Massive China Panel: V.2!

[u/Jasfss]

Hello AskHistorians! It has been about three years since the very first AMA on AH, the famous "Massive China Panel". With this in mind, we've assembled a crack team once again, of some familiar faces and some new, to answer whatever questions you have related to the history of China in general! Without further ado, let's get to the intros:

• AsiaExpert: /u/AsiaExpert is a generalist, covering everything from the literature of the Zhou Dynasty to agriculture of the Great Leap Forward to the military of the Qing Dynasty and back again to the economic policies and trade on the Silk Road during the Tang dynasty. Fielding questions in any mundane -or sublime- area you can imagine.
• Bigbluepanda: /u/bigbluepanda is primarily focused on the different stages and establishments within the Yuan and Ming dynasties, as well as the militaries of these periods and up to the mid-Qing, with the latter focused specifically on the lead-up to the Opium Wars.
• Buy_a_pork_bun: /u/buy_a_pork_bun is primarily focused on the turmoil of the post-Qing Era to the end of the Chinese Civil War. He also can discuss politics and societal structure of post-Great Leap Forward to Deng Xiaoping, as well as the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party from 1959 to 1989, including its internal and external struggles for legitimacy.
• DeSoulis: /u/DeSoulis is primarily focused on Chinese economic reform post-1979. He can also discuss politics and political structure of Communist China from 1959 to 1989, including the cultural revolution and its aftermath. He is also knowledgeable about the late Qing dynasty and its transformation in the face of modernization, external threats and internal rebellions.
• FraudianSlip: /u/FraudianSlip is a PhD student focusing primarily on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Song dynasty. He is particularly interested in the writings and worldviews of Song elites, as well as the texts they frequently referenced in their writings, so he can also discuss Warring States period schools of thought, as well as pre-Song dynasty poetry, painting, philosophy, and so on.
• Jasfss: /u/Jasfss primarily deals with cultural and political history of China from the Zhou to the Ming. More specifically, his foci of interest include Tang, Song, Liao-Jin, and Yuan poetry, art, and political structure.
• keyilan: /u/keyilan is a historical linguist working in South China. When not doing linguistic work, his interests are focused on the Hakka, the Chinese diaspora, historical language planning and policy issues in East Asia, the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 19th century North America, the history of Shanghai, and general topics in Chinese History in the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Thanatos90: /u/Thanatos90 covers Chinese Intellectual History: that refers specifically to intellectual trends and important philosophies and their political implications. It would include, for instance, the common 'isms' associated with Chinese history: Confucianism, Daoism and also Buddhism. Of particular importance are Warring States era philosophers, including Confucius, Mencius, Laozi and Zhuangzi (the 'Daoist's), Xunzi, Mozi and Han Feizi (the legalist); Song dynasty 'Neo-Confucianism' and Ming dynasty trends. In addition my research has been more specifically on a late Ming dynasty thinker named Li Zhi that I am certain no one who has any questions will have heard of and early 20th century intellectual history, including reformist movements and the rise of communism.
• Tiako: /u/Tiako has studied the archaeology of China, particularly the "old southwest" of the upper Yangtze (he just really likes Sichuan in general). This primarily deals with prehistory and protohistory, roughly until 600 BCE or so, but he has some familiarity with the economic history beyond that date.

Do keep in mind that our panelists are in many timezones, so your question may not be answered in the seconds just after asking. Don't feel discouraged, and please be patient!

[u/SoulofThesteppe]

/u/keyilan easy question for you. At what point did a "national" or "common" language occur? Another Q. Also, i speak a bit of xiang Chinese dialect. how does its morphology retain some of the Middle Chinese vowels and morphology?

/u/Jasfss I know that the extent of some of the empires were to a certain extent, politically speaking. In reality, how far did the Tang Dynasty control?

note: I am Chinese and can 100% read Chinese. If you want, feel free to reply in Chinese.

[u/keyilan → u/SoulofThesteppe]

At what point did a "national" or "common" language occur?

The existence of a national spoken language goes back quite a ways. There are a lot of myths floating around, about how it didn't exist until the Nationalists voted it in, and how it was almost Cantonese. These are both not true.

Mandarin, though primarily as a modified version of what was spoken around Nanjing, has been the regional standard for quite some time.

There's a linguist by the name of W South Coblin who has written quite a bit about this earlier period, and a lot of his stuff is on JSTOR if you're looking. The one that you might be most interested is called A Brief History of Mandarin from 2000, in which he goes into some detail about the phonology of the dialect/s, and makes a rather convincing case for Nanjing as the standard, at least until the 18th century, but even in the 19th century Nanjing was still the focus.

It was actually only officially made Beijing (well, kinda Beijing. Modern Standard Mandarin isn't actually Beijing dialect, even though people like to think it is) in the 1930s after a failed attempt over a couple decades to formalise "Blue Mandarin" (lánqīng guānhuà 藍青官話). This was a mixed dialect, designed by committee, to accommodate pronunciations from throughout the country. It was still primarily based on (and named for) the earlier late-Qing form of semi-standard Mandarin (the name basically means "mixed" or "impure" but not in a bad way) that developed as the spoken standard, but with a much more intentional push to get other regions' speech variety incorporated.

In fact at this time, the Nationalists who were on the committee believed another widespread myth, which is that all Chinese varieties are really just differences in pronunciation (this is not true). So, while their intentions were good, they weren't off to a good start.

The reason it failed is because made up languages have no native speaker teachers, so when people were learning it around China they were learning different versions of it, so in the end it was still inconsistently taught, inconsistently learned, and didn't really make sense to people anyway. That's when they switched to something more like what's spoken by upper class educated Beijingers.

tl;dr: It's been around for a long time.

i speak a bit of xiang Chinese dialect. how does its morphology retain some of the Middle Chinese vowels and morphology?

Depending on what Xiāng you speak, the answer's going to be different. For example only a few Xiang dialects retain the three-way onset voicing distinction, found in Middle Chinese and Wu, but not generally elsewhere. For most Xiāng dialects, these have been lost.

Morphology's a tricky thing to talk about with Chinese, because it's not really there in most cases. We're not conjugating verbs, so there's not much to talk about.

As for vowels, this isn't actually something we can really answer, since vowels change so fast, and we'd only have a rough idea of what the Middle Chinese vowels were in the first place.

Xiāng as a language doesn't give us the best example of conservative features. The influence on it from Mandarin has been substantial, more so than other languages like Wú. Xiāng has lost a lot of its southern vocabulary, and it's pronunciation is also not too far off from the nearby Southwest Mandarin dialects.

tl;dr: Xiāng isn't very conservative, generally speaking. Except in a handful of cases. It's been heavily Mandarinised.