VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 1
Occupying a Position and Colonization, the Deepest Stroke in the Study of Positions
The sections before this have laid out the taker, the taken, and the five depths. This section goes back to the deepest of those five layers, occupying a position, and stands it side by side with the one everyone knows best, colonization, to see clearly the single most important watershed between the two. One line, set down first. Colonization means you have arrived, and you are still a foreign country. Occupying a position means you have arrived, and you have become this nation. This dividing line is the deepest stroke in all international conduct, and the hardest to see through.
One. The Root Difference Between Colonization and Occupying a Position Falls on One Line
At first glance, colonization and occupying a position both look like the strong arriving on the weak's land, settling in, and taking charge. But the root difference falls on one line, the line between outside and inside, and whether that line is still there. Colonization means you have arrived, but you are still a foreign country, and one day you will be asked to leave. Occupying a position means you have arrived, and you have become this nation, the local people have become your subjects, and the history books write you as one of this nation's dynasties.
The difference between the two does not lie in how many troops the conquest used, and does not lie in how much wealth the rule carried off, those are only the surface. However harsh colonization gets, the line between outside and inside stays clear from beginning to end, who is the guest and who is the host, both sides know it in their hearts. Occupying a position runs deepest, and its depth lies exactly in erasing that line entirely, erasing it so far that later generations open the history books and cannot even tell that an outsider was ever there. The true watershed falls after the rule ends. When colonization ends, the colonizer packs up and goes home, and the colonized become masters of their own land once again. When occupying a position ends, or runs on all the way to today, the outsider has long since been written into the official history, and no one can tell any more who came from outside and who was local.
Two. First, Colonization, Britain and India
Britain ruled India for nearly two hundred years, and the politics, economy, education, and administration of the whole subcontinent were turned upside down. English became the official language, British law was set up, railways ran across the whole country, and India became the raw material base of Britain's industrial system. And yet, even transformed this far, not one person would say India is a dynasty of Britain. The British in India remained British from first to last, and Indians remained Indian, and this line of identity never blurred by a single inch.
In 1947 India became independent, the British withdrew, and India became once again the India of the Indians. France and Vietnam, the Netherlands and Indonesia, every history of colonization ends much the same way, the colonizer withdraws, and the colonized land becomes itself again. The wave of decolonization in the twentieth century was, at its root, the natural ceiling of this layer of colonization at work. The colonizer knows clearly that he is the outsider, and the colonized know clearly who the outsider is, and this one knowing clearly locked in colonization's end point from the very start.
Three. Now Occupying a Position, the Mongol Yuan Dynasty Is the First Complete Sample
When Kublai Khan founded his state, the name he chose for the dynasty was Great Yuan, taken from the line in the Book of Changes, great indeed is the originating power of Qian, not a Mongol word, and not a tribal name. That was the first step. The second step mattered more, setting the capital at Dadu, today's Beijing, the city laid out after the traditional Chinese capital plan in the Rites of Zhou, Record of Trades, its central axis clear. The third step, taking over China's whole bureaucratic system, setting up the Secretariat and the Censorate, and ordering Han officials to compile the histories of the dynasties before it, the History of Liao, the History of Jin, the History of Song.
This last step was crucial. In China's political tradition, compiling the history of the previous dynasty is the most solemn ceremony there is for declaring I am the rightful successor. A new dynasty compiling the history of the old one amounts to saying, in front of everyone under heaven, the old line ends here with me, and what I carry on is this rightful line of incense, not some other band that fought its way in from outside. Kublai Khan had Han officials compile the histories of the Song, Liao, and Jin, and with that one stroke, the Mongols were no longer conquerors from the steppe, but a link in China's rightful chain, carrying on from what came before and opening what came after. The result, the Yuan dynasty fell in 1368, and yet the Yuan was written into the sequence of official histories, becoming one link in the chain Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing. In any general history of China today, the Yuan is one of China's dynasties, not Mongols ruling China for more than ninety years. Occupying a position succeeded. Politically it did not last long, but in identity it had already been accepted by the official history.
Four. The Manchu Qing Dynasty Was the Most Thorough Occupying of a Position
The Qing's whole undertaking was finer than the Yuan's. Shaving the head and changing dress, keep your head and lose your hair, keep your hair and lose your head, enforced from the year after the Qing entered the pass, and for more than two hundred years, Han men wore a queue on their heads. This was not an ordinary change of dress, it was the most direct visual declaration of an exchange of identity. Literary inquisitions came reign after reign, and anything touching the distinction between barbarian and Chinese, or overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming, was punished severely, this was gripping tight the right to write history. The History of Ming took nearly a hundred years from start to finish, and the aim of this vast project was to set the Qing firmly into the rightful chain Ming, Qing. Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong studied Han culture deeply, Kangxi could annotate memorials in several scripts, and Yongzheng wrote essays with his own hand arguing the Qing's legitimacy. This whole set was not simply a means of rule, it was a great project of exchanging identity.
In 1912 the Qing came to an end, and yet the Qing entered China's official history as a dynasty. In today's history textbooks, the Qing is China's last dynasty, not Manchus ruling China for two hundred and sixty-eight years. Occupying a position, a complete success.
Five. Here One Most Important Stroke Must Be Added, Occupying a Position Runs Both Ways
The Mongols and the Manchus succeeding at occupying a position does not mean Chinese civilization was replaced, quite the opposite. After the Mongols became a Chinese dynasty, the main body of the Yuan's bureaucracy and rites remained a continuation of Han culture. After the Manchus became a Chinese dynasty, the main body of the Qing's imperial examinations, its Grand Secretariat, and its Chinese classics remained a continuation of the Chinese tradition. This is a uniquely remarkable ability of Chinese civilization, the conqueror who came from outside ends up assimilated, in turn, by this land's civilization, and becomes one stretch in the sequence of Chinese civilization.
Look elsewhere and it stands out even more. The Mongol cavalry swept across Eurasia, the Ilkhanate was Islamized within a few generations, the Golden Horde melted into the East Slavic world within a few generations, and only the branch in the Central Plains left behind the Yuan, a complete Chinese dynasty. After the Manchus entered the pass, by the end of the Qing even the Manchu language was no longer in everyday use. The positional meaning of this runs very deep. Occupying a position successfully is the invader's victory, and at the same time it is also the victory of the civilization that was invaded, because the exchange of identity has never been one-way, and the conqueror, in the end, is rewritten by this land's civilization too. The root lies in Chinese civilization's whole set of things, its writing, its bureaucracy, its rites, its histories, forming a system of its own, tight and easy to use. A conqueror who wants to govern so large a land cannot do without it, and once he uses it, a few generations later, his own language and customs are drawn into it instead. This one, the two-way assimilation of civilizations, is a very deep layer, left for the volume on saving people later in this work to unfold, and set aside here for now.
Six. Japan Tried to Occupy a Position and Failed, Another Key Sample
After the war of 1895, Japan took Taiwan, and carried out half a century of Japanization there, not sending a governor-general to manage things, but setting out to turn the people of Taiwan into subjects of the Japanese emperor, changing their names, speaking Japanese, worshipping at Shinto shrines. In 1910 it annexed the Korean Peninsula, the same set. In 1931 it propped up Manchukuo, and in 1937 it launched its full-scale invasion of China. What Japan meant to build was not a colony, it was the folding of all East Asia into a new order centered on Tokyo. This design ran far deeper than Britain's in India, what it wanted was not the right to rule, it was an exchange of identity, it was occupying a position.
And yet in 1945 Japan surrendered, and the whole project collapsed overnight. Taiwan was restored, Korea became independent, Manchukuo was dissolved, and Japanization came to nothing at all. Behind it stood China's resistance, which never once stopped, the front-line battlefield and the battlefield behind enemy lines each in its place, holding Japan down for a long time, so that it never managed to gather the two things occupying a position needs, enough time, and a stable enough situation. This is a true miracle in the history of Chinese civilization, in the twentieth century, an age when national power was at its strongest and technology at its most advanced, it came through a third large-scale attempt at occupying a position. The Yuan and the Qing, two successes. Japan, this one time, failed.
Seven. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the thirty-eighth layer. International conduct has five depths, and the deeper the layer, the harder to see through and the harder to reverse, and the deepest layer is occupying a position. Line up how the five layers end. When colonization ends, the colonizer is asked to leave. Losses from seized resources can slowly be repaired. The line on the map around ceded territory may one day be redrawn. An unequal treaty can, in the end, be abolished as the balance of strength shifts. Only occupying a position is different. Once occupying a position succeeds, the conqueror has already been written into the official history, and has already become part of this land's history, and to turn it back, one must first win back the right to write history, and that pen has long been held in the hand of the one who occupied the position.
This is why occupying a position runs deeper than the four layers before it. What it moves is not the distribution of strength in some one field, what it rewrites is who am I, is what this land's past actually was. The watershed between occupying a position and colonization lies not in the process but in the ending. After colonization ends, each side goes back to its own place. After occupying a position succeeds, the outsider is written into the official history, and no one can tell any more who is who. See through this watershed, and the true depth of international conduct lies right before your eyes.
The next section returns to the line of law, and lays out the unequal treaty, the layer of legal packaging that comes after the taking. Carry the understanding that occupying a position is the deepest layer, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Two. The Unequal Treaty, the Legal Dressing After the Taking.