Taiwan Today

The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.
By Arthur Waldron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 296 pp., plus illustrations, maps, and index.

The Great Wall has many meanings for Chinese and non-Chinese alike. It is among other things a wonder of the world, a Chinese historical artifact, a metaphor. As a world wonder, it is averred to be the only man-made structure visible from outer space. As historical artifact, it has been both acclaimed and denounced by Chinese - applauded as national symbol and at the same time condemned as symbol of state oppression for its forced-labor construction. As a metaphor, it performs functions like that found in a recent headline in a publication by the East-West Center in Honolulu: “Doing business in China - how to scale the Great Wall.”

The historical and mythical meanings of the Great Wall are explored in this stimulating and wide-ranging book by Professor Arthur Waldron of Princeton University. He early on puts to rest the myth that the Wall was constructed or linked together during the reign of Chin Shih-huang-ti, showing that the Wall as we know it dated from the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644). While that piece of historical revisionism is important, Waldron’s most significant contributions lie in his exploration of larger themes in Chinese culture, foreign policy, and politics, including the historical definition of “Chineseness,” the dynamics behind the making of Chinese foreign policy, and the nature of Chinese political culture.

A people’s self-definition comes in large measure from their relationships to political, economic, or cultural “significant others.” Throughout Chinese history, the nomadic peoples to the north and west were those continual others to the sedentary Chinese farmers and state bureaucrats. A strength of Waldron’s work is his clarification of the political and cultural nature, not only of the Chinese, but also of the nomads. He under scores the interpretation set forth by Thomas Barfield in his 1989 work, The Perilous Frontier (Blackwell), that powerful Chinese state control contributed to strong political confederacy on the frontier, rather than understanding the relationship as alternating cycles of strong China-weak nomads and weak China strong nomads. Waldron’s description of the rationally pragmatic nomadic leaders - Esen, the Altan Khan, as well as the Yuan regime itself - should put to rest any remaining latent historically induced images of barbarian blood-thirst.

The definition of China hinged on the Chinese view of the nomads. Waldron argues that every Chinese regime had to answer the question: whether and where to draw the line between steppe and China proper. Was China a country or a civilization?

Focusing on post-Tang China, Waldron concludes that Chinese regimes followed two models in dealing with the question. The model of the Tang, Yuan, early Ming, and early Ching dynasties was more cosmopolitan: a strong court defined China as a country, seeing itself in dynastic terms and interpreting politics in terms of kinship. At these times, the court used a range of forceful and pragmatic foreign policies, including active military campaigning and the stationing of posts along the frontier, but it under took little systematic wall-building. In its approach to the foreign policy issues concerning the nomadic peoples, each regime tended to be more accommodating and inclusive.

In contrast, the Sung, late Ming, and late Ching dynasties shared a model that was more inward-looking. Defined by literati, China was a culture, a civilization. For these regimes, drawing the line between China (hua, 華) and barbarian (i,夷 ) was not simply demarcating steppe from China proper, but, perhaps even more so, the very definition itself contributed to a cultural coherence and unity that enabled it to stand against others.

This process, in other words, substantiated a world view that sharpened the differences between Chinese and the nomadic peoples. It also made these differences not only cultural but ethical as well. In foreign policy decisions regarding the peoples and cultures of the steppe, politics and morality thus merged. In such a situation, there was less room for accommodation and more reason for exclusiveness. Again and again the debates throughout these dynasties focused on how culturally exclusive China must be in order to remain Chinese.

One of Waldron’s compelling points of analysis shows that wall-building was not the only - or even the primary - foreign policy. Nor was it the only cultural approach. China has not always been obsessed with raising barriers to keep others out. The building of walls, whether physical or metaphorical, was (and is), according to Waldron, the “product of particular ideas and circumstances.”

This interpretation is particularly in tune with the current interpretive social science approach to historical analysis. Fueled especially by the work of anthropologists, this approach eschews the determinacy of social science models in favor of an emphasis on process and particularistic analysis. Waldron particularly questions the ecological and socioeconomic forces used as explanatory models by Owen Lattimore, or what he calls the cultural Middle Kingdom complex associated with John K. Fairbank. For Waldron, what becomes important in foreign policy decision-making is the messy world of possibilities inherent in domestic political contention, disagreement, and stalemate. His cogent presentation persuades us that such an analysis is very likely on target.

Although Waldron distances himself from culturally determined analyses, he accurately points out to the reader that the political struggles that loom so importantly in his interpretation occurred in a cultural context. For the self confident cosmopolitan regimes with an outward vision, Waldron notes few problems in foreign policy: they were realistic, pragmatic, and knowledgeable about the world in which they were compelled to act. In that light, this volume contains the most positive version of Yuan dynasty rule that I have encountered.

It was in the usually southern-based, literati-controlled regimes- militarily weaker, less self-assured, and obsessed with being Chinese - that Waldron locates inherent problems of Chinese political culture. When the debate began to focus on the limits of Chineseness and the parameters of Chinese culture, there emerged what could be called a “moralization of reality.” The normal give and take of political struggle began to be seen in moral terms so that ‘it became increasingly difficult to compromise in any fashion.

This inability to compromise, which Waldron shows occurred in the Ming dynasty not only on the northern frontier but also in Vietnam and with the Japanese pirates on the east coast, led to policies that were completely divorced from reality and were often unworkable in actuality. The influence of this culture bound outlook always seemed to be exacerbated when there was no powerful emperor to take charge. Furthermore, Waldron finds among the practitioners of such a binding cultural consensus no understanding of the dynamics of steppe life and reality.

This is the framework in which he sketches aspects of the policy struggle regarding the Mongol-controlled Ordos region (the sandy desert plateau in today’s Inner Mongolia) in the 1540s and after. The Ming complex of weak rule, idealized rhetoric, and inability to compromise spelled ineffectuality and weakness in policy. Waldron consistently finds that part of the problem was the shift of economic and political power to the south and the stalemate of continuing tensions between what he sees as a positive syncretic Yuan legacy and the negative purely literati moral traditions of the south.

There are aspects of Waldron’s analysis, however, that raise questions. Despite his call for understanding new possibilities in the combative world of domestic politics and his warnings about taking social, economic, and cultural models as the keys to analysis, he him self seems locked into certain biases. Waldron’s obvious disapproval of the closed Confucian cultures is so strong that he seems constantly to be applauding the more “intelligent” position of those regimes (more closely tied to steppe culture) that downplayed the role of culture. If only, he seems to be saying, all regimes could have responded in such an enlightened way. There is an editorializing and judgmental quality here that is somewhat disconcerting.

But even more at odds with his advocacy of casting off cultural determinacy is what I perceive as interpretations bound by a political determinacy, specifically by the form and substance of political cycles. For exam pie, he argues, again with what may be considered some historical editorializing:

Had the Chinese rulers of the time possessed an understanding of the dynamics of the steppe comparable to that of the Yuan rulers, or even of their own founding emperors, they might have improved their own military situation by making use of the rivalries among these nomads, and perhaps supported Batu Möngke to some extent. Not that a complete peace would have been possible: rather, the nomadic threat could have been reduced in scale by economic and diplomatic means, so that what remained might have been militarily manageable. Restoring trade relations to what they had been at the beginning of the fifteenth century would have been an important step.

The question is, how are we to know that such policies would have had the effects Waldron presumes? He is basing these suppositions on what occurred in what he interprets as previous similar cycles of the relations between the steppe and China proper. Is this not in effect reifying cyclical forms of the past as predictors of what certain policies might produce in the present? Was there any certainty that because specific policies had worked in the past, they would work again in the same way in a different historical context? Was it not possible that with different historical casts of characters - even in somewhat similar situations - a previously successful approach might not work, and might even be counter-productive?

Waldron’s interpretative editorializing against the Confucian approach and for the cosmopolitan approach (such as appears in the passage above) seems to put him in a position which precludes certain historical possibilities. (One is reminded of other interpretations that once posited that Confucian values could not be used as a base for helping to bring China or any country into the modern world, a position cast in great doubt today by the economic successes of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and the Republic of China.)

These critical suggestions notwithstanding, Waldron’s contributions in this volume are substantial. In addition to the gems of historical analysis already discussed, he alerts readers to the relevance of his findings to China today. Certainly it is easy for us to fit the events of the 1989 Peking spring into Waldron’s description of the moralizing, uncompromising nature of political struggle. And his contention that Chinese continue to build great figurative walls of various sorts is borne out by that East West Center headline.

If the last is a bit facile, other points seem solid and suggestive. He points to the remarkable growth in this century of the cult of the Great Wall, sponsored and promoted by a wide variety of leaders. Yet, he argues, its meaning has remained unclear: “guaranteed to be a multivalent symbol of Chineseness, and to mirror for the rest of us our fantasies about that society.”

The cult of the Wall developed as a national unifying symbol in the after math of the destruction of the monarchy, to fill a vacuum created “at the heart of Chinese civilization which to this day has not been filled ... [not] even [by] the cults of Sun Yat-sen and Mao.” In the end Waldron seems to be suggesting that the Great Wall today may be per forming a more important function than it ever did as an instrument of defense. - R. Keith Schoppa is a professor of Chinese history at Valparaiso University in Indiana. •