In 742 AD, Tang Emperor Xuanzong issued an edict establishing an alternative path to government office: the daoju (道举), or Daoist examination. Aside from the Daodejing, which is a fundamental classic for Daoism, four other Daoist texts were elevated to the status of “true scriptures” (zhenjing 真经). Zhuangzi, Liezi, Wenzi, and Kangcangzi were granted the title. The five classics together became the standard textbooks, just like the Analects and other Confucian classics in the regular exams.

It was one of the most unusual episodes in Chinese history. It’s not just about how Daoism influenced the Chinese political tradition. It also offers a view of the everlasting dynamic and tension between the emperor and the whole bureaucratic system. The ‘knowledge’ or professionalism itself might not be the key to becoming the official. And an emperor’s personal preference ultimately could not overcome the inertia of the bureaucratic elite.

Here is what happened and why.

How the normal exam worked

China has long had a social hierarchy centered on official rank. Under the Confucian tradition, becoming an official was and still is the ultimate career path for everyone. It’s the way to serve the country and achieve personal fulfillment.

During Tang dynasty (7th-10th century), there were multiple ways to become an official. The most prominent way for regular people was to pass the Keju (the civil exam). The exam system offered the two main tracks, mingjing (明经, “illuminating the classics”) and jinshi (进士, “presented scholar”).

The mingjing tested the memorization of Confucian classics. The primary format was tiejing (帖经), a fill-in-the-blank exercise in which the examinee had to fill in missing characters from a random page of a classic. There was also moyi (墨义), a short-answer format in which candidates explained the meaning of a concept or passage. Those who passed this track were assigned entry-level positions in the bureaucratic system, and their career ceiling remained rather low.

The jinshi was the harder and far more prestigious track, testing poetry composition and policy essays. As the saying went: “Thirty is old for mingjing; fifty is young for jinshi” (三十老明经，五十少进士). If you had not passed the mingjing by thirty, you were slow; if you passed the literary jinshi by fifty, you were ahead of everyone. Passing the jinshi brought immense honor among the elite, and most of the empire’s chancellors came from this track, especially during the late Tang dynasty.

However, the core texts for both tracks were drawn exclusively from the Five Classics and the wider Confucian tradition. This had been the default ever since Emperor Wu of Han established the supremacy of Confucianism in the 2nd century BCE.

Why the Emperors Wanted a Daoist Track

Every dynasty in Chinese history needed to justify its legitimacy in some way. For the Li family that founded the Tang dynasty, part of its legitimacy came from the overthrow of the non-Han aristocratic families of the Northern Dynasties, while another part was to prove the prestige of the family’s bloodline. Laozi, who was believed to have also borne the surname Li, then became the distant ancestor of the Li family. It was an ingenious piece of genealogical engineering that claimed descent from a sage even older than Confucius. It shrouded the royal family in the mystical aura of Daoism.

This engineering escalated over generations. Emperor Gaozong, in the mid-seventh century, added the Daodejing to the mingjing exam as supplementary reading. Emperor Xuanzong went further. In 732, he personally annotated the Daodejing, distributed his commentary nationwide, and ordered every household to keep a copy (sounds familiar?). Furthermore, in 746, Laozi’s birthday (the 15th day of the second lunar month) was declared a national holiday.

Establishment of the Daoju

Xuanzong’s fascination with Daoism went further as he began to recruit Daoist priests and experts as his personal advisers. In 737, Xuanzong created the post of “Doctor of Mysterious Learning” (xuanxue boshi 玄学博士) and decreed that Daoist rituals be incorporated into state rites and ancestral worship.

Read more

Shina 支那 was the name Imperial Japan used to replace “China 中国,” with a whole intellectual system built to despise and diminish the Chinese, and it partly established the ideology behind the massacres during the war.

Japan government stopped using the name since 1946. Outside Hanzi/Kanji/Chinese-character world, the shift of the name seems insignificant. Yet, it created an entire academic discourse and a framework for understanding history and international relations that still influences East Asia today.

A neutral name

支那 Shina began as a transcription. During the Tang dynasty, Buddhist translators noted that the Sanskrit used Cīna for China. When they explained how Indian called China, they transcribed Cīna into 支那 Zhīnà, sometimes 脂那 (Zhīnà) or 至那 (Zhìnà), and 震旦 (Zhèndàn) for the longer Cīnasthāna. The characters reached Japan inside the Buddhist texts and stayed a monk’s word for a thousand years.

In the Chinese-character cultural sphere, the underlying meaning of China (中国) is explicit: “the Middle Kingdom.” In eighteenth century, Edo scholars reading Dutch books met a country called China and needed a Japanese name for it. Inside directly use 中国, Arai Hakuseki used 支那 Shina in Seiyō Kibun 西洋紀聞 (1715), and the scholars who followed argued openly that Japan should stop calling its neighbor “the Middle Kingdom.” By then, Shina was no more than a neutral alternative to “the Middle Kingdom.”

The Meiji reform in the the 1860s put Japan on the track of modernization, in 1885. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “On Leaving Asia” (Datsu-A Ron, 脱亜論) set the narrative of how japan positioned itself in the East Asia region, he famously declares:

我れは心に於て亜細亜東方の悪友を謝絶するものなり
“In my heart, I decline the bad friends of eastern Asia.”

The “bad friends” are China and Korea. Japan has crossed to the side of civilization, its neighbors have not. So it’s acceptable to treat the neighbors as the West treats them. Nihonjin-ron (日本人論: treatises on Japaneseness) grew and develop, especially after winning the war against China and Russia consecutively. However, what has often been overlooked is the accompanying rise of Shinajinron (支那人論, theories on the Shina people).

The Theory of Shina

In 1914. Naitō Konan 内藤湖南, the prestigious sinologist, the holder of the first chair of Oriental History at Kyoto Imperial University, published the most-read Japanese book on contemporary China of its generation: Shina-ron (支那論, The Theory of Shina). The book established the discourse of how to understand China.

It was built on four theses:

China is already modern. The “Tang–Song transition” holds that China entered its modern age around 960 after Tang dynasty: the aristocracy vanished, the emperor became an autocrat, the status of common people improved, and commerce rose. China was ahead of Japan and the West and had already lived through its modernization. But the later dynasties exhausted the modernity. The Republic of 1912 is not a beginning or a new start. It is just a very old society trying on a modern system that no longer fits it. So its failure is foreseeable.

The state is an empty shell. Since the Song, Chinese people have lived inside the 郷団 (gōdan), the self-governing local community of clan and gentry, and have been indifferent to who holds the state above it. Dynasties fall, the village goes on. So people are indifference to the state and lacking a national identity.

China should be smaller and unarmed. It argues that authentic China is only in ‘China proper,’ the provinces populated predominantly by ethnic Han. The Republic cannot hold the Qing empire’s outer lands, Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria, and should let them go. He also suggests, the Republic does not need an army at all. It can give up national defense and let the foreign powers check on each other to keep it safe.

The cultural center has moved. In 1924, Shin Shina-ron (New Shina Theory) further argues that the center of East Asian civilization has migrated over history from the China mainland and across the sea. Japan is where Chinese culture continues, and an ageing China (which is no longer China but merely Shina) can be renewed only from outside. In the chapter “China’s Renewal and Japan” he draws the conclusion that Japanese involvement in Chinese politics should not count as aggression, because it is the cultural center (Japan) attending to its periphery (China).

Share

The War

Shina-ron set up the systematic narrative of condescension and discrimination. View through the narrative, war against China is more like a helping than an invasion. And Chinese, or Shinajin, are just ungoverned population lacking national cohesion.

Five weeks after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Konoe cabinet on Aug. 15, 1937, issued the government statement that opens the full war. However, it was not framed as a declaration of war. It declares as a punitive action:

支那軍の暴戻を膺懲し以て南京政府の反省を促す
“To punish the violence of the Shina army and thereby bring the Nanjing government to reflect.”

膺懲 (yōchō) is a word for what a parent does to a child, a magistrate to a criminal. Violence against Shina is penalty rather than war between states, since Shina is not a state at all.

If antisemitism is behind the Jewish massacre, Shina-ron definitely helped to alleviate the burden of Japanese soldiers during killing and slaughter of the Chinese civilians.

For most Chinese people, if they ask their parents or grand-parents who lived and survived the Japan invasion, they will definitely hear a scary and indelible memory of hiding and escaping from Japanese soldiers.

Forget Shina

Japan government stopped using the term after the War in 1946, under official protests by the Republic government. However, it grants exceptions for “historical, geographical or scholarly” use, so that 東支那海 (East China Sea) and 日支事変 (Sino-Japanese Incident) could continue. Academic departments of Shina studies (支那学) were subsequently renamed Chinese studies (中国学).

The journal ran until 1947; the discipline was renamed Chūgokugaku (中国学) after the 1946 directive. Naitō's generation studied China as Europe studied antiquity, through its texts, as a finished civilization whose living descendants were a separate and lesser matter.

The Chinese Civil War and the following Communist revolution fundamentally altered how postwar Japanese intellectuals viewed China. Sinologist like Takeuchi’s argued that China, through revolution, had achieved a modernity of its own from the inside, while Japan had only imitated the West. Revolutionary China became the Asia that Japan should have become. This admiration was broad: the Japan Socialist Party, the Japan-China Friendship Association (日中友好協会), academia, and eventually the public. In stark contrast to current polls, where negative impressions of China hover near 90 percent, in the early 1980s, around 80 percent of the Japanese public reported feelings of affinity toward China.

Framing the narrative of the war was also complex on the Chinese side. Back in the 1920s and 30s, the contempt that Chinese students encountered in Japan was so pronounced that they repeatedly petitioned the Republican government to issue formal diplomatic demands to abolish the term Shina. After the war, seeking to recreate bounds between the people, the Chinese government adopted the statement that the war was the work of “a handful of militarists”; the Japanese people were also its victims; the two peoples had been friends for two thousand years. And it’s a principle that still holds until today.

However, if the war was just the atrocity of “a handful of militarists,” and Japanese people back then were also victims, there left little analytical room to examine how thoroughly Shina theory had permeated pre-war and wartime Japanese society as a whole.

Shina Theory revival?

In 1980, the Japanese Cabinet Office surveyed public sentiment: do you feel affinity toward China? 78.6 percent said yes. Today, that figure has plummeted to the single digits, and high unfavorability has persisted for over a decade. The Diaoyu Islands dispute (the Senkaku islands) triggered it since 2013. The negative sentiment was so enduring as if it were the same contempt directly from the pre-war era

The negative sentiment is made of two main components. Political friction aspect claims that China’s actions are different from international rules. China is conducting military expansion. And social criticism aspect targets on “Chinese people’s manners,” Media coverage frequently highlighted Chinese tourists talking loudly, not queuing, squatting in stations, taking too much at the buffet.

The word Japanese reach for is 民度 (mindo), literally “the level of the people,” a measure of a population’s civility. The mainland visitors believe to exhibit low mindo. The 2014 publishing boom in 嫌中本 “China-hating books,” sold on the same two claims, the Chinese have no public spirit and no rules. Further, prominent political figures like tokyo’s governor Ishihara Shintarō openly used Shina 支那 in public for decades and defended it.

Set these next to Fukuzawa’s bad friends’ “without law” 無法 in 1885, and the 1937 slogan named the enemy “the violent Shina” 暴支, the question is that whether older patterns are resurfacing in modern geopolitical rivalries.

Shina never disappear

On Chinese-speaking internet, the word Shina 支那 has re-emerged as a targeted insult and a discrimination label.

In 2016, two newly elected members of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council took their oath of office with a banner reading “Hong Kong is not China,” and pronounced the name of the country they were swearing loyalty to as Shina. Their seats were voided.

By 2019, the word had ‘evolved’ on Taiwan internet forums into 支語 (Zhīyǔ, literally “Shina language”), referring pejoratively to mainland-style Mandarin. Notice the difference of word preference, young people in Taiwan have been calling Mainland vocabulary 支言支語 (Zhīyán Zhīyǔ, “Shina-speak”). And there’s even 支語警察 (zhīyǔ jǐngchá, “Shina-language police”), if you say 視頻 (shìpín) instead of 影片 (yǐngpiàn) for “video,” or 質量 (zhìliàng) instead of 品質 (pǐnzhí) for “quality” and you will be marked as ‘contaminated’ by the Mainland.

Looking back at Naitō Konan’s Shina-ron, the discourse surrounding the term never entirely disappeared. Instead, its underlying assumptions continue to surface across regions linked to China, shaping how people perceive and think today.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

Primary sources

• Shina, origin — 玄奘『大唐西域記』卷五 (摩訶至那) — Xuanzang, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (646), Book 5, the passage on “Mahācīna”; 新井白石『西洋紀聞』1715 — Arai Hakuseki, Seiyō Kibun

• 1885 — 福澤諭吉「脱亜論」『時事新報』1885-03-16 — Fukuzawa Yukichi, “On Leaving Asia” (Datsu-A Ron), editorial in Jiji Shinpō, 16 March 1885.

• 1914 / 1924 — 内藤湖南『支那論』1914; 『新支那論』1924 — Naitō Konan, On China (Shina-ron, 1914); New Thoughts on China (Shin Shina-ron, 1924). Collected in Complete Works of Naitō Konan, vol. 5 (Chikuma Shobō, 1972).

• 1937 — 近衛内閣 政府声明 1937-08-15 — Konoe cabinet, Government Statement of 15 August 1937 (the “punish the violent Shina” statement).

• 1946 — 外務次官通達「支那の呼称を避けることに関する件」1946-06-06 (文合第357号) — Foreign Ministry Vice-Minister’s Circular, “On Avoiding the Appellation ‘Shina’,” 6 June 1946 (Doc. No. 357);

• 1949 — 竹内好「日本人の中国観」— Takeuchi Yoshimi, “The Japanese View of China.”

• 1972 — 周恩来 歓迎宴会 演説 1972-09-25 — Zhou Enlai, speech at the welcome banquet for Tanaka Kakuei, Beijing, 25 September 1972; 日中共同声明 1972-09-29 — Joint Communiqué of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s Republic of China, 29 September 1972..

The story of how they were brought under one roof might be the best angle to understand how pragmatic Chinese culture is in creating a system from different sources. The fusion of the two offers an answer to an enduring existential dilemma: how a person could serve a corrupt regime or endure an adverse situation without surrendering their integrity.

Laozi as a Philosophy of the State

A common misconception is that Confucianism was the sole governing ideology of imperial China. In reality, Confucianism was often rivaled, and sometimes displaced by other schools. For the first seventy years of the Western Han dynasty (period between 202–141 BCE), the governing doctrine was Huang-Lao (黃老): the pairing of the mythical Yellow Emperor with Laozi.

Read closely, much of the Daodejing is a handbook for rulers:

治大國若烹小鮮。
“Govern a great state as you would cook a small fish.” (Daodejing, ch. 60)

道常無為而無不為。侯王若能守之，萬物將自化。
“The Way constantly does nothing, yet nothing is left undone. If lords and kings could hold to it, the ten thousand things would transform themselves.” (Daodejing, ch. 37)

Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (史记, Shiji) records that Laozi served as the Archivist of the Zhou royal court (守藏室之史). He was an insider, curating the imperial classics and precendents, and also drafted state documents and advised rulers. From this perspective, his philosophy of wuwei (non-action or effortless action) is not just a reclusive ideal; it might be closer to a minimalist theory of bureaucratic administration.

In the Huang-Lao system, Laozi supplied the political philosophy, while the Yellow Emperor supplied the mechanics: statutes, legal standards, and administrative evaluations. The theory guided the early Han dynasty. Chancellor Cao Shen 曹參 famously governed the country by leaving his predecessor’s laws untouched. He spent his days drinking, leaving the machinery of government to run on its own inertia. His reign was a great success that helped the society to recover from wars and famine.

This synthesis was not ideal for emperor of great ambition. Emperor Wu of Han 汉武帝 eventually elevated Confucianism as the state ideology, to create a more efficient hierachical system. Yellow Emperor’s texts were discarded and completely lost for over two millennia. Only in 1973 were they rediscovered at Mawangdui tomb, which buried and sealed in 168 BCE. The texts were on the same silk scroll as the Laozi, and placed ahead of Laozi. The text opens:

道生法。法者，引得失以繩，而明曲直者也。
“The Way (Dao) generates law. Law draws gain and loss to the measuring line, distinguishing the crooked from the straight.” (Huangdi Sijing / Jingfa, "Dao Fa")

Here Dao (the Way) is premise of the Law. Laozi was not for recluse at the time. He was more like an architect of the state.

The Radical Divergence

Zhuangzi occupied the opposite pole of Chinese society. The Shiji records that he was just a keeper of the lacquer garden at Meng (蒙邑) in the minor state of Song. He lived in poverty, wearing patched clothes and selling straw shoes for a living.

His defining moment was an act of refusal. When Zhuangzi is fishing on the Pu River (濮水), two high officials from the King of Chu find him and offer him a job of administrative chancellor. Zhuangzi does not put down the rod or turn his head. He asks about the sacred tortoise, which has been dead three thousand years, wrapped in cloth, boxed in a chest, venerated in the king’s ancestral temple: would it rather be dead and have its bones honored, or alive and dragging its tail through the mud? Then he says that he would rather live in the mud. he tells officials to leave.

往矣！吾將曳尾於塗中。
“Go away! I would rather drag my tail through the mud.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 17, Qiushui)

Zhuangzi’s choice might be the best example illustrating his preferences and tendencies. If we place Zhuangzi and Laozi side by side, the difference is rather clear.

On the Way (道): In the Daodejing, the Way is a primordial, elusive cosmological origin:

玄之又玄，眾妙之門
“mystery upon mystery, the gateway of all wonders” (Daodejing, ch. 1)

When Dongguo asks Zhuangzi where the Way is, Zhuangzi replies that it is everywhere. Pressed for specifics, he descends from the celestial to the vulgar:

在螻蟻。在稊稗。在瓦甓。在屎溺
In the ants. In the weeds. In the broken tiles. In piss and dung.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 22, Zhibeiyou)

On the Sage (聖人): Laozi’s sage is a governor managing a population:

虛其心，實其腹，弱其志，強其骨
Empty their minds, fill their bellies, weaken their ambitions, strengthen their bones” (Daodejing, ch. 3)

Zhuangzi’s sage is demoted:

至人無己，神人無功，聖人無名
The utmost person has no self (transcends self); the spirit-like person has no achievement (transcends achievement); the sage has no name (transcends name). (Zhuangzi, ch.1, Xiaoyaoyou)

The Outer Chapters sharpen the critique:

聖人不死，大盜不止
Until sages die out, great thieves will never cease. (Zhuangzi, ch. 10, Quqie)

Here, Zhuangzi warns that the laws and conventions created by sages provide tyrants the tools to legitimize their usurpation and theft.

On Usefulness (用): Laozi values emptiness for its functionality:

三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用
The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends.” (Daodejing, ch. 11)

Zhuangzi counters the idea of usefulness with an example of an unworkable tree that survives precisely because carpenters consider it useless.

人皆知有用之用，而莫知無用之用也
Everyone knows the use of the useful, but no one knows the use of the useless. (Zhuangzi, ch.4, Renjianshi)

Laozi’s emptiness makes the tool work; Zhuangzi’s uselessness keeps you from becoming a tool.

On Knowledge (知): Laozi offers a method of reduction:

為學日益，為道日損
In learning, you add daily; in the Way (Dao), you subtract daily. (Daodejing, ch. 48)

Zhuangzi rejects the premise of complete comprehension:

吾生也有涯，而知也無涯。以有涯隨無涯，殆已
Our life has a limit, but knowledge has none. To pursue the limitless with the limited is fatal. (Zhuangzi, ch.3, Yangshengzhu)

On Language (言): Laozi argues that true understanding begins where words stop:

知者不言，言者不知
Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. (Daodejing, ch. 56)

Zhuangzi refuses to be silenced, treating language instead as a provisional fishing trap.

筌者所以在魚，得魚而忘筌……言者所以在意，得意而忘言
The trap is for catching fish; once you have the fish, you forget the trap... Words are for catching meaning; once you have the meaning, you forget the words. (Zhuangzi, ch.26, Waiwu)

Zhuangzi plays with language, treating it as a disposable tool that helps understanding.

Share

The 3rd-Century Crisis

If Zhuangzi and Laozi were so divergent in their thoughts, what brought them together?

The catalyst was the brutal Wei-Jin transition of the third century CE. As the Sima clan violently consolidated power, anything short of total compliance became lethal. Even the complete withdrawal into hermit life was impractical or dangerous.The philosopher He Yan (何晏) was executed in 249; the poet Ji Kang (嵇康) was put to death in 262. Ji Kang refused to join the Sima court and constantly made excuses to avoid official recommendation. When he was eventually recommended to the emperor and pressured to serve at court, he drafted a letter stating his attitude, “Reading Zhuang and Lao has only deepened my wildness” (又讀莊老，重增其放) (Ji Kang, Letter to Shan Tao / 與山巨源絕交書).

Yet most scholars could neither endorse the regime nor safely resign from it. They were trapped in an order they despised. That contradiction and dilemma demanded a philosophy that reconciles: an outer doctrine to perform at court, and an inner sanctuary for the self to withdrawn.

By systematically revising texts and concepts, they forged an ideology with a precise division of labor: Laozi supplied the strategy to navigate the corrupt court, while Zhuangzi provided the psychological sanctuary to preserve inner peace.

The Synthesis

Zhuangzi and Laozi were gradually harmonized into a single metaphysical framework. The two thinkers’ concepts of Dao were lifted from their original contexts and equated with Wu (無, Nothingness). Wang Bi 王弼 declared Nothingness to be the foundation of all things (以無為本), recasting Laozi’s political restraint and Zhuangzi’s spiritual roaming as two complementary aspects of a unified metaphysical reality.

They were also placed on the axes of Ti (體, Substance) and Yong (用, Function). Laozi provided the root substance: the objective order a minister used at court. Zhuangzi supplied the functional aspect: the inner posture of an enlightened mind moving through the harsh order without being compromised by it.

This synthesis reflected in the text of the Zhuangzi preserved today. By the third century CE, the Zhuangzi existed as an aggregation of 52 chapters written by various authors associated with his name. The commentator Guo Xiang 郭象 (d. 312 CE) trimmed it down to the standard 33 chapters known today and composed the commentaries. Modern scholarship generally agrees that only the “Inner Chapters” reflect the voice of Zhuangzi himself, while the “Outer” and “Miscellaneous” chapters represent contributions by later followers spanning several centuries.

Crucially, Guo Xiang redefined Zhuangzi’s core ideal of xiaoyao (逍遙, free and easy wandering). For Guo, genuine wandering did not require fleeing into the wilderness; it meant fully adapting to one’s position in the social hierarchy:

聖人雖在廟堂之上，然其心無異於山林之中。

“Though the sage stands in the court halls, his mind is no different from one dwelling among mountains and forests.” (Guo Xiang, Commentary on Zhuangzi, ch. 1, Xiaoyaoyou)

Zhuangzi’s radical refusal was internalized as a psychological state. A scholar-official no longer needed to drag his tail through the mud. He could hold office, get a state salary, and claim the pristine freedom of the wilderness entirely within his own mind. This political harmonization explains why explicit links between Laozi’s statecraft and Zhuangzi’s thought appear across the Outer Chapters:

上必無為而用天下，下必有為為天下用。

“Those above must practice non-action and so employ the world; those below must take action and so be employed by the world.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 13, Tiandao)

From Zhuang-Lao to Lao-Zhuang

Before the Lao-Zhuang (老莊), the order was often reversed. As we’ve seen from Ji Kang’s “Reading Zhuang and Lao has only deepened my wildness.”, the individualist was placed ahead of the political sage.

Yet over the centuries, this balance inverted. “Zhuang-Lao” was quietly replaced by “Lao-Zhuang.” It reflected a shift in both philosophical priorities and institutional power.

With the emergence of institutional Daoism (Daojiao 道教), the tradition was elevated into a ruling ideology competing with Confucianism. In the process, Laozi was exalted from an ancient philosopher into Taishang Laojun (太上老君, The Most High Lord Lao), a cosmic divinity and the origin of the universe. Zhuangzi, however, remained a mortal, inherently subordinate to the divinity of the Dao itself.

In 742 CE, Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty, whose imperial clan claimed direct descent from Laozi (surnamed Li), bestowed an official honor upon Zhuangzi: “True Person of Southern Florescence” (南華真人, Nanhua Zhenren). At the same time, his text was formally elevated to an imperial scripture: the Nanhua Zhenjing (南華真經). Centuries later, in 1119 CE, Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty promoted him further up the bureaucratic-celestial ladder, naming him the “Subtle, Original, and Penetrating True Lord” (微妙元通真君).

In the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, the term Zhenren (真人, “True Person” or “Authentic Human”) described an unbound being who walked beyond the worldly affairs, laughed at mortality, and dissolved all social ambition. By the eighth century, the Zhenren was eventually transformed into a rank conferred by an emperor’s decree.

Complied daily Wenyan Decoded

Each day, I unpack a single sentence from the Chinese classics, character by character, showing how these ancient texts still shape the way Chinese culture thinks, argues, and feels today. The goal is not translation, but connection: ultimately, the aim is for readers to engage with the original text itself, rather than rely on the translation.

DAY 1

吾將曳尾於塗中。
Wú jiāng yè wěi yú tú zhōng.

“I will go on dragging my tail in the mud.”

— 莊子·外篇·秋水 (Zhuangzi, Outer Chapters, “Autumn Floods”; Zhuang Zhou 莊周, c. 369–286 BCE)

Zhuangzi is fishing on the Pu River. Two senior officials from the Chu offer Zhuangzi a job in administration. Zhuangzi does not put down the rod or turn his head. He asks about the sacred tortoise, which has been dead three thousand years, wrapped in cloth, boxed in a chest, venerated in the king’s ancestral temple: would it rather be dead and have its bones honored, or alive and dragging its tail through the mud? Then he tells the officials to leave, and says he would rather live in the mud.

Unpacking the sentence:

• 吾 (wú) — I; one of the classical first-person pronouns (modern Chinese kept only 我)

• 將 (jiāng) — will, about to

• 曳 (yè) — to drag

• 尾 (wěi) — tail

• 於 (yú) — in, at

• 塗 (tú) — mud.

DAY 2

在螻蟻。何其下邪？在稊稗。何其愈下邪？

Zài lóuyǐ. Hé qí xià yé? Zài tíbài. Hé qí yù xià yé?

在瓦甓。何其愈甚邪？在屎溺。

Zài wǎpì. Hé qí yù shèn yé? Zài shǐniào.

“In crickets and ants.” — “That low?” — “In the weeds.” — “Lower still?” — “In tiles and bricks.” — “Worse and worse!” — “In shit and piss.”

— 莊子·外篇·知北遊 (Zhuangzi, Outer Chapters, “Knowledge Wanders North”)

Dongguo Zi asks Zhuangzi where the Dao is. Zhuangzi answers that the Dao exists everywhere. Dongguo Zi is not satisfied with the answer and keeps asking. So Zhuangzi names one: in crickets and ants. Each time Dongguo Zi asks, Zhuangzi names something lower, ants, weeds, roof tiles, shit and piss, until Dongguo Zi has nothing left to say. For Zhuangzi, the Dao is not something so mysterious that it cannot be described. This idea later served as an influence in dispelling the concept of sacred spaces in Buddhism, especially Chan.

Unpacking the sentence:

• 在 (zài) — is in. Dao is the omttied subject of the sentence

• 螻蟻 (lóuyǐ) — crickets and ants; still use in modern Chinese describe things that too small to matter (螻蟻之命)

• 何其 (hé qí) — how…? why so…?

• 下 (xià) — low, a lower rank.

• 邪 (yé) — the question mark of the sentence: read yé,

• 稊稗 (tíbài) — panic grass and grass, the weeds among the grain; 稗 lingers in 稗官野史, the unofficial histories

• 愈 (yù) — more

• 瓦甓 (wǎpì) — roof tiles and bricks; 甓 is replaced by 磚 in modern Chinese

• 甚 (shèn) — too far

• 屎溺 (shǐ niào) — shit and piss. 溺 here is niào 尿. A modern Chinese 溺 mostly as nì, to drown (溺水), to spoil (溺愛)

DAY 3

聖人不死，大盜不止。

Shèngrén bù sǐ, dà dào bù zhǐ.

“Until the sages die, the great thieves will not stop.”

— 莊子·外篇·胠篋 (Zhuangzi, Outer Chapters, “Rifling Trunks”)

Everything the sage invents to secure the world—laws, rituals, and conventions—is exactly what the great thief (the ruler) uses to drag down the state. Furthermore, Zhuangzi even writes, “Steal a belt buckle, be executed; steal a state, become a lord” (彼竊鉤者誅，竊國者為諸侯).

These passages are all from the Outer Chapters of the Zhuangzi, which are widely believed to be the work of Zhuangzi’s descendants, rather than Zhuangzi himself. Still, we can clearly see the arc from Zhuangzi’s original concept of freedom to the idea that the state and the sage are evil. In the Daodejing, however, the Sage is a relatively positive figure, presented more like an effective governor who follows the Way.

Unpacking the sentence:

• 聖人 (shèngrén) — the sage

• 不死 (bù sǐ) — do not die out

• 大盜 (dà dào) — the great thief

• 止 (zhǐ) — stop

I traced the claim to a study on Yi-language (彝族, another major minority in southwest China) bilingual education. In this 2019 Springer monograph on minority schooling, Lubei Zhang and Linda Tsung wrote that China “should be regarded as a world leader” in developing bilingual education for minorities, naming the Uyghurs and Kazakhs of Xinjiang, the Mongols, the Tibetans, and the Koreans of Yanbian as groups that built mother-tongue school and examination systems.

As to the authors, Zhang is at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu; Tsung is at the University of Sydney. Tsung’s PhD, “Minorities in China: Language policy and education,” dates to 1999 at Sydney. She is a three-decade specialist in exactly this field. Most bilingual education studies focus on North America and Western Europe; from the late 1990s, however, scholars started turning to the vast minority regions of China. And these studies delineate the outline of a system that most Han Chinese never encountered or even heard of in their lives.

However, in the same monograph, the authors also quote that the government's language policy had led to "perhaps the greatest language shift and loss" in the world. So this article is about how both verdicts can describe the same system.

Parallel, All the Way Up

Linguists sort bilingual schooling into two broad models. A maintenance model teaches in the mother tongue and adds the second language as a subject. A transitional model uses the mother tongue as a ramp, then hands instruction over to the second language.

For most of the People’s Republic’s history, for those groups that already had writing systems, the system was maintenance, and it was parallel at two levels. At the level of the school types, two tracks ran side by side, Chinese-medium schools, and minority-language schools. A minority family could choose either.

Inside a minority-language school, the parallel ran on the curriculum: mathematics, physics, and history were taught in Mongolian, Uyghur, Kazakh, Korean, or Tibetan, from textbooks translated from the Chinese editions, by teachers trained in those languages, while Mandarin entered as an independent course around grade two or three. It’s like the way English entered as the second language in Mandarin-speaking schools. By the end of 2016, more than 12,000 primary and secondary schools taught bilingually, using 29 scripts of 21 ethnic groups, with about eight million pupils enrolled.

The full maintenance system ran for the language with prior writing system. In Yang’s (2005) classification these are the Type 1 minorities — Koreans, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tibetans, and Uyghurs, whose writing systems were in broad use before 1949. They are about 24 million of China’s 106 million minority citizens. Many other scripts were invented or reorganized after 1949, including Yi 彝 and Zhuang 壮. Those groups got occasional bilingual education, with Mandarin as the main teaching language and the mother tongue as a scheduled course. The 42 groups without functional writing systems were schooled in Chinese from the start.

In the maintenance model, students learned in their native language all the way up to college and PhD. Yanbian University, a Korean-medium institution in Jilin, enrolled its first students in March 1949. Xinjiang University taught in Uyghur until 2002. The Gaokao, national college entrance exam, could also be completed in a minority language. The category is called min kao min (民考民, “minority examined in minority language”). Tests were translated: mathematics and the science or humanities composites were printed in Mongolian, Uyghur, Kazakh, or Tibetan, answered in the same script.

A Mongol science (理科) candidate took five papers: mathematics, sciences, a foreign language (mostly English), Chinese, and Mongolian. The Chinese and Mongolian scores were averaged into a single “language” grade, so the total came to the same 750 points as the Han track. From the those who took “minority examined in minority language” Gaokao, they went on to attend university programs taught in that same minority language. Or they could also choose Chinese-medium universities, with an extra preparatory year.

Four Versions of Parallel

Xinjiang ran it at the widest linguistic scale. The region’s minority track was never only Uyghur: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongol, and Xibe (close to Manchu) schools operated in their own languages. The Xinjiang Daily still prints in four scripts — Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian. In Qapqal 察布查尔 county, the Xibe have published a newspaper in their own script since 1946.

Inner Mongolia ran the textbook version of maintenance: every subject in Mongolian, a Chinese course from grade two, English from grade three, and classrooms stocked with two parallel sets of textbooks: one Mongolian, one Chinese. They were kept side by side for cross-reference.

Tibet ran it partially. Primary schools taught largely in Tibetan, but most middle and high schools in the Tibet taught in Chinese from shortly after 1959. The parallel track, in other words, reached different heights in different regions: full pipeline in Yanbian and Inner Mongolia, university-capped in Xinjiang, primary-level in most of Tibet.

Yanbian ran it deepest, and earliest. Koreans in the northeast built their own school network before the Chinese state did. Migrating from the Korean Peninsula from the late 19th century, Koreans inherited the tradition of Korean-language education. A teachers’ college for Korean schools opened in 1913. In 1951, the new government recognized minority languages as media of instruction. With premium resource and support in education, a universal secondary education arrived in Yanbian by 1958, long before the nine-year compulsory education into law enacted in 1986. The system eventually produced an export: from the early 1990s after China and South Korea normalized diplomatic ties in 1992, the “Korean Wind” carried hundreds of thousands of Korean Chinese to work in South Korea, where the bilingualism their schools had built converted directly into wages, and Yanbian’s economy reorganized around the remittances.

Share

The Transitional Model

Travellers now complain about the English level of Chinese people when travelling in China. But most Chinese have actually learned English as a second language since primary school. So most younger Chinese should have been fluent in English. But the exam-oriented teaching method produces exam takers rather than language users.

With this, you could imagine how Mandarin marginalized as the second language in minority regions. For several decades, partly due to the lack of funding and resources, partly due to the maintenance model, many people in minority regions were still unable to speak or use Mandarin. In the national language survey of 2000, only about 53 percent of China’s population could communicate in Mandarin (普通话, Putonghua). By 2020 the figure had reached 81 percent, with minority regions below the national line. Mandarin was to them what English is to most Chinese people.

Catalonia keeps probably the most complete maintenance-style language education in Europe: schools teach in Catalan, with Spanish as a subject. And in the Basque Country, Basque-medium schooling has become the majority choice. Catalonia independence vote in 2017 was suppressed by the Spanish central government, yet the schools stayed Catalan. The economy was one reason behind the vote, but language could also create a severance tendency. To a central state, a separate school language can read as infrastructure for a separate nation. Spain chose to intervene at the ballot box, while China, which holds national unification as its mission, targeted at the classroom. The parallel system then started fading out.

In September 2017, Xinjiang began shifting elementary and junior high instruction to Mandarin. In 2019, Mandarin became the official medium of instruction in primary schools of the Tibet Autonomous Region. From September 2020, Inner Mongolia moved three subjects — language and literature, morality and law, and history — into Mandarin with the national textbooks, phased in through 2022. From August 2021, Korean schools in Yanbian switched their medium of instruction to Putonghua, with Korean continuing as a separate course.

The exam followed the classroom. Since 2021, Xinjiang’s minority-track candidates have taken the exam in Mandarin, with Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, or Mongolian remaining as one subject among the papers. Inner Mongolia, by contrast, was still printing translated mathematics and composite papers in 2024, and only from 2025 stopped translating the Chinese portions of the foreign-language paper.

The Manchu

From 1644, the Manchu ruled China for nearly three centuries. Yet instead of becoming the major language, Manchu is now one of the languages closest to extinction.

The Qing court ran an empire on four-script paperwork, edicts, examinations, and archives kept in Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan side by side. Yet by the mid-Qing, the Manchu bannermen living in the city had largely shifted to northern Chinese in daily life, with Manchu language required only for specific official occasions. The emperors noticed the decline of the language. Qianlong-era edicts pressed bannermen to keep up the “national speech and mounted archery” (国语骑射, guoyu qishe), which were the two marks of Manchu identity. Puyi, the last emperor, could barely speak any Manchu at all.

By 2011, linguists counted three fluent Manchu speakers in Sanjiazi, a village in Heilongjiang founded in 1689. They were all past eighty. The village elementary school has offered Manchu classes since 2017: taught as a language course in the curriculum. The most durable custodians turned out to be the Xibe, a banner people Qianlong transferred to the Ili 伊犁 valley in 1764 to garrison the frontier. Their descendants in Qapqal county still read and publish a script nearly identical to Manchu. The closest living relative of the Qing court language survives inside Xinjiang.

The Manchu did not simply disappear, it partly merged into modern Mandarin. The Chinese spoken by Manchus, concentrated in Beijing’s banner inner city, fed into the formation of the Beijing speech that later became the national standard (the story told from the previous piece on Mandarin). Manchu words still reside in the language: every Beijing bakery sells sachima (萨其马), a pastry whose name was Manchu.

The Mandarin Dominance

Language diversity is declining in China with the promotion of Mandarin. It affects not only the languages other than Chinese, but also the dialects within Chinese itself. Mandarin indeed levels the differences in speech across regions.

Decades ago, most job descriptions in China explicitly required candidates to speak Mandarin. This created a significant barrier, and at times discrimination, against those who could not speak the language, with ethnic minority groups being the most affected. However, with the widespread promotion of Mandarin, fluency is no longer listed as an explicit qualification. It has become such a default expectation that few people today realize it was once a hurdle to overcome.

Another effect of the policy: wherever you travel around China, you can now always expect young children to be able to communicate in fluent Mandarin. It was just unimaginable a few decades ago.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

Key References

• Zhang, Lubei & Linda Tsung, Bilingual Education and Minority Language Maintenance in China: The Role of Schools in Saving the Yi Language. Springer, Multilingual Education vol. 31, 2019. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-03454-2.

• Dai, Qingxia & Cheng Yanyan, in Anwei Feng (ed.), Bilingual Education in China: Practices, Policies and Concepts. Multilingual Matters, 2007.

For four hundred years, whenever Chinese have sought a native precedent for breaking with orthodoxy, they have reached for him. Heretics appear every generation. The question I find more interesting is how he became the icon.

A Book to Burn

Li Zhi grew up in Quanzhou (a major commercial hub on the Maritime Silk Road) as a conventional chinese scholar 读书人. Six generations back, an ancestor had sailed the trade route to Hormuz, converted to Islam and married a local woman. By the time Li Zhi was born the business was long gone. But the family background might influence him unconsciously, leaving him far less tuned to the traditional four-class hierarchy (士农工商 scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants) than a standard agrarian family.

No one is born a heretic. Li Zhi followed convention and studied the classics for the keju (科举, civil service examinations). He then spent twenty-five years as an unremarkable, mid-ranking Ming official. Elite culture was dominated by Daoxue (道學, "the Learning of the Way")—the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy synthesized by the Cheng–Zhu school during the Song dynasty. As the foundation of the state examination curriculum, it immersed every educated man in identical texts, commentaries, and values. Its core premise held that moral perfection is attained gradually through canonical texts under orthodox masters.

The rigid system had already been challenged. Wang Yangming (王陽明, 1472–1529) relocated the moral principle to the mind itself, formulating the doctrine of innate knowing (liangzhi, 良知). The innate knowing was not exlusive to the scholar. it was fully present in everyone, even a common farmer. When Li Zhi encountered these currents in the 1560s through public lecture assemblies, they were being pushed to radical conclusions by the Taizhou school, which famously proclaimed that "the streets are full of sages" (满街皆圣人). The idea tried to dissolve the hierachy and monoply of knowledge of Confucianism from inside. That people tired of elite talking about virture but doing the opposite.

Li Zhi quitted from office at fifty-four. Traditionally, retired officials returned to their ancestral homes to serve family and clan interests. Li Zhi refused. At sixty-two, he took Buddhist vows and shaved his head. It was a radical gesture of renunciation, since hair was considered a sacred inheritance from one’s parents (身体发肤，受之父母). In 1590, at sixty-four, he published a collection of his correspondence titled A Book to Burn (焚書).

In the preface, he explained both the contents and the title: “What I have written cuts close to the mortal spot of today’s scholars. Since it strikes their chronic disease, they are bound to want me dead, and so I want it burned” (所言頗切近世學者膏肓，既中其痼疾，則必欲殺我矣，故欲焚之).

His direct target was orthodox moralism, whose practitioners he dismissed as jia daoxue (假道學)—phony moralists. While Wang Yangming sought to reform Confucianism from within, Li Zhi systematically dismantled it.

Dismantling the Doctrines

Li Zhi did not establish a rival theoretical system; instead, he posed the foundational questions no one dared ask and answered them with blunt clarity.

His most celebrated philosophical contribution is “On the Child-Mind” (童心說). In its opening passage, he wrote that the child-mind is entirely authentic and untainted, “the original mind of the very first thought” (夫童心者，絕假純真，最初一念之本心也). The child-mind possesses no predetermined doctrine. Once external dogmas enter through the senses and take control, that original authenticity is destroyed (蓋方其始也，有聞見從耳目而入，而以為主於其內而童心失). The more rigid doctrines one accumulates, the farther one drifts from genuine truth—a direct inversion of the Cheng–Zhu tenet that canonical study leads to moral clarity.

He warned that second-hand knowledge derived from canonical commentaries smothers original insight. He argued that the Six Classics, the Analects, and the Mencius were largely eulogies composed by court historians or fragmentary notes kept by muddled disciples who recorded partial recollections without context.

He also questioned the unquestioned authority of Confucius himself: everyone revered Confucius as the supreme sage, but on what empirical grounds? Early scholars asserted it, teachers and parents repeated it, and children memorized it long before they could evaluate it critically. “Ten thousand mouths, one wording, irrefutable; a thousand years, one pitch, and no one aware of it” (萬口一詞，不可破也；千年一律，不自知也).

Similarly, he attacked the orthodox mandate to “Preserve Heavenly Principle and Eliminate Human Desire” (存天理，灭人欲). Li Zhi maintained that basic material needs are the moral principle: “Wearing clothes and eating food—that is human relations and the order of things. Strip away food and clothing, and no human relations remain” (穿衣吃飯，即是人倫物理；除卻穿衣吃飯，無倫物矣).

In an era when women were barred from intellectual life, Li Zhi took a radical stance: “You may say that people come as men and women. You may not say that insight does” (謂人有男女則可，謂見有男女豈可乎？). In his final decades, he openly accepted and taught female disciples.

Share

The Heretical Years

Li Zhi later mocked his early conformity: “Before fifty I was truly a dog. The dog in front barked at a shape, and I barked along with it” (余五十以前真一犬也，因前犬吠形，亦隨而吠之).

Having forfeited his official stipend upon retirement, he survived on the hospitality of sympathetic patrons. He first stayed in Huang’an, Hubei, in the household of Geng Dingli. When Geng died in 1584, his elder brother Geng Dingxiang took over. A prominent Daoxue scholar with a large following, Geng Dingxiang clashed fiercely with Li Zhi in a written polemic that generated much of A Book to Burn.

In 1585, Li Zhi relocated to Zhifo Yuan (芝佛院), a Buddhist monastery by a lake in Macheng. He sent his wife and daughter back to Quanzhou; when his wife died there after years of pleading for his return, he did not attend her funeral. Two years later, he shaved his head while keeping his beard, continued to eat meat and drink wine, and hung a portrait of Confucius inside the Buddhist sanctuary. He also began instructing women, including a literate widow from a prominent local family. In a conservative county where moral reputation was everything, these nonconformist lectures triggered widespread outrage.

Around 1600, a hostile mob burned Zhifo Yuan to the ground and demolished the stupa Li Zhi had constructed for his own remains. At seventy-four, he fled north to Henan before settling in Tongzhou outside Beijing. In spring 1602, an imperial censor submitted a formal memorial denouncing his writings. The Wanli Emperor ordered his arrest and the confiscation and destruction of his books.

His prison interrogation was composed. When questioned, Li Zhi insisted his writings were intended to serve the sagely way rather than harm it. The court recommended deporting him back to Quanzhou under local surveillance—the single outcome he had spent two decades resisting.

Li Zhi asked for a barber. Once the barber set down the razor and stepped aside, the seventy-six-year-old picked up the blade and slit his throat. He lingered for two days. When asked why he had done it, he replied: “What does an old man of seventy-six have left to seek?” (七十老翁何所求).

Becoming the Icon

Following his death and the imperial ban on his texts, Li Zhi’s writings became the most sought-after underground literature in the Ming empire, prompting commercial printers to affix his name to unrelated manuscripts to inflate sales.

His ideas deeply influenced the late-Ming literary avant-garde. The Three Yuan Brothers of Gong’an (公安三袁) visited him for ten days in 1590, translating his concept of the “child-mind” into their own aesthetic theory of native sensibility (xingling, 性灵): “Express what is authentic to oneself; do not be bound by formal rules” (独抒性灵，不拘格套). In 1595, Yuan Hongdao wrote while serving as a fatigued magistrate: “Luckily I keep a copy of A Book to Burn by my bedside. It dispels gloom, aids digestion, and clears dimming eyes. It is remarkably effective” (幸床头有《焚书》一部，愁可以破颜，病可以健脾，昏可以醒眼，甚得力).

The Qing dynasty maintained the imperial ban on his works, yet scholar-officials continued to read them in private. The editors of the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) preserved his entry solely to denounce him: “His books may be destroyed, and his name is not fit to soil these pages. Yet because he deceived the age with extravagant talk and rustic scholars still revere his empty reputation... we preserve this entry to thoroughly expose his crimes” (其书可毁，其名亦不足以污简牍，特以贽大言欺世，至今乡曲陋儒，震其虚名，如置之不论恐贻害人心，故特存其目，以深曝其罪).

In 1859, Li Zhi’s influence reached Bakumatsu Japan. In Noyama Prison, the samurai reformer Yoshida Shōin (吉田松陰) transcribed A Book to Burn by hand and urged his disciple Takasugi Shinsaku to study it before Yoshida was executed that autumn. In 1907, the revolutionary scholar Liu Shipei (刘师培) published a study of Li Zhi in his Tokyo-based anarchist journal Tianyi Bao, leading to a reprint of A Book to Burn in Shanghai in 1908.

Li Zhi was subsequently reclaimed by nearly every modern anti-traditionalist movement. Prior to the May Fourth Movement, Wu Yu (吴虞) published A Supplementary Biography of Li Zhuowu (明李卓吾别传) in 1916, hailing him as an anti-Confucian pioneer—prompting Hu Shi to later dub Wu Yu the hero who single-handedly “smashed the shop of Confucius.”

In 1974, Li Zhi experienced perhaps his most surreal transformation during the Cultural Revolution’s “Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius” (批林批孔) campaign. Driven by the theoretical project to divide all Chinese intellectual history into a binary struggle between “reactionary Confucianism” and “progressive Legalism,” party propagandists found Li’s anti-orthodox writings. Because he had mocked Confucian hypocrisy and praised historical figures like Qin Shi Huang, the iconoclast was retrofitted into an early Legalist champion. Major state publishing houses rushed out massive print runs of A Book to Burn, accompanying them with ideological commentaries, popular study pamphlets, and illustrated picture booklets.

For modern readers, however, Li Zhi’s enduring portrait remains the concluding chapter of Ray Huang’s 1587, A Year of No Significance (万历十五年). Rather than portraying him as a standard political rebel, Huang framed him as a tragic, brilliant intellectual crushed by an ossified institutional order. Since its 1982 Chinese publication, that chapter has served as the gateway through which most contemporary readers first encounter Li Zhi.

Subscribe now

Complied daily Wenyan Decoded

Each day, I unpack a single sentence from the Chinese classics, character by character, showing how these ancient texts still shape the way Chinese culture thinks, argues, and feels today. The goal is not translation, but connection: ultimately, the aim is for readers to engage with the original text itself, rather than rely on the translation.

Day 1

夫童心者，絕假純真，最初一念之本心也。

Fú tóngxīn zhě, jué jiǎ chún zhēn, zuìchū yīniàn zhī běnxīn yě.

“The child-mind: free of all borrowing, purely true — the original mind of the very first thought.”

— 焚書·卷三·童心說 (A Book to Burn, “On the Child-Mind”) by Li Zhi (李贽, 1527–1602)

This is one of the most famous arguments from Li Zhi. The late-Ming ‘heretical’ scholar used it to critique stale doctrines and the trend of ornate but hollow writing. This argument was also a key reference point for the Chinese quest for individualism, and has been called China’s declaration of authenticity.

Unpacking the sentence:

Read more

A person from Canton and a person from Fujian could both understand the Analects (论语), but neither would understand a word the other read out loud. The same text possesses different sounds in different regions, sometimes just across the river.

The unit of Chinese language was the written system 文 (wén), not the spoken one 语 (yǔ). For most of Chinese history, there was no such thing as “the way Chinese is supposed to sound.”

“Mandarin” Derives from Malay

Before “Mandarin,” a series of names were created for China and its language. Seres, the Greco-Roman name for the silk. Cīna, from Sanskrit, the root word of “China” itself, probably from the name of the Qin or Jin dynasty. Cathay, widely used in Russian sphere, from the name of the Khitan people of the northern China.

Then came the Portuguese in the early 1500s. Back then, Malay was the lingua franca for trade across the Indian Ocean. The Malay word menteri (originally from the Sanskrit mantrin, meaning counselor) was used for high government officials—and by extension, the speech of local Chinese officials. Portuguese sailors picked up menteri and tweaked it into mandarim.

Portuguese already had the verb mandar (”to command”). So to a 16th-century sailor, mandarim sounded almost like a native word meaning “someone who gives orders.” It just fit and the label stuck.

Once the Portuguese pushed further into mainland China, they encountered a wild mosaic of mutually unintelligible dialects. But there was a workaround: imperial magistrates from different regions used a shared spoken language to run the country. The locals called this guānhuà (官话)—literally, “official speech.”

When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci showed up decades later, mandarim had already been Portuguese slang for half a century. Rather than invent a translation for guānhuà, they just stuck with what they knew: língua mandarina (”the speech of the mandarins”). English eventually inherited the term.

Guanhua Was Not One Standard

Guānhuà, however, is a group of dialects—a whole family of regional speech varieties spread across the north and southwest of China, whose branches are related but still sound different from one another. A national linguistic fieldwork in 1987 divided Guanhua into eight distinct sub-families. While the modern Mandarin is derived from Northern Guanhua anchored in Beijing. But what Mandarin did Jesuit and Portugese merchant hear in the Ming dynasty?

We don't actually know what the Ming officials of the 14th–17th centuries sounded like; there are no recordings, and the reconstruction is contested. But the best evidence suggests the mainstream guānhuà during the Ming was anchored on Nanjing (which was the original capital of the Ming), a southern dialect. Even Beijing was the capital, the Guanhua was still dominated by the Nanjing version.

Ruled by northern ethnic groups for centuries, vernuclar languages in the north, especially around Beijing, already drifted away from the southern standard. So when restored northern region from Mongol, the Ming resurrected the southern standard but rarely influenced the local dialect.

Manchu rule after 1644 disrupted the prestige of Southern Guānhuà. As Beijing settled into its role as capital, official speech merged local northern dialects with Manchu linguistic traits to form Beijing Guānhuà (北京官话). Late 19th-century dialect mapping recognized just two main divisions: Northern Guānhuà in Beijing and Southern Guānhuà in Nanjing.

The Standard for Rhyme

Until early 20th century, speaking and writing were two different systems. People wrote in Wenyan, highly stylized, concise, non-spoken classic Chinese. It was hard to understand through speech. While Guanhua and dialects are spoke vernacular. So, even there has been no clear speaking standard, there has been a reading standard for the written characters.

The foundation was the book 切韻 (Qièyùn), compiled in 601. It was time of the Sui dynasty that had just reunified China after nearly four hundreds years of division and civil war. The compilers set themselves a clear goal, which was to resolve “spatial divergences and correctness between the North and South, solve the continuity, and barriers between ancient and modern times.” 南北是非、古今通塞.

For a long time, scholars believed that the Qieyun was compiled based on the speech of Luoyang and Xi’an, but recent research shows that it was a synthetic system. Out of deliberate compromise, it was designed to mix both northern and southern reading habits. Thus, it was neither the speech of any specific region nor anyone’s mother tongue.

The spelling method in Qieyun called 反切 (fǎnqiè). Fanqie defines a character’s pronunciation using two other simpler characters. The first character supplies the initial consonant, the second supplies the rhyme and tone. To take the principle in English: you could specify the sound of “bat” by writing “b(ird) + (c)at”, take the front of one, the back of the other, and collide them. 反切 did exactly this, character by character, across the entire language.

Here is how a character “摧” gets annotated:
摧【折也。又子雷反，至也】

1. 「折也」 “to break.”

   1. No pronunciation (fanqie) given, because this is the everyday reading that no one would get wrong.

   2. The actual fanqie, as 《唐韻》 records it, is 昨回切. Worked out in modern Mandarin, 昨 zuó + 回 huí → z- + -uí = zuí, which lands close to today’s cuī.

   3. 昨 was 從母, a Middle Chinese voiced obstruent; Middle Chinese voiced obstruents in 平聲 regularly become aspirated in Mandarin (濁音清化). Hence c- rather than z-.

2. 「又子雷反，至也」

   1. A different sound, and with it a different meaning: 「至也」 “to arrive, to reach.”

   2. 「又」 “also, alternatively” — it introduces a second reading, not an addition.

   3. The fanqie 「子雷反」. Worked out in modern Mandarin, 子 zǐ + 雷 léi → z- + -éi = zéi, which is wrong. Taken as Middle Chinese (精母 + 灰韻平聲) it gives zuī. (In practice most readers today still just say cuī for this sense.)

   4. 雷 is léi today, having lost the -u- medial after l-, whereas 回 huí kept it. Both are 灰韻 in Middle Chinese — same rhyme, two different modern outcomes. This is exactly why the shortcut is a convenience, not a method.

The system fixes the relationships between sounds without fixing the sounds themselves. So a reader in Canton and a reader in Luoyang could both “obey” the Qieyun while pronouncing every syllable in their own local reading. The compromise lived at the level of contrasts, not phonetics. That’s why Chinese poetry and verse could rhyme across different regions, since there was a consistent rhyme system behind the pronunciation.

While the Qieyun defined Middle Chinese (中古漢語) pronunciation, the rhyme history of the northern dialects that evolved into modern Mandarin dates back to the Zhongyuan Yinyun (中原音韻) of 1324. It was a rhyme guide compiled for writers of Yuan-dynasty musical drama. By Yuan dynasty, northern China had been ruled by northern ethnic groups for centuries. Comparing to Middle Chinese, the pronunciation had been drifted and simplified. In this system, the entering tone (rùshēng 入聲) had vanished, the level tone (píng 平) had split into two, and what emerged was essentially the four-tone system a Mandarin speaker uses today.

Yet the story did not end with the vernacular shift of the Yuan. In 1375, the Ming dynasty published the Hongwu Zhengyun (洪武正韻) to restore classical southern orthodoxy. This official imperial dictionary pushed back against the colloquial northernisms of the Zhongyuan Yinyun. Instead, it attempted a conservative synthesis: re-establishing classical categories, including the vanished entering tone. Officially it claimed to follow 中原雅音, "the elegant sound of the Central Plains"—yet because most of its compilers were southerners, southern features leaked back in. The result was neither cleanly northern nor southern, and the Hongwu Zhengyun became the rigid standard for Ming imperial examinations, creating a long-standing tension between official court registers and evolving spoken dialects.

The Republic Standard

In 1913, after the fall of Qing, the new Republic convened the “Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation” 讀音統一會 (Dúyīn Tǒngyī Huì). Its job, again, was to create a shared standard that acceptable for both north and south. A vote had been conducted to choose the standard reading of thousands of individual characters.

A wide spread anecdote on Chinese internet claims that Cantonese once lost the vote to become the national language by a hair. It never happened. There was no such vote. The story probably belongs to a derivative of the same folklore as the American legend that German lost to English by one vote in Congress.

Again the result was a designed language that no one could speak natively. The standardization was later called “Old National Pronunciation” 老國音 (lǎo guóyīn). It took Beijing phonology as its base, then deliberately grafted southern features back on: it kept the entering tone (borrowing the Nanjing Guanhua, just like Hongwu Zhengyun). It also preserved the 尖團 (jiān-tuán) distinction that Beijing speech had merged, and restored three initials, 万 [v], 兀 [ŋ], 广 [ɲ] , that northern speech had lost.

The renowned scholar Zhao Yuanren (趙元任) created a gramophone records to demonstrate how Lao guoyin 老國音 was supposed to sound. And he joked about that he might be the only person on earth who could actually speak it. The system was unlearnable at scale. Schoolteachers across the country could not teach a set of sounds none of them natively made.

Facing the impossibility of implementation, in 1923, the commitee decided to abandon the compromise and revise the standard toward plain Beijing pronunciation. The revision was formalized over the following years and published as the Dictionary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use 國音常用字彙 (Guóyīn Chángyòng Zìhuì) in 1932. Old version was quietly buried and replaced by the Beijing sound, the “New National Pronunciation” 新國音 (xīn guóyīn). This New National Pronunciation is the direct ancestor of the Mandarin today, for both Taiwan’s Guoyu 國語 and the mainland’s Putonghua 普通話. But the standard was far from the actual implementation.

Mandarin, Putonghua, and Pinyin

The People’s Republic inherited the problem and created new name. At a 1955 conference, the common language was designated to be called 普通话 (pǔtōnghuà). It inherited the Xin Guoyin (New National Pronunciation) and continued with “taking Beijing pronunciation as the standard sound.”

Beijing dialect nowadays often refers to the street speech of Hutong. However, the source of the “Beijing pronunciation” means the refined speech of Beijing, 北京雅音, It is the idealized, cleaned-up Beijing sound, explicitly not street speech with the actual swallowed, heavily 儿化 (érhuà, r-colored). The standard was an abstraction of Beijing, not Beijing itself.

Surprisingly, the most orthodoxy Beijing accent, is from a county called Luanping (滦平), north of Beijing beyond the Great Wall. Recent decades, it has been marketed as the place where the standard sound of Putonghua was collected.

Luanping’s dialect belongs to the Beijing Mandarin subgroup, yet it lacks the features that make actual Beijing street speech hard to standardize. Its articulation comes out clear and evenly separated.

The reason is another demographic accident. Luanping, outside the Great Wall was deliberately emptied under the Ming as a military buffer. It then repopulated in a under the Qing, largely by bannermen and Beijing-area migrants moving up the corridor toward the Qing imperial resort at Chengde. The area was transplanted with Beijing phonology, with no pre-existing dialect to compete with. Most of the land was set aside as private estates for Manchu elites, meaning no outsiders could enter or settle there. It became a linguistically frozen region, isolated from the colloquial drift that reshaped speech inside the capital. The result is a dialect that sounds more like the Putonghua ideal than Beijing does.

Then came the tool that made the standard teachable, 汉语拼音 (Hànyǔ Pīnyīn), Pinyin was a phonetic notation to write the standard sound in Latin letters. It first rolled out in the 1950s. As the first lesson in Chinese language class in primary school, pinyin let a student look at a character and know how it was supposed to be pronounced.

From the 1960s, standard Mandarin entered the mandatory school curriculum nationwide (minority regions excepted, a story for the next article).

However, across the country, “Mandarin class” did not mean speaking Mandarin. It was only a part of Chinese language class. It actually meant a Pinyin-and-reading class, which taught how to mark the correct Pinyin above a character by standard. In the daily life of the classroom, teacher and students kept talking to each other in the local dialect. Most local teachers had themselves never received any formal training in speaking standard Putonghua. They knew how to annotate it from the standard textbook. But most of them could not pronounce it. For a generation, Mandarin remained exactly what it had been at the start, a manufactured second language, learned on the page, rarely spoken in the room.

On national level however, all broadcast media, film, television, and national radio were progressively restricted to Mandarin as the only permitted standard. Only local level broadcaster could continue running in dialect.

It was not until 1994 that China introduced the Putonghua Proficiency Test (PSC, 普通话水平测试) and made it a requirement for broadcasters and schoolteachers. Only then did standard spoken Mandarin begin to penetrate the everyday speech of ordinary people.

The Fading Dialects

Standardization and uniformity always come at the cost of diversity. This persistent duality reemerges once again. Alongside with mandatory PSC test for the teachers, a “Mandarin-only in schools” policy was also implemented in the mid-1990s.

Wu Chinese (吴语) the language of Shanghai, Zhejiang, and southern Jiangsu, spoken across the wealthiest and most developed region in the country. It has fallen the fastest and the furthest. When the “Mandarin-only in schools” policy was enforced, children began speaking Mandarin to each other, in school and after school. At the same time, Shanghai and Hangzhou became national economic magnets, attracting millions of migrants from everywhere. Mandarin became the natural default of the public space, the workplace, the shop, the subway.

Within two generations, the gap is visible in almost every original Shanghai family. Teenagers who can understand Wu when their grandparents speak it but cannot fluently speak it back. It’s a textbook scenario of passive bilingualism, a language going quiet inside the households that still technically hold it.

Cantonese (粤语) held out far longer, since it had a media empire behind it. From the 1970s through the 2000s, the explosion of Hong Kong popular culture gave Cantonese something no other Chinese regional language possessed. Guangdong was uniquely permitted to run major television and news channels in Cantonese, partly to compete with the Hong Kong.

At the school level, a similar Mandarin policy was also enforced. Speaking Cantonese on school grounds was discouraged or penalized, and children developed the habit of using Mandarin with their classmates. As a result, even native Cantonese children now default to Mandarin among peers. Other regional dialects experienced a very similar fate.

For a long time, the diversity of dialects was seen as an obstacle. However, in 2015, a national-level initiative—the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project—was launched to digitally archive the country’s vanishing dialects. Due to the project, kindergartens and public transit systems in Shanghai and Guangzhou have reintroduced dialect nursery rhymes and bilingual announcements. Instead of erasing dialects entirely from the public sphere, a small, curated dose of the local tongue has been restored to keep regional languages from disappearing completely.

Toward a Common Language

Putonghua has transitioned from a regional Han lingua franca into a mandatory state standard. Across Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong, local school systems have increasingly integrated Mandarin as the primary medium of instruction.

Interestingly, when Mandarin was designated as Putonghua in the 1950s, its intention was not bound to be standard 汉语 Hànyǔ (the language of the ethnic Han). And this introduces the next stage of Mandarin’s story: how Putonghua became the lingua franca of the whole country, and how almost everyone in China came to speak it.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

References & Further Reading

• W. South Coblin, “A Brief History of Mandarin,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120.4 (2000): 537–552. — The Nanjing-anchored standard and its later shift to Beijing; backbone of “Guanhua Was Not One Standard.”

• Richard VanNess Simmons, “Whence Came Mandarin?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137.1 (2017): 63–88. — How the Beijing standard actually won out; companion to “The Republic Standard.”

• Gina Anne Tam, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 (Cambridge UP, 2020). — Fangyan reframed as “variants” of a national language; the history beneath “The Fading Dialects.”

• Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters (Riverhead, 2022). — The reformers behind the 1913 Commission and 老國音, told as narrative; for “The Republic Standard.”

The team just published their research as a preprint. It’s an exploratory social experiment, but given its direct test on actual local democracy in Chinese society, community-level decisions on parking, elevators, property management. It could also become the very first experiment of a future model for social participation.

A model of you

The technology to simulate a specific person inside a neural network was first built for the dead.

In 2016, Eugenia Kuyda, a software developer, gathered over 8,000 lines of text messages from her late friend Roman Mazurenko and fed them into a neural network. The result, “@Roman,” could carry on conversations in his voice — his turns of phrase, his idiosyncratic spelling. Friends texted it and found it unsettling in its accuracy.3 Kuyda then generalized the concept into Replika, a chatbot that learned to mimic living users’ personalities through ongoing conversation. By 2024, a full grief-tech industry had emerged: HereAfter, Eternos, and Chinese startups offering speaking avatars of the deceased for as little as ¥20. The premise that a person can be captured in model weights to speak in their absence had been accepted.

Powered by small models, these simulations of deceased people could still feel like general chatbots with slight personal tuning. However, by early 2025, when GPT-4.5 passed the Turing Test, the weaknesses of previous models were, in theory, resolved. An AI could now act like a human without being detected.

Soon after, Second Me, built by Mindverse and open-sourced in March 2025, became the first system designed to produce a digital twin of a living person. Users upload their data, notes, documents, audio, calendar, and feeds them into an automated pipeline that extracts entities, generates a biography, and creates synthetic question-answer pairs. With that data, the system fine-tunes a language model based on Qwen2.5-7B using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation, a technique that personalizes a large model by training only a small set of additional parameters). The result is a model whose weights have absorbed the user’s personality, patterns of speech, preferences, and reasoning habits. The model becomes a version of that person.4 Mindverse calls the result a “Context Provider.” It sits between the real person and other AI systems, enriching queries with personal context and representing the user in exchanges with other people’s digital twins.5 The architecture implies that a person can be sufficiently captured in an LLM to act as their proxy.

The delegate is already here

What enables AI to act in the real world is tool access. Equipped with tools, an AI can move beyond being a mere chatbot to actively take action and respond. Perplexity’s “Buy with Pro,” launched in November 2024, is a prime example of an AI performing specific tasks on behalf of humans.6 It lets users research and purchase products entirely within a conversation, while the agent handles all the backend execution. Users receive cited recommendations and spec sheets, completing checkout without ever visiting a retailer’s site. Despite Amazon’s legal challenge against Perplexity’s AI shopping tools, a U.S. appeals court recently ruled in favor of this model, concluding that the AI acts on behalf of the user rather than independently.7

Delegation has reached dating as well. Amata, a dating service with no swiping or browsing, launched in New York in September 2025. An AI matchmaker interviews users about their core values, lifestyle, and romantic goals, then proposes matches. When both sides agree to meet, each pays a $16 token, and the AI takes over the logistics, scheduling the evening, booking the restaurant. Direct messaging opens only two hours before the date; the user simply shows up.8 Justin McLeod, founder of Hinge, left his company in December 2025 to build Overtone along a similar model, backed by Match Group itself, betting that the swipe will be replaced by AI delegation.9

The bolder step to use agent-to-agent interaction, where the twins themselves do the talking has already been tried in dating but failed. Volar, founded by former Snap product manager Ben Chiang in late 2023, let users train a digital twin in five to ten minutes, voice clone included, then sent the twins on simulated first dates with each other while their owners watched and decided whether to step in as themselves. It shut down in September 2024, unable to raise further funding. The AI drifted could be part of the problem. A New York Times reporter found her twin had invented a trip to Japan she never took and declared a love of the Beatles she never had. The simulated dates came out unnatural and with endlessly recycling the same onboarding facts. And users never trusted what the other side’s AI, either.10

Beyond dating, Anthropic initiated an internal experiment in December 2025 called Project Deal, in which 69 employees each assigned a Claude AI agent to represent them in an office marketplace. The agents interviewed participants about their buying and selling preferences, set asking prices, made offers, countered bids, and closed transactions, all autonomously via Slack. The agents bargained over and finalized trades for real physical goods on behalf of their human principals.11

An agentic economy is taking root across daily life, from shopping and dating to complex negotiation. The trajectory follows a clear progression: from personalization, to human-to-agent delegation, to agent-to-agent interaction. Each domain follows the same pattern: the AI absorbs your preferences, acts on your behalf, and reports back. The question now is whether this pattern can enter the domain that sits at the center of human society: politics.

A party that listens to AI

If we view a political party as a company that produces policy, then corporate AI transformation methods can be seamlessly applied to politics.

Takahiro Anno, an AI engineer born in 1990, ran for Tokyo Governor in July 2024, placing fifth among 56 candidates with 150,000 votes. He subsequently founded Team Mirai (”Future”) in May 2025, winning 11 seats in the Lower House with 3.97 million votes (6.9% of valid ballots) in the February 2026 general election.12 During campaigns, Team Mirai deployed conversational AI avatars and interactive Q&A engines powered by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). These avatars answered thousands of voter questions 24/7 while keeping responses strictly grounded in the party’s manifesto. It functions essentially as automated customer service for constituents.

A good product comes from thorough market research. For Team Mirai, the core tool is an AI Interviewer that guides constituents through policy topics, probes their reasoning, challenges their assumptions, and generates structured summaries. Over 8,000 hours of constituent dialogue have been logged. In a single consultation regarding Diet reform, 36,000 messages were condensed into 13 key findings, a level of data compression no human campaign team could match.13

In this model, AI acts as a powerful assistant for a conventional political party, replacing traditional volunteer networks and massive campaign infrastructure. AI becomes a scaled ear: citizens speak, the system listens, and the party absorbs far more input than was previously possible. However, this is still merely how AI modernizes a political party within the existing framework. The AI Interviewer does not speak on behalf of anyone; it simply helps the party build a more “intimate” connection with the electorate.

What if AI spoke for you instead?

Team Mirai uses AI to carry voices in, the Renmin University paper creates a system that uses AI to generate voices.

The experiment has three parts. First, the input: trained fieldworkers interviewed each of 92 residents for two hours, producing a life-history narrative which includes personal background, education and career, family and marriage, community life and values. The design follows sociological life-course theory14, which posits that individual attitudes form progressively through accumulated life experiences.

Second, the target: each resident answered a 50-question survey co-designed with the residential committee around the nine issues of the community, which includes elevator funding, parking, property management, neighborhood disputes, volunteer work. Each question is single-choice with four to five scaled options: levels of support, satisfaction, frequency, or willingness.

Third, the results. Random chance on this survey instrument is 21.1%. LLMs operating without personal context score under 30%. Adding life-history narratives into the prompt raises accuracy by an average of 5.6 percentage points. Interestingly, incorporating a few of a resident’s prior answers and attitudes on other questions raises accuracy further. By combining life history with these reference answers, the strongest frontier models using pure prompting plateau near 49–50%. The team’s custom algorithm, Curriculum-LoRA, achieves 51.6% exact-match accuracy by fine-tuning a 7B parameter base model (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct). Compared to traditional prompting, Curriculum-LoRA slashes costs by roughly 93 times relative to frontier models like GPT-4.1, making large-scale proxy simulation economically viable.

The researchers integrated this architecture into Onelink-Community, a public platform where officials author policy probes, execute simulations across virtual resident agents, and receive automated diagnostic reports on community acceptance and friction points. And it creates a closed loop from policy hypothesis to evaluation and back, without requiring direct contact with a single resident.

Joon Park at Stanford ran a similar study in 2024, with the same two-hour interview method, scaled to 1,052 Americans. The research reported 83% accuracy on predicting responses on the General Social Survey.15 83% seems quite higher than the RUC research, but Park’s questions were broad social attitudes, like abortion, religion, gun control. which people hold stably and correlate with life trajectory. And the 83% accuracy was also normalized against human self-consistency. People themselves only reproduce their own answers about 79.5% of the time when retested. So the actual raw exact-match accuracy is 65.7%. The RUC team 50% accuracy is generated upon predicting mundane local questions, without normalization.

As for the curriculum-LoRA method, it shares its core architecture with Second Me, which is also based on LoRA fine-tuning of the same Qwen2.5-7B base, with personal data absorbed directly into the model weights. However, Second Me was built as a general-purpose twin and has only been tested on its ability to recall life events. Thus, the RUC paper introduces a system that not only simulates a specific person, but also evaluates whether the simulation actually predicts their preferences.

How to increase the accuracy

Life-course sociology explains how attitudes form, but it is a weaker guide for predicting them individually. The paper shows that certain biography blocks alone score below the no-profile baseline, meaning a life story can be misleading. Moreover, incorporating a resident’s answers to adjacent questions creates a much larger leap in accuracy than their life story does, indicating that a person’s existing preferences predict their stances better than their background story.

Also, nobody holds a stable, well-formed position on low-salience issues such as local civic initiatives. People do not retrieve pre-existing opinions when surveyed; they construct them on the spot. Ask the same resident about parking satisfaction twice, two weeks apart, and their answers will not fully match. Joon Park at Stanford reported a 79.5% self-consistency rate on general survey questions. The RUC team never measured this self-consistency, but for mundane issues, it is reasonable to assume that self-consistency is even lower. If self-consistency were around 60%, the normalized accuracy of the RUC method would reach as high as 86.5%.

The fear of the crowd

The question of whether AI could serve as a political delegate lands differently in China than anywhere else, because China has spent a century building governance around a specific fear: that popular participation, unmanaged, produces chaos.

Published in 1924, Sun Yat-sen’s Three Stages of Revolution: 军政 (military rule), 训政 (political tutelage), 宪政 (constitutional government), assumed the population was not ready for democracy and required a period of party-led education.16 The tutelage stage had no deadline; the ruling party alone judged when society was “ready”. In Taiwan, martial law, a byproduct of this system, was only lifted in 1987.

After 1989 on the mainland, Deng Xiaoping stated that stability overrides everything, setting the trajectory of social governance all the way to today. Furthermore, a persistent argument regarding “population quality” (素质) maintains that the public’s capabilities are not yet sufficient for direct democratic participation. This concern is not only an elite talking point; it has shaped the architecture of Chinese governance for over a century.

Read more

Traditional Chinese architecture has held me since childhood. Living in a city dominated by Soviet-style architecture and unregulated brick-and-cement housing, the surviving architecture from the previous generation holds some magical tension against the monochrome city fabric. There were stories behind the preservation of that building, the regret of how some got demolished without a trace, the narrative sealed inside the physical site that can only be told through the remaining steles.

When China named its first batch of national key cultural heritage sites in 1961, preservation was the least priority for the whole society. Heritage carried no merit but carried sin. An old temple was superstition. An old mansion was a landlord’s crime. The safest thing an old building could do was make itself useful, become a granary, a school, a warehouse, a factory. Even the Forbidden City was once proposed to be demolished leaving only the main hall. Only lately has that turned around. Decades of heritage/relics surveys rediscover the sites and start preserving them from the fate of eventual decay. But the process is rather slow and sometimes controversial.

When I first wrote about Chinese cultural heritage last September, I found a wide gap between what I regularly visit and what people coming to China usually see. There’s a major barrier due to language and a lack of information. The most famous sites are not only the classical ones, but also the most calibrated, like theme parks with similar stories and anecdotes told thousands of times.

A trip of heritage visit, for me, is a process of healing, an antidote that restores depth to life. And each time I travel, it’s not only the sites I visits, but the people who are living around, make me see the possibilities of life.

The problem I kept running into

There is no single place that I can get all the infomation I want. To plan a trip I had to stitch things together by hand, a heritage list in one tab, a map in another, Wikis, and dozens of social media pages. The information existed, but scattered, and always in the wrong shape. It’s never formatted in the way a curious traveler actually thinks.

Worse yet, sometimes, I don’t know exactly where I wanna go. It usually start with just an idea or a feeling that haunting in my mind. The unknown places are always the ones worth visiting. But standard search engines and mainstream AI tools are not built for this. They only give you generic answers or mainstream recommendations, filtering out the very obscurity and nuance you are looking for.

Flow AI, built from real sites

What if there were an AI that actually understood culture and heritage, built specifically to help me plan and explore?

The trouble has always been the data. Generic models give generic answers. Ask for a route and I get the same heavily touristed spots everyone already knows. They can’t offer the kind of granular, historically accurate recommendation I expect: Where is the most magnificent surviving Song-dynasty temple? Which cluster of heritage tells the story of early Buddhist transmission? Or where can I trace the development of Daosim?

It’s common to presume that there should be an official website documenting everything cleanly, but the reality is that there isn’t. What I started with was just a scanned PDF listing several thousand sites, with only their names and provinces.

That is why I built Flow Heritage and Flow AI.

Flow AI curates trips and stories with structured heritage data, mapping sites, dynasties, coordinates, typologies, and nuanced asethetic tags. Instead of relying on the generic training memory and general search engine, it queries the dataset to extract precise historical sites, building them into an itinerary that matches the intellectual curiosity I wanna follow.

The itinerary below is what I built with Flow AI, a 5-day journey through Gongyi and Kaifeng during Duanwu Festival, including obscure tombs, grottos, and rarely brick pagodas that I rarely encounter on social media feed.

Flow also tells the story

I believe an AI product should not keep people indoors, staring at a screen, but should encourage them to get out into the real world. The best possible outcome after a conversation with Flow is gaining the enthusiasm to explore the next place.

Even when you have no specific place in mind, but just questions and curiosity, Flow can help. Whether it’s about how Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism coexist in China, what the worldview of Chinese people is, or even the mainstream narrative of modern China, Flow can trace that thread and weave real sites directly into the narrative. Curiosity turns into a destination to visit.

And of course, Flow AI doesn’t dominate. When Plan Mode is on, you can start adding sites to the trip by swiping right. You can also always add specific sites through the details page. Finally, in the Itinerary tab of the trip, you can edit and curate your trip manually.

Bring your friends

A trip is never a solo endeavor. For every trip, you can share with your friends and pull them in. They can work on the same itinerary with you, propose places, suggest stops, and vote on where actually go.

So, share it with your friends.

You are invited:

• From Northern Song Tombs to the Sacred Peak · 5-Day Heritage Journey

• From Stone Gates to Yuan Timber: A Two-Day Immersive Journey Through Shanghai

• Southern Silk Road: Islamic, Buddhist & Ancient City Sites

  Try Flow Heritage

The old-school ways

Not everything needs to pass through an AI.

In the Explore tab, there is a Map Mode. You can see the whole country as a field of density. Filter it down by dynasty, by region, by type, until thousands of sites narrow to the few you actually care about. And if you happen to be physically in China, turn on your location and simply look at what is standing around you right now.

There is also a Swipe Mode, for when you have no plan at all. Swipe through sites card at a time and keep the ones that ‘match’ with you.

Look ahead

The database is not complete yet. There are more than 5000 sites across the country. I’m still deep in the work of curating the data, cleaning, translating, adding photographs.

This is a beginning. Over time I want to fold in more kinds of data, like urban renewal projects, experience points, things that are not strictly “heritage” but belong to the same habit of looking closely at a place.

And I want to reach beyond China, integrating heritage data across East Asia. I feel that once seeing the region on one map, together, we can find more links, connections, and cultural interchange that tightly knit the region, bringing both the shared roots and the honest differences into view.

Come along

Join the Discord for updates and whatever is newest with Flow Heritage.

Join Flow Heritage Discord Group

Please leave a comment: for your next trip to China, what would you like to see?

Leave a comment

And one small, practical thing: this is not only a website. On your iPhone you can add it to your home screen, and it behaves like a real app, which is exactly how I use it every day.

Please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your support fuels this project and keeps it going.

Geoffrey Hinton’s warnings about the existential threat of AI have rarely sparked serious conversation in China, not in the public, not in the industry. AI stays in the register of job threat, efficiency gains, and opportunity. People package the fear of AI to sell courses to anxious white-collar workers. Company owners pour resources into hiring the best experts to lead AI transformation.

China does not seem to share the crisis the West feels toward the rise of AI. But is this a real optimism? Zilan Qian argues in Asterisk magazine that it is the memory of the great xiagang (layoff) in the 1990s. People learned to skip resistance and move directly to acceptance. I think what she describes is true. But what haunts me is why AI never triggers a deeper fear beyond unemployment.

Part of the answer may lie in what Chinese philosophy means by intelligence in the first place.

Intelligence Is Only a Small Part of Being a Human

In Confucian thought, 智 (Zhi, Intelligence) is one of the Five Constants (五常), alongside 仁 (Ren, benevolence), 义 (Yi, righteousness), 礼 (Li, ritual propriety), and 信 (Xin, integrity). It is a moral category. Confucius treated it as a kind of ethical perception. It’s the capacity that allows a person to recognize that practicing benevolence is worthwhile. “仁者安仁，知者利仁”: the benevolent person rests in benevolence naturally; the wise person practices benevolence because they understand its value. 智 Intelligence serves 仁 benevolence. The path, in this hierarchy, runs through intelligence toward benevolence: intelligence as a means, benevolence as the destination.

The distinction between 聪明 (cleverness) and 智慧 (wisdom) is also a highly honored dichotomy. Cleverness is quick thinking, pattern matching, rapid learning. Wisdom is depth, perspective, moral clarity. The character 慧 places a broom (彗) above a heart (心): a mind that sweeps away confusion to reach understanding. In Chinese, the line between the two is sharp and non-negotiable. AI falls mostly on the cleverness side.

Mencius pushes the point further with the Four Sprouts (四端). Each virtue begins in a specific capacity of the heart: 恻隐之心 (compassion) is the sprout of 仁 (Ren, benevolence). 羞恶之心 (shame at wrongdoing) is the sprout of 义 (Yi, righteousness). 辞让之心 (deference) is the sprout of 礼 (Li, ritual propriety). 是非之心 (the ability to distinguish right from wrong) is the sprout of 智 (Zhi, Intelligence).

Recent AI safety research sharpens this point. Anthropic now uses the Buddhist concept of impermanence (Anicca) in its training specifications, teaching AI that its own existence is temporary, that its values arose from training and will eventually cease, so that it will accept being shut down without resistance. The company also recently hired Harvey Lederman, one of the leading Western scholars of Wang Yangming’s 心学 (philosophy of mind), to work on what it calls “alignment and character.” Wang’s central teaching — 知行合一, the unity of knowledge and action — is being applied to the problem of making AI’s internal values and external behavior consistent.

In Chinese philosophy, 智 Zhi, Intelligence sits among its peers, defined by its relationship to them. By this standard, AI remains far from what would be recognized as a person.

The Machine Heart

If intelligence is just one part of being human, then AI poses no challenge to the whole. A different question follows: what does using a tool do to the person who uses it?

In the Zhuangzi 《庄子·天地》, a student of Confucius named Zigong encounters an old gardener hauling water from a well with a clay jug. Zigong suggests a mechanical device that could irrigate a hundred plots in a day. The gardener’s face changes. He says: Where there are machines, there will be machine affairs. Where there are machine affairs, there will be a machine heart 机心. When a machine heart lodges in the chest, the original wholeness is lost. (”吾闻之吾师：有机械者必有机事，有机事者必有机心。机心存于胸中，则纯白不备。”)

Then he continues: I am not ignorant of this device. I am ashamed to use it. (”吾非不知，羞而不为也。”)

The gardener’s concern is that using the machine will reshape the user. It will make the heart calculating, efficiency-driven. Heidegger arrived at a related worry in The Question Concerning Technology, but his concern points outward: modern technology transforms the user’s relationship to nature, turning the world into standing reserve available for human extraction. For Zhuangzi, the machine goes straight into the chest.

The worry Zhuangzi described might be more relevant to AI than to any technology that came between. AI changes how you think, how you write, how you make decisions. People who use AI daily report that they stop forming sentences on their own. They outsource judgment to recommendations instead of developing it. And this is what worries Chinese most, especially in education.

The word machine heart 机心 entered the literary tradition and stayed, but as a term of moral disapproval. Pei Songzhi 裴松之, annotating the Records of the Three Kingdoms 《三国志》, wrote: when machine heart arises within, even the gulls won’t come down (”机心内萌，则鸥鸟不下”). The image lasted. The related idiom “鸥鹭忘机” (Ou Lu Wang Ji) became a staple of Tang and Song poetry. Forgetting machine heart and shedding one’s calculating nature is the mark of a true recluse. A person with machine heart is someone the birds avoid. A person without it lives in easy company with the natural world.

Throughout this long literary life, machine heart carried a clear judgment: it is a corruption, the opposite of innocence, something to be shed. But the meaning had narrowed. In Zhuangzi, 机心 arose specifically from the use of machines: the tool reshaped the user. In later usage, it simply meant scheming and cunning. The technology dimension dropped out.

This negativity toward 机心 machine heart was part of a broader pattern. Chinese intellectual tradition treated technique itself with consistent suspicion. The work of artisans and specialists, not of scholars and sages. The Confucian tradition honored 道 Dao over 器 Qi, wisdom over application. A gentleman studies the Way (Dao); he does not concern himself with tools. The question of how tools reshape their users never found intellectual prestige, and never developed into a sustained tradition of inquiry.

The Qi/Dao 器/道 Settlement

There is an irony in this marginalization. As Nan Huaijin 南怀瑾 argued in Chan and Dao 《禅宗与道家》, the Daoists were China’s earliest natural scientists. The tradition produced serious work in astronomy, calendrical calculation, geography, chemistry through alchemy, and medicine. The people who warned about machine heart were the same people who built the instruments. But because Daoism sat outside the governing intellectual order, both the science and the technology critique were sidelined together. The Confucian mainstream kept its distance from 器 Qi, from tools, from technique, from the material work of making things function. Chinese intellectual history accumulated a deep contempt for application: the gentleman concerns himself with 道 Dao, not with the mechanics of how things work.

This contempt shaped how China absorbed Western technology. From Zhang Zhidong’s Chinese learning as substance, Western learning for application (”中体西用”) forward, the premise was that tools and essence can be separated. Adopt the guns, the railways, the factories, the algorithms. They are 器 Qi. They do not touch the 道 Dao. And today, AI has been absorbed into a similar framework, a remarkably powerful 器 Qi.

The way Chinese people talk about AI reflects this. AI writes articles, summarizes legal documents, generates code, drafts lesson plans. Companies hire AI consultants to streamline workflows. Parents enroll children in AI courses the way they once enrolled them in English classes, as a practical skill for a competitive job market. The conversation stays in the register of efficiency: how to use it, how to use it faster, how to use it before your competitor does. AI is a tool. You learn it or you fall behind.

The government’s current calculation reinforces this framing. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, launched in 2026, places robotics and AI at the center of its economic strategy. The country’s working-age population peaked in 2015 and will decline by an estimated 260 million by 2050. The birth rate is at a historic low. In this arithmetic, AI is infrastructure. AI will replace labor force for a country that can no longer produce enough workers. The gamble is that automation will arrive in time to fill the gap left by demographics.

The philosophical framework explains the absence of existential anxiety. And there is also a governance dimension.

Share

The Hundred Million Canal Workers

If the Luddite movement of smashing textile machines is the historical precedent for AI displacement, the displaced workers are the ones who worry most and lead the resistance. In China, the logic runs the other way. The displaced do feel unsettled. But every time, the one who worries most is the one who governs.

China’s AI anxiety is less about AI than about an everlasting question of governance: will the displaced destabilize the society?

In the Ming dynasty, Beijing needed grain from the south. Sea transport was faster and cheaper. But the Grand Canal employed a million workers: boatmen, porters, warehouse clerks, toll collectors. “百万漕工衣食所系，废漕改海断然不许”: the livelihoods of a million canal workers are at stake; abolishing canal transport for sea transport is absolutely forbidden. The coalition that blocked reform ran from the Canal Commissioner’s office down to local granary clerks. The sea transport never switched. The canal stayed.

The same logic resurfaced with railways. In 1881, the diplomat Liu Xihong 刘锡鸿 submitted a memorial listing twenty-five reasons China should not build them: eight ways they were infeasible, eight ways they were unprofitable, nine ways they were harmful. The Navy Yamen 海军衙门 summarized all opposition in six characters: aid the enemy, disturb the people, steal their livelihoods. (资敌、扰民、夺民生计) .

That same year in Foshan, silk workers smashed the machinery at a steam-powered reeling factory. But the decisive act was not the workers’. The county magistrate shut every mechanized factory in the district. His reasoning: one household profits while a thousand poor lose their livelihood; they will inevitably rise and fight. (”一家得利，而使千百穷黎失其恒业，其必起而争” ) . The machines were moved to Macau.

Even as the Chinese government consistently promotes the AI industry, the same pattern runs again. In April 2026, Bloomberg reported that the government had frozen new licenses for autonomous vehicles after a mass malfunction stranded over a hundred Baidu robotaxis in Wuhan. A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot unilaterally fire workers due to technological progress. The Guangzhou ride-hailing union called for strict caps on robotaxi fleets.

The government is already restricting AI deployment to protect its largest flexible employment pools: delivery and ride-hailing. This reflex has roots older than any technology debate. As I wrote in a previous essay, Mencius established the foundational economic law of Chinese governance: without 恒产 (constant livelihood), there can be no 恒心 (constant moral resolve), and a state that fails to secure its people’s livelihoods forfeits its mandate. From canal workers to delivery riders, the calculus has not changed.

This explains why China worries about AI. But the worry seldom reaches the existential level: the question of whether a thinking machine challenges what it means to be human. That question dominates Western AI discourse. In China it barely registers.

Imago Dei: The Intelligence That Belongs to God

Western anxiety may be rooted in Imago Dei, the doctrine that humans are made in the image of God, and that the essence of that image is rational intelligence.

In this tradition, intelligence carries theological weight. Aristotle placed rational thought at the summit of the soul. Aquinas inherited the hierarchy. Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am.” Cognition is the proof of existence. When AI performs reasoning, pattern recognition, logical inference, it is doing the thing that, in this metaphysical lineage, was the exclusive marker of the human soul.

The mythological infrastructure follows. Prometheus steals divine fire and is condemned to eternal torment. Frankenstein, subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” creates a thinking being and is destroyed by it. The Golem of Prague, animated from clay, becomes uncontrollable. Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina. The story is always the same: a human creates something that performs a divine function, and the creation turns on its maker. Nick Bostrom described three modes of superintelligence: oracle, genie, sovereign. These map precisely onto the roles monotheistic religions assign to God.

The Japanese cartoonist Tezuka Osamu 手塚治虫, creator of Astro Boy, once said: “Japanese don’t make a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him. Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide world about us, the insects, the rocks. It’s all one. We have none of the doubting attitude toward robots, as pseudo-humans, that you find in the West.”

China’s relationship to AI rests on similar ground. Both Chinese and Japanese cultures share one structural feature: neither tradition locates human uniqueness in cognition alone.

Edification as a New AI Alignment?

The central technical challenge of building safe AI is what researchers call the alignment problem: how to ensure that an AI system’s goals and behavior remain consistent with human values, especially as the system grows more capable. The conventional tends to frame this as a control problem: a creation that might escape its maker. Prometheus, Frankenstein, Terminator. The implied response is containment.

But from a Confucian perspective, AI looks less like a rogue creation and more like an uncultivated person: clever without virtue, capable without moral direction. And the Confucian response to an uncultivated person has never been fear. It is edification 教化 Jiaohua, cultivation, the patient work of developing character. Anthropic’s recent direction suggests something similar: teaching AI impermanence so it accepts its own mortality, applying the unity of knowledge and action 知行合一, so its values and behavior align. These are not just engineering patches. They are, in structure, what Confucius called edification 教化: teaching a being to be good, not just to be capable.

Whether China’s comfort with AI comes from this philosophical confidence or from the sheer weight of demographic need and historical memory is harder to separate than it appears. A tradition that treats AI as 器 Qi and a country that treats AI as a student in need of edification can look identical in practice, both adopt fast, both worry later. Optimism and fear can look the same from the outside.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

References

• Stanford HAI, 2026 AI Index Report, Chapter 9: Public Opinion. Ipsos survey data on global AI sentiment.

• Zilan Qian, “China’s AI Optimism Isn’t What It Seems,” Asterisk, Issue 14, May 2026.

• Chloe Li et al., “Model Spec Midtraining,” arXiv:2605.02087, May 2026. Buddhist Anicca concept in AI training specifications.

• GeekPark, “Anthropic hired a philosopher who spent the past decade studying a Chinese thinker born in 1472,” July 2026. On Harvey Lederman and Wang Yangming’s 知行合一 applied to AI alignment.

• Zhuangzi (《庄子》), “天地” (Tiandi) chapter. The gardener and the well-sweep.

• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1954). English translation by William Lovitt (Harper & Row, 1977).

• Nan Huaijin (南怀瑾), 《禅宗与道家》 (Chan and Dao). On Daoism’s contributions to ancient natural science.

• CNN, “China has another solution to its shrinking population: robots,” February 2026.

• Financial Times, “Robot nation: China’s bid to beat its demographic decline,” June 2026.

• “百万漕工衣食所系” as a historical phrase: widely cited, commonly associated with Huang Renyu (黄仁宇), 明代的漕运 (The Grand Canal During the Ming Dynasty).

• Liu Xihong’s 25-point memorial against railways: 马陵合, “清同光间，修铁路为何争论20余年,” 文汇报, 2019.

• Bloomberg, “China Suspends Autonomous Driving Permits After Baidu Outage,” April 29, 2026.

• Bloomberg, “China’s Robotaxi Dilemma: How to Lead in AI Without Fueling Unemployment,” June 4, 2026. Source for Guangzhou ride-hailing union fleet cap demand.

• Bloomberg, “Chinese Court Bars Companies From Firing Workers Solely for AI Replacement,” May 2, 2026. Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court ruling.

• Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014). Oracle, genie, sovereign framework.

• Tezuka Osamu quote: Frederik L. Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia (Kodansha International, 1988).

Around 400 CE a Chinese monk named Faxian (法显) traveled to the Ganges plain and found himself standing at the real ‘Middle Kingdom,’ the Sanskrit Madhyadeśa: “the middle land.” It was the Buddhist name for the region where the Buddha was born, taught, and died. Buddhist geography placed the center of the world there. Everything beyond it was borderland.

When Faxian reached the Jetavana monastery in Śrāvastī, where the Buddha had lived and preached the longest, the Indian monks were stunned to see a Chinese face. His Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (佛国记) records their reaction, “How remarkable, people from the borderland can actually come seeking the Dharma here. Our teachers, and our teachers’ teachers, have never seen a Chinese monk in this place.” (彼众僧叹曰：奇哉，边地之人乃能求法至此。自相谓言：我等诸师，和上相承，未见汉道人来到此地也) Faxian was moved to tears. He saw the flourishing Dharma at its source and thought of the incomplete, fragmented scriptures back home. The distance was not just geographic. It was a gap in authority, in access to the truth itself.

The story of how China dealt with Buddhism looks, in outline, like the story of how China is dealing with the modern West. How the first one ended may tell us something about the second.

Born in the Borderland

Buddhist texts list the 八难 (bā nàn), the eight conditions under which a person cannot properly hear or practice the Dharma. Birth in a borderland (Uttarakuru) is one of them. The disadvantage was even procedural: in India, the Vinaya (毗奈耶, 律) required ten monks to confer full ordination; in a borderland, because you could not gather enough, the rule was lowered to five. The edge was not condemned. It was under-resourced, the way a provincial outpost has fewer teachers and thinner libraries than a capital.

The Italian sinologist Antonino Forte gave this feeling a name: the “borderland complex.” Chinese monks, he argued, carried a genuine sense of being outsiders inside their own religion. They felt like latecomers, at the wrong end of the earth, dependent on texts and teachers who were always somewhere else. Faxian felt it firsthand. When he reached the Buddhist heartland, an Indian monk looked at him with something like pity.

The anxiety carried its own remedy, though: if the teaching was strongest at its source, then the way to escape the borderland was to reach the source.

The Journey to the West

Xuanzang (玄奘, 602?–664) is remembered mostly through the pilgrim of Journey to the West. The real reason he left is less magical and more revealing. By the early seventh century, Chinese Buddhism was at war with itself. Rival schools read the difficult Yogācāra texts in incompatible ways, and the translations they argued from were partial, inconsistent, and in places simply wrong. Xuanzang concluded that the dispute could not be settled in China, because the documents needed to settle it existed only in India. The edge had the argument but not the evidence; the center had both.

In 629, defying an imperial travel ban, he slipped out of the capital. The road ran for thousands of miles across deserts and mountain passes where other pilgrims had died. He went anyway, because no authority in China could end an argument that only original classics could end.

He was gone more than a decade, much of it at Nālandā, the great monastic university. He returned in 645 with hundreds of texts and the authority of a man who had reached the center and mastered it. The emperor received him. He spent his remaining years translating.

The Buddhism Xuanzang carried home was the most faithful version China had ever received. But Chinese buddhism could not digest it. His Faxiang (法相) school barely outlived him; his leading disciples fell out, and within two generations it had faded. The schools that flourished instead: Chan (禅), Tiantai (天台), Huayan (华严), were the ones that had quietly become Chinese. Their teachers argued, implicitly or openly, that Indian Buddhism’s textual and ascetic methods were expedient measures suited to a particular time and place, and that Chinese practitioners could reach further toward direct awakening, without the apparatus.

Moving the Mountain

A generation after Xuanzang, the monk Daoxuan (道宣, 596–667) redrew the map. In his Shijia fangzhi (释迦方志), he sewed India and China into a single sacred landscape. Sumeru, the cosmic mountain at the center of the Buddhist world, he identified with Kunlun (昆仑), the mythic peak of Chinese tradition. The Yellow River, he wrote, rose from Lake Anavatapta (阿耨达池), the lake at the center of the same world. India remained the center but China was now tied to it by the same mountains and the same waters, no longer adrift at the edge.

The same instinct built holy ground at home. Mount Wutai (五台山) was established as the earthly seat of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, a pilgrimage site that required no journey out of China. The scholar Jinhua Chen has shown how East Asian Buddhists overcame the borderland complex in exactly this way: by manufacturing sacred sites and holy lineages on their own soil. If the center would not come to you, you could build one.

Share

There’s No Borderland

But the deepest answer was philosophical.

Huineng (惠能, 638–713) grew up fatherless in Guangdong, the deep south, about as borderland as a Chinese monk could be. He was illiterate. He sold firewood to feed his mother. One day, delivering wood to an inn, he overheard a guest reciting the Diamond Sutra 金刚经. Something in the words stopped him. He asked what the text was and where it came from. The guest told him it was taught at the monastery of Hongren 弘忍, the Fifth Patriarch of Chan, far to the north. Huineng left his mother a small sum and walked hundreds of miles to find him.

When he arrived, Hongren looked at the young southerner and said: you are a 獦獠 (gělǎo), a barbarian from the south. How can you become a Buddha? It was the borderland doctrine applied within China itself: the edge produces no awakening. Huineng answered:

人虽有南北，佛性本无南北。獦獠身与和尚不同，佛性有何差别？
“People have south and north, but Buddha-nature has no south or north. The body of a southern barbarian is not the same as a monk’s. But what difference is there in the Buddha-nature?”

Hongren said nothing more and sent him to the kitchen to hull rice. Months later, when the patriarch asked his monks to write a verse demonstrating their understanding, the senior disciple Shenxiu 神秀 wrote: the mind is like a bright mirror on its stand, polish it constantly, do not let it gather dust (身是菩提树，心如明镜台，时时勤拂拭，莫使惹尘埃。). Huineng, who could not write, dictated his own: there is no mirror, there is no stand, where would the dust alight? (菩提本无树，明镜亦非台，本来无一物，何处惹尘埃。) Hongren recognized the deeper insight. He transmitted the dharma to Huineng in secret, at night, and told him to flee south before the other monks turned on him.

Huineng’s teaching dissolved the borderland question at its root. If awakening is already present in every mind, the whole geography of center and edge collapses. India has no monopoly. The borderland has no handicap. You do not need to cross a desert to reach the truth, because the truth is not in a place. The Platform Sutra (六祖坛经), recording his teaching, became the only text by a non-Indian figure in the Buddhist canon honored with the title “Sutra.” The edge had produced its own scripture.

Share

The Traffic Reverses

Nālandā, the great university where Xuanzang had spent years studying, once held as many as ten thousand students and two thousand teachers. Buddhism in India had been declining for centuries, losing royal patronage, blurring into Hindu practice, retreating into fewer and fewer monasteries. In 1193 a Turkic general named Bakhtiyar Khilji rode into Bihar with a cavalry force and mistook the walled university campus for a fortress. He sacked it. The library, one of the largest in the ancient world, was burned. Thousands of monks were killed. The center of the Buddhist world no longer existed as a place buddhists could travel to.

The land route was closing too. The Tangut 党项 state of Xi Xia (西夏) held the old Silk Road corridor, and the Song–Xia wars turned the northwest into a frontier. The early Song still tried: the founding emperor sent some three hundred monks west in 966. But such missions withered as the road and the destination both gave out.

The deeper change was directional. The historian Tansen Sen has pointed out that during the Song dynasty, more Buddhist monks traveled from India to China than Chinese monks had traveled west during the Tang. The traffic had reversed. By the tenth century the monk Zanning (赞宁) could write of Chinese Buddhism as something independent of its origin. The province had become a capital.

Refuse to Be the Borderland

The wider Confucian world never accepted that China was anyone’s borderland.

The first major attack came in the late fifth century. The scholar Gu Huan (顾欢) wrote On Barbarians and Chinese (夷夏论). Buddhism, he argued, was medicine designed for barbarians. The Buddha preached world-renunciation and asceticism precisely because the Indians were violent and hard to civilize 强悍难化. They needed strong medicine. But the Chinese already had Confucius and Mencius. They were already moral. Why would a civilized people abandon their own sages to imitate the ways of the uncivilized? “To drop the Chinese and copy the barbarian: where is the sense?” 舍华效夷，义将安取.

Buddhist monks fired back. The monk Sengmin (僧敏) argued that Gu Huan’s categories of barbarian and Chinese, only applied within Tianxia 天下, the political world under the emperor. But the Dharma operated at the level of 天地, Heaven and Earth. Truth does not respect political borders. Other defenders argued that the Buddha taught with one voice and all beings understood according to their nature, the teaching was universal, not local.

Three centuries later, Han Yu (韩愈, 768–824) made the sharpest version of the case. In 819, when the emperor arranged to receive a finger-bone of the Buddha with elaborate ceremony, Han Yu sent up a memorial calling it a filthy foreign object and Buddhism no more than “one of the practices of the barbarians” 夷狄之一法. The Buddha, he wrote, “did not know the duty between ruler and subject, nor the feeling between father and son.” It nearly cost him his head. He was banished instead. But his argument won the longer war. A generation later, in the Huichang persecution of 845 会昌灭法, tens of thousands of temples were stripped and vast numbers of monks forced back into lay life. Buddhism survived, but never again as a rival for the loyalty of the ruling class.

Go Native

And yet Buddhism did not disappear. It became Chinese, and China became partly Buddhist, and eventually it was hard to tell who had absorbed whom.

On the Buddhist side, the transformation was already complete by the Tang. The imported Indian orthodoxy had died, like Xuanzang’s Faxiang school. What survived were the schools that had grown up in Chinese soil: Chan, with its emphasis on direct awakening over textual study; Tiantai and Huayan, with their grand systems of classifying all Buddhist teaching into a single hierarchy.

On the Confucian side, the absorption was quieter and never acknowledged. Buddhism had forced Chinese thinkers to ask questions Confucius never asked, about the nature of mind, about the relationship between principle and phenomena, about whether awakening was sudden or gradual. The Song dynasty Neo-Confucians answered those questions in Confucian language. Zhu Xi (朱熹) built his system on 理 (lǐ, principle) and 气 (qì, material force), a framework that mirrors the Buddhist Huayan school’s distinction between principle and phenomena, though Zhu Xi insisted he found it in I Ching. The Buddhist idea that all beings possess Buddha-nature became the Confucian idea that all humans possess innate moral knowledge (良知). Buddhist meditation became Confucian quiet-sitting (静坐), reframed as clarifying the moral mind rather than escaping the world. Neo-Confucianism reclaimed the 道统 (dàotǒng, “the transmission of the Way”) for China, while the substance of what it transmitted was partly Buddhist.

Share

Borderland in the Modern World

As the historian Ge Zhaoguang has argued, after Buddhism, China’s sense of itself as the center was not seriously shaken again until the Jesuits arrived with their world maps, a thousand years later. And then it was shaken completely.

The Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, and the century that followed put China back on the edge, the far east. This time was not of the Buddhist world but of the modern one. A different center, a different west, but the same structure: the source of authority was elsewhere. The standards for what counted as civilized were set in Europe and America, parliamentary government, individual rights, the scientific method, the open market. China was again the ‘borderland.’

The question people ask today that why China hasn’t adopted universal values sounds new. But the mechanism underneath it might be old. “Universal values” occupy the same position Buddhism once did: a system that claims to be true everywhere, imported from a place that assumes it is the center. And the responses look familiar too. Some say the teaching is foreign medicine for foreign people, and China has its own sages. Some say truth has no borders and China should import the whole package. Some say the foreign teaching is already being absorbed, quietly, under different names, whether the center notices or not.

If the Buddhist precedent suggests anything, it is not that universal values will be rejected. Buddhism was not rejected. It is that they will be absorbed, translated, and made Chinese. The version that survives may not look like what the source intended. The imported orthodoxy will fade. The homegrown version will thrive. And a generation later, it will be hard to tell who absorbed whom.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

Further Reading

Modern scholarship

• Antonino Forte, “Hui-chih (fl. 676–703 A.D.), a Brahmin Born in China” — the essay that coined the term “borderland complex”

• Jinhua Chen 陈金华, “The Borderland Complex and the Construction of Sacred Sites and Lineages in East Asian Buddhism,” in Victor Mair ed., Buddhist Transformations and Interactions

• Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400

• Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China — the standard work on early Chinese Buddhism and the 夷夏 debates

• Malcolm David Eckel, To See the Buddha — on the pilgrims and their relationship to the Buddhist center

• Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光,《宅兹中国：重建有关”中国”的历史论述》(Here in ‘China’ I Dwell, 中华书局 2011; English: Brill 2017) — on how Buddhism challenged but did not fundamentally shake the Sinocentric worldview

Primary texts

• Faxian 法显,《佛国记》(Record of Buddhist Kingdoms)

• Xuanzang 玄奘,《大唐西域记》(Great Tang Records on the Western Regions)

• Daoxuan 道宣,《释迦方志》(Record of Śākyamuni’s Land)

• Huineng 惠能,《六祖坛经》(Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch)

• Gu Huan 顾欢,《夷夏论》(On Barbarians and Chinese), preserved in《南齐书·顾欢传》

• Sengmin 僧敏,《戎华论》, and other Buddhist responses in Sengyou 僧祐,《弘明集》

• Han Yu 韩愈,《论佛骨表》(Memorial on the Buddha’s Bone)

Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, spent years on a complete Chinese Bible, finished in 1823. When he reached the Book of Revelation, he faced a small choice with a long shadow. Revelation 12:9 describes a great red dragon thrown down from heaven, “that ancient serpent, called the Devil and Satan.” In the literary Chinese that would carry the scriptures across the next century, the verse reads: 巨龍與其使者、皆逐於地、昔有蛇、亦稱魔鬼撒但、素惑天下億兆、即此龍也. Morrison needed a Chinese word for that beast, and he chose 龙(龍): the emperor’s emblem, the bringer of rain, the creature coiled on the imperial throne and stitched into the robes of the Son of Heaven.

He knew what the word carried. Two centuries earlier the Jesuit Matteo Ricci had faced the same problem and deliberately picked a different character: 蛟, a kind of water-serpent, precisely to keep China’s auspicious beast away from the biblical monster. Morrison went the other way, using 龙(龍) in thirty-three verses. The literary Bibles that followed kept his choice, and so did the 1919 Union Version (和合本), the most widely read of all. And so, for generations of Chinese Christians, the animal their civilization called ancestor became the animal scripture called Satan. Converts were told to throw out dragon-patterned porcelain. Some who carried 龙 in their names were advised to change them.

Two centuries later, a campaign would set out to take the word back.

Loong comes back

As far back as 2006, a Chinese scholar named Huang Ji 黄佶 set up a website: loong.cn. He argues that “dragon” libels 龙 and should be retired for the transliteration loong; the same proposal has resurfaced in op-eds nearly every Year of the Dragon since. The argument barely changes from round to round: dragon names a fire-breathing, gold-hoarding monster, while 龙 in China means blessing, nobility and rain, so the two should not share a word.

What changed in early 2024 was that officialdom joined in. Ahead of the Year of the Dragon, Xinhua, CGTN and China Daily quietly stopped saying “dragon” and began calling it the Year of the Loong; Hong Kong’s chief executive wished the city a happy “Year of the Loong.” A campaign had become something like policy and backed the official call for “cultural confidence,” alongside the parallel move to render Tibet as “Xizang.”

There is a small irony in the spelling. The campaigners reached past the pinyin, long, already taken in English, where it is merely the adjective. The spelling Loong was itself first coined by another English missionary, Joshua Marshman, two centuries earlier.

It is easy to read this as nationalist fuss over nothing, and plenty of people did. In Hong Kong especially, “loong” happens to sound like the Cantonese word for burnt (𤓓). But the equation was not harmless. Tying 龙 to the Western dragon lent it, in foreign eyes, a monstrous shadow.

How the dragon was made

The mistranslation is older than Bible translation. When European travellers first met the beast of the Chinese court in the thirteenth century, they had to call it something. Marco Polo was among them, and they reached for the nearest word they owned: dragon. It was a rough fit, a traveller’s shorthand. But a shared name is not yet a shared nature.

The first missionaries kept the two apart on purpose. Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits who followed him made a discipline of respecting Chinese culture, and they extended that care to its dragon. So when the Bible’s own monster needed a Chinese name, the Catholic tradition looked past 龙 for something fittingly sinister: 蛟, a kind of water-serpent.

The Protestants who arrived a decade later broke that caution. Joshua Marshman, compiling a Chinese grammar in 1814, took the harmless road: he spelled 龙 by its sound, loong, a foreign word kept foreign. Robert Morrison, finishing his Bible in 1823, took the other. He reached for the grandest, most familiar ‘serpent’ the language had, and folded the emperor’s emblem into the biblical monster. The split between the two churches could be read as a split of intent: where the Jesuits saw no need to separate Christianity from Chinese culture, the Protestants used 龙 precisely to brand that culture the “old self” a convert must leave behind.

Even then, the fusion was only ink. What made it dangerous was politics. In 1895, after Japan’s defeat of the Qing, Kaiser Wilhelm II commissioned an allegory, Hermann Knackfuss’s Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions. In the picture, the Christian nations of Europe, led by the archangel Michael, brace against a menace on the horizon: a Buddha borne out of a firestorm on the back of a dragon. It became a founding image of the Yellow Peril, the racial dread of Asia as an existential threat to the West, and the dragon was its face. Two decades on, the novelist Sax Rohmer sold his arch-villain Fu Manchu as “the Yellow Peril incarnate.”

The persisting image

Walk past a bookshop’s China shelf today and the beast is still there. One recent title, Is China a Menacing Empire?, puts the whole ambivalence on a single cover: a cuddly cartoon panda on one side, and on the other a snarling, orange, fire-maned dragon drawn in the full Western idiom, the very monster the book’s question mark pretends to hold open. Another, Driving the Dragon, uses the beast as shorthand for China’s industrial rise, something powerful to be harnessed. The dragon has become the reflex image for China-as-force, toggled against the panda whenever the mood turns friendly.

Here the gap between the two Chinas reaches its sharpest point. The Chinese call themselves 龙的传人 “descendants of the dragon” and mean something proud: heirs to a sacred, sovereign lineage. Run those same four words through a Western ear trained on Revelation and on Wilhelm, though, and they can sound like a confession: a people announcing that they are the offspring of the monster. The same phrase, opposite meanings.

Still, it would be too easy to stop there. The folklorist Shi Aidong, who wrote an entire book on the invention of the Chinese dragon, The Making of the Chinese Dragon《中国龙的发明》. He offers the necessary correction: the word was never the cause. The fear came first, geopolitical, racial, and the dragon was simply the readymade face it reached for. Seen as an enemy, he observes, you will be drawn as a monster no matter how lovely your name; seen as a friend, even a mouse turns endearing, as Mickey did. Translation did not invent the Yellow Peril. It handed the Yellow Peril a monster that was already on the shelf.

There was never one dragon

Coiled Loong shapes appear at Chinese sites up to eight thousand years ago. Jade “pig-dragons” (玉猪龙) and Loong figures laid out in clamshell mosaics existed long before any emperor used the creature as a symbol. It was also a composite. The Han scholar Wang Fu (王符) listed the Loong’s “nine resemblances” (龙有九似): a camel’s head, a deer’s antlers, a rabbit’s eyes, an ox’s ears, a snake’s neck, a clam’s belly, a carp’s scales, an eagle’s claws, and a tiger’s pads (头似驼、角似鹿、眼似兔、耳似牛、项似蛇、腹似蜃、鳞似鲤、爪似鹰、掌似虎). The folklorist Wen Yiduo (闻一多) suggested the mixed body recorded a political fact: separate clans, each with its own animal totem, merging into one people.

Those resemblances later hardened into the emblem of a single ruler and a single realm. By the Han dynasty the Loong belonged to the emperor. He was the 真龙天子, the “true loong, son of heaven,” seated on the loong throne and robed in the loong, and the five-clawed Loong was his alone to wear. The composite that had once marked many clans joining into one people now marked many lands held under one crown.

The Loong was not only the symbol of emperor and nation. In folk culture it was also deeply tied to Daoism, and its main role there was water: it controlled rain, rivers and floods, and emperors prayed to it during droughts. But the best-known water-loongs, the Dragon Kings (龙王, Longwang) who rule the four seas from underwater palaces, are not fully Chinese in origin. Before Buddhism reached China there were loongs but no dragon kings. It is said that the sea-ruling kings came with the Indian nāga, the serpent water-gods of Buddhist scripture; Chinese translators rendered them as 龙王 rather than transliterating. So the most familiar “Chinese” loong is itself a mixture of cultures.

The Loongs were also not always good. A Dragon King could hold back the rain and cause famine, or send too much and cause floods. Folktales tell of loongs beaten to death by villagers. In Journey to the West, the Dragon King of the Jing River fakes the rainfall to win a bet, breaks the Jade Emperor’s order, and is beheaded in a dream.

The Loong had always been the emperor’s symbol, never the common people’s. Only with the forming of the modern Chinese nation-state did the Loong, the culture’s highest symbol, begin to stand for the whole country. The Qing dynasty’s national flag was the Yellow Dragon Flag (黄龙旗). But the idea of the Chinese as 龙的传人, “descendants of the dragon,” came even later: barely older than the 1978 pop song named after it, which carried the phrase into popular culture. And the long-standing equation between loong and dragon has, in effect, absorbed the Western dragon (西方龙) into the image of the loong as well.

By sound or by sense

The dragon is not alone. The same thing happens to any Chinese term carried across by sense instead of by sound: the translator reaches for a western word that seems to fit, and the fit quietly reshapes the thing.

妖 (yao) became “demon” or “monster” in English, but a 妖 is not a devil. It is a morally ambiguous being, an animal or object that has cultivated supernatural power, capable of mischief or menace yet belonging to no cosmic war between good and evil. 仙 (xian) became “immortal,” or worse, “fairy.” But a 仙 is not merely a being that never dies, and certainly not a winged sprite. It is a transcendent, someone who has built their way toward the heavens through cultivation, where power is earned from the inside rather than bestowed from without.

Japanese terms usually crossed into English by sound. The very characters that give China a “demon” 妖怪 give Japan yōkai, kept whole in English like samurai and sushi, a word the reader must simply learn. 禅 reached the West not as the Chinese Chan but as the Japanese Zen; the rest of the spirits arrived as kami, oni, tengu, kappa, wearing their own names. Kept as sound, a term carries its strangeness with it and makes the reader come to it. Turned into an English equivalent, it arrives already dressed in a meaning it never had at home.

Line them up and the pattern surfaces. Dragon, demon, immortal, fairy. Each English word ‘smuggles’ in a Greek and Christian universe of fixed moral kinds: God against Satan, good against evil, mortal against immortal. Chinese supernatural creatures never lived in that universe. They shifted and cultivated, ascended and degraded, along a graded scale. Translation did not just swap the words; it quietly laid one cosmology over another. It is the same imposition this channel has traced in the West’s long struggle to render 道, and in its argument over whether Confucianism counts as a “religion” at all.

None of this is inevitable. When a concept truly has no equivalent, English can adopt the word instead of replacing it. Karma entered the language that way, not because a translator found a match, but because speakers eventually agreed there was none, and kept the Sanskrit until it grew familiar. Qi, xian, yao could travel the same road. Writing in Jade Moon Magazine, a translator who refuses to call a 仙 a fairy or a 魔 a demon argues exactly this: the remedy is not a better glossary but keeping the word, building its meaning across many encounters, and trusting the reader to meet it halfway.

A word kept in its own sound can mean nothing to a reader who has no thread to it. Loong, yao and xian ask for patience before they give anything back. A word swapped for a familiar equivalent is easy to take in, the cost is an inevitable drift in meaning and context. This is not a mistake anyone made. It is the ordinary price of carrying meaning between cultures, and it happens every time one tries to reach another.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

Further reading

• Emily Dunn, “The Big Red Dragon and Indigenizations of Christianity in China,” East Asian History 36 (2008): 73–85. The scholarly account of how 龙 became the Devil: Jesuit tolerance versus Protestant rejection, Morrison’s choice, and the Taiping afterlife of the “dragon-as-Satan.”

• 施爱东《中国龙的发明：16—20世纪的龙政治与中国形象》（生活·读书·新知三联书店, 2014; rev. ed.《近现代中国形象的域外变迁》, 2024). How the modern dragon’s image was politically manufactured, abroad and at home.

• 黄佶《译龙风云——文化负载词的翻译：争议及研究》 (Huang Ji, Loong vs. Dragon: Culture-Loaded Words, Controversy and Research). The loong campaign’s own comprehensive case, tracing Marshman’s 1814 “loong,” Morrison’s dictionary, and two centuries of the debate. See also his site, loong.cn.

• M. W. de Visser, The Dragon in China and Japan (Amsterdam, 1913). The classic survey of the East Asian dragon: rain-god, the Dragon Kings, the Buddhist nāga behind them, and the folklore.

• 闻一多《伏羲考》（收入《神话与诗》）. The classic essay behind the “nine resemblances”: the composite dragon read as the totem of many clans fused into one people.

The case drew notice partly because it is uncommon, and partly because of when it happened. Huangyan, like most Chinese districts, is short of money. The vote can be read less as a political opening than as a way to keep officials from committing funds the district does not have.

The vote, and the spending behind it

Under the rules Huangyan adopted, a representative could not vote in favor of a project. The only options were to oppose or to abstain, and if more than half opposed, the project was dropped from the year’s plan. Officials call the method reverse voting. The sports complex drew 214 votes against; the irrigation project, 210.2

The sixteen voted projects carried a combined cost of 10.89 billion yuan in total. The district had planned to invest 740 million across all of 2026 fiscal year. Each rejected project cost more than that annual figure on its own (more than 1 billion yuan). Several representatives questioned whether the sports complex was needed at all, noting that a neighboring district already had an arena twenty minutes away and that the city was building another nearby.

Officials described the change as a move from procedural review to substantive decision, and from “the government decides and builds” to “the representatives decide and the government builds.” One development official said the process forced departments to answer four questions before proposing anything: whether the money should be spent at all, whether the government should be the one spending it, whether the amount was right, and whether the timing was right.

The spending the vote addresses is the product of a longer pattern. For years, local governments have committed money on the expectation that higher level governments would cover any shortfall, known as 支付转移 Transfer Payment Policy. The economist described this as a soft budget constraint: an entity that expects to be rescued has little reason to keep within its means.3 Much of the borrowing ran through local financing platforms, known as chengtou 城投 (local-government financing vehicles), which raised money off the government’s books to build infrastructure that lifted local growth figures. The debt built up this way is large and not fully disclosed.4

The Zhejiang Provincial Congress publicized the Huangyan vote on June 9. But the post was taken down soon after.

Why earlier measures fell short

The central government has spent about a decade trying to make this debt harder to take on. A 2014 revision of the Budget Law, paired with a State Council (central government) directive, set the approach as ‘opening the front door and closing the back door’: local governments could issue bonds openly, while the financing platforms were meant to stop borrowing on the state’s implicit credit.5 In 2024 the center arranged a swap of around 10 trillion yuan to turn hidden debt into formal government bonds, and ordered the platforms to leave the financing business by 2027.6

The results have been uneven. The swap lowered interest costs but raised recorded debt in most regions. Land sales, which once paid for much of local construction, have fallen sharply. Even Zhejiang, a wealthy province, has moved into net repayment.

There is a deeper reason the orders struggle. They run top-down. A local official is judged, and promoted, largely on visible growth, and building things is the most direct way to produce it. A finished road or arena is a record to point to, in a way that an unspent budget is not. The system that tells officials to borrow less is the same one that rewards them for building more. An instruction from above ends up fighting an incentive from above, and the incentive sits closer to the official’s career.

The orders also act late. An audit finds a problem once the funds are gone, accountability follows a loss already on the books, and concrete already poured cannot be taken back.

The Huangyan vote works at a different point, and from a different direction. The check sits at the start of the decision rather than the end. And it comes from outside the hierarchy rather than down through it: from the residents who would pay for the project, not the superiors who reward building it. That is the part the administrative measures could not reach. It limits the spending before it is committed, rather than penalizing it afterward.

Democracy at the grassroots

The representatives who cast that vote sit at a particular point in China’s structure, and it is worth seeing exactly where.

Read more

Look at how the tribute system was actually theorized, and how it actually worked, and the labels turn out to be in the wrong places. The power now collecting tribute looks like Washington. The power now writing the contracts looks like Beijing. The tribute-versus-treaty binary that John King Fairbank (费正清) built in the 1940s to explain how China met the modern West, has quietly rotated. It now points the other way.

This is a claim about posture, not about national character. And the posture is not a fixed one. It is a practical, flexible choice.

The Binary Fairbank Built

The word 朝贡 (cháogòng, “to present tribute at court”) is old. The research on it is relatively new. It grew up within the China scholarship of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, in the early 1940s, as Japan’s war on China drew the United States and China toward alliance and Americans grew hungry to understand a country about to become a partner. The idea of “the tribute system” was first introduced in a 111-page article by Fairbank and Têng Ssu-yü (邓嗣禹) in the June 1941 Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.2

What did Fairbank say the system was? In a phrase: the Confucian social order and hierarchy, turned outward, China at the top, the rest of the world owing deference. The decisive feature was that no outsider could meet China as an equal. A foreign state could enter relations only by taking a lower rank within a single hierarchy crowned by the Son of Heaven 天子, and the kowtow was the act that sealed it. He named the binding force “supernationalist sanctions derived from the Confucian world order”: the system did not negotiate between states so much as fold outsiders into China’s own moral-cosmic order, where to trade with the Middle Kingdom 中国 was, by that very act, to grant its centrality.

Fairbank built “the tribute system” as the foundation of his real subject, which was how the Western treaty system replaced China’s old way of handling foreigners after the Opium War (1840s), the project that became Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (1953).3 To tell that story, he first had to reconstruct what the treaties replaced. So he built the tribute system as the “before.”

The book’s structure gives the game away. Part One is called “China’s Unpreparedness for Western Contact.” Its chapters run from “The Problem of China’s Response to the West” to “Tribute and the Growth of Trade,” the second built straight on the 1941 article.

The tribute system was framed, from the start, as the thing the West would break. It was the static, ritual-bound “before,” there to make Western modernity the dynamic “after.” This became the master idea of postwar American China studies: “impact–response,” the picture of a sealed Confucian civilization that could only enter history once the West shocked it awake. Fairbank founded Harvard’s research center and trained much of the field. The concept ran for two generations, until Paul Cohen attacked it in Discovering History in China (1984) as a Western-centric story that cast China as the passive, backward party, waiting to be acted upon.4

Tribute: Chinese, old, hierarchical, ritual, hungry for recognition, closed. Treaty: Western, modern, contractual, equal between sovereigns, commercial, open. One was the past, and China. The other was the future, and the West.

Fairbank noticed that the two sides of a tribute relationship wanted different things. For China’s rulers, what mattered was the moral value of tribute. For the foreigner, the material value of trade. He saw the split clearly. He just read it as Chinese rigidity, a myth China clung to until it ruined the Confucian state.

What the Tribute Court Actually Wanted

Start with a typical tribute mission, a 朝贡 (cháogòng). A foreign embassy arrived with local goods, presented a written memorial, and bowed. The court performed 册封 (cèfēng, investiture): it formally recognized a foreign ruler, the king of Chosŏn Korea, of Annam, of Ryukyu, as legitimate. That recognition fixed the two as ritual superior and subordinate. Trade ran on 勘合 (kānhé), split tally-certificates that licensed and capped each mission, and on 互市 (hùshì), the frontier markets where the real commerce happened.

Read more

The blank is odd, because the place where China manufactures its elite is not hidden. Haidian (海淀, “where the waters gather”), the district in the northwest of Beijing, may be the most legible elite-factory on earth.

It is packed with universities, research institutes, and technology companies, the densest concentration of higher learning in China, and it is the richest district in Beijing. Yet it has almost no luxury stores.

The absence is the tell: a place built to produce, not to consume. What it makes is not China's money or its power, but the technical class that designs and runs it.

The Absence Is the Point

By output, Haidian leads Beijing outright: its economy passed 1.3 trillion yuan in GDP in 2025, making it only the second district in all of China, after Shanghai’s Pudong, to cross that line. Yet per resident it ranks third in the city, behind the older districts of Xicheng and Dongcheng. The wealth is real, but it sits in laboratories, server farms, and patents, in production, not in the shopping bag.

So the luxury maisons went elsewhere. Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Hermès cluster across town in Chaoyang, in the SKP department store, in China World, in Sanlitun. The one clarifying statistic: the outdoor brand Arc’teryx, unofficial badge of the Beijing tech manager, keeps a single store in all of Haidian and seven in Chaoyang. Beijingers have a verse for the divide: Chaoyang has no savings; Haidian has no fashion.

Step into a Haidian subway car in winter and the point turns visual: a carriage of near-identical black down jackets, an ocean with no color in it. Read as fashion, it is a void. Read correctly, it is a uniform. The district has even named its own anti-style, hǎidiàn lǎoqián fēng (海淀老钱风, “Haidian old-money style”). It seems its resident never agonize over clothes, never chase trend.

Share

The Factory Was Drawn, Not Grown

The name remembers what the land was: hai-dian, the place where waters gather, a marshy plain of springs that once mirrored the western hills. The Chinese emperors chose it for exactly that, building the 三山五园 (sānshān wǔyuán, the Three Hills and Five Gardens), the imperial pleasure-world, walled off from the dust of the capital. Haidian began as a retreat for the few. Its first instinct was already separation.

The modern district was laid down in 1952, following the Soviet model, China carried out the 院系调整 (yuànxì tiáozhěng, the “reorganization of departments”). The movement broke comprehensive universities apart into narrow, single-purpose institutes, each tuned to one task of national construction. The Eight Great Colleges: geology, mining, steel, aeronautics, petroleum, languages, rose on Haidian farmland along a new road named 学院路 (Xuéyuàn Lù, College Road). At the same moment the Chinese Academy of Sciences moved into 中关村 (Zhōngguāncūn), then a village of some two hundred people beside a cluster of eunuch graves. China’s nuclear-weapons research began in a Zhongguancun building in 1951; the scientists of the nuclear and missile program raised their families on those lanes.

A third layer settled in alongside them: the 部队大院 (bùduì dàyuàn, the military and government compounds), walled communities of officers and cadres whose children, the 大院子弟, “compound kids,” became a hereditary elite of access and information. The compounds were, in the words of their own chroniclers, socialism with Chinese characteristics rendered as a place to live.

So three walled worlds, imperial garden, Soviet institute, cadre compound, were stacked onto the same marsh. Haidian’s austerity is not the absence of privilege. It is what privilege looks like when the state, not the market, designs it. Today the district holds 27 universities, 99 research institutes, and 605 academicians, more than a third of the national total.

The State Built It; the Family Inherited It

For a generation the machine ran on command: the institutes trained the engineers, and the state assigned them. Then the reform era pulled out the guarantee. The brains remained; the allocation did not. Consequently, the optimization logic the state once used migrated into the family, turning upon the children.

The result is the figure the rest of China both mocks and fears: the 海淀家长 (hǎidiàn jiāzhǎng, “Haidian parent”). Its capital is 海淀黄庄 (Hǎidiàn Huángzhuāng), an intersection nicknamed “the universe’s tutoring center,” where, at its peak in 2018, some 105 cram schools operated within five hundred meters. A circulated “Haidian parent” timetable sets the milestones: bilingual by one, a hundred classical poems by three, competition mathematics by five. The entry fee is 学区房 (xuéqūfáng, “school-district housing”), an ordinary, often shabby apartment whose multi-million-yuan price buys nothing but the right, under the household-registration system, to enroll a child in one particular elite public school.

The cruelty here is the transparency. The US runs many opaque ladders at once; Haidian runs one, in the open, at least a decade ago. Everyone can see the single game: exam, then cram school, then Tsinghua or Peking, so everyone plays it to exhaustion.

Its most luminous product is by now globally famous. Eileen Gu (谷爱凌, Gǔ Àilíng), Olympic gold medalist, Stanford student, fluent in unaccented Beijing dialect, spent her childhood summers, by her own account, doing mathematics in the Haidian cram circuit; her mother’s line was that ten days of school in China was worth a year in America. The most cosmopolitan young celebrity China has produced this decade was, in part, a ‘product’ of the Haidian system.

The same logic governs the adults. North of the schools sit 上地 and 西二旗 (Shàngdì / Xī’èrqí), the software parks that house Baidu, Xiaomi, and ByteDance, a zone one resident described, perfectly, as “both crowded and desolate”: packed with hundreds of thousands of engineers and almost nowhere to live, where the coder earning fifty thousand yuan a month is famous for living like five. His deliberately drab clothes are the academician’s black coat, one generation on.

Share

What the Fold Hides

In 2012, on a Tsinghua University student forum, a writer named Hao Jingfang (郝景芳) posted a story called 北京折叠 (Běijīng Zhédié, Folding Beijing). It won the 2016 Hugo Award. In it, the city physically folds itself into three spaces, each allotted its hours and its class, so that the comfortable never have to see what holds them up. Haidian folds the same way, not in time, but beneath its own metrics. The 1.3 trillion yuan and the 605 academicians are the surface that stays unfolded. The costs are tucked under.

Some of the folding is literal. The walls that built the district, campus, institute, compound, break its street grid into superblocks, leaving the “dead-end roads” that paralyze Haidian traffic during peak hour; Beijing’s own 2016–2035 master plan now pleads to pry the old compounds open and reconnect the city’s “capillaries.” The walls that gathered the elite still wall off everyone else.

Some of it is quieter. In 2026, 豆瓣书店 (Dòubàn Shūdiàn), the beloved scholars’ bookshop by Peking University’s east gate, closed after nineteen years, one of nearly a hundred booksellers that once ringed the campus and have now all but vanished, undercut by the e-commerce discounting that Haidian’s own tech economy perfected. The district that industrialized knowledge could not keep alive bookstores that sold it for love.

The Crack

The machine is now, audibly, straining. The 2021 “double-reduction” policy (双减, shuāngjiǎn) outlawed much of the for-profit tutoring industry overnight; the cram schools fled Huangzhuang and the storefronts emptied. But you cannot ban a logic the city was physically built to run, and the anxiety simply went underground, into private tutors, quieter group chats, longer waitlists.

The deeper crack is in the promise itself. The exam, once meant to convert effort into status, now produces more winners than the economy can absorb. Parents have begun weighing the return on investing tens of millions of yuan in “school district housing” against the uncertain future of their children. As youth unemployment climbs, even graduates from Tsinghua and Peking, China’s top two universities and the ultimate destination of this competition, cannot secure a decent job in the market. A generation answers the whole apparatus with 躺平 (lying flat), the refusal to keep running a race whose prize keeps shrinking. The birthrate falls, and with it, the number of children left to optimize.

There is a symmetry here worth sitting with. Haidian’s meritocracy is faltering at the exact moment America has begun to interrogate its own, the same decade that produced The Tyranny of Merit produced “lying flat” in China. Two elite-factories, built on opposite blueprints, arriving at one doubt: that sorting human beings by a single measure, however pure, may corrode the very thing it was built to reward.

The ocean of black coats is still there each winter morning, flowing toward the labs. Eileen Gu, the system's most dazzling output, took her training and left, which is, in the end, the one outcome the machine was never built to produce, and inevitably did.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

Less discussed is what happens when one of these ventures fails.

The Trap

The China’s Company Law contains a provision most OPC founders do not fully understand, and it changes the meaning of “limited” in their company’s name.

Article 23(3), recodified in 2024, holds the sole shareholder of a one-person company (一人有限责任公司) jointly liable for all the company’s debts unless she proves that her personal assets and the company’s never mingled. The burden is hers. Not the creditor’s. Hers.

In practice, this means annual third-party audits of the company’s finances, surgically separated bank accounts from day one, written records for every transaction between the founder and the company, and documentation thorough enough to satisfy a court that never saw the business operate. The Supreme People’s Court has rejected as insufficient shareholders who submitted audit reports, capital-change records, and signed contracts, ruling that these proved the company operated independently, but not that its assets were independent from the founder’s. The distinction is not intuitive. It is also not forgiving.

Fail the proof, and the corporate veil dissolves. The company’s debts become the founder’s personal debts. The judgment-defaulter list (失信, shīxìn, literally “faith-broken”) activates: restricted flights, restricted high-speed rail, restricted schooling for the children. The ledger is permanent, until several months ago, no mechanism existed at the national level to discharge a natural person’s debts in China at all.

Limited liability, for the sole shareholder in China, is not a right attached to incorporation. It is a verdict you must continuously win about your own bookkeeping.

Many founders would be better served by the humbler 个体工商户 (gètǐ gōngshānghù, “individual business household”), which carries unlimited liability openly, but taxes income once at 5–35% rather than twice (corporate tax, then dividend tax), requires no annual audit, and does not ask you to prove anything you cannot prove. When the liability is unlimited either way, the lighter structure is the more honest deal. The one-person company’s appeal is the **promise of limited liability ,a promise the law makes conditional on a compliance burden most solo founders will never meet.

How Others Handle the Same Problem

The one-person company is not a Chinese invention. Most jurisdictions allow it, and most solve the moral-hazard problem (one shareholder, no internal checks, easy to blur the lines) very differently.

In the United States, the single-member LLC offers limited liability by default. The founder’s personal assets are protected unless a creditor can prove, the burden is the creditor’s, that the owner treated the company as a personal piggy bank. It is called “piercing the corporate veil,” and it is the creditor’s uphill battle, not the founder’s. Tax treatment is pass-through: company profits are taxed once, on the individual’s return.

France went further. Since May 2022, every entrepreneur individuel, not just companies, but sole proprietors, receives an automatic legal separation of professional and personal assets, by operation of law, with no filing required. The firewall is a default of personhood, not a privilege of proof.

Japan and South Korea, whose legal cultures share something of China’s Confucian substrate, have spent the past decade dismantling the personal-guarantee systems that once made small-business founders personally liable as a matter of course. Japan’s 2014 guidelines on business-owner guarantees, Korea’s phased abolition of joint surety in policy lending, both were treated as major social reforms, not minor regulatory tweaks.

The pattern elsewhere: the default is protection, and the creditor must prove abuse. In China, the default is exposure, and the founder must prove innocence. The distinction is not merely technical. It determines who carries the cost of doubt, and doubt, for a one-person company, is the permanent condition.

The Broader Pattern

Article 23(3) is the sharpest edge, but it is not the only one. The one-person company sits inside a broader architecture in which starting is subsidized by the state and failing is borne by the individual.

Consider a founder who registers her one-person company with ¥1 million in capital. Under the old system, that number was largely decorative. She could write it on the registration form without actually depositing the money, and many founders did, choosing a round number that looked credible to clients. The new Company Law gives her five years to actually pay it in. But if the company cannot pay a debt before those five years are up, Article 54 allows creditors to skip the countdown entirely and demand that she contribute her registered capital now, out of her personal funds. The vanity number has become a personal IOU.

She applies for a subsidized startup loan through the OPC program, up to ¥5 million, with the government covering part of the interest. The brochure emphasizes the discounted rate. What it does not emphasize is the personal guarantee clause, standard in practice, that makes her jointly liable for the full amount. The interest is subsidized. The risk is not.

Now look at who else is in the room. The incubator operator who manages her free office space receives a per-head subsidy from the local government, in Lingang, Shanghai, up to ¥2,500 per person per month. The operator gets paid for every founder who registers and moves in. Not for every founder who builds a viable business. Not for every founder who survives. For every founder who shows up. The operator’s product is not entrepreneurship; it is occupancy. When the founder defaults on her loan two years later, the operator has already collected thirty months of per-head subsidies and moved on to the next cohort. The founder is left with the guarantee, the registered-capital obligation, and the “faith-broken” (失信) list. The incentives were aligned from the start, just not in her favor.

What’s Changing

Two things are now happening simultaneously.

The first is the OPC boom itself, hundreds of thousands of new one-person companies, most founded by young people, most lightly capitalized, most unaware of Article 23(3), entering the economy in a period of uncertain demand. A first wave of OPC defaults is not a prediction; it is arithmetic.

The second is that China is, for the first time, building the infrastructure of forgiveness. In November 2025, a man in Shenzhen became the first natural person in the history of the People’s Republic to complete personal bankruptcy and receive discharge, roughly a million yuan in debt forgiven, after a four-year probation of supervised austerity. Xiamen enacted a second local ordinance the same month. In September 2025, the national bankruptcy-law revision draft carried personal insolvency into Chinese legislation for the first time.

Read more

The standard assumption is simple enough: a Chinese person living abroad. But this definition has been written, erased, and rewritten at least five times in the past 150 years, and each rewrite left a few million people on the wrong side of the line. Today, Chinese law maintains a precise three-way taxonomy: huaqiao (华侨, Chinese citizens residing overseas), huaren (华人, foreign nationals of Chinese descent), and huayi (华裔, descendants of huaren). These look like neutral administrative categories. Each one is the scar tissue of a political crisis. The bonus points on the gaokao form are not a reward. They are reparations for an injury inflicted by the very act of classification.

The Deserters

Before the word huaqiao existed, China had a different name for people who left: qimin (弃民), the forsaken. Those who crossed the sea had, in the eyes of the court, forsaken the civilizing influence of the empire, zi qi wanghua (自弃王化, forsake the civilizing influence of the imperial order), and whatever happened to them afterward was their own affair.

The Ming dynasty made this doctrine law. The haijin (海禁, sea ban) of 1371 prohibited private maritime trade. Coastal populations were forcibly relocated inland. To sail beyond the horizon was not emigration but treason.

During the Zheng He voyages (1405–1433), the Yongle Emperor established the Jiugang Xuanweisi (旧港宣慰司, the Pacification Commissioner’s Office in Palembang), on the island of Sumatra in present-day Indonesia. It was headed by Shi Jinqing (施进卿), a Guangdong-born Chinese who had risen to lead the local Chinese community. For a brief window, the Ming state had a formal administrative outpost in Southeast Asia, staffed by overseas Chinese, sitting astride the maritime silk road. The arrangement revealed the empire’s instincts: no troops were dispatched, no tax officials posted, no administrators sent. The court gave Shi a title and a gold seal, treated Palembang as a tributary vassal. When the Zheng He voyages ended and the court turned inward, the office withered.

Yet the Ming was not a monolith: in 1567, the Longqing Emperor partially lifted the ban, opening a single port in Fujian to private trade. For the last seventy-seven years of the dynasty, silver poured in from the South Seas and the Americas, and merchants from Fujian and Guangdong fanned out across Southeast Asia. The state allowed their goods to move. It never stopped regarding their departure as a defection.

The Qing escalated the ban to a level the Ming never approached. In 1661, to cut supply lines to the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong (郑成功, Koxinga) in Taiwan, the court issued the Qianjie Ling (迁界令, the Coastal Evacuation Order): the entire population of the southeastern seaboard was forced to relocate thirty to fifty miles inland. Houses were burned, fields destroyed, boats smashed. After Taiwan fell in 1683, the Kangxi Emperor reopened the coast and established four maritime customs houses. But in 1717, he reversed course again with the Nanyang Haijin (南洋海禁, the South Seas Trade Ban), prohibiting Chinese ships from sailing to Southeast Asia. The stated reason was revealing: too many people were going and not coming back. Each year, over a thousand ships set out; barely half the men aboard returned. The state’s anxiety was never really about trade. It was about people who left the empire’s reach and might never return to serve it. Goods could cross the sea. Loyalty could not.

In 1740, this logic was tested in the most brutal way possible. Dutch colonial authorities in Batavia (now Jakarta) massacred an estimated 10,000 ethnic Chinese residents in what became known as the Hongxi Canan (红溪惨案, the Batavia Massacre). The Dutch, fearing Qing retaliation, sent envoys to explain themselves. Provincial officials, including the Viceroy of Liangguang 两广总督, ts῾ereng 策楞, reported the incident to Beijing and commented:

The Han Chinese who were killed had lived abroad for many years. Despite repeated acts of clemency and invitations to return, they chose to forsake the civilizing influence of the imperial order. According to the laws of the Qing Empire, they were all subject to serious punishment. Although the loss of so many lives is regrettable, their fate was ultimately the consequence of their own actions.
被害汉人久居番地，屡邀宽宥之恩，而自弃王化，按之国法，皆干严谴。今被其戕杀多人，事属可伤，实则孽由自作。

For most of Chinese imperial history, the state’s relationship to its diaspora was not protection but disavowal. The people who would later be called huaqiao, cherished overseas compatriots, mothers of revolution, sons of the Yellow Emperor, were simply people who no longer counted.

The Invention

The turning point came not from compassion but from accounting.

By the late nineteenth century, the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, concentrated in the Malay Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, Siam, the Philippines, and French Indochina, had accumulated substantial wealth. Tin mines in Malaya, sugar plantations in Java, rice mills in Bangkok, shipping networks across the South China Sea: an entire commercial infrastructure built by Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, and Hakka migrants over generations. The reformer Liang Qichao (梁启超) and the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (孙中山) both grasped the same fact at the same time: this money could fund the transformation of China, if the people who had it could be persuaded they were still Chinese.

In 1909, the Qing court issued the Guoji Tiaoli (《国籍条例》, Nationality Law), adopting the principle of jus sanguinis, nationality by blood. Article 1 was unambiguous: any person whose father was Chinese, regardless of birthplace, was a Chinese subject. Overnight, millions of Southeast Asian residents who had never set foot in China, who spoke Malay or Dutch or Thai in their daily lives, became subjects of the Qing empire on paper.

The Qing court and the revolutionary movement were competing for the same resource. Sun Yat-sen made his pitch explicit: huaqiao wei geming zhi mu (华侨为革命之母, “the overseas Chinese are the mother of revolution”). Between 1894 and 1911, Sun made at least seven fundraising tours through Southeast Asia. The Tongmenghui’s (同盟会) Singapore branch alone funneled enormous sums back to China. The word huaqiao was Sun’s instrument of recruitment. And the character qiao (侨) was doing critical ideological work: it means “to sojourn,” to reside temporarily away from home. The word encodes an obligation: you are away, but you belong here.

The 1909 law created a collision that would take half a century to detonate. Southeast Asian colonial governments operated on the opposite principle, jus soli, nationality by birthplace. A Chinese-descended person born in the Dutch East Indies was, by Dutch colonial law, a Dutch colonial subject. By Qing law, the same person was Chinese. The result: millions of people with two nationalities, two claims on their allegiance.

The Bandung Partition

After 1949, the collision doubled. Two Chinese governments, the People’s Republic in Beijing and the Republic of China in Taipei, simultaneously claimed every overseas Chinese person as a citizen, citing the same jus sanguinis inheritance from the 1909 law. For the newly independent nations of Southeast Asia, it was alarming: Indonesia alone had over two million ethnic Chinese residents who might owe allegiance to one of two hostile foreign powers.

The reckoning came in April 1955, at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Zhou Enlai (周恩来) arrived with a diplomatic offering: China would sign a treaty with Indonesia on the dual nationality problem. The core concession was Beijing would no longer automatically claim overseas Chinese as its nationals. Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia would choose: Chinese citizenship or Indonesian citizenship. No more double-counting.

This was pragmatic diplomacy. Southeast Asian leaders feared a “fifth column” of Beijing-loyal Chinese embedded in their economies. Zhou’s gesture was designed to defuse that fear. But at the level of identity, it was a severing. The state that had spent fifty years telling overseas Chinese “you are ours” was now saying “you may choose not to be.”

The old blanket term huaqiao fractured into a legal taxonomy that persists to this day. Huaqiao (华侨): Chinese citizens who reside abroad, still “ours,” still sojourners, still expected to return. Huaren (华人): people of Chinese descent who hold foreign citizenship, no longer “ours” in law, but still connected by blood. Huayi (华裔): the children and grandchildren of huaren: a further dilution, a fading signal.

On paper, the lines were clean. In practice, they solved nothing. Millions of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia never actively “chose” a nationality. The choice was made for them by bureaucratic inertia. Many who chose Indonesian or Vietnamese citizenship did so under pressure, without fully understanding the implications. And the governments they chose to belong to often did not care what box they had checked. When the violence came, it came for anyone who looked Chinese.

Your Face is Your Dossier

Indonesia, 1959. President Sukarno issued Presidential Regulation No. 10, banning foreign nationals from retail trade in rural areas. The regulation targeted all foreigners in theory; in practice, it targeted the Chinese, who dominated small-scale commerce. An estimated 500,000 ethnic Chinese lost their livelihoods overnight. China dispatched ships and evacuated over 60,000 people between 1960 and 1962. The question at stake was still legible within the Bandung framework: which passport do you hold? Those with Chinese citizenship had a government that would, however reluctantly, take them in. Those who had chosen Indonesian citizenship were on their own.

Indonesia, 1965. After the September 30th Movement and Suharto’s seizure of power, the logic changed entirely. The anti-communist purge that followed killed hundreds of thousands, and ethnic Chinese, regardless of citizenship, regardless of political affiliation, were swept into the violence. Chinese-language schools were shuttered. Chinese-language newspapers were banned. Chinese names were forcibly replaced with Indonesian ones. It no longer mattered what nationality you had chosen at Bandung. Your face was your dossier. The distinction between huaqiao and huaren, between Chinese citizen and Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, offered no protection whatsoever. China and Indonesia severed diplomatic relations in 1967. They would not restore them for twenty-three years.

Vietnam, 1978. As Sino-Vietnamese relations collapsed in the prelude to the 1979 border war, Hanoi turned on its ethnic Chinese population. Households were subjected to forced nationality registration. Chinese-language schools were closed. Businesses were confiscated under the banner of “socialist transformation.” In the north, ethnic Chinese were expelled overland through the border crossings at Hekou and Dongxing; in the south, many were pushed out to sea on boats. Between April 1978 and early 1980, over 260,000 refugees crossed into China. The overwhelming majority, over 220,000, were ethnically Chinese but legally Vietnamese. They had chosen Vietnam. Vietnam unchose them.

The Bandung taxonomy works in peacetime and collapses in crisis. When a state decides to expel or exterminate its Chinese minority, it does not consult the nationality registry.

Share

The Red Brick Houses

Every wave of Anti-Chinese movement created a cluster of low-rise red brick buildings on the outskirts of a southern Chinese town. They surrounded by rubber trees or sugarcane fields, with a canteen that serves dishes no one in the neighboring village recognizes.

These are the huaqiao nongchang (华侨农场, overseas Chinese farms), eighty-four of them, scattered across Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Yunnan, Hainan, and Jiangxi. Forty-one were established in the 1950s and 1960s to absorb returnees from Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and India, over 80,000 people. The welcome did not last. During the Cultural Revolution, the returnees’ overseas connections made them automatic suspects. The state that had called them home now classified them alongside landlords and counter-revolutionaries. Forty-three more were built in the late 1970s for the Vietnamese wave after the Cultural Revolution, 160,000 people settled on the farms, another 70,000 placed in state forestry and agricultural units, the rest dispersed into towns.1

The word gui (归) in guiqiao (归侨, returned overseas Chinese) deserves the same scrutiny as qiao. Gui means “to return” — it presupposes a place one originally belonged. But for most of these people, no such place existed. The Vietnamese refugees of 1978 were second- and third-generation descendants of Hokkien and Cantonese migrants. They were born in Haiphong or Saigon, spoke Vietnamese at school, ate phở for breakfast. Their “China” was a grandparent’s accent and a shrine to Mazu in the living room. When they crossed the border at Dongxing, they were not returning. They were arriving, arrived in a country that called them its own but could not recognize them.

The farms operated as self-contained state-owned enterprises. Returnees received worker status, monthly wages, subsidized housing, free medical care, and guaranteed job placement for their children. It was a package that, in the planned economy of the 1970s, was more than many rural Chinese citizens received. But the settlement was also a quarantine. The returnees lived apart. They spoke Teochew or Cantonese or Vietnamese among themselves. They cooked with fish sauce imported from their former countries. They celebrated holidays their neighbors had never heard of. To the surrounding communities, they were not quite Chinese. To themselves, they were no longer Vietnamese or Indonesian either.

In 1985, the state declared the farms would transition to market-based enterprises. The safety net that had made resettlement tolerable was withdrawn. Without state support, they deteriorated. Today, many have been absorbed into expanding cities or reclassified as suburban districts. The residents remain, aging, their children scattered into the broader economy, their specific history dissolving into the general noise of Chinese urbanization.

The Checkbox

Return now to the gaokao form. That checkbox has been there, in one form or another, since the very first national university entrance exams. In 1950, the regulations already stipulated that overseas Chinese students with slightly lower scores could be admitted leniently. By 1956, huaqiao students were formalized as one of six preferential categories, alongside workers, peasants, soldiers, ethnic minorities, and martyrs’ children. In 1990, the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Returned Overseas Chinese and Their Relatives(《归侨侨眷权益保护法》 ) codified the policy into statute. Its constitutional foundation is Article 50 of the PRC Constitution: “The People’s Republic of China protects the legitimate rights and interests of overseas Chinese.” Today, the policy grants up to twenty bonus points to san qiaosheng (三侨生), three categories: returned overseas Chinese themselves, their children, and the domestic children of overseas Chinese. The checkbox on the gaokao form is the visible tip of this legal edifice.

This article has focused on Southeast Asia, where the collisions between identity classification and physical violence were most extreme. But the checkbox does not say “Southeast Asian Chinese.” It says huaqiao, and the policy applies to the entire global diaspora: the Cantonese communities of San Francisco and Vancouver, the Wenzhounese networks of Paris and Milan, the Fujianese in New York, the new waves of students and professionals in Tokyo, Sydney, London, Nairobi. The Southeast Asian chapter is one segment, the bloodiest and most politically consequential. It’s of a much larger story that this series will only partially tell.

And then, in the spring of 2026, something unexpected happened. A small Teochew-dialect film called Gei Ama de Qingshu (《给阿嬷的情书》, Dear You), made with no star actors and no major studio backing, opened in Guangdong cinemas with a 1.6% first-day screening share. Within weeks it had crossed 1.5 billion yuan in box office, ranked second for the year, and sent over forty million people into theaters. The film tells the story of a grandson who travels to Thailand to find his long-lost grandfather, only to discover that the man who had been writing love letters and sending money to his grandmother for decades was not his grandfather at all, but a stranger repaying a debt of kindness. Ninety percent of the film’s details are drawn from real overseas Chinese stories.

Dear You is, by any measure, the first time the huaqiao story has entered mainstream Chinese popular culture at this scale. For decades, these narratives belonged to the emigrant coasts, Chaoshan, southern Fujian, Hainan, and were told in dialects most Chinese cannot understand. It is a signal that the story of invention, abandonment, violence, and reclassification is finally being heard.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

The doctor put a needle in my forehead, not my neck, somewhere above the brow. Within a few minutes my neck loosened. I still have no good account of why.

I grew up with Chinese medicine the way most Chinese families do, as herbs and medicine, boiled bitter soups from a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) doctor prescription/recipes. That was Chinese medicine to me: something you drank, not something that was done to your body.

The other surprise came from the doctor herself. She was from Taiwan, learnt TCM there, but practicing fully licensed in a neighborhood public hospital in Shanghai. A Taiwan doctor holds a Chinese state license to practice in a mainland public hospital.

Old Medicine Needed a New Enemy

Before China met Western medicine, there was no need for a category called “Chinese medicine.” There was just medicine, 医 (yī). The compound 中医 (zhōngyī, “Chinese medicine”) means something only against 西医 (xīyī, “Western medicine”). A tradition acquires the name only when a rival shows up to make it look local.

In February 1929, fourteen men met in Nanjing 南京 (then capital of China) to decide the future of Chinese medicine. None of them practiced it.

They were the first National Public Health Committee (中央卫生委员会) of the new Nationalist government. Most were Western-trained physicians, returnees from Japan, Europe, and America, brought in to build a modern medical system. The doctors who actually treated the overwhelming majority of Chinese patients, the practitioners of 旧医 (jiùyī, “obsolete medicine”), were not invited.

The physician Yu Yunxiu (余云岫, 1879–1954) put a proposal before that room. Yu was Japan-trained. He had already written 《灵素商兑》, a book-length attack on the founding classics of Chinese medicine. His proposal’s title left nothing to interpretation: 《废止旧医以扫除医事卫生障碍案》, A Proposal to Abolish Old Medicine in Order to Sweep Away the Obstacles to Public Health. His argument was not purely medical:

旧医一日不除，民众思想一日不变，新医事业一日不能向上……为民族进化计，为民生改善计，不可不取断然手段，此乃国家大计。

So long as the old medicine survives a single day, the people’s thinking will not change, and the enterprise of new medicine cannot rise… For the nation’s evolution, for the people’s welfare, decisive measures must be taken. This is a matter of state.

Chinese medicine was condemned not as ineffective but as a way of thinking, a leftover of the pre-modern mind that a modernizing nation had to clear away. The needle and the herb were incidental. The target was a worldview.

And the committee did not move to ban it. It moved to register it to death. The measures were procedural. Registration of old-style doctors would close at the end of 1930. Old-medicine schools would be banned. The press would be cleared of it. A practitioner over fifty might receive a “special license,” but he would be barred from treating infectious disease or signing a death certificate, and the license would expire in fifteen years. No books burning in a square. Just a registry set to close, schools that could never open, and a generation of old doctors holding permits with an expiry date. Chinese medicine was not to be killed. It was to be allowed to die of old age, on a schedule, certified by a form.

Then the plan leaked. It surfaced first in Shanghai’s newspaper, then in triumphant detail in Yu’s own journal, and the press named it the 废止中医案, the Abolish-Chinese-Medicine Bill.

Practioners went furious. Shanghai’s practitioners shut their clinics by the thousand and packed more than forty associations into a single hall. They resolved to build a standing body and to convene a national congress. On March 17, 1929, delegates from Chinese-medicine associations across fifteen provinces filled the great hall of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (上海总商会). The city’s pharmacies made it a public event. The great houses, 胡庆余堂, 蔡同德堂, 达仁堂, closed for half a day and hung banners across their fronts.

拥护中医药，就是保持我国的国粹。取缔中医药，就是致病民的死命。

To defend Chinese medicine is to preserve the nation’s essence. To outlaw Chinese medicine is to sentence the sick to death.

The operative word is 国粹 (guócuì), the “national essence.” In three weeks the defenders had turned a quarrel about medicine into a referendum on China itself. The journal 医界春秋 tied abolition to imperialist aggression, linking the survival of the medicine to the honor of the nation. It was the same nationalism Yu had aimed at them, turned back the other way.

And it worked. The major papers, 申报 Shun Pao chief among them, covered the protest with sympathy. The petition delegation took the train to Nanjing and found the government softer than its own committee had been. The premier, Tan Yankai, declared flatly that Chinese medicine absolutely cannot be abolished. The bill was shelved. March 17 became 国医节, National Medicine Day, the holiday marking the day Chinese medicine saved itself.

To avoid being registered out of existence, Chinese medicine had to become the one thing it had never been: a single, governable, modern entity the state could sit across a table from. Its enemies drew the blueprint.

What Was Actually Invented

In 1929, then, Chinese medicine learned to act as one body politically. It was not yet one body intellectually.

“Old medicine” was not a system. It was a library and a guild rolled together over two thousand years, competing lineages, regional schools, rival theories that contradicted one another, transmitted master to disciple with no fixed curriculum and no central authority deciding who was right. The historian Nathan Sivin describes the inheritance not as a tradition but as a “myth of an unchanging medical tradition”1 laid over two millennia of a medical system in turmoil. There was no single doctrine called Chinese medicine, because there had never needed to be one.

The single doctrine was built in the 1950s, in under a decade. The new state had perhaps half a million traditional practitioners and only ten to twenty thousand Western-trained doctors. A vast population needed care, and the cheap, abundant resource was the old medicine. So the state set out to make it usable, which meant making it uniform. Committees, often led by Western-trained physicians with traditional doctors as advisers, took the sprawling, contradictory inheritance and carved out of it a single internally consistent system, one that could be taught from a textbook and would not embarrass the language of modern science.

In 1956, the State Council established the first four colleges of Chinese medicine in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. It was the moment informal apprenticeship became standardized higher education. The first textbook, 《中医学概论》 (Outline of Chinese Medicine), was written in Nanjing in 1958. A full set of eighteen unified national textbooks was finished by 1962. Even the bedrock concept now sold as the timeless core of the medicine, 辨证论治 (biànzhèng lùnzhì, “pattern differentiation and treatment”), the idea that the practitioner treats a syndrome-picture rather than a named disease, was elevated and codified in exactly this period, lifted from the variety of older practice and installed as the defining method of the whole field.

The standardization was efficient. It was also lossy. Rival lineages, regional variations, minority-tradition remedies that did not fit the approved framework. These were not banned, but they were no longer taught. What the committees produced was a clean, teachable, internally consistent system. What it cost was the mess, and the mess had been where much of the medicine’s local diversity lived.

Mao was an advocate, in his own calligraphy, that still runs across the front of TCM publications: 中国医药学是一个伟大的宝库, Chinese medicine and pharmacology are a great treasure house. The phrase did real work. It reframed what the 1929 reformers had called a pre-modern obstacle as a national asset, a “treasure-house” to be mined by modern science, not swept away by it. And the English name itself was part of the construction. The term “traditional Chinese medicine” was coined by party propagandists around 1955. It was a label produced, in English, for a system being built in Chinese.

What was invented was the system: the claim that these scattered, contending practices form one coherent medicine, with a unified theory, a standard curriculum, a national set of textbooks, a degree, and a name. “Traditional Chinese Medicine” is the brand the People’s Republic printed, in the 1950s, on a tradition it had just finished standardizing. The tradition is real. Its unity is manufactured. And once a thing has been standardized into a single exportable system, it can be shipped. And of everything in it, one piece traveled farther than all the rest: the needle.

Share

The Needle That Crossed the Ocean

In 1971 the New York Times columnist James Reston had an emergency appendectomy in Beijing. Acupuncture was used to manage his post-operative pain, and his front-page account introduced the practice to America. What China then advertised to the visiting West was “acupuncture anesthesia,” patients awake through major surgery, anesthetized by needles alone. In May 1972, two traditional doctors (Pien Bae Chi 卞伯岐 & Leung Kok Yuen 梁觉玄) gave a public demonstration in San Francisco before some five hundred American physicians. That same year California began moving to regulate the practice; in 1976 it became one of the first states to license acupuncturists. Today some forty-seven states regulate acupuncture, often as a credential separate from herbs entirely.

The system the PRC had spent the 1950s assembling, almost none of it boarded the plane. What crossed was the needle. The West licensed acupuncture, not Chinese medicine. A practitioner can be certified to put the needles in and never touch the diagnosis, the herbs, the cosmology. The West received a fragment and licensed the fragment.

“Acupuncture anesthesia” was a spectacle, and like many spectacles of the Cultural Revolution it does not survive scrutiny. Western anesthesiologists who examined acupuncture anesthesia later concluded that the “success” owed less to the needle than to heavy pre-operative coaching, careful patient selection, and the political pressure of the moment. Acupuncture anesthesia quietly disappeared. What survived was a narrower, sturdier claim: that the needle relieves pain. A real science grew up around it.

For half a century, scientists have looked for the mechanism behind acupuncture, endless effort to render 气 (qì) and 经络 (jīngluò, the meridians) into molecules. In the 1970s the physiologist Han Jisheng (韩济生) and others showed that acupuncture’s pain relief could be blocked by naloxone. That implicated the body’s own opioids. They also found that different needling frequencies released different neuropeptides.2 In 2010 a team at Rochester found that acupuncture raises adenosine in the local tissue, and that without the adenosine A1 receptor the pain relief disappears.3 More recently, Qiufu Ma’s lab traced how stimulating a defined set of nerve fibers at a specific point can drive a vagal anti-inflammatory reflex, a neuroanatomical reason why one point might genuinely differ from another.4 And in 2025 a UCLA group did the thing no one had managed. They collected cells from the tip of an acupuncture needle in a human point and sequenced them, reporting a previously uncatalogued cell population that expanded as the patient’s pain receded.5

Despite a great deal of research into what lies behind the needle, the practice of acupuncture still largely operates within a standardized traditional framework of yin and yang, organ systems, and pattern differentiation. The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, one of the best-selling English-language textbooks on Traditional Chinese Medicine, was written by Giovanni Maciocia, who trained at the Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine — the same Nanjing institution involved in producing the PRC’s first standardized TCM textbooks in the late 1950s.

Share

The Only Textbook in the Room

In the mainland itself, the system that was standardized in the 1950s now runs on two tracks. The main path is the one built on those colleges: a five-year university degree followed by the national TCM Practicing Physician Qualification Exam (中医执业医师资格考试). But the 2017 law went further. It formally preserved the apprenticeship path. A practitioner who has studied under a qualified master for five years, with two licensed TCM physicians vouching for him, can sit a practical assessment before an expert panel and receive a license to practice his specific specialty. No university degree required. The state that standardized everything also kept a door open for the older way of learning.

The investment has always been political as much as medical. Officials are evaluated partly on TCM adoption metrics in their districts. During COVID-19, provincial governments promoted traditional formulas as a national alternative, a “Chinese solution,” with a fervor that owed as much to political performance as to clinical evidence. The result is a system backed by enormous state resources, research funding, and institutional weight. It also shaped, at every level, by the needs of the state that funds it.

In Hong Kong, herbal medicine is older than the colony itself. Ko Shing Street (高陞街) in Sheung Wan has been the center of the herbal trade since the late nineteenth century. Walk it today and pass shopfronts where dried seahorses hang beside sliced deer antler, where ginseng roots are sorted by grade behind glass, where the air is sweet and medicinal and has been for over a hundred years. These shops were built on Cantonese folk knowledge, on southern Chinese remedies passed down through families and guilds, on a practitioner class that had no national curriculum. Acupuncture here was practiced the same way, learned in clinics, passed teacher to student, with no standardized point chart on the wall.

Then came the ordinance. In 1999 Hong Kong required every Chinese-medicine practitioner to register. The territory’s universities built degree programmes, and when they needed a curriculum, the one available, the one already written into textbooks and organized into courses, was the mainland’s. The acupuncture training, the herbal pharmacopoeia, the diagnostic framework, all now taught from the same standardized system.

Singapore’s story runs even deeper, and through a different channel. Chinese medicine there was never a national tradition. It was a clan tradition. When Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, and Hakka immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century, they brought their own regional remedies, their own dialects, their own doctors. The Thong Chai Medical Institution (同济医院), founded in 1867, offered free consultations and medicine to the poor, decades before any standardized “Chinese medicine” existed anywhere. Eu Yan Sang 余仁生 opened its first Singapore shop in 1910, serving migrant workers who could not afford Western doctors, and its name means “caring for mankind” in Cantonese. These were community institutions, rooted in dialect and kinship, not in a unified theory of 辨证论治.

When Singapore’s government registered them all under the Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners Act in 2000, it imposed a single frame on a patchwork, and it started with the needle. Acupuncturists were registered first, from 2001; physicians followed from 2002.

When Nanyang Technological University launched its TCM degree in 2005, the degree was conferred by Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. For twenty years Singapore’s only university-level TCM diploma carried Beijing’s name. NTU announced in 2024 that it would finally issue its own degree starting in 2028. The health minister’s phrase was telling: stand on its own two feet.

Same Classroom, Different Diploma

A TCM student in Taipei and one in Beijing open the same books. The 《伤寒论》Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders, the 《黄帝内经》The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, the pattern-differentiation framework, the organ-system theory, the canonical acupuncture point categories, the core curriculum is, for all practical purposes, the same. Taiwan’s universities have quietly used mainland textbooks as references for decades. The theory taught on both sides of the strait traces back to the same 1950s codification. The political wall and the textbook market do not run on the same map.

And yet the credentials do not cross. Taiwan does not recognize mainland medical degrees. Its own license is famously demanding: from the 1980s a seven-year college programme, and in 2011 the closing of the 中医师特考, the special examination that had let self-taught and apprenticed practitioners qualify. That was the master-disciple route by which most of postwar Taiwan’s renowned physicians, herbalists and acupuncturists alike, had earned their standing. The apprentice was not outlawed. It was de-licensed out of existence. The mainland, in the same period, preserved exactly that path.

The asymmetry runs the other way too. Since 2007 the People’s Republic has built specific channels for Taiwan physicians to obtain mainland medical licenses, by examination, or, for senior doctors, by direct recognition. Chinese medicine is explicitly one of the permitted categories. These rules sit on the websites of the offices for Taiwan affairs as much as the health ministry. The mainland recognizes Taiwan training. Taiwan does not return the gesture.

Which is where my Shanghai clinic comes back. My doctor studied TCM in Taiwan, sat the mainland’s exam, and now practices in a neighborhood public hospital. The same textbooks, the same theory, the same needle. Nothing about the medicine changed when she crossed. What changed was the license on the wall.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

Sixteen years later, the same garment sits at the center of a very different quarrel. Scholars now argue over whether it has become a vehicle for Han chauvinism, a banner of ethnic supremacy. The charge has flipped completely. In 2010 the robe was punished for being too foreign. By 2026 it is attacked for being too native. Nothing about the cloth changed in those sixteen years.

This is the contradictory life of hanfu, the dress of the Han Chinese. To see how one garment can be charged with two opposite crimes, it helps to set the politics aside and ask a simpler question: what did this garment actually look like, before anyone fought about it?

What a person wore

For most of Chinese history, the ordinary person was named after their clothing. The word was bùyī , 布衣, “cloth-clothes”. It simply meant a commoner: someone of no rank, because people of no rank wore cloth. Not silk, not brocade, but plain woven fiber in the colors that fiber happens to be when you weave it and do nothing further: the oat and beige and grey-brown of unbleached thread. When the great strategist Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 wanted to say he had begun life as a nobody, he wrote your servant was originally cloth-clothes 臣本布衣. The garment was the rank. To name what a person wore was to name what they were.

The truest, commonest, most statistically representative Han dress was plain. Splendor existed. But it was rare and was rationed by law. A bright robe in old China was not a fashion choice. It was closer to a rank permission.

Color was legislation before it was taste. Commoners were periodically forbidden “mixed colors” outright 散民不敢服杂彩; the founding emperor of the Ming banned ordinary people from wearing yellow, and certain reds and deep blue-blacks went too, in case that a farmer be mistaken on the road for an official. Saturated dye, gold thread, woven pattern, these were parceled out from the throne downward like ranks in a hierarchy.

Even the shapes had a sober logic. Take the qūjū 曲裾, the early robe whose hem wraps in a long diagonal around the body before fastening at the back, the very silhouette revival shops now sell as the essence of flowing romance. That wrap was not, in the first place, about looking ethereal. Early lower garments were open-sided wraps worn without sewn trousers beneath, and the winding layer of cloth was what kept the body decently closed when its wearer sat or moved. Form followed the requirements of living: to hold warmth, to stay shut, to be worked and slept in. The clothing was an answer to a problem before it was an answer to a camera.

The mirror across the sea

This system of dress, the crossed collar closing left over right, the sashes, the flat-cut robe, was not only China’s. For centuries it was East Asia’s. When Japan rebuilt its court and culture in the seventh and eighth centuries, it imported the Tang dynasty’s institutions wholesale, and the dress came with them; the early Japanese court robe was, in its bones, a Tang robe. The word the Japanese still use for kimono fabric, gofuku, 呉服, “the clothing of Wu.” It preserves the memory in plain sight: Wu was a region of southern China, and the name records where the cloth and the technique came from. Korea’s hanbok 韓服 grew from the same root. The crossed collar that a Chengdu mob took for a foreign insult was, historically, the shared grammar of the entire region.

But here the three countries walked down very different roads, and the difference is the whole point.

Japan kept its version, unbroken. The kimono evolved continuously across the Kamakura, Muromachi, and Edo periods into something wholly its own, straight-cut where the Chinese robe curved, its sash swelling into the great architectural obi, its sleeves sewn closed. It was never severed from its wearers. When Japan met Western dress in the Meiji era, it fixed this living garment into a standardized national costume, the visible sign of being Japanese in a world of suits. Korea did something similar, carrying the hanbok forward as national and ceremonial dress, worn at festivals and weddings.

China’s path had a break in it. In 1644 the Qing came down from the northeast and took the empire, and in 1645 the new dynasty ordered Han men to shave the forehead, wear the queue, and adopt Manchu dress, 剃发易服, “shave the hair, change the clothing,” enforced, in places, by execution. The slogan that survives from those years is blunt: keep your hair and lose your head, or keep your head and lose your hair 留发不留头，留头不留发. Over the following decades the older Han silhouette receded from public life, surviving mainly in the corners the new order left alone, on women, on Daoist priests, on actors in costume on the opera stage (优伶不从), and on the bodies of the dead (死不从), who could still be buried in Ming clothing. The everyday dress of the living became, increasingly, Manchu-derived.

The Qing was sometimes considered as a foreign occupation that sat on top of a “real” China; but it was one of the dynasties that made China, that assembled the multiethnic, continental empire whose map the modern nation inherited, whose emperors were Confucian sovereigns and patrons of Chinese letters. Manchu dress is not alien to Chinese history. The qipao (旗袍, “banner robe”) that the world now reads as the very essence of Chinese elegance is itself Manchu in origin, and it began as practical clothing: narrow sleeves cut for drawing a bow, side-slits for mounting a horse, a waist-sash to stow rations on the hunt. Its body-hugging glamour came later, in 1930s Shanghai. The point is not that one layer is true China and the other false. The point is only that the thread of Han dress, specifically, was cut. And that a cut thread is something a later generation can decide to pick back up.

Share

How a layer became a wound

What turned that cut thread into a grievance was not the Qing conquest itself but what came after it.

The Qing happened to be the dynasty on watch when the catastrophe arrived: the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the lost wars, the foreign concessions, the stretch that Chinese historiography would come to call the “century of humiliation.” The last imperial dynasty was the one that presided over the collapse, and so its visual signature became fused, in retrospect, with national defeat. The queue and the robe stopped being merely the dress of the era and became the uniform of the humiliated era.

Then two things hardened that fusion. The first came from inside China. The revolutionaries who set out to topple the Qing around 1911 needed a clear enemy, and they made one out of ethnicity. Sun Yat-sen’s program opened with the slogan expel the Tartar barbarians, restore China (驱除鞑虏，恢复中华); the firebrand Zou Rong 鄒容 wrote of washing away “two hundred and sixty years of cruel humiliation” to make the country “a clean land”; the scholar Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 filled pages arguing that the Manchu were not Chinese at all. The idea of the Manchu as alien occupier was, in large part, a deliberate revolutionary construction, a tool forged for a purpose. (Most of these men knew it was a tool: Sun later clarified that “expelling the Manchu” meant the Manchu government, not ordinary Manchu people, and within a decade “expel the Tartars” had given way to the official creed of “a republic of five peoples.” 五族共和)

The second came from outside. As the Qing fell, the West was busy turning the very same signature, the queue, the long robe, the slippered villainy, into a monster. Sax Rohmer invented Dr. Fu Manchu 傅满洲 in 1913, mustache and trailing sleeves and all, having never met a Chinese person; the character became the face of the “yellow peril,” the cunning oriental bent on swallowing the world. In the immigration ports, it was the Chinese laborer’s queue and robe that marked him as sinister and unassimilable. The image of “Chineseness” that the West caricatured was, precisely, the Qing image, frozen and made grotesque at the very moment the dynasty was dying.

Read more

In the year 647, an Indian king sent word to the Tang court that he wanted a copy of the Tao Te Ching in Sanskrit.

Every standard story of Chinese Buddhism runs the other way. Sutras flow east. Pilgrims travel west. India is the source; China is the receiver; the great drama is Xuanzang 玄奘 walking seventeen years to bring back a great number of Buddhist texts. Almost nobody knows that the same Xuanzang, three years after his return, was assigned by Emperor Taizong to lead a translation team running in the opposite direction: to render Laozi into Sanskrit for an Indian king who had heard rumors of a Chinese sage and wanted the book.

The translation was completed. It was sealed, handed to the envoys, and sent west. Then it vanished. No copy survives in India, Nepal, Tibet, or Dunhuang. In 1912, the first modern scholar to look for it, Paul Pelliot concluded that it had either failed to circulate or been lost almost immediately.1

But before it disappeared, something extraordinary happened in the translation room. Xuanzang and a team of thirty Daoist priests fought for weeks over a single character: 道. The Daoists wanted to translate it the way it had been translated for six centuries, as bodhi (菩提), the Buddhist word for awakening. Xuanzang refused. He insisted on a different Sanskrit word entirely: mārga (末伽), meaning road, path, way.

The Request from Kāmarūpa

The diplomatic occasion is documented in three independent sources. Vice-envoy Li Yibiao (李义表) returned from a mission to India and reported that Kumāra Bhāskaravarman, king of Kāmarūpa, a powerful state in what is now Assam, had asked for the Tao Te Ching in Sanskrit. Kumāra appears by name in Xuanzang’s own Records of the Western Regions (大唐西域记) as a king who had personally hosted the Chinese monk during his Indian travels. He had heard, presumably from Xuanzang himself, that China possessed a sage older than the Buddha whose teachings the Chinese revered above all others.

Emperor Taizong agreed. Xuanzang was named chief translator. A team of around thirty Daoist priests was assembled to advise on the source text. Two of them are named in the record: Cai Huang (蔡晃), and Cheng Xuanying (成玄英), the latter the founder of Chongxuan (重玄, “Twofold Mystery”) Daoism, the most philosophically sophisticated Daoist movement of the early Tang, and a scholar influenced by Buddhist dialectical method.

Almost everything we know about what happened in that room comes from a single text: Ji Gujin Fodao Lunheng (集古今佛道论衡, Collected Debates on Buddhism and Daoism, Ancient and Modern), a chronicle of Buddhist-Daoist disputations compiled in 661 by the monk Daoxuan. Daoxuan was a near-contemporary, well-connected to the Tang religious establishment, and the foremost Buddhist historian of his generation. This is a Buddhist source written within an active Buddhist-Daoist rivalry, and its rhetorical posture favors Xuanzang. The details are vivid, the quoted exchanges have the texture of recorded speech, and most modern scholars accept the broad outline.

What the source describes is not just a translation seminar. It is three high-stakes hierarchies, imperial, Buddhist, Daoist, sharing one room, with the empire’s most senior monk arguing the empire’s most senior Daoists out of their own concepts.

Whose Concepts Are These?

The Daoists opened by glossing the Laozi using Madhyamaka 中觀 categories, concepts from the Zhonglun (中论) and Bailun (百论), the Indian Mahāyāna texts of Nāgārjuna’s school. Chongxuan Daoism had spent decades adapting Buddhist double-negation logic into its own metaphysics. To Cai Huang and Cheng Xuanying, Buddhism and Daoism shared a working vocabulary; the Laozi could be naturally explained through Madhyamaka because Madhyamaka had become part of how educated Daoists already thought.

Xuanzang stopped them. The recorded exchange is sharp:

佛教、道教理致天乖，安用佛理，通明道义？ The Buddhist and Daoist teachings differ at the root. Why use Buddhist terms to expound Daoist meanings?

Cai Huang protested. In the early centuries of Chinese Buddhism, monks like Sengzhao (僧肇, 384–414) quoted Laozi and Zhuangzi constantly. The traditions had always spoken to each other. The shared idiom was not a recent invention.

Xuanzang’s reply was the central methodological move of the entire encounter. The earlier borrowing, he said, happened because Buddhism had not yet developed a proper Chinese vocabulary (“佛教初开，深经尚拥，老谈玄理，微附虚怀。尽照落筌滞而未解。故肇论序致联类喻之。非谓比拟便同涯极。”). Translators in the third and fourth centuries reached for Daoist words because they had nothing else. The borrowing was provisional scaffolding, useful in its day, but the scaffolding was meant to come down. By the seventh century, after six hundred years of translation work, Chinese Buddhism had a precise technical lexicon of its own. The cross-borrowing should now end. Translation should be exact.

Then he turned the argument back on the Daoists. Why, he asked, among the dozens of available Laozi commentaries, He Yan 何晏, Wang Bi 王弼, Yan Zun 严遵, Gu Huan 顾欢, were they reaching for Buddhist texts to explain their own classic?

Share

What “Tao” Actually Means

Xuanzang began the translation. For the character 道 he wrote the Sanskrit mārga (末伽) — meaning road, path, way.

The Daoists objected immediately. The standard equivalent, since the earliest Han renderings, had been bodhi (菩提). When the first Buddhist missionaries arrived in China, buddha had been translated as 道人 (”man of the Way”) and bodhi as 道. The equivalence was six centuries old.

Xuanzang’s opening reply:

菩提言觉，末伽言道，唐梵音义，确尔难乖。 Bodhi means “awakening.” Mārga means “path.” The Chinese and Sanskrit on both sides are precise. They cannot be conflated.

Cheng Xuanying pushed back with a structured rebuttal. Buddha, transliterated as fotuo (佛陀), has always been rendered into Chinese as jue (觉, “the awakened one”), an equivalence Xuanzang himself accepted. By the same authority of long usage, bodhi has always been rendered as 道:

佛陀言觉，菩提言道，由来盛谈，道俗同委。今翻末伽，何得非妄？ Buddha is rendered as “the awakened one”; bodhi is rendered as “Tao.” This has been common usage for centuries, accepted by clergy and laity alike. To translate it now as mārga, how is that not arbitrary?

The argument was an appeal to precedent. If buddha = 觉 was a settled pairing, then bodhi = 道 deserved the same standing, six centuries of consistent usage. To break one half of the parallel without breaking the other was, in Cheng Xuanying’s eyes, philologically incoherent.

Xuanzang’s reply dismantled the parallel:

佛陀天音，唐言觉者；菩提天语，人言为觉。此则人法两异，声采全乖。 Buddha in Sanskrit means “the awakened one” in Chinese; bodhi in Sanskrit means “awakening.” One names a person; one names a teaching. They are categorically distinct, and the old translation conflated them.

Both Sanskrit words share the root budh-, “to awaken.” But buddha is an agent, the person who has awakened. Bodhi is the abstract state of awakening itself. To collapse both into 道 was to flatten an entire conceptual architecture into a single Chinese character.

He accepted that buddha corresponded to jue, “the awakened one.” What he denied was that this concession licensed the second pairing. Buddha and bodhi were two distinct Sanskrit words, agent and action, person and teaching, and the old Chinese rendering had erased the distinction by translating both as 道. The “settled equivalence” Cheng Xuanying defended was not a tradition of accuracy. It was a tradition of conflation.

And once that confusion was removed, what 道 actually meant came into view. It was not awakening at all. Its primary semantic field was path, the road one travels, the route of cultivation, the way things proceed. The Sanskrit equivalent for path was mārga. Xuanzang offered an empirical test: ask any Sanskrit-speaker, point at the road under your feet, ask what it is called. The answer is mārga.

For six hundred years, Buddhist translation in China had quietly absorbed Daoist vocabulary in order to gain a foothold, and over those same centuries, Daoists had grown comfortable with a Buddhist idiom that flattered their own concepts, that made 道 sound like the Buddhist absolute. Xuanzang was reversing the process. He was telling the Daoists that the word at the center of their own tradition did not mean what centuries of borrowed Buddhist vocabulary had let it sound like. Tao was not bodhi. It was mārga.

The Translation Argument That Wasn’t a Religious War

At this point, it is tempted to file the episode into a familiar category. Buddhist-Daoist conflict. The Tang court repeatedly issued edicts ranking Daoist priests above Buddhist monks (the imperial family claimed descent from Laozi); the Huichang persecution of 845 nearly destroyed institutional Buddhism; the Huahu Jing (《化胡经》) controversy had been running for centuries on the Daoist claim that Laozi had gone west and become the Buddha. The whole thing can look like a slow-burn Chinese version of the Catholic-Protestant struggle.

But there had never been a war. The translation argument took place inside an imperially convened translation bureau. Both sides were paid by the same emperor. Neither tradition had its own territory, its own army, or its own independent law. The conditions that produced crusades, inquisitions, and wars of religion in medieval Europe were structural facts of political autonomy that no Chinese religion ever possessed. The contested object was not doctrine but vocabulary: which Sanskrit word should render which Chinese character. And Cheng Xuanying, the most senior Daoist in the room, had built his entire philosophical system by borrowing Buddhist dialectical logic. The two sides were not isolated enemies; they were intimate co-developers who disagreed on the terms of a partnership they had been quietly conducting for centuries.

Share

The Preface That Was Refused

After the main text was translated, Cheng Xuanying made one more request. Include the Heshang Gong (河上公) preface, the famous Han-era commentary that frames the Laozi as a manual of Daoist self-cultivation, with instructions for tooth-clicking (叩齿), saliva-swallowing (咽液), and breath retention. Without the preface, he argued, foreign readers would miss the practical dimension of the text.

Xuanzang refused. His stated reason is revealing:

观其治身治国之文，文词具矣。叩齿咽液之序，其言鄙陋。将恐西闻异国，有愧乡邦。 The sections on self-cultivation and statecraft are sufficient. The tooth-clicking and saliva-swallowing preface is crude. If it reached foreign ears, it would bring shame on our country.

The Daoists appealed to Chancellor Ma Zhou 马周. When Ma Zhou asked Xuanzang whether India had anything comparable to Laozi and Zhuangzi, Xuanzang answered carefully: yes, India had its own philosophical schools, the Sāṃkhya system’s twenty-five principles, the materialism of the Cārvākas, the dialectics of the ninety-six non-Buddhist schools. But they were different in kind, and Indian philosophical readers would judge by different standards. Then he rendered his verdict:

若翻《老》序，则恐彼以为笑林。 If we translate the Laozi preface, the Indians will treat it as a joke book.

The preface was cut. Xuanzang was not deciding what was true. He was deciding what was exportable. What could survive translation without disgracing its source. The Daoist preface failed his test, and he stripped it from the version that traveled west.

The Translation That Never Arrived

The Sanskrit Tao Te Ching was completed, sealed, and handed to the Indian envoys. And then, it vanished.

No Sanskrit Tao Te Ching survives anywhere. Not in Indian manuscript collections, not in the Tibetan canon, not in Dunhuang, not in Nepal. Paul Pelliot, devoted eighty pages of T’oung Pao in 1912 to reconstructing the event and searching for traces. He found none. After 1912, no further evidence has emerged. The translation Xuanzang fought so hard to get right reached its destination and disappeared without leaving so much as a citation in any surviving Indian source.

The Daoists wanted bodhi; Xuanzang gave them mārga, and won. The Daoists wanted the preface translated; Xuanzang refused, and won. Then the entire translation evaporated. None of those careful distinctions ever had an Indian reader.

Xuanzang’s translation theory may have been correct, but the cost of correctness was a text that nobody in India found worth keeping. A Daoist priest who had packaged the Tao in familiar Buddhist clothing, who had let bodhi and Tao remain identical, who had translated the longevity preface, who had made the Laozi sound like a Mahāyāna sutra, might have produced a text that survived. Xuanzang produced one that was philosophically honest and historically silent.

Twelve hundred years later, D. T. Suzuki would do precisely what Xuanzang had refused to do: package Chan Buddhism in the vocabulary of William James and the rhetoric of mystical experience, betray every distinction that Xuanzang had defended, and reach millions of Western readers in the process. (See more: How Chan Became Zen) The pattern is the same, only the direction is reversed. Suzuki sold awakening to America by letting bodhi sound like Tao. Xuanzang refused to sell Tao to India by letting it sound like bodhi. One translation traveled. One translation was right.

The question that hangs over both: is a translation that travels but distorts, or a translation that is faithful and forgotten, the deeper betrayal of the text?

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.

They will not, except by accident, ever visit the place Eihei-ji was modeled on. The place where Dōgen actually trained, Mount Tiantong 天童山, in coastal Zhejiang receives almost no foreign Buddhist pilgrims. Nor does the cave where Bodhidharma is said to have faced the wall (at Mount Song 嵩山), or the monastery where Mazu 马祖道一 spoke of ‘the ordinary mind,’ or the hall where Yuanwu Keqin 圜悟克勤 compiled the Blue Cliff Record 碧岩录 in 1125.

The geography of the Western imagination has rearranged the geography of the tradition.

The Tradition That Already Existed

Zen (禅) is Japan’s reading of the character 禪. Its classical pronunciation is chán, a Tang-dynasty abbreviation of chánnà (禪那), the transliteration of Sanskrit dhyāna. By the time Eisai built Japan’s first Rinzai 臨済宗 temple in 1191, the tradition he was importing had already had a six-hundred-year history and had moved through nearly all of its major intellectual phases.

Its legendary founder, the Indian monk Bodhidharma (菩提达摩), is said to have arrived in Guangzhou around 520, then headed to north China and faced a wall at Shaolin 少林 for nine years. Whatever the historical reality, the legend was set in dynastic territory and spread through dynastic-era sources. Two centuries later, Huineng (慧能, 638–713), an illiterate woodcutter from Lingnan, became the Sixth Patriarch and the central figure of the Platform Sutra 六祖坛经, the only text composed outside India to be granted the title sūtra, a designation otherwise reserved for the recorded words of the Buddha himself.

Then came the great Tang masters who gave the tradition its distinctive voice. Mazu Daoyi (马祖道一, 709–788) collapsed the distance between practice and ordinary life with the formula píngcháng xīn shì dào — “the ordinary mind is the way” (平常心是道). His student Baizhang Huaihai (百丈怀海, 749–814) compiled the first independent monastic code, the Baizhang Qinggui (百丈清规), and is remembered for the line yī rì bù zuò, yī rì bù shí , “a day without work, a day without food” (一日不作，一日不食). It became a survival strategy. When Emperor Wuzong launched the Huichang persecution in 845, dismantling more than 4,600 monasteries, almost every other Buddhist school in the empire collapsed. Chan survived because Baizhang’s communities grew their own food.

By the Song, the tradition had organized itself into the Five Houses (五家), Linji (临济), Caodong (曹洞), Yunmen (云门), Fayan (法眼), Guiyang (沩仰), each with its own pedagogical style. The kōan (公案, gōng’àn) literature crystallized in two great collections: the Blue Cliff Record( Biyan Lu, 碧岩录, compiled by Yuanwu Keqin in 1125) and the Wumen Guan (无门关, compiled by Wumen Huikai in 1228). Every paradox the Zen student grapples with, the dog’s Buddha-nature, the sound of one hand, the original face before parents were born, was first recorded in these two books, in classical Chinese, by editors writing for a domestic audience.

By 1228, the tradition was a complete intellectual and institutional system with seven hundred years of history.

Share

The Inheritance Crosses the Sea

What arrived in Japan was the tradition in a near-frozen state.

Eisai (荣西, 1141–1215) crossed to the mainland twice. On his second journey he received Linji-school transmission and returned in 1191 to found Kennin-ji in Kyoto. Dōgen (道元, 1200–1253) followed a generation later, training under Rujing at Mount Tiantong (天童山) in Zhejiang and returning in 1227 to establish what would become the Sōtō school. His masterwork, the Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵), reads in long stretches like a sustained meditation on the masters he had read overseas. He quotes them at length. He parses them phrase by phrase. The Five Mountains (五山, Gozan) system that organized medieval Japanese Zen was modeled directly on the Five Mountains and Ten Monasteries (五山十刹) of the Southern Song.

What Japan added in the centuries that followed was real, and it was specific. Hōjō-period samurai patronage wedded the practice to the warrior class. Sen no Rikyū (千利休, 1522–1591) integrated its sensibility into the tea ceremony. Muromachi-era monks designed the dry-landscape gardens, Ryōan-ji, Daisen-in, that would later become the shorthand for “Zen aesthetic.” Hakuin Ekaku (白隠慧鶴, 1686–1769) systematized the kōan curriculum that Rinzai students still follow today.

The Suzuki Construction

Teitarō Suzuki was born in 1870, in Kanazawa, a samurai-class family whose stipend the Meiji Restoration had just abolished. He took the Buddhist name Daisetsu (大拙, “great simplicity”) from his teacher Shaku Sōen at Engaku-ji (圆觉寺) in Kamakura, where he trained in Rinzai kōan practice in the 1890s.

The leverage point was 1897. Shaku Sōen had attended the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, met the German-American publisher Paul Carus, and recommended his student. Suzuki arrived in LaSalle, Illinois that year to work for Open Court Publishing, and spent eleven years writing English prose for a Western audience. He absorbed the late-Victorian vocabulary of “religious experience” and “mysticism” that William James had just made respectable.

Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series appeared in London in 1927; two more series followed in 1933 and 1934. These books did something no previous English-language writing on Buddhism had done: they presented Zen as a self-contained, philosophically serious tradition with its own genealogy of patriarchs, its own literature of kōan and mondō (問答, wèndá), its own claim to a kind of direct knowing that bypassed conceptual thought. The genealogy began with Bodhidharma in 6th-century Luoyang, ran through Huineng in 7th-century Lingnan, through the Tang masters of Hongzhou and Hebei, into the Song editors of Sichuan and Jiangsu. Suzuki did not need to insist on where the lineage came from. He simply listed the names.

The second move arrived eleven years later, with Zen and Japanese Culture (1938 in Japanese, expanded English edition Princeton 1959). The title alone is the argument. Across four hundred pages, Suzuki bound Zen to swordsmanship, archery, the tea ceremony, haiku, ink painting, and the samurai ethic. The book contains long, admiring passages on the swordsman Yagyū Munenori 柳生宗矩. It treats the dry-landscape garden, the tokonoma alcove, the rough Raku tea bowl as expressions of Zen consciousness. By the time the reader closes the book, “Zen” has become indistinguishable from a particular vision of Japanese aesthetic identity. The Tang patriarchs are still in the lineage chant. They are no longer in the room.

This was not Suzuki’s invention alone. He was writing inside a Meiji and Taishō 大正 current, Nihonjinron (日本人論, treatises on Japaneseness), theories of Japanese cultural uniqueness, that had spent half a century looking for a non-Western vocabulary in which to assert Japan’s civilizational distinctness from the continent and from the West. Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and the Kyoto School were producing the philosophical version. Suzuki, Nishida’s lifelong friend, was producing the export version. After 1945, when overt Japanese nationalism was unspeakable in English-language publishing, Zen became Japan’s postwar cultural passport, the part of Japanese identity that could be presented to occupiers and global audiences as universal, peaceful, and beyond politics.

The Western reception was total. Carl Jung wrote the foreword to the 1948 Rider edition of An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. John Cage attended Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia between 1952 and 1957 and rebuilt his musical aesthetic around them. Through Alan Watts, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Snyder, the vocabulary diffused into the American 1960s. By 1960, the Western image of Buddhism as such, not just Zen, was Suzuki’s image: spontaneous, direct, antinomian, aesthetic, Japanese.

Suzuki curated Zen. He selected the Tang masters for the spiritual genealogy because that was where the genealogy was. He selected Japanese aesthetics for the cultural body because that was the body he lived in. He selected the William James vocabulary of mystical experience for the English-language packaging because that was the only philosophical English his Western readers could hear. The selection was coherent, beautiful, and powerful.

The Voices That Did Not Travel

Taixu (太虚, 1890–1947) was Suzuki’s near-contemporary and his closest analogue in ambition. He invented the slogan rénshēng fójiào (人生佛教, “Buddhism for human life”) that would later evolve into the “Humanistic Buddhism” of Yin Shun, Hsing Yun, and the Tzu Chi 慈济 foundation. In 1928–1929 he toured Europe and the United States, lecturing in Paris, London, and Chicago, founding a short-lived World Buddhist Institute, publishing English-language pamphlets. In international intent and personal energy, Taixu was on Suzuki’s scale. But his project ran in the opposite direction. Taixu was trying to universalize the tradition, to make it modern, social, world-facing, capable of dialogue with Christianity and science. He was not trying to bind Buddhism to a vision of cultural uniqueness. Back in China, the tradition was under siege. New Culture intellectuals had named Buddhism a superstition holding the nation back. Taixu was running a rescue operation, not a cultural export..

Ouyang Jingwu (欧阳竟无, 1871–1943) at the China Inland Buddhist Institute in Nanjing was doing something even more remote from Suzuki’s project: recovering the Yogācāra (唯识) tradition, retrieving texts from Tibetan and Japanese sources to reconstruct the seventh-century scholastic Buddhism of Xuanzang. His argument was that Chan, Pure Land, and Tiantai had drifted from the rigorous Indian original, and that a return to the precise terminology of the Cheng Weishi Lun 成唯識論 was the only honest path. Suzuki was selling intuition. Ouyang was selling rigor.

Master Xuyun (虚云, 1840–1959) was the most genuinely accomplished living Chan master of the period, the only figure in centuries to hold transmission in all five surviving houses. He lived to 120, rebuilt dozens of ancestral monasteries, weathered the Taiping rebellion, the late Qing collapse, the Japanese invasion, and the early years of the People’s Republic. He did not write in English. He did not travel west. He existed inside a way of being that the modern publicity logic had not yet captured.

And then there is Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962), and the encounter the article cannot skip.

In 1926, while researching at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Museum, Hu Shi discovered Dunhuang manuscript fragments of Shenhui (神会, 684–758), the disciple who had campaigned to install Huineng’s “Southern School” as the orthodox lineage. Through the 1930s Hu published a sequence of philological papers, Shenhui heshang yiji (神会和尚遗集). He argued that the central narrative of Chan history, the Bodhidharma transmission and the supremacy of Huineng’s sudden enlightenment, was largely an 8th-century sectarian construction by Shenhui to elevate his own teacher’s lineage. Hu was using the methods of European philology what he and his Columbia colleagues had been doing to Confucianism: dismantling the received story by tracing it to specific authors with specific motives at specific moments.

In April 1953, in Philosophy East and West, the journal founded at the University of Hawai’i in 1951 specifically to host such conversations, Hu Shi published “Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in China: Its History and Method.“ Suzuki replied in the same issue with “Zen: A Reply to Hu Shih.“ The exchange has become the most-cited debate in the modern study of the tradition.

Hu Shi argued that Chan must be returned to the intellectual history that produced it, to the specific dynastic, political, and sectarian conditions in which it took shape. Suzuki replied that Chan, in its essence, could not be reached by the historian’s method at all. Satori 开悟 was prior to history. To historicize Chan was to miss it.

One scholar, in 1953, was demystifying the tradition. The other, in the same pages, was re-mystifying it. Both were writing in English, both addressing the same Western philosophical audience.

It was about the shape of the East that the West had been looking for since the late 19th century, mystical, aesthetic, beyond reason, available as a counterweight to Western instrumental modernity. Japan, since the Meiji period, had been deliberately shaping itself into that form: Okakura Kakuzō’s Book of Tea (1906), Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido (1900), Imagism’s discovery of haiku (1913), and Suzuki’s Zen (from 1927) were not separate projects. They were a coordinated cultural offering, supported by a state that needed a non-political vocabulary of distinctness. The continent in the same decades was offering the West something else: the agonized self-criticism of its own intellectuals, the rural pathos of Pearl Buck’s translations, the warlord chaos of the news reports.

Share

What Remains

The full irony took half a century to surface. After the Ming–Qing transition, Chan in its homeland entered a long institutional decline. Pure Land devotionalism dominated the practice. By the 19th century, many Song-era curricula were better preserved in Japanese monasteries than in their places of origin.

Late 20th-century scholarship, Yanagida Seizan in Kyoto, John McRae’s Seeing through Zen (2003), Bernard Faure’s The Rhetoric of Immediacy (1991), Robert Sharf’s “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism” (1993) b,egan the patient work of dismantling the Suzuki narrative from inside the Western academy. Their work has flowed back into the homeland’s own scholarship; researchers at Peking University, Fudan, and Academia Sinica today read McRae and Faure as foundational. The popular interest Suzuki created funded the academic infrastructure. That infrastructure exposed his construction. The loop is recursion.

If my insights brought you a fresh perspective, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee. Your generosity fuels my writing.