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- [00:08]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Red lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:21]
B
Hi, everyone here.
- [00:23]
C
Sorry, we're. Are we going?
- [00:24]
B
We're going now. Yeah.
- [00:25]
C
I'll just tell you anyways, I'm number two ranked player in America and Premier League Fantasy. My brother pushed me into making a team last minute and I just like threw something in and I got number two in all America. It won't last, but I am the king right now.
- [00:43]
B
This is truly impressive, sir. Thank you. I'm glad. This is what happens when. This is like when the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean where they showed up in a completely distinct field where they had none of the skills, where they had basically built out their skills in a certain situation, entered a different ecosystem than one where you as like a libertarian schizo entered the fantasy football space.
- [01:07]
C
Right. Because I don't watch soccer, so I don't know the players.
- [01:09]
B
But wait, this is soccer? I thought you said.
- [01:12]
C
Okay, that's Premier League. Yeah.
- [01:14]
B
Oh, okay, cool. I don't follow schools.
- [01:17]
C
That's a ton of people on those. It's a huge league. It's got a million people.
- [01:22]
B
Is this. What country is this?
- [01:24]
C
It's a global league. So I'm 40 globally, but number two in the US just, just for this week. I'll be down next week.
- [01:33]
B
I'm happy for you. I didn't. I don't follow sports at all, which was a real nightmare growing up in Philly because in Philly everything is sports. I was ruthlessly mocked when I went to public school for not being in sports. But. So this episode is Imperial China and we're going to cover the period from that where the ancient China episode stops, which is the Han dynasty, until the arrival of the British with the modern China video. And that's 2,000 years in one of the great Eurasian civilizations. And that may seem unnecessarily long and unfair, and it probably is. However, I'm still going to do it. And the reasoning for that is a big difference between me and other macro historians. A macro historian is a. Is like a historian who covers all the different sub periods of history. It's like grand strategy is to strategy what macro historians are to normal history. Grand strategy is playing strategy. Game is grand strategy is how to manage strategy on top of a series of sub strategic games. So a grand strategist would like keep track of an entire nation's Macro strategy, while a moderate strategist would would lead an army, which is still profoundly difficult. But macro history is how basically the different sub eras of history fit together into a larger narrative of human history. And so most macro historians tend to have either backgrounds in politics, technology or military history. And I have a background in culture, so I'm a cultural historian and is my background's in anthropology. And when I look at China in the 2000 years from the Han Dynasty until the breakdown of the old Chinese civilization with European colonialism is it's the same fundamental civilizational bedrock where China's social institutions formed around the time of the Han Dynasty. That's when the ruling class seized power. It's when the religious structure fossilized. Although Buddhism came in later, but Buddhism filled in the pre established structure that Daoism already had. It's when their economic system developed, it's when they developed their military system. And so when we're going to cover Hindu India, which I probably have to read another two books in the topic to do it justice, I'm going to do the same thing where India Greco Roman civilization in China exist on the same broader civilizational trajectory because they're part of Civilizational Cycle 2. Civilizational Cycle 2 is after the Bronze Age collapse until the fall of Rome. You saw the formation of these different civilizations that had the Axial Age at the same time in 500 B.C. they felt the Dark Age at the same time in 200 to 400 A.D. they had large empires around the birth of Christ. And so there is the strong parallels by India, Greece and China that occur at similar rhythmic patterns. What happened in India and China is they fossilized around 200 BC and they kept going for a lot longer as dominant world civilizations. India was the dominant world civilization around the time of the European Dark Ages. And China was for several different periods where China may have been out of the big four. Eurasian civilization, the one that was on top for the longest, but it depends by what metric you use. And India and China fossilized around 200 BC around the birth of Christ. And then they got knocked out of their stasis with European colonialism, then with the western half of Eurasia. That also happened with classical civilization, where in 200 BC classical civilization also stopped culturally innovating, where the Romans built a great empire, but they were pulling on the Greek precedent. But with the civilizations in the western part of Eurasia, they got destroyed around the time of the fall of Rome, which caused another civilizational cycle. And the reason I feel warranted for covering 2000 years of Chinese history in a single video is when the cultural bedrock is formed. The thing you are really talking about is the political shifts on top. And there were some economic or religious or those other shifts, but you're looking at a period which has a fundamental unity of character.
- [06:28]
C
It's interesting how there's this tendency to get stuck in the bedrock of your cultural developments. Like you're talking about Greek in India, and it's almost as if sometimes you need an outside force to be able to pick up the ball on that and integrate it, because it's. You were so tied to the original insight that you're not able to evolve it. I mean, there's ways to evolve within your own society, but it's a interesting dynamic.
- [07:00]
B
One of the things I've thought about, because keep in mind, I did alternate history videos for my first seven years of YouTube, so this is already how my mind works. But China experienced their own equivalent to the Fall of Rome period, and they saw barbarian invasions across North China. China split up into a series of collapsing feudal kingdoms. And that started in 200 A.D. and it ended around 600. And you had the Jin dynasty unify China. But the difference is that in Europe, there was still the fall of Rome, but Justinian didn't pull the empire together. We're in 600 AD under, I believe, the. I think so Chinese history is complicated. You had a. You have, like, three different Jin dynasties, you have three different Qin dynasties, you have multiple Song dynasties. Because in China, due to Confucianism, naming matters a lot. And so you have to follow the ritual names in Chinese culture in order to maintain sort of religious harmony. And so they'll reuse names from earlier periods of Chinese history, which makes it very difficult to keep track of things because. Are you talking about the Jin dynasty in the third century AD or the Jin Dynasty in, like, the sixth century AD? I think there was a Jin dynasty in the Warring states period, like 400 B.C. i could be wrong there. Or are you talking about the Qing Dynasty in the early modern period or the qin dynasty in 200 BC? So you run into these problems, but the Sui Dynasty unified China in the 600s, and with that, you saw Justinian attempted it. These are this huge school. I wouldn't say huge. It's just me reflecting the intellectual ghettos I exist in. There's an intellectual school of calling the period after the fall of Rome and before Muhammad as late antiquity. Because after Rome fell, you see this continuity of culture among the barbarian kingdoms and the Byzantines and Justinian was an emperor who nearly reunified the entire Mediterranean. And what would have happened to show the parallel between Western Europe and China is if Justinian reconquered basically the entire Roman Empire, I would guess barring northern France and Britain. And then Islam never arose. And so China had its own fall of Rome, but then it pulled itself back together. And a key distinction in the western half of Eurasia, in the eastern half of Eurasia is partly due to fighting grasslands nomads versus huge rice farming cultures, is the numeric discrepancy between the civilized and the barbarian was 100 to 1, I would guess for the Germans versus the Romans because it's forest farmers versus wheat farming civilization. So it's probably like 10 to 1. And so in it's the Arabs were desert barbarians who also had an, a large enough numeric discrepancy where the barbarians in the western half of Eurasia were able to knock out the pre established civilizations to a degree where they had to go through a trans, a transmutation of forms. And the transmutation of forms is when a pressure is applied onto a certain society or a thing that forces it to reformulate into, into a higher, better form. And so with the fall of Rome you saw the rise of Byzantine, Western and Islamic civilization out of the ashes of classical and Persian and the older civilizations of the Middle east like Egypt and Babylon, while in the East India and China kept going without real changes. And I've always wondered, due to my alternate history background, where Korea and Japan formed as ethnic identities at the same time as China's version of the Fall of Rome, what would happen if civilizational structures fossilized differently where Korea, Japan, North China, Manchuria became a distinct civilization by fusing with the barbarian steppe peoples. And then South China became its own civilization because both of them, there was a time before South China assimilated into North China when they were significantly more culturally different. And at the same time their climates were super different. North China was grassland land focused, South China was ocean focused. And I think it's fundamentally fascinating.
- [11:34]
C
I would love to dig deeper into the differences between north and South China because like you said, they've been together for the last 400 years. I think of most of the differences in terms of ideology, in terms of Hong Kong, because the southern ethnic type is most concentrated in Hong Kong and they are very opposed to the mainland. And I feel like those attitudes might translate more broadly into the south first divide. But I don't have a real clear mental picture of how there's a great.
- [12:04]
B
Anthropology book called the Nine nations of North America. And it breaks apart North America into nine different, nine different sub regions. And I think as an anthropologist, it's probably the best work on the topic. My friend, Deep read Dan, he's made the best cultural map of America I've seen anywhere. But he's going more so for the anthropology and the Albion seed stuff. If you want to understand how North America works today, Nine nations of North America does the best with the Rust Belt, the Great Plains. I've made that map for China. It's just, I made it on my older computer, so I lost it. But you can split China in a series of sub regions and China is, it's useful to compare it to as if the Roman Empire survived. And we're going to tease out that thread, but you can draw that thread for a pretty long segment. And so in the same way that in the Roman Empire you have these distinct local cults in these distinct local religions unified under the worship. In China, they don't worship the emperor as a God. They see him as like a manifestation of the divine will. There, there's a different, there's a strong, there's a very large difference between those two things I want to clarify. And so the emperor is a spiritual authority in the same way that like, let's say he would be in the Islamic world, but it's nowhere near the same where the emperor can't. He performs the spiritual rites but he's not a religious figure. And this sounds like nitpicking in our society, but when you. One of my friends likes to say the way history works is small differences over large groups of people over large periods of time mean the difference in everything. Theologically, Islam and Christianity are quite close, but in application they're incredibly different. And, and so when I was in the Imperial palace in Beijing, it was just, it was utterly ridiculous because the Imperial palace is Ming dynasty forward like 14th century onwards. And I was hearing about all the things the Chinese emperor did where most of the emperor's job, especially in the decadent periods of Chinese history, wasn't actually governing China. It was following the ritual prescriptions. And when China entered its crash out phases, where every civilization goes to sort of crash out periods, what they did is they would, they'd obsess over the Confucian ritual prescriptions and then not govern the country. China did this like five times at least. Where, when China entered, sort of like cultures have a situation where they circle the drain when their cultural technologies become so fossilized and sclerotic that that what they do is that they follow their cultural rituals which exist to unify and give the society guidance rather than actually solving the problems. And so this was an issue several times in Chinese history where in the period of Wang man, which is a really funny name, Huangman, it was this Confucian radicalism where for example, China was falling apart due to famines and civil war. And this was around the time of the birth of Christ. The Confucian radical emperor Wangmu, I think he was a teenager when he got power. He was not mature enough for what the authority he was given. He would do things like in Chinese culture, ritual prescriptions guide how you, how governance works. And I can explain this if you're interested, but it's sort of like the way politeness works. And politeness is very important. I always show politeness because what you're doing when you're polite is you're recognizing another person's innate humanity and their innate boundaries and respect. So in Heinlein once said, the destruction of politeness is scarier than like legitimate wars because it shows a society where people stop caring about each other and they stop treating each other with respect. And so what China did is they made this the dominant moral principle of their religious worldview. And so Wangmuang would do things like there were the four great oceans in Confucian terminology. And so he picked this lake in Central Asia which is like the size, it's a, it's smaller than a county. And then said, he said it was the western ocean. Or he would do things where he would destroy the agricultural system and the pre established like landholding nobility who knew how to farm. And then he subdivided it up among these like socialist peasants which caused mass famine because it was following correct Confucian protocol. Or the emperor was responsible for burning incense all the time. And interestingly this was a dominant thread of the medieval world economy because they were sourcing their incense like frankincense and myrrh in the Bible from Arabia. So the Chinese were importing enormous amounts of incense from Arabia, partly because they disliked incense, partly for these religious purposes. And what China did was it was stuck in these very like autistic ritual prescriptions as their religion. And they couldn't mentally break out of this. And I forgot how this relates to the China's version of the nine nations of North America, but I can go to that topic if you have nothing else to say.
- [17:22]
C
Yes, we'll figure it out if we go do it.
- [17:24]
A
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- [18:11]
D
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- [20:07]
B
So I've studied. So for China's nine nations of North America, you have China proper and China proper is about a third of China's geography and it's the eastern part of the country where China today is of comparable geographic size to the modern us. It's bigger than America without Alaska. But two thirds of that is not inhabited by the ethnic Han Chinese. It's inhabited by the sort of nomadic peoples like Tibetans or the Mongols or the Uyghurs or the manchus. And over 90% of Chinese live in China proper. And so China has its wild east, which you can split up into different regions, where you have the Tarim Basin, which is where the Uyghurs live. That's desert, that's the road west. You have Mongol, you have Inner Mongolia, you have Tibet, Manchuria. And then the next most easy split for China is north and south. And China inhabits the same latitudes as North America. So that's the best way to sort of mentally understand. Mentally understand how China works.
- [21:11]
C
And basically like the us but it ends in the step instead of the Pacific Ocean.
- [21:16]
B
Exactly. That's a way, good way of putting it. And it would be as if 90 plus percent of America's population was east of Arkansas, such it would be ended.
- [21:25]
C
In the steppe instead of the coast.
- [21:26]
B
Yes. Or a lot of America's only populated because we killed the Indians. Sorry, sorry. I just had a note because I bought this taint in Cairo and then it has this little metal thing that I threw out to be scratched my arm against and I'm terrified. It has like tetanus. Although I have the tetanus vaccine.
- [21:45]
C
Oh, don't worry about that. Tetanus is with metal mixed.
- [21:48]
B
Oh, there's a little bit of metal in this. And so I'm scratching.
- [21:51]
C
Yeah, but that's fine as long as it's not mixed with. It's, it's the, the poop that's on the nails from the cows that gives you the infection.
- [21:58]
B
I bought this in fucking Cairo. How am I supposed to know what it's been? And so it didn't draw blood, it nearly drawed blood. So There was a 15 second mental panic where I'm like, it's going to give me a horrifying illness. And then I like, it didn't draw blood, so I'm good. So that was what my mind was on. This ebony, by the way, I love.
- [22:17]
C
We'll go through the evidence of Tennessee later.
- [22:19]
B
So if you want to compare America to China, Beijing sits at the exact latitude as Philadelphia, 40 degrees north. Shanghai sits at the latitude of Jacksonville in New Orleans, Hong Kong is like Cuba and the Yucatan. If you like mess with the map a little bit, you could say Hong Kong sits the latitude of the Florida Keys. And Harbin in Manchuria sits at the latitude of Quebec City. So it's the same latitudes. And the original Chinese nation formed the latitude of sort of Virginia and North Carolina, where Confucius was from Shandong Province. And then there was a period of conquest outwards, where China is a conquest society, which just did a really good job of assimilating, where it's similar to Rome. And I'm going to say that again and again. Where the Italians conquered the entire Mediterranean region, and then they assimilated everyone in the broader region into their culture. And so by the time of the third century, people from Croatia or Britain or Syria would call themselves Romanitas, where it's the central region conquered outwards, but they did such a good job of assimilating and psyoping the conquered peoples that they formed the same ethnic identity. And so in China, like, the North Carolina region, started conquering the entire region, stretching from, like, New York down to Cuba. And the northern region was conquered way before the rest. Where the conquest of South China was actually deeply impressive, where they did it over a single generation to the Qin Dynasty. And the Qin Dynasty is where we're going to start, where you had the Warring States period. And watch the ancient China video for more context. The Chin conquered the area down to, like, Jacksonville and New Orleans, down to the Yangi Delta, from all these different distinct sub kingdoms. But the Chin are very much like. They're very much like Stalin or Mao, where they were this horrifying, authoritarian, totalitarian society where the government forced everyone to live in these communal compounds where they worked for the government. There was very little private economy, and they would. If one person in the compound committed a crime, everyone else would be killed or everyone else would be punished for it. And they killed off all the old nobility. They burned all the books written before their start. They tried to. They. They legalized religion and all these different things. And they would do even more crazy stuff, like they built the Terracotta army with. Where they built out a miniature army to serve the emperor in his afterlife because he was trying to attain immortality. And he did that through mercury poisoning, which failed. And they also were the first people to build the Great Wall of China. And Chinese historians have always had very mixed understandings of the Qin Dynasty, where they think this is the first time China got unified. And they built out a lot of the structures that later became Chinese Imperial, the Chinese Empire. The problem, though, was that they were just stunningly brutal by any metric you'd pick. And so they oppressed The Confucians. And the Confucians are to China what Christianity is to the West. They're the dominant religious substructure of China. And so when the Confucians were writing this, they wrote very negative things that the Qin Dynasty and their emperor, Qishi Huang Di, while he was still the founder of that civilizational trajectory. And Shishi Huangdi went through a rehabilitation in the 20th century, where the. The Communists liked him, of course, for obvious reasons. Dong saw him as his progenitor. And besides that, the Western left also like Chishi Huangdi. So he went through a period where. He went through a period where they tried to rehabilitate him. In the modern left, in history, the just pick all the worst opinions. They'll pick the most horrifying tyrants, people who have very few, like, actually good traits, like John Lackland or the Mongols or Qishi Huangdi, and then they'll try to rehabilitate them. And he conquered South China, and he did so quite quickly. Where North China had civilization for a thousand years up to that point, South China was tribes. And they did so by going through the river systems, where most of South China is unified by river systems, where you can go from the Yangtze delta in the middle of the country down to the bottom pretty quickly, and you do so by water. So they took out the water routes, solidified them by forts, and then conquered the entire south of the country in a single generation without any real military campaigns, which is pretty impressive. And so the Northern generals militarily occupied the south for the next thousand years, and they even pushed all the way down to Vietnam. And they called Vietnam. They gave it, like, an incredibly condescending name of, like, our little brother south of China, because the Vietnamese are their own distinct ethnicity. They have their own language, but the Chinese just said, no, you're ours. And so the Chinese held South China for a very long time. And they only really assimilated it in the early Middle Ages, where at the time of China's fall of Rome, South China remained part of the broader Chinese nation, but it was under the control of these Northern warlords, where Northern warlords controlled the south, kept it as an occupied military territory where they brought in Northerners. And the issue was partly disease. McNeil talks about this, where the Northerners were not acclimated to the South's diseases. And so what they did was once northerners picked up the genetic immunity from malaria, and people pass on immunity to illnesses through mother's breast milk. So it takes generations. Northerners migrated into the south, then the south became part of the broader Han nation. And oh, this is what I was going to say with the commonalities between the Chinese religious structure and the Chinese sub nations where in China you have languages that are highly distinct, where Cantonese and Wu, that's from the language around Shanghai and Mandarin is based around Beijing. And that was the language of the Chinese government. It developed over the high medieval period where even, sorry, Mandarin's early modern period, that was like a Ming dynasty thing where until the 18th and 19th centuries every region of China had their own dialects that were basically mutually unintelligible and the only way to communicate was by language. And so if you're a northerner in the south, because the Chinese Alphabet does not have a relation to words, it's as if the Egyptian Alphabet kept going where it's a pictograph, it's an image. And so you can use the language in a variety, you can use the written text in a variety of contexts. So if you're a Mandarin speaker going to Hong Kong, which kept Cantonese much longer because it was part of the British Empire, so they didn't have the Mandarin based Chinese conformist school system, you can use the Alphabet. So the Alphabet held China together. And if they didn't have it, they would have split up by now, I think. And the cult of the emperor and the shared religions held together these highly distinct languages that are further apart than let's say Spanish and French where it's comparable to if the Roman Empire survived and you have the shared Roman Empire, but then people evolved into having these sub languages like French and Spanish and Catalan and those things. And so in China you have these highly entrenched regional cultures. And as continental sized empires go, India is the continental sized country with the most internal cultural difference. Russia is the least. Russia has less cultural internal diversity than America does. And so China is somewhere between on this axis. Actually no, Australia is by far the least. But they've got 40 million people, they barely count. And China's somewhere between America and India in cultural diversity. Where I would China is less than the European Union. So there's in this access, China has more internal cultural diversity than America does. It has less than the European Union and it has less than India. And so if you go inside the sub regions of China, this is how I divide it. You have the North Chinese Plain which has militarily dominated the rest of China. And that's the region south of the wall. That's the latitudes from like New York down to the Carolinas. That's Combination of woodland and grassland. It's got a climate comparable to the American Midwest. And that region is where the central government's been based. They're more hierarchical, they're more conformist, and they're the imperial core. In, like, fantasy novel terms, it's the.
- [31:35]
C
Same as the US So far.
- [31:36]
B
It is south of it. You mean the Northeast?
- [31:40]
C
Yeah.
- [31:42]
B
So if you and I start talking about this, it's going to come the entire rest of the video. So I'm going to refrain, because we could make a video on American regional cultures or the history of that in the future. But the Northeast also, it's our naval and industrial core. So in China, that naval and industrial core is in the south and the East. What we did in America is with the government contracts in the managerial state is that we de industrialized and decommercialized our old technological and commercial core. So those things had to move to the Sun Belt, which is what also happened in China, where earlier on, their technological and commercial core was in the north, but due to the centralizing government power, it migrated to the south, which the government can hold on less easily.
- [32:27]
C
While we could get some indications of how our current process is going to go, because that's happening now with the Sunbelt, like you said, based on what we learned in China. Right.
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B
You are not going to become China. We're not allowed to. We're not going to become the centralized bureaucratic state where. Where everyone's crushed under the government, denied.
- [32:46]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah. No lessons for how to avoid it.
- [32:49]
B
Yes. And so you have the north, and then you have the Shanghai Delta, which is the mouth of the Yangtze River. And for most of the last thousand years, this is the most dense besides Bengal, the mouth of the Ganges river, this is the most populous place on Earth, and it's sometimes the wealthiest place on Earth as well. And whatever city dominates the mouth of the Yangtze is determined by context in a historic time period. Sometimes it's Shanghai, which was originally a British fishing village. Sometimes it's Hangzhou, sometimes it's Nanjing. There's a variety of other ones. And this is China's second core. So whenever the capital is not in Beijing, it's at the mouth of the Yangtze River. But the thing as well is that this sub region, it has, like, urban maladies. And I follow a lot of Chinese YouTubers I want. There's like six Chinese YouTube channels I watch to keep up with Chinese news. And they all talk about Shanghai as like a sort of New York region where it's hyper Competitive, it's capitalist, but it also, it's very cold, it's very sociopathic, it's very status seeking, where Beijing is like a macro sized Washington D.C. and then Shanghai is like New York and they attract different varieties of people. But like, imagine if we made Washington D.C. twice as cold and sociopathic and that would be Beijing. And I'm sure that's not fair, but it's the best explanation I can give. Apologies to Chinese viewers. You can tell me if I'm wrong in the comments. Then you have the central Yangtze Valley, which is agricultural core. It's lots of people and it's similar to the American Midwest, where everyone discounts the power of the Midwest. Like the rest about The Midwest is 100 million people. It's frequently been the wealthiest place on earth. But the problem with the central Chinese core is because it's so dispersed, you can't concentrate pressure. So this region is like the chessboard for the rest of China. People fight across it, it and it can't concentrate power. Where in the Northeast, due to the way it works, you have very distinct cultures like Philadelphia or Boston or New York or D.C. which have very different vibe, completely different culture. Like growing up in Philly, we didn't know anyone from New York or D.C. because it's that regionally concentrated. And in the Midwest you'll have Milwaukee, you'll have Chicago, you'll have Detroit, which aren't able to build up regional concentration in the same way because the Midwest is so dispersed. West of that you have Sichuan, which is an area the size of France. And keep in mind all of these provinces, or a lot of them, have over 100 million people. So Guangzhou province has nearly 150 million people. I have some stories in China where you can drive for three hours straight, look in each direction and see these enormous skyscrapers that are just, I don't know, 50 stories tall right next to each other. You'll see like 10 of them and you'll drive for hours straight. And you just see them for hours upon hours upon hours. And I'm thinking this is how you have a billion people in a country. That's where they live.
- [36:09]
C
It's amazing. Like I've said, the Shanghai to Xi' an train route, almost an unbroken collection of endless gray landscapes. Like when you're in Tokyo on the tower and you see endless gray. And then at night it's all orange light and smokestacks.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Is what sticks out at night, but it's, it's a complete ocean of gray.
- [36:30]
B
Yeah, it's crazy. Or I've taken hyper, I've taken high speed railroads in China too, and I've seen that as well. Where people forget how empty most of America is. Even the most crowded northeastern states are, the vast majority of them are empty. And in China, it's not like this. Where China has the highest population density in the world, especially the eastern third. So you can take transiting cities, you won't see any forest. It's going to be factory, going to be. The land is polluted. It's the most domesticated landscape in the world. And I, when I was a kid, I loved nature documentaries and I would watch these Chinese nature documentaries or there was a one by the BBC I loved. And it's funny because it was seven episodes and only one of them was in China proper. All the others were like, look at the pandas. And Sichuan, which is the edge of China proper. Look at, look at the pumas or the leopard, the snow leopards in Tibet. This is like the kind of like there's a distinct type of goat that informed like Theseus's golden lamb that lives in western China. So it's funny that when you look at the human narrative of Chinese history, it's mostly in China proper, but then for the animal wildlife, almost none of it's in China proper. And their one documentary on China proper was like, very few animals live here. There's like two Yangtze alligators that are left and there's like one Yangtze dolphin. But it's interesting that a time of Confucius, or even into the early Christian era, China had rhinoceros. In modern Yangtze, the modern Shanghai area, they had the alligators and the dolphins, as we said, in the Yangtze they had elephants. In South China they had tigers. And tigers are significantly more dangerous than lions. Tigers would just. In India and China, they just wipe out entire villages without the peasants being able to fight back because the peasants weren't armed and they didn't have a martial tradition. So in European folklore, you hear about the monster that kills people and then some brave knight shows up and kills it. In China, that just doesn't happen.
- [38:33]
C
It's just the monster that wipes out the town.
- [38:35]
B
Yeah, exactly. And then you have to wait till the emperor, you get the notice from the emperor to kill it or the emperor sends a guy to kill it and you had a variety. I'm probably forgetting others too. So China used to have an insane wildlife in the ancient period. And you think about like, it's weird to think of Confucius seeing A tiger or seeing an elephant. And at the same time, in ancient Greece, they had. At the. In early Greece, they had lions.
- [39:03]
C
In Greece, black main lions, too, bigger ones.
- [39:08]
B
That's so cool. They also had oryx or these huge extinct Ice age cows that lived in Greece.
- [39:15]
C
And yeah, I was the white rhino. Last male just died. There's two females left.
- [39:21]
B
Yeah.
- [39:22]
C
And they have, like, IVF plans or whatever they're working on. It's so frustrating because they banned the trade because they insisted that's the only way to stop it, and they banned farming. But it would have been so easy to farm these white rhinos like they did with the other species and just have thousands and thousands of them, but they try to shut it down.
- [39:42]
B
It's heartbreaking. I love animals. One of my passion projects is I want to make, like, animal preserves in Texas the size of European countries and then put African and world animals in there so that if these countries have issues, if there's a major famine where Africa starves and they kill all of their endangered species, we can still have them in America to make sure they're okay.
- [40:03]
C
Exactly. The animal rights people are working harder than anybody else to kill these animals like they killed the white rhino by getting the trade successfully shutting. Shut down. And by getting. By making farming illegal and making farming unprofitable because there's no legal market to sell it into. They killed the animals.
- [40:21]
B
It's like the things you say about child labor, where once the government installs child labor laws, it increases child labor because parents will practice child labor if they're going to starve.
- [40:33]
C
Yeah.
- [40:34]
B
And so if your family's going to starve, they're just going to do illegal child labor. And anthropologically, the second children, the second parents can afford not to have child labor. They'll automatically take their kids out of the workforce. And so for endangered animals, once you get rid of the legal trade, illegal trade pops up. Because if you're a Zambian tribesman and you live in dirt poverty, you don't care. Killing the elephant, it means your family's going to eat.
- [41:00]
C
Right. So they still get poached, but you're not. There's no motivation to farm, so.
- [41:05]
B
Exactly. So, oh, yeah, China has also been responsible. China is more responsible than any country for the endangerment of those African animals. Because lots of traditional Chinese medicine involves, like, crushing up an elephant or a rhino for medicine.
- [41:22]
C
Well, that was part of the confusing part because they got Yo Yo Ma to make that illegal in China. Maybe not Yo Yo Ma, the basketball player, he Did a big public campaign to make it elite. Yeah. And they made it illegal. And so that killed the farms in South Africa because they had no market to sell it into. Yeah, but the white rhinos were in different countries that didn't have farms at all.
- [41:47]
B
Yeah.
- [41:48]
C
So it was entirely avoidable.
- [41:51]
B
Another note before we return to China is for conservative political people in the audience. Keep in mind that every single environmental issue except CO2 emissions scores better with conservatives than progressives. In every other form of environmentalism, between forest preservation, animal rights, keeping, making sure the water is clean, the air is clean, conservatives care more than progressives. It's just we've coded environmentalism as global warming. So if conservatives want to pick up the issue of environmentalism, it's very easy and return to China. So to go to the sub regions of China, you have Sichuan in the west, an area the size of France with I think like nearly 100 million people. And Sichuan has always been its own distinct cultural polarity where it was an independent country until the Qing period where they conquered it. And it's surrounded by mountains. And so when the rest of China falls, Sichuan is always the last place where it was the capital of China in World War II because the Japanese took the eastern third of the country. And Sichuan is known for the place in China today with the best work life balance. It is a highly humid, subtropical climate. I went there when I saw the largest statue of Buddha on earth. The town, the university town where that Buddha statue is. It's my favorite place I've been to in China. He's very peaceful and beautiful. So. And then you go to the south and I always think about the area between the Yangi and the bottom coast because I know there's like hundreds of millions of people there. And I couldn't say a thing about it because it's mountains. But you get to the southern coast and you have the Guangzhou and you have Fujian. And both of them have their own distinct languages and cultures, but both are the merchant sort of pirate like cultural archetype. And so when China's interfaced with the rest of the world, they've done so through Fujian and Guangzhou. And they alternate having advantages over one or the other in Hong Kong, in Shenzhen or in Guangzhou. Guangzhou is the place where most of the important Chinese modernist figures were from because that's where the Europeans had the biggest presence. And it also adapted technology the best because it's the furthest away from the central government in Beijing. And so Gwangju has done better in the modern period, in the Medieval period, Fujian did better. Taiwan has become functionally an extension of Fujianese, Fujianese culture, where Taiwan was inhabited by these indigenous peoples who were relatives of the. I believe the Filipinos who were. Or the relatives of the Filipinos. And then it got populated by the Han Chinese in the modern period, between the 17th century, where the Dutch actually held Taiwan for the Chinese did, which I love to say, to throw off Chinese people where. Because they'll always say Taiwan is Chinese. And I'll say, you know, the Dutch were there first, but like Hong Kong.
- [44:51]
C
It was literally a rock.
- [44:53]
B
Yes. And I don't mean that as a serious claim. I just like. I like fucking people. And so Taiwan was populated recently. It's culturally an extension of China nearly completely. And then you have. So you have the bottom coast and you have Yunnan, and Yunnan is the mountainous southwest. That region was only populated by the Han in the early modern period, where China had its own Wild east moment. And John Key talks about that during the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, where Chinese settlers would move into Yunnan and like Guijiang in the sort of the mountainous southwest. And China has a lot of designated sort of native peoples, which are like the Native Americans in America. They have reservations, they have independent privileges, but it's. They're not given anywhere near as good treatment as the natives in America are. And so most of them are concentrated in Yunnan, because in the mountains, there's lots of space for distinct cultures. And Yunnan's the poorest place or one of the poorest places in China today. And in China's wild, wild west, down in Yunnan in the early modern period, they had stuff where you had battles between settlers and local tribes, you had genocide of the local tribes, you had enslaving them. So it was just a crazy moment. And so those are the distinct sub regions of China proper.
- [46:19]
C
It sounds like Colorado or something.
- [46:21]
B
Yeah, something like that. Or New Mexico. So we go into different sub regions of China, and let's do this chronologically, where the story of the fall of the Qin Dynasty, and this is around 200bc is such a good emblem for why bad regimes fall. And the Qin Dynasty was used for the rest of Chinese history as a cautionary tale for what the emperor had to avoid. And we spoke about that already. But it started falling when, after the fall of the Qin Emperor, there was not the sort of fear to hold the empire together, because Qin Shi Huangdi was a brutal man, and he was capable of just holding the reins really tightly. But his son was not as strong. And they ruled purely through Fear. Where the China's dominant ideology were the legalists. And the legalists thought that you need to use brutality and force to control people. And through that, you can basically, you can dominate the public. And you should never use carrots. You should only use sticks. And as an example of that, one of the. It was very draconian, where they said, we're going to kill you for everything. And so these soldiers had to meet up for a muster spot where China had confused, had conscription, and the penalty for arriving late was death. And the soldiers who were walking out, they had flooding in their sub region. So because they were going to arrive to the muster point late already, they just launched a revolution because they were dead men anyway. And the Qin were so widely hated that this caused a spark and this warfare where it fell apart. And one of my favorite fantasy novels ever is the Grace of Kings is the Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. And it's sort of a Chinese steampunk version of Game of Thrones. And it's really fun. And it does a pretty good job of explaining this exact time period where they take all the dynamics from the fall of the Qin Dynasty and the rise of the Han, but then they put it in a fantasy setting. And, for example, there were two rebel leaders. One was this noble warlord, and another was the future Han emperor. And he was a sort of vagrant and peasant who rose up to become emperor, which is actually an archetype in Chinese history. It's happened at least twice where a homeless man becomes emperor. The start of the Han Dynasty and the third of the Ming Dynasty, the third of the Song Dynasty, also was a peasant rising to emperor. Where out of the great four Eurasian civilizations, China is the one that allows social mobility the most and where class divisions are the weakest. And what happened was that these two commanders, they rebelled against the central monarchy, where the Qin Dynasty fell pretty quickly, and these warlords fought each other. And then as the war continued, they started to become enemies and the two dominant rivals. And then the founder of the Han Dynasty murdered his former ally, installing himself as emperor. And the Han Dynasty was China's equivalent of the Roman Empire. It was their great central classical civilization, where they reached what would become their greatest geographic extension in all the future. Chinese dynasties were modeled off the Han. And so when you hear about the ethnic Chinese, they are the ethnic Han, in the same way that if the Roman Empire survived, they would have called themselves Romanitas.
- [50:03]
C
Like the Romanians.
- [50:04]
B
Exactly. Yeah. I am going to go to the bathroom. I will pause and I will return so with the rise of the Han Dynasty, you saw a fundamental shift from the Qin Dynasty to a completely different structure. Where I talked about the religious structure of China in the earlier video on ancient China. So that's already solidified. Watch that video for more context. But China's got this duality within Daoism and Confucianism. And I can compare Confucianism to Christianity because it's the sort of substructure and this operating system of China in the same way that Christianity is the underlying operating system of Western civilization. And you can plug other moral codes on top of Christianity, like science or liberalism or leftism, but it fits inside the Christian framework. Or in China, Confucianism is the bedrock where China is mostly Confucian and there are periods that it gets more other religions, but it can't fully stray from Confucianism without losing its character in the same way that when the west strays from Christianity, the West loses its character. And so the Qin Dynasty, that was under legalism, which was a brief ideology which burnt out because it was just too brutal, where legalism treats people as if they're pawned on a chessboard to be controlled in legalist texts. I read a primary source about this where they literally tell the king, do not love your wives and your concubines too much because women make you weak. So you must stay in your masculine frame so that your concubines don't make you weak. Or like, do not care about the lives of your followers because they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. It's overtly sociopathic, which I, to be.
- [51:56]
C
Fair, if you have concubines, it's probably easy to overextend yourself.
- [52:00]
B
Exactly. A man has only so much virility. He must either put it into his women or put it into his conquest. Or you could just increase your virility, but you can only increase your virility so much with a rhino horn. Exactly. And so the legalism failed because it was just too overtly brutal. Although it did create a lot of the political institutions in like the logic of imperialism. So it operate in the background. Then you have Confucianism, which is respect your social superiors, respect the social contract. Confucianism is not a spiritual worldview. It's more so like liberalism or Marxism, where it's a political ideology, where China's ruling class were Confucian governed bureaucrats. And China had multiple ruling classes we'll talk about, but their predominant one were the bureaucracy, where the west is today. Governed by bureaucracy. But a key distinction is that in China they were tested by reading the ancient texts. And that would be as if America's bureaucracy came from Bible study. So it's in some ways closer to the Catholic Church than it is to the modern Western bureaucracies. So they'd study the texts, pass the exam and then be put into the government. So you have that substructure and then you have Daoism, which is the Chinese version of alchemy. And it's more chill vibes and it's going with the flow and mastering nature in accepting the chaotic. And the Han Dynasty was highly Taoist, so they installed a free market economy which made China very wealthy. And they had a philosophy of governance based around Wu Wei. And Wu Wei is go with the flow. Where in the Han Dynasty they said the government which governs the least does the best, and the best way to govern is to govern as little as possible. That was a well established principle in the Han Dynasty.
- [53:54]
C
I love how universal these things are.
- [53:57]
B
It's like the truth, almost as if. Yes. And so the Han Dynasty became and became one of the wealthiest places in the world in an engine of growth where they restrained the government so that China could grow out as a popular, as a sort of pluralist society. And the Han Dynasty extended to China's largest borders historically, where there's sort of. I have three historic China's. There's Greater China, which is the Tarim Basin. The Tarim Basin is China, historic China before the modern period. The furthest west it gets is like modern Kyrgyzstan. The furthest China has ever gotten west is like 100 miles west of its. Further of its westernmost border today. So the China can take the Tarim Basin, they don't take Tibet. So on the map, Tibet is the area in the southwest of China. It's the highest place on earth, much like Berkeley University. And it's this high up desert plateau where it's just cold and icy. And the Chinese never took it, partly because the Tibetans were mighty warriors until the Mongol period when the Mongols killed off their warrior nobility and made them domesticated under the Buddhist priesthood. But also the Chinese were taking out the Tarim Basin because they were trying to invade west along the Silk Road to reach the connections with Persia and India. And so the Tarim Basins, the western road out to that. And it's a lot of desert and it was populated by people who were ethnic Europeans at the time called the Takarians. Watch the Silk Road video if you want more context on that. And the way to see the Chinese expeditions in the Tarim Basin is almost as if America fighting space wars, where we could fight space wars. Now, it would require such an enormous capital investment that it would be incredibly expensive to do so. And periodically the American voter would get really tired of funding these space wars. But in the broader scheme of things, said space wars would give America enormous strategic and sort of civilizational benefit. So the issue China ran into with these expeditions in the Taurim Basin, which are in the pre industrial world, non oceanic travel, just, it was very hard to do. It was very hard to send wagons thousands of miles by lands take out the Tarim Basin. So what China would do is they'd have a period where they'd colonize it frequently exert enormous amount, enormous amounts of effort to colonize the region where today China is currently genociding the Uyghurs and putting the Han Chinese in. But this is like the fifth time China's done it. And each time the Tarim Basin is one of the most genocided places on Earth because it's in the middle of the map and really isolated. So the Chinese will send settlers, all the settlers will die. A new group migrates in, new group migrates and kills that group. So it's this constant battleground. But it is interesting where you'll hear stories of there were Chinese colonists who were sent out in the Han Dynasty around the birth of Christ. And then 700 years later, the Tang Dynasty reinvades the region and they run to these Chinese settlers who are sort of like this science fiction isolated community where they have all of these cultural mores from 700 years earlier. But they're still identifiably Chinese, right?
- [57:23]
C
Like the, the island off of Virginia. And that, that still speaks kind of in a more original British accent, but it's so amazing. The whole Eurasia region is insane because it's like a wild west goes all the way to the end. And then when you get to the end, it goes into another wild west coming from the other direction. So it's, it must be infinitely hard to get across, especially the middle, which is the most sparse and least habitable.
- [57:51]
B
It's important to realize that a big reason that China's held together for so long, and this speaks to a concept historians talk about where you need to have shared struggle to keep a nation together is the climactic and civilizational shift from Mongolia to north China is huge. Where across the step from west to east it gets drier and colder and more difficult to live in. So the Mongols were the most barbaric and the most primal of any of the nomadic peoples. Then you have the Chinese, who, out of the big four civilizations, they were the most civilized and the most like, sort of tempered by their own civilizational trajectory out of any people. And that's not purely a good thing. What I mean by that is that in China, the government and the civilization gained such power that they destroyed the religion, they destroyed the military, they destroyed a lot of these very different things. And so you're pitting together one of the most savage barbarian peoples right next to one of the most basically cultured and civilized peoples, which is why the Mongols kept on conquering China, where. And at the same time, China's held together, because you've had this horrifying threat right next to them. And so they've had to keep together as a civilization to fight off the nomads of Mongolia, where the Chinese state first unified at the same time as they were fighting the Shuang new barbarians or the ancestors of the Huns, who had this confederacy across Mongolia, stretching across the plains over a thousand miles. And then until the time of the Ming Dynasty, they were still held together fighting against the Mongols. So it's this continuity and the reason that Beijing, or the North Chinese Plain has consistently been the capital of China is the North Chinese have had to get their acts together militarily to fight off the barbarians. So if the North Chinese are developing all of these systems to fight off the barbarians, it's made them the toughest people in China, which meant they can conquer the rest of China.
- [59:59]
C
That makes, that gives a lot of useful context into why they dominated the south. That makes a lot of sense.
- [60:03]
B
And the Chinese had this consistent geographic issue where when they fought, the Schwang knew initially, essentially they had a series of horrible wars where the Schwengnu won, the Schwenu humiliated the Chinese, married their princesses and forced them to extort enormous amounts of tribute. But then this created a period of introspection inside China where they completely changed their social and military structure, fought against the Shang new again, and then they genocided the entire Mongolian grassland where they were so hard to fight. The Chinese just said, fuck it, we're going to kill all of you. So they went to every water source in Mongolia, butchered every one of the major water sources. And because the nomads had no place to get water, they had to migrate west and they burnt all the grasslands, they killed all the people, which forced the Huns west. So they eventually slammed into Europe 600 years later. And the Chinese built their first colonial empire out in the Tarim Basin in Uyghurstan. I hate the term Xinjiang because it's new frontier in Chinese. And it just. It's completely destroying the Uyghurs who are the native people who have been genocide. And I think it's completely unforgivable. The Western media does not hold China accountable for it because it's legitimately a genocide. And we have so much evidence for that. I don't want to get into that now. It takes me forever to explain, so I call it speaker stance. And so the reason the Chinese went out to Uyghurstan first is because they didn't have a lot of good cavalry, where this speaks to the climactic difference, where the Chinese could only fight infantry because China was so densely populated, there was no place for large horses. So they had these pike armies. But the nomads, who fought entirely on horseback, they had a numeric. They had an enormous qualitative military advantage which where they could just ride circles around the Chinese, murdering them and the Chinese couldn't counter them. So when the Chinese did fight the nomads, the, when it worked under the Han was just a complete destruction of the grassland. But the Chinese couldn't pull that trick very much because it required such an enormous expenditure of effort that once they did it once and then they saw the nomads come back later, they can't justify the do this set up themselves again and again and again, which is why they built the Great Wall. And the Great Wall was first built under Qixi Huangdi, and it wasn't maintained uniformly, but it went up and went down and was. There were certain periods where part of it was maintained and other parts weren't. But even in the Ming Dynasty, in the early modern period, that was when the Great Wall was the best maintained, nearly 2,000 years after the original version. So it's been a continuous thread over Chinese history. And part of the Great Wall was there are certain periods of Chinese history where the oppressive state was so bad that the oppressive state was so bad that people would flee out to the grasslands to escape the government. So in the early medieval period, the Great Wall was built to keep the Chinese in more than to fight the barbarians out, which is one of those interesting dynamics you keep seeing in history. Once you get a certain level of skill that you wouldn't notice in the beginning.
- [63:17]
C
What do you mean? How does the skill relate to it?
- [63:20]
B
Once you pass the Dunnings Kruger on studying history, you're going to Start to notice all of these patterns. When you start studying history, you're not going to notice. But once your pattern recognition gets good enough, you realize it's omnipresent. And so one of the patterns you keep finding in history is the pull of barbarism is often stronger than the pull of civilization. So there are certain eras of history where people willingly choose to become barbarians because being a barbarian is better than being civilized. It happened in the period of the fall of Rome. It happened in Southeast Asia as a continuous thread. A lot of the white people in colonial America chose to become Native Americans because that was a better lifestyle. So there's like the pull of barbarism as a better way of life is a consistent thread. And the barbarians consistently beat the civilized peoples. Another thread is the omnipresence of religion and mysticism and affecting development. When you start studying history, you don't notice it, but once you pass Dunnings Kruger, you realize religion is such an important element of how history works that to not study religion is kind of mad. Or you start to notice how much disease affects history. When you start studying history, you, you notice the. The pattern. You notice the basal patterns like politics or technology. And then once you get deeper into history, there are certain variables that are incredibly powerful that no one tells you about. When you start studying the discipline, right?
- [64:49]
C
Like the philosophical and religious currents, like all the stuff that really helps you track it through another.
- [64:56]
B
Yes.
- [64:56]
C
Overriding layer.
- [64:59]
B
So you have the front against the barbarians and they go through China proper, the Tarim Basin. The Chinese held it into the Han, they regained it as the Tong dynasty. And then that was the last time the Han pushed out there. So there were two periods when China was strongest, when they could project power out, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. But it was. It was like their version of the moon, the moon landing. They could do it as stunts when they had a really good social structure, but they normally didn't have the energy and the will. And another thing is that the Chinese became resentful that. So whenever they had to do these Western wars, it enabled the government. When the government got the military and the technology to fight out in Kyrgyzstan, it meant they also had it to oppress the Chinese. So the Chinese political equivalence of libertarians and conservatives, which I don't like that phrase, it's completely anachronistic. They hated these colonial expeditions because it would allow the Chinese government to have these vectors to oppress their own people. They're having these enormous militaries. And the Chinese went through this fascinating period, watched the Silk Road video where they discovered the rest of the world. And the reason they did so is they had to go out west to find sources of cavalry to counter the nomads. So they looked for this place called the land where the, the blood sweating horses are. And that was the Takarians in the Tarim Basin in western China, where they sent out an explorer to find the rest of the world. The Huns captured him, made him marry a Hunnish woman. He fled from them, left his wife, then went west to the Tocharians, who they were like Scythian peoples in western China, befriended them, built an alliance with China, kept going west, discovered Persia, made it to Iraq, heard rumors of Rome, but then the people there lied to him, saying it would take a one year voyage to reach Rome rather than a week or two. So he never reached Rome. But this One guy, around 150 BC, he was the first person who realized China is not the only civilization in the world. So it's the historic equivalent of discovering multiple alien planets. It's the Chinese. It's the historic equivalent of a space opera. And he even he met a lot of Greeks, because the year before he reached Afghanistan, the Greek kingdom of Afghanistan had lost out to the Sockeye People or a variety of Scythians. So it's interesting that you see this trajectory a lot, where a Roman army which was captured by the Parthian Persians, were used as mercenaries to fight against China. The Chinese captured them, put them in a village in Western China, or under the reign of Marcus Aurelius, there were Roman sailors who made it to the Chinese capital in the North Chinese Plain. So there's. I'm not giving this topic justice because it doesn't really relate to China's imperial trajectory in itself, but there's this whole fascinating thread of how China related to the Silk Road and how they discovered the existence of the rest of the world.
- [68:01]
C
Everybody loves a crossover episode.
- [68:05]
B
Exactly. So the biggest extension of China is they have the Tarim Basin and they always have this little sliver of land in Gansu Province which connects China proper to the Tarim Basin. Then China has practically never held Inner Mongolia. That's a modern thing. Under the Tang Dynasty, they got the grasslands to submit to them. But the Tong, they could get the Mongols to basically pledge fealty. But the Chinese had real issues on the overt grassland. Then the Chinese held Northern Korea a lot. And the Chinese taught the Koreans how to have government and political system, where in a lot of cases, Korea parrots China's social and government system more than China itself. Korea is more conformist. It's more bureaucratic, it's more confusion than China itself is why.
- [69:03]
C
Why did Korea get like the concentrated version of China?
- [69:08]
B
This is a really common anthropological principle, it's almost a law in itself that colonial peoples or peoples on the fringe will end up taking cultural trajectories from the cultural interior more so than the cultural interior. So in a lot of ways, in practically every anthropological metric, America is more culturally English than England is because when the English migrated to America, they were separated from the European context. So their English traits sort of concentrated. Or Russia is the concentration of a trajectory which sort of existed in medieval Europe, that being the absolutist. Russia took on the trajectories of the Mongol Empire and then concentrated them on an industrialized society in a way the Mongols could not. And so when you're dealing with Korea, and keep in mind, in the year 1600, China had 120 million people and Korea had 1 to 2 million. So when you're operating on that much smaller a scale, it's much easier to concentrate institutions and maintain a consistent trajectory. And Korea's consistently been a Chinese feudatory. The Chinese haven't been able to conquer it because Korea was, frankly, poor enough. It wasn't worthwhile. And on top of it, the Koreans were just tough fighters. There were two or three times where Koreans defeated Chinese armies four times their size, one of which was in the Sway wars where the Chinese. It was the eastern equivalent of the Greco Persian wars, where the Chinese sent a huge army out to Korea, which got crushed. And this is one of the founding moments of Korean nationalism, because that war is what helped build the Korean nation. So in Tong, or the Han dynasty, the Chinese held the northern part of Korea while the south was independent. And then the Chinese also held Vietnam from before the birth of Christ, where they conquered a kingdom called the Dong Song, which is a funny name until 1000 AD when Vietnam finally declared independence. And after then, Vietnam fought off 27 Chinese invasions and won all of them. So we shouldn't be too sad that we lost in Vietnam, because they have a lot of practice, much like the Koreans. The Vietnamese are really tough.
- [71:35]
C
It sounds a little bit like England, Scotland, where they're kind of occupying, slash, invading them at will for thousands of years, but always having trouble, like, fighting fully occupying them.
- [71:44]
B
Yeah, it's comparable to Canada as well, where Vietnam is the only Confucian Southeast Asian country. The rest of them pull more so from the Islamic or the Indian tradition. And like Canada. Canada, it's an extension of America, but its identity is around not being an extension of America. This is another really weird anthropological thing that happens where because Vietnam's entire identity was fighting off the Chinese invasions, they took on all of these Chinese elements to oppose China. So they took in the Chinese bureaucratic system, their Confucian, their language is Chinese derived, all these distinct things where in Canada, because their identity is not being American, because they're in opposition to America, they take on all these American attributes.
- [72:38]
C
Yeah, makes sense. So what time period are we in now?
- [72:41]
B
We're not doing times.
- [72:42]
C
Oh, got it. We're in the four.
- [72:44]
B
We got sidetracked in the Han Dynasty. And so there's three Chinas geographically. The first one is the Greater China, which manifested into the Han and the Tang Dynasty or around the time of Christ and the 700 AD. The second one is China Proper, which we spoke about. That's the 1/3 eastern part of the country where the Chinese live. China was concentrated in China proper for most of this period. I would say in the Chinese Dark Ages, China was split up among China proper, the Song Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, and then the third. China is the weakest when the Chinese can only hold South China. And that happened parts of the Chinese Dark Age, later Song Dynasty, where barbarians take the north and the ethnic Hans survive in the south. And these were periods which caused South China to exceed North China. When South China beats North China, it's because the North's been conquered by barbarians either in the 13th century or in the Dark Age period where northerners would flee to the south and then introduce technology and culture. And these were profound periods of cultural transfer inside China. And because you saw this huge demographic move, and it's very comparable to the move recently in America from the north to the south, which is we know like we know so many people in Texas who are from the north who migrated down south because the north basically had its own barbarian invasions.
- [74:16]
C
Yeah. Ideological and globalist in nature. And so then how. And I guess we'll get to this, but I'm curious to see how when that prosperity moved to the south, South China Sunbel Belt China, how did the north either maintain or retake control even though the south remained more prosperous?
- [74:39]
B
So one of the history books I shill a lot. Lincoln pains sea and Civilization makes a very interesting point. And the tipping point from north to south dominance is around a thousand A.D. and that's partly due to disease gradient where the north, the Chinese finally acclimated to the South's diseases. And it's also partly due to the economic and mercantile shift of the high Middle Ages which you saw in Europe, where in the high Middle Ages North Europe surpassed South Europe due to shifts in plow design which meant that the North Europeans had could exploit their land in a way they weren't before. And in China it was the introduction of a new variety of rice agriculture which allowed having multiple iterations of rice farming a year. So that was around a thousand A.D. and that gave the South a demographic lead where by the time of the 13th century and the Mongols killing 30 million people in North China is of course also a factor where by the year 1270 South China had 80% of south of China's population. And it's where the lion's share was. And so the other thing is that North China was focused on the steppe in fighting the land barbarians. So the Tang and the Han Dynasty were the ones who conquered out into the grasslands. They were North China based. After a thousand AD, China becomes an ocean facing civilization. Where around 800 you saw Persian communities and Persian traders in Guangzhou. So the Song Dynasty in the high medieval period they didn't have any like land facing wars, but they were constantly trading with the rest of Eurasia. The Ming dynasty sent ships out to East Africa. So once South China gained demographic importance, China became ocean facing. But the north maintained its power over the south by crushing capitalism and, and using the centralized government. Because what happened in the Ming Dynasty is in the first few generations the Chinese were open to this global facing colonial empire in the world. But after that, the central bureaucracy that was North China focused throttled China's mercantile economy, its capitalism and its trade system. Where by a certain point in the Ming Dynasty, rather than sailing out to Kenya, they had nearly completely shut off foreign trade and they had created all of these regulations against internal Chinese trade which was the north artificially weakening the south to regain power.
- [77:20]
C
So we need to keep basically the bureaucratic control out of the north, even if the economic and demographic power goes south.
- [77:30]
B
Yeah.
- [77:30]
C
And it clicks. It's really interesting because you said in the beginning the South China was an ocean facing culture, in the North China was not. So when the demographic and political economic power shifted, South China became an ocean. Because that was an ocean facing country because that was the characteristic of the South.
- [77:51]
B
Yeah.
- [77:52]
C
And then like when the north totally took over in the 1600s, then they closed all the ocean facing stuff. So you can really connect it to the original nature of the populations.
- [78:04]
B
You can. And China fits in these sort of macro historical patterns where as an example, the stability of Southeast Asian governments is dependent on China's economy. In time periods when China had a strong economy, Southeast Asia was unified under these strong centralized governments. When the Chinese economy collapsed, Southeast Asia fell into warlordism. It's like how you can correlate the price of coffee with Columbia's Colombia being a democracy. When coffee price is high, Colombia is a democracy. When coffee price is low, it's a military dictatorship. So China fits into these rhythmic patterns across the world. And China was the wealthiest and most advanced place in the world for most of the historic period. Where to see this, where the social collapse of the han dynasty in 200 AD created a ripple effect which caused the fall of Rome. Because once China fell out, then. Once China fell out, you saw the destruction of the Silk Road, which destroyed the economies of the areas in between. And then that recession eventually slammed into the Roman Empire. It's similar with the fall of Rome. The introduction of Chinese gene pools into Europe killed a third of Europe's population due to plague. And then the reverse happened in China with the introduction of European gene pools. Alternately, the economic crisis from the Thirty Years War caused the fall of the Ming dynasty because by the time of the 17th century, the Chinese were dependent on European gold and silver. So when the Spanish economy fell apart, China couldn't maintain their internal gold and silver markets.
- [79:45]
C
I love how our largest battles are fought between microbes and viruses. We're not even aware of it. And to make a little epic about it. Yeah, the miniature animated world.
- [79:55]
B
The Black Death, too. The Black Death started in Yunnan and then spread to Europe. And it's interesting where what you see with. So North China didn't have to become the bureaucratic one, and South China didn't have to become the mercantile one. Where in the 11th century, North China was on the verge of the Industrial Revolution, where they had blast furnaces that had larger scale than anything until 19th century. Britain and China invented gunpowder. They invented the compass. And these were most in the printing press. These were mostly pushes by the Taoists where gunpowder is trying to find the elixir of immortality. And Dao is with the.
- [80:43]
C
They found the opposite.
- [80:44]
B
Yeah, exactly. But then what happened with the blast furnaces, gunpowder, all of these technologies and China had ships equivalent to Europe's. In the 15th century, Europe had some advantages where the Chinese boats were bigger, but the Europeans were faster and more like nimble.
- [81:01]
C
But they were an alternate version of a ocean fairing ship.
- [81:05]
B
Yes, exactly. They were so huge, they had miniature. They had gardens on them to grow their own food. The treasure ships were just Huge. They were.
- [81:12]
C
It brings back your space analogy.
- [81:14]
B
It does, yeah. And so when China does stuff, it does so in a huge scale without really a commitment to quality. So for the external wars against Mongolia or Burma or Vietnam or Korea, the Chinese would frequently send armies four times the size of the locals, not train them at all, not supply them, not have clear direction, and then the locals just butcher them in the local terrain. And it's the same thing with the sailing, where they build these ships several times larger than European ships, but then they're not as nimble or as good at sailing long distances. So China can really do things in a large scale. But the way their bureaucracy works is it's harder to have quality control. And so when they had the Industrial Revolution and the technology of the high Middle Ages, what then occurred was the government regulated it out, or we have records of this, where they made the regulations so hard for the blast furnaces that the Chinese didn't build them. The Chinese military, what the bureaucrats in charge said in the same manner that good iron does not go into nails, good men don't go into the military. And China was facing barbarian invasions at this time, where the bureaucrats would write poetry at how much they wanted to retake the north. But then they didn't actually fund the military to do so. And so China had all of these opportunities to break through to the next level. But their bureaucracy always handicapped them because Confucius was an arch conservative, where he was writing in 500 BC, and he was trying to go back to 500 years earlier, he would memorize the rituals of the early Zhou dynasty, which had a better social structure because China was in social collapse, then he would imitate them. So Chinese culture was only looking backwards. And because China was the great power of their region, they had no incentive to change. And so they consistently hit these issues. And so In a thousand AD, even in 1400, China could have completely dominated the world. They had the largest economy in the world into the 19th century. It was a highly cultivated and civilized society, highly technically advanced. Their elite were some of the most educated people in the world who were chosen through the Gao Kao system. But because their government and their bureaucracy handicapped them, they were incapable of doing so, and they stagnated.
- [83:34]
C
Two things I can think of with the blast furnaces is when. When they discovered the ability to have that kind of level of productive capacity, I'm sure they were immediately aware of all the implications that if that blast furnace technology spread throughout China, it might have some implications around their control of the Manufacture of weapons.
- [83:53]
B
Yes.
- [83:54]
C
Uh, and so they want to stay in control of their blouse furnaces, so they regulate the other ones out, get to keep a nice monopoly. And then the part about the good Chinese man should aspire to what, poetry or something and not the lower base. Yes, fighting is exactly how we were. Like all good American, we don't use this exact phrasing. But all good American kids with a good future and good parents go to college and the trades, which are happen to be really high in demand, just like the military was in demand then get ignored as not the ideal thing that the ultimate American should do or something.
- [84:33]
B
I wanted to be an entrepreneur when I was in high school and I got so much crap from school where everyone told me I had to go to college. Now everyone I know who went to college is just utterly screwed. Where it's the same system. And in China their, their ideal of masculinity was to study letters and to study Confucianism. But the problem with that ideal of masculinity is you can't fight the fucking Mongols and so your society gets conquered. And past 1000 AD, with the Neo Confucian Renaissance, China could never really fight offensive wars again. Where there were three ruling classes in China, there were the bureaucracy, the eunuchs and the nobility. And the bureaucracy won. And let's go through each of them. Where the bureaucracy formed initially in the Han dynasty and they were founded off Confucian principles, where they would have tests, where people would study the classics. And if you were passed your test enough, you would be promoted through the government system. And this initially worked out well because they were studying for broader knowledge and critical thinking. And so in the 12th century, in the medieval period, these ruling bureaucrats were people who were polymaths, who would make intellectual breakthroughs in a variety of fields. But in the early 14th century, with the rise of the authoritarian Ming dynasty, they structured it in a highly controlled way where you had to write the essays on very specific topics they chose. You had to write it in this very specific style. You had to write it in a very specific everything. So there was no space for creativity. And that's when China stopped being a forward facing power. So they selected their class through these highly like autistic controlled methods, which didn't make the best quality men. And that became an issue. So the thing with the Confucian bureaucracy is their benefit was they could maintain Chinese civilization where China never had this institution, they just wouldn't have survived. And they also had one of the most humane systems of Governance in all of Eurasia, where Chinese enlightened despotism was something that just was better than Islam or India or Russia, because Confucianism built in these moral structures so that it was very easy to prevent it from devolving into tyranny. So Confucianism is hyper conservative strategy. And that worked because China was the son of their area. China already had all the cards in their favor, so they didn't really have to play aggressively. And so that's why they went Confucian. It ultimately made them too conservative to change and throttled their development. So that was the first thing the Confucian bureaucracy. And China is a clan structure. The clan determines everything in China. They, your parents determine who you marry, they determine who you work with, they determine how you're taught. And China is ruled by these pater familiars or a single grandfather who has total authoritarian control over the entire extended family who live in a shared compound. In South China. They have these walled fortress family compounds. And that also informs the Chinese political structure, which is highly authoritarian, where they treat human life with contempt, where China will happily kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people in wars. But families would invest in generations to have one of their children pass the bureaucratic test. He would hoard money for it, invest it back in the family to train their children to do so. So you have these family lines which consistently pass the tests. And they would sort of have understandings that this family has good enough blood. They'll consistently pass people who can make the tests. But there was social mobility. And the Chinese have prized themselves continually on having high social mobility. And it's frankly remarkable. China had the gao cow bureaucratic system for thousands of years, even until today. And it did not become more corrupt and degenerate. It's like the Catholic Church. It's held together by the sense of like moral, spiritual, central direction.
- [88:43]
C
That's what I was thinking of how long it lasted, because this sounds exactly how, you know, not many people could go to university. And then the families that did, if they, if you went to university in the 60s and then your kid didn't, that's like, whoa, really going backwards. So people are building these family legacies of everybody in the family going to university. Oh, I'm the first in my family to go to university is following all these kind of social themes. It's just collapsing a lot earlier than the Chinese one. Thankfully, the.
- [89:13]
B
The way the secular cycles work in China and secular cycles are the consistent patterns where every few centuries societies fall apart due to having like Elite overproduction, too many people competing for good jobs, inequality, too high, too much competition and for jobs. And it happened like the Black Death, the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution. China has those. And the way to look for it is to figure out when the standards for the tests are completely impossible for normal people. So in the 19th century, when China had the Taiping Rebellion that killed 30 million people or 20 million people, the guy who launched it, Hong Shu Kuan, was this guy who had did the test three times and he failed each time. He had a spiritual experience where he saw himself as the second son of Christ, launched a revolution, made himself emperor, conquered all of South China. So what you're seeing here is this person who is completely capable enough to make himself emperor is being blocked out by the system. Where over the medieval and early modern period, as China had the commercial revolution, they had a moral panic of we're giving the merchants too much power, the merchants lack cultivation. We, we're going to use the state to throttle the merchant class so the merchants would buy up land, then become Confucian bureaucrats. And so it's interesting that China had the commercial revolution of Europe, but they throttled it on purpose where they said, we don't want a social code based on money. And so what you saw instead is that when China had political crises, what was going on was because China was like a sort of partial capitalist economy where the road to social mobility was through the test taking. And in certain Chinese political crises, the tests became so corrupt, people didn't trust them, so they had the revolution. So there's this single throttle for social mobility which basically determined the success of the Chinese nation. And that's very dangerous because when you have a single throttle for your nation's success or a single ruling class, when you screw that up, your entire civilization is going to fail.
- [91:18]
C
Right. Because there was mobility initially through the tests, but there's no mobility outside of the test. So when that gets messed up, it's a problem. And it reminds me of the French system where they have this really hard test at the end of high school, like when you're 17 or 18, and it just feels like it's getting harder and harder. And people talk about how hard it is and it determines your entire college opportunities because they have a restricted number of universities spots because it's public. It's not like everybody can be an art major. And so there's tons of resentment built up around this test.
- [91:51]
B
Yes.
- [91:52]
C
And it just means everything.
- [91:53]
B
You would not believe me, but the French actually structured it Off China on purpose. France went through a period of China obsession in the 18th century because they also have the bureaucratic Sun King monarchy and it caused the French Revolution. Yes, it's cringe. And you have the bureaucracy who eventually got a throttle on China, especially after the neo Confucian Renaissance, the 11th century. The second are the eunuchs who like, I just do not like these people, if I'm being perfectly honest. You look at the eunuchs, they're guys who have their testicles cut off because in China the Klan controls everything. And so because of that, in order to have people who can trust for the government, you have to cut their testicles off so that they won't have children and favor their children. And so over various periods of Chinese history, these eunuchs get power in the eunuchs, in the bureaucracy fight where the bureaucracy are hyper family Confucian oriented. The eunuchs are the opposite. So under Wang Maung, the eunuchs had a lot of power, which was later crushed. So the government would introduce the eunuchs in. They fight with the Confucians and the eunuchs suck because they have no balls. Literally. It's just constant, like harem court infighting where the eunuchs don't care at all the survival of the country. They're constantly infighting, they have no masculine virility. And it's just like in the eunuchs were finally crushed by the Confucians, that they were this consistent force of just court harem politics serving the interests of the emperor. And in the 15th century, the eunuchs had a lot of power, which was there. China had this political crisis relating to like some weird about like the emperor not following the correct customs. And then the eunuchs push that when the Confucians crush the eunuchs. But the eunuchs are this undercurrent in Chinese history.
- [93:43]
C
Did they have any redeeming qualities? Because I was thinking of them like the hyper productive career gay stereotype.
- [93:50]
B
No, they eunuchs have no redeeming qualities except that they're not going to have kids, which is.
- [93:56]
C
I'm just trying to find a way to rank them above the bureaucracy. That's my agenda.
- [94:00]
B
No.
- [94:00]
C
Damn.
- [94:01]
B
Okay, so the third group is the nobility. And the nobility, like the Han dynasty had a warrior nobility which they used to fight against the barbarians. And China's gone in and out of warrior nobility and socialist phases. The Han went through a socialist phase, the Tang went through a socialist phase, and the warrior nobility grew a lot stronger. Due to the nomadic barbarians where when China had its fall of Rome, all this nomad blood went into North China and they actually became the founders of a lot of Chinese. China's ruling dynasties. The Tang Dynasty, China's greatest dynasty, had lots of Turkic barbarian blood. And so the nobility, they were Buddhists because they didn't like the Confucian bureaucracy. So Buddhism was strongest in China in the medieval period because it was brought in before the Dark Age, early modern period, before the Neo Confucian renaissance of the 11th century, because this nomadic barbarian Buddhist elite made it popular. And the Buddhists were actually the people who pushed capitalism or the Buddhist monasteries, they were the banks of China and they were the industrial centers. And Buddhism's interesting where it fulfills a role similar to Daoism and it kind of goes in and out. It was big in the Middle Ages, a lot of the big political movements. There was a rebellion in the 12th century that killed like a million people by the messianic Buddhists. The Buddhists fought. They were the people who launched the revolt against the Mongol empire in the 14th century. But then Buddhism ultimately got crushed by the rise of Neo Confucianism with the bureaucracy where it's an undercurrent to China that never fully attains dominance. And the nobility pushed for China to be a military authority. But what happened was that with the peasant revolt of the rise of the Song dynasty, the peasants just butchered the entire nobility. So in the 10th century, China had this enormous civilizational shift from being a Buddhist warrior noble country to being a Confucian bureaucratic country.
- [96:00]
C
Oh, the Song peasants killed the Buddhist nobility. Damn. My fantasy team is called the Song Dynasty, the one I talked about earlier. That's funny, I was thinking about China.
- [96:12]
B
Yeah, it's the Chinese French Revolution. And so we've covered the distinct elements. The only thing left to do is talking about China's history chronologically. So Han Dynasty, there's the Western and the Eastern Han, the Western Han. And in high school, there's a Chinese restaurant in Philly called Han Dynasty. And we call it Handy Nasty.
- [96:34]
A
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- [97:44]
D
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- [98:51]
B
Han Dynasty, they conquered out west and they fell due to Wangmong, which is another easy sex joke where Wang Mong was this Confucian radical who was a teenager and he seized power and the peasants were starving. China's having a civil war and he obsessed with Confucian rituals and this caused a revolt which killed millions of people until he was unseated and they brought in another relative of the Han Dynasty to form the Eastern Han, which I think might have briefly reconquered the west. But then they didn't, and the Eastern Han held together for 200 years. They fell apart and then after this comes the War of the Three Kingdoms and this is China's sort of Arthurian Trojan War period Where China's great epic, the romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was written in I believe the 14th or 15th centuries, it's set in this time period. And I saw this Chinese movie called Redcliffe which is this six hour heroic epic about this time period. And it's a high budget movie. It's got a lot of stunts, but it's not very good movie. The storytelling isn't good. It's like it lacks class. It's a lot of cool battles, but it's ridiculous stuff like jumping over the other side's armies in their pike formation or singular heroes killing hundreds of men. Those sorts of things. Things. And I, I saw with my dad in high school and my dad would constantly mock the scene where one of the heroes is this sensitive guy who births a horse to show how caring he is. And my father just uses as a joke like why don't you just birth a horse to show like it's. You can clearly see the authors are putting it in to like sort of bait the female audience because he's this handsome guy who's cultured, he just births a horse in the middle of the story with no relation to the rest of the plot but.
- [100:36]
C
Right, like holding a baby, etc.
- [100:38]
B
Exactly. Yeah. That was division of three kingdoms where the empire fell apart because the Han had grown degenerate in the warlord Cao Cao seize control of North China. And it's widely disputed in China whether Caucao was the good guy or the villain or if he's like on his villain arc because his. He was sort of brutal warlord but he had some good elements and he wanted to unify China for the greater good. And in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was written by a South Chinese guy, the heroes are the two southern kingdoms which are fighting against the north. And they had this battle over the Yangtze river where the south beat the north. And there's lots of heroism and manliness and love and all those things. Good plot points. And so that was a big war, killed like 4 million people. This is a consistent thread in Chinese history. If like atrocities, the Matthew White book, which is the Hundred Worst Atrocities. If you read the Hundred Worst Atrocities you're going to read a lot about medieval China because China was the only place in the medieval world that had a large centralized state which could enforce conscription on the population. So you'll read about medieval Europe where like Charlemagne's army of 12,000 guys or like friggin the Capetian monarchy of France having their 500. There are points in the early French Monarchy when the king of France's army was just him and his friends of like 500 guys. And in China it's like Wang Mong raises an army of 300,000 men, or the Warring States periods armies of 2 million men. It's just crazy numbers. And so China raises these huge armies. They have the huge wars. And so if you read the bloodiest wars, it's lots of Chinese civil wars. So war, War of the Three Kingdoms, that doesn't really go anywhere. So China falls into a dark age period where the Jin monarchy briefly pulls things back together. And China has like several comical tyrants in this time period. One of the comical tyrants is like this like child emperor who raises taxes so much for their palace that rich people have their entire fortune stolen on the spot. And then the empire falls apart. Chinese emperors are liable to power tripping in the same way that like Caligula or Nero would. But Confucianism was generally very good at stopping that. Chinese emperors have less power tripping than their power and length should entail.
- [103:08]
C
It's like Emperor Cusco. How does that limit. How do they. How does Confucianism limit the bad behavior of the.
- [103:17]
B
Confucianism has very strong set moral principles about what inferiors need to offer superiors and what superiors are responsible to inferiors for.
- [103:27]
C
So. So it keeps an eye on the responsibility of leadership.
- [103:29]
B
Yeah, it's got an operating book on how to use hierarchical relationships, which is why China survived so long, because the lower classes are loyal to the upper classes and the upper classes are loyal to the lower classes. So Confucianism is an operating book for social cohesion, which is why Confucian countries have the lowest crime rates, highest educational attainment, greatest social stability.
- [103:52]
C
Right. And you always lose the emperor's respect for his responsibilities before the population's respect for the emperor. So if you. Because he has less accountability. So if you can maintain that accountability, then you prevent that.
- [104:10]
B
Exactly. Well put. And so you have several power tripping emperors in this time period. So the Sui dynasty was super tyrannical. That was at the end of the Dark Ages. They were the dynasty that united China in the 600s. They would just spend human lives like ammo clips where they invaded Korea where they lost hundreds of thousands of men. China periodically launches these armies of hundreds of thousands of men which again, they don't trust, train or organize or like feed, so they'll get slaughtered by local armies.
- [104:43]
C
Well, the worst, the worst part is you think, oh wow, what a waste of resources. And then you realize the reason why they're not feeding him or sending him or they're just sending away surplus populations so they don't have to evolve their social institutions and getting the bonus of.
- [104:56]
B
Yeah.
- [104:57]
C
And efficiently taking out some rivals.
- [104:59]
B
Because the bureaucracy aren't going to fight these wars. They have no incentive. Make sure they're taken care of. And that's very overt in the modern period, where part of the reason Mao Zedong launched the Korean War is he wanted to kill off the old Nationalist army because the Nationalists defected to the Communists partway through the war, but they weren't hardened Marxists. So Mao is like, how do I kill these people who have connections to the old guard without just having a purge, make me look bad? So he just sends them off to Korea to get slaughtered by the Americans.
- [105:30]
C
That's a brutal dynamic for them because then they have to fight really, really hard.
- [105:34]
B
Yeah.
- [105:34]
C
To survive. Which just. And the better they fight, the more they feed into mouse power.
- [105:38]
B
Exactly.
- [105:39]
C
And the worse they fight, the more they die.
- [105:41]
B
Yeah. It's like in the Bible where King David. King David was lusting after a local girl, so he sent her husband to get killed on the front line so he could take her. And so the Chinese Dark Ages are like a historic clusterfuck. I read this history of China. I believe it's by Eberhard. It's not very well written, if I'm honest. And it really focuses on the Dark Age period. So I have all this knowledge stuck in my head of. Because it's like the European Volkerwanderung where you have these like tribal groups that are subsets of other tribal groups who migrate halfway across the map who fight another tribal group who form a kingdom. China had that where the Tibetans, the Huns, the Turkic peoples, the Mongols, all carved up different statelets in North China. And oftentimes there was ethnic mixes where like the Tibetans would mix with the Huns to make a new ethnicity to conquer a different sub region of North China. So China went through that phase and it's not really worthwhile to talk about. I don't like historic time periods that are just hyper complex political battlefields. But China had a period of like the Ten Kingdoms, where these ten feudal states on the barbarian edges gained independence, then they fought against the interior, all those sorts of things. And out of this Dark Age period where South China maintained Han control and the north was under barbarians, China saw this new influx of vitality. For the Tang Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty were China's high point, more so than the Han and this is like 6:11 to like 9:11. It's a 300 year time period. It's funny, when I was at Wawa back in Pennsylvania, I bought some stuff for 211 and the guy at the Wawa, it's our gas station, which is widely loved, he said, you know what happened in the year 211? He said it, the rise of the tong. And I said, no, that was 6 11. And he said, oh, you'd probably know the trick. And he didn't realize that I'm the wrong guy to pull the trick on.
- [107:48]
C
That's hilarious. Yeah, you've stepped into the wrong alley.
- [107:52]
B
He goes, that the early 200s is the Han. It's the fall of the Han dynasty is really confusing that he's trying to.
- [107:59]
C
It's like trying to mug Crocodile Dundee with a pocket knife.
- [108:02]
B
Yeah, exactly. So the Tang arose and they pushed China back to its maximum boundaries and they actually fought the Arabs at the Battle of Talas River. And they were this partial Turkic warrior society, and they mixed in with the Chinese. And the Tang, really, that was China when it was most pluralist, because you had the bureaucracy, you had the warrior nobility, you had the Buddhists, you had the Daoists, you had the Confucians. And China was a multicultural society. You had huge Muslim quarters in Xi', an, you had Persian communities in Guangzhou. And we even have records of them making racist jokes where they're like, find me a poor Persian because the Persians were the merchant class, or find me an honest Arab. Where we have like their ethnic stereotypes from medieval China.
- [108:52]
C
Oh, that's hilarious. I wonder how accurately they overlap with our stereotypes of similar regions.
- [108:58]
B
So it's not that close. Because keep in mind, for them, the Muslim world was competitive, if not wealthier and more advanced than China. China. So they saw the Muslims as these merchant wealthy ethnicities, the way we would see the Jews. And they saw the Central Asians as virile. So lots of peoples that modern Westerners would not see as advanced or like cultured. They saw through that lens.
- [109:22]
C
Right. Especially because of the people they were interacting with.
- [109:25]
B
Yeah. And it was said that Xion, the capital, which is a wonderful city, I've been there, was like. It was Paris, it was Rome, it was New York. It was a.
- [109:33]
C
It's beautiful. The architecture. Yeah.
- [109:36]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [109:36]
C
I went all over, saw all the buildings. Like a speedrun.
- [109:40]
B
Yeah.
- [109:41]
C
And it's just beautiful. Like Turkish, Indian mosque.
- [109:46]
B
Yeah.
- [109:47]
C
Weird mixed kind of things of buildings that were built a long time ago.
- [109:51]
B
And you have this undercurrent of Muslims in China, which you see in Xi', an, and they were called the Hui. Where the Chinese Muslims were so assimilated in the Chinese culture that they were initially seen as a distinct ethnic group, but they're not really anymore. And there's a Shaun C. Restaurant Philly, which I love. Philly's Chinatown is big enough that like you could. There's a restaurant for the Wu region, there's a restaurant for Hong Kong, there's a restaurant for Shaun C. That stuff. I love Xi'. An. It's one of my favorite cities.
- [110:19]
C
Really interesting architecture. Like kind of square, tall buildings with a lot of layers inside, with like a lot of small narrow walkways at different levels. And kind of Indian style walls are, you know, shutters that are carved with the small patterns.
- [110:36]
B
It's. It was an extension of this Central Asian civilization that kind of had potential, but it didn't go anywhere where you had, especially for Christians, where there was this Central Asian Christian civilization which stretched from Syria out to Western China. And they had their own architecture, they had their own philosophy, their own culture that just got nuked by Islam. But if Islam hadn't arisen, I think it could have developed their own trajectory that would be comparable to any other world civilization. And so there also were Christians in China and there were even messianic. In ancient medieval China, you had messianic monotheistic cults arise that would launch these big revolts that are clearly derivatives of the monotheistic religions in Western Eurasia. But so Tang Dynasty multicultural. But then the Tang fell partly due to the An Lushan Rebellion, which is one of the bloodiest wars in history, where China had grown reliant on these Central Asian generals to hold the frontier because they were the people with the skills to hold against the nomads. They hired certain nomads to fight other nomads were at the start of their empires. The Chinese could convince their own people to fight on the frontiers. But for both the end of the Han and the Tang, they become reliant on these nomadic peoples where one of their top generals was a Sogdian or an ethnic Persian from modern Uzbekistan called Anluan. And he was the general on the northeastern frontier against the Manchus and the Mongols. And there's a lot of weird stories here. This is in the 8th century where, for example, he. It was widely known that he was having an affair with the emperor's most beautiful concubine, but he was also so overweight and she would had a fetish where she dressed him up as A child in the Roman court and a baby.
- [112:31]
C
Is there nothing new?
- [112:34]
B
Yes, there's nothing new under the sun as the Bible says. And so the emperor got suspicious. The emperor didn't like the affair. He also didn't like that An Luxan was like positioning himself to be emperor to because he was buddies with all the nomadic generals that China was dependent on. And so the emperor invited him down to the capital where China before Beijing became the capital in the high medieval period, their western capital was Xi' an, which is that sort of mouth of the valley that leads out to Sichuan in the eastern capital is at Liaoyang. So when China felt insecure they put the capital at Xi'. An. When they felt secure they put it in. In Lao Yang in the middle of the plain. And so I believe the capital was it. I forget which one is it? I think. I don't know man. I forget which it was at the time. They alternate so much. But he invited them to the capital. An Luxan got his armies from the north and then just burned the capital instead rather than appearing at the court which started a multi generational civil war which killed 20 million people more than World War I in the 8th century rate, which is impressive.
- [113:43]
C
Wow. So the guy was on to him.
- [113:45]
B
Yeah, yeah. And this war was absolutely brutal. I mean of course it killed like. I think it killed like a third to half of it killed like China had 60 million people at the time. So it killed a third of the population. And after generations the native Chinese won against the nomads. But as a crazy story, An Luxan was murdered by assassins but he was so fat that it took forever to claw through his fat to murder him in his tent. So we just heard him screaming forever in his tent because they couldn't cut through the fat fast enough.
- [114:20]
C
Wow. Well that's like. That's why most of the successful gladiators were a little bit fat. Unlike the movies where they're shredded because if you're fat you could take sword hits before it cuts the muscle.
- [114:30]
B
Yeah, we should give that to the body Positive activists as their new talking point. And so by the end of the war, the sons of the guys who started the war were the guys commanding both because it took so long. But the Tang won and they pulled themselves together but they were never able to the same sort of military conquest they did before because they didn't trust the nomadic peoples because they had betrayed the Chinese nation. And so this was the final point that the ethnic Han started launching these wide scale wars outside China. China and after like 150 years, the Tang Dynasty finally fell. And the rise of the Song dynasty was this huge transformation where China had its own French Revolution where they butchered the entire nomadic nobility, they killed the Buddhist ruling class. And then there was the Neo Confucian Renaissance which we've spoken about a few times already. It was this switch towards the bureaucracy and social conservatism and those things. And I think out of all the events in the last thousand years, the Neo Confucian Renaissance is the most important event in China for the reasons we spoke about.
- [115:41]
C
And this is the renaissance after the 900 population was murdered.
- [115:48]
B
900 to 1000.
- [115:51]
C
It directly follows this period where a third of the population was killed.
- [115:55]
B
So that's 750. Then the Neo Confucian Renaissance is 900 to a thousand.
- [115:59]
C
Okay, so it took a bit and. But the key is that the Mongol side lost that.
- [116:04]
B
Yes. And then 900 until the Mongols was the Song dynasty, which was stunningly wealthy period of capitalism in connection with the rest of the world. There are stories that Chinese women stopped learning how to cook because there were so many restaurants they could get takeout at. And the Song dynasty was really good on the sort of soft stuff. But they couldn't fight militarily because the Confucian bureaucrats didn't know how to fight. And so they faced this military threat. We're first under the, I believe the Khitan or the kittens. Meow meow. And then followed by the Jin, no, the Khitans and sorry, the Liao people. The north of China was conquered by barbarians. And this is when we're talking about the Chinese writing poetry at how much they wanted to defeat the barbarians while not funding the military. Where the north of China was conquered by these barbarians from Manchuria and Mongolia and Gansu Province, the connector to western China was taken over by the Tibetan Tongut peoples where the Tibetans had several large scale empires which basically conquered out where the Tibetans even sacked the capital a few times in the Dark Age period where they had their own empire empires which were rivals to China several times before the Mongols killed off Tibet's ruling class. And so the south soon kept going the rise of these barbarian kingdoms. And this is when Beijing became the capital of China. And then come the Mongols. Watch one of our recent videos where Genghis Khan firstly butchered a majority of North China's population. Where China had like 100 million people. Genghis Khan killed most of North China and he secured that region, utterly destroying it. Where they had to convince the Mongols to not kill all the Chinese because they would make more money by having them farm. And the south of China was more saved because they were conquered two generations in by Kublai Khan. And by that point the Mongols had really chilled out. And the Mongols destroyed shift out their strategy towards land in ocean warfare, using boats and Chinese conscripts to conquer north of the south of China. Because the Song had built out these huge fortifications and the Mongols had only held all of China for something like 80 years. And after the horrors which really traumatized the Chinese, the Mongols held it down with the pox, the Pax Mongolica, which connected China, the rest of the world, which is when Marco Polo was in China. And the Black Death is what killed the Mongol control on China in the 14th century, where it killed more Mongols than it did the local Chinese. And this actually was a pioneering moment in gunpowder warfare where the local Chinese used flamethrower tactics to fight the Mongols in again, one of the bloodiest wars in history. The Chinese drove the Mongols out. And it's the same mechanism as well to the fall of the Han, where this vagrant, I think he was Zhu Yuan Zhang, he was working with another bandit warlord. And in Chinese history you'll read about bandits where bandits will control a lot of territory and they'll become warlords. And that always puzzled me as I'm thinking if a bandit has enough territory and he's just a warlord. And apparently in Chinese terminology, if you're a warlord, you're. They just call you a bandit. So when they're talking about like the bandit army is, they're really talking about independent warlords. And though they fought, they first drove out the Mongols and they fought against each other at the huge lake battle of Poi Yong, before Zhu Yongzhang took over all of China, installing the ethnic Han Ming monarchy, which was this horrifying authoritarian state where the government you needed papers to leave your hometown. They crushed the capitalist economy. The bureaucracy to assess your position in society was done by highly controlled and autistic methods. And China became a closed society under the Ming dynasty, where although it was a period of wealth and power, China continued its trajectory of social conservatism and lack of innovation, which would ultimately do them in.
- [120:34]
C
It's funny that they called them bandits. It shows the Chinese real strict adherence to like credentialism.
- [120:41]
B
Yes.
- [120:42]
C
Because they're more about the official channel, the title rather than the quality or. Yeah, but versus in Europe, you'd almost classify the size of the army with the title.
- [120:53]
B
Yes. Exactly. Although if you get to seize the title of Emperor, you get to be emperor, where three different times peasants or vagrants rose to become emperor. So once you get the title, you get the title.
- [121:05]
C
You have to literally rewrite the entire book of what classifies you as what to make it. It's like it's all or nothing.
- [121:13]
B
Exactly. China is one of the best historically recorded societies because they view history as part of their religious tradition. You learn the lessons of history and the classics. But the problem is that the way the Chinese wrote history was highly formulaic and ritualized. So a lot of their history writing was not actually useful later on in history because they were following the ceremonial prescriptions of thousands of years earlier. So it was a consistent issue in Chinese history when they switched dynasties. But how you're going to write the history of the last dynasty, because it was this religious thing of when the last dynasty dies, how do you write the history of it to summarize the lessons for future generations?
- [121:54]
C
And whatever the format for that was did not apply to the new situations, and they weren't able to, which makes sense, because if there's a really strong precedent about remembering history, someone's going to have to find a way to make that not useful and just ceremonial, otherwise it's going to undermine whatever they're doing by providing real lessons.
- [122:13]
B
There was also the political issue of you have to show respect to your ancestors, but you also have to signal why this shift in regime was ultimately necessary. So it's this double bind all of these authors end up in of how do we not disrespect the ancestors? And then also, why do we say how the new regime is justified in seizing power? And then every time they do this, they would study all of the previous histories and then basically reclassify them inside the new narrative.
- [122:43]
C
Right. Which like you, you reduce it to nullifying any insight, to the point of nullifying insight.
- [122:49]
B
They also, those Chinese histories, they were always dependent on the Confucian frame of saying the morality of the ruler determines the success. Where they weren't able to understand economic factors or sociological factors, or in China, they would judge whether against the success of the ruler, they kept these sort of ancient animist traditions that, for example, when Kublai Khan faced this mass flooding and freezing in China caused by the mini ice Age, he had to do all these rituals to show that he still had the mandate of heaven, because in China, if there's enough bad weather, it invalidates the right to rule.
- [123:26]
C
Right. Well, that's not a great lens but the other one is not the worst lens in terms of how good is the person. Because if you can't find, if you can't figure out any other patterns that they're latching onto, somebody who has certain characteristic traits, not just like caring about people, but like a balance of wisdom and different traits is going to be more likely to fall on something that might be a little bit better. But they're not tracking what they're falling on actually is something specific that has a distinction reason for being different.
- [124:02]
B
It's the most advanced level four can do in terms of consciousness. Level four can only assess, like, the moral quality of the ruler versus the laws of God. Level five, you get to like military and political analysis. Level six is like class analysis, race analysis. Level seven, which is what we're doing is integrating all of them at once. And so Ming Dynasty, much like the Tokugawa Shogunate we talked about, by establishing this very closed society, China actually experienced a lot of growth in wealth, where the Chinese switched from their fiat currency, which they had in the high medieval period, which blew up. China's population doubled from 1350 until 1600, partly because the Mongols and the plagues kept it artificially low. Then it tripled again from 1600 until 1800, and that was due either to the introduction of new rice from Southeast Asia, New World crops like potatoes and corn, or other things like that. And another thing is China's alternate between capitalism and socialism. So periods like the Song Dynasty or the Han, which had more Taoist or Buddhist influence, were more capitalist under the Tang Dynasty. And they really glorified this in school. The government divided up all land among the peasants. You weren't allowed to sell your land. You had to pass it on generationally, which removed competition. But then that ultimately didn't work and caused the fall of the Tang Dynasty. Also in the Ming Dynasty, you saw more socialism, Qin Dynasty, more socialism. And so in China, there's this constant polarity between the government enforcing socialism, which causes decay, or capitalism, which causes the entrenchment of wealthy nobility in oligopolistic interests, which then the government uses envy to crush the ruling nobility so the bureaucracy doesn't lose power.
- [125:55]
C
And that's their way of kind of like sustaining the bureaucracy to the next right. Because if you scapegoat the oligarchy without actually restoring a market, it's going to go to the next phase as a.
- [126:14]
B
General rule in the Chinese civil wars. And I tested this when I read Chinese histories in, like, the vast majority of cases, the rebel faction, which sides with the landowning nobility wins. So you'll see. I was reading about the different Chinese civil wars and like checklist, the one who works with the nobility wins this time. Checklist. It's true again and again. And these lines aren't super distinguished where you would buy up this noble land and then you would use it to funnel into the bureaucracy. Where if you were a successful merchant in China, you would try to become a bureaucrat asap. So you try to buy up land, leave your trade. So your son doesn't have the merchant stain. But in Chinese society they still kept track of it. So they track how many generations had occurred since your family had been forced to touch money.
- [127:03]
C
Right. And by the time you get to the point where you might be considered in the nobility, you're going to be out of money.
- [127:07]
B
Yeah.
- [127:08]
C
Because you'll be many generations without being a merchant.
- [127:10]
B
It's a low growth mindset and sorry, I gotta sell my friggin nutrient and sigma course now. So Ming dynasty, it sort of bureaucratic sclerosis again falls in the 1600s with the rise of the Qing Dynasty who fall of the Ming dynasty was a mess. It's like the third bloodiest war in history. It's like a pattern here. It's like the fall of Chinese dynasties are bloody. And it was just really depressing to read about where the Ming dynasty is so broken that the Ming emperor sent an order, his own staff killed him because they didn't want to follow the order. And then china falls apart. Bandits 1. So the bandits rebel, the army mutinies refuses to fight the bandits. And then the Manchus under Nurhaki, where the Manchus are a barbarian people from China's northeast frontier. They have a lot of similar attributes to step peoples like the Mongols, but they're a forest people, people who had a combination of farming, hunter gathering and herding. And they had conquered Mongolia and had a very powerful dynasty under Nurhaki, who was. Nurhaki had as many children as Genghis Khan did, which is quite an impressive accomplishment. He's in the top 10 most successful.
- [128:27]
C
Oh wow.
- [128:28]
B
Yeah.
- [128:29]
C
From that period.
- [128:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. One of the most successful male like genealogies in history. And Nurhaki, he invaded the south and when he was at the Great Wall, the top Chinese generalist said, fuck it, I'm going to work for you now. I hate the government so much, I'm literally going to sell out my own country to the barbarians. And so Nurhaki conquered the south and it would have gone well except he made this demeaning thing where all Chinese had to wear, like, a girly pigtail and didn't wear the girly pigtail, you'd get killed. And this was utterly demeaning on purpose to show that you would submit to the Manchu monarchy. And so this extended the war by additional, like, five to 10 years and another, like, 10 million deaths because the Manchus didn't know who they could trust inside China because they didn't know the Chinese. They were a different ethnicity unless they had the pigtail. And so the next.
- [129:25]
C
Yeah, go ahead.
- [129:26]
B
The next five to 10 years of the war, just them brutally, like, destroying the rest of China, trying to crush them and to force them into utter submission. And the Manchu generals would literally carve out, like, sub regions of China, and the Manchu leader would have to fight further civil wars to get these colonial generals to submit to him.
- [129:44]
C
It's amazing how it starts off with forcing people to have a ponytail and then be willing to die in the tens of millions to resist it. To Jackie Chan being devastated when his ponytail is cut off. Yeah, like 400 years later in Chinese history.
- [130:00]
B
It's funny how life works. They kept the ponytail rule until the 20th century, which is insanity. And, like, when the Chinese immigrated to America, the Americans would mock them for still wearing the ponytail.
- [130:14]
C
So because they didn't, it's objectively girly, but they lost track of that. Yeah, we could objectively, with no context, identify that.
- [130:22]
B
And the Chinese like to cope a lot that the Manchus were. Were ethnic Han, which they weren't. I've read up the Taiping rebellion into the mid 19th century. The Manchus still were legally distinct from the Han Chinese. When Hongshuquan launched his revolt against the Manchus, he literally called the Manchus the foreign devils. And so they were a distinct ethnic group for centuries afterwards. And the Chinese were under the Manchu monarchy. But all of these barbarians had to assimilate the Chinese culture and use the Chinese institutions because the Chinese outnumbered them 100 to 1. And so, like, the Chinese evolutionary strategy kept going, even though they kept losing militarily, because all the barbarians had to work inside the Chinese system. So China as, like, a biological unit kept going. And the barbarian invasions did not force introspection, dude. Because China as a unit survived, even though for most of the last thousand years, China was under foreign governance. And again, people who outnumbered The Chinese outnumbered 100 to 1 because the Chinese's own social and civilizational structure had so beaten down the population that they lost the will to fight back.
- [131:37]
C
Wow, this sounds like the Trump Admin, where he goes and takes over the government, but he's outnumbered like 100 to 1 in terms of bureaucracy. And then you're stuck within the structure unless you get. And maybe he'll be able to get more in there and change it more. So it might be a different example, but that's been consistently the case, right, where you're like, you get a different idea, gets in a different guy gets in, and then they get overwhelmed by the. The bureaucracy's momentum.
- [132:04]
B
And so here we are in the early modern period, and this is the start. This video is the bridge from ancient China to modern China videos. And there's other videos. You can watch the medieval Asia video, you can watch the Silk Road video, you can watch the Mongol video to get context on specific sub regions of this topic. But the first Europeans to come to Asia were the Portuguese. And they had a fort in Maau. And much like Japan, China was utterly cut off. And so the Chinese had a single fort they could communicate with. The Dutch were blocked out because they held Taiwan and they fought against the Manchus where the Manchus had to drive the Dutch out of Taiwan. And so that you had this Portuguese base. And the Jesuits were the people who really did the cross culture analysis. And the Chinese emperor had some Jesuits in his posse because the Chinese emperors loved clocks. So they had the Chinese maintain clocks for them, their room of clocks. This is the kind of society we're dealing with, not the Western guns, not the steam engines, the pretty clocks. And then they also had the Chinese maintain the observed, The Portuguese maintained the observatory. So the Portuguese Jesuits were communicating with the emperor directly. And they were the people who funneled the information back to Europe so that the French could like LARP as the Chinese and say they want to build an enlightened despotism like China. And so the European connection to China really weakened when the Pope backstabbed the Jesuits, which was not a cool move, by the way. The Jesuits were doing a lot of great stuff. And so the Chinese had this very tenuous connection to the west and. But they were still dependent on the west. Whereas as we said before, the Spanish loss in the thirty Years War caused the fall of the Ming dynasty due to economic ripples because they were dependent on Spanish gold after destroying their paper fiat currency. And I am going to end this video where the modern China video started, in the same way I'm going to start this video where the ancient China video ended with the fall of the Qin Dynasty with the other Qing dynasty, where Lord McCartney in 1791 brought the rolling Stones to China, and I'm just making that up. Macartney McCartney, and he showed up with rifles, steamships, clockwork, nearly at the scale of computers and full maps of the world. And the Qing monarchy said, you have nothing of value to offer us, because we've seen the end point of this, where China is governed by a small Manchu elite who have ruled for centuries, and they're telling the British they have nothing to offer them. And this is the start of the century of humiliations where the old Chinese civilization died. Modern China is partly the same civilization as the old China, where it's similar religion, actually kind of. Kind of not similar religion. The Communists are in charge, but the Chinese maintain their folk beliefs. The bureaucracy is still in charge. It's the same ethnic group, same language, but at the same time, it's a very different China. Where you look at Asia today, and Asia's in an interesting place where I don't really see any of the Asian countries capable of having the creativity required to deal with the modern world. The west does not have the creativity to deal with the modern world. We're going to have to try really hard to do that. But in Asia, their civilizations crush down their individuality for millennia. So we're looking at an Asia which is still not grappled with the trauma of European colonialism, where China today still is really pissed at the century of humiliations. And so China is going through a transformative period that's going to last centuries. It started with Lord McCartney arriving. But the only way the Chinese are going to win here is if they can pull back from their ancient traditions, because the Chinese, if they take cultural trajectories from the west, it's like trying to, like, you know, my mom had me planting a lot of trees growing up, and if you try to, like, graft one tree onto another tree, it's going to die. So you have to take something from its root structure and then graft it to somewhere else. The Chinese can't take from the West's trajectory because it doesn't fit into their organic culture culture. So they're going to have to look back into their history to figure out what can we incorporate from our own past that will let us have the creativity to update our civilization to the Industrial Revolution. And they're facing that threat more than anyone. China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. They're careening towards basic extinction. I watch a lot of Chinese YouTube channels, and cities like Beijing and Shanghai are practically empty now because they don't have the jobs anymore because they have 50% youth unemployment. So people are leaving their hometowns. In China, we're seeing a failure of the Communist Party, which is arch modernity alongside the culture where China's degenerated its culture with modernity more than any other people. So the Chinese are forced now to look back upon their own past and think where did we go wrong and what can we pull from our own history? Because their very survival is on the line.
- [137:16]
C
The tricky part about that is a lot of the examples probably are going to revolve around the south of China.
- [137:23]
B
Yeah.
- [137:23]
C
Which does not necessarily work for the ruling class. We've spoken about Taoism as a thing to tap into. That's like a general obvious one. But it's fun. It's. It's really important to conceive of it like you did in that it's not just relating something from the trends that are common in China now to Western values. You, you can pick through any period of Chinese history. It's the same. And that gives you a lot more options because there's things you can pull out and revive.
- [137:55]
B
And yeah.
- [137:56]
C
All you need, all you're doing is creating a lens through which people can channel these ideas through a relatable experience.
- [138:02]
B
Yes.
- [138:03]
C
Just like how we talked about with Africa where they have traditions and, and their culture. The various cultures that both have war and markets and socialism and they can choose to pull from any of those.
- [138:17]
B
Yes. I have faith in the Chinese people and not the Chinese government. I love Chinese civilization. I collect Chinese art as an example. I have several Chinese art pieces in my house. And you look at China, this is a multi thousand year civilization that reached degrees of cultivation and advancement comparable to any other civilization in the world. They also have a very strong and long track record. The Chinese Communist Party is one of those brutal organizations in history. It's killed 40 million people. The bloodiest atrocity in history. It keeps its people under a throttle and it keeps them artificially philistine. So the Chinese people will have to figure out what they're going to do independent from their authorities. But their school and social structure has trained them ever since childhood to not do that. But they're going to have to pass this challenge to survive. And I think that's a good place to stop.
- [139:11]
C
Yeah. That's a lot of interesting themes to explore there.
- [139:14]
B
Yes. Next video.
- [139:16]
C
Good luck, China.
- [139:17]
B
Good luck. Well, we're waiting for you and we're hopeful that you can pull through. On this next video is the Gunpowder Empires.
- [139:24]
C
Excellent.
- [139:26]
B
Bang bang. Bang. For those that don't know, the gunpowder empires were. When we think of the early modern period in Europe, we think of this period of exploration, advancement, like the Reformation, science, the Renaissance, and in the rest of the world, the gunpowder empires were these authoritarian states developed by gunpowder that unified huge empires and that include the Ottoman Turks, the Safavid Persians, Songhai in Africa, the Russians, the Spanish, the Mughals, and China and Tokugawa. So we're going to look at early modern Asia.
- [140:01]
C
Excellent.
- [140:02]
B
Okay, bye.
- [140:03]
C
Bye. See you next time.
- [140:06]
A
History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.