China's 436 Years of Internal Conflict

You are receiving this post/email because you are a patron/subscriber to Of Two Minds / Charles Hugh Smith. This is Musings Report 2023-53.

I am naturally wary of making sweeping statements about anything as complex as China's long history and its equally complex culture, but I'm prompted to attempt the task by my reading of 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline by Ray Huang, first published in 1981, right on the cusp of Deng Xiaoping's world-changing reforms.

The book is an academic treatise by a scholar who was an associate of Joseph Needham, whose decades of research in China resulted in a monumental history of Chinese science, history and culture. I would not call 1587 light reading, as it is difficult to grasp its core ideas without a grounding of Chinese history, culture and philosophy.

I began my study of China over 50 years ago when I earned a degree in Comparative Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I was able to take classes from two widely admired professors of Chinese philosophy, Chang Chung-yuan and Cheng Chung-Ying. It seems to me that Chinese philosophy--Confucianism, neo-Confucianism, Legalism (Mencius et al), Taoism and in the 20th century, China's version of Marxism--remain constant foundations beneath the great flux of China's often tumultuous history.

In this sense, a grounding in Chinese philosophy is perhaps the ideal path to understanding the history and culture of China.

Professor Chang lived next door to the Quaker House which I frequented in those years. After evening meetings, I would see him performing Tai Chi in the shadows of his small front yard.

I haven't maintained a list of the many books I've read on China; I've listed a few that I recall below. I was blessed to visit China twice, the first time in 2000, with "insider" friends. I also was fortunate to befriend many Chinese immigrants from the mainland who privately shared their family stories of the Cultural Revolution, a topic that remains "sensitive," i.e. verboten. 

In other words, I am not an expert or a scholar, I am merely an informed observer.

The precision of 436 years is of course absurd. It is nothing more than 2023 - 1587.  But the paradoxes that generated the decline of the Ming Empire still exist today, and this is why we can speak of China's 436 Years of Internal Conflict.

The key insight of 1587 is the exploration of the paradoxes inherent in any centralized political system whose foundational sources of power are essentially moral. This is the essence of the Confucianist world-view: the universe is in harmony if the moral hierarchy is impeccable: if the emperor is morally righteous, the empire's vast bureaucracy will be morally sound, the villages will be dutiful and households will obey the father/husband. This harmony flows from the top--the emperor--to the bottom--the countless peasant households.

This harmony depends on the moral order being maintained, for this generates the Mandate of Heaven: all is aligned and harmonious in Heaven and Earth.

The problem is moral guidelines are not as precise and easy to follow as regulations and rules. Life is complicated and so ambiguities must be sorted out by what Huang calls "the personal touch." If officials attempt to force overly rigorous compliance with tax codes, for example, the gentry become upset and the resulting disharmony eventually makes it way to The Forbidden City in Beijing. The problems must be smoothed over with "the personal touch:" the mentor of the offending official might call upon the official and offer some oblique counsel. If this fails, the offending official will be quietly transferred to a remote region of the empire.

In other words, the entire leadership of the empire is based on promoting moral guidelines which cannot be fully institutionalized into regulations everyone follows, i.e. the rule of law. Instead, "the personal touch"--the relationships formed by classmates, mentors and colleagues--are the real-world foundation of policy and decisions.