|
Navigation
 This wiki This page |
To understand the influence of the Great Wall on the Chinese and the rest of the world today, we have to look on its history and its meaning 2000 years ago till now. It is not only a structure of stone signalizing power and strength, but it is also a sign of isolation of the Chinese people against other civilizations. There is not only a physical barriere on symbolized by the wall, but also a mental one.2.1 Evoltuion until the 19./20. century (changer le titre?)As many might think, there is, thus, no single Great Wall, but instead many lesser walls. For further reading, when refering to the walls, we will only use the term Great Wall for cause of simplicity.The first Europeans who encountered the wall were impressed by its colossal physical reality and were even more surprised by observating the chinese indifference against the wall. This indifference only started to warm into increasingly ardent enthusiasm some seventy years ago in the strictly instrumental interests of satisfying a clearly perceived need in modern China: to provide an emblem of China's past historical greatness to carry its sense of national self-esteem through the lean yeas of twentieth century, through its failed revolutions, civil wars, foreign invasions, famines and crushingly widespread poverty. Chinese wallbuilding was not invariably a symbol of national strength and prestige as it is today. It was often adopted as a defensive frontier strategy after all other options for dealing with the barbarians - diplomacy, trade, punitive military expeditions - had been exhausted or discarded. It was a sign of military weakness, diplomatic failure and political paralysis, and a bankrupting policy. Even if it is a widespread opinion that the Great Wall is thousands of years old, only a few of the still existing walls today have such a long history. The impressive stone Great Wall north of Bejing for example, now visited by millions of tourists every year is not thousants of years old; it dates back about only 500 years, to the building effort of the Ming dynasty. Several pieces of the Great Wall were only restored and manicured in the second half of the twentieth century by Communist labour. Although from as far back as the first millenium BC many kingdoms and dynasties built walls in various parts of north China and Mongolia, most of them have now disappeared, leaving no more than sandcastle-like remains cut out of the powdery loess terrain of north-western China. 2.2 Why WallsHumans, however, never tire of fighting over land, and wherever there are territorial disputes, walls tend to follow. The Chinese through history may have been rather more wall-conscious than most peoples, but the wall-building impulse is a fairly universal human one, shared by all the ancient civilizations - Rome, Egypt, Assyria. And it is an impulse that has, in fact, survived the twentieth century, the close of the Cold War and the apparent End of History.If we look around us today, we can identify several modern walls, like the one build up and still beeing erweitertKKK between Israel and Palestina, or the one separating Mexico from the United States. Walls are still very present today, even if we life in an age of globalization, defined not by obstacles and barriers, but by free flows - of transport, trade, finance and information. Because Chinese have always been better at writing things down than their nomad neighbours, it is their version of events that has dominated views of the conflict between the settled and nomadic populations. In the Chinese sources, the nomads are always portrayed as the greedy, aggressive hordes who descended in terrifying raids on the peace-loving Chinese. Chinese sources are full of hostile descriptions of rapacious barbarian nomads from the north as 'birds and beasts', 'wolves to whom no indulgence should be given'. The Chinese belief that their non-Chinese neighbours were no better than animals. There is laso much evidence to suggest that the habitants of the frontier territories were more often targets of Chinese aggression than aggressors themselves. But whichever side was the primary aggressor - northern tribes greedy for Chinese goods or Chinese greedy for foreign vassals - it was clear that China's rulers and armies were unable either to defeat the northerners military ot to contemplate compromise or negotiation. And so, in the ninth century BC, the Chinese first turned to a policy that would remain a comforting, albeit counterproductive, last resort for the next 2'000 years: wall-building. If we focus on the northern walls, according to the Chinese built to 'guard against' or 'resist the barbarians', the curious thing about these northern walls is how remote most of them are from farmable land, and how close to the stepper proper - in some cases, far aside present-day Mongolia. Indeed, the position of these walls gives the sense that they were designed not to defend China but to occupy foreign territory, to setting up of military posts that would police the movement of the people across these areas. Non of this elevates the nomads to the status of innocent victims in the millennia-old conflict between China and the steppe, but it does at least suggest we should slightly rethink the way which they have been demonized for thousends of years in both, China and the West. Traditionnally, the Chinese are always hte wronged parties, terrorized by the evil Huns north of the Great Wall line. But if the first frontier walls, the percursors to 2'000 more years of hostility and wall-building between China and the steppe, were designed to expand, not defend, China, they illuminate a previously ignored factor in wall history: aggressive, acquisitive Chinese imperialism. This does not, of course, mean we should excuse the subsequent 2'000 years of nomad raids as an exercise in working through colonial trauma. Nor does it make Genghis Khan any more historically sympathetic or desirable as a neighbour. But it does reconfigure the simplistic Chinese propaganda picture of innocent Chinese farmers defending themselves against greedy nomad raiders. It also shows that walls do not always have to be defensive: build them in the middle of newly invaded and occupied territory and they become a prop to expansionist colonialism. Whatever the true political and military reasons for wall-building, it soon proved strategically counterproductive for almost every state that undertook it. If, on the one hand, wall-building was driven by Chinese imperialism rather than by purely defensive concerns, the net diplomatic result as to produce out of the fractured nomadic tribes a unified opposition force that would plague China's northern borders for the next centuries. If, on the other hand, the walls were purely defensive in purpose, their failure was even more serious. As future centuries would repeatedly demonstrate, frontier walls proved little obstacle to conquering, semi-barbarian hordes from the north. But hte border these barriers established definded the zone of conflict over which walls would be built and frontier battles fought for the next two millennia. 2.2 The condition today |
Share |