The Histories of China and Iran Cast a Long Shadow

The Olympic games are on and everybody is looking at China. Journalists are falling over each other in an attempt to provide the world with some sort of understanding of this remarkable country.

China wants nothing more than to shine before a world that it has only recently decided to rejoin. They are astonished—and hurt—at the spiteful rhetoric they hear. I don’t think we would carp as much if we understood what China is and how their present relates to their past.

Everything that can be said about China and its history can also be said about its counterpart at the other end of the Silk Road, Persia (Iran). They share amazing similarities in nature and experience that it behooves us to understand:

• Antiquity. Both are old civilizations, old empires that enjoyed a number of renaissances. Both also suffered devastating invasions, one of which, the Mongol invasion, did them enormous damage from which neither completely recovered.

• Empires. China became imperial by absorption. They never marched their armies to distant places nor did they acquire overseas empires. They have extended their influence much more through trade than conquest, which they are doing again. Persia, however, was an imperial power that conquered vast territories from 500 BC through 531 AD, after which they never acquired empire again. But like the Chinese, they have always extended their influence through trade and culture. China and Persia have never made war with each other; instead, they opened the Silk Road and for centuries exchanged goods, gifts, and culture.

• Governance. Both China and Persia had periods of great wealth when their central governments were powerful, pervasive, and intelligent. Both were lucky in some of their kings. However, brilliant monarchs rarely have brilliant offspring, and the best of empires fall apart when the center cannot hold. Warlords or barbarians then make life hellish for the people until another strong leader emerges. Both the Chinese and Persians know this—and this is why they prefer the devil they know to the one they do not. Chaos for them is not “creative” as it can be for us; it means famine, violence, and death.

• Injured Pride. It is difficult for countries with distinguished histories to see themselves weak, insignificant, and targets of outside interference. When events turn sour, the public looks for someone to blame—and the obvious target, the Emperor or Shah--must deflect that anger onto someone else. An internal “enemy” is often available—but better yet is an outside foreign power. Neither country has learned that evil events are more often self-created than from outside. China is beginning to acknowledge this—but Iran is far from such understanding yet.

• Talented Populations. China, with its always large population, has contributed more than its share to the world in high culture. They have been experts in literature and philosophy, art and architecture, agronomy, printing, cookery, rice cultivation, metallurgy, gunpowder, silk manufacture, and a system of civil service. Persia, with its much smaller population, was a master of military arts, imperial governance, agronomy, irrigation systems, medicine, literature, and fine arts (architecture, carpets, textiles). The so-called “Golden Age of Islam” which people think of as Arab culture was not at all; it was largely the culture of Islam’s most distinguished conquest, the Persians.

• Four Hundred Bad Years. These two great civilizations declined from 1500-1900 into a backwardness and xenophobia that left them vulnerable to the energetic forces of the modern west. Neither became a colony, but both were exploited by their own terrible elites and those from outside. Both are on the rise today, but China is hampered by feudal ignorance and traditional stubbornness in its vast hinterland and Iran is smothered by a backward and feudal Islam.

Watch the Olympics, and cut China a little slack. They are running as fast as they can, considering from how far they have come.

650 words

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.