Reinventing China

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY, DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT GEOGRAPHY

[With apologies to Sam Cooke]

M. Douste-Blazy* Reinvents History For China Suck-Up
Yesterday Arrêt sur images, a political affairs program on France 5, aired excerpts from an interview with M. Douste-Blazy, France's foreign minister, conducted by China's Phoenix TV.** M. Douste-Blazy made the interesting observation that one of the things France admired about China was that it had never waged war beyond its borders.
[Pause. And pause again.]

Where to begin?

First, we'd observe that really big countries tend not to drop out of the sky complete and entire with their borders intact. China, which is today a really big country, started off modestly as a series of dynasties and kingdoms, sometimes small (Shāng Dynasty 商朝) sometimes big (Yuan Dynasty 元朝), sometimes many (Sixteen Kingdoms 十六國) sometimes one (Qin Dynasty 秦朝).
We can better understand M. Douste-Blazy's remark if we think of Chinese invasions as border expansions. In this sense M. le Ministre would argue that China's various conquests of Mongolia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Tibet, Turkmenistan, Moldova, South Korea, North Korea, and Japan, et al., were not conquests but China firming up its borders. Technically that can be construed as an internal matter, which France, of course, respects

M. LE MINISTRE ILLUSTRATES THE SNAP OF CHINA'S HISTORICALLY ELASTIC BORDER

The Video Clip Can Be Seen Here

Or perhaps M. le Ministre was referring to the Republic of China, which since its removal to Taiwan in 1949 has never prosecuted a war with anybody.
For more from France's whackiest minister see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and the first footnote below.
* The dimmest bulb in the dark Chirac marquee™.
** Asia Times 12.03.2004 on Phoenix TV:

The TV operator's keen understanding of what Beijing will allow in media coverage has enabled it to rise like the phoenix from the ashes of official central government broadcasts to become one of the largest broadcasters on the mainland.

This means CEO Liu and his team heed the regulations that do not permit any references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the Falungong spiritual movement, abortion as a family-planning measure, and other human-rights and some political issues.
*** 中國愛法國: China La-uuuuves Faa-rance