Posted on 09/03/2017 2:01:57 PM PDT by Jyotishi
I agree mostly with this assessment. China has been fractured by different languages, cultures, and invasions over the last 2 millennia.
That they couldn’t even conquer and dominate the tiny Korean peninsula confirms this.
What China might have historically believed in and wanted to do (at least in one strain of ancient thought) could differ from what it had been capable of till now.
And they did SOME conquering successfully, or we’d never have heard of Sun-Tzu.
Even if Korea proved too hard of a nut to crack, China wasn’t always as big as it is now. Tibet is only part of a trend.
Only a true fool would dismiss a country the size of China.
The things that China conquered are mostly now... China.
Are the thin skinned Chicoms pissed about this article? Link is down for me. Host error on their end.
“And they did SOME conquering successfully, or we’d never have heard of Sun-Tzu”
No.
That was all just inter-Han conflicts within a fairly small geographic area of East China.
China expansion, to the degree it expanded, was due to being taken over by outside forces.
>I agree mostly with this assessment. China has been fractured by different languages, cultures, and invasions over the last 2 millennia.
And yet it’s the oldest continuous civilization. Where as the Romans, the Persians, and even the Greeks are all gone.
>That they couldn’t even conquer and dominate the tiny Korean peninsula confirms this.
China’s dominated the Korean peninsula for most of recorded history. Conquering it outright is a very difficult task due to the terrain but generally Korean kingdoms have been tributary states to China. China’s not much as an offensive conquering power in the style of other empires. But their model has worked well in keeping China Chinese for a very long time now.
I am firmly with India in the coming clash between these two giants, but this is just wrong. China has a long history of greatness. (As does India.)
China literally calls itself Middle Country (Zhong Guo)... they were/are the center of their universe, LOL. Impassable mountains to the west, the biggest and toughest ocean to the east, the Mongols to the north (they learned that harsh lesson enough times to stop trying), and untamed jungles and little worth conquering to the south. They had no place to expand to for centuries, no a reason to try.
This is a good article and very true.
For example, the most famous and popular book in China is about this very thing, Journey to the West (The Monkey King).
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The novel is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang who traveled to the “Western Regions”, that is, Central Asia and India, to obtain Buddhist sacred texts and returned after many trials and much suffering. It retains the broad outline of Xuanzang’s own account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, but the Ming dynasty novel adds elements from folk tales and the author’s invention
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West
Well OK, if we go with that explanation, what happened once these “external forces” began to rule?
Didn’t they, too, winnow through the culture, keeping what looked promising and chucking out the rest?
A philosophy refined by winners is probably going to be bent on winning, correct?
Excellent book!
Spence is a great scholar and somewhat unusual for academics a very good writer.
Just the Zhou dynasty alone is an impressive and sustained early pinnacle.
But the fracturing you describe was part of the Chinese dynastic survival strategy: they were able to successfully rule over multiple peoples by allowing them to retain much of their own culture.
“The things that China conquered are mostly now... China.”
Tibet and East Turkestan are modern exceptions, but generally it’s the opposite.
The places that conquered China became China and Chinese.
Qing Dynasty and Manchu rule is the most recent example.
Chinese would get conquered by outsiders, but would absorb the outsiders in to Han culture.
History is all well and good, but the question now is what can India and the other nations of Asia do to prevent Chinese dominance in the 21st century?
Well fine, but I think the whole thing was supposed to be about where did these ideas that China ought to be hegemon come from.
Are they simply Marxist ideas with no further history? Or are there strains of Chinese thought (in whatever sense, even if they were from former outside sources) which were doggedly set on hegemony one day?
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