Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Unable to plunder southern China because they lacked a high-end army, and running out of opportunities to plunder northern China because they already ruled it, the kings of Northern Wei were getting seriously short of resources to buy their supporters’ loyalty—a potentially fatal weakness in a low-end state. In the 480s Emperor Xiaowen realized that only one solution remained: to move toward the high end. This he did with a vengeance. He nationalized all land, redistributed it to everyone who would register for taxes and state service, and—to make the Xianbei start thinking and acting like subjects of a high-end state—launched a frontal assault on tradition. Xiaowen banned Xianbei costume, replaced Xianbei with Chinese family names, required all courtiers under thirty to speak Chinese, and moved hundreds of thousands of people to a new city at the hallowed site of Luoyang.

  Some Xianbei gave up their ancestral ways and settled into ruling like regular Chinese aristocrats, but others refused. Culture wars escalated into civil wars, and in 534 Northern Wei split into Eastern (modernizing) and Western (traditionalist) states. The traditionalists, clinging to nomadic lifestyles, were able to keep attracting horsemen from the steppes, and soon it looked like their military muscle would overwhelm the revolution Xiaowen had begun. Desperation, however, served as the mother of invention. Where Xiaowen had tried to turn Xianbei warriors into Chinese gentlemen, his successors now did the opposite, giving Chinese soldiers tax breaks, appointing Chinese gentry as generals, and allowing Chinese warriors to take Xianbei names. The peasants and literati learned to fight, and in 577 rolled over the opposition. It had been a long, messy process, but a version of Xiaowen’s vision finally triumphed.

  The result was a sharply polarized China. In the north a high-end state (renamed the Sui dynasty after a military coup in 581) with a powerful army sat atop a fragmented, run-down economy; in the south, a fragmented state with weak institutions tried, but largely failed, to tap the wealth of a booming economy.

  This sounds utterly dysfunctional, but it was in fact perfect for jump-starting social development. In 589 Wendi, the first Sui emperor, built a fleet, took over the Yangzi Valley, and flung a vast army (perhaps half a million men) at Jiankang. Thanks to the extreme military imbalance between north and south, the city fell within weeks. When they realized that Wendi actually intended to tax them, southern China’s nobles rose up en masse, reportedly disemboweling—even eating—their Sui governors, but they were defeated within the year. Wendi had conquered southern China without grueling wars that devastated its economy, and an eastern revival took off.

  WU’S WORLD

  By re-creating a single huge empire, the Sui dynasty did two things at once. First, it allowed the strong state based in northern China to tap the south’s new economic frontier; and second, it allowed the south’s economic boom to spread all across China.

  This was not always deliberate. When the Sui emperors built the greatest monument of the age, the 1,500-mile-long, 130-foot-wide Grand Canal that linked the Yangzi with northern China, they wanted a superhighway for moving armies around. Within a generation, though, it had become China’s economic artery, carrying rice from the south to feed northern cities. “By cutting through the Taihang Mountains,” seventh-century scholars liked to complain, “Sui inflicted intolerable sufferings on the people”; yet, the scholars conceded, the canal “provided endless benefits to the people … The benefits they provide are enormous indeed!”

  The Grand Canal functioned like a man-made Mediterranean Sea, changing Eastern geography by finally giving China the kind of waterway ancient Rome had enjoyed. Cheap southern rice fed a northern urban explosion. “Hundreds of houses, thousands of houses—like a great chessboard,” the poet Bai Juyi wrote of Chang’an, which once more became China’s capital. It sprawled across thirty square miles, “like a huge field planted with rows of cabbages.” A million residents thronged tree-lined boulevards up to five times as wide as New York’s Fifth Avenue. Nor was Chang’an unique; Luoyang was probably half its size, and a dozen other cities had populations of a hundred thousand.

  China’s recovery was something of a double-edged sword, though, because the fusion of northern state power and the southern rice frontier cut two ways. On the one hand, a burgeoning bureaucracy organized and policed the urban markets that enriched farmers and merchants, pushing social development upward; on the other, excessive administration put a brake on development by shackling farmers and merchants, regulating every detail of commerce. Officials fixed prices, told people when to buy and sell, and even ruled on how merchants could live (they could not, for instance, ride horses; that was too dignified for mere hucksters).

  Civil servants regularly put politics ahead of economics. Instead of allowing people to buy and sell real estate, they preserved Xiaowen’s system, claiming all land for the state and merely loaning it to farmers. This forced peasants to register for taxes and kept powerful landlords in check, but tangled everything in red tape. For many years historians suspected that these land laws told us more about ideology than reality; surely, scholars reasoned, no premodern state could handle so much paperwork.* Yet documents preserved by arid conditions at Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi Desert show that eighth-century managers really did follow these rules.

  Farmers, landlords, and speculators of course found ways to evade the regulations, but the civil service steadily swelled to fill out mountains of documentation and went through a revolution of its own. In theory, entrance examinations had made administration the preserve of China’s best and brightest since Han times, but in practice aristocratic families always managed to turn high office into a perk of birth. In the seventh century, however, exam scores really did become the only criterion for success. So long as we assume (as most people did) that composing poetry and quoting classical literature are the best guides to administrative talent, China can fairly be said to have developed the most rational selection processes for state service known to history.*

  As the old aristocracy’s grip on high office slowly loosened, administrative appointments became the surest path to wealth and influence for the gentry, and competition to get into the civil service stiffened. In some years fewer than one candidate in a hundred passed the exams, and stories both sad and comical abound of men retaking the tests for decades. Ambitious families hired tutors, much as they do nowadays to get their teenagers through the exams that winnow out applicants to the most-sought-after universities, and the newly invented printing presses churned out thousands of books of practice questions. Some candidates wore “cheat shirts” with model essays written in the lining. Because grades depended so heavily on literary composition, every young man in a hurry became a poet; and with so many fine minds versifying, this became the golden age of Chinese literature.

  The exams created unprecedented social mobility within the educated elite, and some historians even speak of the rise of a kind of “protofeminism” as the new openness expanded to gender relations. We should not exaggerate this trend; the advice to women in The Family Instructions of the Grandfather, one of the commonest surviving eighth-century books, would have shocked no one a thousand years earlier—

  A bride serves her husband

  Just as she served her father.

  Her voice should not be heard

  Nor her body or shadow seen.

  With her husband’s father and elder brothers

  She has no conversation.

  On the other hand, new dowry patterns and liberal (compared to Confucian ideas, anyway) Buddhist attitudes toward female abilities gave the wealthiest women scope to ignore grandfather’s instructions. Take Wu Zetian, who, after one kind of service as a Buddhist nun, took up another (aged thirteen) as a concubine in the emperor’s harem, before marrying his son as a junior wife. Wu ran rings around her dizzy, easygoing husband, ruling from behind the bamboo curtain, as the saying went. And when her husband conveniently died in 683, Wu allegedly poisoned the obvious heir, then deposed two of her own sons (one after six weeks, the other
after six years). In 690 she pulled back the bamboo curtain to become the only woman who ever sat on China’s throne in her own right.

  In some ways Wu was the ultimate protofeminist. She founded a research institute to write a Collection of Biographies of Famous Women and scandalized conservatives by leading a female procession to Mount Tai for China’s most sacred ritual, the Sacrifice to Heaven. Sisterhood had its limits, though—when her husband’s senior wife and favorite concubine became a threat while Wu was maneuvering her way to the top, she (again, allegedly) suffocated her own baby, framed her rivals, then punished them by chopping off their arms and legs and drowning them in a vat of wine.

  Wu’s Buddhism was as contradictory as her protofeminism. She was certainly devout, at one point outlawing butchers’ shops and at another personally going beyond Chang’an’s city limits to meet a monk returning from collecting sacred texts in India, yet she flagrantly exploited religion for political ends. In 685 her lover—another monk—“found” a text called the Great Cloud Sutra, predicting the rise of a woman of such merit that she would become the universal ruler. Wu took the title Maitreya (Future Buddha) the Peerless, and legend holds that the face of the beautiful Maitreya Buddha statue at Longmen reflects Wu’s (Figure 7.3).

  Wu had an equally complicated relationship with the civil service. She promoted entrance examinations over family connections, yet the Confucian gentleman scholars whose dominance this guaranteed hated their female ruler with a passion, and she returned the sentiment. Wu purged the scholars, who retaliated by writing official histories making her the archetype of what went wrong when women were on top.

  But not even they could conceal the splendor of her reign. She commanded a million-strong army and the resources to send it deep into the steppes. More like the Roman army than the Han, it recruited largely within the empire and drew officers from the gentry. It could intimidate internal rivals but elaborate precautions kept its commanders loyal. Any officer who moved even ten men without permission faced a year in prison; any who moved a regiment risked strangulation.

  Figure 7.3. The face of Wu Zetian? Legend has it that this monumental statue of the Future Buddha, carved at Longmen around 700, was modeled on the only woman to rule China in her own name.

  The army took Chinese rule farther into northeast, Southeast, and central Asia than ever before, even intervening in northern India in 648, and China’s “soft” power reached further still. In the second through fifth centuries, India had eclipsed China as a cultural center of gravity, its missionaries and traders spreading Buddhism far and wide, and the elites of newly forming Southeast Asian states adopted Indian dress and scripts as well as religion. By the seventh century, though, China’s influence was also being felt. A distinctive Indochinese civilization developed in Southeast Asia, Chinese schools of Buddhism shaped thought back in India, and the ruling classes in Korea’s and Japan’s emerging states learned their Buddhism entirely from China. They aped Chinese dress, town planning, law codes, and writing, and buttressed their power by claiming both approval and descent from China’s rulers.

  Part of Chinese culture’s appeal was its own openness to foreign ideas and ability to blend them into something new. Many of the most powerful people in Wu’s world could trace their ancestry back to steppe nomads who had migrated into China, and they maintained their ties to the steppe highway linking East and West. Inner Asian dancers and lutes were all the rage in Chang’an, where fashionistas wore Persian dresses with tight-laced bodices, pleated skirts, and yards of veils. True trendsetters would use only East African “devil slaves” as doormen; “If they do not die,” one owner coldly observed, “one can keep them, and after being kept a long time they begin to understand the language of human beings, though they themselves cannot speak it.”

  The scions of China’s great houses broke their bones playing polo, the nomads’ game of choice; everyone learned to sit, central-Asian style, on chairs rather than mats; and stylish ladies dallied at the shrines of exotic religions such as Zoroastrianism and Christianity, carried east by the central Asian, Iranian, Indian, and Arab merchants who flocked to Chinese cities. In 2007 a DNA study suggested that one Yu Hong, buried at Taiyuan in northern China in 592, was actually European (though whether he himself migrated all the way from the western to the eastern end of the steppes or whether his ancestors had made the move more slowly remains unclear).

  Wu’s world was the product of China’s unification in 589, which imposed a powerful state on the south and opened a vast realm to southern economic development. That explains why Eastern social development rose so rapidly; but it is only half the explanation for why the Eastern and Western scores crossed around 541. For a full answer we also need to know why Western social development kept falling.

  THE LAST OF THEIR BREEDS

  On the face of it, Western recovery seemed at least as likely as Eastern in the sixth century. In each core a huge ancient empire had broken down, leaving a smaller empire that claimed legitimate rule over the whole region and a cluster of “barbarian” kingdoms that ignored such claims (Figure 7.4). After the calamities of the fifth century, Byzantium had shored up its frontiers and enjoyed relative calm, and by 527, when a new emperor named Justinian ascended the throne, all signs were positive.

  Historians often call Justinian the last of the Romans. He governed with furious energy, overhauling administration, strengthening taxes, and rebuilding Constantinople (the magnificent church Hagia Sophia is part of his legacy). He worked like a demon. Some critics insisted that he really was a demon—like some Hollywood vampire, they claimed, he never ate, drank, or slept, although he did have voracious sexual appetites. Some even said they had seen his head separate from his body and fly around on its own as he prowled the corridors at night.

  Figure 7.4. The last of their breeds? First Justinian of Byzantium (533–565) and then Khusrau of Persia (603–627) attempt to reunite the Western core; Heraclius of Byzantium strikes back against Khusrau (624–628).

  What chiefly drove Justinian, according to gossip, was his wife, Theodora (Figure 7.5), who got even worse press than Wu Zetian. Theodora had been an actress (in antiquity, often a euphemism for prostitute) before marrying Justinian. Rumor had it that her sex drive outdid even his; that she once slept with all the guests at a dinner party and then, when they were exhausted, worked through their thirty servants; and that she used to complain because God had given her only three orifices. Be that as it may, she was very much an empress. When aristocrats opposing Justinian’s taxes tried to use rioting sports fans to overthrow him in 532, for instance, it was Theodora who stopped him from fleeing. “Everyone born must die,” she pointed out, “but I would not live to see the day when men do not call me ‘Your Majesty.’ If you seek safety, husband, that is easy … but I prefer the old saying—purple [the color of kings] makes the best shroud.” Justinian pulled himself together, sent in the army, and never looked back.

  Figure 7.5. Worse (or better, depending on your perspective) than Wu? Empress Theodora, as represented on a mosaic at Ravenna in Italy, completed in 547

  The very next year Justinian dispatched his general Belisarius to wrest North Africa from the Vandals. Sixty-five years earlier fireships had sent Byzantium’s hopes of retaking Carthage up in smoke, but now it was the Vandals’ turn to collapse. Belisarius swept through North Africa, then crossed to Sicily. There the Goths fell apart too, and Justinian’s general celebrated Christmas 536 in Rome. All was going perfectly. Yet by the time Justinian died in 565 the reconquest had stalled, the empire was bankrupt, and Western social development had fallen below the East’s. What went wrong?

  According to Belisarius’ secretary Procopius, who left an account called The Secret History, it was all the fault of women. Procopius provided a convoluted conspiracy theory worthy of Empress Wu’s Confucian civil servants. Belisarius’ wife, Antonina, Procopius said, was Empress Theodora’s best friend and partner in sexual high jinks. To distract Justinian from the all-to
o-true gossip about Antonina (and herself), Theodora undermined Belisarius in Justinian’s eyes. Convinced that Belisarius was plotting against him, Justinian recalled him—only for the Byzantine army, lost without its general, to be defeated. Justinian sent Belisarius back to save the day; then, paranoid once more, reran the whole foolish cycle (several times).

  How much truth Procopius’ story holds is anyone’s guess, but the real explanation for the reconquest’s failure seems to be that despite the similarities between the Eastern and Western cores in the sixth century, the differences mattered more. Strategically, Justinian’s position was almost the opposite of Wendi’s when he united China. In China, all the northern “barbarian” kingdoms formed a single unit by 577, which Wendi used to overcome the rich but weak south. Justinian, by contrast, was trying to conquer a multitude of mostly poor but strong “barbarian” kingdoms from the rich Byzantine Empire. Reuniting the core in a single campaign, like Wendi’s in 589, was impossible.

  Justinian also had to deal with Persia. For a century a string of wars with the Huns, conflicts over taxes, and religious upheavals had kept Persia militarily quiet, but the prospect of the Roman Empire rising from the ashes demanded action. In 540 a Persian army broke through Byzantium’s weakened defenses and plundered Syria, forcing Justinian to fight on two fronts (which probably had more to do with Belisarius’ recall from Italy than any of Antonina’s intrigues).