GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE - 3 3 1
coalesce, just as exchanges of domesticates between ecologically diverse
regions enriched Chinese food production, exchanges between culturally
diverse regions enriched Chinese culture and technology, and fierce competition
between warring chiefdoms drove the formation of ever larger and
more centralized states (Chapter 14).
While China's north-south gradient retarded crop diffusion, the gradient
was less of a barrier there than in the Americas or Africa, because
China's north-south distances were smaller; and because China's is transected
neither by desert, as is Africa and northern Mexico, nor by a narrow
isthmus as is Central America. Instead, China's long east-west rivers (the
Yellow River in the north, the Yangtze River in the south) facilitated diffusion
of crops and technology between the coast and inland, while its broad
east-west expanse and relatively gentle terrain, which eventually permitted
those two river systems to be joined by canals, facilitated north-south
exchanges. All these geographic factors contributed to the early cultural
and political unification of China, whereas western Europe, with a similar
area but a more rugged terrain and no such unifying rivers, has resisted
cultural and political unification to this day.
Some developments spread from south to north in China, especially
iron smelting and rice cultivation. But the predominant direction of spread
was from north to south. That trend is clearest for writing: in contrast to
western Eurasia, which produced a plethora of early writing systems, such
as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittite, Minoan, and the
Semitic alphabet, China developed just a single well-attested writing system.
It was perfected in North China, spread and preempted or replaced
any other nascent system, and evolved into the writing still used in China
today. Other major features of North Chinese societies that spread southward
were bronze technology, Sino-Tibetan languages, and state formation.
All three of China's first three dynasties, the Xia and Shang and Zhou
Dynasties, arose in North China in the second millennium B C
Preserved writings of the first millennium B.C. show that ethnic Chinese
already tended then (as many still do today) to feel culturally superior to
non-Chinese barbarians," while North Chinese tended to regard even
South Chinese as barbarians. For example, a late Zhou Dynasty writer of
the first millennium B.C. described China's other peoples as follows: "The
people of those five regions-the Middle states and the Rong, Yi, and other
wild tribes around them-had all their several natures, which they could
not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They had their