送交者: xj 于 2005-1-31, 17:25:59:
回答: 大部分同意。欧洲就象咱们春秋战国 由 xj 于 2005-1-31, 17:09:08:
是不是考古的人因果关系都是反着来的。
CHAPTER 16 How China Became Chinese
IMMIGRATION, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, MULTILINGUALISM, ethnic diversity—my state of California was among the pioneers of these controversial policies and is now pioneering a backlash against them. A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public school system, where my sons are being educated, fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children. Those children represent over 80 languages spoken in the home, with English-speaking whites in the minority. Every single one of my sons' playmates has at least one parent or grandparent who was born outside the United States; that's true of three of my own sons' four grandparents. But immigration is merely restoring the diversity that America held for thousands of years. Before European settlement, the mainland United States was home to hundreds of Native American tribes and languages and came under control of a single government only within the last hundred years.
In these respects the United States is a thoroughly "normal" country. All but one of the world's six most populous nations are melting pots that achieved political unification recently, and that still support hundreds of languages and ethnic groups. For example, Russia, once a small Slavic state centered on Moscow, did not even begin its expansion beyond the Ural Mountains until A.D. 1582. From then until the 19th century, Russia proceeded to swallow up dozens of non-Slavic peoples, many of which retain their original language and cultural identity. Just as American history is the story of how our continent's expanse became American, Russia's history is the story of how Russia became Russian. India, Indonesia, and Brazil are also recent political creations (or re-creations, in the case of India), home to about 850, 670, and 210 languages, respectively.
The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world's most populous nation, China. Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople. It was already unified politically in 221 B.C. and has remained so for most of the centuries since then. From the beginnings of literacy in China, it has had only a single writing system, whereas modern Europe uses dozens of modified alphabets. Of China's 1.2 billion people, over 800 million speak Mandarin, the language with by far the largest number of native speakers in the world. Some 300 million others speak seven other languages as similar to Mandarin, and to each other, as Spanish is to Italian. Thus, not only is China not a melting pot, but it seems absurd to ask how China became Chinese. China has been Chinese, almost from the beginnings of its recorded history.
We take this seeming unity of China so much for granted that we forget how astonishing it is. One reason why we should not have expected such unity is genetic. While a coarse racial classification of world peoples lumps all Chinese people as so-called Mongoloids, that category conceals much more variation than the differences between Swedes, Italians, and Irish within Europe. In particular, North and South Chinese are genetically and physically rather different: North Chinese are most similar to Tibetans and Nepalese, while South Chinese are similar to Vietnamese and Filipinos. My North and South Chinese friends can often distinguish each other at a glance by physical appearance: the North Chinese tend to be taller, heavier, paler, with more pointed noses, and with smaller eyes that appear more "slanted" (because of what is termed their epicanthic fold).
North and South China differ in environment and climate as well: the north is drier and colder; the south, wetter and hotter. Genetic differences arising in those differing environments imply a long history of moderate isolation between peoples of North and South China. How did those peoples nevertheless end up with the same or very similar languages and cultures?
China's apparent linguistic near-unity is also puzzling in view of the linguistic disunity of other long-settled parts of the world. For instance, we saw in the last chapter that New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of China's area and with only about 40,000 years of human history, has a thousand languages, including dozens of language groups whose differences are far greater than those among the eight main Chinese languages. Western Europe has evolved or acquired about 40 languages just in the 6,000-8,000 years since the arrival of Indo-European languages, including languages as different as English, Finnish, and Russian. Yet fossils attest to human presence in China for over half a million years. What happened to the tens of thousands of distinct languages that must have arisen in China over that long time span?
These paradoxes hint that China too was once diverse, as all other populous nations still are. China differs only by having been unified much earlier. Its "Sinification" involved the drastic homogenization of a huge region in an ancient melting pot, the repopulation of tropical Southeast Asia, and the exertion of a massive influence on Japan, Korea, and possibly even India. Hence the history of China offers the key to the history of all of East Asia. This chapter will tell the story of how China did become Chinese.
A convenient starting point is a detailed linguistic map of China (see Figure 16.1). A glance at it is an eye-opener to all of us accustomed to thinking of China as monolithic. It turns out that, in addition to China's eight "big" languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as "Chinese"), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 "little" languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers. All these languages, "big" and "little," fall into four language families, which differ greatly in the compactness of their distributions.
At the one extreme, Mandarin and its relatives, which constitute the Chinese subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan language family, are distributed continuously from North to South China. One could walk through China, from Manchuria in the north to the Gulf of Tonkin in the south, while remaining entirely within land occupied by native speakers of Mandarin and its relatives. The other three families have fragmented distributions, being spoken by "islands" of people surrounded by a "sea" of speakers of Chinese and other language families.
Especially fragmented is the distribution of the Miao-Yao (alias Hmong-Mien) family, which consists of 6 million speakers divided among about five languages, bearing the colorful names of Red Miao, White Miao (alias Striped Miao), Black Miao, Green Miao (alias Blue Miao), and Yao. Miao-Yao speakers live in dozens of small enclaves, all surrounded by speakers of other language families and scattered over an area of half a million square miles, extending from South China to Thailand. More than 100,000 Miao-speaking refugees from Vietnam have carried this language family to the United States, where they are better known under the alternative name of Hmong.
Another fragmented language group is the Austroasiatic family, whose most widely spoken languages are Vietnamese and Cambodian. The 60 million Austroasiatic speakers are scattered from Vietnam in the east to the Malay Peninsula in the south and to northern India in the west. The fourth and last of China's language families is the Tai-Kadai family (including Thai and Lao), whose 50 million speakers are distributed from South China southward into Peninsular Thailand and west to Myanmar (Figure 16.1).
Naturally, Miao-Yao speakers did not acquire their current fragmented distribution as a result of ancient helicopter flights that dropped them here and there over the Asian landscape. Instead, one might guess that they once had a more nearly continuous distribution, which became fragmented as speakers of other language families expanded or induced Miao-Yao speakers to abandon their tongues. In fact, much of that process of linguistic fragmentation occurred within the past 2,500 years and is well documented historically. The ancestors of modern speakers of Thai, Lao, and Burmese all moved south from South China and adjacent areas to their present locations within historical times, successively inundating the settled descendants of previous migrations. Speakers of Chinese languages were especially vigorous in replacing and linguistically converting other ethnic groups, whom Chinese speakers looked down upon as primitive and inferior. The recorded history of China's Zhou Dynasty, from 1100 to 221 B.C., describes the conquest and absorption of most of China's non-Chinese-speaking population by Chinese-speaking states.
We can use several types of reasoning to try to reconstruct the linguistic map of East Asia as of several thousand years ago. First, we can reverse the historically known linguistic expansions of recent millennia. Second, we can reason that modern areas with just a single language or related language group occupying a large, continuous area testify to a recent geographic expansion of that group, such that not enough historical time has elapsed for it to differentiate into many languages. Finally, we can reason conversely that modern areas with a high diversity of languages within a given language family lie closer to the early center of distribution of that language family.
Using those three types of reasoning to turn back the linguistic clock, we conclude that North China was originally occupied by speakers of Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages; that different parts of South China were variously occupied by speakers of Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai languages; and that Sino-Tibetan speakers have replaced most speakers of those other families over South China. An even more drastic linguistic upheaval must have swept over tropical Southeast Asia to the south of China—in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Peninsular Malaysia. Whatever languages were originally spoken there must now be entirely extinct, because all of the modern languages of those countries appear to be recent invaders, mainly from South China or, in a few cases, from Indonesia. Since Miao-Yao languages barely survived into the present, we might also guess that South China once harbored still other language families besides Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, but that those other families left no modern surviving languages. As we shall see, the Austronesian language family (to which all Philippine and Polynesian languages belong) may have been one of those other families that vanished from the Chinese mainland, and that we know only because it spread to Pacific islands and survived there.
These language replacements in East Asia remind us of the spread of European languages, especially English and Spanish, into the New World, formerly home to a thousand or more Native American languages. We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. The immediate causes of that language replacement were the advantages in technology and political organization, stemming ultimately from the advantage of an early rise of food production, that invading Europeans held over Native Americans. Essentially the same processes accounted for the replacement of Aboriginal Australian languages by English, and of subequatorial Africa's original Pygmy and Khoisan languages by Bantu languages.
Hence East Asia's linguistic upheavals raise a corresponding question: what enabled Sino-Tibetan speakers to spread from North China to South China, and speakers of Austroasiatic and the other original South China language families to spread south into tropical Southeast Asia? Here, we must turn to archaeology for evidence of the technological, political, and agricultural advantages that some Asians evidently gained over other Asians.
everywhere else in the world, the archaeological record in East Asia for most of human history reveals only the debris of hunter-gatherers using unpolished stone tools and lacking pottery. The first East Asian evidence for something different comes from China, where crop remains, bones of domestic animals, pottery, and polished (Neolithic) stone tools appear by around 7500 B.C. That date is within a thousand years of the beginning of the Neolithic Age and food production in the Fertile Crescent. But because the previous millennium in China is poorly known archaeologically, one cannot decide at present whether the origins of Chinese food production were contemporaneous with those in the Fertile Crescent, slightly earlier, or slightly later. At the least, we can say that China was one of the world's first centers of plant and animal domestication.
China may actually have encompassed two or more independent centers of origins of food production. I already mentioned the ecological differences between China's cool, dry north and warm, wet south. At a given latitude, there are also ecological distinctions between the coastal lowlands and the interior uplands. Different wild plants are native to these disparate environments and would thus have been variously available to incipient farmers in various parts of China. In fact, the earliest identified crops were two drought-resistant species of millet in North China, but rice in South China, suggesting the possibility of separate northern and southern centers of plant domestication.
Chinese sites with the earliest evidence of crops also contained bones of domestic pigs, dogs, and chickens. These domestic animals and crops were gradually joined by China's many other domesticates. Among the animals, water buffalo were most important (for pulling plows), while silkworms, ducks, and geese were others. Familiar later Chinese crops include soybeans, hemp, citrus fruit, tea, apricots, peaches, and pears. In addition, just as Eurasia's east-west axis permitted many of these Chinese animals and crops to spread westward in ancient times, West Asian domesticates also spread eastward to China and became important there. Especially significant western contributions to ancient China's economy have been wheat and barley, cows and horses, and (to a lesser extent) sheep and goats.
As elsewhere in the world, in China food production gradually led to the other hallmarks of "civilization" discussed in Chapters 11-14. A superb Chinese tradition of bronze metallurgy had its origins in the third millennium B.C. and eventually resulted in China's developing by far the earliest cast-iron production in the world, around 500 B.C. The following 1,500 years saw the outpouring of Chinese technological inventions, mentioned in Chapter 13, that included paper, the compass, the wheelbarrow, and gunpowder. Fortified towns emerged in the third millennium B.C., with cemeteries whose great variation between unadorned and luxuriously furnished graves bespeaks emerging class differences. Stratified societies whose rulers could mobilize large labor forces of commoners are also attested by huge urban defensive walls, big palaces, and eventually the Grand Canal (the world's longest canal, over 1,000 miles long), linking North and South China. Writing is preserved from the second millennium B.C. but probably arose earlier. Our archaeological knowledge of China's emerging cities and states then becomes supplemented by written accounts of China's first dynasties, going back to the Xia Dynasty, which arose around 2000 B.C.
As for food production's more sinister by-product of infectious diseases, we cannot specify where within the Old World most major diseases of Old World origin arose. However, European writings from Roman and medieval times clearly describe the arrival of bubonic plague and possibly smallpox from the east, so these germs could be of Chinese or East Asian origin. Influenza (derived from pigs) is even more likely to have arisen in China, since pigs were domesticated so early and became so important there.
China's size and ecological diversity spawned many separate local cultures, distinguishable archaeologically by their differing styles of pottery and artifacts. In the fourth millennium b.c. those local cultures expanded geographically and began to interact, compete with each other, and coalesce. Just as exchanges of domesticates between ecologically diverse regions enriched Chinese food production, exchanges between culturally diverse regions enriched Chinese culture and technology, and fierce competition between warring chiefdoms drove the formation of ever larger and more centralized states (Chapter 14).
While China's north-south gradient retarded crop diffusion, the gradient was less of a barrier there than in the Americas or Africa, because China's north-south distances were smaller; and because China's is transected neither by desert, as is Africa and northern Mexico, nor by a narrow isthmus, as is Central America. Instead, China's long east-west rivers (the Yellow River in the north, the Yangtze River in the south) facilitated diffusion of crops and technology between the coast and inland, while its broad east-west expanse and relatively gentle terrain, which eventually permitted those two river systems to be joined by canals, facilitated north-south exchanges. All these geographic factors contributed to the early cultural and political unification of China, whereas western Europe, with a similar area but a more rugged terrain and no such unifying rivers, has resisted cultural and political unification to this day.
Some developments spread from south to north in China, especially iron smelting and rice cultivation. But the predominant direction of spread was from north to south. That trend is clearest for writing: in contrast to western Eurasia, which produced a plethora of early writing systems, such as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittite, Minoan, and the Semitic alphabet, China developed just a single well-attested writing system. It was perfected in North China, spread and preempted or replaced any other nascent system, and evolved into the writing still used in China today. Other major features of North Chinese societies that spread southward were bronze technology, Sino-Tibetan languages, and state formation. All three of China's first three dynasties, the Xia and Shang and Zhou Dynasties, arose in North China in the second millennium B.C.
Preserved writings of the first millennium B.C. show that ethnic Chinese already tended then (as many still do today) to feel culturally superior to non-Chinese "barbarians," while North Chinese tended to regard even South Chinese as barbarians. For example, a late Zhou Dynasty writer of the first millennium B.C. described China's other peoples as follows: "The people of those five regions—the Middle states and the Rong, Yi, and other wild tribes around them—had all their several natures, which they could not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They had their hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food without its being cooked by fire." The Zhou author went on to describe wild tribes to the south, west, and north as indulging in equally barbaric practices, such as turning their feet inward, tattooing their foreheads, wearing skins, living in caves, not eating cereals, and, of course, eating their food raw.
States organized by or modeled on that Zhou Dynasty of North China spread to South China during the first millennium B.C., culminating in China's political unification under the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. Its cultural unification accelerated during that same period, as literate "civilized" Chinese states absorbed, or were copied by, the illiterate "barbarians." Some of that cultural unification was ferocious: for instance, the first Qin emperor condemned all previously written historical books as worthless and ordered them burned, much to the detriment of our understanding of early Chinese history and writing. Those and other draconian measures must have contributed to the spread of North China's Sino-Tibetan languages over most of China, and to reducing the Miao-Yao and other language families to their present fragmented distributions.
Within East Asia, China's head start in food production, technology, writing, and state formation had the consequence that Chinese innovations also contributed heavily to developments in neighboring regions. For instance, until the fourth millennium B.C. most of tropical Southeast Asia was still occupied by hunter-gatherers making pebble and flake stone tools belonging to what is termed the Hoabinhian tradition, named after the site of Hoa Binh, in Vietnam. Thereafter, Chinese-derived crops, Neolithic technology, village living, and pottery similar to that of South China spread into tropical Southeast Asia, probably accompanied by South China's language families. The historical southward expansions of Burmese, Laotians, and Thais from South China completed the Sinification of tropical Southeast Asia. All those modern peoples are recent offshoots of their South Chinese cousins.
So overwhelming was this Chinese steamroller that the former peoples of tropical Southeast Asia have left behind few traces in the region's modern populations. Just three relict groups of hunter-gatherers—the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islanders, and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka—remain to suggest that tropical Southeast Asia's former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like modern New Guineans and unlike the light-skinned, straight-haired South
Chinese and the modern tropical Southeast Asians who are their offshoots. Those relict Negritos of Southeast Asia may be the last survivors of the source population from which New Guinea was colonized. The Semang Negritos persisted as hunter-gatherers trading with neighboring farmers but adopted an Austroasiatic language from those farmers—much as, we shall see, Philippine Negrito and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers adopted languages from their farmer trading partners. Only on the remote Andaman Islands do languages unrelated to the South Chinese language families persist—the last linguistic survivors of what must have been hundreds of now extinct aboriginal Southeast Asian languages.
Even Korea and Japan were heavily influenced by China, although their geographic isolation from it ensured that they did not lose their languages or physical and genetic distinctness, as did tropical Southeast Asia. Korea and Japan adopted rice from China in the second millennium B.C., bronze metallurgy by the first millennium B.C., and writing in the first millennium A.D. China also transmitted West Asian wheat and barley to Korea and Japan.
In thus describing China's seminal role in East Asian civilization, we should not exaggerate. It is not the case that all cultural advances in East Asia stemmed from China and that Koreans, Japanese, and tropical Southeast Asians were noninventive barbarians who contributed nothing. The ancient Japanese developed some of the oldest pottery in the world and settled as hunter-gatherers in villages subsisting on Japan's rich seafood resources, long before the arrival of food production. Some crops were probably domesticated first or independently in Japan, Korea, and tropical Southeast Asia.
But China's role was nonetheless disproportionate. For example, the prestige value of Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han'gul alphabet. That persistence of Chinese writing in Japan and Korea is a vivid 20th-century legacy of plant and animal domestication in China nearly 10,000 years ago. Thanks to the achievements of East Asia's first farmers, China became Chinese, and peoples from Thailand to (as we shall see in the next chapter) Easter Island became their cousins.