Lin Daoqian once established settlements in the port of Pattani in present-day Thailand, and the small independent state of Da Ni (Bo Ni), but was wiped out by the Ming government, together with the Portuguese in Siam, Cambodia and Macau. Lin Feng was expected to occupy Manila, but was wiped out by the Spaniards due to lack of domestic support.

Why did the pirates of foreigners play an active role in strengthening the country and enriching the people, and are still considered heroes, while our pirates were no worse than foreigners back then, but not only did they not play any role in strengthening the country and enriching the people, but they died at that time and had no place to be buried, and we are still ashamed to mention it today?

Is it our pirates who are too antagonistic to the government? Not. Because almost all the pirates in China are forced to go to Liangshan, and after going up the mountain, they are still thinking about Zhao'an and want to be an obedient businessman. From Wang to Zheng Chenggong, from Lin Daoqian to Lin Feng, there is a history of being recruited. Their recruitment is also sincere, and they are thieves again, or forced out by the government's distrust.

Is it that our government does not want to expand? Neither is it. At that time, the world was in an era without rules of the game, a world of the jungle, and what country did not want to invade others and expand its territory? Which of today's great powers was not formed by annexing other small countries? Throughout history, China has had to go out to invade and annex when it is strong, and it is only when it is weak that peace is the mainstay. At that time, expansion was the expression of human nature at the national level, and it was understandable.

Is it China's seafaring technology that is too backward? Not even more. The Chinese have long invented the compass, and at least until the Ming Dynasty, China's shipbuilding technology has always been ahead of the world. Zheng He was able to sail to the coast of East Africa because of advanced navigation technology.

Is it the lack of adventurous spirit on the part of the Chinese? Is it the lack of seafaring tradition among the Chinese? Is China's inland vast enough that there is no need for overseas expansion? …… None of these are any.

The Chinese government did not expand overseas, let alone use pirates to plunder overseas to achieve a strong country and rich people, simply because of the yellow earth culture of the Chinese. Hegel recognized this. In The Philosophy of History, he says: "China, India, Babylon...... The people who occupy the cultivated land are in seclusion. They did not share in the civilization given by the sea, and now their voyages, whatever the course of such voyages, did not affect their cultures, so that their relationship with the rest of world history was entirely sought out and studied by other peoples. Hegel concluded: "Western civilization is a blue ocean culture, while Eastern civilization is an earthy yellow inland culture." ”

There was once a widely controversial argument that summarized Chinese culture as the earthy yellow culture as opposed to the azure culture, and pointed out. China's future is to move towards a blue culture. Today, this statement, although inevitably radical and biased, is a sharp point to the problem of Chinese culture for thousands of years.

We cannot deny many excellent things in traditional culture, but we cannot help but see that the dead end of traditional culture is conservative and closed, and it is the rejection of foreign culture. Without this recognition, China will not be able to fully modernize. Isn't today's progress the result of being in line with the world? Market Economy, Human Rights and Freedoms. Science and democracy, these are not inherent in traditional culture, we have learned and accepted over the years, don't we progress?

From the perspective of the history of the merchant gang, we have the most developed business in the pre-capitalist society, and there were merchant gangs in the Ming and Qing dynasties that are still influential today. These were once called the germs of capitalism, but they did not grow into towering trees of capitalism. Even after the invasion of Western capitalism, it withered rapidly, and the reason for this was not this conservative earthy yellow earth? Culturally. Only the world is national.

How can we maintain and carry forward our own traditional culture if we stick to our own set of outdated cultures, refuse to learn from foreign cultures, and do not accept things that are recognized by the whole world? Only when we are guided by universal values can we make our own characteristics stand out. Stay young forever. What we should think about when we study the Shang Gang today is how the earthy yellow culture affects the Shang Gang and how to eliminate the Shang Gang.

Earthy culture tends to be self-contained, taking itself as the center of the world and its own system as the best system. He thinks that other countries and peoples are uncivilized barbarians. This kind of culture is the root cause of our ultimate failure to find a way to modernize in addition to the blue culture and from our own earthy yellow culture since the Opium War. If the direction is wrong, the way to find is also crooked and evil, and in the end it is still far from modern civilization. Since the Westernization Movement, China's path to modernization has been so tortuous, and there has been no progress for more than 100 years, because it has rejected the blue culture in the wrong direction.

If you think about it carefully, the conservative earthy yellow culture is not an inherent cultural tradition in China, nor is it something that is innate. Although Confucianism, the foundation of traditional Chinese culture, was born in the Spring and Autumn Period and became the mainstream ideology of official orthodoxy by the Han Dynasty, it was not so conservative and resting on its laurels until the Ming Dynasty.

The strength of the Han and Tang dynasties came from openness. Although the conditions at that time were mainly the opening up of the land, China had absorbed many factors of enrichment, from material to spiritual. In the Song and Yuan dynasties, in addition to cultural exchanges on land, there was also the content of maritime exchanges. Although the blue culture had not yet been formed at that time, and was more of an export of Chinese culture, it was by no means exclusive to foreign culture. The science of the Song Dynasty had misinterpreted Confucius's Confucianism, but it had not yet been transformed from thought into practice, and both the rulers and the people only regarded it as a doctrine.

The key to change was after the Ming Dynasty. The sea ban in the early Ming Dynasty magnified the unfavorable factors in traditional culture, and conservatism and arrogance became the main theme. Since then, we have not had the opportunity to communicate with the blue culture, and the vast country of China has become a place of isolation. By the Qing Dynasty, this characteristic was more pronounced and more stubborn.

The Opium War opened the door to the country, and the Chinese people did not learn from the outside, but resisted foreign culture more strongly. Even if you want to learn, it is "learning from the middle school for the body, learning from the West for use", using Western technology to maintain the basic civilization, rather than absorbing the blue culture. To this day, this ideology still surfaces from time to time, and the world is still viewed with this mentality.

Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the lack of understanding of the model of blue culture and the importance of maritime hegemony has determined that these two generations of governments should implement strict maritime bans, and also determined the people's misunderstanding of piracy. In this context, we have given up our original maritime leadership, and it is impossible to support or support pirate groups to expand, nor can we use maritime trade to strengthen the country and enrich our people.

From the suppression of pirate groups in the Ming Dynasty to Qianlong's refusal of foreign trade in the Qing Dynasty, to Cixi's use of the Boxer Rebellion to xenophobia. This is a road of fighting the blue culture with the earthy yellow culture, and it is also a road of failure. Modern China has been constantly beaten and repeatedly defeated, which is the inevitable result of this road. The failure of the Westernization Movement and many reforms was due to the fact that they did not want to give up the local yellow culture, and even tried to use modern science and technology to save the local yellow culture. (To be continued......)