Tibet
Tibet is a historical region covering much of the Tibetan Plateau in Inner Asia. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpa, Qiang and Lhoba peoples and is now inhabited by considerable numbers of Han Chinese and Hui people. Tibet is the highest region on Earth, with an average elevation of 5,000 metres; the highest elevation in Tibet is Mount Everest, Earth's highest mountain, rising 8,848 m above sea level. The Tibetan Empire emerged in the 7th century, but with the fall of the empire the region soon divided into a variety of territories; the bulk of western and central Tibet was at least nominally unified under a series of Tibetan governments in Lhasa, Shigatse, or nearby locations. Thus Tibet remained a suzerainty of the Mongol and Chinese rulers in Nanjing and Beijing, with reasonable autonomy given to the Tibetan leaders; the eastern regions of Kham and Amdo maintained a more decentralized indigenous political structure, being divided among a number of small principalities and tribal groups, while often falling more directly under Chinese rule after the Battle of Chamdo.
The current borders of Tibet were established in the 18th century. Following the Xinhai Revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1912, Qing soldiers were disarmed and escorted out of Tibet Area; the region subsequently declared its independence in 1913 without recognition by the subsequent Chinese Republican government. Lhasa took control of the western part of Xikang, China; the region maintained its autonomy until 1951 when, following the Battle of Chamdo, Tibet became incorporated into the People's Republic of China, the previous Tibetan government was abolished in 1959 after a failed uprising. Today, China governs western and central Tibet as the Tibet Autonomous Region while the eastern areas are now ethnic autonomous prefectures within Sichuan and other neighbouring provinces. There are tensions regarding dissident groups that are active in exile. Tibetan activists in Tibet have been arrested or tortured; the economy of Tibet is dominated by subsistence agriculture, though tourism has become a growing industry in recent decades.
The dominant religion in Tibet is Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is a primary influence on the art and festivals of the region. Tibetan architecture reflects Indian influences. Staple foods in Tibet are roasted barley, yak meat, butter tea; the Tibetan name for their land, Bod བོད་, means "Tibet" or "Tibetan Plateau", although it meant the central region around Lhasa, now known in Tibetan as Ü. The Standard Tibetan pronunciation of Bod, is transcribed Bhö in Tournadre Phonetic Transcription, Bö in the THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription and Poi in Tibetan pinyin; some scholars believe the first written reference to Bod "Tibet" was the ancient Bautai people recorded in the Egyptian Greek works Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Geographia, itself from the Sanskrit form Bhauṭṭa of the Indian geographical tradition. The modern Standard Chinese exonym for the ethnic Tibetan region is Zangqu, which derives by metonymy from the Tsang region around Shigatse plus the addition of a Chinese suffix, 区 qū, which means "area, region, ward".
Tibetan people and culture, regardless of where they are from, are referred to as Zang although the geographical term Xīzàng is limited to the Tibet Autonomous Region. The term Xīzàng was coined during the Qing dynasty in the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor through the addition of a prefix meaning "west" to Zang; the best-known medieval Chinese name for Tibet is Tubo. This name first appears in Chinese characters as 土番 in the 7th century and as 吐蕃 in the 10th-century. In the Middle Chinese spoken during that period, as reconstructed by William H. Baxter, 土番 was pronounced thux-phjon and 吐蕃 was pronounced thux-pjon. Other pre-modern Chinese names for Tibet include Wusiguo, Wusizang and Tanggute. American Tibetologist Elliot Sperling has argued in favor of a recent tendency by some authors writing in Chinese to revive the term Tubote for modern use in place of Xizang, on the grounds that Tubote more includes the entire Tibetan plateau rather than the Tibet Autonomous Region; the English word Tibet or Thibet dates back to the 18th century.
Historical linguists agree that "Tibet" names in European languages are loanwords from Semitic Ṭībat orTūbātt, itself deriving from Turkic Töbäd, literally: "The Heights". Linguists classify the Tibetan language as a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan language family although the boundaries between'Tibetan' and certain other Himalayan languages can be unclear. According to
European Union
The European Union is a political and economic union of 28 member states that are located in Europe. It has an area of an estimated population of about 513 million; the EU has developed an internal single market through a standardised system of laws that apply in all member states in those matters, only those matters, where members have agreed to act as one. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods and capital within the internal market, enact legislation in justice and home affairs and maintain common policies on trade, agriculture and regional development. For travel within the Schengen Area, passport controls have been abolished. A monetary union was established in 1999 and came into full force in 2002 and is composed of 19 EU member states which use the euro currency; the EU and European citizenship were established when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993. The EU traces its origins to the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, established by the 1951 Treaty of Paris and 1957 Treaty of Rome.
The original members of what came to be known as the European Communities were the Inner Six: Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany. The Communities and its successors have grown in size by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit; the latest major amendment to the constitutional basis of the EU, the Treaty of Lisbon, came into force in 2009. While no member state has left the EU or its antecedent organisations, the United Kingdom signified the intention to leave after a membership referendum in June 2016 and is negotiating its withdrawal. Covering 7.3% of the world population, the EU in 2017 generated a nominal gross domestic product of 19.670 trillion US dollars, constituting 24.6% of global nominal GDP. Additionally, all 28 EU countries have a high Human Development Index, according to the United Nations Development Programme. In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Through the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the EU has developed a role in external relations and defence.
The union maintains permanent diplomatic missions throughout the world and represents itself at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the G7 and the G20. Because of its global influence, the European Union has been described as an emerging superpower. During the centuries following the fall of Rome in 476, several European States viewed themselves as translatio imperii of the defunct Roman Empire: the Frankish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire were thereby attempts to resurrect Rome in the West; this political philosophy of a supra-national rule over the continent, similar to the example of the ancient Roman Empire, resulted in the early Middle Ages in the concept of a renovatio imperii, either in the forms of the Reichsidee or the religiously inspired Imperium Christianum. Medieval Christendom and the political power of the Papacy are cited as conducive to European integration and unity. In the oriental parts of the continent, the Russian Tsardom, the Empire, declared Moscow to be Third Rome and inheritor of the Eastern tradition after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The gap between Greek East and Latin West had been widened by the political scission of the Roman Empire in the 4th century and the Great Schism of 1054. Pan-European political thought emerged during the 19th century, inspired by the liberal ideas of the French and American Revolutions after the demise of Napoléon's Empire. In the decades following the outcomes of the Congress of Vienna, ideals of European unity flourished across the continent in the writings of Wojciech Jastrzębowski, Giuseppe Mazzini or Theodore de Korwin Szymanowski; the term United States of Europe was used at that time by Victor Hugo during a speech at the International Peace Congress held in Paris in 1849: A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas. During the interwar period, the consciousness that national markets in Europe were interdependent though confrontational, along with the observation of a larger and growing US market on the other side of the ocean, nourished the urge for the economic integration of the continent.
In 1920, advocating the creation of a European economic union, British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that "a Free Trade Union should be established... to impose no protectionist tariffs whatever against the produce of other members of the Union." During the same decade, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, one of the first to imagine of a modern political union of Europe, founded the Pan-Europa Movement. His ideas influenced his contemporaries, among which Prime Minister of France Aristide Briand. In 1929, the latter gave a speech in favour of a European Union before the assembly of the League of Nations, precursor of the United Nations. In a radio address in March 1943, with war still raging, Britain's leader Sir Winston Churchill spoke warmly of "restoring the true greatness of Europe" once victory had been achieved, mused on the post-war creation of a "Council of Europe" which would bring the European nations together to build peace. After World War II, European integration was seen as an antidote to the extreme nationalism which had devastated the continent.
In a speech delivered on 19
Cantonese
Cantonese is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety and standard form of Yue Chinese, one of the major subgroups of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi, it is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western world. While the term Cantonese refers to the prestige variety, it is used in a broader sense for the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese; when Cantonese and the related Yuehai dialects are classified together, there are about 80 million total speakers. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities.
Although Cantonese shares a lot of vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation and lexicon. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is; this results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton, the traditional English name of Guangzhou; this narrow sense may be specified as "Canton language" or "Guangzhou language". However, "Cantonese" may refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper. Speakers called this variety "Canton speech" or "Guangzhou speech", although this term is now used outside Guangzhou. In Guangdong and Guangxi, people call it "provincial capital speech" or "plain speech".
Academically called "Canton prefecture speech". In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province speech", or as "Chinese". In mainland China, the term "Guangdong speech" is increasingly being used amongst both native and non-native speakers. Given the history of the development of the Yue languages and dialects during the Tang dynasty migrations to the region, in overseas Chinese communities, it is referred to as "Tang speech", given that the Cantonese people refer to themselves as "people of Tang". Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Yue branch of Chinese varieties, it is called "Standard Cantonese"; the official languages of Hong Kong are English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has many different varieties. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals.
It is used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese; as in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in everyday life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent and vocabulary. Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. Due to the city's long standing as an important cultural center, Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. Despite the cession of Macau to Portugal in 1557 and Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, the ethnic Chinese population of the two territories originated from the 19th and 20th century immigration from Guangzhou and surrounding areas, making Cantonese the predominant Chinese language in the territories.
On the mainland, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. Cantonese remained a dominant and influential language in southeastern China until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its promotion of Standard Chinese as the sole official language of the nation throughout the last half of the 20th century, although its influence still remains strong within the region. While the Chinese government vehemently discourages the official use of all forms of Chinese except Standard Chinese, Cantonese enjoys a higher standing than other Chinese langua
Macau
Macau or Macao the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, is a special administrative region on the western side of the Pearl River estuary in southern China. With a population of 653,100 in an area of 32.9 km2, it is the most densely populated region in the world. Macau was a colony of the Portuguese Empire, after Ming China leased the territory as a trading post in 1557. Governing under Chinese authority and sovereignty, Portugal was given perpetual occupation rights for Macau in 1887; the colony remained under Portuguese control until 1999. As a special administrative region, Macau's system of government is separate from that of mainland China. A sparsely populated collection of coastal islands, the territory has become a major resort city and the top destination for gambling tourism, it is the ninth-highest recipient of tourism revenue and its gaming industry is seven times larger than that of Las Vegas. Although the city has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, it has severe income inequality.
Macau has a high Human Development Index and the fourth-highest life expectancy in the world. The territory is urbanised and most development is built on reclaimed land; the first known written record of the name "Macau", rendered as "Ya/A Ma Gang", is in a letter dated 20 November 1555. The local inhabitants believed that the sea goddess Mazu had blessed and protected the harbour and called the waters around A-Ma Temple using her name; when Portuguese explorers first arrived in the area and asked for the place name, the locals thought they were asking about the temple and told them it was "Ma Kok". The earliest Portuguese spelling for this was Amaquão. Multiple variations were used until Amacão / Amacao and Macão / Macao became common during the 17th century standardising as Macao, Macau today. Macau Peninsula had many names in Chinese, including Jingao and Haojingao; the islands Taipa and Hengqin were collectively called Shizimen. These names would become Aomen, Oumún in Cantonese and translating as "bay gate" or "port gate", to refer to the whole territory.
The region is first known to have been settled during the Han dynasty. However, Macau did not develop as a major settlement until the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century; the first European visitor to reach China by sea was the explorer Jorge Álvares, who arrived in 1513. Merchants first established a trading post in Hong Kong waters at Tamão, beginning regular trade with nearby settlements in southern China. Military clashes between the Ming and Portuguese navies followed the expulsion of the Tamão traders in 1521. Despite the trade ban, Portuguese merchants continued to attempt settling on other parts of the Pearl River estuary settling on Macau. Luso-Chinese trade relations were formally reestablished in 1554 and Portugal soon after acquired a permanent lease for Macau in 1557; the small population of Portuguese merchants became a growing city. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Macau was created in 1576, by 1583, the Senate had been established to handle municipal affairs for the growing settlement.
Macau was at the peak of its prosperity as a major entrepôt during the late 16th century, providing a crucial connection in exporting Chinese silk to Japan during the Nanban trade period. Although the Portuguese were prohibited from fortifying Macau or stockpiling weapons, the Fortaleza do Monte was constructed in response to frequent Dutch naval incursions; the Dutch attempted to take the city in the 1622 Battle of Macau, but were repelled by the Portuguese. Macau entered a period of decline in the 1640s following a series of catastrophic events for the burgeoning colony: Portuguese access to trade routes was irreparably severed when Japan halted trade in 1639, Portugal revolted against Spain in 1640, Malacca fell to the Dutch in 1641. Maritime trade with China was banned in 1644 following the Qing conquest under the Haijin policies and limited only to Macau on a lesser scale while the new dynasty focused on eliminating surviving Ming loyalists. While the Kangxi Emperor lifted the prohibition in 1684, China again restricted trade under the Canton System in 1757.
Foreign ships were required to first stop at Macau before further proceeding to Canton. Qing authorities exercised a much greater role in governing the territory during this period; as the opium trade became more lucrative during the eighteenth century, Macau again became an important stopping point en route to China. Following the First Opium War and establishment of Hong Kong, Macau lost its role as a major port. Firecracker and incense production, as well as tea and tobacco processing, were vital industries in the colony during this time. Portugal was able to assert its sovereignty. Portugal occupied nearby Lapa and Montanha, but these would be returned to China by 1887, when perpetual occupation rights over Macau were formalised in the Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking; this agreement obligated Portugal from ceding Macau without Chinese approval. Despite occasional conflict between Cantonese authorities and the colonial government, Macau's status remained unchanged through the republican revolutions of b
Adoption of Chinese literary culture
Chinese writing and institutions were imported as a whole by Vietnam, Korea and other neighbouring states over an extended period. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD, followed by Confucianism as these countries developed strong central governments modelled on Chinese institutions. In Vietnam and Korea, for a shorter time in Japan and the Ryukyus, scholar-officials were selected using examinations on the Confucian classics modelled on the Chinese civil service examinations. Shared familiarity with the Chinese classics and Confucian values provided a common framework for intellectuals and ruling elites across the region. All of this was based on the use of Literary Chinese, which became the medium of scholarship and government across the region. Although each of these countries developed vernacular writing systems and used them for popular literature, they continued to use Chinese for all formal writing until it was swept away by rising nationalism around the end of the 19th century.
During the 20th century, several Japanese historians grouped these three countries with China as an East Asian cultural realm. According to Sadao Nishijima, it was characterized by Chinese writing, Mahayana Buddhism in Chinese translation and Chinese legal codes; the concept of an "East Asian world" has seen little interest from scholars in the other countries following its appropriation by Japanese militarists in terms such as the "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere". Nishijima is credited with coining the expressions Kanji bunka-ken and Chūka bunka-ken, which were borrowed into Chinese; the four countries are referred to as the "Sinic World" by some authors. At the beginning of the current era, the Chinese script was the only writing system available in East Asia. Classical works of the Warring States period and Han dynasty such as the Mencius, the Commentary of Zuo and Sima Qian's Historical Records were admired as models of prose style though the ages. Writers sought to emulate the classical style, writing in a form known as Literary Chinese.
Thus the written style, based on the Old Chinese of the classical period, remained static as the various varieties of Chinese developed and diverged to become mutually unintelligible, all distinct from the written form. Moreover, in response to phonetic attrition the spoken varieties developed compound words and new syntactic forms. In comparison, the literary language was admired for its terseness and economy of expression, but it was difficult to understand if read aloud in the local pronunciation; this divergence is a classic example of diglossia. All formal writing in China was done in Literary Chinese until the May Fourth Movement in 1919, after which it was replaced by Written Vernacular Chinese; this new form was based on the vocabulary and grammar of modern Mandarin dialects the Beijing dialect, is the written form of Modern Standard Chinese. Literary Chinese persisted for a time in journalism and government, but was replaced there too in the late 1940s. Buddhism reached China from central Asia in the first century AD, over the following centuries the Buddhist scriptures were translated into Literary Chinese.
Buddhist missionaries spread these texts throughout East Asia, students of the new religion learned the language of these sacred texts. Throughout East Asia, Literary Chinese was the language of scholarship. Although Vietnam and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, these were limited to popular literature. Chinese remained the medium of formal writing until it was displaced by vernacular writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though they did not use Chinese for spoken communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations, which provide clues to the pronunciation of Middle Chinese. Chinese words with these pronunciations were borrowed extensively into the local vernaculars, today comprise over half their vocabularies, thus Literary Chinese became the international language of scholarship in East Asia. Like Latin in Europe it allowed scholars from different lands to communicate, provided a stock of roots from which compound technical terms could be created.
Unlike Latin, Literary Chinese was not used for spoken communication, lacked the neutrality of Latin, being the language of an extant neighbouring state. Books in Literary Chinese were distributed. By the 7th century and earlier, woodblock printing had been developed in China. At first, it was used only to copy the Buddhist scriptures, but secular works were printed. By the 13th century, metal movable type used by government printers in Korea, but seems not to have been extensively used in China, Vietnam or Japan. At the same time manuscript reproduction remained important until the late 19th century; the northern part of Vietnam was occupied by Chinese empires and states for all of the period from 111 BC to 938 AD. When the country achieved independence, it continued to use Literary Chinese. At first Buddhist monks dominated scholarship in the country; the earliest extant writings by Vietnamese authors are poems from the late 10th century, in Chinese, by the Buddhist monks Lac Thuan and Khuông Việt.
After three short-lived dynasties, the Ly Dynasty was established with the support of Buddhist clergy, but soon came under increasing Confucian influence. A Confucian Temple of Literature was erected in the capital, Hanoi, in 1070. Civil service examinations on the Chinese model began in 1075, in the following year a college was established for training sons of the ruling el
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a regional intergovernmental organization comprising ten countries in Southeast Asia, which promotes intergovernmental cooperation and facilitates economic, security, military and sociocultural integration among its members and other countries in Asia. It regularly engages other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. A major partner of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, ASEAN maintains a global network of alliances and dialogue partners and is considered by many as a global powerhouse, the central union for cooperation in Asia-Pacific, a prominent and influential organisation, it is involved in numerous international affairs, hosts diplomatic missions throughout the world. ASEAN was preceded by an organization formed in 31 July 1961 called the Association of Southeast Asia, a group consisting of the Philippines, the Federation of Malaya, Thailand. ASEAN itself was created on 8 August 1967, when the foreign ministers of five countries: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, signed the ASEAN Declaration.
As set out in the Declaration, the aims and purposes of ASEAN are to accelerate economic growth, social progress, cultural development in the region, to promote regional peace and mutual assistance on matters of common interest, to provide assistance to each other in the form of training and research facilities, to collaborate for better utilisation of agriculture and industry to raise the living standards of the people, to promote Southeast Asian studies and to maintain close, beneficial co-operation with existing international organisations with similar aims and purposes. The creation of ASEAN was motivated by a common fear of communism, ASEAN achieved greater cohesion in the mid-1970s following a change in balance of power after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; the region's dynamic economic growth during the 1970s strengthened the organization, enabling ASEAN to adopt a unified response to Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1979. ASEAN's first summit meeting, held in Bali, Indonesia in 1976, resulted in an agreement on several industrial projects and the signing of a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, a Declaration of Concord.
The end of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s allowed ASEAN countries to exercise greater political independence in the region, in the 1990s ASEAN emerged as a leading voice on regional trade and security issues. In 1984, Brunei became ASEAN's sixth member and on 28 July 1995, Vietnam joined as the seventh member. Laos and Myanmar joined two years on 23 July 1997. Cambodia was to have joined at the same time as Laos and Burma, but its entry was delayed due to the country's internal political struggle, it joined on 30 April 1999, following the stabilization of its government. In 1990, Malaysia proposed the creation of an East Asia Economic Caucus composed of the members of ASEAN as well as China and South Korea, with the intention of counterbalancing the growing US influence in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and in Asia as a whole. However, the proposal failed because of heavy opposition from the Japan. Work for further integration continued, the ASEAN Plus Three, consisting of ASEAN, China and South Korea, was created in 1997.
In 1992, the Common Effective Preferential Tariff scheme was adopted as a schedule for phasing out tariffs with the goal to increase the "region's competitive advantage as a production base geared for the world market". This law would act as the framework for the ASEAN Free Trade Area, an agreement by member states concerning local manufacturing in ASEAN, it was signed on 28 January 1992 in Singapore. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a revival of the Malaysian proposal, known as the Chiang Mai Initiative, was put forward in Chiang Mai, Thailand, it called for better integration of the economies of ASEAN as well as the ASEAN Plus Three. The bloc focused on peace and stability in the region. On 15 December 1995, the Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty was signed with the intention of turning Southeast Asia into a nuclear-weapon-free zone; the treaty took effect on 28 March 1997. It became effective on 21 June 2001 after the Philippines ratified it banning all nuclear weapons in the region.
On 15 December 2008, member states met in Jakarta to launch a charter, signed in November 2007, with the aim of moving closer to "an EU-style community". The charter turned ASEAN into a legal entity and aimed to create a single free-trade area for the region encompassing 500 million people. President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stated: "This is a momentous development when ASEAN is consolidating and transforming itself into a community, it is achieved while ASEAN seeks a more vigorous role in Asian and global affairs at a time when the international system is experiencing a seismic shift". Referring to climate change and economic upheaval, he concluded: "Southeast Asia is no longer the bitterly divided, war-torn region it was in the 1960s and 1970s"; the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was seen as a threat to the goals envisioned by the charter, set forth the idea of a proposed human rights body to be discussed at a future summit in February 2009. This proposition caused controversy, as the body would not have the power to impose sanctions or punish countries which violated citizens' rights and would therefore be limited in effectiveness.
The body was established in 2009 as the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. In November 2012, the commission adopted the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. The'ASEAN W
Manchuria
Manchuria is a name first used in the 17th century by Japanese people to refer to a large geographic region in Northeast Asia. Depending on the context, Manchuria can either refer to a region that falls within the People's Republic of China or a larger region divided between China and Russia. "Manchuria" is used outside China to denote the geographical and historical region. This region is the traditional homeland of the Xianbei and Jurchen peoples, who built several states within the area historically; the definition of Manchuria can be any one of several regions of various size. These are, from smallest to largest: Northeast China: consisting of Heilongjiang and Liaoning; this is the area referred to as "Manchuria" in the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions. Inner Manchuria: the above, plus parts of modern Inner Mongolia, plus Chengde; the above, plus Outer Manchuria: the area from the Amur and Ussuri rivers to the Stanovoy Mountains and the Sea of Japan. In Russian administrative terms, Ussuri krai, southern Harbin oblast', Primorskiy kray.
These were part of the Qing dynasty China according to the Treaty of Nerchinsk that defined the border in the region between China and Russia, but were ceded to Russia by the unequal treaties of the Treaty of Aigun and the Treaty of Peking. The above, plus Sakhalin Island, included on Qing dynasty maps as part of Outer Manchuria though it is not explicitly mentioned in the Treaty of Nerchinsk; the island was included in Manchuria on maps made by the Japanese Shogunate and Russian Empire. Despite lines on maps and empires' political claims, the island was inhabited by Ainu people until the Soviet Union enforced an evacuation policy after 1945. Three centuries and a half must now pass away before entering upon the next act of the Manchu drama; the Nü-chêns had been scotched, but not killed, by their Mongol conquerors, one hundred and thirty-four years were themselves driven out of China, a pure native dynasty being re-established under the style of Ming, "Bright." During the ensuing two hundred years the Nü-chêns were scarcely heard of, the House of Ming being busily occupied in other directions.
Their warlike spirit, found scope and nourishment in the expeditions organised against Japan and Tan-lo, or Quelpart, as named by the Dutch, a large island to the south of the Korean peninsula. It may be noted here that "Manchuria" is unknown to the Chinese or to the Manchus themselves as a geographical expression; the present extensive home of the Manchus is spoken of as the Three Eastern Provinces, namely, Shêngking, or Liao-tung, or Kuan-tung and Heilungchiang or Tsitsihar. – Herbert A. Giles and the Manchus, 1912 "Manchuria" is a translation of the Japanese word Manshū, which dates from the 19th century; the name Manju was invented and given to the Jurchen people by Hong Taiji in 1635 as a new name for their ethnic group. According to the Japanese scholar Junko Miyawaki-Okada, the Japanese geographer Takahashi Kageyasu was the first to use the term "満州" as a place name in 1809 in the Nippon Henkai Ryakuzu, it was from that work that Westerners adopted the name. According to Mark C. Elliott, Katsuragawa Hoshū's 1794 work, the "Hokusa bunryaku", was where "満州" first appeared as a place name was in two maps included in the work, "Ashia zenzu" and "Chikyū hankyū sōzu" which were created by Katsuragawa.
"満州" began to appear as a place names in more maps created by Japanese like Kondi Jūzō, Takahashi Kageyasu, Baba Sadayoshi and Yamada Ren, these maps were brought to Europe by the Dutch Philipp von Siebold. According to Nakami Tatsuo, Philip Franz von Siebold was the one who brought the usage of the term Manchuria to Europeans after borrowing it from the Japanese, who were the first to use it in a geographic manner in the eighteenth century although neither the Manchu nor Chinese languages had a term in their own language equivalent to "Manchuria" as a geographic place name; the Manchu and Chinese languages had no such word as "Manchuria" and the word has imperialist connotations. According to Bill Sewell, it was Europeans who first started using the name Manchuria to refer to the location and it is "not a genuine geographic term"; the historian Gavan McCormack agreed with Robert H. G. Lee's statement that "The term Manchuria or Man-chou is a modern creation used by westerners and Japanese", with McCormack writing that the term Manchuria is imperialistic in nature and has no "precise meaning" since the Japanese deliberately promoted the use of "Manchuria" as a geographic name to promote its separation from China at the time they were setting up their puppet state of Manchukuo.
The Japanese had their own motive for deliberately spreading the usage of the term Manchuria. The historian Norman Smith wrote that "The term'Manchuria' is controversial". Professor Mariko Asano Tamanoi said that she "should use the term in quotation marks" when referring to Manchuria. In his 2012 dissertation on the Jurchen peo
