From: Xiaowen Li <lix@CRSA.BU.EDU>
Subject:      FWD for Mr. H. Anonymous - General Ma Yuan and "Vietnam" (3)
Reply-To: Xiaowen Li <lix@CRSA.BU.EDU>
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 09:18:07 GMT
Comments: To: china-nt@uga.cc.uga.edu

This is a forwarding. The previous installments have been posted on
SCC. Mr. H. Anonymous suggests me to forward this on China-net also.
This forwarding does not imply I agree or disagree the points in this
article.

======================================================================
  Re: General Ma Yuan and "Vietnam" (III)

The trouble in discussing Ma Yuan, the Zheng sisters, and Zhou Enlai's
"apologies" is that many "learned" people are fond of applying the
modern notion of nation, ethnic groups, etc. to make it an impossible
mess, not to mention some 20th century geopolitics getting into
the way.  Still more hopeless is those "back-to-the-future" moralists
trying to stuff their post-industrial "liberal humanism" down the
throats of those ancient players who have been dead for thousands of years.

To help sort out this mess, the first thing to do is perhaps to take
a look at the so-calles ethnic picture of the Chinese nation at the
time.  One thing we have to realize is that even at the very moment,
the so-called "Han" people are far from being a homogeneous, monolithic
group.  Their dialects may be about as "uniform" or "unified" than those
associated with the Babel Tower.   Their appearance shows such wide
variation across the country that casual foreign visitors are often
dumbfounded.  Their genetic traits?  We can list various ancient
Yue/Viet groups in the South, XiongNu/XianBei/TuJue/Mongol/Manchu in
the North, plus Indo-Iranians, Arabs, Jews, etc, in the Southeast and
Northwest.  We may also note the various Chinese surnames in use or
attested.   Western and Western-trained "experts" almost always have
trouble dealing with Chinese surnames of XiongNu, XianBei, or Indo-
Iranian origins, sometimes mispronouncing them, sometimes trying to
truncate them, but most often so intimated by their sheer appearance
that virtually no Western "expert" can be found anywhere studying
such surnames.

Well, one could say the picture was hardly any neater 2000 years
ago.  Indeed it was quite possibly even less admissible of easy
characterizations.  Or we may further go back to the formative
stages of the "Chinese nation".  Even in the hardcore Central China
"Zhu1Xia4" states and as late as in the Spring-Autumn period, there
lived many non-Xia or non-Sinic groups like Di2.  In the South the
Kingdom of Chu3 was for a long time dismissed by the ZhuXia as an
outright non-Xia state.  And how about the Kingdom of Yue which
produced the beautiful XiShi?  Recent archeological discoveries have
proven beyond any doubt that the Yue people belonged to a group
distinctly different from those in Yellow River valley, as did most
of the people in today's southern China and northern Vietnam.

Nevertheless, all these various groups participated actively in
forming and shaping the ancient Chinese nation.  Both Chu and Yue
(and yet another originally non-Xia state Wu2, despite its ruling
family's impressive "royal" surname Ji1-- more on this later) had
played the role of a "Ba4"(*) in Chinese politics.  Modern
researchers attribute much of the substantial "non-Sino-Tibetan"
strata in today's Chinese language(s) to early participation by
non-Xia groups in the cultural and linguistic history of China.
If I may quote Professor Judith Treistman:

   [The] genius of Chinese civilization can be viewed as the result,
   the product, of many cultures interacting with a heretofore
   unsuspected intensity.

(*)Note: Ba4 refers to either a state or a ruler of that state.
   Both the state of Chu3 and its great king Zhuang Wang were
   among the top five.  Some authorities listed Yue and
   its great king GouJian among the top seven.  It is to be
   noted that toward the late Spring-and-Autumn period, none
   of the three new Ba4 was universally regarded as ZhuXia.
   All three called their rulers King, rejecting the Zhou's
   residual authority.  More later.

Meanwhile, not all Sino-Tibetan-speaking groups who originally lived
within the confines of the Chinese states would eventually become part
of the Chinese nation.  As many modern researchers have pointed out,
one of the key factor was the way of life people had chosen.  Of
particular importance was whether they went into labor-intensive and
technology-intensive farming made possible only with permanent abode.
As a result many originally Chinese(Sino-Tibetan)-speaking people
became "marginalized" and eventually "non-Chinese", forced out of the
Chinese realm or at least its hardcore.  I would not be so bold as
some (Western) scholar to suggest that part of the early XiongNu
Confederacy might have been formed this way, though the relationship
between the early Sinic cultures and the Steppe cultures is undeniable.
But I certainly would not exclude such a possibility regarding many of
the Qiang1 groups, which had been recorded by many early sources as
well as mythologies as one of the founding groups of the Chinese nation.

It is therefore important to note that it was more the way of life
than any "ethnicity" that helped forge and form the Chinese people
and define and distinguish their culture, something to remember when
we turn our attention to the Yangtse River valley and further south
and wonder at the remarkably rapid Sinicization of those quite possibly
non-Sino-Tibetan groups including various ancient Yue/Viet communities
living in that region.

(To be continued)
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