I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
The difference between Western and Chinese territorial expansionism isn’t that different, especially when you compare the complete conquest and destruction of the Dzungar Khanate wrought by the Qing. Fundamentally, the territories of feudal polities were constrained by how long it would take to travel from the frontier to the central government. There’s no reason to think that a feudal polity wouldn’t further expand if they had less constraints such as the adoption of faster transportation. Yes, the tributary system existed, but the empire proper also saw overall expansion and incorporation of tributary relationships and de jure rule into de facto rule as well. You can see this with Nanzhong/Dali where it oscillated between being a frontier of the empire with almost no de facto rule and a tributary state before being incorporated into the empire proper during the Yuan. Chinese expansionism also wasn’t just through the Asian interior either since Kublai Khan tried but failed to conquer Indonesia and Japan. Now, if you’re talking about settler-colonialism where European powers conspired to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population in the Americas in order to steal their land and replace their population with European settlers not indigenous to the land, then yes, I don’t see even alt-history China doing that.
Overall, my initial comment in this thread is pushing back the idea that:
Capitalism was destined to develop in Western Europe when there were multiple candidates. The two candidates I could see were China and India. Perhaps there were others as well.
Capitalism was passively developed through material conditions which saw its birth as inevitable and not brought forth into existence through human activity. It was developed through human activity, and I don’t just mean things like primitive accumulation, but that the preconditions of capitalism’s arrival themselves were also brought forth through human activity.
Combining the two would mean that beyond just pointing out the advantageous material conditions of Western Europe, you would have to point to key historical events which pushed the origins of capitalism in Western Europe’s favor. Now if you want to argue that the Industrious Revolution as experienced in China and India would lead to a completely new mode of production that was neither feudalism nor capitalism (nor socialism), that’s fair. But you would have to show how this new mode of production is distinct from capitalism.
To explore your tangent a little more, I’d say that Western and Chinese territorial expansionism is more different than alike, precisely for the examples you’ve cited.
Viewing cultures in reductive civilizational cliches is not a rigorous mode of analysis, but it is worth drawing a few points from. The Qing and Yuan phases of expansion are in direct contrast with the remarkable lack of relative expansion under the so-called “Han Chinese” dynasties. Those two dynasties were established under conquest and actively contextualized their reign as one of triumphal subjugation over the general population and majority culture. Operating under that mode of cultural belief allows a more assertive geopolitical posture compared to the more passive foreign policy philosophies of the “traditional” dynasties.
The example of the Imjin War between Ming China and Korea vs Japan is a good example, because it establishes the stakes involved in clarifying this. Some scholars in South Korea (though not the consensus view, as far as I’m aware) who operate from an adversarial basis towards the entire Chinese presence in Korean history see the war as a fight for Korea’s independence against not just Japan, but also Korea’s Ming ally, who “actually wanted to annex Korea while they were there supporting Korea.” Thus, Korea fought off not just Japan’s hard takeover but also the Ming “soft takeover.” K.M Swope’s “A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598” shows how this view is completely unfactual. The Ming were certainly frustrated at the military inefficiency of lacking direct control in Korea while conducting the defence against Japan, but they were never interested in annexing Korea as a result of this.
The real reason for this allegation is that those scholars simply aren’t capable, through their Hobbesian cynicism, of conceiving a foreign policy relationship that isn’t based on an agenda of conquest and eventual annexation in the style of European imperialism. As such, they see shadows of European settler-colonialism everywhere in history, even when the evidence isn’t there. By this, their motive is to essentially whitewash the genocidal European mentality that brought about the past 500 years of global trauma by saying that “Europe just simply got to it first, everyone else would have done it as well in the same position.”
I call this the “You would have been a Holocaust supporter if you lived in Nazi Germany” cultural relativism-fetishist argument you used to see all the time on Reddit, which forgets through its assumption that, no, not everyone is a hetero-normative White Christian and most people in the world would have been thrown into the camps if they were somehow transported to Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, a rejection of that mode of conduct is how China historically behaved by-and-large under the “traditional” dynasties and how modern China aims to be.
I would add that through this, the parallels between the “Ming takeover” allegation and the modern propaganda against China’s BRI could not be more plain. The argumentation is basically the same. “Sure, those countries may be right to resist the Western/IMF neocolonialist ‘hard takeovers,’ but they also have to watch out for China’s aid ‘soft takeovers’ too.”