Xu Jilin: An ambiguity peculiar to the north and south of China, most people ignore the | Culture runs rampant

✪ Xu Jilin | East China Normal University

【Introduction】What is "China", and how has this vast and culturally diverse civilization continue to this day? This is an important issue that has re-emerged in recent years. The differences and connections between the North and the South are undoubtedly a key to understanding China's diverse civilization.

Mr. Xu Jilin, the author of this article, believes that historical China is a complex of multiple civilizations, and "Central China", "Frontier China" and "Southern China" represent farming civilization, nomadic civilization and marine civilization respectively, which together constitute "pluralistic integration" in the sense of civilization. In ancient times, although the cultural and economic advantages were in the south, it was usually the north that conquered the south and established a unified regime, because the north had a martial tradition from the steppe, and through the combination with the long-standing Culture of the Central Plains, it had the two basic points of "strength + civilization" needed to maintain a huge classical empire. Beginning in the Ming Dynasty, the relationship between the North and the South was reversed. The rise of the southern maritime civilization indicates that the traditional China with the agrarian-nomadic civilization as the main axis will be transformed into a modern China with the agricultural-marine civilization as the core. By the late Qing Dynasty, the southern maritime peoples soon integrated into the maritime order established by Westerners centered on legal power, becoming economic agents of colonial rulers. In the period of the Republic of China, the emerging southern forces could not dominate the overall situation, and the old and new, the north and south, the coast and the interior, the central plains and the frontier, the agricultural order and the nomadic order continued to produce internal rifts and conflicts, until a new northern continental civilization, the socialism of Soviet Russia, appeared in the world. Since then, China, centered on agricultural civilization, has been subject to the dual constraints of the British and American maritime civilizations and the soviet and Russian continental civilizations. Where to go is confusing to modern Chinese.

Xu Jilin believes that only by grasping the interaction between the three major civilizations of farming, nomadism and the sea can we better understand the interaction between the north and the south in Chinese history. The interlacing of the three spaces and the competition and conflict of the three civilizations are the deep secrets of Chinese history; Whether they can achieve reconciliation will be the hope of the Chinese nation.

This article is transferred from "Xu Jilin's Window", originally titled "The Culture of the North and the South That You Know and Don't Know". The article only represents the views of the author and is for the reference of all the kings.

What you know and don't know about the culture of the North and the South

Bounded by the Qinling-Huai River, China is geographically divided into two major cultural plates, north and south. The southern culture is delicate and elegant, and the northern culture is magnificent, becoming two landscapes with very different styles. Geographically, north and south are determined.

However, culturally, the distinction between the north and the south is relative: for the northern nomadic areas, the Central Plains is the south, while for the Yangtze River Basin, the birthplace of Chinese culture, the Central Plains is the North, and for the Min and Cantonese people further south, whether it is the Central Plains in the Yellow River Basin, or the Central China and Jiangnan in the Yangtze River Basin, for them it is the North; The so-called Jiangnan, after the Jingkang Nandu, is just another Central Plains, culturally orthodox Central Plains. The relativity and ambiguity of the south and the north are the salient features of China, a vast country.

In the history of Chinese culture, there are two core issues, one is east and west, and the other is north and south. The Heihe-Tengchong line proposed by Mr. Hu Huanyong is the dividing line between the agricultural culture of the Han people and the nomadic culture of the frontier peoples. North and south are the two different styles of the Central Plains Han culture formed after the Yongjia Nandu.

Therefore, there are two different understandings of the relationship between the north and the south in history, one is the division between the north and the south within the Central Plains Han culture, and the other is the confrontation between the Hu and Han Dynasties, such as the Southern Dynasty and the Northern Dynasty in the Middle Ages, and the Two Song Dynasties and the Liaojin in the Recent Era. Since the Wei and Jin dynasties, the confrontation between the east and the west (Hu Han) has been deeply embedded in the relationship between the north and the south, and the northern culture has both The Han culture and the Hu culture. Huhan culture has been integrated through the three great fusions of the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the Two Song Dynasties, the Liaojin and the Yuanqing, and it is difficult to distinguish between the northern Central Plains cultures.

Observing the great history of China, there are two different central views, one is the Central Plains Central View, which measures the great changes in history and culture by taking the Central Plains civilization of the Chinese-Han people as the yardstick. The Central Plains Central View presupposes the binary opposition between the Han culture of civilization and the barbaric Hu culture, and it seems that China's progress is the history of how the Central Plains civilization assimilated the surrounding barbarians. Thinking about the north-south issue from the central central view of the Central Plains, it is easy to fall into the trap of Han chauvinism.

The other is latimer's view of the center of the Great Wall, which treats the farming peoples inside the Great Wall and the nomadic peoples outside the Great Wall as two equal civilization communities, and examines the exchanges and struggles between the two. The Central View of the Great Wall focuses on the history of the interaction between the two major ethnic groups in the northern frontier (Saifang), but the southern frontier (Haiphong) is a blind spot for its research. Since the Southern Song Dynasty, especially after the Ming Dynasty, the maritime culture of Ou Min Yue began to rise and became a factor that cannot be ignored when thinking about China.

Historical China is a pluralistic complex centered on agricultural civilization and containing nomadic civilization and marine civilization. Only by placing them in the context of the interaction of the three major civilizations can we more deeply understand the cultural relations between the north and the south in history. In a nutshell, northern China is a complex of agrarian-nomadic civilizations, and southern China (since the Ming Dynasty) is a complex of agrarian-marine civilizations. The interaction of these three civilizations constitutes the complexity of the relationship between the North and the South in history, so it is understandable why in ancient times, it was usually the north that conquered the south, but in modern times, the situation is reversed, the south defeats the north, but in the end it is dominated by the new north.

▍ Nomadic - the north of the agrarian civilization

The center of Central Plains culture was originally in the middle and lower basin of the Yellow River, since the Yongjia Rebellion and the southward migration of the royal family, the population and economy of Jiangnan have developed greatly, and the center of culture has gradually shifted to the middle and lower basins of the Yangtze River. The north-south pattern was thus formed. The southern culture inherits the orthodoxy of the Central Plains and combines with the indigenous peoples of the south to form the hard-working, delicate, elegant and dashing character of the southern farming peoples. In the north, the birthplace of the Central Plains culture, because of the Wuhu invasion, it brought the unique toughness, ruggedness and vitality of the nomadic people, forming a very different style from the south.

Confucius once said: "Quality wins over literature and wilderness, literature wins quality over history, and literature is polite, and then gentleman." "Literature and quality, these two temperaments that were originally balanced among the agrarian peoples, after the separation of the north and the south, each developed to the extreme side, the southern culture is better than the quality, with the civilized mannerism, while the northern cultural quality is better than the text, with the original simplicity and brute force.

In the 1600 years of history after Wuhu Chaohua, the north was under foreign rule for 800 years. The South is only 350 years old. As a result, the differences between Hu and Han gradually degenerated into differences in northern and southern cultures. Miyazaki Ichiding, the second-generation leader of the Kyoto School in Japan, believes that the Han nationality is "civilizationalism" and the Hu ethnic group is "simplicity", just like Confucius said that the culture and quality have become the spiritual symbol of the increasing solidification of the northern and southern cultures.

Regarding the changes in the strength of the north-south culture, the two southern crossings of Yongjia and Jingkang are the turning point, and the Japanese scholar Kuwabara's famous article "The North and South China Seen in History" analyzes that before the Yongjia Southern Crossing, the northern culture has always been dominant, and the big figures are all from the north. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the North-South trend was balanced. After the unification of the Sui and Tang dynasties, the southern faction had a cultural advantage over the northern faction.

After jingkang nandu, the economic and cultural center shifted to jiangnan, and most of the talents came from the south, and since then the north has been completely incomparable with the south, especially after the Ming and Qing dynasties. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the results of the examination were that all the jinshi were from the south, and there was not a single northerner, which made Zhu Yuanzhang angry, which was proof of this. Ding Wenjiang selected 5783 people from the biographies of the Twenty-Four Histories, and statistically found that the national elite was concentrated in the Yellow River Basin before the Southern Song Dynasty; After the Southern Song Dynasty, it gradually tended to the Yangtze River Basin.

Since the cultural and economic advantages are in the south, why did the Sui and Tang Dynasties end the division of the north and the south, and the Northern Song dynasty end the rebellion of the five dynasties and ten kingdoms, both the north defeated the south, and all the great unified regimes established in the north were established? Later, the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty were even more ethnic minorities who came out of the grasslands and forests, unified the farming areas and nomadic areas, and established a true unity that spanned the central and western regions and ran through the north and south. This reason should be analysed in the context of global history.

For ten centuries, from the 7th century to the 17th century, the hegemons of Eurasia were not agro-agrarian peoples, but nomadic peoples. In the era of cold weapons, whoever has high-quality horses and tough cavalry will influence the battlefield. Not only in military strength, but also in spiritual temperament. Once the barbarian Yuan Qi from the steppe came to the Yellow River Valley and combined with the Axis civilization of the Central Plains, it was not something that the Central Plains royal family and nobles who had fled to the south could fight. The strength of the South lies in the exquisite culture and open economy, while the strength of the North lies in the organization and action power from the grassland. The founders of the Sui Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty all had humble blood, and after several generations of Sinicization, the integration of the blood and culture of the Hu and Han ethnic groups created a military strength and political organization in the north that was far higher than that in the south.

Although the South has cultural advantages, it is weaker than the North in temperament. The Eastern Jin Dynasty had the famous scholars and wonderful metaphysics, the Southern Song Dynasty had the prosperous Jiangnan and confucian scholars, from the Western Jin Dynasty to the Southern Dynasty and then to the Southern Song Dynasty, the Confucian ritual music tradition from the Central Plains combined with the Taoist romanticism in the south, resulting in only a weak southern culture and a small imperial court mentality. The center of gravity of Chinese politics has always been in the north. In the north, there is a shangwu tradition from the steppe, coupled with the combination with the long-standing Central Plains culture, yiwen yiwu, which is a dual temperament that the classical empire must have.

The maintenance of a huge empire is based on the two basic points of civilization and strength, the farming peoples in the Central Plains have civilization, and the steppe peoples on the frontier have strength. In the north after the Wuhu Chaohua, the primitive barbarism of the grasslands and the political and religious traditions of the Central Plains were integrated, presenting the Han culture of Hu and the Culture of Hu, both civilization and strength, from the Sui and Tang Dynasties to the Mongolian Yuan and the Great Qing, all showed ambitious imperial ambitions and desire to expand, in contrast to the small southern imperial court that was satisfied with partial security and the pattern was forced. In Chinese history, the weather of the empire came from the north, and once the domineering nomadic civilization was grafted with the delicate agricultural civilization, it was impossible for the pure agricultural civilization in the south to compete.

In this regard, the Northern Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty are a stark contrast. Although the Song Dynasty was established for the northerners, at the beginning of the founding of the Song Dynasty, in order to guard against the division of the feudal towns, the rules were established, and the Shangwen was light and the barbarian warriors were suppressed by the Confucian civilian officials. Although the Song Dynasty was a northern regime, its spiritual temperament was that of the south. The spiritual gist of the Tang and Song dynasties' turning was to turn inward. The Tang Dynasty's flying spirit from the north was increasingly weakened, and under the influence of Buddhism in the south, the Song Dynasty turned to spiritualization and internalization, so it could not resist the iron hooves of Liaojin, and finally was expelled from the north.

Let's look at the Ming dynasty regime. Zhu Yuanzhang, the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty, was located in Nanjing. After his son Yongle Emperor seized the throne at the Battle of Jingkang, he moved the capital to Beijing, symbolizing that he inherited the Shangwu tradition of the Mongolian Yuan, rather than the Shangwen relics of the Two Song Dynasties. He ordered Zheng He to lead a fleet of 10,000 people to the West seven times, showing the hegemony of the Northern Empire. Only after the Yongle Emperor, the Ming Dynasty became increasingly introverted, casting the Great Wall in the north and setting up a sea ban in the south, re-revealing the background of its southern regime, just a closed continental dynasty.

However, the times are stronger than people, and looking at the world, a new era of marine civilization is already knocking at the door.

▍ Injected into the south of the marine civilization

The vitality of the South does not lie in the purity of the agricultural civilization, but in the birth of the marine civilization. In the reversal of north-south relations, the Ming Dynasty was a turning point. This turning point is related to the advent of the era of global maritime civilization.

At the same time that Columbus discovered the New World, Westerners also appeared in Asia. In 1493, Portugal entered India, and in 1513, Portuguese ships sailed into the port of Canton. At the end of the 16th century, Matteo Ricci came to China and opened the doors of the court with a self-chiming bell, and in the early 17th century, the Dutch entered Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The southern coast has become a breakthrough point for marine civilization.

From the perspective of global history, before 1500, it was the domain of Arabs, Turks and Mongols, and in Central Asia (inland Asia), the heart of Eurasia, various nomadic peoples controlled the lifeblood of east-west traffic and the navigation of world history. The nomadic peoples, like the Central Plains Dynasty, were continental empires, and from the Liaojin regime to the Mongolian Yuan Empire, they could easily conquer the agricultural areas, but they could never cross the sea. Kublai Khan's two expeditions to Japan were defeated by the terrible sea kamikaze and returned home. The same was true of the Central Plains Dynasty.

In the 15th century, Zheng He's voyage to the West was only an accidental act of the personal will of the Yongle Emperor, who on the one hand imposed a sea ban and strangled civil trade, and on the other hand, promoted national prestige and expanded tributary trade. Naturally, this kind of imperial expansion that costs the people and money cannot last. When the Yongle Emperor moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, far from the south and close to the grasslands, it was doomed to return to the fate of the mainland empire. After Yongle, his descendants became increasingly closed, ceding sea power to westerners who came to knock on the door.

Every historical change in the Central Plains is related to the impact of foreign civilizations. Before the 16th century, the nomadic peoples of the northern steppes were the nomadic peoples who challenged the agricultural civilization of the Central Plains, and after the 16th century, the Western peoples who had an impact on China gradually became the Western peoples from the sea. The demise of the Mongol Empire was a millennial event in global history, marking the beginning of the end of the era of the Terrestrial Empire and the imminent arrival of a new era of sea power empire. Such a big change, embodied in Chinese history, is the "Yuanming turn": when the Ming rulers returned to the north, in the southern folk, the maritime civilization showed the dawn, and the historical center of gravity began to shift from the north to the south.

Before the arrival of Europeans, in the South China Sea, a South China Sea world community with private free trade as the main body emerged, a maritime trade network that used silver as a medium to connect East Asia with Europe by sea. Thus in the south of China, an ocean China emerged. Guangdong, Fujian and Nanyang, for the Min and Cantonese people, there is no so-called domestic and foreign concepts today, around the South China Sea, constitute a living world that can be freely traveled, accessed and traded, and the local clan relationship network of the Chinese also extends from Guangdong and Fujian to Southeast Asia, forming a cross-national cultural community.

Professor Bu Zhengmin pointed out: "From the end of the 13th century to the 14th century, the continental world economy that originated in the Yuan Dynasty crossed the steppe and expanded westward to Persia and Europe. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a maritime world trading economy centered on the South China Sea connected the Ming Dynasty with various trading systems in and out of the Indian Ocean and across the Pacific Ocean. These two different worlds include China in different ways." The continental world economic community of the Yuan Dynasty, with the north as the axis; The Ming Dynasty's ocean-type world economic community was centered on the south. The rise of the southern marine civilization after the Ming Dynasty indicates that the traditional China with the agrarian-nomadic civilization as the central axis will be transformed into modern China with the agricultural-marine civilization as the core.

The southern coastal zone, especially Ou min yue, is significantly different from the north in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, or from the two lakes and jiangnan in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. These fishermen, who grew up by the sea and ate by the sea, are not as afraid of the sea as the Central Plains, nor are they as conservative and closed as the self-employed farmers. In them, the cultural accumulation of the small-scale peasant economy in the Central Plains is not deep, but has the commercial spirit of the marine people who dare to take risks, open up to the outside, and are shrewd and calculating. The sea is a symbol of freedom, and the land is the abyss of totalitarianism.

The Central Plains Dynasty established a universal monarchical structure based on a small peasant economy. But in Ou Minyue, far away from Emperor Tiangao, the southern marine ethnic groups (Wenzhou, Minnan, Chaoshan, Hakka, Cantonese, etc.) have a very rich, bottom-up folk clan network. With these expansive clan networks, they crossed the seas and emigrated overseas, throughout the Southeast Asia region and later into North America, establishing a global Chinese commercial trade community. Locally, they quickly integrated into the legally-centered maritime order established by Westerners and became economic agents of colonial rulers.

However, the merchants of southern China and the merchants of Western Europe lived in two very different social structures. The maritime peoples of Western Europe developed a spontaneous and expanding market order with contracts and rights as the core, while the maritime peoples of southern China grew up under the monarchy-bureaucratic order of the Central Plains for thousands of years, and there was a remnant of the innate attachment of the agrarian peoples to power, they were bold in business but extremely weak in politics. In the face of power, instead of actively defending their rights, they are keen on rent-seeking, obtaining exclusive monopoly rights, and being proud to be a red-top businessman.

Overseas Chinese merchants who made a living in the South China Sea also had similar characteristics of the agrarian-marine ethnic groups along the southern coast, regarding the Western rulers as another emperor, with the highest goal of obtaining the economic concessions of the colonial masters. As the famous American scholar Kong Feili pointed out in the book "The Chinese among the Other": "No matter how rich the merchant is, it is difficult to make a difference in his career, and the merchant can only be subordinate to the monarch and the scholar." When Chinese businessmen live overseas, they often do not compete with contemporary rulers for political power. On the contrary, as in their ancestral homeland of China, they bowed to the local rulers in exchange for some kind of trust, and more likely to get some kind of preferential treatment, such as special rights to exercise the right to taxation. ”

It can be understood that although the southern marine economy began to rise after the Ming Dynasty, the southern marine population was only a group of economic animals that lacked political consciousness because of its deep-rooted agrarian nature, so the prosperity of the southern economy and the prosperity of marine commerce were not transformed into political requirements for autonomy. The powerful southern economy still cannot fight the political power of the north, and the agrarian-maritime civilization in the south has always been an economic giant and a political dwarf in the face of the northern agrarian-nomadic civilization. At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Zheng Chenggong's Southern Maritime Empire once attacked Nanjing in the Northern Expedition, which was only an accidental exception, and even so, it ended in the submission of the South to the North.

▍ The struggle between the North and the South after modern times

The Manchu Qing Dynasty was the last wave of grassland/forest peoples in Chinese history to impact the Central Plains, and the dual system of farming/nomadic civilization established by the Manchu Qing Dynasty was to unify the farming Han people and the nomadic frontier peoples in the same imperial territory after the Mongolian Yuan Empire, which was both the peak of the northern empire in history and the last return to the light. Especially after entering the 19th century, the Western maritime civilization has been ahead of the Eurasian inland civilization in terms of economic and military strength, as well as the political and religious system.

In the past, the grassland civilization impacted the Central Plains, and the aftermath rippled from the coast, but now it is reversed, and the shock wave of the new civilization from the sea radiates from south to north, from the coast to the interior, to the depth of the land of Shenzhou, and even the grassland. Chen Xujing, who had a special study of the north-south issue during the Republic of China period, pointed out: "The direction of The development of Chinese culture in history has been inherent in the north and the south; However, the trend of modern Chinese cultural development is from south to north. ”

After the 19th century, almost all the major events that affected China were brewed in the south, and then attacked the north: the Opium War that opened up the five ports of trade, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolution that swept through the south, the foreign affairs movement carried out by Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong and other southern feudal officials in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the kang liang new party, a local scholar who appeared on the national stage from remote Guangdong, the Xingzhong Association supported by overseas Chinese in Nanyang, the Huaxing Society with the background of the two lakes, the Guangfu Society of Jiangsu and Zhejiang people, and the national congressional petition movement launched by the southern gentry. Until 1911, the Xinhai Revolution, which first attacked in the south. For the first time in Chinese history, the south, which was the first to gain the wind, launched wave after wave of active offensives to the north. From a civilizational point of view, it is tantamount to a challenge from the newly emerging maritime order in the south to the agrarian-nomadic order in the north.

Before the birth of the maritime civilization, the south was usually not the opponent of the north, and the only success was that Zhu Yuanzhang expelled the Mongols and established the Ming Dynasty. However, Zhu Yuanzhang was born in Fengyang on the Huai River, at the junction of north and south, and for a long time mixed at the bottom, contaminated with the barbarism of the northern nomads, and after becoming emperor, Ming Chengyuan took over the absolute monarchy of The Original. In the past, the Central Plains Dynasty of the Han People, from the Han and Tang Dynasties to the Two Song Dynasties, was ruled by monarchs and scholars, but Zhu Yuanzhang conquered the north politically, but was conquered by the north in soul, and sinicized and institutionalized the absolute monarchical dictatorship created by the Yuan Dynasty.

However, after the modern era, the offensive of the south against the north obviously has a different connotation and pattern of the times. The south of the Xinhai Revolution, whether it is the constitutional gentry or the revolutionaries, is the representative of the maritime civilization, and their impact on the northern nomadic-agricultural civilization symbolized by the Qing court is to hope to establish a new China that is in line with the international maritime order. However, during the Xinhai period, the traditional old order was too strong, and the emerging southern forces could not dominate the overall situation, and the final result of the Xinhai Revolution could only be a compromise between the north and the south to achieve a temporary reconciliation of the maritime, agricultural and nomadic order. The Republic of China is the product of a great compromise and reconciliation, but it has also left many sequelae of internal conflicts.

The great unified empire established by the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty across agriculture and tourism was based on royal power as the center and symbol, and when the Qing Emperor abdicated the symbolic universal royal power disintegrated, the constitutional order with the Constitution as the core was delayed, so the multi-ethnic Republic of China, which inherited the vast territory of the Qing Dynasty, immediately had a national identity crisis. The old and the new, the south and the north, the coast and the interior, the central plains and the frontier, the agricultural order and the nomadic order, constantly produce internal tears and conflicts.

One is manifested in the tearing between the east and the west, the central plains and the frontier. The great unification of the Qing Empire, with royal power as its axis, was a pluralistic symbol, a pluralistic religion, and a pluralistic governance structure. "One kingship, each expressed", the Qing Emperor was called the Emperor in the Han People, in the Mongols, he was the Great Khan of the Steppe, and in the Tibetans, he was the Living Bodhisattva of Manjushri. When the Republic of China was established in the modern nation-state model, some frontier peoples no longer recognized the Republic of China as a national symbol, nor did they consider themselves to belong to the emerging nationality of the Chinese nation, and they tried to break away from the chaotic and changeable central government and achieve independence or partition.

Tibet remained de facto semi-independent until 1949, and at the instigation of Russia, Outer Mongolia tried to break away from China, and finally succeeded through the Yalta Covenant at the end of World War II. There have been repeated separatist uprisings in Xinjiang, and the Republic of East Turkistan was established for the second time. A puppet state of Manchukuo emerged in the northeast under the auspices of Japan. When the Republic of China was in the form of five generations and ten kingdoms of internal and external troubles, the centrifugal force of the nomadic civilization of western China on the civilization of the Central Plains of eastern China became more and more intense, especially when the separation activities were blessed by foreign forces.

The second is the conflict between the south and the north, between the maritime civilization and the agricultural civilization. After the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the southern culture, mainly the southern farming civilization in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, to the Southern Song Dynasty, especially after the Ming Dynasty, the marine civilization of Ouzhe, Zhejiang and Guangdong began to appear, ahead of the south, the original remote coastal defense border areas became the center of civilization, which can be understood why from the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, the southernmost Lingnan culture, with Guangzhou as the center, will open the atmosphere of the times, ahead of the whole country. Guangzhou was originally the most remote place in the south of the Central Plains Empire, and became the most open southern center in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

After the late Qing Dynasty, Shanghai, as the first metropolis in the Far East as a treaty port, became the leader of the South, enough to compete with Beijing, the symbol of the North. The Republic of China is the product of the compromise between the north and the south, Yuan Shikai represented the north, in the early Minchu to the north to the south, became the life president, and even called the emperor. But the tide of the times had turned to the south, and Yuan was soon discredited and depressed. In the Republic of China after Yuan, the dispute between the north and the south resurfaced, and two legal systems, two parliaments and two governments were formed in Guangzhou and Beijing.

The struggle between the north and the south is a struggle for power on the surface, but in essence it is a struggle between the old and the new. Zhou Zuoren said: "The 'north-south dispute' is not a war between people in two places, but a war of ideas. The war between the north and the south should be renamed 'the war between democratic ideas and chieftain ideas'. "Although the May Fourth New Culture Movement was launched in Beijing, both the author of "New Youth" and the new school professors at Peking University are mostly southerners, from the coastal provinces that were the first to gain popularity, and have studied in Shanghai, Japan, Europe and the United States. The south is new and the north is old, which became an indisputable fact at the beginning of the Republic of China.

Liang Yuandong, a scholar during the Republic of China period, said: "The reason why the north rules the south is because the economic supply of the north is not as good as that of the south, and in order to maintain the status of the ruling class, the north must take the south, but the south does not have to rule the north. "Whether in ancient times or in modern times, the north has a strong sense of unity, while the south has a strong sense of division. From the Xinhai Revolution and the Second Revolution to the Inverting Yuan Movement and the Autonomy of the Provinces, the several confrontations between the South and the great unification of the North after the Republic of China were all manifested in the form of "independence of the provinces" and "autonomy of the provinces." The domineering spirit of the north in the political center and the centrifugal centrifugation in the south in the cultural and economic center constitute a sharp contrast.

At the same time as the old and new cultures of the North and the South were clashing, a new northern continental civilization appeared in the world, that is, the socialism of Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia is a continental civilization empire with communist ideology, and its maritime civilization empire represented by Britain and the United States has formed two major antagonistic camps in the twentieth century. China, centered on the agrarian civilization, has since been constrained by the dual constraints of the maritime civilization of Britain and the United States and the continental civilization of Soviet Russia. Where to go is confusing to modern Chinese.

Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles originally absorbed the maritime civilization from the West, but wanted to implement it in China with the background of agricultural civilization, but there was no place to start, and it was impossible to mobilize the people to participate in the revolution.

However, it is difficult for marine civilizations and continental civilizations to be treated in one furnace. The Kuomintang was essentially Anglo-American, with Soviet Russia as its use. The two are bound to have internal conflicts. As a result, the kuomintang and the communist party split, and it was inevitable. After that, the confrontation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party was quite interesting to the dispute between the New South and the New North. The base camp of Chiang Kai-shek's regime was along the coast of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, so the capital was Nanjing, with Jiangnan as the base of the regime. The National Government came from the open coast, but many of the traditions of the Central Plains peoples remained, and it was a semi-marine, semi-agricultural regime. Although the CCP started in the south, its real development was to move to the north after the Long March, with a strong northern character, and it was a Soviet-Russian-style continental-type regime.

Farming peoples have a strong sense of practicality and plasticity, and can be combined with marine civilizations and can also be integrated with nomadic civilizations. Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, China has been a continental-type country of agrarian-nomadic civilization influenced by maritime civilization, neither sea nor pastoral, and has been in turmoil between freedom and despotism. The long contest between the South and the North is related to this. The victory of the CCP over the Kuomintang in 1949 can be understood as the conquest of maritime civilization by mainland civilization, and the reform and opening up begun by Deng Xiaoping after 1978 was also the return of marine civilization to mainland China, which was another civilizational Northern Expedition. But, as in history, the political center has always been in the north. The spatial dislocation of the north and the south forms the key to understanding Chinese history.

If you understand the historical north-south relationship, you will also understand "what is China". Historical China is a complex of diverse civilizations, central China, frontier China and southern China, each representing agricultural, nomadic and maritime civilizations, which constitute a "pluralistic unity" in the sense of civilization. China does not only have a Central Plains space, but also a nomadic world and a maritime world. The intertwining of the teeth of the three worlds and the competition and conflict of the three civilizations are the deep secrets of Chinese history. Can farming, nomadism, and maritime civilizations be reconciled in the future in time and space? Perhaps, this is the hope of the Chinese nation.

This article is transferred from "The Window of Xu Jilin" and was originally titled "What You Know and Don't Know About The Culture of the North and the South." Welcome to share personally, media reprint please contact the copyright owner.