Thinking about China in History

The longue durée

We last left off with Su Dongpo, who lived from 1037-1101. We will next pick up our story at the end of the seventeenth century. What was happening right here in northwest Connecticut 600 years ago? To what extent is that a helpful comparison for thinking about China?

How do you talk about history over a 600-year period? Which of those things can we present visually in a fairly digestible format?

First, poke around with the interactive Harvard World Map

• Navigate to Harvard’s WorldMap (external link)
  
• Teacher introduction:
  
  • Selecting a base map.
    
  • Using the shift-select zoom function.
    
  • Operating opacity controls for overlays.
    

Next, either using the map interface or doing your own outside search, pick a small handful of visuals that captures history in China from the Song to the early Qing.

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”

The following quotations are drawn from among highly-respected European and American thinkers about China.

• “The history of China itself does not develop anything and on that account one cannot engage in the details of that history.”—Georg Hegel (1770-1831)
  

• “At times the conditions inherited from ancient times of one or another oriental people have been regarded as the foundation of everything. But one cannot possibly use as a starting point the peoples of eternal standstill to comprehend the inner movement of history.”—Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)
  

• “East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. . . . Europe, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is ‘the source -the unique source’ of the ‘ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom’. . . . These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.”—Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), The Clash of Civilizations
  
  
  
• “The collective or interdependent nature of Asian society is consistent with Asians' broad, contextual view of the world and their belief that events are highly complex and determined by many factors. The individualistic or independent nature of Western society seems consistent with the Western focus on particular objects in isolation from their context and with Westerners' belief that they can know the rules governing objects and therefore can control the objects' behavior.”—Richard Nisbett (1941-), The Geography of Thought