China Flashcards
Used in the printing press, this was developed in China some 400 years before Gutenberg.
Movable type
This man led the 1911 revolutionary movement dedicated to establishing democracy in China.
Sun Yat-Sen
Born around 45 BCE, the short rule of the usurper Wang divides the “Western” and “Eastern” periods of which Chinese dynasty?
Han
In mid-18th century China, all foreign trade was confined to this port city.
Canton (now Guangzhou)
Chinese Emperor Yangdi undertook great public works projects in the 600s like this once 1,100-mile waterway.
The Grand Canal
What is the common, Romanized four-letter name of the “Empress Dowager” who rose from the position of third-rank concubine of Emperor Xianfeng to essentially rule China, autocratically and ruthlessly, for most of 47 years beginning in 1861?
Cixi
Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan were half of this group that became unpopular and lost power soon after Mao’s death.
Gang Of Four
What Chinese nationalist party founded by Song Jiaoren and Sun Yat-sen has led Taiwan virtually unopposed since 1949? Chiang Kai-shek led the National Revolutionary Army, the military wing of this party, on his Northern Expedition to unify mainland China in 1928, but later fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Maoists.
Kuomintang
This ancient Chinese divination text, which has a history of over two and a half millennia, is also known as the “Book of Changes.”
I Ching
A brief period of intellectual and political debate in 1956-57 in Communist China, initiated in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Josef Stalin, takes its name from a line in a classical Chinese poem. The name of this campaign (and the line in the poem) references a “hundred” what?
Flowers
The Treaty of Nanjing, in which the Qing government ceded Hong Kong to Queen Victoria, concluded the first of two wars that are most commonly known by what name?
Opium Wars
What famous military operation began in Jiangxi in October 1934 and ended in Shaanxi a year later?
Mao’s Long March was long both in terms of distance (5,600 miles) and time.
In 1959, Mao Zedong instituted the second five-year plan of his rule targeting massive increases in industrial output and agricultural efficiency. This plan, which was a disastrous failure, is best known as the “Great” what (two word answer)—a misnomer, as industrial production halved by 1962?
Leap Forward
The Chinese nationalist party founded and led by Sun Yat-Sen shortly after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, and still today a prominent party in the politics of Taiwan, is often referred to in the west by what three-letter abbreviation?
KMT (Kuomintang)
This cryptid resembling an ape-like man reported in mountainous regions of China translates its name literally to “wild man”
Yeren
