Status Updates From The Foundations of Eastern ...

Finished with last three lectures

45: PRC. More familiar material now. It feels like this chapter is a history written by the party now: “Good Mao / Bad Mao”; Mao as a “complex figure”. It’s apparent Mao was bad for China generally. He destroyed a generation and set the country back. He was good for the party though, which is why he’s celebrated within PRC now.

43 & 44: Medieval, Tokugawa & Meiji. I have to learn more about the rise of the nationalists after the Great Depression and before the war.

42: modern Korean history. Again, much of this is new to me. Korea and Japan were really the only two E. Asian Maritime country that we’re not colonized . The kinship lasted up until the early 20th century. I knew that Japan had colonized Korea in the early 20th century, but I didn’t know how it proceeded from expansionary Japanese policy previous denials of western colonizers.

41: the Chosun. Interesting overview of a part of the world that I don’t know much about. The Koreans created their own form of fusionism that created a class of scholar bureaucrats. That class was inherited and eventually cleaned by internal factions. Women were little more than household slaves. What implications does that have for modern Korean Society? Christianity brought to Korea by converts in China.