Bridge building
The Blip Report for Wednesday, August 21st 2024
While the United States is planning on re-building the 2.5 kilometre Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore by 2028 (maybe), I read a story about bridge building in China - ‘Unprecedented! China is frantically building cross-sea bridges. What does this mean?’ that China is embarking on massive transportation bridge and tunnel construction.
And they also plan to build a bridge/tunnel to connect over 130 kilometres from Fujian province to Taiwan island!!! China not only is planning to unite with Taiwan politically and economically but also physically!
And I read this story about China building a bridge to the past – ‘Over 200,000 years old! The Pirro site refreshes the time when humans landed on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau’, that an archeological dig in Tibet shows human activity that is at least 200,000 years old!
Now, if you search one of the approved mediocre internet sites (that all say the same thing, most of the time), the accepted narrative is that after moving out from Africa, homo sapiens entered China about 40,000 years ago. But here is archeological proof that humans were in Tibet 200,000 years ago!!! China is re-writing the history books!
And if humans were in eastern Tibet 200,000 years ago, how many thousands of years earlier were they in eastern coastal China? And wouldn’t they have travelled across that land bridge to the Americas, at around the same time, perhaps?
And then I read an interesting story about going back in time to China’s ‘war of resistance against Japanese aggression’ - ‘Mao Zedong's Views on Japan during the Anti-Japanese War’, and about how Mao saw Japan, acting not from a position of strength but from a position of weakness.
From ‘On Protracted War’ (1938), Mao writes that:
“From the perspective of social development, Japan is no longer a prosperous country. The war cannot achieve the prosperity desired by the Japanese ruling class, but will achieve the opposite of what it desires - the death of Japanese imperialism. This is the so-called retrogressive nature of Japan’s war.”
From ‘New Democracy’ (1940), Mao writes that:
“Precisely because it is about to die, it relies more on colonies and semi-colonies to survive, and will never allow any colony or semi-colony to establish a capitalist society with bourgeois dictatorship. Precisely because Japanese imperialism is trapped in a deep pit of serious economic and political crises, that is, it is about to die, it must attack China and turn China into a colony, and it has cut off China's path to establish a bourgeois dictatorship and develop national capitalism.”
And I was thinking that if we actually could build a bridge to the past, so that Mao could see the world today, he might look around and perhaps just say the same thing, except he would remove the word ‘Japanese’ and replace it with ‘North Atlantean’.
I think Mark Twain said that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme’.