Whither China: Can Humaneness Take Root?

Since U.S. President Richard Nixon first established diplomatic with communist China in 1972, sinologists have watched China for signs of increased respect for human rights. (‘Sinologists’ are scholars who study China.)

Observers have hoped that increased interaction with other nations would nudge China toward developing a more free society. These hopes have been dashed sometimes, and been confirmed sometimes.

China’s legacy of atrocities and genocides included the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1962 and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ from 1966 to 1969.

The ‘Great Leap Forward’ culminated in a manufactured famine which caused the deaths of approximately fifteen million people (some estimates range as high as thirty million).

The ‘Cultural Revolution,’ despite officially ending in 1969, caused painful ripple effects until 1976, causing the deaths of between 500,000 and two million Chinese, and several million more Tibetans.

The question, in the wake of Nixon’s diplomacy, was whether China would become more humane. The results were at best mixed. Occasionally gestures toward civil rights alternated with the events like the Massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which several thousand people died, or with the bullying of religious minorities like Christians and Tibetan Buddhists.

By 2015, journalists Chen Guangcheng and Melanie Kirkpatrick could write:

China often punishes its critics by abusing their relatives; Chen’s family was no exception. Over the years, his wife was assaulted, his daughter was forbidden to go to school, and a nephew was jailed. Some family members and close friends advised him to give up his work. “I felt misery about the pain my family had suffered,” he writes. “[But] I firmly believed — as I still do — that if you bow your head before the Communist Party, it will soon make you get on your hands and knees, and next it will stomp on your crouching body until it destroys you.”

Until 2015, China also pursued its ‘one child policy,’ forcing women to undergo forced sterilization and forced abortions.

Chen never says what motivated him to be the voice of the voiceless in China. He invokes “heaven” from time to time, and he remains faithful to Chinese traditions such as praying at the graves of ancestors. He makes no mention of God or religion. What his deeds make abundantly clear, though, is his belief in the sanctity of life and his great compassion for the sick, those with disabilities, and the unborn.

Moving toward the third decade of the twentieth century, the nations of the world looked to mass protests in Hong Kong in mid-2019 to see if there were any signs of what would come next: Whither China? Oppression or freedom?

Founding Civilization in Brazil

Although Brazil was discovered in the year 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, it remained largely uncivilized and undeveloped for several centuries. Brazil’s first advancement happened when the queen of Portugal temporarily moved her capital to Brazil from 1807 to 1814.

The capital had been relocated because Napoleon threatened the safety of Lisbon, Portugal’s permanent capital city.

Around the same time, and perhaps partly for similar reasons, the first groups of German-speaking settlers brought cultural development to Brazil, as Thomas Sowell writes:

Substantial German immigration to Brazil, as to South America in general, began early in the nineteenth century and included over the years not only immigrants from what is now Germany, but also sizable numbers of Germans from Russia, Switzerland, and Austria.

The reader might be puzzled at the phrase ‘Germans from Russia,’ but from the mid-1700s forward, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to parts of Russia, hoping to make a new home there. Russia’s low literacy rates and weak economic infrastructure, however, caused many of these Germans to move on to other countries.

In 1818, a group of Germans settled in Ilheus. In 1819, another group settled in Sao Jorge. When Brazil became politically independent from Portugal in 1822, the new nation’s government worked to entice Germans to live in Brazil.

Most settled in the southern part of Brazil, concentrated in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the first enduring German agricultural colony was established in 1824, though earlier unsuccessful attempts to establish German colonies in Brazil go back to the late eighteenth century.

Among the first Germans to make their home in Brazil, farming was a dominant activity. Later waves of Germans settled in cities instead of in the countryside, and became entrepreneurs, merchants, technical innovators, craftsmen, and industrialists.

Settlements of Germans, in groups numbering in the hundreds or the thousands, continued to be made in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.

By the end of the twentieth century, almost a million Brazilians used German as their primary language at home; almost three million speak German. There are villages which operate primarily as German-speaking communities.

Over the decades, the flow of Germans into Brazil enabled the development of technology and commerce. The Germans were, and are, leaders in medicine, the arts, and the economy of Brazil.