This is very interesting and I enjoyed it. I think the analysis of the memetic role of the Confucian academia in constraining the power of the emperors is probably quite right. But it's not enough to explain the situation.
The medieval Europeans did not accept the legitimacy of multiple states. They continuously invented new ways to tie themselves to imperial Roman titles ("Rex Romanorum," "Holy Roman Emperor," "Roman Catholicism"). The word "Catholic" means universal! Even HRE Carlos V felt this! In 1521, at the Diet of Worms, he said "“the empire from of old had not many masters, but one, and it is our intention to be that one.” That's explicitly saying multinational political organization is illegitimate.
Westphalia was remarkable because it was the first time in European political history that multinational political organization was accepted as per se legitimate! The meme of universalism is a core, core part of Christianity and European political thought up until very very recently.
I respectfully disagree. For starters, the discussion veers more than once into the very trap of assuming uniformity of China in time and in space right after (correctly) identifying and warning about said bias. But more importantly, it utterly misses the elephant in the room. Specifically, the Chinese writing system. Sure, it's super clunky inasmuch as it takes at least 8 years to learn in school. But crucially, this also means that people can speak totally differently, yet write exactly the same. In the pre-translation app world, when people from say Southern China visited Beijing, they would quickly realize they were speaking mutually unintelligible languages. No problem - then they would simply whip out a pencil and a paper and start writing.
I believe it was this far more than anything else that kept China together even in times of fragmentation. Were it not for this, chances are the Chinese would long ago have fractured into a group of related but separate nations, somewhat like the Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages of Europe, or similar groupings worldwide.
This feels like an incomplete answer -- after all, there's a vast number of countries whose elites use Modern Standard Arabic today (and would've used Qur'anic Arabic 150 years ago), yet don't unite. Europe continued using Latin as a lingua franca until French replaced it in the 1600s/1700s. (And of course the Roman Catholic Church did remain united, actually -- with the easterners insisting on Greek or Church Slavonic excepted -- until the success of the Protestant Reformation, which rapidly led to the end of the universality of Latin).
Maybe the inheritance rules of Salic law prevented the Franks/the empire of Charlemagne from being eternally united like China? (One of my hobbyhorses is the extent to which modern Western civilization is not actually particularly Roman, but is very very clearly and directly Frankish). But that feels too simple -- surely if the conditions were there Salic law would not have been a barrier (and in fact Salic law and eternal division were abandoned pretty early in the Middle Ages).
In my non-academic experience of Arabic, it actually varies enough between countries to qualify as separate yet related languages. Omitting most vowels (as in any Semitic script ultimately derived from proto-Sinaitic) allows for that.
Am also uncertain as to what exactly you mean by "The West" - this category seems easily geographically stretchable and squishable and is thus imprecise. The Franks really only ever influenced the westernmost 1/3 of the European continent even at their peak. Europe extends far further east, west and south.
Oh, yes, of course. My point is that there is a vast area where, for centuries, educated people could've communicated with each other using written Qur'anic Arabic (even if their spoken dialects would've differed). Similarly, there is a vast area which in the Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church (this is basically what I mean by "the West"), where educated people could've communicated using Latin, even if their languages would've differed (and of course many would not even have spoken Romance languages at all, which were rarely thought of as separate languages until Petrarch).
This doesn't seem that different from the ability of educated Chinese people from different parts of China to communicate using written Classical Chinese -- except that Classical Chinese writing, with its character system, seems *harder* to learn than Qur'anic Arabic or Classical Latin. So this being the cause feels remarkable.
Educated people were few and far between in places you list. Vast majority of population illiterate. And not merely the lower classes, I do not think Charlemagne was literate, let alone knew Latin. But in China, even the lowliest illiterate peasant could memorize and recognize at least those characters that mattered to him directly (one of the words for "hotel" is literally "big alcoholic drink shop".)
The author's theory of why China stayed united relies on the sensibilities of educated, literate people, and on ideas passed down through classical Chinese writing. And educated people have a disproportionate effect on society -- consider the Protestant Reformation, or even the fact that the leaders of the Xinhai Revolution had Western or Japanese educations (vanishingly rare in China at that time).
Arabic writing system is not a pictographic language, last time I checked. Alphabets, abugidas and syllabaries do not count here, since they are qualitatively different yet mutually similar. Literacy in those systems is an all-or-nothing thing, it makes zero sense to learn half the alphabet. But literacy in the Chinese writing system comes in many degrees. This renders ut qualitatively different. Therefore, your argument about Arabic above, for all of its considerable erudition, seems largely irrelevant to me here. The writing system is the main reason, everything else, no matter how impressive-sounding, is frankly just garnish. Maybe imagining it as an "emoji language" may help you see the qualitative difference here...
Why would the pictographic language help unity? It seems easier to imagine it fostering division because it is harder to learn than an alphabet like Latin or an abugida like Arabic. But Pines's book has one of its hypotheses being that Chinese unity was bolstered by unity of a single written language across Chinese elites. That feels unlikely to me given the experiences of both Islamic and Western civilizations.
But then fewer people will learn it, and fewer people will become attached to concepts that are predominantly spread using the written language. You can appeal to some kind of counterintuitive indirect effect here (maybe if people put more effort into learning something, they're more attached to it), but I just don't see why that would predominate.
Like, there are still many parts of the classical Chinese canon untranslated into English. Part of the reason for this must just be that Classical Chinese is very difficult to learn.
Again you seem to utterly ignore the fact that literacy in Chinese is not an all-or nothing thing, but comes in many degrees.
The argument that "then fewer people would learn it" is frankly a bit silly. I suggest you to acquaint yourself with the basics of the Chinese writing system. Then it may become quite obvious (and you do not need that much, I am very far from fluent there.) Please do not take this as a personal criticism: it's just that you insist on tacit assumptions derived solely from non-pictographic writing systems. I can relate ro that, for I could never understand it myself without knowing at least the general layout from within. Different rules.
(Far as Classical Chinese, it is so pervaded with multiple meanings that, for example, the first line of the Daodejing literally has 2000-5000 different English translations, depending on the source. This renders all of John Searle's dumbotronic "Chinese Room" thought experiment a completely silly fallacy - it turns out Classical Chinese is so ambiguous that merely "knowing the factographic rules" is pretty much tantamount to passing the Turing test!)
See, the human sense of aesthetics dictates that what really strikes us as profound and intriguing is stuff that is right at the intersection between what can and what cannot be understood. What can be understood is boring. What cannot is unfathomable. Therefore, that which lies at the intersection is likely to be experienced (rightly or wrongly) as very profound. And that is EXACTLY how the Chinese writing system appeared to its users, barring maybe only the most erudite of the literati. It's the difference between saying that someone is a "tough guy" (yaaawn, YR!) and saying he is an "overbearing and eristic homosapiens." In the latter case, most people will have no clue what it even means, yet will be utterly convinced it must be something utterly wonderful.
Similarly to the number of Western rulers who were called Caesar. The last of whom was deposed in 1946, is still alive, and was later elected President of his country.
But being the Tsar or the Kaiser is not a claim of exclusive, divinely-ordained, universal jurisdiction over all culturally Roman lands. Being a caliph is a claim of exclusive, divinely-ordained, universal jurisdiction over all Islamic lands.
> the Chinese are very aware from their history of the way that ritual inferiority inexorably leads to loss of sovereignty and political submission...[and] they refuse to accept such a fate, because they believe that it is incompatible with the power and prestige that China deserves.
that's spot on, and it's something very deeply felt, even for someone mostly western educated. i'm surprised this is perceptible to someone non chinese, and articulated so clearly. it's the polar opposite strategy to (meiji) japan, and i don't think it could have been otherwise
Lotta great stuff in here, and I’m always glad to find a fellow fan of Christopher Beckwith, that mad reincarnation of Paul Pelliot, whom I once heard at a conference speculate that monotheism might be steppe export, reaching the Hebrews via the Mitanni.
Couple stray thoughts: in West Eurasian thought, the empire was also a singular thing, particularly when you’re dealing with the Roman-derived imperium. There’s only one right to rule the world, as even the Ottomans were claiming well into the sixteenth century (and likely privately believed well after).
Also, the idea of the emperor as high priest chimes really well with the Aztec conception of the office. (Indeed, it was Montezuma II’s prophetic duties rather than the council’s strategic read that stayed their hand from initially annihilating the weird bandits in the floating houses). I’m sure I could find some insane theory to tie this all together, using the scholarly article I (seriously) ran across one time arguing that Mayan might be a Sino-Tibetan language.
I knew I would be in for a wild ride when I got to the part of Beckwith's book where he describes Aristotle as a stenographer for steppe wisdom. I didn't know he felt that way about monotheism too! I am so jealous that you got to meet him.
I hadn’t actually read him at the time (and Empires of the Silk Road hadn’t yet come out). But since I’ve become a big fan of his stuff, as wildly speculative as a lot of it is. I haven’t read his books on Koguryo or phoronyms, but his other books are a lot of fascinating fun. Was the Buddha a Scythian? Maybe?
Actually, separation of worldly and religious authority is very much a European outlier, i e. the exception rather than the rule. And it grew serendipitously out of the long-standing conflict between the Popes and the Holy Roman emperors. If you wish to know more about how that process came to be, just google "Canossa."
Far as the Aztecs and the Mayas, here a super interesting curveball: the Nahuatl word for "hill" is "tepeTL" (my emphasis.) In Turkish, it's "tepe". In Phoenician it's "tophet". Could be a random linguistic convergence, but it sure opens up a lot of interesting possibilities...
So glad you find it intriguing! And to also connect back to China, An Lushan was almost certainly an ethnic Göktürk. The famous Chinese poet Li Bai supposedly had some Turkish ancestry. And I also believe that when the Seljuks first showed up in Anatolia, their ruling class was reputed to have fusion East Asian features, later largely lost via further mixing...
On his mother's side; his father was Soghdian (An was the Chinese family name taken by Soghdians from Bukhara who entered Tang service), as discussed in Pulleyblank's Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan. Lushan is the modern Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese transcription (roughly lok-san in the contemporary pronunciation) of a Soghdian name equivalent to Roxanne, and thus Iranian in origin (as the Soghdians were).
There was a good deal of Turkic/Mongolic (Xianbei) admixture with the upper classes during the period of disorder following the end of the Han dynasty, as many of the states in north China were founded by Turkic peoples, particularly the Tabghach, founders of the Toba Wei state, whose number included ancestors of the founder of the Tang dynasty (his mother was the daughter of a leading Xianbei general), and there's solid recognition of the influence of steppe cultures upon Chinese culture (The Ballade of Mulan, for example, is set in the Toba Wei state and Mulan does such things as apply yellow face powder, a Turkic custom); that was one of the major interests of my classical Chinese teacher, who specialized in the literature of the period between the Han and the Sui/Tang.
Tophet was not the word for "hill" but might have come from a word meaning "hearth," as it was the name given to areas where fire ceremonies (often involving child sacrifice) were carried out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tophet#Etymology
As for the -tl in tepetl, that was a suffix with three forms (-tl following vowels, -tli following most consonants, and -li following l), usually called the absolutive suffix, which most nouns took when they were not affixed to indicate possession or plurality, roughly, and was dropped when it was compounded with a following noun. Thus, nan-tli 'mother', to-nan 'our mother' (prefixed and thus no -tli is used), and Tonantzin 'our honored mother', the epithet of several Aztec goddesses and then used as a title for Mary.
This is all well and good, but you failed to address the question posed. Why are there so many Chinese people?
At the end of the day the answer to that is simple and complex - because at some point in the past China must have had a sustained period of high fertility and/or low mortality. Thats it, it cant be anything else.
And while the text above is well written (as always), informative and mostly free of factual error (no, there has not been a "destruction of industrial capacity" in the west) it really doesnt contain any explanation as to when and why the high fertility and/or low mortality occurred. I guess you could argue that the "why" part is lurking somewhere implicitly in the story told, but since there isnt even an exposition of how China managed to have that demographic growth *despite* the super bloody civil wars, rebellions and conquests which wiped out millions of Chinese from the "so many Chinese" number, at best this implicit answer is very unsatisfactory.
Demographics is a lot more boring than historical story telling or theories about how ancient scholars meme'd an ideology into being (particularly appealing to contemporary online folk which comprise your readership). But if youre going to ask a demographic question, you need a demographic answer, boring or not.
This is a boring take, I’m sorry. The review quickly addresses the answer - big country, lots of farmland etc - and then goes on to a far more interesting question around why so many people are happy to call themselves Chinese. It’s not an article about demography and also is a refreshing change from the overplayed and reductive “geography is destiny” narratives
It seems to me that the existence of large numbers of people in the Chinese heartland is easily explained by the existence of lots of productive farmland. What really demands explanation is the fact that all of those people are more or less culturally unified and identify with the "Han" ethnicity, which is a cultural and ideological development.
Not sure if that works. Maybe. First, India. Now bigger than China. And cant really tell a similar story about memes and what have you.
Second, lots of places across the world have productive farmland. But China isnt just a large it also has/had high population density. Why was the density higher in those places than others?
Third, while your reply possibly makes sense, the thesis remains to be proven. North America also has ton of productive farmland. Why didn't pre-contact California have higher population density than 14th century China? I need the logical links from premise to conclusion here.
To elaborate a bit - the reasons for high fertility are actually pretty well known: early and near universal marriage relative to other places (except for India, this explanation also works for India). But why? The reasons dont seem to have anything to do with literati and scholar bureaucrats meme'ing a particular ideology into existence.
Cool sounding stories are not always the correct stories.
"Why didn't pre-contact California have higher population density than 14th century China?"
Water -- lack thereof in California. Pre-contact California had about as many people as the limited water supply could support. China had a lot more water, and therefore could support a much higher population density. Of course there were other factors too, such as the Californian Indians remaining in the Stone Age -- although some might argue that was a consequence of the low population density and thus of the then-limited water supply (prior to modern water diversion schemes).
Cultivated maize only reached the territory of the modern USA about 1500 years ago, if I am not mistaken, while rice has been cultivated in China for more than 10 000 years, and other grains for many millennia, too. I think that is sufficient as a first answer. On top of that, indigenous Californians seem to have actively resisted agriculture, but that story would be more complicated to tell.
I don't really feel qualified to answer. Jared Diamond argues that south to north adaption of agricultural crops in the Americas was harder than east - west adaption in Eurasia, but New Mexico doesn't seem that different from Mexico City.
In any case, that only takes us to New Mexico, Cahokia and finally Ontario. California is a different story - Graeber and Wengrow argue for an active cultural resistance to agriculture among Californian gatherers. This is just as much a history of ideas approach as Pines' book about Chinese imperial ideology. Again, I don't feel qualified to judge Graeber and Wengrow's thesis.
The tianxia thing means that a bunch of people who have about as much in common as a Romanian does with a Castilian person all think of themselves as being in the same ethnic group. Europe is also suffering from the effects of having had 2 massive industrial wars fought on its territory in less than 30 years, along with the effects of the Nazi extermination camps.
I think it’s boring only if you lack curiosity and are looking for clickbaity just-so stories. Explain North America then. Big country, lots of farmland etc. And if the answer is so obvious why even pose the question in the first place and then pretend to write a rather lengthy article in response? Explain India for that matter. None of this “unity” stuff yet more populous than even China.
And hey, I already said the answer was probably boring.
>They knew that if their elites were absorbed into the global elite monoculture blob, if they began listening to the same music and venerating the same holy symbols and adopting the same discursive conventions, then the inevitable result would be absorption into an alien empire.
What's the big deal, if China was happy to rationalize 100 years of mongol rule? Is it that the president sits in Washington and not Beijing? The Yuan emperors didn't spend all their time in Beijing either. Hard to see why on one hand the Chinese literati are happy to throw their lot in with the steppe barbarians but "globohomo" is a bridge too far.
It's probably the fact that race had a distinct role in the original, colonial time when the attitude to Western hegemony was formed. While Manchu or Mongol rulers also had discriminatory practices, these were primarily culturally determined and if you decided to pick up those practices (and got good enough to be authentic) you could play the part. You might look a little different but those tended to be smoothed over due to the fact that ethnicity with geographically close states can be a bit of a spectrum, so they had seen more Han looking Mongols/Manchu before and vice a versa. No such luck with the race divide.
I dunno about China's intellectual history being rich--my overall impression throughout this essay was of a solipsist and narcissistic culture, isolated and self-absorbed, stuck in a local basin of cultural space.
I thought over and over, "what a pity for the Chinese that India is not (geographically) closer to China".
Very good review. Fascinating parallels between Confucian literati and the Muslim ulama, who were/are a similar scholarly institution parallel to the state. They acted primarily as judges and lawyers but could also take on high level bureaucratic positions at times. Much could be written about how they aided in the conversion of the barbarians who would come storming into Islamic heartlands, eventually spreading Islam all the way into Central Asia.
If we consider empires as memetic organizing principles, then many aspects of ancient Rome are alive and well. Likewise, some of the Mongol conceptions of personal freedom promulgated in the time of Genghis seem familiar to us today, including the rights of women and the illegitimacy of theocracy. Genghis also opposed the construction of irrigation systems. A weirdly logical measure that promoted free movement of the Mongol cavalry, as well as controlling the size of cities and the demand for agricultural slaves.
> "Genghis also opposed the construction of irrigation systems"
The mongols actively destroyed vast portions of Iran and Iraq's irrigation infrastructure, which is where a fair portion of that "30 million dead" came from.
No one hated the Mongols more than the ruling classes that they displaced.
Cities that accepted the yoke were generally spared, cities that resisted— usually because of rulers who wished to maintain their power and their loot— were ruthlessly destroyed.
Like city walls, irrigation underpins entrenched vampiric power structures and populations tied to agriculture. Mass agriculture is the basis of imperial military power and the root of slavery on a mass scale.
Not much has changed, really. The Mongols are coming, I can hear the hoof beats beyond the gate.
This was great. My high school education and reading has given me only a passing recognition of Chinese history, but I'm glad to hear they disprove Guns Germs and Steel as well.
I noted another thing. I've seen it opined that the American rebellion was the only rebellion where people came out the better after, and that was because it was a rebellion run by the literati. It seems China has actually done that a dozen times. Unclear whether it was a feature or a bug.
This gets me thinking that reading about the Warring States/Qin/Han period (maybe even the Book of Lord Shang) is actually the right play for getting a crash course on Chinese thinking
Wow, the part about reframing that 'why so many Chinese people' question was brilliant! It's amazing how a shift in perspectiv can clarify a complex problem. Totally makes me think about system boundaries and emergent properties. Super insightful review!
This is very interesting and I enjoyed it. I think the analysis of the memetic role of the Confucian academia in constraining the power of the emperors is probably quite right. But it's not enough to explain the situation.
The medieval Europeans did not accept the legitimacy of multiple states. They continuously invented new ways to tie themselves to imperial Roman titles ("Rex Romanorum," "Holy Roman Emperor," "Roman Catholicism"). The word "Catholic" means universal! Even HRE Carlos V felt this! In 1521, at the Diet of Worms, he said "“the empire from of old had not many masters, but one, and it is our intention to be that one.” That's explicitly saying multinational political organization is illegitimate.
Westphalia was remarkable because it was the first time in European political history that multinational political organization was accepted as per se legitimate! The meme of universalism is a core, core part of Christianity and European political thought up until very very recently.
^^^ Great point, I am also curious why China's efforts at unitary-empire-memes succeeded where Europe's failed.
I respectfully disagree. For starters, the discussion veers more than once into the very trap of assuming uniformity of China in time and in space right after (correctly) identifying and warning about said bias. But more importantly, it utterly misses the elephant in the room. Specifically, the Chinese writing system. Sure, it's super clunky inasmuch as it takes at least 8 years to learn in school. But crucially, this also means that people can speak totally differently, yet write exactly the same. In the pre-translation app world, when people from say Southern China visited Beijing, they would quickly realize they were speaking mutually unintelligible languages. No problem - then they would simply whip out a pencil and a paper and start writing.
I believe it was this far more than anything else that kept China together even in times of fragmentation. Were it not for this, chances are the Chinese would long ago have fractured into a group of related but separate nations, somewhat like the Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages of Europe, or similar groupings worldwide.
This feels like an incomplete answer -- after all, there's a vast number of countries whose elites use Modern Standard Arabic today (and would've used Qur'anic Arabic 150 years ago), yet don't unite. Europe continued using Latin as a lingua franca until French replaced it in the 1600s/1700s. (And of course the Roman Catholic Church did remain united, actually -- with the easterners insisting on Greek or Church Slavonic excepted -- until the success of the Protestant Reformation, which rapidly led to the end of the universality of Latin).
Maybe the inheritance rules of Salic law prevented the Franks/the empire of Charlemagne from being eternally united like China? (One of my hobbyhorses is the extent to which modern Western civilization is not actually particularly Roman, but is very very clearly and directly Frankish). But that feels too simple -- surely if the conditions were there Salic law would not have been a barrier (and in fact Salic law and eternal division were abandoned pretty early in the Middle Ages).
In my non-academic experience of Arabic, it actually varies enough between countries to qualify as separate yet related languages. Omitting most vowels (as in any Semitic script ultimately derived from proto-Sinaitic) allows for that.
Am also uncertain as to what exactly you mean by "The West" - this category seems easily geographically stretchable and squishable and is thus imprecise. The Franks really only ever influenced the westernmost 1/3 of the European continent even at their peak. Europe extends far further east, west and south.
Oh, yes, of course. My point is that there is a vast area where, for centuries, educated people could've communicated with each other using written Qur'anic Arabic (even if their spoken dialects would've differed). Similarly, there is a vast area which in the Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church (this is basically what I mean by "the West"), where educated people could've communicated using Latin, even if their languages would've differed (and of course many would not even have spoken Romance languages at all, which were rarely thought of as separate languages until Petrarch).
This doesn't seem that different from the ability of educated Chinese people from different parts of China to communicate using written Classical Chinese -- except that Classical Chinese writing, with its character system, seems *harder* to learn than Qur'anic Arabic or Classical Latin. So this being the cause feels remarkable.
Educated people were few and far between in places you list. Vast majority of population illiterate. And not merely the lower classes, I do not think Charlemagne was literate, let alone knew Latin. But in China, even the lowliest illiterate peasant could memorize and recognize at least those characters that mattered to him directly (one of the words for "hotel" is literally "big alcoholic drink shop".)
The author's theory of why China stayed united relies on the sensibilities of educated, literate people, and on ideas passed down through classical Chinese writing. And educated people have a disproportionate effect on society -- consider the Protestant Reformation, or even the fact that the leaders of the Xinhai Revolution had Western or Japanese educations (vanishingly rare in China at that time).
Arabic writing system is not a pictographic language, last time I checked. Alphabets, abugidas and syllabaries do not count here, since they are qualitatively different yet mutually similar. Literacy in those systems is an all-or-nothing thing, it makes zero sense to learn half the alphabet. But literacy in the Chinese writing system comes in many degrees. This renders ut qualitatively different. Therefore, your argument about Arabic above, for all of its considerable erudition, seems largely irrelevant to me here. The writing system is the main reason, everything else, no matter how impressive-sounding, is frankly just garnish. Maybe imagining it as an "emoji language" may help you see the qualitative difference here...
Why would the pictographic language help unity? It seems easier to imagine it fostering division because it is harder to learn than an alphabet like Latin or an abugida like Arabic. But Pines's book has one of its hypotheses being that Chinese unity was bolstered by unity of a single written language across Chinese elites. That feels unlikely to me given the experiences of both Islamic and Western civilizations.
Exactly because it's harder to learn. That is key.
But then fewer people will learn it, and fewer people will become attached to concepts that are predominantly spread using the written language. You can appeal to some kind of counterintuitive indirect effect here (maybe if people put more effort into learning something, they're more attached to it), but I just don't see why that would predominate.
Like, there are still many parts of the classical Chinese canon untranslated into English. Part of the reason for this must just be that Classical Chinese is very difficult to learn.
Again you seem to utterly ignore the fact that literacy in Chinese is not an all-or nothing thing, but comes in many degrees.
The argument that "then fewer people would learn it" is frankly a bit silly. I suggest you to acquaint yourself with the basics of the Chinese writing system. Then it may become quite obvious (and you do not need that much, I am very far from fluent there.) Please do not take this as a personal criticism: it's just that you insist on tacit assumptions derived solely from non-pictographic writing systems. I can relate ro that, for I could never understand it myself without knowing at least the general layout from within. Different rules.
(Far as Classical Chinese, it is so pervaded with multiple meanings that, for example, the first line of the Daodejing literally has 2000-5000 different English translations, depending on the source. This renders all of John Searle's dumbotronic "Chinese Room" thought experiment a completely silly fallacy - it turns out Classical Chinese is so ambiguous that merely "knowing the factographic rules" is pretty much tantamount to passing the Turing test!)
See, the human sense of aesthetics dictates that what really strikes us as profound and intriguing is stuff that is right at the intersection between what can and what cannot be understood. What can be understood is boring. What cannot is unfathomable. Therefore, that which lies at the intersection is likely to be experienced (rightly or wrongly) as very profound. And that is EXACTLY how the Chinese writing system appeared to its users, barring maybe only the most erudite of the literati. It's the difference between saying that someone is a "tough guy" (yaaawn, YR!) and saying he is an "overbearing and eristic homosapiens." In the latter case, most people will have no clue what it even means, yet will be utterly convinced it must be something utterly wonderful.
Can't decide if the word you're looking for to translate the role of the emperor as culturally unifying ritual divine conduit is "caliph" or "pharaoh"
Augustus.
Similarly to the number of Western rulers who were called Caesar. The last of whom was deposed in 1946, is still alive, and was later elected President of his country.
But being the Tsar or the Kaiser is not a claim of exclusive, divinely-ordained, universal jurisdiction over all culturally Roman lands. Being a caliph is a claim of exclusive, divinely-ordained, universal jurisdiction over all Islamic lands.
> the Chinese are very aware from their history of the way that ritual inferiority inexorably leads to loss of sovereignty and political submission...[and] they refuse to accept such a fate, because they believe that it is incompatible with the power and prestige that China deserves.
that's spot on, and it's something very deeply felt, even for someone mostly western educated. i'm surprised this is perceptible to someone non chinese, and articulated so clearly. it's the polar opposite strategy to (meiji) japan, and i don't think it could have been otherwise
Lotta great stuff in here, and I’m always glad to find a fellow fan of Christopher Beckwith, that mad reincarnation of Paul Pelliot, whom I once heard at a conference speculate that monotheism might be steppe export, reaching the Hebrews via the Mitanni.
Couple stray thoughts: in West Eurasian thought, the empire was also a singular thing, particularly when you’re dealing with the Roman-derived imperium. There’s only one right to rule the world, as even the Ottomans were claiming well into the sixteenth century (and likely privately believed well after).
Also, the idea of the emperor as high priest chimes really well with the Aztec conception of the office. (Indeed, it was Montezuma II’s prophetic duties rather than the council’s strategic read that stayed their hand from initially annihilating the weird bandits in the floating houses). I’m sure I could find some insane theory to tie this all together, using the scholarly article I (seriously) ran across one time arguing that Mayan might be a Sino-Tibetan language.
I knew I would be in for a wild ride when I got to the part of Beckwith's book where he describes Aristotle as a stenographer for steppe wisdom. I didn't know he felt that way about monotheism too! I am so jealous that you got to meet him.
I hadn’t actually read him at the time (and Empires of the Silk Road hadn’t yet come out). But since I’ve become a big fan of his stuff, as wildly speculative as a lot of it is. I haven’t read his books on Koguryo or phoronyms, but his other books are a lot of fascinating fun. Was the Buddha a Scythian? Maybe?
Actually, separation of worldly and religious authority is very much a European outlier, i e. the exception rather than the rule. And it grew serendipitously out of the long-standing conflict between the Popes and the Holy Roman emperors. If you wish to know more about how that process came to be, just google "Canossa."
Oh, I’m aware of the history of division of temporal and spiritual authority in the West. It goes back further than Canossa, though.
I don't think I've ever claimed it did not. But Canossa was where it got formalized, even if it was done for purely ad hoc reasons at the time.
Far as the Aztecs and the Mayas, here a super interesting curveball: the Nahuatl word for "hill" is "tepeTL" (my emphasis.) In Turkish, it's "tepe". In Phoenician it's "tophet". Could be a random linguistic convergence, but it sure opens up a lot of interesting possibilities...
Ha! Love it! Somewhere, the Güneş Dili (“Sun Language”) theorists who claim Turkish is the Ursprache are cheering…
So glad you find it intriguing! And to also connect back to China, An Lushan was almost certainly an ethnic Göktürk. The famous Chinese poet Li Bai supposedly had some Turkish ancestry. And I also believe that when the Seljuks first showed up in Anatolia, their ruling class was reputed to have fusion East Asian features, later largely lost via further mixing...
On his mother's side; his father was Soghdian (An was the Chinese family name taken by Soghdians from Bukhara who entered Tang service), as discussed in Pulleyblank's Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan. Lushan is the modern Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese transcription (roughly lok-san in the contemporary pronunciation) of a Soghdian name equivalent to Roxanne, and thus Iranian in origin (as the Soghdians were).
There was a good deal of Turkic/Mongolic (Xianbei) admixture with the upper classes during the period of disorder following the end of the Han dynasty, as many of the states in north China were founded by Turkic peoples, particularly the Tabghach, founders of the Toba Wei state, whose number included ancestors of the founder of the Tang dynasty (his mother was the daughter of a leading Xianbei general), and there's solid recognition of the influence of steppe cultures upon Chinese culture (The Ballade of Mulan, for example, is set in the Toba Wei state and Mulan does such things as apply yellow face powder, a Turkic custom); that was one of the major interests of my classical Chinese teacher, who specialized in the literature of the period between the Han and the Sui/Tang.
Tophet was not the word for "hill" but might have come from a word meaning "hearth," as it was the name given to areas where fire ceremonies (often involving child sacrifice) were carried out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tophet#Etymology
As for the -tl in tepetl, that was a suffix with three forms (-tl following vowels, -tli following most consonants, and -li following l), usually called the absolutive suffix, which most nouns took when they were not affixed to indicate possession or plurality, roughly, and was dropped when it was compounded with a following noun. Thus, nan-tli 'mother', to-nan 'our mother' (prefixed and thus no -tli is used), and Tonantzin 'our honored mother', the epithet of several Aztec goddesses and then used as a title for Mary.
This is all well and good, but you failed to address the question posed. Why are there so many Chinese people?
At the end of the day the answer to that is simple and complex - because at some point in the past China must have had a sustained period of high fertility and/or low mortality. Thats it, it cant be anything else.
And while the text above is well written (as always), informative and mostly free of factual error (no, there has not been a "destruction of industrial capacity" in the west) it really doesnt contain any explanation as to when and why the high fertility and/or low mortality occurred. I guess you could argue that the "why" part is lurking somewhere implicitly in the story told, but since there isnt even an exposition of how China managed to have that demographic growth *despite* the super bloody civil wars, rebellions and conquests which wiped out millions of Chinese from the "so many Chinese" number, at best this implicit answer is very unsatisfactory.
Demographics is a lot more boring than historical story telling or theories about how ancient scholars meme'd an ideology into being (particularly appealing to contemporary online folk which comprise your readership). But if youre going to ask a demographic question, you need a demographic answer, boring or not.
This is a boring take, I’m sorry. The review quickly addresses the answer - big country, lots of farmland etc - and then goes on to a far more interesting question around why so many people are happy to call themselves Chinese. It’s not an article about demography and also is a refreshing change from the overplayed and reductive “geography is destiny” narratives
It seems to me that the existence of large numbers of people in the Chinese heartland is easily explained by the existence of lots of productive farmland. What really demands explanation is the fact that all of those people are more or less culturally unified and identify with the "Han" ethnicity, which is a cultural and ideological development.
Not sure if that works. Maybe. First, India. Now bigger than China. And cant really tell a similar story about memes and what have you.
Second, lots of places across the world have productive farmland. But China isnt just a large it also has/had high population density. Why was the density higher in those places than others?
Third, while your reply possibly makes sense, the thesis remains to be proven. North America also has ton of productive farmland. Why didn't pre-contact California have higher population density than 14th century China? I need the logical links from premise to conclusion here.
To elaborate a bit - the reasons for high fertility are actually pretty well known: early and near universal marriage relative to other places (except for India, this explanation also works for India). But why? The reasons dont seem to have anything to do with literati and scholar bureaucrats meme'ing a particular ideology into existence.
Cool sounding stories are not always the correct stories.
"Why didn't pre-contact California have higher population density than 14th century China?"
Water -- lack thereof in California. Pre-contact California had about as many people as the limited water supply could support. China had a lot more water, and therefore could support a much higher population density. Of course there were other factors too, such as the Californian Indians remaining in the Stone Age -- although some might argue that was a consequence of the low population density and thus of the then-limited water supply (prior to modern water diversion schemes).
So… geography
Cultivated maize only reached the territory of the modern USA about 1500 years ago, if I am not mistaken, while rice has been cultivated in China for more than 10 000 years, and other grains for many millennia, too. I think that is sufficient as a first answer. On top of that, indigenous Californians seem to have actively resisted agriculture, but that story would be more complicated to tell.
Ok, why did it take cultivated Maize so long to reach California? It was right next door.
(See, we're now actually trying to answer the relevant question rather than going on an irrelevant tangent about unity under heaven or whatever)
I don't really feel qualified to answer. Jared Diamond argues that south to north adaption of agricultural crops in the Americas was harder than east - west adaption in Eurasia, but New Mexico doesn't seem that different from Mexico City.
In any case, that only takes us to New Mexico, Cahokia and finally Ontario. California is a different story - Graeber and Wengrow argue for an active cultural resistance to agriculture among Californian gatherers. This is just as much a history of ideas approach as Pines' book about Chinese imperial ideology. Again, I don't feel qualified to judge Graeber and Wengrow's thesis.
https://substack.com/@merothwell/note/c-176367646?r=2hw9av
The tianxia thing means that a bunch of people who have about as much in common as a Romanian does with a Castilian person all think of themselves as being in the same ethnic group. Europe is also suffering from the effects of having had 2 massive industrial wars fought on its territory in less than 30 years, along with the effects of the Nazi extermination camps.
I think it’s boring only if you lack curiosity and are looking for clickbaity just-so stories. Explain North America then. Big country, lots of farmland etc. And if the answer is so obvious why even pose the question in the first place and then pretend to write a rather lengthy article in response? Explain India for that matter. None of this “unity” stuff yet more populous than even China.
And hey, I already said the answer was probably boring.
Wait some centuries.
>They knew that if their elites were absorbed into the global elite monoculture blob, if they began listening to the same music and venerating the same holy symbols and adopting the same discursive conventions, then the inevitable result would be absorption into an alien empire.
What's the big deal, if China was happy to rationalize 100 years of mongol rule? Is it that the president sits in Washington and not Beijing? The Yuan emperors didn't spend all their time in Beijing either. Hard to see why on one hand the Chinese literati are happy to throw their lot in with the steppe barbarians but "globohomo" is a bridge too far.
It's probably the fact that race had a distinct role in the original, colonial time when the attitude to Western hegemony was formed. While Manchu or Mongol rulers also had discriminatory practices, these were primarily culturally determined and if you decided to pick up those practices (and got good enough to be authentic) you could play the part. You might look a little different but those tended to be smoothed over due to the fact that ethnicity with geographically close states can be a bit of a spectrum, so they had seen more Han looking Mongols/Manchu before and vice a versa. No such luck with the race divide.
I dunno about China's intellectual history being rich--my overall impression throughout this essay was of a solipsist and narcissistic culture, isolated and self-absorbed, stuck in a local basin of cultural space.
I thought over and over, "what a pity for the Chinese that India is not (geographically) closer to China".
Very good review. Fascinating parallels between Confucian literati and the Muslim ulama, who were/are a similar scholarly institution parallel to the state. They acted primarily as judges and lawyers but could also take on high level bureaucratic positions at times. Much could be written about how they aided in the conversion of the barbarians who would come storming into Islamic heartlands, eventually spreading Islam all the way into Central Asia.
One thing the Europeans brought to China that none of the steppe barbarians who conquered it ever did was an alternate civilization.
If we consider empires as memetic organizing principles, then many aspects of ancient Rome are alive and well. Likewise, some of the Mongol conceptions of personal freedom promulgated in the time of Genghis seem familiar to us today, including the rights of women and the illegitimacy of theocracy. Genghis also opposed the construction of irrigation systems. A weirdly logical measure that promoted free movement of the Mongol cavalry, as well as controlling the size of cities and the demand for agricultural slaves.
> "Genghis also opposed the construction of irrigation systems"
The mongols actively destroyed vast portions of Iran and Iraq's irrigation infrastructure, which is where a fair portion of that "30 million dead" came from.
No one hated the Mongols more than the ruling classes that they displaced.
Cities that accepted the yoke were generally spared, cities that resisted— usually because of rulers who wished to maintain their power and their loot— were ruthlessly destroyed.
Like city walls, irrigation underpins entrenched vampiric power structures and populations tied to agriculture. Mass agriculture is the basis of imperial military power and the root of slavery on a mass scale.
Not much has changed, really. The Mongols are coming, I can hear the hoof beats beyond the gate.
> "Mass agriculture is the basis of imperial military power and the root of slavery on a mass scale"
It's also the basis of civilisation, but sure, I take your point.
https://imgflip.com/i/achcvz
…and obesity.
This was great. My high school education and reading has given me only a passing recognition of Chinese history, but I'm glad to hear they disprove Guns Germs and Steel as well.
I noted another thing. I've seen it opined that the American rebellion was the only rebellion where people came out the better after, and that was because it was a rebellion run by the literati. It seems China has actually done that a dozen times. Unclear whether it was a feature or a bug.
This gets me thinking that reading about the Warring States/Qin/Han period (maybe even the Book of Lord Shang) is actually the right play for getting a crash course on Chinese thinking
Wow, the part about reframing that 'why so many Chinese people' question was brilliant! It's amazing how a shift in perspectiv can clarify a complex problem. Totally makes me think about system boundaries and emergent properties. Super insightful review!
Stephenson's Diamond Age predicts a Chinese peasant insurrection led by a neo-Mandarin class.
The Shangs seemed to have been very nasty Indo-Europeans with Aztec-y behavior.
"Pines interprets the rebellions as a kind of “bloody popular election,”"
I forget which book I read on the Byzantine empire, but it described a very similar system of "voting"