Is China a "warlike culture"? - Noah Smith is clueless about China (Part 4)

It has been almost a year since the last installment of the “Noah Smith is clueless about China” series. How time flies!

A few days ago, Noah Smith wrote an article titled TikTok is just the beginning. There are two parts to his article. In the first part, he made the argument about why TikTok has to be banned. In the second part, he discussed TikTok represented a broader problem, whether liberalism can really survive the “world of centralized, networked technology”, where he definitely recognizes some challenges.

I actually agree with his Part 2 a lot. I have long believed that information technology has made centralized systems substantially more efficient at governance and liberal systems substantially more chaotic than in the past. The jury is still out on which system is better in our age, an issue I honestly don’t know the answer to.

It’s his Part 1 that I will focus on for this essay.

Noah’s core argument basically runs like this: TikTok has to be banned because China is an adversary. China is using TikTok to not only gather data but, more crucially, also use it as a potent ideological weapon in order to weaken America. “China’s leaders are readying their nation for a confrontation with the United States.”¹

To the potential criticism that, perhaps, China may not be that evil and China’s ambitions are limited, Noah counters that “trying to appease China simply won’t work” because China won’t stop there:

Some Americans comfort themselves with the belief that if we give the country’s leaders what they want — remove export controls and tariffs, cancel industrial policy and cede manufacturing industries to China, let China conquer Taiwan unopposed, and so on — then they will become satisfied and leave us alone. This obviously failed with Hitler, but the people who think it’ll work with China tell themselves that the Chinese have historically not been a warlike culture, and will be satisfied with Taiwanese “reunification” and a bit of fawning and praise.

Here, Noah, like many people, makes reference to Hitler and the Munich Agreement. Surely, the core lesson of Nazi Germany was that you should never appease the aggressor.

So is China an aggressor country like Nazi Germany?

Noah basically says, of course! To argue against “some people” who think China has not been a “warlike culture”, he further adds a footnote. I believe the core of Noah’s argument, as well as most of his China-related writings, rests here, in this little footnote:

You would be astonished at the number of smart people, especially in the tech industry, who have expressed this idea to me. Obviously it’s historically false — China has fought countless border wars throughout its history, as well as a number of the deadliest civil wars ever recorded. But what’s even more dismaying is how some people are placing their hopes for the free world in tired cultural stereotypes.

If China is just as warlike as the West, and has unlimited ambition at the expense of other nations, then confronting China is only morally right, and thus banning TikTok is morally right. Otherwise, it is just a power competition between a rising power and an incumbent one with no inherent right or wrong.²

So, does China like war? Is China’s ambition limited? This will be the central question my article seeks to address today.

The ideas in this article are frankly quite obvious to most Chinese people, as I am only presenting a general consensus of our people. But for those of you who can’t read Chinese, who haven’t lived in this country for an extended period of time³, and who don’t have a direct bodily experience with these ideas, I can only try my very best to rely on logic and long and winding paragraphs. So please bear with me.

If you are close to Noah, please share this article with him. Even if I am a paying subscriber of Noahpinion, I am barred from commenting on his article for 99 years. I obviously didn’t persuade him last time, so let me try it again.

My thesis will cover 8 parts in a mostly Q&A format.

The topics/questions are:

1. Why is it extremely difficult for China to be expansionist?

2. If China is not warlike, what about the numerous “border wars”?

3. What about the “deadliest civil wars”?

4. Does history even matter for discussion today?

5. China’s inability to go after “value-based” or “faith-based” wars

6. Lack of ideological mobilization for an unlimited expansionist war

7. The low ROI of military conquest in the Information Age

8. What if an event like 9/11 also happens to China?

There is a navigation bar on your left if you are on the web version, so simply navigate to the section that interests you.

Parts 1-3 will be a dense discussion of history. If you don’t care about history, please go to Part 4, discussing why history matters in this case.

Please note that I only have time to finish topics 1-4 for this week, and I will finish the rest in the following weeks.

#1 Why is it extremely difficult for China to be expansionist?

This part is a rehash of the ideas I presented in the first installment of the “Noah Smith is clueless about China” series.

The main idea is this: the setup of China through the millennia is essentially a core agricultural plain area⁴ trying but failing to expand beyond its limits.

This “central plains” is a “resource curse.” It is perhaps the largest single body of arable lands in ancient times (outside the New World.) No Chinese ruler could afford to divert their attention elsewhere while ignoring the task of managing this rich land. Their priorities in this regard are pre-destined: internal affairs first, external affairs second. (This is not much different from today. We may not be so agricultural today, but we now have 1.4 billion people living mostly in the central plains area to manage.)

Yet managing this area is difficult. The Chinese rulers had to design and experiment with all sorts of administrative methods to govern it, which was never perfect but nonetheless exhausted most of their attention, the attention that could otherwise have been spent preparing for external warfare.

This mechanism was different from Europe, which didn’t have as strong an agricultural base as China. Therefore, Europeans were forced to set their eyes on the outside world as pirates/explorers/conquistadors, generally with a very different outward-facing mentality.

When the internal affairs were in good order, there were indeed attempts at expansion. But after many iterations, this effort has eventually been constrained and boxed in by insurmountable geographical constraints. So while Mongolians could sweep across Eurasia in a few decades, and Alexander the Great could fight all the way from Greece to Pakistan in 10 years, China was only able to reach its furthest possible extent a few hundred years ago, during the height of Qing Dynasty, in a particular corner of Eurasia, despite 3000-5000 years of continuous history.

One big reason for this inability to expand globally, apart from geography, is that each war effort depends on overtaxing the core agricultural area, the exact area that Chinese rulers can’t afford to mismanage in the first place. This tends to breed discontent, disobedience, rebellions, civil wars, and eventually, the fall of a dynasty.

This mechanism almost brought down the Han Dynasty when Emperor Wu’s war of conquest became too costly. He even had to issue a public apology to pacify the empire.

It almost broke down the Tang Dynasty when Emperor Xuanzong’s military conquests abroad made the central plains so weak it set up the stage for the An Lushan Rebellion, possibly the bloodiest war in human history.

It did bring about the downfall of the Sui Dynasty when Emperor Yang’s over-taxation for his war efforts against Goryeo (essentially present-day Korea) led to the spectacular collapse of his short-lived dynasty.

I do not deny that China had ambitions for military expansion. I do not deny that some ambitious leaders in our history had grandiose ambitions for glory. But there is a huge gap between what they wanted to achieve and what they could achieve. Our track record in this regard, though, is embarrassingly incompetent. The cycle of military conquest to imperial over-stretch to over-taxation to internal implosion has already been repeated many times in our long history. If millennia of trials haven’t made us a global empire, I doubt we will ever be.

Arriving at the doorstep of modernity, the Project of China has been extended to the farthest possible extent that’s allowed by geography. We have already conquered all the “known” universe to us. Emperor Qianlong of Qing, who presided over the farthest extent of territory that China ever controlled, refused to trade with the British, thus missing a chance for his empire to connect with industrialization. He just didn’t bother.

The territorial claim of China today is actually much smaller than that of Qing, mainly because of the loss of Outer Mongolia, a big chunk of Manchuria, and parts of Xinjiang to the Russians or Russian-backed forces. Combined, the total territorial loss exceeded the size of India, but China now officially recognizes these losses. (Although, funnily, the Republic of China (a.k.a Taiwan) still formally holds on to these territories.)

People’s Republic of China’s territory overlaid on that of the Qing Dynasty. Most of the differences were because of the Russians, but China today recognizes the reality

But does a discussion of history really matter? Will the technology of today rekindle ambitions for expansionism? Why should we care about this gibberish of Xuanzong or Wu or Yang or Han, who lived many thousand years ago?

For my answer to these questions, please navigate to #4 of this article.

#2 What about the numerous border wars?

The numerous “border wars” are what many people like Noah use as the counter-argument. I also received a similar challenge last time.

I do not deny those border wars. There were many of them. But I have to say China’s so-called border wars were marked by more failures than successes.

Take the example of the Korean Peninsula. After successive waves of invasion by the Sui and Tang Dynasties, China finally crushed the powerful Goryeo Dynasty that reigned over the Korean Peninsula. But China was never able to solidify its occupation there, and the Tang control there soon faded away.

Sure, the Chinese helped Koreans fend off an invasion by the Japanese (the Imjin War) and helped North Koreans fend off an invasion by the Americans (the Korean War), but China never used those occasions to colonize the Peninsula either. Why? It’s just too costly. It doesn’t make practical sense.

We can also look at Vietnam. China did control Northern Vietnam for several periods in history. But those periods were shorter and shorter. And after 20 years of Ming’s rule over Northern Vietnam 600 years ago, China has never been able to establish control there. Why? It is just so hard to control those jungles, just like what the French and the Americans later painfully found out.

There was a brief border war between China and Vietnam in 1979, but it was a strategic move by Deng Xiaoping to weaken the alliance between Vietnam and the Soviet Union, with tacit backing from the US. China quickly withdrew from Vietnam with no intention to claim any territory, once Deng’s strategic goal was achieved.

And we don’t even have to look at Japan. Han technic people have never even tried to invade Japan, despite the fact that Japanese pirates raiding China’s coast had been a major headache for the Ming emperors. Mongols, after controlling China, twice tried to invade Japan but never succeeded, giving rise to Japan’s kamikaze mythology.

It’s not to say China had no military successes in its war of expansion. A notable example was General Gao Xianzhi⁵, who took the Tang army to scale the snowy mountains of the Pamir and traveled all the way to Gilgit in today’s Pakistan, scoring some impressive victories and adding Kashmir under Tang control, an impressive military feat that could even rival that of Hannibal’s campaign in Europe.

But just a few years later, it’s also the same Gao who lost to the Abbasid Arabs at the Battle of Talas in modern-day Kazakhstan, which was the only known armed conflict between the Chinese and the Arabs.

And only 4 years after the defeat at Talas, the An Lushan Rebellion broke out. It’s the imperial over-stretch all over again. The center could not hold. The Tang was permanently damaged by this and lost influence over Central Asia. Gao himself was beheaded by order of Emperor Xuanzong after a major defeat at the hands of rebel forces.

The An Lushan Rebellion

We also can’t ignore another major fact here: Most of China’s bloodiest border wars happened in reverse: It’s the ethnic minorities, hungry but excellent fighters marveling at war and plunder, who raided, invaded, and often took control of China.

In fact, invasion by nomads and mobilization of national resources to fend off those invasions (the Great Wall, the Great Canal) is a core theme of Chinese history.

Many of these invasions had huge success. To name but a few:

Nomadic invasions ended the Han-Jin continuum and gave China 400 years of chaos.

Even Tibetans once occupied Chang’an, Tang’s capital city, a crisis that could not have been resolved without the assistance of Uyghurs.

It was the Khitans who subjected the Northern Song Dynasty to a vassal state, the Jurchens who finished the Northern Song, and the Mongolians who ended the misery for the Southern Song.

The Ming armies finally fought off the Mongolians, but Manchus invaded again, ending the Ming fewer than 300 years later.

Not to mention the Japanese, who almost succeeded at occupying China had the United States not joined WWII.

Why? Again, it’s because the agricultural core region is too weak militarily. Farmers do not make good horsemen. We value money-making much more than killing people.

And then, we need to consider the ultimate twist to this story: had it not for these “nomadic invasions” that added some steel into our national character, China would never have extended beyond China Proper at all.

Most periods of expansion in China happened during the non-Han dynasties. The Tang emperors originated from the Northwestern plateaus and were mixed-blooded⁶, helping China to extend control over present-day Xinjiang and Central Asia. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty helped to incorporate Mongolia and Tibet into China for a few decades. Ultimately, it’s the Manchus whose Qing Dynasty really helped China establish effective control over Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet, and Taiwan. In fact, the whole history of Qing was almost like a “reverse takeover” by Manchuria of China Proper and using China Proper as a base to expand into peripheral regions to the farthest extent allowed by geography.

By contrast, most Han-dominated dynasties, such as Song, Ming, and Jin, often marked the smallest territorial sizes in our history.

We are just too bad at war.

#3 Civil wars

What about those deadly civil wars? I believe more Chinese lives were lost in our numerous civil wars and armed rebellions than were lost in external wars. Does that mean the Chinese love to fight wars?

I think the case of civil war proves exactly the opposite. When we show the part of our human nature that’s violent, we often do it inward rather than outward. It’s again the “imperial over-stretch” problem. Most of those civil wars happened when external wars became too costly to bear or created too much of a power vacuum inside, for example, the aforementioned An Lushan Rebellion.

These civil wars also loom large in our leader’s minds. We are keenly aware that it will always be internal strife that destroys us, and too much ambition overseas would only make this internal problem worse, unlike the experience in the West, where the natural reflex is to channel domestic discontent into fervor for foreign adventurism.

#4 Does history even matter for discussion today? Isn’t this a “cultural stereotype”?

For the question of war and peace, history matters greatly.

There are at least 3 big reasons.

First, history shapes our cultural reflexes. For a nation with a record of failures at external conquests, painful memories of being conquered by supposedly more “inferior” people, and even more painful memories of civil wars as a result of imperial over-stretch, it will always be a hard sell for warmongers to persuade people to fight unless it’s a matter of self-defense. Chinese people simply can’t square themselves with being a successful expansionist power because they almost never have been such a power. Better work hard, eat well, sleep well, earn some good money, and create some babies rather than sacrificing our good lives for the emperor’s vanity.

These cultural reflexes act as very important guardrails against ambitious leaders who might really have expansionist ideas. Any war effort requires willing subjects who can support it; otherwise, the war machine can’t possibly operate.

Secondly, history also shapes our imaginations. People can’t foresee the future but can only look at the past. And those past memories have a strong influence over today’s choices. If, after several millennia, China could only get as much territory as what the Qing Dynasty had achieved, that memories would be fixed there. It would be extremely difficult to persuade average Chinese people that, no, we actually deserve much more.

The same mechanism also worked for Westerners. It would be disingenuous to suggest that history does not matter for them. Let’s face it: a big reason that many Westerners are so anxious about China’s rise is because Hitler happened. The West tried to appease him, but he was never satisfied and wanted even more. That historical memory shaped the imagination today: no matter the wildly different contexts, China may be today’s Nazi Germany, hellbent on destroying the world, and we should do all we can to contain its rise.

And then there is another huge reason why history matters, and this one is quite unique to China: Chinese people may be one of the few people on earth who care a lot about history. Just take this example: I believe, on average, each Chinese person, no matter their education level, has around 100-200 historical names in their heads, and we think this is normal.⁷ They may not read too many books, but many novels, movies, and TV shows are saturated with characters from our long history, making it impossible to forget.

What this means is that not a single political decision in China is made without the influence of our historical memories. So when a leader in China decides to go to war for something, rest assured that memories of many older wars will flash back to inform him what’s really at stake.

So, does history matter? It surely matters.

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Parts 4-8 are here.

1. I have to say, if I were the US government, I would also ban TikTok. The reasoning will not be so different from Noah's. This app is ultimately controlled by an adversary power, and it doesn’t really follow the norms of our dominant value system. It’s not yet used massively to promote CCP talking points, but just look at the amount of anti-Israel and pro-Palestine content on it. It’s out of control! No society, not even a democracy, would allow something contradicting the society’s core value system (as defined by the political elite, of course) to have so much influence. It’s self-destructive, extremely divisive, and logically impossible for a society to accept.

But, of course, the Noahs and Smiths can’t talk to Gen-Zs in their face that TikTok has to be taken away because they are gullible idiots or because they think the platform is anti-semitic. Instead, it has to be framed in a way that points to China (or its government) as a dark, evil force conspiring to weaken and divide America.

2. To this central argument, I found an interesting comment below Noah’s article by a user Wandering Llama (emphasis my own):

I still don't really see what makes China so exceptional. Isn't this what all great powers want of great powers they are not aligned with? Doesn't the US want Russia and China to be weaker and poorer too?

On the merits of the policies advocated by Noah regarding China I agree on most, but the demonization of China makes me a little uneasy. I'd just frame this as a great power struggle - the US is at the top, wants to continue being at the top, and needs to fend off any challengers.

Noah didn’t respond to this comment. If he does comment, I imagine the response will be along the lines of: China is evil. China is an expansionist power that has strong military ambitions that will wreak havoc upon the world, and that ambition has to be checked.

3. I agree with Noah Smith that traveling doesn’t really help you understand a country. Reading and living do.

4. In Chinese, it’s often called “中原 central plains”, while some people like to call it China Proper, where Han Chinese mostly populate it.

5. Gao Xianzhi, also named Go Seonji, was an ethnic Goryeo/Korean whose father was taken captive by Tang when Goryeo fell. Tang was a cosmopolitan dynasty indeed.

6. Taizong, the most consequential emperor of the Tang, was also called by Turkic tribes as “The Great Heaven Khan”.

7. I myself probably remember 1000-1500 names.