How did China become the China of China?

Immigration, encouraging sponsorship of ethnic minority members and women, multilingualism, and ethnic diversity-California, where I live, is one of the advocates of these controversial policies, and now it takes the lead in strongly opposing them. My son is studying in a public school in Los Angeles. As long as you look at the classrooms in these schools, you will find that the abstract debate about these policies is as concrete and practical as the faces of these children. These children represent more than 80 languages used at home, while English-speaking whites are a minority. At least one of my son's playmates' parents or grandparents was born outside the United States: three of my own son's grandparents were not born in the United States. However, immigration has only restored the racial diversity that the United States has maintained for thousands of years. Before Europeans settled, the mainland of the United States was the birthplace of hundreds of Indian tribes and languages, and it was only in recent centuries that it was controlled by a single government.

In these respects, the United States is a completely "normal" country. The six most populous countries in the world, except one foreign country, are all ethnic melting pots that achieved political reunification not long ago, and still maintain hundreds of languages and nationalities. Russia, for example, used to be a small Slavic country with Moscow as its center. It was not until A.D. 1582 that it began to expand beyond the Urals. From then until the19th century, Russia began to annex dozens of non-Slavic ethnic groups, many of which still maintained their original language and cultural characteristics. Just as American history is a story about how vast areas of our mainland became American regions, Russian history is a story about how Russia became Russia. India, Indonesia and Brazil are also recent political creations (or political re-creations in India's case), which are the cradles of 850, 670 and 2 10 respectively.

The main exception to the universal phenomenon of modern national melting pot is China, the most populous country in the world. Today's China seems to be a unified country politically, culturally and linguistically, at least to the layman. It was politically unified in 22 1 1 BC, and remained unified for most of the centuries thereafter. Since China began to have writing, it has only one writing system, while modern Europe is using dozens of modified letters. Of China's population of 65.438+0.2 billion, more than 800 million people speak Mandarin, which is the most widely used language as a mother tongue in the world. About 300 million people speak seven other languages, and the relationship between these languages and Mandarin and between them is just like the relationship between Spanish and Italian. Therefore, not only is China not a national melting pot, but even the question of how China became the China of China people seems ridiculous. China has always belonged to the people of China, and has belonged to the people of China almost since the early days of history.

We take this seemingly unified China so seriously that we forget how amazing it is. We shouldn't have expected this unification in the first place. There is a genetic reason. Although there is an inaccurate ethnic classification in the world that classifies all China people as Mongolian people, the differences covered by this classification are much greater than those among Swedes, Italians and Irish people in Europe. In particular, there are considerable differences in heredity and physique between northerners and southerners in China: northerners are like Tibetans and Nepalis, while southerners are like Vietnamese and Filipinos. My friends in North China and South China can always tell each other from their appearance at a glance: people in North China tend to be taller and heavier, with pointed noses, smaller eyes and "upturned eyes".

There are also differences in environment and climate between North China and South China in China: the north is dry and cold; The south is wet and hot. The genetic differences in these different environments indicate that there has been a long history of moderate isolation between northern China and southern China. But in the end, these people have the same or very similar language and culture. What happened?

Although some other parts of the world have settled for a long time, their languages are not uniform. From this point of view, China is obviously almost unified in language, which is puzzling. For example, in the last chapter, we saw that the area of New Guinea is less than one tenth of that of China, and the human history is only about 40,000 years, but it has 1 1,000 languages, including dozens of language families, and the differences among these language families are far greater than those among the eight major language families in China. During the 6000-8000 years after the introduction of Indo-European, about 40 languages were gradually formed or acquired in Western Europe, including English, Finnish, Russian and other different languages. However, there are fossils to prove that humans existed in China more than 500,000 years ago. In such a long time, China will inevitably produce thousands of different languages. Where are they?

This strange thing implies that China used to be diverse and changeable, just like all other countries with large populations still show it now. China is different only in that it was unified much earlier. Its "China" is to rapidly simplify a vast area in an ancient melting pot of ethnic minorities and emigrate to tropical Southeast Asia, which will have a great impact on Japan, North Korea and even India. Therefore, the history of China provides the key to understand the whole history of Southeast Asia. This chapter will tell the story of how China became the China of China.

A convenient starting point is a detailed map of China language. For all of us who are used to seeing China as a monolithic entity, it's really an eye-opener to look at this map. It turns out that there are eight "big" languages in China-Putonghua and its seven close relatives (usually called "Chinese"), and the number of people who speak these languages ranges from 65,438+065,438+080 million to 800 million-and there are more than 65,438+0.30 "small" languages, many of which are spoken by only a few thousand people. All these "big" and "small" languages are divided into four language families, and their distribution density is quite different.

Mandarin and its relative languages belong to the Chinese language family of Sino-Tibetan language family, which is distributed in North China and South China of China continuously. People can hike from the northeast of China to the Beibu Gulf in the south. But there is still no separation from the land where people who speak Mandarin and their relatives' languages live. The other three major language families are scattered and scattered, and are used by people in some "inhabited areas", surrounded by the "Wang Yang Sea" of people who speak Chinese and other related languages.

Particularly dispersed is the distribution of (also called Manyimian) language family, which includes 6 million people and is divided into about five languages, with colorful names: red Miao, white Miao (also called striped Miao), black Miao, green Miao (also called blue Miao) and Yao. Miao Yao-speaking people live in dozens of isolated small areas, surrounded by people of other languages, who are scattered in 500,000 square miles from southern China to Thailand. More than 654.38 million Miao-speaking refugees from Vietnam brought this language to the United States, but their more widely known name in the United States is another name of this language family, Manchu.

Another scattered language family is the South Asian language family, and the most widely used languages in this language family are Vietnamese and Cambodian. The distribution of 6 million South Asians ranges from Vietnam in the east to the Malay Peninsula in the south, and then to India in the west. The fourth and last branch of the China language family is the Dai-Jia-Dai language branch (including Thai and Lao), with a population of 50 million, which is distributed from South China to the south into the Thai Peninsula and to the west into Myanmar.

Of course, the distribution of Miao Yao-speaking people today is so fragmented and scattered, not because some ancient helicopters dropped them one by one on the land of Asia. One can guess that they initially had a relatively continuous distribution, but later they became fragmented, because people from other language families expanded or induced Miao Yao people to give up their own languages. In fact, a large part of this fragmented language distribution process occurred in the past 2500 years, which is a well-documented historical fact. The ancestors of modern people who speak Thai, Lao and Burmese all moved to the present place from South China and its neighboring areas in history, and successively drowned the descendants of earlier immigrants who settled there. It is especially difficult for Chinese-speaking ethnic groups to replace other ethnic groups and change them in language, because Chinese-speaking ethnic groups despise other ethnic groups and think they are primitive inferior ethnic groups. The history books of Zhou Dynasty in China from BC 1 100 to BC 22 1 recorded the conquest and absorption of most non-Chinese ethnic groups in China by some Chinese-speaking vassal states.

We can use several kinds of reasoning to redraw the map of East Asian languages thousands of years ago. First, we can reverse the known history of language expansion in recent thousands of years. Secondly, we can infer that if there is only one language or related language family in some modern areas, and this language or language family occupies a vast continuous area, then these areas prove the geographical expansion of this language family, but it is not long enough to differentiate into many languages. Finally, we can do reverse reasoning: if there is a high degree of linguistic diversity belonging to a particular language family in some modern areas, then these areas are almost the early distribution centers of the language family.

Using these three kinds of reasoning to pull back the language clock, we can draw the conclusion that China's North China was originally occupied by Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages; Different parts of South China are occupied by people who speak Miao Yao, South Asian and Dai, Jia and Dai languages at different times. People who speak Sino-Tibetan have replaced most people who speak other languages in South China. An even more astonishing language upheaval must have swept the whole region from tropical Southeast Asia to southern China-Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Malay Peninsula. No matter what languages were spoken in those places at the beginning, they must have died out now, because the modern languages in these countries seem to be modern loanwords, mainly from southern China or Indonesian in some cases. In view of the fact that English is difficult to continue to exist today, we can also guess that there may be other language families in South China besides English, South Asian, Dai and Dai, but none of these other language families have left any surviving modern languages. We will also see that Austronesian language family (all Filipino and Polynesian languages belong to this ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This linguistic change in East Asia reminds us of the spread of European languages, especially English and Spanish, to the New World. The New World was once the birthplace of more than 1000 Indian languages. We know from modern history that English didn't eventually replace American Indian, just because Indian sounds sweet. On the contrary, this replacement requires English-speaking immigrants to kill most Indians through wars, massacres and diseases, which makes the surviving Indians have to adopt English, the new language of the majority. The direct cause of language replacement is the advantage of foreign Europeans over Indians in technology and political organization, which comes from the advantages brought by long-standing grain production. Australia's indigenous language was replaced by English, and the original pygmies and Koisan languages in sub-equatorial Africa were replaced by Bantu, which basically went through the same process.

Therefore, the dramatic language changes in East Asia have raised a corresponding question: What makes Sino-Tibetan people migrate from North China to South China in China, and South Asian people and people who speak other languages of South China in China go south to tropical Southeast Asia? Here, we must turn to archaeology to see if there is any evidence that some Asians have gained advantages over others in technology, politics and agriculture.

Like other places in the world, most archaeological records of human history in East Asia only show the remains of hunter-gatherers, who used rough stone tools and no pottery. In East Asia, the earliest evidence of different situations comes from China, because there were crop residues, livestock bones, pottery and polished stone tools around 7500 BC (in the new warehouse era). This era is less than 1000 years since the Neolithic Age and the crescent moon began to produce grain. However, because we know little about China before 1000, we can't determine whether the start time of grain production in China coincides with the fertile crescent, or earlier or later. At least, we can say that China is one of the earliest animal and plant domestication centers in the world.

China may actually have two or more independent food production centers. I have already mentioned the ecological differences between the cool and dry north and the warm and humid south of China. Even at the same latitude, there are ecological differences between coastal lowlands and inland plateaus. Different wild plants grow in these fundamentally different environments, so early farmers in different areas of China may have different uses of these plants. In fact, the earliest crops identified at present are two kinds of drought-tolerant millet in North China, while rice in South China indicates that there may be two different plant domestication centers in North and South China.

Some archaeological sites in China have not only the earliest evidence of crops, but also the bones of domestic pigs, dogs and chickens. Besides these domesticated animals and crops, there are many other domesticated animals and plants in China. Among these animals, buffalo is the most important (for pulling plows), while silkworms, ducks and geese are the other most important animals. Later, the familiar crops were soybeans, hemp, oranges, tea, apricots, peaches and pears. In addition, just as the east-west axis of Eurasia made many such China animals and crops spread westward in ancient times, the domesticated animals and plants in West Asia also spread eastward to China, where they gained an important position. West Asia's particularly significant contributions to the economy of ancient China were wheat and barley, cattle and horses, and (to a lesser extent) sheep and goats.

Like other parts of the world, China's grain production has gradually produced some other symbols of "civilization" discussed in chapters 1 1 4. China's extraordinary bronze smelting tradition began from 3000 BC to 2000 BC, which eventually led to the development of the world's earliest cast iron production in China around 500 BC. After that, 1500 was the period when a large number of scientific and technological inventions emerged in China mentioned in Chapter 13, including paper, compass, unicycle and gunpowder. Fortified cities appeared in 3,000 BC, and great changes have taken place in the shape of tombs, some simple and unpretentious, and some luxurious furnishings, which shows that there are classes. Tall city walls, huge palaces, and finally the Grand Canal (the longest canal in the world, with a total length of more than 65,438+0,000 miles) to defend the city prove that a hierarchical society has emerged, because only the rulers of such a society can mobilize a large number of civilian labor. The preserved characters appeared in the second Millennium BC, but they may have appeared earlier. Our archaeological knowledge about the emergence of cities and countries in China has been supplemented by written records about the earliest dynasties in China, which can be traced back to the Xia Dynasty, which rose around 2000 BC.

As for infectious diseases, which are a more disastrous by-product of grain production, we are not sure where some of the most important diseases originating in the old world occur. However, some European works from Roman times to the Middle Ages clearly described that bubonic plague and possibly smallpox came from the East, so these germs may have originated from China or East Asia. Influenza (from pigs) is more likely to occur in China, because pigs have been domesticated in China for a long time and have become very important livestock in China.

China has a vast territory and diverse ecology, and has created many different regional cultures. From the archaeological point of view, it can be distinguished according to their different styles of pottery and artifacts. During the fourth millennium BC, these regional cultures expanded geographically, and they began to influence, compete and merge with each other. Just as the exchange of domesticated animals and plants between regions with ecological diversity enriched China's food production, the exchange between regions with cultural diversity enriched China's culture and technology, and the fierce competition among warring chiefs promoted the formation of a larger and more centralized country (Chapter 14).

Although the north-south gradient in China hinders the spread of crops, this gradient is not an obstacle in China as it is in America or Africa, because the distance between north and south in China is short; At the same time, it is also because the north and south of China are not separated by deserts like Africa and northern Mexico, nor by narrow isthmus like Central America. China's great rivers from west to east (Yellow River in the north and Yangtze River in the south) facilitate the spread of crops and technology between coastal areas and inland areas, while the vast area and relatively gentle terrain between the east and the west of China finally connect the water systems of these two rivers through canals, thus promoting the communication between the north and the south. These geographical factors contributed to China's early cultural and political unification, while western Europe, though almost as big as China, has relatively uneven terrain and no such integrated river, so Europe has not achieved cultural and political unification until today.

In China, some new things spread from south to north, especially iron smelting and rice planting. But the main transmission direction is from north to south. This trend is most obvious in writing: too many writing systems have appeared in the western part of Eurasia, such as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittites, Minos and Semite. China, on the other hand, produced only one proven writing system. It was perfected in North China and spread all over the country, which prevented the development of any other immature writing system or replaced it in advance, and finally evolved into the writing still used in China today. Other important and distinctive things spread southward by North China society are bronze handicrafts, Sino-Tibetan languages and the composition of the country. The first three dynasties in China-Xia, Shang and Zhou-rose in the north of China in 2000 BC.

The existing works dating back to 1000 BC show that Chinese people at that time often felt (and many people still do today) that they were culturally superior to non-Chinese "barbarians", and North Chinese even often regarded South China as barbarians. For example, a writer in the late Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC described other ethnic groups in China as follows: "China and Yi Rong, the people of five parties, are both sexual and unchangeable. There are foreigners' tattoos in the East and people who don't eat fire. " The author of Zhou Dynasty then described the primitive tribes in the south, west and north as indulging in the same barbaric customs: "The south is barbaric. Carve a topic, fork a toe, and people who don't eat fire. The west is called Rong, standing in clothes, and some people don't eat. In the north, there is a cave with clothes and feathers in it. Others don't eat whole grains. " .

Some countries established by or imitating the Zhou Dynasty in northern China extended to southern China in the first millennium BC, and finally realized the political unification of China under the rule of Qin Dynasty in 22 1 BC. China's cultural unification also accelerated in the same period, and the literate and "civilized" Chinese countries absorbed and assimilated the "barbarians" without writing, or became an example for these people to follow. This cultural unity is sometimes cruel. For example, Qin Shihuang declared that the previous classics were worthless and ordered them to be burned, which caused us great inconvenience in understanding the early history and writing of China. These and other severe measures must have played a role in promoting the spread of Sino-Tibetan languages in North China to most parts of China, and the distribution of Miao and Yao languages has fallen into a fragmented state.

In East Asia, due to China's leading position in grain production, technology, writing and ethnic composition, China's innovation and reform have also made great contributions to the development of surrounding areas. For example, until the fourth millennium BC, tropical Southeast Asia was still occupied by hunter-gatherers, who made gravel tools and stone tools, belonging to the so-called peaceful cultural tradition named after the peace site in Vietnam. Since then, crops from China, Neolithic technology, village life and pottery similar to South China have spread to tropical Southeast Asia, and perhaps some language families from South China have followed. Historically, Burmese, Laotians and Thais expanded southward, completing the China in tropical Southeast Asia. All these modern nationalities are modern collateral relatives of South China compatriots.

China's influence is like a roller-overwhelming, and once tropical Southeast Asian countries have left almost no trace among the modern residents in this area. There are only three groups of hunter-gatherers left-Saman Dwarf Black People in Malay Peninsula, andaman islands Islander People and Victorian Dwarf Black People in Sri Lanka-which makes us think that the primitive inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia may have dark skin and curly hair, just like modern New Guineans, instead of light skin, straight hair people and their collateral relatives like South China in China. These short black people in Southeast Asia may be the last survivors of the aborigines who opened up New Guinea. The little black Mang people still live a life of hunting and gathering. They bartered with nearby farmers, but they also adopted a South Asian language from these farmers-we will see that short blacks in the Philippines and pygmies in Africa also adopted the languages of their farmers' trading partners. Only in distant andaman islands, some languages unrelated to the South China language family survived-they are the last surviving languages among hundreds of extinct indigenous languages in Southeast Asia.

Even North Korea and Japan have been greatly influenced by China, but their geographical isolation from China ensures that they have not lost their linguistic, physical and genetic characteristics like tropical Southeast Asia. Korea and Japan adopted China's rice in the second millennium BC, China's bronze smelting in the first millennium BC, and China's writing in the first millennium AD. China also introduced wheat and barley from West Asia to Korea and Japan.

This introduction of China's important role in East Asian civilization must not be exaggerated. In fact, not all the cultural progress in East Asia originated from China, and Koreans, Japanese and tropical Southeast Asians are not unproductive barbarians. The ancient Japanese invented some of the oldest pottery-making techniques in the world, and settled in the village as hunter-gatherers long before the introduction of grain production, relying on Japan's rich seafood resources to make a living. Some crops may have been domesticated first or independently in Japan, South Korea and tropical areas of Southeast Asia.

However, China's role is still too great. For example, the popularity of China culture in Japan and North Korea is still high. Although the writing system originated from China in Japanese has various shortcomings in expressing Japanese, Japan does not intend to give it up, and North Korea has only recently replaced the clumsy words originated from China with its own wonderful proverbs. The persistence of China characters in Japanese and Korean is a vivid legacy of the 20th century, when animals and plants were domesticated by China nearly 654.38 million years ago. Due to the achievements of the earliest farmers in East Asia, China became the China of China people, and people who came to Easter Island from Thailand (as we will see in the next chapter) became their distant relatives.