China: 3000 Years of History, 50 Years of Revolution. Robert Louzon 1998
The general who re-established China’s national unity at the end of the third century BC was to found a dynasty that lasted for more than 400 years. This dynasty was not content with maintaining national unity. It also re-established China’s rule over the non-Chinese peoples, annexing vast territories not inhabited by Chinese, lands and entire countries that were not able to be colonised by the Chinese, in which the conditions of production were altogether unlike those of the Chinese. Whilst Shi Huang Di had founded the Chinese national state, it was the Han who created the Chinese empire. (For the sake of clarity it is best to restrict the word ‘empire’ to those states like the Roman, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, which included people of different nationalities.)
From now on, the broad outline of the history of China is quite simple, for it came to be dominated entirely by the ‘imperial’ question. It was to become an alternation of Chinese and barbarian dynasties. On three occasions, in fact, China collapsed, and then it was no longer the Chinese exercising their domination over the barbarians, but the barbarians who were to penetrate China; ‘invasion’ was to succeed ‘conquest’, placing one of their leaders on the throne.
In the course of the 2000 years that passed between the accession of the former Han and the abdication of the last emperor in 1912, six great dynasties were to succeed each other in China – three Chinese and three barbarian. Moreover, during the interval between each Chinese dynasty and the barbarian dynasty that replaced it, except on the third occasion, was a long period that may be regarded as a ‘Middle Ages’, during which China was divided into several states with constantly changing frontiers, the barbarian states in the north, and the others, the Chinese ones, in the south. It was something analogous to what happened in the West in our Middle Ages, when the old Roman empire was divided between the barbarian kingdoms in the west and the countries adhering to Byzantium, the ‘second Rome’, in the east.
We give below a list of these six principle dynasties, the Chinese being indicated with bold type and the barbarians with italics. As regards the latter, the Chinese name of the dynasty is given only in brackets, for they are more generally designated by the name of the Mongolian people from whom they originated.
* Han (203BC-220AD)
* First Middle Ages (220-588)
* Tuoba (Sui) (588-618)
* Tang (618-907)
* Second Middle Ages (907-1276)
* Mongols (Yuan) (1276-1368)
* Ming (1368-1644)
* Manchus (Qing) (1644-1912)
The first Han was made emperor by the intervention of two elements that we are going to see appearing in all the ‘troubled’ epochs of China’s history, and which often changed into each other – namely, proletarians and soldiers.
The troubles of 209BC that led to the fall of the successor of Shi Huang Di were occasioned by men whom Chinese historians describe as ‘vagabonds’.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that the existence of great masses of these ‘vagabonds’ was due to the agrarian reforms of Shi Huang Di. There is nothing more dangerous, in fact, than to destroy a man’s attachment to the land. The land holds the man, but the man holds the land. Freed from this tie, being no longer part of a village community, no longer being able to dispose freely of his lands, nor to mortgage or sell them, the peasant soon risks finding himself deprived of the means of production, and is consequently reduced to the condition of a proletarian. Unless at this time there is a general expansion of production making the employment of a great mass of new workers possible, the proletarian becomes a ‘vagabond’, or one of the ‘unemployed’, as we say today.
This problem of men without land, of men without property, which the institution of property has itself created, is well known to present-day colonisers. Granting to natives the right to dispose of the ownership of the lands they cultivate, whether by recognising the right of the tribe to sell its lands, or by dividing up the land between its members, generally results in a quick sale of the lands by those who have become their owners, who, once they have spent the price of the sale, often find themselves deprived of all means of production: they become ‘vagabonds’. [1]
What resources then remained to prevent these vagabonds from dying of hunger, when they did not find employment in productive labour, thanks to a contemporaneous economic revolution? Only one – to become soldiers.
The reason the agrarian reform of 361BC that was confined to the state of Qin had succeeded was due to its position as a marcher state, and especially as that march most exposed and vulnerable to invasion. Qin therefore always required soldiers, and once it set out to conquer the whole of China, it needed even more soldiers. Perhaps that was even the ulterior motive for the agrarian reform: to obtain soldiers.
On the other hand, when the agrarian reform was extended over the whole of China, it caused the number of proletarians to swell far in excess of the number of soldiers needed, and so it came about that since they could not become soldiers of the state, they were obliged to become soldiers against the state. These vagabond proletarians in rebellion formed themselves into ‘armed bands’, and the principal chiefs of these bands carved out kingdoms for themselves out of the ‘empire’ that they had helped to overthrow, modelling the kingdoms on those sanctified by tradition before the time of Shi Huang Di. The restoration of the ‘good old days’, of kings, feudal lords, scholars and literati, was the work of upstart troopers.
It was not long before one of these ‘soldiers of fortune’, as Voltaire called them, who had become king of the ancient kingdom of Chu (Sichuan), defeated his colleagues, and installing himself at Shi Huang Di’s capital at Xi'an in the state of Qin, proclaimed himself emperor. He was the first ruler of the Han dynasty.
This dynasty is regarded by the Chinese as their founding dynasty. This is rightly so. It was not only that this dynasty made China an empire, but it was also this dynasty that established the principles of government and the institutions that ruled China uninterruptedly until yesterday – as much under barbarian as under Chinese dynasties. The China of 1840 was still that of the ‘sons of Han’.
In foreign affairs, Han’s task was to pass over from the defensive to the offensive. Instead of simply defending itself against the barbarians of the north and west from behind the Great Wall, the Han dynasty established its rule over the country of the barbarians.
It was particularly from the time of Wu, who ascended the throne in 140BC, that this policy was systematically adopted and achieved its greatest success. Wu was the first fully to merit the title of emperor. [2]
In effect, China then became not only mistress of Mongolia, but of the whole of eastern Turkestan as far as the Pamirs, and about the first century of the Christian era, it even penetrated beyond the Pamirs into western Turkestan, where the Dayuezhi [3] of the Amur and Syr Darya recognised its suzerainty.
This was its first, and practically its last, contact with another great irrigational civilisation, that of the Indus, whose political and cultural ties with Afghanistan and Turkestan were very close. It was a civilisation that was at the same time Greek in its art, an old remnant of the Greek regimes installed in these lands by Alexander’s generals, and Indian in its religion, Buddhism. If Greek art had only a limited influence on the art of China, Buddhism, on the other hand, was destined to achieve its greatest triumphs in China. Not only was it to become the third official religion of China, but it was to find its true homeland there.
Expansion beyond the Pamirs was ephemeral, but it was long lasting as far as the Pamirs. Since the time of the emperor Wu, the normal range of the Chinese empire outside China proper was to include the Gobi, Lop Nor and Tarim deserts, which outside their oases were peopled only by nomads and cattle-breeders – by people who were the antithesis of the Chinese themselves, in other words.
As has been said, China’s national unity was achieved in 221BC, and the Chinese empire took shape about 120BC. China as a national state therefore lasted for no more than a century. This very short period as a national state, contrasting with the long periods during which it was broken up into several states, or existed as an empire, is a very general phenomenon. Contrary to what might be expected, the national stage is an unstable stage; the two major stable forms of the state are those where the people are split up, or those in which it dominates the others.
At the same time as they were subjugating the northern desert countries, in the south the Han were actively pursuing a policy of populating and placing fertile lands under cultivation.
Colonising the basins of the Chang Jiang and the Red River was vigorously carried through, partly by assimilating into China those Annamites who had established themselves in the Chang Jiang basin, and partly by pushing back into the basin of the Red River those Annamites who sought to preserve some traits of their own nationality, but who were nonetheless obliged to accept the rule of a Chinese governor. The conquest was decisive over the Chang Jiang; Chinese domination over the Red River was subject to various alternations, but in neither of these two deltas was Chinese civilisation ever placed in question.
In addition to the colonisation of the south, the Han attempted the colonisation of the north-east. In 102BC they annexed Korea. [4] But here the conditions were less favourable than in the south. Korea certainly offered a tempting plain for intensive agriculture on its western side, as this plain faced China directly, although it was narrow and split up into districts. On the other hand, the peninsula was quite isolated from China, at least by the land route, on account of the high mountain range separating it from Manchuria, and so it was never more than half assimilated into China. Korea received rice and its religion from China, but that was about all. On the political plane, its dependence on China was only intermittent, and even when it existed it was hardly more than nominal. The Korean has remained a Korean, both as a citizen and as a man, even though he received his ‘cultivation’ from China, in both senses of the word.
The extension of colonisation was bound to lead to a shift in China’s political centre of gravity, but it was only a slight shift, for the expansion of the empire elsewhere made it as necessary as ever for the centre of gravity to be close to the north-western barbarians, even when they were subdued. From the beginning of the first century of the Christian era, the capital ceased to be Xi'an, the old Qin capital, and was transferred to Luoyang, 300 kilometres to the east and hence nearer the plain. [5]
The system the Han instituted for the government of China and the empire was as long lived as the empire itself. The system was essentially a compromise. When Shi Huang Di wanted to establish his centralised administration, the literati sent him remonstrances arguing that he should rather follow the system attributed by tradition to the legendary emperors – to share out the government of the different provinces amongst the various members of his own family. Shi Huang Di did nothing of the sort, but it was the system adopted by the Han dynasty.
The empire, and even China proper, was too vast, with regard to the means of communication available at the time, to be governed directly from the capital. It was therefore necessary to place at the head of each region somebody in the capacity of king, viceroy or governor – the name itself did not matter. The individual so appointed had to be endowed with wide powers, one might even say plenipotentiary powers. This was what the first Han emperor did. From the moment he proclaimed himself emperor, he distributed the different provinces of China amongst those warlords who had helped him.
But China was too homogenous, and its unity was rendered too urgent by the danger threatening from the barbarians, to allow any of these powerful governors to free themselves and make independent states out of their provinces. Yet this was what they wanted. So arose the whole corpus of enactments and institutions designed to prevent them from achieving their aims.
The first measure taken for this purpose by the Han was to reserve as far as possible the position of viceroy to members of their own family. The loyalty of these high functionaries was thus guaranteed by the family tie, as far as it could be. The unity of the empire rested upon the unity of the imperial family.
But the cry for unity did not preclude utilising the spirit of rivalry. The motto of ‘divide and rule’ is not specifically Latin. The maintenance of imperial authority over the viceroys could more easily be secured if a permanent means could be found to set them in opposition to each other. This is the origin of one of the most original features in Chinese political customs.
Like any other man, the Chinese emperor has a mother, and furthermore, like every Chinese, he is bound to the most absolute veneration for his mother and to show her complete obedience. The imperial family is thus made up of two families. On the one hand, there is the family of the emperor’s father, which is his only family in the legal sense, whose name he bears and to which he owes all the family obligations; on the other hand, there is his mother’s family, which means nothing to him in the legal sense, but with regard to which he must do all his mother demands. It therefore follows that if the mother is in any way an intriguer, which is usually the case, the two families are at daggers drawn over the distribution of titles and offices.
The conflict becomes all the more acute when the empress’ family by the method of murder or ‘invitation to suicide’ arranges for the emperor’s heir to be a minor so young that a regency is formed, at the head of which there is always the mother, until the infant emperor comes of age. The two families exercise their power in such a way that during the minority of the emperor it is the maternal clan that rules, whilst after the mother’s death it is the paternal clan. Finally, between the emperor’s majority and the death of his mother, the balance swings between one or the other clan, in accordance with the greater or lesser filial devotion evinced by the emperor.
This family dualism has remained the foundation of Chinese politics for 2000 years and under all the dynasties, even the non-Chinese ones. We find the key rôle of the Emperor’s mother under a Manchu dynasty at the beginning of the twentieth century at the time of the Boxer movement, just as we find it in the second century before the Christian era under the purely Chinese Han dynasty. [6]
But the state not only needs viceroys, it must also have a number of other functionaries of all ranks. To choose them, the Han reversed the policy of Shi Huang Di. The Emperor Wu summoned the literati, and gave them a kind of monopoly in the administration of the state.
This was also a compromise between centralisation, which made the appointment of functionaries solely dependent upon the sovereign’s will, and decentralisation, which made it dependent upon other authorities (local assemblies, constituted bodies, etc.), or upon birth. The Chinese functionaries, the ‘mandarins’, are indeed legally subject only to the central power, but the law that requires that they be exclusively selected from amongst the literati – that is, from amongst those who have passed certain examinations – greatly limits the central power’s choice. Giving the monopoly of political functions to one group makes a ‘corps’ out of them, with its own interests, its own way of life, and its own power. The state’s absolutism is thus limited by privilege.
But here, however, we again find the adage ‘divide and rule’ at work, because opposed to the corps of learned men there is the corps of eunuchs. Since the emperor’s mother, as a woman, cannot receive men, it is necessary for her to surround herself with eunuchs. These eunuchs, wielding the influence that the mother exercises over her son, thus find themselves in a position to challenge the power of the literati. [7] Together with the rivalry between the two families, the struggles between the eunuchs and the literati encompass the entire history of the Chinese court.
However, if the literati had to share influence on the political plane with the eunuchs, in the sphere of the intellect they enjoyed a total monopoly, and encountered no opposition.
Since the beginning of the Christian era in the West, the educated have been divided into two rival groups, the clerics and the laymen, and it is largely due to the rivalry between these two groups that understanding has progressed. The cleric with his religious ‘culture’ is the breastplate against which the lay scholar armed with rational and scientific culture is obliged to fence, and the progress of the latter is often to be measured by the vigour with which clerics combat it. Without the likes of De La Barre, there would doubtless have been no Voltaires. [8]
Now in China, the basic rationalism of the people forbids all opposition of this kind. In a country where religion is only a philosophy, the scholar is at once a cleric and a layman; as state functionaries, within their jurisdictions, the mandarins are also the official representatives of Confucianism.
It may be that the absence of this kind of dualism accounts for the barrenness of Chinese thought, and for the fact that since its great classical centuries it has produced next to nothing, its scholars being merely content to comment on the great authors who had lived at the time of the hegemons.
This intellectual immobility of the Chinese people must not, however, be taken as an exceptional characteristic.
As we have seen, by a curious coincidence, the great era of Chinese thought is at the same time as the great era of Western thought – the ‘Greek miracle’ of the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BC. Now if it is true that China has produced nothing new since, the West for its part had to wait for the beginning of the modern era with Descartes and Bacon [9] to mark a new stage in the development of thought. Between the fourth century BC and the seventeenth century AD in the West, as in China itself, there has been hardly anything that was fundamentally new. At both ends of Eurasia, the human spirit slept for 2000 years, and if this sleep has lasted 300 years longer in China, that is a fact of no great consequence. If the Chinese were still able to swear by Mencius but a few years ago, let us not forget that for many centuries we ourselves were able to do nothing but swear by Aristotle. [10] In fact, everywhere in the world thought sleeps in this way, until new techniques come along to give it a shove.
The most serious consequence of this cultural immobility was to keep the Chinese language in a state very close to that adopted by the script at the beginning, and so made it a specialist art. Chinese writing today is the only script that is still ideographic, a script whose signs represent things and not sounds.
A word is formed by a single syllable in Chinese. Since the number of syllables at the disposal of men’s throats is limited, the Chinese are obliged to use the same word to express different things, so that it is only by the tone in which a word is pronounced that the sense in which it is used can be understood. Now since there can be no question of a ‘tone’ in script, in writing a like word, or a like sound, it is necessary to use different characters according to the sense in which the word is taken, and this excludes phonetic writing. There is thus no correspondence between the spoken and the written language. Such is the method of the Chinese language as it is found in the most ancient inscriptions, and such is the method used in China today. Whereas India and Japan themselves adopted alphabetic scripts derived from the Phoenician alphabet, China has continued to write as did the ancient Egyptians. [11]
This duality of the spoken and written language, although expressing itself in a different form, is comparable to that which existed in our own Western world during the thousand years or so when Latin, although no longer spoken, was still the written language; it had the same consequences in China as in Europe, but to an even greater degree, because in China the two languages, that spoken and that written, differed even more.
When a written language is unrelated to a spoken language, the people as a whole – the common people, that is – cannot learn it. Only a few privileged people have the necessary time to devote to the long study that it requires. If Western scholars had to spend several years acquiring a knowledge of Latin, the mandarins of the East had to spend an entire lifetime of study to acquire a mere knowledge of the principal characters of their writing.
This state of things led to two unfortunate consequences: deprived of this primary intellectual tool ensuring the registration and availability of thought at any time, the great majority of the people could never get beyond the most elementary ideas. All the resources of the intellect, and all the potential riches in the brains of millions of human beings were thus rendered inoperative.
The other unfortunate consequence is that the privileged few themselves, those who had learned to read and write, had not only lost all of their youth and a considerable part of their mature years – in other words, the period of life when intellectual vigour is at its height – in learning the simple art of writing, but since understanding it alone was a privilege for them, they reckoned that achieving it was quite enough, and from then on they had the right to contemplate their own navels, with no more to do than live in idleness and enjoy the sense of ‘superiority’ indicated by their numerous certificates. So it is that all privilege, all monopoly, sterilises even the minds of those people who are supposed to benefit from it.
Even so, the dialectic never loses its rights. The difficulties of the Chinese script resulted in the invention of printing.
The difficulty that there was in drawing with precision the 40 000 or so characters that made up Chinese writing, by the sixth century AD led to the invention of engraving them on wood and reproducing them by simple impression. [12] The persistence of hieroglyphs thus led to the invention of printing. Extreme difficulty in writing thus had as a result extreme simplicity in its reproduction. The rotatory machines that today produce hundreds of thousands of copies per hour are the descendants of the toiling Chinese writer engaged in the production of a single copy.
All that we have just seen as regards the political, administrative and cultural organisation of China bears witness to that peasant conservatism that is one of the characteristics of the country. The fact that China was an empire, however, and had to ensure its conquest and occupation of remote territories, also made it impossible for it to remain purely peasant.
Before the Han dynasty, as in all agricultural communities, commerce was profoundly looked down upon. It was regarded as ‘the lowest of occupations’, and those who devoted themselves to it were, as under the early Romans, deemed unworthy even to pay tax. Their position was somewhat like the Indian outcasts, or the Jews in Europe.
But the great expeditions that the Chinese armies under the emperor Wu and his successors conducted as far as Turkestan could not operate without the supply of materials of all kinds which must be provided for the army. Now provisions also means providers. The last years of the second century BC witnessed in China, as a little earlier in Rome, the rise of a class of purveyors of war materials, who, like the purveyors of war materials in all the eras of great wars, as for example the equestrian order in the Roman republic, built up considerable fortunes. But unlike the Roman equites, who confined themselves to exploiting the imperial provinces through the medium of the state, these early Chinese capitalists used their resources to create an industry and develop trade. It is very likely that the two great specifically Chinese industries, porcelain and paper, go back to the Han dynasty. On the other hand, the installation of Chinese armies in the Mongolian steppes for the first time made safe the route which led from China to the frontiers of the Indo-Greek world of Turkestan and the Punjab, whose civilisation was at that time in full swing. It was then that the era of the famous ‘silk road’ began.
It goes without saying that a class that had become so important in numbers and in wealth could not remain indefinitely without citizen status. The first of these ‘nouveaux riches’ sought to attain it individually by the purchase of real estate and thus enter the class of landed proprietors, but very soon the emperor Wu issued an edict prohibiting the reinvestment of money earned in commerce and industry in real estate. The same kind of edict that for long prevented the Jews of Europe from becoming landowners struck the Chinese merchants in the same way, and for the same reason. But whilst the European Jews finally in the nineteenth century secured their ‘emancipation’ and became citizens like everybody else, it would seem that the Chinese merchants, industrialists and financiers secured theirs at the close of the Han empire. This relatively rapid emancipation of the Chinese merchants had the effect of making the Chinese people a nation of merchants as well as a nation of cultivators.
Now if the cultivation of the soil, at least as practised in China, is an element of permanence, commerce is an element of mobility. Commerce continually transforms everything that it touches, it is the supreme factor in the progress of communities. Periodic repetition is the law of cultivation, but constant renovation is the essence of commerce. It follows that if the history of China shows a permanent substratum, from the fact of cultivation predominating in it, overlaying it is a history of frequent revolutions and experimentations due to the importance of commerce. Thus, as Réclus remarked, there is no country where the system of land tenure, for example, has changed more frequently. [13] The stability imposed by cultivation alone is constantly challenged by commercial development.
It was a popular revolution that brought the Han to power; it was a popular revolution that enabled the junior branch to succeed the elder; and it was a popular revolution that finally put an end to the dynasty.
These two latter revolutions, that of the Red Eyebrows at the start of the first century AD, and that of the Yellow Turbans at the end of the second century were, according to Granet, ‘the consequences of an agrarian crisis due to the development of the large domains’. [14]
From now on we faced with one of the most important dialectical phenomena, common to many countries and many eras: Latifundia perdidere Italiam. [15] The concentration of property as the originator of revolutions was the beginning of the end for Greece, as it was for Rome and for our Middle Ages. By its very development, property leads to its concentration in fewer and fewer hands, and this concentration leads to the destruction of the society that is based upon property. In China, however, the factors of permanence are so powerful that the concentration of property there has never so far led to the end of Chinese society, but it has produced profound political changes, overthrowing dynasties, causing barbarian invasions, and so on.
The process by which the concentration of property operates presents a fairly general character, and it is worth our while dwelling on it.
The concentration of property, even landed property, operates most of all through the medium of transferable capital. The accumulation of capital arising from the supply of war materials, from industrial undertakings, from commerce and from financial operations very soon grows to such an extent that it can no longer be employed, without great technical transformations, in the branches where it had originally been gained. One single outlet for its investments remains – the purchase of land. As the capitalists are in possession of vast financial resources and are used to thinking on a large scale, they ‘assemble’ lands in order to convert them into vast private estates. It is thus that the latifundia originate.
But because of the way these were built up in China, the problem of the landless, which we have seen was provisionally solved by means of great conquests, was bound to be renewed.
In fact the great capitalist estate is not exploited in the same way as the cultivator’s bit of land, nor even like the squire’s small farm; its cultivation is less intensive. Cattle breeding replaces cultivation, often to a considerable degree, and to such an extent that during this time we see whole herds of sheep and horses developing in China, despite the Chinese traditional dislike of cattle breeding. As we know, cattle raising on rich ‘grasslands’ requires far less labour for the same surface of ground. That is why only some of the peasants expropriated by the new landowner will be able to sell their labour power to him. We should say in passing that in China the sale of his labour power by an expropriated peasant means the sale of his body. He does not hire himself out as a paid worker, but sells himself as a slave. And private slavery, which did not exist in China before the Han, was at first tolerated under the Han, and then legalised. As for those who had no chance of making themselves slaves, because their services were no longer required, at the end of the dynasty they no longer had the opportunity of becoming soldiers, for the great conquests had been completed. So they formed an underclass of unemployed – the ‘vagabonds’.
Thus history repeats itself: the institution of property, as we have seen, produces a first expropriation of workers; its concentration now leads to a second.
The state, however, is always conscious, if only dimly, of the danger which the concentration of property presents with regard to political stability and social security; thus it happens that measures are sometimes taken to hold back this process of concentration, but if they succeed in holding it back for a little while, it is only to cause it to surge forward in the end.
That is why Wu, as we have pointed out, adopted the indirect measure of prohibiting the purchase of land from funds originating in the operations of trade and industry. Later on, during the last years before the Christian era, a more radical measure was enacted: a maximum area of land was stipulated (five hectares for a family of eight persons) and a maximum number of slaves fixed per family. But, as always happens in such cases, all these laws were withdrawn, or never applied, or circumvented, so that finally a rising broke out in Shandong, and in the year 3AD a minister named Wang Mang poisoned the emperor and proclaimed himself emperor in his place. [16]
Taking up again a policy that had already been sketched out by Wu, but systematising and developing it further, Wang Mang now embarked upon a vast experiment in ‘controlled economy’, which was the first attempt to institute ‘state capitalism’ in China, an attempt which we shall see was to be renewed with more thoroughness 1000 years later by the Song.
Wang Mang began with a draconian agrarian reform. The ius abutendi [17] was suppressed. The land became inalienable. Nobody any longer had the right to buy or sell either land or slaves. This meant the end of private slavery. The state, moreover, assigned to itself the complete ownership of all the land.
The agrarian reform was followed by a reform of trade. Prices were no longer to be free. Maximum prices for all commodities were to be fixed quarterly. As a counter-measure, goods which no longer found purchasers were to be sold to the state, which kept them as a reserve stock for a period. Finally, state banks were to be instituted, which would loan money at a fixed rate of interest. At the same time, a fiscal reform was undertaken. A tax on incomes was established at 10 per cent tax of gains made. It was a total failure.
Wang Mang was certainly a man of good intentions. But nothing is worse than men of good intentions when they are not also actuated by a will of iron. Three years after having abolished it, Wang Mang re-established the right of free disposal of land. As for his other measures, there was never even an attempt to initiate them. The agrarian reform ran aground in China during the first years of the Christian era, just as it had run aground in Rome a hundred years earlier.
The revolt that broke out in 3AD in Shandong, a revolt which, like all Chinese popular movements, was based on Daoism, whose adherents painted their eyebrows red as a sign of recognition, was fairly soon put down on Wang Mang’s advent to power, but on the failure of his reforms it was renewed with increased vigour. By the year 14AD, when a famine was caused by a breach in the dykes of the Yellow River, the Red Eyebrows were again in full revolt. They fought the armies of Wang Mang and made themselves masters of the whole of the lower basin of the Yellow River. It was then that the moneyed classes, seizing the opportunity offered them by the defeat of the reformer’s armies, came on the scene in the form of a junior branch of the Han, whose soldiers had succeeded in capturing the capital, Chang'an. Wang Mang was then assassinated, and the first ruler of the Later Han dynasty mounted the throne. [18] ‘All is re-established’, as the poet wrote. It was the year 22AD. The reign of the reformer had lasted 13 years.
The Red Eyebrows, however, were still in the field. They had risen against Wang Mang, but they had not done so to help restore the dynastic succession. So they in their turn marched on the capital, captured and destroyed it. But again in turn they were defeated and destroyed by the Han.
This time, everything was well and truly re-established. And everything, too, was to be maintained, because the social problem was once again to be solved as it had been in the time of the former Han – that is to say, by means of war.
The entire empire, which had been more or less left to its own devices during this troubled period, had in effect to be reconquered. A solution was therefore found for the workless and landless – to become soldiers. All the Red Eyebrows who had not been massacred were enrolled in the armies of the new emperor, and the reconquest began. This was the time when a general renowned in the annals of China, Pan Chao, reoccupied eastern Turkestan, and when Tonkin and the island of Hainan were subdued. [19]
It goes without saying that the cycle of events then began again, just as it had done under the former Han; war, the amassing of great fortunes, the concentration of property, the expropriation of the toilers, unemployment. The only difference this time was that the cycle started from a higher level, and was consequently bound to end in an even greater tragedy.
By about the year 130AD, China had firmly re-established its domination over the peoples on its periphery, and peace reigned once more. There were 50 years of peace, and then one day the Yellow Turbans appeared and followed the way of the Red Eyebrows.
This new movement did not arise in Shandong, like the previous one, but in the west of China, in Sichuan. Its ideology, however, was the same, because, as with Shandong, Sichuan was the province in China where Daoism was the most developed.
The slogan of the Yellow Turbans was ‘A New Society for the Year 184’.
The emperor was soon overrun. [20] The Yellow Turbans in turn were themselves defeated, but the danger was that the generals who had succeeded in defeating them had through that fact alone now become so strong that they were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves where they were able to declare their independence. One founded his state on the lower reaches of the Blue River; another was in Sichuan, and finally a third, whose son was to depose the last of the Han emperors, was set up on the Yellow River. [21] Thus not only was the Chinese empire, the work of the Han, destroyed, but so was the work of Qin Shi Huang Di, the unification of China.
At one stroke a terrible question now arose: was China itself, and Chinese civilisation, destined in turn to disappear, overrun by the barbarians?
1. Cf what happened, for example, in certain tribes in Morocco, where a land reform took place entirely comparable with that of Shi Huang Di (see Chez le Berbères du Maroc, by Célérier; Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, May 1936). [Author’s note]
2. The reign of Wu Di (139-87BC) is regarded as the apogee of Western Han power. He regulated government and commerce, patronised literature, and sent his armies as far west as Ferghana.
3. The people called the Dayuezhi in the Chinese annals are almost certainly the great Kushan Empire that ruled most of north-west India in the first and second centuries AD.
4. The armies of the Emperor Wu conquered Korea beginning from 109BC, and organised it into four commanderies within the Han Empire.
5. Chang'an, the former Han capital, which stood on the site of the former capital of the Qin, Xi'an, had been looted and badly damaged during the fighting at the end of the rule of Wang Mang. The capital was now transferred to Luoyang, the former capital of the Zhou emperors.
6. The paramount rôle played by women in the Guomindang movement and particularly by the Song family, the family of Madame Sun Yat-sen and of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was doubtless due to this tradition. It seems in short that in China, where the matriarchal family precedes the agnate one according to experts, it was never completely replaced by it. So the Chinese family is itself also a compromise. [Author’s note] Song Qingling (1892-1975) was the wife of Sun Yat-sen. By marrying her sister, Chiang Kai-shek became head of one of the ‘Four Families’ who controlled Guomindang China, and was related by marriage to two of the others. [Editor’s note]
7. We should note that castration was a result of legal punishment. These eunuchs were therefore criminals. It does not appear that their government was any worse than that of the literati. [Author’s note]
8. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) was the French philosopher most famous for his opposition to religious obscurantism. When the Chevalier De La Barre was beheaded in July 1766 for insulting a religious procession and damaging a crucifix, Voltaire put himself at the head of the storm of public protest, and proposed that the philosophes show their disapproval by leaving France and emigrating to Cleves.
9. René Descartes (Cartesius, 1596-1650), the author of the Discourse on Method, and Sir Francis Bacon (Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans, 1561-1626), politician and philosopher, laid the foundations of the experimental method in the natural sciences.
10. Aristotle of Stagira (c385-322BC) was the founder of one of the main schools of later Greek philosophy, and tutor to Alexander the Great.
11. Louzon is mistaken in his assumption that the script of the ancient Egyptians only contained ideograms. It does, in fact, contain a full consonantal alphabet, along with biliterals and triliterals, although ideograms are also used, either on their own, or as determinatives.
12. The traditional date for the invention of printing is early in the second century AD, but the earliest surviving specimen of Chinese printing on paper occurs on a dharani sutra scroll from Pulguk-sa in Korea (c704-51AD). The oldest dated complete Chinese printed book still extant is the British Museum copy of the Diamond Sutra of AD 868, brought by Sir Aurel Stein from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas at Dunhuang (Joseph Needham, ‘Paper and Printing’, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5, Cambridge, 1985, p149). See notes 14 and 15, Part I, Chapter V.
13. Élisée Réclus, L'homme et la terre, Volume 3, Paris, 1905, p78.
14. Marcel Granet, Chinese Civilisation, London, 1930, p128.
15. ‘It is the latifundia that have destroyed Italy.’ (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Volume 18, no 55)
16. Wang Mang (9-23AD), the nephew of the dowager Empress, became Chancellor of Military Affairs during the reign of the Emperor Ping Di (1-6AD), whom he poisoned. In 6AD, he became Imperial Regent, and in 9AD proclaimed himself first emperor of the Xin Dynasty. It did not outlast his downfall.
17. That is to say, ‘the right to use up’ (Latin).
18. Liu Xiu, known under the reign title of Guang Wu (25-57AD), suppressed his rivals (25-36AD) and established the power of the Eastern, or Later Han Dynasty (25-221AD), which ruled from Luoyang.
19. From 73 to 97AD General Pan Chao conquered the whole of Chinese Turkestan as far as the Indian frontier. Hainan, Tonkin and Annam were conquered by an expedition sent out in 42-43AD.
20. Xian Di (189-221AD), the last emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty, became a puppet in the hands of the general Cao Cao, and was finally dethroned by the general’s son, Cao Pi.
21. The ‘Three Kingdoms’, renowned in later Chinese story, were Wei (220-265AD), the most powerful, ruling the north and north-west from its capital at Luoyang, founded by Cao Pi (the Emperor Wen Di, 221-227AD), Wu (229-280AD), founded by Sun Quan (Emperor Da Di, 229-252AD) in the south-east and south, and Shu Han (221-264AD), regarded as the legitimate line, founded by Liu Bei (Emperor Zhao Lie, 221-223AD) and ruling the west and south-west from Chengdu in Sichuan.