What is remarkable about this documentary, imho, is the fact that it aired before the actual sabre rattling, overcapacity, decoupling, China derisking, and Sinophobia Sinophilia wave (please read this truly excellent article about various uses and misuses of the China mirror). You can see how historically contingent these times are and what changed (clue= from a rising power, China graduated to global power status). It is from a time, not so far ago, when China was seen as a rising economic partner and world power, a truly singular fact in world history, if not the very culmination of full modernity, and where Western modernisation was just a preface or a preamble (in Adam Tooze’s and Kaiser Guo’s words). Myself, I have been trying to view past the whole gradual demonization of mainland China since the COVID pandemic, as we entered some kind of new cold war lunacy.
“This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history. This is really what the provincialization of the West looks like.” (Tooze)
In the same strain, Isabella Weber (an expert in Chinese modern macroeconomics) also urged China watchers from Europe and war hawks everywhere to accept European ‘peripheralization’ and a joining of forces with the Global South rather than relapsing atavistically into imperialist showoff. That this did not happen and that these words and encouragement fell on deaf ears comes as no surprise, considering the role European powers and US imperialism played in Asia and the world at large.
This series is truly remarkable because it goes to the very origins of the Chinese civilisation and minces no words about the importance of China in the 21st century. There is due role given to ritual, writing, cosmic orientation, divination, ancestor cult, the Mandate of Heaven, and family played in its constant formation and reformation, centralization, and decentralization. Here, there is another temptation – to revert to the flawed “clash of civilisations” idea from the 1990s, and so easy to weaponize during the War on Terror. The idea that China is a civilization starts to pop up in official Chinese discourse, as well as Western occidentalist rhetoric. One can say that China had a civilisation historically, but this is again something historically contingent and even a posteriori; to make it uninterrupted and continuous is to ignore some of the biggest transformations during the 100 years or so since the declaration of the Republic and more so since the Proclamation of the People’s Republic. Here is a new longread essay by Kaiser Guo on the invaluable SINICA podcast about the return of these old trappings of the civilisational idea.
In a sense, today’s China is a very young country-state (comparable in this sense with Romania) that has been shaped by momentous, tremendous, but eminently modern transformations, and the appeal to its civilisational fibre tends to ignore this. There is a constant temptation today to rebrand everything, including economic blocs like BRICS or the recent idea of multipolarity in the old Huntingtonian pluralism (a very asymmetric one let’s remember) of civilisations. During my History of Art days I had an important teacher (who also happened to be a minister of cults and culture) that picked up on this new (explain-all) through a civilisational lens – to view any kind of political formation, and even try to establish a Faculty of Religions (as well as a Bank or Religions)in the 1990s all catering to this mostly US geostrategic impulse that ended up in pitching its War on Terror endless wars (but from a Romanian ‘Bysantinist’ Orientalist angle).
One can even say that China was never a unified state or a unified country until very, very late in its history. Relatively short periods of statal unification (no matter what Jared Diamond said in his Guns, Germs and Steel) it was a multistatal, almost federal organism, generally only unified by its very complicated logographic non-alphabetic language writing system (if very expressive, unique, and beautiful). And even this sort of does not define China is more part of the Sinosphere with various other countries, Korea, Japan, amongst the most known, elaborating upon and particularising it. Historians and archeologists have learned to understand the Chinese civilisation as a multicore or dualcore history, even if there was a main Yellow River Great Plain center there was another parallel Bronze Age one in today’s Sichuan – the so-called Sanxingdui culture, this reflects rather the multitude of overlapping Neolithic pre-writing pre-statal formation that covered China’s territory and cannot be so easily mapped unto the historical written tradition, even if its mythical core remains indisputated. For example, Sanxindui does not even get mentioned in this 2016 documentary!
One could say that the British infatuation with the royals, with tradition, with family (that Thatcherite foundation of capitalism and free market) colours some sections of Michael Wood’s Chinese BBC 2 trip. Michael W. is a history professor at the University of Manchester (Univ. of Man). One should maybe temper that with the excellent lecture of Professor Roger T. Ames about “zoethological thinking” and his perception and Sinological life work on how interdependence characterises Chinese philosophy and how “Dao” is to be “interpreted as a dynamic process of symbiosis and co-becoming between humans and the world”.
These are just two of the episodes – one of the golden age of the 960 to 1279960 to 1279 (where some of the most significant inventions associated with China spread and appear, mainly porcelain and movable print) and theYuan and Ming (which is also truly remarkable in its own way). They are stories of incredible resilience of the Chinese nation, from various provinces, and particularly of incredible cities (some historians have calculated that the various Chinese state had about 100 capitals in its history) and the reality (that only then dawned on the European mind) that the center of the world was elsewhere, namely to the East, where vast civilized cities with fast foods (yes that is right), libraries, bookshops, and sophisticated poetry and gardens abounded. It helps you imagine Kaifeng or Nanjing (and all the other capitals of China) at their most resplendent. Another thing that I love is that Wood goes everywhere to schools, institutes, private houses, talks to various people, and in general has very lively exchanges with a variety of local characters.
Anyway, I wish anyone could contrast these documentaries and compare it with today’s endless charade of ‘threats’, anti-CPC venom, tariff wars, geostrategic scheming, jingoism, bluster, boycotts, and supply chain fibrillation.
TimeSpace Warps 