VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 9
Expansion, the Ultimate Goal of Political Institutions
Last chapter covered why centralized authority works. It can concentrate strength, meet outside challenges, integrate inner resources, and make thousand-year arrangements. That chapter ended on a question: since centralized authority is so effective, is it enough just to centralize as hard as possible and make oneself as big as possible? This chapter goes one layer deeper, to what all these capacities are finally for, and the answer is one word, expansion. Expansion is the deepest running logic of a political institution, underlying governance itself. Expansion is the survival instinct of a political institution, and not to expand is to be swallowed by a rival that does. Three sections.
Section One is about expansion being the ultimate goal of political institutions: every political institution is at bottom expanding, and one that does not expand is eliminated. Then it looks at the three forms of expansion, from the territorial expansion of antiquity, to modern colonization with economic plunder as its undertone and deep, lasting wounds behind it, to today's multidimensional expansion across culture, technology, ideology, and infrastructure. A group that does not expand consumes its resources within a fixed boundary, and while its outside rivals expand and it does not, it is overtaken. The expansion of antiquity had land as its object and force as its means. Colonialism, beginning around the sixteenth century, went farther, its aim more economic, its means more systematic, its destruction more thorough, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade shipped about twelve million Black people from Africa to the Americas. Today territorial expansion has nearly stopped, but expansion has not stopped. Multinational enterprises occupy no territory, but they occupy the way of use, the technical standard, the way of consumption.
Section Two sets firm one of the most important methods of this book: on all expansion, pass no verdict of right or wrong. But passing no verdict is not the same as seeing no difference, and different expansions carry different undertones. Then it looks at the distinctive samples of Chinese civilization in history, from the Silk Road to Zheng He's voyages to the western seas, mainly trade, culture, and building. The expansion of colonialism, the expansion of multinational enterprises, right or wrong? Asked again and again, answered again and again: no verdict. Because to judge an expansion right or wrong is a judgment standing on some one standpoint of value. Standing with the side expanded into, one feels it is a violation. Standing with the side expanding out, one feels it is civilization. But colonized, one loses economic autonomy and has resources plundered. Reached by the exchange of trade plus cultural spread, one can choose to accept or not. Emperor Wu of Han sent Zhang Qian on a mission to the Western Regions. Silk, porcelain, and tea went out, grapes, alfalfa, and fine horses came in, a two-way exchange. Zheng He made seven long voyages, over two hundred ships and near thirty thousand people, and across twenty-eight years occupied not an inch of land. This is not to say there was no opening of frontiers. Last chapter's Qin campaign south into the far south was a territorial expansion. What is spoken of here is an overall tendency.
Section Three is an interesting historical contrast. The centralized great state was built in China twenty-two hundred years ago, while Europe was nearly two thousand years late, and the one thing to see clearly is that late is not backward, it is a structural difference of geography, culture, and power structure, each road with its own costs and its own gains. Louis the Fourteenth of France began a full centralized authority some nineteen hundred years after the First Emperor. Europe stayed scattered for a long time, for four reasons: the Alps and the Pyrenees cut the continent into many regions; its languages were extremely plural, while China had one unified written Chinese; royal power, church power, and nobility stood in a three-way balance; and Rome became a vacant seat every European king wished to sit in but none could hold steady. Only after the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, and the French Revolution did Europe move step by step to centralized authority. The other side of scattering is that a scholar pressed in this country could continue in another, and this possibility of getting away brought the plurality of thought, the rise of science, and the exploration of power-limiting institutions.
What this chapter sets firm: expansion is the ultimate goal of political institutions; on all expansion pass no verdict of right or wrong, yet the undertones can be seen; Europe's lateness is not backwardness. This chapter shows you one thing: expansion is the instinct of every civilization, but the ways of expanding differ enormously, and the verdict is left to the reader. The next chapter walks into today, to two present-day samples, China and the United States, where today's centralized authority has long ceased to be the old shape of imperial one-man dictatorship, and then to why centralized authority fails too.
Chapter contents
Section One. Expansion, from territory to colony to many dimensions
Section Two. Both sides of expansion, different undertones and the Chinese samples
Section Three. Why Europe was late, not backward but structurally different
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. Expansion, from territory to colony to many dimensions