Chapter 17 Chapter 16 How China Became the China of the Chinese

Immigration, advocacy for minority members and women, multilingualism, racial diversity — the state of California, where I live was one of the champions of these controversial policies, is now leading the way Strongly oppose these policies.Take a look into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public schools my son attends, and you will see that the abstract debates about these policies are as concrete and tangible as the faces of these children.These children represent more than 80 languages ​​spoken at home, leaving English-speaking whites in the minority.At least one parent or grandparent of every playmate my sons had was born outside the US: 3 out of 4 of my sons' grandparents were not born in the US .However, immigration only restored the racial diversity that America had maintained for thousands of years.Home to hundreds of Indian tribes and languages ​​prior to European settlement, the continental United States has come under the control of a single government only in the last few hundred years.

In these respects, America is a perfectly "normal" country.All but one of the six most populous countries in the world are recently politically unified national melting pots that still maintain hundreds of languages ​​and ethnic groups.Russia, for example, was once a small Slavic state centered on Moscow, until AD 1582 when it began to expand beyond the Ural Mountains.From then until the nineteenth century, Russia began to annex dozens of non-Slavic peoples, many of whom still retained their original languages ​​and cultural identities.Just as the history of the United States is the story of how vast areas of our continent became the domain of the Americans, so the history of Russia is the story of how Russia became the Russia of the Russians.India, Indonesia, and Brazil were also recent political creations (or, in India's case, political re-inventions) and are home to some 850, 670, and 210 languages, respectively.

The great exception to the general phenomenon of the modern melting pot of nations is the world's most populous country - China.Today's China appears to be one politically, culturally, and linguistically unified country, at least to the uninitiated.It was politically unified in 2211 BC and has remained so for most of the centuries since then.Since China began to have characters, it has always had only one writing system, while modern Europe uses dozens of modified alphabets.More than 800 million of China's 1.2 billion people speak Mandarin, the language spoken by the largest number of native speakers in the world.About 300 million people speak seven other languages, which are to Mandarin and to each other as Spanish is to Italian.So not only is China not a melting pot of nations, but even the question of how China became a Chinese China seems absurd.China has always been Chinese, almost from the earliest stages of its recorded history.

We have taken so much credit for this apparent unity in China that we have forgotten how amazing it is.There is a genetic reason why we should not expect this kind of unity in the first place.Although there is an imprecise ethnographic classification of the world's peoples that lumps all Chinese into the Mongoloid race, this classification conceals far fewer differences than between the Swedes, Italians, and Irish in Europe. The difference is much larger.In particular, there are considerable genetic and physical differences between North and South Chinese: North Chinese resemble Tibetans and Nepalese, while South Chinese resemble Vietnamese and Filipinos.My friends from North China and South China can often be distinguished from each other by physical appearance: North Chinese people tend to be taller, heavier, with sharper noses, smaller eyes, and more "slanted" corners of the eyes.

There are also differences in environment and climate between North China and South China: the north is drier and colder; the south is humid and hotter.The genetic differences that arose in these different environments suggest a long history of moderate isolation between North and South Chinese.But what about these people who end up with the same or very similar language and culture? Although some other places in the world have been settled for a long time, the language is not uniform. From this point of view, the apparent near-unification of language in China is also puzzling.For example, as we saw in the previous chapter, New Guinea is less than one-tenth the size of China, and its human history is only about 40,000 years old, but it has 1,000 languages, including dozens of language families. The difference between them is much larger than the difference between the 8 major languages ​​in China.In the 6000-8000 years after the introduction of Indo-European languages, Western Europe gradually formed or acquired about 40 languages, including such different languages ​​as English, Finnish and Russian.However, fossils prove that humans existed in China more than 500,000 years ago.What happened to the thousands of different languages ​​that were bound to arise in China over such a long period of time?

This oddity suggests that China was once as diverse and varied as all other populous countries still are.China is different only in that it was unified much earlier.Its "sinicization" was the rapid homogenization of a vast area in an ancient melting pot of peoples, re-immigrating to tropical Southeast Asia, and exerting significant influence on Japan, Korea, and possibly India.Thus, Chinese history provides the key to understanding the history of Southeast Asia as a whole.This chapter is to tell the story of how China became the China of the Chinese. A convenient starting point is a detailed language map of China (see Figures 16.1 and 16.2).For all of us who are used to thinking of China as monolithic, looking at this map is an eye-opener.It turns out that in addition to the 8 “big” languages ​​in China—Mandarin and its 7 close relatives (often just collectively referred to as “Chinese”), whose speakers range from 11 million to 800 million—there are more than 130 "Small" languages, many of which are spoken by only a few thousand speakers.All these "big" and "small" languages ​​are divided into 4 language families, which vary greatly in distribution density.

Mandarin and its relative languages, which constitute the Chinese family of the Sino-Tibetan language family, are continuously distributed in North China and South China.One could walk across the whole of China from northeast China to the south and still not leave the land inhabited by people who spoke Mandarin and its relative languages.The distribution of the other three language groups is fragmented and scattered, and they are spoken by people in some "inhabited areas", surrounded by "a vast ocean" of people who speak Chinese and other related languages. Particularly fragmented is the distribution of the Miao-Yao (also known as Man-Mian) language family, which includes 6 million people and is divided into roughly five languages ​​with colorful names: Hong Miao, Bai Miao (also known as Stripe Hmong), Black Hmong, Green Hmong (also known as Blue Hmong) and Yao.Hmong-yao speakers live in dozens of isolated pockets, surrounded by people from other languages, spread over an area of ​​500,000 square miles stretching from southern China to Thailand.More than 100,000 Hmong-speaking refugees from Vietnam brought the language to the United States, where they are better known by the family's other name, Man.

Another fragmented language family is the Austronesian language family, the most widely spoken languages ​​in this family are Vietnamese and Cambodian. The distribution area of ​​6 million Austronesian speakers ranges from Vietnam in the east to the Malay Peninsula in the south and India in the west.The fourth and last language branch of the Chinese language family is the Dai-Kadai language branch (including Thai and Lao), which has 50 million people. Its distribution extends from southern China to the Thai peninsula and westward to Myanmar. . Of course, the reason why the distribution of Miao-Yao speakers are so fragmented today is not because some helicopters in ancient times dropped them here and there on the land of Asia.One might conjecture that they originally had a more or less continuous distribution, and that they became fragmented because of expansion by people from other language groups, or by inducing Miao-Yao speakers to abandon their own language.The fact that a large part of this fragmentation of language distribution has taken place within the past 2,500 years is well documented as a historical fact.The ancestors of modern Thai-, Lao-, and Burmese-speaking peoples all historically moved from southern China and adjacent areas to the present site, successively drowning out descendants of earlier immigrants who settled there.Chinese-speaking groups work particularly hard to displace other groups and change them linguistically, because Chinese-speaking groups despise other groups as primitive inferior groups.The historical records of China's Zhou Dynasty, from 1100 BC to 221 BC, describe the conquest and absorption of most of China's non-Chinese population by Chinese-speaking vassal states.

We can use several lines of reasoning to recreate the map of East Asian languages ​​as far back as possible thousands of years ago.First, we can invert the known history of language expansion in the last few millennia.Secondly, we can make the following reasoning: If there is only one language or related language family in some modern areas, and this language or language family occupies a large continuous area, then these areas prove that this language family is in the world. Geographical expansion, only because time has not been long enough for it to differentiate into many languages.Finally, we can also reason in reverse: if there is a high diversity of languages ​​belonging to a particular language family in some modern areas, then these areas are almost the early distribution centers of the language family.

Using these three lines of reasoning to turn back the language clock, we can conclude that: North China was originally occupied by speakers of Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages; People who speak Dai-Cadai languages; and people who speak Sino-Tibetan languages ​​replace most people who speak these other languages ​​in the whole South China.An even more dramatic linguistic upheaval must have swept across the region from tropical Southeast Asia to southern China—Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Malay Peninsula.Whatever languages ​​were originally spoken in those places must now all be extinct, for all modern languages ​​in these countries seem to be recent loanwords, chiefly from South China, or in some cases from Indonesia.In view of the fact that the Miao-Yao language can hardly continue to exist today, we can also guess that in addition to the Miao-Yao language, Austronesian language, and Dai-Cadai language in South China, there may have been some other language groups, but these other language groups did not leave any Surviving modern languages.We will also see that the Austronesian language family (to which all Filipino and Polynesian languages ​​belong) may be one of these other language families that disappeared from mainland China, and that we only know of this language family because it spread to the Pacific Islands and exist there.

This language shift in East Asia reminds us of the spread of European languages, especially English and Spanish, to the New World.The New World had previously been home to a thousand or more Indian languages.We know from our recent history that English did not finally replace Native American in the United States simply because Indians sounded nice.Instead, this replacement required English-speaking immigrants to kill most Indians through war, massacres, and the diseases they brought, forcing the surviving Indians to adopt English, the language of the new majority.The direct cause of language replacement was the superiority of foreign Europeans over Indians in terms of technology and political organization, and this advantage ultimately came from the advantages brought about by the early emergence of food production.The replacement of Aboriginal languages ​​in Australia by English and the replacement of original Pygmy and Khoisan languages ​​in sub-equatorial Africa by Bantu languages ​​has basically gone through the same process. The language upheaval in East Asia thus raises a corresponding question: what enabled the migration of Sino-Tibetan speakers from North China to South China, and the migration of Austro-Asiatic speakers and other languages ​​originally from South China? South into tropical Southeast Asia?Here we must turn to archaeology to see if there is any evidence that certain Asians gained technological, political, and agricultural advantages over other Asians. As in every other place in the world, the archaeological record of most of human history in East Asia shows only the remains of hunter-gatherers who used crude stone tools and did not have pottery.In East Asia, the earliest evidence that things were different comes from China, where crop remnants, domestic animal bones, pottery, and polished (New Cangware) stone tools appear around 7500 BC.This date is less than 1,000 years after the start of food production in the Neolithic and Fertile Crescent.However, because little is known archaeologically about China in the 1,000 years before that, we are still unable to determine whether China's food production started at the same time as the Fertile Crescent, or earlier or later.At least we can say that China was one of the earliest centers of animal and plant domestication in the world. China may actually have two or more centers of food production emerging independently.I have already mentioned the ecological differences between China's cool, dry north and its warm, humid south.Even at the same latitude, ecological differences exist between coastal lowlands and inland plateaus.Different wild plants grew in these radically different environments, so early farmers in different parts of China may have used these plants differently.In fact, the earliest proven crops are two types of drought-tolerant millet in North China, while rice in South China indicates that there may be two different centers of plant domestication in the north and the south. Some archaeological sites in China have not only the earliest evidence of crops, but also the bones of domesticated pigs, dogs and chickens.In addition to these domesticated animals and crops, there were gradually many other domesticated animals and plants in China.Of these animals, the buffalo was the most important (used to pull the plow), while the silkworm, duck, and goose were the other most important.Some of the later crops that are more familiar include soybeans, hemp, citrus, tea, apricots, peaches and pears.Moreover, just as the east-west axis of Eurasia allowed many of these Chinese animals and crops to spread westward in antiquity, so domesticated plants and animals from West Asia spread eastward to China, where they gained importance.Particularly significant contributions from West Asia to the ancient Chinese economy were wheat and barley, cattle and horses, and (to a lesser extent) sheep and goats. In China, as elsewhere in the world, food production gradually gave rise to some of the other hallmarks of "civilization" discussed in Chapters 11-14.China's extraordinary tradition of bronze smelting began between 3000 and 2000 BC and finally led to the development of the world's earliest cast iron production in China around 500 BC.The following 1,500 years were the period of the explosion of the Chinese technological inventions mentioned in Chapter 13, including paper, the compass, the wheelbarrow, and gunpowder.The emergence of fortified cities during the third millennium BC, and the great variation in the form of tombs, ranging from austere to lavishly furnished, suggest class distinctions.The high walls that guard the city, the huge palaces, and finally the Grand Canal (the longest canal in the world, with a total length of more than 1,000 miles) connecting the north and the south of China, proves that a hierarchical society has emerged, because only the rulers of such a society can control A large civilian labor force was mobilized.The writings that survive now date from the second millennium BC, but may have appeared earlier.Our archaeological knowledge of the emergence of cities and states in China was later supplemented by written records of China's earliest dynasties, dating back to the Xia Dynasty, which arose around 2000 BC. As for infectious diseases, the more catastrophic byproducts of food production, we are not sure where in the Old World some of the most important diseases of Old World origin occurred.However, some European writings from Roman times to the Middle Ages clearly describe bubonic plague and possibly smallpox as having come from the East, so the germs may have originated in China or East Asia.Influenza (which originated in pigs) is even more likely to have occurred in China, because pigs were domesticated very early in China and became a very important domestic animal in China. China's vast size and ecological diversity have produced many different regional cultures, which can be distinguished archaeologically by the different styles of their pottery and artifacts.During the fourth millennium BC, these regional cultures expanded geographically, and they began to interact, compete and merge with each other.Just as the exchange of domesticated plants and animals between ecologically diverse regions enriched China's food production, exchanges between culturally diverse regions enriched China's culture and technology, while intense competition between warring chiefdoms drove scale. The formation of larger, more centralized states (Chapter 14). Although the north-south gradient in China impedes crop dispersal, this gradient is not as much of an obstacle in China as it is in the Americas or Africa, because the distance between China's north and south is relatively short; It is not cut off by deserts like northern Mexico, nor is it separated by a narrow isthmus like Central America.Rather, China's large west-to-east rivers (the Yellow River in the north, the Yangtze River in the south) facilitated the spread of crops and technology between the coast and the interior, while the vast expanse and relatively flat topography between east and west China ultimately made the two The water systems of the great rivers were connected by canals, which facilitated communication between the north and the south.All these geographical factors contributed to the early cultural and political unification of China. Although the area of ​​Western Europe was about the same as that of China, the terrain was relatively uneven and there were no such integrated rivers. Therefore, Europe has not been able to achieve cultural and political unity until today. unity. In China, some new things spread from south to north, especially the smelting of iron and the cultivation of rice.But the main direction of propagation is from north to south.This trend is most obvious in writing: Western Eurasia has produced too many writing systems, such as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan script and the Semitic alphabet.China, on the other hand, produced only one well-documented writing system.It was perfected in North China and spread everywhere, pre-empting or replacing any other immature writing system, which eventually evolved into the script still used in China today.Other important and distinctive things that North China societies transmitted southward were bronze crafts, Sino-Tibetan languages, and state formation.China's three earliest dynasties - Xia, Shang, and Zhou - arose in North China during the second millennium BC. Surviving writings from the first millennium BC show that the Chinese already often (as many still do today) felt culturally superior to non-Chinese "barbarians", while The North Chinese also often regarded even the South Chinese as savages.For example, a writer in the late Zhou Dynasty in the middle of the first millennium BC described other ethnic groups in China as follows: body, there are those who do not eat fire." The author of the Zhou Dynasty went on to describe the primitive tribes in the South, West, and North as indulging in the same barbaric customs: "The south is called barbarian. In the west it is called Rong, and there are people who wear clothes and skins and do not eat grains. In the north it is called Di, who live in caves with clothes and feathers, and some people do not eat grains." Some countries established by or modeled on the Zhou Dynasty in North China expanded to South China in the first millennium BC, and finally realized the political unification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC.China's cultural unification also accelerated during the same period, and the "civilized" Chinese countries with writing absorbed and assimilated the "barbarians" who did not have writing, or became a model for these people to follow.This kind of cultural unification is sometimes very cruel. For example, Qin Shihuang declared that all previous books were worthless and ordered them to be burned. This has caused great inconvenience to our understanding of China's early history and writing.These and other severe measures must have played a role in promoting the spread of Sino-Tibetan languages ​​in North China to most of China and India, and brought the distribution of Miao-Yao languages ​​and other language groups to the current fragmented state. In East Asia, as a result of China's leading advantages in food production, technology, writing, and state formation, China's innovative reforms have also made significant contributions to the development of neighboring regions.For example, until the fourth millennium BC, tropical Southeast Asia was still occupied by hunter-gatherer peoples who manufactured gravel and tablet tools belonging to the so-called tradition named after the peaceful site in Vietnam.Since then, crops of Chinese origin, Neolithic technology, village life, and pottery similar to South China pottery have spread to tropical Southeast Asia, perhaps with some South China language groups.Historically, the southward expansion of the Burmese, Laotians, and Thais completed the sinicization of tropical Southeast Asia.All these modern peoples are the modern collateral relatives of their South China compatriots. This Chinese influence was as overwhelming as a steamroller, and the former peoples of tropical Southeast Asia have left little trace among the region's modern inhabitants.Only three remnant groups of hunter-gatherers—the Semang small blacks of the Malay Peninsula, the islanders of the Andaman Islands, and the Sri Lankan Vedoi small blacks—lead us to think that the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia may have been dark-skinned , curly hair, like modern New Guineans, and not like the lighter-skinned, straight-haired South Chinese and their collateral relatives, modern tropical Southeast Asians.These small black remnants in Southeast Asia may be the last survivors of the original people who colonized New Guinea.The Semang little blacks still lived as hunter-gatherers, bartering with nearby farmers, but also adopted a South Asian language from them—as we shall see, the Filipino little blacks and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers also adopted the language of their peasant trading partners.Only in the remote Andaman Islands do some languages ​​not related to the South China language family survive—the last surviving languages ​​of what must have numbered several hundred now-extinct indigenous languages ​​of Southeast Asia. Even Korea and Japan were greatly influenced by China, but their geographical isolation from China ensured that they did not lose their language and their physical and genetic characteristics as tropical Southeast Asia did.Korea and Japan adopted Chinese rice in the second millennium BC, Chinese bronze metallurgy in the first millennium BC, and Chinese bronze metallurgy in the first millennium AD. Word.China also introduced West Asian wheat and barley to Korea and Japan. We must not exaggerate in this presentation of China's important role in East Asian civilization.In fact, not all cultural progress in East Asia came from China, nor were the Koreans, Japanese, and tropical Southeast Asians uncontributable, uncreative barbarians.The ancient Japanese invented some of the oldest pottery-making techniques in the world, and settled in villages as hunter-gatherers long before the introduction of food production, subsisting on Japan's rich marine resources.Some crops may have been domesticated first or independently in Japan, Korea, and tropical Southeast Asia. However, China's role is still too large.For example, the prestige value of Chinese culture is still high in Japan and North Korea, and although the Chinese-derived writing system in Japanese has various shortcomings in expressing the Japanese language, Japan does not intend to abandon it, and North Korea only recently. The clumsy script of Chinese origin was replaced by the wondrous Hangul alphabet of the country.The continued presence of Chinese characters in Japan and Korea is a living legacy of the 20th century, when plants and animals were domesticated in China nearly 10,000 years ago.Thanks to the achievements of the earliest farmers in East Asia, China became the China of the Chinese, and the peoples who came to Easter Island from Thailand (as we will see in the next chapter) became their distant relatives.

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