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The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History By Andrew Chittick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xi + 411 pp. $85.00 (cloth).
- Charles Holcombe
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- Journal of Chinese History / Volume 5 / Issue 1 / January 2021
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- 23 July 2020, pp. 131-135
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Chinese Identity During the Age of Division, Sui, and Tang
- Charles Holcombe
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- Journal of Chinese History / Volume 4 / Issue 1 / January 2020
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- 14 November 2019, pp. 31-53
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During the centuries after the fall of the Han dynasty, dozens of states rose and fell in geographic China, which was not only politically divided but also home to multiple separately named population groups, some of which were speakers of languages unrelated to Chinese. Yet, a single written language was used throughout the region, broadly common institutions were everywhere in place, and there was a widely shared collective historical memory. This memory included an assumed single line of legitimate sovereigns stretching back to the Sage Kings of legendary antiquity. Differently named population groups could adopt that written language, institutions, and historical memory, and their rulers could potentially even join that line of legitimate sovereigns. It was therefore relatively easy for the Sui and Tang dynasties, having militarily unified the geographic space of the old Han empire, to successfully depict themselves as heirs to a unitary China rooted in ancient memory.
Chapter 6 - The Sixteen Kingdoms
- from Part 1 - History
- Edited by Albert E. Dien, Stanford University, California, Keith N. Knapp
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- The Cambridge History of China
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- 28 October 2019
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- 07 November 2019, pp 119-144
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Following the disintegration of the briefly unified Western Jin dynasty in the early fourth century, the subsequent Sixteen Kingdoms era in north China became one of the most complicated periods in all of Chinese history. One hundred and thirty-six years elapsed between the establishment of the first “Sixteen Kingdoms” regime in 304 and the next reunification of the North in 439 by the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534). During that period, there were actually as many as twenty-two significant states in northern China (rather than literally sixteen), ranging from true empires (that is, relatively large multiethnic military-conquest polities ruled by monarchs bearing the Chinese title huangdi or “emperor”) to territories administered independently by so-called “governors” who maintained a pretense of loyalty to the still theoretically legitimate Jin dynasty.
Chapter 5 - Eastern Jin
- from Part 1 - History
- Edited by Albert E. Dien, Stanford University, California, Keith N. Knapp
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- The Cambridge History of China
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- 28 October 2019
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- 07 November 2019, pp 96-118
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In 311, the Western Jin dynasty capital Luoyang fell to “rebel” forces. In 316, the alternate capital, Chang’an, also fell, and the Western Jin was finished. One sixth-century history claimed, undoubtedly with some exaggeration, that “weeds luxuriated in the deserted fields of China” and half the population had perished. A contemporary lamented that marauding nomads now watered their horses in the Yangzi river, deep in central China. Amid gathering indications of dynastic doom, in 306, Sima Yue (d. 311), the final victor in the vicious “Disturbances of the Eight Princes” (bawang zhi luan), that had been the immediate cause of much of this dynastic collapse, appointed his nephew Sima Rui (276–323) to a garrison command at Xiapei, near the modern city of Xuzhou, toward the south.
Chapter 13 - Foreign Relations
- from Part 2 - Society and Realia
- Edited by Albert E. Dien, Stanford University, California, Keith N. Knapp
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- The Cambridge History of China
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- 28 October 2019
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- 07 November 2019, pp 296-308
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The greatest challenge in discussing China’s foreign relations during the Six Dynasties period may be in determining what the concept of “foreign” even meant during this exceptionally complicated, cosmopolitan era. Not only was China divided—with each Chinese dynasty interacting with the others as if they were foreign countries—but, between 304 and 581, most of north China usually lay under non-Chinese rule. South China, meanwhile, had until recently been something of a frontier zone, and it continued to have a large non-Chinese aboriginal population. At the same time, characteristic elements of Chinese culture, notably including the use of the Chinese written language, were spreading to neighboring Korea and Japan, while what is today northern Vietnam could actually have been considered to be part of China. A city located near what is now Hanoi had been a major center of Chinese presence in the far south during the previous Han dynasty, and was not fully eclipsed by the rise of Guangzhou until as late as the seventh or eighth century.
12 - Korea since 1945
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 330-349
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The Korean War
The Cold War first erupted into heated conflict on the Korean peninsula, and the Cold War lingers on still today in Korea long after it has passed into history almost everywhere else. That the first great global crisis of the Cold War era began in Korea was a direct consequence of Allied dispositions at the end of World War II. During that war, the U.S. State Department had contemplated the possibility of a four-power trusteeship to administer the Korean peninsula following its anticipated postwar liberation from Japanese colonial rule. President Roosevelt briefly discussed such plans with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at their wartime Yalta conference – President Roosevelt even suggesting that such a trusteeship might need to continue for some twenty or thirty years. But Korea received so little wartime American attention that in 1945 the U.S. Secretary of State reportedly even had to ask someone where Korea is. Japan then surrendered sooner than many people had expected, leaving the United States almost totally unprepared for any immediate action in Korea. Meanwhile, Soviet Russian troops had already entered the peninsula from the north on August 9, 1945, during the final days of World War II. The first U.S. occupation forces in Korea did not arrive in the south until September 8, a full month later. The arriving American GIs found, as one report to the State Department concluded on September 15, “a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark.”
Amid the gathering signs of what would soon become an open cold war rivalry between the two former World War II Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, there was a not unreasonable fear in Washington that the Soviets might press their early advantage to overrun the entire Korean peninsula. A joint partition of Korea was therefore hastily arranged, and it was actually the U.S. Pentagon that somewhat arbitrarily decided on the thirty-eighth parallel – a mere line on a Pentagon office wall map, reflecting no particular preexisting cultural or geographic conditions – as the point of division between the U.S. and Soviet zones. Meanwhile, throughout the Korean peninsula, so-called People's Committees had quickly organized themselves in the wake of Japan's surrender.
11 - Japan since 1945
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 311-329
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The Postwar Allied Occupation
The Shōwa Emperor's surrender speech was broadcast over the radio airwaves on August 15, 1945, and on August 28, a few days before the formal surrender ceremonies were conducted aboard the battleship Missouri on September 2, the first small advance party of what would eventually become an Allied occupation force reaching up to a quarter million persons touched down in a C-47 transport plane at an airport outside Tōkyō. These first Allied arrivals were uncertain what sort of reception they might encounter. The Japanese, too, were anxious and uncertain what sort of behavior to expect from the arriving foreign army of occupation, whose soldiers had until recently been such bitter enemies. Many Japanese were relieved that the war was finally over, but many were also, understandably, apprehensive. With relatively few exceptions, however, the arriving Allied forces were treated with respect and even privilege – until 1951, for example, the Japanese government provided occupation authorities with free servants – whereas the occupation authorities, for their part, behaved with magnanimity toward their defeated foes. Not a few participants in the occupation discovered a lifelong love and fascination for Japanese culture. In retrospect, the usual verdict is that the postwar Allied occupation of Japan was an overall great success.
Although it is referred to as an “Allied” occupation, it was overwhelmingly really an American affair. Unlike postwar Germany (and also the former Japanese colony in Korea), defeated Japan was not divided into separate zones of occupation by the different Allied powers. A multinational Far Eastern Commission was eventually established in Washington, DC, and a four-power Allied Council for Japan was sent to Tōkyō, which included British, Chinese, and Soviet representatives, but a single, unified, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) was appointed to actively supervise the entire region. The officer assigned this command was the senior American general Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), who set up his headquarters in the Daiichi building in Tōkyō at the end of August 1945. Most of the occupation personnel were also American.
List of Maps
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp xiii-xiv
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1 - The Origins of Civilization in East Asia
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 12-30
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“Out of Africa”: The First East Asians
According to a now lost Old Record cited in the thirteenth-century Korean history Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk yusa), the divinity Hwanung descended from heaven to Mount T'aebaek, a sacred peak at the source of the Yalu and Tumen rivers on the border between present-day Korea and China, where he mated with a she-bear he had helped transfigure into human shape. From their union was born the great Lord Tan'gun, supposedly in the year 2333 BCE, who founded the country known as Old Chosŏn and who is widely celebrated today as the father of the Korean nation.
Meanwhile, according to a quite different Record of Ancient Matters (the Japanese Kojiki, compiled in 712 CE), the grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu was sent down to earth from heaven, bearing the three sacred Japanese imperial regalia – the curved magatama bead, bronze mirror, and sword – to become the founder of the Japanese imperial line (the same line that still occupies the Chrysanthemum throne in Tōkyō today) and the origin of the Japanese nation.
Much earlier, in China, various ancient royal houses also typically claimed divine or miraculous origins, although Western scholars have generally been more impressed by the relative absence of important creation myths from the dawn of Chinese history. The traditional version of China's story begins, instead, with a more apparently human age of (legendary) cultural heroes, starting with Fuxi (supposedly dating from 2852 BCE), who first domesticated animals; Shennong (from 2737 BCE), who invented farming; and the Yellow Emperor (ruling from 2697 BCE), who is popularly viewed as the ancestor of the Chinese people.
Though the Japanese emperor officially renounced his divinity after World War II, in 1946, and few people today are likely to believe literally the story of Japanese imperial descent from the sun goddess, some of these myths and legends are still quite charming. It is doubtful, however, that many nonnatives, coming from different religious and cultural traditions, ever gave much literal credence to such stories of divine descent. Early modern Europeans, for example, brought their own quite different sets of expectations about possible East Asian origins.
10 - The Dark Valley (1930-1945)
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 288-310
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The Rise of Japanese Ultranationalism
The first great wave of modern globalization (which, because of the industrialized West's initial leading role in defining global modernity, in its early phase culturally overlapped fairly closely with what might also be described as Westernization) had begun in the late nineteenth century. In East Asia, it culminated in the 1910s–1920s with China's May Fourth Movement and Japan's Taishō democracy. During these same years, French colonial rule also promoted a degree of Westernization in Vietnam, while Japanese colonial rule in Korea encouraged a curious combination of modernization, Westernization, and forced Japanese-ization. The high tide of globalization receded rapidly after the disastrous collapse of the U.S. stock market in 1929, however. By the 1930s, the world was descending into what some Japanese historians have aptly dubbed a “dark valley.” As a result of the Great Depression, in the United States, real gross domestic product had declined 35 percent by 1933, a quarter of American workers were out of work, and there were calls for the newly inaugurated president Franklin D. Roosevelt to assume dictatorial powers. Even socialism no longer seemed entirely unthinkable in America. In Germany, the Weimar Republic gave way to Adolph Hitler. In China, the Nationalist Republic became an authoritarian single-party state with an increasingly nationalized economy. In Japan, Taishō democracy was thrust aside by the rise of ultranationalistic militarism.
Surprisingly, the industrial sector of Japan's economy recovered fairly quickly from the depths of the Great Depression, thanks to a sharp devaluation in the exchange value of the yen (which made the price of Japanese exports globally more competitive), low interest rates, and increased government spending on public works and armaments. The volume of Japanese exports actually doubled between 1930 and 1936. But, as much of the world responded to the Great Depression by adopting protectionist measures – such as high taxes or outright quotas on imports, which threatened Japan's ability to continue exporting – the argument began to resonate that what Japan really needed was to create an economically self-sufficient yen-bloc that would be independent, and under Japan's own control. Manchuria, in particular, came be viewed as a potential economic “lifeline” for Japan.
Glossary
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp xxi-xxiv
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3 - The Age of Cosmopolitanism
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 60-94
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China in Division
The Sixteen Kingdoms (North China, 304–439)
In the early fourth century, centralized imperial government disintegrated almost completely in north China. For over a hundred years, the ancient Chinese cultural heartland in the north was shredded between what are conventionally known as the Sixteen Kingdoms. More precisely, historians actually recognize twenty-one distinct regimes in north China between the years 304 and 439 (not to mention other independent local communities that never aspired to become states). Despite the conventional English label “Sixteen Kingdoms,” moreover, these regimes were also often really empires, in the sense of being relatively large, multiethnic, military-conquest states ruled by men claiming the Chinese title “emperor” (huangdi). An alternate title, “heavenly king” (tianwang), was, however, invoked with unusual frequency during this period, possibly as a result of cultural influences coming from the steppe. As it happens, most of these Sixteen Kingdoms had rulers with non-Chinese ethnic identities.
While north China plunged into chaos during the fourth century, perhaps an eighth of the entire northern Chinese population may have fled to the relative shelter and stability of the south. Many of these refugees settled in the general region of the lower Yangzi River valley, where members of the Western Jin imperial family reestablished a court in exile, known to history as the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420). The Eastern Jin capital was the city that is today called Nanjing (English: Nanking). This became the nucleus for a series of five (Eastern Jin, Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen) culturally and economically flourishing, but politically and militarily weak, Southern dynasties. Including the earlier third-century southern state of Three Kingdoms Wu, these Southern dynasties are sometimes also referred to as the Six Dynasties. Those people who remained in the north, meanwhile, huddled behind thousands of improvised local fortifications.
Trade and commerce ground to a virtual halt in the north during this period. No new coins were issued in north China for almost two hundred years. Much farmland was given over to pasture (or stood vacant), and a ranching or herding economy spread deeply into north China. The raising of livestock was a fundamental part of the lifestyle of the non-Chinese peoples (generically referred to in the Chinese sources as Hu, and divided into five major different population groups) who now came to dominate the northern landscape politically and militarily.
14 - China since 1945
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 359-398
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The Chinese Civil War
Although China was one of the victors in World War II, conditions in war-ravaged China did not noticeably improve after Japan's defeat. Instead, the catastrophic inflation, corruption, and black marketeering that had begun during the World War only worsened, while the off-again, on-again civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists entered its final phase. In the first months after the war, the U.S. ambassador did succeed in bringing Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek together for face-to-face negotiations. It was reportedly Mao's first ride in an airplane. The American hope was to prevent full-scale civil war and promote democracy in China. For that purpose, in late 1945 President Truman appointed one of America's most distinguished military leaders and statesmen, General George C. Marshall (1880–1959), as a special envoy to China. General Marshall remained in China for a little over a year (December 1945–January 1947), and on his departure, he was able to express cautious optimism that a new Chinese constitution, and democratic elections scheduled for late 1947, might hold.
But General Marshall also expressed concern that efforts at reaching a peace settlement were being frustrated by extremists on both sides. In fact, the bitter antagonism between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists ultimately proved too deep to sustain the uneasy truce. The problems of postwar China in general, moreover, were proving stubbornly intractable. On the island of Taiwan, for example – recently returned to Chinese rule following Japan's surrender – residual damage from World War II, Nationalist Chinese economic policies that restricted the operations of a free market, and the circulation of excessive amounts of currency all combined to foster high unemployment, shortages of goods, and out-of-control inflation. When police attempted to confiscate suspected contraband cigarettes from a middle-aged female street vendor in the provincial capital, Taipei, resulting in a scuffle that killed a bystander, Taiwan erupted into a major island-wide rebellion on February 28, 1947. The rebellion was crushed by Nationalist troops, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Taiwanese. This February 28 Incident (although it was long publicly unmentionable in Taiwan) left a long-festering wound in relations between the Taiwanese people and the ruling Chinese Nationalist government on the island.
4 - The Creation of a Community: China, Korea, and Japan (Seventh-Tenth Centuries)
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 95-131
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Chinese Imperial Restoration: The Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) Dynasties
The Sui Reunification (589) and the Founding of the Tang
In 581, a palace coup brought a new dynasty, called Sui, to power in the history-haunted region “Within the Passes” in northwest China. The founder of this dynasty was a man named Yang Jian (541–604). As emperor, he is known as Sui Wendi (the “Cultured Emperor of the Sui”). His father had been a high official, ennobled as the Duke of Sui, under the last Xianbei-ruled regime in northwest China (the Northern Zhou Dynasty). Yang Jian inherited his father's title as Duke of Sui, and his daughter was selected to be a consort for the imperial crown prince. When this crown prince, in due course, inherited the throne in 578, it made Yang Jian the father-in-law of the reigning emperor – always a potentially influential position. Because this emperor only lived two more years and was succeeded by a young boy, Yang Jian was then well placed to step in and grab supreme power for himself. After eliminating all potential legitimate heirs to the throne, and quelling a certain amount of armed opposition, Yang Jian usurped the throne outright, founding the Sui Dynasty.
A few years earlier, in 577, the last independent Xianbei-ruled dynasty in northeast China (the Northern Qi) had already been conquered by the predecessor of the Sui Dynasty in the northwest (that is, Northern Zhou), accomplishing the reunification of north China. The new Sui Dynasty now aspired to conquer the south too, and complete the reunification of a Chinese world that had been divided (with one brief exception) ever since the disintegration of the Han Dynasty that began in 184. The south, meanwhile, had never recovered from a devastating mid-century rebellion (548–552), which had severely diminished Southern dynasty imperial resources. In particular, control over the strategic upper (western) reaches of the Yangzi River had now passed from the south to the north. During the centuries of division, the north had frequently been able to field superior cavalry-based armies, but the south had always been protected, when all else failed, by the formidable natural barrier of the Yangzi River. Now the south was vulnerable to attack down the line of the river from the west. The final southern military defense also appears to have been ineptly led.
5 - Mature Independent Trajectories (Tenth-Sixteenth Centuries)
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 132-166
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Late Imperial China: The Song (960–1279), Yuan (1271–1368), and Early Ming Dynasties (1368–ca. Sixteenth Century [–1644])
The Song Dynasty Situation
In 907, an upstart military commander dethroned the last Tang emperor and proclaimed himself the founder of a (brief, as it turned out) new dynasty. Once again, China was plunged into a period of division. In north China, Five Dynasties followed each other in rapid succession – three of them founded by Shatuo Türks rather than ethnic Chinese – while southern China was simultaneously partitioned into ten separate regimes. This time, however, the division was only temporary. In 960, the mother of the seven-year-old boy emperor of the last of the northern Five Dynasties, acting in the capacity of a regent, ordered the commander of the Palace Guard, Zhao Kuangyin (927–976), to lead an army north against a rumored Khitan invasion. On the second morning of their march, some of Zhao's officers entered his residence with swords drawn and hailed him as emperor.
The result was a bloodless coup that brought a major new dynasty, the Song, onto the stage. Zhao Kuangyin is known to history as Emperor Taizu of the Song (r. 960–976). Because this Emperor Taizu was acutely aware of the fragmentation that had been caused by warlordism since the middle of the Tang Dynasty, and of the frequency of military coups like the one that had brought him to power, as emperor, he was determined to clearly separate military command from civilian administration. Emperor Taizu hosted a legendary palace banquet for his senior generals at which, with a toast, he relieved them of their military commands and retired them to lives of civilian comfort in the capital.
Emperor Taizu's policies would be successful enough that dynastic change would thereafter be very much less frequent and would never again be the result of an internal military coup. Although there were roughly eighty dynasties in premodern Chinese history, only three of them came after the Song (not counting peripheral alien regimes that sometimes extended into Chinese territory). Each of the relatively few remaining changes of dynasty, furthermore, can be attributed to foreign invasion.
2 - The Formative Era
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 31-59
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The Age of the Classics
Zhou Dynasty China (1045–256 BCE)
The Zhou people who conquered the Shang Dynasty around the year 1045 BCE were originally separate and distinct from the Shang. The Zhou homeland (in what is today Shaanxi) lay to the west of the core Shang territory, and they were politically independent. For a while before their conquest, however, Zhou leaders did acknowledge themselves to be subordinate vassals of the Shang king, and much of Zhou high culture, including oracle bone divination and the production and style of bronze vessels (inscribed with a shared written Chinese language), was derived from Shang. The outcome of their conquest was a new synthesis or fusion.
After the 1045 BCE conquest, the newly established Zhou Dynasty absorbed the preexisting Shang population and even allowed the former Shang royal family to maintain its identity, under the reduced title of dukes (of Song) rather than as sovereign kings, to continue their essential ancestral sacrifices. This illustrates once again the extent to which Chinese civilization was, from the beginning, a hybrid mixture, blending together multiple local cultural traditions. The late Shang had been a relatively small state existing within a field of roughly similar other cultures, and in contact with places that were much more remote, as is demonstrated by the large number of cowry sea shells that were imported from as far away as the Indian Ocean, and the introduction of the horse-drawn chariot (which had first appeared centuries earlier in what is now Kazakhstan) from the northern steppe around 1250 BCE, possibly coming via the northeast. Chinese civilization may have developed largely indigenously, but it was never entirely a closed and isolated system.
As Christopher Beckwith has shown, the Zhou origin myth is strikingly similar to those of a surprising number of other Eurasian peoples, ranging from the ancient Scythians and Romans in the west to the Koguryŏ in Korea, and including the later Turks and Mongols, suggesting an unexpected degree of shared Eurasian culture. According to the Zhou legend, the first ancestor of the Zhou people was conceived when a woman named Jiang Yuan stepped into the footprint of the supreme god Shangdi (the “Lord on High”) and thereby became pregnant.
8 - The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 28 May 2018
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- 11 January 2017, pp 217-258
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Industrialization and the Rise of New Great Powers
The world was fundamentally transformed in the nineteenth century by the Promethean new powers unleashed by the industrial and scientific revolutions. Modern transportation and communications technologies, such as the steamship, the railway, and the telegraph (a telegraphic link between China and Europe was first established in 1871), knit the planet together more tightly than ever before. New military technologies – including ironclad steam warships and machine guns – gave industrialized countries unprecedented military superiority over nonindustrialized peoples. The power and wealth of these industrialized countries also made them widely attractive models, although a perceptible time lag occurred before many peoples outside the early-industrializing core perceived the apparent irresistibility of modernization, and many never welcomed it. “From 1860 to 1914, the web of steel [railways] spread throughout the world, and so did the political, financial, and engineering techniques that had evolved along with it,” yet “among non-Western peoples, only the Japanese showed real enthusiasm for railways,” and even in Japan, the first eighteen-mile stretch of rail line was not laid until 1872 (see Figure 8.1). In China, the first short rail line was built by a British firm in 1876, and then was purchased by the local Chinese government the following year and dismantled.
Despite this delayed start, by the end of the nineteenth century a virtual tidal wave of Westernization was beginning to sweep the world. Consciously Western-style clothing and hairstyles became widely fashionable, especially among elites. In the 1870s, for example, Japanese samurai cut their topknots and tentatively began adopting Western fashions. By 1900, it is said that most Japanese men owned at least one Western-style suit and hat. Representative democratic government also seemed to be the irresistible trend of the times by the end of the century. By 1890, Japan had a written modern Western-style constitution and an elected legislature (called the Diet in English, kokkai in Japanese). Soon after the turn into the twentieth century, even China adopted a formal constitution and held elections for provincial assemblies, and in 1912–1913, China experimented with its first nationwide democratic elections.
In many ways, this nineteenth-century wave of Westernization foreshadowed the current phenomenon of globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Transportation and communications became not only much more rapid but also more standardized.
Contents
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 11 January 2017, pp v-x
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Introduction: What Is East Asia?
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 11 January 2017, pp 1-11
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The country with what is probably already now the world's single largest national economy is located in East Asia, and three of the world's five largest economies are also Asian — two of them (China and Japan) specifically East Asian. In addition to having the world's largest economy, the People's Republic of China also now has the world's second largest military budget, and is clearly an emerging superpower. Although not nearly as huge as China, some of the smaller East Asian states such as South Korea can also boast astonishing recent success stories. This is a dramatic reversal of the situation that had prevailed a century ago, when a handful of Western European powers, together with the United States and Russia (with Japan already as an emerging junior player), dominated much of the planet economically, militarily, politically, and even culturally.
A hundred years ago China was a collapsed and failed state, and, within East Asia, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam were all colonies of foreign powers. Only Japan appeared moderately successful. Even well into the mid-twentieth century, East Asia still remained largely preindustrial, often bitterly poor, and desperately war ravaged. Even Japan, which almost alone in the entire non-Western world had succeeded in asserting itself as a regionally significant modern power by the early 1900s, was left crushed and in ruins by the end of the Second World War in 1945. A fresh start was required in Japan, which gained momentum beginning in the 1960s. Since that time, first South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, then the People's Republic of China, and recently even (to some extent) Vietnam have all joined Japan – though each in characteristically different ways – in achieving dramatic levels of modern economic takeoff. Beyond any doubt, the rise of East Asia has been one of the most important stories of recent world history.
An argument can be made, moreover, that rather than representing some fundamentally unprecedented departure from past human experience, the recent economic strength exhibited by East Asia is really more of a return to normal. For much of history, China – the largest single component of East Asia – enjoyed one of the most developed economies on earth.
7 - Dai Viet (Vietnam before the Nineteenth Century)
- Charles Holcombe, University of Northern Iowa
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- A History of East Asia
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- 11 January 2017, pp 199-216
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When a new Vietnamese dynasty, the Nguyen (1802–1945), was established in 1802 in several important senses it was a realm “that had never before existed.” Never before had the whole of what we think of today as Vietnam been brought together under unified rule, and only now (from 1803), for the first time, did it actually begin to be called “Vietnam.” A glance at any map of modern Vietnam also reveals a country with a somewhat peculiar configuration, which is partly a result of that surprisingly late political culmination and partly a natural consequence of physical geography. There are two large population centers: one in the north in the Red River delta, and one in the south along the Mekong River delta, awkwardly joined together by a long narrow neck of coastland squeezed between the mountains and the sea. Another consequence of Vietnam's historical evolution as a country is that it today contains some fifty-four different recognized ethnic minority populations (although ethnic diversity is hardly unique to Vietnam, and ethnic Vietnamese do constitute a large majority of the total population). Yet, despite some significant late developments, in other important senses Vietnam is truly ancient.
The Origins of Civilization in Vietnam
Wet-field rice agriculture may have been introduced (from farther north, having probably originated in the Yangzi River region of what is today China) into the Red River area shortly after 2500 bce. Bronze metallurgy in the Red River region dates from perhaps 1500 BCE. By about 500 BCE, the Dong Son culture (ca. 600 BCE–200 CE) – so named by modern archeologists because of a type-site located in northern Vietnam – had begun producing magnificent bronze drums of a characteristic style known as Heger I, demonstrating considerable cultural sophistication (see Figure 7.1). With Dong Son, the region also enters the Iron Age. Although these remarkable Dong Son bronze drums are commonly identified with Vietnam, they have been found widely scattered throughout Southeast Asia, and it is still a matter of debate whether their manufacture began in the Red River area of what is today Vietnam or in Yunnan Province of what is today southwest China. The largest concentration of these bronze drums, moreover (of a somewhat later and larger type known as Heger II), are found in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces in south China.