Posts Tagged ‘China’
“Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice?”*…
Rice is the most valuable agricultural commodity on the planet. Hundreds of millions of metric tons of it are produced every year, an amount valued at more than $300 billion every year. Billions of people around the world rely on it as a staple of their diets, and have done so for millennia all over East, Southeast, and South Asia, and beyond.
But the rice that’s so popular today has a distinct beginning as a cultivated crop, a beginning that arrived somewhere along the Yangzi River more than 10,000 years ago. (The rice traditionally grown in West Africa, and which was brought across the Atlantic by enslaved people and merchants in the early modern period, stems from a separate domestication event. It’s not as productive as its Asian cousin, and so is less widely cultivated now.)
Ten millennia in the past, rice grew a bit beyond its current range thanks to slightly warmer and wetter climatic conditions at the dawn of the Holocene. The people living around the Yangzi River, and slightly to the north of there, were quite happy to use the stands of wild rice growing in their homeland. Grasses might not seem like the most natural food source for people to exploit, because it requires a great deal of processing (grinding, cooking, etc.) to make it edible. As part of a forager’s diet, however, it offered advantages: It was plentiful, it was reliable when other food sources like wild game came up short, and if properly stored, it could last for years.
Around the Yellow River, northern China’s key waterway, rice didn’t grow. Millet, however, grew in abundant quantities. As their counterparts had done further to the south with rice, the inhabitants of northern China learned to process it. A couple of thousand years of experimentation led from simply collecting wild grasses wherever they were found to planting wild varieties in gardens and fields, then intentionally and unintentionally selecting for traits to make those grasses more productive and less likely to fall off the stalk. Farmers created their crops, the ancestors of the foods we eat today, and the increasing viability of the crops created farming as a way of life.
For a variety of reasons, successful farmers tend to have large numbers of children, who expand outward from their core areas, taking their way of life with them. This process of demic diffusion defines most centers of early agricultural innovation around the world. Farming begets more farmers, who tend to spread out. For this reason, Neolithic China – an environment home to not one but two distinct agricultural traditions – produced a stunning diversity of early farming cultures. Starting around 7000 years ago, after 5000 BC, these farming cultures exploded in numbers, scale, and complexity. They filled up new territories and built more and larger villages. Towns followed, and leaders in the form of chieftains and kings. Social hierarchies and inequality defined these new Neolithic societies, distinctions of rank that could be inherited across generations.
These were the foundations on which organized states, writing, and what we might eventually call “Chinese civilization” built, many thousands of years down the road…
Jared Diamond has argued that the advent of agriculture was “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race“; in any event, it was a watershed moment. Patrick Wyman explores the dawn of agriculture and of the social complexity it spawned: “Neolithic China.”
* “Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.” – N.K. Jemisin, How Long ’til Black Future Month?
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As we contemplate cultivation, we might recall that it was on this date in 2017 that the U.N. General Assembly adopted 2019-2028 as the Decade of Family Farming. This program aims to serve as a framework for developing and promoting better public policies on family farming– an opportunity to contribute to an end to hunger and poverty as well as to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Here’s something that each of us can do to help the neediest.
“Bright moons cunningly carved and dyed with spring water”*…
‘I am not yet so infected with the contagion of China-fancy’, wrote Samuel Johnson in a letter in September 1777, ‘as to like any thing at that rate which can so easily be broken’. At the time, the craze for Chinese export porcelain – ceramics mass-produced in China for foreign markets – had reached epidemic proportions in the Western world: a ‘contagion of China-fancy’. Over 70 million pieces entered Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and customers from London to Lisbon were desperate for more. The most afflicted were the ‘porcelain sick’ royals and aristocrats, who coated their palace walls, floors and ceilings in ‘white gold’. Patient zero was August the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. His Porzellankrankheit was so acute that he amassed a collection of nearly 30,000 pieces and imprisoned the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger until he figured out porcelain’s secret recipe, which had been closely guarded by the Chinese for centuries.
Export porcelain fused two worlds – producer and consumer, East and West – establishing a relationship that continues to shape the way the world works today…
How Chinese porcelain became a worldwide sensation, changing tastes and the global economy: “White Gold.”
See also: “The European Obsession with Porcelain.”
[Image above: source]
* from a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem describing the Emperor’s porcelain tea cups
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As we handle with care, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972, after President Richard Nixon’s successful visit to China, that Beijing gave the National Zoo a pair of giant pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing. (The U.S. sent China a pair of musk oxen.)
On that first day, nearly 20,000 people stood in long lines to catch a glimpse of North America’s first pandas; in their initial year at the zoo, the pair attracted more than 1 million visitors.
“The international situation is desperate, as usual”*…
Two experts agree that the days of increasingly easy and speedy global flows of goods, money, people, and ideas are over; the future that Tom Friedman evoked in The World is Flat is, at best, delayed. But they have very different ideas of what this may mean…
First, Jean Pisani-Ferry: after a sharp precis of the forces that that have led us to what he calls a “spiky” world, he suggests…
US President Donald Trump’s ruthless use of the centrality of his country’s financial system and the dollar to force economic partners to abide by his unilateral sanctions on Iran has forced the world to recognize the political price of asymmetric economic interdependence. In response, China (and perhaps Europe) will fight to establish their own networks and secure control of their nodes. Again, multilateralism could be the victim of this battle.
A new world is emerging, in which it will be much harder to separate economics from geopolitics. It’s not the world according to Myrdal, Frank, and Perroux, and it’s not Friedman’s flat world, either. It’s the world according to Game of Thrones.
Read his piece in full at “Farewell, Flat World.”
Then consider the argument of Michael O’Sullivan, who agrees with Pisani-Ferry as to the diagnosis, but has a very different prognosis:
Globalization, at least in the form that people have come to enjoy it, is defunct. From here, the passage away from globalization can take two new forms. One dangerous scenario is that we witness the outright end of globalization in much the same manner as the first period of globalization collapsed in 1913. This scenario is a favorite of commentators because it allows them to write about bloody end-of-the-world calamities. This is, thankfully, a low-probability outcome, and with apologies to the many armchair admirals in the commentariat who, for instance, talk willfully of a conflict in the South China Sea, I suggest that a full-scale sea battle between China and the United States is unlikely.
Instead, the evolution of a new world order—a fully multipolar world composed of three (perhaps four, depending on how India develops) large regions that are distinct in the workings of their economies, laws, cultures, and security networks—is manifestly underway. My sense is that until 2018, multipolarity was a more theoretical concept—more something to write about than to witness. This is changing quickly: trade tensions, advances in technologies (such as quantum computing), and the regulation of technology are just some of the fissures around which the world is splitting into distinct regions. Multipolarity is gaining traction and will have two broad axes. First, the poles in the multipolar world have to be large in terms of economic, financial, and geopolitical power. Second, the essence of multipolarity is not simply that the poles are large and powerful but also that they develop distinct, culturally consistent ways of doing things. Multipolarity, where regions do things distinctly and differently, is also very different from multilateralism, where they do them together…
Read an interview with O’Sullivan and more of the excerpt from his new book, The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization quoted above at “Globalisation is dead and we need to invent a new world order.”
For more on the history of nativism and protectionism, especially in the U.S., concluding, as Pisani-Ferry and O’Sullivan do, that they’re with for awhile, see David Kotok‘s “Borders.”
* Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
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As we renew our passports, we might recall that it was on this date in 1405 that Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He set sail on the first of his seven exploratory “treasure voyages” to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa, exacting tribute and encouraging trade.
After his death, at the end of his seventh expedition, Ming naval efforts declined dramatically (the government’s attention having been diverted by a threat from the Mongols in their northwest). 1950s historians like Joseph Needham popularized the idea that after Zheng He’s voyages, China turned away from the seas (as reflected in to the Haijin edict) and was isolated from European technological advancements. But modern historians point out that Chinese maritime commerce didn’t totally stop after Zheng He, that Chinese ships continued to participate in Southeast Asian commerce until the 19th century, and that active Chinese trading with India and East Africa continued long after the time of Zheng.
In any case, it’s clear that Zheng He belongs atop any list of maritime adventurers– the vanguard of globalization.

Statue from a modern monument to Zheng He