“What if… I had?”
“…Hm?”
A vendor heading home passed by them from up ahead. Not having expected such an answer, Xigua turned to look at Ning Yi, faintly puzzled.
Ning Yi kept walking at an easy pace, glancing down at her hand in his. “Twenty years ago—the very day I married Tan’er—someone hit me on the head with a rock and knocked me out. When I woke up, I’d forgotten everything. I told you about this a long time ago, didn’t I?”
“Mm.” Xigua said. “I remember it was someone called Xue Jin. The first time I heard about it, I even thought about going with you someday to settle the score.”
“Never mind that—the Ning Liheng before the beating was a foolish bookworm. It was only after getting hit that he finally came to his senses. Might as well be grateful to the man.”
Xigua looked at him and smiled. “Tan’er says privately, too, that it’s strange—before she married you, she visited you twice and you only knew how to spout classical phrases. It wasn’t until after the wedding that she found out you had so many sly little schemes bottled up inside you—that’s what’s called ‘a quiet one hides a wild streak’…” Seeing Ning Yi shoot her a look, she added, “Fine, get to the point. Where did you see it?”
Ning Yi pulled back his glare and smiled. “You might not believe it if I tell you. During those days I was knocked out, my spirit wandered beyond this world, and I saw… scenes from another world. It was all hazy, like I glimpsed a history spanning over a hundred years… Don’t pinch me, I said you might not believe it, but hear me out first, won’t you—a foolish bookworm suddenly coming to his senses, doesn’t that strike you as strange too? Since ancient times there have been so many stories of spirits wandering beyond this world—Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly and all that. What’s so strange about me glimpsing another possibility for this world?”
Xigua’s expression had already turned somewhat helpless, and she laughed without much patience. “Fine, go on then. What happened to that world?”
“They say that a thousand years from now, our land here still never developed a systematic science of things…”
“So everyone for those thousand years was just dead weight?”
“That’s not quite it. After our current dynasty, the Confucian metaphysical system rose to absolute dominance. They pushed the spirit of ‘the people may be led’ even deeper—ruler as ruler, minister as minister, father as father, son as son—laying out an entire framework of status and roles for everyone under heaven. Without outside enemies, they were self-consistent internally; with outside enemies, they assimilated them. So for the next thousand years, dynasties rose and fell, split and reunited, and there was no need for a science of things to emerge—everyone could still scrape by well enough. Then… that Europe I told you about, the place that’s in such a sorry state now—necessity breeds change, and change opens the way forward—they were the first to develop a science of things…”
“…This is starting to sound like the opening of one of those Bamboo Records storytelling shows.” Xigua pursed her lips. “Why should it be that we never develop a science of things even a thousand years from now?”
“Er…” Ning Yi thought about it. “Let’s just say life over here was too comfortable. The common people suffered too, sure, but even so, half the time we could still afford to support a huge class of well-fed, well-dressed people living in comfort. Without the pressure of survival, those well-off people preferred to study metaphysics and philosophy, cared more about right and wrong, and cultivated themselves as people more carefully. But conditions over in Europe were worse than ours—people were dying left and right at the drop of a hat—so they were relatively more pragmatic, and the moment they grasped some small principle, they put it to use. So we cared more about grand illusions about the whole, while they were able to focus relatively more on the details… not necessarily correct, but let’s just say that for now.”
“Get to the point.” Ning Yi spread his hands. “Anyway, one way or another, the science of things ends up being their invention. A thousand years from now, the power ruling over this land of ours is a foreign regime—the Manchus—who boast to everyone that they’re descendants of today’s Jin people… Don’t laugh, it really is that much of a coincidence…”
“Fine, so a thousand years later the Jin people finally do get to rule the world after all.” Xigua held back her complaints about his lack of originality. “Go on.”
“The Manchus sealed the country off from the outside world. Though they had no science of things, their Confucian art of statecraft flourished, and they believed themselves the Celestial Empire, living quite well. But then the Europeans came, sailing sturdy ships mounted with fierce cannons, carrying muskets. They came to plunder, to do business, forcing this Qing dynasty to open its ports and protect their interests. At first everyone was merely curious about each other, no talk of fighting yet, but as trade dragged on, friction slowly set in…”
“You can’t possibly write this book—if you write it, they’ll know exactly what you’re planning to do next… who writes themselves as the villain…”
Ning Yi shot her a look and decided to ignore the interruption. “The Europeans’ firearms were formidable, but the Qing still saw themselves as the Celestial Empire. The ruler in power at the time was an empress dowager named Cixi—nothing to do with Zhou Pei—and she declared without hesitation that the Qing would go to war against the entire world. And once that war began, everyone finally discovered that the Celestial Empire was already meat on the chopping block—armies of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands strong, couldn’t even beat back a force of a few thousand of the enemy’s men.”
“In the world of nations, falling behind means getting beaten. Once you can’t win, all the good things within your own borders get carved up by your enemies under this pretext or that. From that point on, the whole of China fell into a state of… being invaded and partitioned in turns by many nations, Europe included. Gold and silver were plundered, populations were massacred, cultural relics were seized, homes were burned down—and this went on… for decades, over a hundred years…”
By this point Ning Yi’s words had slowed down. Xigua had at first thought her husband was joking, but by now she found herself drawn in despite herself, brow knitting. “Nonsense… the Martial Dynasty was beaten by the Jin like that too, and we came through it in little more than a decade. Even in the past, being beaten down for a hundred straight years like that isn’t so common—if you’re falling short of someone else, can’t you just learn from them? Even building gunpowder and cannons from scratch, Liheng, took you barely over ten years!”
Ning Yi smiled faintly. “The Manchus’ backwardness was first and foremost a backwardness in the science of things, of course, but that’s only the surface. The deeper problem was already a backwardness in the people themselves and in the culture of the time—Confucianism, starting from where we stand now, went on developing for another thousand years, weaving an even more solid net internally, suppressing people’s very way of thinking, dragging at their hands and feet in every aspect of life, work, and social relations. To defeat the Europeans, all you’d need is to develop the science of things better than they did—but if your very mode of thinking isn’t suited to doing science, then even if you try to do what they do, you’ll never catch up to your enemy… Xigua, the reason I’m selling my goods to all of them today is exactly this—if they don’t change how they think, they’ll always be one step slower than me…”
He drew a breath. “Back to the Qing—beaten, unable to catch up, the Qing knew they had to change. But how much should they change? Xigua, one universal tendency in human society is that any established system will try its hardest to preserve its original form. Even when beaten and forced to adjust, people always lean toward doing just enough to get by. So at first, the emperor carved out a department within the cabinet—fine, let’s learn from the West, learn the science of things, learn to build muskets and cannons ourselves, and use this department to protect ourselves. This is what’s called the ‘Westernization Movement.'”
Xigua pinched his palm. “And you gave it such a disgusting name too…”
“What’s disgusting about ‘Westernization Movement’… never mind. The Westernization Movement was the court carving out a department to carry out change—either learning to build muskets and cannons themselves, or spending money to buy muskets and cannons from others, and using those to drill so-called new troops. But then they discovered that this wasn’t enough either—the troops had problems, the officials had problems, the nation kept getting beaten, ceding land and paying reparations to a dozen or so small European nations, kneeling for decades. Everyone realized, ah, the Westernization Movement won’t do either—they’d need something with even more sweeping change, the entire court would have to change…”
“By then the Qing was already a nation nearly three hundred years old, its system bloated, corruption running rampant. If reform in a single department wasn’t enough, then a top-to-bottom Reform and Renewal was needed. People felt that the past three hundred years of using the Confucian system to keep gelding people’s fighting spirit wasn’t working either—the populace needed to awaken, the wretched masses at the bottom needed to be given more benefits and standing, officials needed to be made more approachable, the system needed to be made cleaner. So next came the Reform Movement.”
“But no matter how badly it was beaten, a feudal nation three hundred years old carries burdens too deep to easily undo. Those who’d been benefiting all along refused to yield ground, internal conflicts intensified, and in the end those calling for and leading the reform were defeated. Since they’d been defeated, the problem remained unsolved—the nation was still kneeling before others outside. If reform through legal means wouldn’t work, then more radical paths had to be taken… People began to say, we need equality, there can be no more Qing, no more court, no more emperor…”
“And so, internal unrest began. Rebels appeared, warlords appeared, everyone wanted to overthrow the emperor, called for equality, for enlightening the people’s minds, for granting civil rights, for attending to the people’s livelihood… Step by step, it grew ever more intense, and decades after that first defeat, they overthrew the emperor, hoping things would finally get better.”
Xigua drew a breath. “You killed the emperor in this book of yours—surely things get better fast after that…”
Ning Yi smiled. “Yes, it seemed that way… A world-shattering feat, and society did improve somewhat. Then the warlords who’d gained power wanted to become emperor themselves. Once such a warlord was overthrown, the next ones finally gave up on that idea—old warlords became new warlords, and calls for equality within society kept on going. People had begun to realize that the problem of the human being was the root problem, that the problem of culture was the root problem. So under those circumstances, many people proposed thoroughly abandoning the old Confucian mode of thought and establishing a new one that could pair properly with the science of things…”
“Throughout this whole process, they kept on getting beaten. The new warlords couldn’t solve the problem; their rejection of the old culture wasn’t thorough enough, so the problem remained unsolved. A new order kept brewing, and gradually leaders with real ideas came together into a progressive party. To resist the outside enemy, a great many members of the elite class formed a government, formed an army, set aside old grudges as much as they could, and fought together. It was around this time that the islanders across the sea had already grown powerful through repeated wars of conquest and partition, and even wanted to rule over the whole of China…”
“Tsk, those short island dwarves—your story is really…”
Xigua made a sound of protest, only to have Ning Yi reach over and rap her on the head.
“…The government formed by the elite class still couldn’t undo China’s thousands of years of deep-seated burdens, because a large part of their own thinking was still the old thinking. Once they became officials and held power, they grew accustomed to looking out for themselves. As the nation grew weaker and weaker, and the pie kept shrinking, everyone inevitably wanted to grab a little something for themselves—the higher officials grabbed more, the lower ones grabbed less. At first, maybe they only wanted to live a little better than the starving common people, but gradually, seeing everyone around them doing the same, and seeing that all their peers considered it excusable, everyone rushed to start grabbing all the more…”
“…Military pay was divvied up and pocketed; the conscripted men sent to the army would starve to death, half of them, before they even got there. The enemy invaded from outside, officials hollowed the nation out from within, supplies ran scarce and the people had no way to live… By this point, the whole of China had already been kneeling before the eyes of the entire world for a hundred years—growing stronger time after time, still not enough; reforming time after time, still not enough… perhaps what was needed then was an even more decisive, even more thorough reform!”
“…The Westernization Movement, measured against a Qing dynasty too burdened to change, was progress. The Reform Movement, measured against the Westernization Movement, was a further step forward. The old warlords replacing the emperor was another step forward. The new warlords replacing the old warlords, another step further still. And then the elite class—idealistic and ambitious, yet inevitably harboring some selfish motives too—replacing the new warlords, another step forward yet again. But what comes after that? Xigua, you have ideals, you have ambitions. Chen Shanjun has ideals, has ambitions. But among the people under you, how many can you actually find who are like that? A little bit of selfishness here and there is forgivable enough—we can just rein it in with strict military discipline… but how do you take the next step forward from there?”
“At that point, perhaps that era itself declared: things can’t go on like this any longer. And so, the system that truly proclaimed equality for all, that put everything toward serving the people, finally emerged. Those who joined that system would truly give up part of their own self-interest, would truly believe in selfless devotion to the common good—not the kind of belief where a great official condescends to decide things for the people, but a belief that they were truly equal to everyone else in the world, that becoming an official was simply a different division of labor—just as someone has to haul away the night soil, someone has to be an official…”
“Could there really be people like that?” Xigua said.
“Of course it was never a hundred percent like that, but the degree of that kind of equality among them was almost beyond belief. Because after a hundred years of humiliation and failure, having watched the entire nation utterly lose all dignity, most of them had finally come to realize… that without this, there was no way out. Many of these people were themselves elites—they could easily have gone into that elite-formed political system too, and if they’d thought a little more of themselves, everyone would have understood. But they had seen with their own eyes that that level of effort alone could not save this world.”
“They kept pushing and remolding themselves, and an entire army, an entire government, came to genuinely believe from the heart in serving the people. It was at that point that the most incorruptible force in the several-thousand-year history of the Chinese people—one might even say in the whole history of human society—was finally born there… you could also say, they were driven to it by necessity.”
There was longing and admiration in Ning Yi’s words, and Xigua looked at him. She naturally didn’t feel deeply drawn into the story itself, but she could tell, looking at the man beside her, that he wasn’t speaking in the mood of someone merely telling a tale. This left her faintly puzzled, and unable to help herself, she found herself thinking about it further.
“So… then what?”