Brendan > Recent Status Updates

“[Modern] China has accepted this legacy of geographically extended Qing rule as if it inhered in the geopolitical facts of Chinese history. It does not. The Inner Asian empire was grafted onto the Chinese cultural zone in the process of meeting Manchu power needs and interests. Securing and retaining the Qing Empire is thus a Manchu achievement that added a vast realm to the historic China only because

“Thus repulsed our final hope
Is flat despair: we must exasperate
Th’ almighty victor to spend all His rage.
And that must end us, that must be our cure:
To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense or motion?”

“A careful reading of history makes it clear that the circumstances of the Ming collapse…were not brought about by any general disintegration of government and society. Far from it. Those fatal circumstances were brought about carelessly, by an administration that simply could no longer manage its resources, utilize its strengths, and maintain its focus.

“Through the exchanges of New World precious metals for Chinese products…Ming China was becoming part of an economically interactive if not yet economically unified world. [] In that commerce, China was essentially a seller of high-quality craft manufactures. Other countries could not compete either in quality or in price. The colonies of the New World and the entire Mediterranean sphere of trade, from Portugal

“The [Chinese] city had nothing like a city charter, and no independent administration, that is, no mayor or town council; no laws or privileges that applied especially to its inhabitants; and no indigenous social groups that would have thought of demanding city dwellers’ ‘rights’ from the central government. In short, Chinese cities had no separate legal or political status; they were not corporate entities

“The conduct of later Ming emperors reveals an impaired imperial institution. The reader of history might well wonder why the elite, and to some extent the general population of Ming China, remained dedicated to the dynasty even when may of its most able statesmen were driven away from service to it… The Chinese were not blind to these emperors’ flaws, but they had to remain hopeful that mundane faults could

Fascinated to learn that the Dalai Lama and its prestige owe mostly to the Mongol conversion to Tibetan Buddhism after their loss of China.
The term ‘Dalai’ is Mongolian in origin (meaning ‘all-encompassing’) — and the power and prestige held by that office were installed by Mongol forces amidst heated rivalry between various Buddhist sects. The 4th Dalai Lama (really the 2nd) was even a Mongol prince!

The story of Zhu Yuanzhang, recounted in detail here, is one of the most remarkable biographies in all of history. An orphaned peasant boy narrowly survives famine and plague, and becomes a Buddhist monk. His monastery is pillaged by troops from the collapsing Mongol Yuan Dynasty, so he joins a gang of Manichaean bandits, then rises through the ranks until eventually defeats all rivals and founds the Ming Dynasty.

On the chaotic collapse of the Yuan Dynasty:

“The government issued ever stricter laws and set ever fiercer punishments in an effort to prop up the forces of order…Social order normally was not maintained by direct coercion but by the much less intrusive reliance on society at large to uphold the norms of appropriate behavior. When that no longer worked and the government’s failures could be openly ridiculed,

On educated Chinese during Mongol rule:
“Many of the elite whose education and personal cultivation under more normal circumstances would have led them to serve in public life turned away from the usual careers to seek compensatory roles in public life.
Many withdrew into…turning their backs to the world to live out more obscure lives. Many who might have been ministers of state in normal times found meaning in

“That [Zhu Xi’s] system of learning should become primarily identified with the pursuit of success in the examination system is a great irony; his purpose was to teach people how to enlarge their minds and their humanity through study of the classics, and he was bitterly discouraged by trends becoming evident in his time toward the debasement of learning as a mere device for gaining status and wealth.”

“In the Song Dynasty, a new spirit in learning and thought, in which all of the elite were immersed, encouraged at its best strong individual self-esteem coupled with feelings of direct responsibility for the world in which they lived. They were free to make their own decisions on what constituted ‘correct learning,’ because those truths were available to all through their own powers of study and reasoning, not

“It long had been clearly seen by many Southern Song observers that extensive landholding by the richer sectors of society encouraged abuses of the tax exemption regulations and an increase of tax evasion among officials and wealthy households. These caused severe imbalances in the revenue system, bringing about widespread hardship in risk society.”

“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

“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

“Reconciling the promise of a Jewish ‘national home’ with the rights of the Arabs who were already there had been hard enough in the 1920s. The flood of refugees from Nazi oppression in the 1930s made it all but impossible. London’s prewar plan was to appease the anger of the Palestine Arabs at the growing Jewish migration by fixing a limit to ensure a permanent Arab majority. With its future settled as an

You know a history book is going to be great when it starts with an extended discussion of the development of roads and canals and their influence over changes in economics and communications.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about that…this is the stuff that is obscured by the famous names and battles, but actually shapes our world far more durably to the present day

“[Qing dynasty] officials, who struggled to keep order, collect the land revenue, maintain the waterways, and manage the grain reserves, faced increasing resistance from a discontented population. Their authority and prestige had already been undermined by the ‘privatizations’ in the era of commercial expansion as licensed merchants took more control over tax collecting, water conservancy, and the grain tribute

“It is the way with all men that, if they do something only for the sake of winning rewards and benefits, then, the moment they see that the undertaking may end unprofitably or in danger, they will abandon it. Therefore rewards, punishments, force, and deception are in themselves not enough to make men put forth their full efforts or risk their lives…If the rulers and superiors do not treat the common people

“Thus India provided its European invader with the resources that could be turned to the task of conquest. Astonishingly early…the Company created its own ‘security zone’ and made itself an Indian power, competing in Indian terms with Indian rivals. […] The effect was to shift the balance of cost and risk away from Britain, the ultimate beneficiary of Indian empire, and toward the hybrid ‘Anglo-Indian’

“The ‘Cotton Kingdom’ [of the United States] and its slavery system, Lancashire industry, and British rule in India were thus bound together by an extraordinary symbiosis. In this respect, as in so many others, however ‘anti-colonial’ their political views, Americans were the indispensable sleeping partners of Europe’s expansion into Afro-Asia.”