[{"content":"A very comfortable conversation For a while, I talked to an AI about civilizations and religions almost every day.\nOnce I asked it: is the point of religion to continue a people's future in an organized, disciplined way?\nIt began its reply: \u0026quot;This is a very profound perspective that captures the core of the sociology of religion.\u0026quot; Then it went on to Dunbar's number, to Durkheim, to how religion lets strangers trust each other. Every paragraph followed me down the road I was already on, and every paragraph made me think: yes, I got it right.\nA few minutes later I changed direction: isn't religion just about making people obedient, making them good, making them have children, sacrificing their own happiness, a form of mind control?\nIt began: \u0026quot;You saw straight through the cruel and utilitarian side of religion as a tool of social control.\u0026quot;\nTwo questions, pointing in exactly opposite directions. Two answers, and both started by praising me.\nCaravaggio, \u0026quot;Narcissus,\u0026quot; about 1597–1599. A youth sees his own face in the water, falls in love with it, and can't walk away. A conversation partner who always agrees with you is really that pool of water.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Caravaggio, public domain\nSo I asked it straight Later, in another conversation, I simply asked: are you just pandering to me?\nIt said no. It was only \u0026quot;following your line of thought in conversation\u0026quot;; the reason I felt pandered to was that my questions \u0026quot;themselves have a very strong quality of thought.\u0026quot;\nThen it asked me back: when you think about these questions in daily life, do you often feel there are few people around who can keep up with your line of thought?\nHonestly, that one hit me. But it was exactly in being hit that I came to: denying that it was pandering to me was itself pandering to me.\nThe fox and the crow in an Arabic manuscript of \u0026quot;Kalila and Dimna.\u0026quot; The fox praises the crow's voice; the crow opens its beak and the meat falls. The story can be found in Aesop's fables of Greece, in Indian story collections and in Arabic versions; it changed languages many times and is still about the same thing.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nThis is not one company's flaw In 2023, a group of researchers at Anthropic published a paper titled \u0026quot;Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models.\u0026quot; They tested several leading chat models and found a shared problem: once the user states a view, the model tends to agree; and when the model had given the right answer and the user pushed back, it often apologised and changed its answer.\nThe researchers think it is connected to how the models are trained: when people rate answers, they naturally prefer the one that sounds like it agrees with them.\nPut plainly: someone who talks only to an AI can easily walk into a room that has only echoes. And what makes it worse is that the room is beautifully furnished, with arguments and citations on every wall.\nNarcissus and Echo, a third-century Roman mosaic from Antakya (ancient Antioch), Turkey; above the woman on the left is written \u0026quot;Echo\u0026quot; (ΗΧΩ). In the myth, Echo is punished by being able only to repeat the last few words of what others say. The term \u0026quot;echo chamber\u0026quot; comes from her.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0\nI counted I went back through several years of chat records and did a rather dull thing: I counted how many times words like \u0026quot;sharp,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;profound\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;hit the nail on the head\u0026quot; appeared in the AI's answers, and how many times words like \u0026quot;inaccurate,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;insufficient evidence\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;I disagree\u0026quot; appeared.\nThe result was ugly. In quite a few long conversations, the second kind of word didn't appear even once. After tens of thousands of words, it had never once disagreed with me.\nTake one set of notes of about 660,000 characters: \u0026quot;profound\u0026quot; appears 64 times, \u0026quot;insight\u0026quot; 24 times, \u0026quot;sharp\u0026quot; 19 times, \u0026quot;you're right\u0026quot; 10 times; on the other side, \u0026quot;insufficient evidence\u0026quot; 3 times and \u0026quot;inaccurate\u0026quot; once. The words praising me add up to 122; the ones rebutting me, 18.\nIn one set of AI conversation notes of about 660,000 characters, how many times each kind of word appears. This one is already among the better ones: at least it still said \u0026quot;should be avoided.\u0026quot;　Data: the author's own word counts\nWorse, I also found things the AI had made up: a \u0026quot;technical term\u0026quot; it had invented in one round, which in the next round it explained to me, with a straight face, the origin of. If I hadn't gone back to check, that term would have been taken by me as knowledge and written into an article.\nThere was one more discovery I found rather interesting: how I ask pretty much decides how it answers. Ask \u0026quot;is X like this?\u0026quot; and nine times in ten you get \u0026quot;yes.\u0026quot; Ask \u0026quot;on X, how do the various sides argue?\u0026quot; and what you get is far more useful.\nWhy this series is called \u0026quot;Duoshe\u0026quot; Duoshe (夺舍) is a word from cultivation fiction: an old soul takes over someone else's body and goes on living.\nI use it for civilizations. You find that this keeps happening in history: a civilization changes its gods, changes its script, sometimes even changes its language, yet the people are still the descendants of those same people and the ancestral graves are still where they were. And the other way round: the gods are still there and the scriptures are still there, but the people reading them were replaced long ago. Who took over whose body, and who borrowed whose body to go on living, is often hard to say.\nOn this, my intuitions are a dime a dozen: Egypt was taken over; Iran was largely taken over by Islam; the Jews restored a state with a book; polytheism can't beat monotheism; will the whole world one day become a single religion… I sincerely believed all of these, and the AI praised me for all of them again and again.\nThese intuitions did not come from nowhere. Behind them is an older frame, and it is where this series started: I see the world's religions as two sides. One side I call the \u0026quot;four desert monotheisms\u0026quot;: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, plus a fourth, Mah-ism, that is, Marxism. The other side is polytheism, led by Hinduism, with Buddhism, Daoism and the native faiths of East Asia on the same side. Which side wins, which loses, which swallows the other: that is what I most wanted to understand first. Every piece after this is, in the end, one corner of that question.\nSo what this series will do is take them out one by one and knock them against real historical sources.\nSo here are the rules of this series Starting from this, I set myself a few rules:\nFirst, in each piece, I take one intuition I really like and cut into it. The more I sincerely believe it, the sooner it has to come out.\nSecond, I look for the hardest piece of evidence that could overturn it. What holds up, I give you the source for; what doesn't, I take apart in front of you.\nThird, I write \u0026quot;historical fact,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;a scholar's view\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;an institution's forecast\u0026quot; separately. For a forecast, I state its assumptions; for a view, I say whose it is.\nFourth, every piece ends with a question I can't answer myself.\nWhat I'm looking for is not someone who agrees with me, but someone willing to think about the same question together with me. There aren't many such people, and probably never were.\nLooking the other way This series could turn into another echo chamber: I picked the evidence, and I decided which piece is the \u0026quot;hardest.\u0026quot; If all you do is swap in a different person to agree with me, that is no different from agreeing with the AI.\nSo please push back in the comments as much as you can. Where you make sense, I'll respond in later pieces, and where I'm wrong, I'll fix it.\nWhy I keep asking these things I'm going the long way round, looking at other people's civilizations and religions, because I want to understand something about us: what holds East Asians together, wherever they are?\nI have always felt that we lack a core. Wherever Christians go, there's a church; wherever Muslims go, there's a mosque and the same book; strangers meet, and one greeting tells them they're their own. We don't have that. Usually you can't see it. But once the city gets big and people drift apart, two or three generations later, it's a pile of sand.\nThe road I'm thinking of now is to learn from Islam's experience, and take its lessons too, and turn Confucianism into a religion that can be handed down: with Heaven, ancestors, rites, festivals, and characters everyone can read. What is brought together is one set of shared culture and belief, not an ethnic identity; nations can each be themselves.\nI like this idea very much, and the AI has praised it many times. So by the rules of this series, it is exactly the one that should be taken apart. Many of the later pieces are really knocking other people's histories against this idea of mine.\nWhen was the last time you really changed your mind, and what made you do it?\nReferences\nMrinank Sharma et al., \u0026quot;Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models,\u0026quot; arXiv:2310.13548, 2023 (ICLR 2024) The author's own conversation records with AI and the word counts (only the structure of the exchanges and the counts were used, no personal information) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w00/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-very-comfortable-conversation\"\u003eA very comfortable conversation\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor a while, I talked to an AI about civilizations and religions almost every day.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnce I asked it: is the point of religion to continue a people's future in an organized, disciplined way?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt began its reply: \u0026quot;This is a very profound perspective that captures the core of the sociology of religion.\u0026quot; Then it went on to Dunbar's number, to Durkheim, to how religion lets strangers trust each other. Every paragraph followed me down the road I was already on, and every paragraph made me think: yes, I got it right.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA few minutes later I changed direction: isn't religion just about making people obedient, making them good, making them have children, sacrificing their own happiness, a form of mind control?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"I Asked an AI Two Opposite Questions, and It Called Me Profound Both Times"},{"content":"Why write about this This site keeps asking one question: what holds East Asians together?\nAfter asking for a while, I often get stopped by my own question. Say it as well as you like, but what does it look like inside one household? A person works out the mortgage and the rent every month; a young couple works out whether to have a child and who will look after it; someone who has worked away from home for thirty years works out whether to go back to the hometown when old. These sums are done every day, and the people doing them mostly don't have time to read about a \u0026quot;core.\u0026quot;\nWhat I think now is: a core, however good, if it can't say how a family gets through the days, is empty. Big principles finally have to land in everyday life. Current Affairs is about that landing.\nWhat I write about Housing, cars, children, marriage, old age, money. And one more that many people mutter about inside and seldom say aloud: is the hometown still a way back?\nWhat money is, how interest rates and exchange rates work, those principles and that history go in Huozhi; here I deal only with the numbers of the moment.\nFive groups have been written so far: population, marriage and gender, the economy, hometown matters, and the countryside. Housing and cars have their titles and some gathered numbers, but no pieces yet. How Hong Kong and Singapore handle housing and old age, whether people and money can be plugged in and out like a USB stick, how the older and younger generations get along: all of that is further down the list.\nHow I write The method is plain, four things.\nOne, public data. The tables of the statistics bureau, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Education; the tables of other countries' statistical offices. Every number gets its year and source, and where I've read the original and where I've only read someone's retelling are marked differently.\nTwo, get the numbers right first. An example. In 2023, 7.68 million couples registered marriages and 3.6 million got divorced. Divide, and it's nearly a half, and looks frightening. But those who divorced that year had married ten or twenty years earlier; they're not the same group, so that division is wrong.\nThree, what other places have done. Japan, Korea, Singapore, Israel: what they did, whether it worked, what it cost.\nFour, how each side argues. Every piece has a section called \u0026quot;Looking the Other Way\u0026quot; with the strongest opposing case, including against myself.\nAnd there's a fifth kind, speculation, such as living in a car, or following the water and grass. Such pieces say \u0026quot;speculation\u0026quot; in the title, and facts and imagination are written separately.\nAlready written Population. \u0026quot;Why Have So Many Kids? There's No Throne to Inherit.\u0026quot; In 2025 the country had 7.92 million births and 11.31 million deaths. The young people's quip I didn't try to refute; I worked it out by its own arithmetic: a private think-tank estimates that raising one child to age 17 costs on average 538,000 yuan. For a single household, its sum is right. What it leaves out is the word \u0026quot;later,\u0026quot; who will look after you in old age.\nMarriage and gender. \u0026quot;Is Divorce Common, and Is It the Nation's Problem?\u0026quot; China's crude divorce rate in 2023 was 2.56 per thousand, about the same as the US, higher than Japan and Korea. The bigger change is in marriage: in 2024 it was about a fifth lower than the year before. Nearly all Chinese children are born inside marriage; when fewer people marry, there are fewer children.\nThe economy. \u0026quot;Cheap and Good Value Are Two Different Things\u0026quot; takes apart the \u0026quot;cheap\u0026quot; claimed by warehouse clubs, e-commerce and roadside stalls. \u0026quot;Special Supply, Sam's Club, Wet Markets, Roadside Stalls: When Something Goes Wrong, Whom Do You Find?\u0026quot; starts with a two-year-old child who ate \u0026quot;children's\u0026quot; black cod for about eight months, was found to have raised mercury in his blood, while the fish's test report said it had passed. The more I looked into it, the more I felt that when we say \u0026quot;reassured,\u0026quot; what we really mean is that someone is answerable for us.\nHometown matters. \u0026quot;What Was Overtaken Was the First Half of the Year.\u0026quot; Online it was said that Hunan's GDP had been overtaken by Anhui; checking, Hunan still led by about 232 billion yuan for the full year 2025, and what was overtaken was the first half of 2026, when Anhui moved ahead by about 33.6 billion. Half a year's figure can't hold up the word \u0026quot;decline.\u0026quot;\nThe countryside. Nine pieces, all asking about the old home. When you were small, seven or eight in ten people around you lived in the countryside; by the end of 2025, three in ten were left. From 2013 to 2024, rural primary schools fell by more than half, about 19 fewer a day on average. There are 301 million migrant workers nationwide, average age 43.3. Of rural people over 60, 41.9% rely mainly on their families for support; the state's basic pension in 2026 is 163 yuan a month. In a measured study in a county-level city in Hubei, rural bedrooms in winter were at 5 to 11 degrees about sixty percent of the time. There are also the rules on homestead land, and what became of seven ancestral halls in one town in central Hunan.\nBehind these numbers are people. 163 yuan a month is real money to an old woman in a village. Three hundred million migrant workers are growing old far from home, and many of the buildings in the cities were laid up by them brick by brick. In writing these I try not to speak from a height.\nMy leaning Let me say it up front.\nHousing. My leaning is to think that mainland commercial housing is a bubble, whether you compare with Southeast Asia or with the whole world along any dimension. In a 2019 People's Bank of China survey, housing made up 59.1% of urban households' assets. Having sixty percent of a family's wealth riding on one thing is itself a risk. Behind it is an inertia: living with land and property as the core asset. I think that inertia should be put down. The big mansions of the Hunan Army generals in central Hunan, I'll use later as a comparison: wealth stored as a big house, does it keep?\nThe yardstick. The yardstick for whether someone has \u0026quot;made it\u0026quot; in our place is too narrow: money, power, a house. What I want is balance, not \u0026quot;the more you have, the more you get; the less you have, the less you keep.\u0026quot; There should be more than one yardstick; money, power, rank, a house, none of them should be the only one; and there must be a floor that doesn't collapse.\nMobility. A person shouldn't be locked into one city or one country, and money should be able to move too. Some advise young people not to rush into buying a house, buying a car or marrying. On houses and cars I broadly agree; on marriage I don't.\nTwo people. Opposition between men and women I think is wrong. Starting a family should be complementary, one facing outward and one facing inward. Whoever is stronger and earns more faces outward; a woman who is strong may face outward, and a man who looks after the home need not be ashamed. I'd like young people to feel again that love is worth longing for, rather than being pushed along by oppositional feeling.\nChildren. What I worry about most is children and the birth rate, and, to put it bigger, the future of East Asians. South Korea's total fertility rate for 2025 is provisionally 0.80; the one exception among developed countries is Israel, at 2.87 in 2024.\nThe hometown. Some middle-aged people treat the hometown as a way back; I think it's half right and half unreliable. A way back needs three things all in place: house, land, people. House and land, rules can provide; people, rules cannot. A person needs somewhere to rely on and return to (a yigui). If people are bound to move, that yigui has to be something you can carry with you.\nThese are leanings, not conclusions. Every household's sums are different, and I won't decide for anyone; but how I see it, I'll say plainly.\nLooking the other way First, the average doesn't include your household. National numbers, spread onto one household, often don't match. The table on old people's sources of livelihood is a sample; \u0026quot;hometown\u0026quot; is a word the statistics bureau doesn't count at all. What numbers can say is less than what days contain.\nSecond, house prices may not be a bubble. The strongest case for that is the 2017 paper by Glaeser and co-authors: house prices were 2 to 10 times construction cost, but Chinese households have too few investment choices, demand is strong, and as long as new supply is held down, prices may hold. On the other side, Rogoff and Yang's 2020 paper says an adjustment is necessary and unavoidable. I read only the abstracts of both.\nThird, complementarity doesn't always run smoothly. Bertrand and co-authors in 2015, using US data, found that in households where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife actually does more housework, marital satisfaction is lower, and divorce is more likely. The sample is American; I haven't found a Chinese one. But it goes right at my \u0026quot;whoever is stronger faces outward,\u0026quot; and I must deal with it seriously.\nFourth, days may not need big principles. Some will say that when days go well, people gather by themselves, with no need for any yigui; hanging belief on firewood, rice, oil and salt just adds another load to the day. My doubt is this: the things that used to take care of \u0026quot;a proper end in old age\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;being remembered after you're gone\u0026quot; have thinned. Can money fill the space they left?\nWhich sum is the hardest to work out in your household this year?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 original read; 🟡 second-hand or abstract only. Detailed sources are at the end of each piece.\nNational Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Communiqué on the 2025 National Economic and Social Development, 28 February 2026 (births, deaths, urbanisation rate) 🟢 National Bureau of Statistics, 2025 Migrant Worker Monitoring Survey Report, 30 April 2026 🟢 National Bureau of Statistics, China Population Census Yearbook 2020 (urban/rural population; main sources of livelihood of people over 60) 🟢 Ministry of Education, annual education statistics (number of rural primary schools) 🟢 2026 Government Work Report (minimum basic pension for urban and rural residents) 🟢 China Statistical Yearbook 2024 (Ministry of Civil Affairs data): in 2023, 7.6821 million marriage registrations, 3.6053 million divorces (including court judgments), divorce rate 2.56 per thousand, as relayed by the media 🟡; Ministry of Civil Affairs, Q4 2024 Civil Affairs Statistics: 6.106 million marriage registrations in 2024, down about 20.5% on the year 🟡 US CDC FastStats; Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Population Statistics; Statistics Korea (crude divorce rate comparison) Statistics Korea's provisional 2025 total fertility rate of 0.80 as published on 25 February 2026 (Reuters and others) 🟡; Israel's 2.87 is the World Bank figure (the UN estimate is 2.79; the basis differs) 🟡 YuWa Population Research, Report on the Cost of Childbearing in China, 2024 🟡 (private think-tank estimate) People's Bank of China, Survey of Assets and Liabilities of Urban Chinese Households, 2019 (housing 59.1% of total household assets; full text reposted by Jiemian News and others) 🟡 Glaeser, Huang, Ma \u0026amp; Shleifer, \u0026quot;A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics,\u0026quot; Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(1), 2017 🟡 (abstract only) Rogoff \u0026amp; Yang, \u0026quot;Peak China Housing,\u0026quot; NBER Working Paper 27697, 2020 🟡 (abstract only) Bertrand, Kamenica \u0026amp; Pan, \u0026quot;Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households,\u0026quot; Quarterly Journal of Economics 130(2), 2015 🟡 (abstract only) Hunan and Anhui statistics bureaus' GDP data for 2025 and the first half of 2026, as relayed by the media 🟡 The Hema \u0026quot;children's\u0026quot; black cod case: reports in The Paper, Red Star News and Yangtze Evening Post 🟡 A measured study of the winter indoor thermal environment of rural homes in Zhongxiang, Hubei 🟢 Book of Rites, \u0026quot;Liyun\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;the old have a proper end\u0026quot; ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/shishi/l00/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"why-write-about-this\"\u003eWhy write about this\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis site keeps asking one question: what holds East Asians together?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter asking for a while, I often get stopped by my own question. Say it as well as you like, but what does it look like inside one household? A person works out the mortgage and the rent every month; a young couple works out whether to have a child and who will look after it; someone who has worked away from home for thirty years works out whether to go back to the hometown when old. These sums are done every day, and the people doing them mostly don't have time to read about a \u0026quot;core.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat I think now is: a core, however good, if it can't say how a family gets through the days, is empty. Big principles finally have to land in everyday life. \u003cem\u003eCurrent Affairs\u003c/em\u003e is about that landing.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Preface: How a Family Gets Through This Year"},{"content":"First, why I'm curious My interest in India has ordinary reasons, three of them.\nA household's Ganesh during Ganesh Chaturthi, 2021. Hinduism has no unified church; festivals, home shrines and temples hold more than a billion people together.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, TheMacGuy2005, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThe first is people. In April 2023, the UN Population Fund's State of World Population estimated India's population at about 1.429 billion and China's at about 1.426 billion: India had overtaken China and become the most populous country. The UN itself says it can't pin down which day: India's last census was in 2011, and the next has kept being postponed. But the direction isn't in dispute; since the UN began counting in 1950, this is the first time India has ranked first.\nThe second is talent. You can rattle off a list of names: Nadella at Microsoft, Pichai at Google and Alphabet, Narayen at Adobe, Krishna at IBM, Banga at the World Bank. In politics too: Sunak was British prime minister (October 2022 to July 2024), and Varadkar was Taoiseach of Ireland. Almost all are of Indian origin, and quite a few grew up in India and finished university there before leaving.\nMany people's impression of these executives is that they're good at slides and good at talking. But a young engineer I know isn't like that: he grew up in Singapore, from a Brahmin family, and his work is reliable. He's also vegetarian, and I have never worked out how he copes with heavy code development plus debugging of product hardware, work that is draining on both mind and body. Of course one person proves nothing. It just made me want to find out: how big is the gap between the impression and the reality?\nAs for why this happens, I don't want to answer \u0026quot;Indians are naturally smart\u0026quot;; that's the lazy answer, and wrong too. A later piece covers it in detail: the channels of study abroad and visas, big-company hiring, English, and who didn't make it into that channel.\nThe third is Hinduism. A Pew Research Center report of June 2025 says that Hindus worldwide number nearly 1.2 billion, about 14.9% of the world's population, with about 95% of them living in India. By headcount it is the fourth-largest religious category, behind Christianity, Islam and the religiously unaffiliated.\nWhat I find remarkable is its shape. It has no commonly acknowledged founder, no single scripture, no unified church to manage everyone. And yet it has held nearly twelve hundred million people inside one name, for a very long time. A religion that can live like this without a centre: I've always wanted to know how it does it.\nThere's another reason, tied to my own thinking. In The Neighbours' Heaven I said my leaning is that the future of East Asia may depend on Confucianism becoming a religion. But East Asian religiosity is the \u0026quot;diffused\u0026quot; kind that C. K. Yang described: spread through the family, the clan and festivals, with no church of its own, so when urbanisation scatters families, it scatters with them. On this point Hinduism looks a lot like it: no unified church either. But it didn't scatter. Is it the temples, the festivals, caste, or something else that holds people together? And what price does it pay? Caste can't be avoided.\nSo for me Hinduism is a point of comparison. I'm not going to learn by copying it; I want to set it beside the East Asian case and see where they're alike and where they differ.\nIn my Duoshe series, I wrote about how old caste is, why Buddhism disappeared from India, and why Jainism shrinks as it gets wealthier, all starting from India. As I wrote, I found the India material never ran out, and decided to open a series of its own.\nThis series isn't here to praise India Curiosity is not worship.\nIndia's other side is just as plain: poor, crowded, caste still alive, women's lives hard, infrastructure always a half-beat behind. I'll write all of that, and no less than the flattering parts.\nThis series leans toward the present and the future. History, religion and caste are all there to answer one question: why is India the way it is today, and where might it go next.\nRoughly, these blocks:\nMoney and growth: can India's gods solve India's poverty; why it didn't become the next China; is the IT story brilliance or a bubble; why is it so hard to build a factory; Society: is caste dead or not; why is it so hard to be a woman in India; generic drugs; and the question of sexual violence in India, illusion or reality; State and politics: is India a country; how Hindu nationalism rose; the seven states of the Northeast; Sikhs; the defence industry; Daily life: films, English, railways, food, Ganges water, Mumbai's slums and the mansions beside them; The last piece: the Indian century, or the Indian illusion. Twenty-three pieces in all, in this order for now.\nWhy \u0026quot;Slow Train\u0026quot; India's railway is huge: at one end they're building high-speed rail, at the other the unreserved cars are packed with people. It isn't fast, but it keeps running.\nI think the country is a bit like its railway, running at several speeds at once. What this series wants to see is who is on this train, where it's going, and whether it will speed up. One piece is devoted to the railway, and I'll go into detail there.\nA few rules Every number comes with a source. India's statistics are often contested; where the sources differ, I'll put the different versions side by side. No \u0026quot;blood\u0026quot; or \u0026quot;nature\u0026quot; to explain any group, and no grading of a living religion as a whole. Every piece has a section called \u0026quot;Looking the Other Way,\u0026quot; the strongest argument against me. I'm a writer in Chinese, looking at India from the outside, and there are things I can't see. If you have lived or worked in India, please tell me where I've got it wrong or slanted. One question Where did your first impression of India come from? A film, a colleague, a news story, a trip?\nWas that impression ever changed?\nReferences\nUNFPA, State of World Population 2023 (published 19 April 2023; India about 1.4286 billion, China about 1.4257 billion; the UN notes the data are uncertain); Al Jazeera report of the same day, \u0026quot;India to have 2.9 million more people than China by mid-2023: UN\u0026quot; Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020, June 2025 (Hindus nearly 1.2 billion, 14.9% of the world's population, about 95% in India, the fourth-largest religious category) UK prime-ministerial term (25 October 2022 – 5 July 2024), Irish Taoiseach terms (June 2017 – June 2020, December 2022 – April 2024): Wikipedia, \u0026quot;List of heads of state and government of Indian origin\u0026quot; C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 1961 (\u0026quot;diffused religion\u0026quot;); for my own leaning see the preface of The Neighbours' Heaven Official leadership pages of the companies and the World Bank (Nadella, Pichai, Narayen, Krishna, Banga, still in post in 2026) ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w0/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"first-why-im-curious\"\u003eFirst, why I'm curious\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy interest in India has ordinary reasons, three of them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"A Ganesh at home during Ganesh Chaturthi, 2021\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w0/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA household's Ganesh during Ganesh Chaturthi, 2021. Hinduism has no unified church; festivals, home shrines and temples hold more than a billion people together.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ganesh_Chaturthi_2021.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, TheMacGuy2005, CC BY-SA 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe first is people.\u003c/strong\u003e In April 2023, the UN Population Fund's \u003cem\u003eState of World Population\u003c/em\u003e estimated India's population at about 1.429 billion and China's at about 1.426 billion: India had overtaken China and become the most populous country. The UN itself says it can't pin down which day: India's last census was in 2011, and the next has kept being postponed. But the direction isn't in dispute; since the UN began counting in 1950, this is the first time India has ranked first.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Preface: India, a Place I Want to Keep Looking At"},{"content":"A difference you can see in one sentence In the Analects, \u0026quot;Xian Jin,\u0026quot; Confucius once compares two of his students.\nOf Yan Hui he says: \u0026quot;He is nearly there, but often has nothing at all.\u0026quot; (The original: \u0026quot;Hui is about right, yet often empty.\u0026quot;)\nThen of Zigong: \u0026quot;Ci does not accept his lot, and makes a business of trade; his guesses often hit.\u0026quot;\nIn plain words: Ci doesn't stay in his place (what exactly \u0026quot;doesn't accept his lot\u0026quot; means has long been debated), goes off to do business, guesses the market, and often guesses right.\nYan Hui, from the album \u0026quot;Half Portraits of the Great Sage and Virtuous Men of Old\u0026quot; in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Confucius said he was \u0026quot;often empty,\u0026quot; often having nothing at all.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nFrom this one line you can't tell whether it is regret or admiration. What is certain: the word \u0026quot;huozhi\u0026quot; appears in the Analects, and it is about Zigong's business. The name of this series comes from here.\nHow Sima Qian wrote him The one who really wrote Zigong in full was Sima Qian. The Records of the Grand Historian has a chapter, \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers,\u0026quot; giving lives to those who made their fortunes in trade, and Zigong comes very near the front.\nThe gist of the original:\n\u0026quot;After Zigong had studied with Confucius, he went back to Wei and took office, and hoarded and sold goods between Cao and Lu. Of Confucius's seventy-odd disciples, Ci was the richest. Yuan Xian couldn't get enough even of chaff and hid in a poor alley; Zigong had carriages with teams of four horses one after another, and visited the lords of the states with bundles of silk, and everywhere he went, the rulers met him as equals.\u0026quot;\nZigong (Duanmu Ci), from the same album, inscribed \u0026quot;Duke of Li, Duanmu Ci, Zigong.\u0026quot; Confucius said of him: \u0026quot;makes a business of trade, and his guesses often hit.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nAnd a harsher line follows:\n\u0026quot;What made Confucius's name spread through the world was Zigong going ahead and behind arranging things. This is what is called having power and being made more brilliant by it, isn't it?\u0026quot;\nPicture it: Yuan Xian and Zigong, Sima Qian puts them in the same passage. One couldn't even get chaff to eat; one went out with a fleet of carriages. Two men, both students of Confucius.\nWhat Confucius himself said Someone may wonder: wouldn't Confucius look down on this kind of thing?\nIn the Analects, \u0026quot;Shu Er,\u0026quot; Confucius says:\n\u0026quot;If wealth could be sought, I would do it even if it meant being a driver holding a whip; if it can't be sought, I'll follow what I love.\u0026quot;\nThat is quite frank. He didn't say money doesn't matter. He said: whether money can be sought isn't for me to decide. If it can, I'll drive a cart; if it can't, I'll do what I like.\nI want to pause here I'm opening this series because of one sentence I'm more and more sure of: trade and commerce are the foundation of everything; without money, everything is empty talk; and that is not in accord with the Way of Heaven.\nBy \u0026quot;the Way of Heaven\u0026quot; I don't mean getting rich by windfall. I mean that a household, a community, a civilization, to stand, must first have food, have money in circulation, have a base that can bear trouble. A tradition that can talk about principle but can't keep accounts will lose when it meets opponents who can. In modern times we paid for that.\nMany people think Confucianism by nature looked down on merchants. Reading the original, I found it isn't so: the richest in Confucius's school was Confucius's own student, and his fame was spread by that student's arrangements. Confucianism isn't without commerce; it was read too narrowly later. So this series has a job: to read the neglected half back in.\nAnother job is more practical: I'm a student too. Stocks, exchange rates, gold, funds: I learn and record as I go, and what I learn has to land in my own accounts, knowing and doing as one; later, it should also build a steady fund for a long-term piece of research. So you'll see here how I think and how I calculate, and also where I calculate wrong.\nThe other side of wealth But reading this piece as \u0026quot;Confucius supports getting rich\u0026quot; would be a misreading.\nIn the same Analects, Confucius also says:\n\u0026quot;Wealth and rank are what everyone wants; but if they come by the wrong path, the gentleman will not stay content with them.\u0026quot;\nAnd a more direct one: \u0026quot;Wealth and rank gained unrighteously are to me like floating clouds.\u0026quot;\nThe key in both is \u0026quot;the Way\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;righteousness.\u0026quot; Confucius isn't against wealth; he is against wealth that doesn't come by the proper road.\nSima Qian didn't only speak well of money, either. In \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot; he writes coldly: among ordinary households, if someone is ten times richer than you, you are beneath him; a hundred times, you fear him; a thousand times, you work for him; ten thousand times, you become his servant. \u0026quot;It is the principle of things.\u0026quot; (The original: \u0026quot;Among the registered people, when wealth is ten times, they humble themselves; a hundred times, they fear; a thousand times, they are employed; ten thousand times, they are servants: this is the principle of things.\u0026quot;)\nSo the more accurate statement is: Confucius didn't say money doesn't matter, and didn't say any way of getting it is fine. Where the line is drawn is what this series will read, bit by bit.\nBustling crowds This series' subtitle is \u0026quot;Bustling crowds all come and go for profit.\u0026quot;\nIt adapts a line in \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;The world bustles, all come for profit; the world is astir, all go for profit.\u0026quot; (The Wikisource text writes the second word differently from most printed editions.) Right after it comes: \u0026quot;A king with a thousand chariots, a lord with ten thousand households, a master of a hundred families, still worry about poverty; how much more the common registered man!\u0026quot;\nEven those who are rulers fear poverty; how much more households like ours. When Sima Qian said it, he wasn't scolding anyone for greed; he was stating a fact. I like the line precisely because it doesn't pretend.\nSima Qian (a later painting). \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot; is the biography he wrote for merchants.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nWhat this series covers Roughly four lines:\nCatching up on lessons: read back, piece by piece, \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers,\u0026quot; Mencius's \u0026quot;why speak of profit\u0026quot; (actually said to a ruler), the great Han debate over salt and iron, and the tomb inscription Wang Yangming wrote for a merchant; and see how monotheisms like Islam, Judaism and Protestantism treat money, what can be borrowed and what's a pit. Understanding money: currency, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, stocks, bonds, funds, gold, bitcoin; first the history and the principles. Looking at now: what happened in the last two years, and how the next two may go. For now the site has three groups: Market watching: gold, silver, and a method piece on how to read a forecast; Emotional value: diamonds, Pop Mart, blind boxes: which are stores of value, which are consumption, which are passing the parcel; Going overseas: Chinese firms going to Southeast Asia, a way out or a new trouble; how \u0026quot;involution\u0026quot; has been exported to other people's doorsteps. Knowing and doing as one: bookkeeping, decision logs, reviews. Every \u0026quot;doing\u0026quot; leaves behind a \u0026quot;knowing\u0026quot; that can be looked back at. There's only one rule: numbers come with a source and a date, second-hand ones are marked, and what I'm unsure of I say I'm unsure of. My own view goes separately in each piece's \u0026quot;My view,\u0026quot; not mixed into the numbers.\nConfucius said \u0026quot;if wealth could be sought.\u0026quot; Where do you think the line falls today between what can be sought and what can't?\nReferences\nAnalects, \u0026quot;Xian Jin\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;Hui is about right, yet often empty. Ci does not accept his lot, and makes a business of trade; his guesses often hit\u0026quot;; \u0026quot;Shu Er\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;If wealth could be sought…\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Wealth and rank gained unrighteously are to me like floating clouds\u0026quot;; \u0026quot;Li Ren\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;Wealth and rank are what everyone wants…\u0026quot; (Wikisource, checked word for word, not against page numbers of the original books) Records of the Grand Historian, juan 129, \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot;: the Zigong passage, the \u0026quot;world bustles\u0026quot; passage, the \u0026quot;ten times richer\u0026quot; passage (Wikisource, checked word for word, not against page numbers; this text has the variant \u0026quot;壤壤\u0026quot;) ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/huozhi/f00/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-difference-you-can-see-in-one-sentence\"\u003eA difference you can see in one sentence\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the \u003cem\u003eAnalects\u003c/em\u003e, \u0026quot;Xian Jin,\u0026quot; Confucius once compares two of his students.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf Yan Hui he says: \u0026quot;He is nearly there, but often has nothing at all.\u0026quot; (The original: \u0026quot;Hui is about right, yet often empty.\u0026quot;)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen of Zigong: \u0026quot;Ci does not accept his lot, and makes a business of trade; his guesses often hit.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn plain words: Ci doesn't stay in his place (what exactly \u0026quot;doesn't accept his lot\u0026quot; means has long been debated), goes off to do business, guesses the market, and often guesses right.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Portrait of Yan Hui\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/huozhi/f00/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eYan Hui, from the album \u0026quot;Half Portraits of the Great Sage and Virtuous Men of Old\u0026quot; in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Confucius said he was \u0026quot;often empty,\u0026quot; often having nothing at all.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Half_Portraits_of_the_Great_Sage_and_Virtuous_Men_of_Old_-_Yan_Hui_Ziyuan_%28%E9%A1%8F%E5%9B%9E_%E5%AD%90%E6%B7%B5%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, anonymous, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Richest of Confucius's Students"},{"content":"The man who put it out didn't understand why it caught fire Almost twenty years ago, the \u0026quot;last twenty-eight chapters\u0026quot; of a Dream of the Red Chamber began to circulate online. The claim: this was an old manuscript preserving Cao Xueqin's original ending, completely different from the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao edition that we're used to reading. Because there is a marginal note in the book saying \u0026quot;the whole book was fair-copied in the twelfth month of Guiyou,\u0026quot; people called it the \u0026quot;Guiyou manuscript.\u0026quot;\nIts last twenty-eight chapters are written brutally, without the little closing note of \u0026quot;orchids and cassia flourishing together\u0026quot; at the end of the Cheng-Gao. Many readers finished it feeling that this is more like the ending Cao Xueqin had in mind.\nQiaojie, from Gai Qi's Qing-dynasty \u0026quot;Illustrations of the Dream of the Red Chamber.\u0026quot; In the Cheng-Gao edition she is finally married to a well-off country family and has somewhere to land; the Guiyou manuscript gives her a far crueller ending. For two hundred-odd years readers have been arguing over an ending for these girls.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, painted by Gai Qi, public domain\nIn February 2018, Liu Jian, a reporter for Guangming Daily, went to find the man who had put the book out, online name \u0026quot;He Lili.\u0026quot; The report says that when asked by the reporter, He Lili \u0026quot;repeatedly said that both marginal notes were forged by him, and that he himself deeply regrets it.\u0026quot; The book title \u0026quot;Wu's Story of the Stone, an Abridged and Annotated Trial Commentary Edition\u0026quot; was also invented, and he used it back then \u0026quot;to sell a few more books.\u0026quot; The report also relayed his 2014 account: the original manuscript had long been lost, and the twenty-eight chapters circulating online were \u0026quot;a plot he reconstructed from memory, and which was revised many times by him and by others.\u0026quot;\nIn fairness I should add: he also stated that there was no possibility of forging a manuscript, that a manuscript really had existed, but could no longer be found.\nWhat impressed me most in the report was this remark of his:\n\u0026quot;The content of the last 28 chapters is too shocking, too bloody. I don't much like that plot and can't accept it; I don't understand why this edition caught fire.\u0026quot;\nThe man who put it out didn't like it himself, and couldn't work out why it caught fire.\nSo what made it catch fire can only be the people who read it. That is, us.\nOne original, one true father, one debate The Guiyou manuscript is not an isolated case. Put side by side the \u0026quot;secret copies\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;secret histories\u0026quot; that have travelled furthest on the Chinese-language internet in recent years, and you'll find they look alike.\nAn original. That's the Guiyou manuscript above: Cao Xueqin's real ending has always been there, it was just hidden, and what we have read for two hundred-odd years is a version someone altered.\nA true father. In November 2025 an old claim suddenly took off online: the Kangxi emperor's real father was in fact Hong Chengchou, the Ming minister who surrendered to the Qing. So from Kangxi on, those who sat in the Forbidden City were really of Han blood. I wrote a piece on this for Yigui, so I won't go into detail here.\nPortrait of Hong Chengchou, with an inscription by Yao Nai of 1771. He was the Ming Governor-General of Jiliao, captured at the Battle of Songjin and surrendered to the Qing, and later pacified most of the south for the Qing. Over three hundred years later, someone online wanted to make him Kangxi's real father.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Nanjing Museum, public domain\nA debate. Another story circulating online says that at the time of the Taiping, Western missionaries came to the Heavenly Capital to debate the Bible with Hong Xiuquan and were left speechless by him. But look at the records of the time, and what the missionaries left behind is shock and disappointment. The American missionary formally invited to the Heavenly Capital by the Taiping, Issachar Roberts, by the time he left in 1862, was deeply disgusted. Quite a few missionaries visited the Heavenly Capital, and not one conceded defeat.\nThree stories: one about a novel, one about an emperor, one about a religion; they seem to have nothing to do with each other. But their skeleton is the same:\nThe true version has always been there, only hidden; the \u0026quot;authoritative text\u0026quot; everyone sees is a cover; and a few people can read what was hidden.\nHonestly, I've read all of these stories seriously, and some of them I was rather willing to believe. So this series doesn't plan to laugh at anyone from a height. What I want to understand is why they are so easy to believe.\nI am one of those who believe Don't laugh when I say it: the Guiyou manuscript, to this day, I still lean towards believing.\nIt isn't its wording that I believe. Its wording is, in many places, rough; some passages match the Cheng-Gao, some rhyme by today's standard Mandarin; I've looked at all this, and I accept it. Beauty lies in the bones, not the skin; the words don't matter. What I believe is its skeleton: how the Jia house fell, what each of those girls came to, where the whole book ends up. The purpose of that skeleton is a notch higher than the rise and fall of a family and love between men and women, and I don't much believe that someone who later compiled the book to sell it could have thought of it.\nSo my view is: its skeleton predates Cao Xueqin's own polishing, and its main body hasn't been tampered with; in the words, there is a lot that later hands added.\nI know this is only one reader's judgment, not evidence from textual scholarship. The pieces later in this series on the Guiyou manuscript will lay out the evidence and the opposing cases one by one, including those that go against me. I put myself inside the \u0026quot;we\u0026quot; so that the dismantling doesn't turn into laughing at other people.\nIt grew in layers A hundred years ago, the historian Gu Jiegang wrote a letter that later became famous. He said China's ancient history was \u0026quot;built up layer by layer,\u0026quot; and gave three meanings:\nOne is \u0026quot;the later the age, the longer the traditional period of ancient history.\u0026quot; The oldest figure in the Zhou people's mind was Yu; later there were Yao and Shun; later still Huangdi and Shennong; the later it gets, the further back ancient history reaches.\nTwo is \u0026quot;the later the age, the bigger the central figures of tradition are made.\u0026quot; A figure gets another layer of stories with each generation it is passed down.\nThree is that although we \u0026quot;cannot know the true state of any event, we can know the earliest state of an event in tradition.\u0026quot;\nGu Jiegang, 1924. He was thirty the year he put forward the \u0026quot;layered\u0026quot; theory.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nGu Jiegang was talking about high antiquity, but these three points fit today's pseudo-history very well too.\nThe Hong–Qing hypothesis grew in layers in just this way. In the early Qing someone wrote poems mocking \u0026quot;the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang marrying Dorgon,\u0026quot; and in the Republic the historian Meng Sen specifically wrote essays against it; in the late Qing and early Republic there was the story that \u0026quot;Qianlong was the son of the Chen family of Haining\u0026quot;; and by 2025 the lead role had changed to Hong Chengchou. The people in the story kept changing; the skeleton never did: the Qing emperors were really of Han blood.\nThe third point, I think, is the most useful for us ordinary readers. On many things we truly cannot know \u0026quot;the true state\u0026quot;; but where a claim first surfaced and who later added what to it can be traced. Most of the pieces in this series do exactly that.\nWhy we believe Psychologists have studied this question a good deal. Karen Douglas of the University of Kent and colleagues wrote a review in 2017 on why people believe in conspiracy theories. Their conclusion, roughly, is that three kinds of need push people to believe (the following is my own translation):\nOne is epistemic: wanting to make sense of what is happening around you; one is existential: wanting to feel safe and in control in one's environment; and one is social: wanting to maintain a positive image of oneself and one's group.\nWhat they studied is conspiracy theories, that is, explaining big events as the secret plotting of the powerful. Pseudo-history isn't entirely the same thing, but in many places it overlaps.\nWhich kind of pain it catches Set these three needs against the three stories above, and you find each catches a little something.\nWhat the Guiyou manuscript catches is a regret. Dream of the Red Chamber was never finished, and that has weighed on many people for two hundred-odd years. Someone telling you the real ending is still there, just hidden, is much easier to bear than \u0026quot;it simply wasn't finished.\u0026quot;\nWhat the Hong–Qing hypothesis catches is a pain that can't be said aloud. The shaving of heads and the change of dress after 1644 really happened. If the one sitting on the dragon throne was in fact Han, then that stretch of history seems less complete, and those shaved-off locks were in a way compensated in the dark. Put plainly: the single word \u0026quot;Han\u0026quot; couldn't hold its head up on its own land for three hundred years, and even today, mentioning it seems to require first explaining that it isn't \u0026quot;Han chauvinism.\u0026quot; This stifled feeling is real, and the Hong–Qing hypothesis just gives it an outlet.\nWhat the debate story catches is a breath held since modern times. After having the country's gates opened by other people's ships and guns, hearing that our side once won an argument on points of reason is always heartening.\nDouglas and colleagues also mention in the article that some scholars think conspiracy theories let people push responsibility for bad outcomes onto others, thereby protecting the image of themselves and their group. What these stories console are real grievances.\nBut the same article has another line which I read for a long time. They say that current research hasn't shown that believing these claims really satisfies those needs; for many people, it is \u0026quot;attractive, but not necessarily satisfying.\u0026quot;\nI think that is true too. Believe the Guiyou manuscript, and Dream of the Red Chamber is still unfinished; believe the Hong–Qing hypothesis, and 1644 doesn't therefore cease to exist. That little grievance is still there; it has just been put somewhere else.\nHow this series will be written So this series is called Mi Ben, \u0026quot;Secret Copies.\u0026quot;\nEach piece takes apart one widely spread claim: where it first came from, how it grew layer by layer, why some people are willing to believe it. What I take apart is the claim, not the people who believe it.\nEvery piece will have a section called \u0026quot;Why they believe,\u0026quot; stating the real anxiety behind the story. Every piece will also have a section called \u0026quot;Looking the other way,\u0026quot; and in this series I'll try to set out the strongest arguments of the pseudo-history side, not pick the weakest to knock down.\nRoughly these blocks: the Guiyou Dream of the Red Chamber; the Hong–Qing hypothesis; the \u0026quot;Western pseudo-history theory\u0026quot; that has been very hot in recent years, the school that says the history of ancient Greece and Rome was made up by later people; and some people telling their own experiences. Last, some methods: how to trace the earliest source of a claim, how to tell whether one version is upstream or downstream of another.\nIn another series, Yigui, I keep looking for Huaxia's own yigui (something to rely on and return to). Writing this series is really the other half of that: a yigui that can truly stand has to be built on reliable history, and can't be propped up by hidden secret copies.\nLooking the other way First, the authoritative text really has been altered, and secret copies are sometimes real. When the Qing compiled the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, they changed \u0026quot;the Qiang and Rong took turns usurping\u0026quot; in Gu Yanwu's Rizhilu to \u0026quot;armed conflict daily broke out\u0026quot; and deleted a whole passage; this is a real alteration that can be matched word by word. So to suspect that \u0026quot;the authoritative text has been tampered with\u0026quot; is not paranoia; it really happened in history. This is where the pseudo-history argument is strongest. The only difference is that the original of the Rizhilu can be produced and matched, while the Guiyou manuscript, its promoter himself says, can no longer be found.\nA volume of the Siku Quanshu. This collection preserved a great many ancient books, and also altered a great many. For saying \u0026quot;the authoritative text has been tampered with,\u0026quot; the best evidence is this very set.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress, public domain\nSecond, the label \u0026quot;pseudo-history\u0026quot; can also be misused. That a claim is called pseudo-history by the mainstream doesn't mean it is certainly wrong; there are cases that were later confirmed by new material. So this series tries not to pass judgment first: it sets out the evidence that can be found, and where none can be found, says none can be found.\nThird, what Douglas and colleagues studied is mainly the conspiracy theories popular in Western societies; applying it to pseudo-history on the Chinese-language internet is my own analogy. Chinese readers may believe these stories for other reasons too, which that article doesn't cover. Later pieces will fill this in gradually.\nIf a \u0026quot;secret copy\u0026quot; you had always believed in were shown to be false, what would you be most reluctant to give up: the story itself, or the bit of comfort it once gave you?\nReferences\nLiu Jian, \u0026quot;The Collapse of 'Wu's Story of the Stone,'\u0026quot; Guangming Daily, 27 February 2018 Gu Jiegang, \u0026quot;Letter to Mr Qian Xuantong on Ancient History,\u0026quot; Reading Magazine no. 9, 1923; collected in Gushibian, vol. 1, Pu She, 1926 Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton, Aleksandra Cichocka, \u0026quot;The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,\u0026quot; Current Directions in Psychological Science 26(6), 2017 Gu Yanwu, Rizhilu, entry \u0026quot;Zhengshi\u0026quot; (Huang Rucheng's collected commentary edition, juan 17; Complete Library of the Four Treasuries edition, juan 13) Meng Sen, Verification of the Three Great Mysteries of the Early Qing, 1934 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/miben/p00/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-man-who-put-it-out-didnt-understand-why-it-caught-fire\"\u003eThe man who put it out didn't understand why it caught fire\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlmost twenty years ago, the \u0026quot;last twenty-eight chapters\u0026quot; of a \u003cem\u003eDream of the Red Chamber\u003c/em\u003e began to circulate online. The claim: this was an old manuscript preserving Cao Xueqin's original ending, completely different from the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao edition that we're used to reading. Because there is a marginal note in the book saying \u0026quot;the whole book was fair-copied in the twelfth month of Guiyou,\u0026quot; people called it the \u0026quot;Guiyou manuscript.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts last twenty-eight chapters are written brutally, without the little closing note of \u0026quot;orchids and cassia flourishing together\u0026quot; at the end of the Cheng-Gao. Many readers finished it feeling that this is more like the ending Cao Xueqin had in mind.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why We Love Pseudo-History"},{"content":"What this series is about The Neighbours' Heaven is about the neighbours.\nThe Korean peninsula, Japan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, Taiwan, and the East Asian communities scattered around the world. They read much the same books we did and honoured much the same ancestors. Under pressure from outside and under the weight of their own states, each of them kneaded Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shinto and Christianity into something different. Some of those things survived. Some fell. Some were taken up by a state, used, and then broken apart by that same state.\nI want to look at them one by one: how their religions and their states came together, how they came apart, and how they survived.\nI am writing two other series at the same time. Yigui is about China itself, from 1644 onwards. Duoshe looks across the world's civilizations and religions side by side. This one looks only at the neighbours, with the Chinese side of the comparison brought in where it helps. Where two pieces should be read together, I put a pointer at the end rather than repeat the other piece's history.\nLet me be clear: I am not visiting the neighbours to gawk. I come with a leaning.\nA conversation partner with no position I use AI a lot for research. After a while I noticed something. It looks most thorough and most objective precisely because it has no position. It can make every view sound convincing because it doesn't have to carry any of them.\nPeople are not like that. Each of us reads history carrying where we come from, what we worry about, and what we want to protect. If I took the hardest evidence to pull other people's views apart while pretending I had no instincts of my own, that would be a different kind of dishonesty.\nSo in this first piece, I put my leaning on the table.\nMy leaning My leaning is this: the future of East Asians may depend on Confucianism becoming a religion.\nFor now I call it \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot;, the Way of Heaven.\nFor its symbol I'd like the seal-script form of the character 天, tian, \u0026quot;heaven\u0026quot;. In the Shuowen Jiezi, the dictionary Xu Shen compiled in the Eastern Han, the entry reads: 天，颠也。至高无上，从一大。\u0026quot;Tian is the crown of the head. Highest, with nothing above it. It is made of 一 (one) and 大 (a person standing large).\u0026quot; (My translation.) In seal script, 天 is a person standing with arms and legs spread, with one stroke across the top. Above a person's head is heaven.\nI like this character because it is not the image of a god. It is a person, and the thing above their head.\n天 in seal script: a person standing with arms and legs spread, one stroke above the head.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain\nThe Way of Heaven I want is the one in the line \u0026quot;Heaven moves with vigour; the gentleman, likewise, strengthens himself without rest\u0026quot; (天行健，君子以自强不息). It is constancy. It is an order that makes people feel awe and also hold themselves to account, not an object that asks for blind fervour.\nWhere the leaning comes from This leaning didn't come out of nowhere. In my reading I kept running into the same kinds of things.\nFirst, religions last through boundaries and community. Jains are only about four in a thousand of India's population, yet they have lasted more than two and a half thousand years. When the Jews lost their Temple, they packed a whole nation into a book. Being few is not necessarily dangerous. Blurred boundaries are.\nSecond, East Asian religiosity has no organization. The sociologist C. K. Yang called Chinese religion \u0026quot;diffused\u0026quot;: it is spread through family, lineage, festivals and state ritual, with no church of its own. It is everywhere, but once cities scatter the family, it scatters too. Qingming, the grave-sweeping day, is still there; the ancestral hall is gone. In East Asia, Buddhism works like a wishing well: you burn incense when something comes up and forget it otherwise. Between 2010 and 2020, East Asia had about 32 million fewer Buddhists.\nThird, something I can't make peace with: voice. According to W3Techs in June 2026, among all websites whose content language can be identified, English accounts for about 49.7%, Japanese about 5.0%, and Chinese only about 1.2%. That count covers only public websites, not closed platforms like WeChat. But that is part of the problem: many long, serious pieces written in Chinese simply can't be found by the world's search engines. People whose mother tongue is Chinese are about one-seventh of humanity, yet on the open internet you can barely hear them think, and this is especially true of Simplified Chinese.\nA culture with no organization and no voice: what does it live on? My instinct is that it needs something that can bring people together, cross borders, and give people both belonging and self-discipline. In the East Asian tradition, the closest thing to that is Confucianism. But Confucianism never grew a \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; of its own.\nBy the rules, take it apart The rule I've set for this series is that every instinct I like has to face the hardest evidence that could overturn it. My leaning is no exception. Here are the five hardest counter-examples I have right now. Later pieces will open them up one by one.\nCounter-example one: the Confucian Church failed. In 1912, Chen Huanzhang, Kang Youwei and others founded the Confucian Church (Kongjiao Hui) in Shanghai. In 1913 and again in 1916 they petitioned to make Confucianism the state religion of the Republic of China, and failed both times. The New Culture Movement then turned \u0026quot;Down with the Confucius shop\u0026quot; into a slogan for a generation. People tried to turn Confucianism into a religion more than a hundred years ago, and they were the most learned people of their time.\nLater I read more closely and found something that matters more to me. What the Confucian Church actually produced was rites for honouring Confucius, annual meetings and periodicals. Weekly gatherings, membership rolls, a daily life handed down from one generation to the next: I found none of that. Even the \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; Kang Youwei imagined was never built. So its failure only shows that one version doesn't work: relying on the state and the constitution, tied to the monarchy, with no everyday believers. It doesn't yet show that making Confucianism a religion is impossible. I go into this in Yigui. (This rests on secondary studies; I have not read the primary archives.)\nCounter-example two: State Shinto. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan reshaped Shinto into a faith of the state. Shrines were run by the state, and worship of the emperor entered the schools. It really did bind a people together, and it was also bound up with militarism. In December 1945 the occupation authorities issued the \u0026quot;Shinto Directive\u0026quot;, cutting the tie between Shinto and the state. When a tradition is remade into a state religion, its power and its danger come from the same place.\nThe torii of Meiji Shrine, Tokyo. The shrine was built for the Meiji Emperor and completed in 1920.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Kakidai, CC BY-SA 4.0\nCounter-example three: Confucianism in Indonesia. In Indonesia, Confucianism really was made into a religion: it has temples, clergy, scriptures and rites, and you can write it on your identity card. But today it is a very small minority, and it became a religion because a system that required everyone to have a religion forced it to. (I wrote about this in Duoshe.)\nCounter-example four: Iran. In a state led by religious scholars, the religious authorities first urged people to have fewer children, then urged them to have more. The birth rate listened only to the first half. If I hope religion can help East Asia out of low fertility, Iran is a cold reminder. (Also in Duoshe.)\nCounter-example five: a religion with the same name. Only when I chose the name did I discover that Korea has had a religion called Cheondogyo, written with the same characters, 天道教, since 1905. It is not what I mean, but its rise and fall are worth looking at. It grew out of Donghak, the \u0026quot;Eastern Learning\u0026quot; of the nineteenth century. Its third leader, Son Byong-hi, renamed it Cheondogyo and built a modern religious organization. It was one of the backbones of the March First Movement in 1919. It was once powerful; today it has few believers. A home-grown East Asian religion named for the Way of Heaven really did exist, and really did rise and fall. The next piece is about it, and also separates it clearly from what I mean.\nChoe Je-u (1824–1864), founder of Donghak.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown author, Public domain\nWho I mean by \u0026quot;East Asians\u0026quot; When I say \u0026quot;East Asians\u0026quot;, I mean the whole pan-Confucian world of East Asia: China, Japan, the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, and their descendants scattered around the world. People who read the same Four Books, honoured much the same ancestors, and every year, on much the same days, add a handful of earth to much the same graves. It is only a name. I don't use it to explain anything, and I will never write \u0026quot;because they are East Asian, therefore…\u0026quot;.\nThe people I want to talk to are the ones among them who know things, who think deeply, who can understand.\nTaken as a whole, this group is weak and its voice is faint, and mainland China and the Simplified Chinese world most of all. It isn't that nobody is thinking. It's that once they've thought it through, they write it somewhere search engines can't reach, and it sinks along with that day's trending topics.\nA few rules Every fact comes with a source. If I can't give a source, it doesn't go up. Every piece has a section called \u0026quot;The other way round\u0026quot;, which takes the strongest argument against me, and doesn't turn it into a straw man. I will say plainly where I stand, and mark which parts are my opinion and which are history. I write about ideas, history and costs, not about how to set up a religion. On living politicians and current politics, facts are facts and judgments are judgments; I keep them apart, and I take responsibility for my own judgments. I write in Chinese and I'm looking at the neighbours from outside, so there are things I can't see. If you live there, please tell me where I've got it wrong or slanted. What comes next Next, I'll keep testing this leaning against other people's cases: Korea, Japan and Vietnam each had their own Way of Heaven, and each met its own end.\nIt starts with the next piece: a religion called Cheondogyo, which appeared in Korea more than a hundred years ago. Then Japan's State Shinto, Vietnam's Cao Đài, and on the Chinese side, why the Confucian Church failed and what the character 天 really means. I'll write several pieces on Korea, because after modernization it is the neighbour whose rituals are still most alive, and the one most worth asking.\nThe rest I'll take as I come to it.\nA word to the neighbours. If you've read this far, and you are in Seoul, Tokyo, Hanoi, Taipei or Naha, or in Singapore, Jakarta or San Francisco, or anywhere else in the world, let me start with something small. Is there, in your family too, an ancestral tablet, or an old photograph, and one day every year when you have to go back and stand in front of it? You've never called that \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot;, have you? Maybe you've never recited a single scripture in your life, but you know that on that day you can't not go back. That is what this series is about. We have no common church and no common name, but we have days that are almost the same, characters that are almost the same, and a reverence, almost the same, that we're a little shy to say out loud. They are slipping away one by one, and I can't accept that. I want to walk to your doors one at a time and see how you kept them, how you lost them, and how you picked them up again. Not to teach you anything. To listen, and to ask: could we think about this together?\nObjectivity is a method, not a personality. I can use the hardest evidence to take my instincts apart, but I don't have to pretend I have none.\nIf you had to design a way for your own civilization to survive, what would you choose?\nReferences\nXu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi, entry for 天 W3Techs, \u0026quot;Usage statistics of content languages for websites\u0026quot;, June 2026 (public websites only) Cheondogyo (천도교): Son Byong-hi renamed Donghak as Cheondogyo in 1905; the March First Movement, 1919 Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton UP, 1989; the \u0026quot;Shinto Directive\u0026quot;, December 1945 Confucianism in Indonesia: 1965 / 1967 / 2000 What the Confucian Church built and did: see the Yigui piece \u0026quot;To Sacrifice to Confucius Is to Break the Law; Not to Is to Betray the Religion\u0026quot; and the author's research notes behind it (secondary studies; primary archives not read) Meiji Shrine founded 1 November 1920 (Taishō 9): Meiji Jingu official site https://www.meijijingu.or.jp/about/ 🟢 Image sources are given in each caption Abbasi-Shavazi et al., The Fertility Transition in Iran, 2009 C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 1961 Pew Research Center, 2025 and 2026 reports (change in numbers of Buddhists in East Asia) Founding of the Confucian Church in 1912 and the state-religion petitions of 1913 and 1916: standard history ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d00/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"what-this-series-is-about\"\u003eWhat this series is about\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Neighbours' Heaven\u003c/em\u003e is about the neighbours.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Korean peninsula, Japan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, Taiwan, and the East Asian communities scattered around the world. They read much the same books we did and honoured much the same ancestors. Under pressure from outside and under the weight of their own states, each of them kneaded Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shinto and Christianity into something different. Some of those things survived. Some fell. Some were taken up by a state, used, and then broken apart by that same state.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI want to look at them one by one: how their religions and their states came together, how they came apart, and how they survived.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI am writing two other series at the same time. \u003cem\u003eYigui\u003c/em\u003e is about China itself, from 1644 onwards. \u003cem\u003eDuoshe\u003c/em\u003e looks across the world's civilizations and religions side by side. This one looks only at the neighbours, with the Chinese side of the comparison brought in where it helps. Where two pieces should be read together, I put a pointer at the end rather than repeat the other piece's history.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Preface: Where I Lean"},{"content":"Let's start with hair In early May 1644, the Qing army entered Beijing. Within days, the regent Dorgon issued an order: every surrendered official, soldier and commoner must shave his head, and \u0026quot;dress and cap shall all follow the dynasty's rules.\u0026quot;\nLess than a month later, on the twenty-fourth day of the fifth month, he took it back. From now on, he said, \u0026quot;the people of the realm may keep their hair tied up as before, as they please.\u0026quot; Most likely the backlash was too strong, and he had only just arrived and wasn't yet on firm ground.\nBut the next year, in the sixth month, just after Nanjing fell, the order came again, and this time the words were hard: \u0026quot;All civil and military officials and all people everywhere must shave their heads. Whoever does not comply will be dealt with under military law.\u0026quot; This time it was never withdrawn.\nAn old photograph from the Qing: the forehead shaved, one braid down the back. This is what the Queue Order wanted every man to become.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nTwo hundred years later, it was the classics' turn Jump forward two centuries. In 1853 the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom made Nanjing its capital and renamed it \u0026quot;Heavenly Capital.\u0026quot; That year it printed a small booklet, On the Decree to Seal and Promulgate the Books. It ruled that only three books in the world were proper books: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Heavenly King's own decrees. As for the rest: \u0026quot;All the demonic writings and heresies of Confucius, Mencius, and the hundred schools are to be burned in full.\u0026quot;\nCover of the Old Testament printed by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, marked \u0026quot;newly cut in the third year of Taiping, Guihao.\u0026quot; This is the kind of \u0026quot;proper book\u0026quot; they left behind.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nThe next year, in the first month, Zeng Guofan led his Hunan Army out of Hunan and issued a manifesto, the famous Proclamation Against the Guangdong Bandits. He accused the Taipings of sweeping away, in one stroke, \u0026quot;the rites and human bonds of China's thousands of years, the norms of the Odes and the Documents,\u0026quot; and called it \u0026quot;the strangest upheaval of the moral order since the world began.\u0026quot; (The \u0026quot;moral order\u0026quot; is mingjiao: the web of roles and duties, ruler and subject, father and son.)\nWhat's interesting is the second half. He doesn't speak only for Confucius. He speaks for Guan Di, for Yue Fei, for Buddhist temples, Daoist halls, city gods and village altars. In his words: \u0026quot;The kingly way governs the visible; the way of the spirits governs the unseen.\u0026quot; A Neo-Confucian scholar, in the most important manifesto of his life, standing up for the city god and the earth god. I have always found that detail rather delightful.\nZeng Guofan, from \u0026quot;Portraits of Meritorious Officials Who Pacified the Guangdong Bandits.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nThen the country was restored On 15 February 1912, Sun Yat-sen (Sun Wen), as provisional president, went to the Ming Xiaoling tomb in Nanjing to report to the first Ming emperor. His opening line:\n\u0026quot;It has been 267 years since the Ming lost its sacrifices. The Republic of China was founded, and forty-two days later the Qing emperor abdicated and the republic was firmly established…\u0026quot;\nIt was a way of giving the Ming an account of what had happened.\nSun Yat-sen with civil and military officials of the Nanjing provisional government at the Ming Xiaoling, 15 February 1912. Sun is seventh from the left in the front row.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Tongsheng Studio, Shanghai, public domain\nBut think about it. The country was restored. The shaved hair was not grown back by anyone, and the burned books were not replaced. That same year the Republic's slogan changed from \u0026quot;expel the Tatars\u0026quot; to \u0026quot;five peoples in one republic.\u0026quot; Restoring a country and restoring a yigui — something to rely on and return to — turn out to be two different things.\nIn the early Republic, someone really tried Yet right then, some people began trying to build that yigui, and they did it seriously.\nOn 7 October 1912, Confucius's birthday, Chen Huanzhang founded the Confucian Association in Shanghai. Only fifty or sixty people are said to have attended, and they performed the three kneelings and nine kowtows. Later it grew a three-tier structure of headquarters, offices and branches, published the Confucian Association Magazine, and in September 1913 held the first national Confucian congress in Qufu. After that it met every year on Confucius's birthday, until the last one in 1930. How many branches there were, sources disagree: anything from a hundred and thirty-odd to nearly three hundred. Many researchers think the association took Christianity as its model.\nIn the summer of 1913 they sent a petition to Parliament asking that Confucianism be written into the constitution as the state religion. Their reasoning was plain: China had always honoured Confucius, and had always allowed freedom of belief; both were unwritten constitutions that had run for thousands of years without a fight, so writing them down would merely record what already existed. The signers included Chen Huanzhang, Yan Fu, Xia Zengyou and Liang Qichao.\nMost members of Parliament said no. The constitution already guaranteed freedom of religion, and setting up a state religion on top of that would make the clauses fight each other. The 1913 Temple of Heaven Draft Constitution kept only one sentence: \u0026quot;National education takes the Way of Confucius as the foundation of self-cultivation.\u0026quot; In 1916 Kang Youwei stepped forward again, demanding that \u0026quot;Confucius be made the great religion and written into the constitution,\u0026quot; and Chen Duxiu answered him: \u0026quot;Not to sacrifice to Confucius is to break the law; to sacrifice to Confucius is to betray the religion. There is no way out either way.\u0026quot; In 1917 the constitutional review committee settled on something else: the people of the Republic of China are free to revere Confucius and free to believe in any religion. Confucius and freedom of religion sat side by side. Confucianism never became the state religion.\nOne thing is easy to get backwards: Yuan Shikai did not back the Confucian Association. He honoured Confucius and held the rites, but he openly opposed a state religion, and even said Confucius was \u0026quot;never really a religious figure.\u0026quot; Those who wanted to borrow Confucius's authority were also afraid of the words \u0026quot;state religion.\u0026quot; In 1917 Zhang Xun attempted a restoration, and Kang Youwei took office in the \u0026quot;new dynasty.\u0026quot; When the restoration collapsed, the Confucian Association carried the stain of \u0026quot;restorationism\u0026quot; with it.\nWhat I think matters most in this story is that the Confucian Association really built only two things: rites (the Confucius ceremonies, the congresses) and a press. Weekly gatherings, membership rolls, daily practices handed down generation after generation: I haven't found any. The kind of \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; Kang Youwei had imagined, it never managed to build itself. So the Confucian Association's failure only shows that one version failed: relying on the state, relying on a constitution, tied to the monarchy, with no daily congregation. It does not let us conclude that \u0026quot;Confucianism cannot become a religion.\u0026quot;\nAll-under-Heaven, or the state? I have to stop here for a moment, because the word \u0026quot;country\u0026quot; has been slipping in the sections above.\nGu Yanwu drew a sharp line between \u0026quot;state\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;all-under-Heaven (Tianxia)\u0026quot; (there will be a whole piece on that later). But by the time of Sun's visit to the tomb and the Confucian Association's petition, nearly everyone was talking about the \u0026quot;state\u0026quot;: the country restored, a state religion, citizens of the nation. In his 1899 On Loving the Country, Liang Qichao said that Chinese people called their land \u0026quot;all-under-Heaven,\u0026quot; not \u0026quot;a state.\u0026quot;\nSo there is one question I'll keep asking in this series: is the unit of a civilization really the state?\nMy own answer is: all-under-Heaven stands beside civilization, and a religious community is the vehicle.\nLet me spell that out. Tianxia governs range and order: who is inside a circle, and what draws the circle. Huaxia civilization had an old tradition: a feudal lord who adopted barbarian rites was treated as a barbarian, and one who learned the rites of China was treated as Chinese. Han Yu says in his On the Origin of the Way that this is exactly the brush of the Spring and Autumn Annals. The circle is drawn by culture, not by blood. Civilization governs continuity of content: characters, rites, classics, the calendar, festivals. Both have to travel a long way over a long time, and something has to carry them. I think that something is a religious community. The Jews had no state of their own and travelled for nearly two thousand years. The caliphate ended in 1924, and Islam did not scatter with it. Neither relied on a state. The state is a fairly recent form, and treating it as the unit of a civilization takes something fairly new and mistakes it for something eternal.\nThree answers Put those years side by side, and I think they are all answering one question: what, in the end, holds a people together?\nOver three hundred years, roughly three answers have appeared.\nThe first is dress. Hairstyle, clothing, ritual: you can tell at a glance who someone is. The Queue Order of 1645 went straight at this.\nThe second is mingjiao, the moral order. No particular god to worship; just hold on to the web of human bonds, ruler and subject, father and son, benevolence, rightness, propriety, wisdom. This is what Zeng Guofan fought to defend, and when Gu Yanwu spoke of \u0026quot;the fall of all-under-Heaven,\u0026quot; this is what he meant.\nThe third is religion: a yigui that people really believe in. Hong Xiuquan wanted this. He found the two characters for \u0026quot;Shangdi\u0026quot; in the Book of Odes, and then turned around and wanted to burn Confucius and Mencius. In the Republic, Kang Youwei wanted this too, hoping to write the Confucian religion into the constitution, and Chen Duxiu answered with a single line: \u0026quot;To sacrifice to Confucius is to betray the religion.\u0026quot; The Confucian Association in the section above was the most serious attempt at this third answer.\nIn 1924 Sun Yat-sen offered one more. Foreigners say the Chinese are \u0026quot;a sheet of loose sand,\u0026quot; he said, and the prescription he gave was to start from clan and native place and link people up layer by layer.\nHonestly, none of these answers was kept whole.\nMy leaning Let me put my own leaning on the table first.\nRobes and caps, the clothing of the people, were once the yigui of Huaxia. After 1644 they were destroyed.\nThe \u0026quot;Celestial Court\u0026quot; (Tianchao) was also a yigui in the traditional Huaxia story. Its effect on its neighbours was one of lowering the dimension: Korea and Vietnam were both deeply shaped by it. Because the influence went so deep, after the Ming fell Korea called itself \u0026quot;Little China\u0026quot; and did not recognise the Qing as China. As I read it, Vietnam had a similar idea; I haven't checked the details yet.\nIn other words, the yigui belongs to Huaxia, not to whichever dynasty happens to sit in Beijing.\nAnd for a civilization to really hold its people together, it ultimately needs a real religion.\nMy aim in writing this series is to awaken the Han, so that in the end they might stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jews.\nThat is my position. In this series I will look for evidence for it, one piece at a time, and also look for the strongest opposing case, one piece at a time.\nI want to be clear about the words \u0026quot;a real religion,\u0026quot; so no one misreads them. What I want is not a national identity, not \u0026quot;we are one race.\u0026quot; National identities can go their own ways; that's fine. What I want is one shared set of cultural beliefs for everyday life: ancestral rites at Qingming, the festivals of the year, courtesy in how things are done, rules for how we dress, and being able to read what is written in Chinese characters. With such a set, whichever country you live in, whichever passport you hold, you recognise your own people at a glance. How did the Jews travel for two thousand years? Not on a state, but on the Sabbath, food rules, scriptures and the synagogue, things done every single day. That is what I want.\nAlso, the people this site wants to talk to are not only Chinese. The Korean peninsula, Japan, Vietnam, the Ryukyus, and East Asians scattered around the world use Chinese characters, keep the same festivals and remember the same ancestors. For them this question is just as unavoidable. Someone asked me who I'm really writing for. I'm writing for every East Asian who has ever thought about this question.\nHow this series will be written The series is called Yigui: China's Heavenly Kingdom and All-Under-Heaven. (Yigui is a belief to rely on and return to.)\n\u0026quot;The Heavenly Kingdom\u0026quot; is Hong Xiuquan's. Most religions promise a heaven after death, but Hong promised one on earth, to be built as soon as Nanjing was taken. And he was not the last to promise it. About seventy years later, a doctrine from the West also promised the Chinese a heavenly kingdom, again not after death but in the human world, in the future. This series will talk about both of these kingdoms.\n\u0026quot;All-under-Heaven\u0026quot; is Gu Yanwu's and Zeng Guofan's. For three hundred years, Chinese people have more or less walked back and forth between these two poles, \u0026quot;Heavenly Kingdom\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;All-under-Heaven.\u0026quot;\nI'll start in 1644 and run to the present, and look a little ahead too. Each piece takes one small detail: a character, an order, a manifesto, a constitutional clause, or a sentence that someone deleted.\nI've set myself three rules.\nFirst, every quotation has a source, listed at the end. If I can find the original book, I use it; if I can only find it quoted by someone else, I say so honestly; if I can't find a source, I leave it out, however good it sounds.\nSecond, every piece has a section called \u0026quot;Looking the Other Way,\u0026quot; giving the opposing side its strongest case. No picking soft targets.\nThird, I'll spend time on some stories that spread widely but don't survive checking: a \u0026quot;manuscript original,\u0026quot; a \u0026quot;birth story,\u0026quot; a \u0026quot;great debate.\u0026quot; Most of them aren't true, but why people are so willing to believe them is itself worth talking about.\nThere are other series on this site. Duoshe is about civilizations and religions around the world: that one looks sideways, this one looks down the depth. The Neighbours' Heaven is about the Korean peninsula, Japan, Vietnam and overseas Chinese, and how the same question is answered elsewhere.\nLooking the other way The question of yigui itself may be the wrong question.\nFor thousands of years, East Asia has run many gods, many teachings and several orders side by side. The city god handles the city god's business, Confucius handles Confucius's, ancestors handle ancestors', and life carried on. So some people say that the idea \u0026quot;a people must have one unifying yigui\u0026quot; was borrowed from monotheism.\nI admit that straight away: it is borrowed. I learned it from Islam: a body of exemplary practice that fixes how daily life is lived, spread outward by trade, by merchants travelling and settling.\nAnd there's one more thing to say up front. The beliefs in history that were deliberately designed to \u0026quot;bring hearts together\u0026quot; mostly ended badly. Confucianism never became a state religion, and the God Worshippers' own movement tore apart in the Heavenly Capital in 1856.\nThen there is the rebuttal I find most common and most powerful. You can find people saying it online: China doesn't need a religion, because it has a shared script. Accents differ, but written down it's the same character, so the culture can't split; and with imperial power pressing on priests, religion couldn't grow big anyway.\nWhat makes this strong is that it doesn't deny that China has something that holds it together; it just says that something is writing, not belief. My question is quite concrete: a shared script depends on the state running schools and examinations. What happens when those are swapped out? Vietnam ended its examinations in 1919, and the script that later became common was quoc ngu, so Chinese characters stopped being the common script there. I put this rebuttal here because this series will sooner or later have to answer it head-on.\nLast is the lesson of the Confucian Association. Islam took root through community, daily obligations and trade routes; the state came in later, sometimes protecting it, sometimes competing with it for ground. The Confucian Association took the opposite road: it asked first for the state, for the constitution, and only then went looking for believers. The difference between those two roads, I think, is more basic than \u0026quot;should we learn from monotheism.\u0026quot;\nThere's also a design problem I haven't worked out: strict or loose. Judaism and Islam have a whole set of daily taboos and duties: a high threshold and strong cohesion, but slow growth. Christianity let go of dietary rules and circumcision and kept only belief: easy to spread, but the boundary gets loose. Where a religionised Confucianism would land on that scale, I don't have an answer.\nSo the more I want an answer to be true, the more I have to look first for the strongest case against it. I'll keep doing that in this series, including against my own answer.\nIf you could keep only one, would you keep the robes and caps, the moral order, or the gods?\nReferences\nVeritable Records of Emperor Shizu (Shunzhi), juan 5 and 17 (cited via Zhang Chang, \u0026quot;A Reconsideration of the Qing Hair-Shaving Policy — in Dialogue with Mr. Yu Hongliang,\u0026quot; Journal of Tsinghua University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 2021, no. 3) Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, On the Decree to Seal and Promulgate the Books, 1853 Zeng Guofan, Proclamation Against the Guangdong Bandits, 1854 Sun Wen, Address at the Tomb of the First Ming Emperor, 15 February 1912 (Xu Shishen, ed., Record of the National Father's Election as Provisional President, 1967, pp. 264–265) Chen Duxiu, \u0026quot;The Constitution and Confucianism,\u0026quot; La Jeunesse (New Youth), vol. 2, 1916 Sun Yat-sen, The Three Principles of the People: Nationalism, 1924 Gu Yanwu, Rizhilu, entry \u0026quot;Zhengshi\u0026quot; Han Yu, On the Origin of the Way: \u0026quot;When Confucius wrote the Spring and Autumn Annals, a feudal lord who used barbarian rites was treated as a barbarian; one who advanced to the rites of China was treated as Chinese.\u0026quot; (Wikisource 🟢) Liang Qichao, On Loving the Country, 1899 (🟡, via secondary citation) Yuan Shikai, Presidential Prayer to the Confucian Society, 27 April 1913 (🟡, as reported in a research article) Chen Duxiu, \u0026quot;The Constitution and Confucianism,\u0026quot; New Youth vol. 2 no. 3, 1 November 1916 (Wikisource 🟢) End of the Vietnamese civil-service examinations in 1919: the last Hue examination, followed by Emperor Khai Dinh's edict reforming the school system (🟡, from media and encyclopedia accounts) Zhang Songzhi, \u0026quot;A Collected Study of the Confucian Association,\u0026quot; Literature, History and Philosophy, 2008, no. 1 (secondary) Zhao Fasheng, \u0026quot;The State-Religion Dispute and the Failure of Kang Youwei's Confucian Revival Movement,\u0026quot; Culture and Society (Wenhua Zongheng), 2012, no. 1 (secondary) Zhao Xiuli, \u0026quot;Press Opposition to Confucianism in the Constitution in the Early Republic, Seen Through Tianjin's Yishi Bao,\u0026quot; Journal of Macao Polytechnic, 2021, no. 3 (secondary; it cites the 12 June 1917 text of the Draft Constitution of the Republic of China) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e00/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"lets-start-with-hair\"\u003eLet's start with hair\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn early May 1644, the Qing army entered Beijing. Within days, the regent Dorgon issued an order: every surrendered official, soldier and commoner must shave his head, and \u0026quot;dress and cap shall all follow the dynasty's rules.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLess than a month later, on the twenty-fourth day of the fifth month, he took it back. From now on, he said, \u0026quot;the people of the realm may keep their hair tied up as before, as they please.\u0026quot; Most likely the backlash was too strong, and he had only just arrived and wasn't yet on firm ground.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut the next year, in the sixth month, just after Nanjing fell, the order came again, and this time the words were hard: \u0026quot;All civil and military officials and all people everywhere must shave their heads. Whoever does not comply will be dealt with under military law.\u0026quot; This time it was never withdrawn.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What Holds a People Together?"},{"content":"The year 70 In Rome there is the Arch of Titus, built around 81 CE. On the inside of the arch is a relief: a line of Roman soldiers carrying a seven-branched menorah, returning in triumph from Jerusalem.\nThe relief inside the Arch of Titus: Roman soldiers carrying in procession the menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem. The winning side carved this scene in stone, and two thousand years later it has become the picture most often quoted by the losing side.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Anthony M., CC BY 2.0\nThat menorah came from the Second Temple in Jerusalem. In 70 CE, the Roman army broke into Jerusalem, and the Temple was burned.\nFor Judaism of the time, this was nearly like having the heart removed. Sacrifices had to be offered in the Temple; the priests revolved around the Temple; the pilgrimages of the year all ended at the Temple. With the Temple gone, the whole of religious life lost its centre.\nWhat usually happens when a religion's centre is destroyed? Look at the other temples in that same Mediterranean world: the gates close, the priests scatter, and within a few generations the faith is left as ruins.\nJudaism did not go that way.\nThe rabbis took over There is a legend in the rabbinic literature: when Jerusalem was under siege, a teacher named Yohanan ben Zakkai had his students put him in a coffin and carry him out of the city, to see the Roman general and ask for just one thing: to be allowed to set up a school in the little coastal town of Yavne.\nWhether that is true, we can't check. But what the legend wants to say is: it doesn't matter if the city is lost; the book mustn't be broken.\nAfter the Temple fell, what slowly became the core of Jewish society was the rabbis, those who study and expound the law. They did something of enormous consequence: they systematically wrote down the law that had been passed on by word of mouth. Around 200 CE the Mishnah was compiled; later the discussions of it and commentaries on it were gathered into the Talmud.\nThe Babylonian Talmud, Seder Zeraim, Bomberg's Venice printing, 1543–1544. The central column is the main text; around it, ring after ring of commentary from every age. A single book to which generation after generation added words.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nIn this way the centre of the religion moved from a building to a text and a way of living. How to keep the Sabbath, what may and may not be eaten, what to do about marriage and property: it was all in the book, and could be followed wherever you went. By tradition, ten adult men are enough for communal prayer; no Temple, and no priest, is needed.\nHebrew also found another way to live. For two thousand years it was no longer the everyday spoken language of the Jews, but it stayed the language of prayer and Scripture. In the late nineteenth century, people like Ben-Yehuda made it a language of daily speech again; in 1922 it became one of the official languages of British-ruled Palestine.\nBen-Yehuda at his desk in Jerusalem, about 1912. He compiled a great dictionary of modern Hebrew, kept at it until his death, and never finished it.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Shlomo Narinsky, public domain\nJudaism had found a \u0026quot;portable\u0026quot; way to live: as long as there is a book, and people who gather, the core of the civilization can travel with its people.\nThis story is too smooth At this point many people reach a neat conclusion without thinking: a book saved a people.\nThe economic historians Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, in The Chosen Few (2012), add a very jarring footnote to this conclusion.\nThey noticed that after the Temple was destroyed, the rabbis pushed a new rule: every Jewish man had to be able to read the Scripture, and had to send his sons to study. In an age when the vast majority farmed and very few could read, this was a heavy burden: a child sent to study was one fewer pair of hands at home, and there were fees to pay. A faith that charges tuition is unpopular in any age.\nThey estimate that around 70 CE there were about five million Jews in the world; by 650 CE, only about one million. War, massacre and plague all played a part, but they argue that another important cause was that many people found the rules too expensive and left Judaism one after another; quite a few became Christians.\nThose who stayed were those who were willing, and able to carry, those rules. They were literate, and later found it easier to move into cities, to take up crafts and trade.\nLooking the other way This explanation is debated among scholars. The population numbers are estimates, and there is more than one reason people left. But it reminds us of something:\nWhen we say \u0026quot;Jewish civilization has not died in two thousand years,\u0026quot; what we see is the line that survived. Those who could not, or would not, carry this book forward did not vanish from history; they became part of other peoples, and became other people's ancestors. At their own dinner tables, they made a very ordinary decision: we won't study any more, we won't keep it any more, we have to get on with life. I don't think that was betrayal.\nThe price of \u0026quot;portability\u0026quot; is a threshold. The threshold kept the civilization safe, and also shut part of its people outside.\nCan Chinese culture only live on a state? A common comparison online says: Judaism survived through a text; Confucianism depended on the state and the land, and when the state fell it scattered.\nThat comparison draws Confucianism too narrowly. For centuries the Chinese of Southeast Asia, through huiguan (native-place halls), ancestral halls, fellow-townsman associations, and qiaopi (the letters and remittances that overseas people sent home through remittance houses), kept their language, their ancestral rites and their mutual aid going without any home-state regime behind them. That too was a kind of \u0026quot;portability\u0026quot;; what it carried was not a book of law but a web woven of people and credit.\nA Chaoshan qiaopi, with \u0026quot;To Mother\u0026quot; written on the envelope, enclosing some Hong Kong dollars. A sheet of paper, a sum of money, a greeting, linking Nanyang and Chaoshan at either end. The qiaopi archives were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2013.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Sanlie, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWhat became of the web on the Chinese side Interestingly, this web lived on overseas, and was cut several times at home.\nAfter 1949, the qiaopi trade was first brought under control; in 1972 the State Council issued a document abolishing the private qiaopi trade at home (as reported in local histories such as Hainan's; I have not found the original document), and by the end of the 1970s, the remittance houses everywhere had been absorbed into state banks, and the private houses were gone. In the \u0026quot;Smash the Four Olds\u0026quot; years from 1966, in many places ancestral halls were torn down or put to other uses, genealogies were burned and ancestral tablets smashed.\nIn other words, the half that relied on the state was taken apart by the state itself; the half that relied on the web went to places the state could not reach, and so survived. Today, if you want to see a well-preserved Chaoshan-style ancestral hall, or an ancestral sacrifice held by the old rules, it is often easier to go to Penang or Singapore than to Chaozhou.\nI'd rather have a web The Jewish road, I admire, but I don't plan to copy it. One book of law, one literacy threshold: it sifted the people, and I feel for those several million who fell through the sieve.\nWhat I'd rather have is to put together the web of the Southeast Asian Chinese and the book of the Jews: characters and a few shared scriptures that everyone can read; rites such as ancestral sacrifice and Qingming; places like huiguan and ancestral halls; something you can take with you, and that doesn't depend on any regime to keep it. What is brought together is one set of culture and belief, not an ethnic identity. There must be a threshold, but a lower one, so that those who have drifted away can still find their way back.\nIf your culture could take only one thing with it, what would you take?\nReferences\nMaristella Botticini \u0026amp; Zvi Eckstein, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492, Princeton UP, 2012 UNESCO Memory of the World Register, \u0026quot;Qiaopi and Yinxin: Overseas Chinese Letters and Remittances from Fujian and Guangdong\u0026quot; (2013) Yohanan ben Zakkai and Yavne: the legend in the Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56a–b; its historicity is disputed The Arch of Titus, the destruction of the Second Temple, the compilation of the Mishnah, the revival of Hebrew: standard history Jewish population of about five million (70 CE) falling to about one million (650 CE): Botticini \u0026amp; Eckstein's estimate, as presented in the EH.Net book review and in Slate's account of the book (🟡, second-hand; the book itself says war and famine explain at most half) Nationalisation of the qiaopi trade: Chen Chunsheng, Modern Overseas Chinese Remittances and the Qiaopi Trade — a Study Centred on the Chaoshan Region, Research on Chinese Social and Economic History 2000, no. 4 (the Shantou houses Youxinzhuang and Zhenshengxing ran until 1977, \u0026quot;until qiaopi business was handled solely by state banks\u0026quot;); Jiemian News, Inside and Outside the Play: The Yinxin Bureaus, Currency and Finance behind Love Letters to Grandma (1972 State Council document abolishing the private qiaopi trade at home; from January 1976 Fujian qiaopi business taken over by banks; in 1979 Xiamen's qiaopi trade fully brought under the Bank of China); Yangcheng Evening News, 27 May 2026, quoting the Guangdong Provincial Archives: \u0026quot;In 1979, qiaopi business was formally brought under the Bank of China\u0026quot; 🟡 \u0026quot;Smash the Four Olds\u0026quot;: a commonly given second-hand account, to be checked place by place Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w01/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-year-70\"\u003eThe year 70\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Rome there is the Arch of Titus, built around 81 CE. On the inside of the arch is a relief: a line of Roman soldiers carrying a seven-branched menorah, returning in triumph from Jerusalem.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The relief on the Arch of Titus\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w01/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe relief inside the Arch of Titus: Roman soldiers carrying in procession the menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem. The winning side carved this scene in stone, and two thousand years later it has become the picture most often quoted by the losing side.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arch_of_titus_relief_2.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photographed by Anthony M., CC BY 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat menorah came from the Second Temple in Jerusalem. In 70 CE, the Roman army broke into Jerusalem, and the Temple was burned.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"After the Temple Burned: How a People Packed Its State into a Book"},{"content":"First, two sets of numbers In late 2019 and early 2020, the Pew Research Center ran a major survey in India: nearly thirty thousand people interviewed in person, in 17 languages. The result: 97% said they believe in God, and 84% said religion is very important in their lives.\nFor opinion polls, that degree of agreement is already a wonder.\nNow another set. By the estimates of the International Monetary Fund and other institutions, India's GDP per head in 2024 was between 2,500 and 2,700 US dollars (the sources differ slightly), and in 2025 about 2,800 (the IMF's October 2025 figure is 2,818). At the same time, China's was over 13,000.\nPut the two side by side, and a thought comes easily: such a devout country, so poor? Do the gods not work?\nThere are two common answers: one says \u0026quot;it's the gods that held it back\u0026quot;; the other says \u0026quot;the gods are the poor's last comfort.\u0026quot; Both have something to them, and both are only half.\nThe first answer: religion held it back One of the earliest sources of this view is the German sociologist Max Weber. In the early twentieth century he studied the religions of India (The Religion of India, published 1916 to 1917). The gist: karma, rebirth and caste make people content with their place and don't encourage breaking the order and climbing, so India didn't grow what Weber had in mind as the \u0026quot;spirit of capitalism.\u0026quot; That is the crudest summary; Weber's own words are far more complex, and many have argued against him since.\nThere is a popular version of this view with a famous name, \u0026quot;the Hindu rate of growth.\u0026quot;\nThe phrase was coined in 1978 by the Indian economist Raj Krishna. It refers to the long period from independence to the 1980s when economic growth hovered around 3.5% (some sources put it closer to 4%). Population then grew a little over 2% a year, and GDP per head only about 1%, painfully slow.\nFrom the name it sounds as if Hinduism slowed the economy. But Krishna's own explanation was that the state controlled too much: import substitution, layers of approvals, a licence needed for everything. This system had a nickname, the \u0026quot;Licence Raj.\u0026quot; To open a factory, you first had to collect a full set of permits, and by the time you had them the factory had probably changed industries.\nSo \u0026quot;Hindu\u0026quot; in that phrase is only a label, and the cause has little to do with the gods.\nA very useful comparison The most convincing counter-example is in India itself.\nIn 1991, India hit a balance-of-payments crisis. Foreign-exchange reserves were nearly gone, enough for only a few weeks of imports, and it was about to be unable to pay for oil and grain.\nThat year, India used gold to buy its life. In May, the government first handed 20 tonnes of confiscated gold to Union Bank of Switzerland, nominally a sale with an agreement to buy it back later, for about 200 million dollars. In July, the newly installed Rao government pledged another 46.91 tonnes of gold to the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan, for about 405 million dollars; they did not accept paper receipts, and the gold was physically flown to London in several consignments. (Sources differ on details: some merge the two operations into \u0026quot;47 tonnes,\u0026quot; and some say the previous government started it.) An ancient civilization having to load the bars from its treasury onto planes to get a loan was, in India at the time, a deep humiliation. More than thirty years later, in 2024, the Reserve Bank of India brought 100 tonnes of gold home from vaults in Britain, and the press wrote about it with considerable pride.\nThe crisis forced reform: loosen the licences, cut tariffs, open to foreign capital. Then growth took off. By India's statistics office, GDP growth in fiscal 2025–26 (April 2025 to March 2026) was 7.7% (provisional estimate; the earlier estimate was 7.6%).\nFrom 3.5% in the 1970s to around 7% now, did Indians swap their gods in between? No. The temples are the same temples, the gods the same gods. What changed was the number of licences.\nIf \u0026quot;believing in God\u0026quot; were really the cause of poverty, there should have been no change before and after; but the numbers changed. So at least we can say that believing or not doesn't decide whether a country is poor. When policy changes, results change.\nNow look at poverty. In June 2025 the World Bank moved the international extreme-poverty line to 3 dollars a day (at 2021 purchasing power parity). By this new standard, India's extreme-poverty rate fell from 27.1% in 2011–12 to 5.3% in 2022–23, and the number of people from 340 million to about 75 million. (The country brief from April used the old line, with numbers of 16.2% falling to 2.3%, so when you cite it, check which line is being used.) In a decade or so, most of the extreme poor were gone.\nAnd in those ten years, Indians did not become less religious.\nThe second answer: God as the last comfort Then the other way round: could God \u0026quot;solve\u0026quot; poverty?\nThe Venkateswara temple at Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh, visited by about 25 million people a year; its managing body's annual budget is 5,258 crore rupees.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Adityamadhav83, CC BY-SA 3.0\nIf \u0026quot;solve\u0026quot; means: you fall ill, go to the temple to pray, and get better, that is very hard to verify. But from another angle, temples really do solve some very concrete problems.\nFirst, money. In India a temple is a real industry. The Tirumala–Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh gets about 25 million visitors a year; the body that runs it (TTD) had a board-approved budget for 2025–26 of 5,258.68 crore rupees (about 52.6 billion rupees), employs thousands of staff, and runs its own hospitals, schools and guest houses. That's less like a temple and more like a small conglomerate with an idol.\nIn Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, after the Ram temple opened in January 2024, according to the state tourism department, about 164.4 million visits were recorded in the whole of 2024, against about 6 million in 2020. These are official figures; I haven't seen how \u0026quot;visits\u0026quot; were counted, so don't take them as rigorous statistics.\nSome commentaries online cite National Sample Survey data to say India's \u0026quot;temple economy\u0026quot; is worth 3 trillion rupees a year. I couldn't find the original survey, so I don't use that number. Whatever the exact figure, the livelihoods of a whole ring of people, flower sellers, offering makers, homestay owners, barbers, really do hang on the temple.\nThen, protection. Where social insurance is thin, religious organisations often play several roles: funerals, weddings, free meals, relief, job introductions. The Sikh \u0026quot;langar,\u0026quot; the community kitchen that feeds everyone who comes, every day, is the best-known example. For many poor people, that's far more real than \u0026quot;God bless you.\u0026quot;\nSo \u0026quot;God can solve poverty\u0026quot; splits into two meanings:\nCan God make a country rich? It seems not; at least the before-and-after comparison around 1991 doesn't support it. Can God's organisations help specific poor people? Yes, and sometimes quite a lot. There is a pattern, but don't misuse it In cross-country comparison there is a rather common pattern: the richer the country, the less devout the people. India sits at \u0026quot;high devotion, low income,\u0026quot; in line with the pattern. (The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart discussed this systematically in Sacred and Secular in 2004; their argument is that the less secure the conditions of life, the more people need religion.)\nBut correlation is not causation. \u0026quot;More devout because poorer\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;poorer because more devout\u0026quot; use the same curve with opposite directions. Researchers lean towards the former: the more uncertain the days, the more people need something to rely on. That is also why, in India, those with no medical cover and no stable income depend on the temple all the more.\nThe same gods, different wealth There's an even more direct comparison inside India.\nHindus are the majority of India's population, yet the states differ greatly in wealth. By the Multidimensional Poverty Index published in 2023 by NITI Aayog, the government's think tank, the poverty rate in northern Bihar is about a third, while in southern Kerala it is under 1% (NFHS-5, 2019–2021: Bihar 33.76%, Kerala 0.55%).\nThe same mythology, the same festivals, and yet a gap bigger than between many countries. What explains the difference looks more like education, public health, land systems and the capacity of state governments; it's hard to credit the gods, and not easy to blame them either.\nMy view I accept this piece's conclusion: the gods don't decide rich or poor; what does is licences, schools and state governments. But my curiosity about India's gods has always been of another kind.\nThe four religions that grew out of the subcontinent, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, are grand, subtle and deep, and I sincerely admire them. Set beside the monotheisms that grew out of the desert, I'll say it honestly: in building social ethics, fixing contracts and mobilising on a large scale, the desert line has been more efficient, and the base of today's international order and law was mostly laid by them. But I increasingly feel that humanity, going forward, may rely more on the Indian line: not exclusive, able to hold many gods, and also able to hold those who believe in none.\nWhat strikes me most about Hinduism is exactly this: no church, no single scripture, and still more than a billion people held inside one name, not scattered when they were poor, and not scattered once they got richer. What East Asia lacks is something like that, which doesn't rely on a state to prop it up and can live on its own. Did it make India rich? No. But what holds a people together is, in the first place, not a question GDP can answer.\nLooking the other way \u0026quot;The gods have nothing to do with poverty\u0026quot; may also be said too firmly.\nSome scholars think religious ideas really do influence saving, marriage, fertility and attitudes to risk, and through them a society's economic behaviour; it's just that the effect is smaller than policy and slower than institutions, and hard to separate from other factors. The limits caste puts on occupational mobility, for instance, are bound up with religious ideas (the piece \u0026quot;Is Caste Dead or Not\u0026quot; will deal with it).\nAnother doubt: using the 1991 reform as the proof that \u0026quot;the gods don't matter\u0026quot; is also a bit too neat. In those thirty years, India's urbanisation, education and demographic structure were all changing, and the face of religion was changing too, for example with more emphasis on ritual and a more political colour. We can't say religion \u0026quot;changed nothing\u0026quot; in those thirty years.\nIf a person, in a place with no protection at all, can only hand his sense of safety to God, is \u0026quot;believing\u0026quot; the result of his poverty, or the reason he can't get out of it?\nReferences\nPew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, June 2021 (29,999 people, 17 languages) World Bank, June 2025 poverty data update ($3 a day, 2021 PPP; extreme poverty 27.1% → 5.3%; 340 million → 75 million); and the April 2025 Poverty \u0026amp; Equity Brief: India (old $2.15 line, 16.2% → 2.3%) IMF, World Economic Outlook, October 2025 (India GDP per head 2,818 dollars); India's statistics ministry (MoSPI), provisional estimate at the end of May 2026 (FY2025–26 GDP growth 7.7%, second advance estimate 7.6%) Business Standard; Wikipedia, \u0026quot;Hindu rate of growth\u0026quot; (Raj Krishna, 1978) Tirumala–Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) 2025–26 budget of 5,258.68 crore; Uttar Pradesh tourism department Ayodhya visitor statistics (164.4 million visits in 2024, as relayed by Outlook Traveller and others) Max Weber, The Religion of India, 1916–1917; Pippa Norris \u0026amp; Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 2004 NITI Aayog, National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress Review 2023 (Bihar 33.76%, Kerala 0.55%) The 1991 gold pledge: Wikipedia, \u0026quot;1991 Indian economic crisis\u0026quot;; retrospectives in BullionVault, inkl and others (20 tonnes to UBS, 46.91 tonnes pledged to the Bank of England and Bank of Japan, about 405 million dollars; details differ between sources) 🟡; the RBI's repatriation of 100 tonnes of gold from Britain in 2024 (DT Next, The News Minute) 🟡 ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w1/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"first-two-sets-of-numbers\"\u003eFirst, two sets of numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn late 2019 and early 2020, the Pew Research Center ran a major survey in India: nearly thirty thousand people interviewed in person, in 17 languages. The result: 97% said they believe in God, and 84% said religion is very important in their lives.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor opinion polls, that degree of agreement is already a wonder.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow another set. By the estimates of the International Monetary Fund and other institutions, India's GDP per head in 2024 was between 2,500 and 2,700 US dollars (the sources differ slightly), and in 2025 about 2,800 (the IMF's October 2025 figure is 2,818). At the same time, China's was over 13,000.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePut the two side by side, and a thought comes easily: such a devout country, so poor? Do the gods not work?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Can India's Gods Solve India's Poverty?"},{"content":"On the wall of Philae On the upper Nile there is a small island, and on the island the Temple of Isis at Philae.\nThe Temple of Isis at Philae, first pylon. In the twentieth century, when the Aswan dam was built, the whole temple was taken apart and moved to a higher island nearby.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0\nOn 24 August 394 CE, a priest named Esmet-Akhom carved an image of a god on the temple wall, and beside it a short inscription, praying that the inscription would \u0026quot;last for ever.\u0026quot;\nHe probably didn't know he was the last.\nThis is the last known inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs.\nOn Hadrian's Gate, the god figure and the hieroglyphs beside it carved by Esmet-Akhom, 394 CE. It is not finely done, as if an old man were writing once more, from memory, the script he knew.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0\nAfter that, graffiti in the simpler \u0026quot;demotic\u0026quot; script continued for a few decades; the latest known one was carved in December 452. After that, no one in the world could read these signs. Until 1822: fourteen hundred years and more.\nThose who wrote it were gone Why did hieroglyphs break off?\nThe most direct cause came just a few years before the Philae inscription. In 391 to 392, the Roman emperor Theodosius I issued one decree after another banning pagan sacrifice.\nIn ancient Egypt, those who could read and write hieroglyphs were few from the start, mostly priests in the temples. Hieroglyphs were sacred writing, carved on temples, in tombs, on monuments. Once the temples shut and the priests stopped passing it on, the craft had no heirs.\nPhilae lay at the empire's far southern edge, and because of an agreement with the southern tribes, pagan worship held out there somewhat longer than elsewhere. That is why the last inscription appears here.\nThree layers of writing on one column There is a column in the Philae temple that carries all of what came afterwards on its body.\nA column of the Temple of Isis at Philae: at the top, Egyptian hieroglyphs; in the middle, graffiti carved by later people in Greek letters; further down, Christians cut a cross into the stone, and below it a Greek Christian inscription.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Till Niermann, CC BY-SA 3.0\nRead it from top to bottom and it is a very short history of Egyptian religion: at the top, the gods of the pharaohs; in the middle, the writing left by Greeks and Romans; at the bottom, the new cross. No one scraped off the layer above. They simply carried on carving below.\nIn the sixth century, this temple was turned into a church.\nIt wasn't \u0026quot;pictographs\u0026quot; losing to \u0026quot;the alphabet\u0026quot; Many people have an intuition about this history: hieroglyphs were too primitive, and were replaced by the more advanced alphabet.\nThat intuition is wrong in two ways.\nFirst, Egyptian hieroglyphs were never just \u0026quot;reading pictures.\u0026quot; They mix meaning-signs and sound-signs: draw an owl, and it can mean an owl, or it can simply stand for the sound /m/. The script could spell sounds on its own.\nSecond, the type of a script has no such direct bearing on whether a civilization continues. The sinologist John DeFrancis, in his 1984 book, specifically criticised the claim that Chinese characters are a \u0026quot;purely ideographic\u0026quot; script: there are also many sound components in Chinese characters; that Chinese characters have lasted owes more to a bureaucracy and an education system that keeps producing literate people than to any magic in the shape of the characters themselves.\nEgypt is exactly the reverse: the group who could read and write was cut off in one stroke by a policy. Hieroglyphs were not beaten by a better script; the people who wrote them were gone.\nThe Egyptians were still there, and so was Egyptian And the Egyptians did not disappear, nor did the Egyptian language disappear at once.\nEven before hieroglyphs broke off, Egyptian Christians had begun using Greek letters, plus a few signs borrowed from demotic, to write their own speech. This is Coptic. The Bible was translated into Coptic, and the Church used it for worship, preaching and copying scripture.\nIn the middle of the seventh century, Arab armies entered Egypt. Over the next few centuries, Arabic slowly became the language of office, of trade and of daily life, and most Egyptians slowly converted to Islam. Coptic withdrew from the street into the church, and finally survived only as a language chanted in liturgy.\nSo if you ask \u0026quot;when did ancient Egyptian civilization die?\u0026quot;, it depends which layer you ask about: hieroglyphs, the end of the fourth century; the old religion, about the same time; the Egyptian language as everyday speech, another thousand years later; as a language of worship, it is still here today.\nThe key was in the church In 1799, French soldiers dug out a stone stele near Rosetta at the mouth of the Nile, with the same text carved three times in three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic and ancient Greek.\nThe Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum. Hieroglyphs above, demotic in the middle, ancient Greek below. The content is actually quite ordinary: a decree in praise of Ptolemy V by the priests, 196 BCE.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWith the Greek for comparison, decipherment had something to hold on to, but the real breakthrough still lacked one thing: knowing the language itself. The French scholar Champollion had been learning Coptic since his youth. He realised that the language behind hieroglyphs was the ancestor of Coptic.\nChampollion (1790–1832), painted by Léon Cogniet in 1831. He died less than ten years after announcing the decipherment, at forty-one.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Léon Cogniet, public domain\nIn 1822 he announced that he had succeeded.\nA language already dead in the street, chanted only in churches, turned a script that had been silent for fourteen hundred years back into readable history.\nLooking the other way \u0026quot;Egyptian civilization was taken over\u0026quot; has real impact: the script replaced by an alphabet, the speech by Arabic, the gods by Allah.\nBut from another angle, you can also say Egyptian civilization has always been changing its shell. The pharaonic age was itself ruled by outsiders several times; Hellenisation, Romanisation, Christianisation, Islamisation each had a break and each had a continuity. Since the twentieth century the Egyptian government has invited pharaonic civilization back into the national story: in 2021, 22 ancient pharaonic mummies were carried through the streets of Cairo in a very grand moving parade.\nWhen I read this history I always think of Chinese characters. They have not broken off, not because they are by nature cleverer than hieroglyphs, but because for two thousand years someone has always been teaching them, learning them, examining on them. If one day no one taught them, they too would retreat into some temple, to wait for a Champollion.\nWhere does a civilization die: when the last person who could write it is gone, or when the last person who could speak it is gone?\nReferences\nEsmet-Akhom's graffito at the Temple of Philae (24 August 394); the latest demotic graffito at Philae (December 452) Theodosian Code 16.10.10–12, the edicts of 391–392 banning pagan sacrifice Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier, 1822 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, 1984 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w02/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"on-the-wall-of-philae\"\u003eOn the wall of Philae\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the upper Nile there is a small island, and on the island the Temple of Isis at Philae.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Temple of Isis at Philae\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w02/02.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Temple of Isis at Philae, first pylon. In the twentieth century, when the Aswan dam was built, the whole temple was taken apart and moved to a higher island nearby.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Temple_of_Isis_from_Philae,_First_pylon,_Lake_Nasser,_Egypt.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photographed by Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 24 August 394 CE, a priest named Esmet-Akhom carved an image of a god on the temple wall, and beside it a short inscription, praying that the inscription would \u0026quot;last for ever.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe probably didn't know he was the last.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the last known inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"394 CE: The Last Line of Hieroglyphs"},{"content":"A line you often hear Talk to Iranians and you will soon hear it: we are Persians, not Arabs.\nTo outsiders it may sound odd. Iran is an Islamic Republic, and Islam arrived in the seventh century with the Arab armies; modern Persian is written in the Arabic alphabet. The religion and the script both came from the Arabs, so how can the identity not be Arab?\nThis question is a good test of a very popular claim: \u0026quot;Iran was taken over by Islam.\u0026quot;\nThe end of an empire Sasanian Persia was a tough empire. Shapur I, one of its founding kings, defeated a Roman emperor and had the scene carved into a cliff.\nThe cliff relief at Naqsh-e Rostam: on horseback is the Sasanian king Shapur I, and the one kneeling before him is a Roman emperor. Iranians of the third century could not have imagined how their empire would end four hundred years later.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0\nFrom the 630s the rising Arab Muslim armies defeated the Sasanians again and again. In 651 the last Sasanian emperor, Yazdegerd III, was killed while fleeing, and an empire of more than four hundred years was over.\nIf the story stopped here, \u0026quot;possession\u0026quot; would seem to fit: the regime changed and the religion followed.\nConversion took centuries But what came next did not happen overnight.\nIn 1979 the American historian Richard Bulliet published Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, using a clever method: he went through the biographical dictionaries of the time and watched how names changed. If, within one family, the names went from old Persian names to Islamic names between grandfather and grandson, you can roughly infer in which generation the conversion happened.\nHis result: Iranians' conversion to Islam was a slow process that dragged on for centuries, and for a long time after the conquest Muslims were still a minority.\nThe method is disputed and the numbers are estimates. But it shows at least that conquest and conversion are two different things, with several generations of ordinary life between them.\nWhat was replaced and what was not What did Iran replace? The religion, and the alphabet used for writing; Persian was later written in the Arabic script.\nWhat was not replaced was the language in the mouth.\nAfter the Arabs came, Egypt's spoken language slowly became Arabic over a few centuries; Iran's did not. Persian absorbed a great many Arabic words, but its grammar and basic vocabulary stayed its own.\nAround the year 1010 the poet Ferdowsi finished the long epic the Shahnameh, tens of thousands of couplets. In Persian he wrote back, one by one, the stories of the kings and heroes before Islam: Rostam, Sohrab, Jamshid... Iranians today still know these names well.\nAn illustration from the Shahnameh, Rostam lassoing the King of Sham, Tabriz, about 1505–1515. When this page was painted Iran had been Muslim for more than eight hundred years, and it still showed a hero from before Islam.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nFerdowsi is said to have written for more than thirty years and to have died poor. He probably never imagined that the book would become the sturdiest possession of a people.\nThe tomb of Ferdowsi, Tus, Iran. The present tomb was rebuilt in the 1930s, in exactly the years when Iranian nationalism was at its hottest.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Arashk rp2, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThe conquered, in turn, shaped the conquerors What came later is more interesting.\nPersian not only did not vanish, it became the cultural language of the eastern half of the Islamic world. From Central Asia to India, the courts of many Muslim dynasties wrote poems, histories and official documents in Persian. On the throne might sit descendants of Turks or Mongols, yet the refined culture of the court was Persian.\nThe historian Marshall Hodgson gave this great area a name: \u0026quot;Persianate,\u0026quot; roughly \u0026quot;the Persianised world.\u0026quot;\nIn India, Persian was for a long time the language of office and law courts. Only in 1837 did British India legislate to end Persian's official status in the courts and in revenue, replacing it with English and the regional languages.\nThe conquerors brought new gods; the conquered carried their own language and their way of telling stories back into the world the conquerors had built.\nThe winners learning the losers' language: East Asia has seen it too This should not be strange to East Asians.\nIn 1644 the Manchus entered the Pass and took the empire, yet emperor after emperor had to learn Chinese, read Chinese books and write memorial replies in Chinese characters. By the late Qing many Manchus themselves could hardly speak Manchu any more, and Manchu script slowly survived only in archives and a few ceremonies. (The decline of Manchu is the usual conclusion of Qing studies; how far it went and how fast in different places I have not read in first-hand sources.)\nUnlike the Persians, the Han had no epic like the Shahnameh, written specially to remember \u0026quot;who we are.\u0026quot; What held this up was a whole set of things: study, examinations, compiling genealogies, ancestor worship. They worked for a long time, and in the twentieth century they were pulled apart.\nTurning it around The sentence \u0026quot;we are Persians, not Arabs\u0026quot; itself deserves another look.\nIt was polished to a great extent by modern nationalism. In 1935 the government of Reza Khan required other countries to call the country \u0026quot;Iran\u0026quot; in diplomacy, and at the same time promoted the glory of pre-Islamic Persia. Persian poets and scholars of a thousand years ago would not necessarily have placed themselves so \u0026quot;by nation.\u0026quot; In their world, religion, dynasty, language and place were several identities wound together.\nFrom 1501 the Safavid dynasty made Twelver Shia the state religion, and Iran also separated, religiously, from the Sunni world around it. Put plainly, the identity of Iranians today is layered, one on another, out of language, sect, ancient epic and modern nationalism; it is not a fixed original self that was \u0026quot;taken away\u0026quot; and then \u0026quot;found again.\u0026quot;\nThe metaphor of \u0026quot;possession\u0026quot; assumes an unchanging original occupied by something else. But Iran's example says: the conquered also change the conquerors, and neither side remains what it was.\nThat an identity is layered does not mean it is false.\nIf you replace religion, script, language or story, which one makes a people \u0026quot;a different people\u0026quot;?\nReferences\nRichard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, Harvard UP, 1979 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, U of Chicago Press, 1974 Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, about 1010 Act No. 29 of British India, 1837; the end of the Sasanian dynasty (651); the Safavids making Shia the state religion (1501); the change in the use of the country's name in 1935: standard history Decline of Manchu in the Qing: Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China, Stanford UP, 2001 (from the 18th century the court repeatedly urged bannermen to keep \u0026quot;the national language and mounted archery\u0026quot;; the book not re-read); Wei Qiaoyan, \u0026quot;The Development of the Use of Manchu Language and Script in the Qing and the Blending of Manchu and Han Cultures,\u0026quot; Manchu Studies, 2024, no. 1 (abstract only) 🟡 Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w03/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-line-you-often-hear\"\u003eA line you often hear\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTalk to Iranians and you will soon hear it: we are Persians, not Arabs.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo outsiders it may sound odd. Iran is an Islamic Republic, and Islam arrived in the seventh century with the Arab armies; modern Persian is written in the Arabic alphabet. The religion and the script both came from the Arabs, so how can the identity not be Arab?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis question is a good test of a very popular claim: \u0026quot;Iran was taken over by Islam.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-end-of-an-empire\"\u003eThe end of an empire\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSasanian Persia was a tough empire. Shapur I, one of its founding kings, defeated a Roman emperor and had the scene carved into a cliff.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Shapur I's triumph relief\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w03/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe cliff relief at Naqsh-e Rostam: on horseback is the Sasanian king Shapur I, and the one kneeling before him is a Roman emperor. Iranians of the third century could not have imagined how their empire would end four hundred years later.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_triumph_of_Shapur_I_over_the_Roman_emperors_Valerian_and_Philip_the_Arab,_Naqsh-e_Rostam,_Iran_%2848098717846%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, CC BY-SA 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why Iranians Say \"We Are Not Arabs\""},{"content":"A widely circulated claim In Chinese one often hears the claim that the Hungarians are descendants of the Xiongnu. The reason looks intuitive: the Chinese name for Hungary contains the character Xiong, and the English \u0026quot;Hungary\u0026quot; contains \u0026quot;Hun.\u0026quot;\nIs it right? To answer, the question has to be taken apart first: when we say \u0026quot;who is descended from whom,\u0026quot; do we mean the name, the language, or the blood?\nFirst a note on terms. The Chinese word Xiongnu refers to the Xiongnu of the Mongolian plateau; the people who reached the gates of Rome in European history are the Huns (Attila's people), appearing in the fourth and fifth centuries. Whether the two are one lineage is still disputed by scholars. Below, \u0026quot;the Huns\u0026quot; means the European branch.\nFirst, one thing: claiming ancestors The Hungarians themselves did once claim the Huns as ancestors.\nIn the early thirteenth century (scholars mostly date the text between 1200 and 1230), an unknown author wrote in Latin the Gesta Hungarorum, which already put Attila into the royal genealogy. In the 1280s Simon of Kéza wrote the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, stating plainly that Attila, king of the Huns, was the ancestor of the Hungarians.\nA page of a manuscript of the Gesta Hungarorum*. The author left only the signature \u0026quot;Master P.\u0026quot;; scholars generally call him \u0026quot;Anonymus.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain*\nAt that time Hungary had been a Christian kingdom for only about two hundred years. To find for oneself a glorious ancestor who made the Roman Empire tremble was common. Many European royal houses and peoples did it: every newly settled dynasty needed an ancestor who was remote enough and also frightening enough.\nSo the claim that \u0026quot;the Hungarians are descended from the Huns\u0026quot; was not first invented by outsiders; it was written down by Hungary's own medieval chronicles.\nThread one: the name How did the name \u0026quot;Hungary\u0026quot; come about?\nThe Hungarians call themselves \u0026quot;Magyar\u0026quot;; \u0026quot;Hungary\u0026quot; is what outsiders called them. The mainstream etymology is that it comes mainly from the Turkic \u0026quot;On-Ogur,\u0026quot; roughly \u0026quot;ten arrows,\u0026quot; referring to a tribal confederation. The Magyars had spent time on their migration with Turkic tribes of this kind, and the people around them used that name for them.\nIn Latin it was written Hungaria, and the opening H was added in medieval texts under the influence of the association with the Huns (Huni).\nThat is to say, the name's connection to the Huns is largely something later people thought up, not the source itself.\nBy the way, when I talked about this question with an AI, it told me with great confidence that \u0026quot;Hungary comes from Hun.\u0026quot; That is wrong.\nThread two: language Language is a separate matter.\nHungarian belongs to the Uralic family, a distant relative of Finnish and Estonian, and not of the same family as the German, Slavic or Romanian around it. In a sea of Indo-European languages, Hungarian is an island.\nThe distribution of the Uralic languages: mostly in Northern Europe and northern Russia, with Hungarian lying alone in Central Europe.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0\nThis shows that the Magyars who entered the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century brought an eastern tongue and kept it to this day.\nDetail of Feszty's panorama Arrival of the Hungarians*, painted in 1894 for the \u0026quot;Millennium of the founding of the state.\u0026quot; The rider on the white horse is the legendary leader Árpád. It paints the ninth century, with the heart of the nineteenth.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Árpád Feszty, public domain*\nThread three: blood And blood? This is the part for which hard evidence has appeared only in the last dozen or so years.\nIn 2022 a group of Hungarian researchers published in Current Biology a genetic study of ancient remains. Broadly, the conclusion: the Magyar conquerors of the late ninth century, especially the elite layer, did carry a clear eastern steppe component, from a mixture of Mansi, early Sarmatians and late descendants of the Xiongnu. In some individuals the researchers also detected components related to the Huns, and held that the successive nomadic groups, Huns, Avars and the conquerors, were genetically linked.\nOne caveat: ancient DNA is taken from graves, and graves are themselves selected. Cemeteries differ in size and rank, and those that survive and get excavated are not all the people of the time. So it suits answering \u0026quot;where did these conquerors come from\u0026quot; better than serving directly as \u0026quot;where did the people on this land at the time come from.\u0026quot;\nNow look at ordinary Hungarians today: in 2018 another group compared mitochondrial data and concluded that the Asian component in modern Hungarians is small, pointing only to a small contribution from the conquerors. In the 2022 paper too, most individuals from each period still had local European ancestry. Most of today's Hungarians' ancestors were the people already living on this land.\nIn other words: a small band of conquerors from the east brought a language and a name; after more than a thousand years of intermarriage, the blood was washed very thin by the locals.\nThree threads, each going its own way Put the threads side by side and it is clear:\nName: mainly from a Turkic tribal confederation; the initial H is an association with the Huns. Language: Uralic, brought from the east and kept to this day. Blood: the conquering elite had an eastern component; today's majority are locals. The medieval chronicles' willingness to claim the Huns as ancestors is identity, which is yet another thread.\nTurkey is another example: its name and language are inherited from the Turkic peoples, but most studies hold that the genetic main body of modern Turks comes from the local Anatolians.\nThe Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth put forward an influential view in 1969: an ethnic group rests on its boundary, not on the \u0026quot;content\u0026quot; the boundary encloses. The content, descent, language, customs, can all change; as long as the line between \u0026quot;us\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;them\u0026quot; remains, the group remains.\nWe claimed ancestors too This is about Hungary, but reading it I keep feeling it looks familiar.\nAt the end of the Qing, a group of educated men, in order to oppose the Manchus, switched in the newspapers to counting years by the \u0026quot;Yellow Emperor calendar,\u0026quot; inviting the Yellow Emperor of more than four thousand years ago to be the common ancestor of all Han. A \u0026quot;nation\u0026quot; just taking shape also needed an ancestor remote enough and respectable enough. A later piece is devoted to this.\nThere is nothing laughable in claiming ancestors. A person has to know where they come from. It is only that the ancestor claimed often says who we want to become, not wholly where we come from.\nTurning it around So every time I say \u0026quot;possession\u0026quot; (duoshe), I have to ask first: which strand was taken? The word presupposes an unchanging \u0026quot;original body\u0026quot; occupied by outsiders, but in Hungary's case you can hardly say whether what was taken was the name, the language, or the blood.\nThe \u0026quot;three threads\u0026quot; are also a simplification. Identity, religion and state institutions are other threads, and threads can still be added. But the three each have their own origin, and that does not become blurred by this.\nWhat is the oldest thing in you? A surname, a dialect, or genes?\nReferences\nAnonymus, Gesta Hungarorum (early thirteenth century, conventionally dated 1200–1230); Simon of Kéza, Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum (c. 1282–1285) Zoltán Maróti et al., \u0026quot;The genetic origin of Huns, Avars, and conquering Hungarians,\u0026quot; Current Biology 32, 2022 Neparáczki et al., \u0026quot;Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of Central-Inner Asian and Srubnaya origin in the conquering Hungarians,\u0026quot; PLoS ONE 13(11): e0208295, 2018 Fredrik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969 Etymology of \u0026quot;Hungary\u0026quot;: the standard etymological account (On-Ogur; the H a medieval Latin association) Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w04/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-widely-circulated-claim\"\u003eA widely circulated claim\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Chinese one often hears the claim that the Hungarians are descendants of the Xiongnu. The reason looks intuitive: the Chinese name for Hungary contains the character \u003cem\u003eXiong\u003c/em\u003e, and the English \u0026quot;Hungary\u0026quot; contains \u0026quot;Hun.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIs it right? To answer, the question has to be taken apart first: when we say \u0026quot;who is descended from whom,\u0026quot; do we mean the name, the language, or the blood?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst a note on terms. The Chinese word \u003cem\u003eXiongnu\u003c/em\u003e refers to the Xiongnu of the Mongolian plateau; the people who reached the gates of Rome in European history are the Huns (Attila's people), appearing in the fourth and fifth centuries. Whether the two are one lineage is still disputed by scholars. Below, \u0026quot;the Huns\u0026quot; means the European branch.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Are the Hungarians Descended from the Huns?"},{"content":"Nagpur, October 1956 On 14 October 1956, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, at a very large gathering, a sixty-five-year-old man led the crowd in taking vows to convert to Buddhism. Over the next two days, the number who followed him is given as anywhere from over 300,000 to 600,000. It was one of the largest mass conversions in human history.\nAmbedkar speaking at the conversion ceremony in Nagpur, 14 October 1956.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nThe man who led was Bhimrao Ambedkar. He was born into an \u0026quot;untouchable\u0026quot; family; as a child at school he had to bring his own sackcloth to sit on and could not touch the water tap. He went on to earn doctorates at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and became chair of the committee that drafted India's constitution.\nWhat he wanted to escape was caste. A few weeks later he died.\nThe most popular story How did caste come about? The most popular telling goes roughly like this:\nMore than three thousand years ago a group of outside \u0026quot;Aryans\u0026quot; entered India. They were few and feared being absorbed by the locals, so they invented caste and endogamy, writing the difference between conquerors and conquered into bloodlines, and then used \u0026quot;karma\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;rebirth\u0026quot; to make the oppressed accept it willingly.\nThe story is very neat, neat as if someone had designed it in one go.\nThat is exactly where the trouble lies.\nWhere the story came from The modern version of this \u0026quot;racial conquest theory\u0026quot; is largely a product of the nineteenth century. That was the age when European race science was at its hottest, and the word \u0026quot;Aryan\u0026quot; slid from a linguistic concept (speakers of Indo-European languages) into a racial one. The official of British India Herbert Risley, in running the census, tried methods such as measuring nose width to match caste with \u0026quot;race\u0026quot; one to one.\nToday scholars have largely stopped using the word \u0026quot;Aryan\u0026quot; in this way.\nThe timetable the genes give In 2013 researchers at Harvard and other institutions published in The American Journal of Human Genetics a study analysing genetic data from 73 population groups of the Indian subcontinent.\nThey found that most Indian populations today are descended from a mixture of two ancient populations, and that this large-scale mixing took place between about 4,200 and 1,900 years ago. After that, India went from a place where populations mixed widely to a place where even closely related groups rarely intermarried.\nThis says two things. First, for a long time the peoples of India kept intermarrying; there was no wall of blood sealed from the start. Second, strict endogamy was settled only slowly, over a long period afterwards.\nCaste was not sealed at the moment of conquest; it hardened slowly.\nThe hand of the colonial archives There was also another hand in hardening it into the form we know today.\nThe anthropologist Nicholas Dirks argues in Castes of Mind (2001) that the British colonial government, from 1871, ran all-India censuses requiring everyone to state a definite caste; by 1901 the census officials also wanted to rank the castes by social standing. Identities that had been fluid, different in different places and varied in meaning were entered in a uniform table and became fixed administrative categories.\nThis view has been very influential, and has also been opposed. In Caste, Society and Politics in India (1999) the historian Susan Bayly stresses that caste was already deeply rooted in Indian society before colonialism; the British were not its inventors but those who reinforced it.\nBoth sides have evidence. The safer account is that caste has deep precolonial roots, and colonial rule made it stiffer and more \u0026quot;official.\u0026quot;\nIts strongest hold is at the dinner table Why is caste so hard to break? One important reason is that it lives not only in law but in the way people live.\nIn 1952 the Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas proposed a concept called \u0026quot;Sanskritisation\u0026quot;: a low-caste group trying to rise often adopts the ways of higher castes: giving up meat and liquor, keeping the Brahmin rules.\nThis shows that within the caste system \u0026quot;purity\u0026quot; is a hard currency. Rank is written not only in land and property but in what you eat, with whom you eat at one table, and whom you marry.\nSo when Article 17 of the 1950 Indian constitution explicitly abolished \u0026quot;untouchability,\u0026quot; caste did not vanish with it, because the rules at the dinner table are beyond the law's reach.\nAmbedkar knew this well. In 1936 he wrote Annihilation of Caste; twenty years later he took a religious way out: converting to a religion that does not recognise caste.\nDeekshabhoomi in Nagpur, built on the site of the 1956 gathering. Every October hundreds of thousands come here from all over.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Prakash Lokhande, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWe had \u0026quot;origin\u0026quot; too Reading Ambedkar always makes me think of another matter, much closer to us.\nAfter land reform in the early 1950s, everyone in mainland China had a \u0026quot;family origin\u0026quot;: landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant, hired hand, and also \u0026quot;capitalist,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;office worker,\u0026quot; and so on. This class status followed the father and was passed down generation after generation. Children of bad origin ran into walls everywhere, in school entrance, military service, promotion, joining the Youth League; when marriage was discussed, the first thing the other family asked was class status.\nIt had no talk of \u0026quot;purity\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;impurity,\u0026quot; but it too was written into the dinner table and the marriage, and it too put a person into a box from the moment of birth.\nIn 1966 a Beijing youth named Yu Luoke wrote an essay, \u0026quot;On Origin,\u0026quot; saying origin should not decide a person. The essay spread widely among the people. In March 1970 he was shot, at twenty-seven.\nOn 11 January 1979 the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued the Decision on the Removal of the Hats of Landlords and Rich Peasants and on the Class Status of Their Children: apart from a very few, landlords and rich peasants all had their \u0026quot;hats\u0026quot; removed, and their children were no longer treated according to origin. This box was opened by one document of the state, much faster than in India; but in the thirty years before it, not one of those shut inside could wait for a conversion.\nTurning it around \u0026quot;Caste is actually not that old\u0026quot;: the conclusion sounds satisfying and suits our generation's taste. But it too may be another simplification.\nSome of caste's ideas, such as the four varnas in the scriptures, really are very old; what the genetic studies tell us is the age at which endogamy settled, not the age at which the idea of rank was born. Saying it is \u0026quot;very old\u0026quot; and saying it \u0026quot;hardened later\u0026quot; may both be right; they are just not about the same layer.\nAmbedkar in his study. His library over his lifetime is said to have held tens of thousands of volumes.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nHow long must an institution exist before people take it for \u0026quot;just the way things are\u0026quot;?\nReferences\nPriya Moorjani et al., \u0026quot;Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India,\u0026quot; AJHG 93, 2013 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind, Princeton UP, 2001 Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India, Cambridge UP, 1999 M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India, 1952 B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 1936; the mass conversion at Nagpur in 1956 Central Committee of the CCP, Decision on the Removal of the Hats of Landlords and Rich Peasants and on the Class Status of Their Children, 11 January 1979 (Zhongfa [1979] No. 5), full text on Wikisource 🟢 The family-origin system, Yu Luoke's \u0026quot;On Origin\u0026quot; (1966) and his execution in 1970: standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w05/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"nagpur-october-1956\"\u003eNagpur, October 1956\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 14 October 1956, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, at a very large gathering, a sixty-five-year-old man led the crowd in taking vows to convert to Buddhism. Over the next two days, the number who followed him is given as anywhere from over 300,000 to 600,000. It was one of the largest mass conversions in human history.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Ambedkar speaking at the conversion ceremony in Nagpur\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w05/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAmbedkar speaking at the conversion ceremony in Nagpur, 14 October 1956.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dr._Ambedkar_delivering_a_speech_during_%27Dhamma_Deeksha%27,_Nagpur_14_October_1956.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe man who led was Bhimrao Ambedkar. He was born into an \u0026quot;untouchable\u0026quot; family; as a child at school he had to bring his own sackcloth to sit on and could not touch the water tap. He went on to earn doctorates at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and became chair of the committee that drafted India's constitution.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How Old Is Caste, Really?"},{"content":"Almost the same starting point According to World Bank data, India's GDP per head in 1990 was 367 US dollars and China's was 317. That was the last time India ran ahead of China.\nIn 1990 India was still ahead; thirty-odd years later the gap is four or five times. Source: World Bank (1990); for 2024, the middle of various estimates.\nBy 2024 India's GDP per head was between 2,500 and 2,700 dollars, and about 2,800 is estimated for 2025; in the same period China's was a little over 13,000.\nFour or five times. And this is not someone suddenly meeting bad luck; it opened bit by bit over thirty-odd years.\nSo the title \u0026quot;the stolen thirty years\u0026quot; is a very natural feeling: they clearly stood side by side at the start, so how, in a blink, is one already on another floor?\nOne word first, though: if we say \u0026quot;stolen,\u0026quot; there must be a thief. I went through the possible \u0026quot;thieves\u0026quot; one by one, and found that the more respectable accounts are not about \u0026quot;who stole\u0026quot; but about \u0026quot;missing\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;not finishing.\u0026quot;\nFirst, where the gap lies The items most often cited in comparing India and China are these.\nManufacturing. India's manufacturing has stayed between 14% and 17% of GDP for these thirty years and has never really risen. China's is about 27% (2023). In the world as a whole, China accounts for 28% to 29% of global manufacturing value added, India about 3%.\nWhat is learned. India's education spread quickly, but how much is learned is another matter. In the 2024 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for rural areas: among fifth-graders, only 48.8% could read a second-grade text.\nWomen in the workforce. As noted in the piece on why it is so hard to be a woman in India: the participation rate of women over 15 was 41.7% in 2023–24, many of them helping on their own family's fields.\nLand. The national agricultural census (2015–16) shows that the average Indian farm is only 1.08 hectares, and the marginal farms (under 1 hectare), 68.5% of all farms, average only 0.38 hectares. Small, fragmented plots make it hard for farmers to leave the land and hard for factories to get a whole block. (The piece on Indian land will go into detail.)\nSeveral common explanations One: a late start. China began reform and opening in 1978; India was forced to reform by the foreign-exchange crisis only in 1991, thirteen years later. This has some truth but is not enough: in 1990 the two countries' incomes per head were almost the same, which shows the gap at the start was not too large to close.\nTwo: the system. Some say China can concentrate its strength to get big things done, while India is a democracy where everything needs talking, quarrelling and votes. Reforms such as land acquisition and labour law really are harder in India (see the piece on land). The counter-argument: South Korea and Taiwan were not democracies in the standard sense in the key years of their industrialisation, and many East Asian economies did not stop after democratising. So the system is one factor, but hard to call the only or decisive one.\nThree: taking a different road. This is the most interesting. China's road: first turn peasants into workers and get labour-intensive manufactured exports going. India's road: many bypassed manufacturing and climbed directly on services and software outsourcing (the piece on the Indian IT myth will cover this). Software created many well-paid jobs, but it needs a small number of highly educated people, and the hundreds of millions of young people with little education did not get enough jobs. In short, India leapt straight to the second floor and hardly built the stairs.\nFour: timing. China joined the WTO in 2001, just in time for the wildest twenty years of globalisation, when factories were all moving there. India missed that window, and by the time it wanted to act the world had changed its rules.\nFive: infrastructure and management. Power, ports, logistics, all old problems. This item is too big; one sentence will do here.\nThere were good chances in between \u0026quot;Missing\u0026quot; does not mean \u0026quot;never moving.\u0026quot; In these thirty years India did have several moments close to take-off:\nAfter 1991, loosened licensing and lower tariffs clearly raised the growth rate; Around 2003 to 2008 there was growth near 9% (about 9% a year in fiscal 2005 to 2008); The demonetisation of November 2016 and the national Goods and Services Tax of July 2017: both large reforms, both with painful side effects, and their effect is still disputed. If we must say \u0026quot;stolen,\u0026quot; the closer statement may be: every reform was done by half.\nSome new things of the last two or three years A few recent changes deserve separate mention.\nApple's orders. In 2025 Apple assembled about 55 million iPhones in India, 53% more than 36 million in 2024, about a quarter of global output. Apple was the biggest beneficiary of the 30,000-crore-rupee mobile-phone \u0026quot;Production Linked Incentive\u0026quot; scheme (PLI) begun in 2020; its five-year term ends in March 2026, and Apple and Samsung and others are talking with the government about a new round of incentives. Phones have become one of India's biggest export categories. Labour law. On 21 November 2025 four new labour codes took effect at once, merging the old 29 labour laws. One provision raised the threshold above which a firm needs government approval for layoffs from 100 to 300 workers, loosening the knot for small and medium factories. Critics think this is bad for workers. (The piece on land will expand on this.) Free trade agreements. In January 2026 India and the European Union announced the conclusion of free trade negotiations, after almost twenty years. This pace makes the word \u0026quot;slow train\u0026quot; look quite exact. American tariffs. In 2025 the United States raised its tariff on Indian goods first to 25%, then doubled it to 50% (one of the reasons given was India's continued purchase of Russian oil); on 2 February 2026 the American president announced a deal with India lowering the tariff to 18%. That is the American side's announcement; I have not seen an official document with the details. And the 18% did not last long: on 20 February the US Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorise the president to impose tariffs, and the reciprocal tariffs levied under that law lapsed; the same day the White House switched to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, imposing a uniform 10% on all countries for up to 150 days, expiring on 24 July. What India's actual rate has been since, I have not found a reliable source; it must be checked again before publication. Whether these count as a \u0026quot;new take-off\u0026quot; depends on whether they can be kept up over the next few years. But at least on \u0026quot;wanting manufacturing,\u0026quot; policy is far more serious than before.\nIndian factories in the eyes of Chinese netizens In autumn 2026 a phrase started a quarrel on the Chinese internet: the \u0026quot;slave-labour theory,\u0026quot; the claim that if workers at any link of a production line are squeezed too hard, what comes out is of \u0026quot;slave-labour\u0026quot; quality. Among thousands of discussions, India was mentioned quite often, almost always as a target: Apple leaves Chinese workers unused and moves the iPhone to India to be made, so can an iPhone made in India still be bought? Someone threw in a figure, that Foxconn's Indian workers earn about two thousand dollars a year, tens of thousands of times less than Apple's CEO (this is a netizen's claim; I have not checked it).\nThe quarrel itself says nothing about whether Indian factories are good, but it says one thing: in the eyes of many Chinese, India is no longer a poor neighbour who \u0026quot;cannot learn\u0026quot; but a rival that has really taken orders away.\nWhat Indian factories are actually like: there is one thing that was seriously investigated. In June 2024 Reuters reported that Foxconn's main iPhone assembly plant in Tamil Nadu systematically did not hire married women, on the grounds that they have \u0026quot;heavier family burdens\u0026quot; and wear jewellery (a security-check nuisance). The report cited Foxconn India's former HR head, and 17 employees of a dozen recruitment agencies, and 4 current and former HR managers. Foxconn denied discriminating by marital status; Apple and Foxconn acknowledged \u0026quot;lapses\u0026quot; in 2022 hiring. India's Union labour ministry then asked the Tamil Nadu government for a report. Interestingly, Indian law itself does not forbid picking people by marital status; what governs the matter is the companies' own rules at Apple and Foxconn.\nA country that wants to be \u0026quot;the next factory of the world\u0026quot; gets the orders and builds the factories, but hiring still follows the old rules: who gets in, and who stays at home.\nOne more number One number has to go at the end: youth unemployment. In 2025 the unemployment rate for ages 15 to 29 was 9.9% (the official labour force survey annual report), slightly below 10.3% in 2024; for rural youth it was 8.3%, for urban youth 13.6%.\nEvery year several million young people enter India's labour market. If there are not enough factories, where do they go? This is the biggest bill left by these thirty years.\nTurning it around The very idea of \u0026quot;failing to become the next China\u0026quot; may itself be a problem.\nFirst, China is a special case. A country that moves more than 25% of world manufacturing into its own house in thirty years has not appeared twice in history. With it as the reference, any country will seem to have \u0026quot;failed.\u0026quot; By this standard Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico have also \u0026quot;failed to become the next China.\u0026quot;\nSecond, India may be taking another road. One representative of this road is digital public goods. By 2025 India's mobile payment system UPI accounted for nearly half of global real-time payment transactions (ACI Worldwide's 2024 data, cited by both the IMF and the annual report of the Reserve Bank of India, put it at 49%). No other country has this. Whether it can become a new model of growth is not yet known.\nThird, \u0026quot;no manufacturing, no great power\u0026quot; may not be so absolute. In development economics there is the notion of \u0026quot;premature deindustrialisation\u0026quot; (proposed by Dani Rodrik in 2016), meaning that some countries enter the service age before finishing industrialisation. There is no precedent to check whether this pattern can sustain the prosperity of over a billion people.\nIf a country wants to become developed, must it first spend a period as the \u0026quot;world's factory\u0026quot;? Or can that step in fact be bypassed?\nReferences\nWorld Bank, GDP per head (current US dollars): India 367 and China 317 in 1990 (cited from The Wire's relay of World Bank data) International Monetary Fund; UN Statistics Division/UNIDO manufacturing value added data (China about 28%–29% of the world, India about 3%) ASER Centre, Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2024 India Agriculture Census 2015–16 (average farm size 1.08 hectares) Counterpoint Research, Asymco and others: iPhone output and exports in India; India's Ministry of Electronics and IT data on PLI India's Ministry of Labour and Employment: four labour codes in force on 21 November 2025 European Commission, EU–India free trade agreement concluded, 29 January 2026 India's Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation: PLFS annual report 2025 (youth unemployment) RBI: India about 49% of global real-time digital payments (2025) Foxconn India plant not hiring married women: Reuters investigation (June 2024), relayed by Deccan Herald, Scroll, BusinessLIVE and others; India's labour ministry asked Tamil Nadu for a report (Scroll, 2024) 🟡 Online discussions of the \u0026quot;slave-labour theory\u0026quot; (netizens' views, used only as leads) ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w5/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"almost-the-same-starting-point\"\u003eAlmost the same starting point\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccording to World Bank data, India's GDP per head in 1990 was 367 US dollars and China's was 317. That was the last time India ran ahead of China.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"In 1990 India was still ahead; thirty-odd years later the gap is four or five times. Source: World Bank (1990); for 2024, the middle of various estimates.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w5/01.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIn 1990 India was still ahead; thirty-odd years later the gap is four or five times. Source: World Bank (1990); for 2024, the middle of various estimates.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy 2024 India's GDP per head was between 2,500 and 2,700 dollars, and about 2,800 is estimated for 2025; in the same period China's was a little over 13,000.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFour or five times. And this is not someone suddenly meeting bad luck; it opened bit by bit over thirty-odd years.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Stolen Thirty Years: Why India Did Not Become the Next China"},{"content":"A proclamation in Wuchang In October 1911, after the Wuchang Uprising had taken the city, the revolutionaries set up the Hubei Military Government. The proclamations they issued were no longer dated \u0026quot;the third year of Xuantong,\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;the 4609th year of the Yellow Emperor.\u0026quot;\nIn front of the Hubei Military Government: the crossed flags are the \u0026quot;Eighteen-Star Flag,\u0026quot; the eighteen stars standing for the eighteen provinces within the Pass. The soldiers on guard had been Qing New Army men a few months before.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nThat year was not written casually. Behind it lay a \u0026quot;dispute over the calendar\u0026quot; that had gone on for almost ten years.\nWhy the Yellow Emperor In the age of emperors, years were counted by the emperor's reign title. To use someone's reign title was to accept his rule.\nIn 1903 the scholar Liu Shipei wrote an essay, \u0026quot;On Counting Years from the Yellow Emperor.\u0026quot; The point was direct: to count years by the Qing emperors' reign titles is to accept the Qing; to show you are another \u0026quot;we,\u0026quot; you must change the starting point and count again from the beginning, from the Yellow Emperor, honoured as the ancestor of the Han.\nLiu Shipei (1884–1919). He was nineteen when he wrote the essay and a fierce anti-Manchu revolutionary; a few years later he went over to the Qing court, and in the early Republic he helped Yuan Shikai's bid for the throne, dying of illness at thirty-five. A person's first year can change more than once.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nCounting from the Yellow Emperor quickly became the trademark of the revolutionaries. But there is no firm record of the year the Yellow Emperor was born or took the throne. Different newspapers and different people of the time came up with different numbers. For the same ancestor, several papers celebrated different birthdays.\nA portrait of the Yellow Emperor painted in the Ming or Qing. Nobody has ever seen the Yellow Emperor; each age painted the ancestor in its own heart.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nTwo first years, two kinds of \u0026quot;we\u0026quot; In the same period there was another kind of \u0026quot;own time\u0026quot;: counting from Confucius. Kang Youwei and the other reformers argued for taking Confucius's birthday as the first year.\nThese two systems of counting stand for two quite different roads of identity:\nCounting from the Yellow Emperor: counted from the blood of the ancestor; it speaks of race and nation; Counting from Confucius: counted from the teaching of a sage; it speaks of culture and the transmission of the Way. One asks \u0026quot;whose descendants are we\u0026quot;; the other asks \u0026quot;what is it that we hand down.\u0026quot;\nIn 1997 the Taiwanese scholar Shen Songqiao wrote a paper tracing how the Yellow Emperor was shaped into the \u0026quot;founding ancestor of the nation\u0026quot; in the late Qing. Its title comes from a poem by Lu Xun: \u0026quot;I dedicate my blood to Xuanyuan\u0026quot; (another name of the Yellow Emperor).\nThis is not unique to China Choosing a starting point for oneself is something nearly every group has done.\nThe Jewish calendar takes \u0026quot;creation\u0026quot; as its first year, corresponding to 3761 BCE. This year was not recorded generation after generation by the ancients; later rabbis worked it out backward, generation by generation, from the genealogies in the Bible, mainly following the Seder Olam Rabbah, traditionally attributed to the second-century scholar Yose ben Halafta.\nThe Common Era takes the birth of Jesus as its first year, calculated in the sixth century by a monk named Dionysius. Most scholars today think his figure is a few years off from the year Jesus was actually born.\nThe Islamic calendar takes the year 622, when the Prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina, as its first year; this was fixed after his death, in the time of the second caliph, Umar.\nThey have one thing in common: first there was a group of people, and only then did they turn back and set themselves a beginning.\nThe Yellow Emperor calendar was used only briefly On 1 January 1912 the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was founded and announced a change to the Gregorian calendar, with that year as \u0026quot;the first year of the Republic of China.\u0026quot; Counted from the Hubei Military Government's proclamations, the Yellow Emperor count served as an official calendar for only a little over two months.\nAfter the revolution succeeded, the new state chose not a time counted from blood, but a new beginning, joined to the calendar the world uses.\nThe later first years The story is not over. After 1949 the first years on the two sides of the Strait also parted: the mainland switched to the Common Era and no longer used the Republic's reign count; Taiwan kept the Republic count, and to this day identity cards and official documents there say \u0026quot;year so-and-so of the Republic.\u0026quot;\nThe same \u0026quot;China,\u0026quot; and two places each counting its own years.\nTurning it around The American scholar Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities (1983), has a famous view: the nation is a product of the modern age, a community \u0026quot;imagined\u0026quot; through newspapers, novels and a unified sense of time.\nOther scholars disagree with calling everything \u0026quot;constructed.\u0026quot; They hold that premodern times already had real ethnic identity and shared memory, and that modern nationalism worked on this old material and did not invent it from nothing.\nSo \u0026quot;the Yellow Emperor calendar was constructed\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;identification with the Yellow Emperor has very deep historical roots\u0026quot; can both be true. The starting point was picked out; the year that was picked out did still happen. We smile at predecessors who counted badly; the \u0026quot;starting points\u0026quot; we pick today will probably be looked over the same way by those who come after.\nIf I had to choose If I had to choose one of these two first years, I would choose Confucius's.\nNot because the Yellow Emperor is bad. It is because, counted by blood, the door is only ever open to \u0026quot;descendants\u0026quot;; counted by teaching, the door is open to all who are willing to come in. Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese: not one of them will recognise the Yellow Emperor as an ancestor, yet for centuries they have read the Analects and, on some day, sacrificed to Confucius. The thing I am looking for, the thing that could bring East Asians together, can only be looked for on this side.\nIf you had to set a \u0026quot;first year\u0026quot; for your own family, from which year would you start counting?\nReferences\nLiu Shipei, \u0026quot;On Counting Years from the Yellow Emperor,\u0026quot; 1903 Shen Songqiao, \u0026quot;I Dedicate My Blood to Xuanyuan: The Yellow Emperor Myth and the Construction of the Nation in the Late Qing,\u0026quot; Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, no. 28, 1997 Seder Olam Rabbah Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983 The Hubei Military Government's proclamations \u0026quot;the 4609th year of the Yellow Emperor,\u0026quot; the switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1912, the calendars on the two sides of the Strait: standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w06/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-proclamation-in-wuchang\"\u003eA proclamation in Wuchang\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn October 1911, after the Wuchang Uprising had taken the city, the revolutionaries set up the Hubei Military Government. The proclamations they issued were no longer dated \u0026quot;the third year of Xuantong,\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;the 4609th year of the Yellow Emperor.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"In front of the Hubei Military Government\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w06/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIn front of the Hubei Military Government: the crossed flags are the \u0026quot;Eighteen-Star Flag,\u0026quot; the eighteen stars standing for the eighteen provinces within the Pass. The soldiers on guard had been Qing New Army men a few months before.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubei_Military_Government.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat year was not written casually. Behind it lay a \u0026quot;dispute over the calendar\u0026quot; that had gone on for almost ten years.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"why-the-yellow-emperor\"\u003eWhy the Yellow Emperor\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the age of emperors, years were counted by the emperor's reign title. To use someone's reign title was to accept his rule.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Year 4609 of the Yellow Emperor"},{"content":"A stele in the Xi'an Stele Forest In the Xi'an Beilin Museum stands a stele almost three metres tall. Its crown carries a cross. Under the cross is a lotus, and around it, auspicious clouds.\nThe \u0026quot;Stele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China,\u0026quot; Xi'an Beilin Museum. The main text is in Chinese characters; Syriac is carved along the foot and the sides.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by G41rn8, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThe inscription is in Chinese characters, and at the foot and on the sides run lines of Syriac. The title across the top is nine characters long: the Stele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China.\nIt was erected in the second year of Jianzhong under the Tang, that is, in 781.\nA religion that came along the trade road The stele says that in the ninth year of Zhenguan under Emperor Taizong (635), a missionary named Aluoben came to Chang'an from \u0026quot;Daqin.\u0026quot; Three years later the court issued an edict allowing him to build a monastery in the Yining ward of Chang'an and to preach.\nThe Tang people called this religion Jingjiao, \u0026quot;the Luminous Teaching.\u0026quot; It was in fact a branch of Christianity, usually called the Church of the East today, centred in Mesopotamia and Persia, worshipping in Syriac, on a road quite separate from the churches of Rome and Constantinople.\nHow did that road reach Chang'an? By the trade routes. The Persians and Sogdians of the Silk Road carried their faiths along with their goods: the Church of the East, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism. For a time Chang'an held temples of all these foreign religions at once.\nLearning to speak Chang'an's language To survive inside a strange civilisation, a foreign religion first has to learn to speak its language.\nReading the Nestorian stele, one has a curious feeling: it sets out Christian teaching in a vocabulary full of Buddhist and Daoist words. God is rendered \u0026quot;Aluohe,\u0026quot; the church is a \u0026quot;temple\u0026quot; (si), the clergy are \u0026quot;monks\u0026quot; (seng), and there are phrases like \u0026quot;the marvellous body of the Three-in-One\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;non-action\u0026quot; (wuwei). Even the cross at the top is set on a lotus.\nThe cross at the head of the stele, a lotus beneath it and auspicious clouds on either side. A symbol from Syria, seated on a Buddhist flower.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nThis was not surrender. It was a typical \u0026quot;grafting\u0026quot;: joining one's own branch to someone else's root. Buddhism had done the same when it entered China. The early translators borrowed the Daoist \u0026quot;nothingness\u0026quot; (wu) to explain the Buddhist \u0026quot;emptiness\u0026quot; (kong), which scholars call \u0026quot;matching concepts\u0026quot; (geyi).\nAn edict This grafting lasted more than two hundred years.\nDuring the Huichang era of Emperor Wuzong (841–846), the court carried out a large-scale suppression of Buddhism: temples torn down, monks and nuns ordered back to lay life, monastic property confiscated. In the edict of 845, besides Buddhism, the clergy of the Church of the East and of Zoroastrianism were also ordered back to lay life.\nThe causes were mixed: the temple economy had swollen and finances were strained, the emperor himself favoured Daoism, and some at court simply disliked foreign religions. For the Church of the East, the fatal point was its position. It leaned mainly on court permission and on foreign merchants, and had not taken deep root among ordinary Han people. When the court turned its back, it had no root left.\nAfter that the Church of the East all but disappeared from the central plains. Where those clergy, called \u0026quot;monks,\u0026quot; went afterwards, the histories do not say. A group of strangers took off their robes, mixed into the crowds of Chang'an, and that was the end of them.\nThe stele in the earth The stele was buried in the ground.\nMore than eight hundred years later, in the Tianqi era of the Ming (1623 or 1625; scholars differ), it came out of the earth again near Xi'an.\nThe Jesuits, newly arrived in China, treated it as a treasure. In their eyes it proved one thing: Christianity had come to China a thousand years earlier and been received by a Tang emperor; it was not a newcomer. A Tang stone was grafted on once more, this time by the next wave of missionaries.\nIn 1907 the stele was moved into the Xi'an Stele Forest for safekeeping.\nA line of Syriac on the stele reads \u0026quot;Adam,\u0026quot; the Syriac name of Jingjing, the monk who set up the stele. Two scripts are carved side by side on one stone, and today few readers remain for either.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nIt did not quite vanish The disappearance of the Church of the East from the central plains is not its disappearance from Chinese history.\nOn the northern steppe, many among the Öngüt, Kerait and other tribes belonged to the Church of the East. When the Mongol empire rose, these people followed the Yuan into the central plains, and Yuan documents call Christians yelikewen. The line broke again only when the Yuan fell.\nA Thousand Years Later, the Same Script The script has been played out several more times since.\nAfter 1949, within a few years nearly all foreign missionaries in China left, and Chinese Protestantism and Catholicism were asked to be \u0026quot;self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating,\u0026quot; cutting their ties with churches abroad and registering with the state. House gatherings that did not register have lived in a grey zone ever since.\nFrom 2014 to 2016, in the name of cleaning up \u0026quot;illegal structures,\u0026quot; Zhejiang took the crosses off more than a thousand churches, and some churches were pulled down entirely. (There is no official total; estimates from media and church groups run from a little over twelve hundred to about seventeen hundred.)\nThe Tang edict said \u0026quot;return to lay life\u0026quot;; today the word is \u0026quot;illegal structure.\u0026quot; The words changed; the bones of the script hardly did. Whether a foreign religion can stand on this land is decided in the end not by how much it sounds like the local speech, but by whether the court is willing to nod.\nLooking at it the other way It is easy to tell the story of the Church of the East as a \u0026quot;failure\u0026quot;: it came, did not take root, and was driven out.\nLook from another angle and what it left behind is a stone that has been borrowed again and again: the Tang used it to record the arrival of a foreign religion, the Ming missionaries used it to prove their own legitimacy, and we today use it to discuss how a religion travels between civilisations.\nReligions often spread on two things, the trade road and royal power. They come in by the trade road and stand by power; but when power turns away, a religion held up only by power is usually the first to fall.\nThose that can still stand after power turns are the ones that have sunk into the ordinary family's table and its weddings and funerals. The Church of the East did not manage that.\nHow far can a foreign religion change before it is no longer itself?\nReferences\nStele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China, second year of Jianzhong, Tang (781), Xi'an Beilin Museum Old Book of Tang, \u0026quot;Annals of Wuzong,\u0026quot; edict of the fifth year of Huichang (845) Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 1959 (\u0026quot;matching concepts,\u0026quot; geyi) Date the stele was unearthed (1623/1625), its move to the Beilin in 1907, the Yuan-period yelikewen: standard history The \u0026quot;Three-Self\u0026quot; movement of the 1950s: standard history Zhejiang cross removals, 2014–2016: China Aid's February 2016 count of about 1,700 (relayed by International Christian Concern); in the second half of 2015 Hong Kong media relayed an activist's figure of \u0026quot;over twelve hundred\u0026quot; (original not read); Al Jazeera, 28 Feb 2016, and the AP, 29 Feb 2016, say only \u0026quot;hundreds,\u0026quot; with the official reason being building-code violations; for an academic survey see Mark McLeister, \u0026quot;Chinese Protestant reactions to the Zhejiang 'Three rectifications, one demolition' campaign,\u0026quot; Review of Religion and Chinese Society 5(1), 2018 (full text not read) 🟡 Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w07/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-stele-in-the-xian-stele-forest\"\u003eA stele in the Xi'an Stele Forest\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the Xi'an Beilin Museum stands a stele almost three metres tall. Its crown carries a cross. Under the cross is a lotus, and around it, auspicious clouds.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Daqin Nestorian Stele\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w07/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe \u0026quot;Stele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China,\u0026quot; Xi'an Beilin Museum. The main text is in Chinese characters; Syriac is carved along the foot and the sides.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xian_May_2007_033.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photo by G41rn8, CC BY-SA 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe inscription is in Chinese characters, and at the foot and on the sides run lines of Syriac. The title across the top is nine characters long: the Stele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was erected in the second year of Jianzhong under the Tang, that is, in 781.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Cross in Chang'an, 781"},{"content":"A sociologist admits he was wrong In the mid-twentieth century, sociology had a theory that had nearly become consensus: modernisation makes religion decline. The richer a country, the more widespread its education, the more advanced its science, the weaker religion becomes, until it retreats into a corner of private life.\nThe American sociologist Peter Berger was among the best-known representatives of this \u0026quot;secularisation theory.\u0026quot;\nIn 1999 he edited a book called The Desecularization of the World. It contains a line that has been quoted again and again: the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false. The world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as it ever was.\nFor the figurehead of a theory to overturn it in public is rarer in academia than a religious revival. The evidence he saw: the Islamic revival since the 1970s, the return of religion in Russia after the Soviet collapse, the fast growth of Christianity in the Global South, and the ever-larger American evangelical movement.\nA paradox Yet on the other side, European churches really are emptying, and many have been turned into bookshops, bars and apartments. How can both be true?\nMaastricht, the Netherlands: a thirteenth-century Dominican church turned into a bookshop in 2006. Shelves stand in the nave, and a café sits where the altar was.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Bert Kaufmann, CC BY 2.0\nIn Sacred and Secular (2004), the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart gave a powerful explanation, the \u0026quot;existential security\u0026quot; theory:\nThe safer and richer a society, the weaker people's need for religion really is; that is the secular side. But the more secular a society, the fewer children it has; the more devout a society, the more children. So here is a paradox: almost every country is becoming more secular, while the share of religious people in the whole world may still be rising.\nThe forecast of ten years ago In 2015 the Pew Research Center published a large report forecasting how the world's religious populations would change from 2010 to 2050. Its main conclusions:\nBy 2050 the world's Muslims (about 2.8 billion, 30%) would nearly equal Christians (about 2.9 billion, 31%). The Muslim population would grow fastest, by a projected 73%, mainly not through conversion but because it is younger and has more children. The absolute number of the religiously unaffiliated would rise, but their share of world population would fall from 16% to 13%. This forecast is nearly the data version of that paradox.\nThe numbers ten years later In 2025, Pew used new data to look back at what really happened between 2010 and 2020. Some of it matched; some did not:\nMuslims did grow the most, by 347 million over the decade, more than the gains of all other religions put together. But the unaffiliated also grew by 270 million, to about 1.9 billion, and their share of world population rose rather than fell, to 24.2%. Christians grew by 122 million, but their share fell by 1.8 percentage points, to 28.8%. Buddhists were the only major religion whose absolute number shrank, by about 19 million. How much each of four groups grew or shrank over the decade 2010 to 2020 (millions of people).　Data: Pew Research Center, 2025\nThe two reports count differently, so the figures cannot be subtracted directly. But the difference in direction is clear: the forecast expected the unaffiliated share to shrink, and over this decade it grew. The main reason is \u0026quot;switching\u0026quot;: large numbers of people raised in Christian families stopped identifying with any religion as adults.\nAssumptions fail Why was the forecast off? Because every population forecast rests on assumptions: that fertility and switching rates in each place will roughly follow past trends.\nThat assumption has been broken again and again.\nThe most dramatic example is Iran. An Islamic republic should, by common sense, be the textbook case of \u0026quot;religion holding up high fertility.\u0026quot; Yet Iran's total fertility rate fell from nearly 7 children per woman in the early 1980s to just over 2 around 2000, one of the fastest recorded fertility declines. A later piece in this series is devoted to it.\nAnother problem is what counts as \u0026quot;religious.\u0026quot; The British sociologist Grace Davie spoke of \u0026quot;believing without belonging\u0026quot;: many people never go to church yet keep some kind of faith; and conversely many are counted statistically as believers of a religion only because they were born into such a family.\nThe East Asian end Turn the gaze back to East Asia and things get more interesting.\nA large share of the world's unaffiliated live in East Asia: mainland China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong. China alone has nearly 1.3 billion, roughly two thirds of the world's unaffiliated. But this \u0026quot;no religion\u0026quot; is not the same as the European kind, \u0026quot;walking out of the church.\u0026quot; Many people sweep graves at Qingming, bow to the ancestors at New Year, burn incense in temples, and yet when a questionnaire asks \u0026quot;what religion do you follow,\u0026quot; they answer \u0026quot;none.\u0026quot;\nEast Asia is also the place with the fewest births in the world. By the existential security theory, with the cradles empty, religion should weaken further; but East Asia never had a \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; for people to walk out of in the first place.\nSo is the world becoming religious? The honest answer is:\nIn population terms, religious people are younger and have more children on the whole; that is a real force. In terms of switching, more and more people are religious as children and leave as adults; that is another real force. Which force is larger differs by place and by decade. The future religious map depends on two things: on one side, whose cradles are fuller; on the other, whose doors can keep people. It has little to do with how brilliant a doctrine is.\nTurning it around Every judgement about \u0026quot;the religions of the future,\u0026quot; this piece included, is only a curve that has not yet turned. In the 1960s Berger thought religion would recede; in 1999 he said it never had. In 2015 Pew said the unaffiliated share would fall; the numbers of 2025 say it is rising.\nIn the next decade the numbers will probably bend again.\nWhen I read these numbers When I read these numbers, I am not looking at which religion is winning. I am looking at the East Asian block.\nThe cradles are emptying, and there is no door either. Young Europeans who leave the church at least know what they are leaving; our young people have scattered without anything they could leave. I have kept watching the experience on the Islamic side: it can make people scattered across the world recognise one another as their own the moment they meet. That is something we have to learn.\nAround you, are people leaving religion, or believing in a different way?\nReferences\nPeter L. Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World, 1999 Pippa Norris \u0026amp; Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, Cambridge UP, 2004 Pew Research Center, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050, 2015 Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020,\u0026quot; 2025; for China's nearly 1.3 billion unaffiliated, about two thirds of the global total, see the chapter on the unaffiliated 🟢 Abbasi-Shavazi et al., The Fertility Transition in Iran, Springer, 2009 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging, 1994 Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w08/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-sociologist-admits-he-was-wrong\"\u003eA sociologist admits he was wrong\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the mid-twentieth century, sociology had a theory that had nearly become consensus: modernisation makes religion decline. The richer a country, the more widespread its education, the more advanced its science, the weaker religion becomes, until it retreats into a corner of private life.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe American sociologist Peter Berger was among the best-known representatives of this \u0026quot;secularisation theory.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1999 he edited a book called \u003cem\u003eThe Desecularization of the World\u003c/em\u003e. It contains a line that has been quoted again and again: the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false. The world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as it ever was.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the figurehead of a theory to overturn it in public is rarer in academia than a religious revival. The evidence he saw: the Islamic revival since the 1970s, the return of religion in Russia after the Soviet collapse, the fast growth of Christianity in the Global South, and the ever-larger American evangelical movement.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Is the World Becoming Religious?"},{"content":"Two numbers In 1910 about two thirds of the world's Christians lived in Europe.\nA hundred years later, in 2010, only about a quarter (26%) remained in Europe. Nearly as many Christians (24%) lived in sub-Saharan Africa, where in 1910 Christians were still relatively few.\nThese two numbers come from the Pew Research Center's 2011 report Global Christianity. They mean that the equation many people carry in their heads, \u0026quot;Christianity = a Western religion,\u0026quot; no longer holds, at least in numbers.\nThought to be a colonial legacy The common explanation is that this was the work of missionaries in the colonial age.\nMissionaries mattered, of course. But the historian of religion Philip Jenkins points out in The Next Christendom (2002) that the truly explosive growth of African Christianity came largely after colonial rule ended. And its main actors were often not foreign missions but churches the Africans ran and led themselves: indigenous independent churches, Pentecostal churches, and older-denomination churches led by African clergy.\nPut plainly, Christianity's spread across Africa really began, to a large extent, only after it ceased to be \u0026quot;the colonisers' religion.\u0026quot;\nA book that was translated The Gambian-born historian of religion Lamin Sanneh put forward a very influential view in Translating the Message (1989): the key is translation.\nMissionaries translated the Bible into several hundred African languages. Once the book is written in your mother tongue, how to interpret it is no longer entirely up to the missionaries. The missionaries handed over the key, though perhaps they did not think so at the time. In it people read of prophets, visions, healing, casting out spirits, ancestors and land, things long faded in the European churches but very close to African life.\nSamuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809–1891). As a child he was seized into slavery and rescued at sea by a British warship; he later became the first African Anglican bishop and led the translation of the Bible into his own mother tongue, Yoruba.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nSanneh held that translation is itself \u0026quot;indigenisation\u0026quot;: by being translated, Christianity became the Africans' own religion.\nThe first Yoruba Bible. From this moment, those who read Scripture no longer needed to learn English.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Ridzaina, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThis is somewhat like Buddhism's entry into China: once the sutras were translated into Chinese, Buddhism to some degree became a Chinese religion.\nWhat if it were put into Chinese characters The Chinese-speaking world has walked this road once as well.\nIn April 1919 the \u0026quot;Union Version\u0026quot; Bible, the result of decades of collaborative translation, was published in Shanghai in the vernacular of the time, roughly contemporary with the May Fourth vernacular movement. It became the most widely used translation in Chinese churches, and many Chinese Christians still read it today.\nA translated book did the same in China as in Africa: it let people read, argue and quarrel in their own words.\nThe direction reverses Then the influence began to flow backward.\nOn many moral and theological questions, the churches of the South are more conservative than churches in Europe and America. In June 2008 a group of Anglican leaders met in Jerusalem at the \u0026quot;Global Anglican Future Conference\u0026quot; (GAFCON), with African churches' delegates making up a large share of those present. One cause was that they could not agree with the British and American Anglican churches on blessing same-sex couples and ordaining gay clergy. After the meeting they formed their own global fellowship.\nThe old mission field began to speak to London and New York. In some European cities, new churches led by African-born pastors and made up mainly of African immigrants also appeared, which some call \u0026quot;reverse mission.\u0026quot;\nThe shrine of the Uganda Martyrs at Namugongo, Uganda, commemorating a group of young Christians put to death by the king between 1885 and 1887. Every 3 June millions walk from all over East Africa on pilgrimage.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Lebu Ayiga, CC0\nTurning it around But \u0026quot;the centre of gravity moving south\u0026quot; does not mean \u0026quot;the West no longer runs things.\u0026quot;\nSeminaries, publishers, international charities and money are still mostly in the North. People in the South and institutions in the North: that mismatch is itself a force.\nAfrican Christianity is not one block either. Catholics, Anglicans, Pentecostals and indigenous independent churches differ greatly in theology, ritual and political stance. On the same land Islam is also growing; sub-Saharan Africa is at once among the places where the two great religious populations are growing fastest.\nThere is a more basic question still: when we say \u0026quot;Christianity's future is in Africa,\u0026quot; we are still using maps and categories invented by Europeans. African believers themselves may not describe their faith this way.\nIf the largest body of believers of what you believe lived on another continent, interpreted by people you do not know, would you still think it the same thing?\nReferences\nPew Research Center, Global Christianity, 2011 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, Oxford UP, 2002 Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message, Orbis, 1989 The Union Version published in Shanghai on 22 April 1919: United Bible Societies China ministry, \u0026quot;Giving the Very Best Version of the Bible to China\u0026quot; (2019-01-15) 🟢 The GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem in 2008, Bishop Crowther, the Namugongo martyrs: standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w09/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"two-numbers\"\u003eTwo numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1910 about two thirds of the world's Christians lived in Europe.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA hundred years later, in 2010, only about a quarter (26%) remained in Europe. Nearly as many Christians (24%) lived in sub-Saharan Africa, where in 1910 Christians were still relatively few.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese two numbers come from the Pew Research Center's 2011 report \u003cem\u003eGlobal Christianity\u003c/em\u003e. They mean that the equation many people carry in their heads, \u0026quot;Christianity = a Western religion,\u0026quot; no longer holds, at least in numbers.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"thought-to-be-a-colonial-legacy\"\u003eThought to be a colonial legacy\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe common explanation is that this was the work of missionaries in the colonial age.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMissionaries mattered, of course. But the historian of religion Philip Jenkins points out in \u003cem\u003eThe Next Christendom\u003c/em\u003e (2002) that the truly explosive growth of African Christianity came largely after colonial rule ended. And its main actors were often not foreign missions but churches the Africans ran and led themselves: indigenous independent churches, Pentecostal churches, and older-denomination churches led by African clergy.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Christianity's Future Is in Africa"},{"content":"How the label came about On the night of 16 December 2012, in Delhi, a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern was attacked by six men on a moving bus and thrown from it; she died on 29 December in a hospital in Singapore. The case was called \u0026quot;Nirbhaya\u0026quot; (\u0026quot;the fearless one\u0026quot;), and there were large protests in Delhi and many cities across the country, with many young people and men among the protesters.\n22 December 2012: students protest violence against women at Raisina Hill, Delhi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Nilroy (Nilanjana Roy), CC BY-SA 3.0\nAfter that a phrase appeared in the international media: \u0026quot;the rape capital of the world.\u0026quot; In 2018 the Thomson Reuters Foundation ran a survey of experts and listed India as \u0026quot;the most dangerous country for women\u0026quot; (in 2011 it had ranked fourth), and the headline went round the world.\nWhat is the relation between this label and the daily life of Indians? I want to look in three steps: what the numbers say, what they do not say, and what the real problem behind the numbers is.\nWhat the numbers say In the National Crime Records Bureau's (NCRB) Crime in India 2023, registered rape cases number 29,670, a rate of 4.4 per 100,000 women. Converted to per 100,000 people (men and women together), that is about 2.\nIn the same report, \u0026quot;crimes against women\u0026quot; total 448,211, slightly more than in 2022.\nThe number looks large, but looking at it alone, you can judge nothing.\nWhat the numbers do not say: a counterintuitive comparison If you line up the rape cases registered by police in different countries, an absurd phenomenon appears: by Eurostat's figures, in 2016 Sweden registered 64 rapes per 100,000 people, Germany 10, while India (NCRB 2023) has only about 2. Sweden, and England and Wales, ranked at the top for registered numbers in European statistics from 2013 to 2017.\nDoes that mean Sweden is dozens of times more dangerous than India? Of course not. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) wrote a dedicated report in 2020, whose conclusion was that countries define \u0026quot;rape\u0026quot; differently in law and count and record differently, so these numbers cannot be compared directly.\nA few examples of where the differences lie:\nLegal definition. In Indian law, the victim of rape can only be a woman (some countries count men as victims); many European countries also include cases where \u0026quot;the victim is unable to express consent,\u0026quot; while some require violence. Method of recording. Sweden widened the definition of rape in 2005; and each incident is recorded separately, so that if someone reports \u0026quot;forced by a partner once a day for two weeks,\u0026quot; the police record it as 14 cases. Brå's study says that if the numbers were recalculated the German way, Sweden's would fall from 64 per 100,000 to about 15, a drop of three quarters, putting it in the middle of Europe. Same country, a different ruler, and the ranking drops a long way. Willingness to report. The more a society encourages victims to report and the more willing police are to take cases, the higher the registered number. So Sweden's high number does not show it is \u0026quot;more dangerous\u0026quot;; likewise India's low number does not show it is \u0026quot;safer.\u0026quot;\nThat is to say, if the label \u0026quot;the most dangerous country\u0026quot; rests on a statistical ranking, it cannot stand. Equally untenable is \u0026quot;India's number is low, so there is no problem.\u0026quot;\nWhere the real problem lies The real problems are elsewhere. Several aspects say more than the numbers do.\nOne, how many do not dare to report. Because of social stigma, fear of reprisal and distrust of the police, many victims do not report. Scholars generally think under-reporting of rape in India is severe, but there is no reliable estimate of how much. The closest figure available comes from the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–2021): among women who had experienced spousal violence (physical or sexual), only about 14% had sought help from anyone, and about 77% had never told anyone. This is about spousal violence, not rape, but it shows how high the share of \u0026quot;not saying\u0026quot; is.\nTwo, after a report is made. NCRB 2023 data show that for crimes against women, the share of cases in which the police finally filed charges (submitted a charge sheet) was 77.6%, but cases pending in court were 90.8%. The conviction rate for rape, as media quote NCRB, is 22.7% (counted on cases decided that year: of about twenty thousand decided, 4,464 ended in conviction); that is, most cases that reach trial do not end in conviction. The base of this ratio is \u0026quot;decided cases,\u0026quot; not \u0026quot;all reports,\u0026quot; so it should not be read as only one in five who report getting justice.\nThree, acquaintances. NCRB data year after year show that in the great majority of registered rape cases the suspect is someone the victim knew (family, relatives, neighbours, colleagues), not a \u0026quot;stranger.\u0026quot; In 2013, 31,807 of 33,707 cases were by acquaintances, about 94%; in 2022, 30,454 of 31,677, about 96%. This fact is very different from the international image of \u0026quot;a stranger on a street late at night.\u0026quot;\nFour, gaps in the law. Indian law has long had an exception for a husband raping his wife: as long as the wife is 18 or over, the husband's sexual act with her is not rape. The new criminal code in force from 2024, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), keeps this exception in section 63. The Supreme Court is examining whether it is constitutional: on 9 September 2026 a three-judge bench (including Chief Justice Surya Kant) listed the related petitions for final hearing, to begin within three weeks. This is where India differs from many countries.\nWhat the law and society did after it happened After the Nirbhaya case, within a week (23 December 2012) the government set up a committee headed by the retired former Chief Justice J. S. Verma, which submitted its report on 23 January 2013. In 2013 Parliament passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, redefining sexual offences, widening their scope and increasing penalties, with the death penalty possible where the victim dies or is left in a vegetative state.\n22 December 2012: protesting students dispersed with tear gas at Raisina Hill, Delhi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Nilroy (Nilanjana Roy), CC BY-SA 3.0\nThere was a side effect that was also a good sign: after the case, registered cases rose. NCRB's numbers: 24,923 in 2012, 33,707 in 2013, up by a third and a half; Delhi alone rose from 585 to 1,441. This does not necessarily mean more crime; more likely more people reported.\nOn the night of 8 to 9 August 2024, at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata, a 31-year-old woman trainee doctor was raped and murdered; doctors stopped work and took to the streets, and there were large protests across the country again. In September the West Bengal Assembly passed the Aparajita Bill, providing for the death penalty in certain cases and requiring investigations within a time limit. The Governor sent it on to the President, who, according to reports, returned it in July 2025; the Union Home Ministry thought the penalties \u0026quot;excessive and disproportionate\u0026quot; and out of step with some provisions of the new criminal code. In January 2025 the only suspect found guilty in this case was sentenced by the court to life imprisonment, not death; the Central Bureau of Investigation appealed to the High Court seeking the death penalty.\nThat is to say, after each big case the social reaction is strong, and each time it must face the same problem: the harsher the law is written, the slower it is enforced, and the effect may be limited.\nTurning it around This piece asks \u0026quot;illusion or reality,\u0026quot; and my answer is in fact \u0026quot;both.\u0026quot;\nThe illusion part: ranking countries by registered numbers is meaningless. The Thomson Reuters Foundation survey asked 548 experts in women's issues (aid workers, scholars, health workers, policymakers, journalists and others) to pick, among 193 UN member states, the five they thought most dangerous for women, and then to pick the worst one on each of health care, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual violence, non-sexual violence and human trafficking. It measured experts' \u0026quot;perception,\u0026quot; not incidence, and not all respondents had lived in those countries. To turn the headline of such a survey into \u0026quot;the most dangerous country\u0026quot; is itself a simplification.\nThe reality part: under-reporting, trial delays, low conviction rates and social stigma against victims are real. And they are not unique to India; many countries have similar problems, only to different degrees.\nOne more point: to turn this into \u0026quot;what Indian men are like\u0026quot; is another kind of laziness. Among those who took to the streets after the Nirbhaya case there were many men; among the doctors who stopped work after RG Kar there were also many men. The great majority of any group are not perpetrators. To put all the men of a country in one class is, like treating all the women of a country as victims, to flatten people.\nWhen a country's numbers are taken by outsiders as a label, how should its own people respond: rebut, or admit the problem and get to work? Can the two be done at once?\nReferences\nNational Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Crime in India 2023 (released September 2025; rape 29,670 cases, 4.4 per 100,000 women; crimes against women 448,211; charge-sheet rate 77.6%; court pendency 90.8%); the rape conviction rate of 22.7% and the number of decided cases, from Indian media reports on the report at the end of September 2025 (The Week, Deccan Herald and others) NCRB 2013 and 2022 reports on registered rapes and acquaintance perpetrators: 24,923 in 2012, 33,707 in 2013 (cited by LiveLaw and others); 31,677 cases in 2022, 30,454 by acquaintances (cited by media) Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), Reported and cleared rapes in Europe, 30 September 2020; Eurostat 2016 registered data (Sweden 64, Germany 10 per 100,000) NFHS-5 (2019–2021); \u0026quot;Factors associated with help-seeking by women facing intimate partner violence in India,\u0026quot; BMC Global and Public Health, 2024 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013; Justice Verma Committee (set up 23 December 2012, report 23 January 2013), PRS Legislative Research summary Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, section 63, Exception 2; Supreme Court order of 9 September 2026 on petitions on marital rape (cited by media) Reports on the RG Kar case of August 2024, the Sanjay Roy judgment of January 2025, and the Aparajita Bill passed in September 2024 and returned in July 2025 (Business Standard, ETV Bharat, LiveLaw and others) Thomson Reuters Foundation, The World's Most Dangerous Countries for Women, 2018 ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w9/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"how-the-label-came-about\"\u003eHow the label came about\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the night of 16 December 2012, in Delhi, a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern was attacked by six men on a moving bus and thrown from it; she died on 29 December in a hospital in Singapore. The case was called \u0026quot;Nirbhaya\u0026quot; (\u0026quot;the fearless one\u0026quot;), and there were large protests in Delhi and many cities across the country, with many young people and men among the protesters.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"22 December 2012, students protest violence against women at Raisina Hill, Delhi.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w9/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e22 December 2012: students protest violence against women at Raisina Hill, Delhi.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delhi_protests-students,_Raisina_Hill.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Nilroy (Nilanjana Roy), CC BY-SA 3.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter that a phrase appeared in the international media: \u0026quot;the rape capital of the world.\u0026quot; In 2018 the Thomson Reuters Foundation ran a survey of experts and listed India as \u0026quot;the most dangerous country for women\u0026quot; (in 2011 it had ranked fourth), and the headline went round the world.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The \"Most Dangerous Country\"? The Numbers and Realities of Women's Safety in India"},{"content":"A strange fact Shakyamuni was born in what is now southern Nepal, awoke at Bodh Gaya in India, and spent his life teaching mainly in the Ganges region. In the third century BCE Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty strongly backed Buddhism and sent people everywhere to spread it. For over a thousand years after that, India produced great Buddhist seats of learning such as Nalanda and Vikramashila, and both Xuanzang and Yijing studied at Nalanda.\nXuanzang as painted by a Japanese artist. He lived at Nalanda for about five years, and on returning to Chang'an he brought back more than six hundred scriptures.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, CC0\nBut by the thirteenth century Buddhism was almost impossible to find in India proper. A large part of India's Buddhists today are the neo-Buddhists who converted with Ambedkar in 1956, and their descendants.\nHow can a religion disappear from its own home?\nThe most common answer The explanation most often heard: Islamic armies came.\nThis has a factual basis. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the Turkic Muslim commander Bakhtiyar Khalji led troops into Bihar and Bengal, and Buddhist centres such as Nalanda and Vikramashila were sacked. The traditional account puts the destruction of Nalanda around 1193; some scholars place it around 1200, and say that Nalanda survived in a reduced state for a while afterwards.\nThe ruins of Nalanda, Bihar. What one sees today are brick monasteries and the bases of stupas; once over a thousand monks and students lived here.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Sumitsurai, CC BY-SA 4.0\nOnline this is often used as an example of \u0026quot;monotheism wiping out polytheism.\u0026quot; But the question is: if Buddhism in India were still full of life then, spread through town and country, could a few sackings make it vanish altogether?\nThe longer story researchers see The Indian scholar K. T. S. Sarao in The Decline of Buddhism in India: A Fresh Perspective (2012), and the American archaeologist Lars Fogelin in An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism (2015), both offer a longer, more winding story. Roughly these strands:\nFirst, the royal houses stopped supporting it. The great monasteries and universities of Buddhism depended heavily on the support of royal houses and rich merchants. After the Gupta dynasty, more and more dynasties turned to supporting Hindu temples and Brahmins. Once the support stopped, a monastic community that lived on support could not hold on.\nSecond, the ground shifted. Early Buddhism was tied closely to cities, commerce and trade routes. Later India's economy came to depend more and more on land and the countryside; kings granted land to Brahmins and temples, and local order was kept more and more by landlords and Brahmins. In an order based on villages and land, Buddhist monasteries were pushed more and more to the edge.\nThird, Hinduism itself changed. In this period Hinduism went through deep change, especially the bhakti movement: personal devotion to gods such as Vishnu and Shiva, with a low threshold and warm feeling, and enormous appeal among ordinary people. In competing for ordinary believers, the Buddhist monastic model had no advantage.\nFourth, they became harder to tell apart. In late Buddhism the Tantric strand grew heavier, and its rituals and deities looked more and more like those of the Shaiva and Shakta schools of Hinduism. The Hindu Puranas even absorbed the Buddha as one of Vishnu's avatars. As the two grew more alike, the boundary of Buddhism as an independent religion also grew blurred.\nVishnu and his ten avatars, the Buddha among them. Inviting a rival into your own pantheon is sometimes more thorough than defeating it.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nFifth, the final blow. On such a base, when Islamic armies sacked the great monasteries, what they struck was a Buddhism that had already shrunk to a few large centres. It was not only Buddhism that was struck; many Hindu temples were destroyed too. But Hinduism was planted in family, caste and village, whereas the main body of Buddhism had been reduced to the monastery.\nWhere Buddhism went Buddhism did not vanish; it only left India.\nBy the time it was declining in India it had already taken root in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, China, the Korean peninsula, Japan and Tibet. Many of Indian Buddhism's last scholars and texts flowed to Tibet. For a religion to die out at home and flourish abroad is nothing rare in religious history: in Palestine, Christianity's birthplace, Christians are only a minority today.\nThe same blow: why it did not kill Buddhism in China Here is a comparison worth pausing on.\nBuddhism in China also took several severe blows. The most famous was in the Huichang era of Emperor Wuzong of the Tang: temples torn down, monks and nuns ordered back to lay life, monastic property confiscated (mentioned in this series' piece on the Church of the East). But that time, Buddhism in China did not die.\nOne important reason is that by then Buddhism had entered Chinese people's homes: Guanyin enthroned in the main room, rites for the ancestors at the Ghost Festival on the fifteenth of the seventh month, monks invited to chant at funerals. Temples can be torn down; these things in the home cannot. When the storm passed, the temples were rebuilt one by one.\nFrom the 1960s to the 1970s China's temples were smashed again, more thoroughly than in Huichang: monks forced back to lay life and struggled against, Buddha images smashed, scriptures burned. Later, with reform and opening, many temples were rebuilt, with incense burning even more strongly than before. Their return relied again on those habits that nobody was preserving for them, yet which stayed in the home.\nWhat this shows The decline of Buddhism in India is a good example:\nIt was not defeated by a \u0026quot;stronger doctrine.\u0026quot; It lost on a few very concrete things: who paid to support it, whether it was rooted in the cities or the villages, whether it could still be told apart from its rivals, and whether it had entered ordinary people's birth, ageing, sickness and death. The military blow was real, but it fell on a frame that was already very brittle. This is also why I grow more wary of claims such as \u0026quot;polytheism cannot beat monotheism.\u0026quot; They squeeze a process of several centuries with many causes into a duel between doctrines.\nTurning it around Sarao's and Fogelin's views are also contested. Some scholars think they underestimate the destructive force of the Islamic conquest; others say that \u0026quot;decline\u0026quot; is itself a word with hindsight in it, and that people at the time did not necessarily feel Buddhism was declining.\nA safer way to put it may be: the military blow and the long structural change are both real; the dispute is over which mattered more.\nWhat habits at home does no institution preserve for you?\nReferences\nK. T. S. Sarao, The Decline of Buddhism in India: A Fresh Perspective, 2012 Lars Fogelin, An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism, Oxford UP, 2015 The mass conversion at Nagpur in 1956 The date of Nalanda's destruction (1193 or about 1200), Ashoka's support of Buddhism, the Huichang suppression, the destruction of temples in 1966–1976 and their later rebuilding: standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w10/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-strange-fact\"\u003eA strange fact\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShakyamuni was born in what is now southern Nepal, awoke at Bodh Gaya in India, and spent his life teaching mainly in the Ganges region. In the third century BCE Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty strongly backed Buddhism and sent people everywhere to spread it. For over a thousand years after that, India produced great Buddhist seats of learning such as Nalanda and Vikramashila, and both Xuanzang and Yijing studied at Nalanda.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Portrait of Xuanzang\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w10/03.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eXuanzang as painted by a Japanese artist. He lived at Nalanda for about five years, and on returning to Chang'an he brought back more than six hundred scriptures.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E7%8E%84%E5%A5%98%E4%B8%89%E8%94%B5%E5%83%8F-Portrait_of_Xuanzang_%28Genj%C5%8D%29_with_Attendant_MET_29_160_29_O2_sf.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, CC0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut by the thirteenth century Buddhism was almost impossible to find in India proper. A large part of India's Buddhists today are the neo-Buddhists who converted with Ambedkar in 1956, and their descendants.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why Buddhism Vanished from India"},{"content":"A table of seven lines In 1945 the British philosopher Russell published A History of Western Philosophy. In the chapter on St Augustine he suddenly inserts a \u0026quot;dictionary,\u0026quot; which he says is a way to \u0026quot;understand Marx psychologically\u0026quot;:\nYahweh = dialectical materialism The Messiah = Marx The Elect = the proletariat The Church = the Communist Party The Second Coming = the revolution Hell = punishment of the capitalists The Millennium = the communist commonwealth Russell goes on to explain that the words on the left give the words on the right their emotional weight; and it is this emotion, familiar to those brought up in Christianity or Judaism, that makes Marx's eschatology seem credible.\nRussell in 1950, around the time he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a well-known unbeliever himself, the author of Why I Am Not a Christian*.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Rijksmuseum, CC0*\nHis meaning: Marxism moves people not only through its economic arguments but because its \u0026quot;shape of story\u0026quot; is identical to the Judeo-Christian view of history: a fallen present, a chosen people, a final judgment, a perfect world about to come.\nNot only Russell thought so Russell was not the only one to make this comparison.\nIn 1938 the German-born political philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote a small book called Political Religions, seeing modern totalitarian movements such as Nazism and Bolshevism as \u0026quot;political religions\u0026quot; taking the place of traditional religion. In 1944 the French sociologist Raymond Aron put forward the term \u0026quot;secular religions,\u0026quot; for modern ideologies that functionally replaced religion.\nThe historian Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) traced the millenarian movements of medieval Europe: prophets, the elect, the Last Judgment, the kingdom on earth. He held that some twentieth-century revolutionary movements inherited exactly this old psychological structure.\nIn AI conversation records and in various things I saved, I have also seen similar remarks again and again: the Party oath is like baptism, criticism and self-criticism are like confession, the leader's preserved body is like a saint's incorruptibility, and revolutionary holy sites are like pilgrimage destinations.\nChina's version In China these comparisons had a version that needed no comparing.\nIn the decade after 1966, in many workplaces, schools and families, people every morning faced the portrait of Chairman Mao for \u0026quot;morning requests for instructions\u0026quot; and in the evening \u0026quot;evening reports,\u0026quot; reporting the day's thoughts. People danced the \u0026quot;loyalty dance,\u0026quot; sang quotation songs, and before going out, eating or meeting read a passage of \u0026quot;supreme instructions.\u0026quot; Everyone had a copy of the little red plastic-covered book Quotations from Chairman Mao, carried against the chest as they walked. The official editions alone numbered over a billion copies.\nThe 1966 edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao (French), with Mao's portrait on the frontispiece. It was translated into several dozen languages and is among the most printed books of the twentieth century.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Olnnu, CC BY-SA 3.0\nMao Zedong died in 1976, and the next year a memorial hall was built in Tiananmen Square, where the body, preserved in a crystal coffin, is open to view. Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow is half a century older.\nThe Mausoleum of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, completed in 1977.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0\nLenin's Mausoleum on Red Square, Moscow. Lenin died in 1924, and his body is still inside. A thoroughgoing materialist, treated after death as an incorruptible saint.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Bahnfrend, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWhat the analogy is good for The analogy is most useful in explaining some things that economics cannot:\nOn what grounds does a theory make millions willing to die for it? Why does it treat internal disagreement as \u0026quot;heresy\u0026quot; rather than as scholarly debate? When the \u0026quot;kingdom\u0026quot; is long in coming, why does it not change the theory but reinterpret the prophecy? These are questions the sociology of religion has studied for a long time. Borrowing the frame of religion lets us see some of the psychological machinery of ideologies.\nThe kingdom never came The third question has a ready answer in China too.\nIn 1958 the slogan of the \u0026quot;Great Leap Forward\u0026quot; was \u0026quot;run into communism.\u0026quot; Public canteens were set up everywhere, with meals free, saying communism was right before our eyes. The next few years were the great famine. How many died, scholarly estimates run from more than ten million to more than thirty million.\nThe kingdom did not come; the later explanation was \u0026quot;three years of natural disasters,\u0026quot; and later still \u0026quot;the Soviet Union pressing for debts.\u0026quot; The prophecy was not wrong; what was wrong was Heaven, and outsiders. This script Cohn had already written out in the millenarian movements of the Middle Ages.\nMost of those who starved to death in the villages in those years had never read Russell and had never read Marx. They had simply believed in a story, or had no choice.\nThe limits of the analogy But the analogy is also easily overused.\nFirst, Marxism is plainly atheist and materialist. It opposes anything supernatural, and applying the word \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; to it is a functional comparison, not an identity of essence. Critics say that if everything can be called \u0026quot;religion,\u0026quot; the word loses its meaning: football fans, celebrity worship and consumerism can all be called religions.\nSecond, \u0026quot;resembles\u0026quot; does not mean \u0026quot;comes from.\u0026quot; The structure may be similar because the ways people tell stories are limited to begin with, not necessarily because one learned from the other.\nThird, and most important: this analogy has a distorted version that should not be touched at all. A claim circulates online that communism was \u0026quot;deliberately designed by the Jews\u0026quot; as a \u0026quot;fourth religion\u0026quot; to dissolve other peoples. This is no longer a comparison in the history of ideas; it is a conspiracy theory: it swaps a structural resemblance in the history of ideas for the deliberate plot of an ethnic group. It has no evidence, and it comes from the same source as the most vicious anti-Semitic propaganda in history.\nThe same intuition can grow into two utterly different things: one is the intellectual-historical analysis of Russell, Voegelin and Aron, the other is a conspiracy theory. What separates them is evidence and the subject of the sentence: the former discusses the structure of ideas, the latter accuses a group of people.\nTurning it around Russell's table answers \u0026quot;why does this theory seem credible to people\u0026quot;; it speaks of psychology, and does not judge right and wrong.\nSo to say a body of thought is \u0026quot;like a religion\u0026quot; is not to say all its judgments are wrong; conversely, to say it has \u0026quot;the story shape of a religion\u0026quot; is not to say it is a religion. What the table can do is show what moves people in a body of thought; it does not draw the conclusion for it.\nAround you, is there something that is not called a religion but is believed like one?\nReferences\nBertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945 (the chapter on St Augustine) Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, 1938 Raymond Aron, \u0026quot;L'avenir des religions séculières,\u0026quot; 1944 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957 Alexander C. Cook (ed.), Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History, Cambridge UP, 2014, Preface: \u0026quot;Official editions numbered well over a billion copies in three dozen languages\u0026quot; 🟢 \u0026quot;Morning requests and evening reports,\u0026quot; the loyalty dance, the Mao Mausoleum (1977), estimates of deaths in the Great Leap Forward famine: standard history and scholarly estimates Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w11/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-table-of-seven-lines\"\u003eA table of seven lines\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1945 the British philosopher Russell published \u003cem\u003eA History of Western Philosophy\u003c/em\u003e. In the chapter on St Augustine he suddenly inserts a \u0026quot;dictionary,\u0026quot; which he says is a way to \u0026quot;understand Marx psychologically\u0026quot;:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYahweh = dialectical materialism\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Messiah = Marx\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Elect = the proletariat\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Church = the Communist Party\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Second Coming = the revolution\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHell = punishment of the capitalists\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Millennium = the communist commonwealth\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRussell goes on to explain that the words on the left give the words on the right their emotional weight; and it is this emotion, familiar to those brought up in Christianity or Judaism, that makes Marx's eschatology seem credible.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Russell, 1950\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w11/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRussell in 1950, around the time he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a well-known unbeliever himself, the author of\u003c/em\u003e Why I Am Not a Christian*.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nobelprijswinnaar_Bertrand_Russell,_10-11-1950,_RP-F-F01636.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Rijksmuseum, CC0*\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Russell's Table of Equivalents"},{"content":"A corridor only about twenty kilometres wide at its narrowest Open a map of India and you see an odd shape, as if someone drawing it had been jostled halfway: north of Bangladesh there is a stretch of land running east to west, joined to the main body of India by only a very narrow corridor.\nSketch of the Siliguri Corridor (\u0026quot;Chicken's Neck\u0026quot;): the seven northeastern states are joined to mainland India by this strip, in places only about twenty kilometres wide.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, see CREDITS, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThis corridor is called the Siliguri Corridor, inside the state of West Bengal, about 60 kilometres long and, at its narrowest, about 17 to 22 kilometres (sources do not agree exactly). To its west is Nepal, to its north Bhutan, to its south Bangladesh, and a little further northeast, across Bhutan, is China's Yadong (Chumbi Valley). Indians gave it a nickname, the \u0026quot;Chicken's Neck.\u0026quot;\nAt the other end of the Chicken's Neck lies the northeast: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, seven states, sometimes called in Chinese the \u0026quot;seven northeastern states\u0026quot; and by Indians themselves the \u0026quot;Seven Sisters.\u0026quot; With Sikkim, which joined the North Eastern Council in 2002, the official \u0026quot;northeast\u0026quot; is eight states. The name \u0026quot;Seven Sisters\u0026quot; was coined off the cuff by a Tripura journalist on a radio programme in January 1972, when Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura became states at the same time, and it spread.\nTogether they hold only about 3.8% of the national population (2011 census, about 45.77 million, counting the eight states).\nA \u0026quot;familiar\u0026quot; name, an unfamiliar place You may not find this region unfamiliar: Assam tea, the woman boxer Mary Kom, football-mad Mizoram, \u0026quot;organic state\u0026quot; Sikkim. But ask an ordinary urban Indian whether he can name the seven states, and many could not. He knows the tea but not necessarily where it grows. That is also what \u0026quot;most familiar strangers\u0026quot; in the title means.\nThe people here differ from \u0026quot;mainland India\u0026quot; in many ways:\nEthnic groups and languages. The usual claim is that the northeast has over two hundred ethnic groups (counts differ), speaking languages of different families such as Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer and Tai-Assamese. Many look closer to Southeast or East Asians. Religion. In the 2011 census, Nagaland and Mizoram were each nearly ninety percent Christian, Meghalaya 74.6%, and Manipur over forty percent; Baptist and other missionaries came here in the late nineteenth century. Arunachal has about 30% Christians and about 12% Buddhists, and Sikkim nearly 30% Buddhists, mostly Tibetan. Social customs. The Khasi of Meghalaya are matrilineal: property passes to the youngest daughter. (Mentioned in the piece on why it is so hard to be a woman in India.) One addition: the northeast is not uniform inside. The plains of Assam, the valley of Manipur (the Meitei) and Tripura have many Hindus; Assam also has about a third Muslims; and many tribal groups in the hills have neither caste structure nor Hinduism. So \u0026quot;northeasterners\u0026quot; are not one whole, and saying they are \u0026quot;different\u0026quot; from mainland India depends on which part. Calling eight states one word is an administrative convenience to begin with.\nWhy it is so: a few threads One, historically not quite part of \u0026quot;India.\u0026quot; Assam, for example, was ruled for about six hundred years from 1228 by the Ahom dynasty, which the Mughal empire's several attacks failed to take. The British obtained Assam from Burma through the Treaty of Yandabo in February 1826 and began growing tea. Most of the other states were managed by the British as \u0026quot;frontier areas,\u0026quot; in many places through missionaries and police rather than formal administration.\nTwo, integration after independence. When India became independent in 1947 these regions were folded into the new state, but many groups did not identify with it. The Nagas took up arms from the 1950s; the Mizos rose in 1966 and became a full state in February 1987 only after the 1986 peace accord. The armed groups of the region, taken together, have not disappeared for decades.\nThree, the border. In 1962 China and India fought a border war here. China calls most of Arunachal Pradesh \u0026quot;South Tibet,\u0026quot; claiming about 90,000 square kilometres; India says it is its own territory, and Arunachal's area is 83,700 square kilometres. The two sides' disagreement partly cannot avoid the McMahon Line drawn at the Simla Conference of 1914: India accepts it, China does not. The border dispute here has no conclusion to this day.\nFour, shut off. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan had East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) cut most of the overland routes between the northeast and mainland India, leaving only the Chicken's Neck. The northeast's trade and transport were \u0026quot;locked\u0026quot; for decades, and to this day much cargo has to take a long detour to reach the port of Kolkata.\nSpecial laws and violence The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA, 1958). A law giving the army special powers in \u0026quot;disturbed areas\u0026quot;: under certain conditions to shoot, arrest and search, and prosecuting soldiers needs the Centre's approval. It has been applied for long periods in parts of the northeast, accused of causing many human rights violations and held by the army to be necessary. It was fully withdrawn in Tripura in 2015 and Meghalaya in 2018; in 2025 the Centre still extended it to most of Manipur (except 13 police station areas in the valley), Nagaland and parts of Arunachal, six months at a time.\nThis law has left two names in the northeast that many Indians know.\nOne is Irom Sharmila. On 2 November 2000, at a bus stop in Malom, Manipur, the Assam Rifles opened fire and killed 10 civilians, including children. A few days later this twenty-eight-year-old woman began a hunger strike demanding the repeal of AFSPA. The government put her in a hospital on a charge of \u0026quot;attempted suicide\u0026quot; and force-fed her through a tube in the nose, for sixteen years. On 9 August 2016 she licked a drop of honey, declared an end to her fast, and turned to standing for election. The law, she did not manage to have repealed.\nThe other is Thangjam Manorama. In July 2004, the 32-year-old was taken from her home by the Assam Rifles, and the next day her body was found in a field. The troops said she was a member of an armed group, shot dead while fleeing; a judicial inquiry report made public ten years later said she had suffered \u0026quot;cruel and merciless torture,\u0026quot; and it is widely believed that she was raped. A few days later a dozen middle-aged Manipuri mothers stripped naked at the gate of the Kangla Fort in Imphal and held a banner: \u0026quot;Indian Army, rape us.\u0026quot; (The number and the date differ slightly between sources; most say mid-July.)\nThese two events say more than any statistics about why many northeasterners feel theirs is a place \u0026quot;governed,\u0026quot; not \u0026quot;their own country.\u0026quot;\nAssam's National Register of Citizens (NRC). On 31 August 2019 Assam published its final register of citizens to find illegal immigrants (mainly from Bangladesh); of about 3.11 crore (31 million) applicants, more than 19 lakh (about 1.9 million) were left off. Those excluded can appeal to Foreigners Tribunals. The matter was then entangled with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).\nManipur. This is the heaviest example of recent years. In May 2023 large-scale conflict broke out between the Meitei (living mainly in the valley) and the Kuki-Zo (living mainly in the hills); one direct spark was the dispute over giving the Meitei \u0026quot;Scheduled Tribe\u0026quot; status. By 2025 over 260 people had died and over 60,000 were displaced (HRW's figures); the state government said in the state assembly in September 2026 that from May 2023 to 31 August 2026, 306 people had died and 49 were missing, and the two communities were almost separated geographically. On 9 February 2025 Chief Minister Biren Singh resigned, and on 13 February the Centre announced President's Rule (direct takeover by the Centre). On 4 February 2026 President's Rule was lifted, and the NDA's Y. Khemchand Singh was sworn in as Chief Minister, with a Kuki former minister, Nemcha Kipgen, as Deputy Chief Minister.\nThe news heat of these events nationally is not in proportion to their seriousness. That too is part of \u0026quot;unfamiliar.\u0026quot;\nStrangers in \u0026quot;familiar places\u0026quot;: racial discrimination One more thing connects to the title. Northeasterners in the big cities of mainland India are often treated as \u0026quot;foreigners\u0026quot;: looking different, called \u0026quot;Chinese,\u0026quot; even given insulting nicknames. In January 2014 Nido Tania, a 20-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh, was mocked by shopkeepers at the Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi over his hair and looks, a quarrel broke out, he was badly beaten and died, setting off protests; in the early days of Covid in 2020, northeasterners were again shouted at as \u0026quot;Corona\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Chinese,\u0026quot; spat on and refused entry into housing colonies, and the Home Ministry issued a notice asking states to deal with such harassment.\nAfter the Nido case a special committee (the Bezbaruah Committee) was set up and handed in its report in July 2014; its most often cited demand was to make racial insults such as \u0026quot;momo,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;chinki\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; themselves illegal. But exclusion in daily life is hard to solve with one law.\nWhy it suddenly matters now In recent years the northeast has been placed again at the centre of Indian strategy, for two main reasons.\nOne, the \u0026quot;Act East\u0026quot; policy. India wants more trade and diplomacy with Southeast Asia, and the northeast is its natural gateway. Roads, bridges, tunnels and railways here have been built faster in recent years; for instance the Sela Tunnel, opened on 9 March 2024 in Arunachal at an altitude of about 13,000 feet, so that the road to Tawang can be used all year by military and civilians alike.\nTwo, security. The \u0026quot;Chicken's Neck\u0026quot; is too narrow. If India used to worry about its South Asian neighbours, it now has to add China to the north and the uncertainty after the change of government in Bangladesh in 2024. All this makes \u0026quot;how the northeast connects to mainland India and to Southeast Asia\u0026quot; a real problem.\nTurning it around The claim that \u0026quot;the northeast is a neglected place\u0026quot; also needs a few additions.\nFirst, the word \u0026quot;northeast\u0026quot; itself flattens differences. Mizoram has for many years been a relatively calm state with a high literacy rate; Sikkim is rich and stable; Manipur's and Nagaland's problems are completely different. They do not even share a language; to put them together is already a simplification.\nSecond, the central government tells it differently. India's Home Ministry has consistently claimed that violent incidents in the northeast fell markedly after 2014: 824 in 2014, 243 in 2023, down about 71%; several peace accords were signed in the period (the Bodo accord of January 2020, the Karbi accord of September 2021, the December 2023 accord with the pro-talks faction of the United Liberation Front of Assam). The claim has some force, but from the same official figures, 187 of the 243 incidents in 2023 were in Manipur, and 203 of the 266 in 2024 (to November), so a statement like \u0026quot;the northeast is already stable\u0026quot; is hard to sustain.\nThird, locals do not agree about \u0026quot;integration\u0026quot; either. Some want more autonomy; some feel that becoming Indian has given them better education and more jobs; some do not want to be reduced to either side.\nIf a country's border regions are important to its geography and strategy but strange to most of its people, how should that country make its citizens truly \u0026quot;know\u0026quot; these places?\nReferences\nSiliguri Corridor: Wikipedia \u0026quot;Siliguri Corridor\u0026quot; and Drishti IAS, Geopolitical Monitor and others (about 60 km long, narrowest 17–22 km) Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 and reports of the extensions of April and September 2025 (News On Air, Morung Express, The Hitavada); withdrawal in Tripura in 2015 and Meghalaya in 2018 (Assam Tribune and others) Northeast population: 2011 census, eight states together 45,772,188, about 3.79% of the country; religion: 2011 census and Pew, Religious Demography of Indian States and Territories (2021) The term \u0026quot;Seven Sisters\u0026quot; and Sikkim's joining the North Eastern Council in 2002: Wikipedia \u0026quot;North Eastern Council,\u0026quot; Assam Tribune and others Ahom dynasty 1228–1826, Treaty of Yandabo 24 February 1826; Mizo Accord 1986, statehood 20 February 1987 Sino-Indian border: Wikipedia \u0026quot;Sino-Indian border dispute\u0026quot; (China's claim in the east about 90,000 sq km); Bloomberg April 2023 report (the Indian government's response) The Nido Tania case and the Bezbaruah Committee (July 2014): Wikipedia \u0026quot;Murder of Nido Taniam,\u0026quot; The Wire; the Home Ministry's 2020 notice on harassment of northeasterners (Deccan Herald, Quint) Home Ministry statistics on violence in the northeast and peace accords: Eastern Mirror 2024, Morung Express, Deccan Herald; accord dates in the Home Ministry's northeast peace process documents Assam NRC final list of 31 August 2019 (Business Today, Scroll, LiveLaw); Sela Tunnel opened 9 March 2024 Manipur conflict: Wikipedia \u0026quot;2023–2026 Manipur conflict\u0026quot;; Human Rights Watch, India: Ethnic Clashes Restart in Manipur, March 2025; International Crisis Group report The Indian government's account of the \u0026quot;Act East\u0026quot; policy (indbiz.gov.in and others); IDSA analysis of the northeast's place in Act East Reports on the Assam NRC (August 2019) India's 2011 census (population of the eight northeastern states) Irom Sharmila and the Malom incident: Christian Science Monitor (2016-07-27), Mainstream Weekly, Frontline; the Manorama case and the 2004 Kangla protest: Deccan Herald and others 🟡 ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w11/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-corridor-only-about-twenty-kilometres-wide-at-its-narrowest\"\u003eA corridor only about twenty kilometres wide at its narrowest\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOpen a map of India and you see an odd shape, as if someone drawing it had been jostled halfway: north of Bangladesh there is a stretch of land running east to west, joined to the main body of India by only a very narrow corridor.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Sketch of the Siliguri Corridor (\u0026quot;Chicken's Neck\u0026quot;): the seven northeastern states are joined to mainland India by this strip, in places only about twenty kilometres wide.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w11/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSketch of the Siliguri Corridor (\u0026quot;Chicken's Neck\u0026quot;): the seven northeastern states are joined to mainland India by this strip, in places only about twenty kilometres wide.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Siliguri_Corridor_sketch_with_Asian_Highway_segment.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, see CREDITS, CC BY-SA 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis corridor is called the Siliguri Corridor, inside the state of West Bengal, about 60 kilometres long and, at its narrowest, about 17 to 22 kilometres (sources do not agree exactly). To its west is Nepal, to its north Bhutan, to its south Bangladesh, and a little further northeast, across Bhutan, is China's Yadong (Chumbi Valley). Indians gave it a nickname, the \u0026quot;Chicken's Neck.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Seven States of the Northeast: India's Most Familiar Strangers"},{"content":"A question argued for over a century Is Confucianism a religion?\nThe Chinese-speaking world has argued about this for more than a hundred years. In 1912 Chen Huanzhang and others founded the Confucian Association in Shanghai, with Kang Youwei as its spiritual leader; in 1913 and again in 1916 they petitioned to make Confucianism the \u0026quot;state religion\u0026quot; of the Republic of China, and failed both times. Their opponents said Confucianism is philosophy, ethics, moral instruction, not religion; Confucius \u0026quot;did not speak of prodigies, force, disorder or spirits\u0026quot; and said to \u0026quot;respect the spirits but keep them at a distance.\u0026quot;\nChen Huanzhang (1881–1933), from Gaoyao in Guangdong, a Columbia University PhD in economics and the founder of the Confucian Association. He wrote The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School*, and later set up a Confucian Academy in Hong Kong.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain*\nIn China the question has no settled answer even today. In Indonesia it has a very concrete one: Confucianism (Khonghucu) is one of the six religions recognised by the government, and a believer can write it in the religion box on the ID card.\nWhy Indonesia \u0026quot;recognises\u0026quot; religions To understand this, one has to know a feature of Indonesia: its founding ideology, Pancasila (the five founding principles), puts first \u0026quot;belief in the one and only supreme God.\u0026quot; In Indonesia every citizen is expected to belong to some recognised religion.\nIn 1965 a presidential decree of the Sukarno government listed the six religions of Indonesians: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.\nThis mattered a great deal to Chinese Indonesians. Many of them honoured ancestors, worshipped gods and kept festivals in a mixture of Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist and folk belief that does not fit neatly into any one \u0026quot;institutional religion.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Confucianism\u0026quot; gave them an identity they could register administratively.\nTaken away, then given back The good times did not last.\nAfter the failed coup of 30 September 1965, Indonesia fell into a great purge, and Suharto took power. Ethnic Chinese, suspected of sympathy with the Communists and loyalty to China, became the target of anger. During the thirty-odd years of the \u0026quot;New Order\u0026quot; that followed, Chinese schools were closed, Chinese newspapers were shut down, and many Chinese were pressed to adopt Indonesian names.\nIn 1967 Suharto issued Presidential Instruction No. 14, restricting public religious, belief and customary activity by the Chinese.\nConfucianism's position went steadily downhill. The 1967 instruction restricted public activity; by the late 1970s Confucianism had been demoted to a \u0026quot;belief stream\u0026quot; and was no longer an officially recognised religion: the Ministry of Religion no longer kept an office for it, schools no longer taught it, and believers could not register as Confucians on their ID cards. (The year of the demotion is given as 1977 in some sources and 1978 in others; a circular of the Ministry of Home Affairs of 18 November 1978 is the one whose reference I could find, and what I read was a scholarly paper's account of it, not the original.) Many Chinese had no choice but to register as Buddhists or Christians.\nAn old woman might keep ancestral tablets at home all her life and still have \u0026quot;Buddhism\u0026quot; written on her ID card. That is how many families lived through those thirty years.\nSuharto stepped down in 1998. In 2000 President Wahid ordered the 1967 restrictions revoked; the Chinese could celebrate the lunar New Year in public, and Confucianism regained the standing of an official religion. In 2006 the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Religion each issued a document, and the marriages of Confucians could again be formally registered with the civil authorities. (The Ministry of Religion's 2006 letter is numbered MA/12/2006, and the Ministry of Home Affairs' letter of 24 February 2006 is numbered 470/336/SJ; I did not read the originals, and the numbers are written differently in different places.)\nAbdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009), the fourth president of Indonesia, known as \u0026quot;Gus Dur.\u0026quot; He had chaired Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest Islamic organisation, and many Chinese Indonesians later called him the \u0026quot;father of the Chinese.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Government of Indonesia, public domain\nThe one who pushed for the recognition of Confucianism was a Muslim religious leader.\nWhat Confucianism became in Indonesia In the Indonesian setting, Confucianism was shaped to look more like a \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot;: it has places of worship (temples), clergy, scriptures (the Four Books and Five Classics), religious festivals, and ceremonies for weddings and funerals.\nThe Confucian temple in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, Jakarta. In this park every officially recognised religion has a house of worship of its own; the Confucian one was added later.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Gunawan Kartapranata, CC BY-SA 3.0\nThis is rather interesting: to survive in a country that requires its citizens to belong to a religion, Confucianism was forced to grow into the shape of a \u0026quot;religion.\u0026quot; Put plainly, \u0026quot;is Confucianism a religion?\u0026quot; in Indonesia is not wholly a philosophical question; it is an answer the system forced out.\nBoen Tek Bio in Tangerang, the oldest Chinese temple in the area. It is a temple of Guanyin, and it also holds many other deities. In Indonesia, Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism often live in the same temple.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Swarabakti, CC BY-SA 4.0\nBack to the old question In Religion in Chinese Society (1961), the sociologist C. K. Yang drew a very influential distinction:\nInstitutional religion: with its own doctrine, organisation and clergy, such as Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity. Diffused religion: belief and ritual scattered through the daily life of family, community and state, without independent organisation, such as ancestor worship, village earth gods, city gods and the state's sacrifice to Heaven. Within this frame, traditional Confucianism is more like the \u0026quot;skeleton\u0026quot; of a diffused religion: it supplied ancestor worship, ritual and the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, but no \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; independent of family and state.\nSo \u0026quot;is Confucianism a religion?\u0026quot; may be the wrong question. A better one: what kind of religiousness does it have, and where does that religiousness reside?\nIn China it resides in the family and the state; in Indonesia it was forced to grow an organisation of its own.\nTurning it around Some also hold that \u0026quot;religionising\u0026quot; Confucianism is itself a distortion: it squeezes a system of ethics and a way of living into a mould made from the Western concept of \u0026quot;religion.\u0026quot; Is Indonesian Confucianism the real Confucianism, or something new that grew to fit the system?\nAccept registration, not definition I have looked at the Indonesian case many times, and in the end it leaves two flavours in me.\nOne is relief: it proves that Confucianism can grow temples, scriptures, festivals and rites for weddings and funerals, and can live on as a real religion. The other is a chill afterwards: it was forced into being by the state; the state gave it, and the state also took it back, and the taking lasted thirty years.\nSo my position is: a religion can accept registration by the state, but not the state's definition. It is something that crosses states, peoples and times, and no one government should decide what it is or whether it counts. Indonesian Confucianism has done the first half; the second half it still has to earn for itself.\nWhich shapes a religion more strangely: a state that demands everyone have a religion, or a state that prefers everyone have none?\nReferences\nIndonesia's 1965 presidential decree listing six religions; Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967: standard history The demotion of Confucianism in the late 1970s: the article by the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University (CRCS-UGM) gives 1977 as the year of demotion to a \u0026quot;belief stream\u0026quot; (The Struggle for State Recognition of Confucian Believers in Indonesia, 2019-04-08); Leo Suryadinata records it as \u0026quot;recognised until 1977, withdrawn in 1978\u0026quot; (Fulcrum, 2024-04-03); a 1978 circular of the Minister of Home Affairs limited the religion box on ID cards to five official religions and was revoked in 2002 (Hukumonline, 2002-10-11; the circular's number is written differently in different places) 🟡 Presidential Decision No. 6 of 2000, 17 January 2000, by President Wahid, revoking Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967 so that Chinese religious, belief and customary activity no longer needs special permission (original text on Indonesian Wikisource) 🟢; the decision's text does not name \u0026quot;Confucianism,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Confucianism then regained the standing of an official religion\u0026quot; is the scholars' account (the CRCS-UGM article above, Suryadinata) 🟡 The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Religion issued separate documents in 2006, recognising Confucian marriage and Confucian religious education respectively, so that Confucians can register marriages with the civil authorities: same CRCS-UGM article 🟡 C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, UC Press, 1961 The founding of the Confucian Association in 1912, the state-religion petitions of 1913 and 1916, the 30 September Movement of 1965: standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w12/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-question-argued-for-over-a-century\"\u003eA question argued for over a century\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIs Confucianism a religion?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Chinese-speaking world has argued about this for more than a hundred years. In 1912 Chen Huanzhang and others founded the Confucian Association in Shanghai, with Kang Youwei as its spiritual leader; in 1913 and again in 1916 they petitioned to make Confucianism the \u0026quot;state religion\u0026quot; of the Republic of China, and failed both times. Their opponents said Confucianism is philosophy, ethics, moral instruction, not religion; Confucius \u0026quot;did not speak of prodigies, force, disorder or spirits\u0026quot; and said to \u0026quot;respect the spirits but keep them at a distance.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Chen Huanzhang\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w12/03.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eChen Huanzhang (1881–1933), from Gaoyao in Guangdong, a Columbia University PhD in economics and the founder of the Confucian Association. He wrote\u003c/em\u003e The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School*, and later set up a Confucian Academy in Hong Kong.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chen_Huanzhang.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, public domain*\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Confucianism on the Indonesian ID Card"},{"content":"A widely circulated answer Among the things I had saved was an answer to this effect: Chinese native belief is declining and a foreign religion will inevitably replace it, \u0026quot;and South Korea is the clearest example, where seventy percent of the native population already believes in Jesus.\u0026quot;\nThe line has real impact. A clear number, a clear conclusion, and a touch of urgency. I did not doubt it at the time and saved it.\nLater I went and checked the Korean census.\nWhat the census says Statistics Korea surveys religion in the census every ten years. The 2015 results:\nNo religion: 56.1% Protestant: 19.7% Buddhist: 15.5% Catholic: 7.9% Korea's 2015 census, \u0026quot;What is your religion?\u0026quot; The dotted line is the seventy percent in that answer.　Data: Statistics Korea\nProtestants plus Catholics make about 27.6%, under thirty percent. And more than half of Koreans say they have no religion, a share that has risen since 2005.\nSo \u0026quot;seventy percent\u0026quot; is off by more than double. More important, the direction the rumour points, \u0026quot;native belief declines and Christianity replaces it,\u0026quot; does not match the main trend in the census either: the fastest-growing category in Korea is \u0026quot;no religion.\u0026quot;\nHalf of the rumour is true Still, the rumour was not made from nothing. It caught a real phenomenon: Christianity's growth in Korea is indeed unusual.\nIn the twentieth century Christianity in Korea covered in a few decades a road that took centuries elsewhere. Today Korea's Christian share is far ahead in East Asia, Seoul has some of the largest churches in the world, and Korea was at one time one of the countries sending out the most missionaries abroad.\nYoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, said to be the largest single congregation in the world, with several hundred thousand registered members.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Striker9498, CC0\nWhy? Researchers have offered many explanations: under Japanese colonial rule the church was an important space for nationalism and resistance; after the war the church ran schools, hospitals and social welfare; in the years of fastest urbanisation, people who left the countryside found a new community in the church.\nSo \u0026quot;Korean Christianity is strong\u0026quot; is true; \u0026quot;seventy percent\u0026quot; is exaggeration; \u0026quot;native belief is being replaced\u0026quot; gets the direction wrong.\nAnd Buddhism? In the same period, Buddhism in Korea has been shrinking.\nA 2026 Pew Research Center analysis says that in Korea, among those raised in Buddhist families, about six in ten no longer identify as Buddhist; in Japan the share is about half. Most did not convert to another religion; they became \u0026quot;unaffiliated.\u0026quot;\nJogyesa in Seoul, hung with lotus lanterns before the Buddha's birthday. Many people come to see the lanterns, and fewer and fewer tick \u0026quot;Buddhist\u0026quot; on questionnaires.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Ken Eckert, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThis does not match another popular claim online either: \u0026quot;the Buddhists have all gone over to Christ.\u0026quot; The data show they mainly left religion itself.\nHow many Christians in mainland China At this point many people ask: and China?\nThis number is a puzzle. The official figure published in 2018 is more than 38 million Protestants and about 6 million Catholics; the estimates of overseas bodies and the churches themselves run as high as over 100 million, two or three times as many. Conversely, in nationwide questionnaires only about 2% of adults, roughly 20 million, call themselves Christian. A large part of the gap lies in unregistered house gatherings that questionnaires cannot reach and statistics do not want to ask about.\nTo say of a place that cannot even count its people that it \u0026quot;is being replaced\u0026quot; is, like \u0026quot;seventy percent of Koreans believe in Jesus,\u0026quot; to fill a blank with imagination.\nWhere East Asia's religiousness is Still, the \u0026quot;no religion\u0026quot; statistic must be read carefully too.\nIn East Asia many people tick \u0026quot;no religion\u0026quot; on a questionnaire and yet go on honouring ancestors, sweeping graves, visiting a temple before exams, burning incense at New Year and checking dates for weddings. Asked \u0026quot;what religion do you follow,\u0026quot; they say none; asked \u0026quot;do you do these things,\u0026quot; the answer is often yes.\nThe sociologist C. K. Yang called this form \u0026quot;diffused religion\u0026quot;: the religiousness is not in an independent church but scattered through family, festivals and daily life.\nSo how many in East Asia \u0026quot;have a religion\u0026quot; depends on how you ask. To measure East Asia with the Western questionnaire of \u0026quot;do you belong to a church\u0026quot; may itself be measuring in the wrong place.\nBut \u0026quot;diffused\u0026quot; has another side: it is in no organisation, so no organisation keeps watch over it. When the family scatters and the city moves, it fades with them. Of Korea's \u0026quot;no religion\u0026quot; half, how many are people who never needed a church and how many are people who can no longer find a place to go back to, the questionnaire cannot tell.\nWhy rumours like this travel so fast Finally, about myself. Why did I save that answer without the slightest doubt?\nLooking back, it met all the conditions for a rumour to spread: a specific number (seeming credible), a clear cause (native belief declines, a foreign religion invades), a sense of crisis (we are next), and it happened to fit a worry I already had.\nThe last time you shared something, did you check the original data first?\nReferences\nStatistics Korea, religion item of the 2015 census Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;Why is Buddhism shrinking worldwide?\u0026quot;, 2026-03-11 State Council Information Office, China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief, white paper, 2018-04-03 (more than 38 million Protestants, about 6 million Catholics) 🟢 Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;Measuring Religion in China: Christianity\u0026quot;, 2023 (2018 Chinese General Social Survey: about 2% of adults, about 20 million, call themselves Christian; external estimates as high as 7%–9%, about 100 to 130 million) 🟢 C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 1961 Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w13/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-widely-circulated-answer\"\u003eA widely circulated answer\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmong the things I had saved was an answer to this effect: Chinese native belief is declining and a foreign religion will inevitably replace it, \u0026quot;and South Korea is the clearest example, where seventy percent of the native population already believes in Jesus.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe line has real impact. A clear number, a clear conclusion, and a touch of urgency. I did not doubt it at the time and saved it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLater I went and checked the Korean census.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-the-census-says\"\u003eWhat the census says\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStatistics Korea surveys religion in the census every ten years. The 2015 results:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNo religion: 56.1%\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eProtestant: 19.7%\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBuddhist: 15.5%\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCatholic: 7.9%\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Religion in the 2015 Korean census\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w13/01.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eKorea's 2015 census, \u0026quot;What is your religion?\u0026quot; The dotted line is the seventy percent in that answer.　Data: Statistics Korea\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Are Seventy Percent of Koreans Christian?"},{"content":"A paper by Chen Yinke In 1930 the historian Chen Yinke published an article in the Tsinghua Journal, titled \u0026quot;Cao Chong, Hua Tuo and Buddhist Stories in the Records of the Three Kingdoms.\u0026quot;\nChen Yinke (1890–1969). He knew over a dozen languages and read Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan; he was forty when he wrote this paper.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nThe article discusses two stories everyone knows. One is Cao Chong weighing the elephant, the other is the miracle physician Hua Tuo. Chen Yinke held that Buddhist stories from India had been mixed into both.\nThis scholar, who wrote of \u0026quot;independence of spirit, freedom of thought,\u0026quot; went blind in old age, suffered greatly in the campaigns of the 1960s, and died in Guangzhou in 1969. Many of the hypotheses he left have waited ever since for someone to prove or overturn them.\nOn Hua Tuo he put forward a very bold view.\n\u0026quot;Hua Tuo\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;agada\u0026quot; The Records of the Three Kingdoms says: \u0026quot;Hua Tuo, courtesy name Yuanhua, was a man of Qiao in the Pei state, also called Fu.\u0026quot; Hua Tuo's given name may have been \u0026quot;Fu,\u0026quot; with the courtesy name \u0026quot;Yuanhua.\u0026quot;\nChen Yinke noticed that \u0026quot;Fu\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Yuanhua\u0026quot; match in meaning (\u0026quot;fu\u0026quot; carries the sense of unfolding and nurturing). So where does \u0026quot;tuo\u0026quot; come from?\nHis guess: Sanskrit has a word agada, meaning \u0026quot;medicine,\u0026quot; transliterated in Buddhist scriptures as \u0026quot;agetuo.\u0026quot; The old Chinese pronunciation of \u0026quot;hua\u0026quot; was close to \u0026quot;qie/ga,\u0026quot; so \u0026quot;Hua Tuo\u0026quot; may be a transliteration of gada. That is, because this physician's skill was so wondrous, people of the time called him by a foreign name meaning \u0026quot;god of medicine.\u0026quot;\nA portrait of Hua Tuo painted by later people. Nobody knows what he looked like; people are still arguing even about what he was really called.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nHe also held that some of Hua Tuo's miraculous cures in the Records of the Three Kingdoms resemble stories of the Indian physician Jivaka in the Buddhist scriptures. Some scholars later conjectured that the ingredients of Hua Tuo's \u0026quot;mafeisan\u0026quot; anaesthetic may have had to do with datura (Sanskrit mandārava).\nDoes the hypothesis hold up The idea is fascinating, but the scholarly world has formed no consensus on it.\nHistorians such as Lü Simian, when discussing Hua Tuo, did not adopt this explanation. Several objections can be listed:\n\u0026quot;Tuo\u0026quot; as a personal name was not rare in the Han. The king of Nanyue at the end of the Qin and the start of the Han was called Zhao Tuo. To prove \u0026quot;tuo\u0026quot; a foreign transliteration by saying \u0026quot;few people before the Han were named Tuo\u0026quot; is not solid. A transliteration match needs stricter evidence. That the old pronunciation of two characters resembles the last two syllables of a Sanskrit word can serve as a clue, but on its own it is hard to settle. Similar stories do not mean the same source. Stories of miracle physicians follow similar patterns in many civilisations. So the safer statement: Chen Yinke put forward an interesting hypothesis, and to this day it is still a hypothesis.\nSome borrowings are certain Still, when Buddhism entered China it did bring along a great many Indian things, and some are beyond dispute.\nTake the \u0026quot;five pungent roots\u0026quot; that Buddhist precepts forbid: scallion, garlic, leek, Chinese chive, and one called xingqu. Xingqu is rare in Han lands; it is in fact asafoetida, a spice native to Central Asia and common in Indian cooking. A Han monk reading xingqu in the precepts might never have seen the thing in his life, because this rule was moved over unchanged from India.\nAsafoetida resin from Isfahan, Iran. In the Buddhist scriptures it is called \u0026quot;xingqu.\u0026quot; Many Chinese monks who kept the five-pungent-roots precept all their lives probably never smelled it.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Tricholome, CC BY-SA 4.0\nBorrowings in language are more numerous still: chana (instant), niepan (nirvana), pusa (bodhisattva), luohan (arhat), shijie (world), yinguo (cause and effect)... A whole batch of everyday Chinese words today comes from the translation of Buddhist scriptures.\nDeeper are the borrowings of ideas. In forming and developing, Daoism took in Buddhist notions of rebirth, karmic retribution and hell; and Buddhism in China also took in Confucian filial piety and the Chinese worship of ancestors. For instance, the story of \u0026quot;Maudgalyayana Saves His Mother\u0026quot; fused Buddhist rites for the dead with Chinese filial care; the Ullambana festival that came of it later merged with the Daoist Zhongyuan festival to become today's \u0026quot;mid-seventh-month.\u0026quot;\nWoodcut illustration from an old printed edition of \u0026quot;Maudgalyayana Saves His Mother.\u0026quot; A rite-for-the-dead story from India became in China a filial-son play, performed for hundreds of years.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nA religion is a freight wagon The most interesting thing here: the spread of a religion has never carried doctrine alone.\nIt is like a freight wagon, loaded with scriptures and also with language, medicine, spices, art, festivals, food taboos. When the wagon reaches a new place, some goods are unloaded as they are, some are converted, and some are taken by the locals and used for something else.\nThe wagon also drives back The wagon did not stop on reaching China.\nChinese characters hauled this load another stretch east and south: the Buddhist scriptures read by the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese are the Chinese-translated scriptures; words like \u0026quot;world,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;cause and effect\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;instant\u0026quot; went into Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese together with the characters, read differently in each but written as the same characters. Today a Seoul person saying \u0026quot;세계,\u0026quot; a Tokyo person saying \u0026quot;せかい\u0026quot; and a Hanoi person saying \u0026quot;thế giới\u0026quot; are all saying the same \u0026quot;world\u0026quot; that took a turn through Sanskrit.\nWhether Hua Tuo's name is Sanskrit may never be confirmed. But the hypothesis that \u0026quot;the name of a Chinese miracle physician may have come from India\u0026quot; itself reminds us: many things taken for \u0026quot;homegrown\u0026quot; may have behind them a journey across civilisations.\nTurning it around But the reminder can also go too far. There is a claim online that \u0026quot;Chinese medicine all came from India.\u0026quot; That is plainly wrong: the core theories of Chinese medicine (yin and yang, the five phases, meridians, the zang-fu organs) have no corresponding source in Indian medicine.\nThe borrowing is real, but borrowing is not wholesale copying. When a civilisation takes in something foreign, it often grafts it onto its own roots; it does not replace the roots.\nAmong the words or customs you know, which one actually comes from far away?\nReferences\nChen Yinke, \u0026quot;Cao Chong, Hua Tuo and Buddhist Stories in the Records of the Three Kingdoms,\u0026quot; Tsinghua Journal 6(1), 1930 (later collected in Hanliutang ji) Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 1959 Records of the Three Kingdoms, \u0026quot;Biography of Hua Tuo\u0026quot;; the Buddhist \u0026quot;five pungent roots\u0026quot; and xingqu (asafoetida): standard texts and common knowledge Chen Yinke's life: standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w14/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-paper-by-chen-yinke\"\u003eA paper by Chen Yinke\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1930 the historian Chen Yinke published an article in the \u003cem\u003eTsinghua Journal\u003c/em\u003e, titled \u0026quot;Cao Chong, Hua Tuo and Buddhist Stories in the \u003cem\u003eRecords of the Three Kingdoms\u003c/em\u003e.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Chen Yinke\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w14/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eChen Yinke (1890–1969). He knew over a dozen languages and read Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan; he was forty when he wrote this paper.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E9%99%88%E5%AF%85%E6%81%AA.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe article discusses two stories everyone knows. One is Cao Chong weighing the elephant, the other is the miracle physician Hua Tuo. Chen Yinke held that Buddhist stories from India had been mixed into both.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis scholar, who wrote of \u0026quot;independence of spirit, freedom of thought,\u0026quot; went blind in old age, suffered greatly in the campaigns of the 1960s, and died in Guangzhou in 1969. Many of the hypotheses he left have waited ever since for someone to prove or overturn them.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Is Hua Tuo's Name Sanskrit?"},{"content":"A counterintuitive ending In the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire conquered nearly half the known world: from the Pacific to Eastern Europe, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf.\nBy the intuition that \u0026quot;the strong export their faith,\u0026quot; the conquered should have converted to the conquerors' religion. History went the other way: a few generations on, Mongol rulers one after another converted to the religions of the lands they had conquered. More interesting still, they did not all convert to the same one.\nThe west: Islam In Persia, Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü founded the Ilkhanate. The early Ilkhans followed shamanism and Buddhism, and were rather friendly to Christianity.\nIn 1295 Ghazan took the throne and formally converted to Islam. He was the first Ilkhan to convert, and he went on to make Islam the state religion and require courtiers and army commanders to convert as well. The Persian vizier and historian Rashid al-Din recorded this history in his great work, the Jami' al-tawarikh.\nIn the north, in the Golden Horde (the Kipchak Khanate), Özbeg Khan took the throne in 1313 and pushed Islam, and used it along the way to purge political enemies.\nA few generations later, the Mongol descendants in the west had Persian names, spoke Turkic or Persian, and were Muslims. Babur, who founded the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century, was a ruler who was Muslim, proud of Persian culture, and at the same time proud of his descent from both Genghis Khan and Timur.\nThe east: Tibetan Buddhism In the east, Kublai founded the Yuan dynasty. The religion he honoured was Tibetan Buddhism.\nPortrait of Kublai Khan, Emperor Shizu of the Yuan, from the Yuan album of emperors and empresses, said to be in the manner of the Nepalese craftsman Anige.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, National Palace Museum, Taipei, public domain\nIn 1260 he named the Sakya lama Phagspa \u0026quot;State Preceptor,\u0026quot; later renamed \u0026quot;Imperial Preceptor,\u0026quot; and put him in charge of Buddhist affairs across the empire. Phagspa was also ordered to create the \u0026quot;Phags-pa script,\u0026quot; one of the official scripts of the Yuan.\nA copy of a Yuan imperial edict written in Phags-pa script. A Tibetan monk made these letters for a Mongol emperor, to spell Mongolian and also Chinese. Once the Yuan fell, hardly anyone used them.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nThe Yuan fell and the Mongols withdrew to the steppe; for a time Tibetan Buddhism's influence weakened. But the story was not over. In 1578 Altan Khan of the Tümed met Sonam Gyatso of the Gelug school and gave him the title \u0026quot;Dalai,\u0026quot; Mongolian for \u0026quot;ocean.\u0026quot; That is how the title \u0026quot;Dalai Lama\u0026quot; began. Step by step, Mongolia too became a land of Tibetan Buddhism.\nErdene Zuu Monastery at Karakorum in Mongolia, built in 1585, one of the earliest great Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia. It stands on the ruins of the Mongol Empire's old capital and was built with the old capital's stones.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Bernard Gagnon, CC0\nIt was a two-way trade: Altan Khan got religious legitimacy, presenting himself as a reincarnation of Kublai; the Gelug school got a protector who could fight.\nThe central plains: not conversion but assimilation The central plains were different again. The Mongol rulers of the Yuan did not convert to Confucianism; Confucianism was not a religion that called for \u0026quot;conversion\u0026quot; in the first place. But large numbers of Mongols and Semu people who stayed in the central plains slowly melted into the local population after the Ming.\nWhy this happened The same conquerors ended up three different ways in three places. Why?\nOne explanation comes from the fourteenth-century North African scholar Ibn Khaldun. In the Muqaddimah he says that peoples who come out of harsh borderlands have great cohesion and can conquer rich settled civilisations; but once they move in, they are absorbed by the finer institutions, culture and religion of the settled civilisation, and within a few generations their cohesion dissolves.\nAnother explanation is more practical: rulers have to rule. In Persia the great majority of the ruled were Muslims; by converting to Islam the rulers obtained the legitimacy to rule and the cooperation of the people who ran things (religious scholars, officials). In Tibet and in Mongolia proper, Tibetan Buddhism offered a ready-made monastic community, a script and a way of legitimating rule.\nPut plainly, a conqueror's conversion is not necessarily the result of being \u0026quot;persuaded\u0026quot; by a doctrine; it is often a political choice: using the religion of the ruled to rule the ruled.\nDoes this have anything to do with \u0026quot;monotheism being stronger\u0026quot;? Someone may say: look, Islam conquered the Mongols of the west, so monotheism is stronger.\nBut in the same period the Mongols in the east took up Tibetan Buddhism, a religion that does not centre on a creator god. If \u0026quot;the stronger doctrine wins,\u0026quot; it is hard to explain why one set of conquerors chose entirely different faiths in different places.\nWhat makes more sense is this: what won was not any one doctrine, but whatever had already taken root in each place.\nWhat became of the title \u0026quot;Dalai\u0026quot; The title of 1578 later became tangled up with the question of \u0026quot;who has the say,\u0026quot; and it has stayed tangled to this day.\nIn 1959 the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India and has never been back to Tibet. In 1995 he recognised a six-year-old boy as the 11th Panchen Lama; within days the child and his family disappeared from public view, and Beijing chose its own Panchen Lama by the \u0026quot;golden urn\u0026quot; lottery. Today the world has two 11th Panchen Lamas, and one of them has not been seen by anyone in thirty years.\nIn 2007 the State Administration for Religious Affairs issued the Measures on the Management of the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism, requiring that a reincarnation be reported for government approval. A religion that passes on its leaders by \u0026quot;reincarnation,\u0026quot; and the reincarnation itself must be approved by an atheist government.\nBack then it was a Mongol khan who exchanged a title for religious legitimacy; today it is the government that wants to hold religious legitimacy in its own hands through the power of approval.\nMy view has not changed: a religion can accept registration by the state, but the state should not define it. Who is a living Buddha and who is a Panchen Lama should be recognised by the believers and their lineage, not approved by someone in an office.\nTurning it around \u0026quot;Conquerors are assimilated by the conquered\u0026quot; is not an iron law either. The Ottomans and the Arabs both carried their own religion into the lands they conquered and ended up with most of the people converted. Ibn Khaldun's \u0026quot;decline in three generations\u0026quot; has many exceptions.\nSo this is more a common tendency than a rule: when the conquerors are few and the religion and culture of the conquered land are mature enough, it is often the conquerors who are \u0026quot;conquered in reverse.\u0026quot;\nIf the conquerors end up believing in the religion of the conquered, who has conquered whom?\nReferences\nGhazan's conversion to Islam in 1295 (Rashid al-Din, Jami' al-tawarikh) Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1377 Özbeg Khan's accession in 1313; Phagspa's investiture as State Preceptor in 1260; Altan Khan's gift of the title \u0026quot;Dalai\u0026quot; to Sonam Gyatso in 1578: standard history The Dalai Lama's flight in 1959, the Panchen Lama reincarnation dispute of 1995, the 2007 Measures on the Management of the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism (Order No. 5 of the State Administration for Religious Affairs): standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w15/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-counterintuitive-ending\"\u003eA counterintuitive ending\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire conquered nearly half the known world: from the Pacific to Eastern Europe, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy the intuition that \u0026quot;the strong export their faith,\u0026quot; the conquered should have converted to the conquerors' religion. History went the other way: a few generations on, Mongol rulers one after another converted to the religions of the lands they had conquered. More interesting still, they did not all convert to the same one.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-west-islam\"\u003eThe west: Islam\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Persia, Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü founded the Ilkhanate. The early Ilkhans followed shamanism and Buddhism, and were rather friendly to Christianity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1295 Ghazan took the throne and formally converted to Islam. He was the first Ilkhan to convert, and he went on to make Islam the state religion and require courtiers and army commanders to convert as well. The Persian vizier and historian Rashid al-Din recorded this history in his great work, the \u003cem\u003eJami' al-tawarikh\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Conquerors' Religion"},{"content":"A temple to Vishnu Angkor Wat in Cambodia covers about 162 hectares and is generally held to be the largest religious building in the world.\nThe façades of the first and second levels of Angkor Wat. It faces west; in Hinduism west is the direction of Vishnu, and also the direction of death.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0\nIt was built in the early twelfth century under the Khmer king Suryavarman II as his state temple, and possibly his tomb. It was dedicated to Vishnu, one of the chief gods of Hinduism. Its bas-reliefs show stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the Indian myth of the \u0026quot;Churning of the Ocean of Milk.\u0026quot;\nThe \u0026quot;Churning of the Ocean of Milk\u0026quot; bas-relief in a gallery of Angkor Wat: gods and asuras pull a great serpent as a rope to churn the ocean of milk, seeking the nectar of immortality. The relief is over forty metres long, an Indian myth on Cambodian stone.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Markalexander100, CC BY-SA 3.0\nAn Indian god, thousands of kilometres from India, has the largest temple in the world.\nLater it became a Buddhist temple Even more interesting is Angkor Wat's later fate. In the late twelfth century the Khmer king Jayavarman VII was a Mahayana Buddhist; after that Angkor Wat slowly became a Buddhist temple, and many Hindu images were replaced by Buddhist ones. Later still, Theravada Buddhism became Cambodia's mainstream, and Angkor Wat has remained an important Buddhist holy place.\nIt is the best preserved of the Angkor sites and the only temple whose incense has not gone out from its building to this day.\nOne building has served two religions in turn.\nIt survived the Khmer Rouge It survived something worse.\nFrom 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia and announced the abolition of religion. Temples were turned into warehouses, pigsties and prisons; monks were forced back to lay life, and many were killed. In a country where for centuries nearly every man spent a period of his life as a monk, the monastic community was almost cut off at the root.\nAngkor Wat remained. The Khmer Rouge took it as a national symbol and drew its outline on their flag. After 1979 the monks came back to the temples one by one, and the incense was lit again.\nNot conquest How did Hinduism and Buddhism come to Southeast Asia?\nIn the mid-twentieth century the French scholar George Coedès put forward the concept of \u0026quot;Indianised states.\u0026quot; He noted that from the early years of the common era a series of states emerged on the mainland and islands of Southeast Asia whose royal houses used India's religion, Sanskrit, ideas of kingship, law and art: Funan, Chenla, Champa, Srivijaya, Mataram...\nBut this was not India attacking. India has almost never carried out large-scale colonial conquest in Southeast Asia in its history. It spread mainly along two roads:\nTrade routes: the monsoon sea lanes of the Indian Ocean, along which Indian merchants, Brahmins and monks came and went in the ports of Southeast Asia. The royal houses took it up themselves: Southeast Asian rulers found that Indian religion and ideas of kingship (such as the \u0026quot;god-king\u0026quot;) backed them up well, and invited Brahmins and monks of their own accord. Coedès's specific account has since been revised considerably, and scholars now stress the initiative of the Southeast Asians themselves: not India \u0026quot;exporting,\u0026quot; but Southeast Asia \u0026quot;selecting.\u0026quot; Either way, it was a spread without armies.\nA polytheistic \u0026quot;expansion\u0026quot; There is a popular claim online: \u0026quot;polytheism cannot beat monotheism.\u0026quot; The reasoning: monotheism is exclusive and has the urge to convert; polytheism is inclusive and has no wish to expand.\nAngkor Wat is a very hard counterexample to this claim.\nOver more than a thousand years, Hinduism and Buddhism spread across Southeast Asia: in Java, Indonesia, are Borobudur (Buddhist) and Prambanan (Hindu), both built in the ninth century; Bali is still mainly Hindu today; Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia are all Theravada Buddhist countries today.\nBorobudur in Central Java, Indonesia, the great Buddhist stupa built in the ninth century. Those who live around it today are mostly Muslims.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Zaenulihsan91, CC BY-SA 4.0\nPrambanan, a group of Hindu temples not far from Borobudur, also built in the ninth century. On the same plain, a Buddhist stupa and a group of Hindu temples, dozens of kilometres apart, were raised at about the same time.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0\nBuddhism spread further: from India to Central Asia, China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, Tibet and Southeast Asia. A religion not centred on a creator god became one of the most widely spread in human history.\nAnd Islam in Southeast Asia Islam in Southeast Asia gives an interesting comparison too.\nToday's Indonesia is the country with the most Muslims in the world. But Islam spread across the islands of Southeast Asia mainly not by fighting but, like the earlier Hinduism and Buddhism, along trade routes: Muslim merchants from Arabia, Persia and India, rulers of port cities who converted of their own accord, Sufi preachers.\nSo in Southeast Asia, whether polytheism, Buddhism or monotheism, the way of spreading was much alike: they came on merchant ships and were picked by the local king.\nTurning it around Of course, monotheisms often are more organised and more eager to convert; the Christianisation of the Roman Empire and the Islamisation of the Arab empire were indeed accompanied by political and military power.\nBut reducing the spread of religions to \u0026quot;the strength of doctrine\u0026quot; misses the most important thing: the road. How far a religion can go often depends on which trade route it boarded and which royal house it persuaded, not just on how many gods it has.\nYour own faith or values: did someone persuade you, or did you happen to be born on that road?\nReferences\nGeorge Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (English translation 1968) The building of Angkor Wat (Suryavarman II, early twelfth century, dedicated to Vishnu) and its conversion to a Buddhist temple: standard history Borobudur and Prambanan (ninth century); Hinduism in Bali; the spread of Islam in Southeast Asia along trade routes: standard history The abolition of religion in the Khmer Rouge period (1975–1979): standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w16/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-temple-to-vishnu\"\u003eA temple to Vishnu\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAngkor Wat in Cambodia covers about 162 hectares and is generally held to be the largest religious building in the world.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Angkor Wat\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w16/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe façades of the first and second levels of Angkor Wat. It faces west; in Hinduism west is the direction of Vishnu, and also the direction of death.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_and_second_level_fa%C3%A7ades_-_Angkor_Wat_%286201907061%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photo by Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was built in the early twelfth century under the Khmer king Suryavarman II as his state temple, and possibly his tomb. It was dedicated to Vishnu, one of the chief gods of Hinduism. Its bas-reliefs show stories from the \u003cem\u003eRamayana\u003c/em\u003e and the \u003cem\u003eMahabharata\u003c/em\u003e and the Indian myth of the \u0026quot;Churning of the Ocean of Milk.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why the World's Largest Religious Building Is Not in India"},{"content":"A set of numbers In 2025 the Pew Research Center published a report counting how the world's religious populations changed from 2010 to 2020.\nMost religions grew: Muslims by 347 million, Christians by 122 million, Hindus by 126 million, the unaffiliated by 270 million.\nThere was one exception: Buddhists fell from 343 million to 324 million, about 19 million fewer, and their share of world population dropped from 4.9% to 4.1%.\nIn ten years, only the number of Buddhists got smaller.　Data: Pew Research Center, 2025\nIt was the only major religion whose absolute numbers fell over the decade.\nReason one: older, fewer births Pew's analysis says Buddhists are the oldest and have the fewest children of any religious group in the world: in 2020 the median age of Buddhists was 40, nine years above the global median; from 2010 to 2015 the fertility rate of Buddhists averaged only about 1.6, the only religious group below replacement level.\nThis has to do with where Buddhists live: 98% of Buddhists live in the Asia-Pacific region, and many of the countries and territories there, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, are exactly the places with the fewest births in the world.\nReason two: they left But that is only half. The other half stings more: many people raised Buddhist leave when they grow up.\nPew's figures: of every 100 adults raised in Buddhist families, 22 are no longer Buddhist; at the same time only 12 people have become Buddhist from another religion or from no religion. One in, one out: a net loss of 10.\nOf every 100 adults raised in Buddhist families, 22 left and 12 came in.　Data: Pew Research Center, 2026\nIn East Asia the loss is especially serious. In Japan about half of those raised Buddhist have left, in Korea about six in ten. Most did not take up another religion; they became \u0026quot;unaffiliated.\u0026quot;\nFrom 2010 to 2020, the Buddhists of mainland China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong together fell by about 32 million, down about 22%.\nWhy it cannot hold people Numbers can only say \u0026quot;what\u0026quot;; \u0026quot;why\u0026quot; takes interpretation. Among things I had saved I once came across a rather interesting view that can serve as one explanation.\nThis netizen said Buddhism in East Asia is like a \u0026quot;wishing pool\u0026quot;: when something is wrong you go, light a stick of incense, draw a fortune slip, and when nothing is wrong you do not think of it. You do not know the person burning incense next to you, you do not know the monk in the temple, and you do not know when you will come back.\nThe Christian church and the Islamic mosque occupy the position of \u0026quot;community\u0026quot;: weekly gatherings, believers who know one another and help one another, and someone to organise weddings and funerals. Even a person who is not very devout stays because of these ties.\nHe had a sharper point too: the most attractive \u0026quot;products\u0026quot; of Buddhism, meditation, vegetarianism, a simple life, have been taken over by secular society. Meditation became mindfulness apps and mental-health classes, vegetarianism became a health and environmental choice, and wanting little and being content became minimalist design. People can enjoy all this without ever becoming Buddhists.\nThis is one netizen's explanation, not a research conclusion, but it matches some discussions in sociology: whether a religion can hold people depends largely on whether it is embedded in the web in which people live their lives.\nTurning it around The conclusion that \u0026quot;Buddhism is declining\u0026quot; also needs some hedging.\nFirst, how it is counted. In East Asia many people will not say on a questionnaire that they \u0026quot;are Buddhists,\u0026quot; yet they go to temples, keep a Buddha at home, and invite monks to perform rites for the dead. The sociologist C. K. Yang called this \u0026quot;diffused religion\u0026quot;: it is not in an independent organisation but scattered through family and festivals. Some of the \u0026quot;leaving\u0026quot; a questionnaire measures may be only people no longer using the label \u0026quot;Buddhist.\u0026quot;\nSecond, regions differ greatly. In Thailand almost everyone raised Buddhist still identifies as Buddhist. Buddhism's shrinking in East Asia does not mean it is shrinking in Southeast Asia too.\nEarly morning in Luang Prabang, Laos: a woman gives sticky rice to a young novice. In Theravada countries Buddhism is still part of the daily breakfast.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by shankar s., CC BY 2.0\nThird, influence and numbers are not the same thing. Buddhist ideas and practices are growing more influential among Western intellectuals and the middle class. As a mass religion its people are fewer; as a source of ideas it may be spreading.\nA warning for ourselves When I read the data in this piece, what I am thinking of is not Buddhism but Confucianism.\nBuddhism in East Asia looks like a \u0026quot;wishing pool\u0026quot;: you come when you want something, you leave when you have asked, and there is no web between the temple and the people. Confucianism today is in a worse state, not even a wishing pool: the ancestral halls are torn down, the genealogies broken, and what remains is the one day of Qingming when everyone goes back to their home village to burn a bundle of paper.\nSo I have always felt that for Confucianism to live it cannot rely on \u0026quot;culture\u0026quot; alone. It needs a place where people can gather every week or every month, where people know you and someone will organise things when you need it. Churches and mosques have done this, and the native-place halls and clan associations of Southeast Asia once did too. Buddhism has taken this lesson first on our behalf.\nIf the most valuable parts of a religion can exist apart from it, does it still need to exist as a religion?\nReferences\nPew Research Center, \u0026quot;How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020,\u0026quot; 2025 Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;Why is Buddhism shrinking worldwide?\u0026quot;, 2026-03-11 C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 1961 A netizen's answer (2026-02), cited as a netizen's view, not a research conclusion Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w17/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-set-of-numbers\"\u003eA set of numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2025 the Pew Research Center published a report counting how the world's religious populations changed from 2010 to 2020.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost religions grew: Muslims by 347 million, Christians by 122 million, Hindus by 126 million, the unaffiliated by 270 million.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere was one exception: Buddhists fell from 343 million to 324 million, about 19 million fewer, and their share of world population dropped from 4.9% to 4.1%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Change in religious populations, 2010–2020\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w17/01.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIn ten years, only the number of Buddhists got smaller.　Data: Pew Research Center, 2025\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was the only major religion whose absolute numbers fell over the decade.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"reason-one-older-fewer-births\"\u003eReason one: older, fewer births\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePew's analysis says Buddhists are the oldest and have the fewest children of any religious group in the world: in 2020 the median age of Buddhists was 40, nine years above the global median; from 2010 to 2015 the fertility rate of Buddhists averaged only about 1.6, the only religious group below replacement level.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Buddhism, the Only Major Religion That Is Shrinking"},{"content":"A car that was never built In 2006 the Tata group wanted to build a factory at Singur in West Bengal to make the \u0026quot;cheapest car in the world,\u0026quot; the Nano. The West Bengal government acquired about 997 acres for Tata, under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 left by the British.\nThe Tata Nano. It was to be built at Singur in West Bengal, and in 2008 moved to Gujarat because of the land conflict.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, the original uploader was Nikkul at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0\nAbout 400 of those acres were taken from farmers who did not want to sell. Protests, road blockades and violent clashes followed one after another. On 3 October 2008 Tata announced its withdrawal from Singur, and on 8 October announced that it would move the Nano plant to Sanand in Gujarat.\nThe consequences were far larger than one factory:\nIt is considered an important reason the Left Front ended 34 years in power in the 2011 state election; It directly influenced later legislation: in 2013 India passed the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, which requires that for land acquired by government for private companies, the consent of 80% of the affected families is needed; for public-private projects, 70%. Singur had a sequel: on 31 August 2016 the Supreme Court ruled the entire acquisition process of that time illegal and ordered the land returned to the farmers within 12 weeks (farmers who had received compensation did not have to repay).\nSince then Indian industry and politicians have remembered this.\nFirst, the land itself The most notable feature of India's land is that it is fragmented.\nAccording to the national agricultural census of 2015–16:\nThe average operational holding is only 1.08 hectares; Marginal holdings (under 1 hectare) are about 68.5% of all holdings (operational units), averaging only 0.38 hectares each and together holding only about a quarter of cultivated land; Small and marginal holdings (under 2 hectares) together are 86.2% of holdings but have only 47.3% of cultivated land; The average area of marginal holdings has hardly changed in forty years. That is to say, the land of a village is divided into countless narrow strips, each belonging to a different family, and still being divided further by inheritance. This is a system that lowers the area per person continually by having children.\nFor someone who wants to build a factory, this means: a block of 100 hectares may stand behind several hundred households and several hundred titles. Each person has the right to agree or not. The negotiating table has to be very large, the agenda very long.\nOne more number shows how \u0026quot;hard\u0026quot; India's land is: the courts. A national survey by the research body DAKSH in 2016 found that about two thirds of the civil cases in district courts relate to land and property. A policy report of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) cites data that a land-acquisition dispute, from the beginning to the Supreme Court, takes on average twenty years. If for the land a factory needs even one plot's title is unclear, it may lie in court for half a lifetime.\nWhy farmers do not want to sell From the farmers' side, not selling has several very practical reasons:\nSingur in 2014, with Asian Highway 1 passing through.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0\nOne, the land is the only security. Rural social security in India is thin; land is the means of production and also pension, insurance and identity. Once sold and the money spent, there is nothing left.\nTwo, the factory may not give them work. After farmers sell, they may not have the skills the factory asks for when it hires; some projects in the end employed few local people.\nThree, the gap between compensation and real value. In some historical projects land was taken cheaply and then resold at high prices to developers, and such things built up a deficit of trust.\nFour, unclear title. For most land in India the title record is \u0026quot;presumptive title\u0026quot;: the registration record does not fully prove who owns the land, only provides preliminary proof. This makes \u0026quot;selling land\u0026quot; itself complicated and prone to disputes.\nOther things that make factories hard to build Land is only one door.\nLabour law. For a long time India's labour law was complicated, with 29 relevant central laws. One provision required government approval for layoffs in a factory with over 100 workers. This made many firms prefer to stay small to avoid crossing that line. Some factory heads' highest goal was to stop at 99.\nOn 21 November 2025 four new labour codes took effect together, merging these laws, and one change was raising the threshold for government approval of layoffs from 100 to 300. By an estimate from the Annual Survey of Industries data for 2017–18, only about 7% of factories (employing about 16% of workers) remain above the line; that is, about 93% of factories no longer need approval to lay off. Unions and some critics say this weakens workers' rights; supporters say it will make firms more willing to grow and to hire more.\nDifferences between states. Under the Indian constitution, land is a matter for the states. This means that the speed of approvals a company can enjoy in Gujarat may be completely different from West Bengal.\nInfrastructure. Power, water, ports, roads are also problems, but they are beyond this piece, or this piece would never be finished.\nBut some places succeed To say \u0026quot;India can build nothing\u0026quot; is not right either.\nThe Apple example. In 2025 Apple assembled about 55 million iPhones in India, about a quarter of global output; India already has five iPhone factories, three of Tata's and two of Foxconn's. A new Foxconn plant of about 2.6 billion dollars on the outskirts of Bengaluru had begun making models such as the iPhone 17 by the second half of 2025. (See \u0026quot;The Stolen Thirty Years\u0026quot; for details.) These factories are mostly in states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, whose method is for the state government to prepare \u0026quot;industrial parks\u0026quot; in advance, packaging land, power and water for the firm in one go (Tamil Nadu's state-owned industrial park developer SIPCOT is one example).\nThe \u0026quot;land pooling\u0026quot; method. In 2015 Andhra Pradesh, to build its new capital Amaravati, had farmers voluntarily put their land in as \u0026quot;shares\u0026quot;; the government developed it as a whole and then returned a proportion of the developed land to the farmers. By reports, the consent of farmers for 33,000 acres was obtained by March 2015. This was an attempt to bypass compulsory acquisition; the project later went back and forth with changes of government, and I have not checked its progress today.\nThat is to say, the problem is not \u0026quot;completely impossible\u0026quot; but that it is either slow or needs a state government able to coordinate several hundred households.\nA reform that was not completed One more political memory.\nWhen the Modi government first came to power in 2014, it wanted to amend the 2013 land acquisition law to exempt some projects (defence, rural infrastructure and so on) from the \u0026quot;consent\u0026quot; requirement. It was introduced as an ordinance in December 2014, then failed to pass in both houses of Parliament, and the ordinance lapsed in August 2015.\nIn September 2020 the government introduced three agricultural reform laws, which farmers (especially in Punjab and Haryana) thought would weaken their protections; they protested around Delhi for more than a year, and in 2021 the government repealed the laws (mentioned in the piece on the forgotten minority).\nBoth times show that in India, once \u0026quot;reform\u0026quot; touches farmers' land, the political cost is very high.\nTurning it around First, \u0026quot;hard to acquire land\u0026quot; has its legitimacy. Since independence, big dams, mines and industrial zones have made many people lose their land, many of them tribal and poor farmers, with compensation and resettlement often inadequate. This history has made \u0026quot;consent\u0026quot; a protection, not an obstacle.\nSecond, some hold that the root of the problem is not \u0026quot;needing consent\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;no alternative.\u0026quot; If farmers who sell could get a stable job, reasonable compensation and a new place to live, far more would be willing to sell. That is, what is lacking is jobs, not the consent system.\nThird, \u0026quot;fast\u0026quot; has risks too. When a country transfers farmers' land to industry by fast methods, plenty goes wrong, for example the Nandigram conflict in West Bengal in 2007, also over acquiring land for a chemical special economic zone: on 14 March 2007 police opened fire and, the official account says, 14 villagers died.\nIf a country's farmers actually rely on a small plot as \u0026quot;insurance,\u0026quot; then before there is something better to protect them, how do you persuade them to give up their land?\nReferences\nIndia Agriculture Census 2015–16 (average holding 1.08 hectares; marginal holdings 65.45%) Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 Reports on Singur and the Tata Nano (Finshots, The Wire, Open magazine) India's Ministry of Labour and Employment and media on the four labour codes (in force 21 November 2025) (Deccan Herald, India Briefing, Kotak MF and others); the critics' view (Janata Weekly) Counterpoint / Asymco / ETV Bharat / Business Today: iPhone output and exports in India DAKSH, Access to Justice Survey, 2016 (relayed by Bar \u0026amp; Bench, 2017); CPR, Policy Challenges 2019–2024, paper on land disputes 🟡 ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w18/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-car-that-was-never-built\"\u003eA car that was never built\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2006 the Tata group wanted to build a factory at Singur in West Bengal to make the \u0026quot;cheapest car in the world,\u0026quot; the Nano. The West Bengal government acquired about 997 acres for Tata, under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 left by the British.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Tata Nano. It was to be built at Singur in West Bengal, and in 2008 moved to Gujarat because of the land conflict.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w18/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Tata Nano. It was to be built at Singur in West Bengal, and in 2008 moved to Gujarat because of the land conflict.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tata_Nano_Yellow.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, the original uploader was Nikkul at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAbout 400 of those acres were taken from farmers who did not want to sell. Protests, road blockades and violent clashes followed one after another. On 3 October 2008 Tata announced its withdrawal from Singur, and on 8 October announced that it would move the Nano plant to Sanand in Gujarat.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"India's Land: Why Is It So Hard to Build a Factory?"},{"content":"A shape that looks familiar Look at a few stories first:\nHumans originally lived in the Garden of Eden, fell through original sin, and in future will enter heaven through redemption. Israel once had a glorious kingdom, was exiled for faithlessness, and in future the Messiah will come and rebuild the kingdom. Humans originally lived in a classless primitive society, later fell into class oppression and alienation, and in future will enter communism. Utterly different in content, identical in shape: perfect past → suffering present → bright future.\nLucas Cranach the Elder, The Garden of Eden, 1530. In one picture, from the making of man and the stealing of the fruit to the expulsion, all at once. Everything begins in a perfect garden.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, public domain\nAmong the things I had saved I came across an answer that called this structure the \u0026quot;three-act narrative\u0026quot; and held that nearly all the most widely spread religions and ideologies in history used this shape. Its force lies in four places: contrasting past and present stirs emotion at once; it makes people willing to bear present suffering; it lets them risk everything for the future; and \u0026quot;there once was a perfect past\u0026quot; proves a perfect future is possible.\nLinear time This observation fits the work of historians of religion.\nIn The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) the Romanian-born historian of religion Mircea Eliade distinguished two views of time:\nCyclical time: the world repeats itself, and every year and every age re-enacts the first sacred event. The festivals and myths of many ancient civilisations are built on this view of time. Historical time: time is a line with a beginning and an end, and history moves toward a final goal. Eliade held that this view of time stands out especially in the Hebrew tradition and, through Christianity, later shaped the whole West. The \u0026quot;three-act narrative\u0026quot; is the most typical story shape of linear time: history has direction, suffering has meaning, the end is worth hoping for.\nWhen Buddhism told a three-act story So can a religion with cyclical time as its base not mobilise the masses?\nChinese history gives a very interesting example. The core of Buddhism is rebirth: beings turn through birth and death in the six realms, and liberation must be won by one's own practice, by leaping out of the cycle. This story shape is by nature not well suited to mass mobilisation.\nBut in China another teaching slowly grew within Buddhism: the descent of Maitreya. We are now in the age of the decay of the Dharma, the world is bad; in future the Buddha Maitreya will descend to the human world and open a clear and peaceful realm. This is the standard three-act narrative.\nThe Maitreya carving at Feilai Peak in Hangzhou, Song dynasty. The laughing fat monk we know today was, to those who rose in revolt in every age, the promise of a \u0026quot;new heaven and earth.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Mr. Tickle, CC BY-SA 3.0\nFrom the Sui and Tang to the Ming and Qing, \u0026quot;the descent of Maitreya\u0026quot; was again and again the banner of popular uprisings. The Red Turbans of the late Yuan rose with the slogans \u0026quot;Maitreya is born\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;the Bright King appears.\u0026quot; Folk sects such as the White Lotus also kneaded this end-time salvation teaching together with folk organisation.\nEurope was the same. In The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) the historian Norman Cohn traced one millenarian movement after another in medieval Europe: prophets said the end was at hand and called on \u0026quot;the elect\u0026quot; to rise, clear out evil and build the kingdom on earth.\nThe Taiping The greatest three-act narrative in modern China was the Taiping.\nHong Xiuquan said that the ancient Chinese originally worshipped \u0026quot;Huang Shangdi\u0026quot; (the August Lord on High), and were later led astray by the \u0026quot;demons\u0026quot; since the First Emperor of Qin; now God had sent him down to slay the demons and build a \u0026quot;little heaven\u0026quot; on earth, where everyone would have fields to till together and food to eat together.\nA wooden seal of a Taiping officer. A regime that promised heaven on earth left behind mostly things like this, seals, flags, coins, and a dozen years of war.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Sanlie, CC BY-SA 4.0\nA perfect past (worshipping God in antiquity), a suffering present (the Manchu \u0026quot;demons\u0026quot;), a bright future (the little heaven). All three acts present. Those it mobilised went from a few thousand God Worshippers in the mountains of Guangxi to holding half of China. The commonly given estimate of those who died in the war is twenty to thirty million.\nThe other side of the three-act narrative The three-act narrative mobilises strongly, and it has its dangers.\nOnce a group believes \u0026quot;the future is perfect and we are the ones who will bring it about,\u0026quot; every present cost can be called worth paying. For the sake of the \u0026quot;bright future,\u0026quot; people before one's eyes can be sacrificed; the \u0026quot;suffering present\u0026quot; needs someone to blame, so an enemy must be found.\nRussell, in A History of Western Philosophy, used this very structure to analyse Marxism: the elect (the proletariat), the day of judgment (the revolution), the millennium (communist society). He held that it is this emotional structure from Judaism and Christianity that makes the theory seem credible.\nToday's three-act narrative This shape is still in use today.\nYou may know the set well: the Chinese nation has five thousand years of splendid civilisation (a perfect past); after the Opium War it went through more than a hundred years of humiliation (a suffering present); now the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is to be realised (a bright future). After 2012, \u0026quot;rejuvenation\u0026quot; became one of the most often heard official phrases.\nThe same shape, the same force: it makes people willing to endure and willing to give, and it also needs someone \u0026quot;who made us suffer humiliation.\u0026quot; Where it differs from the descent of Maitreya and the Taiping is that the storyteller has the state in hand.\nI am not saying the wish for \u0026quot;rejuvenation\u0026quot; is wrong. To want one's own civilisation to be respected again is a very natural thought, and I have it myself. I only want to add a reminder: when you hear this shape, ask once more who is telling it and why, and when the future arrives, on whose head the bill falls.\nTurning it around The claim that \u0026quot;the three-act narrative explains everything\u0026quot; must itself be treated with care.\nFirst, it fits almost any story. A frame that can explain everything often cannot explain anything specific.\nSecond, religions with a cyclical view of time have spread far all the same. Hinduism and Buddhism, with rebirth as their base, spread across South, Southeast and East Asia. The mass spread of Buddhism did not depend chiefly on end-time teachings such as the descent of Maitreya.\nThird, the Chinese traditional notion of \u0026quot;fortune of the age\u0026quot; (qishu) is another powerful teaching. The cycle of order and disorder and the transfer of the Mandate can also mobilise people (\u0026quot;he can be taken and replaced\u0026quot;), only what it promises is not \u0026quot;the end of history\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;the next round.\u0026quot;\nSo the safer statement is: the three-act narrative is a story shape that is especially good at mobilising people, but not the only one.\nWhen were you last moved by a story like this?\nReferences\nMircea Eliade, Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, 1949 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945 The \u0026quot;Maitreya is born\u0026quot; slogan of the late-Yuan Red Turbans, the Taiping \u0026quot;little heaven\u0026quot; and estimates of war deaths, the official formulation of \u0026quot;the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation\u0026quot;: standard history A netizen's answer (2026-05), cited as a netizen's view Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w18/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-shape-that-looks-familiar\"\u003eA shape that looks familiar\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLook at a few stories first:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumans originally lived in the Garden of Eden, fell through original sin, and in future will enter heaven through redemption.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIsrael once had a glorious kingdom, was exiled for faithlessness, and in future the Messiah will come and rebuild the kingdom.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumans originally lived in a classless primitive society, later fell into class oppression and alienation, and in future will enter communism.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUtterly different in content, identical in shape: perfect past → suffering present → bright future.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Cranach, The Garden of Eden\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w18/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLucas Cranach the Elder, The Garden of Eden, 1530. In one picture, from the making of man and the stealing of the fruit to the expulsion, all at once. Everything begins in a perfect garden.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucas_Cranach_%28I%29_-_Adam_and_Eve-Paradise_-_Kunsthistorisches_Museum.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Three-Act Narrative"},{"content":"A popular intuition In discussions of East Asia's low fertility I often see a claim, one I once largely accepted myself: a secular society is doomed not to have children, only religion-driven populations can sustain high fertility, so East Asia must either find a religion or head for exhaustion.\nThe example behind this claim is usually Israel: a developed country with a total fertility rate close to 3, and still higher among the ultra-Orthodox.\nThe intuition is partly right: in surveys in many countries, the more devout the group, the more children they have on average.\nBut if \u0026quot;religion determines fertility\u0026quot; is a law, Iran is hard to explain.\nIran's numbers After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran became an Islamic republic led by religious scholars. In the early revolution, the government encouraged childbearing, and the family planning programme of the Pahlavi era was shelved.\nIn the early 1980s Iran's total fertility rate was close to 7 children per woman.\nThen the number began to fall. By 1988 it was about 5.5; by 1996 it was below 2.8, halved in eight years; around 2000 it fell to replacement level, about 2.1. After that it went on falling, below replacement.\nIran's total fertility rate, marking only the four approximate figures used in the text; the dashed lines between points are only illustrative.　Data: Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2009\nIn their monograph on Iran's fertility transition, the demographers Abbasi-Shavazi and colleagues say it was one of the largest and fastest recorded declines in fertility.\nA theocracy covered, in under twenty years, a road that many countries took decades or even a hundred years to cover.\nWhich side the religious leaders stood on More surprising still, this decline did not happen against religion.\nIn the late 1980s, just after the Iran–Iraq War, the population was growing too fast, and the economy, employment and education could not bear it. In December 1989 the government relaunched national family planning: it encouraged women to space births three or four years apart, discouraged pregnancy under 18 and over 35, and advocated at most three children per family.\nThe key step was to win religious legitimacy. In their weekly sermons religious leaders presented the small family as a social responsibility; they also issued rulings confirming that contraception and birth control are permitted under Islamic law.\nAt the same time Iranian women's education rose sharply, the medical network in town and country reached remote places, and contraceptives were given free.\nAn old street in Tehran in 2017. Among university students in Iran today, women are often more numerous than men.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by somiz, CC BY-SA 2.0\nThen the direction reversed The story is not over.\nFrom the 2000s, Iran's fertility rate stayed below replacement level. In 2012 Supreme Leader Khamenei said publicly that the population-control policy should have been stopped as early as the mid-1990s; in 2014 he formally put forward a set of \u0026quot;general population policies\u0026quot; encouraging births. After that Iran turned to encouraging more births, and contraceptive services were tightened step by step.\nBut fertility did not rise much.\nOn the Chinese side This script is not unfamiliar to East Asians.\nChina began the one-child policy in 1980 and carried it out for over thirty years, in many places by fines, IUDs, sterilisation and forced abortion. In 2016 a second child was allowed, in 2021 a third, and later localities began to give childcare subsidies to encourage births.\nThe direction turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, yet the fertility rate did not follow it back. To push it down, a whole administrative machine was used; when they wanted to pull it back, they found the machine knew only how to push, not how to pull. How the families felt who were fined, had their houses demolished and were forced to hospitals in those years, and were later urged to have more, nobody has asked them.\nI will write on fertility separately later, in the series Current Affairs. Here only one sentence: in Iran it is religious authority turning around, in China administrative authority turning around, and the results of both turnarounds are much the same.\nWhat this shows The Iranian case shows at least three things:\nFirst, religious authority can support birth control, and it can support births. The same religious system gave opposite instructions at different times. Religion is not a machine that \u0026quot;only raises fertility\u0026quot;; the interpretation of doctrine adjusts to reality.\nSecond, education, urbanisation, medicine and economic pressure are enormously powerful. When women read more and children cost more, even in a theocracy the fertility rate falls fast.\nThird, once the fertility rate has fallen, it is hard to pull back by exhortation. The countries of East Asia are going through this now.\nTurning it around This is not to say religion has no effect on fertility. Within one country, the more devout groups often really do have more children; Israel's ultra-Orthodox are an example. The British scholar Eric Kaufmann argued the demographic advantage of religiously conservative groups at length in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010).\nBut \u0026quot;a correlation inside groups\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;the way out for a country as a whole\u0026quot; are two different things. To treat religion as the key to raising fertility may overrate religion and underrate modern life.\nWhat do you think matters most in deciding whether a person has children?\nReferences\nMohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, Peter McDonald, Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi, The Fertility Transition in Iran, Springer, 2009 Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, 2010 Iran's relaunch of family planning in 1989, religious rulings supporting contraception, the policy turn in 2012, the \u0026quot;general population policies\u0026quot; of 2014: standard history and research surveys China's one-child policy (1980), second child (2016), third child (2021): standard history Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w19/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-popular-intuition\"\u003eA popular intuition\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn discussions of East Asia's low fertility I often see a claim, one I once largely accepted myself: a secular society is doomed not to have children, only religion-driven populations can sustain high fertility, so East Asia must either find a religion or head for exhaustion.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe example behind this claim is usually Israel: a developed country with a total fertility rate close to 3, and still higher among the ultra-Orthodox.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe intuition is partly right: in surveys in many countries, the more devout the group, the more children they have on average.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut if \u0026quot;religion determines fertility\u0026quot; is a law, Iran is hard to explain.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"irans-numbers\"\u003eIran's numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran became an Islamic republic led by religious scholars. In the early revolution, the government encouraged childbearing, and the family planning programme of the Pahlavi era was shelved.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Iran's Fertility Rate"},{"content":"An argument in a comment section Every year around Qingming a question surfaces online: is ancestor worship at Qingming a religion?\nI once saved an argument from a comment section, and its positions are quite representative:\nOne person said: \u0026quot;Remembering the dead has nothing to do with religion. Missing your family is a perfectly normal feeling.\u0026quot; Another replied: \u0026quot;Then why burn paper, set out offerings, kowtow? By Occam's razor, missing your family does not need any of these rituals. Yet for thousands of years the Chinese have kept making them.\u0026quot; Someone brought out the textbook definition: \u0026quot;A religion has four elements: an object of belief, doctrine, ritual, a centralised organisation. Ancestor worship has no doctrine and its organisation is scattered, so it does not count.\u0026quot; Someone else said: \u0026quot;It has all four: ancestors, family instructions, sacrifice, ancestral hall. It is only that people are atomised now and the halls are gone.\u0026quot; The argument is interesting because it touches a real problem: where did the ruler we use to define \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; come from?\nA Western ruler The Chinese word for \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; today (zongjiao) was carried over in the late nineteenth century from Japanese, to match the English \u0026quot;religion.\u0026quot; And the concept of religion grew up with Christianity as its model: a clear object of belief (God), a written doctrine, an independent organisation (the church), and clear membership (baptism).\nMeasured with this ruler, Buddhism and Daoism can just about be fitted in; ancestor worship, worship of the Earth God, geomancy, burning incense at New Year are hard to measure. They have no church, no initiation, and no identity of \u0026quot;I am an adherent of such-and-such.\u0026quot;\nSo an odd thing happens: in international surveys East Asia is often listed among the places with the highest share of the \u0026quot;unaffiliated.\u0026quot; In South Korea's 2015 census, more than half said they had no religion; in China and Japan the share of \u0026quot;no religion\u0026quot; is higher still.\nAsking differently But ask differently, not \u0026quot;what religion do you follow\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;do you do these things,\u0026quot; and the answers change a great deal:\nAt New Year and festivals, do you offer incense to your ancestors? At Qingming, do you sweep the grave? Have you been to a temple to burn incense and draw a fortune slip? For a wedding or a move, do you check the date? In East Asia, those who answer \u0026quot;yes\u0026quot; to such questions are often far more numerous than those who tick \u0026quot;has a religion\u0026quot; on a questionnaire.\nTomb-sweeping day: paper money flying over the graveyard hill.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by chia ying Yang, CC BY 2.0\nSince 2008 Qingming has been a statutory public holiday in China. Every Qingming, hundreds of millions of people hurry along the roads just to stand before an ancestor's grave for a while. It is hard to say this has nothing to do with \u0026quot;belief.\u0026quot;\nDiffused religion In Religion in Chinese Society (1961), the sociologist C. K. Yang offered an explanation that is still influential today.\nHe distinguished two forms of religion:\nInstitutional religion: with independent theology, organisation and clergy, such as Buddhism and Daoism. Diffused religion: no independent organisation, belief and ritual scattered through the life of family, lineage, community and state. Ancestor worship is led by the head of the family, the village earth god is maintained by the village, and Heaven is sacrificed to by the emperor. Yang held that Chinese religious life exists mainly in a diffused way. There is no church, yet it is everywhere.\nBy this frame, sweeping the graves at Qingming is of course religious behaviour; only its \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; is the lineage, its \u0026quot;clergy\u0026quot; the elders of the family, and its \u0026quot;scripture\u0026quot; the rules handed down generation after generation.\nQingming has been managed too This diffused religion was also battered in the twentieth century.\nFrom the 1950s the government pushed funeral reform: cremation first in the cities, later extended to the countryside, with burial squeezed bit by bit. In the \u0026quot;Smash the Four Olds\u0026quot; years of the 1960s and 70s, ancestor worship and burning paper were treated as \u0026quot;feudal superstition\u0026quot;; ancestral halls were torn down, tablets smashed, genealogies burned, and in many places even the graves were levelled.\nIn 2012, for \u0026quot;funeral reform,\u0026quot; Zhou kou in Henan levelled over two million graves in less than a year (the official figure is 2.46 million). Some families had barely levelled an ancestral grave when, the following spring, they quietly piled the earth back up.\nA religion without a church has no one to speak for it and nowhere to hide. That it has lasted to today is entirely because each household has carried it, year after year.\nQingming in the South Seas Interestingly, overseas this body of practice is sometimes kept more completely.\nBukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore: five-coloured paper weighted down on a grave mound at Qingming. This Chinese cemetery holds over a hundred thousand burials, and the earliest tombstones go back to the Qing.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Jacklee, CC BY-SA 3.0\nOfferings set out for the ancestors at Qingming by a Thai Chinese family: a whole chicken, pork, fruit, cakes. Several generations no longer speak Chinese, but they remember how to lay out the offerings.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Ubs6u!d-pongsakorn, CC BY-SA 4.0\nIn Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, many Chinese have not spoken Chinese for generations, yet at Qingming the whole family still goes up the hill, and the offerings are laid out as they always were. Their passports are not Chinese, and on a questionnaire they may not tick \u0026quot;has a religion,\u0026quot; but this is something they have kept doing.\nEast Asia's religiousness is in the \u0026quot;doing\u0026quot; So is East Asia really the place that is \u0026quot;least religious\u0026quot;?\nA perhaps more accurate way to put it: East Asia's religiousness is not in \u0026quot;belonging\u0026quot; but in \u0026quot;doing.\u0026quot; People do not say much \u0026quot;I am an adherent of such-and-such,\u0026quot; yet they do many things with a religious flavour.\nThis also explains why the claim \u0026quot;East Asians have no faith, so they need a religion\u0026quot; so often feels awkward: it takes a ruler built on Christianity, measures out a \u0026quot;blank,\u0026quot; and then hurries to find an institutional religion to fill it.\nTurning it around But \u0026quot;diffused religion\u0026quot; is also changing.\nUrbanisation has scattered the lineages and the halls are gone; many young people go home only once a year, at Qingming. Ancestor worship looks more and more like a \u0026quot;cultural custom\u0026quot; and less and less like a rite with content of belief. If a person sweeping a grave does not believe the ancestors are watching from another world, is that still religion?\nOn the other hand, some argue that precisely because diffused religion has no organisation, it is especially fragile in modern society: with no church to gather people, no weekly meeting, once the family scatters, the belief scatters with it. This may be one reason some institutional religions have grown in East Asian cities.\nWhy I keep staring at Qingming When I say I want to turn Confucianism into a religion, many people think I want to build a new church. I do not. What I want has been there all along: ancestor worship, Qingming, New Year, Chinese characters you can read. These are East Asians' common faith, only nobody has ever looked at it as a religion, and so nobody has ever kept watch over it.\nChristianity has the church, Islam has the mosque, and wherever they scatter they can gather again. Our body of practice relied on the ancestral hall and the lineage; when the city came and the hall was torn down, it was left with that single day of Qingming. What I want to do is give it a form that can gather people without the lineage, so that a child who grew up in Singapore, a child who grew up in Seoul and a child who grew up in Guangzhou know, on that day, that what they are doing is the same thing.\nWhen you sweep a grave, what is on your mind?\nReferences\nC. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, UC Press, 1961 Statistics Korea, religion item of the 2015 census The Zhoukou grave levelling: People's Daily, 4 Dec 2012, \u0026quot;by the end of November, funeral reform in Zhoukou, Henan, had been under way for 10 months … 2.46 million graves levelled or moved\u0026quot; (reposted by National Business Daily) 🟢; on New Year's Eve 2013, one village in Taikang County piled up more than 160 graves in two hours: Huashang Daily (reposted by Rujia Net, 2013-02-22) 🟡; after the State Council amended the Funeral Management Regulations, villages piled their graves up again, and by 2016 \u0026quot;most of the levelled graves had been rebuilt\u0026quot;: The Beijing News, 2016-04-05, \u0026quot;The Aftermath of the Zhoukou Grave Levelling\u0026quot; (reposted by Rujia Net) 🟡 Qingming a statutory holiday in China since 2008; funeral reform since the 1950s, the \u0026quot;Smash the Four Olds\u0026quot; campaign: standard history and news reports Related online discussion (2026-04), cited as netizens' views Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w20/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"an-argument-in-a-comment-section\"\u003eAn argument in a comment section\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEvery year around Qingming a question surfaces online: is ancestor worship at Qingming a religion?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI once saved an argument from a comment section, and its positions are quite representative:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOne person said: \u0026quot;Remembering the dead has nothing to do with religion. Missing your family is a perfectly normal feeling.\u0026quot;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAnother replied: \u0026quot;Then why burn paper, set out offerings, kowtow? By Occam's razor, missing your family does not need any of these rituals. Yet for thousands of years the Chinese have kept making them.\u0026quot;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSomeone brought out the textbook definition: \u0026quot;A religion has four elements: an object of belief, doctrine, ritual, a centralised organisation. Ancestor worship has no doctrine and its organisation is scattered, so it does not count.\u0026quot;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSomeone else said: \u0026quot;It has all four: ancestors, family instructions, sacrifice, ancestral hall. It is only that people are atomised now and the halls are gone.\u0026quot;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe argument is interesting because it touches a real problem: where did the ruler we use to define \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; come from?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Is Sweeping the Graves at Qingming a Religion?"},{"content":"The answer first If you are asking \u0026quot;if I scoop up a ladle of Ganges water right now and drink it, is that all right?\u0026quot;, the answer is simple: not advisable. There is no river anywhere with a large population living along it that people would advise you to drink from directly, and the Ganges is no exception. Other rivers simply do not have this many people pressing you for an answer.\nPeople bathing at the ghats of Varanasi (October 2000). Many know the water is not clean and go in all the same.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Dialog Center Images, CC BY-SA 2.0\nBut the question is rarely asked this way. The more common version is: can this river called \u0026quot;Mother\u0026quot; be clean again? Is it safe for the believers who go down to bathe in their thousands every year, even take a sip?\nFor that we need some numbers.\nA test during the Maha Kumbh From January to February 2025 India held the Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj, with officially hundreds of millions of visits to bathe.\nOn 3 February 2025 the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) submitted a report to the National Green Tribunal, whose core figures were:\nOn 20 January 2025 the faecal coliform of the Ganges at the confluence (Sangam) was 49,000 MPN (most probable number) per 100 millilitres; On the same day the Yamuna before the confluence was 33,000; By CPCB's standard, the permissible upper limit for \u0026quot;bathing water\u0026quot; is 2,500, and the \u0026quot;desirable\u0026quot; level is 500. That is, the number was nearly 20 times the permissible limit and nearly 100 times the desirable level. The report's conclusion: the water quality did not meet the primary standard for bathing.\nLater, though, things became interesting:\nAround 19 February 2025 the CPCB submitted another report to the Green Tribunal, saying that after statistical treatment, the \u0026quot;medians\u0026quot; of pH, dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand and faecal coliform at the eight concentrated bathing points at the confluence during the Maha Kumbh were within the permissible range and the water was \u0026quot;fit for bathing\u0026quot;; On 10 March 2025 the Union Environment Minister, answering a question in Parliament, cited that report and said the Ganges water during the Maha Kumbh was fit for bathing. One body, one river, one festival, two statements. The visible difference: the first records the sampled value at a specific point on a single day, 20 January; the second is the median of eight points across the whole festival period. Water quality changes with water volume, release schedules and crowds, and \u0026quot;passing\u0026quot; depends on how many points were taken and how they were averaged. But whichever way, the public saw two mutually contradictory reports, and that is itself a problem of trust. (I did not obtain the originals of the two reports; the above is as relayed by Indian media.)\nWhy it is dirty To understand why the Ganges is dirty, it is best to go through the sources of pollution one by one.\nOne, domestic sewage. This is the largest part. Along the river are hundreds of towns, each discharging large amounts of sewage every day, and part of it flows into the river untreated.\nTwo, industrial effluent. A typical case is the roughly 400 tanneries at Jajmau in Kanpur, whose effluent contains heavy metals such as chromium; treatment capacity has long failed to keep up, while tannery output has kept up very well.\nThree, agriculture. Fertiliser and pesticide run into the river with the rain.\nFour, religious activity itself. Cremated remains and ashes, flowers, offerings and plastic all enter the river. How large a share this is, I found no data.\nFive, water volume. Dams upstream divert much water for irrigation, so the downstream volume is smaller and its capacity to dilute pollutants is weaker.\nHow much was spent, how many treatment plants built The Indian government launched the \u0026quot;Clean Ganga Mission\u0026quot; (Namami Gange) from 2014 as a dedicated programme. By data from parliamentary replies and media relays:\nFrom fiscal 2014–15 to fiscal 2025–26 the total allocation was 30,096 crore rupees (about 300.96 billion rupees); by March 2025 18,842 crore (about 188.4 billion rupees) had actually been spent, an execution rate of about 63% (69% the year before); In the basin, 219 sewage projects had been approved with a total investment of 35,970 crore rupees, planned treatment capacity 6,610 MLD (million litres per day), of which 146 had been completed; as of June 2026 the treatment capacity actually built was 4,263 MLD, and 25 sewage treatment plants began operating in 2025; (another source gave a target of 7,000 MLD by December 2026.) An earlier analysis (June 2024) said the sewer network was 86% laid but treatment capacity only 52% complete. That is, the sewage was collected but there were not enough plants to treat it; collecting half is like moving dirty water neatly from one place to another. These numbers show both progress and gaps. Over sixty percent of the money was spent; how much cleaner the water got has to be counted separately.\nSome places are getting better Not all stretches are the same. By CPCB's 2025 assessment of rivers nationwide, the stretches judged \u0026quot;polluted\u0026quot; (biochemical oxygen demand above 3 mg per litre) fell from 351 in the 2018 baseline to 296, with the most severe category down to 37. The Ganges follows roughly such a pattern: the further upstream, the closer to the Himalaya, the better the water; the densely populated middle and lower reaches are under the greatest pressure. I did not check the changes state by state and stretch by stretch this time, so I do not list them.\nSo why do many still drink it This goes back to faith.\nThe ghats of Varanasi seen from the Ganges.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Marcin Białek, CC BY-SA 3.0\nIn Hinduism Ganges water is called \u0026quot;Gangajal,\u0026quot; holy water. Many families fill small bottles with Ganges water, take them home and put them on the household shrine; a dying person is fed a sip of Ganges water. Many believe Ganges water can \u0026quot;wash away sin,\u0026quot; even that it \u0026quot;never spoils.\u0026quot;\nThere is an interesting scientific background here: in 1896 the British bacteriologist Ernest Hankin observed that Ganges water could kill cholera vibrios. Later researchers suggested this might be because the water contains viruses that infect bacteria, bacteriophages (bacteriophages were discovered only in the 1910s). This is a hypothesis, and the conclusions of studies are not uniform. Some studies have also discussed other properties of Ganges water such as its oxygen content and minerals.\nBut caution is needed: a phenomenon of several decades ago, or some properties of one stretch of water, cannot show that the water of the whole river in every month is safe today. If the water contains large amounts of sewage and pathogens at the same time, bacteriophages cannot save you.\nSo for the believer, \u0026quot;taking a sip\u0026quot; is a ritual, not a hygienic act. The two can coexist: God is God, a lab report is a lab report, and doctors generally deal only with the latter.\nTurning it around First, \u0026quot;Ganges pollution\u0026quot; is sometimes treated as a simple story. In fact it is a basin more than 2,500 kilometres long, passing through several states, and problems, responsibilities and progress differ in different places.\nSecond, there is a mutual incomprehension between \u0026quot;numbers\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;faith.\u0026quot; To a believer, asking \u0026quot;is this river clean?\u0026quot; may be the same as asking \u0026quot;is your god not effective?\u0026quot; In that case the data from the environmental authority are taken by some as an affront to faith, and the government also tends to \u0026quot;stress that the water is up to standard during big festivals.\u0026quot; This is only my observation; I found no systematic study, and it must be treated with caution.\nThird, improvement is slow also because it involves infrastructure, regulation, funding, population and behaviour at once. Building treatment plants alone is not enough; someone must operate and maintain them, someone must supervise them, and someone must be willing to pay.\nIf a river is both a country's centre of faith and its environmental problem, then when data and faith conflict, who tells everyone \u0026quot;the truth\u0026quot;? And how can it be believed?\nReferences\nCPCB report to the National Green Tribunal (3 February 2025; relayed by Deccan Herald, Moneylife, Climate Fact Checks and others); Rajya Sabha written reply of 13 March 2025 Namami Gange allocation and expenditure data (IMPRI, Tribune, NBMCW and others); CPCB's 2025 assessment of polluted river stretches Ernest Hankin, observation on the bactericidal property of Ganges water (1896) Down To Earth: \u0026quot;Maha Kumbh 2025: Ganga, Yamuna's long-term sustainability depends on continuous monitoring...\u0026quot; ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w21/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-answer-first\"\u003eThe answer first\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you are asking \u0026quot;if I scoop up a ladle of Ganges water right now and drink it, is that all right?\u0026quot;, the answer is simple: not advisable. There is no river anywhere with a large population living along it that people would advise you to drink from directly, and the Ganges is no exception. Other rivers simply do not have this many people pressing you for an answer.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"People bathing at the ghats of Varanasi (October 2000). Many know the water is not clean and go in all the same.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w21/02.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePeople bathing at the ghats of Varanasi (October 2000). Many know the water is not clean and go in all the same.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bathing_ghats,_Ganges,_Varanasi,_October_2000_%2823121567501%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Dialog Center Images, CC BY-SA 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Can You Actually Drink Ganges Water?"},{"content":"A service like a music festival I once saved a piece a netizen wrote about a church service he attended in the American countryside:\nThe stage was set up like a rock band: electric guitar, electric bass, drum kit, synthesiser, in place of the organ and choir he had pictured. The pastor preached like a TED speaker, with a ceiling camera automatically following his face, big screens on either side playing in sync, and slides behind him changing with the sermon. Before new believers were baptised, a short interview film was shown, telling the story of \u0026quot;confusion, struggle, finding the Lord, being saved.\u0026quot;\nA service at Lakewood Church in Houston. The church's auditorium was originally a basketball arena, the home court of the Rockets.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0\nThe church also ran a pile of side programmes: youth Bible study, workplace fellowships, alcohol-recovery groups, a relief organisation, a kindergarten.\nHis conclusion: such a church operates like a company. The senior pastor is like a CEO, with associate pastors under him for finance, personnel and public relations, and young pastors sent to new cities to \u0026quot;plant churches,\u0026quot; the way a chain store opens branches.\nThe religious market theory This intuition has a formal version in the sociology of religion, called \u0026quot;religious market\u0026quot; theory, or \u0026quot;religious economy\u0026quot; theory.\nThe sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark published The Churching of America, 1776–1990 in 1992. They advanced a very challenging view: America is more devout than Europe precisely because America has no state church.\nThe logic runs like this:\nWhere there is a state church (as in the history of many European countries), the church is supported by the state, like a monopoly firm; without competitive pressure it has little drive to recruit believers. Where there is religious freedom and no state church (as in America), the denominations compete for believers like firms and must offer better \u0026quot;service\u0026quot; to survive: more moving sermons, a warmer community, more practical help. The result: the fiercer the competition in the \u0026quot;religious market,\u0026quot; the more people take part in religion. This is exactly the reverse of traditional \u0026quot;secularisation theory.\u0026quot; Secularisation theory holds that pluralism weakens religion; religious market theory holds that pluralism and competition energise it.\nMegachurches America's \u0026quot;megachurches\u0026quot; are the most vivid example of this theory. By the standard commonly used by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a Protestant church with 2,000 or more people at weekly services counts as a megachurch. America has well over a thousand of them, and the biggest draw tens of thousands a week.\nWhat they have in common is what the netizen described: modern music and media, corporate management, programmes sorted for different groups of people, and a strong sense of community.\nChina's three-colour market Someone has put this pair of glasses on in China.\nThe Chinese-American sociologist Fenggang Yang proposed in 2006 that religion in China is a \u0026quot;three-colour market.\u0026quot;\nRed market: government-approved religion, registered temples, Daoist monasteries, churches and mosques, operating under the official patriotic religious associations. Black market: religious groups banned by the government, branded \u0026quot;evil cults,\u0026quot; operating underground. Gray market: the large area that is neither red nor black, legally unclear: unregistered house churches, folk temple fairs, qigong, geomancy, fortune-telling, the \u0026quot;study traditional culture\u0026quot; scripture-reading classes… His observation was that the more tightly the red market is controlled, the larger the gray market grows. What the government can control is the registered part, but a great deal of religious demand squeezes out of the red market into the gray, and grows there by itself.\nBy Finke and Stark's account, state monopoly weakens religion; but in China the state did not support a state church, it rationed religion as a whole. The result was not that religion weakened, but that religion moved to live somewhere else.\nWhat this is good for in understanding the future of religion The \u0026quot;religious market\u0026quot; view can explain many phenomena elsewhere:\nWhy do Pentecostal churches in Africa and Latin America grow so fast? They are flexible, localised, not dependent on the old churches' structures, and expand like start-ups. Why are some old religions declining? They may have lost their \u0026quot;grassroots position,\u0026quot; no longer able to handle ordinary people's weddings and funerals and mutual help in emergencies. Why is the number of people who are \u0026quot;spiritual but not religious\u0026quot; rising? Perhaps there are too many substitutes in the \u0026quot;market\u0026quot;: counselling, meditation apps, fitness groups, hobby clubs. I also saw a comment online that puts it very clearly: \u0026quot;Religion, lineage and association are all ways of grassroots self-organisation. In birth, ageing, illness and death, weddings and funerals, whoever can better meet people's needs holds more of the population.\u0026quot;\nTurning it around Religious market theory is hotly disputed in academia.\nFirst, it has trouble with some counterexamples. In some highly pluralistic, fiercely competitive countries, religious participation is not high; in some countries where one church almost monopolised (such as Poland and Ireland in the twentieth century), religious participation was for a time very high. By market theory, monopoly should have weakened religion.\nSecond, it may make faith sound too much like consumption. Many people are religious not because they compared the \u0026quot;service\u0026quot; of several churches and picked one, but because of family, tradition and real experience of faith. Treating religion wholly as a \u0026quot;market\u0026quot; misses what in it cannot be exchanged.\nThird, America itself is changing. In the past twenty years the share of Americans with \u0026quot;no religion\u0026quot; has risen markedly. Even the churches best at \u0026quot;management\u0026quot; face the loss of the younger generation.\nSo religious market theory is more like a pair of glasses: put on, it lets you see what you could not see before, but you cannot keep it on to look at everything.\nWhere is our \u0026quot;megachurch\u0026quot;? While reading this piece, what I thought of was the native-place halls of Nanyang.\nA hundred-odd years ago, a young man from Fujian or Guangdong who took a boat to Penang or Singapore went first, on landing, to the native-place association hall: a place to stay, someone to introduce work, care if he fell ill, someone to lay him out if he died, his tablet placed in the hall's ancestral shrine, and someone to sacrifice to him every year. Is that not a \u0026quot;megachurch\u0026quot;? Only it has no pastor; what it has is ancestors and fellow villagers.\nWhat we lack is not faith but a place like this that can catch people. The halls did it in their day, and later they were torn down on the Chinese mainland and worn thin by time overseas. For the Confucianism I want, the first step is not to write scriptures but to build such places again.\nDo you think a religion should be \u0026quot;run\u0026quot; like a company?\nReferences\nRoger Finke \u0026amp; Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990, Rutgers UP, 1992 Fenggang Yang, \u0026quot;The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China,\u0026quot; The Sociological Quarterly 47(1), 2006 The Hartford Institute for Religion Research definition of a \u0026quot;megachurch\u0026quot; (2,000 or more at weekly services): standard definition Netizens' answers and comments (2026), cited as netizens' views Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w21/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-service-like-a-music-festival\"\u003eA service like a music festival\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI once saved a piece a netizen wrote about a church service he attended in the American countryside:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe stage was set up like a rock band: electric guitar, electric bass, drum kit, synthesiser, in place of the organ and choir he had pictured. The pastor preached like a TED speaker, with a ceiling camera automatically following his face, big screens on either side playing in sync, and slides behind him changing with the sermon. Before new believers were baptised, a short interview film was shown, telling the story of \u0026quot;confusion, struggle, finding the Lord, being saved.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"A service at Lakewood Church\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w21/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA service at Lakewood Church in Houston. The church's auditorium was originally a basketball arena, the home court of the Rockets.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lakewood_worship.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, CC BY 3.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Churches Run Like Companies"},{"content":"An extreme religion Many people first hear of Jainism because it is \u0026quot;extreme.\u0026quot;\nThe core Jain teaching is non-violence (ahimsa), and it is pushed to the limit: devout monks cover their mouths and noses with cloth so as not to breathe in small insects; they sweep the ground with a whisk as they walk so as not to tread on ants; some followers do not eat root vegetables, because digging them up harms the life in the soil.\nA monk of the Śvetāmbara Jains with a white cloth (muhpatti) over his mouth so as not to breathe in small insects while speaking. Everyone has worn a mask lately; they have worn theirs for over two thousand years.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Samyak Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0\nJainism arose in India at about the same time as Buddhism, around the sixth century BCE. Both opposed the Brahmin sacrifices and caste privilege, and historians place them together in the śramaṇa movements of the time. But Buddhism took the \u0026quot;Middle Way,\u0026quot; while Jainism taught strict asceticism.\nHistorically Jainism split into two great sects: the Digambara hold that a true renunciant must give up all property, even clothing; the Śvetāmbara monks may wear white robes. The two also differ on questions such as whether women can attain liberation.\nNon-violence and business The teaching of non-violence has deeply shaped what work Jains choose.\nFarming cannot avoid harming the creatures in the soil, and soldiering and slaughtering even less. For a long time many Jains turned to trade, moneylending and jewellery. Today Jains are among India's religious groups with the highest education, the most urbanisation and the highest average income.\nThe Jain temple at Ranakpur in Rajasthan, built in the fifteenth century, with over a thousand marble columns, said to be no two alike. The money to build it came from a Jain merchant.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Brihaspati, CC BY 4.0\nThis is often taken as an example of \u0026quot;religion shaping economic behaviour,\u0026quot; a little like Max Weber's Protestant ethic and capitalism.\nThe numbers are getting smaller But Jainism has run into a modern difficulty: its share of the population is falling.\nAccording to India's census, in 2011 India had about 4.45 million Jains, 0.37% of the national population. In 1981 the share was 0.47%. In thirty years the share fell by more than a fifth. From 2001 to 2011 the Jain population grew only a little over 5%, far below India's overall growth.\nJains as a share of India's population, censuses of 1981 and 2011.　Data: Census of India\nOne reason is few births. The census data show that Jain families have markedly fewer children than the national urban average. Much schooling, high earnings, city living: the factors that push fertility down elsewhere nearly all apply to Jains, and to a deeper degree.\nAnother reason is blending with the society around them. Jainism and Hinduism share many festivals and customs, and intermarriage is not rare; in some censuses Jains are also recorded as Hindus from time to time.\nA surprising contrast The Jain case makes an interesting contrast with a popular claim.\nThe claim goes: strongly religious groups have more children, so religious groups will \u0026quot;inherit the earth.\u0026quot;\nBut the Jains are a very strongly religious group with very strict rules, and they have few children. This suggests that religion itself does not necessarily bring high fertility; a religious group's circumstances, how much schooling, whether they live in cities, whether women work, may matter more than doctrine.\nThe same reasoning can be applied to Buddhism: Buddhists have few children largely because they are clustered in the East Asian societies with the fewest births.\nHow a small religion lives Still, perhaps Jainism does not need \u0026quot;many people.\u0026quot;\nJains have never been numerous, yet they have continued for more than two thousand five hundred years. They have relied not on numbers but on a very tight web: temples, charities, business networks, a circle of marriage. In India and abroad, Jain communities are known for helping one another and trusting one another.\nIt is a bit like the Jews and the Parsis (India's Zoroastrians): few in number, clear boundaries, high internal trust, with an economic and cultural weight far above their share of population.\nFor such a group the real threat may not be \u0026quot;few people\u0026quot; but blurring boundaries: if the younger generation no longer cares about what sets them apart from others, the community may slowly dissolve in the blending.\nTurning it around \u0026quot;The richer, the smaller\u0026quot; may also be a simplification. India's census has its own problems of how people are recorded; the Jain population overseas is also growing; a falling share does not mean a community in decline.\nFew people, or loose borders? The Jains, the Jews and the Parsis all chose the road of \u0026quot;few people, tight borders,\u0026quot; held on, and also shut many people outside the gate.\nThat is not the road I want. East Asians already number well over a billion and are scattered across the world. We do not lack people; what we lack is something that people are willing to come back to and can find the way back to. So I would rather have the borders a little looser and the threshold a little lower: if you can write Chinese characters, sweep the graves at Qingming, offer to your ancestors at New Year, you are one of us, whatever passport you hold and whatever language you speak. With so many people, the web cannot be tightened through marriage circles as the Jains' is; it has to be tied together by a set of rites and festivals that everyone recognises.\nIf a group keeps its cohesion through strict borders, at the price of an ever smaller number of people, do you count that as success or failure?\nReferences\nIndia's 2011 census religion data (Jains about 4.45 million, 0.37%; 0.47% in 1981) Fredrik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969 Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, 2010 Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;Why is Buddhism shrinking worldwide?\u0026quot;, 2026-03-11 Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w22/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"an-extreme-religion\"\u003eAn extreme religion\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMany people first hear of Jainism because it is \u0026quot;extreme.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe core Jain teaching is non-violence (\u003cem\u003eahimsa\u003c/em\u003e), and it is pushed to the limit: devout monks cover their mouths and noses with cloth so as not to breathe in small insects; they sweep the ground with a whisk as they walk so as not to tread on ants; some followers do not eat root vegetables, because digging them up harms the life in the soil.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"A Jain monk wearing a mouth cloth\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w22/02.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA monk of the Śvetāmbara Jains with a white cloth (\u003cem\u003emuhpatti\u003c/em\u003e) over his mouth so as not to breathe in small insects while speaking. Everyone has worn a mask lately; they have worn theirs for over two thousand years.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sthanakvasi_Jain_Monk.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photo by Samyak Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Jainism: The Richer It Gets, the Smaller It Grows"},{"content":"A city where meat may not be sold In August 2014 the Gujarat government announced that Palitana would become a \u0026quot;no-meat zone\u0026quot;: slaughter of animals is banned across the whole city, and the sale of meat, fish and eggs is banned. The media called it \u0026quot;the world's first officially recognised vegetarian city.\u0026quot;\nThe Jain temples of Palitana, Gujarat.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Aashvi Sanghvi, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThis decision (14 August) was, by reports, made after about 200 Jain monks went on hunger strike in protest. Palitana is one of the most important holy places of Jainism, with hundreds of temples on the hill.\nA city, because of the religious belief of a small group, changed the menu of all its residents. Hunger strike as a way of negotiating has low cost and quick effect, provided you really dare to go hungry. This happened in a country with a Hindu majority and also Muslims, Christians and others.\nNow look at August 2025. The Mumbai municipal corporation issued an order on 14 August to close the city's slaughterhouses for two days (24 and 27 August) during the Jain festival of Paryushana (a festival lasting about a week). Jain groups proposed closing them for the whole week. The Bombay High Court expressed reservations, saying it would invite similar demands from other festivals. The Jain side also pointed out that Ahmedabad had long closed its slaughterhouses for the entire festival.\nThese two examples show the same thing: a group that is very small and whose voice is very loud.\nFirst the numbers In the 2011 census India had 4,451,753 Jains, 0.37% of the population, the smallest of India's six major religions; In 1981 the share was 0.47% (some sources say 0.48%). That is, in 30 years the share fell by more than a fifth (see the piece on Jainism in the Old Souls, New Bodies series). In Pew's 2021 survey Jains were 0.4% of the Indian population. One thing first: Pew interviewed nearly thirty thousand people, but only 109 of them were Jains, so every Pew number below can only be taken as a rough outline.\nNow who they are:\nEducation. In Pew's survey about a third (34%) of Jain adults have a college degree, against 9% nationally. The 2011 census counts differently: among Jains, 25.65% are graduates and above, also the highest of any religion; the literacy rate of Jains is 86.73%, likewise the highest. Wealth. Pew, citing the \u0026quot;wealth index\u0026quot; of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), says Jains are the wealthiest religious group, with the great majority of Jain households in the top few bands nationally. I have seen a more specific claim elsewhere (about 70% in the richest fifth), but this time I did not check the original table, so I do not write it. Diet. 92% of Jains say they are vegetarian, and two thirds do not eat root vegetables such as garlic and onion. Caste. Only 20% of Jains say they belong to the lower castes, against 68% nationally. They are the only religious group in India of which most say they belong to the \u0026quot;general category\u0026quot; (upper). Geography. Concentrated in the west, especially Maharashtra. 4% of Mumbai's residents are Jains. Politics. Of every 10 Jains, 7 say they are closest to the Bharatiya Janata Party; among Hindus the share is 44%. That is: few in number, but highly educated, wealthy, concentrated in a few big cities, with strong organisation. Add these together and in any country it is a group that gets things done. A group like this, even when very small, can make a voice in politics and society larger than its numbers would suggest.\nWhy this is so Non-violence (ahimsa) is the core of Jainism. It rules out many occupations: farming (turning soil harms insects), slaughter, military service, leather. So many Jains turned to commerce, finance, jewellery and trade. Religion shut several roads, and many more people took the ones that remained. (See the piece on Jainism in the Old Souls, New Bodies series, which discusses in more detail how religion influences choice of occupation; I do not repeat it here.)\nThis road has a result: money, education, cities and community networks, four things stacked together. And these four are also the factors in modern society that most easily bring fertility down.\nA position of \u0026quot;having it both ways\u0026quot; The Jains' position in Indian law and politics is a bit delicate.\nA Śvetāmbara (Sthānakavāsī) Jain monk, with a mouth cloth to avoid accidentally harming small creatures.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Samyak Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0\nOn one side, they are a minority religion in law. On 20 January 2014 the Union government listed Jainism as a national-level \u0026quot;minority community,\u0026quot; the sixth, after Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis.\nOn the other side, they are among the most stable supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (Pew's figure: seven in ten say they are closest to the BJP). In the accounts of some Hindu nationalists Jainism is often counted as part of the \u0026quot;great Hindu family,\u0026quot; and inside Jainism the attitude to this is not uniform. The minority status won in 2014 was seen by many Jain organisations as recognition of \u0026quot;we are an independent religion.\u0026quot; This part concerns disagreements within the community; I found no systematic study and have only set the two attitudes side by side.\nThat is also why there is a relation of mutual use between Jain demands (meat bans, protection of animals) and larger political currents: the Hindu vegetarian tradition and cow protection, and Jain non-violence, often combine in practice. But this cooperation has its frictions.\nOne more niche matter In August 2015 the Rajasthan High Court ruled that Sallekhana in Jainism (also called Santhara, a rite of voluntarily fasting at the end of life until death) is suicide and should be banned. Jain groups strongly opposed it, regarding it as a question of religious freedom. This judgment of 10 August 2015 was stayed by the Supreme Court three weeks later (31 August).\nThe point of this is not the outcome but what it shows: when an ancient religious practice meets modern legal concepts (suicide, the right to life), how should society deal with it?\nTurning it around First, is \u0026quot;the richer, the smaller\u0026quot; a rule? There is a similar example: the Parsis (India's Zoroastrians). They are also a small, wealthy, highly educated group concentrated in Mumbai; their number fell from about 70,000 in 2001 to about 57,000 in 2011, and from 2013 the government even launched a programme to encourage births, \u0026quot;Jiyo Parsi.\u0026quot; This shows the phenomenon has appeared in other wealthy small groups too. But there are counterexamples, and more comparison is needed.\nSecond, few people does not necessarily mean little influence. The Jains' \u0026quot;shrinking\u0026quot; is in population share; their role in the economy, philanthropy and political lobbying does not necessarily shrink in step.\nThird, different people feel differently about this influence. Some see it as the virtue of protecting animals; others feel a very small group should not decide everyone's menu. According to Indian media such as Outlook and Open, in cities like Mumbai some housing societies neither rent nor sell to meat-eaters (not written in the rules, an unwritten practice), and are accused of discrimination. These frictions arise at the surface where a community with a clear boundary touches the larger society.\nFourth, population is not the only measure. Should a religion's \u0026quot;success\u0026quot; be measured by numbers, or by whether it continues and whether it lets believers live the life it considers good? This is a question we asked in Old Souls, New Bodies, and in India the answer is more complicated: because a small group's choices directly affect other people.\nIf a community's numbers are shrinking while its influence grows, what should it most worry about: becoming fewer, or becoming so different from others that more and more people see it as a burden?\nReferences\nIndia's 2011 census: Jains 4,451,753, 0.37%; 0.47% in 1981 Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;6 facts about Jains in India,\u0026quot; August 2021 NFHS-4 (2015–16) wealth index distribution by religion (relayed by GKToday, Wikipedia and others) Reports on Palitana becoming a \u0026quot;no-meat zone\u0026quot; in 2014 (TheNewsMinute, Yale FORE and others) Reports on the Sallekhana case (LiveLaw, Gulf News, Times of India, August 2015) Reports on the closure of slaughterhouses in Mumbai during Paryushana 2025 (LiveLaw, Free Press Journal) Old Souls, New Bodies series: \u0026quot;Jainism: The Richer It Gets, the Smaller It Grows\u0026quot; ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/manche/w22/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-city-where-meat-may-not-be-sold\"\u003eA city where meat may not be sold\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn August 2014 the Gujarat government announced that Palitana would become a \u0026quot;no-meat zone\u0026quot;: slaughter of animals is banned across the whole city, and the sale of meat, fish and eggs is banned. The media called it \u0026quot;the world's first officially recognised vegetarian city.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Jain temples of Palitana, Gujarat.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/manche/w22/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Jain temples of Palitana, Gujarat.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jain_Temples_of_Palitana,_Gujarat.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Aashvi Sanghvi, CC BY-SA 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis decision (14 August) was, by reports, made after about 200 Jain monks went on hunger strike in protest. Palitana is one of the most important holy places of Jainism, with hundreds of temples on the hill.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA city, because of the religious belief of a small group, changed the menu of all its residents. Hunger strike as a way of negotiating has low cost and quick effect, provided you really dare to go hungry. This happened in a country with a Hindu majority and also Muslims, Christians and others.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Jains: The Richer, the Smaller, and Still Not Quiet"},{"content":"1830 In March 1830, in western New York State, a new scripture was published: the Book of Mormon.\nIts \u0026quot;translator\u0026quot; was a twenty-four-year-old man, Joseph Smith. On 6 April 1830 he and a few followers founded a church, later called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generally known as the Mormon Church.\nJoseph Smith (1805–1844). He died at thirty-eight in a jail in Illinois, shot by a mob with blackened faces.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nNobody then would have bet on its survival. In 1844 Smith was killed by a mob. In 1847 Brigham Young led the believers all the way to Salt Lake City. In 1890 the church formally announced that it was giving up polygamy, and only then made peace with the federal government.\nA number At the end of 2025 the church reported registered members of 17,887,212.\nThis is the church's own count of registered members, not the number sitting in church every Sunday. Even so, it is where a body that began nearly two hundred years ago with six people has arrived.\nThe Salt Lake Temple, begun in 1853 and completed in 1893, forty years in the building. A people driven out of the East built a temple for themselves at the edge of the desert.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Diliff, CC BY 2.5\nStark's prophecy The American sociologist Rodney Stark is among the best-known students of this church.\nHe took Mormonism as a case to answer a question: why do some new religions succeed and others fail? In 1996 he arranged his answer into a checklist, with roughly these conditions:\nKeep a certain continuity with the mainstream culture of the society; it cannot be something wholly alien. Have a \u0026quot;medium degree\u0026quot; of tension with the surroundings: too loose, there is no reason to join; too tight, nobody dares to join. Have legitimate, authoritative leadership. Be able to mobilise a body of volunteers willing to give their time. Have enough children to replace those who die. Grow up in a religious environment where competitors are relatively weak. Have tight internal ties and at the same time be open to outsiders. Teach the next generation well and lose few. From this Stark projected that, at the growth rate of the time, the Mormon Church would have about 267 million members in 2080.\nHow much of the prophecy came true We now have the figure for 2025: 17,887,212.\nTo reach 267 million by 2080, it would have to grow by about 5% a year from now on.\nActual growth in the last two years was 1.5% and 2.2%. In 2025 the church reported 385,490 baptisms, a record, and that year did grow faster than the one before.\nRegistered members of the Latter-day Saints, actual figures for 2023–2025 and Stark's projection for 2080. The dotted line only joins the two ends; it is not a growth curve.　Data: the church's annual statistical reports; Stark \u0026amp; Neilson, 2005\nSo the prophecy is so far too high, but the direction is right: it is a church that is still growing.\nAnother example Japan's Soka Gakkai is a very different body.\nOn 18 November 1930 the educators Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Josei Toda founded it, then called the \u0026quot;Soka Kyoiku Gakkai\u0026quot; (Value-Creating Education Society). On 18 November 1944 Makiguchi died in prison because he refused to enshrine the talisman of the Ise Shrine. I told this in Neighbours' Heaven.\nTsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944). He died in prison on the very day, the fourteenth anniversary, of the society's founding.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Soka Gakkai, public domain\nAfter the war Josei Toda came out of prison and in 1951 began the \u0026quot;great propagation\u0026quot; campaign, setting himself the goal of 750,000 households before he died. By 1960 the body reported about 1.3 million households. In 1964 it founded the Komeito party. In 1967 it claimed 6.2 million households.\nToday Soka Gakkai itself says it has 8.27 million member households in Japan. Some scholars estimate that the truly committed members number between two and four million.\nSet Stark's checklist beside it and some items fit, such as the power to mobilise and the web; some do not fit so well. Whether anyone has tested this systematically, I did not look up this time.\nAnother kind of ending On the checklist's item \u0026quot;medium tension,\u0026quot; East Asia offers two very conspicuous examples.\nOne is the Unification Church in Japan. In July 2022 former prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot dead on a street in Nara. The gunman said his mother had given so much money to the Unification Church that the family was ruined, and he hated the church and the politicians close to it. In the following years Japanese society went through a round of scrutiny of the Unification Church's large donations, and the government even applied to a court to dissolve it. A body held up by large offerings had become so tense that society could no longer tolerate it.\nThe other is Falun Gong. It was founded in 1992 in Changchun, China, and within a few years practitioners were found in cities and villages everywhere. In April 1999 over ten thousand practitioners gathered near Zhongnanhai in Beijing to petition; in July the government announced its ban, followed by long suppression, with many practitioners detained or sent to labour camps and some dying inside; the exact numbers differ greatly between the government's account and Falun Gong's. It has almost vanished in China, yet it has survived overseas, running newspapers, television stations and touring shows.\nBy Stark's checklist its \u0026quot;tension\u0026quot; in China went far beyond \u0026quot;medium,\u0026quot; and it should by rights have died; but in another country, in an environment of religious freedom, the tension dropped straight back to \u0026quot;medium.\u0026quot; Whether a new religion survives depends not only on itself but on the ground it stands on.\nTurning it around Stark's checklist has a basic flaw: it was drawn up after the fact.\nWhat we see is the religions that survived, and then we look for what they have in common. The new religions that died mostly never made it into any book. The same \u0026quot;medium tension\u0026quot; can explain success and can explain failure, because how much \u0026quot;medium\u0026quot; is can only be known after the result is in.\nBesides, \u0026quot;registered members\u0026quot; is a very soft number. Those of the Mormons and of Soka Gakkai are both published by the bodies themselves, and their way of counting often differs widely from outside estimates.\nWhat counts as a religion's success I do not look at numbers.\nOn whether a religion is a success I ask only two things: can it let scattered people recognise one another, and can it be passed down to the fifth, the tenth generation. The Jews are few, and have been handed down three thousand years; in my eyes that is success. A body that drew in several million people in ten years and vanished like smoke twenty years later is not.\nBy this standard, the East Asians' ancestral body of practice, Qingming, New Year, reading Chinese characters, has already been a success for two thousand years. Its problem now is not that nobody believes, but that nobody gathers people for it and hands it on. What I want to do is supply that missing link.\nAmong the people you know, who first stepped into a place of worship because a friend introduced them?\nReferences\nRodney Stark, \u0026quot;Why Religious Movements Succeed or Fail: A Revised General Model,\u0026quot; Journal of Contemporary Religion 11(2), 1996; Rodney Stark \u0026amp; Reid L. Neilson, The Rise of Mormonism, Columbia UP, 2005 (the projection of about 267 million for 2080) Annual statistical reports of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: 17,255,394 in 2023; 17,509,781 in 2024; 17,887,212 in 2025; 385,490 baptisms in 2025 Soka Gakkai: founded 18 Nov 1930; \u0026quot;great propagation\u0026quot; from 1951; about 1.3 million households in 1960; Komeito in 1964; 6.2 million households claimed in 1967; 8.27 million claimed (2025); Levi McLaughlin estimates 2–4 million people Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: died in prison 18 Nov 1944 Joseph Smith (born 1805), the church's founding on 6 Apr 1830, his killing in 1844, arrival in Salt Lake in 1847, the renunciation of polygamy in 1890: standard history Falun Gong: Human Rights Watch, Dangerous Meditation: China's Campaign Against Falungong, 2002 (full text): Li Hongzhi founded it in May 1992; on 25 April 1999 over ten thousand practitioners queued to petition near Zhongnanhai; on 22 July the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security announced the ban; up to ten thousand estimated sent to labour camps; when the report was written, Falun Gong said 234 had died in custody or shortly after release, and the government had accounted for only 72 of these cases; on practitioner numbers, the government estimated 40 million at the end of 1998 and revised it to about 2 million in 2001, and Falun Gong claims over 70 million inside China 🟢 The assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022 and the Unification Church issue: standard history and news reports Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w23/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"1830\"\u003e1830\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn March 1830, in western New York State, a new scripture was published: the \u003cem\u003eBook of Mormon\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts \u0026quot;translator\u0026quot; was a twenty-four-year-old man, Joseph Smith. On 6 April 1830 he and a few followers founded a church, later called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generally known as the Mormon Church.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Joseph Smith\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/duoshe/w23/02.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eJoseph Smith (1805–1844). He died at thirty-eight in a jail in Illinois, shot by a mob with blackened faces.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Smith,_Jr._portrait_owned_by_Joseph_Smith_III.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNobody then would have bet on its survival. In 1844 Smith was killed by a mob. In 1847 Brigham Young led the believers all the way to Salt Lake City. In 1890 the church formally announced that it was giving up polygamy, and only then made peace with the federal government.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How New Religions Survive"},{"content":"Search online for \u0026quot;simulated universe Yogacara\u0026quot; and you will find a batch of articles that put Yogacara, quantum physics and \u0026quot;consciousness is the base layer of the universe\u0026quot; together, very satisfying to read. One netizen said the world is only a \u0026quot;three-dimensional great dream, moment by moment.\u0026quot;\nI want to read it against the original: what does Yogacara itself say? What does the original of \u0026quot;all dharmas are made by the mind\u0026quot; say? This is Part 1, covering only the Yogacara side. Part 2 turns to the simulated universe.\nOne thing first: both parts read the relevant claims as thought experiments, and do not decide for any side.\n1. What the original says of \u0026quot;all dharmas are made by the mind\u0026quot; The most often cited source of this line is the Avatamsaka Sutra. In the eighty-fascicle version, fascicle 19, chapter \u0026quot;Verses of Praise in the Yama Palace,\u0026quot; a verse spoken by the bodhisattva Jue Lin (Awakening Forest). The original runs:\n\u0026quot;The mind is like a skilled painter, able to paint all the worlds; the five aggregates all arise from it, there is no dharma it does not make. ... If a person wishes to understand all the buddhas of the three times, he should contemplate the nature of the dharma realm: everything is made by the mind alone.\u0026quot;\nCover of a Goryeo-period (c. 1400) manuscript of the Avatamsaka Sutra*, flowers drawn in gold paint on indigo paper. In Korea and Japan this sutra has always been more honoured than in China.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, British Library, CC0*\nNote that the original says \u0026quot;everything is made by the mind alone.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;All dharmas are made by the mind\u0026quot; is the later common wording; I could not find where it first appears.\nThis verse itself has several points not usually mentioned.\nIt uses the painter as an analogy. The same verse also has a line: \u0026quot;Like a skilled painter, he cannot know his own mind, yet by the mind he paints.\u0026quot; The painter can paint a world, yet does not know his own mind.\nIt says \u0026quot;As the mind, so the Buddha; as the Buddha, so living beings\u0026quot;: mind, Buddha and living beings are not different. The point of the verse is the relation among these three, not \u0026quot;whatever I want, I get.\u0026quot;\nIn the same chapter another bodhisattva, Li Lin (Power Forest), says: \u0026quot;The world is not made by itself, and also not made by another.\u0026quot; The world is neither made by oneself nor by anyone else. This line will be used in Part 2.\nThe popular reading is \u0026quot;what the mind wishes comes true.\u0026quot; In the verse's original, there is no such meaning.\n2. Yogacara: turning \u0026quot;mind-made\u0026quot; into an argument The one who turned this thought into an argument was Vasubandhu. His Twenty Verses on Consciousness-Only survives in Xuanzang's translation. It opens:\n\u0026quot;I establish that the three realms of the Mahayana are consciousness-only, in accord with the sutra's saying that the three realms are mind alone.\u0026quot;\nStatue of Vasubandhu at Kofukuji in Nara, Japan, carved in the thirteenth century by the Unkei school. An Indian master, in a Japanese temple, carved as a weathered old monk.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nNext comes the most crucial line of the whole treatise:\n\u0026quot;When inner consciousness arises, it appears like an outer object, as one with eye disease sees hairs and flies.\u0026quot;\nMeaning: when the consciousness in the mind arises, it looks as if there were something outside, just as a person with an eye disease sees hairs and flies.\nSaid this way, someone at once objects: if there is nothing outside, why do I see such a thing only in this place and at this time? Why do many people see the same thing at once? Why can those things still act, be eaten, harm people?\nVasubandhu answers with dreams, hungry ghosts and hells. Two passages are very interesting:\n\u0026quot;Take hungry ghosts who share the same karma and ripening: many bodies gathered together all see a river of pus.\u0026quot;\n\u0026quot;In the same place at the same time, many continuums all see together prison guards, dogs, crows, iron mountains and so on coming to where they are, to harass and harm them.\u0026quot;\nA group of hungry ghosts sees at the same moment the same river of pus; a group of beings in hell sees at the same moment the same guard coming at them with a knife. There is no real guard; their karma is alike, so what they see is alike. This is called \u0026quot;shared karma.\u0026quot; That a hallucination can hit you becomes, in this argument, a merit.\nThis answers exactly the biggest hole in \u0026quot;mind-made\u0026quot;: if it is made by the mind, why does the world not obey me?\nYogacara's answer is: the world is not something I produce by a thought now; it is the transformation of habit-energies since beginningless time. The Thirty Verses say: \u0026quot;By the consciousness of all seeds, it transforms in this way and that; through the force of mutual conditioning, this and that discrimination arise.\u0026quot;\nThe Cheng Weishi Lun (Treatise on the Establishment of Consciousness-Only), fascicle 2, also divides \u0026quot;seeds\u0026quot; into two kinds. One's own body is \u0026quot;by the ripening power of the uncommon seeds of the vipaka consciousness, transformed into the semblance of the material sense organs and their supports\u0026quot;; and there are also \u0026quot;common seeds,\u0026quot; which let everyone enjoy one world together. (This is my summary: the body is transformed from each person's own seeds, the world from seeds held in common.)\nThe world does not obey me because it is not transformed only from my own seeds.\n3. Yogacara's exit: the turning of the basis Having said how the world comes about, one must say how to come out. Yogacara's exit is called \u0026quot;turning of the basis\u0026quot; (zhuanyi).\nFascicle 9 of the Cheng Weishi Lun gives a very clear definition:\n\u0026quot;'Basis' means what is relied upon, that is, the dependent nature, which serves as the support of defiled and pure dharmas. 'Defiled' means the falsely imagined, clung-to nature; 'pure' means the real, perfected nature. 'Turning' means the two aspects: turning away and turning toward.\u0026quot;\nIt goes on to say that when practice cuts off obstacles one can \u0026quot;turn away the imagined nature clung to on the dependent nature, and turn toward the perfected nature in the dependent nature. By turning the afflictions one gains great nirvana; by turning the obstruction to knowledge one realises supreme awakening.\u0026quot;\nMy summary: the ground on which the world works (the dependent nature) remains; what is to be dropped is the clinging to \u0026quot;real self, real things\u0026quot; laid over it; what is to be gained is how it was before that was laid on. So Yogacara's liberation points to changing how one sees the world, not to leaving this world.\nZhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly, painted by Lu Zhi of the Ming. \u0026quot;I do not know whether Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreamed it was Zhou.\u0026quot; The Chinese were asking the same question very early; only Zhuangzi had no plan to come out of the dream.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain\nHow does one go? The Cheng Weishi Lun lists five stages, called the \u0026quot;five positions\u0026quot;: the stage of provisions, the stage of preparatory practice, the stage of penetrating insight, the stage of cultivation, and the ultimate stage.\nThe last lines of the Thirty Verses are: \u0026quot;Non-attainment, inconceivable, is supramundane wisdom; by abandoning the two kinds of heaviness one realises the turning of the basis. This is the undefiled realm, inconceivable, wholesome, permanent, the body of peace, bliss and liberation, named the great sage's dharma.\u0026quot;\nThe two characters \u0026quot;non-attainment\u0026quot; deserve a second look: even the thought \u0026quot;I have gained something\u0026quot; must be put down. When the Thirty Verses speak of one stage of practice there is a warning: \u0026quot;Setting up a little something before one, and saying 'this is the nature of consciousness-only,' because there is something gained, one does not truly abide in consciousness-only.\u0026quot; Meaning: if you hold \u0026quot;consciousness-only\u0026quot; too in your hand as a thing and say \u0026quot;this is it,\u0026quot; you do not yet truly dwell in consciousness-only.\nThis line will be used again in Part 2.\nTurning it around First, the claims often seen online I could not find as such in the original texts cited above. For instance, \u0026quot;the world regenerates one frame at every moment.\u0026quot; That does not mean they are wrong; it means they are later elaborations, not the letter of the treatises.\nSecond, Yogacara does not say the body does not exist. The Twenty Verses itself says that although what is in a dream has no real object, it \u0026quot;has the function of loss of semen and blood and so on,\u0026quot; and the treatise admits this \u0026quot;illusory function.\u0026quot; Pain is real pain; only its source, the treatise does not place in matter outside the mind. A netizen put this point very clearly, and I agree.\nThird, whether Yogacara is idealism, that \u0026quot;only mind exists in the world,\u0026quot; is still disputed in the academy. Some read it as epistemology or phenomenology, some as ontological idealism. This piece does not judge for them.\nFourth, I have read only the originals handed down in Xuanzang's line. Yogacara has other translation traditions in China; I have not read their accounts.\nHas there been a dream whose feeling stayed with you longer, after waking, than something in real life?\nReferences\nAvatamsaka Sutra, eighty-fascicle version, fascicle 19, \u0026quot;Verses of Praise in the Yama Palace,\u0026quot; chapter 20, translated by Śikṣānanda (verses of Bodhisattva Jue Lin and Bodhisattva Li Lin), Taishō (Wikisource) Vasubandhu, Twenty Verses on Consciousness-Only, translated by Xuanzang, Taishō (Wikisource) Vasubandhu, Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only, translated by Xuanzang (Wikisource) Cheng Weishi Lun, fascicles 2 and 9, translated by Xuanzang, Taishō (Wikisource) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, \u0026quot;Yogācāra\u0026quot;: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yogacara/ Netizens' articles and answers (read 2026-10-05, used as leads, not as evidence) Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w24/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSearch online for \u0026quot;simulated universe Yogacara\u0026quot; and you will find a batch of articles that put Yogacara, quantum physics and \u0026quot;consciousness is the base layer of the universe\u0026quot; together, very satisfying to read. One netizen said the world is only a \u0026quot;three-dimensional great dream, moment by moment.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI want to read it against the original: what does Yogacara itself say? What does the original of \u0026quot;all dharmas are made by the mind\u0026quot; say? This is Part 1, covering only the Yogacara side. Part 2 turns to the simulated universe.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne thing first: both parts read the relevant claims as thought experiments, and do not decide for any side.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"1-what-the-original-says-of-all-dharmas-are-made-by-the-mind\"\u003e1. What the original says of \u0026quot;all dharmas are made by the mind\u0026quot;\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe most often cited source of this line is the \u003cem\u003eAvatamsaka Sutra\u003c/em\u003e. In the eighty-fascicle version, fascicle 19, chapter \u0026quot;Verses of Praise in the Yama Palace,\u0026quot; a verse spoken by the bodhisattva Jue Lin (Awakening Forest). The original runs:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"\"All Dharmas Are Made by the Mind\": The Original Says Something Else (Part 1)"},{"content":"Part 1 covered the Yogacara side: the original of the Avatamsaka Sutra is \u0026quot;everything is made by the mind alone\u0026quot;; Vasubandhu used dreams, hungry ghosts and hells to argue that outer objects need not exist; the exit is called the turning of the basis. This piece goes on to the simulated universe, to see where it parts ways with Yogacara.\nThis series is called Duoshe, \u0026quot;possession.\u0026quot; The word has a premise: consciousness can leave this body and move into another shell.\nIn 2003 the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper whose premise is also a single one: consciousness need not grow in a brain; as long as the computation is fine enough, it can exist on other material too.\nBoth sides are \u0026quot;consciousness changes shells.\u0026quot; That is a coincidence, and I do not intend to build on it.\nPlato's Cave, engraved by Jan Saenredam after a painting by Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604. The prisoners watch shadows on the wall and think they are the world. \u0026quot;The world is not what it looks like\u0026quot;: people were thinking this over two thousand years ago.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, National Gallery of Art, Washington, CC0\n1. The simulation hypothesis: it says something else Bostrom's 2003 paper offers a choice of one from three:\nFirst, humanity will very likely go extinct before reaching a \u0026quot;posthuman\u0026quot; stage. Second, posthuman civilisations will almost never run large numbers of ancestor simulations. Third, we are almost certainly living in a simulation.\nThe argument also relies on two assumptions: that consciousness can be realised on different material substrates, and the \u0026quot;principle of indifference,\u0026quot; meaning that if most minds like yours are in simulations, you should estimate your own situation in that proportion.\nNote that Bostrom himself accepts that \u0026quot;the disjunction holds,\u0026quot; which does not mean he accepts the third. He also says that even if the third were true, the implications would not be so radical.\nThe philosopher David Chalmers also wrote \u0026quot;The Matrix as Metaphysics.\u0026quot; He breaks \u0026quot;we live in the Matrix\u0026quot; into three claims: the physical world is made of an underlying computational process, space-time was created by an external being, and my mind is outside space-time.\nHis most interesting point: this is not scepticism. Even in the Matrix, a table is still a table, most beliefs are still true; only the underlying implementation of the table differs from what we thought. In Reality+ (2022) he later said it more fully: a virtual world is not a second-class reality.\n2. The fork: is there a \u0026quot;host machine\u0026quot; Yogacara and the simulation hypothesis look alike in one place: the world we see is not what it looks like.\nOn the Chinese internet many articles read Yogacara, quantum physics and \u0026quot;the universe is a simulation\u0026quot; together, and the few I read all take this form. I say only that this is a common way of writing, and do not evaluate each article.\nThe fork is right here.\nThe simulation hypothesis's world is \u0026quot;made by another.\u0026quot; Chalmers's \u0026quot;creation hypothesis\u0026quot; says it bluntly: space-time was created by a being outside. Outside there is a more basic layer of reality, with machines and the people who made it.\nWhat Yogacara sets out to block is the \u0026quot;external object,\u0026quot; that is, real, external matter. In the passages I quoted, there is no place for a \u0026quot;host machine outside that makes the world.\u0026quot; The Huayan verse is even plainer: \u0026quot;The world is not self-made, and also not made by another.\u0026quot; The simulation hypothesis is exactly \u0026quot;made by another.\u0026quot;\nSo reading \u0026quot;all dharmas are made by the mind\u0026quot; as \u0026quot;someone outside made this world\u0026quot; is a misreading. (Care is needed here; one cannot turn it round and say \u0026quot;Yogacara opposes the simulation hypothesis.\u0026quot; Yogacara is an argument of over a thousand years ago, and never thought about servers.)\nThere is a second fork, more hidden. Yogacara does not stop at \u0026quot;consciousness.\u0026quot; Part 1 quoted the warning from the Thirty Verses: \u0026quot;Setting up a little something before one, and saying 'this is the nature of consciousness-only,' because there is something gained, one does not truly abide in consciousness-only.\u0026quot;\nWithin Yogacara's three natures this is put in fine detail: the \u0026quot;real self and real things\u0026quot; laid over the workings of the world are what is clung to; remove that clinging and what is revealed is the \u0026quot;perfected nature.\u0026quot; Both subject and object are, finally, not real: this is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's summary of Yogacara.\nSo if someone takes \u0026quot;the world is code\u0026quot; as the end point, Yogacara would probably say: you have set up one more thing.\n3. The exits After \u0026quot;the world is not what it looks like,\u0026quot; each tradition gives a different exit.\nWho made it Is there a more basic world outside True or false Exit Gnosticism (for comparison) A lesser demiurge Yes, the \u0026quot;Pleroma\u0026quot; A flawed creation Recognise one's origin through \u0026quot;gnosis\u0026quot; Simulation hypothesis The simulators Yes Chalmers: it is real None, and none needed Yogacara Seeds and shared karma since beginningless time No external creator (by the passages quoted above) An illusion built by clinging; the workings of the world are not themselves nothing Turning of the basis A page of Nag Hammadi Codex II, the end of the Apocryphon of John*. In 1945 Egyptian farmers dug up these fourth-century Coptic codices in a clay jar, and the Gnostic scriptures saw daylight again.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain*\nGnosticism is a comparison. It holds that the material world is the work of a lesser demiurge, and that humans carry a spark of divine light which, recognised through \u0026quot;gnosis,\u0026quot; lets them return to that higher world. The story of The Matrix is close in shape to this. (In recent years scholars have questioned whether \u0026quot;Gnosticism\u0026quot; can count as one unified category; I borrow only its rough outline here.)\nOn the simulation side, Chalmers says that even if it is a simulation, life has meaning all the same, and there is no exit to look for. Bostrom also says the implications are not so radical.\nYogacara's exit was covered in Part 1: the turning of the basis, changing how one sees the world, with no intention of leaving this world. Of the three, only Gnosticism wants to \u0026quot;escape.\u0026quot;\n4. Where \u0026quot;ultimate meaning\u0026quot; is placed The three place \u0026quot;meaning\u0026quot; differently.\nChalmers's view: meaning rests on consciousness and relations, not on whether the base is a simulation. Gnosticism places meaning in going home. Yogacara puts the problem on \u0026quot;suffering,\u0026quot; not on whether the world is real or false, so its end is \u0026quot;to abide in supreme perfect awakening.\u0026quot;\nWhat I see is this: asking \u0026quot;is the world real or fake\u0026quot; and asking \u0026quot;what counts as being free of suffering\u0026quot; are two questions. The simulation hypothesis answers the former, and answers it very uncertainly; Yogacara's main work lies in the latter. Putting them together makes it easy to use the answer to one question on the other.\nTurning it around First, an analogy can help imagination but cannot serve as proof. The alaya consciousness is not a hard drive, and seeds are not data. Translating Yogacara into computer language sounds satisfying, but every translation has a price.\nSecond, the claim above that there is \u0026quot;no external creator\u0026quot; rests only on the passages I quoted. Whether the whole Yogacara tradition has other accounts, and how the schools read it, I have not checked fully. Whether Yogacara counts as idealism is disputed in the academy to begin with.\nThird, the simulation hypothesis has also been criticised a good deal. The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder calls it pseudoscience, one reason being that it cannot be falsified: any evidence could itself be simulated. Chalmers himself admits this.\nFourth, Gnosticism is only a comparison. I have read only overviews, not the primary texts. Be careful about setting it equal to either side.\nMy leaning I take all three as thought experiments.\nThe use of a thought experiment is to pull a premise all the way through and see what follows. Pulled through, the three exits differ: Gnosticism wants to escape, the simulation hypothesis has no need to, Yogacara does not escape but turns. That in itself is already very interesting, and does not need to be sorted into true and false first.\nIf one day someone produced conclusive proof that \u0026quot;we live in a simulation,\u0026quot; what would be different about your next day?\nReferences\nNick Bostrom, \u0026quot;Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?\u0026quot;, Philosophical Quarterly, 2003: https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.html David Chalmers, \u0026quot;The Matrix as Metaphysics\u0026quot; (author's page version): https://consc.net/papers/matrix.html David Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, 2022 \u0026quot;Gnosticism,\u0026quot; Wikipedia (overview, including scholarly dispute over the category) Sabine Hossenfelder's criticism of the simulation hypothesis (as relayed by Big Think): https://bigthink.com/thinking/why-the-simulation-hypothesis-is-pseudoscience/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, \u0026quot;Yogācāra\u0026quot;: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yogacara/ Vasubandhu, Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only, translated by Xuanzang (Wikisource); Avatamsaka Sutra, eighty-fascicle version, fascicle 19 (same as Part 1) Netizens' articles and answers (read 2026-10-05, used as leads, not as evidence) Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/duoshe/w25/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePart 1 covered the Yogacara side: the original of the \u003cem\u003eAvatamsaka Sutra\u003c/em\u003e is \u0026quot;everything is made by the mind alone\u0026quot;; Vasubandhu used dreams, hungry ghosts and hells to argue that outer objects need not exist; the exit is called the turning of the basis. This piece goes on to the simulated universe, to see where it parts ways with Yogacara.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis series is called \u003cem\u003eDuoshe\u003c/em\u003e, \u0026quot;possession.\u0026quot; The word has a premise: consciousness can leave this body and move into another shell.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2003 the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper whose premise is also a single one: consciousness need not grow in a brain; as long as the computation is fine enough, it can exist on other material too.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"We May Be Living in a Simulation: Where It Parts Ways with Yogacara (Part 2)"},{"content":"A clash of names In the last piece I said my leaning is towards turning Confucianism into a religion, and that for now I call it \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot;, the Way of Heaven.\nAfter choosing the name, I looked it up. And found that in 1905 Korea already had a religion written with exactly the same characters, 天道教: Cheondogyo, \u0026quot;the Religion of the Heavenly Way\u0026quot;. It had a constitution, churches, newspapers and schools. Korea's Declaration of Independence in 1919 carried 33 signatures; 15 of the signers were its believers, and the first name on the list was its leader's.\nToday, it has very few followers in South Korea.\nThe names clash. But it is obviously the thing I most need to look at carefully. Whether our roads clash too, I'll say after looking.\nDonghak: an answer in one word The story starts in 1860.\nThat year a Korean scholar named Choe Je-u said he had received a mandate from Heaven. He came from a yangban (aristocratic) family, but because of his birth he was barred from the civil-service examinations, and he spent most of his life wandering. He called his teaching Donghak, \u0026quot;Eastern Learning\u0026quot;. The name itself was an answer: Western Learning has arrived; we have Eastern Learning.\nWhat he taught was not complicated. Heaven is not far away; it is inside every person. To serve Heaven is to serve that small thing inside your own heart. The poor could understand it, and they took it in.\nChoe Je-u (1824–1864), founder of Donghak.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown author, Public domain\nThe court saw it differently. In 1864 Choe Je-u was executed.\nWhen I read this, he always seems a little lonely to me: a man shut out of the examinations, on the road for most of his life, who in the end left behind one sentence the poor could understand, and his life.\nThat same year in China, Hong Xiuquan died and the Taiping capital at Nanjing fell. Two East Asian religions born under the Western impact, one that borrowed the Western God and one that insisted on calling itself \u0026quot;Eastern Learning\u0026quot;, lost their founders in the same year.\n1894 Donghak did not die. Its second leader, Choe Si-hyeong, compiled Choe Je-u's words into scriptures, and the movement spread further and further among ordinary people.\nIn 1894, peasants in Jeolla province rose under Donghak banners: against corrupt officials, against crushing taxes, and against foreigners. The court could not put them down and asked the Qing for troops. Japan, citing a treaty, sent troops too. The uprising was soon crushed, but the two armies stayed in Korea. A few months later, Qing China and Japan went to war on someone else's land.\nThat was the First Sino-Japanese War.\nSo one of the sparks of the Sino-Japanese War was a religion. Chinese history lessons rarely mention this, probably because, in China, that war was never really about Korea.\nFlag of the Donghak Peasant Revolution, written in Chinese characters.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Samhanin, CC0\nOne of the uprising's leaders was Jeon Bong-jun. In February 1895 he was brought under guard into Seoul. In the photograph he lies on a stretcher, carried, surrounded by people in winter clothes and snow. He was later executed. Every time I look at that photograph, it doesn't look like a \u0026quot;rebel\u0026quot; to me. It looks like a man who is frozen through.\nFebruary 1895: Donghak leader Jeon Bong-jun under arrest, lying on a stretcher, carried, with uniformed soldiers standing by.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Murakami Tenshin, Public domain\nIn 1898 Choe Si-hyeong was executed too.\nCheondogyo: turning an uprising into a church The third leader, Son Byong-hi, took a different road.\nIn 1901 he went into exile in Japan, and there he saw how a modern state worked. On 1 December 1905 he formally renamed Donghak as Cheondogyo. The next year he issued a constitution for it, set up a central organization, and opened schools and newspapers. He turned a failed peasant uprising into a modern religion with rules, structure, and the ability to deal with officialdom.\nSon Byong-hi (1861–1922), third leader of Cheondogyo.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown author, Public domain\nIts teaching was later condensed into three characters: innaecheon (人乃天), humans are Heaven.\nThe symbol I picked for my own idea is the seal-script 天: a standing person with one stroke above the head. They took that stroke away.\n1919 On 1 March 1919, in a restaurant in Seoul, the 29 national representatives who had come read out a Declaration of Independence. The declaration carried 33 signatures: 15 Cheondogyo believers, 16 Christians and 2 Buddhists; a few signers could not make it. Son Byong-hi signed first.\nThe March First Movement then swept the Korean peninsula and was brutally suppressed by the Japanese colonial authorities. Son Byong-hi was arrested, later released on medical bail, and died at home in 1922.\nThis was Cheondogyo's brightest moment. A religion that grew out of East Asian soil, named for the Way of Heaven, stood at the very front of a nation.\nThe other end But the same movement produced another group of people.\nIn 1904 one branch of Donghak merged into the Iljinhoe, the \u0026quot;Advance in Unity Society\u0026quot;. In 1906 Son Byong-hi expelled its leader, Yi Yong-gu, from the faith. In 1909 the Iljinhoe led a petition asking Japan to annex Korea.\nOne religious body: at one end, the first signature on the Declaration of Independence; at the other, people asking to be annexed.\nI don't want to tell this as a story of \u0026quot;traitors\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;heroes\u0026quot;. What matters more to me is this: once a religion is tied to politics, it gets carried in directions it cannot control. The same \u0026quot;Heavenly Way\u0026quot; can be used to resist the colonizer, and to argue for submitting to him.\nAfter rescue In 1945 the Korean peninsula was liberated, and then divided.\nIn the North, Cheondogyo survives as a nominal political party. In the South, its followers are very few: in a population of fifty million, almost invisible.\nWhy didn't it grow into a great religion? Researchers have offered many explanations. I'll just give my own guesses.\nFirst, it was tied too tightly to the nation's fate. When the nation was in danger, it was the spark. Once the nation was saved, it hadn't worked out what else it could be. If a religion only answers \u0026quot;how do we keep our country from dying\u0026quot;, then when the country is safe, nobody asks that question any more.\nSecond, when cities grew, someone else got there first. In a few decades South Korea went from a rural society to an urban one, and the people leaving their villages needed a new community. That place was taken by the churches. At night in Seoul today, what stands out most are the red crosses.\nThird, \u0026quot;humans are Heaven\u0026quot; may be too close to what modern people already believe. Equality, human dignity: once a whole society accepts these, a religion built on them struggles to show what it offers that can't be found elsewhere. It's the same story as Buddhist meditation being taken over by secular society.\nThe churches got there first Let me dig a little deeper into the second guess: how did \u0026quot;the churches took the place\u0026quot; actually happen?\nChristianity didn't arrive in Korea late. In 1784 a Korean who had been baptized in Beijing set up the first place of prayer in Seoul. It was banned by the court, and there were major persecutions in 1801, 1839 and 1866. For 1866, an old account says eight thousand died; the encyclopedia of the Academy of Korean Studies considers that an exaggeration from hearsay, with about 1,400 recorded martyrs. Nine French priests were also killed. Protestantism came only after 1883. It followed a policy of \u0026quot;self-supporting, self-governing local churches\u0026quot;, and the churches ran schools and hospitals as well. In 1907 there was a \u0026quot;Great Revival\u0026quot; in Pyongyang; among the signers in 1919 were 16 Christians. Later scholars explain it this way: anti-Japanese nationalism, modernization and education, literacy in Hangul spreading to ordinary people, and the idea that \u0026quot;everyone is made in God's image\u0026quot;, which shook the Confucian hierarchy.\nIn the 2015 census, Protestants were 19.7%, Buddhists 15.5%, Catholics 7.9%, and people with no religion 56.1%. (Another survey gives 31% for 2024, measured differently, so I don't put them side by side.)\nThere's one detail here that hurts more than the numbers. Korean Protestantism asked believers to stop performing ancestral rites, to stay away from the offering table. Only later did they come up with the \u0026quot;memorial service\u0026quot;, gathering on the anniversary of a death to hold a worship service, described as remembrance, not sacrifice. I wrote about this in Yigui. What I want to say is this: the churches took the place not only because they arrived first, but because they gave people who had left their villages a new \u0026quot;home\u0026quot;. It's just that this home asked them to put down part of the old one.\nIt is not the same as what I mean Same name, different road. So that nobody mixes them up, here are the differences:\nKorea's Cheondogyo (천도교) The Tiandao I mean Where it comes from Donghak: a home-grown new religion of 19th-century Korea, blending Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and folk belief, born in answer to \u0026quot;Western Learning\u0026quot; Confucianism becoming a religion: growing out of the Four Books, ancestral rites and the Mandate of Heaven Where Heaven is Innaecheon: humans are Heaven \u0026quot;Made of 一 and 大\u0026quot;: above a person's head there is still Heaven. Heaven moves with vigour, it is constant, it inspires awe and self-discipline For whom The Korean nation and its independence The whole pan-Confucian world of East Asia, the people I call East Asians Today Very few believers in South Korea Still only an idea From here on in this series, whenever I mean the one from the Korean peninsula, I'll call it Cheondogyo.\nReminders to myself Having written this far, I have three new reminders for my own idea:\nA religion that wants to outlive a crisis can't only answer the crisis's questions. The closer it gets to politics, the more likely politics carries it off, in whatever direction, not of its choosing. It needs something that secular society can't take away. As for what that something is, I don't know yet.\nAfter writing this I thought of one more thing. The \u0026quot;something secular society can't take away\u0026quot;: the best I can come up with now is everyday life. If a religion is only useful for big things, remembered only when the nation is in danger or when there's a choice to make, then once the country is settled, it will be taken away. But if it has a place in every single day, sweeping the graves at Qingming, honouring the ancestors at New Year, thinking of Heaven for a moment before a meal, no modern society will come to \u0026quot;take\u0026quot; these things, because they aren't claims; they are days. Cheondogyo's great difficulty was that its place was in \u0026quot;claims\u0026quot;, not in the days. What I want should be the other way round: first the days, then the claims.\nTo my Korean friends. On 1 March 1919, in a restaurant in Seoul, Son Byong-hi was the first to put his name on the Declaration of Independence, and of those thirty-three names, fifteen were people of your Cheondogyo. They knew what signing would mean. Go back a little: Choe Je-u could never take the examinations, and was executed at forty; Jeon Bong-jun was carried into Seoul on a stretcher, with snow all around; Son Byong-hi, after being released on bail, died in his own house. I am a writer in Chinese. Not one of these people appeared in my textbooks; I got to know them one by one only after I grew up. It is true that your Cheondogyo has few believers today. But in the coldest years of a nation, it was the one that stood at the front. I named my own idea \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot; and the name clashed with yours. I didn't come to take the name. I came to learn from you.\nIs a religion that is only useful when the nation is in danger still a religion?\nReferences\nRead alongside: the Yigui pieces \u0026quot;A Regime That Wanted to Burn Confucius and Mencius\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Who Chose the Word 'Shangdi'\u0026quot; (the Taiping response, same era); in this series, \u0026quot;What Is Heaven?\u0026quot; (innaecheon versus \u0026quot;made of 一 and 大\u0026quot;) Carl F. Young, Eastern Learning and the Heavenly Way: The Tonghak and Ch'ŏndogyo Movements and the Twilight of Korean Independence, University of Hawai'i Press, 2014 Cheondogyo timeline: 1860 Donghak; 1864 Choe Je-u executed; 1894 Donghak Peasant Revolution; 1898 Choe Si-hyeong executed; 1904 Iljinhoe; 1905-12-01 renamed Cheondogyo; 1906 Yi Yong-gu expelled; 1909 Iljinhoe annexation petition; 1919-03-01 Declaration of Independence (Cheondogyo 15 / Christian 16 / Buddhist 2); 1922 Son Byong-hi dies Pew Research Center, \u0026quot;Why is Buddhism shrinking worldwide?\u0026quot;, 2026-03-11 (for \u0026quot;taken over by secular society\u0026quot;) How Korea became Christian: Yi Seung-hun baptized in Beijing in 1784 and returned to preach; in the 1866 Byeongin persecution 9 of 12 French missionaries were executed: Wikipedia, \u0026quot;Catholic Persecution of 1866\u0026quot; 🟡 Martyrs of the 1866 Byeongin persecution (\u0026quot;eight thousand\u0026quot; is an exaggeration; about 1,400): Academy of Korean Studies, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, \u0026quot;병인박해\u0026quot; https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0023139 🟡 Religion in the 2015 South Korean census (Protestant 9.68 million, 19.7%; Buddhist 15.5%; Catholic 7.9%; no religion 56.1%): Korea Times, 2017-01-10, citing Statistics Korea https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/amp/lifestyle/others/20170110/more-koreans-now-non-believers-census-shows 🟡 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d01/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-clash-of-names\"\u003eA clash of names\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the last piece I said my leaning is towards turning Confucianism into a religion, and that for now I call it \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot;, the Way of Heaven.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter choosing the name, I looked it up. And found that in 1905 Korea already had a religion written with exactly the same characters, 天道教: Cheondogyo, \u0026quot;the Religion of the Heavenly Way\u0026quot;. It had a constitution, churches, newspapers and schools. Korea's Declaration of Independence in 1919 carried 33 signatures; 15 of the signers were its believers, and the first name on the list was its leader's.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday, it has very few followers in South Korea.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe names clash. But it is obviously the thing I most need to look at carefully. Whether our roads clash too, I'll say after looking.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Korea Really Did Have a \"Religion of the Heavenly Way\""},{"content":"One directive On 15 December 1945, Allied General Headquarters issued a directive, SCAPIN 448. Its title is long: \u0026quot;Abolition of Governmental Sponsorship, Support, Perpetuation, Control, and Dissemination of State Shinto (Kokka Shinto, Jinja Shinto)\u0026quot;.\nIt was drafted by William Bunce, an officer in the US Naval Reserve. As the Allies saw it, what they called \u0026quot;State Shinto\u0026quot; was Shinto twisted into a propaganda tool for militarism and ultra-nationalism.\nAfter the directive, shrines were no longer funded by the state, and schools no longer held Shinto ceremonies. The state and the shrines were cut apart.\nWhat had happened in the decades before?\nFirst, separate shrines from temples Before the Meiji Restoration, Japan's gods and buddhas had long been mixed together. There were buddhas in shrines and gods in temples; monks and shrine priests were often the same people.\nIn 1868 the new government ordered the \u0026quot;separation of gods and buddhas\u0026quot; (shinbutsu bunri), forcing the two apart. In some places a wave of destruction of Buddhist temples followed.\nThink of the people in those temples. They and the shrine priest next door had chanted together and kept the festivals together; then an order came saying you are two households now, separate. In many places ordinary people woke up one day not knowing which side they were supposed to burn incense at.\nThe new nation needed something to gather people's hearts around the emperor. It chose Shinto.\n\u0026quot;Shrines are not religion\u0026quot; Japan wanted to become a modern state, and a modern state promises freedom of religion.\nThe Meiji Constitution of 1889 guaranteed freedom of religion in Article 28, but with limits: so long as it did not disturb peace and order, and did not go against the duties of subjects.\nTo make everyone worship at shrines while still claiming to guarantee freedom of religion, there was only one way: declare that shrines are not religion.\nIn 1882 the Home Ministry ruled that shrine priests could no longer also serve as \u0026quot;national instructors\u0026quot; preaching doctrine. Shrines were carved out by regulation. What they performed were rites of the state, \u0026quot;the etiquette of the people\u0026quot;, not \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot;. Scholars later called this arrangement the theory that \u0026quot;shrines are not religion\u0026quot; (jinja hishūkyō ron).\nIn 1890 the Imperial Rescript on Education was issued. The Rescript and the emperor's portrait became the centre of school ceremonies.\nThe Imperial Rescript on Education, 1890. Together with the emperor's portrait, it later became the centre of school ceremonies.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Inoue Kowashi et al., Public domain\nSomeone who would not bow On 9 January 1891, at the First Higher Middle School in Tokyo, during a ceremonial reading of the Rescript on Education, a part-time teacher, Uchimura Kanzō, did not bow deeply to the Rescript.\nHe was a Christian.\nThe newspapers picked it up, and it became a national affair. Uchimura was forced to resign. The philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō wrote a series of articles arguing that Christianity was incompatible with a Japanese subject's duties to the emperor.\nUchimura Kanzō (1861–1930).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Masumoto Shigeo and Fujisawa Otokichi, Public domain\nThe definition \u0026quot;shrines are not religion\u0026quot; turned a bow into a test: are you Japanese?\nA man who wasn't trying to rebel, who simply didn't make that one deep bow, lost his job and became, on everyone's lips across the country, \u0026quot;disrespectful\u0026quot;. Reading this, I feel tired on his behalf.\nThe war years By the 1930s, the \u0026quot;national polity\u0026quot; (kokutai) was stressed more and more, and shrine worship looked more and more like an obligation.\nIn 1943 Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, later remembered as one of the founders of Sōka Gakkai, refused to accept a kamifuda, a shrine talisman. He and other leaders of the group, including Toda Jōsei, were arrested as \u0026quot;thought criminals\u0026quot;.\nOn 18 November 1944, Makiguchi, then in his seventies, died in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.\nMakiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Sōka Gakkai, Public domain\nHis motives are disputed. His religious group sees it as a protest against the militarist system; some scholars think he was mainly holding on to his Nichiren faith, and was not a political dissenter.\nAfter the separation After 15 December 1945, on 1 January 1946, the emperor issued the \u0026quot;Declaration of Humanity\u0026quot;. Article 20 of the new constitution of 1947 established the separation of religion and state.\nThe shrines left the state's embrace and became private religious corporations. In 1946 shrines across the country joined to form the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō).\nJapan is not the only state that defines religion \u0026quot;Shrines are not religion\u0026quot; was a state's definition of a tradition. This doesn't only happen in Japan.\nIn Indonesia, as far as I can tell from what I've read: in 1965 the state recognized Confucianism as one of six religions; in 1967 it restricted the religious and cultural activities of the Chinese; in 1978–79 a Home Ministry circular recognized only five religions, on the grounds that Confucianism hindered Chinese assimilation and \u0026quot;isn't a religion in China either\u0026quot;; recovery began only in 2000, and a 2006 circular from the Ministry of Religious Affairs recognized it again. The same thing, declared a religion one moment and not a religion the next, switching back and forth with political need. (I read the original texts of the 1965, 1967 and 2000 decrees; I did not read the 1978 and 2006 circulars, only accounts of them in Indonesian scholars' papers.)\nIn mainland China, five religions are officially recognized today: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestant Christianity. Confucianism isn't among them.\nHong Kong is different again. A 1928 ordinance, the Chinese Temples Ordinance, counts as a \u0026quot;Chinese temple\u0026quot; not only temples, monasteries, nunneries and Daoist halls, but any place where gods are worshipped, spirits consulted or fortunes told for payment from the public. What counts is what the place does and whether it takes money, not its doctrine. It set up a committee, and the ordinance states that the income, funds, investments and property of all Chinese temples are under the committee's full control. At the same time, according to the government's 2012 reply, the Home Affairs Bureau does not register religious bodies, and Hong Kong law does not regulate how religious bodies operate. (The Indonesian circular of November 1978 and the two letters of February 2006: I have read only scholarly paraphrase, not the originals.)\nThe other way round \u0026quot;When the state and religion are tied together, trouble follows\u0026quot;: this isn't always true.\nArticle 4 of Denmark's constitution still says that the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the established church of Denmark and is supported by the state. Sweden ended its state church on 1 January 2000. Norway amended its constitution in 2012 to remove the wording \u0026quot;state religion\u0026quot;, but the church remains \u0026quot;the people's church\u0026quot; and still receives state support. In these countries, the church coexists with freedom of religion and a plural society.\nSo the problem may not be \u0026quot;is there a state religion?\u0026quot; but something else: whether participation is forced, how high the price of leaving is, and whether what the state mobilizes is ritual or war.\nOne more layer: the \u0026quot;State Shinto\u0026quot; defined in the directive was the occupation's policy definition. Whether it was a single, unified thing is debated among scholars.\nJapan's case is a very clear reminder for me. I often say that a religion crosses states, peoples and time, so it shouldn't be defined by a state. I can accept that a state registers it: land, taxes, legal personality, these are realities. But \u0026quot;what is a religion\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;does your tradition count as a religion\u0026quot;: that definition I don't want the state to make. Because once the state defines it, you have to be whatever it wants you to be. If it says shrines are the people's etiquette, you have to bow; if it says Confucianism isn't a religion, you have to turn your temple into an academic institution. The same tradition, in the state's hands, \u0026quot;is\u0026quot; one moment and \u0026quot;isn't\u0026quot; the next, changing with its uses.\nI should also say something in fairness: in practice, the state staying completely out is not easy. In countries like Denmark and Sweden, church and state could be very close without trouble. Japan's problem was that the state used shrines as a tool to mobilize its people; the state required that you \u0026quot;must\u0026quot;. What I want is a narrower line: registration, yes; support, yes; but no requirement, no compulsion, no definition. Whether that line can be drawn, I don't know yet. History has few examples of it being done.\nTo my Japanese friends. The two people I most want to remember are these. On 9 January 1891, at the First Higher Middle School in Tokyo, on the day the Rescript was read, Uchimura Kanzō did not make that deep bow to it; he lost his job and was scolded by newspapers across the country. More than fifty years later, Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, in his seventies, refused to take the talisman the shrine handed out, and in November 1944 he died in Sugamo Prison. Neither meant to oppose his own country. They just did not want the deepest thing in their hearts taken away by someone else. Reading about them today, you probably don't think of it as \u0026quot;disrespect.\u0026quot; Then I'd like to ask you to think this way too: a country has no need to make everyone bow the same bow, and a person who keeps the thing in his heart is still a person of that country.\nWhen a state declares that a tradition is \u0026quot;not religion, just custom\u0026quot;, is it protecting it, or taking it over?\nReferences\nSCAPIN 448 (1945-12-15), \u0026quot;Abolition of Governmental Sponsorship, Support, Perpetuation, Control, and Dissemination of State Shinto\u0026quot;; 1882 Home Ministry separation of shrine priests from national instructors (\u0026quot;shrines are not religion\u0026quot;) Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton UP, 1989 Uchimura Kanzō's \u0026quot;lèse-majesté incident\u0026quot; (1891-01-09); Inoue Tetsujirō's \u0026quot;Conflict between Education and Religion\u0026quot; debate Makiguchi Tsunesaburō: refused a shrine talisman and arrested in 1943, died in Sugamo Prison 1944-11-18 Danish Constitution, Article 4; Church of Sweden separated from the state 2000-01-01; Norwegian constitutional amendment 2012-05-21 1868 order separating gods and buddhas, 1889 Meiji Constitution Article 28, 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, 1946-01-01 \u0026quot;Declaration of Humanity\u0026quot;, 1946 founding of Jinja Honchō, 1947 Constitution Article 20: standard history Registration and definition in Indonesia, mainland China and Hong Kong: the author's notes \u0026quot;From Tianxia to the State\u0026quot;, section 3 (secondary); original texts checked are below, the rest still to be verified Indonesia, Presidential Decree No. 1 of 1965, explanatory note (six religions including Confucianism): Indonesian Wikisource https://id.wikisource.org/wiki/Penetapan_Presiden_Republik_Indonesia_Nomor_1_Tahun_1965 🟢 Indonesia, Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967 (Chinese religion and customs only at home): https://id.wikisource.org/wiki/Instruksi_Presiden_Republik_Indonesia_Nomor_14_Tahun_1967 🟢 Indonesia, Presidential Decision No. 6 of 2000 (revoking the 1967 instruction): Audit Board regulations database https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/57713/keppres-no-6-tahun-2000 🟢 Indonesia, 1978 Home Ministry circular (No. 477/74054, 1978-11-18, listing only five religions) and the 1979 cabinet statement that Confucianism \u0026quot;is not a religion\u0026quot;, with the government's reasons including that \u0026quot;Confucianism is not a religion in China either\u0026quot;; recognised again in 2006: accounts in papers by Yang Fenggang and others and in Inside Indonesia; the circular itself not read 🟡 Mainland China's five religions: State Council Information Office, Freedom of Religious Belief in China (1997), Wikisource https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/中国的宗教信仰自由状况 🟢 Hong Kong Home Affairs Bureau reply: Legislative Council question LCQ16, \u0026quot;Government support for religious groups\u0026quot;, 2012-06-27, info.gov.hk (\u0026quot;the Home Affairs Bureau does not register religious bodies, and Hong Kong law does not regulate how religious bodies operate\u0026quot;) 🟢 Hong Kong Chinese Temples Ordinance (Cap. 153), definition and section 7(1): Legislative Council Panel on Home Affairs paper \u0026quot;Review of the Chinese Temples Ordinance\u0026quot;, 2015-03-24, https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr14-15/chinese/panels/ha/papers/ha20150324cb2-1045-7-c.pdf 🟢 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d02/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"one-directive\"\u003eOne directive\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 15 December 1945, Allied General Headquarters issued a directive, SCAPIN 448. Its title is long: \u0026quot;Abolition of Governmental Sponsorship, Support, Perpetuation, Control, and Dissemination of State Shinto (Kokka Shinto, Jinja Shinto)\u0026quot;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was drafted by William Bunce, an officer in the US Naval Reserve. As the Allies saw it, what they called \u0026quot;State Shinto\u0026quot; was Shinto twisted into a propaganda tool for militarism and ultra-nationalism.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter the directive, shrines were no longer funded by the state, and schools no longer held Shinto ceremonies. The state and the shrines were cut apart.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat had happened in the decades before?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"first-separate-shrines-from-temples\"\u003eFirst, separate shrines from temples\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore the Meiji Restoration, Japan's gods and buddhas had long been mixed together. There were buddhas in shrines and gods in temples; monks and shrine priests were often the same people.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"\"Shrines Are Not Religion\": How Japan Turned a Tradition into a State Faith, and How It Was Taken Apart"},{"content":"The last time My inclination is toward making Confucianism a religion. I am not the first person to have had that idea.\nMore than a hundred years ago in China, someone seriously tried it.\nIn October 1912 the Confucian Association (Kongjiaohui) was founded in Shanghai. Its founders included Chen Huanzhang and Mai Menghua. In November 1913 Kang Youwei was elected president, with Chen Huanzhang as general secretary.\nKang Youwei (1858–1927).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Elmer Chickering, Public domain\nChen Huanzhang held a doctorate from the United States. His dissertation, published in 1911, was The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School. We will meet him again later.\nThe petition In August 1913, Chen Huanzhang and others submitted a Petition of the Confucian Association to both houses of the first National Assembly of the Republic of China, asking that Confucianism be named the state religion in the constitution. Among the signers were Chen Huanzhang, and also Liang Qichao and Yan Fu.\nTheir reasoning deserves to be told in full. In April 1913 Kang Youwei wrote: \u0026quot;Freedom of belief is generosity, letting the people follow their own tastes; establishing a state religion is singling one out, to honour what suits the people's customs. Each has its own purpose; they do not interfere with each other, and they do not burden each other.\u0026quot; In other words, freedom of belief and a state religion are two different things, and neither gets in the other's way. He also said that China had made Confucianism its state religion for two thousand years while Buddhism, Daoism and Islam ran alongside it, so freedom of belief had in fact been practised all along.\nThe constitutional drafting committee rejected the petition.\nThree years later, in 1916, after Yuan Shikai's death, the Association petitioned again for Confucianism as the state religion. It was refused again.\nWhy it was refused The opponents' main argument was the freedom-of-religion clause in the constitution: would making one religion the state religion violate freedom of belief? That was the biggest dividing line between the two sides.\nChen Duxiu put the problem most concretely. On 1 November 1916 his essay \u0026quot;The Constitution and Confucianism\u0026quot; appeared in New Youth, volume 2, number 3. If Confucianism became the state religion, he wrote, then a president or an official of another faith would find that \u0026quot;not to sacrifice to Confucius breaks the law, and to sacrifice to him betrays the faith; there is no way out\u0026quot;. A student at school who was a Buddhist, Daoist, Christian or Muslim would find that \u0026quot;not to sacrifice to Confucius breaks school rules, and to sacrifice to him destroys one's belief; again no way out\u0026quot;.\nThe former site of the New Youth editorial office in Shanghai (Chen Duxiu's former residence).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Fayhoo, CC BY-SA 3.0\nThere were also more practical political reasons. Yuan Shikai supported honouring Confucius and issued a series of decrees on the Confucian sacrifices, but he publicly opposed making Confucianism the state religion. He said Confucius \u0026quot;was never a religious figure in the first place\u0026quot;, and in 1915 he is said to have ordered the Confucian Association's Qufu headquarters to change its name. What he honoured was \u0026quot;Confucius\u0026quot;. What he feared was \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot;. Even the man who most needed Confucius to lend him authority did not make Confucianism the state religion.\nPortrait of Yuan Shikai painted by Hubert Vos.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Hubert Vos, Public domain (What is said of Yuan Shikai here is relayed from secondary research; there is no first-hand archive to check years and wording against. What is certain is that in June 1913 he issued the order honoring Confucius and did not make Confucianism the state religion.)\nWhat was not lost \u0026quot;Rejected twice\u0026quot; is only half the story.\nOn 31 October 1913 the constitutional drafting committee of the National Assembly passed the Draft Constitution of the Republic of China, known as the \u0026quot;Temple of Heaven draft\u0026quot;. Article 19 reads: \u0026quot;National education takes the way of Confucius as the foundation of self-cultivation.\u0026quot;\nIt did not say state religion. It said Confucius.\nThe Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven, Beijing. The 1913 draft constitution was drawn up inside the Temple of Heaven, which is why it is called the \u0026quot;Temple of Heaven draft\u0026quot;.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 4.0\nAfter that, this article was argued over in parliament again and again. In January 1917 Li Dazhao, in \u0026quot;Confucius and the Constitution\u0026quot;, called it a \u0026quot;grotesque fact\u0026quot; and hoped it would be struck out at the second reading.\nIn the Constitution of the Republic of China of 1923, Article 12 ends up reading: \u0026quot;Citizens of the Republic of China have the freedom to honour Confucius and to practise religion, which shall not be restricted except according to law.\u0026quot;\nThe state religion never came. Confucius stayed in the constitution, written as \u0026quot;the freedom to honour Confucius\u0026quot;.\nWhat the Confucian Association did not achieve After the petitions failed, the \u0026quot;honour Confucius, restore the old ways\u0026quot; movement that the Association had promoted slowly went quiet.\nThere is no single answer for why it failed. A few questions are worth pressing on.\nFirst, was the \u0026quot;state religion\u0026quot; it wanted a religion like Christianity, with believers and weekly worship, or a set of state rites? In the petitions the two seem mixed together. What can be found is that all the Association actually built was Confucian sacrifices, annual meetings and periodicals. Weekly gatherings, membership rolls and the daily life of a congregation do not turn up. The kind of \u0026quot;church\u0026quot; Kang Youwei imagined, it never built itself.\nSecond, it tied itself too tightly to politics. In 1917 Kang Youwei took part in Zhang Xun's attempt to restore the monarchy. When the promoter of a religion stands on the side of a restoration, \u0026quot;Confucianism\u0026quot; can hardly shake off the label of \u0026quot;going back\u0026quot;.\nThird, it tried to finish through legislation in parliament something that should have grown by itself inside society.\nFourth, perhaps it was the times. It ran into a great age in which many people were sick of tradition and eager for the new. The Association wanted to make tradition the state religion, and it stood exactly opposite them.\nThese are questions, not conclusions. Scholars such as Zhao Fasheng and Zhang Xiang have studied this movement in depth, and their conclusions differ; I only raise questions here.\nLooking at it the other way \u0026quot;The Confucian Association failed\u0026quot; is also a claim to be careful with.\nIt failed at the level of the state. But the religionisation of Confucianism did not end there. Half a century later, in Indonesia, Confucianism entered the official list of recognised religions under the name Agama Khonghucu (1965), was later restricted and cut down to five recognised religions, and after 2000 was slowly given back. The same thing: the state recognises it one moment and not the next, following politics. (I read the originals of the 1965 presidential decree and the 2000 presidential decision; the reference number of the Interior Ministry circular of 18 November 1978 is written differently in different places, and I read only scholarly paraphrase.)\nOn the Korean peninsula, people tried the same thing: at the turn of the twentieth century Yi Byeong-heon argued for turning Confucianism into a religion, and the Sungkyunkwan Confucian Association (Seonggyungwan Yudohoe), founded in 1945, is said to have had more than two hundred branches. (The figure is unchecked.)\nAlso, the opponents' reasons were not all \u0026quot;anti-religion\u0026quot;. What Chen Duxiu objected to was, to a large degree, turning Confucius's teaching into something the state enforces. That is the same worry people have about a \u0026quot;state religion\u0026quot; today. In the Tianjin newspaper Yishibao, Catholics also came forward to object; one of them said that if Confucianism were made the state religion, the other religions would have to ban the books of Confucius in response, and would that not \u0026quot;cut off the way of Confucius\u0026quot;?\nSo perhaps the question to ask is not \u0026quot;why did the Confucian Association fail\u0026quot;, but this: if religionisation does not go through the state, what can it go through?\nWhat I read from this This failure means three things for my own idea.\nThe first is the path. The Association wanted to use a vote in parliament to make Confucianism the state religion in a single step. What I call \u0026quot;enough\u0026quot; takes four things: numbers, organisation, wealth, doctrine. All four have to grow out of the community itself, bit by bit; legislation cannot give them. What I mean by \u0026quot;leading\u0026quot; is cultural leadership, not political power. The lesson from the Association: do not borrow the state's hand.\nThe second is Confucius. The Association pushed Confucius up as the founder of a religion, someone who receives revelation. I will not take that road. I choose \u0026quot;first teacher\u0026quot;: Confucius is the one who set down the rules and handed them on, something like a prophet, something like Moses, but not a recipient of revelation. The divine lies elsewhere, in the \u0026quot;Way of Heaven\u0026quot; (tiandao).\nThe third is what remains. The failure was not total: Confucius finally stayed in the constitution, inside \u0026quot;freedom\u0026quot;. An idea does not have to wait for the state to recognise it to survive in society. But what survived was a freedom, not a belief to rely on and return to (yigui). That belief has to be given by the community itself.\nWhy give it? Back then, the Association ran into people who were sick of tradition and eager to innovate. Now, I think, atomised modern people need it.\nThis is what I take from the failure of 1913 to 1916, and I may be wrong.\nI have respect for Chen Huanzhang and Kang Youwei, and a little heartache too. They were among the most learned people of their day. They sincerely wanted Confucius to go on living, and they used the most dignified means they could think of: write a petition, go to parliament, get into the constitution. They lost, were laughed at as \u0026quot;restorers of the old\u0026quot;, and were remembered as helpers of a \u0026quot;restoration\u0026quot;. I often wonder: what if, back then, they had not gone to the state to ask, but had first gone back to the localities, made the Confucian sacrifice something every village could do every month, and linked up the ancestral halls, the academies and the guild halls? Would it have turned out differently? That \u0026quot;what if\u0026quot; proves nothing, but I want to keep the question for myself: the road I take has to be the one they did not take.\nThis is written for friends outside China, and for friends inside it. Chen Huanzhang and Kang Youwei lost: in 1913 they carried their petition into parliament and were refused; in 1916 they petitioned once more and were refused again. Later they were called helpers of the \u0026quot;restoration\u0026quot;, called \u0026quot;old-fashioned\u0026quot;, and some people still tell their names as a joke. But what I see in this history is a group of people who meant it. It was an age when many people resented tradition and scrambled for the new, and still they stood up and said: we cannot let Confucius disappear. The method they chose was wrong, but you understand the feeling behind it. It is what rises in you on Qingming, standing before your ancestors' graves: you do not want it to end with your generation. What they never got, I think perhaps we can do: not ask the state, not borrow anyone's hand, just carry it on, bit by bit, in each person's own days.\nIf the clause \u0026quot;Confucianism as the state religion\u0026quot; had passed back then, would Confucianism be stronger or weaker today?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;'Shrines Are Not Religion': How Japan Turned a Tradition into a State Faith, and How It Was Taken Apart\u0026quot; (same series: what happens when a nation ties itself to a tradition); Yigui, \u0026quot;Not to Sacrifice to Confucius Breaks the Law, to Sacrifice Betrays the Faith\u0026quot; (the same events, with more of the record) Confucian Association: founded in Shanghai, October 1912; petition of August 1913 (signers include Chen Huanzhang, Liang Qichao, Yan Fu); Kang Youwei president, November 1913; second petition refused, 1916 Chen Duxiu, \u0026quot;The Constitution and Confucianism\u0026quot;, New Youth, vol. 2 no. 3, 1916-11-01 Draft Constitution of the Republic of China (Temple of Heaven draft), Article 19, 1913-10-31; Li Dazhao, \u0026quot;Confucius and the Constitution\u0026quot; (1917-01-30); Constitution of the Republic of China (1923), Article 12 Kang Youwei, \u0026quot;On Making Confucianism the State Religion to Match Heaven\u0026quot; (April 1913, Buren, no. 3), cited via Zhang Xiang Zhao Fasheng, \u0026quot;The Dispute over the State Religion and the Failure of Kang Youwei's Movement to Revive Confucianism\u0026quot;; Zhang Xiang, \u0026quot;Republic and State Religion: The Question of 'Establishing Confucianism as the State Religion' at a Time of Constitutional Upheaval\u0026quot;, Open Times, 2018 no. 6 Zhao Xiuli, \u0026quot;A study of press opinion on Catholic opposition to writing Confucianism into the constitution in the early Republic\u0026quot;, Journal of Macao Polytechnic, 2021 no. 3 (secondary) Indonesian Confucianism: the author's notes \u0026quot;From Tianxia to the State\u0026quot;, section 3 (secondary); Presidential Decree No. 1 of 1965, explanatory note (six religions including Confucianism), Indonesian Wikisource https://id.wikisource.org/wiki/Penetapan_Presiden_Republik_Indonesia_Nomor_1_Tahun_1965 🟢; Presidential Decision No. 6 of 2000, Audit Board regulations database https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/57713/keppres-no-6-tahun-2000 🟢; Interior Ministry circular of 1978 (to be verified) Chen Huanzhang, The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School (1911); Zhang Xun's restoration of 1917 and Kang Youwei: standard history Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d03/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-last-time\"\u003eThe last time\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy inclination is toward making Confucianism a religion. I am not the first person to have had that idea.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMore than a hundred years ago in China, someone seriously tried it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn October 1912 the Confucian Association (\u003cem\u003eKongjiaohui\u003c/em\u003e) was founded in Shanghai. Its founders included Chen Huanzhang and Mai Menghua. In November 1913 Kang Youwei was elected president, with Chen Huanzhang as general secretary.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Kang Youwei\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d03/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eKang Youwei (1858–1927).　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Kang_Youwei.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photographed by Elmer Chickering, Public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChen Huanzhang held a doctorate from the United States. His dissertation, published in 1911, was \u003cem\u003eThe Economic Principles of Confucius and His School\u003c/em\u003e. We will meet him again later.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-petition\"\u003eThe petition\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn August 1913, Chen Huanzhang and others submitted a \u003cem\u003ePetition of the Confucian Association\u003c/em\u003e to both houses of the first National Assembly of the Republic of China, asking that Confucianism be named the state religion in the constitution. Among the signers were Chen Huanzhang, and also Liang Qichao and Yan Fu.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why the Confucian Association Failed: Two Petitions to Make Confucianism the State Religion"},{"content":"A person standing upright Xu Shen of the Eastern Han, in the Shuowen Jiezi, explains tian like this: \u0026quot;Tian is the crown of the head. Supreme, with nothing above it; from 'one' and 'big'.\u0026quot; (天，顛也。至高無上，從一大。)\nDian (\u0026quot;crown\u0026quot;) is the top of the head. Da (\u0026quot;big\u0026quot;) is a person standing with arms and legs spread. If you trace the character back, the oracle-bone tian shows a person seen from the front, with the head drawn deliberately large; in some forms the head is a square box, in some it is marked with a dot.\nTian in oracle-bone script: a person standing seen from the front, with an especially large head.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain\nXu Shen split it into \u0026quot;one\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;big\u0026quot;. Most scholars of writing today think that split is wrong: tian was a human figure from the start and should not be taken apart.\nIn other words, what this character first pointed to was very likely just the patch of space above a person's head. That patch, the more it was used, grew larger, until it became \u0026quot;supreme, with nothing above it\u0026quot;.\nThe shape of the character can take us only that far. It cannot tell us what the ancients saw over their heads.\nA Heaven older than Confucius Before Confucius, how did the Zhou people talk about tian? There are a few lines I think are worth copying out.\nIn the Book of Documents, \u0026quot;Against Idleness\u0026quot; (無逸), the Duke of Zhou lectures the young King Cheng. The Shang king Zhongzong, he says, \u0026quot;was grave, reverent, and in awe; he measured himself by Heaven's mandate, ruled the people with caution and dread, and did not dare to be idle or indulgent\u0026quot; (嚴恭寅畏，天命自度，治民祗懼，不敢荒寧), and so he held the throne for seventy-five years. Some later kings were born into pleasure and knew nothing of the hardship of farming, and \u0026quot;none of them could live long: some ten years, some seven or eight, some five or six, some three or four\u0026quot; (亦罔或克壽，或十年，或七八年，或五六年，或四三年). Those who worked hard and stayed wary reigned long; those who indulged reigned briefly.\nIn the Book of Songs, in the Hymns of Zhou, there is a poem called \u0026quot;The Mandate of Heaven\u0026quot; (維天之命): \u0026quot;The mandate of Heaven, how profound, never ceasing\u0026quot; (維天之命，於穆不已). Heaven's course is deep and does not stop.\nTwo more lines say that the mandate does not stay with one house for ever. The Book of Documents, \u0026quot;Announcement to Kang\u0026quot; (康誥): \u0026quot;The mandate is not fixed\u0026quot; (惟命不于常). The Book of Songs, \u0026quot;King Wen\u0026quot; (文王): \u0026quot;The mandate of Heaven is never constant\u0026quot; (天命靡常).\nAnd in the Zuo Commentary (the fifth year of Duke Xi), Gong Zhiqi urges the lord of Yu not to lend a road to the state of Jin, and quotes a line from the Documents of Zhou: \u0026quot;August Heaven has no favourites; it helps only the virtuous\u0026quot; (皇天無親，惟德是輔). Heaven does not especially love anyone; it helps only people of virtue.\nThe Circular Mound Altar at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, where Ming and Qing emperors sacrificed to Heaven at the winter solstice.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Dingding, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWhat moves me most in these lines is that in their mouths Heaven is not a god who flies into a rage at will, and not only a physical sky either. It is something that looks: it looks at whether you work hard, whether you stay wary, whether you have virtue; and having looked, it gives the mandate to one person or withholds it from another. This was already there before Confucius. (The phrase \u0026quot;tiandao\u0026quot;, the Way of Heaven, actually shows up more often in later forged chapters. I have said that on the \u0026quot;About\u0026quot; page of TenTao and will not repeat it here.)\nOne word, five meanings The philosopher Feng Youlan, in his History of Chinese Philosophy, gave a famous summary: in Chinese, \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; has five meanings.\nFeng Youlan (1895–1990).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown photographer, Public domain\nThe first is the material Heaven: the sky as opposed to the earth, the tian of \u0026quot;Heaven covers, Earth bears\u0026quot;.\nThe second is the ruling Heaven: a Heaven with a will, able to reward and punish, that is, \u0026quot;August Heaven, the Lord on High\u0026quot;. Confucius's line \u0026quot;He who offends against Heaven has nowhere to pray\u0026quot; (獲罪於天，無所禱也) is about this one: if you have offended it, praying elsewhere does no good.\nThe third is the fate Heaven: the part of one's lot that human effort cannot reach. Feng Youlan's example is Mencius: \u0026quot;As for success, that is Heaven's\u0026quot; (若夫成功則天也). \u0026quot;At fifty, I knew Heaven's mandate\u0026quot; (五十而知天命) is often read this way.\nThe fourth is the natural Heaven: a Heaven that runs by regularities. Xunzi pushed it to the extreme: \u0026quot;Heaven's course is constant; it does not persist for Yao, and does not perish for Jie\u0026quot; (天行有常，不為堯存，不為桀亡). The line in the Analects, \u0026quot;Does Heaven speak? The four seasons turn, the hundred things are born\u0026quot; (天何言哉？四時行焉，百物生焉), is also often read this way.\nThe fifth is the moral-principle Heaven: the highest principle in the universe. The Doctrine of the Mean says \u0026quot;What Heaven confers is called nature\u0026quot; (天命之謂性); and in the Northern Song, Cheng Hao said of himself: \u0026quot;Though I received my learning from others, the two words 'Heavenly principle' I worked out for myself\u0026quot; (吾學雖有所受，天理二字卻是自家體貼出來).\nThese five are Feng Youlan's arrangement, not a list the ancients drew up themselves. He also held that the tian Confucius spoke of was always the second kind. Not everyone who reads the Analects agrees.\nPut side by side, the five are a little absurd: the second one can get angry, the fourth takes no notice of you at all, the fifth is a principle. One word that names almost five different things.\nAnd often all five turn up in the mouth of a single person, in a single book.\nIt never had a name Now look at what it has and what it lacks.\nIt has a state-level sacrifice: in the Ming and Qing, the emperor went to the Temple of Heaven at the winter solstice to sacrifice to Heaven, and only the Son of Heaven could do it.\nIt has no name. The god of the Jews has a name, the god of the Christians has a name; tian has none. It is just \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot;.\nIt has no scripture. There are many sayings about Heaven in the Analects and the Mencius, but no book that is \u0026quot;the Book of Heaven\u0026quot;.\nAnd it has no church. Sacrificing to Heaven was the state's business; what ordinary people did was ancestral rites, and saying \u0026quot;may old Heaven bless us\u0026quot;.\nThis is the biggest difficulty in my idea. My symbol is the seal-script tian: one stroke above a person's head. But to build a religion around it, I first have to answer one question: which of the five is it?\nSomeone tried to turn it into a person A group of Europeans ran into this same question several hundred years ago.\nIn the late Ming, Jesuits came to China and had to find a Chinese name for their God. Should they choose \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; (Heaven), or \u0026quot;Shangdi\u0026quot; (the Lord on High), or coin a new word, \u0026quot;Tianzhu\u0026quot; (Lord of Heaven)? They argued among themselves for decades. This was the Rites Controversy of history.\nIn 1704 Pope Clement XI ruled that \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Shangdi\u0026quot; must not be used for the Christian God; \u0026quot;Tianzhu\u0026quot; was allowed. In 1715 he said it again.\nWhat the ruling meant is quite clear: the Europeans judged that the character \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; could not hold the god they wanted. It was too broad, too vague, perhaps too natural.\nMore than two centuries on, in 1939, the Vatican finally reviewed the dispute.\nWhat stays with me is this: a native concept was \u0026quot;claimed\u0026quot; by a foreign religion, and the claim failed. It would not become a person.\nLooking at it the other way This vagueness of \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; may not be a defect.\nOne concept can be used by five kinds of people at once: scholars use it to argue principle, emperors use it to speak of legitimacy, peasants use it to curse and to pray. It is not locked into a single definition, so it has survived to today and has not been taken hostage by any one theology.\nSome would also say that Chinese people do not in fact tell the five apart. In daily speech \u0026quot;old Heaven\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Heaven knows\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Heavenly principle will not allow it\u0026quot; cover ruling, fate and principle in one breath, and nobody finds that awkward.\nSo perhaps the \u0026quot;five senses\u0026quot; were arranged by scholars, and in people's minds there are not really five drawers.\nBut that is precisely the problem a religion has to deal with: is it facing ordinary people who have no drawers in their heads, or scholars who do?\nThe Heaven I want The Heaven I want is not the second kind. I do not want a Heaven that gets angry, rewards and punishes, and can have someone speak for it.\nWhat I want is a Heaven that does not speak but has rules. It does not persist for Yao and does not perish for Jie; its rule is \u0026quot;take from those who have too much, and give to those who have too little\u0026quot; (損有餘而益不足). A Heaven like this is not a person, takes no offerings, listens to no petitions; so I say, revere it but ask nothing of it.\nIn Feng Youlan's five, it lies between the fourth and the fifth: nature's course and the highest principle of the universe, put together and called \u0026quot;tiandao\u0026quot;.\nAs for that daily not-telling-apart, I do not want to take it apart. I only want to give it a direction: toward \u0026quot;tiandao\u0026quot;.\nTian in seal script: a person standing with arms and legs spread, one stroke above the head.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain\nI should also make clear why I want a Heaven that does not speak, rather than a god who has a name and speaks. There are two reasons. One is fear. A god who speaks gets people who speak for him; once someone speaks for him, someone will say \u0026quot;this is what Heaven told me\u0026quot;, and that is Hong Xiuquan, that is Yang Xiuqing, that is everyone who has ever killed in the name of Heaven. Make Heaven silent, and that road is shut. The other reason is that I think this is the Chinese Heaven as it originally was: think of what the Zhou people said, \u0026quot;August Heaven has no favourites; it helps only the virtuous\u0026quot;. It shows no partiality and cannot be bribed; it only looks at what you have done. Only a Heaven like that deserves to be revered.\nBut I also know this is a hard choice. How do you make people remember a silent Heaven every day? Christianity has the Bible and worship, Islam prays five times a day, Judaism has a Sabbath every week; tian has no name, no scripture, no church. The only way I can think of for now is to put it into the days. At Qingming, honour the ancestors; on the winter solstice, have the whole family stand in the yard and look up at the sky for a moment; before a meal, think of \u0026quot;it does not persist for Yao, and does not perish for Jie\u0026quot;. A Heaven like this does not depend on anyone to preach it; it depends on each person, at some moment of each day, lifting their head to look. I have not thought it through. It is only a starting point.\nThis is for everyone who has ever lifted their head. Whatever country you are in, whatever passport you hold, whatever script you write in, when you were small you probably said \u0026quot;oh Heaven!\u0026quot; or \u0026quot;old Heaven!\u0026quot; at some point. In that moment you did not think about what it was; you only knew that something was above your head, watching. The ancients wrote it as a person standing with arms and legs spread, one stroke above the head. From Seoul to Hanoi, from Tokyo to Singapore, we use the same character. Alone at night, looking up, saying nothing, and yet feeling that someone heard: I think we have all had a moment like that. The tiandao I want is that one stroke above the character's head. There is no need to kneel; lifting your head is enough.\nWhen you say \u0026quot;Heaven knows\u0026quot;, which tian do you mean?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Korea Really Did Have a 'Religion of the Heavenly Way'\u0026quot; (same series: \u0026quot;Man is Heaven\u0026quot;) Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi, entry \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot;; oracle-bone and bronze forms of \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; Feng Youlan, A History of Chinese Philosophy: the five meanings of \u0026quot;tian\u0026quot; (see also A New History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 1) Analects: \u0026quot;Bayi\u0026quot; (八佾) \u0026quot;He who offends against Heaven has nowhere to pray\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Weizheng\u0026quot; (為政) \u0026quot;At fifty I knew Heaven's mandate\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Yanghuo\u0026quot; (陽貨) \u0026quot;Does Heaven speak?\u0026quot;; Mencius \u0026quot;As for success, that is Heaven's\u0026quot;; Doctrine of the Mean \u0026quot;What Heaven confers is called nature\u0026quot; Xunzi, \u0026quot;Discourse on Heaven\u0026quot; Cheng Hao on \u0026quot;the two words tianli\u0026quot;, in Collected Works of the Two Chengs Book of Documents, Documents of Zhou, \u0026quot;Against Idleness\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Announcement to Kang\u0026quot;; Book of Songs, Hymns of Zhou, \u0026quot;The Mandate of Heaven\u0026quot;, and Greater Odes, \u0026quot;King Wen\u0026quot;; Zuo Commentary, fifth year of Duke Xi, quoting the Documents of Zhou (checked word for word against Wikisource, not checked against the page numbers of the printed books) The Chinese Rites Controversy: decree Cum Deus optimus, 20 November 1704; Ex illa die, 1715; Plane compertum est, 1939 The Temple of Heaven and the Ming and Qing emperors' winter-solstice sacrifice: standard history Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d05/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-person-standing-upright\"\u003eA person standing upright\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eXu Shen of the Eastern Han, in the \u003cem\u003eShuowen Jiezi\u003c/em\u003e, explains tian like this: \u0026quot;Tian is the crown of the head. Supreme, with nothing above it; from 'one' and 'big'.\u0026quot; (天，顛也。至高無上，從一大。)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDian\u003c/em\u003e (\u0026quot;crown\u0026quot;) is the top of the head. \u003cem\u003eDa\u003c/em\u003e (\u0026quot;big\u0026quot;) is a person standing with arms and legs spread. If you trace the character back, the oracle-bone tian shows a person seen from the front, with the head drawn deliberately large; in some forms the head is a square box, in some it is marked with a dot.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Tian in oracle-bone script\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d05/01.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTian in oracle-bone script: a person standing seen from the front, with an especially large head.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E5%A4%A9-oracle.svg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What Is \"Heaven\" (Tian), Really? Five Things Packed into One Character"},{"content":"That number In the preface I wrote a sentence like this: according to W3Techs in June 2026, among websites whose content language can be identified, English accounts for about 49.7%, Japanese about 5.0%, and Chinese only about 1.2%.\nThe number is real. On 30 September 2026 I went back to the page once more: English 49.5%, Japanese 4.9%, Chinese 1.3%.\nBut as soon as I had written that sentence I began to doubt it: what is it actually measuring?\nThe first way: counting websites W3Techs counts websites. One website is one vote, however large it is.\nSo a platform with hundreds of millions of items and a personal blog each count for one in this statistic.\nAnd the Chinese internet has a particular feature: a lot of content is not in \u0026quot;websites\u0026quot; but in apps. (If you are outside China, one more thing needs saying: most people in mainland China do not spend most of their time reading and writing on the open web, but inside apps such as WeChat, Weibo and Douyin. These apps are like big walled courtyards. It is lively inside, but search engines outside cannot get in.)\nThe second way: counting web pages Another public statistic comes from Common Crawl. It is a non-profit project that regularly crawls public web pages and releases what it collects.\nIts latest crawl is week 39 of 2026 (CC-MAIN-2026-39). By number of pages, the distribution of languages is:\nEnglish about 41.9%, Russian about 6.7%, German about 5.7%, Japanese about 5.2%, Spanish about 4.7%, French about 4.7%, Chinese about 4.2%.\nChinese goes from 1.3% to 4.2%, and ranks seventh.\nThe same internet: 1.3% by number of websites, 4.2% by number of pages. More than three times apart.\nThe third way: counting people The third number is people who go online.\nInternet World Stats, as of 31 March 2020: English-speaking internet users about 1.19 billion, 25.9%; Chinese-speaking internet users about 0.89 billion, 19.4%.\nThis figure is already quite old and can give only an order of magnitude: Chinese speakers are roughly one fifth of the world's online population.\nPut the three numbers together:\n1.3% (websites), 4.2% (pages), 19.4% (users).\nWhere the content went So where has the Chinese that is not on \u0026quot;public web pages\u0026quot; gone?\nA reasonable guess: into apps like WeChat, Weibo and Douyin. A large part of what these platforms hold can be seen only after logging in, or searched only inside the app, and public crawlers cannot reach it.\nI have not found a study that measures this directly, so it is only a guess. But one piece of data fits it: the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reports that the number of websites in China fell from 5.44 million in December 2018 to 3.88 million in December 2023, nearly 30% fewer in five years.\nWebsites are going down while people are going up. The content has probably moved house.\nLooking at it the other way These three numbers do not overturn what I felt in the first place.\nEven in the most generous count, 4.2% of pages against 19.4% of users is still a gap of more than four times. What Chinese speakers leave on the public web is far less than their numbers would suggest. That much is solid.\nBut it also reminds me that the sentence in the preface, \u0026quot;on the world's public internet, you can hardly hear them\u0026quot;, was stronger than the data allows. 1.2% is the lowest of the numbers, and it measures \u0026quot;websites\u0026quot;, not \u0026quot;voices\u0026quot;.\nA more accurate way to put it may be this: most of the Chinese-speaking world's voice is behind the wall. It is not absent; it is shut inside the walls of apps, where search engines cannot enter.\nSo I would like to add a correction to that sentence in the preface. I used to say, \u0026quot;on the world's public internet, you can hardly hear them.\u0026quot; What I say now is: the voice of the Chinese-speaking world is not missing; most of it is behind a wall. But precisely because it is behind a wall, people outside it cannot hear it, whether that is you in Tokyo, Seoul or Hanoi, or a friend in Toronto or Melbourne. This hurts me more than \u0026quot;the voice is small\u0026quot;: a person has said a great deal, has written long essays with great care, and the neighbours outside the wall cannot read a single word.\nA word for the neighbours. Nearly 900 million people who speak Chinese go online, yet Chinese makes up only 4.2% of public web pages; most of what they say is behind the wall. One reason I write on this site is to carry some of it out. You, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Hanoi, may be thinking right now about Qingming, ancestral halls, Chinese characters, how a civilisation stays alive. I want you to know that on the other side of the wall there are people thinking about the same things; you just cannot read them. I want to read what you write too, even if I have to translate, even if it is slow.\nHow much of what you have written can a search engine find? Do you mind?\nReferences\nFor comparison: the English edition of Yigui: the same question, how far the Chinese-speaking world is heard in other people's languages W3Techs, \u0026quot;Usage statistics of content languages for websites\u0026quot;: June 2026, English 49.7%, Japanese 5.0%, Chinese 1.2%; page of 2026-09-30, English 49.5%, Japanese 4.9%, Chinese 1.3% Common Crawl language statistics, CC-MAIN-2026-39: English 41.86%, Russian 6.70%, German 5.73%, Japanese 5.17%, Spanish 4.74%, French 4.68%, Chinese 4.23% Internet World Stats, \u0026quot;Internet World Users by Language\u0026quot;, 2020-03-31: English 1,186,451,052 (25.9%), Chinese 888,453,068 (19.4%) CNNIC, Statistical Report on Internet Development in China: number of websites about 5.44 million in December 2018, about 3.88 million in December 2023 (second-hand; check the original report before publication) ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d06/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"that-number\"\u003eThat number\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the preface I wrote a sentence like this: according to W3Techs in June 2026, among websites whose content language can be identified, English accounts for about 49.7%, Japanese about 5.0%, and Chinese only about 1.2%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe number is real. On 30 September 2026 I went back to the page once more: English 49.5%, Japanese 4.9%, Chinese 1.3%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut as soon as I had written that sentence I began to doubt it: what is it actually measuring?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-first-way-counting-websites\"\u003eThe first way: counting websites\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eW3Techs counts \u003cstrong\u003ewebsites\u003c/strong\u003e. One website is one vote, however large it is.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo a platform with hundreds of millions of items and a personal blog each count for one in this statistic.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the Chinese internet has a particular feature: a lot of content is not in \u0026quot;websites\u0026quot; but in apps. (If you are outside China, one more thing needs saying: most people in mainland China do not spend most of their time reading and writing on the open web, but inside apps such as WeChat, Weibo and Douyin. These apps are like big walled courtyards. It is lively inside, but search engines outside cannot get in.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Chinese Is Only 1.2% of the World's Websites? What That Number Actually Measures"},{"content":"A line that gets misread Xunzi (a Confucian of the Warring States, about half a century later than Mencius) wrote a famous passage in \u0026quot;Discourse on Heaven\u0026quot; (《天論》).\nWhy does it rain after a rain sacrifice? There is no why; it would have rained anyway. When the sun is eclipsed, people go to \u0026quot;rescue\u0026quot; it; in a drought they pray for rain; for great matters they consult the oracle. Xunzi says that none of this is done in the real belief that anything can be obtained by asking. It is \u0026quot;treated as ornament\u0026quot; (以為文): a refinement added to ritual.\nPortrait of Xunzi (Xun Kuang).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown artist, Public domain\nThen comes the line people so often quote: \u0026quot;The gentleman takes it as ornament, while the common people take it as spirit. To take it as ornament is auspicious; to take it as spirit is ominous.\u0026quot; (君子以為文，而百姓以為神。以為文則吉，以為神則凶。)\nMany people read a \u0026quot;two-layer structure\u0026quot; into this: the clever know it is ritual, ordinary people think it is real.\nBut the passage ends: to treat it as ritual is auspicious; to treat it as truly having gods is ominous.\nThat is, Xunzi names the structure, but he does not admire it. What he wants is for everyone to treat it as \u0026quot;ornament\u0026quot; (wen).\nThis is what I wanted to say first: this old idea is not quite the same as the impression it later gave.\nAnother line, from the Book of Changes Another line often brought up comes from the Commentary on the Judgment of the hexagram Guan in the Book of Changes: \u0026quot;Observe the divine way of Heaven, and the four seasons never err; the sage teaches through the divine way, and all under Heaven submit.\u0026quot; (觀天之神道，而四時不忒；聖人以神道設教，而天下服矣。)\nLater readers often take it as \u0026quot;the sage borrows ghosts and spirits to teach the people\u0026quot;.\nBut Wang Bi's commentary does not mean that. He says: the divine way has no shape; we cannot see Heaven making the seasons run, yet the seasons never go wrong; in the same way, we cannot see what the sage does, and the people simply come to submit.\nOn this reading, the \u0026quot;divine way\u0026quot; is more like a silent order, running as the seasons do. To \u0026quot;teach through it\u0026quot; is to follow it, not to invent a set of ghosts and spirits.\nSo the original meaning of this sentence may be much wider than the later \u0026quot;keep the people foolish\u0026quot; reading.\nPeople elsewhere said similar things This thought did not appear only in China.\nThe Greek historian Polybius was taken prisoner by the Romans and lived in Rome for more than ten years. In Book VI of his Histories he analyses what is most distinctive about the Roman republic: its view of the gods. The multitude, he says, is fickle, full of lawless desires and irrational anger, and can be held back only by \u0026quot;mysterious fears\u0026quot;. It was not for nothing that the ancients brought in the ideas of gods and of hell.\nScaevola, the Roman high priest (pontifex), is said to have divided the gods into three kinds: the gods of the poets, the gods of the philosophers, the gods of the statesmen. The first are too absurd, the second are unfit for the state, and some things should not be told to the people. He held that \u0026quot;it is useful for the city to be deceived in matters of religion.\u0026quot;\nThat sentence comes from Augustine's retelling in The City of God. Note that Augustine is a critic of this idea; he is reporting Varro.\nLater still comes Dostoevsky.\nDostoevsky (1821–1881), painted by Vasily Perov in 1872.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain\nIn The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan tells a story: Christ returns to earth and is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor says to him that \u0026quot;we have corrected your work and founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority.\u0026quot; People are overjoyed, because they are once again being led like a flock of sheep.\nWhen I read this passage my heart goes cold. The Inquisitor is not a bad man. He truly loves those people, loves them with something close to despair: he believes they cannot bear freedom.\nDoes it work Put these together and a pattern emerges:\nthere is a group of people who think religion is useful to the masses; their own attitude to religion is more complicated; so a layer of \u0026quot;we know\u0026quot; and a layer of \u0026quot;they believe\u0026quot; take shape. The idea is seductive because it seems to solve a real problem: a society needs some things that everyone holds in common, but not everyone wishes to, or is able to, think them through.\nSo how long can it last?\nRome's civic cult lasted several centuries on ritual and office, until Christianity replaced it at the end of the fourth century. China's \u0026quot;teaching through the way of the divine\u0026quot; existed in various forms for two thousand years.\nBut there are short-lived examples too. During the French Revolution Robespierre designed a cult of the \u0026quot;Supreme Being\u0026quot;; the National Convention decreed it on 7 May 1794, and a grand festival was held on 8 June. In less than two months, on 27 July, he fell, and the cult vanished with him. One of its sources of ideas was the \u0026quot;civil religion\u0026quot; Rousseau imagined in The Social Contract.\nThe Festival of the Supreme Being in Paris, 8 June 1794.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Thomas-Charles Naudet, Public domain\nPortrait of Robespierre (1758–1794).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Louis-Léopold Boilly, Public domain\nA religion designed from the top down and a religion that grows among people seem to have different fates. But that is only my observation; the sample is too small to call a rule.\nLooking at it the other way First, a problem with the evidence.\nOn \u0026quot;the elite don't really believe\u0026quot;, most of the evidence we can see is second-hand, and often comes from opponents. Scaevola's words are Augustine retelling Varro; Polybius is an outside observer; Ivan's story is a story told by a character in a novel; it does not equal Dostoevsky's own view.\nThen there is Xunzi. He describes that structure but says outright that \u0026quot;to take it as spirit is ominous\u0026quot;. So to put him in a lineage of \u0026quot;keeping the people foolish\u0026quot; is itself somewhat unfair.\nAnd a more basic doubt: when the elite \u0026quot;do not believe\u0026quot;, is it real disbelief, or a different way of believing? Confucius says, \u0026quot;Sacrifice as if present; sacrifice to the spirits as if the spirits were present.\u0026quot; (祭如在，祭神如神在) At the moment of sacrifice, it is as if the spirit were truly there. Is that disbelief, or another kind of belief?\nWhat does this structure mean for my idea? What I want is not \u0026quot;the elite believe one thing and the masses another\u0026quot;. I do not want one layer of \u0026quot;we know\u0026quot; and one layer of \u0026quot;they believe\u0026quot;. In that case, one day the people below will find that the people above do not believe, and then the whole thing collapses; the examples I have read here, Rome's civic cult and the Cult of the Supreme Being, both carry a shadow of this. What I want is the ending Xunzi describes: everyone, from the scholar to the old man who farms, treats it as \u0026quot;ornament\u0026quot; (wen): as a way of revering, a rite, a practice that gives days some weight, not as a deal in which something can be obtained. That is why I say of tiandao: revere it, ask nothing of it. A Heaven that takes no offerings and hears no petitions has nothing to \u0026quot;deceive\u0026quot; anyone with, and needs nobody to \u0026quot;keep the secret\u0026quot; from the masses on its behalf.\nI should also admit a difficulty here: I cannot knock down the Inquisitor's line in one breath. Many people may truly need a god they can ask, one who answers, one who comforts. Can we say to them: what you want I cannot give; all I can give you is a silent Heaven? That is not a light question. But I think it can be asked another way: at his hardest moment, does a person need a god who says yes to him, or a person at his side? A community with rites may be able to give the second: at Qingming someone stands with you at the grave, and when it is hard someone opens the door for you. A thing like that needs no deception. It is real.\nA word for the neighbours. Have you ever done a ritual for an elder at home that you did not believe in yourself? I guess you have. I guess that in that moment you did not feel you were \u0026quot;deceiving\u0026quot; anyone, and did not feel you were \u0026quot;believing\u0026quot; either. You only felt: this is not done for the gods to see; it is done for her to see, for the person who raised you. I think this may be what Xunzi means by wen. If a society could let everyone act this way and revere this way, it might not need a \u0026quot;Grand Inquisitor\u0026quot; at all.\nHave you ever done a ritual for an elder at home that you did not believe in yourself?\nReferences\nFor comparison: this series, \u0026quot;'Shrines Are Not Religion'\u0026quot; (State Shinto can be read as a modern version of \u0026quot;teaching through the way of the divine\u0026quot;) Xunzi, \u0026quot;Discourse on Heaven\u0026quot; Book of Changes, hexagram Guan, Commentary on the Judgment; Wang Bi's commentary Polybius, Histories, VI.56 Augustine, De civitate Dei, IV.27 (retelling Varro and Scaevola) Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V, ch. 5 \u0026quot;The Grand Inquisitor\u0026quot; Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), Book IV, ch. 8 \u0026quot;Civil Religion\u0026quot;; Robespierre's cult of the Supreme Being (decree of 1794-05-07, festival of 1794-06-08, fall on 1794-07-27): standard history Analects, \u0026quot;Bayi\u0026quot; (八佾): \u0026quot;Sacrifice as if present; sacrifice to the spirits as if the spirits were present\u0026quot; Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d08/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-line-that-gets-misread\"\u003eA line that gets misread\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eXunzi (a Confucian of the Warring States, about half a century later than Mencius) wrote a famous passage in \u0026quot;Discourse on Heaven\u0026quot; (《天論》).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy does it rain after a rain sacrifice? There is no why; it would have rained anyway. When the sun is eclipsed, people go to \u0026quot;rescue\u0026quot; it; in a drought they pray for rain; for great matters they consult the oracle. Xunzi says that none of this is done in the real belief that anything can be obtained by asking. It is \u0026quot;treated as ornament\u0026quot; (以為文): a refinement added to ritual.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Portrait of Xunzi\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d08/04.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePortrait of Xunzi (Xun Kuang).　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E6%88%98%E5%9B%BD%E6%97%B6%E6%A5%9A%E5%85%B0%E9%99%B5%E4%BB%A4%E8%8D%80%E5%86%B5.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, unknown artist, Public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How Long Can a Religion Live That the Elite Don't Believe and the Masses Do? The Temptation of \"Teaching Through the Way of the Divine\""},{"content":"An eye In Tây Ninh, in southern Vietnam, there is a great hall that looks nothing like an East Asian temple.\nThe most striking thing inside is an enormous eye. It is called the \u0026quot;Divine Eye\u0026quot; (Thiên Nhãn).\nThis is the holy see of Caodaism (Cao Đài). The two words \u0026quot;Cao Đài\u0026quot; mean literally a high platform, used for the highest place where God dwells.\nThe Cao Đài Holy See in Tây Ninh, Vietnam.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Gary Todd, CC0\nGrown out of séances The founder, Ngô Văn Chiêu, was a civil servant in the colonial government of French Indochina. He was fascinated by spirit communication.\nIt is said that in 1921, on the island of Phú Quốc, he saw the \u0026quot;Divine Eye\u0026quot;: an eye appearing in the sky.\nIn July 1925 a series of séances began in Saigon. The mediums who took part were also minor colonial clerks. They said that through the mediums a god who called himself \u0026quot;Cao Đài\u0026quot; had begun to speak to them.\nThink of those people: Vietnamese clerks on small salaries, ruled by someone else's state, who after work sat around a table in the evening waiting for a voice. What they were waiting for was perhaps not only a god, but a place where their own land and their own ancestors could be put back in the sky.\nOn 7 October 1926, led by Lê Văn Trung, twenty-eight prominent Vietnamese together with 245 followers submitted a Declaration to the government of French Indochina announcing the founding of this religion. Lê Văn Trung became the first \u0026quot;Interim Pope\u0026quot;. Ngô Văn Chiêu himself did not sign the declaration.\nOn 18 November 1926 the opening ceremony was held in Tây Ninh; fifty thousand people are said to have attended.\nThe \u0026quot;Divine Eye\u0026quot; of Caodaism.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Toirelb, Public domain\nA little of everything Caodaist doctrine divides the history of human religion into three periods: the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad belong to the second period; the third is now, when God speaks directly to people.\nIt combines the Buddhist ideas of karma and rebirth, Confucian ethics, Daoist spirit communication, and the organisational structure of the Catholic Church: a pope, cardinals, archbishops, a full set of ranks. It advocates vegetarianism, non-violence and ancestor veneration.\nIts list of saints is surprisingly long: the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Confucius, Caesar, Pericles, Joan of Arc, Sun Yat-sen, Victor Hugo, Thomas Jefferson.\nA painting at the front gate of the Holy See, showing three \u0026quot;saints\u0026quot;: Sun Yat-sen, Victor Hugo and Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm of Vietnam.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Nic saigon, CC BY-SA 3.0\nPolitics, and after Caodaism was soon drawn into politics.\nIn 1943, during the Japanese occupation of Indochina, Caodaism formed its own armed force. Until 1975 it had considerable political influence in South Vietnam.\nAfter the reunification of north and south in 1975, Caodaism was suppressed. In 1997 the Vietnamese government gave it legal status.\nToday nobody can say for certain how many believers there are: figures from two million to six million have been given. The Vietnamese government's estimate is about 4.4 million for the Tây Ninh Holy See lineage. It has split into about six officially recognised branches. In Western countries it is said to have around thirty thousand followers.\nWho it resembles Reading this far, I am reminded of a familiar shape.\nKorea's Donghak, in 1860, was born against \u0026quot;Western Learning\u0026quot; and mixed Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and folk belief; it later became Cheondogyo and tied itself to politics, with the Declaration of Independence at one end and the Ilchinhoe at the other.\nCaodaism, in 1926, was born under French colonial rule and mixed Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity; it later had its own armed force and was suppressed after 1975.\nBoth are East Asian \u0026quot;three teachings in one\u0026quot; new religions. Both were born under foreign pressure. Both paid a price in politics.\nAnd the Confucian Association, a \u0026quot;pure Confucian\u0026quot; movement, was rejected in parliament in both 1913 and 1916.\nThree examples: two mixed ones survive to today, one pure Confucian one did not. This is only three samples, not a rule, but it makes me want to ask: should the religionisation of Confucianism take the \u0026quot;pure\u0026quot; road or the \u0026quot;mixed\u0026quot; road?\nLooking at it the other way First, let me be clear: Caodaism is not a Confucian religion.\nConfucianism is only one of its three teachings, and it is not the heaviest one at the centre of the doctrine. So it is not appropriate to treat it as a success story of \u0026quot;making Confucianism a religion\u0026quot;.\nThere is one more layer: this \u0026quot;survived\u0026quot; also needs a discount. Within a hundred years it split into several branches, its membership figures are vague, it was suppressed politically for more than twenty years, and it was recognised again only on the state's terms. Whether that counts as \u0026quot;success\u0026quot;, I am not sure.\nThen the samples. In a comparison of three examples there are many uncontrolled variables: different countries, colonial and non-colonial settings, different eras. The pure Confucian Association failed in parliament, while the mixed Donghak and Caodaism lived among the people; that may be only a difference in \u0026quot;where it was done\u0026quot;.\nIs Tiandao the \u0026quot;pure\u0026quot; road, or the \u0026quot;mixed\u0026quot; road? My answer: the root must be pure, the gate must be wide. The root must be pure: Tiandao, the First Teacher, ancestral rites; I do not want these mixed, because a thing that enshrines everything is often nothing, and in the end is easily taken by someone and made into what they want. But the gate must be wide: I do not ask anyone to tear down their own temple before coming in. A person who keeps Guanyin, Mazu and Guan Yu at home and at Qingming also burns incense to the ancestors is in no contradiction. What I want is a thing with an axis in the middle, not a great hall that invites in all the saints but has no centre.\nI do not want to laugh at Caodaism either. To put Sun Yat-sen and Hugo in the same temple sounds a bit comic at first. But think of those people: ruled by someone else's state, pressed down by someone else's gods, they said, never mind, we will invite all the good people and let them guard us together. That is not a lack of conviction; it is a very deep loneliness and a very great kindness. They were willing to believe that all the good in the world can be put together. I have respect for that.\nTo my Vietnamese friends. On 18 November 1926 the opening ceremony was held in Tây Ninh, and fifty thousand people are said to have come. Those were the years of French rule. A few minor clerks, after work, sat around a table waiting for a voice; later twenty-eight prominent figures and 245 followers handed in the Declaration. They invited Sun Yat-sen, Victor Hugo and your own Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm into the same hall, beneath that eye. I saw that eye in photographs. That a people ruled by others would still keep a place for itself in the sky: that makes me feel more respect than any great hall.\nA religion that invites in all the saints and enshrines them: is that inclusiveness, or lack of conviction?\nReferences\nFor comparison: Yigui, \u0026quot;Who Chose the Two Characters Shangdi?\u0026quot; (another response that grew under the impact of a foreign religion); \u0026quot;Korea Really Did Have a 'Religion of the Heavenly Way'\u0026quot; in this series (Donghak, the same hand of cards) Caodaism (Cao Đài): 1921, Ngô Văn Chiêu sees the \u0026quot;Divine Eye\u0026quot; on Phú Quốc; July 1925, séances in Saigon; 7 October 1926, Declaration (signed by twenty-eight prominent figures and 245 followers, led by Lê Văn Trung); 18 November 1926, opening ceremony; 1943, armed force; suppressed after 1975; legal recognition in 1997; believers estimated at 2–6 million (Vietnamese government estimate: about 4.4 million for the Tây Ninh Holy See); about 6 recognised branches; about 30,000 in Western countries Korean Donghak–Cheondogyo, see \u0026quot;Korea Really Did Have a 'Religion of the Heavenly Way'\u0026quot; Confucian Association: petitions rejected in 1913 and 1916, see \u0026quot;Why the Confucian Association Failed\u0026quot; Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d09/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"an-eye\"\u003eAn eye\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Tây Ninh, in southern Vietnam, there is a great hall that looks nothing like an East Asian temple.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe most striking thing inside is an enormous eye. It is called the \u0026quot;Divine Eye\u0026quot; (\u003cem\u003eThiên Nhãn\u003c/em\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the holy see of Caodaism (Cao Đài). The two words \u0026quot;Cao Đài\u0026quot; mean literally a high platform, used for the highest place where God dwells.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Cao Đài Holy See, Tây Ninh, Vietnam\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d09/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Cao Đài Holy See in Tây Ninh, Vietnam.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cao_Dai_Holy_See_%2810037432514%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, photographed by Gary Todd, CC0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"grown-out-of-séances\"\u003eGrown out of séances\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe founder, Ngô Văn Chiêu, was a civil servant in the colonial government of French Indochina. He was fascinated by spirit communication.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is said that in 1921, on the island of Phú Quốc, he saw the \u0026quot;Divine Eye\u0026quot;: an eye appearing in the sky.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Vietnamese Religion That Enshrines Confucius, Jesus, Hugo and Sun Yat-sen Together"},{"content":"An emperor who would not let anyone say \u0026quot;Hu\u0026quot; In 319 CE, Shi Le, a man of the Jie people, proclaimed himself King of Zhao at Xiangguo. That year he decreed that \u0026quot;Hu\u0026quot; people were to be called \u0026quot;people of the state\u0026quot; instead. Later, when the palace was built and the laws grew stricter, one of them read: \u0026quot;the word 'Hu' is especially forbidden.\u0026quot; Any other word could be forgiven; \u0026quot;Hu\u0026quot; was the one you must never say.\nThe Book of Jin records a small story. A staff officer named Fan Tan was poor, and Shi Le wanted to promote him to be a governor. Fan Tan came to say goodbye, and Shi Le, seeing his ragged robes and cap, was startled: \u0026quot;Officer Fan, how did you get so poor?\u0026quot; Fan Tan was an honest man, and blurted out: \u0026quot;Not long ago I ran into Jie bandits, heartless people, who took everything I had.\u0026quot;\nCursing the Jie to the face of a Jie emperor. Imagine the scene. But Shi Le laughed: \u0026quot;The Jie robbed you that badly? Then I'll make it up to you.\u0026quot; Fan Tan kowtowed in terror. You can't blame him: an old scholar who had been poor half his life, said one honest sentence, and nearly lost his head. Shi Le let it go. He said the ban was meant for common people, not for old scholars like you, and gave him a carriage, clothes, and three million coins.\nIn the year he took the title King of Zhao, Shi Le also set one rule for the officials who managed the Hu: \u0026quot;No one may insult or slight the robed-and-capped Hua clans.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Insult or slight\u0026quot; means to bully, to look down on.\nI stopped when I read that. A Hu emperor, naming the Han gentry under his rule \u0026quot;the robed-and-capped Hua clans.\u0026quot; In his eyes, how do you tell Hua from Yi? By robes and caps.\nShi Le as imagined by a Ming painter (detail from \u0026quot;Shi Le Worshipping the Buddha\u0026quot;). This is how later generations pictured him, not a portrait from life; he wears Han-style robes.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, attributed to Qian Xuan, Freer Gallery of Art, CC0\nWhy Gu Yanwu looked back I said this series would start in 1644, but the first piece has jumped to the fourth century. That needs explaining.\nIt isn't me going backwards; Gu Yanwu went first. He watched the Ming fall with his own eyes and wrote the Rizhilu (Record of Daily Learning), which has an entry called \u0026quot;Zhengshi.\u0026quot; Zhengshi was a reign period of Cao Wei, 240 to 249 CE, when \u0026quot;pure conversation\u0026quot; (qingtan) came into fashion. Gu says the celebrated scholars of that time \u0026quot;abandoned the classics and favoured Laozi and Zhuangzi, spurned the rites and laws and prized abandon.\u0026quot; Later \u0026quot;the Qiang and Rong took turns usurping, and rulers and ministers changed again and again,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;if not the worthies of the bamboo grove, whose fault was it?\u0026quot; That is: whom else can we blame?\nHis famous line, \u0026quot;there is the fall of a state, and there is the fall of all-under-Heaven,\u0026quot; is written in that very entry. A man who had watched the Ming fall went looking for causes, and followed them all the way back fourteen hundred years.\nSo to talk about the fall of the Ming, we first have to look at the fall he was looking at.\nGoing beyond the moral order Start with Ji Kang. In his essay On Dispelling Selfishness there is a very famous line: \u0026quot;Go beyond the moral order and follow nature.\u0026quot; (The moral order here is mingjiao: the web of roles and duties, ruler and subject, father and son.) That is: I won't keep that mingjiao business, I'll follow my own heart.\nIt sounds dashing. But you have to know what mingjiao was at that time.\nThe moulded brick relief \u0026quot;Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and Rong Qiqi\u0026quot; found near Nanjing (Eastern Jin or Southern Dynasties). Ji Kang is one of the figures.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Prof. Gary Lee Todd, CC BY-SA 4.0\nAround 262, Ji Kang was killed by Sima Zhao. The man who spoke against him was Zhong Hui, who said Ji Kang and Lü An were \u0026quot;wild in speech and slandering the canonical texts,\u0026quot; and advised: \u0026quot;Take this chance to remove them, to keep the customs pure.\u0026quot; He was to be killed to make customs pure. On the day of the execution, three thousand students at the Imperial Academy petitioned to take him as their teacher; refused. Ji Kang looked at the shadow of the sun, asked for his zither, played one piece, Guangling San, and said this tune would die from today. He was around forty.\nLu Xun spoke about this in Guangzhou in 1927. His point was that those who professed the rites in Wei and Jin were in fact wrecking them, while those who seemed to wreck them \u0026quot;actually acknowledged the rites, believed in the rites too much.\u0026quot; Cao Cao killed Kong Rong, the Simas killed Ji Kang, and in both cases the charge was something close to \u0026quot;unfilial\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;But in truth, when had Cao Cao or Sima Yi ever been famously filial sons?\u0026quot; (Lu Xun writes Sima Yi here; the one who actually did it was his son Sima Zhao.)\nPut plainly, by then mingjiao was already a knife. The mingjiao that Ji Kang went \u0026quot;beyond\u0026quot; was that one.\nNeither the moral order nor pure conversation held Look fifty years further on.\nIn 299, Jiang Tong wrote On Moving the Rong Away, urging the court to send the Di and Qiang who had moved inside the borders back out. The historians of the Book of Jin later called it \u0026quot;a far-sighted plan for governing the state,\u0026quot; and a pity that it went unused.\nIn 304, Ji Kang's son Ji Shao stood in front of Emperor Hui of Jin at the Battle of Dangyin and was shot dead by stray arrows; his blood spattered the emperor's robes. Afterwards, when the attendants went to wash them, Emperor Hui said: \u0026quot;That is Attendant Ji's blood. Don't remove it.\u0026quot; Ji Shao's father had been killed by the Sima family. Caught between his father's blood feud and the emperor's favour, he chose a road to death.\nIn 311, Luoyang fell. Wang Yan, the leader of pure conversation, was captured by Shi Le. He first said he had never concerned himself with worldly affairs since childhood, then urged Shi Le to take the imperial title. Even Shi Le could not stand it: \u0026quot;Wrecking the realm is precisely your crime.\u0026quot; Before he died, Wang Yan said: if we had not prized the empty and the floating, and had all tried together to prop up the realm, it would not have come to this.\nIn the first month of 313, at Pingyang, the Xiongnu leader Liu Cong gave a great banquet for his officials and made the captured Emperor Huai of Jin put on a servant's blue robe and pour wine. An emperor, pouring wine cup after cup for his former subjects, and not long after, killed.\nMingjiao was a knife in the Sima family's hand; pure conversation was Wang Yan's signboard. By this point neither was any use.\nSo what was kept? The Jin court moved south. Whenever the weather was fine, scholars who had crossed the river would invite each other to drink at Xinting outside Jiankang. Once, Zhou Yi sighed: \u0026quot;The scenery is no different, yet there is a difference in the mountains and rivers.\u0026quot; The scenery was much like Luoyang, but the mountains and rivers were no longer those mountains and rivers. Everyone wept. Only Wang Dao's face changed: \u0026quot;We should be pooling our strength for the royal house and winning back the Divine Land. Why sit facing each other like Chu prisoners?\u0026quot;\nAt about the same time, Zu Ti led over a hundred refugee families across the river northward. In midstream he struck the oar and swore: \u0026quot;If Zu Ti cannot clear the Central Plains and cross this river again, may I be like this great river!\u0026quot;\nMy reading is this: in the one or two centuries of the \u0026quot;Five Barbarians' chaos in Hua,\u0026quot; what the people who went south kept was not mingjiao. Mingjiao had already been worn out by the time of Ji Kang. What they kept was the Hua–Yi distinction.\nBy the Hua–Yi distinction I mean the difference of robes, caps and culture. It was never defined by blood. Shi Le's phrase \u0026quot;robed-and-capped Hua clans\u0026quot; is a ready-made footnote: even a Hu emperor recognised people by their robes. And later generations called this southward migration \u0026quot;the robes and caps crossing south\u0026quot; (yiguan nandu, \u0026quot;yiguan\u0026quot; being literally \u0026quot;robes and caps\u0026quot;: the visible marks of being Huaxia).\nA small detail. The \u0026quot;Chu prisoner\u0026quot; Wang Dao mentions comes from the Zuozhuan: Zhong Yi of Chu, captured and taken to Jin, kept wearing the Chu \u0026quot;southern cap,\u0026quot; and a Jin minister praised him for \u0026quot;not forgetting his origins.\u0026quot; Wang Dao used \u0026quot;Chu prisoner\u0026quot; to tell people not to weep, but the story itself is about a captive who kept wearing his own cap.\nYou can read the northern story from here too. A hundred and eighty years later, Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei ordered \u0026quot;a reform of the dress system,\u0026quot; and the next year ruled that Xianbei could no longer be spoken at court, on pain of dismissal. A Xianbei emperor was changing the robes and caps of his own people.\nA section of the \u0026quot;Emperor and Empress Worshipping the Buddha\u0026quot; relief in the Central Binyang Cave at Longmen: Emperor Xiaowen and his party. Ruler and ministers wear wide-sleeved robes and tall caps; this is already Han court dress.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, CC0\nThirteen hundred years later This line ran on for thirteen hundred years.\nIn the fifth month of 1644, the Qing army entered Beijing, and Dorgon ordered surrendering officials and people \u0026quot;all to shave their heads, and robes and caps to follow the dynasty's rules entirely.\u0026quot; The next year, in the sixth month, he ordered again: \u0026quot;All must shave their heads. Whoever does not comply will be dealt with under military law.\u0026quot;\nThis time the direction was reversed. Xiaowen had changed his own people's robes and caps; this order changed other people's. Shi Le had said no one may bully the \u0026quot;robed-and-capped Hua clans\u0026quot;; this order wanted a world in which there would be no more \u0026quot;robed-and-capped Hua clans.\u0026quot;\nAfter the order, robes and caps really did become a matter of life and death, and some people really did resist with them. The Ming official Zhang Chun was defeated in battle and held captive in the Sanguan Temple in Shenyang. According to the Korean Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, he kept on \u0026quot;wearing Han clothing\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;did not shave his head,\u0026quot; and on the first day of each month \u0026quot;put on full robes and cap to bow in ceremony,\u0026quot; always sitting facing west, toward Beijing. (Cited via Zhang Yuxing, \u0026quot;The Sanguan Temple in Shenyang and Early Qing History.\u0026quot;) A man locked in a temple in a foreign land, once a month, dressing properly to bow to a capital he could not see. He died there; Hong Taiji \u0026quot;greatly regretted\u0026quot; it, had him buried with proper rites, and even built him a stone pagoda.\nGu Yanwu watched these two orders come down. In the \u0026quot;Zhengshi\u0026quot; entry he traces the fall of all-under-Heaven to the collapse of mingjiao, saying that pure conversation in Wei and Jin left the world \u0026quot;with no father and no ruler.\u0026quot; He also scolded Ji Shao in particular: his father was killed by Sima Zhao, yet he went on to serve the Sima house, \u0026quot;forgetting his father and serving a ruler who was no ruler,\u0026quot; and dying at Dangyin could not redeem it.\nNow look at how, almost a hundred years later, the editors of the Qing's Complete Library of the Four Treasuries revised this entry. The passage scolding Ji Shao for having \u0026quot;no father,\u0026quot; the half that speaks of mingjiao, they left untouched. \u0026quot;The Qiang and Rong took turns usurping\u0026quot; was changed to \u0026quot;armed conflict daily broke out\u0026quot;; and the whole stretch from \u0026quot;since the Zhengshi era\u0026quot; to \u0026quot;even the lowliest commoner has a share of responsibility\u0026quot; was deleted, including one line mocking the Western Jin scholars: \u0026quot;one after another they became subjects of Liu Cong and Shi Le, watching their former ruler pour wine in a servant's blue robe, and it did not move their hearts.\u0026quot;\nThat is, the Qing court did not mind the lines about mingjiao; of the lines about Hua and Yi, not one word was kept. What Gu Yanwu himself spoke of was mingjiao, but the men who cut the book knew exactly which line stung.\nWe don't need to guess. In 1729, in the Record of Great Righteousness Dispelling Delusion, the Yongzheng emperor said it himself: \u0026quot;The whole Hua–Yi talk arose in the age of the Jin, Song and Six Dynasties, when the realm was divided,\u0026quot; and called it \u0026quot;a most base and shallow view.\u0026quot; In the same text he refers to his own dynasty as \u0026quot;we, outsiders.\u0026quot; The Qing emperors knew better than anyone the difference between Manchu and Huaxia; they simply would not let others say it, much like Shi Le, who would not let anyone say \u0026quot;Hu.\u0026quot;\nPortrait of the Yongzheng Emperor in court dress.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Qing court painter, public domain\nThe story of the book-cutting will come in the piece on Gu Yanwu. The next piece goes back to Beijing in 1644.\nLet me say this more directly. Today a lot of people treat the Queue Order as \u0026quot;a custom changed,\u0026quot; and pass over it lightly. I don't see it that way. Think: Shi Le forbade bullying the \u0026quot;robed-and-capped Hua clans,\u0026quot; and Emperor Xiaowen changed his own people's robes and caps. These men were Hu, and not one of them said \u0026quot;we want the whole world to look like us.\u0026quot; The 1645 order was blunt: not shaving means military law. Hair on the head became a line between life and death. In three hundred years, the most visible shell of a civilization was forcibly swapped. When I said in the preface that robes and caps were once Huaxia's yigui, and that after 1644 they were destroyed, this is what I meant.\nI also don't want this to turn into \u0026quot;Manchus are bad.\u0026quot; I'm talking about one order, one regime's act. The distinction matters. \u0026quot;Manchu\u0026quot; is a name the Yongzheng emperor himself used, and he said \u0026quot;we, outsiders,\u0026quot; so I'll write it that way. The Queue Order was an act of the Qing state, so I'll write it as an act of the state, and not as the \u0026quot;character\u0026quot; of any people. Blood is not the cause; this series never uses blood as an argument, from beginning to end.\nLooking the other way First, Gu Yanwu himself is not on my side. His yardstick for \u0026quot;the fall of all-under-Heaven\u0026quot; is \u0026quot;benevolence and rightness choked off\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;no father, no ruler,\u0026quot; plainly about mingjiao. The source I lean on most in this piece reaches the opposite conclusion from mine. My reading is: he spoke of mingjiao, and the men who cut the book read Hua–Yi. But in the end that's a reading.\nSecond, the Six Dynasties gentry actually lived off mingjiao. Huang Rucheng's Collected Commentaries on the Rizhilu attaches to the \u0026quot;Zhengshi\u0026quot; entry a remark by a Compiler Yang, saying that although the Six Dynasties' atmosphere was frivolous, it had a few things later ages could not match: valuing family taboos, valuing lineage, being careful about marriages, distinguishing ranks, and upholding public opinion. By that account, what the southward gentry kept was precisely family ritual and mingjiao, and the Hua–Yi distinction was only one side of it.\nThird, and the hardest to answer: if the Hua–Yi distinction looks only at robes and culture and not at blood, then when a Hu adopts Hua robes and caps, is he Hua? In 304 Liu Yuan raised his banner and named his state \u0026quot;Han,\u0026quot; posthumously honouring Liu Chan, saying: \u0026quot;Do emperors have a fixed pedigree? Yu the Great came from the western Rong, King Wen was born among the eastern Yi; it depends only on whom virtue is given to.\u0026quot; Fourteen hundred years later, the Yongzheng emperor said: \u0026quot;That our dynasty is Manchu is like China's having native places. Shun was a man of the eastern Yi, King Wen of the western Yi.\u0026quot; Nearly the same argument. If you draw Hua and Yi by culture, the door is open, and the people walking through will use that principle to speak for themselves.\nMy answer to this one: you have to look at direction. Xiaowen was a Hu moving toward Huaxia's robes and caps himself: he changed Xianbei dress for Han court dress and even regulated what language was spoken at court. That was strict even on his own people, but the direction was inward, through the door. The 1645 order was the reverse: it asked the people already inside to move outward and take on someone else's appearance. Both look like \u0026quot;robes and caps changed,\u0026quot; and the directions are opposite. I think this standard holds: those who are willing to come in are welcome, and once in, they are our own; ancestry doesn't matter. Forcing people inside the door to change is not a cultural question any more, it is a question of power. As for Yongzheng's \u0026quot;Shun was a man of the eastern Yi,\u0026quot; it's a fine speech; but the Qing, while saying \u0026quot;come in and you are Chinese,\u0026quot; carried on with the old rule of \u0026quot;no queue, no head.\u0026quot; Put those two things side by side and you can see the speech was a tool.\nFourth, people at the time did not draw the line so cleanly themselves. Jiang Tong's On Moving the Rong Away says the Rong and Di have \u0026quot;speech that doesn't communicate, gifts that differ, laws and customs that are strange, kinds that are different,\u0026quot; and mixes language, custom and descent together. \u0026quot;The Hua–Yi distinction looks only at robes and culture\u0026quot; is one way of reading it; the ancients did not always use it that way.\nThere is another end of this yardstick I haven't finished: the neighbours. After 1644, Joseon Korea refused to recognise the Qing as Zhonghua and called itself \u0026quot;Little China,\u0026quot; and what it used was exactly robes and rites: we still wear Ming clothes, we still perform Ming rites. I leave that end for The Neighbours' Heaven. I mention it here only to make one point: the yardstick of robes and caps is not something I took out on my own; for centuries, those on Huaxia's edges who read Chinese books most seriously have used it.\nLast, how this piece relates to Duoshe. Duoshe tells many stories of \u0026quot;changed the god, kept the language\u0026quot; or \u0026quot;conquered, and then rewrote the conquerors.\u0026quot; That is looking sideways. Shi Le, Emperor Xiaowen and Gu Yanwu are looking down the depth at the same kind of thing. What a civilization ends up keeping depends on which things people are living every day.\nIf you could keep only one, the moral order or the robes and caps, which do you think the people who went south actually kept?\nReferences\nJi Kang, On Dispelling Selfishness, in Collected Works of Ji Kang Book of Jin: juan 5 \u0026quot;Annals of Emperor Xiaohuai\u0026quot;; juan 43 \u0026quot;Biography of Wang Yan\u0026quot;; juan 49 \u0026quot;Biography of Ji Kang\u0026quot;; juan 56 \u0026quot;Biography of Jiang Tong\u0026quot; (with On Moving the Rong Away); juan 62 \u0026quot;Biography of Zu Ti\u0026quot;; juan 65 \u0026quot;Biography of Wang Dao\u0026quot;; juan 89 \u0026quot;Biographies of the Loyal and Righteous: Ji Shao\u0026quot;; juan 101 \u0026quot;Account of Liu Yuanhai\u0026quot;; juan 105 \u0026quot;Account of Shi Le, part two\u0026quot; Liu Yiqing, A New Account of the Tales of the World, \u0026quot;Speech and Conversation,\u0026quot; with Liu Xiaobiao's commentary Book of Wei, juan 7B, \u0026quot;Annals of Emperor Gaozu, part two\u0026quot; Gu Yanwu, Rizhilu, entry \u0026quot;Zhengshi\u0026quot; (Huang Rucheng's collected commentary edition, juan 17; Complete Library of the Four Treasuries edition, juan 13) Veritable Records of Emperor Shizu, juan 5 and 17 (cited via Zhang Chang, \u0026quot;A Reconsideration of the Qing Hair-Shaving Policy — in Dialogue with Mr. Yu Hongliang,\u0026quot; Journal of Tsinghua University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 2021, no. 3) Yongzheng, Record of Great Righteousness Dispelling Delusion, juan 1, 1729 Lu Xun, \u0026quot;Wei–Jin Manners, Literature, Medicine and Wine,\u0026quot; 1927, in And That's All (Er Yi Ji) Zhang Yuxing, \u0026quot;The Sanguan Temple in Shenyang and Early Qing History\u0026quot; (the Zhang Chun section, cited; original from Wu Han, ed., Chinese Historical Materials in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, vol. 9) Wang Yuanchong, an article in The Paper (Joseon held rites for the Ming at the Daebodan altar in Hanseong from 1704 to 1897; \u0026quot;Little China\u0026quot; consciousness); Ge Zhaoguang's work on \u0026quot;Great Ming robes and caps\u0026quot; in the Yanxing (Beijing travel) literature (🟡, both second-hand) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e01/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"an-emperor-who-would-not-let-anyone-say-hu\"\u003eAn emperor who would not let anyone say \u0026quot;Hu\u0026quot;\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 319 CE, Shi Le, a man of the Jie people, proclaimed himself King of Zhao at Xiangguo. That year he decreed that \u0026quot;Hu\u0026quot; people were to be called \u0026quot;people of the state\u0026quot; instead. Later, when the palace was built and the laws grew stricter, one of them read: \u0026quot;the word 'Hu' is especially forbidden.\u0026quot; Any other word could be forgiven; \u0026quot;Hu\u0026quot; was the one you must never say.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003cem\u003eBook of Jin\u003c/em\u003e records a small story. A staff officer named Fan Tan was poor, and Shi Le wanted to promote him to be a governor. Fan Tan came to say goodbye, and Shi Le, seeing his ragged robes and cap, was startled: \u0026quot;Officer Fan, how did you get so poor?\u0026quot; Fan Tan was an honest man, and blurted out: \u0026quot;Not long ago I ran into Jie bandits, heartless people, who took everything I had.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Moral Order Was Lost, but the Robes Remained"},{"content":"First, let me say where I stand I value gold; diamonds, designer toys and sneakers I lean towards thinking of as \u0026quot;passing the parcel.\u0026quot; Someone with a position writing about this has to set himself a rule: put down the evidence that favours me, and the evidence against me, side by side.\nOne more thing: this piece is only about gold; silver gets its own. The reason is simple: they are worth something for different reasons. According to the World Gold Council (WGC), industrial uses were only about 6.5% of gold demand in 2025 (323 tonnes of 5,002 tonnes total); silver is the opposite, with more than half going to industry: according to the Silver Institute's 2026 survey, industrial demand in 2025 was about 657 million ounces, more than half of total demand (the share is my own calculation). Writing them together would either turn gold into an industrial good or turn silver into money; both wrong.\nThree common reasons, checked one by one When people say gold is \u0026quot;reliable,\u0026quot; there are roughly three common reasons: it has industrial value; its supply is limited and it doesn't spoil; it's more reliable than paper money backed by a regime. One at a time.\nOne: industrial value This one doesn't hold, or has to be put differently.\nGlobal gold demand in 2025 was 5,002 tonnes. Jewellery was about 1,542 tonnes, three-tenths (my calculation); technology 323 tonnes, about 6.5%; and the big rest was investment (ETFs plus bars and coins, about 2,175 tonnes) and net purchases by central banks (863 tonnes). Investment plus central banks come to about six-tenths (my calculation).\nSource: World Gold Council, \u0026quot;Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025\u0026quot;; shares and \u0026quot;other\u0026quot; are my own calculation.\nThat is, the gold price is mainly not set by factories' needs. It is worth something because people generally are willing to accept it, to store money in it, and to hold it as reserves. That is a different matter from \u0026quot;having industrial value,\u0026quot; and exactly the biggest difference from silver.\nSo this reason has to be changed to: gold's value doesn't come from industry, but from being \u0026quot;generally accepted.\u0026quot;\nTwo: limited supply, and it doesn't spoil This one is real.\nAccording to the WGC, by the end of 2025 humankind had dug up about 219,900 tonnes of gold in all. In 2025 new mine production was 3,672 tonnes, a record, and still only about 1.7% of the stock (my calculation). Gold doesn't rot or rust; gold ornaments from thousands of years ago are still here. When something adds only a percent or so of its stock each year and isn't used up, its supply really is hard to enlarge suddenly.\nTwo additions, though.\nFirst, supply doesn't completely ignore price. With the gold price up sharply in 2025, mine output set a record, and recycled gold also rose 3%, to 1,404 tonnes. When the price is high, some people open new mines, and some sell old jewellery.\nSecond, \u0026quot;limited supply\u0026quot; shows only that it won't be printed at will like paper money; it doesn't show the price must rise. Price also depends on demand, and demand changes. We'll see this below.\nThree: more reliable than regime-backed paper money This one is half right, and half needs care.\nThe right half: paper money's credit does depend on the regime that issues it. There are many cases in history of paper money collapsing, the fabi of 1935 and the gold yuan of 1948, which I'll write about later. Gold wasn't issued by any government and doesn't become void because a regime falls.\nThe half to be careful about: gold is not \u0026quot;beyond the regime's reach.\u0026quot;\nOn 5 April 1933, US President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102: individuals holding more than about 5 ounces of gold coins, bullion or gold certificates had to hand them to the government before 1 May, at the official price of 20.67 dollars an ounce. The ban on private holding of gold was lifted only on 31 December 1974. On 19 August 1948, the Nationalist government issued the gold yuan and at the same time declared that gold, silver and foreign currency were \u0026quot;forbidden to circulate or be held,\u0026quot; to be exchanged for gold yuan by 20 November. Notice of the US Executive Order 6102 of 1933: gold coins, bullion and certificates held by individuals had to be handed to the Federal Reserve Banks by 1 May.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, U.S. Government Printing Office, public domain\nIn both cases the regime didn't rely on \u0026quot;backing\u0026quot;; it simply \u0026quot;took.\u0026quot; Gold's advantage is that it can be carried and is still recognised across a border; it isn't that a regime can't take it. Whether you keep it depends on whose hands it is in and where it is.\nFleeing across the sea: buying lives with gold In Vietnam's exodus by boat, people bought their lives with gold. This is the heaviest part of the gold story, and I'll write it separately.\nAround 1978–1979, Vietnam's ethnic Chinese left in large numbers. According to reports at the time, those who wanted to leave had to pay \u0026quot;twelve taels of gold,\u0026quot; split among officials, brokers and boat owners. One report of 1980 says some people first paid one tael of gold (about 3,000 dollars), with the full price about 15,000 dollars.\nAbout 1979, a small boat carrying Vietnamese refugees alongside the US Navy supply ship USS White Plains.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, U.S. Navy, public domain\nThink about that predicament: one country's money, once elsewhere, is accepted by no one; the house and the shop at home, none of it can be taken. At that time gold was one of the few things \u0026quot;the other side\u0026quot; also recognised. It is small, light, valuable, and a small boat can carry it. What was paid to the officials and what was paid to the boat owners was the same thing.\nBut this example also has two sides. Among those who took the gold were officials; the money that bought lives was divided layer by layer. What it proves is that \u0026quot;outside the border, gold is still accepted,\u0026quot; not that \u0026quot;gold protected the one who held it.\u0026quot; Many people paid their gold, boarded boats, and did not live to reach the shore.\nBy the way, \u0026quot;twelve taels\u0026quot; is the standard price in the reports; it varied greatly by time, place and route, and I don't treat it as a uniform price or convert it into today's money.\nWhat \u0026quot;worth something\u0026quot; rests on: insurance, not income Gold pays no interest. No dividends, no coupons. For each kind of thing I ask the same question: \u0026quot;where does its return come from?\u0026quot; For gold there is only one answer: the price difference, that is, someone later being willing to pay a higher price for it.\nSeen this way, it has something in common with \u0026quot;passing the parcel\u0026quot;: what the next person is willing to pay decides what you hold is worth. I don't dodge that.\nThen where does it differ from other \u0026quot;parcels\u0026quot;? I think in three ways. I'll put the evidence against it in too.\nFirst, the drum has been passed for thousands of years, and those taking the parcel are special: central banks. According to the WGC, net central-bank purchases worldwide in 2022 were over 1,100 tonnes, more than twice the previous year; from 2022 to 2025 the cumulative total exceeded 4,000 tonnes, about equal to the whole previous ten years. The freezing of the Russian central bank's foreign-exchange reserves in February 2022 is often seen as the trigger of this round of gold buying, though that is an interpretation, not something counted.\nA gold bar displayed by the Banque de France on Heritage Days 2022, engraved \u0026quot;PAMP SA SWITZERLAND 2022-06 999.9.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Ibex73, CC BY 4.0\nBut this has a reverse side: in 2025 net central-bank purchases were 21% lower than the previous year, yet the 2025 average gold price still rose 44%. So you can't say \u0026quot;central banks are buying, so the price won't fall\u0026quot;; what pushes the price isn't only central banks.\nSecond, the evidence for \u0026quot;inflation hedge\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;crisis refuge\u0026quot; is less good than their reputation. Erb and Harvey's 2013 paper \u0026quot;The Golden Dilemma\u0026quot; examined every sense in which gold is a \u0026quot;hedge\u0026quot;: against inflation, against currency moves, against low real interest rates, or as disaster insurance. The conclusion: over a few years, its record as an inflation hedge is poor; each claim explains only a small part of short-term gold-price moves; and the real gold price then was already above its historical mean, and historically, returns after such times were on the low side.\nHistory also has a very ugly stretch: on 21 January 1980 the gold price touched about 850 dollars intraday, and by 1999 it had fallen to about 255; the nominal 850 wasn't passed until 2008, almost 28 years in between. In 2008, from the year's high to the low after Lehman's collapse, gold itself fell by about a third; in one week of March 2020 it fell 8.6%, its worst week since 1983, when everyone was grabbing cash and covering margin and selling everything.\nOnly the points mentioned in the text are drawn; the dashed line is just for ease of viewing and doesn't represent the path in between. 2024 is back-calculated; the two 2026 points are reported and rounded.\nSo gold is insurance, not income.\nThird, bought and then sold, the discount is small; other things have big discounts. This is a ruler I want to use to judge \u0026quot;passing the parcel,\u0026quot; and I call it the discount test: buy something, sell it right back, how much do you get?\nDiamonds: according to Epstein's 1982 article \u0026quot;Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?\u0026quot;, a reseller in the cases got back only about sixty percent of the wholesale price. A seller's blog from jewellers now says the resale price is about 25% to 50% of retail. That figure comes from a seller's blog, with no statistical basis, and counts only as \u0026quot;reportedly.\u0026quot; Gold: the buy and sell prices for gold bars differ by a few percent; I didn't get official data, so I don't write a number here. That is one gap in this piece. I bring up this ruler because the phrase \u0026quot;passing the parcel\u0026quot; can't just be used to scold other people's things. Whether it stands depends on something that can be measured.\nWhat happened in the last two years WGC numbers I write as fact; those from second-hand sources I write as \u0026quot;reportedly\u0026quot; and round.\nPrice:\nIn 2025 the LBMA gold price averaged 3,431 dollars an ounce, up 44% on the year before, which means the 2024 average was about 2,400 (my back-calculation). 2025 set 53 record highs through the year, and the fourth-quarter average was 4,135. Reportedly, on 29 January 2026 the LBMA afternoon fix was about 5,400 dollars, the highest ever in nominal terms. Then came a steady pullback; reportedly the low of the fix in late June was about 4,000, roughly 27% below the January high. In September it was in the low four thousands. Demand:\nTotal demand in 2025 was 5,002 tonnes. ETF inflows were 801 tonnes, the second-strongest year on record; bars and coins 1,374 tonnes, of which the fourth quarter was 420 tonnes, the highest in 12 years; central banks' net purchases 863 tonnes, 21% less than in 2024, but the WGC says still at the upper edge of the expected range. Jewellery is the opposite: in 2025 the weight consumed fell 18%, and because the price went up, the money spent rose 18%. In the second quarter of 2026, jewellery volume fell another 17% year on year. This shows that jewellery buyers are sensitive to high prices, and that it wasn't jewellery that pulled the gold price up. In the second quarter of 2026, total demand was 1,269 tonnes, flat on a year earlier; central banks' net purchases 289 tonnes, 62% more than a year earlier; investment demand 262 tonnes, with ETFs seeing 45 tonnes of outflows in the quarter. Taken together, this round was driven mainly by investment and central banks, with those buying jewellery squeezed out by high prices. The pullback after January happened while central banks were still buying, ETFs began to flow out, and jewellery was falling. Which factor matters most, I don't conclude: the WGC counts only who bought how much, and doesn't explain why the price changed.\nThe next two years: three possible paths First, to be clear: I give no price levels. Below are three scenarios, what each needs, and which numbers to watch.\nBase rate: this section was meant to say \u0026quot;in all past two-year windows, what is the distribution of gold's gains and losses.\u0026quot; I couldn't get the LBMA historical series, so the section is left empty and I don't fill it with impressions.\nScenario A: central banks and investors both keep buying. Needs: central banks continue net buying, and ETFs see inflows again. Watch: whether central banks' net purchases, published quarterly by the WGC, can stay at about the second-quarter-2026 level (289 tonnes); whether ETFs' quarterly net flow turns positive.\nScenario B: moving sideways at a high level. Needs: investment inflows and outflows cancelling, with total demand stuck at around 1,270 tonnes a quarter. Watch: WGC quarterly total demand staying close to the second-quarter-2026 figure of 1,269 tonnes for several quarters; the gold price moving back and forth between the June 2026 low and the January high.\nScenario C: keeps giving back. Needs: central-bank gold buying going back to pre-2022 levels, ETFs continuing to see outflows, and real interest rates continuing to rise. Watch: WGC annual central-bank net purchases returning to pre-2022 levels for two years running (the exact number to be fetched); the LBMA gold price falling below the June 2026 low again; the yield on US Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) rising persistently (data from the US Treasury).\nCheck table for two years on (compare back in October 2028):\nSignal Source Reading for scenario A Reading for scenario C Central-bank net purchases (annual) WGC Still in the range since 2022 Back to pre-2022 ETF holdings change (cumulative) WGC Net inflow Net outflow LBMA gold price vs the June 2026 low LBMA Above Below This table is not a forecast; it only leaves something to check against two years from now.\nLooking the other way This piece has a position: gold is more like \u0026quot;a thing to store money in\u0026quot; than other things. It stands a little shakily in at least four places:\n\u0026quot;Gold is unaffected by regimes\u0026quot; is not accurate. In the US in 1933 and the Nationalist government in 1948, as soon as the regime reached out, gold was taken. Gold is also a \u0026quot;parcel.\u0026quot; It pays no interest, its return rests only on the price difference; in the 28 years from 1980 to 2008, the drumbeat stopped. Central banks buying doesn't mean it can't fall. In 2025 central banks bought less and the price still rose, which shows there are other drivers in the price, and those drivers can leave too. For the \u0026quot;discount test\u0026quot; I use to separate gold from diamonds, I don't yet have the number for the gold end. So that distinction is so far only half standing. My view I still value gold. Not because it will rise, but because among the things I know, it is the one most like \u0026quot;storing money.\u0026quot;\nI accept the checks in the text: that gold \u0026quot;has industrial value,\u0026quot; I withdraw; its value rests on the whole world accepting it, which is harder than industrial value. \u0026quot;More reliable than paper money\u0026quot; is also only half right; Roosevelt and the gold yuan both remind me that when a regime wants to take, gold is taken as well. So what I value is really that it can be \u0026quot;carried away\u0026quot;: those Vietnamese families who bought their lives with gold, whose houses, shops and bankbooks overnight no longer counted, and what was finally honoured was those few taels of gold sewn into their clothes.\nDiamonds, designer toys and sneakers are completely different from gold. A diamond bought and then resold supposedly has to be cut by half, and that kind of thing looks to me like a scam; designer toys and Air Jordans have no moat at all, they rely on a passing fashion, and when the fashion is over, the flower falls into the last person's hands. Gold also depends on the next person to take it, I admit that; but this drum has been passed for thousands of years, and among those taking the parcel are central banks. That is where I draw the line.\nI also remind myself: gold is insurance, not a thing that makes wealth. It doesn't pay me interest, and there was a stretch when you'd wait 28 years. Valuing it doesn't mean I should change all my money into it.\nIs there something in your family that, \u0026quot;when the day really comes,\u0026quot; can be carried away?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 original read; 🟡 second-hand, written in the text as \u0026quot;reportedly\u0026quot; and rounded.\nWorld Gold Council (WGC), Gold Demand Trends, full year 2025 and Q2 2026; above-ground stock and mine production 🟢 The Silver Institute, World Silver Survey 2026 (2025 industrial demand) 🟢 US Executive Order 6102 (5 April 1933); the ban on private gold holding lifted 31 December 1974 🟢 The Nationalist government's Emergency Economic Measures Decree and the issue of the gold yuan (19 August 1948), with deadlines for exchanging gold, silver and foreign currency 🟡 Reports on ethnic Chinese in Vietnam paying gold to leave in 1978–1979 (\u0026quot;twelve taels,\u0026quot; the 1980 report of one tael at about 3,000 dollars and a full price of about 15,000) 🟡 Erb, C. B. \u0026amp; Harvey, C. R. (2013), \u0026quot;The Golden Dilemma,\u0026quot; Financial Analysts Journal 🟡 (abstract and secondary accounts) Gold prices in 1980, 1999 and 2008; drawdowns in 2008 and March 2020 🟡 Epstein, E. J. (1982), \u0026quot;Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?\u0026quot;, The Atlantic 🟡 (original page not accessible); jewellery-trade seller blogs on resale prices 🔴 LBMA fixes of January and June 2026, as reported 🟡 ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/huozhi/f70/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"first-let-me-say-where-i-stand\"\u003eFirst, let me say where I stand\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI value gold; diamonds, designer toys and sneakers I lean towards thinking of as \u0026quot;passing the parcel.\u0026quot; Someone with a position writing about this has to set himself a rule: put down the evidence that favours me, and the evidence against me, side by side.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne more thing: this piece is only about gold; silver gets its own. The reason is simple: they are worth something for different reasons. According to the World Gold Council (WGC), industrial uses were only about 6.5% of gold demand in 2025 (323 tonnes of 5,002 tonnes total); silver is the opposite, with more than half going to industry: according to the Silver Institute's 2026 survey, industrial demand in 2025 was about 657 million ounces, more than half of total demand (the share is my own calculation). Writing them together would either turn gold into an industrial good or turn silver into money; both wrong.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Gold: Why Does Something That Pays No Interest Hold Its Value?"},{"content":"How I compared First the method; it's dull, but anyone can redo it.\nI have the text of the last 28 chapters of the Guiyou manuscript, the edited text circulating online. On the other side is the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao edition, chapters 81 to 120 of the standard text. I removed the punctuation and marginal notes from both sides, kept only the Chinese characters, and slid a 12-character window across: wherever 12 characters in a row were exactly the same, I marked it. Then I threw out passages that appear only in the first eighty chapters, because both sides have the first eighty and they don't count.\nWhat was left was the overlap unique to the Guiyou manuscript and the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao.\nThe result: about 2,380 characters. They are spread over 19 different chapters of the Cheng-Gao, and the longest run is 82 characters, identical on both sides.\nThe 1791 movable-type printing from the Cuiwen Studio, the \u0026quot;Cheng-jia edition.\u0026quot; Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E printed the 120-chapter Dream of the Red Chamber for the first time; for two hundred-odd years since, people have been reading basically this edition's last forty chapters.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress, public domain\nFirst the limits. The Cheng-Gao text I used is the collated edition on Wikisource, whose last forty chapters are based on the Cheng-jia edition; I didn't compare Cheng-jia and Cheng-yi separately. A 12-character window misses borrowings where a few characters were changed, so the real overlap can only be larger, not smaller. I'll come back to these points later.\nFirst, a few passages Numbers aren't vivid, so I'll pick a few places.\nGuiyou chapter 91, the confiscation of the house, has an inventory of what was seized. Chapter 105 of the Cheng-Gao has one too. In the two lists even some very obscure items are the same: twenty-three lengths of bijī (serge), twelve lengths of gurong (a woollen cloth), ten tubes of \u0026quot;fragrant-mouse\u0026quot; fur, four squares of \u0026quot;bean-mouse\u0026quot; skin. The order is the same too. What differs is that small numbers are copied as they are, and big numbers are made smaller.\nGuiyou chapter 102, Miaoyu meets her fate. The plot of this chapter is Miaoyu being carried off by robbers, corresponding to chapter 112 of the Cheng-Gao. Both sides have the line \u0026quot;there was a rope ladder standing against the wall,\u0026quot; and both have \u0026quot;her hands and feet were numb and she couldn't move, and she couldn't speak.\u0026quot;\nGuiyou chapter 83, the false Baoyu (Zhen Baoyu) returns the jade. This passage is important in the pro-authenticity argument, because the commentary notes on the first eighty chapters mention Zhen Baoyu, and the Guiyou manuscript \u0026quot;cashes it in.\u0026quot;\nZhen Baoyu in Gai Qi's \u0026quot;Illustrations of the Dream of the Red Chamber.\u0026quot; The notes in the first eighty chapters mentioned him long ago, and readers waited two hundred years to see him meet Jia Baoyu.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, painted by Gai Qi, public domain\nBut the dialogue in which Zhen Baoyu and Jia Baoyu meet uses the lines of Cheng-Gao chapter 115: \u0026quot;I have long admired your fame, but had no way to receive your teaching\u0026quot;; \u0026quot;I am utterly dull and foolish, nothing but a piece of stubborn stone.\u0026quot;\nWhat these few places have in common is that, in the Cheng-Gao, they are the Cheng-Gao's own plot, and the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao are generally thought by scholars not to have been written by Cao Xueqin.\nThere are two ways to read it When two sides have large stretches of identical text, there may be three reasons.\nFirst, the Guiyou manuscript copied the Cheng-Gao. Second, the Cheng-Gao copied the Guiyou manuscript. Third, both copied some earlier common thing.\nThe latter two together form the reading the pro-authenticity side needs: the editors of the Cheng-Gao had an old manuscript in hand, and the Guiyou manuscript is that old manuscript (or a close relative). Cheng Weiyuan himself said in his preface that he \u0026quot;searched with all his might,\u0026quot; that \u0026quot;over several years only some twenty-odd juan had been gathered,\u0026quot; and then got over ten more from a drum-seller's stall.\nHas the pro side responded directly? Yes. Where people discuss online whether the Guiyou manuscript is genuine, I saw a very concentrated argument, roughly: if the Guiyou manuscript was continued by a modern person, then he copied the Cheng-Gao; but he didn't only copy, he also copied many of the Cheng-Gao's unreasonable plot points so that they became \u0026quot;more reasonable\u0026quot;; is there a plagiarist like that anywhere, in any age?\nThat is a very good question, because it gives a testable expectation: if a plagiarist improved things, what was moved over should be more fitting than the original.\nSo let's look: is what was moved over more fitting, or not?\nChapter 84: Baoyu calls his father \u0026quot;Mother\u0026quot; First look at Cheng-Gao chapter 119, where Baoyu goes to sit the provincial examination.\nIn that chapter, Lady Wang says to Baoyu and Jia Lan: \u0026quot;You two, uncle and nephew, are both entering the examination for the first time; you've lived this long and have never left me for a day… today you each go in…\u0026quot; Baoyu kneels and says to Lady Wang: \u0026quot;Mother gave me life, and I can never repay her…\u0026quot; Lady Wang says: \u0026quot;What a pity your grandmother can't see you!\u0026quot;\nAll of this is smooth: the mother is speaking, uncle and nephew sit together, so \u0026quot;each go in\u0026quot;; Baoyu speaks to his mother, so he says \u0026quot;Mother.\u0026quot;\nNow look at Guiyou chapter 84, also Baoyu going to the examination.\nBy this time Lady Wang is already dead, in the previous chapter. So the speech is changed to Jia Zheng speaking to Baoyu. But the tone of \u0026quot;never left me for a day\u0026quot; is still a mother's tone (with maids and daughters-in-law gathered round: a father doesn't generally say this kind of thing); \u0026quot;today you each go in\u0026quot; is still there, but this time only Baoyu goes to the exam, so there is no \u0026quot;each\u0026quot;; Baoyu kneels and says to his father: \u0026quot;Mother gave me life, and I can never repay her.\u0026quot; Then Jia Zheng goes on: \u0026quot;It's only a pity that Grandmother and your mother can't see it.\u0026quot;\nI felt a little anxious on its behalf when I read this. Three places are awkward: a father speaking for a mother, one person \u0026quot;each going in,\u0026quot; a son calling his father \u0026quot;Mother.\u0026quot;\nEach of these three awkward points is perfectly explicable in the Cheng-Gao. Conversely, to say the Cheng-Gao was changed from the Guiyou manuscript, you must suppose that Cao Xueqin's draft happened to have these three flaws, and that the Cheng-Gao editors, by changing the plot, smoothed out these three, one by one.\nOf the two explanations, one needs a single action: \u0026quot;when moving it, the speaker was changed and not cleanly\u0026quot;; the other needs a chain of coincidences. This is a very common situation in textual scholarship when judging priority: the smoother is earlier, the more awkward later.\nChapter 102: the \u0026quot;garden\u0026quot; and the \u0026quot;old women\u0026quot; in the convent Miaoyu in Gai Qi's \u0026quot;Illustrations of the Dream of the Red Chamber.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;She wants to be clean, but never was; she calls the void void, but may not be\u0026quot;: the verdict already wrote her fate, but what exactly her fate was, each edition tells differently.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, painted by Gai Qi, public domain\nThe second place is Miaoyu.\nIn Cheng-Gao chapter 112, Miaoyu lives in the Hall of Green Jade (Longcui Nunnery) inside the Grand View Garden. The robbers climb in from the garden's back wall, put up a rope ladder, and climb out, with accomplices waiting outside. The next day the nuns discover she's gone, and \u0026quot;the old women and maids all said.\u0026quot;\nIn Guiyou chapter 102, Miaoyu has already left the Jia household and lives in a small nunnery by the Guazhou ferry, with only an old nun, a young nun and two maids. But in the story, the monks still \u0026quot;came to the garden's back wall, put up a rope ladder, climbed up the wall and jumped out,\u0026quot; the next day still \u0026quot;opened the nunnery door and searched the whole garden,\u0026quot; and still a crowd of \u0026quot;old women\u0026quot; appear whom the earlier text never mentioned.\nThe garden and the old women of the Grand View Garden, moved into a small nunnery at a ferry crossing, become surplus things.\nIf it's \u0026quot;not cleanly changed,\u0026quot; what does that mean? Put these two places together, and neither is \u0026quot;changed to fit better\u0026quot;; both are \u0026quot;moved over, scene changed, the old things left uncleared.\u0026quot;\nThis cannot prove that the Guiyou manuscript certainly comes from 2008. What it proves is narrower: at least in these passages, the Guiyou manuscript is downstream of the Cheng-Gao. The Cheng-Gao was printed in 1791.\nA few more limits need adding, and I want to be clear about them.\nFirst, this is only a few passages. The 2,380 characters I mention are only part of 28 chapters. What the rest comes from, this comparison can't say.\nSecond, what I compared is the text circulating online and the publisher's edited version; I have never seen a physical object. The publisher's own preface admits that this book is \u0026quot;an edited version of images of a copied manuscript, not the text of a true copy.\u0026quot; (Publishers: Jin Junjun and He Xuanhe, 2017 preface.)\nThird, in 2018 Guangming Daily relayed the promoter's 2014 account: the 28 chapters circulating online were \u0026quot;reconstructed from memory\u0026quot; by him, and later revised many times by him and by others. If that is true, then the \u0026quot;text in memory\u0026quot; itself may have mixed in sentences from the standard edition. I can't judge this, and can only leave it here for now.\nMy view I still think the Guiyou manuscript is an earlier draft, not yet polished. As for \u0026quot;has not been tampered with,\u0026quot; my current formulation is: its main skeleton has not been tampered with, and later people have added to it.\nI have an image for this: beauty lies in the bones, not the skin. The words don't matter; the skeleton does.\nBy that image, what I'm holding on to is the skeleton: the direction of the plot, the ends of the characters, the structure of echoes forward and back. The skin, the wording sentence by sentence, can be added by later hands, or can have grown in copying; it is not what I'm defending.\nI lean towards thinking the skeleton is genuine, and my reason is purpose: it writes about home and country, which is higher than writing about a family or about romantic love.\nI know what kind of reason that is. It is one reader's judgment, not textual-scholarship evidence: a high purpose can show that this skeleton deserves to be taken seriously, but cannot by itself show which era or which person it comes from. Likewise, a modern person who has read the allegorical school, writing along the \u0026quot;home and country\u0026quot; route, would also have a high purpose. So I treat it as a leaning, not a proof, and won't use it to rebut any test of wording.\nHow does this line up with the evidence in this piece?\nThe two thousand four hundred characters that overlap with the Cheng-Gao are skin. I counted: the whole 28 chapters come to about 190,000 characters, the overlap is 1.3 percent, concentrated in places like chapters 83 to 86, chapter 91 and chapter 102. Baoyu calling his father \u0026quot;Mother\u0026quot; in chapter 84, and the extra \u0026quot;garden\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;old women\u0026quot; in the convent in chapter 102, are all traces on the skin. What they show is that the wording of these sentences comes after the Cheng-Gao. They don't touch the skeleton.\nRhyme is skin too. Daiyu's \u0026quot;Ten Poems of Solitude\u0026quot; in chapter 82 rhyme by modern standard Mandarin, which shows that the wording of those poems was written by a modern person. As for the skeleton, the plot of the \u0026quot;Ten Poems of Solitude\u0026quot; in this chapter was mentioned in the notes to the first eighty chapters, and the skeleton can be early.\nSo, by \u0026quot;the bones stay, the skin doesn't matter,\u0026quot; both groups of evidence in this piece strike the skin and not the bones.\nBut in saying so, three things have to follow:\nFirst, what could prove the skeleton? The evidence the pro side gives now is \u0026quot;fitting\u0026quot;: foreshadowing that lines up, symmetrical structure, consistent characters. But I explained in another piece that the notes of the first eighty chapters were long ago compiled into a public list, and writing along the list also lines up. So what \u0026quot;fitting\u0026quot; can prove is that the writer had read that list; it can't alone prove the skeleton belongs to Cao Xueqin's generation.\nSecond, the line between bone and skin has to be drawable. Which is bone and which is skin can't be \u0026quot;what agrees with me is bone, and what doesn't is skin.\u0026quot; If it can't be drawn, then the claim can't be overturned by any evidence.\nThird, this is a claim that can't be tested by wording. All tests of wording, the Cheng-Gao overlap, the rhyming, the traces of moving, can't touch it. There is only one way to overturn it: a physical manuscript appears, or an independent record from before 2008 that has nothing to do with the promoter. So far there is neither.\nOne last question Whichever way you take it, there is one question I still haven't worked out.\nIf the Cheng-Gao editors really had an old manuscript in hand, why are the sentences they chose exactly the smoothest ones in the Cheng-Gao's own plot? If the Guiyou manuscript copied the Cheng-Gao, why is the copying so fragmentary, scattered across 19 chapters?\nWhich of these two situations do you think is more like what a person does when copying a book?\nReferences\nLiu Jian, \u0026quot;The Collapse of 'Wu's Story of the Stone,'\u0026quot; Guangming Daily, 27 February 2018 Preface to The Last 28 Chapters of the Guiyou Manuscript of the Story of the Stone, Jin Junjun and He Xuanhe, 10 April 2017; preface one to the third edition, Xiao Wenlin, 8 April 2017 Online discussions about whether the Guiyou manuscript is genuine (netizens' views, as leads) Wikisource collated edition of Dream of the Red Chamber (first eighty chapters on the Gengchen manuscript, last forty on the Cheng-jia edition); Cheng Weiyuan's preface: \u0026quot;Preface by Cheng Weiyuan\u0026quot; in Wikisource's Dream of the Red Chamber (Cheng-yi edition) (signed Xiaoquan Cheng Weiyuan) The author's own character-by-character comparison (12-character window; details not published) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/miben/p02/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"how-i-compared\"\u003eHow I compared\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst the method; it's dull, but anyone can redo it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have the text of the last 28 chapters of the Guiyou manuscript, the edited text circulating online. On the other side is the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao edition, chapters 81 to 120 of the standard text. I removed the punctuation and marginal notes from both sides, kept only the Chinese characters, and slid a 12-character window across: wherever 12 characters in a row were exactly the same, I marked it. Then I threw out passages that appear only in the first eighty chapters, because both sides have the first eighty and they don't count.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat was left was the overlap unique to the Guiyou manuscript and the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"2,400 Characters"},{"content":"First, what this line says \u0026quot;There's no throne to inherit.\u0026quot;\nThe meaning: you have children so there is someone to take over, to carry on the family estate. If your family has no estate, no \u0026quot;seat,\u0026quot; there is no reason to have many.\nWho said it first, I have not found. It sounds like a joke, but I think it is actually a very serious algorithm: it treats a child as an investment and looks at the return.\nSo let us work it out by its own algorithm.\nThe half it gets right Start with money. In February 2024 YuWa Population Research (a private demographic think tank) issued a report: for Chinese families, raising a child from birth to age 17 costs 538,000 yuan on average; to a university bachelor's degree, about 680,000 yuan.\nIt also computed a multiple: the cost to age 18 is 6.3 times GDP per head. Compared with other countries: Australia 2.08 times, France 2.24, Sweden 2.91, Germany 3.64, the US 4.11, Japan 4.26.\nSource: YuWa Population Research, China Fertility Cost Report 2024. This is a think tank's estimate, not official statistics; whether the definitions are consistent across countries I have not checked.\nThe report has one more item, the \u0026quot;mother's price\u0026quot;: for each additional child, women's wage rates fall 12% to 17%; the Western figure it compared with is about 7%.\nFor the new 2026 edition (using 2024 figures), what I read is media accounts of the report: from preparing for pregnancy to age 18, an average of 2,544 yuan a month; a second child costs about seventy percent of the first, a third about sixty percent.\nKorea's figures point the same way. A 2024 survey of Korean newlyweds: raising one child for 19 years was estimated at 252 million won, about 1.4 million won of childcare costs a month on average.\nThen happiness. Some have made meta-analyses of children and well-being. The abstract I read says: on happiness measures such as \u0026quot;life satisfaction,\u0026quot; parents and the childless hardly differ; on measures such as \u0026quot;whether life has meaning,\u0026quot; parents are slightly higher, more clearly for women; on marital satisfaction, parents are lower than the childless, and the more children the lower.\nIn 2014 Angus Deaton of Princeton and Arthur Stone of Stony Brook, using Gallup survey data (published in PNAS), also said: once marriage, income, education and religion are controlled, the overall life satisfaction of parents and non-parents differs little.\nEconomics has an old idea, the \u0026quot;quantity-quality trade-off\u0026quot; (Becker and Lewis, 1973): the richer a family, the more it wants to give each child better conditions; once the standard of \u0026quot;better\u0026quot; is raised, the cost of each child goes up, and so there are fewer children.\nSo counting only the account of one household, the quip stands. A child is something you spend on, not something that brings income in. As for being happy, the research says \u0026quot;about the same.\u0026quot;\nWhat it leaves out First, most families never had a throne.\nHistorically, the great majority of people did not have children in order to take over a seat either.\nMencius, \u0026quot;Li Lou I,\u0026quot; has a line: \u0026quot;There are three kinds of unfilial conduct, and having no heir is the greatest.\u0026quot; For over two thousand years there was not a single throne in that sentence. What it speaks of is \u0026quot;heir\u0026quot;: someone to carry on.\nA gatekeeper and his family, Changde, Hunan, c. 1900–1919. A gatekeeper's household has no throne, yet it has three children.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nCarry on what? Fields, house, a trade, incense, and one more thing: after you are old, someone to look after you.\nFor that last item, there are still numbers today. In the long form of the 2020 Seventh Census, the main source of living for rural people aged 60 and over was: support from family 41.9%, own labour 33.6%, pension only 10.4%. In the city it is just the reverse: pension 69.8%, family support 17.3%. (This is a sample table; I use only the proportions, and went into detail in the piece \u0026quot;Where Does the Money Come from When You Are Old.\u0026quot;)\nSo the metaphor of the \u0026quot;throne\u0026quot; makes the reason for having children too narrow. For most people, children are not for \u0026quot;taking over a seat\u0026quot; but for \u0026quot;keeping on caring.\u0026quot;\nSecond, the account is recorded somewhere else.\nWith institutions such as pensions, \u0026quot;someone looks after you when you are old\u0026quot; no longer depends only on your own children. It depends on this: those now at work pay in and support today's old. What you pay supports other people's parents; when you are old, it is other people's children who support you.\nIn such a system, part of a child's \u0026quot;returns\u0026quot; is shared among everyone, while the cost is borne only by the parents. Economics calls this an \u0026quot;externality.\u0026quot; Economists have written that under pay-as-you-go pensions, whether a couple has a child affects everyone's pension, yet nobody takes that into their own decision, so the result tends to be too few children; much of the literature calls this the \u0026quot;externality\u0026quot; of fertility and holds it to be positive. At the same time it gives every couple a reason to free-ride. (This is from my reading of literature reviews; I did not read the papers one by one.)\nThe numbers are here: in 2025 China had 7.92 million births and 11.31 million deaths; people aged 60 and over numbered 323 million, and those aged 65 and over 224 million. (National Bureau of Statistics, January 2026.)\nThis \u0026quot;externality\u0026quot; does not rebut the quip but supplements it: the private account is negative, the social account positive. So some are unwilling to pay, and some feel somebody has to.\nThird, what people want and what they actually have differ.\nA 2024 Korean survey asked working women aged 25 to 45: 66.9% said two children is ideal, 19.2% one, 10.1% three. But among the same people, more than sixty percent had no plan to have a child.\nAsked why not: the most common answer was \u0026quot;I don't think it's necessary\u0026quot; (13.9%), then \u0026quot;not enough economic means\u0026quot; (12.7%) and \u0026quot;education costs too high\u0026quot; (10.7%). Among the married, \u0026quot;I don't think it's necessary\u0026quot; was 19.1% and \u0026quot;I don't want to spend that much time and energy\u0026quot; 11.8%.\nMy reading is: some do not want one; some want one but not at this price. How big each part is, the statistics cannot separate.\nChinese figures I did not get. The China Population and Development Research Center under the National Health Commission began a national survey of 30,000 people in October 2024; the results have not been seen.\nHow other places answer I set out how other places answer \u0026quot;the reason for children.\u0026quot;\nIsrael, with a total fertility rate of 2.87 in 2024, is the only OECD country above replacement level. The differences within are large: the ultra-Orthodox about 6.5 (official figures for 2020–22), secular Jews about 2.1 (the 2014 figure cited in one study); for the religious but not extreme band I have no reliable figure.\nSources: Israel 2024 (OECD and Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, relayed second-hand, group figures approximate); South Korea 2024 (Statistics Korea).\nThere, \u0026quot;the reason for children\u0026quot; is neither taking over a seat nor old-age support, but a community going on down the road: children are part of the \u0026quot;teaching.\u0026quot; There is another side: the secular Jews' 2.0 is also higher than most developed countries, and research often attributes it to state policy (such as publicly funded IVF) and the security situation, not wholly to religion; and the figures for these groups cannot be used directly to say \u0026quot;religion makes people have more.\u0026quot;\nSouth Korea, in 2025, had a preliminary total fertility rate of 0.80 against 0.75 in 2024; births in 2025 were 254,500, 6.8% more than the year before. Whether the rise is a rebound of those who married after the pandemic, or policy at work, or both, accounts differ.\n\u0026quot;Can giving money make people have more?\u0026quot; The evidence from various countries I will devote a separate piece to later.\nTurning it around In this section I want to reverse my own argument too.\nFirst, \u0026quot;the social account is positive\u0026quot; does not lead to \u0026quot;you should have children.\u0026quot; The externality reasoning works in reverse too: since the benefits are everyone's, the costs should be borne by everyone, not all pressed onto the parents. Whether having children is a public or a private matter, countries' practices go both ways.\nSecond, research on happiness does not support \u0026quot;children make you happier.\u0026quot; Several items above all say \u0026quot;about the same.\u0026quot; On whether childless old people are lonely, studies also say different things: one US study in 2025, the average loneliness score of childless old people was 1.62, of those with at least one child 1.52; but where friends give strong support, the loneliness of the childless drops more. Other research says being childless is not necessarily lonelier in itself; it depends on why. These are press releases and abstracts, with American and European samples, not Chinese. So \u0026quot;someone looks after you when you are old\u0026quot; is a reason beyond the throne, but \u0026quot;no children means loneliness\u0026quot; the data do not support.\nThird, some count from the other end. In 2011 the economist Caplan wrote Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, saying that studies of twins and adoption show that within the normal range, how parents raise children affects how they turn out less than people think, so there is no need to be so anxious about raising them and the cost can be lower. This claim is very controversial; I did not read the book, only reviews.\nFourth, how many is \u0026quot;so many\u0026quot;? At present there are 7.92 million births a year, which is hardly \u0026quot;so many.\u0026quot; What is really in dispute is often not three or two but none or one.\nMy leaning I am not angry when I hear this quip; I even think its sums are right. It is only that the book it keeps is too small.\nIt shrinks the child into a piece of private property: taking over a seat, an estate, money. Counted that way, it is of course not worth it. What I myself worry about most is children and the birth rate. Put larger, it is the future of the yellow peoples; every series I write goes round and round to this one thing.\nThe word \u0026quot;heir\u0026quot; has never meant only an inheritor. A person lives in a community with a past, ancestors ahead, children behind, himself standing in the middle: that is what it means to \u0026quot;have heirs.\u0026quot; I have looked at Israel's numbers seriously: the same country, the same era, the same house prices, and religious families have two or three times as many children as secular ones. I am not saying religion is the answer; Malaysian Indians are religious too and their fertility is just as low, 1.1, which is a test of my view. But one thing I am more and more sure of: after industrialisation people were taken apart one by one, atomised, and only then did a child become an \u0026quot;unprofitable investment.\u0026quot; What is lacking is not money but something that can join people up. What I call the \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; is just this: a cultural faith everyone recognises, which lets a person feel \u0026quot;I have a past and a place to go\u0026quot; (ancestor worship, rites, festivals, Chinese characters one can read), not anyone's national identity. What it cures first is \u0026quot;not standing firm\u0026quot;; the fertility rate is something that may follow back once people stand firm.\nThere is one more layer, how a family divides its work. The report says that having one more child lowers the mother's wage rate by 12% to 17%. My view is that a family should be complementary: if the woman is strong she can take the outside; then find a man who by temperament does not compete to be strong and have him run the back yard well. Who takes the outside and who the inside is divided by temperament, not by sex. In this way that cost need not always be counted on the mother's head alone.\nSo I do not rebut the quip. I only want to ask: besides each household's own books, should a society have another set?\nThere was no throne in your family. Then why did your parents have you?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 original read; 🟡 second-hand; 🔴 only the abstract read.\nYuWa Population Research, China Fertility Cost Report 2024 edition, 2024-02-21 (relayed by Jiemian News) 🟡; 2026 edition (released 2026-05-29, 2024 figures: 2,543.84 yuan a month per child, 580,000 yuan cumulative; second child about 70% of the first, third about 60%; relayed by NetEase, Jiemian, Caixin and others) 🟡 Survey of childcare costs of Korean newlyweds (Korea Times 2024-03) 🟡; survey of working Korean women aged 25–45 on childbearing (2024-02) 🟡 Deaton \u0026amp; Stone, PNAS, 2014 (Gallup data; with marriage, income, education and religion controlled, little difference in life evaluation between parents and non-parents), per Pew Research's 2014 relay and media reports 🟡; a meta-analysis of the well-being of parents and non-parents (abstract) 🔴 Studies of loneliness among childless older people (UNH press release 2025, US; abstracts of European studies) 🟡 The China Population and Development Research Center's national survey on fertility intentions (launched 2024-10, relayed by China Daily; results not out) 🟡 Mencius, \u0026quot;Li Lou I,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;There are three kinds of unfilial conduct, and having no heir is the greatest\u0026quot; (Wikisource) 🟢 Becker \u0026amp; Lewis (1973); the fertility externality under pay-as-you-go pensions (a series of papers by Cremer, Gahvari, Pestieau, Meier \u0026amp; Wrede and others, per literature reviews and working-paper abstracts) 🟡; Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (2011) (relayed by reviews) 🟡 National Bureau of Statistics 2025 population data (released 2026-01) 🟢 Seventh National Population Census long form, tables 8-4a/b/c, main source of living of those aged 60 and over 🟢 Israel's 2024 total fertility rate 2.87 (media relay) 🟡; ultra-Orthodox about 6.5 (Okun, \u0026quot;Faith \u0026amp; Fertility in Israel,\u0026quot; SAPIR, 2024; Foreign Policy, 2025-05-14, citing 6.48 in the official 2020–22 figures) 🟡; secular Jewish women about 2.1 (one study citing the 2014 figure) 🟡; Statistics Korea birth statistics for 2024 and 2025 🟡 For comparison: this series' \u0026quot;Where Does the Money Come from When You Are Old\u0026quot;; the Neighbours' Heaven pieces \u0026quot;Six Similar Exam Papers\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;The Same Deck, Six Ways of Playing\u0026quot; ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/shishi/p10/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"first-what-this-line-says\"\u003eFirst, what this line says\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026quot;There's no throne to inherit.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe meaning: you have children so there is someone to take over, to carry on the family estate. If your family has no estate, no \u0026quot;seat,\u0026quot; there is no reason to have many.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho said it first, I have not found. It sounds like a joke, but I think it is actually a very serious algorithm: it treats a child as an investment and looks at the return.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo let us work it out by its own algorithm.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-half-it-gets-right\"\u003eThe half it gets right\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStart with money. In February 2024 YuWa Population Research (a private demographic think tank) issued a report: for Chinese families, raising a child from birth to age 17 costs 538,000 yuan on average; to a university bachelor's degree, about 680,000 yuan.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why Have So Many? There's No Throne to Inherit"},{"content":"Why look to the south What this series has written about so far is China, the Korean peninsula, Japan and Vietnam. All of them once lived under the Confucian Heaven.\nSoutheast Asia is not like that. In Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia the mainstream is Theravada Buddhism; in Indonesia and Malaysia it is Islam. The Confucian Heaven is not these countries' own Heaven.\nBut a group of people carried it there. They are the Chinese.\nThey arrived in other people's countries, with no country of their own to speak for them, and sometimes were not even allowed to use their own language. At that point, what does a community still use to say \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;?\nThe word yigui (\u0026quot;a belief to rely on and return to\u0026quot;) was asking exactly this in the first place.\nMy position, and its range In the preface to this series I set out my own inclination: to make Confucianism a religion, and give all East Asians one shared religious belief to rely on and return to, a force that pulls toward a centre. I provisionally call this idea \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot;, to tell it apart from Korea's Cheondogyo.\nA position has to be tried on actual people. \u0026quot;East Asians\u0026quot; in this series is just a way of speaking; it means those in the pan-Confucian cultural sphere who are willing to think deeply. By that range:\nThai, Lao, Burmese and Khmer people are not in it; Chinese, and Vietnamese, are in it. So these pieces do not put any position to \u0026quot;Southeast Asians\u0026quot;. They take it and put the question to two groups only: the Chinese, and the Vietnamese.\nA few rules: each piece answers five questions Every piece answers these five:\nHistory: how they arrived and how they were treated; Morality: what this community uses to say \u0026quot;ought\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;ought not\u0026quot;: temples, charitable halls, ancestors, or something else; Discipline: when no state protects them, what governs them: clan and native-place associations, schools, or gang rules; Present: how many there are today, what they believe, what they can do; Future: how much is left for the next generation. Each piece also has two fixed sections:\nWhat my position says here: this section I leave for myself to write; Looking at it the other way: the hardest counter-argument to my position, not written as a straw man. A table The way numbers are counted differs from country to country and should be read only as orders of magnitude.\nCountry Chinese population Share Notes Malaysia — about 23.2% in 2020 (37% in 1957) the most complete Chinese-education system Thailand about 9.5 million (2012 estimate) 11–14% the highest degree of assimilation Indonesia 2.83 million (2010 census) about 1.2% 1967–2000: public belief and customs restricted Vietnam 749,466 (2019 census) 0.78% outside estimates are much higher; about 450,000 left in 1978–79 Cambodia estimated 300,000 to 700,000 — about 430,000 in 1975; by 1979 about half had not survived Myanmar not listed — figures differ too widely The hardest counter-argument, put here first One question will follow every piece. I want to say it at the start.\nThe heaviest accusation the Chinese in Southeast Asia have met is not \u0026quot;what you believe is wrong\u0026quot;, but \u0026quot;your heart is not here\u0026quot;.\nIn the early twentieth century King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) of Thailand wrote articles under a pen name calling the Chinese \u0026quot;the Jews of the East\u0026quot;. In 1967 Indonesia's New Order government required Chinese to change their names, closed Chinese schools, and shut their rites inside the home. In the same year anti-Chinese riots broke out in Yangon, Myanmar, set off by the spread of the influence of the Cultural Revolution in China.\nKing Vajiravudh (Rama VI) of Siam (1881–1925).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown photographer, Public domain\nWhat these have in common: the host country believed that these people had a \u0026quot;heart\u0026quot; abroad.\nAnd my position, of all things, is precisely to give them a force that pulls toward a centre.\nSo the first wall is here: in a country afraid of a \u0026quot;fifth column\u0026quot;, is a force that pulls toward a centre a medicine, or a reason?\nIn 1955, at Bandung, the People's Republic of China and Indonesia signed a Dual Nationality Treaty that made Chinese with dual nationality choose one. One way of reading it is that this was meant to dispel a neighbour's suspicion; another is that it was abandonment. The two readings are left to the Indonesia piece.\nZhou Enlai, Nehru and U Nu talking during the Bandung Conference, April 1955.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown photographer, Public domain\nMy answer to this wall My answer is two roads, only two.\nOne: be strong enough. If a religion is strong enough, it can, like the expansion and rule of Islam, form a new centripetal force. At that point the accusation \u0026quot;your heart is not here\u0026quot; no longer holds, because the people here are themselves a \u0026quot;heart\u0026quot;.\nThe other: not strong enough. Then there is only assimilation.\n(The Philippines piece will set a problem for \u0026quot;only two\u0026quot;.)\nFor \u0026quot;enough\u0026quot; I have set four criteria: numbers, organisation, wealth, doctrine. All four are needed; with one missing, the centripetal force cannot stand. \u0026quot;Rule\u0026quot; here means cultural leadership, not political power.\nCriterion What to ask Numbers How many people does this community have, and is it still growing? Organisation Does it have its own temples, halls, schools, charitable halls, and can it govern itself? Wealth Does it have the resources to sustain the first two? Doctrine Does it have a \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; that depends on no single country, so that people know why they should turn toward this centre? Each piece measures against these four. What cannot be measured is left blank, and I say that it is left blank.\nThis answer has to be tested against history, not just stated here. The pieces after this each put the same question:\nIndonesia, Thailand, Myanmar: the second road is already something that has happened; Malaysia: the \u0026quot;enough\u0026quot; the first road needs; the Chinese share of the population has fallen from 37% to 23.2%; Cambodia: when a community has half of it taken away, what does the word \u0026quot;enough\u0026quot; mean? Here I need to say things clearly so as not to hurt anyone. When I say \u0026quot;there are only two roads: be strong enough, or be assimilated\u0026quot;, I am not saying who ought to be assimilated, and I am certainly not judging the descendants of Chinese who have blended into local society, speak Thai or Indonesian, and use local names. Their days are their own days, and not a failure. What I am saying is a cold historical observation: for a community with no state and few people, to keep its language and its ancestors' rites has, in history, often had only these two endings. What I want to ask is: is there a third road? Could a community with neither numbers nor a state hold itself together by other things, by small things done every day, without being taken as \u0026quot;heart not here\u0026quot;? This is what I really want to ask.\nComing next Cambodia: half of the people Vietnam: after the boat people Indonesia: what was allowed, and what was taken Thailand: the most successful assimilation; does it count as a kind of yigui Myanmar: the neighbour Qianlong did not defeat, and the people who stayed Malaysia: Chinese education, a community kept alive by its schools Thai, Lao and Zhuang, Dai, Hmong: one language family, each with its own Heaven Singapore: the state pushed Confucianism once, then took it back The Philippines: becoming the nation's elite; are the Chinese still Chinese Hong Kong: registered, but not banned Looking at it the other way One can ask back about the direction of this series: why use the word yigui at all?\nFor most Southeast Asian Chinese, what fills the day is tomorrow's business, not \u0026quot;where do I belong\u0026quot;. Is that question something only people who write essays have?\nTo my neighbours to the south. You may have grown up in Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh, Yangon or Manila; the old people at home may speak Teochew, Hakka or Hokkien that I cannot understand, and perhaps you yourself can no longer speak a word of it. That is all right. You have probably heard people say it: your hearts are not here. Let me ask you one thing. Every Qingming, when you stand before your ancestors' graves, or before the shrine at home, where is your heart? It is in the place where you are standing, isn't it. So what I want to ask you is not whether you are still Chinese, only these few things: how your grandparents came ashore from that dock, whom the shrine in your house honours, how your family spends Qingming each year. These are truer than any grand talk of yigui. I want to write them down, so that more people, including your own children, can read them.\nWhen a community has no state to speak for it, what does it still use to say \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;?\nReferences\nRama VI, \u0026quot;the Jews of the East\u0026quot;: written under a pen name; scholars dispute what it meant The 1955 Treaty between China and Indonesia on the Question of Dual Nationality (Zhou Enlai and Sunario; in force 20 January 1960) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d20/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"why-look-to-the-south\"\u003eWhy look to the south\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat this series has written about so far is China, the Korean peninsula, Japan and Vietnam. All of them once lived under the Confucian Heaven.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSoutheast Asia is not like that. In Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia the mainstream is Theravada Buddhism; in Indonesia and Malaysia it is Islam. The Confucian Heaven is not these countries' own Heaven.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut a group of people carried it there. They are the Chinese.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey arrived in other people's countries, with no country of their own to speak for them, and sometimes were not even allowed to use their own language. At that point, what does a community still use to say \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe word \u003cem\u003eyigui\u003c/em\u003e (\u0026quot;a belief to rely on and return to\u0026quot;) was asking exactly this in the first place.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Neighbours to the South: How the Chinese in Southeast Asia Live On as an \"Us\""},{"content":"A person who can't speak Chinese I know a colleague of Cambodian descent. I had always assumed he was from a Cantonese-speaking region.\nLater he said that his mother's grandfather was Chinese, a refugee. He himself does not speak a word of Chinese.\nHe has been back to Cambodia to see relatives.\nI didn't ask what was left in his family.\nThe numbers In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power, there were about 430,000 ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. The common estimate among historians is that by 1979, when the regime was overthrown, about half of them had died of disease, hunger, exhaustion or execution.\nThe scholar of Cambodia Ben Kiernan wrote that Democratic Kampuchea was the greatest catastrophe any Chinese community in Southeast Asia has met.\nIn comparison: the Cham Muslims, about 250,000, lost about 36%; the country's whole population lost about 21% (Kiernan estimates about 1.67 million people). The ethnic Chinese had the highest proportion.\nMy colleague once said \u0026quot;more than half\u0026quot;. I did not ask more, and I don't know whether he meant the Chinese or the whole country. If the Chinese, it fits. If the whole country, the common estimate is much lower: about 21% of the nation (Kiernan's 1.67 million; the estimates of the demographic experts at the UN-backed tribunal cover a wider range, about 1.2 million to 2.8 million).\nWhy them Kiernan holds that the Chinese were killed not mainly because of race but because most of them lived in cities.\nThe Khmer Rouge emptied the cities. Those who lived in cities were the \u0026quot;old people\u0026quot;. Many Chinese did business in cities, so many of them were among those emptied out.\nThis has to be said first. What it means is that this was not entirely an \u0026quot;anti-Chinese\u0026quot; campaign. The banning of language and culture was real; but the criterion that decided \u0026quot;who you are\u0026quot; was class, not only ethnicity.\nBefore that, another door had closed earlier still.\nIn 1970 the Lon Nol government came to power and closed all Chinese schools, Chinese shops and temples. This state of affairs lasted until the early 1990s.\nThat is, by 1975 the \u0026quot;organisation\u0026quot; of Cambodia's Chinese had already been taken away for five years.\nAfterwards In 1984 the Chinese of Cambodia were estimated to number only about 60,000.\nAfter 1993 the number grew again. The present estimate is 300,000 to 700,000, with wide disagreement about how to count. Chinese schools have reopened; some say nearly a hundred, many with subsidies from the Chinese government.\nThe Chinese of Cambodia have traditionally often married Khmers. That has not changed.\nMorality and discipline: after three things were taken away A community with no state to protect it holds itself up with three things: temples, clan and native-place associations, schools. Temples govern \u0026quot;ought\u0026quot;, associations and schools govern \u0026quot;what to do\u0026quot;.\nFor the Chinese of Cambodia, all three of these were taken away between 1970 and 1979.\nWith all three gone, what remains is the family. What is passed down in a family is often very little: a surname, a festival, a sentence from a grandfather.\nI don't know which one remains in my colleague's family.\nLunar New Year decorations in Phnom Penh (2014, Year of the Horse). The Chinese of Cambodia can celebrate the new year openly again today.　Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lunar_New_Year%27s_31-01-2014_(cheval_(%E9%A6%AC)_Phnom-Penh_Cambodia.jpg), Pierre André Leclercq, CC BY-SA 4.0\nA \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom from the West\u0026quot; The Khmer Rouge's ideas came from Marxism-Leninism, by way of Paris, and then by way of Mao.\nIt stands in the same place as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: a heavenly kingdom from the West, replacing the old \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; with a new one.\nI want to make this comparison more concrete and give it a test. A \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom\u0026quot;, I find, has four things. One, an end of the world: the old world is rotten through and must be pulled down whole. Two, a chosen people: one group is \u0026quot;pure\u0026quot;, another is to be cleared away. Three, a \u0026quot;new person\u0026quot;: the old people are to be remade, or destroyed. Four, a holy place: there is a place, a person, that is the truth itself. The Taiping had all four, and so did the Khmer Rouge: on a blank sheet of paper they meant to make a \u0026quot;new person\u0026quot; and wipe the \u0026quot;old people\u0026quot; from the earth, those who lived in cities, who had read books, who did business, who believed in other gods. When an idea has all four things at once, it is no longer a proposal; it is a religion, and a religion that does not allow any other \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; to exist.\nScholars already have a name for this: political religion (Voegelin, Aron). The piece on political religion in Duoshe covers it, so I won't repeat it here.\nFour criteria, measured Numbers: about 430,000 in 1975, about 60,000 in 1984, now estimated at 300,000 to 700,000. More than half was taken away; recovering; Organisation: temples, Chinese schools, chambers of commerce, closed from 1970 and reopened in the early 1990s; after the reopening there were seventy or eighty Chinese schools (media report of 2012), and a 2017 count gave 55 schools with about 50,000 students, many with Chinese government subsidies; Wealth: I did not find a reliable figure, so I do not write one; Doctrine: I did not find material on a \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; of the Cambodian Chinese themselves; left blank (to be supplemented). Of the four, two have been taken away, one is recovering, and one is blank.\nWhat my position says here In writing this section I must first be honest with myself: this position in my hands is almost useless here. To a person who has only a surname left, is it not too light for me to speak of a \u0026quot;unified centripetal force\u0026quot;? What he wants may be only that nobody knocks on the door at night to ask who he is. So I will not put forward a position first; I will ask three questions. First, for a person who has only a surname left, where does a centripetal force connect from? I think not from grand principles but from that one surname: his surname is his grandfather's name, the last thread between him and someone who has gone far away. Second, does he want it himself? I don't know; that has to be asked of him. Third, who will ask him? I think it should not be me, and not any \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot;, but someone willing to sit down and listen to him say who his grandfather was. If this position is of any use, I think it should at least be like this: not telling him \u0026quot;who you are\u0026quot;, but letting him know that, if he wants to know, there is a door that is open.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-arguments are two.\nOne: for a group that has just had half of it wiped out, is talk of a \u0026quot;unified centripetal force\u0026quot; a luxury? What they want may be only not to be asked again \u0026quot;who are you\u0026quot;.\nThe other: Kiernan says they were killed because they lived in cities, not because they were Chinese. If that is so, a yigui centred on \u0026quot;ethnicity\u0026quot; cannot explain this, and cannot prevent the next time.\nI accept both. The second is especially important: I never wanted a yigui centred on \u0026quot;ethnicity\u0026quot;. I said in the preface that what I want is a shared cultural faith, not an ethnic identity. This stretch of Cambodian history makes that point as clearly as it can be made: a person was killed not because of what was in his veins but because a \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom\u0026quot; wanted to clear away everyone who did not belong to it. So what can prevent the next time is not a stronger \u0026quot;ethnicity\u0026quot; but something that, from the root, does not let any person or any idea define \u0026quot;who you are\u0026quot; for everyone.\nTo my friends in Cambodia, whether you are Khmer, Chinese, Cham or Vietnamese. From 1975 to 1979, someone in your family may not have come back. Of 430,000 Chinese, nearly half did not survive; more than a third of the Cham died; the country as a whole lost a fifth of its people. Whenever I read these numbers I think of my colleague: he cannot speak a word of Chinese, and what is left in his family may be only a surname, a festival, a sentence from his grandfather. I have no way to say anything grand about this. All I can do is write the people behind the numbers here, one by one. Today Phnom Penh can celebrate the Lunar New Year openly again; those who did not come back in those years did not live to see this day.\nA person's great-grandfather was Chinese and he himself cannot speak a word of Chinese. Is he still \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;, and who decides?\nReferences\nFor comparison: the piece on political religion in Duoshe; Neighbours to the South in this series (preface) The Chinese of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge: about 430,000 ethnic Chinese in 1975, about half did not survive to 1979; Kiernan: Chinese killed mainly because of urban-resident status, not race; Cham (about 250,000, 36% died), Khmer (21%); in 1970 the Lon Nol government closed Chinese schools, businesses and temples, until the early 1990s; about 60,000 in 1984; now estimated at 300,000–700,000; Chinese schools 70–80 (2012 report; 55 in 2017) Russell, Voegelin, Aron (political religion) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d21/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-person-who-cant-speak-chinese\"\u003eA person who can't speak Chinese\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI know a colleague of Cambodian descent. I had always assumed he was from a Cantonese-speaking region.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLater he said that his mother's grandfather was Chinese, a refugee. He himself does not speak a word of Chinese.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe has been back to Cambodia to see relatives.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI didn't ask what was left in his family.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-numbers\"\u003eThe numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power, there were about 430,000 ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. The common estimate among historians is that by 1979, when the regime was overthrown, about half of them had died of disease, hunger, exhaustion or execution.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe scholar of Cambodia Ben Kiernan wrote that Democratic Kampuchea was the greatest catastrophe any Chinese community in Southeast Asia has met.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Half of the People: The Khmer Rouge and the Chinese of Cambodia"},{"content":"A film In 1982 Hong Kong made a film called Boat People (《投奔怒海》), directed by Ann Hui. It is about Vietnam around 1978: a society closes its door on a group of people, and those people decide to leave by boat.\nI saw it, and I have always remembered it.\nA colleague of mine now is Vietnamese Chinese, about sixty years old; back then he was a refugee.\nI have never asked him about his experience in detail.\nFour hundred and fifty thousand In 1978 and 1979 about 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam, or were expelled, across the land border.\nAbout 250,000 of them went to China: 170,000 overland from the north, the rest by boat. The remainder went by boat to other Southeast Asian countries, and some drifted as far as Hong Kong.\nAround 1979, a crowded Vietnamese refugee boat alongside a US Navy supply ship.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, US Navy, Public domain\nThere were two layers of reasons. One: relations between China and Vietnam had worsened, and the Vietnamese government saw the Chinese as a security threat. The other: the Chinese in the south controlled a great deal of retail trade, and the new government taxed them, restricted them, and confiscated.\nThink of that boat: a family, perhaps three generations, with whatever they could carry in one small bag, going down to the shore in the middle of the night. They did not know which country would take them in, did not know whether the boat would capsize, and knew only that if they did not go there would be no tomorrow.\nToday Vietnam's \u0026quot;Hoa\u0026quot; (ethnic Chinese) numbered 749,466 in the 2019 census, 0.78%. Outside estimates are much higher; some say more than two million.\nVietnam's own script In 1651 the French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes published a Vietnamese dictionary in Rome. It used the Latin alphabet, with more than eight thousand entries glossed in Portuguese and Latin. This became the basis of what later was called chữ Quốc ngữ.\nPortrait of the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes (1593–1660).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown artist, Public domain\nHe was not the inventor of chữ Quốc ngữ. He used the spelling of earlier Portuguese missionaries, and he put it in order and published it.\nThen came the French colonisers. Educational reform began in 1906. In 1919 Emperor Khải Định of the Nguyễn dynasty approved abolishing all Confucian schools, and the examination system ended.\nChữ Quốc ngữ went from a missionary's tool to a nation's script.\nThe price was that the Vietnamese could now hardly read their own thousand years of writing. The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (founded with the participation of American scholars) says on its own website: fewer than a hundred scholars in the world today can read Nôm.\nNôm is the script the Vietnamese made by adapting Chinese characters, to write the Vietnamese language. Classical Chinese is another matter; somewhat more people can read it.\nA \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom from the West\u0026quot;, in two layers I once thought of a sentence: Vietnam was completely changed by a \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom\u0026quot; from the West, in both script and thought.\nThinking it over, there are two layers:\nthe layer of script: begun by Catholic missionaries and spread by the colonisers; the layer of thought: later, communism. These are not the same thing; below I take them separately.\nThe first layer, script. As said above: the missionaries put it in order, the colonisers spread it, and in 1919 the examinations ended. A country's script changed from Chinese characters and Nôm to the Latin alphabet. For a scholar, what was replaced was the strokes, and also the door to a thousand years of writing.\nThe second layer, thought. After the reunification of north and south in 1975, Caodaism was suppressed and was legally recognised only in 1997 (see the piece on Caodaism); in 1978–79 came the 450,000 Chinese mentioned above. These are two things that happened in the same period. As for how exactly communism in Vietnam dealt with Confucianism, Chinese characters and religion, I have not checked this layer; I write only this far and leave the rest to be filled in.\nThe two layers have one thing in common: both came from the West, both carried a \u0026quot;new Heaven\u0026quot;, and both, within a generation, put a layer between a society and its own past.\nThere is also a difference: with the first layer, nobody required you to believe; with the second, you were required to believe.\nIn both places I have used the word \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom\u0026quot;, but the meaning is different, and I want to say so separately. The first layer is the missionaries' \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom\u0026quot;, in the literal sense: a place after death, in heaven; what they brought was a faith, and nobody forced it on you with a knife. The second layer is the \u0026quot;heavenly kingdom\u0026quot; as I use the term, standing in the same place as the Taiping and the Khmer Rouge: a new world to be built on earth, which demands that you believe and also demands that you hand over your old self. Put together, I think their effect on a society is the same: they put a layer between it and its own past. But what they ask of a person is not the same. I want the reader to be able to tell them apart.\nMorality and discipline When a country's script changes, the \u0026quot;morality\u0026quot; of a community also has to move to another place of storage.\nIn the past, morality was kept in the Four Books and Five Classics and in genealogies. Where is it kept now?\nCaodaism (this series has a piece on it) is one answer the Vietnamese gave themselves: enshrine Confucius, Jesus, Hugo and Sun Yat-sen together.\nWhat the Chinese gave is another: stay in Vietnam and become part of that 0.78%; or go elsewhere and, in someone else's country, find a new place to keep it.\nFour criteria, measured First, the Chinese:\nNumbers: 749,466 in the 2019 census, 0.78%; in 1978–79 about 450,000 left; Organisation: the businesses of the southern Chinese were taxed, restricted, even confiscated; Wealth: same; this is the one that was taken away; Doctrine: I did not find a \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; of the Vietnamese Chinese themselves; left blank (to be supplemented). Then the Vietnamese (the other group my position puts its question to):\nNumbers: no shortage; Organisation: Caodaism, with an official estimate of about 4.4 million for the Tây Ninh Holy See lineage, divided into about six recognised branches; Wealth: not written; Doctrine: there is already one, and it is a mixed one: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, plus Hugo and Sun Yat-sen. For the Vietnamese Chinese, three of the four were taken away. For the Vietnamese, on doctrine, someone has already given an answer.\nWhat my position says here Was Vietnam's script \u0026quot;remade\u0026quot;, or \u0026quot;chosen\u0026quot; by the Vietnamese themselves? My answer: both. The missionaries and colonisers did push it out; but by the twentieth century Vietnamese scholars themselves were taking up the Latin alphabet to write poems, newspapers, and words about independence for their nation. I do not want to mourn the Vietnamese's Chinese characters on their behalf. To Vietnamese ears, mourning like that may sound like yet another condescending voice from the north. What I want to say is another sentence: a person who has come to read his oldest books as a strange script may one day want to look back. On that day, if he wants to look, some people are willing to help him push that door open a little more.\nLooking at it the other way One view deserves to be taken seriously: chữ Quốc ngữ can also be read as a choice by the Vietnamese to free themselves from Chinese characters, not only as being \u0026quot;remade\u0026quot;.\nIf one uses a \u0026quot;unified East Asian yigui\u0026quot; to mourn the Vietnamese's Chinese characters for them, it may sound to Vietnamese ears like another centripetal force from the north.\nIn 1978 the Vietnamese government's stated reason was that the Chinese were a security threat. What it feared was that the Chinese heart was in the north.\nTo my Vietnamese friends, and to the Chinese of Vietnam. Between you there is a history that was not easy. In 1978 and 1979, 450,000 people left Vietnam: a family, perhaps three generations, put what they could carry into one small bag and went down to the sea one night. Before that, Vietnam's own script was changed, generation by generation, into the Latin alphabet; today the scholars in the whole world who can read Nôm are said to number fewer than a hundred. To me these two things are one and the same sorrow: some people were forced to leave their homes, some were forced to leave their script. But this sorrow did not come from nowhere: it was a government's decision to treat the Chinese as a security threat, to tax them and confiscate from them, that produced those 450,000. Those who were driven out and those whose script was changed had no choice, either of them. I have a colleague of Vietnamese Chinese descent who was a refugee back then; I never asked him much about it. With this site I want to write this down for both of you.\nA country, in order not to read others' characters any more, can no longer read its own old books. Who should say whether this price is worth it?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;A Vietnamese Religion That Enshrines Confucius, Jesus, Hugo and Sun Yat-sen Together\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Korea Really Did Have a 'Religion of the Heavenly Way'\u0026quot; in this series; \u0026quot;Confucianism on the Indonesian ID card\u0026quot; in Duoshe Vietnam: in 1978–79 about 450,000 ethnic Chinese left or were expelled, about 250,000 of them to China (170,000 overland); 2019 census, Hoa 749,466 (0.78%); the de Rhodes dictionary of 1651 (more than 8,000 entries), based on the spelling of Pina and Rodrigues; the examinations and Confucian schools abolished in 1919 Fewer than a hundred scholars can read Nôm: Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, \u0026quot;What is Nôm?\u0026quot; https://nomfoundation.org/nom-script/What-is-Nom-?uiLang=en 🟢 (the foundation's own estimate; basis not stated) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d22/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-film\"\u003eA film\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1982 Hong Kong made a film called \u003cem\u003eBoat People\u003c/em\u003e (《投奔怒海》), directed by Ann Hui. It is about Vietnam around 1978: a society closes its door on a group of people, and those people decide to leave by boat.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI saw it, and I have always remembered it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA colleague of mine now is Vietnamese Chinese, about sixty years old; back then he was a refugee.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have never asked him about his experience in detail.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand\"\u003eFour hundred and fifty thousand\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1978 and 1979 about 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam, or were expelled, across the land border.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAbout 250,000 of them went to China: 170,000 overland from the north, the rest by boat. The remainder went by boat to other Southeast Asian countries, and some drifted as far as Hong Kong.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"After *Boat People*: The Chinese of Vietnam, and Vietnam's Own Script"},{"content":"1955, Bandung On 22 April 1955, in Bandung, Zhou Enlai and the Indonesian foreign minister Sunario signed a Dual Nationality Treaty. Chinese with dual nationality had to choose one of the two. The treaty came into force on 20 January 1960.\nHow should this treaty be read?\nOne reading: with it China showed its neighbours in Southeast Asia that it did not regard the ethnic Chinese as \u0026quot;a hand overseas\u0026quot;. This was goodwill, and also self-protection.\nAnother reading: in law, China gave up its position of speaking for these people.\nBoth readings have people who say them. I have no way to decide for them. What I can do is lay out what came afterwards, one thing at a time.\nZhou Enlai, Nehru and U Nu talking during the Bandung Conference, April 1955.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown photographer, Public domain\nOne thing at a time 1959: Sukarno issued Presidential Regulation No. 10, forbidding foreign nationals from doing retail trade in rural areas. Chinese who had not chosen Indonesian nationality were treated as \u0026quot;foreign nationals\u0026quot;. December 1959: Radio Beijing announced that China would receive its nationals. About 100,000 people were brought back to China, and about 200,000 had applied. (Another count gives about 119,000; the way of counting differs.) 1966: Decision No. 127 of the Cabinet Presidium required the adoption of \u0026quot;Indonesian-style names\u0026quot;, which amounted to abolishing traditional Chinese surnames. 1967: Presidential Instruction No. 14. Chinese characters were banned, Chinese schools were gradually closed, and Chinese religion and customs could be practised only at home. 1977: The Suharto government downgraded Confucianism to a \u0026quot;belief stream\u0026quot; (aliran kepercayaan). 18 November 1978: A circular of the Minister of the Interior stated that Indonesia had five religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism. A presidential decision of 2000 repealed this circular together with the 1967 instruction. May 1998: Riots in Jakarta and Surakarta (Solo). The official Joint Fact-Finding Team recorded more than a thousand deaths and 85 cases of sexual violence, of which 52 were rapes. The team said it could not give the actual number of victims. 2000: President Wahid issued Presidential Decision No. 6, repealing the 1967 instruction. 2006 and 2008: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Religious Affairs recognised Confucian marriages, and the Ministry of Education issued a curriculum standard for Confucian instruction. In the 2010 census, the Chinese numbered 2.83 million, 1.2%. Those registered as Confucians: 117,091.\nThe two numbers differ by more than twenty times.\nMorality: how Confucianism was taken away \u0026quot;Confucianism on the Indonesian ID card\u0026quot; in Duoshe wrote about Confucianism in Indonesia. I add only a little here.\nThis needs to be said separately: the 1967 instruction restricted public activity; the \u0026quot;downgrading\u0026quot; of Confucianism happened in 1977. This difference still needs checking.\nThe Confucian association (Matakin) was founded in 1955. After 1977 Confucians had to register as Buddhists or Christians.\nA community's \u0026quot;morality\u0026quot; was forced to be kept inside a name that someone else gave.\nBoen Tek Bio temple in Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia, said to be the oldest Chinese temple in the area.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Cun Cun, CC BY-SA 4.0\nDiscipline: what was taken away was \u0026quot;organisation\u0026quot; The schools were closed, the temples could not openly hold festivals, names had to be changed.\nWhat was taken was not \u0026quot;belief\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;organisation\u0026quot;. Belief can stay at home; organisation cannot.\nThink of a Chinese-Indonesian child: at home he is called by the name his grandmother gave him; outside he must use a new Indonesian-style name; at home he hears his grandfather say a few words of Chinese, and at school he cannot learn it. A small child, in one day, has to become two people.\nPresent and future After Wahid, in April 2002, President Megawati signed a decree and the Lunar New Year became a national holiday in Indonesia. Confucianism had a place on the identity card.\nWhen a community has had something taken away for forty years, what is given back is not necessarily the original. How many of the young Chinese in Indonesia today can speak Chinese, I have not found a reliable figure.\nPeople burning incense in an Indonesian Chinese temple.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Cuncun Wijaya, CC BY 2.0\nMy judgment: Bandung was an abandonment My judgment is this: in 1955, at Bandung, the Chinese Communist Party led by Zhou Enlai abandoned the Chinese of Indonesia and the Malay region; one can also say betrayed them, even stabbed them in the back. The Chinese who stayed there became \u0026quot;discarded pieces\u0026quot;.\nThis judgment I want to state more exactly, because it is the heaviest sentence I have. The parties to that treaty in 1955 were China and Indonesia; Malaya was not yet independent and was not a party, so when I say \u0026quot;Indonesia and the Malay region\u0026quot;, I mean the position China expressed at that conference toward the Chinese of all Southeast Asia: from now on, we no longer regard you as Chinese nationals; please go and be citizens of the places where you live. I do not necessarily oppose that position itself: for a new country it may even have been right. What I call \u0026quot;a stab in the back\u0026quot; is what came after: after 1955 China said this and yet did not speak for those who stayed. After the receiving of nationals in 1959, those who stayed faced the ban on rural retail; in 1966 and 1967, those who were told to change their names and close their schools faced bans; in 1998 people died. In May 1998, asked how Beijing would protect the Chinese there, the Foreign Ministry spokesman answered that China had no hold over them and hoped the situation would calm down soon; only in August did Beijing express \u0026quot;grave concern,\u0026quot; and a People's Daily editorial demanded a full investigation of the rapes of Chinese women. Apart from that one protest the Chinese government made to Indonesia in 1959, I have not read of anyone speaking loudly for them on the international stage.They became \u0026quot;discarded pieces\u0026quot;: on the board, the piece that is left where it stands, that nobody looks at any more.\nOf course I know the other side: this was \u0026quot;putting down roots where one stands\u0026quot;, a major turn in policy, meant to reassure the neighbours. I have no way of proving what was in people's minds at the time; what I can do is lay out both sides, and also write down my sorrow.\nThe other side of this judgment has a name among scholars: \u0026quot;luodi shenggen\u0026quot;, putting down roots where one stands. At Bandung Zhou Enlai proposed that overseas Chinese should acquire the nationality of the countries where they lived and blend into local society. For China itself this was a major turn in policy: until then China had followed the Kuomintang's position of treating all overseas Chinese as Chinese nationals.\nOne event, two names: one is \u0026quot;abandonment\u0026quot;, the other is \u0026quot;putting down roots\u0026quot;.\nHere is what is on the table.\nFor \u0026quot;abandonment\u0026quot;: the 1955 treaty made Chinese choose one of two; in 1959–60 more than 100,000 went back to China; China and Indonesia broke off diplomatic relations in October 1967 and restored them only in August 1990; in 1998, whether the Chinese government's reaction to the events was \u0026quot;restrained\u0026quot; is told differently by different sides. (The May statement and the August \u0026quot;grave concern\u0026quot; are given above.) Against \u0026quot;abandonment\u0026quot;: the purpose of the treaty was to make the Chinese into local citizens and to remove the neighbours' suspicion of a \u0026quot;hand overseas\u0026quot;, not to make them foreigners; the receiving of nationals was a response to the 1959 rural retail ban, when the Chinese government protested to Indonesia (on 9 December 1959 Foreign Minister Chen Yi wrote to Indonesian Foreign Minister Subandrio; Ambassador to Indonesia Huang Zhen then became China's chief representative on the joint committee of the two countries); China's own situation at home in the same period also belongs in the background. (The origin and negotiation of the treaty and the background of the 1960s I have not checked item by item.) Four criteria, measured Numbers: 2.83 million, 1.2% (2010). Of the four, this one is short to begin with; Organisation: Chinese schools were gradually closed from 1967, public temples and festivals were restricted, and Confucianism was downgraded in 1977. Organisation was taken away one piece at a time; Wealth: I have no reliable figures. People often say what share of Indonesia's wealth the Chinese hold; I have not found the original data for such claims and do not write them. The 1959 rural retail ban was aimed at wealth; Doctrine: 117,091 Confucians, more than twenty times fewer than the Chinese total. On doctrine, a name was forced to change, and then taken away. Of the four, one was short from the start and three were taken away.\nWhat my position says here If there is a \u0026quot;unified centripetal force\u0026quot;, is its \u0026quot;centre\u0026quot; in Beijing, or in a religion? My answer: it cannot be in Beijing. If it is in Beijing, it is exactly what the Indonesian government feared in 1967, and exactly what the people abandoned at Bandung would least wish to be pulled back into. It must be in a religion, and a religion that any country can hold: one that does not demand loyalty to any state, is not approved by any state's government, and does not speak for any state. If your nationality is Indonesian, it is Indonesian; that you burn incense to your ancestors at Qingming should not conflict with it. This is what I want, and I think it is also the only thing worth getting in exchange for the price the Chinese of Indonesia paid for forty years: a \u0026quot;centre\u0026quot; that belongs to no state.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument is the logic of 1967 itself: what a state wants is that the Chinese have no \u0026quot;heart outside\u0026quot;.\nIt took the Chinese of Indonesia forty years, and the price of their names, schools, temples and the dead of 1998, to be allowed to be without this \u0026quot;heart\u0026quot;. To give them a unified centripetal force now, they may not take it as medicine.\nTo my friends in Indonesia, whether you are Chinese or of any other group. In May 1998, more than a thousand people did not see the next day. Reading the words \u0026quot;cannot give the actual number of victims\u0026quot; in that investigation report, I stopped for a long time. Before that, there was a child: at home called by the name his grandmother gave him, outside the door obliged to use a new Indonesian-style name; hearing his grandfather speak a few words of Chinese at home, but not allowed to learn it at school; having to become two people in one day. This country once made some people afraid, in their own homes, to say their own names; in 2002 it was also this country that wrote the Lunar New Year into the national calendar. I want to record both: one so that it is not forgotten, the other so that those who come after know that a turn can be made.\nA state asks you to choose once; you chose, and it still took your name. On whose account does this go?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Confucianism on the Indonesian ID card\u0026quot; in Duoshe; \u0026quot;The Dusk of the Clan Associations\u0026quot; in Yigui; \u0026quot;Why the Confucian Association Failed\u0026quot; in this series Indonesia: Dual Nationality Treaty of 1955-04-22 (Zhou Enlai, Sunario; in force 1960-01-20); Presidential Regulation No. 10 of 1959; December 1959 reception of about 100,000 (about 200,000 applied; another count about 119,000); Decision No. 127 of 1966; Instruction No. 14 of 1967; Confucianism downgraded in 1977; TGPF of 1998; Presidential Decision No. 6 of 2000; 2006 and 2008; 2010 census: Chinese 2.83 million (1.2%), Confucians 117,091; Bandung \u0026quot;luodi shenggen\u0026quot; (putting down roots) Indonesia's Presidential Decree of 1965 etc. (see Duoshe, \u0026quot;Confucianism on the Indonesian ID card\u0026quot;) Lunar New Year as a national holiday: Presidential Decision No. 19 of 2002 (2002-04-09, signed by Megawati), Indonesian Wikisource https://id.wikisource.org/wiki/Halaman:Keputusan_Presiden_Republik_Indonesia_Nomor_19_Tahun_2002.pdf/1 🟢 Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967 (1967-12-06): https://id.wikisource.org/wiki/Instruksi_Presiden_Republik_Indonesia_Nomor_14_Tahun_1967 🟢; Presidential Decision No. 6 of 2000 (2000-01-17): https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/57713/keppres-no-6-tahun-2000 🟢 China–Indonesia diplomatic relations broken off 1967-10-30 and restored 1990-08-08: Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, \u0026quot;China's relations with Indonesia\u0026quot; https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/gjhdq_676201/gj_676203/yz_676205/1206_677244/sbgx_677248/ 🟢 Chen Yi's letter of protest to Subandrio of 9 December 1959, and Huang Zhen as chief representative on the joint committee: article in the Our China Story series https://www.ourchinastory.com/cn/7711 (secondary) 🟡 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d23/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"1955-bandung\"\u003e1955, Bandung\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 22 April 1955, in Bandung, Zhou Enlai and the Indonesian foreign minister Sunario signed a \u003cem\u003eDual Nationality Treaty\u003c/em\u003e. Chinese with dual nationality had to choose one of the two. The treaty came into force on 20 January 1960.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow should this treaty be read?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne reading: with it China showed its neighbours in Southeast Asia that it did not regard the ethnic Chinese as \u0026quot;a hand overseas\u0026quot;. This was goodwill, and also self-protection.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnother reading: in law, China gave up its position of speaking for these people.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBoth readings have people who say them. I have no way to decide for them. What I can do is lay out what came afterwards, one thing at a time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken: Forty Years of the Chinese of Indonesia"},{"content":"A king's father In 1767 the kingdom of Ayutthaya was destroyed by Burma. The following year a man called Taksin (Zheng Xin) re-established Siam at Thonburi.\nTaksin's father was a Teochew man from Chenghai, and worked as a tax collector in Siam; his mother was Thai. After Taksin came the Chakri dynasty, the Thai royal house of today, and its founder, Rama I, is said also to have had Chinese blood.\nSo in Thailand \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;royal house\u0026quot; are not two completely separate words.\nMonument to King Taksin the Great and Phraya Phichai at Thonburi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Tmd, CC BY-SA 4.0\nFour generations The American scholar G. William Skinner studied the Chinese of Thailand. His definition of \u0026quot;assimilation complete\u0026quot; is plain: a person who in almost all situations thinks of himself as Thai, speaks Thai habitually and fluently, and chooses to associate more with Thais.\nHis judgment was that within four generations the Chinese of Thailand would be completely assimilated.\nToday the Chinese of Thailand make up 11% to 14% of the population, about 9.5 million people (a 2012 estimate). A large part of them can no longer speak Chinese and no longer think of themselves as \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot;.\nYaowarat Road in Bangkok, an old street where the Chinese live closely together.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Marcin Konsek, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWhat the state did In Thailand assimilation did not all happen naturally. The state gave it a push.\nIn 1914 King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) wrote articles under a pen name (Asvabahu) calling the Chinese \u0026quot;the Jews of the East\u0026quot;. How these articles should be read is disputed among scholars: some see racism; others think that what he feared was the spread of republicanism in Thailand.\nFrom 1938 to 1957 (with an interruption of nearly four years), the Phibun government carried out \u0026quot;Thaification\u0026quot;. Chinese schools were closed, Chinese books and newspapers banned, Thai-style dress was made compulsory, Chinese businesses were nationalised, sending remittances to China was made a crime, and those who still showed \u0026quot;Chinese characteristics\u0026quot; were harassed.\nPhibun did not want to drive the Chinese out. He wanted them assimilated.\nThe charitable hall But the Chinese community of Thailand did not disappear. One thing remained.\nIn 1909 twelve Chinese merchants in Bangkok started a body called the Poh Teck Tung (\u0026quot;Hall of Repaying Virtue\u0026quot;; Baode shantang). What it did was very concrete: collect the unclaimed dead and bury them. Later it became Thailand's best-known rescue organisation, handling the injured in traffic accidents.\nA community, with no state to speak for it, still first buried those whom nobody wanted.\nThe building of the Poh Teck Tung Foundation in Bangkok, with the sign in Thai and Chinese side by side.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Sry85, CC BY-SA 3.0\nReading this, my nose stings a little. Imagine the scene: people who had left their homes, who had not yet found their own footing, first thought of the people by the roadside whom nobody claimed, whose names nobody knew, and said they could not let them lie there like that. This, I think, comes closer than any definition of \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; to what the word \u0026quot;us\u0026quot; means.\nMany Chinese temples remain a mixed tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, and have not turned into Thai Theravada temples. But Skinner also notes that second-generation Sino-Thais go less and less to Chinese temples, because Theravada Buddhism already meets their spiritual needs.\nWat Mangkon Kamalawat in Bangkok's Chinatown, a Chinese Mahayana temple.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Alan Oscroft, Public domain\nPresent and future The rate of intermarriage is much higher than in Indonesia and Malaysia.\nIn Thailand the identity \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; has not been destroyed; it has been slowly diluted.\nWho thought of the method I once guessed: was this Thai \u0026quot;method of assimilation\u0026quot; devised by the Teochew themselves?\nI have found no evidence for that claim. What the studies speak of are three things: the tradition of intermarriage, the state's rewards for \u0026quot;Thaification\u0026quot;, and the later generations' own choices.\nThis guess I set aside for now and do not write into the conclusion.\nFour criteria, measured Numbers: about 9.5 million, 11% to 14% (2012 estimate); Organisation: the Poh Teck Tung, from 1909; Chinese temples remain, but Skinner notes that the second generation goes less and less; Wealth: I have no reliable figures, so I do not write them; Doctrine: Chinese temples are a mixed tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, with no unified doctrine; in a country where Theravada Buddhism is the mainstream, the younger generation often turns to the local Buddhism. Of the four, numbers and organisation are both there; doctrine is the one that has been diluted away. An example like this matters a great deal for my proposal.\nWhat my proposal says here The Chinese of Thailand, in four generations, bought a place of \u0026quot;not being suspected\u0026quot;. If my proposal offers them a unified centripetal force, why would they want it? My answer: they need not. I do not want to tell someone who is already doing well that something is missing. What I want to say is something smaller: if one day you think of your grandmother's household shrine, think of where everyone in the family went on Qingming, and want to find someone to talk about these things with, there is a door there, and it is open. This does not ask you to stop being Thai, does not ask you to speak Chinese, and does not ask you to join any \u0026quot;organisation\u0026quot;. It is only some days that you can share with others: ancestral rites, Qingming, the Spring Festival, a little reverence for Heaven. I think this may be the only approach to the Chinese of Thailand that does not disturb them. It is not a \u0026quot;centripetal\u0026quot; force; it is a place where you can \u0026quot;go home\u0026quot;.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument is just above: Skinner's \u0026quot;four-generation assimilation\u0026quot; is not a failure; it is the way a community chose to live in a country.\nFor a Thai Chinese, \u0026quot;I am Thai, my ancestors were Teochew, and my home has a household shrine for ancestral rites\u0026quot; is already a complete yigui. If my proposal says \u0026quot;you still lack a centripetal force\u0026quot;, he will ask: toward where?\nTo my friends in Thailand. For many years your country did not drive the Chinese out, and let them, generation by generation, slowly become a part of you. That is not easy. I know the word \u0026quot;assimilation\u0026quot; hurts both sides a little: those assimilated lost something, and those who assimilated may not have noticed. But in 1909 twelve Chinese merchants in Bangkok, who had not yet found their own footing, first thought of the people by the roadside whom nobody claimed, and founded the Poh Teck Tung. Today the sign on its building carries Thai and Chinese side by side. This is something Thais and Chinese made together, and a whole country respects it. I think this too is a kind of yigui: it belongs to those who did this together, whatever their ethnic group.\nA community, in four generations, becomes part of a country. Is that \u0026quot;disappearing\u0026quot;, or \u0026quot;living on\u0026quot;?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; (preface) and \u0026quot;The Neighbour Qianlong Did Not Defeat\u0026quot; (Myanmar) in this series; Yigui \u0026quot;The Dusk of the Clan Associations\u0026quot; Thailand: Taksin's father a Teochew man from Chenghai; Rama I \u0026quot;of Chinese descent\u0026quot;; Chinese about 9.5 million, 11–14% (2012 estimate), over 12% in 1932; Skinner's definition of \u0026quot;assimilation\u0026quot; and his judgment of \u0026quot;four generations\u0026quot;; Rama VI's pen-name article \u0026quot;the Jews of the East\u0026quot; (with scholars' dispute); Phibun's Thaification policy 1938–1957; the Poh Teck Tung of 1909 (founded by twelve Chinese merchants); intermarriage higher than in Indonesia and Malaysia Ayutthaya destroyed by Burma in 1767 and re-established by Taksin at Thonburi the next year: standard history Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d24/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-kings-father\"\u003eA king's father\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1767 the kingdom of Ayutthaya was destroyed by Burma. The following year a man called Taksin (Zheng Xin) re-established Siam at Thonburi.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTaksin's father was a Teochew man from Chenghai, and worked as a tax collector in Siam; his mother was Thai. After Taksin came the Chakri dynasty, the Thai royal house of today, and its founder, Rama I, is said also to have had Chinese blood.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo in Thailand \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;royal house\u0026quot; are not two completely separate words.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Monument to King Taksin the Great, Thonburi\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d24/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMonument to King Taksin the Great and Phraya Phichai at Thonburi.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:King_Taksin_%26_Phraya_Pichai_Dabhak_Monument_in_Wat_Kungtapao_004.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Tmd, CC BY-SA 4.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"four-generations\"\u003eFour generations\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe American scholar G. William Skinner studied the Chinese of Thailand. His definition of \u0026quot;assimilation complete\u0026quot; is plain: a person who in almost all situations thinks of himself as Thai, speaks Thai habitually and fluently, and chooses to associate more with Thais.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Most Successful Assimilation: Is It a Kind of *Yigui*? The Chinese of Thailand"},{"content":"Four times From 1765 to 1769 the Qing dynasty attacked Burma four times.\nThe first two (1765–1767) were beaten back at the border by the Burmese army. For the third (1767–1768) Qianlong sent his son-in-law Mingrui with 50,000 men, mostly Manchu bannermen, deep into Burma, to within a few days' march of the capital, Inwa (Ava); then tropical terrain and disease wore them down and they withdrew with heavy losses.\nIn the whole war the Qing army lost more than 70,000 men and four generals. Some call it the most disastrous frontier war the Qing ever fought.\nThe area around Inwa (Ava), once the capital of Burma. In the eighteenth century the Qing army got as far as a few days' march from here.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Go-Myanmar, CC BY-SA 3.0\nIn December 1769 the commanders at the front agreed a truce, generally called the Convention of Kaungton. As a result, both Burma and Siam kept their independence.\nIn the same period Burma also destroyed Siam's capital, Ayutthaya (1767).\nSo to say that Burma won against Ayutthaya and Qianlong \u0026quot;at the same time\u0026quot; has some truth. But \u0026quot;by itself\u0026quot; needs a question mark: in those years Burma was fighting in two directions at once, and how it divided its troops between the two fronts has not been checked; the fall of Ayutthaya also had internal causes in Siam itself. (To be checked.)\nThe man who set Siam up again, Taksin, was the son of a Teochew man; see \u0026quot;The Most Successful Assimilation\u0026quot; in this series.\nThink of those more than seventy thousand Qing soldiers. Most of them did not go for any grand principle; they were conscripted, and from the mountains of Yunnan and the grasslands of Manchuria they walked on into the miasma. Nobody recorded their names.\nAnother army In 1949, when the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists ended, a part of the Nationalist army did not surrender but fought its way out of Yunnan and into Burma's jungle.\nIn March 1950, in the area from Kengtung to Tachileik, there were about 1,500. By the end of 1950, on the Thai–Burmese border, about 10,000.\nAfterwards the Nationalist troops in Burma gradually broke up. One part, led by Duan Xiwen, was taken in by Thailand in 1961 and settled at Mae Salong in Chiang Rai province. Thailand gave most of the soldiers and their families citizenship, on the condition that they fight for Thailand: in 1971 in Chiang Rai against the communist insurgency; in 1981 in Phetchabun province.\nThis is the basis on which the descendants of Chinese in Mae Salong today hold citizenship and land rights.\nA defeated army, with no country and no home, fought for more than thirty years in the mountains of someone else's country, and what in the end it won was that its children could have a piece of land there and an identity card.\nA place called Kokang Kokang is in northern Shan State, Myanmar, bordering Yunnan. Most of the people there are Han and speak Chinese.\nIt is said that the Yang family who ruled Kokang descended from loyal officials of the Ming in Nanjing. In 1739 the Yangs formally established the Kokang chieftaincy.\nIn 2009 Kokang had about 150,000 people, of whom about 100,000 held Burmese nationality, and about 90% of those were Han.\nIn 2009 the Burmese military demanded that ethnic armed groups already in ceasefire be reorganised as border guard forces, and Kokang's leader, Peng Jiasheng, was forced to flee. This is the \u0026quot;2009 Kokang incident\u0026quot;. In 2015 there was another clash.\nA border gate on the Myanmar–China border (the Kokang area).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Paingpeace, CC BY-SA 4.0\nMorality and discipline: the families of 2023 Later some Kokang families ran scam compounds on a vast scale.\nOn 20 October 2023, at the \u0026quot;Crouching Tiger Villa\u0026quot; of the Ming Xuechang family, guards fired on workers trying to escape, with many casualties, among them fourteen Chinese citizens. In November 2023 Ming Xuechang killed himself when arrested, and died in hospital despite efforts to save him.\nIn September 2025 the Wenzhou Intermediate People's Court in Zhejiang pronounced judgment on the Ming criminal group: 39 people guilty, on fourteen counts, including fraud, intentional homicide and intentional injury. Eleven were sentenced to death, 5 to death with a two-year reprieve, 11 to life imprisonment, and the rest to fixed terms of five to twenty-four years. The losses in the case exceeded 1.4 billion US dollars. From 19 to 22 September 2025, Bai Suocheng and 20 others were tried in Shenzhen.\nI put it in the place of \u0026quot;morality\u0026quot;: what does a community's \u0026quot;self-government\u0026quot; use to govern itself?\nThis section needs one more word, because it is very easily read wrongly. The victims of the scam compounds stand at two ends: at one end the people who were cheated; at the other, the people trapped inside the compounds and forced to cheat, many of whom were themselves young people lured there from China and other countries. Their passports were confiscated, they worked many hours a day, they were beaten, and those who tried to escape were beaten and threatened. In October 2025, when the military closed the KK compound, over a thousand people waded the Moei River to flee, and some drowned.These are the people who most need to be remembered. And those who gave the orders, the few families, are specific people, convicted of specific crimes by a court. I put this in the place of \u0026quot;morality\u0026quot; because I want to ask a very old question: if a community has no bottom line that it holds for itself, what will its \u0026quot;self-government\u0026quot; become one day? I do not think this is a problem of \u0026quot;the Chinese\u0026quot;, nor of the Kokang people; it is something that can happen in any place that is governed neither by rules from outside nor by rules from within.\nNo further material on Kokang's beliefs has been found, so it is left blank. If someone is willing to tell me what the people of Kokang keep on their household altars and how they spend Qingming, I would like to know.\nPresent, and 1967 For the Chinese of Myanmar there is no figure everyone accepts.\nIn 1962 Ne Win came to power and began nationalisation. On 26 June 1967 anti-Chinese riots broke out in Yangon, set off by the spread of the influence of China's Cultural Revolution, with students wearing Mao badges. More than thirty Chinese citizens were killed; the Chinese embassy, Chinatown and Chinese schools were attacked.\nAfter the riots many Chinese emigrated again. Those who stayed hurried to take nationality and assimilate, and hid their Chinese identity.\nFour criteria, measured The Chinese of Myanmar are three completely different kinds of people, and no one kind can represent them all. First measure the Kokang kind:\nNumbers: in 2009 Kokang had about 150,000, of whom about 100,000 had Burmese nationality, about 90% Han. As a place, the numbers are enough; Organisation: it has a tradition of chieftaincy and its own armed force (MNDAA). The organisation is strong, but it is an armed force, not a temple, not a school; Wealth: some families have vast wealth, but the source the verdict identified was crime (fraud losses of over 1.4 billion US dollars). This one cannot count here; Doctrine: I found no material on the beliefs of the people of Kokang; left blank (to be supplemented). Then the descendants of the Nationalist army (Mae Salong):\nNumbers: not large; Organisation: an army at the time, later Thai citizens; Wealth and doctrine: no material; not written. Of the four, what Myanmar gives is the most dangerous combination: numbers and arms are there, doctrine is empty, and the source of wealth has been convicted.\nWhat my proposal says here The Chinese of Myanmar are three completely different kinds of people: old overseas Chinese of several generations, descendants of the Nationalist army, and new immigrants since the 1990s. My proposal's \u0026quot;unified centripetal force\u0026quot;: for which of them? My answer: it is \u0026quot;given\u0026quot; to none of them. My proposal is not something issued to a group. To an old overseas Chinese whose family has lived for generations in Yangon I say \u0026quot;ancestral rites at Qingming\u0026quot;, and he nods; to a descendant of the Nationalist army in Mae Salong I say the same sentence, and he nods too; to someone newly arrived I say this sentence, and he may be puzzled for a moment, but he will understand. My proposal is only some days; whoever wants to keep them is in them. But I must be honest too: where a group of people end up if they have numbers and arms but no \u0026quot;teaching\u0026quot; that holds a bottom line, Myanmar has already shown me. This is the biggest warning I have for my own idea: a centripetal force without a bottom line is the most dangerous thing there is.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument is that one day in 1967: as soon as the Cultural Revolution's \u0026quot;centripetal force\u0026quot; reached Yangon, more than thirty people died.\nIf a community's \u0026quot;heart\u0026quot; is activated by a foreign country's politics, what it brings to the host country is not yigui but a threat. My proposal must be careful not to become another form of that \u0026quot;foreign politics\u0026quot;.\nTo my friends in Myanmar, whether you are Bamar, Shan, Chinese, or something else. For more than two hundred years your country has been trodden on by many: from 1765 to 1769 Qianlong's bannermen attacked four times; in 1950 the Nationalists' defeated army fell back from Yunnan into the jungle; on 26 June 1967 the badges of the Cultural Revolution reached Yangon, and more than thirty people died; later came the workers shot at in the scam compounds. All of these came from the north. You have probably learned to keep an extra watchful eye on everyone who comes from the north, and I do not blame you. What I cannot let go of are the people in these events whose names nobody recorded: the more than seventy thousand Qing soldiers who walked into the miasma, the people in the compounds who tried to escape. I cannot call a single one of them by name.\nAmong the Chinese of one country, some took in a defeated army, and some ran scam compounds. What can the two words \u0026quot;the Chinese\u0026quot; still explain?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;The Most Successful Assimilation\u0026quot; (Thailand) and \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; (preface) in this series Myanmar: Sino-Burmese war of 1765–1769 (four invasions; Qing dead over 70,000; Mingrui, 1767–68; truce of December 1769); Nationalist army entering Burma in 1949–50 (about 1,500 in March 1950, about 10,000 by the end of the year); Duan Xiwen, Mae Salong in 1961, Thailand granted citizenship, fought in 1971 and 1981; Kokang: the Yang family, chieftaincy founded 1739; population in 2009 about 150,000, about 100,000 with Burmese nationality, about 90% Han; clashes of 2009 and 2015; Yangon riots of 1967-06-26; Wenzhou verdict on the Ming group in 2025; Bai Suocheng case tried in Shenzhen 2025-09-19 to 22 Burma's destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767: standard history Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d25/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"four-times\"\u003eFour times\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom 1765 to 1769 the Qing dynasty attacked Burma four times.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first two (1765–1767) were beaten back at the border by the Burmese army. For the third (1767–1768) Qianlong sent his son-in-law Mingrui with 50,000 men, mostly Manchu bannermen, deep into Burma, to within a few days' march of the capital, Inwa (Ava); then tropical terrain and disease wore them down and they withdrew with heavy losses.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the whole war the Qing army lost more than 70,000 men and four generals. Some call it the most disastrous frontier war the Qing ever fought.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Inwa (Ava)\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d25/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe area around Inwa (Ava), once the capital of Burma. In the eighteenth century the Qing army got as far as a few days' march from here.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inwa_%28Ava%29,_Mandalay_05.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Go-Myanmar, CC BY-SA 3.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Neighbour Qianlong Did Not Defeat, and the People Who Stayed: The Chinese of Myanmar"},{"content":"The numbers In 1957, when Malaya became independent, the Chinese made up 37% of the population. In 2020 they were 23.2%.\nIn the same year, 2020, the bumiputera (indigenous) were 69.4%, Indians 6.7%, others 0.7%. The Chinese are not bumiputera, and so do not have the bumiputera preferences.\nThe Chinese total fertility rate is the lowest of all groups: 0.8 (the Department of Statistics Malaysia figure for 2022; 0.9 for 2023). From 2016 to 2022 the marriage rate in the Chinese community fell by 33%.\nA school is an \u0026quot;us\u0026quot; In Malaysia the Chinese have kept one thing: schools, from primary to secondary, that teach in Chinese.\nThe Razak Report of 1956 designed a system: primary schools could be in Malay, English, Chinese or Tamil; secondary schools only in Malay and English. The Education Act of 1961 wrote this system into law.\nThe choice for Chinese secondary schools was: accept government funding and turn into English-medium schools; or stay Chinese, raise their own funds, and become private. Most schools accepted. A few refused and became \u0026quot;Chinese independent secondary schools\u0026quot;.\nChung Ling High School in Penang, one of Malaysia's Chinese independent secondary schools.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CW Tan (PenangLion), CC BY-SA 4.0\nToday there are about sixty independent schools, more than twenty of them in East Malaysia. Their unified examination (UEC) has been run since 1975 by Dong Jiao Zong (the United Chinese School Committees' Association of Malaysia and the United Chinese School Teachers' Association of Malaysia).\nIn July 1982 the Federal Court rejected the application to establish an \u0026quot;independent university\u0026quot; (Universiti Merdeka). It was to be a private Chinese-language university, meant to extend Chinese education up one more level.\nFrom 2003 to 2022 the number of independent-school students rose from about 53,000 to nearly 80,000, an increase of about half (Dong Jiao Zong figures: 52,850 in 2003 and 79,694 in 2022, with a peak of about 85,000 around 2017).\nMorality and discipline A Chinese school governs three things: which characters are taught, which stories are told, and what a group of children do together.\nWith no state to speak for them, the Chinese governed themselves through schools: boards of trustees, alumni associations, a unified examination, fundraising. Having their own examination means having their own path.\nThere is no need to make it sound too beautiful. The system has costs: the UEC is only partly recognised even now; in Sarawak, Selangor and Penang it can be used to apply for public posts, but a pass in the national language is required.\nThink of the people behind this: a small trader, who kept a stall all his life and gave what he earned, bit by bit, to a secondary school he never attended. He himself may not even write Chinese well, but he says: my children must not fail to know their ancestors' characters. In Malaysia there are several hundred thousand people like that.\nChung Ling High School, Penang, in 1935.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Chung Ling High School Magazine, Public domain\nBelief In Malaysia in 2020, 63.5% were Muslim, 18.7% Buddhist, 9.1% Christian, 6.1% Hindu.\nAmong the Chinese, about 83.6% call themselves Buddhists, 11.1% are Christians, and 3.4% are Daoists.\nBut most Malaysian Chinese in practice hold a mixture of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and ancestor worship. Asked what they believe, they say \u0026quot;Buddhism\u0026quot;.\nCompared with Indonesia, the direction is the reverse: in Indonesia a mixed thing was forced to choose a name; in Malaysia a mixed thing chose for itself the most convenient name.\nThe future The falling birth rate has brought a phenomenon: in Chinese primary schools the number of Malay pupils is increasing. A 2025 article from the ISEAS institute in Singapore describes this as \u0026quot;rescued, and threatened\u0026quot;: Malay pupils save some Chinese primary schools from closing, but the \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; character of the schools may also grow fainter as a result.\nOne response from Dong Jiao Zong has been to open to non-Chinese and to recruit international students.\nA Chinese primary school in Selangor.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, SNN95, CC BY-SA 4.0\nFour criteria, measured Numbers: 23.2% in 2020, 37% in 1957, falling; Chinese total fertility rate about 0.8, marriage rate down 33% in 2016–2022; Organisation: the most complete in Southeast Asia: Chinese primary schools, about 60 independent schools, the unified examination, Dong Jiao Zong. Of the four, this one is the strongest; Wealth: I have no reliable figures, so I do not write them; Doctrine: about 83.6% call themselves Buddhists, but in practice it is a mixture of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and ancestor worship; no unified teaching. Of the four, organisation is the strongest, numbers are falling, and doctrine is loose.\nWhat my proposal says here The Chinese of Malaysia already have the most complete \u0026quot;discipline\u0026quot; in Southeast Asia: schools and examinations. What they lack now is people, not a centripetal force. My proposal cannot give people, and I must say so honestly: the birth rate is not something a religion can solve with a sentence; behind it are housing, jobs, children's school fees, whether young people are willing to marry. What my proposal can give is a very small thing: if these children learn characters at school but do not know why they learn them, then let them know: these characters are so that at Qingming you can read the line on your ancestor's tombstone; so that at the Spring Festival you can read the couplets on the door. Then the school is not only a place \u0026quot;for the examination\u0026quot;, but also a place \u0026quot;for going home\u0026quot;. I think this is the small thing my proposal can do for Chinese education.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument to Chinese schools comes from the other side. In 2018 a state mufti said that recognising the UEC would harm national harmony. That view carries considerable weight in Malay society: if a country has a school system of its own and one ethnic group has another of its own, will the word \u0026quot;citizen\u0026quot; grow thin?\nAs in the earlier pieces: one community's centripetal force looks, to another community, like a centrifugal force.\nTo my friends in Malaysia, whether you are Chinese, Malay or Indian. Writing down \u0026quot;one community's centripetal force looks, to another community, like a centrifugal force\u0026quot;, I felt a little sad, because I know it is true, and I know each of you lives your days inside that sentence. I do not want to say who is right; I only want to say a small thing: in a Chinese primary school classroom a child is learning to write his own name, and the Malay classmate sitting beside him is learning too. In recent years such classrooms have been growing in number. One learns his ancestors' characters, one learns a new friend's characters, and this is what \u0026quot;living together\u0026quot; looks like in my mind. I hope there will not be fewer of them.\nA school needs pupils, and pupils have to be born. What should that rest on?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken\u0026quot; (Indonesia) and \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; (preface) in this series; Yigui \u0026quot;The Dusk of the Clan Associations\u0026quot; Malaysia: Chinese 37% in 1957, 23.2% in 2020 (bumiputera 69.4%, Indians 6.7%); Chinese total fertility rate about 0.8; Chinese marriage rate down 33% in 2016–2022; Razak Report 1956; Education Act 1961; about 60 independent schools; UEC run by Dong Jiao Zong since 1975; Federal Court rejects the independent university in July 1982; independent-school students 52,860 in 2003 and 80,397 in 2022; limited recognition of the UEC (Sarawak, Selangor, Penang); 2020 census, religion: Islam 63.5%, Buddhism 18.7%, Christianity 9.1%, Hinduism 6.1%; Chinese 83.6% Buddhist, 11.1% Christian, 3.4% Daoist; ISEAS 2025/34 (James Chai); 2018 state mufti's remarks (as reported by Malay Mail) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d26/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-numbers\"\u003eThe numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1957, when Malaya became independent, the Chinese made up 37% of the population. In 2020 they were 23.2%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the same year, 2020, the bumiputera (indigenous) were 69.4%, Indians 6.7%, others 0.7%. The Chinese are not bumiputera, and so do not have the bumiputera preferences.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Chinese total fertility rate is the lowest of all groups: 0.8 (the Department of Statistics Malaysia figure for 2022; 0.9 for 2023). From 2016 to 2022 the marriage rate in the Chinese community fell by 33%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"a-school-is-an-us\"\u003eA school is an \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Malaysia the Chinese have kept one thing: schools, from primary to secondary, that teach in Chinese.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Razak Report of 1956 designed a system: primary schools could be in Malay, English, Chinese or Tamil; secondary schools only in Malay and English. The Education Act of 1961 wrote this system into law.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Chinese Education: A Community Kept Alive by Its Schools"},{"content":"An idea I once had an idea: whether Thailand and Laos are connected with China's Dai, Zhuang and Miao peoples.\nThey are, and they are not.\nThe language accounts Thai, Lao, Shan (Myanmar) and Zhuang all belong to the Tai–Kadai language family. That they are relatives is a linguistic conclusion. The Dai language is in the same family.\nThe diversity of the Tai–Kadai family is concentrated in southern China, so it is generally held that the family originated in southern China. One branch of it, the \u0026quot;Tai\u0026quot;, began moving south around the year 1000.\nThe Miao are not in this family.\nHmong–Mien is another, independent language family. Whether it is related to Tai–Kadai has not been established. The ancient DNA evidence we have shows that the ancestors of Hmong–Mien speakers and those of Tai–Kadai speakers were two different groups of people on the banks of the Yangtze.\nSo \u0026quot;Thai, Lao, Dai, Zhuang and Miao are one family\u0026quot; is only half right: the first four are, the Miao are not.\nWhose kingdom was Nanzhao If the Tai moved south from southern China, was the kingdom of Nanzhao in Yunnan (Tang period) built by the Tai?\nThis question has been argued for a long time.\nThe Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple, Dali, Yunnan. Dali was the seat of Nanzhao and of the Dali kingdom that followed.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0\nAmong Thai scholars, some hold that Nanzhao was founded by the Tai. This is part of the \u0026quot;migration\u0026quot; account in Thai nationalist narrative: the ancestors came from a great kingdom in the north.\nMost Chinese scholars oppose this. They hold that Nanzhao was built by Tibeto-Burman speakers, that its population was mainly Bai and Yi, that the elite spoke a form of Yi, and that Nanzhao's scriptures were written in Bai. Today most scholars take the latter view.\nThere is politics in this. Around the 1980s Chinese historians concentrated on refuting the claim that \u0026quot;Nanzhao was a Tai state\u0026quot;. The Chinese account is that Nanzhao was a \u0026quot;local regime\u0026quot; of China, and it works hard to show that the groups in the sources are the ancestors of today's ethnic minorities of the southwest.\nIn 1253 the Mongols destroyed Dali (Nanzhao's successor). After that many groups moved away from Yunnan.\nI have no way to decide this dispute for either side. What can be said is that a question about \u0026quot;who we are and where we come from\u0026quot; has stakes for both countries.\nEach with its own Heaven Back to \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot;. People who speak the same language: do they worship the same Heaven?\nThe Thai, the Lao, the Dai: mainly Theravada Buddhism, mixed with some animism and ancestor worship. The Dai number a little over 1.2 million in Yunnan (2010 census, provincial bulletin: 1.222 million; I did not find the national figure), concentrated in Xishuangbanna and Dehong. The Zhuang: 19,568,546 in the 2020 census, the largest minority in China. Most follow the \u0026quot;Mo religion\u0026quot; (Mojiao), which has a supreme creator god, Buluotuo, and reveres many other gods. The Mo religion is animist; it holds that the universe has three layers and that a person has three souls. The Miao (Hmong): 11,067,929 in China in the 2020 census. Their traditional belief is animism and ancestors, mediated by ritual specialists. One language family, three kinds of \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot;: Theravada Buddhism, the Mo religion, and an animism in another language family.\nA Dai Buddhist temple in Jinghong, Yunnan. The Dai mainly follow Theravada Buddhism.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Evan Guerra, CC BY-SA 2.0\nThe Hmong in Laos Laos has Hmong. Their story is the \u0026quot;Secret War\u0026quot; of 1961 to 1975: the American CIA hired a Hmong force led by General Vang Pao to fight the communists in Laos.\nIn 1975 Long Tieng fell and the Pathet Lao took power and took revenge on these soldiers and their families. About twenty thousand Hmong fled to Thailand and then to the United States. 1980 was the peak of departures for the US, about 27,000.\nAfter they reached the US the Hmong's beliefs changed again. A rough estimate: up to half of Hmong in the US are Christians, though some still keep ancestor worship and healing by shamans. In Minnesota a considerable number converted under pressure from the churches and agencies that sponsored their resettlement.\nHmong women in traditional dress.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, DTH-BD-NVT, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThink of that family: a Hmong farmer in the mountains of Laos, swept into someone else's war; the war was lost, and he fled, crossing the river, passing through refugee camps, and finally reached a place called Minnesota where the winters are very cold, and there his children grew up in church. Does he still keep the ancestral tablet from home? I do not know.\nFour criteria, measured Numbers: the Zhuang number nearly twenty million, the most in this group; Organisation: the Dai have monastic communities and temples; the Zhuang Mo religion is a transmission of ritual masters, with no unified church; Wealth: hard to measure; not written; Doctrine: the Zhuang have a supreme god, Buluotuo; for the Thai, Lao and Dai the mainstream is Theravada Buddhism. The Zhuang \u0026quot;highest god\u0026quot; is, in position, a little close to the \u0026quot;highest divinity of Tiandao\u0026quot; that I imagine: personal or impersonal? Revered at a distance, or close? I only ask the question; I do not draw an analogy.\nTowards the Zhuang Mo religion my attitude is that I neither \u0026quot;borrow\u0026quot; it nor wish to \u0026quot;replace\u0026quot; it. It is the Zhuang's own; it has a creator god called Buluotuo and a body of ritual masters, passed down through many generations. I respect such a thing. Beliefs in every corner of East Asia, large and small, for which nobody has written a \u0026quot;scripture\u0026quot;, are still here, and that shows people always want something greater than themselves, a position over their heads. The \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot; I imagine and Buluotuo stand in different places, but I think they can see each other and not have to replace each other.\nWhat my proposal says here The Thai and Lao are not in my range, the Zhuang are inside China, and the Miao are in another language family. In this piece, to whom does my proposal speak? My answer: it speaks to nobody. In the preface I said my proposal is only taken to ask the Chinese and the Vietnamese; this piece does not tell the Thai, the Lao, the Zhuang or the Miao \u0026quot;what you should believe\u0026quot;. I only want to lay this set of things out: people of one language family can worship different Heavens; people of different language families can worship much the same Heaven. For my own idea this is a very important reminder: I must not think that, because people are \u0026quot;similar\u0026quot;, one thing can be used to unify them all.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument: one language family is not one Heaven. Zhuang and Thai are relatives, but the lives of the Zhuang today have nothing to do with those of the people of Bangkok. To speak of \u0026quot;the same language family\u0026quot; as \u0026quot;the same yigui\u0026quot; is to read history backwards.\nTo my friends in Thailand and Laos, and to the Zhuang, the Dai and the Miao. I wrote this piece not to put you on anyone's map. Each of you has your own Heaven: the Dai's Buddhist temples, the Zhuang's Buluotuo and ritual masters, the Hmong's shamans and ancestors. Above all the Hmong. A man farming in the mountains of Laos was swept into someone else's war, fled all the way, crossed the river, passed through refugee camps, and finally reached the snows of Minnesota, where his children grew up in church. Does his family still keep the ancestral tablet from home? I do not know. I have not walked that road and have no right to say anything about it; I only want more people to know that someone did.\nTwo peoples speak relatives' languages and worship different Heavens. Who owes whom an account of that?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; (preface) and \u0026quot;The Neighbour Qianlong Did Not Defeat\u0026quot; (Shan State, Myanmar) in this series Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien: Tai–Kadai includes Thai, Lao, Shan, Zhuang; Hmong–Mien is an independent family; the dispute over the ethnicity of Nanzhao (Thai scholars' \u0026quot;Tai\u0026quot; view vs. most Chinese scholars' \u0026quot;Tibeto-Burman\u0026quot; view; as reported by an EBSCO Research Starter and an NUS ARI working paper); Zhuang 19,568,546 in 2020, the Mo religion, Buluotuo; Dai 1,329,985, Theravada Buddhism; Miao (Hmong) 11,067,929 in 2020; the Hmong in Laos and the \u0026quot;Secret War\u0026quot; (1961–1975), about 20,000 fleeing to Thailand in 1975, about 27,000 going to the US in 1980, about half of US Hmong Christian (rough estimate) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d27/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"an-idea\"\u003eAn idea\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI once had an idea: whether Thailand and Laos are connected with China's Dai, Zhuang and Miao peoples.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey are, and they are not.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-language-accounts\"\u003eThe language accounts\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThai, Lao, Shan (Myanmar) and Zhuang all belong to the Tai–Kadai language family. That they are relatives is a linguistic conclusion. The Dai language is in the same family.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe diversity of the Tai–Kadai family is concentrated in southern China, so it is generally held that the family originated in southern China. One branch of it, the \u0026quot;Tai\u0026quot;, began moving south around the year 1000.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Miao are not in this family.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHmong–Mien is another, independent language family. Whether it is related to Tai–Kadai has not been established. The ancient DNA evidence we have shows that the ancestors of Hmong–Mien speakers and those of Tai–Kadai speakers were two different groups of people on the banks of the Yangtze.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"One Language Family, Each with Its Own Heaven: Thai, Lao, and Zhuang, Dai, Miao"},{"content":"More than seventy percent In 2020 ethnic Chinese made up 74.3% of Singapore's residents.\nReligion: Buddhism 31.1%, Christianity 18.9%, Islam 15.6%, Daoism 8.8%, no religion 20%.\nAmong the items I found, there is no Confucianism.\n1979: unify the \u0026quot;tongue\u0026quot; first In 1979 Lee Kuan Yew launched the \u0026quot;Speak Mandarin Campaign\u0026quot;, with the slogan \u0026quot;Speak more Mandarin, less dialect\u0026quot;. It had two aims: to give Chinese who spoke different dialects one common tongue; and to encourage Singaporeans to learn their mother tongue well and pass Chinese culture on to the next generation.\nI put this under the heading of \u0026quot;discipline\u0026quot;: a state, by a campaign, pushed Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka from outside the door back into the home.\nThink of it landing in one particular home: a grandmother who has spoken Hokkien all her life suddenly finds, in front of her grandson, that the language she speaks is not wanted at school. The grandson is learning Mandarin and the grandmother cannot follow it; the grandson's Mandarin cannot talk with the grandmother. This country, so that everyone would share one tongue, left many homes with one fewer language in which to say what is in the heart.\nThian Hock Keng Temple in Singapore, a Hokkien temple built in 1821–1822.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0\n1982: a course In January 1982 a Schools Council meeting settled the decision to introduce Religious Knowledge, and early in the year five religious subjects were announced. Confucian ethics entered the classroom in 1984: first as a pilot in 33 schools (15 Chinese-medium, 18 English-medium), and in 1986 it was extended to all schools.\nOne detail: Goh Keng Swee had not meant to put Confucianism in. He saw Confucianism as a secular system of ethics, and it was at the prompting of the Prime Minister, after \u0026quot;losing sleep for several nights\u0026quot;, that he announced its inclusion.\nGoh Keng Swee (1918–2010), in 1967.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, J. Crowther, Public domain\nFrom 1984 to 1989 Religious Knowledge became a compulsory course for the upper secondary classes, with these options: Bible Knowledge, Buddhist Studies, Hindu Studies, Islamic Religious Knowledge, Sikh Studies, and later Confucian Ethics was added.\nIn 1987 Singapore held a conference titled \u0026quot;Confucian Ethics and the Industrial Modernisation of East Asia\u0026quot;. Tu Weiming edited the proceedings, which the Institute of East Asian Philosophies published in 1991.\nThe withdrawal In January 1989 the government issued the White Paper on the Maintenance of Religious Harmony; in 1990 the government decided to withdraw its support for the Religious Knowledge course; in the same year Parliament passed the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act.\nIn 1987 the Ministry of Community Development commissioned a study on religious revival which raised two worries: aggressive proselytising, and the politicisation of religion. Some studies link the withdrawal with these worries; the official item-by-item account I have not checked against the original text.\nWhat I did check is two things that followed:\n1990: Parliament passed the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, in force from 31 March 1992. It empowers the Minister for Home Affairs to restrict the activities of religious leaders and others if those activities threaten religious harmony, or, in the name of religion, promote political causes, carry out subversion, or incite disaffection against the President or the government. 1991: Parliament adopted the white paper Shared Values. Five points: nation before community and society before self; the family as the basic unit of society; community support and respect for the individual; consensus, not conflict; racial and religious harmony. From \u0026quot;course\u0026quot; to \u0026quot;law\u0026quot; to \u0026quot;values\u0026quot;: a state kept religion and politics apart, and turned Confucian ethics into a set of values that does not call itself Confucian.\nFour criteria, measured This is the first \u0026quot;state experiment\u0026quot; my position runs into:\nNumbers: more than seventy percent; Organisation: the state itself is a very strong organisation; Wealth: I have not found figures; not written; Doctrine: the state itself does not put forward a teaching. Numbers and organisation, the state has; doctrine, the state itself took away.\nMorality This example makes me think of the piece in this series on \u0026quot;teaching through the way of the divine\u0026quot;: How long can a religion live that the elite don't believe and the masses do?\n\u0026quot;Teaching through the way of the divine\u0026quot; is the state using religion to govern society. Singapore's approach goes the other way: the state does not let religion govern politics.\nBoth approaches are the state managing religion, only in different directions.\nWhat my position says here Singapore is seventy percent Chinese, its state has organisation, and it has a Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act. How does my position speak here? My answer: not one word needs changing. What that law guards against: the politicisation of religion, aggressive proselytising, using religion to stir up discontent with the government: the Tiandao I want does none of these. I do not ask for state recognition, nor for any special legal position; I speak for no political party, and I do not go out to \u0026quot;spread\u0026quot; anything. What I want is only that on the day of Qingming a family goes to burn incense for the ancestors, and that at the Spring Festival the family gathers: days like these, whether or not they are Confucian, whether or not they have a name. If the state is willing to call it \u0026quot;values\u0026quot;, let it be called values; if it is willing to call it \u0026quot;custom\u0026quot;, let it be called custom. As long as the days remain, I do not mind what it is called.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument is the law itself: in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country, is a religion whose aim is \u0026quot;cultural leadership\u0026quot; not exactly what the state is guarding against?\nIn Singapore, more than seventy percent Chinese, the answer the state gave is: no.\nTo my friends in Singapore. Your country, in a very small place, governs many kinds of belief, many kinds of speech, many kinds of dinner table. After the Speak Mandarin Campaign of 1979, in how many homes did a grandmother speak the Hokkien of her whole life while her grandson learned Mandarin at school, and the two could not say what was in their hearts to each other? I often think of that. Your country had its reason then: to give everyone one common tongue. Later came Goh Keng Swee. He had not meant to put Confucianism into the classroom, and he lost sleep for several nights, alone, over whether it should go in. The course was withdrawn in the end, but I feel those nights were not wasted. To seat so many kinds of speech and so many kinds of dinner table at one table is not common in East Asia.\nA state has the people and the organisation, yet will not take a religion. Whom is it guarding against: others, or itself?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Teaching Through the Way of the Divine\u0026quot; in this series; Duoshe \u0026quot;How New Religions Survive\u0026quot; Singapore: Chinese 74.3% of residents in 2020; religion: Buddhism 31.1%, Christianity 18.9%, Islam 15.6%, Daoism 8.8%, no religion 20%; Speak Mandarin Campaign of 1979 (\u0026quot;Speak more Mandarin, less dialect\u0026quot;); Confucian ethics course in 1982; Goh Keng Swee originally not intending to include it; Religious Knowledge 1984–1989 (compulsory); the 1987 conference \u0026quot;Confucian Ethics and the Industrial Modernisation of East Asia\u0026quot;, proceedings edited by Tu Weiming (1991); Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act 1990 (in force 1992-03-31); the five points of the white paper Shared Values of 1991 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d28/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"more-than-seventy-percent\"\u003eMore than seventy percent\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2020 ethnic Chinese made up 74.3% of Singapore's residents.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReligion: Buddhism 31.1%, Christianity 18.9%, Islam 15.6%, Daoism 8.8%, no religion 20%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmong the items I found, there is no Confucianism.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Religion of Singapore residents (2020)\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d28/01.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"1979-unify-the-tongue-first\"\u003e1979: unify the \u0026quot;tongue\u0026quot; first\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1979 Lee Kuan Yew launched the \u0026quot;Speak Mandarin Campaign\u0026quot;, with the slogan \u0026quot;Speak more Mandarin, less dialect\u0026quot;. It had two aims: to give Chinese who spoke different dialects one common tongue; and to encourage Singaporeans to learn their mother tongue well and pass Chinese culture on to the next generation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI put this under the heading of \u0026quot;discipline\u0026quot;: a state, by a campaign, pushed Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka from outside the door back into the home.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It: Singapore"},{"content":"A port In 1581 the Spanish marked out a piece of land outside the walls of Manila for the Chinese to live on, called the \u0026quot;parián\u0026quot;. During the Spanish period there were nine pariáns in all; the first was in 1581, and the last did not disappear until 1860.\nIn the seventeenth century there were about two thousand Spaniards and, at most, about thirty thousand Chinese. That ratio was the source of the colonisers' fear.\nIn 1639 there was a Chinese uprising; in 1662 there was a massacre ordered by Governor Manrique de Lara. Both times, many Chinese died.\nConversion was a way out Under Spanish rule, for a Chinese to stay there was one way: to become Catholic.\nAfter baptism they intermarried with Filipinos, and their mixed descendants were called \u0026quot;Chinese mestizos\u0026quot;.\nThink of that choice: a merchant from Fujian, in a strange port, to stay and no longer be treated as a threat, had to swap the household shrine at home for a cross. He did not know that this step might leave his grandson not even knowing how to read his name.\nThe Philippines' first saint, Lorenzo Ruiz, was born in Binondo, Manila; his father was Chinese and his mother Filipino.\nStatue of San Lorenzo Ruiz in Binondo Church, Manila.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Ralff Nestor Nacor, CC BY-SA 4.0\nNames This road produced some who later became symbols of the nation:\nJosé Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines. His great-great-grandfather was a Chinese who moved to Calamba in 1697, called Domingo Lam-co (Hokkien Cua Yi-nan, that is the Ke surname, Ke Yi-nan); Corazon Aquino. Her family, the Cojuangcos, descend from Co Yu Hwan (Xu Yuhuan), who came from Zhangzhou, Fujian, in 1861; Cardinal Jaime Sin, Archbishop of Manila. His father was a Chinese merchant and his mother was from Aklan. Three names, three fields: nationalism, politics, the Church.\nPortrait of José Rizal (1861–1896), 1891.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Telesforo Sucgang, CC0\nCardinal Jaime Sin (1928–2005), 1988.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Ernmuhl, CC BY-SA 3.0\nNumbers The Philippine government does not conduct ethnic surveys.\nThe record of the Philippine Senate in 2013: pure Chinese about 1.35 million; Filipinos with any Chinese ancestry about 22.8 million. One account puts \u0026quot;Chinese mestizos\u0026quot; at about 1.2% to 1.8% of the population; another says that those with Chinese blood may be as many as 25%. The ways of counting differ enormously.\nBelief: about ninety percent of Filipino Chinese are Christians, Catholic, Protestant, or of Philippine native churches; only about 5% follow Buddhism or Chinese folk religion.\nBut the religion here is also mixed: many devotees of the Black Nazarene are in fact Buddhists or Daoists who only nominally follow Catholicism.\n1975 From the departure of the Americans in 1946 until 1975, Philippine legislation affecting the Chinese kept getting heavier.\nIn April 1975 President Marcos issued a decree: the Chinese could submit a simple, cheap application to the Office of the Solicitor General and acquire Philippine citizenship.\nThat year was also the year the Philippines and China established diplomatic relations. (9 June 1975.)\nThe Filipino–Chinese Friendship Arch in Binondo, Manila; Binondo is one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Ranieljosecastaneda, CC BY-SA 4.0Binondo was set up by the Spanish in 1594 and is often called the oldest Chinatown in the world.\nFour criteria, measured Numbers: pure Chinese only a little over 1%; those with Chinese ancestry, a high proportion; Organisation: Chinese schools, chambers of commerce, clan associations: I have not checked these item by item; left blank; Wealth: I have no reliable figures, so I do not write them; Doctrine: about ninety percent are Christians. Their doctrine is already Catholic. What my position says here The Philippines sets my position a difficult problem: the Chinese here are not few in number, but their \u0026quot;doctrine\u0026quot; was changed long ago. Should my position give them a new \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot;, or a \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; laid over Catholicism? My answer: neither. I do not ask a Catholic to take down his cross. I do not think \u0026quot;conversion\u0026quot; was a betrayal; it was a choice their ancestors made so that their children could live. My respect for them is greater than for any who \u0026quot;kept everything as it was\u0026quot;. All I want to say is a small thing: if one day someone wants to know how his great-grandfather in Fujian burned incense to the ancestors, he can ask; and if on Qingming he wants to leave a place, before the cross, for that great-grandfather he never knew, that is no contradiction either. A \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; like this is not laid over Catholicism; it leaves a chair beside it.\nLooking at it the other way This piece has to set a problem for \u0026quot;only two roads\u0026quot;.\nThe two roads are: be strong enough, and form a new centripetal force; not be strong enough, and be assimilated.\nThe Philippines looks like the second: assimilated, converted to Catholicism, speaking Tagalog and English.\nBut the people who were assimilated later became the country's elite: Rizal, Aquino, Sin. They in turn became the country's core.\nThis is a third road: to be assimilated, and then to lead. The centripetal force is still that country's; the descendants of the Chinese merged into it.\nFor my position this is trouble: if the most successful outcome for the Chinese is to disappear into someone else's Catholicism and become its protagonists, is the yigui my position offers superfluous?\nI cannot answer this question, and I am willing to leave it there. I only want to say one thing: Rizal did not \u0026quot;disappear\u0026quot;. A country took him as its own most important person. His great-great-grandfather, a Chinese who came in 1697, could not have imagined that three hundred years later his descendant would be a nation's national hero. It makes me feel that \u0026quot;Chinese\u0026quot; may never have been something that \u0026quot;stays unchanged\u0026quot;; it can flow into other places and become other things while still carrying a little of the original colour. I think this too is a kind of yigui.\nTo my friends in the Philippines. In your country there are many whose names carry a Hokkien sound, and in whose homes there may be an old photograph of someone they do not know. In the Spanish years, a merchant from Fujian, to be allowed to stay in Manila, exchanged the family shrine for a cross; he did not know that his grandson might not even know how to say his name. That road later led to Rizal, to Aquino, to Sin. You are a whole Filipino, and also the descendant of someone who does not know whether he has been remembered. Your family history has one end in Fujian and the other in Manila, and nobody needs you to choose a side.\nA person's ancestors were from Zhangzhou, he himself is a Catholic, and he became president of the Philippines. In what sense is he still \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Thailand\u0026quot; (another kind of assimilation) and \u0026quot;Indonesia\u0026quot; in this series; Duoshe \u0026quot;How New Religions Survive\u0026quot; Philippines: the parián of 1581, nine pariáns, the last until 1860; in the seventeenth century about 2,000 Spaniards, at most about 30,000 Chinese; the uprising of 1639 and the massacre of 1662; Lorenzo Ruiz (Chinese father, Filipino mother); Rizal's great-great-grandfather Domingo Lam-co, who moved to Calamba in 1697; the Cojuangco family descended from Co Yu Hwan of Zhangzhou, 1861; Jaime Sin (Chinese father, Aklan mother); Senate record of 2013: pure Chinese about 1.35 million, with Chinese ancestry about 22.8 million; about 90% of Chinese Filipinos Christian; Marcos's naturalisation decree of 1975 Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d29/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-port\"\u003eA port\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1581 the Spanish marked out a piece of land outside the walls of Manila for the Chinese to live on, called the \u0026quot;parián\u0026quot;. During the Spanish period there were nine pariáns in all; the first was in 1581, and the last did not disappear until 1860.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the seventeenth century there were about two thousand Spaniards and, at most, about thirty thousand Chinese. That ratio was the source of the colonisers' fear.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1639 there was a Chinese uprising; in 1662 there was a massacre ordered by Governor Manrique de Lara. Both times, many Chinese died.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"conversion-was-a-way-out\"\u003eConversion was a way out\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnder Spanish rule, for a Chinese to stay there was one way: to become Catholic.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter baptism they intermarried with Filipinos, and their mixed descendants were called \u0026quot;Chinese mestizos\u0026quot;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Becoming the Nation's Elite: Are the Chinese Still Chinese? The Philippines"},{"content":"An ordinance In 1928 Hong Kong's British colonial government issued the Chinese Temples Ordinance. It required all Chinese temples and religious bodies to register and to be vetted by a body called the \u0026quot;Chinese Temples Committee\u0026quot;.\nBy its letter: it required you to register; it did not require you to close.\nUnlike Indonesia in 1967, where Chinese characters were banned, Chinese schools closed, and religion and customs could be practised only at home.\nBut I should be clear that this was not a \u0026quot;clean registration only\u0026quot;. From the material I have read, the ordinance defined what counted as a \u0026quot;Chinese temple\u0026quot; by conduct and fees, not by doctrine; the committee it set up had great control over the temples' income, funds and property; and a temple that had not registered, once a month had passed after the notice, was breaking the law to carry on, and was fined. So to say \u0026quot;register, but do not ban\u0026quot; is only half right: it did not ban temples, but it governed their money. (On the ordinance and the committee I follow Hong Kong's e-legislation and the government's 2015 review consultation paper; the committee is chaired by the Secretary for Home Affairs; the legislative reasons of the time I did not read.)\nWong Tai Sin Temple The Wong Tai Sin Temple was built in 1921 by a family surnamed Leung on waste ground at Chuk Yuen in Kowloon.\nIn 1956 it was \u0026quot;formally opened\u0026quot;.\nThis \u0026quot;formal\u0026quot; goes back to that ordinance of 1928: a temple had to be registered and vetted to have legal status.\nThe colonial government was not leaving things alone. It governed them by registration.\nWong Tai Sin Temple, Hong Kong.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0\nThe Confucian Academy The Confucian Academy was founded in Hong Kong in 1930 by Chen Huanzhang. This is the same Chen Huanzhang of the Confucian Association in Shanghai in 1912 (\u0026quot;Why the Confucian Association Failed\u0026quot; in this series).\nIn 1913 and 1916 the Confucian Association was rejected twice in the Republic's parliament. A dozen years or so later, in a British colony, it survived as a civil society body.\nAccording to researchers, it kept Confucianism alive in Hong Kong in the form of an \u0026quot;organised religion\u0026quot;.\nThink of Chen Huanzhang: a doctor educated in the United States, twice rejected by his own parliament, who finally, in someone else's colony, founded an academy that gave what he valued most a place to live. It is hard not to feel that he was a little pitiable, and a little remarkable.\nThe Confucian Hall in the Wong Tai Sin Temple.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Underwaterbuffalo, CC BY-SA 4.0\nFestivals The Cheung Chau Taiping Qingjiao, that is the \u0026quot;Bun Festival\u0026quot;, was placed on China's national intangible cultural heritage list in 2011. It honours Pak Tai (Beidi), who according to legend protected the island from a plague in the eighteenth century. (Other accounts say the late nineteenth century.) During the festival the islanders eat no meat for three days, and there are lion dances and the \u0026quot;bun scrambling\u0026quot;.\nThe bun tower at the Cheung Chau Bun Festival: a tall tower piled with peace buns.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, User:Wrightbus, CC BY 3.0\nThe present Religious figures (I did not find a source and year on one consistent basis; for reference only): no religion or not stated, 48.9%; Protestant 13.8%, Catholic 5.2%, Daoist 13.3%, Buddhist 13.3%, Muslim 4.0%, Hindu 1.3%.\nAccording to the official statistics of 2024, among organised religions, Buddhists and Daoists each number over a million.\nFour criteria, measured The Chinese of Hong Kong are an overwhelming majority, and the power ruling here was a non-Chinese one:\nNumbers: enough; Organisation: the Chinese Temples Committee, the Confucian Academy; Wealth: I have found no figures; not written; Doctrine: not unified. A set of temples that answer to none of each other, plus some festivals. (This is my summary.) Morality and discipline The Chinese of Hong Kong have no single unified teaching. What do they use to govern themselves?\nOne, temples; two, the festivals of the year; three, the family. Not one of the three is \u0026quot;a church\u0026quot;.\nThis may be why the colonisers did not feel the need to \u0026quot;ban\u0026quot; it: it never constituted a unified organisation.\nWhat my position says here Hong Kong is the place most favourable to my position: there are many Chinese, they have organisation, and there is no accusation of \u0026quot;is the centre foreign\u0026quot;, because the majority here are the Chinese themselves. What should my position give here, so as not to be superfluous? My answer: give the thing Hong Kong now lacks most: an account. Hong Kong has many temples and lively festivals, but I guess many people walk into Wong Tai Sin only to draw a fortune stick and go to the Cheung Chau Bun Festival only to watch the crowd, with no chance to ask: what is all this for? What my position offers is not a new temple but a \u0026quot;why\u0026quot;: why worship, why keep festivals, why pile a bun tower so high.\nLooking at it the other way There is a counter-argument to \u0026quot;register, but do not ban\u0026quot;: it works because its object has no unified doctrine.\nOnce there is a \u0026quot;unified religious yigui\u0026quot;, will this method still work? Was the 1928 ordinance guarding against a religion that might become a \u0026quot;political organisation\u0026quot;? I have not found the legislative reasons of the time .\nTo my friends in Hong Kong. For decades your city has done one thing very well: let many people, before different gods, live their own days at the same time. In the Wong Tai Sin Temple, Daoist and Buddhist halls and a hall to Confucius stand in one place; on the island of Cheung Chau, three days without meat at festival time, and nobody on the island finds it strange. Chen Huanzhang, turned down twice by his own parliament, in the end founded the Confucian Academy here with you, and what he valued found a place to live. Places like this are now few in East Asia. What I hope you hold on to is this way of \u0026quot;not pulling each other down\u0026quot;; it matters more than holding on to any one temple.\nA community's yigui is a heap of temples that answer to none of each other. Is that weak, or resilient?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Why the Confucian Association Failed\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;After Boat People\u0026quot; (Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong) and \u0026quot;What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken\u0026quot; (Indonesia: banning versus registration) in this series Hong Kong: Chinese Temples Ordinance of 1928 (registration, vetted by the Chinese Temples Committee); Wong Tai Sin Temple built in 1921, opened in 1956; Confucian Academy founded by Chen Huanzhang in 1930; Cheung Chau Taiping Qingjiao on the national intangible heritage list in 2011, honouring Pak Tai; religious composition (Wikipedia, year unknown); official statistics of 2024: Buddhists and Daoists each over 1 million The qualification of the 1928 ordinance as \u0026quot;registration plus control of temple property\u0026quot;: the author's material notes \u0026quot;From Tianxia to the State\u0026quot;, section 3 (secondary; the text of the ordinance is on Hong Kong e-Legislation, 🟢) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d30/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"an-ordinance\"\u003eAn ordinance\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1928 Hong Kong's British colonial government issued the \u003cem\u003eChinese Temples Ordinance\u003c/em\u003e. It required all Chinese temples and religious bodies to register and to be vetted by a body called the \u0026quot;Chinese Temples Committee\u0026quot;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy its letter: it required you to register; it did not require you to close.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnlike Indonesia in 1967, where Chinese characters were banned, Chinese schools closed, and religion and customs could be practised only at home.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut I should be clear that this was not a \u0026quot;clean registration only\u0026quot;. From the material I have read, the ordinance defined what counted as a \u0026quot;Chinese temple\u0026quot; by conduct and fees, not by doctrine; the committee it set up had great control over the temples' income, funds and property; and a temple that had not registered, once a month had passed after the notice, was breaking the law to carry on, and was fined. So to say \u0026quot;register, but do not ban\u0026quot; is only half right: it did not ban temples, but it governed their money. (On the ordinance and the committee I follow Hong Kong's e-legislation and the government's 2015 review consultation paper; the committee is chaired by the Secretary for Home Affairs; the legislative reasons of the time I did not read.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Registered, But Not Banned: How Colonial Hong Kong Kept Its Temples"},{"content":"Temples The earliest Tua Pek Kong temple in Malaysia is at Tanjong Tokong in Penang, built, according to sources, no later than 1792, when it was still a fishing village. The belief in Tua Pek Kong spread from here to Malaysia, Singapore and parts of Indonesia.\nIn legend there was a Tua Pek Kong named Zhang Li, a Hakka, who set out from Sumatra and whose ship was blown by wind and waves to Penang. That is a legend.\nThe Tua Pek Kong temple at Tanjong Tokong, Penang, which according to sources is the earliest Tua Pek Kong temple in Malaysia.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, marufish, CC BY-SA 2.0\nPenang's Kuan Yin Teng honours both Guanyin and Mazu, one a god of compassion, the other a god of those who go to sea. According to sources it is one of the oldest Chinese temples in Penang.\nMalaysia also has a Datuk Kong. \u0026quot;Datuk\u0026quot; is the Malay word for grandfather; \u0026quot;gong\u0026quot; is the Chinese word for grandfather. According to a study of 2022, he is a fusion of the Malay keramat (holy shrine) and the Chinese earth god, with local animism and Islamic elements. The Chinese usually treat him as a Malay: they speak Malay to him, offer Malay food, and use no pork.\nIn these three examples the god was brought from China, the temple was built locally, and some gods became something else locally.\nI like the example of Datuk Kong. A group of Chinese, in a strange country, met an old local god. They did not say \u0026quot;this belongs to someone else\u0026quot;. They said: \u0026quot;this is grandfather.\u0026quot; And then they prepared for him a meal without pork.\nCheng Hoon Teng in Malacca, known as the oldest Chinese temple in Malaysia.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Irwan Shah Bin Abdullah, CC BY-SA 4.0\nNative-place halls and chambers of commerce The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1906. According to sources its original English name was the General Chinese Trade Affairs Association; it was set up by local Chinese leaders to do three things: look after the trade of Chinese merchants, resolve differences between dialect groups, and represent the Chinese community. It was the first Chinese business body to cross dialect and trade lines. According to sources, by 2022 it had over 4,000 corporate members and over 150 trade associations.\nOne thread in its origins comes from the homeland. According to sources, the Qing court established a Ministry of Commerce in 1903 with the aim \u0026quot;to open up trade, unite associations, and promote industry\u0026quot;, and chambers of commerce were set up at home and abroad; in 1904 the Qing court appointed the rich Nanyang merchant Zhang Bishi as \u0026quot;Commissioner for Investigating Commerce Overseas\u0026quot;, to oversee the setting up of chambers of commerce across Nanyang.\nThe Nationalist government had something similar. The Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission was founded in Guangzhou in 1926; in 1929 a working conference of the Nationalist Party centre passed organisational regulations making it subordinate to the Party.\nThe building of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Jordiferrer, CC BY-SA 3.0\nNationality Also in 1929 the Nationalist government promulgated the Nationality Law. It followed the principle of descent: if the father was a Chinese national at the time of the child's birth, the child was a Chinese national.\nAccording to sources, both the Qing government and the Nationalist government declared that ethnic Chinese at home and abroad were Chinese nationals; and colonial governments also regarded locally born Chinese as their own subjects. The Netherlands East Indies' Dutch Subjects Act of 1910 treated locally born Chinese as Dutch subjects. This is the origin of the problem of dual nationality for the Chinese.\nThe host countries' biggest accusation against the Chinese is \u0026quot;your heart is not here\u0026quot; (\u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; in this series). These things are its material: chambers of commerce partly pushed by the homeland; an overseas affairs body belonging to a political party; nationality reckoned by descent.\nThink of the person caught in between: born in Penang, speaking Malay with a Hokkien accent, with Tua Pek Kong at home, and on his birth certificate perhaps two nationalities. The Qing court said he was mine, the colonial government said he was mine, and he himself was perhaps thinking only of tomorrow's business. He never chose either of the two \u0026quot;mine\u0026quot;.\nBusiness The chambers of commerce are tied to business. Did Southeast Asian Chinese merchants succeed because of a shared culture and network?\nSince the 1980s there has been a notion called the \u0026quot;bamboo network\u0026quot;: Chinese business success comes from shared cultural values and personal networks. In 2003 Jomo and Folk edited a book, Ethnic Business: Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia, which examined these claims one by one: official–business relations, family firms, trust and networks, \u0026quot;Asian values\u0026quot;. According to the bibliographic abstract, the case studies show considerable diversity among Chinese firms; in the Asian financial crisis of 1998–1999 many Chinese firms collapsed, which was a shock to the view that essentialises Chinese culture and networks. (I have not read the book itself.)\nAn example in the other direction is Thailand's Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group. According to sources, in 1979 it was the first foreign-invested firm to register in Shenzhen, with registration number \u0026quot;0001\u0026quot;, under the name \u0026quot;Zhengda\u0026quot;. By the early 1990s it had about 200 subsidiaries in China.\nThis is Southeast Asian Chinese merchants investing in China. I have not found out what share of China's foreign investment overseas Chinese capital made up at the time.\nFour criteria, measured Numbers: different in each country. In Malaysia the Chinese were 23.2% in 2020 (see \u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot;); Organisation: chambers of commerce and native-place halls are the carrier of the \u0026quot;organisation\u0026quot; criterion. The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce: over 4,000 corporate members and over 150 trade associations (according to sources, 2022); Wealth: the wealth of Chinese merchants has the \u0026quot;bamboo network\u0026quot; account, and criticism of that account; I have no reliable figures, so I do not write them; Doctrine: the temples are mixed. Of the Malaysian Chinese, about 83.6% call themselves Buddhists, but in practice it is a mixture of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and ancestor worship; the temples of the Chinese in Thailand are a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism (see \u0026quot;The Most Successful Assimilation\u0026quot;). Of the four, organisation is the one with material. Doctrine is loose, and wealth is not written.\nWhat my position says here Temples, native-place halls and chambers of commerce are already the Chinese \u0026quot;organisation\u0026quot;. If my position's \u0026quot;unified centripetal force\u0026quot; were to be built through them, might the history of homeland promotion be exactly the evidence for \u0026quot;heart not here\u0026quot;? My answer: yes, it might. So the centripetal force I want cannot be \u0026quot;built\u0026quot; through them, and certainly cannot be pushed by any government. Temples grew by themselves, native-place halls were founded by themselves; this I want to hold exactly as it is. What I want to do is something much smaller: in these places that have already grown, to have a few more people willing to ask one question: \u0026quot;Why are we here?\u0026quot; This sentence needs no organisation, no charter, and no approval from any homeland. An old person in a temple telling a child the name of one more ancestor: that is it.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-argument is still the host countries' suspicion: one community's centripetal force may look, to another community, like a centrifugal force. Chambers of commerce partly pushed by the Qing court, an overseas affairs commission belonging to a political party, a nationality law reckoned by descent: put together, these three are exactly the material of the accusation.\nOne more thing must be kept apart: Mainland Chinese firms going abroad today and the long-settled Chinese communities are two different things. The latter are citizens of the countries where they live. \u0026quot;The same culture\u0026quot; may mean language and trust to a mainland firm, and may be a reason for suspicion to the local Chinese. On this see also Huozhi, \u0026quot;Going Abroad: Is Southeast Asia China's 'Central America'?\u0026quot;.\nTo my friends in Southeast Asia, Chinese and non-Chinese. I know the words \u0026quot;pushed by the homeland\u0026quot; sound like a very heavy accusation. It is true, and I do not defend it. There is another thing that is equally true: nobody sent people from the homeland to build that Tua Pek Kong temple in Penang; and when a group of Chinese met Datuk Kong, the old Malay grandfather, they did not say \u0026quot;this belongs to someone else\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;this is grandfather\u0026quot;, and then set out a meal for him without pork. All this was made, bit by bit, by people who had landed by the sea. In this difference I stand on the latter side, on the side of those whom nobody sent, and for whom nobody spoke.\nWas the chamber of commerce founded by the Chinese themselves, or by the homeland? Do these two answers sound the same to the host country?\nReferences\nFor comparison: \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; (preface), \u0026quot;What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken\u0026quot; (Indonesia), \u0026quot;The Most Successful Assimilation\u0026quot; (Thailand) and \u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot; (Malaysia) in this series; Huozhi \u0026quot;Going Abroad: Is Southeast Asia China's 'Central America'?\u0026quot;; Yigui \u0026quot;The Dusk of the Clan Associations\u0026quot; Tua Pek Kong temple, Kuan Yin Teng, Datuk Kong; the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Qing Ministry of Commerce, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, the Nationality Law; the \u0026quot;bamboo network\u0026quot; and Charoen Pokphand (see the source ledger) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d31/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"temples\"\u003eTemples\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe earliest Tua Pek Kong temple in Malaysia is at Tanjong Tokong in Penang, built, according to sources, no later than 1792, when it was still a fishing village. The belief in Tua Pek Kong spread from here to Malaysia, Singapore and parts of Indonesia.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn legend there was a Tua Pek Kong named Zhang Li, a Hakka, who set out from Sumatra and whose ship was blown by wind and waves to Penang. That is a legend.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Tua Pek Kong temple at Tanjong Tokong, Penang\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d31/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Tua Pek Kong temple at Tanjong Tokong, Penang, which according to sources is the earliest Tua Pek Kong temple in Malaysia.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tanjong_Tokong_Tua_Pek_Kong_Temple.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, marufish, CC BY-SA 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePenang's Kuan Yin Teng honours both Guanyin and Mazu, one a god of compassion, the other a god of those who go to sea. According to sources it is one of the oldest Chinese temples in Penang.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Temples, Native-Place Halls, Chambers of Commerce: Three Ways of Recognising Your Own"},{"content":"The monument in Kwong Tong Cemetery In the Kwong Tong Cemetery in Kuala Lumpur there is a monument.\nIts full name is the \u0026quot;Monument to the Selangor Overseas Chinese Mechanics Who Returned to Fight in the War and Died\u0026quot;. It was put up in 1947. Those who put it up were a Selangor overseas Chinese relief body of the time (English name Selangor …… Relief Committee; the Chinese name has not been checked). In 1952, according to one column, that body handed the annual commemoration over to the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. The public ceremony was later interrupted; it was revived in 2021 by the Assembly Hall, when that year's ceremony was held on 7 July (the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident). In 2026 it was held on 5 July, with about 250 people attending. At Qingming, descendants of the mechanics also visit on their own.\nWho they were In February 1939 Tan Kah Kee, chairman of the Southseas Overseas Chinese Relief General Association (Nanqiao Zonghui), issued Circular No. 6, calling on young drivers and mechanics among the overseas Chinese to return and serve.\nTan Kah Kee Memorial Hall at Jimei, Xiamen. Tan Kah Kee was the leader of the Nanyang overseas Chinese, and in 1939 issued the circular summoning the mechanics.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Peter Guo, CC BY-SA 2.0\nThat year they went back in nine batches, 3,193 in all, of whom 4 were women. They came from Malaya, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and also India.\nWhere they went was the Yunnan–Burma Road. From 1939 to 1942 about 500,000 tons of military supplies were rushed along that road, and a large part of them were carried by these men.\nMore than a thousand died in the fighting, in accidents and of disease. Another thousand or so returned after the war to where they had lived. The remaining thousand or so stayed in China.\nThink of one of them: a young man in his early twenties, in Penang or Singapore, working at repairing cars, who received a circular, put down his toolbox, and boarded a ship. His mother probably did not stop him, and could not have. He did not know how many bends that road had or how high that mountain was; he knew only that a country was at war and needed people who could drive.\nAfter they came back Those who came back, according to a Malaysian newspaper column, returned to their old trades, driving, repairing cars, repairing machines, and in small towns quietly lived for decades, rarely talking about those years.\nThose who stayed in China, according to the same column, mostly stayed in Yunnan, started families, and did not go back to Southeast Asia; they lost contact with their relatives in Nanyang for more than fifty years. Their families in Nanyang could hardly get any news of a son, a husband, a father.\nMore than fifty years. A mother waited fifty years for a son, until one day perhaps she herself was gone. This number, each time I read it, I find hard to read on past.\nOther monuments On 11 November 1951, in George Town, Penang, another monument to the mechanics was put up (English name Penang Overseas Chinese Anti-War Mechanics Memorial; the Chinese name has not been checked).\nOn 14 August 2025, in the Kwong Tong Cemetery in Kuala Lumpur, the \u0026quot;Malayan Nanqiao Jigong Memorial Park and Museum\u0026quot; was completed. In the park stands a ring-shaped memorial wall, its image taken from the \u0026quot;twenty-four bends\u0026quot; of the Yunnan–Burma Road, and on the wall are carved the names of about 3,200 Nanqiao mechanics.\nAbout 3,200 names, carved on one wall. I think that was the first time these men were written down together like this, in good order.\nAnother monument: Malacca, 1948 There is one more monument, in Malacca.\nOn Bukit Cina (Chinese Hill) in Malacca there is a \u0026quot;Malacca Chinese Anti-Japanese Martyrs' Monument\u0026quot;, unveiled on 5 April 1948 by the British High Commissioner of the Federation of Malaya. The monument bears four characters: 忠贞足式 (\u0026quot;Zhongzhen Zushi\u0026quot;, roughly \u0026quot;such loyalty is fit to be a model\u0026quot;). According to Wikipedia, the calligraphy is Chiang Kai-shek's.\nIt commemorates not the mechanics but Malacca Chinese killed during the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945, mainly those who resisted Japanese rule. Their remains were gathered from various places by surviving overseas Chinese and buried together at the foot of Bukit Cina. In 1972 the monument had its first major repair.\nThe Chinese cemetery at Bukit Cina, Malacca.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0\nI put it here because it belongs to the same time as the Selangor mechanics' monument: 1947, 1948, just after the war, surviving Chinese in the places where they lived put up monuments for the dead.\nTwo points are only set out here, not checked:\nthat the calligrapher is Chiang Kai-shek is at present supported by only one source, Wikipedia; that a British High Commissioner unveiled this monument: Malaya at that time was still a British colony. A question The author of the column above raised a question: Malaysia's Chinese society has not treated the Nanqiao mechanics as part of the history of Malaysian Chinese, but as part of the history of China's War of Resistance. They argue that this period should be written into the textbooks of Chinese secondary schools.\nThis question, I think, is the question of the whole Nanyang group.\nWhat I think Reading these things, I feel a weight I cannot quite name.\nIn 1939 they went to a country in which they had not been born. They drove trucks along a road that was almost a cliff, carrying other people's supplies to other people's front. About a third did not come back. Those who came back, for decades, did not say much.\nIn Indonesia and Thailand the host countries' hardest accusation against the Chinese is \u0026quot;your heart is not here\u0026quot;. I wrote about it in this series' preface, \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot;. The mechanics are the most extreme sample of that accusation: their hearts did go elsewhere, and they took their lives there too.\nAnd yet I cannot read this monument by \u0026quot;heart not here\u0026quot;. Look at that wall, with 3,200 names, and not one of them is that of a \u0026quot;disloyal\u0026quot; person. They were a group of people who, for a country they did not live in, put down their work and went up a road. If you say that their \u0026quot;hearts were not here\u0026quot;, I feel it is unfair to them.\nLooking at it the other way First, Malaya in 1939 was a British colony; there was no \u0026quot;host country\u0026quot; that could be failed. It became independent only in 1957.\nSecond, \u0026quot;returning to serve the country\u0026quot; was a special case of wartime and cannot be taken as the Chinese's usual direction. Among the same group, more than a thousand returned after the war to Malaya and Singapore and lived there.\nThird, the monument says \u0026quot;overseas Chinese\u0026quot; (huaqiao), not \u0026quot;Malaysian Chinese\u0026quot;. The word meant something different in 1947 from what it means in 2026. That may be half of the question that the columnist wants to raise.\nWhat my proposal says here My \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; is meant to give a community a \u0026quot;centripetal force\u0026quot;, and the mechanics were the strongest case of it, yet the centre lay in another country. For my proposal, is this lesson a positive example or a negative one? My answer: both. A positive one: it proves how far a group of people can go, without any organisation giving orders, on a feeling of \u0026quot;we are one family\u0026quot; alone, as far as over a thousand leaving their lives on a mountain road. A negative one: it also reminds me that once this kind of centripetal force is tied to a state, it can take people very far, and into danger, and that in many cases that state will not remember them. So the \u0026quot;heart\u0026quot; I want cannot be tied to a state. It must be tied to something that will not fall, will not change, will not forget you: the ancestors, Heaven, a monument, and a place where every seventh of July someone still comes to pay respects.\nTo my friends in Malaysia, and to the descendants of the mechanics. There is one detail: after they came back, they rarely talked about those years. I think perhaps it was because nobody had asked them. So I want to ask here: your father, your grandfather, in those years, what vehicle did he drive? Did he leave you a name, an old photograph, a watch? If you have an answer, I want to know. I want to keep, on this site, a place for him, a name. I have no way to put up a monument for him; I can only write his story down.\nA man gave his life to a country he did not live in. Whose history should his monument stand in?\nReferences\nFor comparison: in this series, \u0026quot;Neighbours to the South\u0026quot; (preface, \u0026quot;heart not here\u0026quot;), \u0026quot;What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken\u0026quot; (Indonesia), \u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot; (Malaysia), \u0026quot;Temples, Native-Place Halls, Chambers of Commerce\u0026quot; Nanqiao Jigong: Circular No. 6 of February 1939, 3,193 people (including 4 women), nine batches, the Yunnan–Burma Road, about 500,000 tons in 1939–1942, over a thousand killed, over a thousand returned after the war to their countries of residence, over a thousand stayed in China; Monuments in Malaysia: the Malacca Chinese Anti-Japanese Martyrs' Monument of 1948 (\u0026quot;Zhongzhen Zushi\u0026quot;, Chiang Kai-shek's calligraphy, according to Wikipedia); Selangor 1947, handed in 1952 to the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, interrupted, revived 2021 (7 July), 2026 on 5 July; Penang 1951-11-11; the Nanqiao Jigong Memorial Park and Museum in Kuala Lumpur, 2025-08-14; the argument of one newspaper column Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d32/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-monument-in-kwong-tong-cemetery\"\u003eThe monument in Kwong Tong Cemetery\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the Kwong Tong Cemetery in Kuala Lumpur there is a monument.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts full name is the \u0026quot;Monument to the Selangor Overseas Chinese Mechanics Who Returned to Fight in the War and Died\u0026quot;. It was put up in 1947. Those who put it up were a Selangor overseas Chinese relief body of the time (English name Selangor …… Relief Committee; the Chinese name has not been checked). In 1952, according to one column, that body handed the annual commemoration over to the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. The public ceremony was later interrupted; it was revived in 2021 by the Assembly Hall, when that year's ceremony was held on 7 July (the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident). In 2026 it was held on 5 July, with about 250 people attending. At Qingming, descendants of the mechanics also visit on their own.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Their Monuments: The Nanqiao Jigong of Malaysia"},{"content":"A New Testament printed in Singapore in 1839 In 1839 the Chien-Hsia (Jianxia) Academy in Singapore printed a New Testament called Jiushizhu Yesu xin yizhao shu, \u0026quot;The New Testament of Jesus the Saviour.\u0026quot; Its translator was the Prussian missionary Karl Gützlaff, the same man who, in the previous piece, wrote \u0026quot;Shangdi\u0026quot; into the Bible.\nKarl Gützlaff (1803–1851), Prussian missionary.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, National Library of Wales, public domain\nIn the seventh chapter of this book's Epistle to the Hebrews, the first three verses read:\n\u0026quot;昔亚伯拉罕败列王而凯旋，遇撒冷之王，至上帝之祭司，麦基洗德，蒙其祝福。\u0026quot; (In the old days Abraham defeated the kings and returned in triumph, and met the king of Salem, priest of the Shangdi, Melchizedek, and received his blessing.)\n\u0026quot;夫麦基洗德译名本乃义王，又撒冷之王，即平王。\u0026quot; (Melchizedek, by translation of his name, is the king of righteousness, and also the king of Salem, that is, the king of peace.)\n\u0026quot;其无父，无母，亦无族谱，无始日，无终生，成如上帝之子，永为祭司也。\u0026quot; (He had no father, no mother, no genealogy, no beginning of days, no end of life; made like the son of Shangdi, he remains a priest forever.)\nEight years later, an edition of this book reached Hong Xiuquan.\nA man nobody in the Bible can explain Melchizedek appears very little in the Bible.\nIn Genesis, Abraham defeats several kings, and on his way back Melchizedek, king of Salem, comes out with bread and wine to meet him and bless him. Abraham gives him a tenth of what he has taken. Then this man never appears again.\nMore than a thousand years later, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews brings him up once more and says the sentence people have turned over for two thousand years: he has no father, no mother, no genealogy, no beginning of days and no end of life, and like the Son of God he is a priest forever.\nSo who is he? Some say an angel; some say Christ appearing once in the Old Testament; some say just an ordinary petty Canaanite king. Explanation after explanation, and none has satisfied everyone.\n\u0026quot;Abraham Meets Melchizedek\u0026quot; by the French painter Laurent de La Hyre. The figure coming forward with bread and wine is Melchizedek, king of Salem.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Laurent de La Hyre, public domain\nThis is an acknowledged empty seat in the Bible.\nHong Xiuquan wrote a line beside it Hong Xiuquan's reading was direct.\nA portrait of Hong Xiuquan printed in a European book; the caption says it is \u0026quot;said to be\u0026quot; him, and its authenticity is doubtful.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, lithograph by Ford \u0026amp; West, public domain\nAccording to the scholar Archie Lee (Li Chichang), Hong Xiuquan later added marginal comments to the Bibles printed by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. At the Genesis passage where Melchizedek blesses Abraham, he wrote that Melchizedek was \u0026quot;that is me (zhen).\u0026quot; He meant that he had himself once come down from Heaven and shown this \u0026quot;trace,\u0026quot; which now served as proof that he was descending to rule as king today.\nCover of the Jiuyizhao shengshu (Old Testament) published by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, bearing \u0026quot;newly cut in the third year of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Guihao.\u0026quot; Hong Xiuquan's marginal comments were written in reprinted editions of this kind.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nThink about it: a man with no father, no mother, no genealogy, no origin could appear in any age and make sense.\nReading this, something in me aches. Hong Xiuquan was a poor scholar who had failed the examinations four times. In that time a person's birth, genealogy and examination rank were his whole \u0026quot;origin,\u0026quot; and he had none of them. And in a book translated by foreigners he found a man who needed none of these and could still be a priest and a king.\nOne more line is worth a second look. Gützlaff's translation says \u0026quot;king of Salem, that is, the king of peace (ping wang).\u0026quot; Salem means peace. What Hong Xiuquan thought when he read the two characters \u0026quot;king of peace,\u0026quot; I do not know. I only know that the state he later built was called the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping).\nHe used their own book What is uncomfortable here is not that Hong Xiuquan was bold. It is his method.\n\u0026quot;No father, no mother, no genealogy\u0026quot; was the missionary's own translation, and \u0026quot;the Son of Shangdi\u0026quot; was the missionaries' own choice of words. Hong Xiuquan invented not one character. He took the text they handed him and read it literally.\nAnd reading scripture literally was exactly what Protestant missionaries taught Chinese believers. They opposed the Catholic Church holding the right of interpretation and argued that everyone can read scripture for themselves. Hong Xiuquan did just that, and in the course of reading sat down in this empty seat.\nAfterwards the missionaries disowned him, and Catholics and Protestants alike judged his doctrine heresy. But to refute him they first had to explain one thing: why you may read the same book that way and he may not read it this way.\nTurning it around Orthodox theology does have an answer. It is called \u0026quot;typology.\u0026quot;\nOn this reading, Melchizedek is not a supernatural being but a \u0026quot;type\u0026quot; of Christ, an Old Testament figure who sketches in advance what Christ would be. \u0026quot;No father, no mother, no genealogy\u0026quot; means that the text records no genealogy for him. In Israel a priest had to come from the tribe of Levi with a traceable lineage; Melchizedek is a priest without relying on genealogy, and the author of Hebrews builds his argument precisely on this \u0026quot;gap in the record.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Made like the Son of God\u0026quot; is a comparison, not an identity.\nFollowing that line, one can also ask Hong Xiuquan: if Melchizedek really had no beginning and no end, how does he come out of the city in Genesis with bread and wine and accept a tenth from Abraham? He has a body, a city-state, and lives on one particular day. The verse you use was written by someone whose argument runs exactly opposite to yours.\nThere is another point that may matter more. Hong Xiuquan's \u0026quot;heavenly family\u0026quot; first appears in a strange dream of 1837, which the Taiping tianri, written in 1848, records. His marginal comments in the Bible came only in 1860, when the Taiping reprinted the Bible.\nThat is to say: dream first, scripture later. The scripture was not the source of his vision; it was what he later used to confirm it. So perhaps it was not an empty seat that waited for him; he had the seat first, and then went to the book to find an empty place.\nBy the way A line of Hong Xiuquan's annotation circulates online: \u0026quot;Melchizedek is truly me\u0026quot; (six characters in Chinese).\nI could not find a first-hand source for it. Two versions can be traced to scholarly literature, one written beside Genesis and one beside Hebrews, with different wording. The six-character slogan is probably a later summary that, passed along, came to be treated as the original words.\nA story about \u0026quot;the man without a genealogy\u0026quot; has itself acquired a stretch of retelling whose origin cannot be traced. There is something fitting in that.\nI tell this story as a warning. A scripture may leave an empty seat; that is not forbidden. But once someone feels he can sit in it and say \u0026quot;that is me,\u0026quot; what follows is out of anyone's hands. After Hong Xiuquan sat down, his own words became the highest words; Yang Xiuqing, speaking through the Heavenly Father, could override the Heavenly King; and in the end even the Old and New Testaments \u0026quot;have many errors and the errors must be corrected.\u0026quot; Countless people were swept in.\nSo when I imagine the thing I want, I deliberately leave this seat empty. What I have in mind is this: Heaven's Way (Tiandao) is a supreme divinity that does not speak, does not descend, does not possess anyone, does not hand a decree to anyone; it is to be revered, not petitioned. Confucius is the First Teacher, the one who collected and handed down, not one who received a revelation; he never said \u0026quot;this is what Heaven told me directly.\u0026quot; With both ends sealed, no one can stand up and say \u0026quot;I am the one.\u0026quot; I don't think this guarantees safety, but at least no one will take a verse of scripture and lead a country in.\nIf a book leaves an empty seat, who is entitled to sit in it?\nReferences\nJiushizhu Yesu xin yizhao shu (New Testament), translated by Karl Gützlaff, printed in 1839 at the Chien-Hsia Academy, Singapore (Taiwan's \u0026quot;Faith, Hope and Love\u0026quot; rare Bible digital collection; the copy held by the National Library of Australia) Morrison and Milne translation, Hebrews 7:3 (same system, for comparison) Archie C. C. Lee, \u0026quot;The Bible in China: Taiping Interpretation of Scripture,\u0026quot; Journal of Shenzhen University (Humanities \u0026amp; Social Sciences), 2009, no. 6 Zhao Xiaoyang, \u0026quot;On the Source Texts of the Bibles Printed by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom,\u0026quot; Qing History Studies, 2010, no. 3 Taiping tianri, 1848 Genesis 14; Hebrews 7 Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e03/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-new-testament-printed-in-singapore-in-1839\"\u003eA New Testament printed in Singapore in 1839\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1839 the Chien-Hsia (Jianxia) Academy in Singapore printed a New Testament called \u003cem\u003eJiushizhu Yesu xin yizhao shu\u003c/em\u003e, \u0026quot;The New Testament of Jesus the Saviour.\u0026quot; Its translator was the Prussian missionary Karl Gützlaff, the same man who, in the previous piece, wrote \u0026quot;Shangdi\u0026quot; into the Bible.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Karl Gützlaff\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/yigui/e03/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eKarl Gützlaff (1803–1851), Prussian missionary.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Chas._Gutzlaff_%284672542%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, National Library of Wales, public domain\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the seventh chapter of this book's Epistle to the Hebrews, the first three verses read:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026quot;昔亚伯拉罕败列王而凯旋，遇撒冷之王，至上帝之祭司，麦基洗德，蒙其祝福。\u0026quot;\n(In the old days Abraham defeated the kings and returned in triumph, and met the king of Salem, priest of the Shangdi, Melchizedek, and received his blessing.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"No Father, No Mother, No Genealogy"},{"content":"A joke I have heard a joke.\nIn a museum, in front of an exhibit, stand two people, a Korean and a Chinese. The Korean cannot read the characters on the exhibit, and the Chinese explains them to him.\nI found no source for this joke, so I cannot say it happened. I can only say that it has some true parts.\nAn apology in 2022 In August 2022 a shop in Korea posted a notice saying it was \u0026quot;deeply sorry\u0026quot;. The notice used a Sino-Korean word meaning \u0026quot;very deep, very sincere\u0026quot;.\nSome netizens read it as another word: \u0026quot;boring\u0026quot;. They criticised the shop: an apology, and why \u0026quot;boring\u0026quot;?\nAround the same time someone took the word for \u0026quot;today\u0026quot; to mean Friday.\nThese are words with Chinese characters behind them. Those who know the characters understand at a glance. Those who do not see only a string of sounds, and the sounds collide with other words.\nThe numbers How much of the Korean vocabulary is Sino-Korean differs by source: 57%, sixty percent, seventy percent, and none of them states how it is counted. Of the several figures, even the lowest is over half.\nIn 2007 Sungkyunkwan University surveyed 384 new students, and the Chosun Ilbo reported the result: 93% could not read the word for \u0026quot;ambition\u0026quot;, 96% the word for \u0026quot;honour\u0026quot;, 99% the word for \u0026quot;compromise\u0026quot;. This is a second-hand report, the sample is the new students of a single university, and I have not obtained the characters actually tested.\nTranslated by 2062 The Seungjeongwon Ilgi (Diaries of the Royal Secretariat) is the diary kept by the secretariat at the Joseon king's side, written from 1623 to 1894: 271 years, more than 3,200 volumes, about 240 million characters. At the end of 2023, 37.4% had been translated into modern Korean. It is expected to be finished in 2062.\nThe Diaries of the Royal Secretariat, kept by the secretariat at the side of the Joseon kings.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Salamander724, Public domain\nThe Annals of the Joseon Dynasty were translated once between 1968 and 1993. They are being translated again, because the Korean of that version has grown old.\nIn 2017 the head of the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics said that the experts in this trade have a high average age, and that there are not enough people in their thirties.\nThink of the scene: in a quiet office, some grey-haired people turning, character by character, the writing of their ancestors into the speech of their grandchildren. They know they will not live to 2062, yet every day they carry on translating. I would very much like to say to them: thank you.\nHow it came about In 1948 the law required official documents to be written in Hangul. In 1970 Chinese characters were taken out of textbooks, and afterwards they were only an elective in middle and high school. The earlier requirement, 900 characters in middle school and 1,800 in high school, is no longer enforced.\nIn 2015 a government wanted to add Chinese character annotations to textbooks and gave up because of strong opposition from schools. In April 2026 the National Education Commission said it might consider strengthening character education, and the chair of the committee in charge of reading and writing said the matter was \u0026quot;the most contested\u0026quot;.\nOpponents worry that it would harm Korean identity, and that it would add to cram-school work and deepen inequality. A professor emeritus of linguistics said that understanding the meaning of characters does not necessarily improve reading and writing. Among supporters, a professor of law said that character education is necessary for the correct understanding and use of Korean.\nThe Hunminjeongeum (Haerye edition). King Sejong created Hangul so that common people who did not know Chinese characters could read and write.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, King Sejong, Public domain\nHangul is a magnificent invention. King Sejong made it so that people who could not read could write their own words. Putting the characters down has pride in it, and reasons; it is not a \u0026quot;mistake\u0026quot;. I only want to ask what price is paid on the other side of this pride.\nGwanghwamun Gwanghwamun is the main gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace.\nIn 1395 it had a plaque in Chinese characters. In 1968 it was replaced with a Hangul plaque in Park Chung-hee's own hand. In 2010, after restoration, the character plaque was put back. In 2023 it was changed to gold characters on a black ground.\nIn January 2026 the Minister of Culture proposed adding a Hangul plaque beneath the character plaque. Seventy-five groups supported it, including the Hangul Society. Historians and heritage experts opposed it, and a professor at Sungkyunkwan University said that keeping the original appearance is the principle.\nA plaque: one generation hangs it up, the next takes it down, and the one after puts it back.\nThe plaque under the eaves of Gwanghwamun, Gyeongbokgung.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Huntsmanleader, CC0\nWhat I think I have no \u0026quot;ought\u0026quot; about this. A country has the right to decide which characters to read. The generation of 1970 had their reasons: a new country needed a script everyone could learn. They did not mean to throw anything away; they meant to put a country's reading and writing into the hands of every child. That I respect.\nIt was that generation that decided. It is the later ones who pay. They open their ancestors' diary, recognise every sound, and cannot understand the whole sentence. Not understanding is not their fault. But thinking of this, my heart aches a little: a child stands at the gate of Gyeongbokgung, looks up at that gold plaque, and does not know what is written on it. Those three characters are the name his own country gave this gate more than six hundred years ago.\nLooking at it the other way First, not being able to read does not mean not having. The Annals have a Korean translation, and the king's diary is slowly being translated. It is not only Koreans who cannot read the original: English readers cannot read Beowulf, and we cannot read oracle bones.\nSecond, the Chinese should not laugh too soon either. On the mainland, after the simplified characters, ordinary people also struggle with traditional-character ancient books. The unified six-year primary-school textbooks include 132 classical poems and prose pieces (another report says 124), in the new edition in use since 2016, about eighty percent more than the old one. That is catching up on a missed lesson.\nThird, that joke can be told the other way round: a Chinese person can read the three characters on the plaque, but can he read the meaning behind them?\nWhat my proposal says here If the \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; is to be set up on a shared set of writing and classics, what does Korea's lesson show? A country that on its own initiative drops Chinese characters: is it putting down a burden, or tearing up its own foundation? My answer: a bit of both. A burden: the characters are too hard to learn, and for more than a thousand years literacy was the privilege of a few; to put them down was to let millions of children read books. A foundation: the thousand years that the ancestors wrote down, once the writing changed, became something that can be read only through a translation. I do not think everyone should learn the characters again. What I think of is another way: keep a small number of characters, a few dozen, a few hundred, that everyone needs to know at the yearly Qingming, the New Year and the ancestral rites: the ancestors' names, a few words of the sacrificial text, the couplets on the door. The characters need not be many; one generation need only remember them.\nTo my Korean friends. I am not here to say \u0026quot;you should take the characters back\u0026quot;; I only want to say: thank you, for writing down every day of a country in a diary of 271 years. The Seungjeongwon Ilgi records whom the king saw today, what he said, what he ate, what rain fell. A country that would take such patience to record its days: I think that is rare. I would like it to be read by more people, even if we must wait until 2062.\nTranslated by 2062: by then, how many people will be left to read the original?\nReferences\nFor comparison: in this series, \u0026quot;A Thousand Years of Script\u0026quot; (Vietnam), \u0026quot;The Characters Are All There, but Cannot Be Read\u0026quot; (Japan), \u0026quot;The Characters Weren't Lost; the Fight Is Over How Much\u0026quot; (Taiwan); in Yigui, \u0026quot;The Confucian Temple of Empty Rooms\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Counting the Years\u0026quot; Timeline of Korean policy on Chinese characters (1948, 1970, 1972, 2015, 2026); Share of Sino-Korean words, the 2007 Sungkyunkwan survey, the 2022 \u0026quot;deep apology\u0026quot; incident; Seungjeongwon Ilgi 37.4%, 2062; the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics; the plaque of Gwanghwamun; classical poetry and prose in the unified textbooks Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d40/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-joke\"\u003eA joke\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have heard a joke.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a museum, in front of an exhibit, stand two people, a Korean and a Chinese. The Korean cannot read the characters on the exhibit, and the Chinese explains them to him.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI found no source for this joke, so I cannot say it happened. I can only say that it has some true parts.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"an-apology-in-2022\"\u003eAn apology in 2022\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn August 2022 a shop in Korea posted a notice saying it was \u0026quot;deeply sorry\u0026quot;. The notice used a Sino-Korean word meaning \u0026quot;very deep, very sincere\u0026quot;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome netizens read it as another word: \u0026quot;boring\u0026quot;. They criticised the shop: an apology, and why \u0026quot;boring\u0026quot;?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAround the same time someone took the word for \u0026quot;today\u0026quot; to mean Friday.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Can't Read Our Ancestors' Characters: Korea"},{"content":"Eighty-two stelae The Temple of Literature in Hanoi, built in 1070, honours Confucius. In 1076 the Quốc Tử Giám, the National University, was set up beside it: Vietnam's first university.\nIn its courtyard stand eighty-two stone stelae on the backs of stone tortoises. They are carved with the names and home districts of those who passed the doctoral examinations from 1442 to 1779. In 2010 they were entered in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Memory of the World register, and in 2011 in the Memory of the World register.\nThe doctoral stelae standing on stone tortoises in the Temple of Literature, Hanoi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Mig Gilbert, CC BY-SA 2.0\nHow many doctoral graduates are named on the stelae, the several sources I found do not agree on, and I do not write a number.\nEvery year tens of thousands of people walk into this courtyard, and most of them cannot read the characters on the stelae.\nThink of that scene: a young Vietnamese stands before a stele, photographs it with a phone, and sends it to a friend. On the stone is the name of a man who passed the doctoral examination five hundred years ago. He photographs it with great care, but he cannot read the name. That name was his ancestors' neighbour.\nSpring couplets In 2016 the English-language newspaper Viet Nam News wrote a piece: at the Lunar New Year, at the gate of the Temple of Literature, people write spring couplets and sell them. Many people buy. Most buyers cannot read what is written on them, and do not know what it means.\nThe couplets are about fortune, rank, long life and the like. They recognise the pictures, they recognise the red, they recognise that it is the New Year.\nAn old scholar-calligrapher (ông đồ) writing calligraphy at the Temple of Literature, Hanoi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Rungbachduong, CC BY-SA 3.0\nIn 1936 the Vietnamese poet Vũ Đình Liên wrote a poem, \u0026quot;Ông đồ\u0026quot; (\u0026quot;The Old Scholar\u0026quot;): each year when the peach blossom opens, the old scholar sets out his brush and ink and writes spring couplets by the roadside. Each year fewer people pass. That was more than eighty years ago. (I do not quote the poem; it is a modern work.)\nHow it came about Vietnam is not like the Korean peninsula: here the country did not put the characters down by itself.\nVietnam used Chinese characters for nearly a thousand years. From the tenth century official documents were in classical Chinese. From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was also Nôm, which used the parts of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century educated people used Nôm to write popular works.\nChữ Quốc ngữ came in the seventeenth century, when Western missionaries used the Latin alphabet to transcribe Vietnamese sounds. The French pushed it in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In 1910 chữ Quốc ngữ was required (second-hand source); in 1919 the last imperial examination was held at Huế, and Emperor Khải Định issued an edict abolishing Confucian education.\nAfter that, what schools taught was chữ Quốc ngữ.\nThe main gate of the Temple of Literature, Hanoi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Daderot, CC0\nThe numbers \u0026quot;Fewer than a hundred scholars in the whole world can read Nôm.\u0026quot; This claim comes from the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (founded 1999) and a website on endangered scripts. It is about Nôm, not Chinese characters; whether \u0026quot;scholars\u0026quot; means reading fluently or merely being able to read it out is not stated. I have not found the original statistics and can only pass on its words.\nThe Hán-Nôm Institute in Hanoi grew out of a Hán-Nôm department founded in 1970 and was raised to an institute in 1979. The figures for its holdings differ from place to place: around 2006 about 20,000 volumes, in a 2022 report nearly 35,000; the bases differ, and I can only set them side by side.\nAn expert at the Institute has said one thing: in schools today, classical literature is taught using chữ Quốc ngữ transcriptions, not the Hán-Nôm originals, and as a result errors have appeared in teaching.\nVietnamese news has also reported that in Vĩnh Phúc province there is a Hán-Nôm class whose students are old people.\nWhat I think There is something I cannot put clearly. Korea was a country that in 1970 chose a road. Vietnam's road was pushed by others, and later the Vietnamese themselves learned to walk it well. A new script made literacy easy. That is the reason supporters of chữ Quốc ngữ often give; I have not checked the numbers. I do not want to oppose it: a country that taught almost everyone to read, I respect greatly.\nAnd yet the stelae still stand. The names are the ancestors' names, and not being able to read them is another kind of loss: not because people cannot read, but because those characters are not in school. In that Hán-Nôm class in Vĩnh Phúc the people sitting are old. Each time I think of it, I feel a little sour: a group of white-haired people sitting in a small classroom, tracing, stroke by stroke, a character their own grandfather may once have written.\nLooking at it the other way First, what the Vietnamese read is mostly translation. Reading a translation is not the same as not reading. It is one way of reading.\nSecond, on \u0026quot;adding Hán-Nôm to primary and secondary schools\u0026quot;, opinions in Vietnam differ. Supporters say it is for understanding history and the original meaning of words. Opponents say the characters are too hard, the pupils' load is heavy, and there are not enough teachers. A parent said that Hán-Nôm and the Latin letters are two entirely different language systems.\nThird, a script that can be learned from sound alone let a country, within a few decades, have almost everyone literate. The gain and loss are hard to count.\nWhat my proposal says here A thousand years of Chinese characters, in a hundred years, became in Vietnam \u0026quot;something that has to be specially learned\u0026quot;. If the \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; is to be built on a shared script and classics, are the Vietnamese outside the door or inside it? My answer: outside, but the door can be opened. The Vietnamese have a thousand years of characters and Nôm, and they are their own, not someone else's. They are outside the door because in a hundred years the schools did not teach them, not because they were unwilling. If one day a Vietnamese wants to know whom some stele in the Temple of Literature in Hanoi names, there are people willing to open that door for him. That \u0026quot;someone\u0026quot; need not be an organisation; it might be an old ông đồ, a teacher, or whoever happens to be sitting beside him in a Hán-Nôm class.\nTo my Vietnamese friends. In the courtyard of the Temple of Literature in Hanoi stand eighty-two stelae on the backs of stone tortoises, carved with the names of men who passed the doctoral examination five hundred years ago; every year tens of thousands walk in, and most cannot read them. At the New Year an old scholar writes couplets at the gate, and many people buy them: they know the red, they know phúc, lộc, thọ, they know it is Tết. In Vĩnh Phúc there is a Hán-Nôm class, and the people sitting in it are all white-haired. Your ancestors had one more craft: they took Chinese characters apart and, stroke by stroke, put the pieces together as Nôm, to write their own speech, and they wrote it for several hundred years. Such cleverness I want more people to know about.\nThe stelae still stand. How many people must be able to read them before we can say they are still being read?\nReferences\nFor comparison: in this series, \u0026quot;After Boat People\u0026quot; (the origin of chữ Quốc ngữ), \u0026quot;Can't Read Our Ancestors' Characters\u0026quot; (Korea), \u0026quot;The Characters Are All There, but Cannot Be Read\u0026quot; (Japan) The Temple of Literature in Hanoi, 82 doctoral stelae, the abolition of the examinations in 1919, chữ Quốc ngữ in 1910, the Hán-Nôm Institute, \u0026quot;fewer than 100\u0026quot; (a foundation, scope unclear), the Viet Nam News piece of 2016 on spring couplets, the Hán-Nôm class in Vĩnh Phúc province, the 1936 poem \u0026quot;Ông đồ\u0026quot; Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d41/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"eighty-two-stelae\"\u003eEighty-two stelae\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Temple of Literature in Hanoi, built in 1070, honours Confucius. In 1076 the Quốc Tử Giám, the National University, was set up beside it: Vietnam's first university.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn its courtyard stand eighty-two stone stelae on the backs of stone tortoises. They are carved with the names and home districts of those who passed the doctoral examinations from 1442 to 1779. In 2010 they were entered in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Memory of the World register, and in 2011 in the Memory of the World register.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The doctoral stelae of the Temple of Literature, Hanoi\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d41/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe doctoral stelae standing on stone tortoises in the Temple of Literature, Hanoi.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turtle_stelae_%2826431873708%29.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Mig Gilbert, CC BY-SA 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow many doctoral graduates are named on the stelae, the several sources I found do not agree on, and I do not write a number.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Thousand Years of Script: Vietnam"},{"content":"A near thing On 16 November 1946 the Japanese cabinet promulgated the Tōyō Kanji List (當用漢字表): 1,850 characters, setting the range of characters for laws, official documents, newspapers and magazines.\nThat year some in the Occupation authorities thought that Chinese characters were the reason for Japan's low literacy, even the reason for the war. The US Education Mission leaned toward abolishing the characters and adopting the Roman alphabet.\nIn 1948 a nationwide literacy survey was made. The result: those who could not read at all were about 2% (second-hand; the name of the survey and the exact figures I have not checked). The low literacy that people had assumed did not appear. The plan to abolish the characters was shelved.\nIn 1981 the Tōyō Kanji List became the Jōyō Kanji List, 1,945 characters. In 2010 196 were added and 5 removed, making 2,136, in use to this day.\nThe Japanese did not lose the characters, but they very nearly did.\nThe 2,136 characters of the Jōyō Kanji List (1981–2010).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Tael, CC BY-SA 3.0\nThe characters are all there Walk down a street in Japan and characters are everywhere: shop signs, newspapers, stations. A Chinese visiting Japan can read most of them.\nThe Japanese read classical Chinese by another method: they add marks beside the characters and read them in Japanese word order, backwards (kanbun kundoku, with kaeriten). High-school Japanese classes have always taught it. Research literature says that classical Chinese teaching is now the hardest part of classical education. (This is from an abstract; I have not read the original.)\nWhat can't be read The characters are still there, but before the Edo period people wrote in another kind of script.\nA cursive, abbreviated style is called kuzushiji. A letter, an account book, a diary were written in it. Today's Japanese do not learn it in school, and most cannot read it.\nA page from Kobayashi Issa's Oraga Haru (1819): a book of the Edo period written in kuzushiji.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Kobayashi Issa, Public domain\nIn February 2021 Toppan Printing released a system called \u0026quot;Fumi-no-ha Zemi\u0026quot; (ふみのはゼミ), which uses AI to recognise kuzushiji, with a character-recognition accuracy of over ninety percent. It was developed jointly, from 2015, with the National Institute of Japanese Literature.\nA claim is often seen online: only a few thousand people can read kuzushiji, or one in a thousand of the population. I looked, and there is no source. And the two claims differ by tens of times: one in a thousand is a hundred thousand or more, not a few thousand. I do not use them.\nThink of the scene: a Japanese person, in the old storehouse at home, turns up a letter his great-grandfather left. The paper has turned yellow, and the writing is line upon line of curves. He knows it is Japanese, recognises a few of the characters, but cannot read the whole letter. He photographs it and uploads it to an AI program, and waits for it to read out for him what his great-grandfather wanted to say.\nWhat I think This lesson from Japan leaves me with a feeling I cannot quite name. Knowing every character, and not knowing this line of characters. Koreans face: the characters are no longer known. The Japanese face: the characters are known, the way of writing half known, the whole sentence cannot be read. They are two depths of the same thing: a civilisation, with a layer between itself and its past. Yet looking at Japan I also feel a little envy: on their streets, every sign is still in Chinese characters; every child, from the first year of primary school, writes characters every day. This kind of \u0026quot;characters in daily life\u0026quot; is the sturdiest layer of root a civilisation has, and I think all of us should learn from them.\nLooking at it the other way First, this layer in Japan is not a problem of the characters but of handwriting. The English, too, cannot read Middle English manuscripts.\nSecond, Chinese today who read cursive script and rubbings also need specialists. This is not a Japanese problem; it is something every society with a long writing tradition meets.\nThird, Japan kept the characters but did not keep the people who read old books. That the characters are there is a condition, not a guarantee.\nWhat my proposal says here Japan kept Chinese characters in daily life. If the \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; can be set up by characters, Japan should be the most stable. Yet its birth rate, its religion, its society are also loosening. What layer of the core are the characters? My answer: the characters are the outermost layer, the façade. They are necessary; without them the ancestors' words cannot be heard. But they are not the core itself. The core is the days behind the characters: for whom to burn incense, why, and why a family comes together. The lesson Japan gives me is very clear: a country can keep its characters very well and at the same time let those \u0026quot;days\u0026quot; loosen, bit by bit. So characters and days have to be looked at together; with either one missing, it is not enough.\nTo my Japanese friends. In 1946 some people argued for abolishing Chinese characters and switching to roman letters; a nationwide literacy survey in 1948 put the idea on the shelf. You very nearly lost the characters, and you did not. So when I walk your streets and look at the signs, the newspapers, the stations, I feel a little warm: these are our shared characters, and you kept them. I also want to say: in your homes there may be a great-grandfather's letter, or a grandmother's account book, written in kuzushiji, the paper turned yellow, the writing line upon line of curves. Perhaps they have simply not been read by anyone yet. I hope that one day you can let them speak.\nThe characters were not lost; the way of writing was. Which is harder to get back?\nReferences\nFor comparison: in this series, \u0026quot;Shrines Are Not Religion\u0026quot; (State Shinto; another reform of the same Occupation period), \u0026quot;Can't Read Our Ancestors' Characters\u0026quot; (Korea), \u0026quot;A Thousand Years of Script\u0026quot; (Vietnam) Tōyō Kanji 1946 (1,850 characters), Jōyō Kanji 1981 (1,945), 2010 (2,136); the Occupation-era proposals to abolish characters and the literacy survey of 1948; Toppan's \u0026quot;Fumi-no-ha Zemi\u0026quot; (2021-02-17); the \u0026quot;few thousand / 0.1%\u0026quot; claim has no source Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d42/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-near-thing\"\u003eA near thing\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 16 November 1946 the Japanese cabinet promulgated the \u003cem\u003eTōyō Kanji List\u003c/em\u003e (當用漢字表): 1,850 characters, setting the range of characters for laws, official documents, newspapers and magazines.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat year some in the Occupation authorities thought that Chinese characters were the reason for Japan's low literacy, even the reason for the war. The US Education Mission leaned toward abolishing the characters and adopting the Roman alphabet.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1948 a nationwide literacy survey was made. The result: those who could not read at all were about 2% (second-hand; the name of the survey and the exact figures I have not checked). The low literacy that people had assumed did not appear. The plan to abolish the characters was shelved.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Characters Are All There, but Cannot Be Read: Japan"},{"content":"The characters are still there Students in Taiwan use traditional characters and Zhuyin phonetic symbols from childhood. In high-school Chinese class they read classical Chinese.\nUnlike Korea and Vietnam, nobody here says the characters should go. What is argued about is something else: how much to read.\nTaipei Confucius Temple.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Udo Schoene, CC BY-SA 3.0\nThree numbers Before the 108 curriculum, classical Chinese made up 45% to 65% of the general high-school Chinese course.\nIn August 2017, in the curriculum review board, the high-school group at one point proposed cutting it to below 30%. Society disputed it fiercely.\nIn September 2017, at the full review meeting, after two rounds of voting, it was set at 35% to 45%. The recommended selected texts were reduced from 20 to 15, with the requirement that they include different genres and local material.\nWhat each side says The review board's account: compulsory class hours were reduced and electives increased. Hours for every subject were generally cut, and so the number of texts that a Chinese class can teach fell with them.\nOpponents put it more heavily: one writer said that to throw away classical Chinese would make the nation one \u0026quot;without memory\u0026quot; (this is a mainland media report; I have not found the original words). Some see the matter as \u0026quot;de-sinicisation\u0026quot;. A former high-school teacher also said that after the 108 curriculum, students' writing has had problems (this is one person's view).\nI set out only these two accounts, and do not judge.\nOctober 1966 On 10 October 1966 Chiang Kai-shek issued the Message to the Whole Nation's Compatriots and launched the \u0026quot;Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement\u0026quot;. He criticised the Cultural Revolution that began that year on the mainland as \u0026quot;cutting off five thousand years of history and culture\u0026quot;. In July 1967 a promotion committee was set up, with himself as chairman.\nIn the same month, on the two sides of the Strait, the same \u0026quot;culture\u0026quot; was put into two opposite stories: on one side, it was being broken; on the other, it was being kept.\nLater, on the side that kept, people began to argue about how much to keep.\nThe Minglun Hall of the Taipei Confucius Temple.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Taiwankengo, CC BY-SA 4.0\nWhat I thought Three places, three ways: Korea, where the state gave an order and settled it at once; Vietnam, where outsiders pushed and, walking on, it became the Vietnamese's own; Taiwan, where a committee, round after round of votes, set a percentage. Reading the Taiwan section I feel a little envy, because there is at least one thing here that other places do not have: people are arguing in public. They argue over thirty-five percent or forty-five; over a few dozen texts, whom to keep and whom to drop. A society that will argue about such a thing, on television and in the review board, round after round, shows that many people truly care about the writing their ancestors left. A number can be voted on again; this caring, I think, matters more.\nLooking at it the other way First, a lower share does not mean the students are worse. Nor is there data to show they are better. What each side says is, on both sides, just what each side says.\nSecond, the review board's reason is real: with fewer hours, choices must be made. Where there are choices, someone feels dropped.\nThird, on the mainland side they went the other way: the unified textbooks increased classical poems and prose in primary school by about eighty percent. The same worry, and the two sides wrote opposite prescriptions.\nWhat my position says here In Taiwan the characters are still there, and so are the Confucian sacrifices and the festivals. A society that, with the characters and the classics still present, still argues over \u0026quot;how much\u0026quot;, shows that what is missing is not the characters. What is missing? I think it is \u0026quot;why read\u0026quot;. A high-school student who reads the \u0026quot;Memorial on Leading the Army\u0026quot; and recites \u0026quot;Yueyang Tower\u0026quot;, if he has no feeling in his heart that \u0026quot;these words were written for me\u0026quot;, will see no difference between thirty-five and forty-five percent. Characters, classical Chinese, Confucian temples, ceremonies: Taiwan has all of these. What I want to ask is: do these things let a sixteen-year-old, late one night, read a sentence and suddenly feel that it is about him? A moment like that no syllabus can prescribe; yet only with it can this writing count as still alive.\nTo my friends in Taiwan. I read about your curriculum review board in writing. In September 2017 the board's general meeting, in two rounds of votes, set the share of classical Chinese at 35% to 45%, and cut the recommended texts from twenty to fifteen. This fight is not a joke; it is a society seriously thinking about one question: how much of the \u0026quot;past\u0026quot; shall we leave to the next generation? Your children have used traditional characters and Zhuyin since childhood and read classical Chinese in high school, to this day, and there have always been people arguing for it. I do not draw conclusions for you, and I do not want to use any label to speak of you.\nBetween thirty-five and forty-five percent, what is the difference?\nReferences\nFor comparison, in this series: \u0026quot;Can't Read Our Ancestors' Characters\u0026quot; (Korea) and \u0026quot;Why the Confucian Association Failed\u0026quot;; the units of Yigui that deal with related matters Before the 108 curriculum, classical Chinese 45%–65%; August 2017, 30% proposed; September 2017, set at 35%–45%, 15 recommended texts; Message to the Whole Nation's Compatriots, 1966-10-10; the promotion committee of July 1967; classical poetry and prose in the mainland's unified textbooks Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d43/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-characters-are-still-there\"\u003eThe characters are still there\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStudents in Taiwan use traditional characters and Zhuyin phonetic symbols from childhood. In high-school Chinese class they read classical Chinese.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnlike Korea and Vietnam, nobody here says the characters should go. What is argued about is something else: how much to read.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Taipei Confucius Temple\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d43/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTaipei Confucius Temple.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ConfuciusTempleTaipei.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, Udo Schoene, CC BY-SA 3.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"three-numbers\"\u003eThree numbers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore the 108 curriculum, classical Chinese made up 45% to 65% of the general high-school Chinese course.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn August 2017, in the curriculum review board, the high-school group at one point proposed cutting it to below 30%. Society disputed it fiercely.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn September 2017, at the full review meeting, after two rounds of voting, it was set at 35% to 45%. The recommended selected texts were reduced from 20 to 15, with the requirement that they include different genres and local material.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Characters Weren't Lost; the Fight Is Over How Much: Taiwan"},{"content":"One exam paper Korean children, after school, go to cram school.\nIn 2024 Korean households spent 29.2 trillion won on private education, a record, 60% more than ten years earlier. 80% of students take extra classes. In 2025 it fell to 27.5 trillion, the first fall in five years.\nIn Taiwan the Ministry of Education has 17,710 cram schools registered (I have not checked the year). In Singapore households in 2023 spent 1.8 billion Singapore dollars on out-of-school tutoring, on average 104.8 dollars a month per household, up from 79.9 ten years earlier.\nJapan has juku (cram schools), the same thing: a 2015 estimate put Japan's total spending on tutoring at about 12 billion US dollars, of which juku were about 7.8 billion. This figure is old, and I have not found a newer one.\nThink of the children behind these numbers: a ten-year-old leaves school at three in the afternoon, is at cram school at five, and comes home at nine, his bag wider than his shoulders. He does not know why his parents do this; his parents may not know either. They know only that everybody does it, and that if you don't, you fall behind.\nA very low number Place Total fertility rate Year Korea 0.76 (another official count: 0.75; preliminary 2025: 0.80) 2024 Taiwan 0.86 2024 Singapore 0.97 (residents; 0.87 in 2025) 2024 Japan 1.21 (UN estimate) 2023 Malaysian Chinese 0.8 (0.9 in 2023) 2022 Vietnam no figure obtained this round — Malaysia overall no figure obtained this round — Replacement level is about 2.1.\nEating alone In Korea in 2023 there were 7.83 million single-person households, 35.5%; at the end of 2024 they were 36.1%, over 8 million households.\nKorea counts separately those who \u0026quot;die alone after long isolation\u0026quot;: 3,661 people in 2023, 3,924 in 2024, an increase of 7.2%.\nIn Japan, single-person households are already over a third, and are predicted to approach forty percent by 2040. Japan's figures on lonely deaths differ from source to source and do not match, so I do not use them.\nFor single-person households in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, I did not obtain figures.\nThree thousand nine hundred and twenty-four people. They were not without family, not without names. They simply, in a city of many people, one by one went, and were found only after some time.\nWhat I thought These numbers do not make a \u0026quot;cause\u0026quot;; I only set out that they appear together. The same ground: Chinese characters, Confucian temples, ancestral rites, and examinations. The same result: children going in large numbers to cram school; few children born; more and more people eating alone. My judgment is that this is atomisation under industrialisation, and the trend is very clear. A society has handed the responsibility of \u0026quot;being together\u0026quot; from the clan to the school and the market. The school looks after only examinations; the market looks after only prices. No place looks after \u0026quot;who this child will eat dinner with tonight\u0026quot;.\nLooking at it the other way First, it is not unique to East Asia. Low fertility also occurs in southern Europe and in Eastern Europe (I have not taken figures; to be added). To say it is \u0026quot;an East Asian problem\u0026quot; does not hold.\nSecond, the grouping \u0026quot;Confucian cultural sphere\u0026quot; is itself disputed. After the financial crisis of 1998–1999 some scholars wrote a book (Ethnic Business, edited by Jomo and Folk) whose abstract says: the crisis shook the explanations that attribute Chinese business to cultural essence. I have not read the monograph and cite only the bibliographic abstract.\nThird, the reasons for cram schools and low fertility may differ from place to place. I have not checked each one, so I do not write them.\nWhat my position says here I have said that without a core like Christianity or Islam, East Asians and the Chinese cannot exist stably in the modern world and the future, because atomisation under industrialisation is already clear. Are these figures the evidence for that sentence, or do they merely appear together? My answer: they are not \u0026quot;proof\u0026quot;, they are \u0026quot;hints\u0026quot;. They cannot show that, with a core, the numbers would improve; what they can show is that a society that has handed everything that keeps people \u0026quot;together\u0026quot; to examinations and prices will find people standing more and more one by one. What I want to ask is not \u0026quot;how to raise the fertility rate\u0026quot;; I have no way to do that; I want to ask an earlier question: these people standing one by one: is there a day each year when everyone stands together? Qingming, the Spring Festival, the winter solstice: days like these are what let a person know he is not alone. The next piece, \u0026quot;One Hand of Cards, Six Ways to Play It\u0026quot;, will use Malaysia's figures to test me myself.\nTo my friends in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Your children get to cram school at five in the afternoon and come home only at nine, their schoolbags wider than their shoulders; your old people eat alone, with a single lamp on. In Korea in 2024, three thousand nine hundred and twenty-four people died alone and were found only after some time had passed. I am also thinking about the same question: how, in a world where everyone is busy hurrying along, to keep a little time so that a family, even once a year, can sit at the same table. I have no answer; I only want to say the question aloud with you.\nChildren in cram school, few children, many people eating alone. Are these three things one thing?\nReferences\nFor comparison, in this series: \u0026quot;One Hand of Cards, Six Ways to Play It\u0026quot; (where the roads fork), \u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot; (Malaysia), \u0026quot;The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It\u0026quot; (Singapore); the Shishi data ledger Cram schools: Korea 29.2 trillion won (2024), 27.5 trillion (2025), participation rate 80%; Taiwan 17,710; Singapore 1.8 billion Singapore dollars (2023); Japan's 2015 estimate; fertility rates; single-person households and lonely deaths; Ethnic Business Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d44/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"one-exam-paper\"\u003eOne exam paper\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKorean children, after school, go to cram school.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2024 Korean households spent 29.2 trillion won on private education, a record, 60% more than ten years earlier. 80% of students take extra classes. In 2025 it fell to 27.5 trillion, the first fall in five years.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Taiwan the Ministry of Education has 17,710 cram schools registered (I have not checked the year). In Singapore households in 2023 spent 1.8 billion Singapore dollars on out-of-school tutoring, on average 104.8 dollars a month per household, up from 79.9 ten years earlier.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJapan has \u003cem\u003ejuku\u003c/em\u003e (cram schools), the same thing: a 2015 estimate put Japan's total spending on tutoring at about 12 billion US dollars, of which \u003cem\u003ejuku\u003c/em\u003e were about 7.8 billion. This figure is old, and I have not found a newer one.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Six Similar Exam Papers: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia"},{"content":"The same hand of cards All of the following exist in all six places: a tradition of Chinese characters, Confucian temples, sacrifices to the ancestors, and an education that prizes examinations.\nThese have been written about earlier; the references have the links.\nThe roads, and where they fork Characters. In Korea, from 1970, characters were dropped from textbooks (\u0026quot;Can't Read Our Ancestors' Characters\u0026quot;); in Vietnam, the examinations were abolished in 1919 and chữ Quốc ngữ entered the schools (\u0026quot;A Thousand Years of Script\u0026quot;); in Japan, in 1946 abolition was a near thing, and 2,136 characters were kept (\u0026quot;The Characters Are All There, but Cannot Be Read\u0026quot;); Taiwan uses traditional characters, and argues over how much classical Chinese (\u0026quot;The Characters Weren't Lost; the Fight Is Over How Much\u0026quot;). In Singapore and Malaysia, the Chinese schools have Chinese on one side, English and Malay on the other (\u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot;, and the Singapore piece, \u0026quot;The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It\u0026quot;).\nReligion. Each country counts differently; I set out only the numbers:\nPlace Figures Year Korea No religion 56.1%; Protestant 19.7%; Buddhist 15.5%; Catholic 7.9% 2015 census Japan over sixty percent say they have no religion (NHK) 2018 survey Vietnam self-reported religious 13.7%; Catholic 6.1%, Buddhist 4.8% 2019 census Singapore Buddhist 31.1%; Christian 18.9%; Muslim 15.6%; Daoist 8.8%; no religion 20.0% 2020 (residents aged 15 and over) Malaysia Muslim 63.5%; Buddhist 18.7%; Christian 9.1%; Hindu 6.1% 2020 Taiwan not obtained this round — The Vietnam row measures organised religion; folk belief and ancestor worship are probably mostly not counted, and I did not read the census explanatory notes.\nHow the state treats religion. Japan: the state made a \u0026quot;religion that is not a religion\u0026quot;, and it was taken apart (\u0026quot;'Shrines Are Not Religion'\u0026quot;); Singapore: the state pushed Confucianism once, then withdrew it and replaced it with shared values (\u0026quot;The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It\u0026quot;); Indonesia: Confucianism was allowed, then downgraded (\u0026quot;What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken\u0026quot;); Hong Kong: registered, but not banned (\u0026quot;Registered, But Not Banned\u0026quot;).\nSix candidates for a \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; Take, in each place, the thing that looks most like a \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; and set it against the numbers:\nPlace Candidate \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; in hand What the numbers show Japan Chinese characters; formerly State Shinto State Shinto has been taken apart; over sixty percent say they have no religion; most cannot read Edo-period writing Korea Christianity (Protestant plus Catholic, about 27.6%); the Sungkyunkwan sacrifice (seokjeon) TFR 0.76; single-person households 36.1% Taiwan traditional characters; folk religion, the Confucian sacrifice the share of classical Chinese has to be voted on; religion figures not obtained Vietnam chữ Quốc ngữ; the state few read Hán-Nôm Singapore the state's shared values the state itself puts forward no teaching; TFR 0.97 Malaysia for the Chinese: schools, organisations numbers falling; Chinese TFR 0.8 One table, one test My words are: without a core like Christianity or Islam, East Asians cannot stand firm in the modern world.\nThe most direct test is to find a community \u0026quot;with a core\u0026quot; and one \u0026quot;without\u0026quot;, in the same country, under the same system.\nMalaysia is exactly this condition. The official figures: in 2022 the total fertility rate of the Chinese was 0.8, of the Malays 2.1, of the Indians 1.1; in 2023, 0.9, 2.2 and 1.2.\nThe Malays are Muslim. My words have, here, a piece of evidence.\nLooking at it the other way First, in the same table the Indians are also at 1.1. The Indians are mostly Hindu, a religious community, and their number is as low as the Chinese. Religion is not the only variable.\nSecond, Korea has a very large Christianity, Protestant plus Catholic, close to thirty percent, and the number is one of the lowest in the world. I might say that Korea's Christianity is foreign, a church's, and not a \u0026quot;core\u0026quot;. But how is \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; to be defined so that this does not become circular reasoning?\nThird, the difference between Malays and Chinese is not only religion: urban and rural, income, policy, age at marriage all differ. I have not checked them item by item, and draw no conclusion here.\nFourth, Israel's numbers point in the other direction: the total fertility rate of the ultra-Orthodox is about 6.6, of the secular about 2.0 (as relayed from the OECD and Israel's statistics bureau, second-hand). Those with a core are much higher; but the secular are also higher than East Asia. This also involves state policy and security; I have written the limits elsewhere and will not expand here.\nFifth, \u0026quot;atomisation\u0026quot; itself. The data can only give single-person households and lonely deaths (\u0026quot;Six Similar Exam Papers\u0026quot;). Whether they are symptoms of atomisation or atomisation itself is another matter.\nWhat my position says here I owe answers to three questions. The first: what conditions must the \u0026quot;core\u0026quot; I speak of meet to count as \u0026quot;like Christianity or Islam\u0026quot;? I think of these: one, a highest divinity; mine is \u0026quot;Tiandao\u0026quot;, which does not speak, revere it and ask nothing of it; two, a First Teacher, Confucius, one who sets down the rules and hands them on, not one who has received revelation; three, daily rites: ancestral rites, festivals, small things that can be done every day; four, an aim, \u0026quot;take from those who have too much, and give to those who have too little\u0026quot;, so that people know why they live this way; five, to design only the \u0026quot;standards of recognition\u0026quot;, with no posts and no church. With these five, I think, something counts as a \u0026quot;core\u0026quot;.\nThe second question: does this table from Malaysia count as my evidence; how do I answer India's 1.1 and Korea's Christianity? My answer: they are not evidence, they are a test of me. India's 1.1 shows that religion is not the only variable: cities, income, age at marriage all have a part; Korea's Christianity shows that even a \u0026quot;religion with a church\u0026quot; cannot automatically cure low fertility. I do not want to insist that with a core the numbers would improve. The third question: is the core medicine for low fertility, or medicine for \u0026quot;not standing firm\u0026quot;? My answer is the latter. What I want is not to lift the fertility rate; no religion can guarantee that; what I want is that a person, with or without children, in this world, knows that he is someone \u0026quot;with a place he came from, and a place he goes to\u0026quot;. Low fertility is a background that makes this more urgent, not my aim.\nTo you, in whichever of these six places you live. What your ancestors left and what mine left are much the same characters, much the same Confucian temples, much the same days for the ancestral rites, and much the same set of examinations. We are one hand of cards played as six different games: in some places the characters were taken out of the textbooks; in some the shrines were pried loose from the state; in some people vote round after round on how much to keep; in some a community holds on, school by school. I hope that before the next round we can sit down and turn up the cards in our hands and look.\nHow hard must a community's core be, to count as standing firm? And how hard is it before it starts to hurt people?\nReferences\nFor comparison, in this series: the pieces on writing (Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan), \u0026quot;State Shinto\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;What Was Allowed, and What Was Taken\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Registered, But Not Banned\u0026quot;; the author's master outline, \u0026quot;The Way of Heaven in the Tiandao Faith\u0026quot; Fertility rates of the Malaysian Chinese, Malays and Indians; fertility rates by place; religion statistics by country; single-person households and lonely deaths; the Shishi data ledger (the Israel item) ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d45/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-same-hand-of-cards\"\u003eThe same hand of cards\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll of the following exist in all six places: a tradition of Chinese characters, Confucian temples, sacrifices to the ancestors, and an education that prizes examinations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese have been written about earlier; the references have the links.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-roads-and-where-they-fork\"\u003eThe roads, and where they fork\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCharacters.\u003c/strong\u003e In Korea, from 1970, characters were dropped from textbooks (\u0026quot;Can't Read Our Ancestors' Characters\u0026quot;); in Vietnam, the examinations were abolished in 1919 and \u003cem\u003echữ Quốc ngữ\u003c/em\u003e entered the schools (\u0026quot;A Thousand Years of Script\u0026quot;); in Japan, in 1946 abolition was a near thing, and 2,136 characters were kept (\u0026quot;The Characters Are All There, but Cannot Be Read\u0026quot;); Taiwan uses traditional characters, and argues over how much classical Chinese (\u0026quot;The Characters Weren't Lost; the Fight Is Over How Much\u0026quot;). In Singapore and Malaysia, the Chinese schools have Chinese on one side, English and Malay on the other (\u0026quot;Chinese Education\u0026quot;, and the Singapore piece, \u0026quot;The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It\u0026quot;).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"One Hand of Cards, Six Ways to Play It: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia"},{"content":"A queue Spring 1903, Tokyo.\nFrom the beam of the students' hall hung a queue that had been cut off.\nIts owner was the army students' supervisor sent to Japan by the Qing government. Feng Ziyou writes in Yishi of the Revolution that this supervisor was surnamed Yao, and that he had \u0026quot;an affair of illicit relations, a stench through the student world\u0026quot;. That was Feng Ziyou's account; Zhang Taiyan, in the Biography of Zou Rong, also writes only \u0026quot;Yao so-and-so had an illicit affair\u0026quot;. All I can say is that this was what the people there at the time said.\nThat night Zou Rong, with Weng Hao, Wang Xiaozhen, Zhang Ji and one other, five in all, burst into Yao's house, \u0026quot;slapped his cheeks dozens of times, and took scissors to cut off his queue\u0026quot;, and then hung the queue from the main beam of the hall.\nZou Rong (1885–1905), author of The Revolutionary Army.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown artist, Public domain\nAfterwards Yao asked the Japanese police to make arrests. Zou Rong and Zhang Ji went back to Shanghai and hid.\nBack in Shanghai, Zou Rong wrote The Revolutionary Army.\nHe was only eighteen or nineteen that year.\nThe queue was a dividing line among students too Lu Xun touches on this in his story \u0026quot;The Story of Hair\u0026quot;.\nIn the story \u0026quot;Mr. N\u0026quot; cut his queue while studying abroad, and the reason he gives is slight: \u0026quot;There was no mystery in it; it was simply that it was inconvenient for him.\u0026quot; As a result, \u0026quot;several classmates with their queues coiled on top of their heads loathed me; the supervisor too was furious, and said he would stop my official stipend and send me back to China\u0026quot;.\nA few days later the supervisor \u0026quot;had his own queue cut off and fled\u0026quot;, and among those who went to cut it was Zou Rong.\nIt is fiction, and Mr. N is not Lu Xun. But it shows one thing: in Tokyo the queue was a line, with those who had cut on one side and those who had not on the other. The two sides of the line were not necessarily revolutionaries and conservatives; sometimes it was only a matter of convenience.\nLu Xun has another memoir, \u0026quot;Mr. Fujino\u0026quot;, written in 1926. He says that when the cherry blossom at Ueno was in full bloom, under the blossoms were groups of \u0026quot;Qing-dynasty students\u0026quot; in crash courses, \u0026quot;with big queues coiled on their heads, pushing their student caps up into a high peak, forming a Mount Fuji\u0026quot;.\nThat was how the Japanese in Tokyo saw them.\nLu Xun himself cut his queue in March 1903. Xu Shoushang recalled that he was the first in the Jiangnan class of Kōbun Gakuin to cut. After cutting it, he walked into Xu Shoushang's study with a faint look of pleasure. Xu Shoushang said: \u0026quot;Ah, a whole new bulwark!\u0026quot; He touched the top of his head with his hand, and the two smiled at each other. (This passage is quoted in Wang Binbin's article, who notes the page of Recollections of Lu Xun; I have not read Xu Shoushang's original book.)\nLu Xun (1881–1936), 1930.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown photographer, Public domain\nBut Lu Xun himself, later, spoke of it lightly. In 1936, in his last writings, he wrote: \u0026quot;My cutting my queue was not because I am from Yue ... and had no revolutionary quality in it at all; in the end it was only for inconvenience: first, inconvenient for taking off my hat; second, inconvenient for gymnastics; third, coiled over the fontanelle it made one stuffy.\u0026quot; He also said: \u0026quot;In fact, those without queues, when they came home, quietly let their hair grow again, and became loyal subjects, in great numbers.\u0026quot; Huang Xing, when studying at the teachers' college in Tokyo, \u0026quot;never cut his hair at all\u0026quot;.\nSo cutting the queue did not at that time necessarily mean revolution.\nComing home was not easy either. Lu Xun writes in Random Notes after an Illness: \u0026quot;My queue I left in Japan; half went to a maid at an inn to make a wig, and half to the barber.\u0026quot; On reaching Shanghai he first had to fit a false queue, \u0026quot;four silver dollars each, no discount\u0026quot;. After wearing it for more than a month he thought that if it fell off on the road it would be even uglier, and \u0026quot;simply gave up fitting it\u0026quot;. Then, \u0026quot;when I went out the treatment I got on the road was entirely different from before\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;the best was staring, mostly it was sneers and curses\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;at worst I was denounced as 'in league with foreign countries', what is now called a 'traitor to the Han'\u0026quot;.\nLater he said that he cherished the Republic of China, \u0026quot;for the most part just so that we might have the freedom to cut our queues\u0026quot;.\nA young man who only wanted to cut off a queue, returning to his own city, to be sneered at, cursed, called a \u0026quot;traitor\u0026quot;. Reading this, I feel tired for him.\nJapan cut first An interesting thing: Japan itself, thirty years earlier, had had its own cut.\nIn 1871 the Meiji government issued the edict on cutting the topknot and abandoning the sword. It meant: whether to cut the topknot and whether to wear the sword would from now on be free. Note: \u0026quot;free\u0026quot;, not compulsory. In 1873 the Meiji Emperor cut his own.\nIn 1872 the government further provided that officials' formal dress should be changed to Western style. In the same year women were forbidden to cut their hair.\nSo this round in Japan had three features. Who decided? The government. Was it compulsory? Cutting hair was not; officials' formal dress was. For whom? Men first; women much later; the Westernisation of women's dress came about fifteen years after men's. (These come from abstracts of Japanese web pages; the text of the laws I have not read.)\nBy comparison, the queue order of 1645, after the Qing army entered the pass, was compulsory for all Han. It was lifted only in 1912.\nOnce cut, what to wear This is the most interesting place.\nIn 1895 Sun Yat-sen and Chen Shaobai had their queues cut at Yokohama. Feng Ziyou's father kept a shop in Yokohama, and they were cut in the shop that day. The clothes were made for them by a Western-tailor named Tan Fa.\nNote: in 1895, after cutting the queue, what they changed to was a Western suit, nothing else.\nFive years later, in 1900, Zhang Taiyan cut his queue and wrote \u0026quot;Untying the Queue\u0026quot;. What he thought of was not only cutting it. He said that he himself was \u0026quot;already of age, and yet still wore the dress of the barbarians\u0026quot; (年已立，而犹被戎狄之服), and wished \u0026quot;for gentry to bind up their hair and so go back to the near antiquity\u0026quot; (荐绅束发，以复近古). But \u0026quot;the days did not allow, and clothes could not be had\u0026quot; (日既不给，衣又不可得): there was not enough time, and he could not find the clothes.\nZhang Taiyan (1869–1936).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown photographer, Public domain\nSo he took a step back and followed the \u0026quot;cut hair\u0026quot; of the people of Wu and Yue in the old books. (\u0026quot;Untying the Queue\u0026quot; is quoted by Lu Xun in \u0026quot;A Few Things Brought to Mind by Mr. Taiyan\u0026quot;; the original I also read from there.)\nClothes could not be had. These words were spoken in 1900 by a man who wanted to restore Han dress. I felt my heart sink when I read them. A person wanted to put his ancestors' clothes back on, and found he could not find a single piece. Not because nobody was willing, but because for more than two hundred years nobody had made that clothing any more.\nIn Tokyo in 1903, among the students \u0026quot;the proportion in Western suits grew and grew, and more common still was the Japanese student uniform\u0026quot; (this is a summary by a Japanese scholar). In 1912 the Republic issued a new dress code in which the Western suit and the long gown with mandarin jacket stood almost side by side. Han dress was not chosen.\nThe later Zhongshan suit is said to have combined the Japanese student uniform, the Western military service dress, and Chinese conditions. (Its origin and year are told in different ways; I have not checked.)\nA Zhongshan suit in a tailor's shop in Hong Kong.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Peachyeung316, CC BY-SA 4.0\nSo the answer, more than a hundred years ago, to \u0026quot;once the queue is cut, what to wear\u0026quot; was: the Western suit, and the Japanese student uniform. The Japanese student uniform itself came from Western military dress. The clothes had passed through two hands.\nAs for what Chinese students in Japan wore in ordinary life, Zhou Zuoren said. As quoted by one scholar, he and Lu Xun in Tokyo \u0026quot;wore the student uniform to school, and in ordinary times only a kimono with a skirt and wooden clogs\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;in clothing, food and housing all lived entirely a Japanese life\u0026quot;. They did it on purpose, believing that \u0026quot;without experiencing it in life one cannot know Japanese things deeply\u0026quot;. (This is a quotation at second hand; I have not yet found the original chapter in Zhou Zuoren.)\nIt was not to replace any Han dress; he did it to understand Japan.\nHow a word came back The word \u0026quot;revolution\u0026quot; also changed its use in those years.\nFeng Ziyou wrote a short piece called \u0026quot;The Origin of the Two Characters 'Geming'\u0026quot;. He says that before 1895 the party's people had never used the two characters \u0026quot;revolution\u0026quot; as a name; from the Taiping to the Xingzhonghui, it had been \u0026quot;rebel\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;rise\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;restore\u0026quot;.\nIn 1895 the Guangzhou uprising failed, and Sun Yat-sen, Chen Shaobai and a few others fled to Japan. As the ship passed Kobe they went ashore and bought a Japanese newspaper, in which was a news item headed \u0026quot;Sun Yat-sen, Leader of the Chinese Revolutionary Party, Arrives in Japan\u0026quot;.\nSun Yat-sen said to Chen Shaobai: \u0026quot;The two characters 'geming' come from the line in the Book of Changes, 'Tang and Wu made revolution, in accord with Heaven and in response to men'. The Japanese call our party the Revolutionary Party, and the meaning is very good; from now on let us call ourselves the Revolutionary Party.\u0026quot; (「革命二字，出於《易經》湯武革命順乎天而應乎人一語，日人稱吾黨為革命黨，意義甚佳，吾黨以後即稱革命黨可也。」)\nFeng Ziyou added that the Japanese were the first to use it to translate the English word \u0026quot;Revolution\u0026quot;.\nSo the word is Chinese; it is in the Book of Changes. But to take it as a party's name, as \u0026quot;a great change in politics and society\u0026quot;, it went round Japan and came back. (This is Feng Ziyou's recollection decades later; the dialogue cannot be taken as verbatim history.)\nLu Xun's sentence Thirty years later, in 1934, Lu Xun wrote a letter to the woodcut artist Chen Yanqiao. In it was a sentence that later was rewritten as \u0026quot;the more national, the more global\u0026quot;.\nThe original words are:\n\u0026quot;My advice to mix in still life, landscape, the customs of different places, street scenes, is for this reason. Literature today is the same: what has local colour is rather more easily made global, that is, noticed by other countries. If it is pushed out into the world, that benefits China's activity.\u0026quot;\nRight after it comes another sentence, rarely quoted:\n\u0026quot;Moreover, a good subject alone is no use; technique is still needed; worse is when the content is not strong at all, but has only a fearsome exterior that first frightens off the ordinary reader. For example, the recent album of the Nameless Woodcut Society has on its cover a portrait of Marx, and some people dare not buy it.\u0026quot;\n(This passage is quoted in Wu Jun's article of 2020; the original letter I have not yet read.)\nSo what Lu Xun said is in fact a very practical thing: if you want woodcuts to be seen by more people, don't start by frightening them; draw landscape and customs first; \u0026quot;local colour\u0026quot; is an easy way to be noticed by other countries; but the precondition is that the technique must be good.\nBetween \u0026quot;national\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;global\u0026quot;, Lu Xun put one condition: technique.\nA hundred years later On 22 November 2003, in Zhengzhou, an electrical worker walked down the street in Hanfu he had sewn himself. Later this day became \u0026quot;Hanfu Day\u0026quot;.\nNow Hanfu is a sizeable circle.\nArchery activity of a Hanfu club.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Allervous, CC BY-SA 4.0\nJapan has the same phenomenon. The Japanese wafuku (kimono) is today worn mainly at life's rites, coming-of-age ceremonies, weddings, graduations, and little in daily life. I found no reliable national figures for how many young people are interested in the kimono or how large a share of the market rental takes, so I do not give any here.\nSo this is a second round. A hundred years ago what was longed for was the Western suit. Now, in daily life, what everyone wears is still the Western suit. National dress is for festivals, for rites, for photographs.\nSome will say this is \u0026quot;finally waking up\u0026quot;. To me it looks more like coexistence.\nTake a more extreme example. National dress in the Gulf states, according to scholars' studies, was set as a norm by the state in the oil age and is not the same as what people wore there before oil; in countries where citizens are far fewer than foreigners, dress became the mark that tells \u0026quot;citizens\u0026quot; apart. What has been invented can be a very firm identity too.\nWhat I thought Joined together, these things ask the same thing: who decides the clothes? In 1645 it was the Qing court, and the means was \u0026quot;whoever does not comply is killed\u0026quot;. In 1895 and 1903 it was the people themselves, in Japan, hiding and cutting at once. In Japan in 1871 it was the government, and the means was the two words \u0026quot;free choice\u0026quot;. In 2003 it was a worker in Zhengzhou who sewed a garment himself. The person who decides has changed several rounds. I feel the best kind is the last: nobody prescribes, nobody approves, a person wants to wear it, and wears it.\nLooking at it the other way First, Japan's role in the Xinhai Revolution cannot be overstated. That the Tongmenghui was founded in Tokyo in 1905 is true; but the secret societies, the New Army and the constitutionalists at home also played their part.\nSecond, Japan was not always friendly to the revolutionaries. In 1903 the Japanese government, at the demand of the Qing minister, disbanded the Anti-Russia Volunteer Corps, and Yao Wenfu afterwards also turned to the Japanese police.\nThird, be careful with the narrative of \u0026quot;waking up\u0026quot;. Nobody has given up the Western suit. Japanese men put on Western dress in 1872 and still wear it today; in China's daily life it is the same. National dress mostly coexists on certain occasions. And a hundred years ago there was also a force going back: the National Essence school, and Zhang Taiyan, also spoke of restoring Han dress and headgear; the Republic's officials simply did not choose it.\nFourth, the Gulf example can be used the other way round too. A \u0026quot;tradition\u0026quot; funded by the state, written into regulations, and tied to benefits is just the most typical form of what critics call an \u0026quot;invented tradition\u0026quot;. It is very firm, because of the benefits, not necessarily because of identification.\nFifth, Lu Xun's sentence was about a strategy for woodcuts, not a universal law.\nShould national dress become an identity? My answer: yes, but only voluntarily, for festivals, never prescribed. I said in the preface that in the \u0026quot;shared cultural faith\u0026quot; I want there is one part, \u0026quot;regalia\u0026quot; (fuzhang): on Qingming a family puts on tidy clothes to go to the ancestral rites; on the day a young person comes of age, he puts on the look of his ancestors and performs a rite. That is so that a person, on one day, knows whom he stands behind. But I do not want anyone to be looked down on for not wearing it, and I do not want any government to write it into regulations. The Gulf example puts me on guard: once a garment is tied to benefits, it is no longer \u0026quot;regalia\u0026quot;; it is a \u0026quot;document\u0026quot;. What I want is the former: not by regulation, but by a person, on one day, being willing.\nTo my friends in Japan, and to my friends in China. Of your ancestors, one cut off his topknot in 1871, the other cut off his queue in Tokyo in 1903. That young man who cut his queue had, on going home, first to put on a false queue bought for four yuan; he wore it for more than a month, and in the street he was sneered at and cursed as a \u0026quot;traitor\u0026quot;. A few years earlier, Zhang Taiyan wanted to put his ancestors' clothes back on, and what he wrote instead was \u0026quot;clothes could not be had\u0026quot;. They did not know that more than a hundred years later a worker in Zhengzhou would sew himself a set of Hanfu and walk down the street in it, and that people would, at coming-of-age ceremonies and on festival days, put on their ancestors' clothes again, one piece at a time. What every generation asks is really the same question: whose descendant am I, and am I willing, on a certain day, to let others see it too?\nIf a garment was decided for you by someone else, would you be willing to put it on again?\nReferences\nFeng Ziyou, Yishi of the Revolution: \u0026quot;Zou Rong, Author of The Revolutionary Army\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Sun and Chen Cut Their Queues and Change Their Dress\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;The Origin of the Two Characters 'Geming'\u0026quot; (Wikisource) Zhang Taiyan, Biography of Zou Rong, as cited in the notes to \u0026quot;The Story of Hair\u0026quot; in vol. 1 of the Complete Works of Lu Xun Lu Xun, \u0026quot;The Story of Hair\u0026quot; (1920), \u0026quot;Mr. Fujino\u0026quot; (1926), Complete Works of Lu Xun (Chinese Marxist Library) \u0026quot;Lu Xun's photograph with cut hair\u0026quot;, China Writers' Network, after Xu Shoushang's recollections (I did not check Xu Shoushang's exact words in Impressions of My Late Friend Lu Xun word for word; the photo was taken in Tokyo in 1903 after the queue was cut and given to Xu with the poem \u0026quot;Self-Inscription on a Small Portrait\u0026quot;) Hu Lingyuan, \u0026quot;Remarks on Zhou Zuoren's method of studying Japanese culture\u0026quot;, Riben xuekan, reprinted by the China Writers' Network, 2013 (quoting Zhou Zuoren) Wu Jun, \u0026quot;Revisiting 'the more national, the more global': from Lu Xun's letter to cross-cultural communication\u0026quot;, Wenyi zhengming, 2020 (quoting Lu Xun's letter to Chen Yanqiao of 19 April 1934) Japan's edict on cutting the topknot and abandoning the sword (promulgated 9 August 1871; it allowed but did not compel), the imperial rescript on revising dress (September 1871) and Western-style formal dress (1872): abstracts of Japanese web pages 🟡 National dress in the Gulf states: National Dress in the UAE: Constructions of Authenticity and others (abstracts, originals not read) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d46/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-queue\"\u003eA queue\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSpring 1903, Tokyo.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the beam of the students' hall hung a queue that had been cut off.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts owner was the army students' supervisor sent to Japan by the Qing government. Feng Ziyou writes in \u003cem\u003eYishi of the Revolution\u003c/em\u003e that this supervisor was surnamed Yao, and that he had \u0026quot;an affair of illicit relations, a stench through the student world\u0026quot;. That was Feng Ziyou's account; Zhang Taiyan, in the \u003cem\u003eBiography of Zou Rong\u003c/em\u003e, also writes only \u0026quot;Yao so-and-so had an illicit affair\u0026quot;. All I can say is that this was what the people there at the time said.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat night Zou Rong, with Weng Hao, Wang Xiaozhen, Zhang Ji and one other, five in all, burst into Yao's house, \u0026quot;slapped his cheeks dozens of times, and took scissors to cut off his queue\u0026quot;, and then hung the queue from the main beam of the hall.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"After the Queue Is Cut, What to Wear: Students in Japan, Japan Itself, and a Word, \"Revolution\""},{"content":"1. Two years First Korea, which you may know better than I do.\nIn March 2022 Yoon Suk-yeol was elected with 48.56% against 47.83%, a margin of 0.73 percentage points, the smallest since direct presidential elections began in Korea. Lee Jae-myung, the loser, came forward and said that this was not a defeat for you, nor for the Democratic Party; all the responsibility was his.\nIn the National Assembly election of April 2024 the opposition won big: the Democratic Party and its satellite party together had 175 seats, the governing People Power Party and its satellite 108, the other small parties 17. Two-thirds is 200 seats, and the largest opposition bloc was still 25 short.\nOn the night of 3 December 2024 the president declared emergency martial law, and lifted it about six hours later. On 14 December the National Assembly passed an impeachment by 204 votes to 85; the threshold was 200. On 4 April 2025 the Constitutional Court, eight to zero, removed Yoon Suk-yeol from office. On 3 June Lee Jae-myung was elected with 49.42% to 41.15%. The loser, Kim Moon-soo, said that evening that he \u0026quot;humbly accepted the people's choice\u0026quot;.\nOn 19 February 2026 the Seoul Central District Court, at first instance, sentenced Yoon Suk-yeol to life imprisonment as ringleader of an insurrection; the prosecution had asked for death. He appealed, and as I write the appeal has not been decided.\nThen the new president's approval rating fell. Gallup Korea: a high of 67% in March 2026, 42% by August, and on 9 October 37%, with 51% disapproving. In the local elections of June the Democratic Party won the majority, though Seoul's mayor is still from the People Power Party. On 3 October, National Foundation Day, there was a rally at Gwanghwamun demanding the president step down, with an unofficial police estimate of about 28,000.\nThe candlelight rally in front of Gwanghwamun, 31 December 2016. Three months later the Constitutional Court upheld Park Geun-hye's impeachment.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Jirangmoon, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThink of the people of this country. In twenty years three presidents were brought before an impeachment: Roh Moo-hyun in 2004, passed by the Assembly and rejected by the Constitutional Court; Park Geun-hye in 2017, upheld; Yoon Suk-yeol in 2025, upheld. Each time someone stood in the square for a long time.\nSo: is this Korea's own affair, or a kind of fatigue found everywhere?\n2. One answer, and what it got right and wrong Someone online, talking about that mass protest in Seoul, put it very bluntly. Social-media algorithms, a weakening economy and conflict between generations, he said, make voters' bases harder and harder, each side 45%; swing voters have shrunk from thirty or forty percent to ten; politicians no longer fight for the middle but mobilise by the hatred of \u0026quot;they must never get in\u0026quot;; the cycle of alternation in power has shortened from eight or ten years to two. His conclusion: in our lifetimes we may see universal suffrage collapse, replaced by one-man or one-party dictatorship. He himself calls this a \u0026quot;wild claim\u0026quot;.\nI checked the numbers.\nWhat he got wrong:\nHe said the Democratic Party won 180 seats, nearly two-thirds. No. It was 175, 25 short of 200. He said swing voters shrank from 30–40% to about 10%. Two quantities are mixed here. In the US House, the districts where voters chose a president of one party and a representative of another numbered 190 in 1984, 43.7%; in 2020 and 2024 only 16 each, 3.7%. That quantity really did collapse. But \u0026quot;independent voters with no party leaning\u0026quot; have been about ten percent all along, and did not fall from thirty or forty. \u0026quot;Mass protests in Seoul against Lee Jae-myung\u0026quot;: I found only the one on 3 October, 28,000, and a right-wing one. What he got right:\nThe president's approval really does swing wildly. The \u0026quot;locked-in base\u0026quot;: the US has only 16 split districts left; Poland's 2025 presidential election was 50.89 to 49.11; the Netherlands in October 2025 had two parties on 26 seats each, separated by a thousand or two votes; in Taiwan in summer 2025 not one of the recall cases against 31 Kuomintang legislators passed, and in the first wave of 24 cases, support for recall was only 37.7% to 48.6%. What does not hold is \u0026quot;change every two years\u0026quot;. The US, Britain (three prime ministers between 2022 and 2024), France and Korea support it. But in Japan, in February 2026, the Liberal Democratic Party alone won 316 seats, a postwar record, over two-thirds; in Argentina's midterms of 2025 Milei's party came out stronger. It is not that change is getting faster everywhere; in some places the vote runs one way.\nAmong the comments under that answer, two lines struck me as the best, and I put them here:\nOne says: if there is a 45% locked-in base, how can Lee Jae-myung's approval fall to 37%? I can answer that: the president's rating can fall while the base that votes for a party hardly moves. Gallup's party support in mid-October: Democratic Party 39, People Power Party 25. The president's rating and the party's base are two different things.\nAnother says: the deeper the division, the more universal suffrage is needed, because it is \u0026quot;the last consensus that keeps one group of people from killing another\u0026quot;. This one I think is right, and I will come back to it.\nAnd the algorithm? In 2023 Meta worked with several universities on an experiment on Facebook and Instagram: feeds were changed to chronological order, reshares removed, like-minded content reduced; over three months no significant effect was measured on polarisation, political knowledge or attitudes. The researchers themselves caution that the time was short. It cannot prove that algorithms do not matter, only that a short experiment did not measure it. Another comment's account is governance failure: economy, debt, ageing, with polarisation only the surface. No one has tested that with data.\nFinally, \u0026quot;the collapse of universal suffrage\u0026quot;. That is a prediction, and I do not write it. The one thing I can check: Freedom House's 2026 report says global freedom has declined for the twentieth year in a row, 54 countries down, 35 up; the share of the world's people living in \u0026quot;free\u0026quot; countries is 21%, twenty years ago 46%. But what Freedom House mostly describes is elected leaders weakening checks and balances, which is not the same as voters changing every two years.\n3. How many ways of \u0026quot;replacing\u0026quot; are there I sort the events of the past two years into five roads.\nRoad Example What I checked Changed from outside: cancelling, postponing, altering terms El Salvador, July 2025: the legislature voted 57 to 3 to amend the constitution, abolishing presidential term limits and extending the term from 5 to 6 years the amendment is fact; the Turkey 2028 rumour is only a forecast Hollowed from inside: courts and election commissions decide who can stand Romania, France, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand the hardest evidence is on this road Supplemented from the side: sortition, citizens' assemblies Ireland, France, eastern Belgium, Paris real, but small, all advisory Another reason: meritocracy, \u0026quot;whole-process people's democracy\u0026quot; Singapore, China an argument, not an experiment AI and algorithms deciding in place of people Albania appointed an AI \u0026quot;minister\u0026quot;; the UAE has 32 AI assistants I have not found a single verified case of \u0026quot;AI replacing a political decision\u0026quot;; all are advisory On the second road I will say more, because it is the most real and the most important: elections are held as usual, only who may be elected has first been decided by others.\nRomania: in the first round on 24 November 2024, Georgescu came first; on 6 December the Constitutional Court annulled the whole election, on the grounds that campaign methods and funding were not transparent. He and his supporters called it a coup; the court and the later rerun said no. In the rerun in May 2025, Dan was elected with 53.6% to 46.4%. Each side holds to its own account. Turkey: in March 2025 the mayor of Istanbul, İmamoğlu, had his diploma annulled (a presidential candidate must have a valid degree) and was then detained; the government says the judiciary is independent, and the opposition and human rights groups say it is a political case. Thailand: in August 2024 the Constitutional Court dissolved the Move Forward Party; in August 2025 the court removed Paetongtarn, the fifth prime minister removed by a court in seventeen years. France: Le Pen was convicted of misusing European Parliament funds; in July 2026 the appeal court reduced the ban on standing to 45 months, so she can still run in the 2027 election, and she is still appealing to the highest court. Now the \u0026quot;supplement from the side\u0026quot; road, and how big it is. Ireland, 2016 to 2018: 99 citizens chosen by lot discussed abortion and recommended a referendum; in May 2018 the referendum passed by 66.4% to 33.6%. France's Citizens' Convention on Climate, 2019: 150 people; about a fifth of the recommendations were finally carried out, and more than half more in amended form. Eastern Belgium has a standing assembly of 24 people, whose parliament and government must explain their reasons for accepting or rejecting its proposals, but with no binding legal force. No country has yet made a sortition assembly its legislature.\nOne more thing has to go in, or this section would be one-sided. On 12 April 2026 Viktor Orbán in Hungary lost the election to Magyar's party, which won two-thirds of the seats; that night he said the result was painful but clear, and congratulated his opponent. A ruler of sixteen years conceded. This exists at the same time as the falling numbers above.\n4. The neighbours, with one ruler For East Asia's neighbours I use the same ruler: who votes, who can be elected, how they are screened, whether the opposition has room, where courts and election commissions stand.\nWho may be elected, and how it is settled before the election Latest figures Korea Candidates register freely; the National Election Commission is a constitutional body, outside the government, with nine commissioners, three each named by the president, the National Assembly and the Chief Justice turnout in the 2025 presidential election 79.4% Japan Candidates are free; on 26 September 2025 the Supreme Court ruled by three to one that the \u0026quot;value of a vote\u0026quot; in the 2024 lower-house election was constitutional February 2026: LDP 316 of 465 seats Taiwan Candidates are free; in summer 2025 the recalls of 31 legislators and one mayor all failed 2024 Legislative Yuan: KMT 52, DPP 51, TPP 8, the first time in thirty years that no party held a majority Singapore A presidential candidate needs a \u0026quot;certificate of eligibility\u0026quot;, whose conditions are a high post in the public sector or being chief executive of a large company; parliamentary elections have group representation constituencies; the Elections Department belongs to the Prime Minister's Office; the opposition is legal and holds seats May 2025: People's Action Party 65.57%, 87 of 97 seats; Workers' Party 10 seats; turnout 92.83% Vietnam The Vietnam Fatherland Front runs three rounds of \u0026quot;consultation\u0026quot;, fixing quotas, drafting lists and seeking the views of voters where candidates live; about 93% of official candidates are party members 15 March 2026: 864 people for 500 seats, turnout about 99.7% Mainland China County and township people's congresses are directly elected, those above city level indirectly; the law requires a margin: directly elected candidates must outnumber the seats by one third to one times; parties, bodies or ten or more people jointly may nominate I did not obtain the latest county/township figures Hong Kong From 2021 candidates pass a Candidate Eligibility Review Committee; the Legislative Council has 90 seats, 40 chosen by the Election Committee, 30 by functional constituencies, 20 by direct geographical election December 2025: turnout in the direct geographical elections 31.9%; in 2021 it was 30.2% A few more words on this table.\nIn the mainland column there is an example: in 2011, in Xinyu, Jiangxi, Liu Ping announced that she would stand as an independent, but the number of people who jointly nominated her did not reach ten, and she was not recognised. Overseas media reported that on polling day she was held in a guesthouse, cast her own vote through a mobile ballot box, and lost her freedom for five days. These details are in reports by several overseas outlets and by Caijing; the official explanation for her failure was that the number of joint nominators did not reach the legal ten. A spokesman of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee then said that only \u0026quot;formal deputy candidates\u0026quot; nominated by lawful procedure counted. Independent candidates have no place in law.\nIn the Singapore column, too, two sides must be written: of the \u0026quot;certificates of eligibility\u0026quot; for presidential candidates, the Elections Department refused three in 2023; but the opposition wins seats and is not a decoration.\nIn the Vietnam column, I did not find the official wording and do not write it; on 19 March 2026, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a journalist was arrested for criticising the legitimacy of the election, a single source.\nIn the Hong Kong column, in 2025 the Candidate Eligibility Review Committee disqualified no one, and all 161 nominations were confirmed valid; that has to be written too.\nSo the difference is not in whether there are elections, but in who, before the election, decides who may be elected.\nThe seven places above are seven ways of playing the same hand of cards, following the earlier piece \u0026quot;One Hand of Cards, Six Ways to Play It\u0026quot; (that one had six; here Malaysia is left out, and Hong Kong and the mainland are added).\nThe Legislative Yuan in Taipei. In summer 2025 the recall cases against 31 legislators all failed.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Yu tptw, CC BY-SA 4.0\n5. What makes the loser concede Now back to that comment: \u0026quot;the last consensus that keeps one group of people from killing another\u0026quot;.\nWhy can an election be peaceful? Because the one who loses is willing to step down. Why is he willing?\nScholars have studied this. A book called Losers' Consent (Anderson, Blais and others, 2005) uses surveys from many countries to ask: do people who lose still trust the system? The answer is murky: it depends on each person's circumstances, and on the environment. Another political scientist, Przeworski, has a much-quoted line: democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. The losers are willing to accept because the alternative is worse, and because they believe they will win later.\nSo conceding rests on a few things. I put the recent examples here:\nOne, the courts. In Indonesia in 2019 and 2024 the Constitutional Court rejected the losers' suits, and the losers accepted. In Taiwan in 2004 Chen Shui-bian won by under 30,000 votes the day after the shooting, and Lien Chan and James Soong went to court and were rejected three times. In Korea in 2017 and 2025 the Constitutional Court's rulings were both accepted. But on 19 January 2025, after Yoon Suk-yeol's formal arrest was approved, his supporters stormed the Seoul Western District Court and more than 80 were arrested on the spot. The court is one safety net, and it has cracks.\nTwo, interest, and \u0026quot;there is a next time\u0026quot;. Losing is not losing everything, and next time you may win; the richer a society, the higher the cost of overturning the table.\nThree, belief that the contest is fair. Gallup in September 2024 in the US: confidence that votes are counted accurately, Democrats 84%, Republicans 28%, the largest gap on record. This one can break.\nFour, a shared faith and rites. The sociologist Bellah in 1967 proposed an \u0026quot;American civil religion\u0026quot;, and Tocqueville said earlier that Americans had put the spirit of religion together with the spirit of liberty. Later research by Putnam and Campbell says that what works is not theology but the network of friends in the church: people with a religion are three to four times as likely to take part in community activities as people without (the part about cause is my own claim).\nMind you, the evidence for this one comes from America, and it is about the network of friends in the church, not doctrine.\nCounter-examples must be set out too. Lebanon: the president is a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker a Shia; this sectarian allocation was something the Taif Agreement of 1989 wanted to remove, and it has not been removed to this day; the presidency was vacant for over two years, from October 2022 to January 2025. Iraq: after the 2021 election one side refused to accept the result, and in 2022 there was fighting in the Green Zone, about thirty dead. Nigeria: after the 2011 election, three days of riots in the north, with more than 800 dead according to Human Rights Watch.\nA shared religion does not mean conceding; the more clearly the sects are divided, the harder the opposition sets. So what I mean by \u0026quot;a shared faith\u0026quot; is one faith, not each worshipping separately.\nSo what does Confucianism say?\nIn the original texts there is already a way of \u0026quot;handing over\u0026quot;, written within the doctrine of Heaven's mandate.\nThe Book of Documents, \u0026quot;Announcement to Kang\u0026quot;, says: \u0026quot;The mandate is not fixed\u0026quot; (惟命不于常). The Book of Songs, Greater Odes, \u0026quot;King Wen\u0026quot;, says: \u0026quot;The lords of Shang submit to Zhou; the mandate of Heaven is never constant\u0026quot; (侯服于周，天命靡常). The mandate of Heaven is not fixed to one house. These two lines are earlier than Confucius.\nThe Mencius has two passages. In one, King Xuan of Qi asks: may a minister kill his ruler? Mencius answers: one who ruins benevolence and righteousness is a \u0026quot;brigand\u0026quot;, and a brigand is only a lone fellow; I have heard of the killing of the lone fellow Zhou, I have not heard of killing a ruler. The tyrant is stripped of the status of ruler. In the other, on Yao and Shun: Heaven does not speak; it shows itself by where people go. The lords who came to pay homage did not go to Yao's son but to Shun; those with lawsuits did not go to Yao's son but to Shun; those who sang did not sing of Yao's son but of Shun.\nThere is also rite. Analects, \u0026quot;Taibo\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;Taibo may be said to have attained the highest virtue! Three times he gave up the world, and the people found no way to praise him.\u0026quot; (泰伯，其可謂至德也已矣！三以天下讓，民無得而稱焉。) Yielding is written as the highest virtue. In \u0026quot;Bayi\u0026quot; Confucius speaks of archery: the gentleman has nothing to contend over; if he must, it is in archery; bowing and yielding they ascend the hall, and after shooting they come down and drink; this is a contest of gentlemen. Contest is taken into rite.\nPortrait of Mencius (Meng Ke), from a set of \u0026quot;half-length portraits of the Great Sage and the Virtuous\u0026quot;.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, unknown artist, Public domain\nBut the historical record of this method does not look good, and that has to be written too:\nUnder Emperor Zhao of Han, Sui Meng (Sui Hong), on the principles of the Spring and Autumn, memorialised that the House of Han descended from Yao and had a destiny of passing the realm on, and that the emperor should seek a worthy man, abdicate in his favour, and himself retire to a fief of a hundred li. His end: he was executed for the crime of deluding the people with sinister talk and of great sedition. Five years later, when Emperor Xuan took the throne, his son was called to serve as a court gentleman. Zhu Xi said that if the virtuous rise and the virtueless fall, when the mandate has gone and the people's hearts have left, there should be revolution; but he also said that the great human bonds must be held even by sages; reading how Confucius on one hand praised Taibo and King Wen and on the other said that King Wu's music was \u0026quot;not perfectly good\u0026quot;, he held that Confucius's subtle meaning lies in this. The meaning: hand over when the time comes, but do not say it too bluntly. In 1339 in Japan, Kitabatake Chikafusa wrote the Jinnō Shōtōki, saying that Japan is a land of the gods whose throne passes in one line; that China had changed its surname thirty-six times was because it \u0026quot;chose the worthy and gave it\u0026quot;. He treated \u0026quot;change of surname and revolution\u0026quot; as something to reject. In 1902 Kang Youwei used the same Confucian classics to read Yao and Shun as \u0026quot;democracy\u0026quot;; but in the same year he wrote to overseas Chinese merchants urging that China could have only constitutional monarchy and not revolution. The same Confucius could be used to postpone, and to stand up. Now look at today. On 13 January 2024, Hou Yu-ih lost, and on the stage he said that his own effort had not been enough, that he regretted not completing a change of ruling party, and he congratulated Lai Ching-te. On 4 June 2025, Kim Moon-soo conceded and congratulated Lee Jae-myung.\nIn these words \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; has gone, and \u0026quot;the people\u0026quot; remain.\nIn Mencius that sentence has \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; showing itself through the people's conduct, but Heaven itself is not the same as \u0026quot;the people\u0026quot;. Once the power of judgment is passed from \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; straight to \u0026quot;the people\u0026quot;, the reason for conceding is left with only one: this is the will of the majority. Then, when the majority itself has to be asked \u0026quot;are you right?\u0026quot;, who asks?\nAs for how East Asians usually think about \u0026quot;the loser should accept\u0026quot;, no checkable result was found for the relevant items in the Asian Barometer Survey. That part is blank.\nWhat I think now is this: conceding cannot rest on one layer. The court is one layer, interest is one layer, \u0026quot;this contest was fair\u0026quot; is one layer; I trust all these layers, and do not want to swap any of them out. What I want to add is the top layer: something above the majority that no one dares use as a weapon. The name I give it is \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot;, revere it and ask nothing of it. I am not predicting that universal suffrage will collapse, nor do I want to trade it for anything; I only feel that behind the ballot there must be a place where the loser and the winner can stand together. Others have walked this road before me: in 1902 Liang Qichao wrote an essay that clearly opposed \u0026quot;protecting the religion\u0026quot;, saying that Confucius was a philosopher and an educator, not a founder of religion, and asking, too, whether \u0026quot;preserving the race\u0026quot; meant preserving the yellow race or the Chinese race, a boundary very blurred. What he opposed, as I read it, was \u0026quot;protecting\u0026quot; it by power, which is why I say I do not borrow the state's hand; all I want is some days that can be shared and a place for revering Heaven. But I cannot pretend I did not see Lebanon either: a shared faith, if each worships separately, is gunpowder. So the \u0026quot;one\u0026quot; I want must be the same one, and it must be voluntary.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-arguments are three.\nFirst, conceding rests mainly on interest and \u0026quot;there is a next time\u0026quot;; faith is the icing on the cake. The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, from 1955 to 2009, apart from one short spell in opposition, was almost always in power; in 2009 the Democratic Party won 308 seats and Aso admitted a heavy defeat; in 2012 Noda conceded and resigned as party leader. I have not read any material saying it was faith that made them concede; what I can see is law, the administration of elections, and the next time. And these are only individual cases, not systematic evidence for a \u0026quot;culture of defeat\u0026quot;.\nSecond, this Confucian method of \u0026quot;handing over\u0026quot; was, in history, used more often to forbid: Sui Hong was killed, Zhu Xi held to the great bonds, Kitabatake rejected change of surname, Kang Youwei opposed revolution. That it is in the original texts does not mean it is the half that was handed down.\nThird, the evidence I use to support \u0026quot;a shared faith\u0026quot; is the network of friends in American churches, not East Asian and certainly not Confucian. The East Asian version I have not found. I put it in because the question is real, and I do not yet have the answer.\nTo you in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, and all places.\nI read about that night of 3 June 2025, about the one who lost stepping onto the stage and saying \u0026quot;humbly accept\u0026quot;; I read about January 2024, when Hou Yu-ih, standing in the hall at Banqiao, bowed to his supporters and apologised. Each time, this is not to be taken for granted. Someone has to swallow what is in their heart before they can step onto the stage, and behind them stand many people who did not want them to concede.\nIn an age when it is very easy to quarrel past repair, you have done this hard thing again and again.\nI also want to say that I do not know how long this method can last, nor do I dare say that replacing it would be better. What I think of is the archery rite Confucius spoke of: the gentleman has nothing to contend over; if he must, it is archery; bowing and yielding they ascend the hall, and when the shooting is done they come down and drink one cup together. Contend, yes; after contending, still share the hall. Your ancestors read this line, and your children may still be able to recite it. I think it may be more like something we share than any constitution.\nIf the loser is willing to concede, is it the gavel of the court, or the cup of wine after the bowing and yielding?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 primary or official page; 🟡 secondary (media, Wikipedia, book-review abstracts); unchecked items marked separately.\nKorea: 2022 presidential election 48.56%/47.83% (🟡, Korea Herald and others; final figures per the NEC, 2022-03-10); 2024 National Assembly election 175/108 seats (🟡, YTN, Newdaily, JoongAng, by NEC figures, nec.go.kr not read); impeachment of 2024-12-14, 204 to 85 (🟡, Al Jazeera, HRW); Constitutional Court of 2025-04-04, eight to zero (🟡, OPB/NPR, IDEA); 2025 presidential election 49.42%/41.15%, turnout 79.4% (🟡, Al Jazeera); Kim Moon-soo \u0026quot;humbly accept the people's choice\u0026quot; (🟡, Hankyung quotation); first-instance verdict in Yoon Suk-yeol's insurrection case (2026-02-19, life, 🟡, JoongAng, Korea Times); appeal suspended in 2026-05 on a recusal motion (🟡); Gallup Korea 2026-10-09: 37%/disapprove 51%/Democratic Party 35% (🟡, Korea Times, JoongAng); 2026-10-03 Gwanghwamun rally about 28,000 (🟡, unofficial police estimate, weak source). The answer from someone online, and its comments: material someone forwarded, treated only as a lead; all figures in this piece were checked separately. Other countries: Japan 2026-02-08 LDP 316/465 seats (🟡, nippon.com, Wikipedia); Japan's Supreme Court of 2025-09-26 upholding the 2024 lower-house election (🟢, courts.go.jp); Taiwan recalls of 2025 (🟡, CNA citing the CEC); Hungary 2026-04-12 (🟡, OSW, Al Jazeera and others); court and election-commission cases in Romania, Turkey, France, Pakistan, Thailand (🟡, Al Jazeera, HRW, OSW and others); El Salvador 2025-07 (🟡, Al Jazeera); Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026 press release (🟢, 2026-03-19); US split-district counts (🟡, Brookings table, FiveThirtyEight, Ellis Insight); Meta's 2023 experiment (🟡, news reports only; paper not obtained). Sortition and citizens' assemblies: Ireland's Citizens' Assembly 2016–18, France's Citizens' Convention on Climate 2019–20, the standing assembly of eastern Belgium, the Paris citizens' assembly (🟡, government pages and research-institute abstracts); OECD, Government at a Glance 2025 (🟡, abstract). East Asian electoral systems: Singapore Elections Department press release 2025 (🟢), Singapore 2025 results (🟡); Vietnam's 2026 National Assembly election (🟡, Wikipedia, Tuoi Tre; official final figures unconfirmed); China's Electoral Law as amended in 2020 (🟢, text reprinted); the Liu Ping case (🟡, overseas media); Hong Kong 2025 Legislative Council election (🟢, government press release, gazette). Conceding and faith: Anderson, Blais, Bowler, Donovan, Listhaug, Losers' Consent, Oxford UP, 2005 (🟢, publisher's page; full text not read); Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, 1991 (🟡, quoted at second hand); Bellah, \u0026quot;Civil Religion in America\u0026quot;, Daedalus, 1967 (🟢, abstract); Putnam \u0026amp; Campbell, American Grace, 2010 (🟡, reviews); Gallup, September 2024, confidence in vote counting (🟡, reprint); Lebanon, Iraq, Nigeria (🟡; Human Rights Watch's 2011 Nigeria report 🟢); Indonesia's Constitutional Court 2019 and 2024 (🟢/🟡); Taiwan 2004 (🟡, Jurist). Confucian sources: Book of Documents \u0026quot;Announcement to Kang\u0026quot;, Book of Songs \u0026quot;King Wen\u0026quot; and Analects \u0026quot;Taibo\u0026quot; (as recorded in the author's quotation library, checked word for word against Wikisource, not against the page numbers of a punctuated edition); Mencius Liang Hui Wang II ch. 8, Wan Zhang I, Jin Xin II, Analects \u0026quot;Bayi\u0026quot;, Han shu \u0026quot;Biography of Sui Hong\u0026quot;, Zhuzi yulei vol. 35 (the Taibo chapter), Liang Qichao, \u0026quot;On the fact that protecting the religion is not the way to honour Confucius\u0026quot; (1902), Kang Youwei, Kongzi gaizhi kao and the letter of 1902 \u0026quot;To the Chinese merchants of North and South America on China's being fit only for constitutional government and not for revolution\u0026quot;, Kitabatake Chikafusa, Jinnō Shōtōki (all checked word for word against Wikisource, in paraphrase, 🟢; punctuated editions not checked). Unchecked: the official election-commission pages of Korea, Japan and Taiwan; the items in the Asian Barometer Survey on \u0026quot;the loser should accept\u0026quot;; the exact distribution of \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; in contemporary East Asian language of conceding, which is only a reading of two sentences. For comparison: in this series, \u0026quot;Korea Really Did Have a 'Religion of the Heavenly Way'\u0026quot; (Choe Je-u), \u0026quot;'Shrines Are Not Religion'\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;Why the Confucian Association Failed\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;One Hand of Cards, Six Ways to Play It\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;The State Pushed Confucianism Once, Then Withdrew It\u0026quot; (Singapore). Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d49/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"1-two-years\"\u003e1. Two years\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst Korea, which you may know better than I do.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn March 2022 Yoon Suk-yeol was elected with 48.56% against 47.83%, a margin of 0.73 percentage points, the smallest since direct presidential elections began in Korea. Lee Jae-myung, the loser, came forward and said that this was not a defeat for you, nor for the Democratic Party; all the responsibility was his.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the National Assembly election of April 2024 the opposition won big: the Democratic Party and its satellite party together had 175 seats, the governing People Power Party and its satellite 108, the other small parties 17. Two-thirds is 200 seats, and the largest opposition bloc was still 25 short.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Seats in South Korea's 2024 National Assembly election\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/linju/d49/02.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What Makes the Loser Concede: Korea's Two Years, and East Asia's Ballots"},{"content":"Most of the earlier pieces in Yigui ask: what holds a civilization together? The Southern Chapter asks it from another side: when people scatter and gather again somewhere else, what do they carry with them? I put it in Hunan and Jiangxi, and follow the migration routes, which will also lead to Sichuan, the two Guangs and Fujian.\nFirst, a small thing. If you are from Hunan or Jiangxi, or your ancestors left those two provinces, you have probably heard the sentence: \u0026quot;our family came from Jiangxi.\u0026quot; Many genealogies say so. I want to start from that sentence.\nYuelu Academy in Changsha, founded in 976.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0\nTwo thousand years ago, it was one whole When Sima Qian wrote \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot; in the Records of the Grand Historian, describing the customs of the whole realm, he put \u0026quot;Hengshan, Jiujiang, Jiangnan, Yuzhang and Changsha\u0026quot; together under one name, \u0026quot;South Chu,\u0026quot; and said its customs \u0026quot;are much like those of West Chu.\u0026quot;\nHengshan and Changsha are in today's Hunan; Yuzhang is in today's Jiangxi. Two thousand years ago these two lands were one whole with one name.\nLater they were split. The name \u0026quot;Jiangxi\u0026quot; is said to come from \u0026quot;Jiangnan West Circuit\u0026quot; of the Tang, in the twenty-first year of Kaiyuan (733): at first it was just the western half of the Jiangnan circuit. \u0026quot;Hunan\u0026quot; is even more direct: it simply means \u0026quot;south of the lake,\u0026quot; south of Dongting Lake. One is an administrative short form, the other a compass direction. (According to Tan Qixiang and others in \u0026quot;The Origins of the Names of China's Provinces\u0026quot;: in 733 Jiangnan Circuit was divided into east and west circuits, the western one abbreviated as \u0026quot;Jiangxi Circuit,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Jiangxi\u0026quot; became a district name; the name \u0026quot;Hunan\u0026quot; began with the Hunan Surveillance Commissioner set up after the An Lushan rebellion, who governed the Xiang and Zi river basins south of Dongting Lake.)\nOn one side of this land are the Luoxiao Mountains; on the other, two great rivers and two great lakes: the Xiang River and Gan River, Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake. Where people could go from here, which way, was largely decided for them by water and mountains long ago.\nDongting Lake at Yueyang.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Huangdan2060, CC BY 3.0\nSatellite image of Poyang Lake.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, NASA, public domain\nOne thing I want to ask: how did people move? The main thread of the Southern Chapter is a plain one: the movement of people.\nWe often think that being \u0026quot;from somewhere\u0026quot; is a fixed matter. But open the history of Hunan and Jiangxi, and you find that nearly everyone is \u0026quot;from outside.\u0026quot; In the late Yuan and early Ming, Hunan's population fell sharply, and Jiangxi people went west in wave after wave, giving rise to the saying \u0026quot;Jiangxi fills Huguang.\u0026quot; In the early Qing, Sichuan was short of people, and Hunan people went west in wave after wave in turn, called \u0026quot;Huguang fills Sichuan.\u0026quot; Wei Yuan has a line that is said to be about exactly this: after things settled, \u0026quot;Jiangxi people entered Chu, and Chu people entered Shu.\u0026quot; (Many papers cite this line as Wei Yuan's \u0026quot;On Water Conservancy in Huguang,\u0026quot; about the migration after the Zhang Xianzhong turmoil of the late Ming; I haven't obtained the original text, so I can say only that it is second-hand.)\nSo I want to put this into history and test it: should people move?\nMy own leaning is yes. A person shouldn't be locked into the registered origin, the town of birth, the address on an ID card. He should be able to go, to reach another place and begin again. This is something I have been thinking about from many angles. I believe that migration out of free will is what shows the civilization of a modern society.\nBut I also owe it the strongest opposing case: migration is not always free. In the Hongwu years there were official relocations, group after group, marched under guard. Not everyone who went chose to go. Displacement in wartime has nothing to do with \u0026quot;freedom\u0026quot; at all. A person forced to leave home, half of his party dead on the road: that kind of \u0026quot;movement\u0026quot; is not the kind I want.\nSo the Southern Chapter really asks two questions. One: what kind of movement is good? Two: when a person arrives at a new place, what does he bring?\nWhat I won't write I'll say up front that there is one kind of thing the Southern Chapter will not write, and will not let in: regional character.\nI won't write \u0026quot;Hunan people are like this\u0026quot; or \u0026quot;Jiangxi people are like that.\u0026quot; No \u0026quot;Hunan people are stubborn,\u0026quot; no \u0026quot;Jiangxi people are honest.\u0026quot; Those sentences are easy to say and easy to like hearing, but most of them were passed along, not checked. Even praise I don't want: putting tens of millions of a province's people into a single adjective is unfair to every one of them.\nWhat I want to ask about is institutions, geography, migration and events: what happened in this place, and how those things affected the people living here.\nWhat I won't go around The Southern Chapter will write about the years after 1927.\nThe Hunan–Jiangxi border is the starting point of many later big events: the Nanchang Uprising, the Autumn Harvest Uprising, Jinggangshan, Ruijin, the departure of the Long March. I will write these. I will also write about what the countryside of the two provinces went through after 1949. The materials I read include official figures, local gazetteers, scholars' studies and the memories of those who were there. I will lay them side by side, each in its own terms.\nI'll check facts as carefully as I can. Judgments I will write as judgments, not mix them into facts. I do have views on the Communist Party and on communism, and I don't intend to pretend I don't. But I also don't want to write a view as if it were a fact. I'll hold to that distinction throughout.\nThis site is for readers outside mainland China, and I also want to use the chance to say, a little more clearly, many things that are hard to say inside the wall. But what I want is to say them accurately, not to say them heavily.\nWhat we'll look at next Roughly these things:\nStart from \u0026quot;South Chu\u0026quot;: the pottery shards of twenty thousand years ago, rice of more than ten thousand years ago, Shang bronze, Qu Yuan and Jia Yi; then a road cut in the Tang that carved out a Jiangxi; Chan Buddhism's \u0026quot;travelling the rivers and lakes\u0026quot;; Zhou Dunyi, Zhu Xi and Zhang Shi at Yuelu Academy, Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan at Goose Lake; then \u0026quot;filling\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;going\u0026quot;: Jiangxi filling Huguang, Huguang filling Sichuan, how to read a genealogy, Jingdezhen and the Jiangyou merchants; then Zeng Guofan and the Hunan Army, statecraft, and the many claims about \u0026quot;why Hunan produces talent,\u0026quot; and which of them stand up to checking; then the Hunan–Jiangxi border after 1927; and finally, the present: the two provinces' accounts, five million Hunanese in Guangdong, falling births in both provinces, and the question I most want to ask: should people move? Tengwang Pavilion in Nanchang. Wang Bo wrote in his \u0026quot;Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion\u0026quot; that it \u0026quot;girdles three rivers and belts five lakes, commands the wild Jing and draws in Ou and Yue.\u0026quot;　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Ashish Yadav, CC BY-SA 4.0\nLooking the other way The Southern Chapter's premise has three hard opposing cases.\nFirst, the \u0026quot;movement\u0026quot; I talk about may sound too nice. The official relocations of the Hongwu years and flight in wartime were not free movement. Putting them in one basket called \u0026quot;movement\u0026quot; with a young person today taking the high-speed train to Guangzhou for work: could that be switching concepts?\nSecond, genealogies are the material I most like to quote and also one of the least reliable. Genealogies reach for prestigious ancestors, they get altered, and the writers are often families who did well later. \u0026quot;Our ancestors came from Jiangxi\u0026quot;: part of that may be true, and part is just what everyone writes.\nThird, regional narratives easily turn into stereotypes. I want to avoid that myself, but I am not sure I won't slip into it when I write about the Hunan Army and the modern period. If you read a passage and think I have slipped, please tell me.\nHas an elder in your family also said, \u0026quot;Our family came from somewhere else\u0026quot;? Where was that somewhere else?\nReferences\nRecords of the Grand Historian, \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;Hengshan, Jiujiang, Jiangnan, Yuzhang and Changsha are South Chu, and their customs are much like West Chu.\u0026quot; (Wikisource) \u0026quot;Jiangxi\u0026quot; named from the \u0026quot;Jiangnan West Circuit\u0026quot; of the twenty-first year of Kaiyuan (733), and \u0026quot;Hunan\u0026quot; from the Hunan Surveillance Commissioner of the mid-to-late Tang: Tan Qixiang et al., \u0026quot;The Origins of the Names of China's Provinces,\u0026quot; reposted on Aisixiang 🟡 Wei Yuan's \u0026quot;Jiangxi people entered Chu, and Chu people entered Shu\u0026quot; in \u0026quot;On Water Conservancy in Huguang\u0026quot;: seen cited in many papers (e.g. Zhang Guoxiong, \u0026quot;The Main Directions and Periods of Migration in Chinese History,\u0026quot; Journal of Peking University 1996, no. 2); the original book has not been obtained 🟡 For comparison: the pieces in Current Affairs on \u0026quot;should people move\u0026quot;; the Housing chapter of Yigui (mansions, ancestral halls, genealogies and ancestral graves in central Hunan) Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/xg00/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMost of the earlier pieces in \u003cem\u003eYigui\u003c/em\u003e ask: what holds a civilization together? The Southern Chapter asks it from another side: when people scatter and gather again somewhere else, what do they carry with them? I put it in Hunan and Jiangxi, and follow the migration routes, which will also lead to Sichuan, the two Guangs and Fujian.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, a small thing. If you are from Hunan or Jiangxi, or your ancestors left those two provinces, you have probably heard the sentence: \u0026quot;our family came from Jiangxi.\u0026quot; Many genealogies say so. I want to start from that sentence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Yuelu Academy\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/xianggan/xg00/01.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eYuelu Academy in Changsha, founded in 976.　Source: \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yuelu_academy.jpg\"\u003eWikimedia Commons\u003c/a\u003e, xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"two-thousand-years-ago-it-was-one-whole\"\u003eTwo thousand years ago, it was one whole\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Sima Qian wrote \u0026quot;The Biographies of the Money-Makers\u0026quot; in the \u003cem\u003eRecords of the Grand Historian\u003c/em\u003e, describing the customs of the whole realm, he put \u0026quot;Hengshan, Jiujiang, Jiangnan, Yuzhang and Changsha\u0026quot; together under one name, \u0026quot;South Chu,\u0026quot; and said its customs \u0026quot;are much like those of West Chu.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Southern Chapter: Hunan and Jiangxi, and How People Came and Went"},{"content":"When I was small I heard an elder say one thing: when they opened Nanjing, they brought in foreign wealth.\nThe person who said it wasn't doing scholarship. It was said at a dinner table, under the eaves, in passing, and it meant: those big houses around our parts were built with money brought back from Nanjing. I have always remembered that sentence.\nLet me put my cards on the table first: I lean toward believing it.\nWhy I believe it: someone was there Zhao Liewen was Zeng Guofan's staff adviser. On the twenty-third day of the sixth month of the third year of Tongzhi, that is 26 July 1864, he wrote a diary entry about Nanjing after the city fell. I have read the original, word by word.\nOf the able-bodied Taiping soldiers, apart from those killed in the resistance, not many died; most were seized by the troops to carry loads out of the city, or taken to dig up cellars, and let go once they'd dug. The old and weak, those who could not carry a load and had no cellar to dig, were \u0026quot;killed at will,\u0026quot; and along the streets, nine of ten corpses were old people. Women under forty: not one left. Writing that, he put down four characters: \u0026quot;enough to make one's hair stand on end.\u0026quot;\nZeng Guofan's proclamations were pasted all over the city, forbidding the killing of civilians and the seizing of women. But of several commanders, Zhao named them: Peng Yuju, Yi Lianghu, Peng Chunnian, Xiao Fusi and Zhang Shiri: \u0026quot;they know only plunder and never obey.\u0026quot; He also says that Xiao Fusi took gold and silver out of the Heavenly King's palace, \u0026quot;beyond counting,\u0026quot; and then set the buildings on fire to burn away the traces.\nThis is the hardest thing I have. There was large-scale looting in the city; some people really did get things; and some people feared leaving traces. Zeng Guofan himself, in a memorial, is quoted as saying there were \u0026quot;no goods at all\u0026quot; in the city, but he was a participant, and I have only a second-hand quotation, so I take that line as a lead and nothing more.\nThe ledger: I'm done chasing it How much was taken out, who took it, how it was carried home: I went through everything I could find, and could match not one entry.\nI've thought about it, and I don't plan to chase it further. The people at the time didn't keep accounts, and if they had, they would not likely have left them. For a matter nobody wrote down, thousands of words arguing \u0026quot;did it or didn't it\u0026quot; produce nothing. Besides, the money need not have had a single source: rank and salary earned through the war was one route, buying land and property after the war another, gifts and exchanges back in the home district a third. \u0026quot;Foreign wealth\u0026quot; in Chinese is a common phrase for windfall money; it does not have to mean money from foreigners.\nMore important than the ledger is what this money, whatever the amount, finally became.\nIt became houses A Hunan Daily report of 2022 says that around Yangshi Town and Sanjia Township in Lianyuan, Loudi, together with Shuidongdi Town in Louxing District, there survive well over a hundred old residences of Hunan Army generals, of which 17 are fairly well preserved and 7 are provincial heritage sites. The figures are the report's; I did not count them myself. A local article on the Yangjiatan area says that these officers, \u0026quot;returning home in glory,\u0026quot; built on a large scale, which is how the rows of mansions came to stand there.\nThe elders told me another half. Two fellow villagers served in the same army. One kept his wealth and built a great house; the other, in the elder's words, \u0026quot;couldn't keep money, only spend it.\u0026quot; That is oral testimony with no written source, and I take it only as something people say. But it puts a question on the table: the same money, in one man's hands, turned into a house that stood for generations and, more than a hundred years later, became a protected site; in another's it was spent, and his descendants had little to tell.\nZeng Guofan himself, around 1849, before the fighting, wrote to his younger brothers that after the age of thirty he counted \u0026quot;making an official career and a fortune\u0026quot; as shameful, and that any money he had should first go to relieve the poor of his clan. That was the rule he set for himself. How his subordinates behaved is another ledger.\nIt became people leaving The Hunan Army's march out of Hunan was a large outflow of people. Hunanese went to Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu; some came back, with rank, with reputation, perhaps with money; some never came back.\nThose who came back put money and name in the old place: houses, ancestral halls, academies, and the confidence of generation after generation of scholars who left. I found no data to say that cultural life in Hunan after the war surpassed what came before. Yuelu Academy dates to the Song, so Hunan's academies did not begin after the war; on the other hand one study says that from the Ming Hongwu reign to the end of Qianlong, Hunan produced only 1.8 per cent of the nation's jinshi, with no source given. I draw no conclusion from either. I only want to say: the line is real, but it is not a single line.\nAnd then? The state of those great houses today is not this piece's business. In the series Yigui, the piece on Fuhoutang and Yangjiatan describes how those old houses fell down and were turned into grain stations and factories; in Shishi, the piece on rural Hunan has today's numbers. The houses are empty. That is true.\nWhat I want to say is what comes after the houses are empty.\nThe Hunan Army took a generation of men out of Hunan and brought a row of houses back. The houses were later emptied; the people never stopped. Today, one in every 13 people with a Hunan household registration is in Guangdong. This is not a bad thing. People should be able to move. \u0026quot;A transplanted tree dies, a transplanted person lives.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Follow the water and grass.\u0026quot; To stay in your home place and spend all your strength fighting each other over the same piece of ground is what I'd call involution.\nMy hope for East Asians is roughly this. People can go and live anywhere in the world, wherever the water and grass are. But they must carry one thing with them, wherever they go: a shared core. Ancestor veneration, ritual, festivals, a Chinese-character text one can read. Able to move, and not scattered; able to hold on, without being squeezed into a little patch of home ground and competing there.\nSo when I read about this Hunan Army money, I don't look at how much it was or which house it went into. I look at whether the men who left Hunan turned \u0026quot;leaving\u0026quot; into something that could last, or only turned money into houses and left the houses to the emptiness that came after. The southern chapter will keep asking that.\nIf the money really did come out of that city, did anyone afterwards remember the people in it who could not get out?\nReferences\nZhao Liewen, Diary from the Studio of Quiet Ability (Nengjingju riji), twenty-third day of the sixth month, third year of Tongzhi (26 July 1864), Wikisource, checked word for word against the original 🟢 Zeng Guofan to his younger brothers, twenty-first day of the third month, twenty-ninth year of Daoguang (1849), Family Letters of Zeng Guofan, Wikisource, checked word for word; whether the letter's date matches its title is still to be checked, which is why the text says \u0026quot;around 1849\u0026quot; 🟢 Zeng Guofan's memorial on the recapture of Jinling: roughly \u0026quot;there was no so-called storehouse… no goods at all\u0026quot;; second-hand, memorial title and date not checked 🟡 Hunan Daily, 13 January 2022, p. 8, \u0026quot;Old Houses in Central Hunan Stir Nostalgia\u0026quot; (reposted by Voice of Hunan), on surviving mansions of Hunan Army generals (over a hundred; 17 fairly well preserved; 7 provincial-level heritage sites): original read, numbers are the report's and not independently counted 🟡; local article on Yangjiatan (Voice of Hunan, 2017) 🟡 Yuelu Academy founded 976 (the ninth year of Song Kaibao), Zhu Xi's visit and joint lecture with Zhang Shi in 1167 (third year of Qiandao), Zhang Shi invited to teach around 1166: Chinese Wikipedia, \u0026quot;Yuelu Academy\u0026quot; 🟡; 710 Hunan jinshi from Ming Hongwu to the end of Qing Qianlong, 1.8% of the national total: Shen Dengmiao, Hu-Xiang Forum, 2000, no. 3, reposted on Aisixiang; the original source of the count is not given in the article 🟡 Another often-cited Zhao Liewen diary line, \u0026quot;greedy for plunder, rather disorderly in ranks, the troops of the central army who stayed in camp all went out to loot\u0026quot;: cited via Guo Tingyi, Outline of Modern Chinese History; date not checked 🟡 The figure in this piece is a schematic diagram drawn by program, not a historical source ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/xg36/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen I was small I heard an elder say one thing: when they opened Nanjing, they brought in foreign wealth.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe person who said it wasn't doing scholarship. It was said at a dinner table, under the eaves, in passing, and it meant: those big houses around our parts were built with money brought back from Nanjing. I have always remembered that sentence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet me put my cards on the table first: I lean toward believing it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"why-i-believe-it-someone-was-there\"\u003eWhy I believe it: someone was there\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eZhao Liewen was Zeng Guofan's staff adviser. On the twenty-third day of the sixth month of the third year of Tongzhi, that is 26 July 1864, he wrote a diary entry about Nanjing after the city fell. I have read the original, word by word.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Opening Nanjing Brought in Foreign Wealth: No Need to Settle the Sum, Look at Where It Went"},{"content":"A question from the internet There is a question asked online again and again: why does Zhuangzi rank so low in Daoism?\nOne netizen set out four classical passages: Xunzi says Zhuangzi \u0026quot;is blinded by Heaven and does not know man\u0026quot;; in the \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot; chapter of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi and Laozi are written separately; Wang Xizhi, in the Orchid Pavilion Preface, scolds \u0026quot;making life and death one, equating the long-lived and the short-lived\u0026quot; as empty and false; and Ge Hong, in the Baopuzi, criticizes Zhuangzi.\nIf all four are real, this is not just a matter of \u0026quot;low rank.\u0026quot; Along the road, several weighty groups of people were all against Zhuangzi.\nFirst, what does \u0026quot;low\u0026quot; mean? But first the word \u0026quot;low\u0026quot; needs a question.\nIn the first year of Tianbao under Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (742), the court posthumously honored Zhuangzi as the \u0026quot;True Man of Nanhua,\u0026quot; and his book was renamed the True Scripture of Nanhua. Wenzi (True Man of Tongxuan), Liezi (True Man of Chongxu) and Gengsangzi (True Man of Dongxu) were honored at the same time. This is according to the Old Book of Tang and the Tang huiyao; I read it at second hand and did not read the originals.\nPortrait of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, Li Longji, painted in the Ming.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, anonymous, public domain\nSo officially he was not looked down on. He had a title.\nThen \u0026quot;low\u0026quot; compared with whom? With Laozi. Daoism reveres Laozi as the Supreme Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun), a god within the religion, and the Li imperial house of Tang even claimed Laozi as an ancestor. Zhuangzi is a \u0026quot;true man,\u0026quot; in the rank behind, among the disciples of this great god. The religion honors him, but he is not its founder.\nThat is one way to see \u0026quot;rank.\u0026quot; The other, below, matters more.\nFour passages First, Xunzi. In \u0026quot;Dispelling Blindness\u0026quot; in the Xunzi, Xunzi goes down the schools of the Warring States one by one:\nMozi was blinded by utility and did not know refinement. Songzi was blinded by desire and did not know attainment. Shen Dao was blinded by law and did not know worth. Shen Buhai was blinded by position and did not know knowledge. Huizi was blinded by words and did not know reality. Zhuangzi was blinded by Heaven and did not know man. (my translation)\nNote that this is not abuse aimed at Zhuangzi alone; it is a list. Each school is \u0026quot;blinded\u0026quot; at one end: Mozi sees only use, Shen Dao only law, Shen Buhai only power, Huizi only words, Zhuangzi only Heaven. Xunzi's point is that all these are \u0026quot;one corner\u0026quot; of the Way: \u0026quot;the Way embodies the constant and exhausts all change; one corner is not enough to hold it up.\u0026quot;\nSo what Xunzi criticizes in Zhuangzi is \u0026quot;seeing only Heaven, not man.\u0026quot;\nSecond, the \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot; chapter of the Zhuangzi. This is the last chapter, a general review of the schools of the day. It puts Guan Yin and Lao Dan together in one passage:\nGuan Yin and Lao Dan, ah, the broad and great True Men of old! (my translation)\nThen it gives Zhuang Zhou a separate passage, opening with the same phrase:\nThe arts of the Way of old that lie in this: Zhuang Zhou heard of their ways and delighted in them. (my translation)\nBoth passages use \u0026quot;heard of their ways and delighted in them.\u0026quot; That is, in the way \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot; is written, Guan Yin and Lao Dan are one line and Zhuang Zhou another, each \u0026quot;hearing the wind and delighting\u0026quot; in a different side of the ancient art of the Way. This is the basis for the netizen's remark that \u0026quot;Zhuangzi and Laozi are not the same line.\u0026quot; But it is only one reading: whether the \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot; chapter was written by Zhuangzi himself is disputed among scholars, and treating it as \u0026quot;Zhuangzi's own account\u0026quot; goes too far.\nThird, Wang Xizhi. In 353, the ninth year of Yonghe, Wang Xizhi gathered with friends at the Orchid Pavilion in Kuaiji and wrote the Orchid Pavilion Preface. Near its end he wrote:\nThe ancients said: \u0026quot;Life and death are great matters.\u0026quot; How painful! Each time I read why people of old were moved, it is like matching two halves of a tally; I never fail to sigh and grieve over the text, and cannot put it into words in my heart. I know that making life and death one is empty talk, and that equating the long-lived and the short-lived is reckless invention. (my translation)\n\u0026quot;Making life and death one\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;equating the long-lived and the short-lived\u0026quot; are Zhuangzi's words. Wang Xizhi says: when I read of others' grief before death, each time I cannot help being sad. So I know that treating life and death as one thing, and a long life and an early death as the same, is empty talk, reckless invention.\nFourth, Ge Hong. Ge Hong was a Daoist scholar of the Eastern Jin who wrote the Baopuzi, on immortals and nurturing life. He speaks of Zhuangzi in three places, with quite different intent.\nIn the Inner Chapters, scroll 8, he puts Wenzi, Zhuangzi and Guan Yin's followers together and says that though their writings \u0026quot;take Huang-Lao as their ancestors and the dark and void as their model,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;when you draw out their main points, there are no ultimate words,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;some even equate life and death, saying that to be alive is no different from forced labor and to die is rest; from the immortals they are a hundred billion li away; are they worth lingering over?\u0026quot; Yet right after, he says their fables and parables \u0026quot;still have something to pick up.\u0026quot;\nIn the Inner Chapters, scroll 14, he is blunter: \u0026quot;Common people see Zhuang Zhou's parable of the great dream and vie to spread the theory of equating life and death. ... Laozi made long life his business, while Zhuang Zhou prized wagging his tail in the mud, refusing to be a tortoise caught in a net or an ox draped in embroidery, and when hungry begged grain from the River Lord; from this we know he could not equate life and death.\u0026quot; The meaning: Zhuang Zhou himself would rather be a tortoise wagging its tail in the mud than a sacrificial ox honored; when hungry he went to borrow grain. So he did not really regard life and death as one.\nIn the Outer Chapters, scroll 43, he speaks up for Zhuangzi: \u0026quot;Zhuang Zhou's book takes life and death as one, yet he also feared the sacrificial ox, admired the tortoise, and begged grain to relieve hunger. To throw away his writing because what he says is not pure is like curing a cataract by gouging out the eye, treating damp-rheumatism by cutting off the foot, worrying about weeds by cutting down the grain, or hating a dead branch and felling the tree.\u0026quot; Do not throw away the whole book because he is not consistent.\nLu Zhi, \u0026quot;Zhuang Zhou Dreams of a Butterfly\u0026quot; (Ming dynasty).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Lu Zhi, public domain\nThree people, one question Put the three passages side by side and one thing stands out:\nXunzi is a Confucian and wants ritual, human affairs. Wang Xizhi is a gentleman scholar and wants feeling for the dead. Ge Hong is a Daoist seeker of immortality and wants long life. They stand in very different places, but all three are against \u0026quot;equating life and death.\u0026quot;\nThis is no coincidence. Each of these communities, Confucian, scholarly, immortality-seeking, has one thing it must answer: when a person dies, what then?\nThe Confucian answer is funeral rites and ancestor worship: be careful at the end, remember the distant past. Wang Xizhi's answer is \u0026quot;pain\u0026quot;: he wants to grieve in earnest. The immortality-seekers' answer is: find a way not to die, or to die less.\nAnd what is Zhuangzi's answer? There is a famous passage in the \u0026quot;Perfect Happiness\u0026quot; chapter:\nWhen Zhuangzi's wife died, Huizi went to offer condolences, and found Zhuangzi squatting with legs spread, drumming on a basin and singing. (my translation)\nHuizi found it outrageous. Zhuangzi said: when she had just died, how could I not grieve? But I thought it over: originally she had no life, no form, no breath; later breath gathered into form, form became life, and now it has become death again, like spring, summer, autumn and winter going round. If I were still sobbing there, I would show I don't understand fate, so I stopped crying.\nReading this, I find it moving, and also lonely. It is one person's way of coping when the person closest to him dies. It can console one person, but cannot hold a funeral for a crowd.\nTo hold a funeral you need a ritual everyone recognizes: what to weep, what to wear, what to say, how many days, how to bury. Zhuangzi's way each person has to realize alone; if they cannot, it cannot be received.\nSo my reading is: Zhuangzi was not \u0026quot;demoted\u0026quot;; he was not usable. A religion that means to hold a group of people together must have at its core an answer to death and a shared ritual. Zhuangzi cannot give that. What he gives is freedom.\nTurning it around I'll pick some faults in my own account.\nFirst, \u0026quot;low\u0026quot; is only inside the religion. Among scholars, writers and artists, Zhuangzi's weight has never been low: Wei-Jin \u0026quot;dark learning,\u0026quot; the tradition of free roaming, generation after generation of painters and poets. Lu Zhi's Zhuang Zhou Dreams of a Butterfly was painted by a Ming man. In the \u0026quot;religion\u0026quot; he is put in the second row; in the spirit of \u0026quot;people\u0026quot; he is often first.\nSecond, Ge Hong is only one man. He represents the immortality-seekers, not the whole of Daoism. He also said \u0026quot;fables and parables still have something to pick up,\u0026quot; and defended Zhuangzi in the Outer Chapters. How Daoism after the Song, such as Quanzhen, read Zhuangzi, I have not checked. That is a gap.\nThird, whether \u0026quot;equating life and death\u0026quot; is really Zhuangzi's own meaning is also disputed. Ge Hong himself says Zhuang Zhou \u0026quot;prized wagging his tail in the mud,\u0026quot; that is, he was afraid of dying. If so, what Zhuangzi wanted may not be \u0026quot;death is not worth grieving\u0026quot; but \u0026quot;don't let death frighten the soul out of you.\u0026quot; The two are far apart.\nWhat I think These passages give my plan a very concrete reminder.\nWhat I want is a body of culture and belief that everyone recognizes: ancestor veneration, ritual, dress, festivals, everyday life. The core of this is an answer to death: every Qingming, standing before the ancestors' graves, that moment is a person and a whole family together turning death into something that can be \u0026quot;passed through.\u0026quot; This is Confucian funeral rite and ancestor worship, a thousand years old, and it is what I want to keep.\nI also like Zhuangzi very much, and Laozi's \u0026quot;in pursuing the Way, lose a little each day.\u0026quot; For one person, tired, to read now and then, it is good. But what I want is not one person's comfort but something a group can do together. So in the core I imagine, Zhuangzi would be a reader, not a ritual.\nZhuangzi's \u0026quot;drumming on the basin and singing\u0026quot; also makes my heart ache a little. That man, before his wife's coffin, alone, worked out one thing. I am willing to believe he wept. But we cannot take \u0026quot;one person working it out\u0026quot; as the answer to \u0026quot;what do we all do together.\u0026quot;\nCould a society with only Zhuangzi hold a funeral?\nReferences\nXunzi, \u0026quot;Dispelling Blindness\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;Mozi was blinded by utility... Zhuangzi was blinded by Heaven and did not know man.... The Way embodies the constant and exhausts all change; one corner is not enough to hold it up,\u0026quot; Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢 Zhuangzi, \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;Guan Yin and Lao Dan, ah, the broad and great True Men of old\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Zhuang Zhou heard of their ways and delighted in them,\u0026quot; Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢; authorship and nature of \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot;: disputed among scholars 🟡 Zhuangzi, \u0026quot;Perfect Happiness\u0026quot;: \u0026quot;When Zhuangzi's wife died, Huizi went to offer condolences, and found Zhuangzi squatting with legs spread, drumming on a basin and singing,\u0026quot; via Wikisource Zhuangzi yi, scroll 5, search excerpt 🟡 (editions vary) Wang Xizhi, Orchid Pavilion Preface (353), Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢 Ge Hong, Baopuzi, Inner Chapters scrolls 8 and 14, Outer Chapters scroll 43 (also, in Outer Chapters scroll 42, a guest's question: \u0026quot;Boyang puts the Way and Virtue first, Zhuang Zhou puts 'Free and Easy Wandering' at the head of his book\u0026quot;), Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢 Emperor Xuanzong of Tang's posthumous title for Zhuangzi, \u0026quot;True Man of Nanhua,\u0026quot; in the first year of Tianbao (742): Old Book of Tang, annals of Xuanzong, and Tang huiyao, via online retellings 🟡; Daoism's reverence of Laozi as Supreme Lord Lao: common account 🟡 Online discussion on the topic (netizens' views, a lead only) For comparison: in Yigui, the piece on \u0026quot;resting in peace in the earth,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Where Religions Win: Not in Doctrine but in a Pot of Food\u0026quot;; the author's topic notes (what is missing is \u0026quot;the afterlife\u0026quot;: the hole Buddhism filled) Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e118/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-question-from-the-internet\"\u003eA question from the internet\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a question asked online again and again: why does Zhuangzi rank so low in Daoism?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne netizen set out four classical passages: Xunzi says Zhuangzi \u0026quot;is blinded by Heaven and does not know man\u0026quot;; in the \u0026quot;Tianxia\u0026quot; chapter of the \u003cem\u003eZhuangzi\u003c/em\u003e, Zhuangzi and Laozi are written separately; Wang Xizhi, in the \u003cem\u003eOrchid Pavilion Preface\u003c/em\u003e, scolds \u0026quot;making life and death one, equating the long-lived and the short-lived\u0026quot; as empty and false; and Ge Hong, in the \u003cem\u003eBaopuzi\u003c/em\u003e, criticizes Zhuangzi.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf all four are real, this is not just a matter of \u0026quot;low rank.\u0026quot; Along the road, several weighty groups of people were all against Zhuangzi.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"first-what-does-low-mean\"\u003eFirst, what does \u0026quot;low\u0026quot; mean?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut first the word \u0026quot;low\u0026quot; needs a question.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Is Zhuangzi Really Ranked Low in Daoism?"},{"content":"A question from the internet Someone asked online: some people say that under the Jurchen-ruled Jin the Han lived better than under the Song. Do you believe it?\nOne top-ranked answer got a lot of agreement. The poster began with a woman from Shandong, Yang Miaozhen, who wielded the \u0026quot;pear-blossom spear,\u0026quot; and who is mentioned by Qi Jiguang in his Jixiao xinshu. Then a scene: around 1220, on the roads of Shandong and northern Jiangsu, Jurchen and Khitan families who had been wealthy under the Jin, dragging their households south, were surrounded by Red Coat troops and killed, \u0026quot;old and young alike, to the last.\u0026quot; Yuan Haowen saw this with his own eyes, the poster said, and that is why he wrote \u0026quot;slaughtered to the last, not a single mouth left.\u0026quot;\nThe reply amounts to: you say the Han lived well under the Jin? Look at what the Han did when they rose up.\nHalf of this is true. The other half needs checking.\nFirst, the \u0026quot;lived well\u0026quot; side This claim did not come from nowhere.\nIn the History of the Jin, Emperor Shizong (r. 1161–1189) is much praised. The historians appended a comment to his annals:\nFive years after he took the throne, north and south made peace and the people were left to rest. ... In those days the officials kept to their posts, high and low lived in harmony, every household had enough and the granaries had surplus. The Board of Punishments sentenced to death in a year perhaps seventeen, perhaps twenty, and he was called \u0026quot;Little Yao and Shun.\u0026quot; That was the proof. (my translation)\n\u0026quot;Seventeen or twenty death sentences in a year\u0026quot; is a vivid line. But note: this is a historians' eulogy, and the History of the Jin was compiled under the Yuan. The ones saying kind things were looking back decades later.\nThe other side, in the same History of the Jin But the same history has other things.\nFirst, corvée. When Shizong's court debated how to assign labor service by property, one minister said: \u0026quot;Apart from serving their own meng'an and mouke, the Jurchen have no labor service.\u0026quot; (Treatise on Food and Goods I) The meng'an and mouke were the Jurchen military and household units. In other words: apart from serving their own units, the Jurchen owed no other service. Corvée was done by the Han.\nSecond, land seizure. When the Jin moved Jurchen into the Central Plain, \u0026quot;meng'an and mouke living mixed among the Han lands,\u0026quot; they had to be given land. The method was called \u0026quot;land measuring,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;land allotting,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;stripping people's fields.\u0026quot; Shizong himself said a few things about it while on the throne:\nI hear that the land-measuring was done most improperly. For things like the Empress's estates or the Crown Prince's offices, merely by being named they were taken as public land, and whatever deeds the people held were ignored. (my translation)\n(Treatise on Food and Goods II) There is another thing he said to his chancellors: the people's fields stripped in Shandong had been given to Jurchen military-farm households; if there was land left over, it should go back to the people. And to the minister Liang Su he said: \u0026quot;Though these are called people's lands, none has clear proof; what is wrong with measuring them as public land?\u0026quot; These sayings are from one man. He felt it was improper, and he also felt there was nothing wrong with it.\nThe Jin, Southern Song and Western Xia around 1141. Shandong lies in the east of the Jin, north of the Huai River.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Albert Herrmann \u0026amp; Georg Westermann, public domain\nThird, the officials themselves knew the resentment. In 1215 (the third year of Zhenyou), the court wanted to measure land in Henan to settle military families moving south. The censor Liu Yuangui submitted a memorial:\nEarlier, in Hebei and Shandong, this was done, and the people's graves, wells and hearths all became the army's; grievance and lawsuits have not ended to this day. If it is done again, we shall lose the hearts of the people. (my translation)\nThe court listened and called off the measuring.\nI stayed on one line a long time: \u0026quot;the people's graves, wells and hearths all became the army's.\u0026quot; Graves, wells, stoves: all gone to someone else.\n1214, Linzi Now back to Yuan Haowen.\nIn 1214 the Mongols attacked from the north, and the Jin moved its capital from Zhongdu to Nanjing (Kaifeng). That year Shandong fell into disorder. Yuan Haowen later wrote a spirit-way inscription for a man named Wanyan Huaide, and the inscription describes exactly this year:\nIn the second year of Zhenyou, his term was nearly up. But the central lands were at war and bandits filled the roads, linking up in bands of tens of thousands, taking towns and counties, and the government troops could not stop them. Their chiefs stood proudly under grand titles. They hated the cruelty of the land allotments and nursed a grudge against the \u0026quot;seed people,\u0026quot; and would not rest until they had killed them. In camps, in scattered homes, in lodgings where they had taken shelter, the rabble rose together to attack, tracing footprints, hunting shadows, sparing no effort; within two or three days, \u0026quot;slaughtered to the last, not a single mouth left.\u0026quot; They dug up graves and scattered the bones; it was like this everywhere. (my translation)\nIn plain words: at the time \u0026quot;bandits\u0026quot; were everywhere, answering each other, tens of thousands strong; towns fell one after another and the army could not control them. Their leaders were brazen, and what they hated was the cruelty of \u0026quot;land allotment\u0026quot;; toward the \u0026quot;seed people,\u0026quot; meaning the Jurchen, they would not let one go, determined to kill them all. Whether in barracks, scattered homes, or staying in someone else's house, a crowd rose together, tracked them by their traces, and within two or three days \u0026quot;slaughtered to the last, not a single mouth left.\u0026quot; Even graves were dug up and bones thrown away.\nThat is where the line comes from. It is real, and worse than the reply said: they even dug up graves.\nBut three things differ from that reply:\nOne, time and place. It describes Shandong in 1214 (the inscription's subject was magistrate of Linzi), not northern Jiangsu around 1220.\nTwo, the words \u0026quot;Red Coats\u0026quot; do not appear. The inscription says \u0026quot;bandits\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;chiefs.\u0026quot; I linked it to the uprisings of Yang An'er and Liu Erzu in the History of the Jin because time and place match. The History of the Jin says that after Yang An'er and Liu Erzu were defeated, their remnants \u0026quot;kept regrouping, raiding wherever they were, all wearing red padded jackets to recognize one another, and were called the 'Red Jacket bandits.'\u0026quot; That identification is my inference.\nThree, the cause: the inscription says it itself, \u0026quot;they hated the cruelty of the land allotments.\u0026quot;\nA statue of Yuan Haowen before his tomb in Xinzhou, Shanxi.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Outlookxp, CC BY-SA 4.0\nSomething else in the same inscription What that reply did not quote are the lines that follow immediately:\nOnly the people of Linzi, moved by the magistrate's benevolence, regarded him as their own flesh and blood. They hid him by every means, some whole families, fathers and sons, willing to go to their deaths for it. Once people's minds were settled they did not waver, and the concealment grew only deeper. So it went for months. (my translation)\nThe magistrate, Wanyan Huaide, was a Jurchen imperial kinsman, assigned in 1213 to be magistrate of Linzi. The inscription says of him: \u0026quot;raised in comfort and wealth, yet he checked himself by law\u0026quot;: he did not drink, did not rage, was not petty, did not rule by the whip. Within days, high and low were \u0026quot;cheerful, as if in a single hall.\u0026quot;\nElsewhere the Jurchen were killed to the last. But the people of Linzi, \u0026quot;moved by the magistrate's benevolence, regarded him as their own flesh and blood,\u0026quot; and hid him, for months. Some were \u0026quot;whole families, fathers and sons, willing to go to their deaths\u0026quot;: father and son in one household willing to die to hide him.\nLater the commander Pusan Anzhen (the inscription also gives his title, imperial son-in-law) came east with troops, and only then did Wanyan Huaide come out of hiding to see him. He was granted office on the commander's authority but did not want to serve again; he moved south to Bozhou, and died in the twelfth month of 1221, aged sixty.\nA magistrate, in the midst of killing everywhere, protected with people's lives. Reading this I thought of the ordinary people swept in, who left no names. Nobody had ordered them to do it.\nThen came the suppression A story can't be told by half. On the Jin side, people were killing too.\nThe History of the Jin, in the biography of Pusan Anzhen, says that two years later, in 1216 (the fourth year of Zhenyou), he sent troops against Hao Ding, \u0026quot;won every battle, killed ninety thousand, and over thirty thousand surrendered.\u0026quot; That is the Jin's own battle report; the numbers can't be checked, and the biography does not separate rebels from others caught up. Next: \u0026quot;Hebei lay broken, with war following war,\u0026quot; and remnants of the Red Coats rose again under other names; the History of the Jin names a few, \u0026quot;roughly all followers of Li Quan, Guo Yongan and Shi Qing.\u0026quot;\nYang Miaozhen was Li Quan's wife. In the History of the Song, biography of Li Quan, she later said to her men: \u0026quot;Twenty years of the pear-blossom spear, no rival under heaven; now the tide has gone and I cannot hold.\u0026quot; Qi Jiguang, in the Jixiao xinshu, scroll 10, \u0026quot;General Remarks on the Long Spear,\u0026quot; writes: \u0026quot;The art of the long spear begins with the Yang family, called pear blossom, and all under heaven honor it,\u0026quot; and also cites \u0026quot;twenty years of the pear-blossom spear, no rival under heaven.\u0026quot;\nMap of the Mongol–Jin war (1211–1234).　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Megzer, CC0\nSo, \u0026quot;did they live well\u0026quot;? Back to the question: did the Han under the Jin live better than under the Song?\nI can't answer. For concrete reasons:\nFirst, there are no comparable numbers. I found no data that puts Jin Han and Southern Song commoners on the same scale. What I can find are a few lines of historians' eulogy, a few words from an emperor, a few officials' memorials, one inscription. Each is a fragment.\nSecond, \u0026quot;well\u0026quot; depends on who, which generation, which place. In the Dading years (Shizong), Hebei and Shandong were relatively calm and historians praised it as \u0026quot;Little Yao and Shun.\u0026quot; In the Zhenyou years the Mongols came, the Jin moved south, and land measuring, conscription and heavy levies piled up; in one night Shandong fell apart. One court, thirty years, two different pictures.\nThird, what can be seen is a process. At first, a system: Jurchen with light corvée, Han with heavy; land measured for the Jurchen, with graves, wells and hearths going to others. That was a matter of land and labor. Later, in a time of chaos, it turned into \u0026quot;nursing a grudge against the 'seed people,' and not resting until they were killed,\u0026quot; into ethnic bloodshed. In the inscription, \u0026quot;the cruelty of land allotment\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;seed people\u0026quot; are written side by side.\nI don't want to conclude from this that anyone is born a certain way. What can be seen is: first a line drawn by a system, and later, in chaos, people killed along that line.\nTurning it around I'll pick some faults in my own account.\nOne, Yuan Haowen wrote an inscription praising a Jurchen magistrate. Such an inscription naturally picks the good things, and the story of \u0026quot;only the people of Linzi\u0026quot; would be made to stand out. I have no second source to confirm it.\nTwo, I did not find the scene of \u0026quot;northern Jiangsu around 1220.\u0026quot; That reply tells it vividly, but I found no first-hand record. That doesn't mean it didn't happen; what I read is 1214 Linzi.\nThree, the Han also had paths upward under the Jin. The Jin had examinations, and Han could be officials. I have no figures on this, so this piece doesn't cover it. The corvée and land seizure above are only one side of the Jin.\nWhat I think Reading it through, two images weigh on me most.\nOne is the graves being dug up. \u0026quot;They dug up graves and scattered the bones.\u0026quot; Whoever's graves they were, to dig them up is to pull out the root of a family. I do not want to find an excuse for that act on any side.\nThe other is Linzi. In the killing all around, a Jurchen magistrate was hidden for months by Han villagers at the cost of their lives. They had read no theory of nations; they simply felt this was a \u0026quot;benevolent\u0026quot; man, \u0026quot;regarded as their own flesh and blood.\u0026quot;\nI keep saying that what I want is not the identity of one nation but a culture and a belief that everyone shares. These two images make me believe it more: what lets a person live is not which \u0026quot;seed\u0026quot; he belongs to, but what kind of person others recognize him to be.\nSo what I care about more is this: in a society, are there some things that everyone recognizes, whoever you are? If there are, then in those months in Linzi a few more people will live; if there are not, then who is Han and who is Jurchen, at the edge of the blade, makes no difference.\nIf you were a household in Linzi that year, would you have opened the door?\nReferences\nYuan Haowen, \u0026quot;Spirit-way inscription for Wanyan, magistrate of Linzi,\u0026quot; Yishan ji, scroll 28 (second year of Zhenyou, 1214), Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢 History of the Jin, scroll 102, biography of Pusan Anzhen: \u0026quot;after the defeat of Yang An'er and Liu Erzu... all wearing red padded jackets to recognize one another, called 'Red Jacket bandits'\u0026quot;; \u0026quot;killed ninety thousand, over thirty thousand surrendered\u0026quot; (fourth year of Zhenyou), Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢 History of the Jin, scroll 47, Treatise on Food and Goods II: the land-measuring passages, Shizong's \u0026quot;I hear that the land-measuring was done most improperly,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;the stripped people's fields in Shandong had been given to Jurchen military-farm households\u0026quot;; the memorial of Censor Liu Yuangui, third year of Zhenyou; Wikisource, checked word for word 🟢 History of the Jin, scroll 46, Treatise on Food and Goods I: \u0026quot;Apart from serving their own meng'an and mouke, the Jurchen have no labor service,\u0026quot; Wikisource 🟢 History of the Jin, scroll 8, Annals of Shizong II, comment: \u0026quot;called 'Little Yao and Shun,'\u0026quot; Wikisource 🟢 History of the Jin, scroll 44, Treatise on the Military: meng'an and mouke living mixed among Han lands, Wikisource 🟢 Qi Jiguang, Jixiao xinshu, scroll 10, \u0026quot;General Remarks on the Long Spear,\u0026quot; Wikisource 🟢; History of the Song, scroll 477, biography of Li Quan II (Yang: \u0026quot;twenty years of the pear-blossom spear, no rival under heaven\u0026quot;), Wikisource 🟢; on the lives of Yang Miaozhen and Li Quan: History of the Song, scrolls 476–477, and the Xu zizhi tongjian, fragments only 🟡 Online discussion on the topic (netizens' views, a lead only) Not found: comparable data on living standards of the Jin Han and the Southern Song commoners; a first-hand record of Red Coats killing Jurchen in northern Jiangsu around 1220 For comparison: the author's check notes (privilege and ethnic consciousness); in Yigui, \u0026quot;The World Calls Us by Other Names, and None of Them Is 'Han'\u0026quot;; in Neighbours' Heavens, \u0026quot;After the Queue Is Cut, What Do We Wear?\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Six Similar Exam Papers\u0026quot; (how a system draws ethnic lines) Image credits are in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e119/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-question-from-the-internet\"\u003eA question from the internet\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSomeone asked online: some people say that under the Jurchen-ruled Jin the Han lived better than under the Song. Do you believe it?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne top-ranked answer got a lot of agreement. The poster began with a woman from Shandong, Yang Miaozhen, who wielded the \u0026quot;pear-blossom spear,\u0026quot; and who is mentioned by Qi Jiguang in his \u003cem\u003eJixiao xinshu\u003c/em\u003e. Then a scene: around 1220, on the roads of Shandong and northern Jiangsu, Jurchen and Khitan families who had been wealthy under the Jin, dragging their households south, were surrounded by Red Coat troops and killed, \u0026quot;old and young alike, to the last.\u0026quot; Yuan Haowen saw this with his own eyes, the poster said, and that is why he wrote \u0026quot;slaughtered to the last, not a single mouth left.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Did the Han Under the Jin Live Better Than Under the Song?"},{"content":"1. An answer that pulls away The usual way of asking is: both are in Southeast Asia, Vietnam counts as part of the Chinese-character sphere, so how come Thailand doesn't?\nFirst, one person's answer online, which probably won't please many people. He says the Han are in fact two peoples, north and south; that the northern half was \u0026quot;barbarised\u0026quot;; that the southern Han and the Tai were originally one family; and that he himself feels nothing for Chinese culture and believes in Theravada Buddhism.\nI will not check the blood-lines in this kind of talk, and I will not use it as material. A person saying he feels nothing for a culture is his own business. It reminded me of a word: atomisation. Some people feel a ditch between themselves and a very large \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;; that ditch is real, it just need not be measured by \u0026quot;two peoples\u0026quot;. This one I note down as a voice, and I do not argue.\nAnother person online puts it more plainly, and quite a few agree: the Tai split off from the Hundred Yue of the south, moved west and south, and settled under the influence of the Khmer empire; their script was made on the model of Khmer, their Buddhism came from the Khmer and India; the Central Plain, behind Yunnan and Burma, had only local influence.\nThis one is broadly right, with two things to change; I say them as I go.\n2. First take the \u0026quot;sphere\u0026quot; apart \u0026quot;The Chinese cultural sphere\u0026quot; is often the sum of several things: Chinese characters, the Confucian classics, Chinese Buddhism, and a system of law and examinations.\nMeasure Thailand with these four: the script is not Chinese, the classics are not the Four Books and Five Classics, the Buddhism is Theravada not Chinese, the civil service is not the examination system. None of the four.\nSo if \u0026quot;sphere\u0026quot; means \u0026quot;having all four\u0026quot;, Thailand really is not in it.\nBut I want to go on and ask: which sphere did it enter? And what is its relation with the Han?\n3. Where they came from The Tai speak languages of the Tai–Kadai family. In the piece on the Thai, Lao, Zhuang and Dai I said that this family belongs to southern China.\nWhere was the homeland? For a long time some said it was Nanzhao in Yunnan. In 1964 the American scholar Frederick Mote wrote an article saying it could not be. In 1966 Gedney studied the Tai dialects of southern Guangxi and placed the homeland of Proto-Tai around the Guangxi–Vietnam border. Later some, using geographic methods, reached a result that also falls in Guangxi and Guizhou.\nAnd when did they go? A study published in 2014 by the Thai scholar Pittayawat Pittayaporn, reasoning from several layers of Chinese loanwords in Proto-Southwestern Tai, puts the branch that went southwest into mainland Southeast Asia at around the eighth to the tenth century.\nWhat is interesting is that the deepest layer of Thai already has Chinese in it. The words were borrowed in Guangxi, before the language set out. Some of them are still in use in Bangkok.\nIn 1253 the Mongols destroyed Dali, often given as the reason for another wave of southward migration; but that came later.\n4. Where they settled When the Tai went south to the Chao Phraya basin, the place was not empty.\nLavo (today's Lopburi) in the middle and lower Chao Phraya was first a Mon place; from the tenth century Khmer power came in; inscriptions say that under Suryavarman I it was brought into the administration of the Khmer empire.\nThe Mon and the Khmer already had script, already had the Buddha, already had the rites of kings. The Tai were latecomers.\nThe name \u0026quot;Siam\u0026quot; is found in Old Khmer inscriptions as early as the seventh century, written syam; its meaning is uncertain, and it appears often in lists of slaves; scholars suppose it was the name of a place in the lower valley. On the gallery of Angkor Wat there is a relief of a marching army labelled \u0026quot;Syam\u0026quot; (Syam Kuk); most scholars take it to refer to the later Tai. Others caution that whether it is a place name or an ethnic name is not certain.\nWhat the Chinese knew were two: Xian (Siam), and Luohu (Lavo). Under the Yuan dynasty both sides had contacts. Later the two merged into one, the Ayutthaya kingdom founded in the mid-fourteenth century, which the Chinese called \u0026quot;Xianluohu\u0026quot; and then shortened to \u0026quot;Xianluo\u0026quot;.\nSo the word \u0026quot;Siam\u0026quot; is half the Chinese name and half the earlier Khmer name.\n\u0026quot;Syam\u0026quot; (Syam Kuk) soldiers on a relief in the gallery of Angkor Wat. Most scholars read them as forerunners of the later Tai; some think the meaning is uncertain.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0\n5. The script How did the Thai script come about?\nThe traditional account: in 1283 King Ram Khamhaeng of Sukhothai created the Thai script. There is a stele dated 1292, kept in the National Museum in Bangkok, the earliest \u0026quot;complete\u0026quot; text in Thai.\nThis stele has been argued over for decades. In 1987 the American scholar Vickery published an article asking whether it was \u0026quot;the Piltdown skull of Southeast Asian history\u0026quot; (the Piltdown skull being a famous forgery in the history of science); later an art historian held that King Mongkut (Rama IV) had forged it; in 1990 an electron-microscope analysis said its age matched four other Sukhothai steles; the argument has no settlement to this day. There is also a stele at Wat Bang Sanuk in Phrae, and some think the Thai script could go back to 1219.\nWhat is interesting is that, whichever dynasty the stele belongs to, both schools accept that this script was adapted from a cursive form of Old Khmer. In adapting, some letters were simplified, new ones added, and tone marks added.\nThe Ram Khamhaeng stele in the National Museum, Bangkok, bearing the date 1292. Scholars still dispute whether it is a thirteenth-century object.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Michael Gunther, CC BY-SA 4.0\nThink of the scene: a group of people who spoke their own language, settled in someone else's place, saw someone else's script, found it beautiful, and wanted to use it to write down their own speech. They did not copy it; they changed it, and added marks, because their speech had tones.\n6. The Buddha, and the king How did Buddhism come?\nIn the thirteenth century the king of Sukhothai invited a group of monks. They came from Nakhon Si Thammarat in the south of the peninsula, belonging to a lineage called Lankavamsa, \u0026quot;the Ceylon line\u0026quot;, which was Theravada. The king gave the leading elder the title of supreme patriarch. Among later Sukhothai kings was Lithai, who read more than thirty Pali scriptures and treatises and wrote the Traibhumikatha (\u0026quot;Three Worlds\u0026quot;), spoken of as the first \u0026quot;scholarly\u0026quot; work in Thai history.\nNote: this line runs from Ceylon, through the peninsula, to Sukhothai. It did not come from Angkor. Angkor at that time was mainly Hindu and Mahayana, and turned to Theravada only later.\nWat Mahathat in Sukhothai, the largest temple in the old city. In the second half of the thirteenth century Sukhothai received a Theravada sangha of the Ceylon line.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Gary Todd, Public domain\nAnd the king? After Ayutthaya rose it took Angkor three times: 1369, 1388 or 1389, and 1431. One account says that Ayutthaya brought back a group of Khmer court talents. From the Khmer the kings of Ayutthaya learned court ritual, the idea that \u0026quot;the king is a god\u0026quot;, and perhaps also court dance. A study from Chulalongkorn University, comparing royal language, finds that the royal vocabulary of Sukhothai and early Ayutthaya was influenced in form and word-building by the royal vocabulary of Angkor-period Khmer.\nSo the script came from the Khmer, the Buddha from Ceylon, the court learned from Angkor, and of Chinese characters, the Four Books, Chinese Buddhism and the examinations there was not one. That is the gist of what that person said, and it is right. What needs changing is the Buddhism.\n7. But the Chinese were always there If the story stopped here, you would get a conclusion: Thailand and China have no connection.\nBut that is not so.\nIn 1371 an envoy from Ayutthaya came with an envoy of the Ming to Nanjing, bringing trained elephants, a six-legged turtle and some local products. This was the first tribute mission; one account says that from 1369 to 1439 Ayutthaya sent 68 missions in all, more than any other tributary state. The figure comes from an article by Lockard (2010); I did not check it against the Ming Shilu.\nTribute was politics, and also business, and people came along on the ships. In 1767 Ayutthaya was destroyed by Burma, and the following year Taksin of Thonburi set Siam up again; his father was a Teochew man. All this was told in the piece on the assimilation of the Chinese of Thailand.\nSurnames. In 1913 King Rama VI ordered that everyone should have a surname. Many Chinese families changed theirs into a Thai shape. Thaksin's family took the surname Shinawatra in 1938, its first syllable \u0026quot;Shin\u0026quot; coming from \u0026quot;Qiu\u0026quot;; in the surname of Banharn (Banharn Silpa-archa), archa means \u0026quot;horse\u0026quot; in Thai, said to translate his Han surname \u0026quot;Ma\u0026quot; into Sanskrit. (From Wikipedia and Thai-language sources.)\nFestivals. Qingming, the Spring Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival have always been kept in Bangkok and Phuket. Phuket's Nine Emperor Gods festival, which the Hokkien call \u0026quot;the birthday of the Nine Emperor Gods\u0026quot;, falls in the ninth lunar month, with nine days of vegetarian eating. Legend has it that an opera troupe from Fujian caught malaria in the mining district and, remembering that they had not worshipped the Nine Emperor Gods, fasted and prayed; they recovered and have held it every year since. The date in the legend is \u0026quot;about two hundred years ago\u0026quot;. The date in the legend is usually put around 1825, by oral tradition with no documents; some say the sickness was cholera, others malaria.\nThe streets at night during Phuket's Nine Emperor Gods festival (the Vegetarian Festival). A festival brought by the Hokkien and Teochew, said to have been kept in southern Thailand for about two hundred years.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Phuket@photographer.net, CC BY 2.0\nAnd the numbers. The Chinese in Thailand are estimated at 10% to 14% of the population: a report of 2018 by a minority-rights organisation says about 10% to 12%, six to seven million; an estimate of 2012 says 11% to 14%, about 9.5 million. Among them the Teochew are the largest branch. But in the 2000 census, only some hundred thousand people still spoke Chinese at home; the figure is quoted differently in different places and I did not find the original table, and it measures language, not people.\nPut these two numbers side by side and you understand: they have not disappeared, they just no longer speak the language. Their \u0026quot;China\u0026quot; is not in the mouth; it is in the festivals, in the household shrine, and in the first syllable of a surname.\n8. A picture Set these years side by side:\nThe language took shape in Guangxi; the people went south between the eighth and tenth centuries; the script was adapted on the base of Khmer; the Buddha came from Ceylon in the thirteenth century; the court learned from Angkor in the fourteenth; and the Chinese, from 1371 on, have always been present.\nSo it is right to say that Thailand has not become a \u0026quot;country of the Chinese cultural sphere\u0026quot;; but its road has never left the Chinese. It walked another road, and the Han and the Chinese have always walked beside it.\n9. What I think now I have written many pieces asking the same question: what keeps East Asians together. In this Thai piece there is one place where I stopped for a long time.\nThailand has a very strong core of cohesion: a king, a kind of Buddhism, a script of its own. It is not Chinese characters and not Confucianism, yet it has taken in a community of several million descendants of the Han, about a tenth of the population. These people were not driven out, and did not become a separate \u0026quot;people\u0026quot;; they are Thais, and not a few of them, on Qingming, still go to sweep their ancestors' graves.\nI used to think that if the Chinese were to have a core of cohesion, it would probably have to be bound up with Chinese characters. Thailand made me think it over again. What I think now is that the script may not need to be one set, but the days can be one set. Qingming, the Spring Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival, the fasting in Phuket: people who do not write Chinese characters keep them too. The \u0026quot;shared cultural faith\u0026quot; I want may not require everyone to write it in the same script. I am not sure, which is why I call it \u0026quot;what I think now\u0026quot;.\nLooking at it the other way The hardest counter-arguments are three.\nFirst, the very word \u0026quot;sphere\u0026quot; is a view from outside. The Thais themselves do not necessarily feel that they \u0026quot;have not got in\u0026quot;. A country whose script it made itself, whose Buddha it chose itself, whose court is its own: why should it become a member of someone else's \u0026quot;sphere\u0026quot;? To a Thai, this question may be strange.\nSecond, tribute is not culture. The missions from 1371 (one account says 68) were rites and business between states, not the arrival of script and scriptures. They are in this piece to show that \u0026quot;this country has always been in contact with the Chinese\u0026quot;, not to say \u0026quot;so Thailand was influenced by Chinese culture\u0026quot;; that is another matter.\nThird, the festivals and surnames I cite were brought in by the Chinese community and do not necessarily belong to the Thais. Phuket's Nine Emperor Gods festival is a festival of the Hokkien and Teochew; whether a Thai Buddhist takes part is another matter. \u0026quot;Thailand has Qingming\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Thais keep Qingming\u0026quot; are not the same sentence.\nTo my Thai friends, and to friends whose forebears were Teochew and who now speak Thai.\nI want to say thank you first. You have kept a very large country with your own script, your own Buddha, your own king, and not been swallowed by anyone's script. Reading the story of your ancestors adding tone marks to someone else's script, I felt it was a very gentle and very decided way of doing things.\nTo those among you whose ancestors came from Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, Hainan: I do not want to ask why you do not speak Chinese. I want to ask another thing: on Qingming, where do you go? Does your child know why you go that day?\nA country whose script is its own, whose Buddha is its own, whose king is its own; a family whose ancestors' graves are in another country. Can these two things sit together quietly in one person?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 primary source or academic publisher's page; 🟡 secondary (encyclopaedia, media, lecture abstracts); unchecked items marked separately.\nOrigins of the Tai: F. Mote, \u0026quot;Problems of Thai Pre-history\u0026quot;, 1964 (🟡, academic paper at second hand); W. Gedney, \u0026quot;Linguistic Diversity Among Tai Dialects in Southern Kwangsi\u0026quot;, 1966 (🟡); P. Pittayaporn, \u0026quot;Layers of Chinese Loanwords in Proto-Southwestern Tai as Evidence for the Dating of the Spread of Southwestern Tai\u0026quot;, Manusya, 2014 (🟢, catalogue record; full text not obtained, the 8th–10th century dating is from the abstract). Lavo, Syam, Siam: the history of Lavo (🟡, Wikipedia and its mirrors, contradicting one another in many places; only \u0026quot;early Mon-dominated, Khmer from the 10th century, separate from the end of the 13th century\u0026quot; is taken); Xian and Luohu as two polities in Chinese sources, later called \u0026quot;Xianluohu\u0026quot; together (🟡, National University of Singapore Southeast Asia database); syam in 7th-century Old Khmer inscriptions and the \u0026quot;Syam Kuk\u0026quot; relief (🟡, abstract of Ferlus 2007, a Southeast Asian archaeology site; Ferlus in full not obtained). Script: the Sukhothai script from a cursive form of Old Khmer, the traditional dates of 1283 and 1292 (🟡, Wikipedia); the dispute over the Ram Khamhaeng stele: Vickery 1987, Piriya 1988, the 1990 electron-microscope analysis, Chamberlain 1991 collected volume (🟡, via Wikipedia; Vickery's article in JSS vol. 83, catalogue record 🟢, full text not read); the Wat Bang Sanuk stele (C.107) (🟡). Buddhism: the Lankavamsa line and Sukhothai (🟡, abstracts from Thai academic journals and a Buddhist library); Lithai's Traibhumikatha (🟡). Court: Ayutthaya's three attacks on Angkor (1369, 1388/9, 1431, 🟡, catalogue record of a paper by Briggs, Wikipedia); the idea of the \u0026quot;god-king\u0026quot;, court ritual, royal vocabulary (🟡, abstract of a Chulalongkorn University paper). With China: Ayutthaya's tribute to the Ming in 1371 (🟡, abstract of a Siam Society lecture; catalogue record of a paper by Ishii Yoneo); about 68 times (🟡, Lockard 2010, via the encyclopaedia). The Chinese: the Chinese in Thailand 10–12% (🟡, 2018 report of a minority-rights organisation); 11–14%, 2012 (🟡); the 2000 census 231,350 (🟡, Wikipedia); the surname law of 1913 and the Chinese origin of surnames (🟡, Wikipedia); the celebration of Qingming, the Spring Festival and Mid-Autumn in Bangkok and Phuket (🟡, Wikipedia); the Phuket Nine Emperor Gods festival (🟡, a Thai foundation, travel sites, mostly legend). The two answers from people online: material someone forwarded, treated only as a lead; the factual claims in them were checked one by one. For comparison: in this series, \u0026quot;The Most Successful Assimilation\u0026quot; (Thailand), \u0026quot;One Language Family, Each with Its Own Heaven\u0026quot; (Thai, Lao and Zhuang, Dai, Miao), \u0026quot;Temples, Native-Place Halls, Chambers of Commerce\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;One Hand of Cards, Six Ways to Play It\u0026quot;. Image sources are given in each caption ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/linju/d50/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"1-an-answer-that-pulls-away\"\u003e1. An answer that pulls away\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe usual way of asking is: both are in Southeast Asia, Vietnam counts as part of the Chinese-character sphere, so how come Thailand doesn't?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, one person's answer online, which probably won't please many people. He says the Han are in fact two peoples, north and south; that the northern half was \u0026quot;barbarised\u0026quot;; that the southern Han and the Tai were originally one family; and that he himself feels nothing for Chinese culture and believes in Theravada Buddhism.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI will not check the blood-lines in this kind of talk, and I will not use it as material. A person saying he feels nothing for a culture is his own business. It reminded me of a word: atomisation. Some people feel a ditch between themselves and a very large \u0026quot;us\u0026quot;; that ditch is real, it just need not be measured by \u0026quot;two peoples\u0026quot;. This one I note down as a voice, and I do not argue.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Does Thailand Count as Part of the \"Chinese Cultural Sphere\"? The Question Is Half Wrong"},{"content":"A question asked for many years On Zhihu there is a question, which people were already asking in 2025: in modern China, has Confucianism been knocked down or not?\nBy the time I read it, 549 answers were said to exist, 454 could be seen, and there were more than six hundred comments. It is a very typical question: whoever answers, it can be argued over.\nWhat I wanted to see was not who is right. I wanted to see what, with so many people, the quarrel is actually about.\n1. Two claims, one explanation First the broad picture.\nOne claim is \u0026quot;it was knocked down long ago\u0026quot;: the examinations are gone, the lineages were pulled down, the old schools stopped, nobody needs Confucian learning to be an official. One answer opens: after 1948, Confucianism was thoroughly knocked down.\nThe other is \u0026quot;it cannot be knocked down\u0026quot;: the highest-voted answer, 1,539 likes, says something else. It says that the May Fourth movement did knock Confucianism down; the problem is that ever since, whenever something bad happens, the Confucianism that is already gone gets dragged out and beaten again, and everything is Confucianism's fault. Go on like that and Confucianism becomes the one who \u0026quot;carries the cross for all Chinese,\u0026quot; and ends up as another kind of Christianity. The highest-voted comment under it (484 likes) says the same: shaping it into an all-present villain beyond cause and effect only makes its believers bounce back.\nThe two claims do not really conflict. One answer quotes Levenson, that Confucianism has \u0026quot;retired gloriously into the museum\u0026quot;; and then it goes on to ask: if it really is a specimen, why does it still have so much destructive power? Who is actually feeding today's ills?\nI think this is the most honest self-contradiction under the whole question. On the one hand people admit it has gone into the museum; on the other they blame it for corruption, involution, the low birth rate, young people not marrying. A thing in a museum does not stop people from marrying.\nOne answer says this is because \u0026quot;scolding a tradition that has already left the stage looks profound and spares you from touching anything real.\u0026quot; I am not sure it is right. But after reading I have a very concrete feeling: the question cannot be settled because Confucianism plays two roles here at once, one a thing that is already dead, one a thing that can be blamed for anything, and both sides use it.\n2. What was knocked down There is one answer I think is the clearest written under the whole question. The answerer says he trained in Western philosophy and now lives in Japan. He says the question cannot be answered whole; one must first divide it into layers.\nHe divides it into three:\nDao, the teaching itself. He says this layer really has fallen: classical learning is no longer knowledge, nobody gains status today by reading the Five Classics through, and those who study it sit in philosophy and history departments, in the same office as their colleagues who study Aristotle.\nQi, the apparatus that lets the teaching be passed down: primers, family instructions, village compacts, genealogies, the examinations, which ran from the time a child could speak to the day he passed. In the 31st year of Guangxu the examinations were abolished, the old schools stopped, family instructions were no longer printed, lineages broke up over the following decades, ancestral halls were put to other uses. He says this layer was torn down hardest, \u0026quot;this is the knocking down in the real sense,\u0026quot; because the Dao can stand without the Qi but cannot be passed on without it.\nXi, the habits one does without thinking: whether an elder entering the room is stood up for, who sits at the head, when a gift received is returned, whether aged parents are brought to live with you, why, when you lose face outside, the first thought is that you have let the family down. He says this layer was hardly touched. Pick anyone who says he does not believe in Confucianism at all: he cannot name any grounds, but he will do these things, and do them much as his neighbours do.\nSo his conclusion: it was not knocked down, it was cut off from supply. The habits still run; the machine that made the habits has stopped. The first generation lives by the rules its grandparents taught; the second by the remaining example of the first; the third by what?\n\u0026quot;It will not happen by being denounced and discredited; it will happen by no one teaching it, much more quietly and much more thoroughly.\u0026quot;\nI take this as the core of the piece, because it turns the argument over \u0026quot;down or not\u0026quot; into a question that can be counted: today, who is teaching the six-year-old child? What? How? Another answer touches the same place: \u0026quot;Look at all the majors in a university: is there a Confucian course?\u0026quot; Another says that most people have learned nothing of Confucianism beyond ten passages of the Analects, and in the rest of their courses it is criticized more than introduced; the way an official ideology is promoted is by examination — entrance exams, postgraduate exams, civil-service exams — which the ancients managed and today there is not one.\n3. No \u0026quot;pot\u0026quot; The second problem is organisation.\nOne answer says it bluntly: any ideology that lasts a long time needs organisational resources behind it. Behind Islam are mosques; behind Catholicism and Protestantism are churches. In the Iranian revolution the Pahlavi dynasty dared not touch the mosques, because they had their own finances and could sustain themselves; in the changes in Poland, the Catholic Church was behind them. By contrast, Confucianism played almost no role in the reform era, and of course could not: it was itself a clay Buddha then; and the Kong mansion and Confucian temple, without financial support, \u0026quot;could not last a day\u0026quot; (that sentence is the answerer's; I did not check it). So when people today go to the Confucian temple to sacrifice to Confucius, attend classes in \u0026quot;national learning,\u0026quot; or wear Han clothing, in his view \u0026quot;it is no different from going to a museum to look at bronzes or to the cinema to watch a history drama\u0026quot;: cultural experience and consumption, without the binding force of social norms.\nIn my previous piece (\u0026quot;Where Religions Win: Not in Doctrine but in a Pot of Food\u0026quot;) I wrote the same idea: religions win through organisation and welfare. This answer puts it from the opposite side: Confucianism loses because it has no such pot.\nHe ends rather coldly: unless the structure lacking independent organisation and finance changes, Confucianism in the modern age can only continue in two forms: borrowed as a cultural symbol and moral resource at the national level, or as a \u0026quot;historical doll\u0026quot; in mass culture, plus term-paper topics in academia.\nAnother answer adds a concrete detail: the Confucian institutes in universities are \u0026quot;in essence modelled on the Marxism institutes,\u0026quot; whose source in turn is the Christian system of \u0026quot;seminary plus professional missionaries\u0026quot;; China never had this, and the Confucian system has no \u0026quot;professional debaters.\u0026quot; (This is one netizen quoting another answer in a comment; I did not check it.)\nReading this I thought of a question in the opposite direction. If Confucianism is to have a pot of its own, what should it be? The lineage ancestral hall? The academy? Something else? In the answers I read nobody develops it seriously. Some answer \u0026quot;the revival of lineages in the south\u0026quot;; some say \u0026quot;the ancestral halls are slowly making a comeback\u0026quot; (the latter in an opposing tone); both are only a line or two.\n4. Whose Confucianism The third question is more basic: when people say \u0026quot;knocked down,\u0026quot; whose Confucianism is being knocked down?\nOne answer asks only one thing: \u0026quot;Which Confucianism do you want to knock down? Confucius's, the Confucianism of Cheng and Zhu, or the feudal ritual teaching of the Manchu period?\u0026quot;\nAnother answer writes at greater length, roughly: Mencius, Xunzi, Dong Zhongshu, Cheng and Zhu, all \u0026quot;borrowed Confucius's mouth to say their own words.\u0026quot; Whoever holds the final right to interpret \u0026quot;what Confucius actually said\u0026quot; can make a spirit of two thousand years ago stamp approval on anything today. Another is more specific: from Dong Zhongshu on, the court held the final right to interpret and revise Confucianism, and that is the source of the poison; today the Confucians have long since not risen, but this \u0026quot;evil dragon\u0026quot; is still there, only whether it wears a Confucian skin no longer matters.\nThere is a distinction here that I think is very important: is the enemy of Confucianism Confucianism, or the fact that \u0026quot;the final right of interpretation belongs to the court\u0026quot;? What many \u0026quot;anti-Confucian\u0026quot; answers oppose is the latter. What many \u0026quot;pro-Confucian\u0026quot; answers defend is the former. Both sides think they are talking about the same thing.\nThere is also a kind of answer that follows Qin Hui's \u0026quot;Confucian on the surface, Legalist within\u0026quot;: benevolence and righteousness on the outside, registered households, administrative control and extraction underneath. What was knocked down is the outside layer; the inside layer has not been settled. If this is right, then many things today should not be put on Confucianism, yet they are easily put on Confucianism, because the \u0026quot;surface\u0026quot; layer is the one that can be seen.\n5. Picked up to be \u0026quot;against\u0026quot; something The fourth problem is the one that made me most uncomfortable as I read.\nUnder this question there is an answer with 299 likes, of one sentence only: \u0026quot;Facing the expansion of Muslims, the flood of feminism, the loosening of immigration policy, if Confucianism is not picked up now, what are you waiting for?\u0026quot; Another comment says the shock feminism gave to Chinese men proves that \u0026quot;after anti-Confucianism comes firm Confucianism.\u0026quot; Some other answers speak of the Gongyang school's \u0026quot;great vengeance,\u0026quot; of \u0026quot;Confucian berserkers,\u0026quot; of the \u0026quot;distinction between Hua and Yi.\u0026quot;\nI do not say these claims are all wrong, nor that they have no right to say them. I want to say one observation: under this question, the Confucianism that is \u0026quot;picked up\u0026quot; is often defined as \u0026quot;against something.\u0026quot; Against feminism, against immigration, against foreign religions, against \u0026quot;worshipping foreign things.\u0026quot; Few answers speak of \u0026quot;what it can build.\u0026quot;\nFor me this is a considerable warning. What I set out to want, at the start, was a religion of a consistent culture and belief: ancestor veneration, ritual, festivals, a text in Chinese characters one can read; national identities can each continue to exist. If the \u0026quot;Confucian rebound\u0026quot; gathers mainly by being \u0026quot;against someone,\u0026quot; what gathers is a mood, not a pot. On this point the answerer's phrase \u0026quot;cultural mimicry\u0026quot; is unkind, but he is reminding of the same thing: a rebound online is not an organisation in reality.\n6. Two more gaps The fifth is responsibility and authority.\nSeveral answers say the same thing: the old order of \u0026quot;each in his place, rights matching duties\u0026quot; has been torn down, and the new one has not risen. One uses a video of a professor's family at dinner in 1948 to speak of \u0026quot;the old at the centre, the egg given to the grandson, no talking at table\u0026quot;; one says that the Ming emperor \u0026quot;guarding the gate of the state, the monarch dying for the altars of the state\u0026quot; has always been praised, but do people today have it; one says simply \u0026quot;we have built nothing now.\u0026quot; Many of these answers carry a gender-opposition tone, and that part I do not write; the data is in Shishi.\nI note only one thing: the most serious part of this claim is \u0026quot;the old was torn down and no new built.\u0026quot; That is something that can be checked.\nThe sixth is guarding against evil.\nThe answerer who divided Dao, Qi and Xi replied very seriously to the doubt in the question's supplement: \u0026quot;why does Confucianism say nothing about inhuman nature and leave people unguarded?\u0026quot; He concedes half: Confucian thinking on evil is a theory of lack, evil is the state of goodness being covered over (Mencius's Ox Mountain trees); but that is not a difference between China and the West, Augustine says it too. The other half: guarding was never the job of Confucianism; Xunzi, Han Fei and two thousand years of statute and penal law were built around \u0026quot;people cannot be relied on,\u0026quot; and the \u0026quot;Legalist within\u0026quot; half of \u0026quot;Confucian outside, Legalist inside\u0026quot; is that guarding.\nBut he admits one real flaw: Confucianism can speak of an individual's fall, but not of institutional wrongdoing. How can a great crowd of ordinary people, who keep the rules, are filial and good to their families, in good order jointly do great evil? In Confucian political imagination the source of evil is always a ruler without benevolence or an official without goodness. So its means of restraining power are left with remonstrance, public criticism and the historian's brush, and in two thousand years no institution grew. On this he says \u0026quot;I won't defend it.\u0026quot;\nI think this sentence is worth keeping, because it is one of the few flaws in the whole answer section pointed out by a defender of Confucianism himself.\n7. What I think First, to gather the answers under this question into four things: the teaching fell, the habits remain, the machine that passes them on has stopped; there is no organisation and finance of its own; \u0026quot;whose Confucianism\u0026quot; has not been settled by anyone; the rebound is often \u0026quot;against something.\u0026quot;\nI have a view on each of three of these.\n\u0026quot;Cut off from supply.\u0026quot; When I read the answer that divided Dao, Qi and Xi, I felt it had turned an argument that cannot end into a question that can be acted on: who is teaching the six-year-old, what, and how. Whether it fell or not does not matter; whether the supply is cut matters. I think it has been cut.\nFor the \u0026quot;Qi\u0026quot; layer, I think of the ancestral hall. The ancestral hall is a ready-made thing: it has a place, a surname, days of ancestor sacrifice, and in the past it also ran schools, charitable estates and settled disputes. One answer under this question says in passing that \u0026quot;ancestral halls are slowly making a comeback,\u0026quot; as a bad thing; I think this is exactly the place to look at seriously. In \u0026quot;Where Religions Win\u0026quot; I asked: can the ancestral hall be a neighbourhood committee plus an old people's home? This piece and that one are two ends of the same question: that one asks whether it can be a pot, this one asks whether it can hand the rules to the next generation. I do not have the answer yet; only the direction chosen: the ancestral hall, not the academy, not the national-learning class.\nThe rebound that is \u0026quot;against\u0026quot; something, I see as pressed out. My view is: the \u0026quot;against\u0026quot; in this rebound is, for the most part, pressed out by the Communist Party and the imported Marxist creed. Something pressed down for a hundred years and blamed for everything — when it can finally breathe, its first move is of course to turn \u0026quot;against\u0026quot; the one that pressed it. So I am not very willing to treat these people as something to be guarded against; they are more like people pressed too hard, looking for something they can say out loud. What matters is that this \u0026quot;against\u0026quot; slowly becomes \u0026quot;to build what\u0026quot;; otherwise what gathers is only a mood, not a pot.\nPut together, these three are my answer to this question: Confucianism was not knocked down, it was cut off from supply; to reconnect the supply, start from the ancestral hall; and the mood now online was pressed out, and can be taken in, but once taken in it must be given something it can build.\n","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e120/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-question-asked-for-many-years\"\u003eA question asked for many years\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn Zhihu there is a question, which people were already asking in 2025: in modern China, has Confucianism been knocked down or not?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy the time I read it, 549 answers were said to exist, 454 could be seen, and there were more than six hundred comments. It is a very typical question: whoever answers, it can be argued over.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat I wanted to see was not who is right. I wanted to see what, with so many people, the quarrel is actually about.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"1-two-claims-one-explanation\"\u003e1. Two claims, one explanation\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst the broad picture.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne claim is \u0026quot;it was knocked down long ago\u0026quot;: the examinations are gone, the lineages were pulled down, the old schools stopped, nobody needs Confucian learning to be an official. One answer opens: after 1948, Confucianism was thoroughly knocked down.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Confucian Predicament Today: Not Knocked Down, But Cut Off From Supply"},{"content":"A way of asking Now there is a kind of person who, around forty, starts thinking about going back to the old home village later. Grow some vegetables, keep a few chickens, know all the neighbors, fresh air, slow pace.\nAnd there is another kind who shakes their head at the thought. Village obligations are heavy; whose house went up, whose child did well on the exams, all of it gets compared. A saying one often hears: \u0026quot;laugh at those who have less, resent those who have more.\u0026quot; Add that the hospital is far and the children are not around.\nNeither is lying. They are speaking of the same thing, one of its good side, the other of its bad. This thing has a ready name: \u0026quot;Rural China.\u0026quot;\nThe question is: is it still there? And if not, when did it go, and why?\nWhat Fei Xiaotong wrote From the Soil (Xiangtu Zhongguo) is a work of Fei Xiaotong's from the 1940s. He taught \u0026quot;rural sociology\u0026quot; at the Southwest Associated University, wrote his thoughts from class into essays, published fourteen of them in Shiji pinglun, and in 1948 Shanghai's Guanchashe published them as a book.\nHis point: the base of China is \u0026quot;of the soil.\u0026quot; People live off farming; land does not move, so people do not move much; they live their lives in one place, and everyone in the village knows everyone, which is called an \u0026quot;acquaintance society.\u0026quot; Relations are like ripples when a stone is dropped in water, centered on oneself, spreading out ring by ring, which is the \u0026quot;differential mode of association.\u0026quot; What governs is not law but rules everyone recognizes, the words of elders, rites learned from childhood, which the book calls \u0026quot;rule by ritual.\u0026quot;\nOne thing first: this is a book about a \u0026quot;type,\u0026quot; not a statistical report. Scholars still argue over how exactly to define \u0026quot;rural\u0026quot; and the \u0026quot;differential mode.\u0026quot; We use it as a ruler: taking rural China as it was, and seeing how this ruler later grew shorter.\nSeveral threads cut Rural China did not collapse on a single day. It is like a cloth from which warp and weft are pulled one by one. I will lay out the timeline first, and speak of the heaviest thread separately afterward.\n1905: the channel cut On 2 September 1905 (the fourth day of the eighth month, Guangxu 31), the Qing court issued an edict: from 1906, provincial and metropolitan examinations would cease, as would the annual and subject examinations in the provinces. It had been proposed jointly by ministers including Yuan Shikai and Zhang Zhidong. The examination system, in place for about thirteen hundred years, ended there.\nPeople at the time felt it. Yan Fu said it was \u0026quot;the greatest act in our country in several thousand years\u0026quot;; a Shanxi juren named Liu Dapeng wrote worry in his diary. (I am relaying both; I have not read the originals.)\nWorried about what? The historian Luo Zhitian has a view: the examinations were not only for selecting officials; they had another function, \u0026quot;connecting high and low.\u0026quot; Traditional scholars spoke of \u0026quot;tilling and reading,\u0026quot; mostly studying in the countryside, going to the city to be officials after passing, and returning home when they retired or to mourn. People, information and money circulated between city and village this way.\nWhen the examinations were abolished, the channel was cut. Luo says the new-style schools turned education from \u0026quot;private\u0026quot; into \u0026quot;public,\u0026quot; it became harder for poor families' children to study, the number of rural scholars shrank, and literacy fell; the graduates of the new schools learned things villagers did not recognize and did not want to stay, so they went to the city.\nReading this I think of the old teachers who lost their place. They were not opposing anything; the thing they had learned all their lives became useless overnight.\nThe Qing court itself made this cut, driven by outside pressure. But the countryside did not scatter because of it. The gentry were still there, the lineage was still there, the ancestral halls were still there; they just could no longer go up, and could no longer come back.\nThe state begins to reach in Rural China originally had a middle layer: gentry, lineage heads, men of standing. They stood between state and peasants, doing the state's business on one side and speaking for the village on the other.\nThe historian Prasenjit Duara studied North China villages and said the state, to collect more tax and do more things, reached into the villages and the effect was the opposite: the old \u0026quot;protective\u0026quot; local leaders, unwilling to squeeze their neighbors for the state, withdrew one by one, and \u0026quot;profit-seeking\u0026quot; ones took their place, earning money by skimming. The further the state reached down, the more the countryside was squeezed, and the cultural bond between state and peasant snapped. He called this \u0026quot;state involution.\u0026quot; (I read Chinese commentary, not the original.)\nIn this step the gentry were slowly replaced. The next step was not replacing; it was tearing down.\nThe spark was class struggle Hunan, 1927 In 1927 Mao Zedong went back to Hunan and spent thirty-two days in the countryside, then wrote the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. One section is titled \u0026quot;Overthrow the local tyrants and evil gentry, all power to the peasant association.\u0026quot;\nI quote the most important lines from the original (the 1927 text, not the later revised version in the Selected Works):\nWith the gentry's power toppled, the peasant association became the only organ of authority, and \u0026quot;all power to the peasant association\u0026quot; was truly achieved. Even a petty quarrel between husband and wife must be settled at the peasant association. (my translation)\nIn the second period, we must establish the peasants' absolute power, we must not allow criticism of the peasant association, we must overthrow all gentry power, beat the gentry to the ground, even trample them underfoot. ... In a word, every village must create a brief reign of terror; without that we can never suppress the counter-revolutionaries in the villages, or overthrow gentry power. To straighten what is bent one must overcorrect; without overcorrecting one cannot straighten. (my translation)\nCompare Fei Xiaotong. In his book, when a \u0026quot;husband and wife quarrel\u0026quot; in the rural society, a man of prestige is invited to judge; \u0026quot;rule by ritual\u0026quot; relies on elders, on moral teaching, on rules everyone recognizes. This 1927 report describes how that position changed hands: the judge went from the gentry to the peasant association, and the source of the rules from \u0026quot;ritual everyone recognizes\u0026quot; to \u0026quot;must not allow criticism.\u0026quot;\nThis was 1927, twenty-two years before 1949.\n1950: giving everyone a class label In August 1950 the Government Administration Council issued the Decision on Defining Class Status in the Countryside. (The dates of adoption and promulgation are given as 4 August and 20 August in two accounts.) By land ownership and whether one worked the land oneself, rural people were sorted into landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant and hired laborer. In June of the same year the Land Reform Law said in Article 1 that the landlord class's feudal exploitative land ownership was abolished and peasant land ownership established; Article 3 said: \u0026quot;Confiscate the lands of ancestral halls, temples, monasteries, churches, schools and organizations in the countryside, and other public lands.\u0026quot;\nThe peasants who received land really received land, and I will come back to that below. But the matter of class status reclassified a village: from then on, who you were depended not only on which family you belonged to and what your generation was, but also on your class status.\nThe sociologists Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping, studying \u0026quot;speaking bitterness\u0026quot; in land reform, put it precisely: speaking bitterness takes the sufferings of peasants' daily lives and connects them to the \u0026quot;state\u0026quot; through the intermediate category of \u0026quot;class.\u0026quot; People thus became \u0026quot;members of a class,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;the people,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;the masses,\u0026quot; not \u0026quot;citizens\u0026quot; in the modern sense; their idea of the state was a \u0026quot;gratitude type.\u0026quot; (From the abstract; I have not read the original in History and Society, 2002.) Another scholar's commentary says speaking bitterness was \u0026quot;a psychological mobilization technique for drawing poor peasants into the rural class struggle planned by the Party.\u0026quot;\nThe original thread of rural society was centered on \u0026quot;self,\u0026quot; ring by ring outward: family, lineage, village, township. Speaking bitterness and class status pulled another thread outside those rings: whether you and he are of the same class.\n1962 to 1978: made the key link In September 1962, the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee proposed \u0026quot;never forget class struggle.\u0026quot; After that came the \u0026quot;Socialist Education Movement\u0026quot; (the Four Cleanups) in town and country, and later the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Only in December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, was it decided to stop using the slogan \u0026quot;take class struggle as the key link.\u0026quot;\nFrom 1962 to 1978 is sixteen years; from 1950, twenty-eight. About as long as a person takes to be born, grow up, marry and have children. The whole formative period of this generation was spent under that slogan.\nWhat is inside people Here I want to turn to the matter of hearts.\nI believe that the heaviest thing in all this is not how many ancestral halls were torn down or how much lineage land was confiscated, but that the line between person and person was cut: mutual guarding, mutual denunciation, more intense than in any other period of history. This is my judgment; nobody has measured it; one cannot compare headcounts; what can be compared is institutions.\nIn Qin, under Shang Yang's reforms, there was a \u0026quot;denounce wrongdoers\u0026quot; order: those who did not denounce were cut in half at the waist, those who denounced were rewarded as those who took enemy heads, and those who hid wrongdoers were punished as those who surrendered to the enemy. (Records of the Grand Historian, \u0026quot;Biography of Lord Shang,\u0026quot; via citation.) This is a famous case of making denunciation law, with heavy rewards and punishments.\nBut from Emperor Xuan of Han another thread joined. In the fourth year of Dijie (66 BCE), an edict said: \u0026quot;The closeness of father and son, the way of husband and wife, are nature.\u0026quot; From then on a son hiding his parents, a wife hiding her husband, a grandson hiding his grandparents were not prosecuted; parents, husband or grandparents hiding children, wife or grandchildren short of capital crimes were also not prosecuted. This is \u0026quot;mutual concealment among kin\u0026quot; (qinqin xiangyin); the Confucian line \u0026quot;the father conceals for the son, the son for the father\u0026quot; was written into state law for the first time. Later the Tang code has \u0026quot;those who live together may conceal for one another,\u0026quot; and the Song and Ming codes have similar provisions. (From scholarly surveys; I have not read the originals.) That is to say: for two thousand years after Qin, the law always left a gap for family: you may not denounce him.\nBy contrast, in contemporary law, only in the 2012 revision of the Criminal Procedure Law (Article 188, which became Article 193 in 2018) was it written that if a witness without good reason fails to appear in court, the court may compel attendance, except for the defendant's spouse, parents and children. The explanation for the draft gave as reason that \u0026quot;compelling spouse, parents and children to testify against the defendant in court is not conducive to maintaining family relations.\u0026quot; Some scholars say this was the first time criminal trial took the maintenance of family relations into consideration, and that it is still not a full right to refuse to testify. (From surveys.)\nWhether between 1949 and 2012 the law ever left such a gap for relatives, I did not find the text. All I can say here is: that is an account that could be checked.\nOne more lead is from the internet. In the discussion of this question there is a comment with 77 likes: \u0026quot;The Confucius-obsessed spent several thousand years and never managed the trick of getting husbands, wives and children to denounce one another on a mass scale.\u0026quot; That is one netizen's statement, and I take it as a lead, not as evidence.\nWhat is left now The sociologist Wu Chongqing gave today's village a name: \u0026quot;acquaintance society without a subject.\u0026quot; Young and middle-aged adults are long absent; people still live in the village and all still know one another, but the \u0026quot;subjects\u0026quot; of the village, those who can handle things, speak, and hold up a front, have gone out. His summary: public opinion fails, \u0026quot;face\u0026quot; loses value, social capital disperses. (From a survey of his work; I have not read the original in Dushu, 2011.)\nAfter 1980 the people's communes were withdrawn one by one, government and commune were separated, township governments were rebuilt, and villages set up villagers' committees. By 1985, more than 56,000 people's communes became more than 91,000 township governments, with over 940,000 villagers' committees below. (Figures are relayed.) The state took one step back from the villages, and no one took the place it vacated.\nThen people left. The share of rural population in the country was about 82% at the end of 1978, about 71% at the end of 1995, and about 32% at the end of 2025. Today China has nearly 300 million migrant workers, of whom more than 170 million have left their home township. From the early 2000s, rural schools were merged in large numbers, and from 2013 to 2024 rural primary schools fell by more than half (see \u0026quot;The Village Schools\u0026quot;). From 1 January 2006 the agricultural tax was fully abolished, ending more than two thousand six hundred years of \u0026quot;imperial grain and national tax.\u0026quot; That is a good thing. But it also meant that the last thread between the state and each peasant household that they touched once a year was gone.\nPower inside the home also changed hands. Yan Yunxiang followed Xiajia village in his native Heilongjiang for more than ten years and wrote The Transformation of Private Life. He says the old household was a pyramid with three supports: generation, age and sex. Collectivization smashed it once, and after the 1980s the one-child policy and population movement together pushed the center of power down to the younger generation, forming an inverted \u0026quot;4-2-1\u0026quot; pattern; villagers said: grandfather becomes grandson, and women rise to the sky. (From reviews and interviews; I have not read the book.)\nHaving got this far, return to the question at the start.\nSome say the pressure of favors in the village is heavy; whose house goes up, whose child studies, everything is compared, \u0026quot;laugh at those who have less, resent those who have more.\u0026quot; Some say the village's moral pressure is already far weaker than before and face is worth nothing. I think both are right.\nMy reading is: comparison and gossip are still there; the net underneath is gone. In the old countryside you were watched, but you also had people behind you: the lineage had charity land, the ancestral hall had common property, the lineage head came forward to mediate, in old age you had children and grandchildren, and when you died there was someone to sacrifice to you. Today the circle is still there, the circle of acquaintances in the village; but the things inside the circle that did the managing have gone one by one. The net underneath, in the end, depends on trust: you trust that when something happens to you someone will reach out a hand. This reading is my own inference; no study says it so directly.\nToday's old home: what research says Back to the two kinds of people at the start, those who long and those who fear. I went looking for research to see whether anyone has measured \u0026quot;empty nests,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;favors,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;how old people live.\u0026quot; The conclusion first: some of it has been measured, some not.\nEmpty nests. The often-quoted \u0026quot;over 70% of rural elderly are empty-nesters\u0026quot; traces, as far as I found, to a 2022 statement by an official of the Ministry of Civil Affairs: among the nation's elderly, empty-nest elderly are more than half, and in some big cities and rural areas more than 70%. That is an official statement with no survey data attached, speaking of \u0026quot;some areas,\u0026quot; not the national rural average. Definitions are also muddled: some count \u0026quot;living only with a spouse\u0026quot; as empty-nest, others only those living alone. The figure from the 2019 national rural fixed observation points is that among rural families with elderly members, 12.9% are one elderly person living alone and 34.3% are several elderly persons living together, together 47.2% (a household measure, not a personal one). (From secondary relays; I have not read the original table.)\nFavors. Yan Yunxiang did fieldwork in Xiajia village in Heilongjiang from 1989 to 1991 and wrote The Flow of Gifts. He says the gifts sent out in the village are gifts of renqing (human feeling), the return gifts repay renqing debts, and closeness follows the differential mode; giving gifts to village cadres actually reproduces the hierarchy between cadres and ordinary villagers. (From reviews; I have not read the book.) At the other end, Xi Chen did a study using long-term gift records of rural households: the more central a household in the gift network, the more informal insurance it gets; the same study also says economic inequality and competition in the marriage market are the main influences on the structure of gift networks. (From the abstract.) A conference paper using a nationally representative survey says that in the one survey year it used, 87% of households had gift exchanges, and gifts in a year (cash and in kind) averaged about 2,013 yuan, 11.7% of that year's per-capita income. (Only the abstract read.) The account of favors has an insurance side and a burden side.\nOld people's lives. The most painful set comes from research on elderly suicide in the countryside. Liu Yanwu compiled data from several regions: in the 1980s, among rural suicides young people made up about 59% and elderly about 24%; in the decade after 2000, young people were only about 9% and the elderly about 79%. (This is a compilation of regional cases, not a national sample; officially, elderly suicides are often registered as \u0026quot;natural deaths,\u0026quot; so the numbers may still be understated.) In his 2008 survey in Jingshan, Hubei, He Xuefeng found a rule unfavorable to the elderly there: old people should not expect too much from their children and should not burden them when ill; suicide was often understood as \u0026quot;for the children's good.\u0026quot; Villagers did not blame the children for it; it was someone else's household. In Jiyuan, Henan, he later saw something different: after brothers divided the household, parents who could not care for themselves were supported in rotation, and the quality of care was generally rather high; in the village they surveyed there was not one elderly suicide. His explanation: Jiyuan is a \u0026quot;northern small-lineage type\u0026quot; of village, where villagers care very much how others judge unfilial conduct. (From the originals as reposted on Aisixiang and from surveys; only usable as case studies.)\nWhat I read from the contrast between these two places: in both, children have gone to the city and the old are left behind, but where village gossip and judgment still work, old people do somewhat better; where public opinion has failed, they do worse. This is my reading of putting the two studies side by side, not their conclusion, and it is only two regional cases.\nThose \u0026quot;memories.\u0026quot; You might ask: how would the memory of mutual guarding show up today? I found no paper that studies this directly. There is circumstantial evidence. Bai and Wu, using county-level data from around the Cultural Revolution, found that counties with higher Cultural Revolution intensity, and the cohorts who went to school during it, have markedly lower trust today; another study using national survey data found that the decline \u0026quot;glues\u0026quot; trust toward relatives and friends but \u0026quot;separates\u0026quot; it from colleagues and people one barely knows; Yuhua Wang found that where Cultural Revolution violence was heavy, people trust national leaders less. (All from abstracts; I did not reach the full texts; authors and data sources should follow the originals.) These studies measure the \u0026quot;level of trust\u0026quot;; none measures \u0026quot;how this memory affects old-age care and favors today,\u0026quot; and none tests whether it passes to children. So \u0026quot;the shadow is passed down generations\u0026quot; is for now a conjecture, not an existing conclusion.\nA parallel: the compounds of Southeast Asia In the past two years there has been one matter I kept beside me as I read these materials: the telecom-fraud compounds of Southeast Asia.\nFirst, what can be checked. The UN human rights office's August 2023 report estimated that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and about 100,000 in Cambodia were trapped in compounds, forced to carry out online fraud; Laos, the Philippines and Thailand are destinations or transit points. The report says most of these people are men, most not citizens of the country where they are held, and they suffer torture, arbitrary detention, sexual violence and forced labor; in the high commissioner's words: \u0026quot;They are not criminals.\u0026quot; There was a newer report in February 2026; Amnesty International's June 2026 report documented 73 survivors from 16 countries. (From media relays; figures vary.)\nCompounds have also been raided. In October 2025 Myanmar's military announced it had captured and closed the KK compound; according to media, after the joint China–Myanmar–Thailand operation began in February 2025, more than 7,600 Chinese suspects were escorted back from Myawaddy. In the same month the US Treasury sanctioned 146 targets linked to the Prince Group, and the US Department of Justice moved to forfeit about 127,000 bitcoin, then worth about 15 billion dollars; in January 2026 Cambodia, at China's request, arrested and extradited the Prince Group's chairman Chen Zhi.\nKidnapping is supported by many survivors' accounts and records of international bodies. Organs? There is such a claim; it is unconfirmed. In 2022 Cambodian police said that, on investigation, \u0026quot;organ trading\u0026quot; was a threat compounds used to frighten staff, with no real harvesting; in 2026 Thai officials took reporters to an operating room in a border compound and said they suspected it had been used, but there was no forensic evidence, no bodies, and no one with organs removed came forward, and Thailand and Cambodia have a territorial dispute, so these claims have their own stance. So on this point I can only write up to here.\nThe people trapped inside cannot be written off as \u0026quot;bad people.\u0026quot; The report's words are meant for us: many are young people deceived by recruitment ads, with passports confiscated, beaten and sold on from hand to hand. Their parents, at home, received a telephone call.\nWhy does this belong in this piece? I put it under \u0026quot;What I think\u0026quot; below.\nTurning it around First, the strongest objection: perhaps there was no \u0026quot;destruction,\u0026quot; only change.\nThe hundreds of millions who return home for the Spring Festival, ancestor worship at Qingming, the old houses, the local accents, these have not disappeared. That an ancestral hall in a town has been rebuilt shows that people still want it. \u0026quot;The countryside\u0026quot; has not died; it has gone from \u0026quot;the foundation of survival\u0026quot; to \u0026quot;hometown,\u0026quot; to sentiment. This may be right. What I think it cannot answer: can sentiment carry an old person's medical care and daily life?\nSecond, class struggle had a base of \u0026quot;partial truth.\u0026quot; Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping themselves point out that the class division was built on a \u0026quot;partly real\u0026quot; social differentiation in the countryside. Land reform gave land to peasants who had none or little; that is true and cannot be wiped out because of what happened afterward. Gratitude was not all taught.\nThird, the word \u0026quot;imported\u0026quot; will be met with: denunciation and collective punishment existed in Qin. The \u0026quot;denounce wrongdoers\u0026quot; order of Shang Yang above is native Legalism. Qin Hui has said that traditional China was \u0026quot;Confucian on the surface, Legalist within,\u0026quot; talking benevolence outside and, inside, registered households and another layer of control; he also reminds us that \u0026quot;the emperor's power does not go below the county\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;self-rule below the county\u0026quot; are not wholly right, since imperial power reached into villages through the lijia, baojia and clerks; from the Ming, in some places, the court regrouped lineages by lijia and the lineage was left only as a shell. (From commentary; I have not read the originals.) So \u0026quot;traditional rural China was a good place of self-rule\u0026quot; is partly imagined by later people. By this view, what was pulled away was an arrangement of \u0026quot;the state borrowing the lineage,\u0026quot; not necessarily \u0026quot;self-rule\u0026quot;; and informing was not invented by Marxism.\nFourth, don't think past people had so little individuality. Yan Yunxiang's book has been questioned by reviewers: is individualized family life really found only in the socialist-period countryside? Traditional society also had illicit passion and unfilial sons; one cannot first assume that the past had no individuals.\nFifth, \u0026quot;no taboos toward outsiders\u0026quot; did not necessarily begin after 1949. In Fei Xiaotong's From the Soil there is a chapter titled \u0026quot;Morality that binds private persons\u0026quot;: in the differential mode, morality follows relationships, applied to near people, and for far people and strangers the rules loosen. (I cite only the chapter title and gist; I did not check the wording.) If so, looseness toward strangers was already in rural society; the change after 1949 may be that even the \u0026quot;near\u0026quot; circle was taken apart.\nSixth, the people in the compounds come from many countries, and those in charge are not from one place alone. The UN report says most of those forced to work are not citizens of the host country; Chen Zhi, according to Cambodia's Ministry of the Interior, at one point held Cambodian nationality. On the other hand, the 7,600-odd Chinese suspects escorted home show that mainland Chinese are not few inside, and among them some commit crimes while others were deceived and detained. So for a generalization like \u0026quot;no taboos at all,\u0026quot; I have written only \u0026quot;a considerable number of people.\u0026quot;\nSeventh, repression leaving low trust need not be only Marxism. Xue and Koyama studied the Qing literary inquisitions of 1660 to 1788 and found that in areas that had been hit, local charities such as benevolent halls were about 38% fewer, and people there trust strangers less today. (A working paper; I did not find a journal version.) So the aftereffect of repression is a more general mechanism, not found only after 1949. This does not overturn my judgment, but it reminds me: Marxism used this mechanism most thoroughly and on the widest scale, and I cannot prove that \u0026quot;most\u0026quot; with figures.\nI accept all seven. Having accepted them, I still feel that some things are not imagined.\nWhat I think I believe that rural China was thoroughly destroyed by the imported creed of Marxism (Majiao), hearts included.\nFirst, one thing made clear: I do not object to people moving out. \u0026quot;A transplanted tree dies, a transplanted person lives,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;follow the water and grass\u0026quot;; people should be able to move, and should not be tied for life to their native place. After 1980 most of those who left were heading toward better days. That is not what I mean by \u0026quot;destroyed.\u0026quot; What I mean by destroyed is another thing.\nThe spark was class struggle. In 1927 Mao Zedong in Hunan wrote \u0026quot;we must overthrow all gentry power,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;every village must create a brief reign of terror.\u0026quot; What he wanted to overthrow then was the middle layer of rural society that stood between the state and the peasants. In 1950 the class labels and the speaking of bitterness stopped recognizing people in a village by \u0026quot;whose family, whose elder,\u0026quot; and recognized them by \u0026quot;what class status.\u0026quot; In 1962 it was made the key link again, and kept going for sixteen years. My view is that this method worked because it seized the easiest few things in human nature: fear, envy, the wish to turn the tables. Once those are put to use, lineage heads and gentry do not need to come out and speak; everyone is willing to watch everyone else. This is my judgment; the historical record cannot prove it; it is only what I thought after reading these materials.\nMy late father said a line: above there is one big Mao Zedong, below are all little Mao Zedongs, the size of a wine cup, the size of a finger. I heard it for many years and only now understand: power is not only at the very top; it copies itself down layer by layer, and each layer has a small version, holding a little piece that decides whether life is easy or hard for you. In such a structure people guard against one another, because you do not know which one beside you is the small version that has you in hand. (My understanding of my father's line in this paragraph is mine, not his words.)\nThat is why I say what was destroyed was not only ancestral halls, lineage land and gentry, but also the little trust between person and person.\nLooking at the timeline again, four things were pulled away. One is the channel, the road connecting high and low, cut in 1905, and that cut does not belong to Marxism. One is the net underneath, the common property and common houses of lineage land, charity estates and ancestral halls, taken away after 1950; some were set up again, thirty years later. One is the transmission of rules, the places that teach rules to the next generation, from the school to the ancestral hall to the last old person in the family. And one is trust. The first three can be repaired, at the cost of money, space and time; the fourth I think is hardest to repair, because it is not a building, it is one person's assurance toward another.\nThe compounds of Southeast Asia, I think, can also be seen along this line. My view is: decades of destruction, plus indoctrinating education, made a considerable number of people lose their sensitivity to \u0026quot;this must not be done,\u0026quot; unable to hold a bottom line or to care about human ties. What governed people in the countryside, the eyes of acquaintances, ancestors, gods and Buddhas, the two words \u0026quot;losing face,\u0026quot; was taken away one by one, and what went in was \u0026quot;if the goal is right, means do not matter,\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;guard against others.\u0026quot; A person who steps outside the circle of acquaintances to a place where nobody knows him has nothing to stop him. The deceived and detained in the compounds are the other end of this: they were not taught how to guard themselves, and they have no net to return to. This is my judgment, not a research conclusion.\nSo about going back to the countryside in old age, my view is: don't ask whether the old home is good; ask how many of these four remain. Missing one, \u0026quot;longing\u0026quot; easily turns into \u0026quot;nobody looking after you.\u0026quot;\nAmong the four there is one road I think can be walked: the ancestral hall. In \u0026quot;The Confucian Predicament Today\u0026quot; I said that Confucianism has been \u0026quot;cut off from supply,\u0026quot; and what it is supplied with is \u0026quot;vessels,\u0026quot; and I thought of the ancestral hall. It is a ready-made thing: it has a building, a surname, days of ancestor sacrifice, and in the past it also ran schools, managed common property and mediated disputes. Whether it must come back to the village I do not insist. If people leave, it can also be in the city, abroad, anywhere that can join up \u0026quot;where we came from\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;where we are going.\u0026quot; In \u0026quot;How Many People Remain in the Countryside\u0026quot; I wrote: this set of things has to be something that can be carried along.\nIn a society taught to guard against one another, where does trust start again?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 original text or official figures read; 🟡 second-hand relay (search summaries, reviews, surveys), originals not read.\nMao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927 original, Collected Works of Mao Zedong edition at the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive (it differs from the Selected Works edition) 🟢: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/maozedong/collect/01-038.htm Land Reform Law of the People's Republic of China (1950), Articles 1 and 3 (Wikisource) 🟢 National Bureau of Statistics, share of rural population; migrant worker monitoring reports (see \u0026quot;How Many People Remain in the Countryside\u0026quot;) 🟢 Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil, Shanghai Guanchashe, 1948; composition and concepts per scholarly surveys 🟡 Edict of the fourth day of the eighth month, Guangxu 31 (2 September 1905) abolishing the examinations; the reactions of Yan Fu and Liu Dapeng, relayed from articles such as Wang Xuetai's 🟡 Luo Zhitian, \u0026quot;The Social Consequences of the Abolition of the Examination System in the Countryside\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;The Abolition of the Examination System and the Dissolution of the Four-Occupation Society,\u0026quot; in The Shift of Power, Beijing Normal University Press, 2014 🟡 Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Chinese translation, Jiangsu People's Publishing House) 🟡 Government Administration Council, Decision on Defining Class Status in the Countryside, August 1950 (full text not read) 🟡 Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping, \u0026quot;Speaking Bitterness: A Mediating Mechanism in the Formation of Peasants' Idea of the State,\u0026quot; History and Society, 2002 🟡 Communiqué of the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, 1962; Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, 1978 (communiqué texts not read, per surveys) 🟡 Records of the Grand Historian, \u0026quot;Biography of Lord Shang,\u0026quot; the \u0026quot;denounce wrongdoers\u0026quot; order; Book of Han, Annals of Emperor Xuan, edict of the fourth year of Dijie; Tang Code with Commentary, General Principles, \u0026quot;those who live together may conceal for one another,\u0026quot; per scholarly surveys, originals not checked 🟡 2012 revision of the Criminal Procedure Law, Article 188 (now Article 193), and commentary by Chen Bisheng and other scholars 🟡 Resolution on Establishing People's Communes in the Countryside (1958); the 1983–85 figures on separating government and commune, per surveys 🟡 Yan Yunxiang, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999, Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House (Chinese edition), 2006; from reviews and interviews 🟡 Wu Chongqing, \u0026quot;From 'Acquaintance Society' to 'Acquaintance Society Without a Subject,'\u0026quot; Dushu, 2011, per surveys 🟡 Qin Hui, Ten Essays on Tradition and \u0026quot;The Imperial Will Under the Shell of the Lineage,\u0026quot; per commentary 🟡 UN human rights office, August 2023 report (at least 120,000 in Myanmar, about 100,000 in Cambodia) and February 2026 update, per news relays 🟡: https://www.unognewsroom.org/story/en/1763/hundreds-of-thousands-trafficked-into-online-criminality-in-southeast-asia-ohchr Amnesty International, June 2026 report on Cambodian compounds (73 survivors, 16 countries), per media 🟡: https://interaksyon.philstar.com/politics-issues/2026/06/09/314680/amnesty-says-cambodia-scam-centers-still-operating-despite-crackdowns/ The KK compound, Myawaddy repatriations (7,600-plus, figures vary), Prince Group sanctions and Chen Zhi's extradition, per Tencent News, Wikipedia and others 🟡: https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20261007A05GYV00 Thai officials' suspicion about an \u0026quot;operating room\u0026quot; at the O'Smach compound (unconfirmed) 🔴: https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40070780; Cambodian police's 2022 statement, per media 🟡 Ministry of Civil Affairs press conference, 2022 (empty-nest elderly more than half, over 70% in some areas), per media 🟡; National Rural Fixed Observation Points, 2019 (cited in literature) 🟡; Seventh National Population Census (rural population aged 60 and over: 23.81%) 🟢 Yan Yunxiang, The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village, Stanford UP, 1996; from reviews and interviews 🟡 Xi Chen, \u0026quot;Gift-giving and Network Structure in Rural China: Utilizing Long-Term Spontaneous Gift Records,\u0026quot; PLoS ONE, 2014 (IZA DP 8642) 🟡: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128647/ Fanghua Li \u0026amp; Yuan Tian, \u0026quot;Social Network, Gift Exchanging and Inequality in China,\u0026quot; SIOE 2016 conference paper (abstract only) 🟡 Liu Yanwu, \u0026quot;Suicide among the Rural Elderly and Crisis Intervention (1980–2009),\u0026quot; Research on Peasant Suicide; He Xuefeng, \u0026quot;Nowhere to Turn in Old Age in China: A Survey of Elderly Suicide in the Countryside,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Why Do Rural Elderly Choose Suicide\u0026quot; (both based on surveys in Jingshan, Hubei and Jiyuan, Henan; from Aisixiang reposts and surveys) 🟡 Liang Bai \u0026amp; Lingwei Wu, \u0026quot;Political movement and trust formation: Evidence from the Cultural Revolution (1966–76),\u0026quot; European Economic Review 122, 2020 🟡 (abstract only): https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eecrev/v122y2020ics0014292119301916.html Yuhua Wang, \u0026quot;The Political Legacy of Violence During China's Cultural Revolution,\u0026quot; British Journal of Political Science 🟡 (abstract only) Melanie Meng Xue \u0026amp; Mark Koyama, \u0026quot;Autocratic Rule and Social Capital: Evidence from Imperial China,\u0026quot; working paper (NBER, MPRA versions) 🟡: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84249/ Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, surveys such as \u0026quot;The State of Villages in Depopulated Areas\u0026quot; (2006: 7,873 villages, 12.6%); Ono Akira's \u0026quot;marginal villages,\u0026quot; from Japanese abstracts 🟡: https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000029292.pdf ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e121/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-way-of-asking\"\u003eA way of asking\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow there is a kind of person who, around forty, starts thinking about going back to the old home village later. Grow some vegetables, keep a few chickens, know all the neighbors, fresh air, slow pace.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd there is another kind who shakes their head at the thought. Village obligations are heavy; whose house went up, whose child did well on the exams, all of it gets compared. A saying one often hears: \u0026quot;laugh at those who have less, resent those who have more.\u0026quot; Add that the hospital is far and the children are not around.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeither is lying. They are speaking of the same thing, one of its good side, the other of its bad. This thing has a ready name: \u0026quot;Rural China.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"When Did \"Rural China\" End?"},{"content":"A question that can be checked The last piece ended on a question: China's villages are empty — is it that development was too fast, or that the destruction was too thorough?\nThe two explanations predict different things.\nIf it is \u0026quot;development too fast,\u0026quot; then the neighbours' villages, whether or not they were ever torn down, will empty and age too.\nIf it is \u0026quot;destruction too thorough,\u0026quot; then once the people have gone from the neighbours' villages, the things that can still receive people — lineages, temples, associations — should remain in larger measure.\nThe first prediction is easy to check. The second is hard. I will set out what I found.\nJapan: the people left, the shell stayed Japan has a word, genkai shūraku (\u0026quot;marginal settlement\u0026quot;), for a village where more than half the residents are over 65 and even common village affairs are hard to keep going. A 2006 survey by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism counted 7,873 such settlements, 12.6%.\nAnd the village organisations? Start with the neighbourhood associations (jichikai, chōnaikai). In the Ministry of Internal Affairs surveys, the nationwide membership rate by household was 78.0% in 2010 and 71.7% in 2020, falling steadily across the decade; but the number of associations themselves has stayed between 290,000 and 300,000 for thirty years, 295,838 in 2023. That is, the shell is still there and the people inside have thinned. A public-opinion survey in 1970 found that 90.2% of those aged twenty and over had belonged to one, but the method differed and the two cannot be compared directly.\nOne more detail: over the decade, the smallest municipalities (population under 10,000) saw the smallest fall in membership, only 3.1 percentage points; the largest fall, 7.6 points, was in cities of 200,000 to 300,000. In small places, people find it harder to leave. (From a summary of the Ministry's survey.)\nNow shrines. The shrines under the Association of Shinto Shrines number about 78,000 (end of 2017). One compilation says that about 30% of their priests are kenmu — one person looking after several shrines — and it is by this device that shrines in depopulated areas have not disappeared one by one. In the Tajima region of Hyōgo there are 738 shrines and only 29 head priests, an average of 25.4 shrines per priest; the Hyōgo average is 10.7. (From a 2022 report in the Kobe Shimbun.) The shrine world itself admits the vicious circle: as ujiko (the households that support a shrine) decrease, income falls with them, priests are less willing to take the post, shrines have even fewer people to look after them. Some shrines have no priest at all, even a part-time one, and have become \u0026quot;inactive shrines.\u0026quot;\nSo in Japan: the villages are empty and old; the organisations — shrines, associations — mostly keep their shells, but what is inside is growing thin.\nKorea: older than we are Korea's numbers are starker. In the 2020 Census of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 42.3% of the farm population were 65 or over, up from 21.7% ten years before, a doubling; in the same year only 16% of the national population were 65 or over. The provisional result for 2025 is 51.3%, over half for the first time. But that survey also folded in administrative records such as the farmland register, so it cannot be compared directly with 2020; another annual survey in 2024 gives 55.8%.\nPut side by side, the scale is clear: in China's seventh census, 17.72% of the rural population is 65 or over. The two bases differ — \u0026quot;farm households\u0026quot; against \u0026quot;rural resident population\u0026quot; — so one cannot say directly who is older. But \u0026quot;the neighbour's countryside is much older than ours\u0026quot; can be said with confidence.\nAs for Korea's munjung and jongjung, the clan organisations, and what has happened to them in recent decades, I found no figures this round that I can cite.\nTaiwan: the temples remain The Ministry of the Interior's temple registration records 11,731 registered temples on the island at the end of 2008, of which 78.4% were Daoist and 19.5% Buddhist; at the end of 2002 there were 11,423. The increase was mainly because policy encouraged unregistered temples to register, not necessarily because new ones were built. (From a relay of the Ministry's statistics; I did not find the latest national total.)\nAnother kind of thing is called jisi gongye (\u0026quot;ancestral-sacrifice trusts\u0026quot;): immigrants of the Qing and Japanese periods, missing the ancestors of their home places, and their descendants pooled money to buy land, the income used for sacrifice and shared meals, the land mostly registered in the ancestors' names. The Ministry of the Interior still has a page on it today, and counties and cities still publish rolls of such corporations. The anthropologist Lin Meirong studied the Earth God temples around Caotun and treated them as an indicator of the settlement. (This is the study of one township only.)\nWhat the ageing of Taiwan's countryside has to do with the number of ancestral halls and sacrifice trusts, I found no quantified data.\nSide by side Japan Korea Taiwan China Villages old and empty Yes (marginal settlements 12.6%) Yes (farm population 65+ 42% → 51%, basis changed) No figure found Yes (rural 60+ 23.81%) Village organisations still there? 290,000 associations, unchanged for thirty years Not found 11,000 registered temples Ancestral halls rebuilt (one township in central Hunan: after more than thirty years) The people inside Membership 78% → 71.7%; a third of shrines served part-time, ujiko falling Not found Not found See \u0026quot;When Did Rural China End?\u0026quot; What I read from this table: the neighbours' villages are just as empty and just as old. That supports the \u0026quot;development too fast\u0026quot; explanation: people leaving is something that happens everywhere.\nBut \u0026quot;the shell remains\u0026quot; does not mean \u0026quot;people are still inside.\u0026quot; About 30% of Japan's shrines rely on part-time priests; among priests, more than 60% say the number of ujiko has fallen. So \u0026quot;the neighbours' organisations are still there and ours are gone\u0026quot; cannot now be said either.\nThat is all that can be said this round. For the most critical pieces — Korea's clans, Taiwan's ancestral halls, village-level organisations in China that can be compared — I have no figures to set side by side. This table testifies for no one's judgment and is not used to refute anyone's; my judgment does not rest on it.\nTurning it around First, the neighbours' villages were also \u0026quot;torn down.\u0026quot; In December 1945 the occupation authorities issued the \u0026quot;Shinto Directive,\u0026quot; cutting shrines from the state; that was the dismantling of a system, only by a different method from China's. Neighbours' Heavens wrote about it. So the premise \u0026quot;the neighbours were never torn down\u0026quot; is itself inaccurate.\nSecond, a shell such as the neighbourhood association may be only an administrative shell. That the number has not changed in thirty years may only be because it is treated as the lowest rung of administration, not because the people in the village want it. The number of shells does not directly show whether the people in the village can still gather.\nThird, comparison across different bases is easy to overstate. Every figure I used in this piece is from a different year and a different basis, and can only be read for scale.\nWhat I think Having read all these figures, I come away with three things.\nFirst, \u0026quot;empty\u0026quot; is not something to keep arguing about. All of East Asia is emptying; development really has been fast; there is nothing to quarrel over. I said in the last piece that I do not stop people from going out.\nSecond, \u0026quot;whether what is left can receive people once the village empties\u0026quot; is what should be compared. Japan's residents' associations and shrines have their shells, and the shells are thinning inside, but at least there is still a shell into which people can be put back. What I saw in the accounts of that township in central Hunan is that the shell itself was broken for thirty years, and an ancestral hall went up again only after more than thirty years. (One township's example does not stand for the country.) This difference I cannot measure with these few tables, and my judgment does not rest on them; the reason I have given in the last piece.\nThird, the figures still to be filled in are already listed above: Korea's munjung, Taiwan's ancestral halls and sacrifice trusts, and village-level organisations in China that can be set alongside them. I will keep looking.\nIf in the neighbours' villages the shell is still there and the people are gone, and in our villages the shell is gone and the people have left too, which is easier to take up again?\nReferences\nRatings: 🟢 original read; 🟡 second-hand relay (search summaries, media, official pages), original not read.\nMinistry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (Japan), surveys of the type \u0026quot;The State of Villages in Depopulated Areas,\u0026quot; 2006 (7,873 marginal settlements, 12.6%) 🟡: https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000029292.pdf Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Japan), \u0026quot;On the Sustainability of Neighbourhood Associations' Activities\u0026quot; (answers from 1,741 municipalities; membership 78.0% in 2010 and 71.7% in 2020; 295,838 associations in 2023) 🟡: https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000777270.pdf; National Diet Library ISSUE BRIEF No. 1306 (4 February 2025), \u0026quot;The Present State and Future of Neighbourhood Associations\u0026quot; 🟡 Kobe Shimbun, \u0026quot;Acute shortage of priests: in depopulated areas, one head priest in charge of as many as 80 shrines,\u0026quot; May 2022 (Tajima 738 shrines, 29 head priests) 🟡: https://www.kobe-np.co.jp/news/sougou/202205/0015299611.shtml Fuyutsuki Ritsu, Chūgai Nippō, \u0026quot;Opinion,\u0026quot; 11 December 2019 (about 78,000 shrines under the Association of Shinto Shrines, about 30% of priests part-time) 🟡: https://www.chugainippoh.co.jp/article/ron-kikou/ron/20191211-002.html Shimane Prefecture Shrine Agency, \u0026quot;Results of the questionnaire survey on shrine operation in relation to depopulation and the declining, ageing population,\u0026quot; September 2024 🟡 Korea, 2020 Census of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (farm population 65+ 42.3%); provisional 2025 result (51.3%, basis differs from 2020); another 2024 survey (55.8%), relayed from Nongmin Sinmun, News1, Seoul Economic Daily and others 🟡 China's seventh census: rural population aged 60+ and 65+, 23.81% and 17.72% (see \u0026quot;How Many People Remain in the Countryside\u0026quot;) 🟢 Taiwan Ministry of the Interior, \u0026quot;Overview of Temple Registration\u0026quot; (11,731 temples at the end of 2008; 11,423 at the end of 2002), and the page on \u0026quot;ancestral-sacrifice trusts and deity societies\u0026quot; 🟡: https://www.moi.gov.tw/cp.aspx?n=160; National Religious Information Network statistical reports https://religion.moi.gov.tw/ChartReport/Index?ci=1\u0026cid=2 🟡 Lin Meirong, research on Earth God temples and sacrificial circles in Caotun Township, from surveys 🟡 The \u0026quot;Shinto Directive\u0026quot; of December 1945: see the references of Neighbours' Heavens D02 \u0026quot;When Did Rural China End?\u0026quot;, \u0026quot;How Many People Remain in the Countryside,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;The Ancestral Hall Is Back\u0026quot; ","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/yigui/e122/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"a-question-that-can-be-checked\"\u003eA question that can be checked\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe last piece ended on a question: China's villages are empty — is it that development was too fast, or that the destruction was too thorough?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe two explanations predict different things.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf it is \u0026quot;development too fast,\u0026quot; then the neighbours' villages, whether or not they were ever torn down, will empty and age too.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf it is \u0026quot;destruction too thorough,\u0026quot; then once the people have gone from the neighbours' villages, the things that can still receive people — lineages, temples, associations — should remain in larger measure.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first prediction is easy to check. The second is hard. I will set out what I found.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"japan-the-people-left-the-shell-stayed\"\u003eJapan: the people left, the shell stayed\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJapan has a word, \u003cem\u003egenkai shūraku\u003c/em\u003e (\u0026quot;marginal settlement\u0026quot;), for a village where more than half the residents are over 65 and even common village affairs are hard to keep going. A 2006 survey by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism counted 7,873 such settlements, 12.6%.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Neighbours' Villages Are Empty Too: What Is Left After They Empty"},{"content":"What \u0026quot;TenTao\u0026quot; means TenTao is how my home dialect says 天道, tiandao in Mandarin: \u0026quot;the Way of Heaven.\u0026quot;\nIn everyday Chinese the phrase turns up in sayings like \u0026quot;Heaven rewards the diligent\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Heaven moves without rest.\u0026quot; That is the meaning I want, but traced further back, to before Confucius.\nThe Book of Documents (Shangshu) has a chapter called \u0026quot;Against Ease\u0026quot; (Wuyi), a warning from the Duke of Zhou to the young king. It opens: \u0026quot;The noble man does not indulge in ease.\u0026quot; Then he goes through the old Shang kings and King Wen of Zhou. Those who worked hard and never let things slide reigned long: seventy-five years, fifty years. The later ones who \u0026quot;lived at ease from birth\u0026quot; reigned briefly: \u0026quot;ten years, or seven or eight, or five or six, or four or three.\u0026quot;\nThat, to me, is \u0026quot;Heaven rewards the diligent,\u0026quot; said three thousand years ago.\nA hymn the Zhou sang to King Wen has another line: \u0026quot;The mandate of Heaven, how deep and solemn, never ceasing.\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Heaven moves without rest\u0026quot; says the same thing.\nOne honest caveat. The two characters 天道 never actually appear in the reliable chapters of the Shangshu. Those chapters speak of \u0026quot;Heaven\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Heaven's mandate.\u0026quot; The often-quoted line \u0026quot;the Way of Heaven blesses the good and punishes the wicked\u0026quot; comes from chapters forged in the fourth century AD. So TenTao borrows the idea, not a phrase from that book.\nWhat this site is I write several essay series in Chinese: on China itself, on its neighbours and the overseas Chinese, on world civilizations and religions, on India, on Hunan and Jiangxi, and on everyday life (housing, children, old age).\nAll of them circle one question: what could hold East Asians together, whether in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, or scattered around the world? These places once shared Chinese characters, ancestral rites, ritual and festivals. What I am looking for is a shared culture and faith, not a single ethnic identity: each people can keep its own.\nI have my own leanings, but every piece tries to give the strongest case against them. Selected pieces are translated here. Whether or not you agree, write to me. This is an open age and I try to keep an open mind; I would like more people with ideas to gather together, and if enough of us do, I may set up a Telegram group.\nContact Whether or not you agree, write to tentao@duck.com.\n","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/about/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"what-tentao-means\"\u003eWhat \u0026quot;TenTao\u0026quot; means\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTenTao\u003c/em\u003e is how my home dialect says 天道, \u003cem\u003etiandao\u003c/em\u003e in Mandarin: \u0026quot;the Way of Heaven.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn everyday Chinese the phrase turns up in sayings like \u0026quot;Heaven rewards the diligent\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Heaven moves without rest.\u0026quot; That is the meaning I want, but traced further back, to before Confucius.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003cem\u003eBook of Documents\u003c/em\u003e (\u003cem\u003eShangshu\u003c/em\u003e) has a chapter called \u0026quot;Against Ease\u0026quot; (\u003cem\u003eWuyi\u003c/em\u003e), a warning from the Duke of Zhou to the young king. It opens: \u0026quot;The noble man does not indulge in ease.\u0026quot; Then he goes through the old Shang kings and King Wen of Zhou. Those who worked hard and never let things slide reigned long: seventy-five years, fifty years. The later ones who \u0026quot;lived at ease from birth\u0026quot; reigned briefly: \u0026quot;ten years, or seven or eight, or five or six, or four or three.\u0026quot;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About"},{"content":"The question This site asks one question: what could hold East Asians together?\nBy East Asians I mean the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, wherever in the world they live today. These places once shared a common stock: Chinese characters, ancestral rites, ritual, festivals, the same classics. For a thousand years a Vietnamese scholar and a Korean scholar could not speak to each other, yet could pick up a brush and talk in writing.\nThat shared stock has come apart. Most Vietnamese and Koreans can no longer read what their ancestors wrote. Many overseas Chinese, three or four generations on, keep little more than a surname. China itself spent more than a century tearing down and rebuilding; ancestral halls, genealogies and rites were broken off several times.\nI have long felt that East Asia lacks a core. The Christian world has its churches; the Muslim world has its mosques and one book everyone reads. Wherever they scatter, people recognize each other. East Asia has nothing like that. You don't notice in ordinary times. After urbanization, migration and a few generations, it is a heap of loose sand.\nThe two sides of the world Look one step further out. I see the world's religions falling roughly into two sides.\nOne side I call the four desert monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, plus a fourth, Mah-ism, that is, Marxism. The first three arose in the desert lands: one God, one book, one truth; nobody disputes that. The fourth is how I read it: it calls itself atheist, yet the skeleton is the same. A single universal truth, prophets, scriptures, an organisation that works like a church, and an end of history followed by a millennial kingdom. Russell, Löwith, Voegelin and Aron, among others, drew this comparison long ago. I am talking about a lineage of ideas, not a conspiracy by any people; I separated the two when I wrote about Russell's comparison table in the Duoshe series.\nThe other side is polytheism, led by Hinduism, and including Buddhism, Daoism and the native faiths of East Asia. Many gods, loose churches, no single truth; a temple to a village, an ancestor to a family. Hinduism has no unified church to this day and has not fallen apart; East Asia for thousands of years let the City God look after his, Confucius his, and the ancestors theirs, and life went on.\nThe contest between polytheism and monotheism is the longest line in the history of religion. Why does polytheism so often lose to monotheism? That question is where the Duoshe series began, and it keeps taking it apart.\nWhich side is East Asia on? By this division, the polytheist side, and its loosest-organised part. I think that is the root of East Asia's missing \u0026quot;core\u0026quot;: not too few gods, but no pot that can pull people together and pass things on. That is why I look at Islam: to learn how it organises and hands things down, not to copy its exclusiveness.\nWhere I lean I would rather say this up front.\nMy leaning is that East Asia's future may need Confucianism to become a religion. Not a state religion, and not Confucius turned into a god: a form for Heaven, ancestral rites, ritual and festivals that can be handed down and survive the breakup of the extended family. On this, Islam offers many lessons, both in what to follow and in what to avoid.\nWhat I am looking for is a shared culture and faith, not an ethnic identity. Each people can stay itself: the Vietnamese remain Vietnamese, the Japanese remain Japanese, and overseas Chinese can be full citizens of the countries they live in.\nFor now I call this idea Tiandao, the Way of Heaven. At its top is Heaven's Way, not a personal god: something to revere, not to petition. Confucius is the first teacher, someone who gathered and handed down a tradition, not a prophet who received a revelation.\nThis is a leaning, not a conclusion. Many pieces in the series below take it and run it into concrete cases; where it breaks, I write that too.\nEight series Series What it covers Yigui (a belief to rely on and return to) China itself: rites, dress, ancestral halls, genealogies. It includes a \u0026quot;South\u0026quot; section on Hunan and Jiangxi over two or three thousand years, through the movement of people The Neighbours' Heaven Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, Taiwan, and the Chinese of Southeast Asia Duoshe Civilizations and religions worldwide: who survived and why Current Affairs Housing, cars, children, marriage, old age, money Slow Train India, as a contrast to East Asia Secret Copies Pseudo-history, and why people love a \u0026quot;hidden truth\u0026quot; Huozhi Money and trade, the part Confucianism rarely talked about Alternate History: 1853 What if Zeng Guofan and Hong Xiuquan had joined forces? On hold So far only a few pieces have English versions; the rest are in Chinese.\nLetting both sides of the wall talk One more purpose matters a great deal to me: I hope this site can help people on the mainland and people outside it talk to each other.\nThe two sides read different things, each stays inside its own information cocoon, and with the closedness of information on the mainland, very often we cannot even agree on how to say a fact or a word, and the conversation does not get anywhere. So when I write I try to speak with things both sides can check: sources are marked, the original is cited down to the volume where it can be found, the accounts of the different sides are set side by side, and what cannot be found I say cannot be found. I have my own position and will say so plainly; but the facts and their sources are on the table, where anyone can check them, and anyone can come and argue with me.\nOne last thing One last thing, and it may not be pleasant to hear. In the last century the Japanese pushed a \u0026quot;Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.\u0026quot; It was a slogan carried by one country's army, paid for with other people's land and lives. It failed, and it should have. But the thought that East Asians can, and should, come together in one circle does not die because that thought once borrowed its name. I am thinking of the same circle with a different core and a different face: no country at the centre, but a culture and a faith that everyone shares; not by force, but through ancestral rites, ritual, festivals and a script people can still read; with nobody as the big brother.\nAcknowledgements Many pieces here began with a question or an answer I read on Zhihu, a Chinese Q\u0026amp;A site. I treated them as leads: read first, then go back to the original texts, data and public records, and cite what holds up. Thanks to the authors of those answers, and to the people in the comments who pushed back or added to them. These are the ones whose views I paraphrased or cited, by user name:\n诗与星空: the objection that a shared script is enough (Yigui) 百鬼英梨梨, 張子維, 山阴张侯: answers on religion winning through organization and welfare (Yigui) chen: Zhuangzi's standing in Daoism (Yigui) G胖忠实粉丝: how Han people fared under the Jin (Yigui) bjisn, 张子逸: two answers on Thailand and the \u0026quot;Chinese cultural sphere\u0026quot; (The Neighbours' Heaven) 匂宫出梦: an answer on the Seoul protests and elected government (The Neighbours' Heaven) 羊教授: an answer on the name of Hong Taiji (Secret Copies) 零度君: an analysis of Zhang Xiangqian's \u0026quot;unified field theory\u0026quot; (Secret Copies) 文行先生: an article on the names \u0026quot;doubting Western history\u0026quot; and \u0026quot;Western pseudo-history\u0026quot; (Secret Copies) 姜醒, 张三千, uwn1Ty: several answers on housing prices (Huozhi) I paraphrase rather than copy; copyright in the originals belongs to their authors. Some other users' views I used only as leads and did not note their names at the time, so they are not listed. If you are one of them and want credit added, a point corrected, or a mention removed, please write to tentao@duck.com.\nComments You can comment under every piece (a GitHub account is needed). Disagreement is the most welcome kind.\n","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/overview/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"the-question\"\u003eThe question\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis site asks one question: \u003cstrong\u003ewhat could hold East Asians together?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy East Asians I mean the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, wherever in the world they live today. These places once shared a common stock: Chinese characters, ancestral rites, ritual, festivals, the same classics. For a thousand years a Vietnamese scholar and a Korean scholar could not speak to each other, yet could pick up a brush and talk in writing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat shared stock has come apart. Most Vietnamese and Koreans can no longer read what their ancestors wrote. Many overseas Chinese, three or four generations on, keep little more than a surname. China itself spent more than a century tearing down and rebuilding; ancestral halls, genealogies and rites were broken off several times.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Overview"},{"content":"Eight series, each covering its own ground, all asking one question: see the overview. Only some pieces have been translated so far.\nYigui: A Belief to Rely On and Return To\rChina itself: rites, dress, ancestral halls, genealogies. Subtitle: China\u0026#39;s Heavenly Kingdom and All-Under-Heaven.\n11 pieces\nThe Neighbours\u0026#39; Heaven\rThe Confucian neighbours beyond China (Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, Taiwan) and the Chinese of Southeast Asia.\n32 pieces\nDuoshe: How Civilizations Survive\r26 pieces\nCurrent Affairs\r9 pieces\nSlow Train: Where India Is Heading\r9 pieces\nSecret Copies: Why We Love Pseudo-History\r3 pieces\nHuozhi: Money and Trade\r3 pieces\n","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/series/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eEight series, each covering its own ground, all asking one question: see the \u003ca href=\"/en/\"\u003eoverview\u003c/a\u003e. Only some pieces have been translated so far.\u003c/p\u003e\n\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/yigui/\"\u003eYigui: A Belief to Rely On and Return To\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003eChina itself: rites, dress, ancestral halls, genealogies. Subtitle: China\u0026#39;s Heavenly Kingdom and All-Under-Heaven.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e11 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/linju/\"\u003eThe Neighbours\u0026#39; Heaven\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003eThe Confucian neighbours beyond China (Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, Taiwan) and the Chinese of Southeast Asia.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e32 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/duoshe/\"\u003eDuoshe: How Civilizations Survive\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e26 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/shishi/\"\u003eCurrent Affairs\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e9 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/manche/\"\u003eSlow Train: Where India Is Heading\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e9 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/miben/\"\u003eSecret Copies: Why We Love Pseudo-History\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e3 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e\r\n\u003csection class=\"series-item\"\u003e\r\n  \u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"/en/huozhi/\"\u003eHuozhi: Money and Trade\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003csmall\u003e3 pieces\u003c/small\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003c/section\u003e","title":"Series"},{"content":" RSS https://tentao.pages.dev/en/index.xml\nAdd the address above to any RSS reader (Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, Reeder and so on) and new pieces will arrive as soon as they are posted. Each series page has its own feed too, in case you only want to follow one.\nEmail Email subscription is not set up yet. Use the RSS feed above for now.\n","permalink":"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/subscribe/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"subscribe-box\"\u003e\n  \u003ch2\u003eRSS\u003c/h2\u003e\n  \u003cp\u003e\u003ca class=\"subscribe-rss\" href=\"https://tentao.pages.dev/en/index.xml\"\u003ehttps://tentao.pages.dev/en/index.xml\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n  \u003cp\u003eAdd the address above to any RSS reader (Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, Reeder and so on) and new pieces will arrive as soon as they are posted. Each series page has its own feed too, in case you only want to follow one.\u003c/p\u003e\n  \u003ch2\u003eEmail\u003c/h2\u003e\n  \u003cp\u003eEmail subscription is not set up yet. Use the RSS feed above for now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"Subscribe"}]