Status Updates From Imperial China, 900-1800

“The Chinese, however, have never felt that those who failed the highest examinations, under those odds, were necessarily of inferior cultivation and intelligence. Many noted literati throughout history failed, sometimes repeatedly; they were seen not as ‘failed men’ but as learned persons whom fate had not (yet) favored.
Those who did not receive degrees had to make their living apart from official service…

“‘Nativist reaction’ has been seen at many times and places in human history. [] Such movements seldom have led to the mass displacement of the ‘adopted’ culture and full return to the idealized ‘native’ culture by the reacting society. But that is not the whole measure of their meaning. They can provide culturally destabilized or socially dissatisfied persons with the means to reorient their lives

“What the Jurchens accomplished in less than fifteen years is unparalleled. They defeated in war the two largest and most powerful nations in all of East Asia, the Khitans and the Chinese. The former they entirely absorbed…the latter gave up the northern third of its territory, the China of revered antiquity, down to the Huai River boundary that separates wheat- and millet-eating North China from the South, where

“This was the great dilemma of Northern Song elite culture: the burst of new vitality represented by Ouyang Xiu and Wang Anshi, and even by extraordinary geniuses such as Su Shi, soon became routinized in individuals’ and families’ pursuit of status and advantage, deemphasizing intellectual engagement. A new elite was formed by the examination system, more open to talent, considerably more egalitarian in tone,

“Legitimate political parties could not take form, and any who expressed political disagreement were, by definition, morally deficient, hence insidious. ‘Loyal opposition’ could not be acknowledged within a system of politics defined by ethical and personal rather than by operational and institutional norms. China still struggles with the heritage of this eleventh-century political failure.”

“The elite constituted through [the exam] process dominated Song life — in respect to the operation of government, the formulation of all aspects of policy, the establishment of social standards throughout the realm, the trends in literature and the arts…the definition of ethical standards, and the exploration of new horizons in philosophy.

“Literary skill lay at the heart of intellectual life, and at this period of Chinese history [i.e. the Song Dynasty], intellectual life came to bear even more directly on political careers and on policy than had previously been the case. ‘Scholar’ and ‘official’ virtually became terms that, both ideally and practically, defined each other.”

“When we examine these historical events quite analytically, the incompatibility of Buddhist doctrine with the basic orientations of steppe life would seem to be obvious, but social behavior is seldom governed by detached, rational analysis. The great appeal of Buddhism [to steppe peoples] lay in its accessibility; some measure of its fundamental truth was open to almost any mind, and seeming contradictions between

“Giving the Khitan and other steppe peoples their due, however, does not demand that we forgo all value judgments. Quite simply, for most of us (though not necessarily for everyone), the norms and peculiar achievements of Chinese civilization hold more intrinsic value than do those of the nomads. The refinement of their learned, humanistic tradition did not make all Chinese admirable: they neither precluded all

Finally on to the Ming.

“Observing [the Uighurs, Shatuo Turks], the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for a more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just ‘little Chinese.’”

“Even though Stone Age man everywhere appears to have been nomadic in the sense of wandering about in search of food, pastoral nomadism as it developed in Inner Asia is quite different. It is an advanced form of social organization, the preference of people whose forebears probably had practiced agriculture…To those reluctant agriculturalists the alternative of nomadism offered more than did the hard life of

What does Mote have against the south? Seemingly endless discussion of northern states, references to "Korea, Japan and Annam," as if they constituted the whole of the sinosphere (though he's not even mentioned that Vietnam was just coming out of a thousand years under Chinese rule), a reader could be forgiven for not realizing the Dali Kingdom existed at this time. I wonder if Kokang will get its mention in time.