Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
My original point has not to do with some academic history lesson about either case, it has to do with the fact that while “networking” plays a role in every society, China placed much more emphasis on it in periods throughout its history relative to other societies; and was deeply embedded in its governance structures in a way that Europeans didn’t have an analog (yes; they tried it too, but again it wasn’t like the systems you had in Asia).
And the point of the "history lesson" was to illustrate that I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when you say that China placed much more emphasis on networking as part of the state, especially during the early Tang as you specify, when to my eyes European states were as or even more networking-based -- both prior to, contemporary with, and after the Tang, despite the pretensions of the Roman Republic.
You did, however, say this:
The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks)…But anyway, it wasn’t until the 7th century onward that power shifted away from the influence of these families.
Setting aside that the Tang was itself founded in the 7th century and that the expansion of the imperial examinations occurred in the early Tang, I took to understand as continuing throughout the Tang, and which — while having some truth even in the post-Zhou era, is decidedly less true of China at that point compared to any other state in the world at that time.
In any case, a few points.
You yourself identify that the 科舉 keju examination system in fact precedes the Tang, which already should suggest that despite the small scale and minor role of the examinations, the Sui state was already looking for ways to decrease the impact of personal networks by introducing relatively objective measures. Even prior to the expansion of the keju, the Sui and the Tang (as well as previous Chinese states) would try to minimise the danger of guanxi-based relationships to the state and the bureaucracy through methods like the 回避制 huibi zhi (known as the law of avoidance†) to prevent officials from developing regional power bases that could challenge central authority; the Sui administrative reforms that abolished hereditary offices, centralised appointments to regional offices (instead of succession by local elites), regular evaluations of regional officials, …etc. So the Sui and early Tang state was already moving towards relative meritocracy against established patronage systems, even before the examination system exploded in importance with Wu Zetian and especially during the turbulent late Tang period where the clans gradually lose importance (as you correctly point out).
The early (and even mid-late) Tang court was indeed dominated by aristocrats, and the emperor in fact did appoint members of the Longxi Li clan who were close in kinship to governorships and military command. However it is important to note a few things. Princely appointments to commanderies were a counterweight to local elites, but the princes appointed were also constrained by the centrally appointed bureaucracy who were nominally subordinate (and who often would report not to the princes, but to their own ministry). These appointments were both to prevent local elites from consolidating power as well as designed to not let princes actually utilise them as independent administrative/economic bases (hardly surprising given that Tang Taizong gained the throne through fratricide). And of course, early Tang emperors often relied extensively on non-kin (and even poor commoner in the case of Wei Zheng, for example) advisors and officials.
In this way even the early Tang state was very far from a patrimonial state like you seem to suggest, and its institutions served to depower the relatively informal and relational basis of power since the Jin in favour of a legible formal bureaucracy (even if the aristocracy was massively overrepresented in this bureaucracy, and that patronage networks functioned within these — as they still do today!).
(It should be noted that central authority did weaken during the Six Dynasties period between the Han and Sui, which saw a resurgence in the importance of aristocratic elites. Some methods to curb the power of large landowning clans, such as 均田制 juntian zhi (equal-field system), ended up backfiring in the end as well either through elite co-opting, change in policy, or shifting of the sociopolitical climate. The argument that some sort of guanxi DNA is indelibly woven into the Chinese psyche would likely do better in reference to the turbulent Jin dynasty rather than the Tang.)
† A pre-existing norm since the Han
I am in fact less familiar with details of European history, but my understanding was that familia and clientela relationships defined most, if not all, of Roman society; and that Roman politics operated more or less through networks of personal obligation (even if dispersed or distant), with heavy reliance on intermarriage, family alliances, patronage and sponsorship of other politicians, mobilisation of patronage networks during the republic in order to secure posts for clients, legions/the praetorian guard installing their favoured general as emperor…the list goes on. Even the “Five Good Emperors” — which was itself fairly extraordinary in Roman history in its frank merit-based succession, if I recall correctly — were appointments made off personal relation mixed with informal judgement of merit, rather than any sort of formal meritocracy.
This is in contradistinction to the Chinese, who even before the keju had at least tried to formalise methods to draw out talent from the base population through systems of recommendation that required magistrates to assess and promote local talents (with quotas based off households) in the 察舉制 chaju zhi system, in an attempt to address blatant nepotism†; oral and textual examinations in the court of these identified talents via 對策 duice, in which candidates were interviewed in front of the court‡; formalised bureaucratic education in the establishment of the 太學 taixue state academy which allowed non-aristocrats to gain merit and access to the court; etc.
This is not to say that Rome did not have its (informal) equivalents to the above. A fair few novus homo (like Cato the Elder and Cicero) were able to rise to the patrician class during the republic through great distinction, after all (although it also rather reinforces the idea that the aristocracy was otherwise quite closed), and many Roman emperors were from non-patrician backgrounds (e.g. Diocletian, Vespasian, …). Roman elites also obviously had education (either familial or through tutoring) for their children, and republican Rome (at least until the end) also had social institutions that was expected of an aspiring senator to in the cursus honorum. However as far as I understand it, Rome retained a greater aristocratic culture, with a greater emphasis on personal connections, and with none of the formal institutions that early-mid imperial Chinese states established in attempts to curtail nepotism.
And if we go a bit further into the early medieval period we get feudalism, which is literally a network of personal connections and reciprocal obligations between lords and vassals (at various levels), with extremely high importance placed on bloodline and marriage alliances, etc. In fact, during this exact period of time, Europe was moving towards an even more clientelist system than the Roman system, while China was moving towards the opposite. The papacy and episcopacy were also notoriously family- and connection-based; were cardinal-nephews not literally the central case for which the word nepotism is coined?
If the above is correct, then China in fact has almost always been less prone to this sort of guanxi ever since its unification under the Qin until at least the early modern era, albeit in the context that premodern states by necessity rely much more heavily on informal connections, especially at a local level, and perhaps excepting the Sima Jin.
† This was not very successful in the long run, but hey, at least Han Wudi tried?
‡ This, again, was not very successful in the long run. The entire process was full of holes, from candidates successfully gaming selection criteria of 孝廉 xiaolian, to families forming (or having existing) relationships with examiners. But hey, at least they tried, and that’s more than can be said for the rest of the world at this time. The nine-rank system that replaced the chajuzhi in Wei and Jin also became co-opted by the aristocracy quite quickly.
Much of the above suggests another thing as well: a lineage attempting to nepotism itself into absolute power within a state might encourage cultivating guanxi with the sovereign (or proxies and appendages of the sovereign), but it cannot tolerate other families, clans, and associations trying to guanxi themselves into power, and as such would find alternative methods — such as meritocracy — to develop loyalty and staff the state bureaucracy. After all, the imperial family of each Chinese dynasty were obviously patrimonial institutions, but that didn’t stop the Song or the Ming from being meritocratic for their day.
And in any case, despite some cultural idiosyncrasies in its performance, much of the modern phenomenon of guanxi is in my impression closer to things like royal/papal/aristocratic patronage of artisans or workshops, or the “old boys’ club”, phrases which refer to obviously western institutions; and which has existed essentially in every society in some form or another. I also think there’s probably a reasonable case to be made that the guanxi system that we see today owes its modern form to the relative disorder and anarchy present from the late Qing all the way to the end of the Cultural Revolution; this dovetails with your observation that:
[patronage networks are] often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent
Pigeon
coo coo
3d ago
The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that.
I find this incredibly difficult to take seriously. Medieval and Renaissance Europe was full of patronage networks, as was Rome (and its client states), and the Sui-Tang period is precisely the point in history where China develops the institution of meritocratic examinations for the civil service. If anything, you would expect the reverse.
Pigeon
coo coo
12d ago
My experience is the reverse (she asked for it first), although we stopped after concerns about cognitive impact in the long term.
Pigeon
coo coo
18d ago
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security.
I have heard this anecdotally and from statistics, but I’ve seen cases where it works out.
Like myself! My partner is likely to outearn me over our lifetimes. Neither of us have an issue with that so far, I cook better than she does.
Pigeon
coo coo
18d ago
I've never heard of any people who sat around neglecting to invent the wheel for ten thousand years
Does this count specifically for carts and other transport (i.e. other vaguely wheel-like things don’t count)? Because the Incans never got around to wheels proper because of fairly obvious geographic limitations.
In my darker moments, I think if we do manage to crack the problem of cis men being able to carry pregnancies to term, it will be very revelatory. All the partnered guys on here who want four or five kids? Now you can have that! You can carry those seahorse pregnancies to term! Let's see how enthusiastic the "barefoot and pregnant" guys are when it's them barefoot and pregnant!
I may not be representative here, but my partner and I have actually discussed this before and lamented that I was the man and she the woman — we both think I’d be more willing to put my career on standby and suffer the physical consequences for children than she would be, though it’s difficult to say for certain given the biological impossibility in practice.
That said, I do most of the housework/chores in the household, and we expect if/when we have children I’d probably spend more time with them than she would. We both work in similar roles as well, so it’s not like I’d be giving up less than she would be — it’s just that the way things came to be, I happen to have occupied the stereotypically feminine part of our relationship and she the more masculine part. We might both just be built different.
Though e.g. Shanghainese men are very whipped stereotypically do cater to their women very much, so it’s not like this is unheard of.
You are making dark hints that this will be a terrible new dawn, for women it will just be Tuesday.
This is quite particular and hard to generalize worldwide.
Pigeon
coo coo
23d ago
So if they said "I politically believe that people like me are benefited from seeing people with views like you as demonic monsters and that killing you would be a net positive to my group's quality of life" is that really gonna be ok?
There are many screeds on this site against Jews and to a lesser extent East Asians (mostly Chinese?) which are dignified with coherent, if scathing, responses. While I sympathise with the poster insofar as that his "team" is much more sparse than a Jewish or an East Asian poster's would be in this arena, and the animosity against blacks here would definitely be extremely unpleasant for a black person, it's not like 2rafa flames out on the regular when one of the resident jooposters posts another novella's worth of holocaust denial.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
With a huge caveat that I'm not a historian, let alone a military historian of classical China, my understanding is that:
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Riverine warfare becomes much more important starting with the Huai, at least in comparison to cavalry warfare, and northern states tended to have significantly weaker maritime capabilities due to the lack of necessity for this in conquering the North China Plain;
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An inability to exert power along the Huai river and Huainan for a southern state means that a northern state is able to exert much more initiative in trying to attack the Yangtze proper;
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Conversely, being able to hold the Huai river/Huainan gives a lot more slack for a southern defender before an invader can reach the Yangtze.
So it is perhaps less that the Huai is exceptionally defendable as much as that the Huai river and gatekeeps the Jiangnan area; a northern state able to dominate the Huai river and its surrounds is more likely to be a credible threat to the south both in terms of maritime capability as well as logistically. On the other hand, a southern Chinese state that was capable of exerting power over the Huai would not necessarily find itself being able to dominate the plains north of it.
This is of course only part of it. As you know, another way of conquering a southern state based on the Yangtze is from upstream, as with the eventual conquest of Wu, or the fall of southern Song after the fall of Xiangyang.
Isn't it usually along the Huai? That was the point of division for the Jin (晉) and the Sixteen Kingdoms, as well as the Southern Song and the Jin (金). This puts the entire Yangtze delta area unambiguously within the "South", rather than it being bisected by the Yangtze into North and South, at least if you follow the old course of the river before it became a Yangtze tributary.
(I realise I'm nitpicking and this comment is more being a pedant for the other commenters, as you clearly suggest that the Yangtze delta is "Southern" in another comment)
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Nah, like, shitty photographs from banquets and such, reunion parties, the like. That and stuff like yearbook photographs. I don't stalk peoples' instagrams, not having one myself.
Half of them don't seem to curate their images at all anyway
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Notably, true polyploidy is generally not compatible with life for humans, so the number of actual children with this with this should round to zero. Mixoploidy with a mosaic of diploid and polyploid cells -- usually diploid-triploid mosaics? -- can survive beyond infancy but usually have, uh, developmental challenges. I haven't heard of a viable mixoploidy with diploid and haploid cells.
For better or worse we're not grapes or fish.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
TBH I kinda get it, liking tomboys isn't weird at all
Most of my experience with this is seeing people liking tomboys (or at least otherwise girly-girls acting tomboyish), but the idea of it is at least acceptable enough that トモちゃんは女の子！ was popular enough to get an anime.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I feel like if I just go through my female high school classmates' photographs (and how they aged) a good double digit number at the very least would be prettier than her. She's, like, second quartile at best?
Some of it might also be the makeup. An ex of mine who was extremely pretty when you used East Asian makeup techniques and products, or hell, didn't use any makeup at all, looked shockingly bad when she got her makeup done by a Western professional.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I think even in East Asian reckoning Christine Fang is not that good looking?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...
And before humans (+ tree shrews) decided to torture themselves, chili peppers produced capsaicin to repel mammals, ergo eating modern kimchi is morally impermissible because it’s a profanation of its natural function?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
wars CANNOT be a smashing success just by blowing things up. They have to achieve the political goal. War is politics!
I admit I had more confidence that people in this forum had at least heard of Clausewitz…
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.
I’ve heard colleagues grouse about needing to do mathematics when “the reason [they] got into medicine was to get away from maths!” I’ve also seen frankly shocking levels of statistical ignorance in the doctor population.
One thing that stuck with me is an informal experiment a friend of mine did many years ago — he asked a few dozen consultants what a p-value indicates. I think he got a grand total of one correct answer. And these are people who are supposed to be regularly reading (and sometimes writing) academic papers!
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
My understanding is that something similar happened for railways, even without the significant differences in engines (?). Revolutionary technology that generated multiple bubbles along the way that bankrupted many people.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization
This is a truly bizarre take without more elaboration.
So are you saying that you're in the outlier of outliers for having known multiple trans people IRL? This might be true, but "liars on the internet" is multiple orders of magnitude more common so you'll have to forgive me if I have doubt you're that special unicorn.
You'll have to take my word for it, but for various reasons including profession, social circle and upbringing I do know more trans people -- either professionally or otherwise -- than the modal person. I'm not even saying that it's impossible for a man to pass as a woman (and I in fact concede that women may well pass as men -- I can imagine at least one trans man who I've met who I think would've passed as a short and stubby guy if given androgens), but I think the rate of truly passing trans women is really very, very low, edge cases aside (e.g. vanishingly small number of truly passing trans women, small number of people who legitimately have a poor sense of sex differences, etc). I certainly don't know of one and I know upwards of five trans women (and a few more in passing both personally and professionally -- I once recommended Wandering Son to a trans person who hadn't heard of it and never met her again).
(edit: that said, now that I think about it, potentially the reason I'm able to recognise trans women is because I have seen more of them than normal. Perhaps I am not the modal observer either.)
Yeah, so you're even saying that there's overlap even when you aren't trying.
That isn't me "passing", though -- they recognised the error when they looked more closely. And I think for the majority of cases that is also what is happening to trans people getting clocked as women -- people don't look very closely when it's actually only in passing, +/- when they clock that something's not quite right they're too polite to say otherwise. I'm also honestly stumped by the idea that someone could have sex with a trans person and not realise, unless they've never had sex before. I doubt a trans man would be able to fool a natal woman either -- last I checked neopenises weren't very convincing at all.
I suppose this really depends on what it means to "pass". I would categorise someone as "passing" if under more-than-incidental observation someone still mistakes the trans person's natal sex. Under a looser definition of "pass" that might not apply. I imagine morbidly obese people might also have an easier time passing due to all the fat obscuring the frame. But there are still other non-visual tells...
I'm not even a conservative who's dead set on denying that trans people exist or something -- I have great sympathy for the transmedicalist sort of trans people, and if there was a button that magically transformed men into women (and women into men) I would be all for people to press that button if they really wanted to. I think that the greatest insult and harm that the tucutes and recent "trans activists" have done is to transmedicalist-trans people themselves. I can't speak for other people, but to my eyes it's not accurate that even a significant minority of natal men, even with great effort, can generally pass as natal women with current technology. It's a sad situation.
If you knew they were trans in person you were looking for features with confirmation bias
No, I clocked them as extremely obviously not natal women and then got confirmation in one way or another afterwards. What did you think I meant by “confirmed”?
Or hell just go look at some of the older Jerry Springer episodes about guys who didn't realize they fucked a trans woman and got upset after it was disclosed.
That seems absolutely nuts. How the hell does that happen? The texture of neovaginas is, like, not going to be anything close to a real one. Even just the lack of proper lubrication for one.
I’m sorry but your insistence that trans women are actually generally passing reads as massive cope to me. That some lizardman’s constant worth of interactions suggest otherwise is not relevant in this case -- I've been clocked offhand as a woman previously during a period of my life when I had long hair by people who weren't paying too much attention, and I was not trying to present as a woman and definitely wouldn't appear female to anyone actually looking.
The focus on the family unit, and obligations arising within such, is hardly unique to China in the premodern world. And despite the Confucian sheen on this, early Chinese states really did develop institutions in an attempt to move away from "I know a guy" as a recruitment strategy. That doesn't scream "was more of an integral part of the state apparatus than in other polities" to me.
Confucian ethics also would not necessarily disapprove of submitting to formal, legible state power, as a legitimate part of the Confucian hierarchy; the 五倫 wu lun (five cardinal relations) includes the ruler-subject relation, and in some Confucian interpretations — e.g. in the Xunzi (noting that Xunzi had not been marginalised in the early Tang, and Mengzi had not been canonised as such yet) and in the Doctrine of the Mean — this is placed above familial relations. Thus the focus on family does not necessarily imply approval of the sort of informal patronage characterised by, say, the Jin aristocratic landlords.
This I do not understand. The hostility of Romans to regnum affectare is all well and good, but did this not occur hand-in-hand with celebration of the aristocratic patronage system, which was seen as an important civic institution (especially early in the Republic)? Extensive informal patronage networks throughout society and absolute authority seem rather opposed to me.
(In fact this is mirrored by the Chinese example — aristocratic clans often had the most to lose when the sovereign, or the state, consolidates power.)
There is a potential somewhat-adjacent avenue that I think might grasp at what you really mean (esp. with the gesture at the co-evolution of clan and state):
Some hiccups with this model exist (e.g. I’m hesitant to map India, Iran, or even Russia onto these categorisations), and I’m not sure there’s meat on this bone, but I think it’s an interesting thing to ponder.
Or perhaps it is the reverse — the philosophical innovation of subordinating the family as a part of a “greater family” in the state may have allowed early Chinese states to form with less resistance (and where other polities would’ve failed to divert loyalty from a tribe to a state).
Both of these are, however, significantly more bounded than “China placed much more emphasis on it in periods throughout its history relative to other societies” or that networking “was deeply embedded in its governance structures in a way that Europeans didn’t have an analog”.
† Fukuyama did glibly call Qin China the first modern state, after all.
edit:a word
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