HOW FAR WILL THE DRAGON SWIM?
 AROUND THE WORLD AND MAYBE NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME
  

CHINESE TRAINING VESSEL ZHENGHE VISITS FRENCH POLYNESIA

The Chinese Navy Training ship ZHENGHE  is visiting Papeete , French Polynesia. The ship is named for a Chinese Admiral of 600 years ago who some historians now believe may have visited the Americas about 70 years before Columbus and planted colonies and returned to China via a circumnavigation of  the globe via a southern route. Author Gaven Menzies presents the evidence for  Zhenghe's circumnavigation in "1421 THE YEAR THE CHINESE DISCOVERED AMERICA". A hyper link to Amazon's presentation of the book appears below.

 Today's training ship ZHENGHE is on a 30,000 mile circumnavigation "good will tour".  Also below is a hyper link to the Peoples Daily, the source of this news item. The voyages of ZHENGHE both ancient, and the present on going one are highly interesting. The evidence presented in Mr. Menzies' book seems solid. I've read it and can recommend it as an entertaining and informative read. 

 We can only hope that the spirit of Admiral ZHENGHE will eventually permeate the Peoples Liberation Army's Navy. Zhenghe used "soft power" to influence and impress, and made friends for his ill fated emperor around the world. There are so far no indications that he had to resort to violence on his circumnavigation, something that can not be said for later European navigators. Unfortunately Zhenghe returned to a very different China than he left from and to a different emperor. His ships were left to rot and the colonies he planted abandoned and absorbed into Native American cultures. There is excellent genetic evidence presented in Mr. Menzie's book that the left behind Chinese sailors were absorbed and not killed off by the natives.

 Chinese naval behavior off of the coastal islands of Vietnam was the direct opposite of the behaviors exhibited by Admiral Zhenghe. Perhaps the naming of a training ship after the good admiral may be a sign that the PLAN may yet adopt the naval values and culture of the civilized world and pull back from its aggressive stance relative to its coastal neighbors. Thug/Bully tactics were definitely not what Zhenghe was all about.

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Source for News story: People's Daily: Click on hyper-link below
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90786/7898885.html