With yesterday's post, I was continuing a line of argument which I
started some time back with a discussion of Roman expansion to the east,
along the Silk Route originating, ultimately, in Northwest China. The
Roman military rulers were, for the time being, however, preoccupied with
the more limited objective of the portion of the Silk Route through
Mesopotamia, half of which they succeeded in conquering by the time of
Septimius Severus (193-207) and Alexander Severus (222-235); part of which
they then lost in an aggressive war under Julian (361-363). For those of
us indoctrinated in the narrative of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman
Empire, the very idea that the Romans were ready to give up on Western
Europe, were Germans were coming in the window and through the door, even
to relinquish Rome itself, as they did, or at least put Rome on rollers
and move it to the Bosphorus, closer to their Real Interests in the Near
East, makes us recoil in horror. Time and again, in 359-363, Persia offered
Constantius II and Julian peace in exchange for Roman evacuation of Northern
Mesopotamia. But not one square inch would they consider giving up; why should
they not have the whole of Mesopotamia. After all, it was in 197 that Septimius
Severus sacked Ctesiphon, enslaving 100,000. Between 115 and 117 Trajan, before
that, had annexed all of Mesopotamia (whence the Romans were driven out by
indigenous revolt). Even further back, and every halfway successful Roman
general mentioned it, there were the astonishing deeds of Alexander.
Either the Roman policy was insane, or our narrative of the Decline And
Fall of the Roman Empire is contaminated with Eurocentric illusion, or both
of these were true. Weren't the Romans supposed to be scrounging every last
soldier and *denarius* to shore up a collapsing Western Europe? Apparently
not. The Paranoid Constantius II sent Julian, as a newly-minted Caesar, but
without military experience, to Trier to stop a huge invasion by Alemanni.
This was a dumping-ground assignment; perhaps Julian would get killed. As
luck had it, it was Julian's account of what happened that stuck. In 360,
he smashed the Alemanni at Strasbourg, capturing 30,000. He pulled this
off by shipping supplies from Britain, he said. Why was this necessary;
what sort of condition was Gaul in at the time, or what was going unusually
right in Britain? Once back in Paris, with a loyal army at his back, he was
in a position to get even with Constantius for attempted political murder
by allowing his overenthusiastic, sure, sure, troops to proclaim him emperor,
whereupon he marched on Constantinople, sufficiently remote in space and time
that his enemy was safely dead of natural causes, permitting a peaceful
transfer of power and planning aggressive war to the East.
In 751, China intervened in a war between the kings of Tashkent and
Ferghana. As both of these caravan cities were on a major trade route,
China had clear and imperative vested interests in intervention. Is this
not the usual logical conclusion of a policy where Normal material vested
interests are not operative, hence the subjective and imaginative element
in policy-making runs riot? I do believe this is possible. To put the crisis
of 751 into perspective, let's review the previous several hundred years'
struggles for control of the Silk Route. Since the first century, a strong
regime in North China would find it imperative to control a string of towns
called The Four Garrisons. The westernmost of these was Kucha, site of the
Stone Pillar, where caravans from China turned around, exchanging goods with
caravans from Parthia/Persia. We are now in Uzbekistan, a long distance south
and west of the Four Garrisons. The decisive battle of Atlakh, or Battle of
the Talas River, took place still further to the west, near Samarkand. This
was extraordinary imperialism for China. Though the Qing, in the eighteenth
century, encompassed more territory than the Tang, the Qing had firearms and
about eight times the population as did the Tang. The Tang period has gone
down in Chinese folk memory as a time of glory and victory. The subsequent
Song era, despite vastly superior economic and technical development, is
recalled, by contrast, as a time of arid cheapskate moneygrubbers, as in
large measure it was.
One, but only one, possible cause of the failure of commercialism in the
early Tang is the "demographic mound" effect discussed yesterday. If the
Near Eastern, European, and Byzantine civilization areas to the west had
suffered population decimation and material losses from the Plague, and
China had not, there was a shortage of consumers for Chinese exports, luxury
goods like silk, lacquerware, and now porcelain. The balance of payments in
religious texts and artifacts is unclear. Buddhist statuary and painting was
exported to Korea and Japan; scriptures were imported at huge effort and
expense from India. But China was now becoming a major exporter of scripture
on its own, as the intellectual center of Mahayana and especially Chan
Buddhism. New Sutras of entirely Chinese origin, that is, with no Indian
originals, were proliferating.
Trade, as it would turn out, increased by leaps and bounds after the mid-
Tang crisis. As previously mentioned, the Chinese state, like some other
pre-capitalist empires, promoted trade, or at least dismantled regulation,
to ease the crisis of state finance brought on by inability to collect land
tax from its own privileged class. Collection of commercial taxes was vastly
easier: Recall Gaozong of the Southern Song, reigned 1127-1162: "Commercial
taxes bring in millions. Why tax the people?" By which he meant, the regime
had lost the land-tax-vulnerable regions of North China; it was thrown back
on the landlordism-rife Yanzi Valley economic core; and those serf-driving
landlords were in a state of semi-permanent tax-insurrection. But we're way
out of our period.
The disastrous defeats of 751-755, followed by the army revolts, civil
wars, and Tibetan occupation of the capital, 755-763, had broken the back
of the state apparatus. Regional warlordism prevented revenues reaching the
capitals in North China; and the elaborate machinery theoretically in place
to regulate commerce simply collapsed. Curiously, trade started to proliferate
or even boom, except of course where revolts, invasions, or ambitious warlords
made this impossible. Bills of exchange, called "flying money," started to
circulate among merchants, based on deposits of funds with the state salt
monopoly. (In subsequent periods the backing of printed paper money came to
be secured upon government salt stocks, under the assumption that, as a
necessity of life, the salt was saleable. When this assumption failed, in
1355, the state apparatus disappeared overnight.) The main port of entry in
the south, Guangzhou (Canton) first reached enormous size in the late Tang.
As the salt smuggler Huang Zhao is said to have killed 200,000 foreigners
in Guangzhou in 878, it is plausible that the total population was larger.
(Just as the state salt monopoly had huge importance in public finance and
economic life as a whole, so did salt smugglers attain vast importance, at
times, in politics. Huang Zhao, in his revolutionary career, 865-880, pillaged
the country from end to end, capturing both capitals, Changan and Loyang, only
to be caught and killed. A deserter from the rebels, Zhu Wen, commanding
ex-rebels in a pacification program analogous to the South Vietnamese "Open
Arms," *chieu hoi*, finished off the Tang in 907.) Another brake on mere-
moneygrubbing, or the spirit of enterprise, was the deep-dyed religious
piety which went with the social dominance of the armoured knightly class
in China as in Europe. Secularization was both cause and effect. That caustic
xenophobe, Han Yu, 768-824, decided by the later Tang that Buddhist monks were
bizarre-looking and fundamentally un-Chinese. Such thoughts were, earlier than
this, not thinkable. The Tang state did not expropriate the Buddhist Church
between 841 and 845 to promote economic development and counteract social
parasitism. It did so because it was flat broke. But earlier, it would not
have dared, vastly more powerful as it had been. Social causaliy is that
tangled mess we weave/When ourselves we set out to deceive.
If mutually reinforcing factors were promoting trade internally in the
late Tang, how might this have been abetted by causal factors outside China?
Obviously, the "demographic mound" was being levelled, as "demographic sinks"
outside were being filled up. Warren Tradgold's book title, The Byzantine
Revival: 780-843 says it all in terms of the temporal correspondence between
the filling in of demographic "potholes" deriving from the Plague of Justinian
and its recurrences (about every eleven years). The subsequent pandemic of
1348-1350, after all, continued to ravage cities into the seventeenth century,
in Europe and China alike. Make that "early eighteenth" to cover the Marseilles
outbreak. So, once again, allowing three hundred years for demographic
recuperation, we have world-systemic economic conditions which suffice
to bring hundreds of thousands of foreigners to Guangzhou *just in time*
to get massacred by xenophobic antielitist anticommercial peasants. The
wonderful thing about the process of capitalist development is how *neatly*
it all works out, and conveniently, too. I am, of course, being ironic.
I've considered the mutually reinforcing variables involved in the late-
Tang commercial expansion first to get a better grasp on the pre-existing
early-Tang militaristic state. In my own mind, that is. Honestly, I am assuming
that anyone considering him her it self qua conscious entity a unit or
subsystem of Western Civilization should at this time be watching Monday
Night Football. Inclusive of New Zealand, where it is Tuesday Night, all
are drunk, all are tight.
Seriously now, Tang was a Mediaeval society, military and religious. It
was not, however, feudal. It had a state every inch a state, which intervened
actively in the economy for moral reasons, ie, without counting the cost
(unless belatedly). The social core of the ruling class was the Great Families
of Northwest China, on the economic periphery, but in a *political* core
region, as it had been since the Qin unification. As I mentioned in an earlier
post, one almost *never* finds political cores corresponding with economic
cores in pre-capitalist empires ensuing from the unification of state-systems.
Exceptions, such as the shift of the capital from Rome to the Bosporus by the
Albanian Emperors, need to be explained. The economic core was becoming the
rice-rich Yanzi Valley, which was made to feed the enormous capital, misnamed
Chang'an, Eternally Safe, population 2 million, via the Grand Canal. Both were
built by the Sui, 581-618, whom the Tang overthrew.
The Sui and Tang are credited with "pure-Chineseness," which is spurious.
They followed, from 317, a period during which all ruling families were, with
brief interruptions, Hun (Xiongnu), Mongol, or Turkish in origin, and self-
consciously so, in North China. There were some other ingredients to the
ethnic stew, proto-Tibetans, etc; all these collectively called The Sixteen
Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians. An anthropologist from the European Dark
Ages would have been at home. That's to say, ethnogenesis delusions and
faith in the miraculous was everywhere. Including the Southern Empire, whose
capital, Jiankang, was home to the Six Dynasties, each successively claiming
to embody the Authentic Chinese Experience. Which is about as true as claims
to Hunanese origins of the Cantonese who run your local Hunanese restaurant.
Between the cultural particularism indigenous to the Yangzi valley and the
1949-Guomindong-esque flight from the Huns in the period around 317, Chinese
Tradition was a figment of the imagination, and historians cannot, have not
since Sui-Tang times, found anything Chinese about it. The Southern Empire
was derided as "decadent," "licentious," "perverted," "debased," and other
obvious tipoffs to anomalously high status of women. Most of this criticism
is unfair. It is true that the second ruler of the Liu Song dynasty (420-479),
who reigned 424-463, had a sister who demanded, and got, a "harem" of thirty
young male hunks. Mostly, the Southern Empire was a sleazy, hedonistic place,
for the privileged few. There are few cases known to equal the Southern Empire
for laxity in state service, selfish greediness in exploitation of the poor,
tax avoidance, and lawlessness in the history of ruling classes. During the
Eastern Jin (317-420), the Great Families would collect official titles and
salaries, doing no work in return: the meaning and purpose of existence was
aesthetic refinement, pure coversation, and metaphysical speculation. To be
fair, life expectancy, from pandemics of smallpox and measles and from endemic
malaria, was much shorter. (On first reading of these times, I called it The
Empire of the Hippies.) Legends were actually current to the effect that, in
the flight south, the people freely elected the Lords, and volunteered to be
their serfs. Any Marxist out there knows what to make of that.
There is no god, and she's unjust, but there was a Daoist peasant war
in 399-402 which failed, and a major social revolution, which succeeded by
accident, in 549-552. The Great Families, deserted by slaves and serfs,
were left alone in their palaces wearing Fine Vestments; the doors were
nailed shut from the outside, and there was no food had anyone been there
to cook it. A General Chen returned from suppressing revolt in Hanoi, took
power, and founded a dynasty named after himself, whose last representative
was carted off to Chang'an by the Sui founder as a housepet. To be honest,
I have recounted this in excessive detail as it is too weird not to tell.
In its day, Jiankang must have been a great place to do business, as it
benefited from centuries of apathetic, crooked, and slovenly government. It
was complained by the Great Families that people ran away to engage in trade
for being too lazy to do honest labour as serf-slaves; and this must have
entered into it. The finest proof that Jiankang must have thriven commercially
is that, when permitted to revive, it became, as Nanjing, a great commercial
city, and has remained so ever since when someone wasn't "cutting off the
rotten tails of capitalism." At the time (589), however, the Sui ordered the
place levelled to the ground for presumed ideological motives; and built
another regional capital in its stead, some distance downriver, where the
second Sui ruler was murdered. The effect of this morality story is to
heighten, for me, the sense of the Sui moralistic loathing of Southern
luxurious vice, only to fall victim to its seductiveness themselves. As
that's the sense Chinese moralists have made of it, too.
For reasons ostensibly cosmological (the ruler is he, always by definition
he, who "faces south," and vice versa), more likely politco-military, the
capital of China is normatively in the North. Two attempts to break this
rule, in 1368-1402 and 1927-1949, have attracted ghosts, demons, and reaction-
aries. The ghosts and demons I have from official sources of the 1960s, if
you recall, also. The ghost of the emperor who died in the civil war ending
in 1402 was hunted all over the Indian Ocean. Anyhow, there was no question
but that the capital would be moved back to where it had been since the
Unification of 221 BC, with exceptions. The likely reason is the security
of the Silk Road and the Four Garrisons, due west. Next only to the Great
Wall, the Grand Canal built to feed this place was the most enormous public
works project built in China prior to the next canal, required by the shift
of the capital to the east, and the one after that, by the shift to Beijing.
What I am trying to indicate is the symbolically important indifference to
pecuniary and human cost in the site selection.
Grandiosity of public works was matched by that of expenditure on the
military. At their height, under Xuanzong, 710-756, the Tang stud farms
bred 400,000 horses for the military. The typical soldier of the Tang,
not quantitatively but ideologically, was the mounted warrior, bearing
a lance with pennant, and clad in what looks to me, from a tomb statue,
like plate armour. (European analogues were making do with chain mail at
this time.) To repeat, though trained like a European feudal warrior, the
Tang version belonged to a regular army unit. This fought in disciplined
formation, with none of the single-combat heroics of Europe and Japan. At
the Battle of the Paekche River, in Korea, the Japanese expeditionary force
was so soundly thrashed by Tang discipline that major military reforms,
imitating China, were introduced. I should remind you, though, that the
cavalryman was not necessarily a member of the ruling class. Only pedigreed
members of the Great Families of Northwest China, in the region of Chang'an,
merited this distinction.
The ruling class was as "pure Chinese" as the Carolingians were "pure
French," social purity of any sort being spurious when not pernicious. (By
"pure French," I mean to hint that the half-Turkish descent of the Tang
was perhaps more decisive than the half-Chinese.) Turks, Mongols, etc, were
heavily intermixed with each other and Chinese, with surnames and spoken
languages changed as social climbing and "Restoration Movements" may have
dictated (eg, when the Northern Wei split into neo-Turkist and Chinesizing
factions in 535). Tang court culture was suffused by the rhythms of Turkish
folk music, without awareness of which, I'm told, much poetry makes no sense.
The second Tang ruler, Taizong, erected Turkish-style images celebratory of
his killing the enemy imaged.
The Tang is recalled as glorious in its provision of stable government.
This is lying propaganda, intentional from the outset. Li Yuan, emperor
Gaozi, was a usurping general who staged a coup against the Sui as the
Sui had ousted the Northern Zhou. He initiated the peculiar, obsessive
Tang concern with legitimation ritual. (See Howard J. Wechsler, Offerings
of Jade and Silk: ritual and symbol in the legitimation of the Tang dynasty,
Yale, 1985). In 627, Li Shimin, second in line for the succession, had the
crown prince and brother fourth-in-line murdered; then forced his own father's
abdication. Confucianization, we're all for filial piety and brotherly
solidarity, and legitimization-ritual proliferation picked up speed. Li
Shimin, emperor Taizong, was succeeded by his fourth son, notable for weak
character, Gaozong, without poliical violence because: The Joy Of Taizong's
Declining Years (cf Abishag The Shunamite) was also Gaozong's "Main Squeeze,"
as the armenians say, Wu Zhao, mentioned yesterday. Two sons, Chongzong and
Ruizong, were successively discarded after Gaozong's death in 680; then came
the dynasty whose sole ruler was a woman, the Zhou. A pious Buddhist, Emperor
Wu Cetian was never a nun in any sense, and with age, her Conduct Unbecoming
was such as to provoke her removal by coup, February 5, 705; her death was
announced due to natural causes. The real grudge was resentment in the ruling
class of her mass beheadings of Overmighty Subjects. The effects of this had
at one time made her popular, since the estates of the ruling class grew at
the expense of the allotments of peasants. Oh, goodgrief, I've forgot to
explain. Sorry.
By the Tang code, every able-bodied male peasant received a guaranteed
land allotment for life, on condition he was responsible for taxation and
served in the military. Commoner peasants fought in the infantry or did
forced labour in the logistics branch. Every dependent, ie, wife, children,
aged parents or gradparents, received a fractional allotment. This sounded
utopian, but it worked for a century. Sufficiently vigorous use of repressive
state power ensured this; and there was a precedent in the allotment system
of the Turkish-Mongol Northern Wei (386-535). That regime had been Harsh yet
Firm.
In principle, the allotments were non-alienable. As state control of the
economy eroded or collapsed after the mid-Tang civil wars, the allotments
became fully heritable and alienable private property. The military and state
finance were in a correspondingly hopeless mess by that time. The land
allotment system either was not extended to or disappeared fastest in the
Yanzi Valley economic core, where serf-landlordism was entrenched. As one
historian said of a much later period, "Differences between serfs and tenants
were real, but were not important."
The coup of 705 had restored the previously-deposed Chongzong, who was
not permitted to do anything without the permission of his wife, the Empress
Wei. Whether the latter's adulteries were politically strategic or hedonically
motivated screwing around, this was unconcealed not only from Chongzong
himself, but more importantly, from the Censorate, whose sworn duty was
to sniff out and impeach all those guilty of criminality or moral wrongdoing;
if necessary, to admonish the Son of Heaven at risk of life, "on the palace
steps," as a later slogan had it. A memorial was sent to Chongzong stating
that matters had reached such a pass that something unspecified would have
to be done by person or persons unnnamed; see CP Fitzgerald, The Empress Wu,
1967. On July 8, 710, Empress Wei and Princess An Lo fed Chongzong some
yummy Chinese dumplings; these were laced with deadly poison.
In the coup of July 21-22, 710, the future emperor Xuanzong, as a card-
carrying male, hence able to command troops, collaborated with Princess
Tai Ping, daughter of Wu Cetian and finest political mind in the capital,
who spread her money around, via the future Xuanzong, to the Palace Guard
to murder their officers (all of the Wu and Wei families). There ensued
a night of headhunting familiar in the Chinese Histories. The Empress Wei
exhibited disgraceful lack of aristocratic compusure by running for her
life, straight into a bunch of rebels who beheaded her. The Princess An
Lo should be credited with Real Class by calmly painting her eyebrows in
front of her mirror until beheaded. The third woman target, Shang-kan Wan'er,
legal expert and former Private Secretary to Wu Zhao/Cetian, was trying to
tell a story about how she was Really Working For the Opposition when beheaded
by the future Xuznzong personally. These sickening details (a) illustrate the
substance of power politics in the Tang; (b) emphasize the importance of women
in the contest for power; and (c) indicate the probable depths of both macho
megalomaniacal bravado *and* insecurity over holding power that rendered
Xuanzong's reign, ended July 16, 756, by forced abdication, so crazy. We
have reached the place in the analysis where the irrationality of the polity
has generated the irrational mind of the scope the Soviets used to call
"World-Historical."
The principal activity of the Tang state in the reign of Xuanzong became
the legimation of its own existence, and the that of the exalted ruler, called
*minghuang*, "brilliant emperor." Exclusive of aggressive expansionist
imperialist war. Without the latter, it would tempt some scholars to compare
Xuanzong's reign to Bali:
"At first sight, Tang China seems indeed to be close to the Balinese
case. The time, energy and expense and the intellectual priority accorded
to state ritual in the period in which the code was produced was such as
to suggest that Tang imperial ceremonials, far from being secondary, might
indeed constitute the most important function of the state. (David McMullen,
"Bureaucrats and cosmology: the ritual code of T'ang China," in David
Cannadine and Simon Price (Eds.), Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial
in Traditional Societies. Past and Present Publications, Cambridge
University Press, 1987[1992].)
This compendium, issued in 732 and covering 150 different, invariably
complex and expensive, court rituals for every, literally, every occasion,
was confined to those real or spurious ceremonies found in the Classics and
sanctioned by Confucian scholars as consistent with suppositiously authentic
texts alleged to predate the Qin unification of 221 BC or accepted as
canonical thereafter, including ceremonies in honour of Confucius himself.
It does not cover, include, or mention ceremonies of the Buddhist and
Daoist faiths; nor of course does it mention the very numerous deities, even
those state-sanctioned, worshipped at shrines of the Chinese popular religion.
Xuanzong himself claimed direct descent from the imaginary Laozi, alleged
author of the oldest canonical Daoist text, Dao De Jing, whose name,
translated as Old Master, indicates antiquity comparable to Confucius.
Though nominally an adherent of Daoism, Xunzong had responsibilities to
protect and uphold the priviliges, increasingly ostentatious and abusive,
of the Buddhist clergy; China was at this time as Buddhist as Europe was
Christian.
All these legitimating rites, incantations, and supernatural faiths availed
naught in the face of Xuanzong's intractable stupidity mixed with blind
persistence. When he failed, he tried, tried again. These traits, once he
commenced to lose, cumulated his losses, first against Arabs, then against
the alliance of Tibet and Nan Zhao (in what is now Yunnan), finally against
army generals handpicked by himself.
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Due to the inclusion of fiction in World Systems Theory, this writer feels
impelled to include a selection from the fictitious diary of Lady Yang
Gueifei, who attained to the goal of all Daoists, Immortality, by sharing
the bed of Xuanzong. Thanks to which, when Xuanzong's remaining soldiers
mutinied, she was handed her silk scarf and told to go yang yourself, at
which Xuanzong, with typical feeling for those who loved him, heaved a sigh
of relief that it wasn't him they were doing in. As I honour hereditary
aristocracy for having been born in New York City rather than Kiev Guberniya
in the Evil Empire when there were Evil Emperors, I weep that Lady Yang's
elegant neck fell into the hands of such roughnecks; but then, consider the
compensations. She has been a staple of Chinese folktales as well as High
Culture, having become at once The Greatest Slut in Chinese History *and*
a Tragic Romantic Heroine. Unfortunately, when I reread my fictional scene,
where Lady Yang upraids the Ruler of All Under Heaven for sending an army
straight at the Iranian border at a time when the Iranians have just had
a revolution, which was led by a man code-named abu-Muslim Muhammad ibn-
Muslim al-Khurasani, "which sounds pretty Fundamentalistic to me, so if
these Mulims weren't religious maniacs before when we were calling them
that, they sure as hell are now," accusing China of Eastern Imperialism,
making war against God, and restoration of heathenism, "all of which is
true, you know," etc, I have Xuanzong saying, "th' fuck, yuou think I'm
Jimmy Carter, stupid bitch." Which is entirely in character, but the use
of such language here and elsewhere compels the suppression of the text
in respect of the tender sensibilities of the viewing audience. Such was
also the fate of a bit of fiction I wrote when, after writing an innocent
joke about threats of "retrograde consciouness" represented by "women of
the semiperiphery," I was horrified to find the very thing spoofed, as
extreme, you know, on sale at a real newsstand, called World Wide Nudes:
Sexy Girls From Planet Playboy, pictures from Mexico, Brazil, Czech Republic,
Poland, Russian Federation, and <gasp> The New South Africa. The result was
"Who The World Wide Naked Are And How They Fight The World Party," stolen
from V.I. Lenin, in which young Manfred Greenblatt, due to immaature conscious-
ness, fails to radicalize the Mexican coverperson, a Chiapas Maya, into the
arms of Subcommandante Marcos, but instead runs off with her to New Zealand,
where they stay drunk shearing sheep till he is called to the colours in the
War of the Bougainville Secession (from Papua New Guinea), now in progress,
where he dies childless, so does not become the grandfather of Danny
Greenblatt, World Party hero of 2044 in New Zealand, "partly for this reason."
Which was not merely too dirty but, according to the artistic canons of
Socialist Reality-Impairment, fails to provide the World Party with a Positive
Hero. This much at least we owe to WWW's admirable effort at transition to
the Higher Stage of the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
Daniel A. Foss