In responding to a MOOC question on the basis for Later Imperial China’s unity, I express my identity or self-understanding as a Filipino in the context of history’s longue durée.
In HarvardX’s MOOC, ChinaX Part 4 (Literati China: Examinations, Neo-Confucianism and Later Imperial China (formerly titled A New National Culture)), History Prof. Peter Bol shares his theory on why China did not divide into smaller nations in the 2nd millennium AD (from the Song dynasty to the Qing dynasty).
Today’s People’s Republic of China (founded in 1949) encompasses a territory of many cultural and linguistic groups and claims a connection to past dynastic ruling families who spoke non-Mandarin languages. For example, the dominant language during the Yuan dynasty founded and ruled by Mongolian Khans was Mongolian.
Prof. Bol believes that after the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) and consequent disappearance of the feudal Great Clans in the north, the rise of literati elites from different social classes and the institution of national examinations were key to the transmission of shared values and the creation of a national culture.
According to Prof. Bol’s institutional-intellectual explanation, poetry and The Classics of Confucians and Neo-Confucians became part of the above shared culture throughout China. The material for the exams, which asked about literature and Confucian texts, would have united 2nd millennium AD Chinese elites - comprised of literati or scholars who studied for these civil service examinations and made up around 1% of the population - through a common culture across time and space.
After watching Prof. Bol’s presentation and interaction with his fellow professor Michael Szonyi, a social historian, learners were asked to give a short response to the following question:
How would you evaluate this explanation? What are its most persuasive arguments? Are there problems you see in any of these arguments?
Below is my answer (with some edits):
[Title] Philippine experience turns national exam theory on its head
Prof. Bol’s institutional-intellectual explanation is inspiring and reflects his years of learning Chinese intellectual history.
On the one hand, it explains how China was able to construct a common civil ideology despite its vast size covering many nations/ethnic groups and possessing many languages. The statistical analysis of 1% of the population consisting of literati involved at any given time on the state exams being able to transmit shared ideas on poetry and Confucianism to their relations appears justified by modern studies on social networks and the spread of (mis-)information.
On the other hand, different experiences of modern nation-states with a common civil service exam — but where political division or fragmentation continues to be a reality — appear to turn this institutional theory on its head.
For example, in the Philippines, civil service exams were first administered during the American colonial period of the early 20th century; they continued to be taken by Filipino citizens from hundreds of different ethnic and linguistic groups in the archipelago after our country became an independent nation-state in 1946.
Yet, from 1946 until the present, the Philippines has seen the cycling of strongmen or local bosses (and even heard calls to “federalize” and give autonomy to regions and reduce the central national government’s powers); maintained local cultures of patronage particularly in politics; and experienced numerous rebellions driven by class and religious conflicts.
For an archipelagic country like the Philippines, it appears that a common civil service exam has not fostered a shared national culture sufficiently strong (yet) to replace local cultural values of reciprocity; patronage; and loyalty to one’s family and barangay (kampung or clan).
Possible reasons for these differences between the Chinese and Philippine experiences are:
Geographical
While China is a landlocked country where travel and conquests by land were feasible for centuries, the Philippines is an archipelago of 7,100 islands (surrounded by natural moats!) where ethnic groups found their unique ecological-economic niches, and reciprocity among them, rather than land-territorial conquest, was found to be the more practical political strategy.
Political
While Chinese political theory appeared to recognize states as having fixed borders that needed to be defended and, ideally, expanded, Southeast Asian political formations influenced by Hindu-Buddhism, including those in ancient Philippines, have been described by scholars (informed by Indian philosopher Kautilya’s 350 BC treatise on statecraft) as mandalas that emphasized relationships, rather than territorial borders (they sometimes overlapped), and where power became more diffuse the further one looked from the polity’s political center.
Cultural
As stated above, in Nusantara or the Malay island world (in which I include the Philippines), as in many Polynesian islands and Indian Ocean islands where our ancestors migrated using balangays (boats for long-range navigation without the use of compass), reciprocity and egalitarianism are valued over hierarchy (which Chinese Confucians promoted in the form of filial relationships extending even between rulers and individuals); moreover, the Philippines’ island groups generally have maintained cultures of openness to new ideas coming from the seas, and were able to adopt and localize ideas on humanism and liberalism (but also communitarianism/socialism) learned from foreign cultures to wage a shared struggle against colonialism and achieve freedoms and forge our own brand of national identity and culture that (often, not always) respects- rather than fears — cultural diversity and discussions to achieve consensus on a national scale.
In delving into the Philippines’ deep past for personally relevant contexts to China’s many dynasties, cultures, and languages, the author takes inspiration from the late 19th c. Filipino National Hero Jose Rizal’s annotations to Dr. Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609).
