Chapter 12
Civilizations in China defy the deadly 300-year barrier in Mesopotamia, but dynasties are destroyed right on schedule.
Ah China. The head swims in contemplation. Once upon a time a man had rights to a bit of land. He made arrangements to get water from a nearby irrigation channel. He watered the ground and planted rice. When the rice was high enough, he flooded the land. Rice does not need so much water; the water was to keep weeds down. In time he had enough rice to feed his family and some left over to exchange for other things he needed.
This was done so often that the entire landscape was transformed from a desert flogged by stupendous rains and pierced by tumultuous rivers into a vast patchwork of rice paddies. So many did the same things that, if my source is right and rightly remembered, there was a greater effect on the global climate than has been wrought by modern industrial society.
The exigencies of the system meant endless, patient work and a society in which cooperation was absolutely fundamental. In some societies there might be sufficient rain, arriving at proper intervals, that a family might farm, eat and thrive with no central power to answer to. If survival depends on a central authority, which oversees an unimaginable network of irrigation channels, one perforce must take the orders of that authority most seriously.
Like all normal people, they had a sense of humor. I know no Chinese, but I do understand that there is a symbol for a woman and a symbol for a roof. Two women under one roof means war.
The government consisted of an emperor and his household wielding absolute power.
Figure 36 shows the survival of these mighty regimes.
Here is the survival experience of Chinese dynasties. As usual, the vertical axis is the chance of surviving another half century. The horizontal axis is the ages of dynasties.
Fig. 35 16
Yes, these are dynasties, not civilizations. The first Chinese emperor was in about 200 BC. The line of emperors continued into the 20th century – always the same civilization although there was sometimes foreign meddling. It makes the West look pathetic in comparison: three-hundred-year brick wall, indeed. Even the dynasties make Western civilizations look sick. For the first 200 years every dynasty looks almost – but not quite – invincible.
This long period of great stability depended on a remarkable strategy. (I am no expert on history, so I can only give you what I have heard.) Each year boys of a certain age were given a test on the sayings of Confucius. The bulk who did not excel could look forward to a life of very hard work, poverty and very little freedom. The ones who did best got a choice: stay poor or get castrated, in which case they qualified for work in the administration of the government. It would be as if we decided here to castrate all the doctors, lawyers, politicians, millionaires, university professors and scientists. I daresay that there are those who might favor such a plan, but don’t expect our overlords to start pushing it.
The upshot was that there were no powerful families. There was no concentration of power that might threaten the imperial house. Then over a hundred years they all collapsed. Just one appears to have gone past 300 but not on to 350 years. What’s going on? The imperial household presumably was exclusive but large. They married cousins all right, but that range of choice soon exceeded the critical number that can be survived. At the end they all ran out of children – or ran out of a sufficient number of capable children – and the dynasty fell. At least in the broadest of strokes, this is the impression. However, I did not run across any time a dynasty failed to have an eligible male heir – a paradox if fertility is the cause. And there were indeed problems including powerful families as we shall see on closer inspection.
Notice the notch slightly before the end. For about fifty years the dynasty is somewhat more vulnerable, but it then recovers. Implicitly there was a fertility crisis that then passed. I think a reasonable person might well shout, “Noise.” It could just be a statistical fluke. If this were the only data, I would totally agree. But as the data sets pile on, that explanation will become untenable.
Something I don’t know is whether this notch is caused by the same thing, the same mechanism of manifestation, as the notch in the Denmark data. You remember that, of course. Just where the degree of kinship should be producing the greatest fertility, there is a little decline. This used to annoy me considerably, since it seemed to mar the beauty of the Sibly curve as manifested in Denmark.
But I don’t know. That curve is fertility against kinship, as measured by marital radius. The present curve is survival (as a surrogate for fertility) against time. If there is a causal connection, I should dearly love to have it explained. The coordinates seem so very different.
There once was a saying in medicine, “Ask a different radiologist, get a different diagnosis.” I had long hoped that some expert in history would look at the timeline of the survival of Chinese dynasties and see if different ages of dynasties fell for different reasons. The possibility seems so remote that I did a ham-fisted amateur attempt. Instead of Teeple, I consulted the China Handbook Series. 17 Sure enough, the overall impression is quite different. Under somewhat closer inspection, the stability and tranquility are reduced. This follows thousands of years of dynastic rule, so of course there were problems. After bouncing around among a number of sources, here is my imperfect list. Up to 100 years I did not check. A dynasty failing in such a short time would simply have been selected out. 100 to 150 years: Revolts, usurper, murder, military revolt, alcoholic emperor, corruption, infighting, turmoil, emperor’s son developmentally disabled, invasion. 150 to 200 years: invasion. 200 to 250 years: Corruption, disinterested emperors, inadequate tax money, murder, raids, war, military revolt, infighting. 250 to 300 years: Eunuch dominance, separatist regions, clique conflicts, peasant uprising, invasion, weak emperors, wars to the north, famines, little silver, peasant and military uprising, emperor hanged himself, elites were outsiders, Western technology and imperialism, rebellions, invasion.
Maybe you can detect a pattern. All I see is that in general, the longer a dynasty lasts, the more problems will crop up and the better they will be remembered. There are a couple irregularities. The real experts seem to have lumped two dynasties named Song as one while they look rather different to me, and I have lumped the Eastern Han with the Western Han because to me they look so similar. The smart money would be on the experts. Given the survival pattern of the dynasties, I graphed them out in the usual way.
Fig. 36 Survival experience of Chinese dynasties from a second source. Chance of surviving that half century is on the vertical axis. Ages of the dynasties is on the horizontal axis.
Figure 3617 shows the survival of the Chines dynasties according to the internet source. They seem less resilient here than in the earlier graph. Remembering that the earlier source had one dynasty making it past 300 years and this does not, the notch is in the same place, happens at the same time. Now the numbers here are too low to be statistically significant to my eye, and the reason for the notch remains inapparent when I look at the problems the dynasties had. I found it odd that I never ran across a case where a dynasty fell for lack of a male heir. And yet, all the other evidence suggests that infertility underlies that final catastrophic half century. You are at your liberty to discount the whole second exercise.
So much for the hard evidence. The rest of this chapter will be speculation based on a smattering of history that I have no reference to support me upon.
The Chinese had coins, and the rule was that the value of the coin was the value of the silver that went into it. Then the Spanish stole an enormous amount of silver from the natives of the Western Hemisphere. Europe was awash in silver. Silver was most attractive to the Chinese, since they could not expand their economy without increasing the amount of real, tangible silver they had to work with. And coins do take wear and get lost.
Obviously, trade would benefit all. There were two routes: the Silk Road over land and shipping over sea. China produced porcelain – still called China – silk and other treasure anyone might adore. These were carried on the backs of camels and horses. Feeding the great caravans might just have brought about the invention of fast food. On the return trip the camels and horses traveled light. Horses may well have been purchased in the west and then taken to China, where vacant grasslands were rare; it was all rice paddy. And of course, the ill-gotten silver would have traveled, too.
When I was a wee thing, my mother had a small China figurine made in Dresden. It was a woman dancing, her fingers thinner than fine pencil leads, her petticoats an open pattern to scale with real holes where the holes should be. Every detail was exquisitely beautiful and done to perfection. My mother cautioned me that it was very delicate. So, when I learned that there was a Great Wall of China, built to turn back armies, I was most puzzled.
For many centuries, people had been putting money with goldsmiths to hold for a fee. When the goldsmiths realized they had more gold than was likely to be taken out at the same time by depositors, they would use some of their gold to buy interest bearing notes. This of course, given the nature of human greed, led to occasional miscalculation and disaster. Beginning with Switzerland, Europe began to introduce central banks to keep matters under control, among other things setting a requirement that banks keep a certain proportion of their reserves – money people had deposited with them – available to prevent bank runs … most of the time. This fractional reserve or partial reserve policy was introduced occurred in the late 1600’s.
Isaac Newton, the famous scientist, became Master of the Mint in Britain in 1699. He obviously could tell what was going on. So, he embarked on a two-faced scheme. On the one hand he was responsible for a reissuance of British coins, at the time like Chinese ones worth their weight in sliver, and Newton was pitiless in his pursuit of counterfeiters and people who would shave a tiny sliver of silver from a coin and pass the coin off as the same value as before, and on the other hand he had to be involved with working on Britain’s partial reserve banking system by which money was created out of thin air – which is still the case.
Given an ample money supply not to mention a stoutish population with a sense of adventure and enormous oak forests so old that their destruction should draw tears to this day, Britain built fleets that came to dominate the world; they even dominated China. Think of it. What was the ratio of their populations? Fifty to one? It would be like Maryland undertaking the conquest of the rest of the United States, and Maryland would not have to bring her forces across a couple or three oceans.
But when it came to trade, there was a problem. The Chinese expected to be paid in real silver. Air just didn’t cut it. So, the Brits began to import enormous amounts of opium they could obtain in India. Remember the line from Pogo,
“Makes a man proud to be a dog.” Opium is not silver, but it is addictive. The Qing dynasty, I think, was furious. They banned the wretched stuff. It came to a war, ultimately honest silver against hot air. The hot air won.
Then came the 20th century. One of the hallmarks of the era depends on the observation that it is easier for rich people to make money than for poor people. The inevitable and lamentable result is that wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. One possible cure is that a democratically elected government could see to it that such concentrations be prevented. Simply make it fair, which would be socialism. One way to do that would be for the government to own the means of production, the creator of wealth, which is communism. A lot of people who reckoned they were smart bought into this line of reasoning.
The counter argument might go that the thing that makes you human is the sum of the decisions you make. Turning decisions over to a central power dehumanizes you. If you are not human, life is hardly worth the effort.
Communism was the darling of the intelligentsia, read college and university faculty. I think they were not as smart as they thought, and this time I have truly massive data to prove it, but that strays too far from topic. Adolf Hitler did terrible things and is suitably loathed. Joseph Stalin killed a lot more people. His Soviet Union is defunct. But Mao Tse Tung, now known as Mao Zedong, dwarfs them combined. When I was a child, my father asked me a trick question. “Imagine the Chinese marching quick step five abreast past a post. How long will it take for them to get by?” The trick was that the population of China was growing so fast that they would never make it. Chairman Mao put an end to that.
Along the lines of the government owning the means of production, which in the Chairman’s early days was just about all agricultural, the government would own the land. So, people were taken from their ancient villages and moved into communes, where they could work together. If anything that might be helpful could be bought, the commune could better afford it. So far as I know, the tractor, so vital in a Kansas wheat field, does not offer much in a rice paddy, but no matter. Mao’s strength was military, killing folks, so he did not have a feel for farming anyway. Still his ideas became the foundation of action in all of China.
Of course, scattering villages meant there was no local focus of identity. It also meant that people who had married within tight social – very extended family – groups no longer did so. The inevitable result was that the birth rate crashed. About the time it dropped below two, the communists introduced the “one child policy,” which was pointless since few families were having more than one child anyway. It was a bit of transparent flummery to keep it from looking like Chinese men were not virile. After some years, it was obvious that this had gone too far, so they began to ease the restriction. It should be obvious to you that the birth rate did not recover.
By this time, they may not be able to turn it around. After their current swan song, China will probably be a minor power.
They don’t seem to be able to catch a break.