VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 1
Occupying a Position and Colonization, the Watershed Between Them
The last chapter sorted the depths of taking and named the positions of taker and taken. This chapter walks the deepest depth, the occupying of a position, and sets it beside the taking everyone knows best, colonization, to see the watershed between them. The two look alike from a distance and are, at bottom, different in kind, and telling them apart is the work of this section. It carries the same discipline as the whole part. It sorts the structure and points at no nation.
Start with colonization, the familiar one. In colonization, a strong nation comes to a weak one, takes its land, its resources, its people, and rules over them, and through it all the taker remains foreign. The colonizer is a foreign power sitting on top of a subject people, drawing wealth outward, and the line between the two stays visible. The subject people know themselves as subject and know the ruler as foreign, and however long it lasts, the foreignness does not dissolve. This is the taking everyone recognizes, plain in its outline, a foreign hand on a people that remains itself beneath the hand. It is a deep taking, reaching into resources, people, and territory, and it is not the deepest, because through it the taken people keep their standing as themselves, even in subjection, and so keep the ground from which they might one day reclaim their position.
Now the occupying of a position, the deeper one. Here the taking does not sit on top as a foreign hand. It reaches into the position itself, into the taken people's very standing as themselves, so that what is taken is not merely land or wealth or even rule, but the place from which the people are their own thing. The occupying of a position can end with the taken people absorbed, their standing dissolved, no longer a foreign hand on top of them because the distinction between taker and taken has itself been erased. This is deeper than colonization precisely because it leaves no visible foreign hand to resist. In colonization there is always the foreign ruler to push against. In the occupying of a position, at its completion, there is no longer a clear foreign ruler and a clear subject people, because the position that made them two has been taken. This is the fifth and deepest depth of the last chapter, and its depth is exactly that recovery from it is hardest, since what was taken is the standing from which recovery would have to start.
Here the volume sets down a turn that keeps the whole thing honest, and it is the turn the chapter guide insists on. The occupying of a position runs both ways, and in the Chinese line it ran in a direction that undoes any simple story of taker and taken. More than once in its history, a people came in from outside and took the position by force, ruling the whole civilization, the Mongols in their time, the Manchus in theirs. By the outline of colonization these were foreign conquerors sitting atop a subject people. But what happened over the generations was not that a foreign hand kept drawing wealth outward while remaining foreign. What happened was that the conquering people were, over time, absorbed into the civilization they had conquered, taking on its language, its learning, its ways, until the line between conqueror and conquered dissolved from the other direction. The occupying of a position, in this case, ran backward, the taker absorbed into the taken, the standing that swallowed the conqueror belonging to the civilization rather than to the army that had entered it. This is the deepest and strangest form of the occupying of a position, where the position itself is so strong that it takes in the ones who came to take it.
See what this does to any simple picture. It means the occupying of a position is not a one-way weapon of the strong against the weak, and not a thing one nation does to another and the matter ends. It is a contest of positions, and the deeper position can absorb the shallower even when the shallower arrives with the army. A conquering force can win every battle and still, over generations, lose its own standing into the civilization it entered, because the position it occupied turned out to be the stronger thing, and drew the conqueror into itself. So the watershed between colonization and the occupying of a position is not simply that one is shallower and one deeper. It is that colonization keeps the two peoples two, while the occupying of a position works on the standing itself, and can run in either direction, the taker dissolving the taken, or the taken absorbing the taker.
The discipline holds firm here, and it must, because this is exactly the ground where a person is tempted to make it a story of his own nation's glory or grievance. To say the occupying of a position ran both ways in the Chinese line is not to boast that this civilization is superior for having absorbed its conquerors, and not to say that being absorbed is always good or being conqueror always bad. It is to set out the structure, that the occupying of a position works on standing rather than on land, that it can run in either direction, and that the deeper position can absorb the shallower. Whether a given absorption was good or ill, for the absorbed and for the absorbing, the reader judges, holding the one measure to every side. The volume sorts the structure and does not hand the reader a verdict that flatters any nation, its own or another.
There is a further layer that reaches back to the whole volume. The occupying of a position works exactly like the cultural scarcity of an earlier chapter, the holding that lives inside the way people think. To occupy a position is to reach the level where a people's own account of themselves, their standing, their sense of who they are, is the thing taken or the thing that absorbs. That is why it is the deepest depth, because it operates where cultural scarcity operates, in the way people think and know themselves, the level whose robe is finest and whose holding is most durable. A nation can lose land and know it has lost land, and set about winning it back. A nation whose position has been occupied may not fully know it, having taken on the standing that makes its own condition look natural. And a civilization whose position is strong enough may absorb a conqueror who does not fully know he is being absorbed, having taken on the standing of the place he entered. The deepest taking and the deepest holding are the same level, the level of standing itself.
So this section sets a thirty-eighth layer. The occupying of a position and colonization look alike and differ in kind. Colonization keeps taker and taken two, a foreign hand on a people that stays itself beneath it, deep but not deepest, because the taken keep the standing from which to reclaim their position. The occupying of a position works on standing itself, can end with the taken absorbed and the distinction erased, and runs both ways, so that in the Chinese line conquering peoples were themselves absorbed into the civilization they entered, the taker dissolved into the taken. This is the deepest depth because it operates where cultural scarcity operates, in the way people know themselves. The volume sorts the structure, points at no nation, boasts of none and smears none, and hands the one measure. The next section returns to the law and watches the taking, at every depth, get stamped lawful by the treaty, from one century's treaties to the charter of the present order. Let the reader carry this watershed into the section that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.