For much of history, Chinese civilisation has thrived within the 400-millimetre annual rainfall isohyet, the climatic threshold separating fertile agricultural heartlands from arid steppes.
*source: Weijian Shan, writing in South China Morning Post
The title of this opinion piece is "To avert war, the West must shatter the mirror by which it views China"
and it spends 5 minutes of deep-dive historical lecturing to make the point: "The concept of the Thucydides Trap, predicting conflict between China and the US, projects the West’s conquest-driven history onto Chinese civilisation"
Shan contrasts agrarian China with "sea peoples", such as the "Japanese raiders"
and quotes a 19th century white man's lightly informed opinion on the soul of the Chinese people:
As US justice Stephen Field wrote in a decision of the US Supreme Court related to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, “[Chinese immigrants’] dying wish is that their bodies may be taken to China for burial”.
Mr. Shan seems to w...
