Chapter 8: China and the World

Hello and welcome back to my blog! As we enter the month of November, make sure to always keep warm as the weather gets chillier. For this week's blog post, I will be discussing Chapter 8: China and the World.


The collapse of the Han Dynasty around 220 c.e ushered in more than three centuries of political fragmentation in China and signaled the rise of powerful and locally entrenched aristocratic families. At the time, Confucianism was discredited and opened doors for the acceptance of Buddhism and Daoism. It was at this time that people witnessed a substantial Chinese migration southward towards the Yangzi River Valley, a movement of people that gave southern China some 60 percent of the country's population by 1000.

Unlike the fall of the western Roman Empire, where political fragmentation proved to be a permanent condition, China regained its unity under the Sui dynasty. Its emperors solidified that unity by a vast expansion of the country's canal system, stretching some 1,200 miles in length and described by one scholar as "an engineering feat without parallel in the world of its time" As the dynasty collapsed, two dynasties followed: the Tang and Song dynasties which were built on the Sui foundations of renewed unity. Politically, the Tang and Song dynasties built a state structure that endured for thousands of years. Six major ministries- personnel, finance, rites, army, justice, and public works were accomplished by the Censorate, an agency that exercised surveillance over the rest of the government.

The "golden age" of the Song dynasty China was perhaps less than "Golden" for many of its women, for that era marked yet another turning point in the history of Chinese patriarchy. Under the Influence of the nomads, whose women-led less restrictive lives, elite Chinese women of the Tang dynasty era had participated in social life with grater freedom that in earlier times. The most compelling expression of tightening patriarchy lay in foot binding. The practice involved the tight wrapping of young girls' feet usually breaking the bones of the foot and causing intense pain. Food binding found general acceptance among elite families and later became even more widespread in Chinese Societies. While the practice of foot binding painfully deformed the feet of young girls and women, it was also associated aesthetically with feminine beauty, particularly in the delicate and elaborately decorated shoes that encased their bound feet.

A rapidly commercializing economy undermined the position of women in the textile industry. Urban workshop and state factories, run by men,  increasingly took over the skilled tasks of weaving textiles, especially silk, which has previously been the work of rural women in their homes.

From early times to the nineteenth century, China's many interactions with a larger Eurasian world shaped both China's own development and that of world history more generally. The Qing dynasty showed an idealized Chinese version of the tribute system. The Chinese emperor received barbarian envoys, who perform rituals of subordination and present tribute in the form of a horse. When nomadic people actually ruled parts of China, some of them adopted Chinese ways, employing Chinese advisers, governing according to the Chinese practice, and at least for the elite, immersing themselves in Chinese culture and learning this process of "becoming Chinese."


Also involved in tributary relationships with China were the newly emerging state and civilizations of Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Unlike the northern nomads, these societies were thoroughly agricultural and sedentary. During the first millennium, they were part of a larger process the globalization of civilization which produced new city and state-based societies in various parts of the world.

Beyond China's central role in East Asia, was its economic interaction with the wider world of Euroasia generally. On the one hand, China's remarkable economic growth, taking place during the Tang and Song dynasties, could hardly be contained within China's borders and clearly had a major impact throughout EuroAsia. On the other hand, China was the recipient as well as a donor in the economic interactions of the third- wave era. By far the most important gift that China received from other countries was neither the material good, but a religion, Buddhism. Until the adoption of Marxism in the twentieth century, Buddhism was the only large-scale cultural borrowing in Chinese History.


As we can see in the current times, China is a major economic superpower. China is well known around the world as one of the top economies following the United States. China becoming a superpower not only in the economic aspect has had long roots in History, as we can see from our discussion above.

This marks the end of this blog post, I hope you are able to learn a lot. We owe it up to our respective ancestors for what we have today, both prosperous and failing. I'll see you in the next post! See you soon!