Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

There’s no quiz today!! Hurray!! We all get an additional 5 quiz points, although it is unknown at this time whether the five points extend over 100% or not.

All of China is thriving in the Song dynasty, the medieval period of great innovation and progress.  Westerners were always stunned at the level of sophistication of Chinese markers, cities, politics, and all other realms.  China was unquestionably the leader in world civilization at the time.  Today, we ask “What went wrong?”  However, this is a wrongly worded question.  To ask why China didn’t produce capitalism assumes all history is on the same trajectory, and is a very bizarre question.  We don’t have to assume that any civilization is on any particular path.

After the Song dynasty there was a brief period of disunity, and then the Mongols happened, everywhere.  They swept into central Asia and eastern Europe, and were militarily superior to any settled civilization.  It was quick and easy for them to win battles, so when they decided to hold the territory they conquered in China, they decided to Sinify, to settle down and adopt Chinese custom.  Their broader impact on Chinese society is not entirely clear during the Yuan dynasty.  They reify the four books of the Confucian tradition, and push more Chinese to the south.

Then, in the 1500s, there is the black plague, originating in central Asia.  Another invention that makes a big impact is wood-block printing.  Before, there were two ways to copy—by ink rubbing or copying.  Even though there are 5000 standard characters, laying them out in blocks for mass-rubbing was much faster to produce large quantities of text.  Over the next several hundred years, a handful of well-known printing houses emerge.  Eventually, by the Ming, the printing houses have figured out that even more than the elite literati whose sons are studying for the exams, there is an enormous population who is hungry to read.

With printing, it became possible to take oral stories and link them together into cohesive novels.

This new level of national unity in the Ming (1400s), and through the dissemination of the classical canon through books, is still diverse, with many languages and politics.  For example, Shanghainese is not just a dialect of Chinese, but rather a completely different language of the Wu family.  This has nothing to do with writing scripts, which can be used to render an arbitrary language through a symbol isomorphism.  Another way to think about the diversity in China is in the distance from the center, which could be a full week with good transportation.  On the fringes of China, there are few Chinese people and officials, and significantly less civilization and society.

The Ming continue the small number of government officials monitoring local officials who actually cooperate to form a government system.  However, this doesn’t always work well.

Zheng He was a eunuch in the main court—a Muslim—who became the commander of a fleet of ships that traveled all along the Chinese coast and southeast Asia, to India, and the middle east, as well as the coast of Africa.  In 1350-1450 China is the strongest world power, but for some reason there’s a withdrawal of Chinese expansion back into China.  We don’t understand why these trading trips shut down, or why there was a corresponding closing down in other ways in the mainland.  Ming society begins to become ultra-conservative, even more than neo-Confucianism.  Filial piety takes on enormous proportions, with stories of sons honoring their mothers.

There is another genre of stories about chased widows, who go through acrobatics to remain chaste and loyal to their previous husbands.  These two values are the ultimate representations of loyalty.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 6:01 pm and is tagged with confucian tradition, yuan dynasty, wood block printing, song dynasty, black plague, world civilization, printing houses, chinese custom, chinese society, disunity, medieval period, central asia, 1500s, literati, four books, mongols, hurray, time today, five points, westerners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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