This is a longish post…
A long time ago, self-congratulatory citizens and academics of Western Europe and the United States would explain the ludicrous assault on Qing Imperial sovereignty in the 19th century as the simple and sad story of the emperor who said no. Poor deluded Qianlong missed an opportunity to liberalize his trade policies and join the ‘comity of nations’ when he dismissed the noble, upstanding diplomat MacCartney with a sniff, a wave, and a haughty letter to His Royal Majesty King George III which boasted that, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.”
Of course this narrative was a poppycock fairy tale to justify the armed expansion of trading and other privileges by the North Atlantic powers in the 19th century.
The Qianlong Emperor wasn’t declaring a new policy, rather he was describing an economic reality: The Qing Empire at the end of the 18th century was a continent-sized trading network of markets and hubs, mines, farms, plantations, factories, merchants, banks, guilds, and relatively sophisticated systems of finance and
Today’s People’s Daily reports that archaeologist working in Sichuan province have uncovered a 4200-year old grave at the Sanxingdui site in which the remains appear to be a man and a woman embracing each other. It might be in keeping with my habits to wax poetic on the permanence of love (or the horrors of live burial) but then my train of thought was derailed by a patch of teleology and bad history.
Archaeologists believe that the Sanxingcun site was once a large ancient settlement in the Chengdu Plain in China’s ancient Shang and Zhou dynasties. There have always been settlers on this land over the past 4,000-plus years.
Apparently the idea of contemporaneous but independent civilizations existing in the space that is now the PRC is a little too wacky and wild for the journalists at the People’s Daily. Repeat after me reporters from The People’s Daily and dentists from Texas: History is messy and full of contradictions, it doesn’t need to be a set of neat compartmentalized facts bundled and packaged to justify the present.
No, really…it’s not.
Nothing like a major global event to stimulate the “crap editorial” industry in China, and with the 2010 Expo around the corner (What? Oh, really? You hadn’t heard? Can’t imagine that!) the Shanghai Daily is cranking them out with astonishing energy.
Yesterday’s installment in “How the dung beetle turns crap and calls it writing” was called “Superpower Responsibilities” and after a luke-warm rehash of bad history, we come to this little turd nugget:
After the Roman Empire collapsed because of the massive migration of Germanic people, the spiritual legacies of its civilization were inherited by the succeeding European world. In comparison, even after the Chinese empire was conquered by other ethnic regimes, like the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, those ethnic groups were eventually assimilated into the Chinese civilization and subsequently became the driving forces that carried forward that civilization.
The Mongols were actually one of the worst examples of “assimilation,” maintaining very specific ethnic distinctions, most notably a caste system with Mongols on the top, Central Asians second, Northern Chinese third, and Southern Chinese at the very bottom. When Zhu Yuanzhang and the boys got around to toppling their rule in the 1360s, rather than simply fade
In a rambling recitation of CCP talking points an interview with Al-Jazeera, China’s special envoy to the Middle East Wu Sike attempted to mend fences with those in the Islamic world who might have taken umbrage to the Chinese government’s response to the riots in Xinjiang.
In true CCP-style, Wu responds to the question “What happened in Xinjiang” with that specialty of Chinese officialdom, “the half-baked historical claim.”
“Wu Sike: Chinese relations with Arabs and Muslims date back to two or three millennia.”
Either Wu needs help with his history or his math.
There is little doubt that the early civilizations in what is today China interacted with other cultures in western Asia dating back to the neolithic period. While Chinese historians aren’t fond of dwelling on the topic, items such as the domesticated horse (and its 2.0 version the chariot) likely came to China as a result of such interactions, as did other useful advances including the cultivation of wheat and the compound bow. In the same way, aspects of what would become Chinese culture, notably the use of silk, flowed west. BUT…
Western Asia is not “Arabia” and Islam first appeared on the scene only in the late
I’m used to having history get mangled in the newspapers, goodness knows the People’s Daily does it all the time, but this piece in the New York Times by IHT art editor Souren Melikian probably deserves a special award of some kind.
For example:
At the height of its maximum extension around the first or second century A.D., the Chinese empire ruled by the Han dynasty nominally controlled the area. Many centuries later, the Mongols overran Uighur lands in the course of their conquests, which embraced territories stretching from the borders of present-day Poland in the west to the Pacific shores of China and included the Middle East. But the great Song dynasty, under which Chinese culture rose to an apex around the 11th or 12th century, showed no interest in such undertakings. Neither did the Ming, who re-established Chinese unity after defeating the Mongol dynasty, who ruled China from 1279 to 1368.
Calling the Song the “apex of Chinese history,” especially from the perspective of an art historian, is a judgment call, but the Song were certainly not much of a military power. Hemmed in by a bevy of hostile groups and eventually overrun, the Song hardly had an opportunity
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