Early Life and Diplomatic Career
Although Zheng traced his ancestral roots to Minhou, a small town near Fuzhou, he was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu. In 1882, he obtained the intermediate degree in the imperial examinations, and three years later he joined the secretariat of the prominent statesman Li Hongzhang. In 1891, he was appointed secretary to the Chinese legation in Tokyo, and in the following years he performed consular duties at the Chinese consulates in Tsukiji, Osaka and Kobe respectively. During his tenure in Kobe, he worked closely with the Chinese community and played an instrumental part in establishing the Chinese guild (Zhōnghuá huìguǎn 中華會館) there. In Japan, Zheng also interacted with a number of influential politicians and scholars, such as Itō Hirobumi, Mutsu Munemitsu and Naitō Torajirō.
Read more about this topic: Zheng Xiaoxu
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, diplomatic and/or career:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say on stage.... Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier.”
—Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)