Day 2 SCP

Today we had a lecture about "Foreign Relations of People's Republic of China (PRC)" which was very interesting, also because the guy speaking, Gabriel was honest and told his own opinions, although this did cause some arguments and discussions between each other.
He told us all about the history of China starting from 1840 with the first Opium war with the English and this is when the treaty of Nanjing and the treaty of Tianjin were signed. The second Opium war was in 1856 and these wars opened China to the world.
Then he went on about the Republic period (1912-1937) with the Japanese war, the foundation of the nation in 1949 and the Korean war with USA from 1951 to 1953. Until 1953, the government didn't have total control of whole of China and the Principles of peaceful coexistence were put in place.

Unlike I've heard from other locals, Gabriel also told us "we have freedom of speech" and he thought that freedom of speech is not a human right.
Some other interesting points are:
"The USA had 100 years between their war and democracy, why can't we have 50?"
This is quite true, because it has only taken China 30 years to get from zero to where it is today, so it's moving very fast. It's the second strongest economy in the world.

"Economic growth is number one" "It's going the right way"
Question about one thing China should learn from Western countries : "China needs to learn how to be strong" Yeah, the Chinese culture is not an aggressive one, it's quite defensive, take for example the Great Wall.

Also something else he said, about the pollution in China, well the developed countries are to be blamed for this because they come to China to set up factories and produce everything here, so that China has to pay for the decreased environment conditions. But if China does something to stop this, the companies will just move to another country such as Vietnam so to keep the strong economy here, China will have to keep up with it and unfortunately the consequences as well.

Xuanwu lake park