Week Ten: Due November 7th

DUE NOVEMBER 7:  READ & BLOG ON Chapter 8 (China and the World)

Chapter Eight: China and the World: East Asian Connections

Together Again: The reemergence of a Unified China

• Substantial Chinese migration southward toward the Yangzi River Valley, a movement of people that gave southern China 60 percent of the country's population by 1000
• Vast environmental transformation, marked by the destruction of the old-growth forces that once covered much of the country and the retreat of the elephants that had inhabited those lands 

A "Golden Age" of Chinese Achievements

• China regained its unity under Sui Dynasty 
• Its emperors solidified that unity by a vast extension of the country's canal system - those canals linked northern and southern China economically and contributed much to the prosperity that followed 
• The ruthlessness of Sui emperors and a futile military campaign to conquer Korea exhausted the state's resources, alienated many people, and prompted the overthrow of the dynasty
• Tang and Song Dynasty
• Culturally, this era has long been regarded as a "golden age" of arts and literature, setting standards of excellence in poetry, landscaping, painting, and ceramics
• Particularly during the Song Dynasty, an explosion of scholarship gave rise to Neo-Confucianism, an effort to revive Confucian thinking while incorporating into it some of the insights of Buddhism and Daoism
• Politically, the Tang and Song Dynasties built a state structure that endured for a thousand years
• Ability to print books for the first time in world history
• A leading world historian has described Tang dynasty China as the best ordered state in the world 
• The most obvious sign of China's prosperity was its rapid growth in population, which jumped from about 50 million or 60 million during the Tang Dynasty to 120 million by 1200
• Adoption of fast ripening and drought resistant strain of rice from Vietnam 
• Industrial production soared. In both large scale enterprises employing hundreds of workers and in smaller backyard furnaces, China's iron industry increased its output dramatically
• Its navigational and shipbuilding technologies led the world
• Chinese invention of gunpowder created within a few centuries of revolution in military affairs that had global dimensions
• Output increased, population grew, skills multiplied, and a burst of inventiveness made Song China far wealthier than ever before - or than any of its contemporaries

Women in the Song Dynasty

• Elite Women of the Tang Dynasty era, at least in the north, had participated in social life with greater freedom than in earlier times
• Paintings and statues show aristocratic women riding horses, while Queen Mother of the West, a Daoist deity, was widely worshipped by female daoist priests and practitioners
• Song Dynasty - tightened patriarchal restrictions on women and restored some of the earlier Han dynasty notions of female submission and passivity 
• Writers highlights the subordination of women to men and the need to keep males and females separate in every domain of life 
• For men, masculinity came to be defined less in terms of horseback riding, athleticism, and the warrior values of northern nomads and more in terms of the refined pursuits of calligraphy, scholarship, painting and poetry 
• Corresponding views of feminine qualities emphasized women's weakness, reticence, and delicacy. Women were also frequently viewed as a distraction to men;s pursuit of a contemplative and introspective life
• Foot binding.
• Strongly urged the education of women, so that they might more efficiently raise their sons and increase the family's fortune

The Tribute System in Theory

• That understanding cast China as the middle kingdom and the center of the world, infinitely superior to the barbarian peoples beyond its borders - China represented civilization
• Tribute System - set of practices that required non-Chinese authorities to acknowledge Chinese superiority and  their own subordinate place in a Chinese-centered world order 
• Foreigners seeking access to china had to send a delegation to the Chinese court - in return for these expressions of submission, he would grant permission for foreigners to trade in China's rich markets and would provide them with gifts often worth far more than the tribute they offered

The Tribute System in Practice

• On Occasion, China was confronting not separate and small-scale barbarian societies, but large and powerful nomadic empires able to deal with China on at least equal terms
• Xiongnu - equal, China gifted in return of protection
• Despite the rhetoric of the tribute system, the Chinese were not always able to dictate the terms of their relationship with the northern nomads
• The practice of bestowing gifts on barbarians, long a part of the tribute system, allowed the proud Chinese to imagine that they were still in control of the situation even as they were paying heavily for protection from nomadic incursion - those gifts in turn, provided vital economic resources to nomadic states 

Coping with China: Comparing Korea, Vietnam, and Japan

• While resisting Chinese political domination, they also appreciated Chinese culture and sought the source of Chinese wealth and power

Korea and China

• Some Korean customs - funeral rites in which the husband was buried in a sacred plot of his wife family, the remarriage of the widowed or divorced women, and female inheritance of property- coded under pressure of Confucian orthodoxy 
• Korea's aristocratic class was able to maintain an even stronger monopoly on bureaucratic office than their Chinese counterparts
• Korea moved toward greater cultural independence by developing a phonetic alphabet for writing the Korean Language
• Clearly part of the Chinese world order, Korea nonetheless retained a distinct culture as well as a operate political existence 

Vietnam and China

• The Vietnamese were ruled by the Chinese officials who expected to fully assimilate this rich rice-growing region into China culturally as well as politically 
• Chinese replaced the local language in official business; Chinese clothing and hairstyles became mandatory 
• A Chinese based examination system in Vietnam functioned to undermine an established aristocracy, to provide some measure of social mobility for commoners, and to create a merit-based scholar-gentry class to staff the bureaucracy 
• There remained much that was uniquely Vietnamese: distinctive language, fondness of cockfighting, habit of chewing betel nuts
• Vietnam long retained a greater role for women in social and economic life, despite heavy Chinese influence 

Japan and China

• Japan's distance from China enabled it to maintain its political independence and to draw selectively from Chinese culture
• Japan's extensive borrowing from Chinese civilization was wholly voluntary, rather than occurring under conditions of direct military threat or outright occupation
• The state found much that was useful in Tang Dynasty China and set out, deliberately and systematically, to transform Japan into a centralized Bureaucratic state on the Chinese model
• Japanese authorities adopted Chinese style court rituals and a system of court rankings for officials as well as the Chinese Calendar
• They likewise established Chinese-based taxation systems, law codes, government ministries, and provincial administration, at least on paper
• The absence of any compelling threat from China made it possible for the Japanese to be selective in their borrowing 
• Japan's women largely escaped the more oppressive features of Chinese Confucian culture
• Japanese women continued to inherit property, often lived apart or with the wife's family, and marriages were made and broken easily

Spillovers: China's Impact on Eurasia 

• One of the outcomes of China's economic revolution lay in the diffusion of its many technological innovations to peoples and places far from East Asia as the movements of traders, soldiers, slaves, and pilgrims conveyed Chinese achievements abroad
• Producing Salt, Paper making, Printing - Chinese innovations of revolutionary and global dimensions
• China's prosperity during the Song dynasty greatly stimulated commercial life and market based behavior all across Afro-Eurasian trading world

On the Receiving End: China as Economic Beneficiary

• Impact of China's involvement with a wider world derived from its growing participation in Indian Ocean Trade

Making Buddhism Chinese

• Initially entered China via the Silk Road trading network during the first and second centuries 
• The stability and prosperity ensured the new barbarian religion held little appeal for native Chinese
• Buddhism took a solid root in China within both elite and popular culture, becoming a permanent, though fluctuating, presence in Chinese life