China Blue Movie Review

[Charolette Antosh]

Twocenturies of migr rule had changed the South forever, but the North had also changed, which brings me to the second great theme of Chinese history to emerge in this period: the polarity between settled farmer and nomadic barbarian. This has always been viewed as a sharp dichotomy in official imperial historiography, but as I discuss at length in my review of The Art of Not Being Governed, the reality was that it was always more of a spectrum. When times got tough, or when state capacity waned, formerly loyal peasants had a tendency to migrate to the peripheries and start lynching nosy census-takers. In fact, this probably accounts for many of the seemingly vast swings in population that China has had over the centuries.5

It would be too easy to end the review here, with the implication that the prepper identity is a fantasy of radical individualism and like all such fantasies, kinda dumb. But the thing is, the prepper world has by and large absorbed this critique and incorporated it into its theorizing. In contrast to the libertarian fantasies of the 1970s, second-wave prepperism (reformed prepperism?) is constantly talking about community, the importance of having friends you can trust, of cultivating deep social bonds with your neighbors, etc.

The earliest iteration of the biggest western MMO, World of Warcraft, splits the difference on the whole chosen one thing. You and thirty nine other players are needed to kill the biggest bad guys, and you get flavor text(that most don't read) saying "Good job hero!", possibly acknowledging that it was a group effort.

Then in later versions you become an extremely consequential supporting character to the writers' pet heroes. A lot of players prefer old school WoW. One reason, even though most don't realize it, is that the awful storytelling of WoW is mostly in the background in the initial version of the game (with less terrible voice acting). Instead, it really is about the "World".

I have a secret confession to make. Late at night, when Mrs. Psmith and the Psmithlets are all tucked away in their beds, I like to stay up in my study and fantasize about\u2026the end of the world. But not just any end of the world, because most apocalypses are very boring. For example: \u201CAI unleashes killer nanobots that turn everybody into paperclips.\u201D Yawn. How dull. Where\u2019s the drama in that? No, like all disordered fantasies, mine are fun, and ever-so-conveniently constructed to push the bounds of plausibility while still being technically possible. I\u2019m mostly fantasizing about apocalypses where almost everybody dies, but where one dashing and well-prepared man with pluck and determination and a giant pile of book reviews can restore an island of order and civilization. Hey come on, it could happen!

Most apocalypses would be awful \u2014 we would all die instantly, or else we would all die slowly and painfully, but somewhere perfectly balanced in the middle are the apocalypses that would be very exciting, and those are the emotional driver that lead me to engage in a mild degree of prepping. Now like all potential addicts, I have some hard and fast rules, clear lines that prevent me from spending all my family\u2019s savings on refurbishing an old missile silo. My main rule is that any prepping I do has to have a dual use in some less exciting but more likely scenario.

So I store a lot of water in my basement because, look the US government tells me it could be useful in the event of a regional or local disaster. We have emergency bags pre-packed that include a list of rendezvous locations a day\u2019s walk from our house because, hey, there are all kinds of reasons we might need that, okay? I own this tool so I can shut off my gas in the event of an earthquake and totally not because it looks handy for bludgeoning feral packs of marauders, so stop judging me. I have precious metals buried in the ground in a secret location because, uhhh\u2026it\u2019s good to have a tail-risk hedge in your portfolio, all right? What\u2019s that? Why is there ammo in there too? Look, a good portfolio should be anti-fragile\u2026

I think all of this is why I like Chinese history so much, because it\u2019s just way crazier, bloodier, and more apocalyptic than the history of most other places. In Western Europe civilization collapsed once (okay fine, twice (okay, fine, three times)), and we\u2019re still ruminating over it and working through this unending cultural psychodrama like some civilization-scale therapy addict. Meanwhile, in China, civilization collapsing is like Tuesday. The history of China is an endless cycle of mini-apocalypses in which the entire political, economic and moral order gets razed to the ground and Mad Max conditions prevail for a few decades or centuries, until somebody gathers enough power in his hands to establish a new dynasty and all is peaceful and harmonious under heaven. A few hundred years later, that new regime grows tired and old, the Mandate of Heaven slips away, and the cycle repeats.

This book covers one and a half full cycles of Chinese state formation and dissolution \u2014 including the final years of the Jin dynasty, the centuries of anarchy and barbarian rule following its collapse, the reunification of the empire under the glorious Tang, the apogee of their rule, and the decline of the Tang with the An Lushan Rebellion. By the way, have you ever heard of the An Lushan Rebellion? Exact numbers are contested, but the upper end of estimates is that 36 million people died, which would have been roughly 1/6th of the population of the earth at the time. As I said, Chinese history don\u2019t mess around.

This whole period often gets referred to as the \u201CChinese Middle Ages,\u201D and unlike the European Middle Ages1 it\u2019s been scandalously neglected by Western historians (with the exception of some of the Tang stuff). This is a shame, because so many of the most important themes of Chinese history got their start during this period, I'll mention two of them here.

The first is the polarity between North and South or, if you want to sound pretentious, between \u201CYellow China\u201D and \u201CBlue China.\u201D \u201CYellow\u201D represents the sandy but fertile yellow loess soil of the North China Plain and the Yellow River valley, heartland of traditional Chinese civilization. But \u201Cyellow\u201D is also the ripe ears of grain that grow in that soil, because the North is a land fed by wheat rather than rice. \u201CYellow\u201D also, by extension, refers to the mass irrigation projects required to make the arid North bloom, to the taxation and slave labor required to dredge and maintain the canals and water conduits, to the sophisticated and officious bureaucracy that made it all happen. And since there is no despotism so perfect as a hydraulic empire, \u201Cyellow\u201D is absolute monarchy, centralization, and militarism. But \u201Cyellow\u201D is also the military virtues \u2014 plain-spokenness, honesty, physical courage, stubbornness, and directness \u2014 the traditional stereotypes of the Chinese Northerner.

Far away, across the wide blue expanse of the Yangtze, lay the wild and untamed South. A land of rugged mountains and dense rainforest, both of them inhabited by tribes that the waves of migrating Chinese settlers viewed as both physically and spiritually corrosive. So those intrepid colonists built their cities by the water \u2014 clinging to the river systems and to the thousands of bays and inlets that crinkle the Southern Chinese coast into a fractal puzzle of land and sea. And thus they became \u201Cblue.\u201D

\u201CBlue\u201D are the blue waters of the ocean and the doorways to non-Chinese societies, blue also is the culture of entrepreneurship, industry, trade, and cunning that spread from those rocky harbors first across Asia and then across the world. The Chinese diaspora that runs the economies of Southeast Asia and populates the Chinatowns in the West is predominately made up of \u201Cblue\u201D peoples \u2014 the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Teochew, the Hokkien. \u201CBlue\u201D is independent initiative and innovation, because beyond the mountains the Emperor\u2019s power is greatly attenuated. But \u201Cblue\u201D is also corruption of every sort \u2014 the financial corruption of opportunistic merchants and unscrupulous magistrates, and the spiritual corruption of the jungle tribes and other non-Chinese influences. \u201CBlue\u201D is pirates and freebooters who made their lairs amidst the countless straits and islands and seaside caves. \u201CBlue\u201D is also unfettered sensuality \u2014 opium came to China via the great blue door, and more than one Qing emperor took a grand tour of the South for the purpose of sampling its brothels (considered to be of vastly higher quality).2

If you know nothing else about the geography of China, know that this is the primary distinction: North and South, yellow and blue.3 But this neglected period, the \u201Ctime of division\u201D after the collapse of the Jin, is when that distinction really started. Settlement of the South began under the Han Dynasty in the first couple centuries AD, but it was still very much a sparsely-populated frontier. What changed in the Middle Ages was that after the collapse of central authority and the invasion of the North by nomadic barbarians, a vast swathe of the intelligentsia, literati, and military aristocracy of the North fled across the Yangtze and set up a capital-in-exile. For the first time the South became really \u201CChinese,\u201D but the society that emerged was a hybrid one that retained a Southern inflection.

It wasn\u2019t just courtiers and generals and poets who fled to the South: millions and millions of ordinary peasants did too, which finally displaced the jungle tribes, and also altered the balance of power between North and South. For the first time in Chinese history, the South had more population, more wealth, and an arguably better claim to dynastic legitimacy. So when the North emerged from its period of anarchy and foreign domination and looked to reassert its traditional supremacy, the South said: \u201Cno.\u201D The Southern dynasties, chief among them the Chen Dynasty,4 were able to maintain an uneasy military stalemate for almost two hundred years, thanks to the formidable natural barrier of the Yangtze River, and to the fact that Southerners were better versed in naval warfare and thus able to prevent any amphibious operations on the part of the North.

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