The Rise of Nanyang: from Piggy to Head of State

1852, Xiamen dock. Chen Yaohua, a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, traveled through time and opened his eyes to find that he had become a "piglet" being sold. He would be put on a ship tomorrow morning and transported to a tin mine in Borneo to die. On the bottom of the cabin, three hundred compatriots were squeezed into a small space, and they were thrown directly into the sea if they died of illness. When everyone accepted their fate, Chen Yaohua clenched his fists: I have read history and know that this road leads to mountains of bones; I have also read engineering and know how to turn knowledge into power. After a night of riots, he fled with the survivors to the interior of Borneo. Starting from the first furnace of molten iron and the first barrel of gunpowder, a foothold was carved out in the rain forest. When the Dutch fleet appeared on the horizon, the former "piggy" was already standing on the newly built fort, behind him were five thousand new troops, two steam gunboats, and a newly born republic. Seventy years later, the Paris Peace Conference. When the representative of this country who stood up from a pool of blood sat at the negotiating table and sat on an equal footing with the great powers, everyone remembered those words—— "What determines the fate of a country is never the size of the land, but whether the people on this land have the bones to stand up."