VOLUME V, CHAPTER 12, SECTION 1
The Five Depths of International Behavior
The previous section set the first foundation firmly, between nations there is no supreme lawmaker and no supreme enforcer, there is only the balance of strength. Since there is no law to fall back on, how far can a strong nation actually go against a weak one. This section lays it out, from the shallowest to the deepest, international conduct sorted into five depths, each one harder to see through than the last, and for the deepest of the five, this run sets down a new term of its own, occupying a position.
One. First, Break Open a Basket, and Stop Calling Everything Between Strong and Weak Colonization
Readers of history easily fall into one basket, stuffing every relation of strength and weakness between nations under the single word colonialism. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a number of scholars took colonialism apart for analysis, each with real insight, and yet largely circling on the same plane, packing every kind of strong-power conduct toward a weak nation into the single concept of colonialism or imperialism.
Sorting things this way is not without its use, but it hides a more important question. A strong nation's conduct toward a weak one runs shallow in some cases and deep in others, and the depth leaves an entirely different mark. Calling every wound colonization is like calling a scraped knee and a ruptured organ both simply an injury, true as far as it goes, and yet it lets you see nothing clearly. This section lays the depths out plainly, five layers running from shallow to deep, and the deeper the layer, the more thorough, the harder to see through, and the harder to reverse its effect on the nation acted upon.
Two. The First Layer, the Shallowest, Colonization
The essence of colonization comes down to one line, you have arrived, but you remain a foreigner. The colonized land carries the ruling power's troops, officials, language, and tax rules, but there is one thing the colonizer can never manage, making the colonized forget who they are. However long the British ruled India, Indians remained Indian. However long the French administered Vietnam, the Vietnamese remained Vietnamese. The colonizer is the guest, the colonized the host, and this positional relationship is written into both sides' identity from beginning to end, and neither side ever forgets it.
Precisely because of this, colonization carries a natural end point built into it. Once the colonized people's national consciousness awakens, the strength to send the outsider away gathers, bit by bit, and the colonizer, sooner or later, has to leave. The wave of decolonization that swept the globe in the twentieth century was exactly the natural result of this positional logic. The colonizer knows he is the outsider, and the colonized knows exactly who the outsider is, and this one shared knowing is colonization's natural ceiling.
Three. The Second Layer, Seizing Resources and People
This layer is more naked than colonization. It has no intention of ruling for the long term, and no intention of staying to govern, it simply carries off material wealth, or living people, directly. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some built outposts along the African coast purely to control the flow of gold and spices and ship the wealth away. Others mined silver on a massive scale in Latin America, shipping it back to Europe boatload after boatload, while the indigenous people in the mines paid for it with their lives. Seizing people ran even more extreme, the transatlantic slave trade running from the mid-sixteenth century into the nineteenth, an estimated twelve to fifteen million Africans forcibly carried across the ocean and sold as goods onto plantations in the Americas.
The logic of this layer treats another people's resources and another people's population as raw material to be taken unilaterally, seized and abandoned with not the slightest sense of governing responsibility left behind. This is the only one of the five layers that carries no intention of rule at all, and the closer a position sits to this end, the less concern it carries for the side acted upon, and the harsher the hand that does it.
Four. The Third Layer, Seizing Territory
Seizing territory differs from colonization. Colonization builds rule on someone else's land while the legal thread of that power stays taut throughout. Seizing territory cuts the land away outright, folds it into one's own map, and fixes it in place with a treaty, so that from then on the land changes its name on the map. Modern China's most typical sample is the ceding of land that followed a string of unequal treaties, Hong Kong Island ceded under the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, Taiwan ceded under the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. The land is cut away, and the local people are not necessarily driven out, but the land's ownership changes, fixed in black and white by treaty, becoming a legal fact.
This layer runs deeper than seizing resources, because it moves the map itself, the legal thread of ownership itself, fixing what strength obtained into part of the international order. But it does not yet reach the deepest layer. The territory is cut away, and the people on it are still the same people, and their culture, language, and generations of memory do not vanish simply because a new line has been drawn on a map. A border can be redrawn many times, and the ledger kept inside the hearts of those living beneath that line does not change along with it.
Five. The Fourth Layer, Legislating Treaties and Rules
This layer is more hidden and more lasting than seizing territory. A power need not occupy your land at all, holding the rules alone is enough to leave a weak nation at a lasting disadvantage. The unequal treaty is its most typical shape, extraterritoriality placing foreigners beyond local law, tariff agreements stripping a weak nation of the power to set its own rates, most-favored-nation clauses letting any privilege one nation grants automatically fall to the treaty power as well. None of these clauses move a single soldier, they are only written into an agreement in the language of law, and then stamped by the weak nation's own seal, endorsing the strong power's position, and the finest touch of all is that the hand of force has already withdrawn, leaving on the page only the four words both sides agreed.
This layer is exactly the extreme version of Huang Zongxi's the law of a single family, played out on the international stage, one power, or a handful of powers, legislating and, borrowing the form of the weak nation's own sovereignty, in substance folding that weak nation into the strong power's own legal system. Today, this layer has grown even finer, the conditions attached to international lending, the whole framework of trade rules, fair for everyone on the surface, and in substance, whoever leads the writing of the rules gets the first advantage. The one who writes the rule and the one governed by it have never once stood in the same position.
Six. The Fifth Layer, the Deepest, Occupying a Position
Occupying a position differs from the first four at the root. In the first four, the relation remains one of outsider to local, with a clear line between outside and inside throughout. Occupying a position is different. Its result is that the outsider becomes you, and you, in turn, become part of that outsider's history, and later histories write the whole matter as it was simply always this way.
Put most plainly, colonization means you have arrived, but you remain foreign, and one day you will be sent away. Occupying a position means you have arrived, and you have become this nation, and this nation's people have become your subjects, and the history books write you as one of this nation's own dynasties, your name carved from then on into the land's own official history. The Yuan dynasty, built by the Mongols, is called, in Chinese history, the Yuan dynasty, one dynasty in China's own historical sequence. The Qing dynasty, built by the Manchus, is the same, called China's last dynasty, not a chapter of foreign occupation. This exchange of position is the deepest, the most thorough, and the most far-reaching of the five depths. It need not be a bad thing, and need not be a good thing, it is only the hardest of the five to see through. Occupying a position is the most critical stroke in this whole run, and a section later on will lay it out in full. Here it is only nailed down, for now, at the deepest position of all.
Seven. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the thirty-fifth layer. Conduct between nations sorts, from shallow to deep, into five layers, colonization, seizing resources and people, seizing territory, legislating treaties, and occupying a position, each one deeper than the last, each one harder to see through, harder to resist, and harder to reverse.
Set the five together, and a pattern surfaces. The deeper the conduct, the less it needs a visible outsider identity, the harder it is for people at the time to see through, and the harder it is to reverse afterward. A colonizer sent away leaves a mark that can slowly heal. Seized resources might, in some other way, be rebuilt over time. Ceded territory is sometimes given, by history, one chance to be recovered. An unequal treaty can, in the end, be abolished as the balance of strength shifts. But once occupying a position succeeds, what has been rewritten is history itself, and to reverse it requires first settling what that history even was, and the right to write that history is already held in the hands of the one who occupied the position. See these five layers clearly, and looking at any matter of strength and weakness between nations, a reader no longer calls it colonization in one broad stroke, but asks instead, which layer, exactly, is this.
The next section looks first at the position of the taker, what structure of strength pushes a nation into the position of the one who takes. Carry these five depths, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Two. The Position of the Taker, Output Falling Short and a Strong Army.