasty is unknown.
There is no surviving record of its whereabouts, and at that time collectors had not yet developed the later habit of covering paintings with ownership seals and inscriptions. For several centuries, the painting simply disappears from the historical record.
Then, in the early 12th century, it resurfaced in the collection of Emperor Huizong of Song (宋徽宗).
Huizong was a disastrous ruler, but an extraordinary artist. Few Chinese emperors were more accomplished in painting, calligraphy, and art collecting. He inscribed "Spring Outing by Zhan Ziqian" on the painting and impressed it with his imperial seals.
Then came catastrophe. In 1127, Jurchen armies from northeast China captured the Song capital of Kaifeng (开封). Emperor Huizong, almost the whole imperial family and enormous quantities of treasure were taken north as trophies.
At the time, England was still ruled by Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror, and the Second Crusade was still twenty years away.
Another of Huizong's sons, Zhao Gou (赵构), escaped capture and eventually established his regime in southern China.
And somehow, Spring Outing appears to have survived the disaster. We know this because the painting later carried the seals of Jia Sidao (贾似道), the immensely powerful, and notoriously controversial chancellor of the Southern Song in the 13th century.
By the 14th century, China was ruled by the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The painting then entered the collection of an extraordinary Mongol princess, a granddaughter of Kublai Khan (忽必烈).
She was deeply fascinated by Chinese painting and calligraphy and assembled an important collection of Chinese artworks, including Spring Outing. In the spring of 1323, the same decade Dante finished the Divine Comedy, she hosted a celebrated party of scholars and connoisseurs in Beijing.
She brought out works from her collection and invited prominent Chinese scholars and artists to examine them, compose poems, and add inscriptions. Among the paintings displayed that day was Spring Outing.
The party took place close to today's Temple of Heaven, where Trump visited this May.
During the Ming dynasty, Spring Outing passed into the collection of another notorious chancellor, Yan Song (严嵩). After Yan fell from power and his property was confiscated, the painting returned to private hands.
By the 18th century, it was owned by An Qi (安岐), the son of a wealthy salt merchant whose family was of Korean origin. From his collection, the painting eventually entered the imperial collection of the Qianlong Emperor, a descendant of the Jurchens whose armies had stormed Kaifeng six centuries earlier, but had somehow failed to carry this very scroll away.
Qianlong lived in the same era with George Washington. They died in the same year. And, during Qianlong's reign, the first American merchant ship reached China, opening direct trade between the newly independent United States and China. The relationship began on remarkably smooth and cordial terms. Chinese officials described Americans as unusually polite and professional, sometimes in striking contrast to their views of the British.
Then the imperial world itself came to an end.
The Qing dynasty collapsed in the revolution of 1911, and in 1912 the last emperor, Puyi (溥仪), abdicated at the age of six. Under the terms of his abdication, he was still allowed to live inside the Forbidden City, and the former imperial household was permitted to retain its private property.
But Puyi apparently understood that this arrangement might not last forever.
In the early 1920s, he began quietly moving some of the most valuable paintings, calligraphy, etc out of the Forbidden City, often disguising the transfers as "gifts" to his younger brother.
In 1924, Puyi was finally expelled from the Forbidden City. The treasures he had failed to remove were subsequently inventoried, and the former imperial collection eventually became part of the Palace Museum.
Puyi, however, had not given up his dream of becoming an emperor again. He turned to Japan for support. After Japan occupied Northeast China, Puyi became the puppet emperor of the Japanese-sponsored state of Manchukuo (满洲国) in the 1930s.
Spring Outing had followed him north. Then came August 1945.
As Japan surrendered and Manchukuo collapsed, Puyi fled the capital. In the chaos that followed, paintings and other treasures left behind in the palace were looted and scattered by members of his own entourage.
And once again, Spring Outing disappeared.
This was not the first time the painting had survived the fall of a dynasty.
But this time, it came dangerously close to disappearing from China forever. In 1946, the painting resurfaced in Beijing's antique market.
A collector named Zhang Boju (张伯驹) learned that it might be sold abroad. Determined to keep it in China, he negotiated the price down to 220 taels of gold (6875 grams).
To raise enough funds, he sold his luxurious Beijing courtyard residence to Fu Jen Catholic University (辅仁大学).
He had sold a home to save a painting. And afterward, Zhang joyfully gave himself a new name:
"Master of Spring Outing (春游主人)"
Although Zhang had paid an enormous price for the painting, he never intended to possess it forever. And that may be the most moving part of the entire story.
While many collectors often dream of saying: This is mine.
Zhang Boju believed almost the opposite.
His philosophy of collecting could be summed up like this:
"These treasures do not need to belong to me forever. What matters is that they stay in China, and that they survive for generations to come."
After the founding of the PRC, Zhang gradually donated many of his greatest paintings and works of calligraphy to the Palace Museum, without compensation.
Among them was Spring Outing, which is now one of the most treasured masterpieces in the collection of the Palace Museum.
But this time, it no longer belongs to an emperor. Not to a princess. Not to a chancellor. Not to a wealthy merchant or a private collector.
For more than a thousand years, each of its owners, knowingly or not, held it only for a moment before passing it on to the next. Now, it belongs to everyone.
And when we look back at that spring painted so long ago:
The riders are still crossing the bridge.
The women in the boat are still talking and laughing.
Two figures are still quietly admiring the flowers.
Fourteen hundred seasons have turned. But spring never left this painting.
@notXiangyu I have eaten dog meat growing up in Guangdong. Also one time eaten龙虎凤（ 蛇，猫和鸡一起炖的汤）
@violahelloworld 猫女，Vivi. 差不多一岁了。
My last post about Zigui County and the Three Gorges Dam:
Many Chinese county seats are centuries old.
Zigui's isn't.
The entire county seat was transplanted to make way for the Three Gorges reservoir. Today, the old town is underwater.
How is the new one doing?🧵
A practical guide about how to choose a good restaurant using Dazhong Dianping (大众点评), which is China's main restaurant directory/review/coupon platform, based on my 10+ years of experience using it almost daily...
But first, some general background information: Thread.🧵
@violahelloworld 正常。我去年在中国旅游时开的手机号，回来用过流量一次之后差不多每个月都会收到这个短信
I often like Ray Dalio's takes on China but he gets quite a lot demonstrably wrong in this FT article on the "tribute system."
China's ancient tribute system - called 朝贡 (cháogòng) in Chinese - is typically very misunderstood in the West: we typically think it involved tributary states paying some form of "tribute" to China in exchange for protection - the way medieval vassals would pay fealty to a lord in Europe.
In reality, it had little to do with that. In fact, it was almost the opposite: in the Chaogong system, it was actually China paying the "tributary states."
The system was basically a quid-pro-quo where China would get "得名" (dé míng, literally "getting name/prestige") while tributary states would get "得实" (dé shí, literally "getting substance/material benefit") in exchange. It was about China paying huge amounts of money and other material benefits for the recognition of its centrality.
That's what makes it so alien to the Western framework, where tributary states are paying UP to the center, and security is enforced through military presence. The Chaogong system was almost exactly the inverse on both counts: China was paying DOWN and regional order was maintained not through the military but through generosity.
The core guiding principle of the system was established by the Hongwu emperor, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty (incidentally one of the most interesting emperors in Chinese history since he is the only founder of a major dynasty who started off in life as a wandering beggar).
The principle he set in place was 厚往薄来 (hòu wǎng bó lái) - literally "generous outflow, modest inflow": giving out much more than you take in. This wasn't a byproduct of the system - it WAS the system. The entire architecture of Chaogong was built on this principle of asymmetric generosity.
Very concretely the way it worked is that tributary states would pay largely symbolic tribute to China (like local specialties and curiosities, the system codified that tribute should be "easy to obtain and not costly", 必易得而不贵) and they would in exchange receive 3 layers of economic benefits:
1) Immediate payback in the form of money and expensive goods (silk, brocade, porcelain, tea, silver, etc.), which value was typically dozens of times the value of the tribute received by the emperor
2) The right to trade during their tribute visit: the envoys' entourage could trade with specially licensed Chinese merchants at the Huitongguan (the official guesthouse in the capital)
3) Most importantly, and that's where the real money was, they would be granted the right to trade at Chinese ports. Under the Ming maritime prohibition, tributary status was the only legal entry point into the Chinese economy
China being China, this gave rise to some pretty funny hustles. The deal was so good that people started inventing entirely fictitious countries just to get in on it. There are several documented cases of people fabricating countries and showing up as "envoys" at the imperial court just to claim the privileges (https://t.co/nlJB8yWblv).
Another funny one is that there are several cases of Fujian merchants who would sail to Southeast Asia, get themselves appointed as minor officials by local rulers, then sail right back to China as "foreign envoys" - carrying huge commercial cargoes. In 1438, three members of Java's tribute delegation turned out to be guys from Fujian (https://t.co/QBES0IVprC).
The scam got so widespread that the Ming had to invent a credential system (勘合, kānhé) specifically to verify that tribute envoys were who they claimed to be and that the countries they came from were real.
More seriously though, the Chaogong system also led to big domestic tensions in some of China's neighboring countries, notably Japan which was permitted only one tribute mission per decade. The stakes were so high that the 2 most powerful feudal clans at the time (the Ōuchi and the Hosokawa) fought a shadow war over who controlled the trade license.
This culminated in the Ningbo Incident of 1523 (https://t.co/TgKtlc7zlO): two Japanese delegations from both rival clans arrived at the port of Ningbo and got into a dispute over whose credentials were legitimate, which ended up in a pitched battle on Chinese soil. They ended up rampaging through the city, killing Ming military officers, and altogether terrorizing the local population - all over who got to trade with China.
The aftermath of the Ningbo Incident led to the total breakdown of Japan-China trade. If that sounds familiar, it should...
Which brings back to today and Ray Dalio's description of China's tribute system, as well as his claim that we're facing some sort of modern revival of it in Asia.
First of all, some parts of his article are correct: there is indeed a significant power shift happening in Asia, with countries hedging by building closer ties with Beijing, and the US progressively withdrawing and altogether losing ground.
He is also completely right that Chinese strategic culture genuinely differs from Western strategic culture: as he writes they indeed play Go (WeiQi) and not chess.
He is however wrong to describe the tribute system as one based on pressure and intimidation. As we've just seen, it was pretty much the opposite: the basic idea was to be so generous that everyone wants in (to the extent that countries would literally fight to be tributaries), not so threatening that nobody dares leave.
He also - weirdly - seems to conflate the tribute system with the Art of War, treating them as two faces of the same Chinese playbook, when they've got strictly nothing to do with each others. They're not even from the same school of thought: the Chaogong system is fundamentally Confucian (以德服人, "winning people through virtue") whereas Sun Tzu is from an entirely different Chinese intellectual tradition - the Strategist school (兵家) - which is about as far removed from Confucian thinking as Machiavelli is from the Bible.
Mashing them together reads like someone who has picked up a handful of Chinese cliché references and treats them as interchangeable ingredients in a single "Chinese strategic culture" soup.
All in all, he makes the error WAY too many Western commentators do with Chinese concepts: he uses them as exotic wrapping paper for a fundamentally Western analysis. Strip away the Chinese terminology and his argument is actually pure Western thinking: what he is claiming is that China, as a rising power, is using its growing economic and military weight to reshape the regional order, weaker states are bandwagoning, and the declining hegemon can't stop it.
He is essentially taking Graham Allison's "Thucydides Trap," awkwardly draping it in misunderstood Chinese concepts, and presenting it as if it were Chinese thinking.
That being said, he is ironically correct - I think - that there is some form of revival of a tribute-like system but not in the way he understands it: China will (and does) use trade - its "generosity" - as a gravitational force to pull countries into its orbit. Not by threatening to cut them off, but by making the relationship too valuable to walk away from. THAT is much closer to how the actual Chaogong system worked.
It doesn't mean that the system is purely benevolent. The flipside of generosity is the absence of it: in the original tribute system, you could be cut off the way Japan was after the Ningbo Incident in the 16th century. And it's also what's happening - to some extent - to Japan today: after PM Takaichi declared that Japan would go to war with China over Taiwan, China has systematically restricted trade with Japan. Same story with what happened, for instance, to Australia in 2020 over PM Morrison's declarations on Covid.
The pattern is the same: the reward for participation is trade, and the punishment for hostility is its withdrawal. Essentially in the tribute system there is no stick, just a carrot: the stick is taking the carrot away.
Which, incidentally, is why you can be extremely confident that China will go to enormous lengths to develop its internal market, and why the current situation where China runs huge trade surpluses is facing mounting pressure to change from within China itself. If countries don't feel they're benefiting enough from trade with China, the entire logic collapses. That's why developing domestic demand isn't some target China sets itself to assuage Western demands, as some claim: it's genuinely a strategic imperative.
It's also why it's ironic that the West is so keen on pushing China to boost domestic consumption: in effect, it means we're already in a de-facto Chaogong-like system and they're asking that the carrot be bigger.
-----
I also wrote a Substack version of this post, which you can find here: https://t.co/jBUIVbDT9C
@AngelicaOung I remember seeing the charred bodies of PLA Soldiers on our 12 inch black and white TV in rural Guangdong, maybe a year or two older than you were. My Dad warn me not to discuss with anyone about what I just watched.
Jeremiah, I believed the Uyghur genocide thing during COVID too. And that the CCP is terrible an the Chinese people are all oppressed etc etc.
But the year is 2026 and Xinjiang has been open for tourism for years. Adrian Zenz is somehow the most authoritative source. I don’t think he’s even been to Xinjiang. His ideological bias is clear. He works for a group that’s anti communism. Would you like it if the world took the word of a Russian person working at an anti-American organization as the Chief Expert for how terrible America is?
Gaza is what a genocide looks like and despite the fact that Gaza is the size of Las Vegas and under Israeli lockdown we have a never ending stream of horrors from there on our timelines. What about Xinjiang, an area 1/6 of China total and crawling with tourists and good internet? Zenz and friends are still waving around those COVID era satellite images.
There is a terrible bug with liberalism. By assuming that your values are universal, you assume everybody who disagrees with you must be evil instead of just have different beliefs or priorities or maybe just because they know different things. You stop looking for pragmatic solutions, compromises, diplomacy and mutual understanding. You don’t even try to see the other persons point of view.
We’ve met each other. I’ve been on your podcast. I’m just the same Angelica you’ve had beers with in DC and Taipei. Then and now, I’ve always just wanted to make the world a better place. Isn’t it interesting how your instinct isn’t to be curious about why I changed my mind…it is to declare me beyond the pale? Aren’t you at all puzzled that a woman you previously thought so highly of your organization flew me out to DC to attend your conference suddenly decided to be a handmaiden to genocide?
No country or system is perfect and I’m no longer a naive believer in one-size-fits all. I hope that somehow you can get some objectivity about the Chinese system. I can’t think of another political party anywhere in the world that is as meritocratic, nor one that has consistently delivered such improvements in life for the last 3-4 decades to its people. Moreover I believe that Xi Jinping actually cares a lot more about the people of China than Donald Trump about ordinary Americans.
Just one more thing I want you to think about…I would almost certainly not have the beliefs I have today if not for living in Taiwan, talking to local Taiwanese, listening to their pundits and influencers. Like it or not, the Taiwanese are not all plucky-little China-hating boba-libs. If you really respect Taiwanese voices, you shouldn’t just cherry pick those who agree with you while dismissing everyone else as propaganda.
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