Nanjing

First off, I haven’t been doing much with my blog up until now other than putting the stories from these emails on the blog. I’m going to change that some starting now. This semester, one of my assignments is to write a ‘journal entry’ about my experiences in China three times every week. These journal entries are all about issues that I’m having over here and what some of these experiences have taught me about China. So, I’m going to be putting every one of these assignments onto my blog, and I’ll tag some of them on to the end of these emails under the label “Assignments – Journal Entries.”

So if yall want to see more of these little tidbits about problems I’m having here in China, how I’m seeing Chinese culture, check out my blog at:

www.free-roaming.blogspot.com

Also, I don’t know how many of yall have been checking, but I have not updated my picture site much. The Chinese government had been working even harder than normal for a while to prevent me from getting access to those sorts of things, so for a while, it was difficult to upload pictures. Now, I’ve found a way around the “Great Firewall of China,” so I’ve updated my picture page. Check it out, there are a ton of new pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/agenbite.lee

For those concerned, I finally had to get a haircut. All of my mormon friends like the hair cut, which means I look like a good mormon missionary. So it’s a bad haircut. You can see the results on the above picture site, in the folder titled “Suzhou.”



And now for something completely different: This email is going to kind of be light on content. A lot has happened, but most of it may be even less interesting than my normal emails, so I’m not going to bother yall with it unless I get really desperate for stories. My parents are coming soon, so I thought it would be good for them and yall to get a little introduction into where I’m studying.

Nanjing is located just a few hours from Shanghai along the Yangze River. It’s an old city, considered one of the four ancient capitals of China. Unfortunately, everytime someone tries to build their capital here in Nanjing, they screw up, so it has become known as a kind of unlucky place to make your capital, with only short dynasties making their capital in Nanjing.

The most recent idiot to make his capital in Nanjing was Chiang Kai-Shek, the megalomaniac who ruled China from 1927 until 1949. He fought the Japanese and sat next to FDR and Churchhill in some of the conferences towards the end of World War II. But his regime was less than successful. He tried to eliminate the Communist all the while the Japanese empire of the 1930’s was expanding into China. In 1937, the Japanese invaded most of China, Chiang Kai-Shek’s government was forced to leave Nanjing and set up a government in exile in inner China, several thousand miles upriver on the Yangze. At this time, the Japanese entered Nanjing unopposed and slaughtered several hundred thousand innocent civilians, raping women and skewering infants on bayonets. This marked a low point in human history.

Before that, one of history’s bloodiest civil wars was focused on this area. A Chinese guy, Hong Xiuquan, read a pamphlet from a Christian missionary and studied the bible. He then had a vision that he was Jesus’ little brother and that he had to purge China of its demons. Long story short, he built up his own government, took over the southern half of China, and almost toppled the dynasty, leaving some twenty million dead in the wake of the conflict.

And there is a lot more history, but I’ll skip it I’ve been told that my emails can often become to “dissertation-like.” Now, Nanjing is no longer the capital of failed dynasties. Instead, Nanjing is the provincial capital of one of the country’s richest provinces, the breadbasket of China. It is also a center of education in the country, with only Beijing and Shanghai being able to challenge Nanjing with having more famous colleges in their city. And that’s where it comes to me; I’m at Nanjing University, one of the top five schools in the country, studying Chinese government and culture. The city has become a major center of commerce, my apartment sitting in the shadow of the seventh tallest building in the world, the Nanjing Greenland Financial Center.