On the Mandate of Heaven, the First Emperor, and why generalizations tend to be false:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In the usual take on modern concepts of revolution, the Yankees started the ball rolling of rejecting the idea that authority because it exists compels the obedience of the governed whether or not they consent to it and the French really got things going when they ovethrew their King, butchered a good number of their own people and initiated the modern tendency whenever shit hits fan to engage in widespread execution as a gateway to progress.

Which when Muslims do it, of course, is evil barbarous terrorism, not like those heroic forward-thinking Robespierres and Lenins who know that "revolution is not a dinner party, a revolution without bloodshed is worthless." But is this concept actually valid? No, not really.

The Chinese, beginning with the rise of the Zhou Dynasty stumbled on a way to institutionalize revolution and political change that managed to last arguably into the modern era and is still around, minus any concept of democracy as such. The Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras took place in the background of the increasingly nominal rule of a dynasty that claimed it overthrew a single legitimate prior dynasty. Reality, of course, was murkier and more convoluted than propaganda bullshit artistry, but it always is so why let ugly fact complicate a beautiful story, eh? But in any event, the Zhou came up with the concept of a Mandate of Heaven. What this meant is that the Chinese were always under the rule of the singular Son of Heaven (what we now call the Chinese Emperor) who was granted the, well, Mandate of Heaven. If things were prosperous and going well the ruler had the Mandate. If natural disasters proliferated or the dynastic structure that sustained the current form of the Mandate was clearly on a downward spiral, the principle of Rule of the Strong came into effect and whoever won and established a powerful new centralized state thus held both the Mandate and the acclaim of Heaven and the people.

Likewise, the Chinese approach was more pragmatic and honest than many on the connection of the state and the monopoly of force that underpins it. The Chinese take was that Empires, of course, were won on horseback but that the Empire could not be governed thus. The Mandate likewise survived the decline of the Zhou to be redefined by the second to last king of the Qin dynasty, Zheng, who paved in blood and violence the basis of a unified state that cracked up the existence of multiple ancient states with traditions that went back for thousands of years in one lifetime to a point where ever since this one man 2,200 years ago, the unified state overcame all the forces that worked against it. While the Battle of Gaixia and the Chu-Han contention made sure the idea stuck, the innovation still won and the greatest, most enduring redefinition of the state and culture in any era that ever happened in the history of the human species happened in China 2,200 years ago. Since Qin Shi Huang built a unified Empire, the Chinese state would have civil wars and periodic phases of de facto independent states, but the ideal and reality into the present-day People's Republic of China was a vast and unified state, usually ruled by a powerful autocrat.

Likewise, these unified states, especially in the period of the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties were extremely creative in both consolidating the idea that if the government becomes incompetent and disastrous the long knives come ou and a new one takes its place and in boosting scientific progress. There was so much invented under the dynasties from Qin to Qing that the question is less what was invented in China and more what wasn't and how other societies aped Chinese developments and improved on them. In other words, the all-powerful Son of Heaven and his bureaucracy did not constrict innovation, and did not impair science, they boosted them in much the same manner as modern science works hand in glove with powerful states and state sponsorship. Yet the Chinese had these ideas, and very workable ideas, centuries before the western end of Eurasia was unified under vast empires and likewise before the major civilization centres in the Americas unified. The lack of democracy enabled the rise of printing presses, guns and gunpowder and artillery, both forks and chopsticks, plows and terraces that enabled the emergence of what was always a major geopolitical population centre from the Qin era onward and even before that, and an active scientific community that flourished even when the nature of the Imperial system shifted with the millennia as all such things do. The Song even were on the vege of an industrial revolution in medieval times when the Mongols wrecked this and encouraged the emergence of a more inwardly-focused concept that really took root in later Ming and Qing times.

So, then, the Chinese present a pair of uncomfortable questions that I'd like to pose: If the concept of government that is poor being overthrown can indeed function without democracy, and if absolutism can make it even a kind of escape valve, why did the Chinese discover this concept at a point when Europeans were content to accept military despotism by God-Emperors as in Da Qin/the Roman Empire? What was so different about the peoples of the Yangtze River and its environs that they were able to envision this and create poewrful centralized states when few others matched them in this before the industrial era?

Next, why is it that in China, absolutism was able to foster science and creativity, but in Europe absolutism tended to degenerate into navel-gazing parody of itself and finally blew itself up in the war whose centennial is still ongoing? The Chinese prospered for millennia in dynamic, active societies under all-powerful semi-divine rulers, but in Europe, absolutism stagnated and disintegrated the more that modernity struck it. Chinese revolts, even when colossal bloodbaths like the An Lushan Rebelllion, did not produce the chaotic bloodsoaked mess of the French or Russian Revolutions but were no less enduring or products of a dynamic change. Why?

In short, does Chinese history in ancient and medieval times suggest that the concept that the ancients were less creative than moderns or more prone to superstittion might just be sneering at the past as foolish and neglecting a huge deal of nuance in what did or did not happen then? Should not the Mandate of Heaven be seen as the true precursor of the spirit of revolution as the gateway to a new history just like 1792 and Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood?

Comments

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Well, what I could say with some certainty is that national (or civilizational) exceptionalism wasn't invented in America.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If the culture or society truly is exceptional, as China's been since the time of the Roman Republic, is noting this reality thus falling into an exceptionalist trap or calling a spade a spade?

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Exceptionalism is not so much about acknowledging that your civilization is somehow unique and exceptional, it's about ascribing some kind of divine right to rule to yourself, and/or a mission to bring your dominance upon others for a presumably benevolent reason ("we're bringing prosperity and stability to you guys, so please sign here and here").

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which is generally speaking the the rhetoric of every single civilization that has ever been or will ever be.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

OK, and?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And that goes right back to my original question of what happens when the exceptionalistic claim has some actual factual teeth behind it, which China's does.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

What happens? Nothing happens. At least nothing changes. A "great power" is still going to assert its exceptionalism, whether there's some merit to that claim or not.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Chinese "exceptionalism" did little to overcome the stagnation that led to their humiliation in the late 1800s. I've heard it argued that an insistence on that exceptionalism (and a strong belief in it among her satellites) is at least partly to blame for the radicalization that followed in a specific one of those satellites in the early 20th century once it was show to be hollow posturing.

In other words: it's all well and good to be "exceptional" when things are going your way. Prop yourself up too high, though, and the fall will be all the more cataclysmic for everyone involved when it, inevitably, comes. Maybe that's a lesson some of us need to remember today.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, it actually did, they just paid the price of Hong Xiuquan and Mao for it.