By John Keay

Impressions

The Chinese have had an extremely well detailed history due to their fantastic record keeping. Their civilization has been extremely successful, relatively continuous, and greatly influential around the world. They seem to specialize in taking ideas from all over and improving on them for personal gain. The current ruling power of the CCP has a much different take on Heaven’s Mandate to rule, but they are still interested in how history can be twisted to justify current foreign policy positions. I learned a lot about the geography and why their society has advanced differently than Western powers.

Actionable Notes

  1. Keep detailed records and refer back to them frequently.
  2. Learn the history and influences on other countries’ culture to have the greatest impact in foreign policy negotiations.

Quotes

  • Of all the issues involved in the power struggle - territorial, dynastic, philosophical, and fiscal- perhaps the most surporising was social, in that dissent swelled from the lowest ranks of society. Resistance to Qin rule proved to be not just popular but populist… While nationalists would later applaud the First Emperor’s efforts at unification, and while Maoists would approve his autocratic efforts in mass mobilisation, orthodox Marxists would be more gratified by the anti-Qin response and its early evidence of peasant revolt and class consciousness.
  • Rome’s near-contemporary empire was comparable in size and would last several centuries. But China’s would weather the millenia. Many explanations - geographical, psychological, even genetic - have been offered for the contrasting fortunes of the two empiresand for the different political orders to which they would give rise - fragmentary and increasingly conensual in the case of Europe’s nation-states, unitary and increasingly authoritarian in the case of China’s empire. Explanations that emphasize imperial China’s more effective administrative structure and its more flexible ideology are certainly not the most exciting. Yet they carry conviction; and both - the administrative machinery and its ideological lubricant - were honed under the Han.
  • The Chang’an bureaucracy ground to a halt - as bureaucracies do - when the supply of paper ran out.
  • Born in 599, the great Tang Taizong, contructor if not architect of the Tang empire, belonged to a generation of Asian empire-builders. From the Tsangpo basin of southern Tibet, Srong-brtsan-sgam-po, his exact contemporary, was masterminding the first unification of the scattered peoples of Asia’s high plateau to lay the foundations of a formidable Tibetan empire. Across the Himalayas in the Gangetic plain, Harsha-vardhana of Kanauj was performing a similar feat in establishing his imperial sway over the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of north India. Simultaneously the Sassanid ruler Chosroes (Khosrau) II was overrunning the Levant and Asia Minor to recreate a Persian empire the stretched from Xinjiang to Egypt. And in the far south-west, along the caravan routes of Arabia, another contemporary took rejection in Mecca as cause for flight (hegira or hijra) to Medina, where, acknowledged as the Prophet, he found a following and launched a crescentade that in less than a centure would obliterate the Sassanids and buffet the frontiers of both India and China.
  • For just as war, being notoriously unpredictable, was to be considered a last resort, so battle was to be offered only when victory was guaranteed. Indeed, if war represented a failure of diplomacy, then deployment represented a failure of strategy, and battle a failure of tactics.
  • [Of the Jin] A dynasty that, for all its faults, had set an example, substatially followed by both Mongols and Manchus, of how non-Han rule could be made acceptable to an overwhelmingly Han population had finally proved itself worthy of the Mandate; extinction with honour had been preferred to the shame of a mock abdication. The Southern Song, come their turn, would know what was expected of them.