The History of China - #100 - Special: Di Yi Bai!

Episode Date: June 9, 2016

Title Meaning: “Hundredth!” It’s a Q&A between you listeners and myself on topics far and wide! They range from yet further exploration of Empress Wu, to the nature of Chinese alcohol, my favorite Chinese movies, Chinese classes and slavery within the Empire and even today, China’s relations with Southeast Asia and why it seems to be a particularly difficult place to conquer across time, the end of the Ming Dynasty, the surprisingly contentious history of silk, and finally a question likely to land me in hot water: a question on how China might change in the century to come (bring it on, Fifty Cent Party!) Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Hey everyone, welcome to The Behemoth, that is episode 100.

Before we launch in, let me just give a quick shout out to my fellow Agora podcast members, one and all. They all rock, and you should listen to all of them. Alright, I hope you're settled in and have a good long commute ahead of you, because here we go. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 100, D.E. Bai. We did it! We made it to the triple digits! Well, I have to say, I never really expected to get this far, much less for you to accompany me this far. But I'm sure glad to have each and every one of you along for the journey as we boldly go where no one has gone before.

No, no, that's not right. Well, where no podcast is... Wait, no. Well, where this show has never gone at any rate, and that's good enough for me. So in order to celebrate this truly momentous occasion, as promised, we're going to spend, well, all of this episode discussing the many great questions you guys, the listeners, have been sending in. Before we get quite there, however, I'd like to take a moment to specifically shout out and say a huge thank you to everyone who continues to support the show through Patreon. That anyone thinks this show is worth any amount of money, when I'm just giving it away like some schmuck, is such a tremendous ego boost. You have no idea. So I'd like to say a big thanks to a few

of our show's newest patrons, which are Alex G, Paul L, and Nicholas S. Thanks to all three of you very, very much. And then, and this is the last side note, I promise, an enormous, spectacular thank you on behalf of the whole Imperial Court to the newly proclaimed Grand Imperial Sculptor of the Dynasty, Christoph M., who went ahead and sent from his 3D printer a whole set of amazing historical Chinese figurines. He'd been talking to me about a replica of an oracle bone, but what he actually sent was beyond my wildest imaginings. Not only an oracle bone, but two guardian lions and three terracotta warriors. I'll be sure to take pictures of these and then post them up on the website for everyone to see,

but wow, Kristoff, thank you. You have my eternal gratitude. What a cool gift. All right, so let's get down to business to defeat the Huns. I'll be going through the questions you've been sending in in no real particular order, mostly just the order they were posted, although not exactly.

Our first question comes from Carrie P., who asked me how I think the fictional representations of Empress Wu Zetian measured up to the real thing. Well, as I'm sure you're aware, I have found Empress Wu to be an enormously fascinating figure in her own right, and I think deservedly so. Enough so at the very least to devote a good five, six, six and a half episodes to her life. And I'm certainly not alone in that, as Carrie pointed out. There have been numerous TV series, feature films, and books dedicated to her

unique period of rule over imperial China. What that uniqueness means, though, that one-offness of her reign both as a woman and then the less unique aspect of her as a ruthless and some might say anti-aristocratic one at that. All of that combines together to mean that she is extremely polarizing and has been for more than a millennium. When she is portrayed in media, whether that be the historical annals from the Song Dynasty or a stage play at the Beijing Opera or a sprawling and expensive television production starring Fan Bingbing. Regardless of what the medium is, her rule is never portrayed simply for its own sake. Rather, it is served to either tell, or reinforce, or in some cases even disabuse, a particular narrative of whatever the author's choosing might be.

Prior to the 20th century, that narrative was a hostile and cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing someone who, gasp, possessed a uterus access to the powers of the monarchy, and that she threatened, and arguably succeeded, in overthrowing the whole of Confucian tradition and ethos. I mean, I know, right? How terrible. But then the whole communist revolution thingy happened, and once Mr. Mao Zedong took on her tale, he told it in a whole new light. No, he said, she wasn't a dangerous, maniacal, philosophical dictatress, but rather a revolutionary, a Marxist after Mao's own heart, just 1,200 years before her time. And according to the Maoist recasting of Empress Wu,

she came from humble origins, they would say effectively a peasant girl, who managed to, through her own grit and brains, outwit and outmaneuver her highborn patriarchal enemies and overthrow the old, decrepit, and thoroughly outmoded patriarchy, sticking it to the man on behalf of the common people, vive overthrow the old, decrepit, and thoroughly outmoded patriarchy, sticking it to the man on behalf of the common people, viva la revolution. Heck, even the 2014 TV series has been widely criticized for pretty much painting Empress Wu as a Mary Sue character and bent on completely exonerating her from any of her alleged crimes

and showing her as some complete innocent surrounded by guilesome and treacherous court and harem officials. All of this, of course, while bedecking the lovely Fan Bingbing in the most extravagant and period-accurate costumes ever designed. And as a brief aside, I found it very funny when I learned that the Chinese television networks actually temporarily cancelled and demanded edits and reshoots to the television series because too many of the, again, period-accurate Tang Dynasty costumes showed just too much cleavage for censors' tastes. Leave it to the PRC to tell a show that its wardrobe is being too historically accurate for modern audiences. But I digress.

So all of these portrayals are interesting, both for the story that they are telling, but also, and at least as I see it, because of what each of these narratives tell us about the person or people writing it rather than what they're writing about. We can see the value systems of whatever time period the portrayal came from reflected in the praise or criticisms leveled at the Empress Wu as a historical figure, whether that's Sima Guang's horror, horror at the idea of a woman in power,

or Chairman Mao's holding her up as a paragon of the proletariat. For me, that's the real value of all these self-interested, self-aggrandizing portrayals of Wu Zetian. But to more directly answer your question, at least I hope, I am absolutely of a mind that the real story is by far the more interesting one, or rather, maybe let me hedge that a bit, the search for the real story. I'm sure I've brought this up in the main narrative on the Empress, but probably the most frustrating, but also fascinating, things about trying to talk about Empress Wu is that we really have almost nothing to go on but wild speculation, rumors, and biased accounts. We're effectively left with nothing but a series of wildly differing caricatures.

So what that's meant for a lot of historians that at least I've read on the topic, and ultimately myself as well, is that it's kind of a process of peeling an onion layer by layer to try to see what the actual person somewhere underneath all of those caricatures might have been like. All those old histories depict her as a monster. All of the communist histories portray her as a hero, but both are pretty two-dimensional when you think about it. As a person, surely there was more than either extreme, because none of us are really a two-dimensional caricature. And so I think it's the most fascinating aspect of all, to try to find

the three-dimensional human inside the centuries upon centuries of two-dimensional biased portrayals serving some alternate narrative. And while we're on that note, there was also a question about Empress Wu from user SillyValley, who managed to sneak it in just in time. He asked, quote, The story about how Wu Menyang wound up in the service of, then the favor, and eventually the wife of Gao Zong sounds too similar to that of the other woman about to enter the stage shortly. Given that story was written hundreds of years after the fact, is it possible that the two stories were simply mixed up, like the many similar wine-pool-flesh-forest stories of pre-Chen eras?" And yeah, silly, I agree with you pretty much completely. The authors of the Classical Historians

were not only writing far, far after the fact, but doing so with the express purpose of presenting a didactic lesson on morality and what good governance and bad governance should be. Especially when it comes to a woman ruler like Wu. We've just got to take a step back and say, hey, wait a second, that sounds an awful lot like you were just borrowing elements from other stories and slapping them onto hers in order to paint her as a monster. The element of Empress Wu's story that popped out to me especially as the most egregious offender of what amounts to

the historical version of a repost was the bit about the newly crowned Empress Wu cutting the limbs off of her two rivals, the former Empress Wang and Consort Xie, and then immersing them in vats of wine for days. That sounds almost word for word like the tale of the evil first Empress of China, Lu Zhi, wife of the founding Emperor of the Han Dynasty in the 2nd century BCE, Gaozhu. The only real difference is what was done with the empress's rivals or rival after they were literally disarmed. Empress Wu's were put into the wine vats, while Liu Zhi's were supposedly thrown into a pigsty. And then there's the whole trope of poisoning family members. I'm sure it happened, I mean, it does, but it does rather scream trope not fact when the exact same thing comes up again and again every time a classical historian

wants to make a point about how bad women in power are. So, yeah. Our next question comes from the Agora Podcast Network's own Thomas Daly. Hi, Tom. He asked, quote, you've referenced wine many times and my Western mind has always assumed you meant grape wine like the Greeks and Romans consumed. But now I'm curious, were the ancient Chinese drinking grape wine or a type of rice wine similar to sake?

End quote. So this is a question that I think I've just been assuming that everybody knew because, you know, I knew it. So of course you do too, right? Yeah, well, you know what happens when you assume. So this is a great question for me to actually have brought up and address. Though as with the history of paper, we might just be about to spiral into a rabbit hole of esoteric arcane knowledge. So let's go. The shortest possible answer is no. Typically, Chinese wine, or jiu, literally just means alcohol, and does not necessarily imply the use of grapes as the word wine does in our western languages. That's not to say, however, that it never has meant wine-based alcohol.

In fact, what might be the oldest grape-based fermented drink ever found originates from pottery jars archaeologists have found in northern China, specifically a Neolithic settlement called Jiahu in Henan province. It has been dated at something like 9,000 years old. Now this discovery was quite recent. 2004, in fact, and chemical analysis of the remnants showed that it was a mixture of wild hawthorn, wild grape berries, beeswax, and honey, and rice, which honestly doesn't sound half bad. Prior to 2004, some of the oldest physical samples of alcohol recovered from China were of the Shang and Western Zhou eras, so around about 3,000 years ago.

Interestingly, those liquors were still liquid after three millennia, since unlike the Jahu brew, they were sealed in airtight bronze vessels rather than pottery. Now these wines, or brews is probably a better term, were made of a mixture of rice or millet, and then flavored with herbs, flowers, and possibly tree resins as well, very typical of Chinese liquors. Interestingly, the methodology of production and recipes of this type of drink have survived and are still produced to this day, and it's called Huangjiu, which literally means yellow wine or yellow alcohol. And seriously, it's all over the place. My father-in-law makes his own Huangjiu moonshine in his closet. And while it's different tasting

than anything you've likely ever had, if you haven't been to China at least, it's not at all bad. Now, Huangzhou we would consider to be a proper wine in the ABV sense, ranging as it does between 16 and 20% alcohol by volume, usually, which is round about what we typically expect from its Japanese and Korean corollaries, sake and soju, respectively. It is undistilled, hence its coloration, which ranges from a pale yellow all the way to a deep chestnut, depending on what you put into it. Just like grape wine, the mixture of ingredients is then seeded with what's called jiaochu, which you'll often see translated as simply liquor mold, but is in fact a specific blend of molds, yeasts, and bacteria rendered into a solid state.

The resultant mixture is then sealed away in jars, placed in a cool, often dark place. In some instances, the production is actually buried for a period, and then the bacterias and molds are left to ferment it into alcohol. Unlike, say, Korean soju wine, we rarely utilize fruit to flavor it, preferring flowers and herbs instead. And yes, in the case of specifically medicinal wines, some rather more bizarre ingredients like animal body parts and even things like entire snakes or bats or birds even. That is definitely a real thing, though I've never been brave or crazy enough to actually try it. Grape wine, or in Chinese, putaojiu, or more commonly today, h today Hongzhou, was first imported to China during

the early Han Dynasty from the western reaches of Central Asia, the areas like Fergana, Sogdia, and Bactria or as we've recently all been referring to that area, Transoxiana. The guy who brought it back was the legendary explorer and pioneer of the Silk Road, Zhang Qian, whom we discussed at length way back in episode 27, which is called Go West, Young Han. Yes, my sense of humor was and is atrocious, and no, it will not be stopping anytime soon. Anyways, how had grape wine from Greece and Rome made it all the way to Transoxiana? Why, the answer is Alexander the Great, of course. Regardless, when the Han Dynasty collapsed in the late 3rd century,

so too did the Silk Road and access to red wine. Once the Tang Dynasty re-established its hold over the Far West, which is, you know, right about where we are right now in the main storyline, Western grape wine was once again made available for import, although it typically was only for the imperial class itself and at times high aristocracy. For everyone else, rice wine it was, and rice wine it would continue to be. Even Marco Polo in the 13th century noted in his account of the Mongol Yuan dynasty the heavy preference for rice wine among both Mongol and Chinese alike, rather than the Western fare that he was accustomed to.

So that brings us to the big guns of Chinese alcohol. And hold on to your hats, because when the Chinese want to get plastered, they pull out all the stops. I'm referring to the demonic entity known as Baijiu, which literally means white liquor, which is something like if Bacardi 151 tasted like every nightmare you've ever had bottled. Baijiu, unlike Huangjiu, is not a rice-based alcohol, but instead comes from a different grain called sorghum, which as its day job is typically mostly grown for cattle fodder. Now, the ancient Chinese had been brewing

with sorghum since before the Han Dynasty at the least. Estimates range back as far as Chinese civilization itself, in fact, so at least 5,000 years, but you know, take that for what that's worth. In truth, however, it only really started gaining real popularity as a spirit after the fall of the Han dynasty and China's fracturing into the three and then sixteen kingdoms. You remember, right? That little tiny 400 year long civil war? I think that we can all agree that the populace of that time was fully justified in getting as hammered as possible for the whole thing. Now, it might look a lot like sake or soju in that it's a clear liquid most of the

time, but it is not and it will verifiably knock your block off. So the first verifiable type of baijiu is called Fenjiu, and it dates back to the southern and northern period, which is the tail end of the period of disunion. Fenjiu clocks in at a paint peeling 65% alcohol by volume, and to just once again compare that to sake, soju, and huangjiu, which all tend to hover between 50 and 20%. I'm pretty sure that you could drive a tractor with fenjiu. If you taste it once, you will never forget it. After the period of disunion, though, the sui and then tang saw the rise to prominence of a different variety of baijiu called yanghe, which mellowed out on the alcohol levels at least a little bit,

reducing it down to the still crazy strong 50 to 55%. Today, Yanghe is considered to be the top shelf variety of Baijiu. And as of the late Qing dynasty, it was the go-to liquor to present as an imperial tribute. Now, the final type of Baijiu I'll bring up, although there are dozens of regional varieties that I'm just going to pass over. The one that I'll bring up though is probably the most famous of them all, which is Mo Tai or Mao Tai. It hails from the eponymous region of Guizhou province and runs about a 55% ABV. Compared to the other two Baijiu's I just mentioned, Maotai is a relatively

new variety, although I have to give the caveat that we are speaking in Chinese terms here, so that still makes it more than 200 years old, from about the middle of the Qing dynasty. Actually, Maotai won a gold medal in 1915 at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Nevertheless, its real rise to prominence was during the Chinese Civil War, and I'll specify, I mean the most recent civil war in the 20th century between the nationalists and the communists, because I will not blame you if you get confused as to which civil war it might be. So anyway, the People's Liberation Army encamped near Mao Tai Guizhou and took a liking to the local liquor. After the formation of the PRC in 1949, it became virtually the official drink at state functions and was in fact the drink of choice

when Richard Nixon and his entourage visited Maoist China back in 1972. Rather famously, at a later reciprocal visit to the U.S. in 1979, just after Mao Zedong's death, the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, met with Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger supposedly stated, quote, I think if we drink enough Maotai, we can solve anything, end quote. The price of a bottle is, quite frankly, astronomical, and is easily more than 200 US dollars a bottle. So, typically a little bit out of my price range, to say the least. Nevertheless, I have had the chance to taste it at a few wedding functions, and it left me, well, let's just say reaching for something, literally anything, to wash away the cloying, pungent taste that sticks to your throat for what feels like days at the least. It is classified as a sauce flavored baijiu,

which is by far the most pungent type, and what I can only describe as something like a cross between a hyper-alcoholic soy sauce and an industrial solvent. Suffice it to say, I am not a fan. My father-in-law, on the other hand, positively loves the stuff, and it's, either Maotai directly or another slightly less well-known baijiu, presented and consumed in great quantities at all of the Chinese weddings, New Year's celebrations, and all other national holidays that I'm forced to go back to my wife's hometown to partake in. Fortunately for me, some kind of red wine is usually also on offer so that I can toast like everyone is expected to without constantly gagging and eventually blacking out. So lucky me.

So that's what I mean by wine when I've been referencing it. One final little factoid on the matter. How do you say cheers in Mandarin? Well it's ganbei. Literally turn your glass upside down and you will be expected to chug it all even if it's red wine especially if it's Baijiu so proceed with caution to all Chinese dinner parties our next question comes from Carl he asks which are the best TV or movie Chinese historical dramas and and why? Well, I really enjoyed Red Cliff, which came out in 2008

and is directed by none other than John Woo. It depicts the eponymous Battle of Red Cliff at the outset of the Three Kingdoms. I thought they did a really good job of not only showcasing the battle on the Yangtze River, but also setting the stage of the main characters and their motivations as well. I'm also quite fond of Raise the Red Lantern, which I thought was a really touching and in-depth look at the life of a concubine, and women in general, in the early 20th century, and specifically during the warlord era of the 1920s.

I have, I believe, already mentioned the Empress of China series, and my reason remains, for the costumes, not so much for the plot. But the sets and the dress are on point, no doubt. I also really enjoyed the Jet Li movie Hero, as a telling of the formation of the Qin Dynasty, and also its beautiful cinematography. And while we're on the topic of Jet Li, Fearless, about the founder of the Jinwu Martial Art Federation, Huo Yanjia, is also a really good movie.

Also, and I'm kind of revealing how much I like kung fu movies in this, Ip Man is a great movie about the Wing Chun kung fu master who eventually taught Bruce Lee, even if it does kind of turn into a red film about how awful the Japanese are at the halfway point. For a while, My Concubine gives a good sweep over Chinese society over a period of about 50 odd years. The next one I rather hesitate to include because it is through and through a state propaganda piece, but I gotta give credit where it's due. The founding of a party is quite

watchable, but just remember, very propaganda, wow, much state-run. Okay, a couple more. I know what some of you are thinking, but what about the Mongols? Now I got you covered. Try, appropriately enough, Mongol, an excellent and visually striking film about the life of Temujin, aka Genghis Khan, or Genghis Khan. I'm also a huge fan of the Netflix show Marco Polo. Now, it's gotten some middling, not-so-wonderful reviews by people who I think seem to have expected it to have been Game of Thrones, but just in China. But I am thrilled that it got green-lighted for a second season because I think it has a great plot and is pretty true, at least in a relative, this is

still a TV show sense anyway, to the historical arc of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. And it also has some of the best and most accurate costumes and sets of the Yuan era that I have ever seen. Not to mention that Benedict Wong absolutely steals the show as Kublai Khan. They should have just named the show Kublai, because seriously, no one cares about Marco. He just does not hold a candle to the Great Khan. On the subject of less-than-historical movies, I'd be remiss if I didn't say Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is just legendary and deservedly so. And then anything by Stephen Chow. Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle, The God of Cookery, Mermaid. You just literally cannot go wrong there. And then anything Jackie

Chan before, and this is important, before Rush Hour. Go ahead and just skip every steaming pile of garbage he turned out after 1998. Not that I have a strong opinion on the matter. The Chinese version of Journey to the West is full-on campy, corny, fun, and by that I mean the TV show made in the 80s and early 90s. I haven't really bothered to see the more recent movies. Finally, if you like food, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is a great movie. The next question comes from Earl K., who asked me to explain the classes in Chinese society a little bit more, and also class mobility, and also to explain whether and how slavery existed in China, and how we might compare that to something like slavery in, say, the Roman Empire. Well, historically, and up until roundabout the dissolution of the imperial system altogether in 1911, the populace of China was divided into the four classes. They were, from bottom to top,

the shang, or merchants, the gong, or craftsmen and artisans, the nong, or farmers, and finally the shi, meaning the aristocracy or officialdom. So let me set this up. As per Confucian ethics, money is a dirty, dirty thing, which you never want to touch. In fact, the official class was for much of the imperial period outright banned from buying or selling anything directly, out of the belief that it was both beneath them and that it was also corruptive, which I mean, I can't say that I blame them for that belief. They typically got around that by just using intermediaries because, you know, obviously. But even though they were totally doing the same thing, the fact that

merchants dealt exclusively in monetary transactions was reason enough to view them with the ultimate disdain. That was compounded by the fact that since a merchant is by definition simply selling or buying stuff that somebody else made, well as such they were viewed as social parasites who profited off of someone else's actual labor. One rung up the ladder of the merchants were the craftsmen and artisans. They were, like the merchants, an urban class based primarily in the cities. They were viewed as a step above the merchants because, hey, at least they made stuff, right? However, since they were city-bound, they typically owned little

or no property for themselves. And since tax laws for the most of the imperial period only taxed property rather than sales, again because that would have been beneath the state, as we actually discussed fairly recently in episode 97, they did not serve as an effective tax source. That's not to say the merchants and craftsmen paid no tax whatsoever, but they were only subject to the headcount tax and were thus still deemed to be relatively small potatoes in the eyes of the government. So the top level of the commoner class, and by far the most numerous,

was the nong, or the landed farmers. By definition, they were a rural class who owned a parcel of land and worked it to feed both themselves, as well as hopefully make enough extra to be able to sell. Now, maybe owned is a little bit misleading. I mean, they held and worked a parcel of land, but that land was ultimately at the disposal of whichever lord legally controlled it. Still, it works as a shorthand, right? 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and

on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.

In northern China, north of the Yangtze River, the big cash crop was to raise wheat, since it was hardier and more able to withstand the dry, arid, and cold conditions. South of the Yellow River, rice was and is king, since it is wetter, warmer, and the product itself is much more sensitive to climactic swings. There's actually a so-called rice theory which is put out by Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia. It states that the differences in agricultural practices necessitated and explains the two widely varying cultures of North and South China. People tend to be more individualistic and independent in the North, thanks to the fact that farming wheat doesn't require a whole lot of cooperation, but can pretty much be managed by oneself and one's own family. Meanwhile, rice requires so much more labor,

not only to directly produce, where you have to go in and individually plant every little sprig of rice, but all the more so in the infrastructure that such planting requires. I'm referring, of course, to those world-famous terraced rice paddies. You know, those tiered mountains with ponds on each stair step. Think for a second about how much labor it must have taken to carve out those hills and mountains, and how much more infrastructure was needed to then constantly refill those

paddies with water. No one could have possibly built or maintained that on their own. It required a huge degree of cooperation, and led, by necessity, to a southern culture much more cooperative and interdependent, one might even say communistic. That said, it is definitely worth pointing out that Mao Zedong came from Hunan, which, you guessed it, is right about the heart of southern China. The farmers were considered the noblest and highest common class, in principle because they worked the land and that was just great, but in a far more practical sense because

that's where the tax revenue was coming from. Since many of these farmers wouldn't have just had fat stacks of cash lying around or anything, oftentimes they'd pay their taxes, assessed both on the amount of land they owned and by the size of their household, in product directly, aka rice or wheat. As just a little aside here, it is interesting to note that now in the 20th century, the nongmin, or the farmer class, has become a derogatory epithet towards people who are uncultured or illiterate or from the provinces, which is quite the turnaround from the high social class that they used to be. But such is the nature of the rapidly modernizing Chinese economy. So finally, we have the Shi, or the official class.

Now, they're whom we've been primarily focused on for virtually all of this podcast and what virtually every single Chinese historian has ever written about. If for no other reason, then that's the only class that was ever bothered to be written down. So, since the whole rest of the show, all 99 episodes before this one, is pretty much all about them, I'm gonna do the unthinkable here and just give them a pass this go-round. If you want to know more about them, well, the whole rest of the show is waiting there for you. The meat of your question, though, I think, was the question of slavery. So I'd like to take a moment, well, more than a moment, to look at that fifth invisible class in the Chinese system, the slaves.

Slavery definitely existed in China. And sadly, as with the rest of the world, it still does today, albeit now illegally. Now a lot of this is difficult to pin down, as it is with a lot of slave information throughout most of time, since there's just not a whole lot of archaeological evidence or historical records about these people who were just simply thought of as cattle or property. In terms of ancient archaeological evidence, there is very little to establish a clear time frame. And in especially the 20th century, the question can and has been super politicized, especially in terms of the Marxist revisionists. Still, the general understanding is that prior to the unification into empire under Qian Shi Huang in the year 221 BCE,

the Xia, the Shang, and probably the Zhou all existed as what's sometimes referred to as slave societies, although I've seen other historians argue that it was a society with slaves, not a slave society, but that's kind of splitting hairs. I've seen some estimates say that maybe a total of 5% of the whole population was formally enslaved in those early prehistorical Neolithic eras. Those slaves would have primarily been captured peoples from war, as well as the children of slave mothers who'd given birth, so it would have been an inherited condition. Indeed, in the south of China, there were entire lines of people who were perpetually enslaved or indentured to entire other lines of people. Moreover, in these early periods, when the master died, slaves would be killed and buried with him so that they could continue to serve their master in the next life, so not even death would see your work at an end.

Under the Qin legal code, the infamous Five Punishments in fact, the idea of perpetual or hereditary slavery was undone, but rather slavery was a punishment for criminals along with their families who could be enslaved. Of course, that also still included war captives because they were uncivilized brutes and why not? Qin Shi Huang put that statute to good use and used hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and I'm sure sure, women, toiling away on his mega-projects like the First Great Wall and his own mausoleum. Then, when he died, his son, Chin Arsha, ordered that many, tens of thousands of people, in fact, be buried with him because he was just a super great guy like that. The majority of slaves would have been menial field workers,

who worked alongside free farmers and did much the same work, but just didn't see any share of the profit. Probably the most famous slave class from the early imperial era were the eunuchs, who were castrated men, who were then sent to work in the imperial palace. This, as we've gone through, led occasionally to what you'd expect to have happen if you snip your political and martial enemy and then put them into close trusted positions near the imperial family. By that I mean betrayal, treachery, and murder. But I don't want us to get the wrong idea about that, because in spite of their bad rap and the classical histories, we have to remember that the vast, vast majority of court eunuchs lived and died and did their jobs perfectly well as trusted and trustworthy servants. They were put in extremely intimate positions that they could have taken advantage of, and yet the vast majority of them didn't. It's just

the few bad apples that the histories have remembered that we judge the vast majority of them didn't. It's just the few bad apples that the histories have remembered that we judge the whole lot of them by a lot of the time. By the Tang dynasty, however, there had entered further distinctions into the question of forced labor. The Tang legal code divided the slaves and near slaves into three distinct groups, the guangnyubei, or the official chattel slaves, the guanhu, or official bonded workers, and the zahu, or general bondsmen. Chattel slaves toiled away full-time as property to be bought and sold, while official and general bonded workers were only compelled to work a set number of days per year, and the rest of the time was their own. Moreover, the latter two categories, since they were not officially categorized as

full-on slaves, were eligible to receive parcels of their own land through government allocation. I mean, we're not talking about a great life here, but it's better than slavery outright. In addition to slaves coming from foreign tribes and nations in wartime, and as a form of criminal punishment, some people were compelled by circumstance to sell themselves and or their family members into slavery or to near slavery. This was particularly common in the event of a natural disaster like a drought or a famine, when parents were sometimes forced to make what must have been the most awful decision ever, to either sell one or more of their family members, indeed their children, into slavery,

so that they all might live, or to just watch everyone in their family starve to death. This could have been a formal sale, as a slave, or as a bugu, or a personal retainer or servant, which was considered socially higher than an outright slave, but still lesser than a commoner. In practice, however, there was little real difference other than social standing, and the fact that, legally speaking, personal servants could not be sold outright, although they could be given away. And in any case, frequently the whole you-can't-technically-sell-your-servant thing was skirted around with a wink and a nod, and an exchange of cash for food and clothing provided to the retainer that, wouldn't you know it, just so happened to be about

exactly what an outright purchase would have been. Weird coincidence, right? Finally, as we mentioned, in the south of China, certain entire lineages were permanently indentured to other family lines. Oh right, and then there were just good old-fashioned kidnappings. China's first formal attempt to abolish slavery altogether actually happened in the year 9 CE, when the usurper of the Han dynasty, Wang Meng, attempted to forbid the practice. After he got his head chopped off about a decade later, though, the restored Han dynasty rescinded the abolition and back into chains the slaves went. Still, at the establishment of both the Han and the Ming, the respective founding emperors decreed that slaves who had been rendered as such

during the chaos of the preceding civil war that had established the dynasty were to be freed. In fact, the Hongwu emperor, the founder of the Ming, decreed that commoners were not to own slaves at all anymore, but that only had the effect of slave owners commonly changing the namesynasties officially enslaved large numbers of Han Chinese, and one might argue that through their conquests, they had effectively enslaved the entire ethnicity for the duration of their respective regimes. During the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, the Heavenly King Hong Xiuqian, and self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ at that, no, seriously, well, he abolished slavery and prostitution in his territory, but it was all brought back once the Qing finally crushed his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, but more on that

when we really get to it. Still, after Wang Meng's first century attempt at abolition ended in failure, no formal attempt to end legal slavery was ever taken up by the throne all the way up to the year 1909, when the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Fu Yi, and the last emperor of China ever, for that matter, decreed the formal abolition of slavery as part of a broader effort to reform and modernize his empire. Well, that didn't go so well, and even the official decree didn't stop people from retaining their slaves through the lifespans of the warlord era and even into the republican era. The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, saw the reaffirmation of slavery's illegality and total abolition. Still, slavery persists even today, and a report by the Global Slavery Index in 2013 estimated that there are some 2.9 million modern slaves in the nation of

China alone. Infamously, in 2007, there was a major scandal known as the Shanxi Black Brick Kiln Incident, which caught the attention of both the Chinese media and even the president at the time, Hu Jintao. The incident revolved around illegal brick-making yards that utilized brutal torture, mental and physical, and even horrific murders to enforce compliance of thousands of kidnapped and enslaved people, including children as young as 8 years old. The story came to national attention after video footage revealed that the local police knew about these illegal operations since as early as 1998, but after having been paid off, had not done anything about it.

In June of 2007, after direct intervention by the national government, but after having been paid off, had not done anything about it. In June of 2007, after direct intervention by the national government, some 550 brick slaves were freed, though the intervention resulted in numerous arrests and subsequent executions or life imprisonments of certain individuals, as well as the forced resignation of the governor of Shanxi province. A subsequent investigation in 2011 found that the practice had not abated in Shanxi, much less China as a whole.

And each year, a handful of people, primarily children, are reported as missing, and it's widely suspected that many of them end up as slave labor in places like brickyards. So that is some sad stuff. Let's lighten the mood a little by getting to our next question, which comes from Mark Soon from Indonesia. He asked about Chinese relationship with Southeast Asia, why China chose to stop conquering southward, what Chinese thoughts and opinions on their region and its peoples were, which is a super broad set of questions. I'll totally try to answer them,

but I might not do an extremely good job of it. Still, let's give it our best shot. Okay, so let me first and foremost paint a really, really broad picture of what the general outlook of your average imperial Chinese citizen was, or might have been, regarding foreign relations and foreign people. I think we can probably sum it up in the following exchange from one of my all-time favorite movies, Casablanca. China's not called China by the Chinese. It's called Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, the literal center point of the universe.

And either you're a part of it, or you're not. A modern take on the idea comes in the form of a Mandarin language joke, which is 中国人觉得地球就有两个国家,中国和外国。 The translation of this is, Chinese people think that there are only two nations on earth, one is called China, and the other is called foreign. Up until at least the point when the Tang dynasty was forced to start realizing that certain other kingdoms like Japan and Korea might actually exist as independent entities, China's understanding of anyone not them basically boiled down to either you're our vassal, or we're at war with you to make us our vassal, or you're too far away for us to care much about you at all. And in the case of the Southeast Asian kingdoms,

it's kind of a mix of all three, with an emphasis on being too far away to really, truly care. Understand that the China that we see on the globe today, or even a representation of the extent of Tang authority rendered as something like borderlines on a map, wasn't actually how the world looked or was thought about by anyone older than a couple of centuries ago. Rather than these solidly demarcated borders that we somehow think of as immutable, it's better to think of official imperial control functioning like a magnet placed

in a pile of iron shavings. At nodes of population, like cities and garrisons, control was of course strong. But the further you got from those, the weaker that magnetic force was, fading off surprisingly rapidly into almost nothing. And the south of China wasn't nearly the highly populated place it is today. Sure, there were some cities, even one or two major ports, but the vast majority of the country still lived north of the Yangtze River. If we look at two of China's southernmost provinces, which are today two of their most populated in fact, we can see in the names themselves how China used to view these once remote holdings. The provinces of Guangdong, which some of you might know better as Canton, and its neighbor Guangxi can be translated as respectively the Eastern and Western Expanses.

Guangxi, the territory which borders Vietnam, is even today an autonomous region rather than a province, and its population is almost 38% non-Han Chinese, primarily the indigenous Zhuang people. Now, a region where only 62% of the people are the majority ethnicity might not sound strange at all in quite a few countries. That's more or less right exactly where the U.S. sits as a whole, for instance. But compare that to China as a whole, where the total population is 92% ethnically Han, making China about as Chinese as Vermont is white. And the stark difference kind of becomes apparent, doesn't it? We're talking about the outer reaches of Chinese culture's ability to penetrate and integrate its neighboring

peoples. That's doubly the case because, as Mark brought up in his question, the cultures and people of Southeast Asia are in many respects quite alien to the Chinese. Unlike Korea or Japan or a whole slew of other neighboring civilizations that basked in the Confucian cultural light of the Middle Kingdom and adopted much of it for themselves, Southeast Asian kingdoms and peoples were far more influenced by the likes of India. Given that the Indian kingdoms had much easier and earlier access to the likes of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia, and all the rest of Southeast Asia, through overseas trade and colonization, versus China's lack of early ocean faring and overland points of contact, it's hardly surprising. Then, of course, we would have to talk about the climate.

Oh man, the climate. As a general rule, up until around about the 20th century, the further south of the Yangtze River an ethnic Han person was liable to venture, the more likely he was to up and just drop dead. The reason? Those nice little tropical diseases that have acted as Southeast Asia's invisible army for millennia. The armies of the Han Dynasty, and six centuries later the Liang Dynasty of the 6th century, could kick down Vietnam's door and come marching through all they wanted.

But they found time and again that they would have to expect to lose upwards of 90% of whatever force they sent, even if they never encountered an enemy soldier. If you're listening to Mike Duncan's current show, you'll know that he just finished out the Haitian Revolution, which saw wave after wave of French soldiers just drop stone dead almost the moment they set foot on the island of Saint-Domingue. Well, it's basically that exact same situation. Unless you could set up the ethnic natives as vassal kings, which, to be sure, was absolutely done. Well, unless they were going to cooperate with you, though. You couldn't really just send a force to take and hold the territories south of the Yunling Mountains, because whatever soldiers

you sent were going to die before they even arrived. Hell, even the Yunling Mountains, because whatever soldiers you sent were going to die before they even arrived. Hell, even the Mongolian Empire, the terror of the steppes, the punishment of God that managed to conquer China, the Arabian Caliphate, Russia, Korea, and Eastern Europe, the army that was only turned back from its conquest of Japan by a freaking hurricane kamikaze-define wind, sinking their entire fleet twice. Well, even they met their match against general disease once they entered the tropical jungles of Southeast Asia three times, and then lost their entire half-million army each and every attempt. And not to downplay the ferocity with which the Champa, the Viet, and all the people fought against anyone dumb enough to invade them. I give them all the

credit in the world for viciously defending their homeland against any and all comers across all of time. The Chinese, the Mongols, the French, and the Americans all learn the really, really hard way that the fighting spirit of the Vietnamese people is well and truly unquenchable and not ever to be taken lightly. I think I rank that area of the world right up there with the likes of Afghanistan as places it's just a really exceptionally bad idea to try to invade. All right, our next question comes from Jason Y, who went in the other direction and asked me a rather specific question. Quote, what do you think of Wanli of Ming's reign? What would you say the biggest impacts he had on China and the dynasty were? If you came across it, what do you think of the book 1587, A Year of No Significance by Ray Huang?

Okay, so first off, just a big disclaimer here. I'm still a good 800 years away from the late Ming, so I do not have nearly the perspective that I hope I will once I've really gone and tried to research a guy like Emperor Wanli. I know of Huang's book, and I've looked up the reviews, but I haven't gotten a copy for myself yet. But that will definitely be on my reading list once I get to the 16th century. As of now, all I can really give to you is my initial impressions after a good

week and a half of Google-fu and perusing bookstores and JSTore. For those of you not in the know, the Wanli Emperor, who will cover in full in his due course once we get to the late 16th century Ming Dynasty, was the 13th and longest reigning sovereign of the Ming, clocking in at 48 years, even longer than our current four-decade-plus reign of Xuanzong of Tang, who will die after a mere 44. Wanli was enthroned at the age of nine, but in spite of his longevity, he's widely remembered as the guy who basically flat-out refused to do his job, and as a result oversaw the steady grinding decline of the Ming dynasty as a whole, which would ultimately succumb to Manchu-Zhechuan invasion and conquest only 24 years after his death in 1620. He outright refused to read court petitions,

appoint replacements to empty official posts after the last occupant had retired or had died, and pretty much just locked himself away in the Forbidden City for 30 plus years, refusing to even attend his own audiences and allowing a cabal of eunuchs to take control, factionalize, and then split the government right down the middle. So, from what I've seen prior to Rei Huang's 1981 book, which is again, 1587, a year of no significance, Wanli was pretty much only remembered as a selfish, hedonistic, and ineffective emperor whose failure to take the reins of his own government and actually steer it away from the cliff edge he was approaching led directly to the fall of the

dynasty to foreign invaders after two centuries and change of Chinese rule. It's rather understandable, from that perspective, why the Red Guard were quite willing to storm Wanli's Dingling Mausoleum, which had already suffered irreversible and extensive damage thanks to a 1956 excavation so badly botched that the PRC government forbade anyone from unsealing imperial tombs ever again. While the Red Guard stormed the mausoleum in 1969 as part of the Cultural Revolution and seized the tomb's occupants and the objects buried with them, denounced them, and then burned them all in a bonfire. Wanli's actions, or rather

inactions, had resulted in the successful second foreign occupation and usurpation of China as a whole. He had, however inadvertently, condemned his own people to nearly 300 years of humiliating foreign rule under the Qing. Rei Huang, however, takes a very interesting perspective on the state of the Ming under Wanli's absentee reign, and makes the case that a series of seemingly unconnected, seemingly insignificant events all snowballed together to accelerate the decline of the Ming that was already afoot, and that Wanli, although admittedly ineffectual, was a creature more to be pitied and empathized with than despised or blamed. In essence, that his withdrawal from

his duties of governance were not the mark of a merely weak-willed man retreating to solitude, but actually an act of passive aggressive rebellion against the system he perceived as fundamentally broken, and yet which trapped and constrained him completely. I think when I get there that it'll be a question that I'll relish getting into more depth. I'm a big fan of searching for the real person behind the two-dimensional portrayals of the ancient histories. However, that will have to wait for another time. Our next question comes from, once again, from Silly Valley.

He asked, on the heels of our discussion of the transmission of paper as of our last episode, if the same sort of pains to protect the cultural secret have been taken with the likes of silk. And the answer is absolutely yes. The larger question is how effective that attempt to keep it safe as a trade secret was. If ever there were a more valuable state secret, I'd be surprised. Maybe the secret of the royal purple dye for Roman emperors' clothes. But in terms of scope and scale, I would have to guess that silk tops the list. The finished product, of course, was known, coveted, and sold at top dollar worldwide, well, from their perspective at least, since the early Han dynasty and the opening of the not-coincidentally-named Silk Road. Now, the big question, the big secret,

was how. There was no great secret, of course, that most caterpillars produced strands of silk and thread, and there had been several marginally successful attempts to produce indigenous silk using wild silk moths in the Eastern Roman Empire. But the fact that the Chinese were able to produce it at both the rate and consistently high quality that they did baffled virtually everyone who sought the material. Unlike attempts at using wild moths, Chinese breeders found a species of mulberry-eating moth caterpillar, at some point circa the 4th millennia BCE, and selectively bred it over generations upon generations to be virtually the perfect silk-producing agent.

The silk moth caterpillar, commonly called the silkworm, produces a tremendous amount of silk as it pupates, while most caterpillars produce far less, sometimes only a single thread to anchor their cocoon. The silkworm, which admittedly also produces only a single continuous thread, nevertheless manages to produce more than a mile of it, wrapping itself up completely. In addition, adult silk moths, in spite of having large, beautiful wings, have been bred over time to be completely flightless, meaning of course that unlike their wild cousins, they are incredibly easy to keep and raise en masse. The only major issue is that if they're allowed to fully pupate, the moth, as it emerges from the mile-long cocoon,

secretes enzymes that dissolve a hole in it, which thus damages the silk. So for production purposes, once the caterpillars enter their cocoon, they are boiled, which both preserves the integrity of the strand and makes unraveling it easier. Though there are other methods, specifically in India, which rely on allowing the moth to pupate fully and complete its life cycle, fear not, even in China, waste not, want not. The boiled worms are sold as medicine to be eaten in China, as well as in Japan and Korea. And at least here I've seen small boxes of them, sometimes only a few of them inside,

selling for sometimes hundreds or even thousands of Dreadmen B. And before you ask, no, I have not tried them, and I do not desire to. I have about as much interest in eating partially developed moths as I do in eating partially developed duck eggs a la Balut in Southeast Asia, which is to say, none at all, ever, thanks anyway. The technique was, at least according to traditional historians like Procopius and Seneca the Younger, a closely guarded state secret, which threatened the death penalty to anyone caught smuggling live silkworms out of the country. According to Procopius, for instance, the secret of silk only made it to the Byzantines

in the 6th century after a pair of Nestorian monks somehow managed to successfully smuggle the worms back west. Those thieving, tonsured bastards. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures. Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore the tales of this amazing culture, from the legendary days of creation and the gods,

all the way to Cleopatra, and everything in between. The History of Egypt podcast is written and produced by a trained Egyptologist. We go much deeper than your average documentary or magazine article to uncover tales of life, great endeavours, and the amazing arc of a mighty kingdom. The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit Ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. And that story, and variations of it, have been the go-to motif for centuries. In the show Marco Polo, for instance, Marco's father is caught trying to smuggle silkworms in the 13th century. And things do not go well for him.

That had once been my operational understanding as well, until it was pointed out to me that my studies of Byzantine history have pointed out a lot, both how dubiously convenient Procopius' account is, and the fact that it's not corroborated by any other stories at all. Further doubt is thrown upon this presumed but not confirmed narrative by Zhang Xushan, considered one of the foremost researchers on silkworm fertility, who says essentially, yeah, one guy told that as a story and it stuck, but we have no way to confirm it, so we don't really know exactly how silk spread. And that's pretty much the extent of the argument.

There's just not enough evidence. We do know, as Silly Valley pointed out in his question, that like paper, silk was not as on total lockdown as Procopius would have us believe, since both Japan and Korea were able to smuggle their own stock of silkworms and its means of production by around the 3rd or possibly as late as the 6th century. Nevertheless, it's also important to at least point out the distinction between the two. That while paper has no shelf life, per se, i.e. you can make it anywhere, anytime, so long as you have the know-how, silkworms are a much more fragile and much more time-sensitive commodity. I mean, in terms of ancient travel

times across the Silk Road, it is feasible. You could even potentially successfully produce multiple generations of silk moths if the trip took too long for the total life cycle, which is about six to eight weeks. But it would have definitely been a rough journey for the little guys. It'd be no surprise if attempted smugglers, even once or if they got past Chinese border checks, would have been unable to keep their cargo alive in the arid, hot, and turbulent conditions of Central Asia. And in the words of the intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett, he's no good to me dead. Plus, even when Bombex Mori did at last arrive in Central and Western Asia and Europe, whenever that may have been, Chinese output was not only staggeringly huge and industrial by comparison, but they had

also refined the process to near perfection, while the likes of the Byzantines would have only been starting out. Heck, to this day, the very name of the product, silk, refers to its Chinese origins. The ancient Greek name for china was cirrus, which was likewise what the lustrous fabric that came from it was known as. Cirrus fabric became known in Latin as cirricum, and eventually morphed into the Old English Sioloc, which you can probably hear sounds an awful lot like the modern English silk. Our final question today comes from ak22016, who asks, Do you believe that by the end of the 21st century, China will transition to a representative democracy? Will this be a smooth and gradual transition?

On the flip side, has the approach of reform through free markets and with an authoritarian form of government proven to be a successful alternative to democracy? Is there a validity to the argument for stability through one-party rule? End quote. And wow, that is one hell of a question to ask, AK. Are you trying to get me arrested or something? Aren't you aware that the PRC is a perfect socialist state utopia with rainbows and unicorns and will be forever and ever?

Okay, have the Wuma tuned me out yet? Good. So all kidding aside, let me pull out my handy dandy crystal ball here and I'll dive into the realm of completely unqualified, probably wildly inaccurate speculation, which, you know, makes me just about as qualified as anybody else. Major social and political change is always impossible right up until it's at your castle gate with torches and spears. If looking at Chinese and world history tells us anything it's that we are really weird as a species and that the twists and turns actual real-life people are capable of throwing into the historical narrative are way more bizarre and unpredictable and even unbelievable than what fiction has ever come up with.

So there's my typically long-winded way of shrugging my shoulders and mumbling, I don't know. But if you forced me to guess, I would say I think China's political system will substantively change in the coming century. But I would stop short of guessing that it would become a liberal representative democracy in the style of the US or Japan or Europe. I don't really see the Communist Party letting other players into the competition willingly. But then again, if you'd asked me in 2010

if I thought Myanmar's military junta would ever allow anything other than an oppressive totalitarian dictatorship in the style of what they had been doing for the last 50 years, that is that no way. And then, the next year they'd voluntarily stepped aside and allowed for what appears to be five or so years of actual, genuine democratic reform.

Likewise, I have to say, if I'd been alive in 1977, and you'd asked me from that perspective, will China become a major global economic superpower with market economy, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola, I would have looked around at the burned-out wreckage of the Cultural Revolution and the thoroughly Maoist state mechanisms, and likewise said, nah, ain't happening, no way. But then, Mao died, and Deng Xiaoping did what had only a couple of years prior been unthinkable, market-based reforms. History's weird like that, man. The Chinese government has evolved and continues to do so. I think there might come a point when, maybe, it wouldn't be unthinkable to allow a real, true opposition party to develop. I don't think that's an inevitability, though.

The CPC likes to keep things in-house, and though there are inter-party factions, liberal and conservative both, I think there is something fundamentally Chinese about wanting to curb and limit factionalization as much as possible, and with a very good real and historically cultural reason to do so. Factionalization in China has repeatedly meant some of the deadliest conflicts in human history. I'm talking about the period of disunion, the An Lushan Rebellion, as we're just about to see, the Taiping Revolution, the Xinhai Revolution, the Chinese Civil War. I mean, we in America, we had one civil war 150 years ago that we still feel the cultural effects of. Imagine if that happened just again and again

and again every single time you allowed two different factions to develop. I'm not saying that this kind of strife is unique to China, certainly not, but I do think that there is some kind of a special sensitivity to allowing even the possibility of a split because the consequences have been so unbelievably devastating time and again. And then combine that with the heavy Chinese preference for not just the institutional and cultural level, but also even at the individual level as well, of a high-order, low-conflict society. Both the Chinese people and the Communist Party would have to be convinced that allowing for political factionalization would be a net positive, and I'm not sure that that conversation will happen quickly or at all.

But it might. I do think that the driving agent as to how much and how fast and in what direction China's ongoing political evolution will be is its economic situation. while the Communist Party has retained its lock on political power, it has shed the vast majority of its socialist ideological tenets in order to do so. Deng Xiaoping's reforms saved the party and the PRC and catapulted it into economic superstardom, leading to a pace of growth and development over 40 years that took the western world more than a century and a half to achieve and let me just say at the outset that that is in large part due to just plain ketchup no doubt but in order for that to have happened they had to allow for private ownership businesses profits blue jeans rock and roll i mean mao would be spinning in his grave if he knew what his country looked like

today. And yet, if we brought Marx and Engels here in a time machine and explained what was going on, I think that they would have said like, well, duh, it's about time they actually read what we wrote about socialism. You can't just skip capitalism and go straight to communism from an agrarian monarchy. Capitalism is a completely necessary step, since it allows for the accumulation of excess wealth that is required for the then next step of post-capitalism, which is socialism. why that they had wanted Western Europe and America to undergo the Great Proletariat Revolution, not backwards poor Asian empires like Russia and China. I mean, historically speaking, we can see the effects of when a communist revolution happens in the wrong type of economic system. It's what leads to devastating five-year plans with no way to implement them, to mass starvation, to peasants being told to literally melt their farm tools down in personal furnaces to provide the state with steel. It's devastating unless you already have the economic output and the mass of stuff available. You can't just go from base

level agrarianism to socialism. You must have the capitalist phase, if you want to call it that, in between to generate the excess wealth. That's fundamental Marxism. I mean, I'm not sitting here trying to promote it, but I have tried to understand it. And I do try to wrap my head around it and see what it is that someone like Karl Marx was actually trying to say and what he was trying to get across. And ultimately, it's no wonder that it didn't work out in the USSR or really even in the PRC because they skipped a fundamental step. But let's get back to the question of the Chinese economy's impact on its political stability. There's quite a few people out there who are a lot better informed than me ringing alarm bells because of exactly this kind of question. China's economic growth in the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s ensured that,

in spite of some protests, some very deadly demonstrations as well, that the Communist Party did not face any real systemic challenge to its legitimacy. All they really had to do was point to their own economy year after year after year and say, hey, take a look. Every year we're getting better and better and your lives are all improving. And we're going to go ahead and take all the credit for all that. You know, you're welcome, Chinese people. Never mind the fact that all of Deng's reforms had

really done was to take the Maoist jackboot off the collective throats of the Chinese people and actually allow them to improve the country in spite of the CPC. Not because of that. Even still, most Chinese looked around, maybe not quite understanding the totality of the situation as we might look back on it today. They looked around and they had to concede the point that, yeah, okay, under this new communist party, post-Mao, things were getting better year by year. China was improving. And without any real strong counter-narrative, the CPC could say that, yeah, indeed, they were making China great again, if I may ironically borrow a turn of phrase from a birthday clown. I have the great jokes. They're all the best jokes. My jokes are tremendous. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. The rocket fuel in China's economic engine is sputtering,

and it has been since at least 2008. China approached the economic crisis, the global downturn, from a very different perspective than most of the other developed nations, who wound up being kind of biting the bullet and eating the recession altogether at once, and then recovering over time. China, on the other hand, decided that a recession was absolutely out of the question, and so rather than face diminishing returns, it would increase internal spending dramatically. That seemed to work in the short term, but the long-term consequence of peeling the band-aid off little by little, rather than all at once, has meant that the pain and the potentially dangerous effects have been strung out over eight years and continuing, rather than just all and done at once. And in spite of the rash of state-directed spending, economic growth, though still at levels that any other country in the world would kill to have, is nevertheless dropping off.

And that's a natural and inevitable consequence of modernization and zooming up through the levels like it did, and now reaching a middle-income plateau for the majority of its people. Once you're all cut up to everyone else, it becomes more and more difficult to continue growing. The same thing happened with South Korea and Japan, after each of which hit their eventual point of more or less parody of a modern western economy. But if China's growth rate continues to drop sharply, then so too will overall happiness with the party in charge, especially when they tend to do things that quite a lot of Chinese people don't particularly like, but have up until now accepted as a trade-off for their tremendous

economic progress, like, say, block off most of the entire internet or accrue massive public debt, which is currently approaching the same percentage of its GDP as the U.S., something like 250% of its overall worth. But markedly unlike the U.S., China's debt issued is much more worrisome because it is continuing to grow rapidly, rather than holding pretty steady like America's. Continued large-scale investiture in housing and infrastructure work, while great, has also created a massive property speculation bubble. But then again, it makes perfect sense because what else are investors supposed to do with their cash? Put their money into the state-run banks? Or to the state-run banks or to the state-run stock market? Most Chinese people with money do not

trust a government that has routinely, heavily, financially punished those who get too far ahead. I mean, this is the same party that once upon a time out-and-out condemned the landlord class as capitalist roadsters and supported outright pogroms against them. I can't say that I blame those who might distrust it when the party says, oh no, we're totally different now, especially when there are still ongoing campaigns against those who are deemed to have made too much too fast. And the wealthy of China have been, since well before 2008, moving their cash, and then themselves, out of China altogether before the state can swing around and smash what they've managed to accumulate. In a New York Times article on this topic, which came out just yesterday, June 5th, it pointed out that last year alone saw a monetary outflow from the PRC to the tune of $676 billion. That's US dollars,

not Chinese RMB, by the way. That is worrisome. Now, most countries tend to have a pretty strong bulwark against which they can defend something like a recession or a depression or an economic hard time when they come a-knocking, as they inevitably do. And that is an ideological narrative to which all of the citizenry agree to believe. One of the nice things about democracy, for instance, is that it's got a really nice sales pitch that feels really good to believe. Of the people, by the people, for the people, no taxation, without representation, all that jazz. It's a great vibe, even in tough times. Monarchy, too, can have a really solid backstory to help maintain social and political cohesion through hard times. Even communism can do a great job of this. China

itself might be the best example. People stuck with Mao through the Great Leap Forward and through the Cultural Revolution and all the terrible destructive hardships in large part because they bought the PRC's ideological line. That's what we need as people. We need an ideological narrative to believe in, and we can bear almost anything if we buy into that. But what is the Chinese Communist Party's ideology today? What's their line? I mean, effectively, they've sold off their socialist soul to the capitalist devil in the name of materialist wealth. There's not much of a better way to put it. What is someone who's Chinese to fall back on if the economy hits a real significant economic road bump,

like, oh, say, I don't know, an enormous housing bubble that people have been pouring their life savings into for more than a decade because A, they don't trust the banking and the stock systems of their country, because A, they don't trust the banking and the stock systems of their country, and B, they have been repeatedly assured that housing will always increase in value forever. Does that sound familiar? What happens if, when, that bubble pops? All I know is that I

plan to be on the other side of the world for that, just like I managed to luck my way into being back in 2008, because I really doubt it will be a pretty situation. Now, Americans can tend to get through something like the Great Recession, or the Great Depression for that matter, because by and large, they believe in the fundamentals of the system they live in, even if they decry elements of corruption that they justifiably perceive on both sides. China, of course, has got its own set of citizens that do, of course, deeply believe in state socialism with Chinese characteristics and the Chinese Communist Party.

I mean, I'm not trying to discount that. There are true believers, of course. But I'd go out on a limb and say that there's quite a few Chinese people out there who do not, in their heart of hearts, yearn for collective ownership or a dictatorship of the proletariat or would weep too terribly hard

at the idea of it being ultimately done away with in favor of a different ideological and political and economic model, or a competing political party for that matter. The other element is that, as literally the only game in town, the CPC is the one and only political group that the people could or would point the finger of blame at in the event of an economic downturn. I mean, perhaps they could play it off as some sinister foreign element or whatever, but I do have a feeling that the Chinese people, or at least the modern urbanites, are wired enough and smart enough in spite of the Great Firewall to see through that

old line. I don't know, though. These are just the thoughts of a random foreigner. And as the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. All right. Well, that should get me an appropriate amount of hate mail from whatever 50 centers might be tuning in. So, mission accomplished. I think that that was all the questions sent in. But if I somehow managed to miss yours, know that it was not intentional at all. Poke me online and I will answer you directly. And I'm also going to leave the question page up on the website so if there's anyone with more questions

feel free absolutely to post them or to email me or to ask on the Facebook page or on Twitter as always we are at THOC Podcast and so we've come to the end of episode number 100 but there's so so much more left to come. Next week, we'll be getting into the opening salvos of the An Lushan Rebellion, a civil war that will bring the Tang to its knees, tear China apart yet again,

and produce more violence and death in a decade than even 70 years of the Three Kingdoms produced. Thank you for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.