The History of China - #196 - Special: ReConsidering China with Xander Snyder & Eric Fogg
Episode Date: July 20, 2020My 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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Hey everyone, today I'm excited to bring you at long last my interview with the hosts of the
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,
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
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
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
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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,
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,
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,
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?
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
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,
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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,
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.?
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,
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.