Chinese history reveals many episodes in which serious challenges from outside China were made to the political, ideological, economic or social status quo inside the country. Several such challenges came, for example, in the form of military attack from outside China, especially from the north and west. Other challenges came in the form of new religious and cultural influences, as when Daoism and Buddhism were introduced. Still other challenges appeared in the form of European ideas and economic pressures.
Let us explore a few such episodes in an effort to generalise about how China reacted to these various types of influence and challenge.5 As we shall see, that reaction typically featured a cluster of elements, including arrogance, ignorance, disinterest, rejection and ‘filtering’ of foreign influences. In my view, China can be regarded as having enjoyed its long and glorious past partly because of the unusual – I would even say peculiar – way in which it has responded to outside influences.
2.1.1 Military and political challenges
A persistent theme in Chinese history revolves around military challenges from the north and west. To me, the best visual image of this theme comes in the form of a metaphor offered by Nelson Ikon Wu. Although the image Wu offers focuses on cultural influences, the same applies to military attacks:
The invisible continuity of the Chinese cultural metamorphosis always seems to me like a giant with his two feet firmly planted in the soil somewhere between Ch’ang-an and Loyang in the northern heartland where farther to the east continental Asia meets the Pacific Ocean. Seen from above and judged by the position of his broad shoulders, the giant appears to be facing south-southeast, with his back toward the desert plateau whose western limits border Asia Minor and point to Europe. Rising high over the terrain as he grows, he (…) does not enlarge his form in a radial-symmetrical way; [instead,] he moves forward and reaches to the left and to the right. The Himalayan Mountains block him from uniting with India, and invaders sneak up to enter him from behind.6
Harry Gelber, in his book The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, documents the many attacks that invaders have waged on China over the centuries but that the Chinese ultimately repelled or reversed. An abbreviated list of these would include the following:7
- the Xiongnu tribal attacks, beginning in the second century BCE and launched from their nomadic ranges in the steppes to the north and northwest of China in an effort to gain access to food sources, especially in winter;
- the Tubo Turks’ attacks in the early fourth century CE, resulting in the capture of the city of Loyang and then of the emperor himself;
- the Tibetans’ incursions in both the north and the south later in the fourth century CE; and
- the takeover of the northern part of China in the twelfth century CE by the Jin people, forcing the Song dynastic leaders south (thereby starting the so-called ‘Southern Song’ Dynasty).
Of course, the two most massive external military and political attacks came from the Mongols and the Manchus. These attacks – one occurring in the thirteenth century CE and the other occurring in the seventeenth century CE – resulted in ‘alien’ control of China for well over half of the last six centuries of its dynastic history.8 And yet the Chinese culture, and even the core of Chinese political integrity, may be said to have prevailed throughout those centuries. Why? Because in the first of these cases the foreign control was short-lived and left little imprint, and in the second of these cases the invaders were in a sense ‘converted’ to Chinese.
As for the Mongols, their Yüan Dynasty faced strong resistance at every attempt to replace Chinese values and institutions with Mongol values and institutions,9 including attempts to introduce legal enactments inconsistent with the codes that had emerged from the Song, Tang and Sui dynasties that preceded the Yüan. For example, the Yüan legal enactment of 1291 (Treatise of Yüan New Regulations, or Chih-yüan-hsin-ko) represented a sharp departure from the pattern of those earlier codes10 and had to be replaced just forty years later by a legal enactment (the 1331 Treatise of Punishment and Law, or Hsing-fa chih) that bore a remarkably close resemblance, both in structure and (especially) in content, to the Tang Code.11 And of course it should be borne in mind that the Yüan Dynasty, partly for the very reason that it did not adapt well and quickly to many Chinese values and institutions, lasted for less than a century.
As for the Manchus, the fact that they enjoyed a much longer and stronger dynasty (the Qing Dynasty) than did the Mongols (the Yüan Dynasty) surely resulted in large part from the Manchus’ careful and thorough adoption of Chinese values and institutions. Indeed, the Manchus seem to have recognised immediately the importance of adopting Chinese culture as their own. Their conscious effort to do so appears in many of their actions just before and during their attempts to supplant Ming rule.
For example, in taking control of Beijing in June 1644, the Manchu leader Dorgon ‘rode in the imperial palanquin into the palace grounds’ and declared that because the Qing had driven away the rebels responsible for the Ming emperor’s suicide, ‘[n]one in history have ever more properly succeeded to the Mandate [of Heaven]’.12 He also asserted that ‘the empire is a single whole. There are no distinctions between Manchus and Hans’.13 Similarly, the first Manchu emperor to occupy the capital in Beijing not only ‘worked hard to master Chinese’, but also ‘continued [his uncle] Dorgon’s practice of heeding the advice of senior Chinese advisors’ and ‘pointedly adhered to the institutional structure of the Ming dynasty’.14 Indeed, he saw to it that the civil service examination system was quickly resumed in 1646.15
In short, as one historian has remarked: ‘It was the Chinese system, Chinese officials, and Chinese ideas that enabled the Manchus to conquer China.’16