Okay, so this one’s been a long time coming, especially after hinting at it during my last blog posting back in April. Apologies for the long wait, but we’ve been busy moving from one foreign country to another and getting a mild case of COVID along the way. It happens, I hope you all understand. Yet this topic, really the distinction between the Chinese culture and the political state of China is one that irks me every time I see it misused, whether accidentally out of ignorance, or intentionally to achieve some political goal.
So let’s dig into it, shall we? But where to start? Like diving into Egyptian or Persian history, the story of the Chinese people goes back a long way indeed! Documentation uncovered by archaeologists indicates that by 1250 BC there was a discernible Chinese language spoken by a wide range of tribes living between the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. As with the early civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, this early Chinese culture developed where food was prevalent, and that usually meant near large rivers.
Yet even the flitting glimpses into Chinese history that we get through modern archaeological digs provide only the foggiest of pictures into what life was really like during this period in Chinese history, today referred to as the Shang Dynasty (1570-1045 BC). What has become apparent is the Shang ruled an area about the size of modern South Africa, with only the slightest presence along the coast north of the Shandong Peninsula. That said, the loose form of control seemingly exerted by a central authority reminds me more of the Celtic presence in Europe prior to Caesar’s rampage. Almost more of a shared culture than a truly functional central system of government.
The Zhou Dynasty which followed (1046-256 BC) didn’t much change the shape of things, though it did lay some groundwork for future unification and expansion. Things like the Chinese concept of a “Mandate of Heaven” became part of Chinese political thinking during this time period. The Zhou are perhaps most famous for the length of their reign; the longest in Chinese history at 789 years. Throughout its long existence, however, it failed to subdue neighboring polities, many of which shared the same Chinese culture. Thus, as Zhou power declined further, those polities fell into China’s Warring States Period (475-221 BC).
The kingdom of Qin would emerge victorious from this round-robin warfare and in a series of lighting campaigns, subdue all the other Chinese kingdoms by 221 BC, in a sense unifying the Chinese people—and creating a real central Chinese state—for the first time. Success against those neighboring kingdoms led to a fit of expansion that created a Qin state roughly the size of Greenland. That said, as remarkable as the rise of Qin might seem, it fell just as incredibly after a mere fifteen years at the top. In that short time, however, the Qin somehow managed to instill the foundation for an imperial system that would survive in China for the next two millennia…seen as so efficient that it remained in use even when China was ruled by outsiders.
Thus the stage was set for the Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) to put it all together. The Han would build the first real, lasting Chinese Empire which is why so much of modern Chinese dialogue refers to the Han in such glowing terms. It is from this point that we generally see a single, Chinese state, though the lands would still occasionally break down into minor kingdoms and polities, vying to reestablish central control. The worst of these disunified periods would occur in the immediate aftermath of the Han’s demise when China slipped into its much romanticized Three Kingdoms period.
The Han set many of the standards by which the Chinese people would judge future leaders. While few Chinese dynasties can truly be considered expansionist—one immediately compares them to neighbors like the Mongols, after all—the Han really were and the lands under at least nominal control of the Middle Kingdom stretched well beyond the long-established borders of Chinese civilization. Once its Chinese neighbors were firmly under foot, the Han marched in all directions, and were generally successful wherever they campaigned. This included pressing south to the coast, and into the mountainous jungles of Southeast Asia, east into the power vacuum created by the collapse of Wiman Joseon in Northern Korea, and most significantly, west beyond the desiccated lands of the Tarim Basin. In total, the Han would come to rule an area two-thirds the size of the current People’s Republic of China.
This, then, is really where one can objectively draw the line and begin to speak of a centrally-administered Chinese state. The Han are, essentially, the line in the sand separating about a thousand years of loosely affiliated and often warring Chinese mini-states into something we can understand as “China”. The concept of a unified Chinese state—once the Jin sorted out the mess left behind by the Three Kingdoms—would survive to modern times. That this would be the case, however, should not have been automatically assumed.
One has to remember that China, once a unified stated could be identified, was conquered and ruled by a number of external foes. Any of these might have dissolved the old political boundaries and incorporated China’s disparate parts into another—locally derived—method of political organization. What’s interesting, perhaps, is that the centralized, imperial system developed by the Chinese seemed to successive invaders to work well, and so they generally left it in place.
These occupation dynasties began with a massive invasion by the Jin, the reign name chosen by the Jurchen, who swept across northern China, forcing the ruling Song to retreat south of the Yangtze River in 1127. The Jin would rule what they considered China proper until Genghis Khan’s Mongols followed their lead, toppling the Jin Dynasty in a series of campaigns from 1211 to 1234.
As before, this left a situation whereby foreign invaders held all Chinese territory north of the Yangtze, while the Song ruled south of the river. This would last until Kublai Khan successfully breached the river barrier after a series of long, heart-rending sieges. The Southern Song, as they are now called, surrendered to the Mongols in 1276, leaving all of China in Mongol hands under the dynastic reign name of the Yuan. Mongol rule of China would last until 1368.
Foreign domination would finally end with the rise of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Once they’d reestablished Chinese control over China, the Ming focused mainly on protecting the territory it once again owned. The Great Wall of China—the version most of us are familiar with today—was constructed by the Ming at this point in time. It joined together or improved upon several shorter wall segments built by Chinese dynasties all the way back to the Qin. Intended to keep the obviously dangerous nomadic tribes of Manchuria and Mongolia out, more than anything else it symbolized the basic military posture taken by the Ming. If that weren’t enough—basically the national level equivalent of yelling at the neighbor kids to get off your lawn—the Ming’s military campaigns were generally defensive in nature as well…even when sending troops abroad.
Yet the barbarian hordes weren’t quite done with China, and the most important of these foreign invasions and occupations was yet to come. The Manchus rolled over Ming defenses in 1644, assuming the mandate of heaven as rulers of China, establishing the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Like the Mongols not so long before them, the Manchu-led Qing was both aggressive and expansion-minded. Over the next few centuries, the Qing would militarily press the borders of China to their current shape. Thus, when the Qing Dynasty—the Manchurian rulers of China—finally fell in 1912, the Republic of China would find itself in control of an area larger than had ever before been contemplated by their forebears.
The Manchus had so successfully forced the varied residents of the region to co-exist that there was little violence associated with the shift from imperial Qing rule to a more-or-less democratic system of government based at Nanking. Thus, the large number of cultural minorities that make up today’s China were molded into one nation by its Manchu rulers, sometimes through force, but just as often through the employment of shrewd policy.
This, in an exaggerated nutshell, is the history of China versus the history of the Chinese people and culture. The latter do indeed have an incredibly rich, three-thousand year history, but this should not be confused with the concept of a unified China which, as you can see, ebbed and flowed with the trends and forces affecting Northeast Asia.
Cultural giants, whose influence extended from Europe in the west to Korea and Japan in the east, politically the Chinese state was nonetheless just another polity in the mix, and not the one which had the greatest effect upon how our modern world turned out. Surprisingly, nor was it the Mongols who conquered all of East Asia—and a good chunk of the world—turning the established order upside down for a hundred and sixty years. No, that distinction goes instead to the Manchus, a rag-tag collection of sedentary, semi-nomadic, and nomadic tribes that ruled over most of Northeast Asia for over two hundred years, drawing and re-drawing the lines on maps still in use today.
M. G. Haynes