Beijing Versus Shanghai, Pastoralism as Key to Civilization

I taped a conversation with Tyler Cowen last week and the first question he asked me was whether I preferred Shanghai or Beijing and I had no answer. It was an appropriate question since I was still jet lagged from having just come from Asia, but what struck me the most during my two short times in China is how much everything seemed the same. I wrote about that bland ubiquity after walking both cities, which I see as an intentional leveling: A uniform modernity which seems to be one of the goals of the CCP, which I’ve likened to the guardian class in Plato’s Republic, who are playing a real world version of SimCountry, directing, managing, and tweaking almost every aspect of Chinese life. One of their primary goals has been to replace the traditional, which they see as messy, embarrassing, and impoverished, with a landscape that is wealthier, but which to me has all the soul and flair of a corporate business park.

This isn’t so much a judgement as an observation. Given China’s past of poverty, tragedy, and hardship, I understand its desire for a more refined, sanitized, and conventional modern lifestyle. The safety, well-being, and economic flourishing of Chinese citizens is a billion times more important than my tourist’s desire for quaint historical character, and they have delivered that. Regardless of what else you think about China and the CCP, it should be acknowledged how impressive the last forty years of stewardship have been, with the wealth of citizens having grown almost thirty times, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Yet despite the outward similarities between Shanghai and Beijing, I am sure there are differences, and that their opacity is as much about me as it is the built landscape. Walking a city as I do, trekking fifteen miles from the outer beltway to downtown repeatedly, isn’t always the best way to understand its culture, and China’s outward uniformity makes this limitation even more apparent.

Still, part of me is stubbornly sticking to my thesis that China is culturally homogeneous, certainly more than other large countries, especially those outside of Asia, which as a continent has a tendency towards uniformity compared to Europe and the Americas.

Chinese conformity isn’t surprising since one of the CCP’s stated goals is to achieve widespread shared prosperity. Uniformity, not division, is what the CCP understands as China’s strength, and hence, any groups hanging on to past ways, especially ones very different from the modal, are an embarrassment. That is a very different way of imagining the public good, one that we in the West, since the Enlightenment, have linked to the protection and expansion of individual rights, with the primary goal being the flourishing of the self, even if that means it is at odds with the flourishing of the wider community.

I am not blind to the problems of the CCP, and I am certainly not so dogmatic as to pretend this approach hasn’t come with huge issues, but I also believe the party isn’t simply cynical hypocrites consumed by a desire for power. They really do have a different understanding of the public good, at a deep philosophical level, and China’s growing economic might means that worldview cannot simply be dismissed as the ramblings of some bad guys. Western style constitutional democracy, with our emphasis on human rights (as defined by us), is an ideology, and when we say it is the highest form that other nations need to advance towards, we are making a claim on truth that a lot of the world doesn’t necessarily agree with.

China is very different, because of its internal similarities, and that is why it isn’t going away. The next decades of global politics will be framed as being about an economic and military competition between the US and China, but the ideological differences are as great as, if not greater, than those between the US and the Soviets. That is harder to see because the CCP isn’t your father’s Communist party, and for all practical purposes has adopted a market economy. They are, however, still committed to the communalism part of Communism, as well as the materialism part. That means they believe in an elite cadre selflessly managing society towards a communal shared good, which translates into conformity over individuality, national order and rights over personal expression — the nail that sticks out doesn’t get praise, but gets hammered down. (...)

My next trip will begin with nine days in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), followed by eight in Xi’an, and then what is quickly becoming my traditional stopover in Seoul before returning home.

I’m going to Tashkent, because on reflection Central Asia is the region of the world that I’m currently most captivated by, because it is the region least similar to the rest of the world, without also being uniformly depressing. In retrospect, Bishkek and Ulaanbaatar were two of my most rewarding trips, and despite their pollution, they are wonderful places to visit, that are inexpensive, safe, unique, and currently not saturated with tour groups. In both places you can lose yourself in the local culture, without feeling that you are either a mark to be exploited, or so different that your existence there is impolite.

I booked this trip because I’m deeply interested in ancient history and am currently reading two books on the Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language, the world’s original lingua franca. This is the famous mother tongue, and the idea that there was a group that was the origin of so many of the great civilizations of the world, has a long intellectual history, one that got derailed by the support of the Nazis.

Despite the Nazis’ warped fascination with it, the core idea remains valid: a civilization from the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age expanded from Central Asia across a vast region, stretching from England to India, and left a lasting genetic, cultural, and linguistic legacy.

This wasn’t the Aryans, like the German archaeologist thought, but the Yamnaya culture that emerged around 3,500 BC from the region that is currently a war zone between Russia and Ukraine.

I would recommend both of the books, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” and “By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia”, although the first is more academic, but also far more insightful.

For those without the time to read them, the quick (and oversimplified) theory is that a pastoral culture from what is now southern Ukraine and Russia, around 5,500 years ago brought together, and perfected, the recent inventions of wool spinning, wheeled travel, domesticated horses, and herding, to learn how to ride horses, build wagons and chariots, and then go forth out both west towards Europe and east across the steppe, and within a thousand years, transform the world.

They did this because they embraced a form of pastoralism which was truly revolutionary, allowing them to leave the narrow river valleys and venture into the otherwise empty steppe, which stretched for 5,000 miles to Beijing, in an almost unbroken series of flat, dry, grasslands.

This lifestyle was so transformative because herds of sheep and cattle were organic factories manage by humans, “grass processors (which) converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone — the foundations of both life and wealth.”

The amazing thing is that pastoral, nomadic, animal-centered lifestyle, the one that forever changed the world over five thousand years ago, still exists today in parts of Central Asia in many ways unchanged, although it has become rarer and rarer. Yet, only a hundred years ago it was still the dominant way of life.

One side note that I add whenever I write about the nomadic and pastoral life— neither means being fully transient without a home; rather, both are deeply tied to place, often more so than a modern person who lives in the same apartment for their entire life. Nomads do shift between locations, carting their tents a few times a year by horse (or now Prius) as the weather changes, but these moves are often short (just up or down from the hill) and they return to the same places repeatedly. Pastoralism, and the nomadic life, are deeply intertwined with the land, which they know in ways we moderns are clueless about.

I don’t know if I will find any lingering traces of the nomadic lifestyle in Tashkent, as I did in Mongolia. However, even if I don’t, I plan to visit the national museums, since much of the archaeology behind the Proto-Indo-European thesis comes from Soviet-era work, which is now housed in local museums

Both of these books also touched on China, given that early farming civilizations also began around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. One book included a map of China’s millet/rice divide, which made me realize that, in traveling from Shanghai to Beijing, I had crossed a 5,000-year-old cultural boundary. I began wondering about Tyler’s original question and whether I had actually noticed this difference.

by Chris Arnade, Walks the World |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. See also: The Divine Engineer of Ancient Sichuan:]

"The first thing one notices about Chengdu, capital of the western Chinese province of Sichuan, is how eager the city is to lean into its theme: the pandas. Smiling pandas peek out of storefront windows, beckoning in tourists to buy panda-themed keychains and fridge magnets. Children run around in black-eared headbands, threading between scooters parked in long rows on the sidewalk. In front of the Lego store in Chengdu’s branch of Taikoo Li, one of China’s premier chain malls, there stands a Lego brick model of a giant panda, larger than life, avatar of the cutesy aesthetic and the material abundance that so define the urban landscape of the new China of the 21st century.

Of course, this new China is just the latest in a succession of “new Chinas” in recent history, from the new China of a national republic to the new China of socialism with Chinese characteristics. But it is a China which outside observers, particularly those better acquainted with its predecessors of previous decades, are liable to find bewildering. In the new China, sleek modern office buildings box in sunken cobbled streets. In the new China, villagers pitch in for group orders of produce and medicine from an online shop. In the new China, street vendors deep-frying potatoes and tofu in an open vat of oil have you scan a QR code to pay with your phone. I’ve only seen one beggar in China since moving to Shanghai last August; he was in Chengdu, sitting on a blanket in front of an entrance to the subway station, head bowed over his personal QR code for WeChat Pay."