What do Madagascar's Malagasy, New Zealand's Maori, and the Hawaiians of the USA have in common?
Well, we can see commonalities of these 3 groups and many more all across the Southern & Eastern hemispheres
in an area we can call 'Austronesia'.
Today, we will focus on language.
But much of the same evidence can be found in biology or archaeology too.
Just as you're closer to your brother than your cousin,
and to your cousin than a Bantu tribesman,
(unless you yourself are a Bantu tribesman)
we can date linguistic developments by language features or related tongues.
It turns out that the languages of these 3 groups are relatively undifferentiated,
meaning these differences that span the globe occurred relatively recently,
less than 4,000 years ago.
Anthropologically, in the blink of an eye.
The Austronesian civilization was, oceanically speaking, far ahead of the rest of the world in its development.
They invented stable, multiple-hold vessels,
and sophisticated oceanographic maps that allowed long distance nautical endeavor long ahead of its development in Europe.
Such was their success in spreading across the world
that there are very few remaining descendants of the previous civilizations.
Most of the ones who do remain have themselves adopted Austronesian languages.
But this isn't the whole story.
These aren't the only members of the Austronesian family.
They are but of one branch.
While these are all linguistically close but grographically very distant,
all of the branches of this tree are geographically proximate, but linguistically very distant,
meaning that these languages are the oldest examples of the Austronesian family.
We find them on the island of Taiwan.
The Aboriginals of Taiwan were not Chinese,
but had lots of contact with the Chinese for a long time.
No dynasty or ruler extended their influence to this island.
He says.
The successful early Chinese unification couldn't have happened elsewhere in Eurasia.
China is the only place on the continent where divisions don't divide north & south.
There is no Sahara, or Himalayas, or Mediterranean dividing China.
Contact, & therefore conflict, was always on the horizon and China unified quite early as a political entity,
albeit under different dynastical crowns.
The history of Chinese war is the story of evolution-style selection pressures.
It was a crucible of war, designed to select the dominant group,
for whom the heavenly mandate was expand,
or the other group will.
It followed the typical method of expansion for a unified Empire.
Step 1:
Protect your people because there are barbarians on the border.
Step 2:
Conquer the barbarians and try to "civilize" them.
Step 3:
Barbarians eventually stop being barbarians.
You're not distinct enough to call them barbarians; they're now your people,
and you have to protect your people because there are barbarians on the border.
This was 'Sinicisation'.
Sinicisation means conversion to the dominant Han Chinese culture in EVERYWHERE.
From its beginning with the Han on the northern plains, more people have been sinicized
than conversion to any nationhood in history.
It doesn't all go smoothly though.
Some of the deepest divisions that exist in mainland China today remain "diet" .
For one, the differences in climate and landscape mean that crops and farming
methods from the tropical to the desert of the tundra just don't translate.
Even less so in the world of vast amounts of small-scale feudal peasant farming.
The places where the non-Han minorities remain are the Tibetan Tundra,
the arid steppe of Inner Mongolia, the Uyghur desert west, and the highland south where
minority languages also thrive:
the fringes of China, the difficult areas to sinicise.
One place China couldn't spread easily was across the water.
Taiwan in the east was frequented by Chinese fishermen, but the Chinese never settled permanently.
They just couldn't, there wasn't enough of a pull or
technological ability to counter the aboriginals home-field advantage.
They had high immunity to each other's diseases and as we can see from the
story of the Austronesian expansion, they're not exactly pushovers.
It took a catalyst for the two to properly come into conflict, and that catalyst was
Dutch.
The acrimonious emancipation of the Netherlands from the Spanish Empire led
to a scramble for overseas possessions.
There are two world class natural ports for trade empires in maritime Southeast Asia:
Manila and Batavia.
Spain and the Netherlands ended up with one each, and from these bases projected their power in the East Indies.
One island that took both of their interests was 'Ilha Formosa'.
Named by the Portuguese for its beauty.
It's not the only example of Portuguese sweet-talk.
They were the first Europeans to trade in a closed Japan, and they also
managed to get themselves a little trading port in Macau.
Other countries weren't able to do that.
The Dutch for example would not kowtow.
They were never on good terms with the mainland so you know what they did?
They parked themselves right across the water on the beautiful island of Formosa.
Unlike other east Asian land masses, this island is not made of plains interspersed among mountains.
The two are removed from each other.
On the Pacific Rim of Fire, one plate slipped under another and created mountains exclusively on the eastern edge of the island.
The plains and therefore the interesting and valuable
land to agricultural and industrial societies are all on the side facing mainland China.
That's where foreign forts and investments were made,
and where plantations were built, and Chinese laborers were invited.
Thanks to Sino-European expansion in the island,
Aboriginals remained mostly in the mountains and the east.
Shortly prior to this point, the Ming Dynasty were the rulers of China.
But they hadn't taken control of the Mongol homeland from their predecessors.
A rump empire of the former Yuan Dynasty remained in the north, and the Ming were
deathly focused on land defense, like you kind of have to be with Mongols.
This is why the Ming built the Great Wall into its largest and most complete form.
They had one of the biggest land armies in history and they needed it.
But even the largest empires don't have unlimited resources. By the time of European
excursions into their waters, it was starting to crumble. So the Ming weren't
as navally inclined as there might have been, and the Dutch settling a little way
away didn't seem to be the biggest threat in the world.
So there the Dutch were; with their extremely portable western-style
capitalist farming methods using Taiwan as an economic colony.
The Chinese workers were afforded land, and the ability to settle.
Oh! And the Spanish also set themselves up on the island.
The Dutch and Spanish faced huge challenges.
Not only with working with the Chinese, and firing at each other.
There were also the Aboriginals who had a pesky habit of scalping Europeans.
The Dutch eventually drove out the Spanish.
But the one threat they never saw;
was the Chinese that they themselves invited.
The colonial heads in Dutch Java refused to afford any more protections
or resources. No women were allowed to settle in Formosa, for the potential
danger of the aboriginals and natural disaster.
Locusts and disease, and seven weeks of earthquakes had plagued the island.
Conditions for the working Chinese were awful.
The Dutch had not held up their end of the bargain.
Their ventures were ruined, and almost all revenue came from the Chinese themselves,
who didn't see much reason to remain under European control.
So raised its head the common theme in Chinese history:
A Peasant Rebellion
Meanwhile on the mainland, the Ming's army wasn't doing its job.
The economy was also collapsing, and famines were rife.
If you can't pay your army, you can't feed your army, and
it doesn't matter how big that army is. You'll have problems, especially when
another group comes along and promises them the world.
The Manchus were a small ethnic group in the northeast who couldn't have come to
power were it not for the swears of the Han majority willing to rebel against the Ming.
This pan-ethnic alliance called itself the "Qing".
They took on the rump Mongol Yuan Dynasty that had plagued the Ming from the north at the same time
that the Russians were poking their noses into the Far East.
The Qing were unstoppable, but that news didn't seem to have reached the islanders.
While the Chinese rebellion against the Dutch was in full swing,
loyalists to the Ming made this island their aim.
Eventually, the Dutch were sufficiently besieged.
They lost and abandoned the island.
The Kingdom of Tungning was declared by Chinese Ming
loyalists to take over the new Chinese society and its economic ventures.
From now on, the island is not Formosa but most definitely Taiwan.
So Mainland China was under a new Qing government, and Taiwan was under the control of the
remnants of the previous rulers of the mainland.
Of course, through inevitable negot-invasion, the Qing eventually came to control Taiwan.
But despite its settlement by the Chinese, it was not seen as a core area of the nation.
That was until the Japanese took it away. We always want what we can't have don't we?
Chinese fragility seemed perennial. It either needed an iron fist or the ideological support of the whole nation.
Without the former, the Qing never had the latter.
As China was opening up to the world, alternatives flooded the country;
Democracy, Fascism, Republicanism, Communism even!
And what was wrong with monarchy in the first place?
This was a fertile age of fantastic variety in political thought.
The vacuum left by the fallen empire was filled by a temporary military government called the "Beiyang".
But it didn't end up being so temporary.
This fractured warlord era presided over a mess.
No central authority could withstand Japanese incursions
despite them also being involved in World War One.
That's not to say that they didn't try to resist.
In the southern city of Guangzhou, the Kuomintang; a Chinese republican movement joined the party.
They tried their utmost best to ally with the right friends, to oppose the right people,
make their way across this giant nation to unify the whole damn country,
and after no less than two decades, the Nationalists achieved their unification.
Finally!
But then they turned around and massacred all the Communists.
We just don't learn; do we?
The second civil war which followed immediately on
the heels of the first, coincidentally overlapped with another World War.
The distraction of the this-time full-scale Japanese invasion put a little pause on
the Nationalist - Communist conflict while they teamed up with the unions of
States and Soviets to put a little downer on the Japanese' day.
And China by far didn't come out unscathed. Even beyond the crimes against humanity
committed by Japanese soldiers, on the low-end estimate four million soldiers
and 15 million civilians died. One event in the resistance against the Japanese was so unbelievably catastrophic.
The 1938 Yellow River Flood was not a natural disaster,
but a military tactic chosen by the Nationalist government to slow the empire's march.
Dykes were destroyed, and one of the most densely populated areas of the world was washed asunder.
The price paid was no less than half a million Chinese lives and between 5 and 12 million refugees.
It took a decade for the river to return to its natural course, and generations of
people have never returned. Events like this, are touchpaper for revolution, and when
your life and world are destroyed like this, you've so little left to lose.
The Communist Party cleaned up (in terms of recruitment) from these affected people.
And after the surrender of Japan, Taiwan was returned
but China remained in civil war. The island came to be home of all the
remnants of the Chinese Republic once the Communist People's Republic had taken total control of the mainland.
Now, why is this story familiar?
Throughout the rest of the 20th century, the Republic of China as the state of Taiwan
is officially known has struggled to maintain the appearance of legitimacy.
Both the legacy of the Japanese and the historical existence of the non-Chinese
Aboriginals could lead to accusations of colonialism, and at this point in history,
that was the worst thing in the world. Sinicisation was back on the agenda.
This was one of the great stories of history.
Convincing the world that Taiwan was Chinese.
But as we know, they weren't the only Chinese.
How can a stunted rump state claim to be the representative for over a billion people?
Why can't they just be on their own?
Thank the United Nations cartel.
The only thing that determines whether something is a country; is whether other countries think it's a country.
That's how we can dismiss some independence movements as frivolous
or illegal, but allow some others, if they past the rules and concerns and
even whims of the most powerful members of the United Nations Club.
Very few members are going to recognize the Republic of China.
When big daddy People's Republic sits there with its economic, and military, and political and nuclear power.
Generally, what People's Republic says goes, and People's Republic says Taiwan belongs to People's Republic.
So on the international stage, Taiwan can do whatever trade and sport they're like in
private. But within earshot of People's Republic, everyone has to publicly
pretend that Taiwan doesn't exist.
It's always good to see patterns in history to understand the present.
No matter how many Chinas or Taiwans you think there are.