Customer Reviews

The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC - AD 2000

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

An extraordinarily pedestrian and highly derivative (she even uses a secondary source for a biblical quote) walk through the history of China through Lovell's self-imagined vehicle of "The Great Wall". Made even more so as Lovell repeatedly reminds us that the construct "Great Wall" is mainly a Western view. Lovell appears to be curiously ignorant of the philosophical underpinnings of Chinese culture and society, and as a result provides us with an extraordinarily ethnocentric and biased view of Chinese history. She loses no opportunity to belittle or castigate virtually every participant in Chinese history.

While Lovell appears to unflinchingly accept both pejorative views of China's relationship with the world and fanciful descriptions of Chinese customs and culture as described by disenchanted English emissaries, she fails to take into account recent accounts of China's historical trade and interactive relationship with Asia and the rest of the world. Her analysis (using the English 1793 abortive mission as the signature event) leads her to argue that, regardless of whether the Chinese were constructing or not constructing walls; whether they were going on voyages of discovery or trade or restricting travel; whether they were allowing outsiders in or keeping them out; whatever they were doing was proof of her thesis that it was China Against the World. Of the 1793 mission, she comments how the British had to "suffer through hours of Chinese Theatre, being laughed at during banquets for their ineptitude with chopsticks", how their "impressive list of presents submitted to the emperor was rendered into gibberish", and finally of the emperors gifts to the British: "a few auspiciously shaped lumps of jade, boxes of china and lengths of cloth, some of which appeared to be recycled items of tribute from Korean, Muslim and Burmese vassals." Both their, and her, ignorance of Chinese customs and culture could not be more clearly defined. It is unclear how the British emissaries knew their list was being mis-translated, as they could neither speak nor write Chinese. For Lovell to parrot (I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here, even though she fails to give citations for this view) "auspiciously shaped lumps of jade" without comment is egregious, to say the least. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with historical China is well aware of the singular importance attached to jade. Of course, at no point are we given what the Chinese view of the mission must have been.

A telling instance of her bias is when she tries to argue that the English instigated Opium Wars were primarily a result of the English desiring free trade. Is it possible that she is unaware of England's Colonial history? Having, or in the process of, colonizing the Indian subcontinent and Burma (for the purpose of opium production and trade), and trying, but failing in their attempts to colonize Tibet and Thailand, England desired to colonize China. Instead they had to settle on providing a safe haven for their drug trade, along with the temporary theft of Hong Kong - the recent return of which to China she particularly laments, equating the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control after 100 years of British Colonialist rule with a symbolic retreat of China to her obtusely-constructed "Great Wall mentality". She even argues that the Crusades provided legitimization for Western (English) utilization of force of arms to gain conquest and concessions from China (and elsewhere). As the Crusades were defeats for the Europeans, this is much like arguing that Vietnam provided the legitimization for the invasion of Iraq.

While she castigates Voltaire's positive assessment of the Great Wall because he never visited the Great Wall, she also castigates those who have visited it and come away with a similar positive assessment, insisting that they could not have seen more than the small portion near Beijing. Woe unto those who do not share her viewpoint - the Jesuits, for example, who she labels "The Jesuit Cult of the Great Wall." (She appears to have a special vendetta against Catholics, including a completely gratuitous and preposterous account of their role in the colonization of the Americas.) On the other hand, she regards those who minimize the status of walls in a favorable light. For example, she appears to regard Daniel Defoe quite highly, despite the fact that he never visited China. Perhaps it's because she subscribes to his fictional view.

A few quotes will serve as defining her attempts to contrast China with the West: "in the contemporary West, where occupation and invasion are, at present, happily the stuff of millennia past, wall-building seems a quaintly old-fashioned idea...", "With the recent notable exception of the invasion of Iraq, for Western powers, committing ground troops in the long term to zones of conflict is a potentially vote-losing last resort.", "Walls and barriers are monuments of a lost, pre-1989 world" If we look at just the period following WWII, we have Korea, Vietnam, Panama, the Falklands, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, etc., etc. As for Western walls and barriers post-1989; U.S. wall against Mexico, Israel's wall against the Palestinians, the English wall in Northern Ireland and the barriers separating North and South Korea to name a few. As for other barriers, one can easily find a myriad of immigration/emigration restrictions in the West.

A few additional points: Only a colonialist could come up with the descriptive phase "Hong-Kongese" to describe Chinese residents of Hong Kong, or consider the Indian nationalists who opposed English colonialism "radicals".

Wherever does Lovell get her date of 1025 for the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty, as she provides no reference for her chronology of dynasties? I've seen 1122 and 11th C as traditional dates; 1027 as a date accepted until recents years by modern scholars; and 1050, 1046, 1045 and 1040 as the most current years (a rather hot - and sometimes vindictive - debate is going on about which of these current dates is correct), but never 1025.

Lovell says Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen, as she calls him) resigned his position as president of the new Republic of China "after barely one year in office." Actually he only served from Jan. 1 to March 12, 1912. Lovell argues that Sun Yixian was no classical scholar (as if she could possibly know) since he adopted the wall as a symbol of Chinese construction and endurance. As his constructs were clearly for public consumption, intended to provide a rallying point for the Chinese, what would she have had him do?

Lovell on Martino Martini, whose Atlas Sinensis she proclaims as being, when they were published, the "most complete and authoritative maps of China to date": his "wild generalizations about the state of the entire wall [were] based , presumably, only on observations of its condition near Beijing." Setting aside her lack of substantive proof of the allegation and that the condition of the wall more than 350 years ago just might have been somewhat different than it is today, would not his maps have the same drawback?

Lovell goes on about how the Qianlong emperor's disdain of the mechanical trinkets brought to him by the English must have been as a result of prior dealings with Europeans having supplied China with earlier mechanical devices. Not possible that the Chinese, in fact, were well aware of such devices due to their own discoveries? Lovell might be surprised to know that the Chinese discovered/invented (just to name a few): quantitative cartography, Mercator-map projection, the first relief maps, Equatorial astronomical instruments, essentials of the steam engine, matches, the mechanical clock, block and mechanical type printing, the decimal system, "zero", the first compasses, dial and pointer devices, magnetic declination of the Earth's magnetic field and the seismograph. All of these hundreds or thousands of years before they were adopted or recognized in the West.

For a parallel, and earlier, book on the Great Wall which Lovell seems to eerily mimic, see Arthur Waldron's The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.

In sum, I am aghast that Lovell would be actually teaching Chinese history and literature at the University of Cambridge.

This book could serve an engaging text for a course in Chinese history. It describes the evolution of that great country tied to its most recognized symbol both as a construction and a thought. Lovell, a teacher of Chinese history and literature at Cambridge handles anecdotes as well as Tom Wolfe. Her prose is so engaging it cries out for colored maps showing different dynasties walls in different colors along with pictures of some of the individuals she describes. The great wall, which is a series of walls spread over a long distance, was intended to wall out the barbarians. Like the Maginot line it was not successful. The Great Wall did not keep Genghis Khan and his successors out. But it had an effect upon the Chinese psyche over much of that country's history. It is a metaphor for China's historical, social and economic isolation.

That the Chinese thought themselves protected, but were walled in, is evident from the British trade mission launched in 1792. Evidently the British were running a trade deficit owing to enormous purchases of tea. George III sent diplomats with extensive gifts on a year long voyage to present their credentials to the Emperor. He received them with a great deal of reserve. Two weeks later the Emperor responded that his country had not "the slightest need of your country's manufacturers." What made the response even more insulting was that it was composed six weeks before the diplomats were shown in. Seventy years later, during the Opium War, the presents were discovered untouched in a stable.

Lovell challenges the perceived singularity of Chinese culture by describing the various walls built from the Warring States period through the Ming dynasty, a period of over 1500 years and the cultural differences during those times. She also asserts that while the wall is long, it is mostly made of mud and not very great. Genghis and his hoard, and later the Manchu's, passed through it with relative ease, testifying to the statement attributed to Genghis that: "the strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them." Hundreds of miles long the wall is now mostly rubble, except, of course, for the tourist sections, such as that President Nixon visited. This is in contrast to the various Chinese city walls dating as early as the third millennium B.C. which are now being excavated.

While the long wall is a symbol of the unity of China over millennia, that unity is mostly fiction. So is the assertion that it can be seen from the moon. The walls were built to bar the nomads, the barbarians and the hoards from the North. The Chinese were assumed to be on the defensive. However, while the walls existed, China colonized much of the area south of the Yangtze and the Tibetan plateau.

As Lovell moves from the Shang to the present, she brings to life the builders and destroyers (including nature) of the wall and the economic causes of the ebb and flow of expansion and defense. She writes that her book "has tried to provide a history of the Chinese world view to reveal its successes and failures, to explain an attitude to the outside world that can seem (and, indeed, often is) puzzling, contradictory and strident, and that shows no sign of evanescing in the face of globalization, the Internet and America's world crusade for freedom and democracy." In many ways she has succeeded. This is a captivating book, well written with a mixture of scholarship and accomplished story telling. However, one is left, especially after reading the description of modern life in China in Oracle Bones, with the impression that the world view of the Chinese is changing much faster than Lovell realizes. And that the most recent wall that China has constructed, the one to bar access to portions of the internet, will suffer the same fate as the Great Wall.

A young English scholar interprets much of Chinese history as a struggle between internationalism and isolationism, reflected in the repeated efforts to wall out invaders from the north. Frequently contrasting official rhetoric about the efficacy of the glorious walls with the reality of their constant failures and treasury-draining costs and occasional perspectives from common people, she surprises the reader with accounts of how European and Japanese incursions strengthened the idea of the Great Wall in the Chinese consciousness. By abbreviating specific incidents and omitting character portraits, Lovell successfully compresses almost 4000 years of history into a narrative with very few boring passages. But with so much time to cover, almost no room is left for comparisons with other civilizations. She does mention Israel's fence a couple of times; another interesting comparison would be with the US borders.
Highly recommended as a source of insight into the folly of empire and insularity.

The history of the Middle Kingdom often presents China as a generally single entity unified against the barbarians. While this image is easy to believe at a superficial level, it glosses over three thousand years of cultural development and adaptation together with dynastic change.

'The Great Wall' presents the reader with 3,000 years of Chinese history from a different perspective. In the same way that there has not always been a unified China, there is not a single 'Great' wall. The walls are both symbolic and actual indicators of China's sense of self.

This book provides a mixture of historical fact and interpretation in a style that I found both informative and entertaining. For those who want to pursue more detailed accounts, the select bibliography is very helpful.

China is rapidly emerging as a world economic powerhouse. China's population is both a source of strength and of weakness.

Highly recommended as a starting point for those who would like to know more about the history of this fascinating country.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Do not be put off by the middle of this book. The good analysis of Chinese society is done in the three front and three back chapters. Don't feel guilty if you skip over the middle, it is all about ancient history, and the author herself writes on page 27 that the history of China as the "Chinese Nation" started only about 100 years ago.
Julia Lovell makes a strong case that China will never stop building walls --- "...the pull between enclosure and openess will continue." (page 348)
I subjectively subtract one star for the probably excellent padding in the middle of this book.

In this excellently written expanisve history of China the book brings us face to face with history and the unique monument of the Great Wall as a metaphor for that histor and the national culture of China. We learn here about the geographic conception of China and the nature of Chinese relations to outsiders from 1000BC to 2000AD, a vast subject, condensed into an understandable polemic. Just a wonderful work,

Seth J. Frantzman

A good read but not so much about the wall as a fortress but more about how the Chinese saw their interaction with the 'barbarians' from the western steppes. The style is light and readable, seeming like an extended essay rather than a history book. The book does not sell itself as a history of the wall and I think that it does a good job of getting its message across. It does not do a great job because it paints broad pictures rather than giving much detail. Indeed there are large tracts in the book where the wall is not mentioned and I was wondering where the book was going.

A constant theme is that the wall did not provide security for the various Chinese Dynasties in their respective attaempts to keep the barbarians out. Even when the barbarians became the rulers of China they forgot the lessens of steppe warfare and resorted to walls with the inevitable failure emerging later. While it is true that the steppe warriors swept past the wall several times I think that the author does not prove her case. If the author had looked at some of the battles then she could have shown where the failures occurred. The author may have also shown that the wall did provide security at times. I have read other accounts where the wall did provide a barrier against the steppe warriors. A wall is only a wall and without a well equipped adequate army to man the wall then it will always fall to an enemy. The author didmention the repetitive corruption and mismanagement that regularly weakened the Chinese imperial armies but still saw the wall as being a failure. Maybe the wall actually balanced some of the weakness of the imperial armies giving them more of a chance than they would have had in open warfare.

The book did not just look at the Chinese views of the world but also the world's view of China. Voltaire's praise of China and the wall attracted several pages of analysis. The foreign views of the wall were interesting but seemed to be an aside and not part of the central thesis of the book.

I would recommend the book as one view on how to 'think' about the wall but it is not a book that will tell you the history of the wall in detail.

Throughout this book I was reminded of General Patton's famous quotation, 'Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.' Yet the creation of walls is obviously a characteristic of man that goes back for millennia.

The common vision of the Great Wall of China is a continuous, 4,300 mile long structure of beautiful crenellated rock towers that is obviously a barrier from the barbarians of the North. This book brings out the truth behind the myth. She reports on all kinds of points:

construction details (much of it was mud, not rock)
effectiveness (not very, some invaders simply bribed the gate keepers)
the sacrifice of the cost of building it
the people involved from the workers to the ruling dynasties
and behind the scenes you cannot help but think of other walls
Hitler's Arlantic Wall
France's Maginot Line
McNamarra's Electronic Line in Vietnam
The Berlin Wall.

All in all, this is a fascinating book about an aspect of China that we have not seen before.

Lovell's book is an easy-to-read sketch of China's history, particularly along its northern frontier. It is packed with colourful anecdotes, making it a very entertaining read. As someone with little prior knowledge of Chinese history, I have come away with a basic understanding of some of the significant events.

My main criticism of the book is that it is at times opinionated. One example is when Mao Zedong is called the "most destructive dictator to rule China." While many would agree, it seemed an unnecessary judgement, especially as it was unsupported and in the context of only a passing reference to Mao.

Lovell ridicules previous historians for jumping to false conclusions, yet that does not prevent her from conjecturing herself. The thesis of the book is that China's walls were a useless defence against the northern barbarians. She supports her assertion by iterating over the instances in history when the walls were over-run, which occurred every few
hundred years, when a dynasty was collapsing and China was in inner turmoil. The purpose of the walls was to deter bands of raiders, monitor the northern borders and serve as an early warning system against larger scale invasions. What is lacking in her analysis, is whether the walls functioned effectively during times of prosperity, when the walls were competently manned. For example, for the 400 years of the Han dynasty, did the wall allow the inhabitants of northern China to live without the constant threat of being raided? The book does not answer this question. Just because the walls were not invincible does not make them useless. The real issue is whether the benefits of increased stability and security outweighed the enormous costs of building and manning the walls. Because the benefits of the walls were not discussed, this issue was not convincingly answered.

Julia Lovell adopts a unique perspective for viewing 3,000 years of Chinese history: its walls. While most can identify the tourist mecca of "The Great Wall," few realize that the contemporary tourist site is but a tiny, heavily restored and recently added part of a series of walls that China has been erected over an almost 2,500 year period.

With one exception noted below, Lovell provides a singularly interesting view of Chinese history. She destroys many myths about China's walls and provides an enlightening perspective on how the walls may have reflected, if not shaped, China's attitudes toward the world.

China's early history, Lovell reminds us, was turbulent. Not only were the tribes and states that would ultimately comprise modern China constantly warring with each other, but tribes to the north, east and west were regularly raiding these nascent states. Thus the first walls, intended to make it more difficult for the nomadic steppe tribes to ravage what is now northern China. They didn't work.

Of course, failure didn't keep subsequent rulers from turning again and again to walls not only to keep invaders out, but to keep their own people in. Over generations, Sinocentricism was one result of the walls: the Chinese were superior to all and neither needed nor wanted intercourse with others except on their own carefully restricted rules. The walls restricted not only the flow of trade goods, but ideas and information as well.

Lovell reviews the rise and fall of one dynasty after another. Her catalog of horrors seems endless with one exception: the rule of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. It's a bit of a shock, frankly, to from one instance after another of brutal death and torture under this Emperor or that to a frighteningly placid description of Mao's China which was more repressive and murderous than any other, some 70 million allegedly dying under Mao's leadership. Further, Lovell repeatedly refers to Mao's Nationalist opposition as being "right-wing," as if that is a signal for something worse than Communist rule. Ms. Lovell might profit from a reading of "The Unknown Mao" or numerous other catalogs of the Maoist terror.

Aside from that bit of possible political bias, Lovell's history is something of a masterpiece. You can't help but marvel at how successive Chinese reigns sacrificed enormous treasure and lives to build their walls, each of which was a failure in its turn. The impact of refusing entry with the help of those walls to goods and, more importantly, ideas had a stunning negative effect on the growth and well-being of the Chinese people. Lovell's treatment of the current Chinese regime and its "Great Internet Firewall" is thought-provoking.

Overall, a marvelous read for anyone with an interest in history, current world events and the future, for the impact of the Chinese walls is still with us.

Jerry