French Quotes
Nguyen Ai Quoc was early pseudonym. In 1945 at the end of World War II, the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek invaded Vietnam instead of attacking the Japanese. 200,000 Chinese troops occupied Vietnam when the war ended. Ho Chi Min and other Vietnamese nationalists diplomatically worked to restore the order of things before the war and have the French return to Vietnam. Many were very critical of Ho for enabling the French Colonials to return with 15,000 troops, as they replaced the Chinese forces. After he made this statement, the Vietnamese then ousted the French and gained their independence but are continuously wary of China, their neighbor to the North and traditional enemy. To this day, Chinese maps refer to Vietnam as “The South-East China Province.”
He was a major critic of French Quebec Separatism and some elements of French Canadian culture including his perception of sexism. His French Quebec Separatist enemies translated passages of this work into French and (some say deliberately) mistranslated this line to read: Quebec women are sows. The quotation was bandied about Canada in the original version as well as the mistranslation.
The 1977 Quebec language law decreed that all immigrants be educated in French, that all businesses transact in French, that English-named towns, rivers, and mountains be Frenchified, and that all English (or even bilingual) commercial signs be outlawed. Other minorities could only transact business in French. After great protest and ridicule the Quebec Parliament amended the law to allow French signs to contain another language provided that the font of the other language was no bigger than half that of the French.
The Boxers were against Western and Christian influence. The Government was too weak to protect the foreigners or the Chinese Christians. So the Western Powers used their soldiers and diplomats to defend the Western Enclaves and Christian Churches not unlike the situation with the Taliban in Afghanistan a century later.
