Who was jin chin what was special about him

No signs of class antagonism, or racism. We politely declined. A few hours later, we headed back to China, our ship loaded with iron ore. It would be a long and not altogether easy journey, a personal voyage pitted with disappointment, revolutionary violence and a military massacre. Born into a poor working class family in in the east-coastal province of Jiangsu, Chin Jin moved with his parents from their small rural town to the metropolis of Shanghai when he was just a month old.

I felt sick inside. It also made me angry, especially because the humiliated official on crutches was so distraught that eventually he found a way of taking his life. So did the compulsory kitchen portrait of Mao. I felt nothing. I refused to swallow the lie that Mao was the saviour of the Chinese people. Then there was the first bout of teenage resistance, innocent but enough for him to taste courage and its power to change things.

An open-air film screening in a local sports ground was announced by the authorities. There was great excitement, but for some reason the guards refused to open the gates into the sports ground where the screening was soon to happen. Without quite knowing why, I bolted. In front of the huge crowd, a guard grabbed me, shouted and slapped me around.

As if to take the heat off me, the whole crowd suddenly surged forward, through the barricades. They bolted, too. It was thrilling. At the time, he recalls, the personal thrill had no political significance. Throughout his teenage years, and well into his twenties, he was neither a dissident nor a Party-minded believer. His parents, a housewife mother of three children and textile factory worker father, were cut from the same cloth. There were moments when they urged us to listen to Communist Party speeches and to praise Mao, but I always turned a deaf ear.

I had the gut feeling that like most people we knew, my parents were simply going along with the routine, despite our hardship.

Our home was small and shabby. We had no books, my parents were virtually illiterate, but in a curious way the absence of ideology at home encouraged me to get on with my own learning. I was inclined to be sceptical, even though I had no well-formed opinions of my own. One of my acquaintances later called me a maverick fan pan zhe. The frenzy of the Cultural Revolution forced young Chin Jin to put his nose to the grindstone.

Why should people be treated like that, I wondered? Their humiliation left a bad taste in my mouth, but I zipped my lips. I was a silent maverick. Amidst the random violence, the mad public attacks on landlords, rich peasants, revisionists and rightists, the first-born son of a working class family quietly set his sights on self-improvement. He worked hard during his middle school years. It lifted my expectations, encouraged me to widen my horizons.

When Deng Xiaoping won control of the Communist Party leadership in , universities in China began to re-open. He failed to win a place. Fresh back from the countryside, the young Shanghai worker was down, but not out. True to character, intrepid Chin Jin found other means of expanding his horizons. In the history of democracy, the sea has special significance. Greek democracies extended citizenship to low-ranked sailors whose muscle power fuelled naval triremes.

In the age of modern sea power, vast oceans sometimes protected fledgling democratic experiments from military invasion the young American republic is an obvious case in point. George Orwell noted in The Lion and the Unicorn how sea-faring powers were on balance friendlier towards democracy because naval crews are ill-equipped to stage military coups on land. And those who go to sea, as Chin Jin discovered, quickly learn the democratic virtue of humility: respect for the elements, a deep sense of human frailty shadowed by the vast complexity of our world, the acknowledgement that human horizons are never fixed.

Now in his early twenties, able-bodied seaman Chin Jin learned those lessons. But it was fond memories of Dampier that stayed with him. Six months before the June 4th uprisings that rocked Chinese communism to its roots, saddened by the sudden death of his mother and not much impressed by the Deng Xiaoping reforms, Chin Jin decided to better his life.

Still youthful he was now 31 , the bluejacket borrowed money from friends and relatives, quit his job at the China Ocean Shipping Company, obtained an Australian short-term visa and headed for Sydney, with the aim of perfecting his English.

He enrolled at Cambridge College in Hurstville, in south Sydney, and lessons went well. The local economy was tight, yet he managed to find part-time jobs, first as a fruit processor then as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant. The work brought in just enough for him to share a small flat with other Chinese immigrants.

After hearing news of the student protests triggered in China in April by the death of the deposed reformer Hu Yaobang, Chin Jin made contact with a group called the Chinese Alliance for Democracy. Halfway through our evening conversation, Chin Jin suddenly grows tense.

My eyes were barely open, but I panicked. The news that morning was so full of terrible stories from Beijing that I threw on my clothes and hurried to Chinatown. Many people were weeping and wailing. I cried, too. A little while later, we marched on the Chinese consulate, to protest against the violent crack-down. Telephone links with China were cut.

Details were sketchy. But that night thousands of us defied our normal routines. We re-grouped in Chinatown, standing in silence, in a candlelight vigil.

From that evening until this day, Chin Jin became a committed democrat. I felt a sense of urgency. A fire burned inside me. It was a moment described in a well-known Chinese story from the Qing dynasty, when the last remaining noblewoman from the conquered city of Yehe pledges to give her life for the cause of freedom from Manchurian rule. Translated into my life, it meant: when people find themselves with their backs to the wall, reduced to a powerless minority, they must resist the injustice they suffer, with all their might, until their last drop of energy.

I vowed never - never - to give up on the democracy for which young people had given their lives. As if to console his pain, or perhaps to bolster his conviction, Chin Jin sticks close to the little word minzhu democracy. The payments were altered twice during the next century as a result of two brief wars between the two states, varying according to the outcome of each conflict. Culture and Institutions Although he did not live to see Jin victory against both Liao and Song, Aguda was responsible for transforming Jurchen society, leading to its success.

Jurchen had no written script and had used Khitan Liao writing until Aguda ordered a Jurchen writing system created in It was called the Jurchen Great Script and was based on the Khitan system. In a Jurchen Small Script was introduced. Neither gained widespread usage, few surviving examples and no complete books of either have survived, and not all words have been deciphered. Pagoda built on Jin Dynasty era Initially, literate Jurchen continued to use the Khitan writing system; later they preferred to use Chinese and did not record their oral traditions or write literature in their own language.

Jin diplomatic correspondence with Southern Song and all other states was written entirely in Chinese and it seems no Song official learned Jurchen. The Jin empire at its peak in had 8. The Southern Song empire had a comparable population, which made them the two most populous states in the world at that time.

There exist no precise figures on the ethnic identity of people of the Jin empire, but experts agree that Jurchen constituted less than 10 percent of the total. Jurchen military colonies were established at strategic locations across northern China and Jurchen were encouraged to migrate from their homeland to northern China.

This policy reduced the reservoir of Jurchen in their homeland and even though they were a privileged group, often as landlords, it made their assimilation to Chinese culture more rapid. Jurchen living amid Chinese quickly became bilingual, and later solely Chinese speakers.

The Wanyang clan ruled the Jin Empire, and within the empire, Jurchen people enjoyed primacy. The military was dominated by the cavalry and was made up almost exclusively of Jurchen. Chinese conscripts and volunteers formed the infantry, but the higher officers were Jurchen.

Jin needed large numbers of officials to administer the populous empire. Most of the lower ranks of the civil administration were made up of Chinese, but few Chinese were admitted to the higher ranks of the civil government. Where there were two officials of the same rank, Jurchen always enjoyed greater privileges than Chinese.

Even the examination system that was inherited from Song times was modified with a parallel system of academies and examinations. The one for Jurchen scholars was held in Jurchen language and script and was easier than the one for Chinese scholars.

Moreover a higher percentage of Jurchen candidates passed than Chinese candidates. Sons of Jurchen officials were also able to receive appointments without passing the exams. Jurchen, became Buddhists and adopted Chinese-style Buddhism. Jin rulers since Aguda had adopted Chinese reign titles and imperial ceremonies. The official ethnic policy of Jin, however, changed several times through the dynasty.

Initially Jin tried to impose Jurchen clothes and hairstyles on its Chinese subjects. These rules were unenforceable and the reverse took place.