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 ifting
our eyes from the current crisis, and the fireworks no doubt soon
to begin, let us ponder some more general lessons for the West.
Here, to get us started, is the story of Shining Lady Wang, an actual
incident from ancient Chinese history.
Shining Lady
Wang was one of the great beauties of her time. Though of humble
origins, she was chosen for the emperor's harem by those officials
who toured the country looking for suitable material. The emperor
at this time was Liu Shi, tenth emperor of the Han dynasty (he reigned
48-33 B.C.). His harem was so big he knew few of them in person.
When he wanted a bed partner, he consulted a book that contained
portraits of all the harem women. Because Lady Wang refused, from
pride and principle, to pay the necessary bribe to the court painter,
that man drew a very unflattering portrait of her for the book,
and so she was never chosen for the emperor's bed.
Liu Shi made
a treaty with the Huns, a savage tribe who lived beyond the Wall.
In return for peace, the King of the Huns demanded a Chinese bride.
Browsing his harem book for a plain-looking woman he could spare,
the emperor saw the portrait of Lady Wang, and ordered her to be
given to the King of the Huns. Asked if she was willing, Lady Wang,
who seems to have been a woman of some spirit, is supposed to have
said: "Better to be a queen among barbarians than to waste
away unnoticed in the emperor's harem."
At the presentation
ceremony, the emperor actually saw Lady Wang for the first time.
Dazzled by her beauty, he fell in love with her on the spot. However,
he had promised her to the King of the Huns, and could not break
his promise for fear of war, so off went Lady Wang to live in a
tent encampment on the steppe, leaving the emperor broken-hearted.
I tell this
story by way of illustrating a central feature of traditional Chinese
statecraft. Imperial China suffered from a chronic geographical
problem. Spread out across the great river valleys and coastal plains
of East Asia, the empire was bordered at the north and west by limitless
forests and grasslands. Roaming across this inhospitable landscape
were wild tribes of nomads — Huns, Mongols, Turks, Kushans,
and Manchus. The fat, lush interior of China was a constant temptation
to these barbarous peoples. Illiterate and politically primitive,
they could rarely unite for long enough to make a concentrated assault
on the Empire; but the threat of such an assault was always present,
and even in their normal state of tribal chaos, some bold entrepreneur
among them, with a dedicated band of followers, could occasionally
launch a devastating raid across the Wall.
The Chinese
realized early on that there was no real hope of permanently subduing
these savages. When armies were sent out to pursue them, the nomads
retreated with their herds into the infinite steppe, melting away
from sight, waiting for opportunities to ambush and encircle the
advancing Chinese, as in the terrible defeat of General Li Ling
in 99 B.C., described in chapter 7 of Maurice Collis's book The
First Holy One. Chinese statesmen therefore developed policies
for managing the barbarians: placating them with gifts like
Shining Lady Wang, sowing discord among them, keeping them off balance.
The problem of the barbarians was one the Chinese were stuck with.
They could never eliminate it, they just had to manage it as best
they could, keeping the wild tribes quiet, or at least keeping their
energies concentrated on inter-tribal quarrels, rather than against
the empire. In the flowery, euphemistic language of the Imperial
court, this was called fu fan — "soothing the barbarians."
Fu fan was about as successful as any other generalized diplomatic
strategy: which is to say, it worked most of the time.
It seems to
me that our statesmen might have something to learn from the ancient
Chinese. Like them, we have a chronic problem. We share our planet
with a number of, to use the currently favored euphemism, "failed
states" — nations whose governments do not offer their
citizens impartial justice, ordinary liberties, democratic representation,
security of property and person, or fair opportunities of prosperity.
By modern standards, these nations are at a lower level of civilization
than ourselves. Politically, in fact, they can hardly be said to
be civilized at all, practicing as they do various styles of medieval
monarchy, obscurantist theocracy, and Leninist gangster-dictatorship.
Government that derives its just powers from the consent of the
governed is not any part of their world-view, nor is it likely to
become so any time soon.
There are rather
a lot of these barbarian states. Every single Arab country; most
other Moslem countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan); most of the
nations of Africa; the remaining Leninist dictatorships (including,
sad to say, China herself under her present thuggish rulers); a
scattering of other places in Asia and Latin America. Every one
of these regimes is not only a blight on its own corner of the earth,
it is potentially a threat to the rest of us, too, since governments
that do not answer to their people are much, much more likely to
start aggressive wars than are democracies. (There is a very good
book about this: Never
at War, by Spencer Weart.) Probably they are more prone
to really big environmental catastrophes. They are also, of course,
more likely to harbor terrorist fanatics.
What can we
do about these barbarians? Like the ancient Chinese, nothing final
or definitive. There is no real constituency in the civilized world
for going in and taking them over, running a sort of MacArthur administration,
or straightforward colonialism. The MacArthur administration only
worked because we had just defeated Japan in a devastating war,
and dropped two atom bombs on them. I doubt the West has the will
for that kind of thing nowadays. 19th-century colonialism isn't
a real option, either. It was only possible because the technological
gap between the West and the others was so vast: "We have got
/ The Maxim gun, and they have not." That no longer applies.
Never mind the Maxim gun: some of the barbarous states are technologically
adept enough to make nuclear weapons. We could probably do our descendants
a favor by launching a massive pre-emptive strike, simply annihilating
the barbarians with barrages of ICBMs. There is, however, no constituency
in the West for such an act of mass murder; though in the event
of, say, a really devastating bio-war attack on us, this might possibly
change. Nope: for the time being, at any rate, we just have to manage
the barbarians, and soothe them.
There are all
sorts of ways to do this. Fear is good, of course, and I hope Colin
Powell's famous predilection for "restraint" will not
be the governing principle in the military operations now under
way. The willingness of barbarians to fight each other should never
be under-estimated, either, and of course, the more of each other
they kill, the less there is for civilized folk to worry about.
From this point of view the Iran-Iraq war was a net positive for
civilization — perhaps we could get it started up again? Thomas
Friedman has suggested a similar strategy in the New York Times:
encourage the Leninist-gangster regimes to eliminate their own fundamentalist
zealots. A crude approach might just be to say to Saddam Hussein:
"Hey, bucko. Do us a favor, will you? Round up all your Islamic
militants and massacre them, like your old pal Hafez al-Assad did
at Hama back in '82. In return, we'll lift current sanctions and
deposit a billion in your Swiss bank account." An unprincipled
hoodlum like Saddam just might go for that.
Then there
is the Shining Lady Wang option. We all know that Arab men go nutso
for pale-skinned European blondes. Well, we have a good supply.
Not many of them, under current social conditions, are likely to
languish unwanted in a Washington harem, but there must be some
subset that is sufficiently patriotic to sacrifice themselves in
the interests of soothing the barbarians. It's not such a bad fate:
You get to be a queen, after all — probably more fun than being
married to an investment banker. Shining Lady Wang actually proved
to be a very good queen to the Huns. She taught them to weave, farm,
and play the guitar. (If you see a woman playing the guitar on horseback
in an old Chinese painting, it is probably Shining Lady Wang.) When
she died she was buried, by her own choice, on the barbarian side
of the Wall. All in all, her life was more useful, more patriotic,
better spent and very likely more interesting than yours or mine.
Any volunteers?
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