VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 3
The Responses of the Taken, Accept, Resist, Grow Strong
The sections before this laid out how the taker takes, how deep the taking goes, and how, after the taking, a treaty stamps it, and the strong side has been laid out more or less in full. But the taken has been left all along in the position of passively being taken from, as if it could only sit and wait. This section turns the taken over, to see one thing clearly. Faced with the taker, a nation that is taken from has never had only the one road of simply bearing it. The taken of history have stood in three very different positions, to accept, to resist, to grow strong. Mencius pointed out the deepest layer long ago.
Born of sorrow and hardship, one lives. In ease and comfort, one dies. Mencius, Mencius, Gaozi II.
Sorrow and hardship keep a people alive, and ease and comfort bring a people to ruin. The taken's present circumstance is one great sorrow and hardship, while the hall filled with gold and jade and the peaceful ease of the sections before this hide, instead, the danger of collapse. Let it be said first. Laying out these three positions is not writing a prescription for the taken. The Study of Positions writes no prescriptions, it only lays out positions. Each of the three has its own causes and its own costs, and none is born higher, and none is born lower.
One. The First, to Accept
To accept is to admit the gap in strength, take on the terms the taker sets, be folded into the other side's system, and in exchange win a breath of survival. The late Qing acknowledging that string of unequal treaties one by one and signing them one by one, was one kind of accepting. The small neighboring states of every era paying tribute to the Central Plains and calling themselves vassals, trading nominal submission for real stability and trade, was also one kind of accepting. In the early days of many colonized lands, the old nobility choosing to work with the colonizer to keep their standing was accepting just the same.
Accepting must be seen from both sides. On one side, accepting can save lives, can keep a part. When you cannot win, fighting hard anyway may get you pulled up by the root, and accepting at least keeps the people, keeps the land, keeps the capital for turning things over later. Knowing the times is sometimes not cowardice, it is cool calculation. On the other side, accepting hands the initiative over to the other side. Give one step today, and tomorrow you may give two, the frog in warm water, by the time the water turns hot, can no longer jump. Taken to the extreme, it can even slide into the deepest layer, occupying a position, handing over even who am I.
So even accepting comes in two kinds. One is accepting with a bottom line kept, admitting the fact that the fight cannot be won right now, while quietly protecting the root, the people, and the seed of turning things over, waiting for a moment. The other is accepting with no bottom line left, giving way and giving way again, until the self has been given away entirely. The first is crouching down in order to spring up later. The second is crouching down and never standing up again. The difference does not lie in the act of accepting, it lies in whether, at the moment of accepting, that bottom line is still there in the heart.
Two. The Second, to Resist
To resist is to rise up and fight back even when the strength is unequal, blocking the taker's steps with will and with flesh and blood. The decolonization of the twentieth century rested on the resistance of one colonized people after another. Vietnam resisted France first and then America, and over decades wore down opponents far stronger than itself until they left. India walked another way, Gandhi's nonviolent noncooperation, the whole nation's refusal to cooperate making colonial rule impossible to sustain. China's war of resistance against Japan was the heaviest of all resistances, the great battles of the front-line battlefield and the holding actions behind enemy lines, a whole nation holding off an invasion far beyond its strength, and it was exactly this resistance that defeated the attempt at occupying a position laid out in the previous section.
Resisting must also be seen from both sides. On one side, resisting can awaken a people's consciousness, and can gather, bit by bit, the strength to turn things over. Resistance takes more shapes than fighting hard alone. A whole nation refusing to cooperate, as with Gandhi, is resistance, and scholars writing books to awaken people's hearts is resistance too. The form can be soft or hard, and the core is the same, refusing to accept this position of the taken, and pushing it back. Dignity is sometimes more important than land, gold, and silver. Lost land can be won back, but once this breath is lost, it is hard ever to stand straight again. On the other side, the cost of resisting is extremely heavy. When the gap in strength is wide, resisting hard often means the sacrifice of fallen cities and lost lives, and it does not always succeed. How many times in history has resistance in the end been crushed, leaving only a stretch of tragic courage behind. Resisting is a road that has to be paved with enormous sacrifice, and before setting out on it, no one can promise it will reach the end.
Three. The Third, to Grow Strong
To grow strong is the third road, not rushing to bow the head, and not rushing to clash head-on, but putting the head down and building up one's own output and arms inch by inch, changing, from the root, this very position of the taken. As said again and again before this, the taken is taken from because it has a hall filled with gold and jade and cannot keep it safe, so what growing strong must fill in is exactly the cannot keep it safe end.
The Self-Strengthening Movement in modern China was one attempt at growing strong, running factories, making guns and cannon, building a navy, and though the war of 1894 exposed it as something abandoned halfway, its direction was right. The industrialization of the decades after was a more thorough one, from depending on imports for everything to building, bit by bit, a complete industrial system, from poor and blank to a high-speed rail network, using the strength of several generations to move itself from cannot keep it safe toward can keep it safe. Japan's Meiji Restoration was the fastest run down this road of growing strong in modern times, an island nation that was about to be forced by gunboats into signing treaties, spending a few decades learning industry and training a new army, and pulling itself out of the position of the taken by sheer force.
Growing strong must also be seen from both sides. On one side, growing strong is the only one of the three roads that can change the position from the root. Accepting cannot change the fate of being taken from, resisting can only hold it off for a time, and only by building up output and defense can the taken truly stop being the taken. This is the hardest road, and the most solid. On the other side, growing strong is extremely hard. It needs a long enough window of peace and several generations of gritted-teeth accumulation, and the slightest break wipes out everything gained before. More important still, growing strong hides a trap, and Japan is the lesson ready at hand. It succeeded at growing strong but did not stop at can keep it safe, it went on, riding the momentum, toward outward expansion, turning step by step from the taken into a taker, going out to take from others. Growing strong filled in its defense, but did not fill in the cycle of taking and being taken itself. The position changed, the game did not.
Four. These Three Positions Are Often Not a Single Choice but a Relay
A taken nation often first uses accepting to win a stretch of breathing room, then uses that time to put its head down and grow strong, and then, at a moment when growing strong has not yet succeeded, is forced to rise up and resist. In the hundred-odd years of modern China, accepting, resisting, and growing strong played out almost in turns and in layers. They are not three forking roads for you to pick one of. They are more like three steps of a stair, and which step the taken stands on is often beyond its own control, it is the balance of strength at the time that pushes it onto that step.
Five. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the fortieth layer. Before the taken stand three positions. Accepting trades for survival, and what it gives up is sovereignty. Resisting keeps dignity, and what it pays is cost. Growing strong changes the position, and must endure a long accumulation, and must also take care not to become, once its defense is filled in, the next taker itself. The three have no higher and lower, but they share one common boundary, all of them still sit inside the frame of taking and being taken.
Accepting is acknowledging being taken from, resisting is holding off being taken from, growing strong is making oneself no longer taken from, and yet what comes after growing strong succeeds. Japan's example lies right there, it became a taker itself, going out to take from the next nation that could not keep its own safe, and the cycle turned one more round, only the people in the positions changed. All three responses answer the same one question, the taking has already come, how should I respond, and not one of them answers the deeper question, how can taking, from the root, stop happening at all. And the root of taking was dug out long before this, it is output falling short, it is not enough to go around. Follow this root down, and truly stopping the cycle of taking and being taken rests not on some cleverer response, but on the day output grows large enough that no one needs to take any more. How to walk that road, this volume only points to here. The true way out waits for the volume on saving people later in this work, and the more thoroughly the positions are laid out, the more firmly that way out can stand.
The next chapter, opening Part Six, comes to the present day, to see what new clothes the international order of the twenty-first century has put on taking, and where it still walks the very same old road of thousands of years ago, and then crosses the bridge from there. Carry the three positions of the taken, and walk into the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Part Six. The Age of Artificial Intelligence, and the Law That Lags.