A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (15 page)

The Chinese Empire, like the Roman Empire, fell apart in the face of economic breakdown and famine within, and incursions by ‘barbarians’ from without. The 4th century was marked by droughts, plagues of locusts, famine and civil wars, a splintering into rival empires, and political, economic and administrative chaos. Something like a million people abandoned their homes and farms, fleeing south from the north China heartland to the Yangtze and beyond. They left a region of devastation and depopulation, where much land had fallen out of cultivation and productive life had reverted to self sufficient farming, with little trade and a decline in the use of money.
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Yet the term ‘Dark Ages’ is not appropriate for what followed. Life was extremely hard for the great mass of peasants, and a countless number died from hunger and disease. But civilisation did not collapse. The agricultural devastation of the north was soon offset by the vigorous and sustained expansion of rice cultivation in the Yangtze region. This replenished the surplus needed to sustain flourishing cities and, with them, a literate elite. While western Europe turned in on itself, southern China was opening up trade routes with south east Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Iran. In the north, rival ‘barbarian’ dynasties fought for control. But they were dynasties which recognised the benefits of Chinese civilisation and embraced Chinese culture.

What is more, the ‘barbarians’ did not simply learn from China. They had some things to teach the old civilisation. Their artisans and herders had been able to develop certain techniques precisely because their societies had not been weighed down by the costs and traditions of empire. These techniques now flowed
into
China—‘methods of harnessing horses, use of the saddle and stirrup, ways of building bridges and mountain roads, the science of medicinal plants and poisons, seafaring, and so on’.
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Such innovations opened the way for increased wealth and an increased surplus. For example, the horse had been used previously in warfare and for speedy communication. But the old methods of harnessing half-strangled it and made it virtually useless for pulling heavy loads or ploughs, tasks that were left to the much slower oxen. The new techniques from the northern steppes began to change this.

The collapse of the central empire was not wholly negative in terms of intellectual development, either. The wars destroyed libraries and irreplaceable manuscripts. But the weakening of old intellectual traditions made space for new ones. Buddhism began to gain influence, brought to China by merchants who trod the long trade routes through Tibet and on through Samarkand to Iran, or who sailed from southern China to southern India. Indian, Iranian and Greek influences began to make an appearance in Chinese art, so that some Buddhist statues show the impact of Hellenic styles. Gernet goes so far as to speak of a ‘golden age of medieval civilisation’, an ‘aristocratic world animated by intense religious fervour and permeated by the great commercial currents which flowed along the trails of central Asia and the sea routes to the Indian Ocean’.
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Certainly, this was all very different from the European Dark Ages.

At the end of the 6th century the empire was reunited, first under the Sui and then under the T’ang Dynasty. Military victory over their enemies enabled the new emperors to extract a surplus from the mass of the population sufficient to undertake enormous public works. Two new capitals, Loyang and Ch’ang-an, were built. Loyang’s walls stretched nine kilometres east to west, eight kilometres north to south, and enclosed a rectangular city of 25 crossing avenues, each over 70 metres wide. Canals 40 metres wide and several hundred kilometres long linked the Yellow, Wei and Yangtze rivers, enabling rice from the south to feed the northern cities. Several hundred kilometres of the Great Walls were rebuilt along the north west frontier, and military campaigns extended the empire’s influence east into Korea, west as far as the borders of India and Persia, and south into Indochina.

There was an administrative structure run by full time scholar-officials, some recruited by a system of examinations. It began to act as a counter-balance to the landowning aristocrat class, and tried dividing the land into small peasant holdings so as to ensure the surplus went to the state as taxes, not to the aristocrats as rents.
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State monopolies of salt, alcohol and tea added to its revenues.

The state was powerful, closely policing life in the cities, and Confucianism—with its stress on conformity and obedience—was dominant within the state bureaucracy. But growing trade brought ideological influences from all over Asia. Buddhism grew enormously in importance, ‘Nestorian’ Christianity (condemned as a heresy in Rome and Byzantium) had some impact, and Manicheism and Zoroastrianism found adherents. The coastal commercial cities of the south contained numbers of foreign merchants—Malays, Indians, Iranians, Vietnamese, Khmers and Sumatrans. Canton even had Shi’ite and Sunni mosques for its Muslim merchants. Chinese influences also radiated in all directions—with Buddhism and the Chinese language and literature spreading to Korea and Japan, and knowledge of paper-making passing through Samarkand to Iran, the Arab world and eventually, after many centuries, to Europe.

The T’ang Dynasty lasted three centuries, but then went into crisis. There were repeated quarrels at the top between the bureaucrats and courtly circles. Some rulers encouraged Buddhism, while others tried to smash it. The costs of sustaining the luxury lifestyles of the ruling class, the public works and an enormous empire soared. The state’s revenues suffered as the class of small farmers went into sharp decline with the rise of large estates worked by tenant farmers and wage labourers.

Meanwhile, the plight of the mass of peasants went from bad to worse. In one region 90 percent of the peasants were reported to be ‘living from hand to mouth’.
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There was a growth of banditry and ‘frequent rural riots, in which peasants participated’. In the 870s a wave of rebellion broke out, threatening the whole empire.
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An insurgent army undertook a great march from north to south and back again to capture the imperial capital, Ch’ang-an, in 880.
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However, it did not win a victory for the hard-pressed peasantry. Most of its members were not peasants—who were loath to leave their plots for any period of time—but people who had drifted away from the land, while its leaders came ‘partly from the rural gentry and partly from the impoverished classes’. Its leader, Hung Ch’ao, ‘had even been selected as a local candidate for the [civil service]…examination’. In a matter of days, the army and its leaders were following different paths. The rank and file fighters joined forces with the local poor and looted the world’s most prosperous city: ‘The markets were set ablaze and countless people slaughtered…The most hated officials were dragged out and killed.’ By contrast, Hung’s ambition was to establish a stable regime with himself as emperor. He revived the imperial system, removing from the state administration only the highest officials, leaving old aristocrats in key positions and taking vicious measures against any of his followers who complained. When someone wrote a poem ridiculing the regime on the gate of a ministerial building, Hung’s deputy ‘killed the officials serving in the department, plucking out their eyes, and hung up their bodies; he executed the soldiers who had guarded the gate, killed everybody in the capital who could compose poetry and employed all other literate people as menials. In all, more than 3,000 people were killed.’

Having turned against his own followers, Hung was unable to keep the throne. An imperial general retook the city from the remains of the demoralised rebel forces a year later. But the rebellion marked the effective end of the T’ang Dynasty, which lost any real power as rival generals fought over the empire. It fell apart into five rival states (‘the five dynasties’) for half a century, until it was reunited under a new dynasty, the Sung.

The rebellion was similar in many ways to those that had brought down the Ch’in Dynasty in 206 BC and had help break apart the Han Empire after AD 184. There were to be other rebellions in the course of Chinese history, often following a similar pattern. A dynasty established itself and embarked upon ambitious plans of palace building, and canal and road construction; it attempted to ward off threats from pastoralists along its northern and western borders with expensive fortifications and foreign wars; it extended its power, but pushed the mass of the rural population to such levels of poverty that rebellions erupted which broke the imperial power apart; then some rebel leader or imperial general established a new dynasty which started the whole cycle again.

The rural poor never gained the benefits of victory. Scattered across the length and breadth of the countryside, tied to their individual plots of land, illiterate, knowing little of the outside world, they could rebel against acts of oppression by the existing state, but they could not collectively counterpose to it a new state in which they ruled as a class. Instead, they looked to create a state in the image of the existing one, but under a ‘good’ rather than a ‘bad’ emperor. It meant that even in victory they set up new rulers who treated them much as the old ones did.

This process even became incorporated into the ruling ideology, with the notion of the legitimacy of a dynasty depending on ‘the mandate of heaven’, which periodically would pass from one dynasty to another.

Yet the recurrent pattern does not mean Chinese society was ‘changeless’, as many Western writers used to claim. As dynasties came and went there
were
cumulative changes, involving the gradual introduction of new techniques into productive activities and, with them, important changes in the relationships between different groups in society.

Leading the world

China continued to undergo a great economic transformation. The owners of large landed estates, worked either by tenant farmers or wage labourers, sought to increase their incomes by investment in new farming implements and milling machinery, and by methods which enabled them to obtain more than one crop a year from their land.
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There was continued migration from the north to the rice-growing areas of the Yangtze Valley and the south. There was a sharp rise in agricultural productivity, and a corresponding growth in the surplus that the rich could use to buy various luxuries.

Trade networks began to connect farmers to local markets, and local markets to provincial cities, which grew in size and importance. More boats than the world had ever seen plied the 50,000 mile network of rivers and canals, carrying not just luxuries for the rich but also bulk products. Money played an increasing part in the transactions of all sections of society and banknotes began to be used as well as coins. The number of traders grew, and some became very rich. The cities grew until the Sung Dynasty’s capital, K’ai-feng, enclosing an areas 12 times the size of medieval Paris, probably had a million inhabitants,
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and the city of Hang-chou, in the Yangtze Valley, anything between one and a half million and five million.
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Industries grew as well. In K’ai-feng, ‘arsenals served the country as a whole…at a time when military technology was developing rapidly’ a textile industry grew up, based on resettled workers from ‘Szechwan and the Yangtze delta’ and the iron and steel industries became ‘highly organised enterprises dependent on more sophisticated techniques, great investments in equipment and large numbers of workers’, under the control of both the government and ‘private iron masters’. Workshops ‘produced articles of luxury for the imperial family, high officials and wealthy businessmen’, but also ‘building materials, chemicals, books and clothing’.
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There was considerable technological innovation. Pit coal was substituted for charcoal in metallurgy, water-driven machinery was used for working bellows, and explosives were employed in the mines. The quantity of iron produced in 1078 exceeded 114,000 tons—it only reached 68,000 tons in England in 1788.
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There was an unprecedented expansion of ceramics and porcelain-making—a technique not discovered in Europe for another 700 years. Gunpowder was in use by 1044—240 years before the first European mention of it. By 1132 it propelled rockets from bamboo tubes and by 1280 projectiles from bronze and iron mortars.
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New naval technologies—‘anchors, rudders, capstans, canvas sails and rigid matting sails…watertight compartments, mariners’ compasses’—enabled Chinese ships to reach the Arabian Gulf and even the east coast of Africa.
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Some could carry 1,000 people, and Chinese map-making was far ahead of not only that of Europe, but also the Arab Middle East.

Finally, advances in book production permitted the creation of a literature aimed at a sizeable middle class audience for the first time in history. Printing from engraved blocks was already taking place in the 9th century. There appeared works on the occult, almanacs, Buddhist texts, lexicons, popular encyclopaedias, manuals of elementary education and historical books, as well as classic works, the complete Buddhist writings, printed promissory notes and practical manuals on medicine and pharmacy.
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By the 11th century moveable type existed, based on the fitting together of individual characters, although it was not used for large-scale printing until the 15th century—probably because the large number of Chinese characters did not make it any quicker or more economical than block printing. In any case, China possessed printed books half a millennium before Europe, and the written word ceased to be the prerogative of a literate elite or of those who dwelt in the great monasteries. Schools, both state-run and private, multiplied, especially in the new economic heart of the country, the lower Yangtze region. As one Chinese writer who lived in this region at the time wrote, ‘Every peasant, artisan and merchant teaches his son how to read books. Even herdsmen and wives who bring food to their husbands at work in the fields can recite the poems of the men of ancient times’.
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