Lessons From Imperial China

“Only the present is fixed, the past is always changing.”

I cannot remember the author of that quote, but if he or she were looking for proof, they would do well to read the new Belknap history of imperial China.  The series is a wonder: learned, lucid, entertaining. It also vividly demonstrates how history is rewritten in the light of current concerns.

In my student years, the dominant books on Chinese history were books like John K Fairbank’s The Chinese World Order and Benjamin Schwartz’s The World of Thought in Ancient China. These books presented a China that was a world unto itself, strongly culturally continuous across time.

In retrospect, we can see how these authors were formed by their own interactions with China. The China they knew was a land wracked by catastrophe, dominated by foreign powers and foreign ideologies. It was natural for these authors to see the “encounter with the modern West” as the central fact in Chinese history – and to divide that history into two lopsided periods, a long “traditional” period up to 1840 and a tumultuous “modern” period from 1840 forward.

We of course see a very different China – and we equally naturally revise our understanding of Chinese history in the light of that altered present.

I have been reading the volumes of the Belknap in reverse chronological order, starting with William T. Rowe’s volume on the Qing (1644-1912), now Timothy Brook on the Yuan and Ming (1271-1644).

I don’t mean to stint a word of praise for these well-written and splendidly edited volumes when I say: they are even more formed by their time than anything ever written by Fairbank and Schwarz.

Rowe’s history of the Qing, for example, presents an image of a hugely wealthy and sophisticated society, urbanizing and commercializing, in the throes of its own modernization, but weakened by a grave crisis inflicted by its own success.

That crisis was over-population. China’s population surged under the Qing empire, plunging the country into an interlocked series of Malthusian traps.

(1) As population surged, labor exploded into oversupply. Over-abundant labor pre-empted industrialization, especially in a country poor in energy resources: why invent a machine to substitute for ultra-abundant human labor?

(2) With over-abundant labor, more and more rural Chinese fell into landless poverty – ready recruits for the accelerating rebellions that exhausted the imperial treasury and broke the imperial army after 1800.

(3) Finally, the sheer mass of the society overwhelmed traditional methods of governance. The Qing relied on local notables to govern towns, and as the towns bulged past the 1 million mark, local powerholders dislodged imperial officials. The empire disappeared from urban China long before it was formally overthrown in 1912.

The parallels to the challenges faced by contemporary China are so glaring that one has to wonder: is this view of the past informed by the present – or is the present here forming a view of the past?

Ditto for Brook’s beguiling history of the Yuan and Ming dynasties. Here the great theme is environmental crisis. The Yuan (Khubilai Khan’s Mongol dynasty) and the successor Ming ruled China during the Little Ice Age, and Brooks sees the catastrophic environmental events of the period as the master-key to their history.

Brook groups the negative climactic events into nine super-clumps or “sloughs”: two of them so savagely severe that they triggered rebellions that toppled each dynasty in turn. The last Ming emperor ruled for only six years, and in that time China was visited by extreme cold, drought, famine, locust, earthquakes, epidemics, and terrible sandstorms (the last the combined effect of drought and deforestation).

North American and Western European environmentalists can fancifully imagine social collapse through environmental degradation. But in modern China, that possibility burns the throat and stings the eyes.

Exhaustion of water supplies, pollution of the air, desertification, the emission of toxins, climate change: these are overwhelming, obvious, inescapable facts about modern China. It’s easy — almost inevitable – to project them back into the past, as Brooks does when he speculates about the sudden appearance of “dragons” as dynasties went into crises. “Dragons” were the way that Yuan and Ming Chinese understood and explained abrupt and frightening events in their physical world, just as we rummage through the vocabulary of environmental concern to anticipate such events in ours.

I do not cite the present-mindedness of these two volumes in this valuable series as a criticism. To the contrary: it’s an asset. Through most of human history, China has been powerful and rich. Historians who knew only the enfeebled China of the 19^th and 20^th centuries might imagine – but could not ultimately believe or convincingly describe – that very different norm.

These new historians can and do. And that awareness of new China and all its challenges creates a remarkable and useful perspective for them. Unlike John Fairbank, they are not standing nostalgic amidst the ruins of old China to lament “what went wrong.” They are looking awe-struck at the rise of a mighty new China anxiously wondering: “can this endure?”

UPDATE: A commenter below mentions Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who led a series of ambitious diplomatic and trading missions between 1405-1433. The commenter repeats the oft-heard idea that Zheng He might have led a “Chinese discovery of America” if only the MING emperors had been more sympathetic. Timothy Brook makes short work of that idea in The Troubled Empire, the Yuan+Ming volume of the Belknap series.

The reason Columbus traveled west and bumped unintentionally into the New World was in order to reach China, the world’s richest and most advanced economy. The Chinese however had no equivalent reason to sail eastward. Zheng He sailed southwest-ward, along trading routes known since Roman times and more intensely developed by Muslim traders in the Middle Ages, deepening pre-existing connections with countries that already knew perfectly well where China was and what it could buy and sell.

And the thing China most needed from the New World – abundant silver – began arriving in abundance in the 1580s, despite the cancelation of the Zheng He missions, as the Spanish shipped the metal to Manila to finance trade with the China market. The thought of a Chinese-speaking Western Hemisphere is not a “might-have-been.” The Chinese sought and found their “New World” in Southeast Asia.

Posted at 2:52pm by David Frum