Sedentary-Nomad Relations

However much Chinese political ideology and moral discourse strove to minimise disorder, influential voices tolerated and even lauded certain forms of violence. Throughout its history, China had an extremely long and porous border requiring constant vigilance.

Despite the importance of these interactions, Chinese usually misunder­stood the motivations of steppe peoples. Authorities almost always dismissed nomads as unreasonable, ferocious, barbaric, malevolent, and relentlessly intent on invading and subjugating China. But in fact nomads tended to see relations with their southern neighbour in extremely realistic terms.^[1032] Greatly outnumbered and lacking the experience needed to rule such a large and complex polity, most tribal leaders recognised the difficulty of trying to conquer and hold Chinese territory. Instead of permanent conquest, they sought to extract maximum resources from the gigantic economy to their south. China's sedentary society supported a high level of material culture that could provide nomads with goods that they found difficult to produce themselves, such as silk, grain, alcohol, metal and myriad luxuries. If the leader of a nomadic clan or tribe could obtain these treasured items from China, either by force or by diplomacy, he could distribute them to attract a base of supporters, thus constructing and consolidating a parallel polity on the steppe.

A unified China provided nomads with a dependable source of prestige goods that their leaders could use to unite fissile kin-groups into a coherent polity. So instead of trying to destroy China, nomads actually preferred a strong Chinese government that could provide a steady flow of gifts intended to bribe them into docility. Aggressive nomads who sought to conquer China usually came from the outer steppe. They did not understand how to obtain a steady flow of resources with minimal force, so they carried out full-scale invasions with the aim of looting or occupying China. The perennial diffi­culties that conquest dynasties faced in ruling a much larger populace attest to the wisdom of the inner steppe peoples who manipulated relations with China to their own advantage. Due to this policy, trade and two-way cultural influence alternated with raids and wars.

While nomads saw their relations with China in terms of material benefit, Chinese usually took a more abstract view. They sought to apply the mandate of heaven ideology to regularise relations with nomadic peoples. The mandate received by the emperor of China theoretically made him the concurrent ruler of ‘all under heaven' (tianxia) or the entire world, so he claimed to be the overlord of other peoples as well. Because Chinese officials relied on this ideology to hold their state together, they sought to bring foreign peoples under the same rubric by demanding symbolic obeisance to their ruler, the son of heaven.

Chinese tried to use political ritual, which reflected the mandate of heaven theory, to organise their relations with other peoples. Emperors and officials put enormous stress on symbolic matters such as formal declarations of submission and allegiance and the adoption of Chinese official titles and patents of nobility. Within nomadic cultures, however, Chinese rituals, symbols and appellations carried little significance.

Sometimes ritualised detente broke down. Nomads regularly launched limited raids into China to force a settlement that would include a steady flow of gifts northward. Alternatively, if Chinese felt that the ritual order had been violated, they might launch a military incursion into the steppe. But due to the insoluble logistical problems of feeding an army amid barren grasslands, and pursuing foes on horseback who usually just rode away and disappeared, these military adventures rarely had a conclusive outcome. More often than not the two sides came to an uneasy compromise, with nomads cynically observing ritual conventions and Chinese rewarding their pro forma com­pliance with gifts. Nomadic and sedentary peoples thus found ways to minimise conflict, even as each side misunderstood the intentions of the other.