The Pendulum chime

I am watching Towards The Republic a second time now after many years. It's a tv serial out of China tracing the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the 1911 Chinese Revolution. The production is meticulous in creating the setting and undercurrent of that era. The camera follows the body movement of the main characters to bring out the feeling, the mood and their predicament. I also notice the frequent use of the sounding of the pendulum clock. In various scenes the ticking of a clock or the chime of the pendulum clock either gives a sense of urgency or eventuality/destiny. I also feel that the Qing royalty's obsession with the western mechanical clocks throws a pathetic irony of the situation during that time ie. their fascination with western ways and technology yet being trapped in a time warp of old traditions and practices.

Just a few days ago the Straits Times published an article entitled US-China tensions: Lessons from the Opium War by Leslie Fong . In the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century the demand for tea by Britain and the West was not matched by any needs from China of  western products. Hence China demanded only silver in exchange for the tea until the East India Company found the solution in opium. When the Chinese burnt 20,000 chests of Opium in 1840 in an attempt to terminate the opium addition/scourge a divided British parliament debated on whether to launch a war on China.  In the end the pro war faction won just by 5 votes. The young William Gladstone who would later become the PM for 4 terms remarked " I am in dread of the judgements of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China," a moral trepidation certainly. Fast forward 180 years and history repeats itself in terms of the trade imbalance but now the table has turned with the West fearing China's growing power and supremacy. The British Empire has fallen a long way too.

Now when I watch the tv serial and the pendulum clock sounds in the background I tend to think that the swing of the pendulum also symbolises the repeat of history as well as the rise and fall of nations and that everything has its own rhythm