Post #14

The Taiping Revolution was very interesting to me in this reading. One of the things that stood out to me was that the revolution cost the lives of almost 30 million people, yet nobody really knows about it. I thought that the ideas of the Taiping were strangely revolutionary for this time period. It reminded me a little of Communism. The belief that there should be no private property and the redistribution of land are both pillars of communism. The rebels also had some ideas that the world would later see such as marriage based off of mutual attraction, and the idea of idea of health insurance. I was very surprised to see how long the revolution lasted considering the rebels did not actually change much.
I think that the Opium War was the major shift in world power away from Asia and towards Europe. The Europeans were able to defeat the Chinese in the Opium war with their mighty military power. This is something that had always been the other way around. Once the Europeans had won the war they were able to create favorable terms towards themselves, such as the opening of the major chinese ports to the Europeans. This helped European countries get their goods into the Chinese markets. By doing this they were able to get more Opium into the country and cause more addicts. All of this combined led to the downfall of chinese authority and power over many European countries. I believe that the Chinese lack of an industrial revolution at this time led to the country not being able to keep up with the Europeans.
After reading this I believe that European greed is one reason why their is so much distrust of Western Culture. If the Europeans had not taken advantage of China and many other Asian countries then the Chinese nationalism that hates Western Cultured would have never been born. The actions of the greedy Europeans during this time still has an affect on us today.