China: 3000 Years of History, 50 Years of Revolution. Robert Louzon 1998
Two kinds of facts dominate the history of China. The first, common to all irrigational civilisations, has to do with China’s relations with its neighbours – the non-irrigating and uncivilised ‘barbarians’. Invasions and counter-invasions recurred regularly throughout the whole 2000 years or more of China’s recorded history.
The second kind of fact, and this is quite peculiar to China, consists in the popular revolts of its people.
The two great conquests of the formidable technical change involved in the Neolithic Revolution, by which access to civilisation was opened to man, were the cultivation of the soil and the breeding of cattle. These two techniques were not at all linked, and cannot be associated together. Cattle breeding, such as is practised in the Western world today, presupposes that during the dead season (that during which vegetation is at a standstill, whether this be in winter or in summer), there is a sufficiency of provender left over from the season of plenty to feed all the cattle on hand. In ancient times, on the other hand, the food resources of the good season were generally just sufficient to sustain the cattle during that season alone. As soon as the dead season came, the herd had to be led to new heights or to new latitudes, where it was still the fertile season, and life could be sustained. Thus, the breeding of cattle was closely bound up with the nomadic life.
The result was that the two great branches of food production developed separately, each in the region best suited to it. Whilst cultivation of the soil found the irrigable lands most suitable, cattle breeding on the other hand preferred steppes and prairies, both of them in the good season providing vast stretches of pasture land where a herd had but to graze on foods more nourishing than those of the more richly watered lands.
So grew up, as much amongst yellow people as amongst whites or blacks, two deeply different types of people, the contrast between which is one of history’s dominating characteristics; the farmer and the shepherd. The tiller of the irrigated land or agriculturalist is essentially sedentary, whereas the shepherd is essentially nomadic; the first thrives on what he cultivates – principally cereals, corn, rice, maize and generally grain; the second is a meat eater, a carnivore; the one is stuck in his valley, the other has the immense stretches of steppe and prairie as his domain; the one is bent over his soil, the other stands erect in order the better to watch his herds; the first works with his arms, the second with his legs; being only in contact with things, the first attains his ends by patient and constant labour; the second, being in contact with animals, has other than his own will involved, and so must always be on the alert and be ready to prove himself the stronger.
This contrast between the two kinds of life and labour has always been the occasion of conflict between these two different kinds of people.
In those irrigated lands which are marked only by oases lying at great distances from each other, the two kinds of people are in close contact, with the nomad shepherds wandering between the oases. In this case, the general rule is that the shepherd establishes his domination over the oasis, and the sedentary agriculturalist becomes the serf and often even the slave of the nomadic cattle breeder. Such is the position even now in the Saharan oases, where the negro of the oasis is the haratin of the desert Tuaregs.
On the other hand, when irrigation covers a great stretch of territory lying together, as in the valley of a river, the nomad is unable to dwell amongst the sedentary folk; he must live outside the region, and consequently cannot in any permanent way establish his domination over the agriculturalist. But even so, attracted by the riches of the irrigated soil, he exerts a constant pressure on its inhabitants, against which they in turn are constrained to exert an equally constant resistance. The massive and compact character of this peasant population is generally sufficient to render this resistance effective, but if one fine day for one reason or another this resistance weakens, then there is immediately an irruption of the nomads – in other words, an invasion. The shepherd then establishes his domination over the lands of the agriculturalist. He cannot, however, maintain this domination without consolidating his position in the occupied territories, and so it follows that he ceases to be nomadic, and sooner or later becomes absorbed amongst the people he has conquered, becoming in his turn sedentary, and so an agriculturalist.
We find this process at work everywhere, amongst the Semites invading Chaldea and founding empires there, and amongst the Turks and Mongols spreading out into the Indus valley and laying the basis for the political unification of India. [1] Nowhere, however, has this contrast between the two kinds of people been more pronounced than on China’s northern frontiers, and as a result nowhere has this factor played so great a rôle as it has in China.
On opposite sides of the Great Wall – that remarkable barrier separating cultivator and shepherd, and symbolising their mutual hostility – there dwell indeed the archetype of the peasant and the archetype of the shepherd.
On the one side sits the Chinese, who has developed the intensive cultivation of the soil to its greatest possible limits, so that, according to É Réclus, he is able to live on between some 600 and 700 square metres of it, or even on 500; [2] on the other side roams the Mongol, who as originator of all the great migration movements, is the only truly great nomad, because with his horse he is far more effectively mobile than the Arabian shepherd. For the horse is not only capable of undertaking long journeys, it can also charge its adversary at top speed.
What enables the Mongol to use his horse is the fact that Mongolia is not the kind of desert-steppe such as we find in the Middle East, but a grassy plain more like a prairie, especially near the Siberian forests in the north. The Chinese call it ‘the grassland’. The shepherd there is not obliged to restrict himself to sheep merely grazing on the shortest grass, nor to the camel nourishing itself on those hard stalks, more woody than they are herbaceous, which grow at great distances apart in desert countries.
Thus intermediate between steppe and prairie, Mongolia enables the horse not only to live, but to have a sufficiency of food that enables the female whilst nourishing her young to have a surplus of milk available for man. Wherever the Mongol roves, other than in the complete desert, his horse will provide him not only with transport, but also supplies his nourishment in the form of milk and flesh, and even helps to prepare it; for its flesh becomes eatable after a more or less prolonged period under the saddle.
The Mongols sometimes made good use of their capacity for movement, and sometimes they misused it. All the great historic invasions have started from ‘the grassland’. Mongolia was the original homeland of the Huns who pushed their way as far as Champagne, [3] of the Avars who advanced as far as Thuringia, [4] of the Turks, the Bulgarians and the Hungarians who established themselves on the outskirts or even in the heart of Europe, [5] as well as of the Tartars who invaded Russia, [6] and of the Mongols proper who advanced to the gates of Vienna. [7]
Such were China’s neighbours, its most immediate ones.
And there was nothing to separate them. Unlike the position in India, there was not the slightest mountain barrier, the smallest forest, nor the tiniest river intervening. From the irrigated valleys of the Wei and the Fen, the cradles of Chinese civilisation, we pass without interruption over more and more arid loess plateaux to the Mongolian steppe. On the north and north-west frontiers of China, the steppes of the Gobi and Lop Nor run alongside some 2000 kilometres of cultivated land.
China thus lay wide open to the ‘barbarians’, in other words, to the nomads. But so also were the lands of the barbarians open to the Chinese. Accordingly, China has always responded to invasion by counter-invasion. China has been invaded as often as India, its sister irrigational civilisation, but with this difference that India, separated from the barbarians by the barriers of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, has never issued from its homeland, whilst China has invaded as often as it was itself invaded. From the first century before the Christian era down to modern times, there has almost always been a Chinese empire, that is to say, a state embracing along with China proper – a country of irrigation and agriculture – other and often immense countries inhabited by peoples with nothing in common with the Chinese themselves, differing in their languages, their culture, their way of life and their modes of production. Thus China was largely imperialist.
Unlike the Indians, who are the most religious of peoples, the Chinese are as little religious as it is possible to be. The Chinese are the only people who are atheist as a whole. By ‘atheist’ I mean literally without god. The proof of it is that it is impossible to name the god or gods of the Chinese, no matter the so-called religion to which they belong (with the obvious exceptions of the small Muslim and Christian minorities). The ‘gods’ of the Chinese are simply men. These are the ‘sages’, whose teachings serve as a guide to the faithful in their private conduct.
These sages are two Chinese, Confucius and Lao Zi, who stand for the two great indigenous ‘religions’, and an Indian, Gautama, for the imported religion, Buddhism, whose whole life was passed in combating the priesthood of his own country (the Brahmins), but these priests in the end succeeded in completely extirpating Buddhism in India, since its inhabitants’ religious fanaticism could not be reconciled with a practically atheistic code of morals. These three men, Confucius, Lao Zi and Gautama the Buddha [8] are historical personalities who lived some 600 years before the Christian era.
The reason for this atheism of the Chinese is to be found in the conditions of their life and work. The man whose harvest depends almost exclusively upon the vagaries of the weather and the atmosphere is necessarily religious. It is nature – that is to say, ‘God’ – that will give him abundance or scarcity. Men in sub-desert countries and those countries where the monsoon plays a predominant rôle thus believe in God, whether he be Islam’s single god or the thousand gods of Hinduism.
The Chinese peasant, for his part, depends far less on the rain. This is not so much because he does not suffer from drought like the rest of the world, but because his principal scourge is not drought.
China’s chief scourge is flooding. The Yellow River, one of the two Chinese rivers that water the country where Chinese agricultural technique, the Chinese people, the Chinese state and Chinese ideology originated, is subject to frequent and terrible inundations which cause it to spread over and devastate the surrounding countryside for hundreds of kilometres, sometimes causing it even to form a new river bed at a great distance from the old one. In the historic period, since the first millennium before the Christian era, the Yellow River has cut no less than four distinct beds, without taking account of fluctuations that only affect the immediate surroundings of its mouth, or of such instances when the river sometimes follows a particular course for only a year, as it did in 1887, when it temporarily became a tributary of the Blue River. In that year, it flowed into the sea at a distance of 600 kilometres from its present mouth, and some 800 kilometres from where it flowed into the sea at the dawn of history.
However, as distinct from drought, flooding can be controlled by man. It is a matter of labour. In the present state of our knowledge, man can no more prevent the rain than he can cause it, but no matter how immense may be the volume of water carried by a river swollen by the rain, he can, with sufficient labour, compel it to flow to the sea without overflowing its banks. All he has to do is to construct adequate dykes along its banks.
Constructing dykes and maintaining them is thus the basic task of the Yellow River Chinese peasant. It means hard work that brooks no delay, on the accomplishment of which his subsistence depends. The Chinese peasant does not have to say: ‘Lord, Give us this day our daily bread.’ His daily bread depends entirely upon his own efforts.
This is why the Chinese do not believe in gods, but in men. And this has two important consequences.
In the first place, China is not a country of religions; it is pre-eminently a country of philosophy, and particularly that which concerns man – moral philosophy. The Chinese is as essentially moralistic as the Indian is essentially religious. That is why during its ‘classic’ period, several centuries before the Christian era, China produced a whole series of great philosophers whose teachings are curiously reminiscent of those that flourished in Europe – 20 centuries later, at a time when the West had begun to free itself from the shackles of religion by establishing its power over nature through science, just as the Chinese had formerly established theirs through labour.
Thus paralleling Xun Zi (third century BC), who regarded human nature as fundamentally evil and called upon the state to curb it, [9] we have Hobbes (seventeenth century), who moreover shared his purely materialist conceptions; [10] paralleling Mencius (fourth century BC), who regarded human nature as fundamentally good and in consequence recognised the right of revolt (so sanctioning Chinese peasant practice), [11] we have Rousseau (eighteenth century); [12] and finally, Mo Zi (fifth century BC), who saw human love as the basis of morality and combined it with a utilitarian justification, [13] was the forerunner of our own Guyau (nineteenth century) with his morality ‘with neither obligation nor sanction’. [14]
Another still more important consequence is on the social level. It is a commonplace, if a very true one, to say that one of the main effects of religion is to enslave the disinherited, and that religion, ‘the opium of the people’, is no more than the chanting of an ancient lullaby to ensure that the people, that great infant, remains fast asleep.
It is therefore not surprising that a non-religious people should be particularly prone to rebellion. It is thus that, in contrast with India, in the whole of whose long history hardly any social movement or revolution is to be found, China has always been a country of political revolutions and ‘social reforms’. Formidable revolts, rising and spreading almost simultaneously like great tidal waves, are amongst the quasi-cyclical phenomena of its history. These uprisings are usually the results of the work of secret societies. They are to be found at the beginning of nearly all important political changes.
The class struggle manifests itself not only intermittently during periods of great popular disturbance, but also in a permanent fashion through the mutual opposition of the two native Chinese ‘religions’.
The duality of faiths in ancient China in fact only reveals the opposition between the rich and the poor. Confucianism is the religion, or, more correctly, the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, whilst Daoism is that of the proletariat. [15]
Confucianism and Daoism go back to the same period – about the sixth century BC, but they differ as much as the lives of those who practice them. The first is essentially a petit-bourgeois morality, a utilitarian one; it reminds us of Franklin and Bentham. [16] The second is a hope and belief in the progressive development of the world according to laws that are outside the control of human beings; it reminds us of Karl Marx.
According to the Chinese chronicles, Confucius was a government official. He began his career as an inspector of the sale and distribution of grain, and ended it as a Minister of Justice. His code of morality, his philosophy and his religion (whatever you want to call it, for these three things are all mixed together in the bourgeois mind) were those of the perfect government functionary, who above all wanted order to prevail. Now for order to prevail, there should be no extravagance amongst those in power, and there should be zeal amongst the workers. The head of state must therefore be without vanity and should spend without extravagance, whilst the people ‘must profit from all the seasons, must make use of all pieces of land, must devote themselves to their duties, and must economise wisely in order to support father and mother’ (Xiao Jing). [17] Moreover, there was nothing ascetic in this code of morality. Festivals, and even revelries, were not to be prescribed, because it was not necessary to ‘hold the bow-string always taut, without ever relaxing it’ (Li Ji). [18]
To attain these ends, relations between sovereign and people must be based upon those of father and children. The family is the prototype of the state. Virtue consists in applying these family qualities to all domains of life.
As regards understanding life and the world, Confucian philosophy contents itself with reviving a very ancient Chinese belief that the world is essentially composed of two complementary principles – the male and the female (the yang and the yin).
To this social utilitarianism, this apotheosis of the static, Lao Zi, the founder of Daoism, about whose life we know almost nothing, opposes the conception of the world becoming. The world is subject to Dao, a sort of mysterious power, which the Greeks called anagkh, and which we today describe by the no less mysterious terms of ‘evolution’ or ‘historic necessity’, and which Chavannes defines thus: ‘that which impresses upon beings the direction along which they develop; it is basically that which causes their forward progress’.
It follows that morality should consist in conforming to Dao in following the evolution of things, and in obeying the laws of social becoming whilst going along with it. The great Chinese philosopher expresses this in a set of rules for practical conduct whose proud and magnificent detachment would form an excellent epilogue to Kropotkin’s Anarchist Morality: [19]
To create without keeping,
To work without profiting,
To excel without dominating,
Such is the Way.
Nowhere else does the class struggle reveal itself with such clarity and vigour as in the opposition between these two philosophies. They are class philosophies in the fullest sense of the term. On the one hand, there is the philosophy of the satisfied, who only ask that things should go on as they are, and formulate regulations ensuring that they will continue; and on the other, there is the philosophy of the dissatisfied, the socially oppressed, who trust in the hidden forces of nature, in ‘progress’, if not to save them, at least to save their descendants.
Admittedly, these two philosophies seem rather to have deteriorated, Confucianism into ancestor worship, and Daoism into the practice of soothsaying and astrology, but even under these inferior forms it is easy to find the sentiments that gave birth to these two systems of belief, which stemmed from two opposing classes.
Such are the two principal factors in the history of China: the constant presence of nomadic barbarians at the gates of the country, or even right at its heart once the gates are forced, and the presence of a people who, not subject to the grip of religion and believing only in themselves, are always ready for revolt once the situation becomes intolerable.
These two factors, moreover, constantly react upon each other in the course of history, a popular revolt being often the forerunner of a foreign invasion, whilst counter-invasion of barbarian land is often for China a means of putting an end to the class struggle, at least temporarily.
1. Semitic influence, already present at the beginning of Sumerian history, became dominant during the Dynasty of Agade (c2340-2159BC) and more or less permanent after the First Dynasty of Babylon (c1894-1595BC). Turkish attacks upon India began with Mahmud of Ghazni in 1001AD and continued under Shihab ud-Din, Muhammad of Ghori, whose general, Qutb ud-Din Aibak, set himself up as Sultan of Delhi. The Mongol Tamerlane (1336-1405) captured Delhi in 1398.
2. Élisée Réclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle, Volume 7, Paris, 1882, p566.
3. The army of Attila (434-453AD), king of the Huns, was defeated in 451AD at the battle of the Catalaunian plains, near Troyes in Champagne, by a joint Roman and Visigothic army.
4. The Avars attacked Thuringia in 562AD, and were checked by an Eastern Frankish army.
5. The Bulgarians under their khan Asperukh first crossed the Danube in 679AD, and in the following two centuries built up an empire in the Balkans stretching from Carinthia to the Black Sea. Dislodged from their lands in south Russia by the Pecheneg (Patzinak) Turks, the Magyars (Hungarians) passed westwards over the Hungarian plain in 890. Their raids continued as far as southern France until their defeat at the Battle of the Lech in 955. The first of the Turkic peoples to enter Europe were thus the Pechenegs, invited by the Byzantine Emperors on various occasions in the ninth and tenth centuries to attack the Magyars and the Bulgarians from the rear. The Ottoman Turks first got their foothold in Europe with the seizure of Gallipolli in 1346. The furthest point of their penetration was their attack on Vienna in 1683.
6. The army of Subodai conquered Riazan, Vladimir and Moscow in 1238, and Batu took Kiev in 1240. The Russian princes continued to pay tribute to the Golden Horde until 1380, and its influence in Russia lingered on until 1480.
7. After the defeat of the Hungarian army at Mohi Heath in 1241, the Mongols of Batu and Subodai advanced to the Danube. Their army was recalled by the news of the death of Ogodai, which meant a return to Mongolia and the election of a new khan.
8. The most famous of China’s sages, Confucius (551-449BC), was born in the state of Lu, where he acted as a minor official and briefly as a minister. The more or less legendary founder of the Daoist philosophy, Lao Zi (604- ) was an archivist at the court of Chu. Gotama, Prince Siddhartha the Buddha (563-483BC), was a teacher who came from the Sakya kingdom on the borders of Nepal and India.
9. Xun Zi (298-238BC) came from the state of Chao, but settled in Chu in later life to write.
10. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the author of Leviathan, the first systematic treatise on the philosophy of absolute government. He believed that without the state society would be reduced to permanent conflict due to the selfish drives of its citizens.
11. The philosopher Mencius (372-289BC) was a native of a small principality bordering on Lu. He opposed the teaching of Mo Zi on the grounds that the universal love he preached would undermine filial piety.
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was the foremost philosopher of the French Enlightenment. He believed that society was responsible for the decline of virtue in man – that in a state of nature he was ‘a noble savage’.
13. The philosopher Mo Zi (468-376BC), an inhabitant of Lu or Song state, was an advocate of universal love, and was held to have written 53 books.
14. Marie-Jean Guyau (1854-1888) was a French philosopher. In his Esquisse morale sans obligation ni sanction he argued for a morality based upon innate human qualities.
15. The school of Confucius, for a time suppressed under the Qin dynasty, was elevated to an official status under the Han, and thereafter remained the official ideology of state. Daoism, on the other hand, with its semi-magical and mystical ideas, continued to have a more popular appeal.
16. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a scientist and politician, and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a social theorist, were utilitarian philosophers who believed that the chief human motives were the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
17. The Hiao King, or Canon of Filial Piety, is traditionally ascribed to Tzi Yü, a disciple of Confucius.
18. That is, the Book of Rites. [Author’s note] The Book of Rites is one of the classics ascribed to Confucius. [Editor’s note]
19. Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) was the foremost Anarchist advocate of the theory that society should consist of freely associated communal units, an argument he put forward in Mutual Aid (English edition, London, 1939).