VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13
Occupying a Position, the Treaty, and the Turning Over of the Taken
The last chapter sorted international conduct into five depths and looked at both the taker and the taken. Part Five closes with this chapter. This chapter walks three steps deeper on from the last. First it sets the deepest of the five depths, occupying a position, beside the one everyone knows best, colonization, to see the watershed between them clearly. Then it returns to the line of law, to see how, after the taking, a treaty is used to stamp it with the seal of legality. Last, it turns over the taken, who has always been passively taken from, to see that under its feet there are in fact several different stones to stand on.
The first section sets occupying a position beside colonization. Colonization means you came and you are still foreign. Britain held India for two hundred years, and when India became independent in 1947, the British still withdrew. English became an official language, railways covered the whole country, and yet no one would ever say India was a dynasty of Britain. Occupying a position means you came and you became this nation. Kublai Khan made his capital at Dadu and had the histories of the Liao, Jin, and Song compiled, and the Yuan was written into the official history. The Qing imposed the shaved head and the change of dress, spent nearly a hundred years compiling the History of Ming, and was written as China's last dynasty. The dynastic name Great Yuan was taken from the Book of Changes, "Great indeed is the originating power of Qian," and compiling the history of the previous dynasty is the most solemn ceremony there is for declaring, I am the rightful heir. Occupying a position runs both ways. The Mongols and the Manchus became Chinese dynasties, yet their bureaucracy and rites remained a continuation of Han culture. In the end, the conquerors were rewritten by this land's civilization too. Japan wanted to occupy a position, forcing imperial-subject assimilation on Taiwan and Korea and building Manchukuo, and in 1945, because of China's resistance, it all collapsed, setting the thirty-eighth layer. What Japan wanted was not the right to rule, it was an exchange of identity, and yet it never managed to gather enough time or a steady enough situation.
The second section is the unequal treaty. Once one is signed, the matter changes from I took what was yours to you agreed to give it to me. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 ceded Hong Kong, imposed an indemnity, and set tariffs by agreement, and half a year later extraterritoriality was added. Tariff sovereignty, judicial sovereignty, and standing to negotiate as an equal, three pillars pulled out at once by a single treaty. The Treaty of Beijing of 1860 was signed in the lingering smoke of the burning Old Summer Palace. What is called mutual consent is a consent one side forced out by arms. The Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 ceded Taiwan, imposed an indemnity of two hundred million taels, and let Japan set up factories in the treaty ports. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed an indemnity of nearly a billion taels. Part of the Boxer Indemnity was later returned to fund schooling, and it raised a generation of scholars such as Hu Shi and Zhu Kezhen. The veto of the five permanent members in the United Nations Charter of 1945 is a snapshot of strength at that moment in 1945, and Roosevelt insisted on lifting China into the five permanent members, setting the thirty-ninth layer. What Roosevelt lifted was the chair called China, not any particular regime sitting in that chair at the time.
The third section turns the taken over, laying out three roads, to accept, to resist, to grow strong. Mencius spoke of living through hardship and dying in ease. "Born in sorrow and trouble, dead in comfort and ease." Hardship keeps people alive, comfort brings them to ruin. To accept is the late Qing signing treaty after treaty, and also tribute traded for peace down the dynasties, and it comes in two kinds, keeping a bottom line and keeping none. The first is crouching down in order to spring up later, the second is crouching down and never standing up again. To resist is Vietnam against France and America, Gandhi's nonviolent noncooperation, and China's resistance against Japan, which defeated Japan's attempt to occupy a position, and its price is sacrifice. To grow strong runs from the Self-Strengthening Movement through decades of industrialization, and it is also the Meiji Restoration, the only road that can change the position at the root, and yet Japan, once it had grown strong, turned around and became a taker. Growing strong shored up the defenses, but did not mend the cycle of taking and being taken itself. The three roads carry no ranking, and all of them remain inside the frame of taking and being taken, setting the fortieth layer. The three are often not a single choice, they are a relay.
Three sections, building from the thirty-eighth layer to the fortieth. This chapter carries the chessboard between nations, from the deepest, occupying a position, to the legalizing treaty, to the responses of the taken, all the way to the doorstep of the present. All three responses answer the question, the taking has already come, how should I respond, and not one of them answers, how can taking be stopped, at the root, from ever happening again. One line never breaks. The root of taking is output falling short, none of the three responses can get out of this cycle, and the real way out waits for the later volume on saving people. This chapter keeps its discipline in particular. Of occupying a position it makes nothing pretty, of resistance it works up no feeling, of growing strong it does no boasting. It lays out the positions only, and leaves the judgment to the reader. The next chapter enters Part Six, to see what new coats the international order of the twenty-first century has put on taking, and from there crosses the bridge to artificial intelligence.
Contents
Section One. Occupying a Position and Colonization, the Deepest Stroke in the Study of Positions.
Section Two. The Unequal Treaty, the Legal Dressing After the Taking.
Section Three. The Responses of the Taken, Accept, Resist, Grow Strong.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. Occupying a Position and Colonization, the Deepest Stroke in the Study of Positions.