From Cathaysian States to China

By Zhongjing Liu

If you know how to come up with the right questions, you may or may not be able to find the correct answer. But if you insist on refusing to ask real questions and instead put forward some false questions that don't originally exist, then you certainly won't get the right ones. Therefore, I suggest that everyone in the future could speak or do something according to the actual occasions since it is related to your own interests, but you must also understand deep down inside what kind of environment you are really in. If someone tells you that China has established a nation-state through the modern revolution, then why did all the things of a normal nation-state should have had fail to appear?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zhongjing Liu
• Release date: May 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463343913

Zhongjing Liu

Historian, ex-medical examiner, author of Canons and Chronicles: China's Historical Construction | 《經與史》作者,曾刀下閱屍、現筆下論史

Book preview

From Cathaysian States to China

Published by Zhongjing Liu at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Zhongjing Liu

Lecturer: Zhongjing Liu （刘仲敬）

Time: March 27, 2016

For Chinese version,

Transcriber: Three Horses （三马兄）

For English version,

Translator: Simon of Cyrene

Cover maker: Fuyukawa Mame （冬川豆）

Note:

1. In case of any discrepancy between the Chinese version and the English version, the Chinese version shall prevail.

2. For Chinese version, please look at: 大陆告别演讲：从华夏到中国

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/815466

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Contents:

Lecture

Q&A

Lecture

The history of East Asia as we know is a product of the inhabitants of various ethnic groups in the East Asia region who, at different times, identified themselves and constructed the structure of their own world. We know that with regard to the existing archaeological evidence, the earliest civilizations emerged in the fertile crescent of West Asia, which currently ranges from Israel to southern Syria, and all the way to northern Iraq. This place, if you draw it out, has a shape of a crescent moon. The left part of the new moon is in Israel, the right part is in northern Iraq, and the middle part of the crescent is in Syria and Jordan. This is the place with the most archaeological sites in the world, and they are archaeologically the oldest. Judging from the available evidence, all civilizations in the world are directly or indirectly derived from this central point; the closest regions to this center are the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, which were touched by the civilization in the second tier; the third batch is the Indus Valley and Greece; then the Far East. Therefore, the Peninsula of East Asia in which we are located is geographically relatively isolated. At the time of the first wave of civilization, we did not even have decent pottery and buildings here. When the earliest bronze civilization in East Asia began to emerge, the first wave of civilized countries in the West Asia region had already come to their ends. The time gap between the two is about 3,000 years.

By the current archaeological evidence, there had been probably two routes of the eastward flow of civilization: one went through Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and then passed through the Tarim Basin to the east into the Central Plains; one also came from the Mesopotamia and passed through the Indus Valley, India, and Myanmar, into the southwestern part of East Asia. It then entered Bashulia and Vietnam, and later reached the Yangtze River. These two civilization lines were of a multi-ethnic nature when they began. The orders and degrees of development of their civilizations were generally proportional to their distance from the central area of civilization. For example, when the bronze casting technique of the so-called Sanxingdui Civilization in the region of Bashulia reached its peak, there weren't even decent buildings nor artifacts in the ruins of the Central Plains. When the sacrificial ceremonies in the Sun Temple and other regions of Basulia were very grand, the sites in the Heluo area were just basically of exorcism.

Sites close to Wuhan and near the Jianghan Plain were basically something surrounded by earth walls that were just a bit more than a meter or even less than a meter high. The very thing that was considered to be the origin of the civilization of the pre-Qin era, the Banpo Village, was in fact, a village of a small number of people. The residents of the village just dug a hole in the ground and covered some thatch over it. One such round hole with a thatch roof and dozens of people lived in it was the peak of civilization in the Yellow River Basin at that time. At the same time, in Mesopotamia, the various city-states of the pre-Abraham period had already produced a complete building system. The ruins of Ur before the flood had at least 22 floors. Even among their peers, the local citizens had the same buildings as the current American garden houses, which had two storeys, a garden, and nearby vegetable gardens. The living standards of the cave dwellers in Banpo Village could never be compared with that of the Ur citizens.

When the bronze wares and the chariot technology were finally introduced into the Central Plains, they created what we know as Shang dynasty. The East Asia where Shang was located was by then still a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural broken structure. As far as the skeletons we have found in each site of Shang people are concerned, the ethnic structure was very complicated because we could see giants of nearly two meters tall at the sites of Shang or before that, and dwarf residents who were shorter than 1.5 meters. Some of the skeletons have obvious red hair or other white features, which were very different from the current inhabitants. It is reasonable to speculate that at the time, even the residents in the core area of the Yellow River Basin were of different ethnic groups and cultural groups.

There was no such thing as Huaxia (Cathay) at that time, let alone the concept of China (Central Country). Back then, the commonly used concept in the Shang dynasty era was Fang Guo. Fang, which contains the meaning of orientation, may be related to the sacrificial system of the Shang dynasty; Guo (country) has a clear meaning. According to the word building method of the character, it is an image of city wall surrounding a warrior that holds a dagger-axe, which indicates that a country (guo) is a castle defended by the armed forces. Where there was a castle for defense was a country, while a place without the defense of a castle was Ye (the wilderness). If there was a country, it meant that organized ruling groups and armed groups were already in place. In Marxist terms, they had classes and countries. Therefore, they had civilization. Fang only represents a rough location. For example, there are words such as Gui Fang, Qiang Fang, Ren Fang, and Meng Fang, which represented different places. For instances, Reng Fang or Meng Fang represented the eastern boundary of the Shang dynasty, and Gui Fang represented the northwest boundary of the Shang Dynasty, and so on. Obviously, this was also related to the view of the universe structure in Shang people's own ritual system. Fang was only a rough position, which contained many different kinds of countries. Guo (countries), on the other hand, were a series of different political groups with governing powers. They were sometimes hostile against and sometimes reconciled with the Shang people.

In the process, we cannot find the word Xia. Although a large number of Oracle fragments have been translated, neither in the early Shang nor in the later period when Shang and Zhou coexisted had a country named itself Xia nor was called so. In the records from the late Western Zhou period and the early Spring and Autumn Period, we could tell that Zhou people thought that they had a certain relationship with Xia and even thought that they might have migrated from the Fen River basin, the core area of the legendary Xia Dynasty, to the Guanzhong Plain. However, the evidence was relatively late. In the middle of the Shang Dynasty, when the earliest record of Zhou emerged, there was no evidence that Zhou people acknowledged the existence of Xia or claimed to be related to Xia. The term Xia began to be used on a large scale only until early in the Spring and Autumn Period. At this time, the royal house of Zhou had moved eastward. The vassal world formed by both Shang and Zhou people began to call themselves the Xia States (Cathaysian States). The reason why the word emerged was mainly to distinguish themselves from other tribes that did not belong to the communities of Shang and Zhou descents. The concept behind the saying Barbarians invaded from the south and north, the central country is at the edge of distinction also started to appear in this period. The word central and country were linked together for the first time when King Wu of Zhou conquered the eastern Shang Dynasty. After he took over the Shang capital, he claimed to have dwelled in the central country, meaning that he had already occupied the great city at the center of the world and the whole universe should be under his rule. The "Central