Invading from the EdgesTexts / text
P. 1
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20160706071420/http://wakinggiants.net/articles/invading.html
Invading from the Edges
home
“Have you not heard of the wanderers of Yueh” - Hsu Wu Key (Ancient Taoist Mystic)
Beijing has won the 2008 Olympics. This victory is widely viewed as vindication of a model of economic development that
is centred on the strength of an authoritarian state.
Ccru is watching for what is brewing at the margins – since this is where everything interesting occurs. It is the forces
seeping in from the periphery - not the dictates of the Politburo - that is ultimately responsible for the development of the
mainland. China calls itself the Middle Kingdom but it still has edges and increasingly the edges are taking over.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Shenzen, a small town on the Pearl River Delta. In 1979 - when it achieved the freedom
granted to the Special Economic Zones - Shenzen was nothing but farmland. Twenty-two years later its streets are filled
with skyscrapers and frenzied shoppers, the product of an economy growing at a staggering 34% a year. The key to this
success lies precisely in its distance from the centre. In Shenzen there is a saying: “the mountains are high and the
emperor is far away.”
It is no surprise that economic activity flourishes on the margins. State centred Confucian society was traditionally hostile
to traders. As early as the late Chou dynasty (1100 –770 BCE) undesirables were banished to the areas south of the
Yangtze River. Merchants were exiled to the edges of the world, populated by pirates and Taoist sorcerers. In Chinese
hyperstitional lore these edges are known as the lands of Yueh.
This zone -on the southern coastal edge of the mainland- bred a maritime culture of commercial dynamism and
entrepreneurial risk that was sharply distinct from the inward-looking, land-locked, state power of the North. Yueh
spawned a hybrid population with an offshore mentality, inspired less by the rigidity of Confucianism than by “the
underground anti-authoritarian counter-cultures of Taoist and Zen Buddhist heterodoxies, that long have flourished on the
Chinese periphery.” It is this hybrid, dynamic, peripheral culture - rather than the state - that is the engine of economic
growth in the Chinese world.
For thousands of years Yueh culture spread outside its borders. Coastal trade brought it to Siberia, Korea, Japan,
Indonesia, through the Indian Ocean, the Malay Peninsula, and across to the Indian subcontinent. This overseas
movement dramatically accelerated when, in 1276, the Mongols invaded and previously sedentary populations swarmed
down from the North. Forced outward by the influence of the nomads the people of Yueh dispersed.
Today there are approximately 60 million Chinese living outside the mainland. This makes the Chinese diaspora the
second largest in the world. By far the majority of these originate from the southern coastal provinces, regions which were
once the ancient Kingdom of Yueh.
This diasporic population has an intense economic vibrancy. This is produced through a distinct market culture unlike that
of the colonists, merchants and multinationals from Europe, America and even Japan. Chinese business operates in an
exterior relation to state backed capitalism with its lumbering bureaucracies, centralized decision making processes and
national headquarters. It functions instead through a true transnationalism, planet-wide networks of communication and