Lies, Damned Lies, and the Chinese Media

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been re-written, every picture has been repainted... Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
-Orwell, 1984 (p. 183)

Did you know that in 1804, King George III of Great Britain (a nation which was running a dead heat with Spain at the time for the title of 'most powerful nation on the planet') traveled all the way to Peking (present-day Beijing) to kowtow with his face to the ground before the Jiaqing Emperor, declare himself a vassal of the same, and offer tribute to the "Ruler of Tianxia?"
You didn't know that, did you?
Neither did I.
In fact, not one of my British friends and colleagues had ever heard this fascinating tidbit of their country's history.
I would surmise not many people alive today (outside of China) have heard this.
Of course, there is a simple reason why none of us have ever heard of this, and it is the same reason why King George III, were he still alive, would be surprised to hear it. That is, it is a complete and utter fantasy. It never happened.
This, however, did not stop the Qing Dynasty from listing the fictitious event in their official history (Feuerwerker, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 4).

It seems that when it comes to minor little details such as whether a particular event actually happened or not, well... in the minds of the Chinese government, it's always been considered best not to dwell on such minutiae.

For instance, this was not the first time Imperial China decided that a more powerful country than themselves had submitted to the "magnificence of the Middle Kingdom," often with nearly cataclysmic results.

History? Which Barbarian Vassal-State is That? I've Never Heard of it

In modern days, the United States sells a lot of weapons to a lot of countries. I don't think providing links is necessary for anyone, whether they like the US or not, to agree on that. Imagine, however, if one of those countries that buys US weapons, let's say Australia, sent a letter back to Washington in response for such a sale, thanking the US for "acknowledging Australian supremacy and paying its due tribute as a virtuous and dutiful vassal."
How well do you think that would go over?
Well, in the late 1390's, an upstart nation of former Mongol slave-laborers called Ming (known to present-day historians as "China's Ming Dynasty"), who had only thrown off the yoke of their northern masters a few years prior, did just that.
Early in the Ming Dynasty the Hongwu Emperor (or Yongle Emperor), a man born a peasant, sent a letter to Tamerlane (or "Timur the Lame") of the Timurid Empire, a Central Asian military superpower which bore the cultural lineage of both the Mongols and the Jihadic conquerors, and which had come admirably close to rebuilding the Mongol Empire (Putz, The Diplomat). The Chinese peasant-emperor wrote this letter in regard to what appeared to be the annual sale of 1,000 Timurid warhorses to China (Suleimenov, "What Happened Between Timur and the Chinese Emperor"). However, the peasant-emperor, in typically arrogant Zhonghua fashion, wrote the letter in the most condescending terms possible, thanking him for his "tribute" and referring to him as "son," a term which carried the implication of a sovereign-vassal relationship. In a paper driven more by raw Zhonghua Jingoism than academic inquiry, Robert Kong Chan of the University of Hong Kong grudgingly acknowledges the absurdity of this.

Timurid Empire (1370–1506) was a powerful state in Central Asia, and under the
leadership of Timur (1336–1405) the empire was known for its military power that
brought it victories one after another during the process of its territorial expansion to
the lands of the Persian, the Indian, the Russian, the Egyptian, and the Turk. In Ming’s
historical records, however, documented that the Timurid Empire was a vassal state of
Ming and Timur acknowledged Ming’s suzerainty and earnestly paid tributes to the
Ming emperor. Considering the military might of the Timurid Empire and Timur’s
territorial ambition, this inevitably arouses suspicion.
-Chan, "Success and Failure of the Ming (18)"

As for the peasant-emperor's letter, it absolutely enraged the Destroyer of Empires, whose domain formed the second-largest contiguous land empire in history (second only to his Mongol forebears, who the Ming remembered clearly). He detained the envoys from the self-proclaimed "Son of Heaven" and marked Ming China, with its army several orders of magnitude smaller, less experienced and less organized than the Timurid Hordes, on his list of targets not for conquest but for extermination... that is, just as soon as he finished dealing with his more powerful and dangerous enemies in the West, the Ottoman Empire. Fortunately for the Chinese (and unfortunately for the teeming millions who have suffered under the humiliation of the Tributary System in later centuries), Timur died as he was setting off for China. Even Kallie Szczepanski, a historian with something of a penchant for glorifying China and downplaying its neighbors, acknowledges how unprepared the Ming Empire was for this threat.

The great conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) had been detaining or executing Ming envoys for years, and decided that it was time to conquer China in the winter of 1404-05. Fortunately for the Yongle Emperor and all the Chinese, Timur became ill and died in what is now Kazakhstan. The Chinese seem to have been oblivious to the threat.
-Szczepanski, "The Yongle Emperor Zhu Di"

China's habit of not only viewing the entire world as vassals but presuming that the world sees themselves the same way has bought them a great deal of trouble through the centuries, and yet the Party-State persists in it. Even today, China officially insists that the world does, in fact, hold China up as the pinnacle of civilization (Chan, 4 & 5), and that a helpless, uncultured world lies prostrate even now before the 'Great Celestial Empire,' begging for Almighty China to resume its rightful place of hegemony (Jin et al., 230). At this point one has to ask "just how deeply ingrained is this delusional habit of seeing history as an endless string of proof of one's own national supremacy in China's national psyche?" The answer is that it runs disturbingly deep. It is, in essence, the foundation of their entire culture.

When it comes to falsehood held up by the present Chinese government as historical fact, the list starts from the beginning of their civilization and at the time of this writing it hasn't ended yet. Their official history (and their much vaunted and frankly laughable claim to 5,000 years of continuous existence) begins with the "Yellow Emperor," a mythological sort of patron saint of the Han Race, who supposedly invented both archery and the wheel (Cao, China's History, 11) during his hundred year rule of China (2697 B.C. –2597 B.C.). Even if one accepts the idea of a Human Being living long enough to rule for a century (to be fair, we must admit this was around the era of the Judeo-Christian Patriarchs, who are credited with 3 digit lifespans themselves), there still remain several problems with this theory. The first is that "most scholars today believe that the wheel was introduced to China from farther west rather than being independently developed there (Strom, Ancient Origins)". The second is that while Egyptians are known to have used archery around 3,000 B.C, there is no recorded use of bows and arrows in China prior to the Shang Dynasty, which reigned from 1766-1027 BC, centuries after the "Yellow Emperor” allegedly lived (World Archery, "A Brief History of Archery"). The third and greatest problem with this version of history is that there is no hard evidence that this "Yellow Emperor" EVER actually lived (Chu, Chinese Whispers, 25). And yet this mythological figure is written into the country's official history and hailed in State Documents as the country's ancestral founder (Chu, 60), and China has a history of handling anyone who disputes their official history rather harshly.

Essentially, in the view of the Chinese government, facts are seen as malleable things meant to be molded (and if necessary, outright omitted or fabricated) for the purpose of "harmony (read 'submission to Chinese authority')," and in order to obtain "harmony" it is necessary first to, as Mao put it, "clarify the relevant facts," or as Confucius put it, "rectify the names (read 'silence anyone who disputes China's distortion of facts')." Despite Xi Jinping's lofty claims that "history is history and it cannot be arbitrarily chosen (Yan, China's Governance, 29)," the Chinese Party-State seeks to do precisely that. In short, in the eyes of the Chinese government, history is, like all other things, subject to the State, not the other way around.

So What Aspects of History Does China Lie About, Anyway?

In a word, "everything," and that's not just some hyperbolic cop-out.
China claims that they have "never had the colonial history of expansion and domination" and "never had invaded other countries, (Yan, 32)," despite a history of warfare that averages to 1.2 wars every year from 1100 BC until 1911 (Mosher, Bully of Asia, 56) and the colonial subjugation of their neighbors under the Sinocentric Tributary System. However, much of China's aggression is whitewashed by the Party by claiming the areas being targeted by this aggression are (or were) part of China. In this vein, their their claims that Tibet has "always been a part of China (Joongang Ilbo, "What Was the Southeast Project")," and their similar claims about the Kingdom that gave rise to Korea (Chosun Ilbo, "What China's Northeast Project is All About"), both set fire to the histories of entire civilizations upon the altar of the Party-mandated doctrine "that Chinese identity transcends ethnic and cultural divisions, embracing peoples outside its traditional Han heartland who have long been influenced by Sinic civilization (Washburn, The Atlantic)." Their claim that "China stayed self-controlled in the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1995 - 1996 (Jin Canrong et al., China's Wisdom, 7)" seems as though it comes from an entirely different reality when one considers that the Crisis in question was nothing more and nothing less than China firing missiles into the sea around Taiwan to attempt to intimidate them out of holding the first-ever free elections in any historically Chinese region (Mosher, 127).
The same could be said for their characterization of the USSR as a "freedom-loving country" dedicated to democracy (Zhang China's Diplomacy, 18). Speaking of the USSR, China's claim that there was a "Soviet-U.S. cooperation for world domination" in the late '50's, which Mao shrewdly kept China from falling prey to (Zhang, 21), is absolutely tinfoil-hat-worthy. And just to keep things current, let it also be pointed out that they claim they are the ones safeguarding freedom of navigation in the West Philippine Sea (or as they call it, the "South China Sea") (Zhao, China Daily).
Regarding domestic affairs, the Chinese government's record is not much better. In economics, for example, it has recently come to light that they lie about their GDP figures (McDonnell, BBC), lies that are compounded by the fact that their own State-Owned firms are giving them false data to begin with (Zhang, China Daily). Regarding domestic unrest, they claim the Tiananmen Protesters were armed rioters slinging molotov cocktails (Beam, Slate), no matter how many eyewitnesses risk being arrested by the regime for calling them out on this (Smith, NY Times). The famine of the '50's is referred to emphatically as a NATURAL disaster (Tang Jun et al., China's Social Development, 49), despite the fact that China's own archives contain the records of Mao ordering the mass extermination of locust-eating sparrows, thus causing it (Phillips, The Epoch Times).
And even when the Chinese government is not inventing events, they have a history of magnifying numbers to increase the leverage they gain from chest-thumping about said events. Take for instance the Nanjing Massacre. Experts' estimates of the death toll from the incident vary widely, but in-depth research by David Askew, Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, has delivered an estimate of roughly 40,000, including 12,000 P.O.W's (Wakabayashi, The Nanking Atrocity, 97), which can be viewed on page 3 of the excerpt in the pdf linked here. However, in the wake of the war, the the Chinese government decided that a paltry 40,000 dead would not constitute a big enough stick to perpetually browbeat Japan with. After all, the number did seem rather unimpressive compared to some of the six-figure atrocities the Chinese themselves had carried out throughout the centuries (Sun Jiahui, The World of Chinese). Perhaps that's why they have adopted an astronomical figure of 300,000 dead in Nanjing, which they insist on even to this day (Peng Guanqian et al., China's National Defense, 6).
Of course, as the death tolls from the Nazi Camps in Europe from the same war came to be known, the Chinese government soon realized that even 300,000 dead would likely be overshadowed by the Holocaust in the West. Therefore, one of the PRC's first actions was an "investigation" into the effect of the war in China. This absolute farce of an investigation arrived at the conclusion that 30 million Chinese were killed in the war (Peng, 6). However, Jan Lehmayer of Populstat Asia cites population research from C.G.M. Klein Goldewijk and J.J Battjes, research that roughly correlates to the PRC's official census data, at least from 1949 onward (Tang, 24). From these statistics, there appears to be no discernible difference in China's population growth rate before, during and after WW2, which casts serious doubt upon the notion that nearly half a percentage point of the country's entire population was killed.

Of course, not all of China's lies are to portray themselves as victims. Sometimes, they lie to portray China as an invincible conqueror. Take the coverage of their economy, for example. Contrary to Western nailbiting, China's economy is a trainwreck (Nye, Huffington Post). The World Bank reports they have a GDP of $12.238 trillion (which has a question mark over it, since the World Bank depends on nations to provide their own GDP reports and China's inaccuracies were noted above) and a national debt of $34 trillion (Curran, Bloomberg), and while the West is watching to see when their housing bubble will pop (Balding, Bloomberg), China is more concerned with their impending bank crisis (Ren & Zhang, SCMP) and record-low personal asset growth (People's Daily, "Bank Savings"). Whichever crisis explodes first, it will do so against the backdrop of an ongoing trade war with the US, massive "Belt-and-Road" overspending and rising unemployment, and all this is happening while they proudly proclaim that their "experts" have forecasted that "China is expected to maintain its medium-to-high-speed economic growth for a long time even after its GDP exceeds that of the United States (Jin et al., 6)" and even claim that it is a "conservative estmate that their GDP will double that of the US in the future (Jin et al., 210). In other words, they believe their GDP will be around $40 trillion, or rather, almost half of the world's GDP.

Altering or forging records and then vociferously (and childishly) throwing a tantrum when anyone does not accept the fiction China peddles as "history" has been part of the toolbox of the Chinese government since so far back into antiquity that they still admitted their ruler was an emperor, but in the PRC era it has become so commonplace that George Orwell's Winston Smith would likely be able to walk into a job at Xinhua and feel right at home. To even attempt any kind of comprehensive study of the number of fallacies in China's official version of history would be beyond the scope of a doctoral thesis, let alone a Steemit article.
But why does it matter? As prolific as their lies are, it is not as though the Chinese government is the only organization in history that has built its legitimacy off of convincing people to believe lies. In fact, in most of the Capitalist world, convincing people of a lie is called "advertising." So, having established that twisting history is a central part of Chinese diplomacy (and of China's entire culture), the question then becomes "why should the world care?"

What Harm Can a Few Chinese Whispers Do?

If you were one of the Filipinos who are now starving while China occupies your ancestral fishing grounds (DeAeth, Taiwan News) (which China claims have always been theirs, despite the absence of any Chinese presence there prior to 1974), one of the Filipinos who are routinely fired upon by the Chinese Coast Guard within your own nation's EEZ (which China claims "indisuptable sovereignty“ over) (Keck, The Diplomat), one of the Vietnamese whose homes were burned and whose mothers and sisters were raped during China's 1979 invasion of Vietnam (which China denies ever happened) (Sullivan, NPR), one of the Uighurs whose families are detained in re-education camps at time of this post (which the Chinese government denies), or one of the Taiwanese who live every day with the fear that the PLA will launch an assault to "reunify" your country (which China denies the existence of) into their draconian empire, you would not ask that question.
And yet, China gets away with these barbaric acts. Why? Because they are too powerful to be stopped? No. The US, or even a second-tier power like Japan or the UK, would be more than a match for China in a confrontation.
They get away with them because no one knows about them, and no one knows about them because anyone who points a finger and cries "foul" incurs the wrath of China's propaganda machine and is labelled as a liar, a revisionist, and whatever other accusations the "Fifty Cent Party," known also as "wumaos" after the Chinese pronunciation of a half-RMB coin (China Digital Times), wishes to apply. Since the key word in social media is "social," and people whose goal is popularity tend not to say anything that will earn angry or negative responses (even false ones by paid government trolls), this threat is enough to silence many. This is precisely what China seeks. If no one calls attention to it, it never happened.
Dr. Christopher Ford got a glimpse of modern China's "unique interpretation" of history at the 4th Xiangshan Forum, and discerned a reasoning behind their insistence on having it believed by the world at large, which he commented on in his follow-up essay, "Sinocentrism for the New Age."

Indeed, our discussions quickly veered off course during the first day, from the presentation of prepared papers on the subject of trust into lengthy comment-and-response cycles in which the participants sometimes seemed to inhabit parallel universes of competing facts and historical claims. In particular, the Chinese and non-Chinese participants seemed to start from radically different starting points on surprisingly basic matters of fact (e.g., about what did or did not happen in the South China Sea in 2012, who started the Korean War, or whether or not Japanese history textbooks acknowledge that country’s invasion of China in the 1930s). In principle, these questions were objectively “knowable,” yet our hosts were not interested in empirical evaluation. Instead, our Roundtable discussions bogged down, for it was apparently central to the agenda of most PLA participants that their version of these facts – and their accompanying characterizations about fault and blame – be accepted by all others as a starting point for future-oriented discussions of “mutual trust.”

China's goal is to control the narrative, from the internet to the newsroom to the halls of government (Reminisci, Steemit, "Down Under Pressure"), and thus control what the world believes (King, Pan & Roberts, Harvard University)). This is the less-than-subtle connotation of the "Tell China's Story to the World" initiative (Blanchard & Martina, Reuters), and China has devoted considerable resources to this goal (Lau, Voice of America), especially among the nations caught in their Neo-Colonial "Belt and Road" scheme, where China insists they "will continue to enhance media cooperation (Zou, China Daily)."
China feels such a deep and abiding need to have their fingers in the media in every corner of the globe because the idea of an entire world where people have free access to information, rather than being coerced into believing whatever is handed down from the Chinese throne, absolutely terrifies them. In China, it has always been the case that the central authority decrees what is "true," and anyone questioning it is punished harshly. This has been China's M.O. for millennia. The desire to subdue any thought other than the "indisputable" word of the Head of State goes all the way back to QinShiHunag, the first emperor of unified China, who issued the edict below.

Anyone indulging in political or philosophical discussion will be put to death, and his body exposed in public.
Scholars who use examples from antiquity to criticize the present, or who praise early dynasties in order to throw doubt on the policies of our own, most enlightened sovereign, will be executed, they and their families!
-De Bary, Chan & Burtson, Sources of Chinese Tradition (154-55)

No discussion, debate, no ownership of books that might offer clues that the State is lying, and in the 2,500 years since QinShiHuang's brutal reign, China hasn't changed much. With the brief exception of Sun Yat-Sen, an American-educated and American-inspired visionary who envisioned a Chinese government "of the People, by the People, for the People, (Reminisci, Steemit, "Sun Zhongshan")," the Chinese government has always feared the idea of individual freedom. Indeed, Western-style Liberal Democracy is the antithesis of their entire authoritarian culture, where "the emperors have a higher authority than the gods (Shi Zhongwen & Chen Qaosheng, China's Culture, 8)." Shi & Chen went on to reiterate this impasse between Confucianism and Liberal Democracy.

Because it advocates the centralized government and the maintenance of hierarchy, it cannot help but reject equality and democracy.
-Shi et al., China's Culture (33)

So as Western-style Liberal Democracy has grown more globally popular in recent centuries (and even more so with the onset of social media, which is not only democratic but an exercise in mob-rule by its very nature), the Chinese State has trembled. In their sight, ideas like democracy and Human Rights represent an "invasive foreign ideology (CPC General Office, Communiqué)," which has insidiously spread across the world by evil, scheming Westerners seeking to topple ancient and benevolent imperiums and replace them with the chaos of a democratic system that is "subject to serious drawbacks, embodied by divided societies and separatist campaigns around the world (Jin et al., 233)," and they have sought to "build an alternative culture to compete with the West: one that is Chinese, socialist, and in the best interest of the single-party rule (Dinic, China/US Focus)." Now, they believe they have found that. What makes this a problem for the rest of the world, is that they stumbled onto the means of doing to the entire world what QinShiHuang did to China: silencing all thought except what comes down from the Chinese throne. China has always used false narratives to control their own population, but in the Information Age they have grander designs. George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, offers a glimpse of what has changed with the arrival of Social Media.

There is nothing new in lying to the public and other nations. It is sometimes essential, sometimes effective. What is new is the amount of information on the audience that is available, the ability to segment the audience to more refined degrees, and the ability to reach a large audience at low cost.
-Friedman, Geopolitical Futures

In a nutshell, one of the most infamously authoritarian regimes in the world's history, with openly stated global hegemonic ambitions (Jin et al., 4, 10, 13, 16, 35 etc.), has discovered a critical weakness in the idea of Government of the People, by the People, for the People: the People tend to be stupid, emotional, and easily duped. Also, they have discovered that the best way to exploit that weakness is to do what they have done better than any other nation on Earth for millennia: lie.

And The Truth Shall Set... Well, You Know the Rest

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-Orwell, 1984 (96)

Democracy's Achilles' Heel has always been that it only works if the People are sensible and informed, and the day has come when that condition is no longer met. From watching the impact of social media (where anyone can post anything, with or without a single shred of evidence, and if the poster was popular enough, then credentials or no credentials they are believed and it immediately becomes fact because nobody has enough sense to do any research of their own) upon the operations of democratic systems, China has concluded that in a world where governments are answerable to the masses, whoever is the loudest voice on the internet controls what the masses believe...
...and anyone who can control what the masses believe can control any government answerable to the masses.

And if that happens, Game Over. The dictator of China wins.

Now, a US-led world may not be batting a thousand right now, but for anyone who is familiar with the Chinese, who has dealt with the fanatical, self-righteous Zhonghua Chauvinism of the Han majority and the Communist Party that leads them, it is impossible to deny that a Chinese-led one would be far, far, far worse. "A million and a half Tibetans slaughtered? Where? It never happened. Unarmed student protesters rolled over by tanks? What are you talking about? It never happened. Filipino fishermen's daily catch stolen from their own waters by the Chinese Coast Guard while their families starve? You're crazy, laowai! That's all lies. It never happened. ...And if we decide we need to send troops rolling through your town to burn everything to the ground, that will never have happened either. Keep that in mind when you post on Facebook. We're building a 'harmonious society' here. Don't be an 'unharmonious element' by running your mouth, or we might have to 'harmonize' you. We're watching you, laowai."

China's economy, as explained above, is a mess, and their military is nowhere close to being a match for the US (Dibb, The National Interest), and geopolitically they have no hope of challenging the hitherto Western-influenced international order, where ideals like individual rights, free speech, and free assembly are given high ideological prestige. Even China admits that China is no match for the US by any measure (Jin et al., 40). They can't win their so-badly-desired global hegemony and build their "Chinese Dream" of a new, global Sinocentric Tributary Order through military, diplomatic or economic means.
But if they can convince the worldwide masses to buy into the Party Line, if they can achieve what they euphemistically refer to as a "fair and reasonable new international order of communication (Zhou, China Daily)," it won't matter. The Chinese Party-State, where the government is not answerable to the People, will tell its own people what to think. Meanwhile, through government-run pages on Social Media outlets they do not even let their own people use (Mozur, NY Times), propaganda institutions on US university campuses such as the Confucius Institute (Lo, South China Morning Post) and of course the now-infamous "Fifty Cent Party,", it will tell the world's people what to think, or rather, will "assist foreign media to know more about China (Zhou, China Daily)." Finally, the deceived and willingly led population, in turn will elect precisely the leaders China wants the "lesser nations" to have (Brady, Magic Weapons). The Chinese government will proclaim to their minions that two and two make five, and anyone who claims they make four will be browbeaten into silence, just as anyone is who speaks of Tibet or Tiananmen today.
And just like Orwell's Ingsoc Party, they will get away with it because they will have total control over the narrative.

In the Information Age, mass-disinformation is a weapon, and China has that weapon pointed at the world's head right now (Kaufman, Delaware Online). We would all do well to remember that it was a Chinese philosopher-general who wrote "兵者, 詭道也 (all warfare is based on deception)." How much more so in the present age! And there is no adequate defense against such a weapon except for one thing.
Truth.
Facts.
People have absolutely got to stop believing everything they hear and start checking sources. Then check the sources of the sources. People must learn to detect nonsense, and do a bit of actual research on their own, and dare I say a good start would be getting off the computer and looking into some of those funny little rectangular paper things people used to store information before the internet came along?
If the nations of the West, or indeed people anywhere, want to keep living in a world where your thoughts are your own and information is freely accessible, it is imperative that the People wake up to the threat.

Works Cited

Books

Cao Dawei & Sun Yanjing. Trans. Xiao Ying. China's History. Beijing. China Intercontinental Press. 2010.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1302-7

Chu, Ben. Chinese Whispers. London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2013.
ISBN 978-1-7802-2474-9

De Bary, Theodore; Chan, Wingstit & Watson, Burton. Sources of Chinese Tradition. New York. Columbia University Press. 1960.
ISBN 978-0-23108-602-8

Jin Canrong et al. Trans. Wen Jianxin. China's Wisdom. Beijing. China Renmin University Press. 2017.
ISBN 978-7-300-24622-2

Mosher, Stephen F. Bully of Asia. Washington. Regnery Publishing. 2017.
ISBN 978-1-62157-696-9

Orwell, George. 1984. Chengdu. Sichuan People's Publishing House. 2017.
ISBN 978-7-220-10169-4

Peng Guanqian, Zhao Zhiyin & Luo Yong. Trans. Ma Chenguang & Yan Shuang. China's National Defense, Beijing. China Intercontinental Press. 2010.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1310-2

Shi Zhongwen & Chen Qiaosheng. Trans. Wang Guozheng. China's Culture. Beijing. China Intercontinental Press. 2011
ISBN 978-7-5085-1298-3

Tang Jun, Zhang Yi, Wang Chunguang & Feng Ling. Trans. Pan Zhongming, Zhang Hongpeng & Gao Jin'an. China's Social Development. Beijing. China Intercontinental Press. 2010.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1306-5

Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture. New York. Berghann Books. 2007.
ISBN 978-1-84545-180-6

Yan Jinrong et. al. Trans. Huang Fang. China's Governance. Beijing. China Renmin University Press. 2017.
ISBN 978-7-300-24625-3

Zhang Qingmin. China's Diplomacy. Beijing. China Intercontinental Press. 2008.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1312-6

Government Documents

Communist Party of China General Office Central Committee. Trans. Mingjing Magazine. "Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere." 22 Apr. 2013.

International Organization Public Data

List of Nations by 2017 GDP; World Bank.org
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.cd?view=map

Academic Papers

Brady, Anne Marie. "Magic Weapons: China's Political Influence Activities under Xi Jinping." Washington. Wilson Center. Kissinger Institute for China and the United States. 16 Sep, 2017.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/magicweaponsanne-mariebradyseptember162017.pdf

Chan, Robert Kong. "Success and Failure of the Ming Century in Pre-modern History and their Contemporary Implications for the Emerging China-centered Pacific Century." School of Professional and Continuing Education. University of Hong Kong. 2017. Web. 25 Sep. 2018.
http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/HKU2017-s/Archive/cd88f6ee-978b-431a-8f8f-25e3ccbbf487.pdf

King, Gary; Pan, Jennifer & Roberts, Margaret E. "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument." Boston. Harvard University. 9 Apr, 2017. Web. 27 Sep, 2017.
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=1463587807&version=meter+at+0&module=meterLinks&pgtype=article&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click

Periodicals

Feuerwerker, Albert. "Chinese History and the Foreign Relations of Contemporary China." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol 402. July 1974

Zhao Lei. “Nation Safeguards S. China Sea Routes.” China Daily, 21 June 2018, p. 3.

Zhang Yi. “Investigation Finds Severe Problems with False Data.” China Daily, 21 June 2018, p. 5.

Zhou Wenting. "Program Aims to Link Countries Through Press Collaboration, Cultural Exchange." China Daily, 21 June 2018, p. 3

Zou Shuo. “Media Strengthens Belt, Road Bonds.” China Daily, 21 June 2018, p. 3.

From the Web

"A Brief History of Archery." Worldarchery.org. 18 July, 2006. Web. 23 Sep. 2018.
https://worldarchery.org/news/93847/brief-history-archery

"Bank Savings Growth Drops in China to Record Low." People's Daily. 28 Sep, 2018. Web. 29 Sep, 2018.
http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0928/c90000-9504648.html

"Fifty Cent Party." China Digital Times.
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Fifty_Cent_Party

"What China's Northeast Project is all about." Chosun Ilbo. 30 May, 2008. Web. 22 Sep, 2018.
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2008/05/30/2008053061001.html

"What Was the 'Southeast Project' that Preceded China's 'Northeast Project.' " Joongang Ilbo. 14 Sep, 2006. Web. 22 Sep, 2018.
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