VOLUME V, CHAPTER 12, SECTION 3
The Position of the Taken, Gold and Jade That None Can Keep
The previous section looked at the taker's position, insufficient output joined with a strong army. This section turns the lens around, to the other side, the taken. Being taken from was never bad luck, and never simply the misfortune of a bad neighbor. A nation becomes one that is taken from because it happens to stand in a position where its own wealth is thick enough to draw envy, while its defenses have grown too loose to hold. Laozi's eight words, a hall filled with gold and jade, no one can keep it safe, speak to exactly this position.
One. First, State the Taken's Position Clearly
No nation in history was ever taken from simply because a bad actor suddenly appeared next door. A nation becomes one that is taken from because it has placed itself in a position meeting two conditions at once, first, output plentiful enough, wealth thick enough to draw outside envy, and second, defenses grown slack, with no force of protection to match that wealth. Meet both conditions, and being taken from becomes, in all likelihood, only a matter of time.
A hall filled with gold and jade, no one can keep it safe. Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 9.
Wealth itself is a signal, and the richer a nation grows, the more it draws the notice of others, its riches laid out in plain view amount to a silent invitation sent out to everyone around it, and the neighbor whose output falls short but whose military runs strong, seeing a hall so full of gold and jade, sooner or later moves. Without a force able to hold its ground at that point, a hall filled with gold and jade is no longer good fortune, it becomes the very root of disaster overhead. The taken and the taker have always appeared as a pair, and one side's hall filled with gold and jade is exactly the other side's reason to move.
Two. The Northern Song, One of the Most Classic Samples of This Pattern
The Northern Song's economy stands as a peak in Chinese history, estimated by later scholars to have accounted for roughly twenty-two percent of the world's economy around the year 1000, its capital at Kaifeng one of the most flourishing cities on earth. Meng Yuanlao recorded its night market.
The night market runs until the third watch, and by the fifth watch it has opened again. Meng Yuanlao, Dreams of Splendor in the Eastern Capital.
The night market stayed lively until the third watch, past midnight, and opened again by the fifth watch, before dawn, a scene Europe would not see for centuries yet. Paper currency first circulated widely here, and Song poetry, painting, and porcelain were the most refined achievements of their age, a hall truly filled with gold and jade.
But the Northern Song's military structure was built on strengthening the trunk and weakening the branches, prizing letters over arms, its imperial guard at its height numbered a million on paper, and yet Ouyang Xiu himself lamented that of seven or eight hundred thousand soldiers, scarcely seventy or eighty thousand could truly be used in battle. Founded on the fear of repeating the late Tang's warlordism, the Song pulled its best troops into the center and rotated its generals constantly, so that soldiers never came to know their own commanders, guarding against the very danger it feared most while, in the same stroke, disabling its own capacity to fight. Its wealth stood at the very top, and its power of protection stood hollow. In 1127, Jin forces marched south, and two emperors were carried off captive, remembered in history as the Humiliation of Jingkang, and the Northern Song, for all its hall filled with gold and jade, could not, in the end, keep it safe.
Three. The Late Ming, the Same Pattern, Carried Even Further
In the mid-to-late Ming, a substantial share of the world's silver eventually flowed into China, silver mined by the Spanish in the Americas routed through Manila into East Asia, traded for Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea, making China the absolute center of output in that early wave of globalization, with money from across the whole world flowing steadily inward.
And yet, at the very same time, the late Ming's political structure had rotted through entirely, factional strife without end, eunuchs monopolizing power, the treasury run dry, unable even to pay the wages of the frontier troops in Liaodong. In 1644, Li Zicheng broke into Beijing and the Chongzhen Emperor took his own life, and that same year Wu Sangui opened the pass at Shanhaiguan, and Qing forces entered through it. On one side, the wealth of the south of the Yangtze surpassed anywhere else under heaven. On the other, it could not manage even the most basic military mobilization. The late Ming's position runs even more typically than the Northern Song's, wealth was in no short supply, what it lacked was the mechanism to turn that wealth into the capacity to defend itself, and once that mechanism failed, a hall filled with gold and jade became meat hanging at the edge of someone else's mouth.
Four. During the Qianlong Reign of the Qing, the Pattern Repeats Once More, This Time Against Powers Arriving by Sea
At the height of its prosperity under Qianlong, the Qing economy is estimated to have accounted for roughly thirty percent of the world's total, truly the largest economy of its time. In 1793, a British delegation arrived in China, and Qianlong, in his reply to the British king, wrote a line.
The Celestial Empire possesses all things in abundance and lacks nothing. Qianlong, Edict to the King of England.
The Celestial Empire had everything it needed and no use for exchanging goods with a foreign country. This confidence was not entirely without foundation, it was a true reflection of the economic scale of the time, but the trouble sat exactly inside that confidence, the more one believes one already has everything, the less one sees how quickly the world outside the door is changing. At that very same moment, Europe had already completed the early accumulation behind a reset of its industrial system, the Royal Navy's gunships had already left the Qing far behind, while the Eight Banners had grown soft and the Green Standard Army had fallen into disrepair, leaving its defenses a name without substance. When the Opium War broke out in 1840, a mere few thousand British troops, fighting a running campaign along the coast, forced the largest economy in the world into ceding territory and paying indemnity, and in 1842 the Treaty of Nanjing ceded Hong Kong Island, imposed an indemnity of twenty-one million silver dollars, and opened five ports to trade. A hall filled with gold and jade, no one can keep it safe, these eight words carved themselves once more into nineteenth-century China.
Five. Widen the View, This Pattern Is Not China's Alone
Mughal India, from the seventeenth into the early eighteenth century, was one of the wealthiest empires in the world, supplying cotton cloth, spices, and gems across the globe, its economy at one point accounting for roughly a quarter of the world's total. But its military stood on the old foundation of feudal fiefdoms, the central authority weakened severely in its later years, the regions each going their own way, and against a new kind of organization like the East India Company, part merchant and part army, it lost battle after battle. At the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a mere three thousand troops of the East India Company routed tens of thousands under the ruler of Bengal, and from then on India slid, step by step, into colonization, Mughal wealth becoming, in the end, raw capital feeding the reset of Britain's industrial system.
There is also another kind of taken nation, one that comes by a different road entirely, having thrown away its own power of protection with its own hand. In the early Ming, Zheng He's voyages to the Western Ocean commanded treasure fleets that stood as the strongest maritime force on earth at the time, but after the Xuande era this capacity was deliberately abandoned, the ships scattered and the charts destroyed, and by the Jiajing era even pirates along the southeastern coast were hard to fend off. Other taken nations failed to hold their defenses, but this was a case of the Ming having the means to defend itself and choosing, on its own, not to. Building a power of protection takes generations, and destroying it takes only one order, and a nation at its very strongest is often the nation most likely to underestimate its own defenses, thinking the seas quiet enough to let its guard down, never realizing that the moment it lays that guard down, it has already quietly slid from a nation that protects itself into one that can be taken from.
Six. Africa, the Heaviest Sample of This Pattern of All
Sub-Saharan Africa was never a wilderness. West Africa's Mali and Songhai, the city-states along the East African coast, and Great Zimbabwe in the south had all known prosperity. The ruler of the Mali Empire, making pilgrimage to Mecca in the early fourteenth century, passed through Cairo distributing so much gold that local gold prices did not recover for years, a hall filled with gold and jade if ever there was one.
But Africa never formed a political and military structure able to mobilize the continent as a whole, its kingdoms each going their own way, and its firearms falling far behind Europe's. From the sixteenth century onward, European powers built outposts one after another along its coasts, and the transatlantic slave trade ran for roughly three hundred years, an estimated more than twelve million people forcibly carried away. By the later nineteenth century, the Scramble for Africa began in earnest, and at the Berlin Conference of 1884, the European powers divided the entire continent between themselves over a map. A hall filled with gold and jade, no one can keep it safe, Africa's turn is the largest in scale, and the heaviest in weight, that these eight words have ever been played out in human history.
Seven. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the thirty-seventh layer. The taken's position is a hall filled with gold and jade joined with no one able to keep it safe, and the thicker the wealth and the emptier the defense, the greater the likelihood of being taken from. Set the Northern Song, the late Ming, the Qing, Mughal India, and Africa side by side, entirely different in region, era, and civilization, and the very same pattern runs straight through all of them, plentiful output paired with slack defenses becomes the taken.
Laozi's a hall filled with gold and jade, no one can keep it safe, and Han Fei's people today fight over them, not out of baseness, but because goods are scarce, are the two ends of one single rope, one speaking, from the taken's own position, of why it could not hold its ground, the other speaking, from the taker's position, of why it had to reach out. Join the two, and the whole picture of international position stands complete. The taken is not a morally innocent victim, and the taker is not a morally evil aggressor. Lay out, as they truly stand, the structures each side occupies, and a nation with plentiful output but no defense to match is taken from as a structural inevitability, and a nation with insufficient output but strong military force reaches outward as a structural inevitability too, and the two together answer why this same story keeps replaying itself, over and over, between nations. See this layer clearly, and looking at any nation rich but not strong, a reader can already feel a little worried on its behalf in advance.
The next section takes up the deepest of the five depths, occupying a position, unfolded directly, to see clearly the watershed line that separates taking from occupying a position. Carry the taken's position, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Chapter Thirteen. Occupying a Position, the Treaty, and the Turning Over of the Taken.