At the end of the Qing dynasty, some foreign newspapers called China 'the sick man of East Asia'.
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An insult from the late Qing and early Republican years, modelled on 'the sick man of Europe', a name for the Ottoman Empire. Today it is used only when talking about that period.
culture
In 精武门 (1972), 李小龙's character 陈真 takes a sign bearing these words back to the Japanese school that sent it and defeats every fighter there, one of the best-known scenes in Chinese film.
