China: A History
John Keay
Harper Press £25, pp556
Here, at roughly 130 pages per millennium, is China's history from the earliest fragments of Xia dynasty to the last emperor, with a little of Chairman Mao added for good (or bad) luck. Its core, though, covers the 'big five' dynasties - Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing - from 200BC to the start of the 20th century, and Keay's choice is deliberate. There is no understanding China present or future without a sense of its past.
Much of that past, by any standard, is awe-inspiring. Not just for the temples, palaces and terracotta armies that remain, but for the earliest books and scripts - and poems - that underpin the beginnings of true civilisation. More than 3,000 years ago, Keay notes, the Shang used a script that is still recognisably Chinese: more, it was soon put to bureaucratic purpose, recording the transactions of government. 'Into the new era of textual record in the first millennium BC, literacy, authority and history went hand in hand.'
Much of the time, the hand of history carried a sword or fired a cannon. Empires did not grow magically, nor retreat except along rivers of blood. Armies half a million strong clash regularly through these pages and sometimes render its narrative pure 1066 and All That. Baby emperors fall like flies. Wicked empresses see others choked to death. Mongol conquerors tumble from their mounts at strategic moments. Slaughter and perfidy are two horses of the apocalypse. But such murderous events are less important - and much less interesting - than the patterns of life that lie beneath.
For the China that matters is the China of Confucius: thoughtful, hardworking, convinced of the value of learning and seeking to mould its future from the wisdom of the elders. In this China, it is politics, not plotting, that wins the day; and the nature of political life that 'the Master' observed almost 500 years BC is oddly modern and wholly relevant. Empires lose steam and traction like modern administrations; they simply run out of energy and ideas.
Consider, for instance, the troubles of the Han dynasty. The emperor is weak, surrounded by manipulative forces and the traditional bureaucracy is intellectually weak, too, its top posts sold off as sinecures. Enter a separate power centre within the palace called the Department of Affairs of State. You might, during the reign of the Emperor Blair, name it the Cabinet Office, or the Office of Cheney for the Emperor George W. So you have unpopular tax reform. You also have hugely unpopular local government reform. And slowly, while the emperor fornicates besottedly - in JFK mode - military commanders in the new, devolved provinces begin to feel their strength.
This is the way the dynasty eventually ends: in corruption, brutality, distraction. Enter, centuries later, the brief Sui hegemony and a new demand for the 'vision thing', in this case a determined attempt to sweep out the inert bureaucratic placemen and put talent, not privilege, first. So the Sui set up a Board of Civil Office to centralise every appointment and monitor the selection process. They also set out to broaden and deepen the whole examination system; everything, in short, that the putative Emperor Balls might put on his check list.
Time and again, new dynasties arise, peddling reforms for agriculture, health or education. And time and again they inevitably fail. It is, at one remove, a chilling comment on the crude rhythms of democracy and the whole concept of 'progress'. Where Gordon Brown goes tomorrow, the Northern or Southern Tong have gone long before. The implicit lesson isn't of some ancient world struggling after modernity. It is of a miraculously modern, sophisticated, ambitious world forever wrestling with the problems of unity and authority.
We keep hearing about a China struggling to catch up and compete, as though it were that other billion-plus nation, India, which Keay chronicled in an earlier, rather more emotionally involved volume. But that's plain ridiculous. Can the nation that built the Great Wall run an Olympic Games? Stupid question. And has Chinese history, the tumultuous change of empires and creeds, stopped? An even more stupid question (which makes you feel puny even in the asking). Anybody fascinated by the puzzle of what comes next for our frail, perplexed planet will find unexpected answers in this crisp, often witty chronicle of amazements: for what comes next, as the Chinese know, is also what came up in the dynasty before last.
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