The History of China - #196 - Special: ReConsidering China with Xander Snyder & Eric Fogg

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

My long-lost conversation with the hosts of the excellent ReConsider Podcast, Xander and Eric... now *finally* delivered to you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to the History of China. Hey everyone, today I'm excited to bring you at long last my interview with the hosts of the
Starting point is 00:00:40 Reconsider podcast, Xander Snyder and Eric Fogg examining the politics, society, and yes, history of China. The funny thing is, we actually did this interview a couple of years back in late 2018, and then I just sort of completely blanked on actually putting it out on my own feed at the time. I think it was that I was so busy putting together that year's strange tale stories that it just got shelved and then put on the back burner and then kind of forgotten. Well, fortunately, they decided to re-release their China series and tag me into it, so I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity for me to finally get it to you for the first time. You should also totally go check out their other three parts and interviews on the topic. They are, as ever, fascinating. All right, so without further ado, this is Xander,
Starting point is 00:01:26 Eric, and my conversation on everything from Confucianism to Xinjiang to China's sense of its own place in world history and its future. So I hope you enjoy. Welcome back, everyone, to Reconsider, part of the Agora Podcast Network, where we don't do the thinking for you. And welcome to episode four of our Reconsidering China series. We're going to be talking about China's history and how that history impacts its worldview today. So the last couple of episodes, we've talked about China's economy, their financial system, some of the current political considerations that the Communist Party is working on now. And today, we have a very special guest. We're going to give you some context about China's very, very long history
Starting point is 00:02:20 and how that shapes China's worldview today with Chris Stewart of the History of China podcast. Chris, welcome to Reconsider. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. 你好,Chris. 你怎么样? 大家好。 正好。 So for folks who are not familiar with Chris's History of China podcast, I just want to make a quick plug for it because, as you know, China's history is very very very long so long in fact
Starting point is 00:02:45 that chris made an entire podcast series out of it um so real hundreds of episodes hundreds of episodes and before we can begin chris i would just like to say or ask in about 30 seconds how would you summarize those hundreds of episodes and thousands of years of Chinese history. Ready? Go. Let's see if the sweeping tale of the broad strokes of the political history of China, but we also get into some of the more social and cultural aspects of it. The Dark Horse hit of this year has actually been about the rice revolution in the early Song period and how they went from feeding only 20 million people with a northern strain of rice to more than 50 million people with rice that they went from feeding only 20 million people with a northern strain of rice to more than 50 million people with rice that they imported from Vietnam. And I was expecting that
Starting point is 00:03:30 one to not get so many downloads, but that's been the breakout hit of 2018. So we go all over the place. Yes, it's I remember that episode. It's so good because it's like it's it's it's this amazing combination of, you know, there's a technological advance of sorts. But most importantly, there is this incredible administrative apparatus that allows it to happen. Or that allows is the wrong word. That makes it happen. And, you know, it's one of those early revolutions that, you know, we think of the Green Revolution in the Indian subcontinent of the 20th century. And this just like pales in comparison. It's super cool. Absolutely. So for those of
Starting point is 00:04:09 you listening, how do you find Chris? Well, look, man, just search the history of China, because he is the authority on the topic. He has the biggest, the baddest, the best podcast on the topic. And so you can't miss it if you go look for it. History of China, go check it out. I'm a big fan. Well, thanks very much. So with that, we'll kick it off with a question. We'll dig into it. So sort of the common narratives that you hear about China today, even for folks who might not be as familiar with the history, often reference its very, very old history. So just first to kind of like lay foundation of sort of what we're going to be talking about, how far back does our knowledge about China go? Is it written history, prehistory? What do we have?
Starting point is 00:04:57 Yeah, well, as your question kind of indicates, there's actually several different answers depending on how you want to look at it. The most common sort of glib answer is the 5,000 years of Chinese history, which is used in my own show's tagline. You ask any Chinese person, essentially, that's the answer you're going to get. That said, that is just a nice literary device coming from the grand historian Sima Qian from the Han Dynasty. And Sima Qian, if anyone's not familiar, is kind of the Chinese Herodotus. He's the father of history in China, also the father of lies, and he has absolutely no head for numbers. Whatever sounds nice is what he uses, regardless of how close or far it is from reality. So 5,000 is the one you'll hear most commonly.
Starting point is 00:05:42 Probably more realistically, if we're talking about history, meaning written records, that's about 3,600 years or so, give or take. That begins with the oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty, which is supposedly the second dynastic order of pre-imperial China from about 1600 BC. If you want to go even further back, prehistorical archaeology, there's Neolithic human settlements as early as, you know, 18 to 20,000 BC. Cool. And so over this at least 3,600 year history, you know, one of the things that, you know, I heard a lot when studying China, which I did in high school and college, and then being in China was this notion of continuity. And I want to talk more about that continuity in a minute. But, you know, every just every history has kind of phases or periods that are highly defining. Like in the West, I tend to think of the like pre, you know, there's the pre 1176
Starting point is 00:06:46 BC era where you had all these, you know, empires in the Mediterranean and then they just up and disappeared and we kind of had to start from scratch, you know, and then, and then like Greeks and Romans and then the, you know, post-Roman dark ages, middle ages, late middle ages renaissance modern era etc and that's kind of how i organized the the history of europe in my mind and if we're thinking about china's history is there a similar kind of easy set of major periods in chinese history and of course i i ask that recognizing that, you know, you have an entire multi-year, hundreds of episodes, podcasts on this. So it's not going to be a great summary. But, you know, can you help us get started? Well, I sure hope I can.
Starting point is 00:07:37 Well, there's the sort of baked in model, which is we could just go about dynasty by dynasty, which is kind of what I do in the show. But in the course of my show, I've come to realize that that's really not the best, at least as I view it, not the best way to break it down. It's not particularly helpful. You get a whole lot of repetition going dynasty by dynasty. So my headcanon has sort of become of breaking it into a few different parts. There's the ancient or the pre-imperial, which covers the so-called first three dynasties that's the xia the shang and the zhou as well as the warring states period yeah which is you know 400 year long running series of civil wars that finally ends in the the second phase which is the imperial phase where china unites into a true empire that we'd recognize under an emperor. That covers, as far as I was thinking of it, the Qin, the first imperial dynasty,
Starting point is 00:08:34 and then the Han, which is the longest and most successful, and then the most famous war in all of Chinese history that there's video games all about, the Three Kingdoms period and the 16 kingdoms and all that. That runs from about 221 BC to about the end of the 6th century a.b that's what i'd call the early imperial period and i just want to say while you're thinking about it that i love that you were saying like is the most famous one the three kingdoms period and i was and you were like let me tell you why it's famous there are all these video games about it but of course i'm thinking like i'm sure almost everyone on our show has heard of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. And I love what it says about you.
Starting point is 00:09:11 That like, ah yes, listeners, you would all know about this Three Kingdoms period from those video games I'm sure you played. Which I happen to have played. But if you were thinking like, wait, what about that Cao Cao guy from that book I read about China? Like, yep, that's the one. Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Anyway, continue. Sorry. That is the one.
Starting point is 00:09:30 I try to, you know, connect to as wide an audience as possible. So if I think your video games tend to be a bit more of a wider touchstone, then I'm sure you've read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms kind of a thing. But no, it's the same one. Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Wu, all that. Good times. So anyway, I'd then say that after that period of disunion, which is another
Starting point is 00:09:53 three to four hundred year civil war, I'd call the next period the Middle Imperial. That's the Sui Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, and the Song Dynasty, which runs from about 580, 1 to 1279. That begins for me the late imperial period, which is the period that is really pockmarked by conquest dynasties and foreign influence and domination. It's kind of the low watermark of the empire. That's the
Starting point is 00:10:20 Mongol Yuan dynasty, the Ming dynasty, which is Chinese restoration, and then the Qing dynasty, until today would be the modern Chinese period, which encompasses the Republic of China, the civil war between the Kuomintang and the communists, and then the modern People's Republic of China. That's how I tend to divide it. So with this much history, what's interesting, what we can do with China, just what we can't with a lot of the countries in the West, is look at this single entity or as this entity is developed over time and really look for patterns, which is something that you can't really do in a country that's 250 years. I mean, you can, but the patterns are not, you're not going to have as big of a sample size, right? Because your longitudinal case, to use unnecessarily wonky words, is much shorter. So, I mean, you talk about these warring states periods, sorry, there is a warring states period, but then there are other civil wars and a dynasty will take
Starting point is 00:11:37 over and there will be several dynasties and then there'll be another civil war. So are there, is this like a cyclical pattern that occurs throughout China's history where there will be some sort of unifying trend towards a new dynasty and they'll hold control for a while and then there'll be a civil war and it just all sort of devolves into regionalism and factionalism? Is that something that exists? And are there other patterns that we can observe as well? Well, yeah. To quote one of my own favorite philosophers, the great Mark Twain, history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Starting point is 00:12:12 And to that effect, certainly I think in the Chinese view and philosophy, they have what's known as the dynastic cycle, that a dynasty will take over, it will unify, it will rebuild infrastructure, expand, and all that, which ultimately leads to several generations down the line. The emperors who are born in the palace who've never seen the outside world leading to stagnation and corruption, the corrupt self-serving officials take over,
Starting point is 00:12:43 leading to decline, higher taxes, more expansionistic wars that are unaffordable, and ultimately leading to revolt, revolution, and overthrow. And then you just sort of lather, rinse, and repeat that whole cycle ad infinitum. Yeah, it's got its own term. And that also goes hand in hand with the Chinese imperial right to rule, which is the mandate of heaven, which is that sort of like the divine right of kings in the West, heaven itself chooses its emissary on earth, the emperor. But if that emperor or his progeny wind up going against the precepts of what's moral and correct, then heaven can take that away. But how do you know heaven's taken that away? You get natural disasters, you get the people suffering, and eventually you get somebody capable of overthrowing that corrupt emperor.
Starting point is 00:13:37 It's a very lovely backwards, self-justifying principle, which is, you know, it's lovely. So you asked the question about cycles and of it being a cyclical pattern. And yes, the Chinese philosophy, the Chinese sort of political view has long been very, very cyclical. And that's in keeping with even the wider philosophy of China and East Asia, of Confucianism, of Taoism. It's all happened before. It will all happen again. Time is a flat circle, that kind of a thing. I want to do a quick tangent to the modern day
Starting point is 00:14:12 before we keep going through some of China's history. You mentioned the mandate of heaven, which is the emperor's right to rule. Now, in modern day China, where there is arguably no religion, I've had some Chinese people tell me Confucianism is a religion, which is maybe something to come back to. But with with the Communist Party and Xi Jinping now, does the mandate of heaven, does that
Starting point is 00:14:36 maybe if not literally apply to today? Is it still sort of a relevant idea kicking around in Chinese political theory circles? That's a great question. I would say you probably would not have anyone overtly saying that idea is still playing or has play, but I think it does at the philosophical level. And what I mean by that is that the current state regime, what have you, is predicated on the notion of the modern state or President Xi to continue on his current course. Now, were circumstances to change dramatically, if growth were suddenly to plummet or cap off entirely, well, things could change rather quickly. So I think in that sense, it is kind of the mandate of heaven, except instead of heaven, it's sort of the mandate of economic prosperity.
Starting point is 00:15:54 Hmm. I like it. Mandate of the Yuan. Yes, the almighty Yuan, yes. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but I'll take it. Actually, one of the things I was thinking about, Chris, when you were giving that answer was, hearkening back to Western philosophy, both Plato and Machiavelli suggest a cyclical nature of governments in the West. Yes. A kind of very different flavor, but the similar reasoning. And when you said in particular that, you know, at some point, the many generations down the line that there are emperors that never leave the palace, you know, like, holy crap.
Starting point is 00:16:34 Right. And then, you know, and then there's this move towards officials taking over, but then becoming self-serving. And then then there's a move towards like the people overthrowing those officials you know the emperor but like essentially those officials who are now ruling and installing someone new or indirectly installing someone new and i i was struck by how similar that was to this notion that you know in these three forms of government that are common between Machiavelli and Plato sort of, which is, you know, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy. Each one of, you know, that reflects a little bit of what you said. And then what that cyclical theory from the West is that one will take power because of like the disaster of what happened before. And people go like, oh, hooray, like the new king is going
Starting point is 00:17:24 to help us. And then, you know, like the new king is going to help us. And then, you know, and the new king has all these privileges because look, it's a hard job. You need to have privileges. But then generations down the line, you know, the king's great, great, great, great, great, great grandkid
Starting point is 00:17:36 forgets why they are king, forgets why they have that mandate and they forget their responsibility. They just start, you know, acting like the whole country exists to serve them. And then the aristocracy takes over and that they become corrupt and then the people take over and they become corrupt. And then they put a king in charge again and the cycle repeats. And I anyway, I I bring that up merely as a reminder to our listeners
Starting point is 00:17:59 or for those who haven't heard me talk about it before, I love that there is this parallel, even if it's not as common in the West, where we tend to think of progress as much more of a straight line, right? Especially ever since the Enlightenment, there's this idea that things can and do just get better all the time, and that there doesn't have to be a backslide. Any return to the past is, you know, other than an aesthetic is ultimately a, you know, it's a failure as opposed to something natural most of the time. Now, quickly back to China. We talked a bit about in these periods, China was fractured and reunited and it was dominated by the Mongols, it was dominated by the Manchurians. And the, you know, the question to ask is, why is there this notion that during this period there was always China, right? Because if you think of, say, the Mediterranean in the West, you know, it was united for quite a long time under the Romans and then it fractured into a bunch of states.
Starting point is 00:19:06 It's sort of getting back together-ish under the European Union. Obviously, everyone has different languages. But other than that language dispersal, is there something about China that, despite all of these fractures and reuniting, makes a unifying thread or a continuous thread throughout this whole process? Well, I would first say that I think it's looking at the Romans and the fracturization of the Romans, especially in the West, and the eventual drift apart of that. But I mean, you still had a lot of those kings and princes and what have you doing their best to try to emulate or become again the greatness of the Roman Empire. You still had the German king calling himself Kaiser in the 1900s, you know, which is, of course,
Starting point is 00:19:59 a riff on Caesar. So I don't think it's quite as different as maybe it might seem where we look at Europe and we see the many different states and the many different languages. But there still is that, or has long been at least, that idea of ultimate reunification under the greatness of Rome. And I think a very similar idea exists and runs through the undercurrent of Chinese history. There's a great, you know, phrase, I can't think of the Mandarin for it right now, but it's in the translation is, you know, long united, we must divide, long divided, we must unite. And what we see over the course of the Chinese reunifications and then fractures again is there's this constant tension between the two populations of China, by which I mean the coastal sort of more outward facing, more mercantile, trade oriented coastal peoples, and then the interior, which are much more reserved,
Starting point is 00:21:00 conservative and agrarian. And any dynastic order, any state is constantly riding this razor-thin line between making one or the other too angry at them to keep the whole system intact. And eventually, they inevitably fall off the wagon one way or the other. But looking back again at the whole timeline of the Chinese Imperium, we've got periods of time where 400 years go by, and there's never been any lasting unification of any sort. And yet still people are striving towards that, or at least the elites are. And I think where that comes from, you mentioned before that Europeans, especially modern Western ideologies that post-enlightenment thinks of time as kind of a straight line forward, or where there are the cycles of Plato,
Starting point is 00:21:59 it's almost because we as a society have forgotten about the mistakes of the past, because we're constantly looking in the other direction. And I think the opposite is almost true in Chinese historiography and Chinese philosophy, where instead of constantly looking forward, they are constantly looking backwards and constantly seeing what once was. And that really informs their idea of what will be and what is to come. So we're in a period of disunion right now, let's say, in China. But we know that it once was united and therefore it must be united again someday. Oh, interesting. You think today is an example of disunity in China?
Starting point is 00:22:41 Oh, no. I realized that I misspoke almost as as soon as I said that I was just pulling that as a hypothetical example. Like, were we in a period of disunity, we would still look back and see that China has been reunited before and therefore would begin. Right now, we're in a period of near unification. And so if we were going by the same metric, you know, we would know that that would not necessarily last forever. I like the comparison that you both brought up about the fall of Rome and the idea that there was some sort of Western European continuity of thought as it relates to reclaiming the throne of the Roman Empire. The Kaiser, the Sultan in the Ottoman Empire really thought he was just a reincarnation of Rome. That said, the Ottoman identity, by the time you get to the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century, what they are is something fundamentally different. And by then, nationalism
Starting point is 00:23:36 had begun to bubble up out of the hundred years war in Western Europe, and people were beginning to identify themselves more as French as opposed to just their local town. But they weren't Romans in the sense that some political leaders wanted them to be. Now, in China, with such a long history of unite, divide, unite, divide, my question for you is, do the Chinese today see themselves as sort of the modern incarnation of sort of a continuous single identity? Because in the West, when a government falls and a new one comes to power, a lot of the times the identity of those people changes. But with all of these turnovers of dynasties and civil wars, is it viewed as a single entity? Yeah. so that's a super interesting sort of question that has changed a lot over time. The modern Chinese identity takes a lot,
Starting point is 00:24:32 takes almost entirely from the nationalistic ideas of Western Enlightenment thought. And that's no accident, of course. And in fact, the Communist Party did its level best between the 50s and the 70s to stamp out any kind of independent ethnic and saying, no, you're not this other people that exists within the country. You are just one of us. And they've since softened that stance. They've since, you know, recognized the importance of having those sort of minority cultures and peoples and letting them kind of do their own thing. But there was a substantial period of time where there is no separate identity from your identity within the state itself.
Starting point is 00:25:32 In terms of, if we go back further, it's round about the Tang Dynasty. So from about the 6th century to the 9th century, that the idea, the real idea of what we would understand as having an ethnic identity really comes into crystallized focus. Prior to that, there was this idea of there are outsiders and there are insiders, there are barbarians and there are the cultured people who are us. But you could basically take those outsiders and bring them in and sort of steep them in the Chinese culture. And eventually they'd be Chinese enough where they'd be no different from anybody else. They'd walk and talk and look sufficiently like one of us to be considered one of us. In fact, the whole Tang dynasty is itself, the rulers are semi-Turkic. So they're
Starting point is 00:26:27 not even what we might think of as purebred Han in that sense. So they're this kind of, we wouldn't call them a conquest dynasty per se, but they kind of ride the line there. The Tang are, of course, considered to be one of the great Chinese dynasties, second perhaps only to the Han. But then about two-thirds of the way through the Tang dynasty, you get this massive, humongous rebellion. And that really crystallizes this sort of us versus them. The outsiders are foreigners and we are within us and there is this dividing line. So that's kind of where you get the ethnic divide between there is an ethnic Chinese and there is an ethnic other. I have a question, though, about being ethnically Chinese, because I have this impression and I think I actually got it from your podcast. So this may be a layup or I may have just misremembered. But I get the impression that like the thing that was China used to be smaller. And then there was like there was China and then there were the Manchurians and the Mongolians and the Yan to the south. And, you know, obviously, Tibet and Xinjiang are their own kettle of fish. But there were like the Han people and then there were all these other people.
Starting point is 00:27:40 And my impression was that what would happen is occasionally like those other people would show up and be like we took you over now haha we got you on the Han we're like how about you just like dress like us and talk like us and they said you know good idea we like your clothes and your your language I guess we're all Chinese now and so like what would happen is like these outsiders would come over come over take over become the dynasty and then like they like 12 minutes later they looked out and be like holy crap what happened we're Chinese now and now like it's no longer a foreigner ruling them
Starting point is 00:28:11 like the foreigner has been taken over from within. Is that am I crazy in thinking that that's how that went down sometimes? No you're not crazy at all that's often how it more or less went down with the Yuan, with the Qing, the Mongols, and the Manchus respectively. Yes, they would start looking, dressing, walking, talking, and acting more and
Starting point is 00:28:34 more like their subject peoples. And that's because these people along the periphery who could come riding down from the north, you know, screaming in on their horses with their bows and terrorize the interior and take it over. In their heart of hearts, they did that because they wanted to have what the Chinese had. They were living in this much rougher, much, much less lush and verdant area of the world that the Asian steps are nowhere to go lightly, for sure. And life is nicer in China than it is in the Gobi Desert, for instance. And so it is very, very easy to kind of, over time, if you spend too much time in Beijing or in Kaifeng or wherever, forget the survival skills that allowed you to take over in the first place. I would say that the Han Chinese, however, too much to their credit, they never forgot. You know, the rulers who lorded over them might have forgotten where they came from and who they really were to some extent, but the populace never forgot.
Starting point is 00:29:40 And as soon as they were able, be it with the Ming or the Qinghai Revolution in 1911, they were willing, ready and able to kick them all out, take their bloody revenge and reestablish themselves as their own government. Right. So, you know, what's interesting is it I always considered China's ethnic identity to be surprisingly fluid and that has allowed it to continue to tell the story of continuity where you know china goes like oh yeah we've always been china it's like what about that time you're ruined by the mongolians it's like oh no they're chinese too what about the venturians like oh no they're chinese right and you go to the mongolians they'd be like oh yeah we're chinese yeah yeah we're on board right and and i i you know i have to assume that that fluidity much like the romans had right like it reminds me a lot of this rome where the romans you know the first it was people from the city of rome ruling then it was italians ruling
Starting point is 00:30:38 and then at some point you know you'd have not you know you'd have people from the balkans ruling and the spaniards it's like oh no they're roman and then at some point you have like the goths ruling that like just showed up last week and the goths are like yes i'm roman too everyone's like you talk funny it's like look i'm doing my best here right but i'm super roman i was like i guess so sure roll with it yeah roll with it exactly and i'm i've always assumed you And I've always thought like, yes, one of the things that allowed, like, despite all of its internal disunity, and its shorter but constant civil wars, its ability to stay Roman was that everyone who showed up was like, oh, yeah, I'm Roman. I'm into it. And yeah, I'm happy to be in charge. But I am Roman. I'm not a Spaniard ruling Rome, a Balkan ruling Rome, a Goth ruling Rome. I'm now a Roman. And what could be better? Right. I think you're right on there. And I think that that's probably with Rome as well as with most of China is that when we talk about ethnicity, we kind of have this very modern perception of it. But in fact, that concept is much more of
Starting point is 00:31:46 like a cultural ethnicity of like, I'm culturally like you, I might not look exactly like you, or yes, you might speak with a funny accent or what have you. But, you know, I do the dance, I wear the clothes, I speak the language, and therefore I am one of you, no matter what I look like or where I come from. And yeah, that does lead to a much more fluid idea of who is us and who is not us. Eric, I like your impersonation of the goth that just showed up in Rome. It's like, hey, guys, guys, I'm trying. They didn't have Hitler for Latin back in Germany. Give me a break.
Starting point is 00:32:20 Cut me some slack, guys. Come on. Yeah, exactly. That guy would become emperor. So we've talked a little bit about how China looks to its past in a way that other countries without the length of history might have a tendency to. Clearly, there is some sort of break with the past with the erection of communism in the middle of the 20th century. I'm not saying it was a complete break with the past, but that seems quite a bit different than what came before
Starting point is 00:32:52 and clearly is different than the communism of the Soviet Union. So how does China's own flavor of communism interact with its long, long history and the culture that is informed by that history? And how do things like the philosophy or religion? I'm not sure exactly what to call it of Confucianism play into all of that now. All right. Cool. I was like, oh, God, you open the Pandora's box.
Starting point is 00:33:24 Oh, my answer is achieve. I was like, oh, God, you opened the Pandora's box. My answer is achieve excellence. No, just kidding. That's a China joke. Yes. Glorious and harmonious. Anyways, so I would say we have to look at the Communist Party of China as it stands today, as apart from the Communist Party of China, as it stood under Mao Zedong, because Mao Zedong was a pure ideologue. He didn't care what happened as long as it was in line with his little red book and his own personal brand of you know authoritarian communism china today and i i say this with a twinkle in my eye and a smile on my face but i say it also with love in my heart
Starting point is 00:34:14 china today takes whatever it wants from any ideology it wants and says and we don't need the rest while often we from the west might look at an ideology and say uh that's a package deal we've got to take it all or take none of it at all china doesn't do that and nor does the communist party of china so it's they literally call it it's what is it socialism with chinese characteristics yes yes yes yes and so it's like we like this bit we like that bit and everything else can go jump in a lake is that is that in the new version of the little red book i think it might be i i've got to, you know, reread that, but I think it might be. To that effect, it's sort of whereas Mao and the early communists were trying to purge, purge, purge everything old about China. Get rid of the four old thoughts, the old people, destroy the mausoleums and the old symbols.
Starting point is 00:35:27 Modern China has really come back around, swung back around to the other side of the coin and said, no, there's value. There's value in the past. There's value in the culture that we collectively agree is ours for the last 36 to 5,000 years. And so you do get this re-infusion of some of the older ideas, some of the old figures, like for instance, Empress Wu Zetian, or a minority leader on the Vietnamese border called Nguyen Che Gau. They've been rehabilitated in the last several decades as being, you know, laudable. And, you know, you got to put on your Soviet rose-colored glasses to kind of understand how they've been rehabilitated. I just imagine one of the glasses frames is shaped like a sickle
Starting point is 00:36:14 and one of the glasses frames is shaped like a hammer. Yeah. Hammer and sickle. Yeah. Fantastic. Oh, I love it. I love it. I want a pair.
Starting point is 00:36:22 Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Like get yourself on Etsy there and, and you'll make some money. I think, I think we've got a business in, in, uh, in the works here. 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 center 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,
Starting point is 00:36:49 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
Starting point is 00:37:25 by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts or go to pod.link slash pax. Okay, everyone stop podcasting. Let's go make some hammer and sickle sunglasses. That's right. And we'll sell it for a profit, which is just what Marx would have wanted.
Starting point is 00:37:41 Just exactly. Actually, it is like, you know, like all those Che Guevara shirts that people buy. I'm sure the person who's making them is like, hey, suckers. Fools. Fools and cretins. Yes.
Starting point is 00:37:58 Anyway, sorry. You were talking about looking at the past through good communist pinko sunglasses. Or, sorry, pinko-tinted sunglasses, yeah. Right, right. Well, I mean, you know, modern China calls itself, well, certainly the outside world calls itself, calls China communist.
Starting point is 00:38:20 China calls itself socialist. And with a communist party that just so happens to be at the helm forever and ever and always but it's it's also a country where i can go get a starbucks coffee before i go make a podcast and buy an apple computer and stuff so it's it's a weird sort of uh fluidity of ideology where it's, we like this about capitalism, so we'll take it. And we like that about socialism, so we'll take it.
Starting point is 00:38:51 And then everything else, I think I'm remembering where we were initially going with this question before we got into sunglasses, then can be infused by those older philosophies. So Confucianism, there, I'm back on the rails. Confucianism is still very much an undercurrent of Chinese idea and its understanding of itself. The respect for family, the respect for the elders, respect for authority. That's never gone away, certainly.
Starting point is 00:39:30 And I wouldn't recognize a China where that wasn't a part of it. Of thinking of others before self and wanting to improve the community, even if that doesn't necessarily directly benefit you right off the bat. I think that's a positive thing to keep so we've got confucianism with chinese characteristics as well yeah is there confucianism without chinese characteristics i mean in japan in korea yeah northern vietnam oh fair enough yeah good point good point yeah i remember specifically also from your podcast that there are these sort of like three dueling, like philosophical threads battling at different times for, you know, dominance in China, which are, if I remember correctly, they're essentially Confucianism, Buddhism and legalism. And maybe I'm leaving out Taoism. So you'll correct me here. But my impression is that different ones are like ascendant at different times.
Starting point is 00:40:29 And so right now within the Communist Party or, you know, within China today, right, 2018 China, do you think that that kind of battle is still valid? And if so, what's, you know, what's like the mix? What's doing well and what's in favor and what's out of favor at the moment? Well, the initial two contenders were certainly legalism and Confucianism. And legalism totally won the first battle. Legalism was the philosophy of the king of Qin who eventually became the first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang. And its philosophy is essentially, I don't care how you feel, obey the law or else
Starting point is 00:41:07 we'll kill your entire family. It's not a very nice doctrine, but it won the war. But it did quickly fall out of favor. I think everyone's pretty happy that legalism did not long survive the Qin dynasty. Although it's probably a better start than, you know, a lot of places which are just anarchy. Because, you know, Xander, you remember when we were traveling in Spain and we saw Hammurabi's Code and we got all excited because they're like, hey, look, it's the first moment of the rule of law in the cradle of civilization. Because at least you know what you're going to get killed for, right? That's true. Seriously, this is a big step forward because it used to be like, oh king's gonna kill you why i don't even know like your entire life was this kafka-esque nightmare that was like somewhere between the trial and mad max and then all of a sudden someone
Starting point is 00:41:56 comes along goes like look odds are pretty low that you're just gonna get killed unless you do any of these things so just don't do them it's wow but what a deal you know this is good stuff that's right well i mean you're you're right on the money we look back at these things and we're like oh my god how draconian could you get these people are awful but you're absolutely right that this is a massive step forward and just having an encoded law no matter how harsh it's not like you know the king doesn't like your face and so you know punishment for you it's a big step forward unless you're particularly yes that yes that shall not be too ugly that's all number 74b so there you go it's right there in stone there's
Starting point is 00:42:37 the yeah there's one of the long lost the 11th commandment there's actually a i'm sure you've seen the mel brooks movie i think it's history of the world part moses walks down from from the from the mountain goes your god hath given you these 15 and then he drops one of the three tablets 10 commandments that's right man we're interrupting you so much you're talking about legalism falling out of favor. No worries. And then stuff. Yeah, essentially legalism fell out of favor because the guy who eventually supplanted Qin, I believe, basically got slated for death at one point. So he's like, no, we're not doing that anymore.
Starting point is 00:43:17 That's when Confucianism kind of makes a comeback. And Confucianism is good as far as it goes, but it is a little hippy dippy. It's like, you know, can't we all just get along? Sunshine and rainbows, the innate goodness of man. And where that kind of goes sideways is when China goes into one of these periods of protracted, centuries-long, brutal civil war, where it's like, you look at a philosophy that's like, hey, we're all just nice, and let's all have a big group hug and sing Kumbaya, like Confucianism does, especially early Confucianism.
Starting point is 00:43:47 And you're like, that does not speak to me. I'm trying to feed my family and my husband just got killed. That's when you get the infusion of Buddhism, which is, of course, an import from Nepal or India. And Buddhism says, you know, yeah, life is suffering. Life does suck. And you just need to get used to it. And just remember that it's not permanent.
Starting point is 00:44:08 And, you know, you've just got to, you know, eat vegetables and think about Buddha and eventually you'll die. And that's the end. And that spoke to people in a way that Confucianism wasn't doing at the time. And so you get this this Buddhism supplanting a lot of the Confucianism wasn't doing at the time. And so you get this Buddhism supplanting a lot of the Confucian thought, especially during the period after the Three Kingdoms, the period of disunity. Buddhism really comes into its own. Running as a counterpoint to all of this is Taoism, which is super esoteric.
Starting point is 00:44:44 It's like you can know nothing. If you think you know it, then you're wrong. The universe is entirely unknowable and its natural state is a state of balance and you cannot possibly understand it. So don't even try. Now go to a cave in a mountain somewhere. The Tao is and what the Tao is cannot be said. Yeah, that's right.
Starting point is 00:45:04 If you think you know what it is you're wrong or cannot be spoken or something you're like okay great so why are we talking about it again see thing is you're thinking about it and what you got to do is not think about it you got to go sit in a cave for seven years and stare at the wall yeah it's it's tough i'm sure there's something to it and it's also it really does not work for my like Western rationalist mind of like, wait, if I can't talk about it, what's the Song Dynasty and Confucians realize, OK, our hippy dippy tie dye flower time wasn't working for us. So let's incorporate a lot of the more cool aspects of Buddhism and Taoism. You know, we'll make the yin yang symbol. We will have some cool golden figures that people can look at and think are
Starting point is 00:46:06 gods. But we're also going to be more chiefly concerned about the here and now. And that's why Confucianism, although Confucianism is sometimes thought of as a religion, and there's some merit to that, but it is more of a philosophy because it doesn't have any real position on the hereafter or any reality other than this one. It is concerned with your ethics and your morals and your actions in this life and how that affects it. And so it maintains that sort of like do good here and now to improve this society, but then we'll take all the bells and whistles and cool colors from the other stuff. And that's when Neo-Confucianism, as it's called, kind of makes its ascendancy and becomes the dominant political pseudo-religious philosophy of China for the next thousand years or so.
Starting point is 00:47:01 Yeah. I really like your summary of Buddhism a little while back. Life is suffering, eat your vegetables and eventually you'll die. Yes. Well, it's on the money. And it's so different
Starting point is 00:47:14 from other sort of Abrahamic religions that are like, you'll die and if you're good, you'll go to heaven. And in Buddhism, it's like, what happens if you're good? It's like,
Starting point is 00:47:23 well, I mean mean depending on you ask nothing or you become maybe a dog or a cow or you do it all again slightly differently and if you're super good your reward is absolute nothingness is literal nothingness yes yes that's wait that's the good ending oh yeah best ending that's the good ending yep hooray nirvana i ask about the religious aspects of confusionism in part because i was confused recently when i was spending some time with a chinese gentleman who lives in the states but he moved over here when he was in his 20s so i mean he's he's a recent transplant and this came
Starting point is 00:48:03 up and he's like no no confusionism, Confucianism is a religion. And he was not middling about it. He was like, oh, well, I was not aware of that. So it's interesting to get a different perspective on it. Yeah, I mean, I wonder what he had to say about the hereafter. You know, it's philosophy about the hereafter, because I know both Confucius and Mencius basically said, why are you asking questions about the next life? Concern yourself about this life. That's all we're concerned about.
Starting point is 00:48:30 Now, what he may be talking about is the Neo-Confucian aspect, which does incorporate a lot more of those metaphysical, more religious things. But still, maybe we could say it's like secondarily sort of a religion, but primarily it's an ethical philosophy system, I would say. Well, as much as I'd like to relate to you how he described it, we were about, between the group of us, three bottles of Burgundy Inn at that point, so I'd probably misrepresent it. Oh, I see. Those are the best conversations, though. Yeah. in it. Oh, I see. Those are the best conversations, though. They are. I have toyed with Eric about the idea of having either an in-person
Starting point is 00:49:09 or a podcast symposium where everyone just, you know, true to Socrates' encounter and Plato's telling of it just drinks the entire time, and the conversations get deeper or shallower as they go on. It depends on who you're with.
Starting point is 00:49:25 Do you mean like... It's like, do you mean love? It's like, oh, come on, get it together. No, I'm serious. Yeah, exactly. Well, if you two and I ever get the chance to hang out here in Asia, I will introduce you to some Asian wines, which will definitely change your perspectives on things. Rising, expanding wines.
Starting point is 00:49:49 Yeah, we're coming to Shanghai. There you go. Book the flight. All right. There you go. I'm going to get back to our line of questioning. I promise. I'm bringing it back in here.
Starting point is 00:49:58 So we've now talked about the continuity of identity, the unification division. We've talked about how what Chinese is changes over time as different ethnicities have become incorporated into sort of the Chinese, quote unquote, nationalist or proto-nationalist identity. What about today with what's going on in Xinjiang, where I heard a statistic the other day where something like one in six Uyghurs are in a re-education camp trying to make them more Chineseized. There's a better word for it than that. Sinicized. Yes, sinicized.
Starting point is 00:50:36 That's right. And just as like a 20 second explainer for folks who aren't familiar, Xinjiang is a region of China in the West where there are a lot of minority Muslims. And they actually refer to the region sometimes as East Turkestan. And there are some statistics that millions of these people are being sent to re-education camps and they're holding family members hostage of Uyghurs who are traveling abroad, making them spy on behalf of the Chinese state. So how does the move towards trying to incorporate different identities square or explain what's going on in Xinjiang? I have nothing to sugarcoat any of that with. That's all very much happening. It's terrible. It's, I think, one of the more terrible things that's happening right now.
Starting point is 00:51:26 Philosophically, I can attempt to explain it, which is not me trying to justify it. What I would say is that sort of geopolitically, China views territories like Tibet, like Xinjiang, or Uyghuristan, or East Turkestan, whatever name you want to call it, they view it as historically its own. You can apply that as well to its current claims in the South China Sea, those little spits of islands that everyone's very much up in arms about right now, with good reason. It's making what it views as historical claims because, for instance, Chinese control of that region surrounding the Taklamakan Desert, what is today Xinjiang, harkens back all the way to the Han Dynasty and its control as a protectorate of the Silk Roads.
Starting point is 00:52:17 Its claim over Tibet goes back to the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols, and how the lamas of Tibet subjugated themselves voluntarily to the Mongol Khans turned emperors. And essentially what both the Republic of China in the first half of the 20th century and then the People's Republic of China said was, yes, we are taking over all of China, and that includes all of its territorial claims and no take backsies kind of a thing. In terms of the awful human rights abuses that are going on there, again, I'm not attempting to justify it at all, but I think it does go back to the harder edge of the communist party, as you said, trying to signify its holdings.
Starting point is 00:53:10 Basically, you are not different than us. Stop being different than us. Stop resisting. Why are you fighting this kind of a thing? And it's terrible. It's horrible. But that's my understanding of essentially what's going on. And then the constant fear of radical Islam potentially committing some kind of a horrible attack. There have been attacks, pretty low grade,
Starting point is 00:53:35 usually with knives before. And even those low grade attacks tend to get really, really upplayed. So there's a nervousness even in Eastern China about the potential for radicalization. And of course, the policies that are being enacted, I would say dollars to donuts, you're creating more radicals than you are suppressing with that kind of a thing. But they don't listen to me. Yeah, the more I read about the system of social credit that's being established in China, the more it's kind of like, whoa, you know, that feels like it's something out of a dystopian novel. But they're certainly testing a lot of that technology in Xinjiang. And it's interesting to see where that's going. I think there's an actual Black Mirror episode about that, isn't there?
Starting point is 00:54:21 There's the one where the girl goes around with her cell phone trying to give five stars to everybody. Black Mirror. Oh yeah, where you're rating every interaction. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead of distributed, it's centralized. I'm going to go have to watch that one. That's a good one.
Starting point is 00:54:39 I have two questions now that we're in the world of geopolitics. Xinjiang and Tibet, if you were to believe my old professor and Taylor Fravel, he would say that Xinjiang and Tibet are very important to China as buffer regions. And they just need to be these like stable buffer regions so that, you know, nobody can invade through the West so that China can only, you know, it can obsess where it's most, where it's most vulnerable, which is from the sea. Because of course, in its recent history, it's been invaded by the sea so many times. Is the desire to include Xinjiang and Tibet primarily this kind of real politic thing? Because of course, if you, I guess the thing you just have to call out is you go like well
Starting point is 00:55:25 china you know at a time was much larger you know the qin dynasty was like much larger than china is today so what's why aren't those claims there is you know is china picking and choosing its claims for primarily geopolitical real politic reasons and is there any sense within china that there's some inconsistency or that it's like hey this is you know this is this is watertight oh i would say there's there's no state in the history of humanity that could have a watertight anything oh of course for sure no no no not at all no i would say it's it's a combination of historical claim used as pretext for that geopolitical realpolitik claim.
Starting point is 00:56:09 I would agree with your professor. I would agree with all that where, you know, the reason why must we have these territories? It does go back to this historical sense of vulnerability from the west and i don't mean like western europe i mean it's literal geographic west into central asia because that is historically where the threats have come from yeah the mongols the turkics uh yeah so i mean well the tibetans themselves too used to kick china's absolutely right for a couple hundred years there, right? Absolutely. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:56:47 Absolutely. It was a very powerful, co-equal, imperial state right up until it wasn't. But it is. And if you look, even today, you can look online at a heat nap of Chinese population. Where is the Chinese population located? You have this vast country, but only about the eastern third to half of it is heavily populated. The western half and the northern half is this, it's a wasteland. It's a defense in depth system, right?
Starting point is 00:57:19 You're going to have to march through this, all this, you know, emptiness to get to us kind of a thing. And, you know know it's not it's not fair for the people who live there for sure but you know that they they see a lot of national security value in that and they they have since at least the you know the 1300s i don't see them giving that up now yeah and then my my next question is that you know my impression is that china literally calls itself which means like the middle or the center kingdom like we're like we're in the middle everything else is in relation to us and for a long time china with you know with
Starting point is 00:57:58 some justification kind of thought of itself as we're the big dog everyone everyone near us exists in relation to us and we're the dominant culture in the area so much so that when they happen to take us over just as a reminder they decide oh we're we're chinese now right like we like send this army over and the army doesn't come back because it decides it's Chinese now. So there's some justification of that. And, of course, China thought of its neighbors as, you know, kind of barbarians, much in the same way that the Greeks thought of their neighbors as barbaric and the Romans thought of their neighbors as barbaric until they incorporated them into Rome. And they're like, oh, you're like super Roman now. Great. So given all that, does China have that sense of being the big deal and everyone else around it being maybe not barbarians, but potential vassal states or etc.?
Starting point is 00:58:57 You know, thinking Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Philippines, even Korea, etc. I would say, and I can only speak from the year 2018, so whoever's listening to this podcast in 2118, take what I say with a grain of salt. But that's probably a notion that China has largely shed itself of. It does not view itself. It's had about 200 years to basically divest itself of the notion that it is the singular font of culture and civilizational influence in the world. You know, Chinese people are not wearing silk robes anymore. They're not growing their hair and nails out in the Confucian style. They import Coca-Cola. They don't even import it. They just produce it here. So no, China,
Starting point is 00:59:47 in spite of its own name, does not have that historical qualm of saying, we are the literal center of the universe and our leader is its heaven's chosen emissary on earth anymore. I would say that China very much views itself as a co-equal on the world stage with its neighbors, especially its neighbors to the West, like Korea and Japan, as well as, of course, you know, Western Europe, the United States, etc. You know, the Chinese name for America is meiguo the beautiful country yeah there's some linguistic uh love there and i think uh the chinese sensibility does not have that sort of we are the civilization and everyone else is just basking in our light from nearer or far than it used to have. So in terms of what that means geopolitically, I would say China absolutely wants to reassert itself. It wants to take its place back on the world stage as the regional
Starting point is 01:00:59 power that it, I would say rightly, sees itself to be. It's got 1.3 billion people. It's building up. It's got its industry. It's going on. And it sees itself as being a co-equal partner at the table with anybody else and is more and more feeling empowered to deal independently with its neighbors. I don't think it wants to make them tributary states any longer. Although, depending on certain trade deals, that might sort of be the de facto, you know, end point, kind of. it does value trade. It does value viewing its partners as individual equals rather than trying to dominate
Starting point is 01:01:50 and demand of them most of the time. We've covered a lot of ground on this episode so far and usually when we have guests on we like to do a little bit of an open-ended question at the end just to make sure that we're not missing something that is outside of the realm of Eric and
Starting point is 01:02:09 my expertise. And a lot of times we'll phrase the question as something like, ah, was there a question we should have asked? But I'm going to do a little bit better than that for you, Chris, because there's so much in the news right now about China, so many competing narratives spinning around. I think it can be difficult without the historical context that you have, for example, to really frame all of this and understand what's going on. So is there anything that people should be aware of or things that they could look into with greater detail if they're interested in to help them reconsider what's going on right now between the US and China or China generally? What is one of the missing elements in all of these narratives? Okay. Wow. Great question. I would say probably two things. First is that I think it's still a very common thread in American and Western thought to view China as a sort of solid block.
Starting point is 01:03:06 They all think together. They all eat at the same time. They all do these mass games kind of thing. And I think that's a huge mistake that really could potentially hobble any understanding or diplomatic relation going forward. China's not some homogenous block of communist cheese it it really is diverse worst cheese ever worst cheese ever as far as as far as cheeses go that's actually i have to call it american cheese because it's not technically cheese but that's right but cheese product yes american cheese product but the only cheese i can imagine that is worse than American cheese would be communist cheese. Chinese communist cheese, yes. They're all lactose intolerant, too, so it'd be made of, I don't know, like, made of ideology.
Starting point is 01:03:58 Made of tofu and ideology. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, tofu, of course. Yeah, anyway, continue. Block of cheese yes so it's easy to look at it from the outside and see it as this one single thing and it's not it is as diverse culturally linguistically ethnically even as any western culture it just happens to have a an authoritarian single party system in control.
Starting point is 01:04:26 So to try to approach China and try to deal with it as this unified block of we would be a mistake. And I've seen that mistake play out a few times while I've been here. And usually those businesses that try to do so wind up closing shop within about a year or two. In terms of how to approach it philosophically or how to understand it philosophically or even geopolitically, it is also, I think, pretty imperative to remember that unlike a lot of the West, especially the U.S., which has a memory of about a goldfish, really, China has a long memory, culturally and even individually. They still have a real sore spot for what's known as the Century of Humiliation, which is the period from about the first opium war in the 1840s or 50s, right up until the declaration of the people's republic of china and how they were mistreated
Starting point is 01:05:29 and humiliated by by the west by japan and so there is this long standing it's not animosity they don't blame there's not like anger at the west per se but there is still this understanding of you know we've got to prove ourselves we've got to you know show that we are we are the great country that we always are and always have been so there's this kind of like you know need to prove themselves as being tough and mighty and and where they view themselves as deserving to be which does help explain the buffer zones in Xinjiang and in Tibet and the current row over the South China Sea. And that China views history as destiny.
Starting point is 01:06:14 You know, the dynastic cycle might be dead in name, but it's not dead in practice. It still draws deeply on its past to inform of what will happen tomorrow. And unlike a lot of the Western countries that, it still draws deeply on its past to inform of what will happen tomorrow. And unlike a lot of the Western countries that since the enlightenment, see time as a straight arrow and constantly going forward, there is a lot more introspection, a lot more drawing from history and what has happened before that informs Chinese decisions about what it will do next.
Starting point is 01:06:41 So that's, that's what I would say. Yeah. Solid answer. You should have a podcast about this or something. Oh, that's a great idea. I had to get on that.
Starting point is 01:06:50 Yeah. I think I would call it something like, I don't know, history of China. That seems too obvious. I think that's what I would go for. It seems way too obvious. I mean,
Starting point is 01:06:58 we'll, we'll come up with something else and put our heads together. Oh no, it's taken. Sorry. It's taken. Oh, darn.
Starting point is 01:07:08 So everyone who's listened and enjoyed this show remember go check out chris's podcast history of china all of the stuff that we talked about is just barely even scratching the surface and he goes deep on a lot of things that you probably don't even know about because westerners are frequently not familiar with Eastern history. So history of China. Yep. And as someone who has listened to literally every single episode, except for like maybe the last two or three
Starting point is 01:07:32 because I've fallen behind all of my podcasts, but God dang, is it good and a little bit addictive. So be careful, put some time aside, eat it in chunks one at a time, you know, et cetera. But it's a real treat and obviously very educational. And as you can tell, Chris is a fun guy too. We've learned a ton. And hopefully you dear listeners have also learned a lot of context and perspective that most importantly, I think doesn't answer questions about China for you, but makes you curious about
Starting point is 01:08:05 China in a way that, you know, you might not have been before. I mean, we want you to walk away from this understanding like, wow, this is this is really complicated. And I know we say that a lot, but we're going to keep repeating it from here until we're dead, because that's reality. And, you know, and with China, I think, I think the whole reason we started this series is that it's very easy to apply our own kind of templates and capitalist colored glasses on a very interesting country that's been through its own very, very long life and history. So if you want to keep exploring China, go listen. And with that, dear listeners, I'll just say, remember, life is suffering. Eat your vegetables and we all die. Thank you, Chris, for joining us.
Starting point is 01:08:58 This has been a pleasure. Well, thank you both so very much. I've had a great time. And as they say, please go check out the History of China podcast. That is at thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com if you're interested. And as said before, eat your vegetables. You will eventually die. There we go.
Starting point is 01:09:20 All right, my friends, don't let the pundits do the thinking for you. Remember always to pause and reconsider This is Eric signing off, we'll see you next time Xander signing off, bye Once again that was my conversation with Xander Snyder and Eric Fogg of the Reconsider podcast. Big thanks to both of them for taking the time, and please go give the rest of their episodes a listen. Next week, we'll be back with our regularly scheduled Yuan Dynasty episode, so that's something to look forward to.
Starting point is 01:09:57 And, as always, thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.

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