"As the world's only superpower, America may look today as if global domination is an entitlement. But if you look back at the sweep of history, it's striking how fleeting supremacy is, particularly for individual cities." N. Kristof on shifting fortunes for cities, looking especially at airport-less Kaifeng in China. NYT
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It's not a new thing to use ancient China or Rome, or the Fertile Crescent as a lesson of cultural set-backs. It had been especially used as warnings to empires thru much of the pre-modern time.
However, contrary to what Nicholas Kristof wants to convince, the fall of Kaifeng is due to foreign aggressions that coupled with the strategic breaking of the Yellow River levee to flood-overwhelm the once splendid city. Song China was in fact a technological advanced society, which invented the gun powder that would travel west and developed into more destructive weaponry later.
Don't let a jounalist tell us what happened in history....
jzxy - thanks for the insight. first of all, i think you should send your comment also to the NYTimes. But second, I don't see why you need to belittle journalists and their profession. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez is, for example, a journalist...yeah, he's pretty good at writing fiction I know, but he also knows history). Whatismore, Kristof has himself a degree in law from Oxford. I'm not saying that the degree makes him better than a journalist. I think it just goes to show that even the best prepared can get their history screwed up. You're making faulty assumptions just like he seems to be doing.
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