{"id":10986,"date":"2017-01-12T21:13:20","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T05:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=10986"},"modified":"2017-01-12T21:13:20","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T05:13:20","slug":"of-lands-and-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/of-lands-and-nations\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Peoples and Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Growing up as a person of European descent in the United States of America, I was raised from birth to be a patriot. In elementary school, my classmates and I learned stories of Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and how George Washington and the armies of the thirteen colonies turned away the evil British redcoats.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, not everyone has this narrative. For example, if I were the descendent of a Sioux Chief, my national identity might be different.<\/p>\n<p>This week I plunged into the book <em>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism<\/em> by Benedict Anderson. I found this work personally engaging for many reasons including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Anderson has a humbling knowledge of world history. He has in impressive ability to effortlessly make comparisons between Eastern, Western, Middle Eastern, and African histories.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>As someone who has spent significant time in the Philippines and Thailand, this is one of the first history books that I have read that acknowledges the unique origins and national identities of these two countries as compared with the rest of Asia.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The discussion of race was fascinating and could be a good reference point for discussion of contemporary race relations in the United States.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>I personally found discussions related to language fascinating. In my Master&#8217;s work, I learned that God used the timing of the birth of Christ concurrent with an era when so much of the world spoke Greek. This allowed the apostles to quickly carry the message of the risen Christ throughout the vast Roman Empire.\u00a0 Anderson&#8217;s discussion carried this thought further.\u00a0 It was also interesting to learn that the\u00a0British\u00a0overseers\u00a0thought that that Hindus of India would convert to Christianity simply by having an English education (Kindle page 93).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The example of the French celebrating their revolution in front of Vietnamese children who were subservient to the French was thought provoking. (Kindle page 120).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Truly, this book has much food for thought about the ways which a group of people develops a common identity as a \u201cnation.\u201d For me, reading this book is helpful in understanding China and its relationship to Taiwan.<\/p>\n<p>Two years ago I stood in a classroom in Guangzhou, China and told a class of university students that I had been to several countries including Laos, Switzerland, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Mexico. One bold young man and interrupted me \u201cTaiwan is not a country.\u201d Instead of engaging him in a sensitive political discussion, I simply asked him, \u201cwell, what is it?\u201d He exclaimed, \u201cIt is a special region of China.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I have just returned from a trip to Taiwan. On this trip, I visited the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, the father of the Republic of China (a.k.a. the George Washington of Taiwan). I saw his face on the money and his portrait hung in a school where our\u00a0mission\u00a0team sang.<\/p>\n<p>I learned that many in Taiwan still speak the Taiwanese language, even though it is only an oral language (a few missionaries tried to write it down but no one really learned to write it). Most everyone I met considered themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>This is a nation that breaks the rules. It is both proudly Chinese, claiming to be the one true modern China, and proudly Taiwanese, celebrating their island culture. It is no secret that the new President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, is controversial. She is Taiwan\u2019s first president with Aboriginal Taiwanese heritage.\u00a0\u00a0 For better or worse, she has made statements and decisions\u00a0that have\u00a0caused\u00a0a rift between Taiwan and Mainland China.<\/p>\n<p>As an outsider with a fairy tale sense of nationalism (i.e. Columbus, Pilgrims, and George Washington) it is difficult for me to wrap my mind around Taiwan. Are its residents Chinese? Are they Taiwanese? Are they both?<\/p>\n<p>While Anderson\u2019s book has not given me total clarity on this issue, it has given me valuable perspective.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Stuzki\/videos\/vb.623950798\/10154923987005799\/?type=3&#038;theater<\/p>\n<h6>Video of Fort Worth&#8217;s Southcliff Worship Team Singing at a Jr. High School in Puli, Taiwan.<\/h6>\n<h6>Notice the Taiwan flag and the portrait of Sun Yat-sen.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Growing up as a person of European descent in the United States of America, I was raised from birth to be a patriot. In elementary school, my classmates and I learned stories of Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and how George Washington and the armies of the thirteen colonies turned away the evil British redcoats. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":10991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[583,747,584,781],"class_list":["post-10986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anderson","tag-cocanougher","tag-nationalism","tag-taiwan","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}