5 - Cultural Diversity and Coercive Cultural Homogenization in Chinese History

Summary

This chapter examines China’s diversity regime which buried its political and cultural diversity in history. For most international relations scholars, China appears as an exception to this volume’s argument on cultural diversity. What is unique about China is not its unity but its precocious capacities for direct rule and military-fiscal extraction which began under the first two unified dynasties: the Qin and the Han. China’s seeming unity is the product of the mutually reinforcing processes of coercive political unification and cultural homogenization. Political unity achieved by military victories produced and reproduced cultural homogeneity. Successful unifiers equated cultural diversity with political troubles and thus sought to level their subjects. A flattened cultural landscape, in turn, legitimated unifiers’ claim to rule ‘all under heaven’. This chapter first outlines China’s cultural plurality in its formative era. It then examines how unified dynasties forged a singular Han culture with an extreme homogenization regime that included mass killings and migrations, standardization of weights and measures, erasure of intellectual diversity, and monopolization of history writing.