It sounds incredulous that Liao even survived,considering it’s surrounded by much more powerful states and that it’s power structure was quite fragile as well.
Mahakhitan: A Chinese Buddhist Civilization in India
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That's actually the perspective of the Song people. The protagonist Zhao Xingde also held such a view. So you could say the Xia and Song were contending for that kind of legitimacy, and they were highly aware of the threat from each other (although the Song seemed more ignorant).
Xia ITTL was built around the time of the failed Song northern expedition in the early 1000s. The founding emperor only had ~50,000 troops when he first marched towards Central Asia (before he returned to take Shaanxi), and his country had a tendency to not overly expand the military ruling class.
Actually I haven't read a lot of web novels in which both Liao and Song were push-overs. But anyways, this is why these two novels are special to me. The author goes out of the way to purposefully avoid "golden fingers". Some readers were not happy with this indeed.
How did they even take over Guanzhong and Sichuan to begin with if they didn’t take it from the Song?
The Liao Dynasty was fundamentally weak by virtue of its’ low population base and its’ overdependecy over the Beijing area.Once the Beijing area is lost,it’s back to nomadic lifestyle for them.
As for the Song Dynasty,it’s a complete mess by virtue of its’ bloated military and civil administration. There’s so much money spent on maintaining unnecessary components of these two organisations that there’s not much money to actually make them fight or govern effectively. It’s actually the main reason why the Song Dynasty repeatedly lost wars IOTL.
They did take those places from the Song though. Guanzhong was taken with a surprise attack when the Song was in a political crisis, but the Xia did not feel like making further bets. The assault forces were actually suppressed by the counterattacking Song reinforcements from east of the Hangu Pass.
Sichuan was subverted by a Xia-trained Shu-revivalist rebellion. That's why it was kept as a Xia vassal afterwards.
I agree with your other assessments. It's just in the novel the Xia was gravely unstable in its initial years and the founding emperor seemed like a very perfectionist guy (wanted to prematurely cut off the islamization of Central Asia while in the meantime make sure any move against the Liao and Song would lead to minimal losses).
Liao and Song in the 1000s were also stronger. The battle-hardened forces Song inherited from the previous northern states in China Proper had not withered completely by then. Liao had Han Derang and his vigilant maneuvers, as well as a relatively stable ethnicity outlook.
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More like some idea or event or object "unnaturally" created like a computer game cheat code. I mean... I know what ASB and wank respectively mean, but I'm not sure about the combined meaning.
It could be that too.Golden fingers could be an outright cheat code that allows you to summon soldiers to being able to do super unlikely things because the author writes the opponents in such a way that makes them completely stupid.Sometimes the ‘cheat’ could be as simple as somehow the person who got Isoted knows how to make smoothbore muskets in the 13th century. ....
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All Qidian novels belong to ASB section here, as the uptimer’s knowledge itself is his golden finger.
I always feel extremely embarrassed by Qidian novels, not for their golden fingers per se, but for their blatant nationalism and jingoism.
Imagine reading a bundeswehr officer isoted to WWII and then pull a sealion, or to the WWI, 7yw, 30yw, or Brunwald, or the crusades, or Teutonburg forest, and the results would always be a Germanwank and Angloscrew and Poloscrew and Francoscrew.
I don’t mind the jingoism,given that a lot of timelines here would be jingoistic as well. What I think is the matter is that they have these fucked up archaic beliefs that incorporates a lot of communist propaganda.They were also quite intolerant of opinion that’s contrary to mainstream Chinese opinion.
For example,I just had a debate with qidian readers on QQ today. The topic was initially about why the Song Dynasty,who was supposedly richer than the Mongols became bankrupt and was conquered. It then shifted to how land consolidation was the cause of destruction for all Chinese regimes. They have this belief that the landlord gentry class was the root of every disaster in China and must be eliminated.When I pointed out that land consolidation wasn’t that much of an issue in Europe,and then people started talking about how every country in Europe had colonies,and that this is the reason why land consolidation isn’t a problem in Europe.When I pointed out that countries like Germany didn’t have colonies for most of their existence and that the few ones they had were poor and did not have much settlers,they started saying that I’m bullshiting and that all colonies must have been profitable,otherwise the Europeans wouldn’t have taken them in the first place.Some people even quote Mao Zedong’s point of view of historical characters at times even when discussing historical characters who had no relevance to post-1900 China at all.
When somehow the discussion shifted to France’s poor performance in WWII(where people started lame old Cheese eating surrender monkey jokes),and I pointed out that a lot of that had to do with France’s demographic disaster in the 19th century,people just started talking about how numbers don’t matter in war.They pointed out the way how the Qing dynasty got smashed by the Europeans as an example,and they totally ignored how I said that numbers matter because France and Germany were equally advanced technologically.When I pointed out the allied victory over Germany as an example of numbers mattering,the same people starting crying about how the Wehrmacht was outnumbered 10 to 1....just wow.When people started talking about how France’s weapons were all archaic ,I got ignored again when I replied that France actually had more modern tanks than Germany.
Quite often,their research into history outside of China’s just downright embarrassing. Their depiction of foreign leaders often fits common stereotypes rather than what scholars think.It’s just pure lazy.
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It’s the elephant in the room of the Chinese mentality. People either go along with it or go against it by creating a mirror image of it.
I had once had an opposite experience. You know baidu post bar’s Guderian bar?
There was one dude (wehraboo or dégùn) who suggested that the Nazis should have created a Ukrainian landlord class ruling over a Russian serfdom, and this would give the Ukrainians more motivation to support the Reich. I think the guy just turned the communist “landlord-peasant” dichotomy around to create a world of idealized serfdom.
Ray Huang once suggested that China’s dilemma was that resources could neither be concentrated on private hands (through land consolidation), nor on government hands (through tax increase), thus no services or enterprise could be created for the accumulation of wealth, and then the price for equality is prolonged poverty.
I believe that the problem with later Chinese dynasties was not land consolidation per se, but the fact that people who grabbed land and evaded taxes did not bear military duties according to their wealth, unlike European knights whose land came with their military duty.
I always held the opinion that Modernity of the West derives from its feudal traditions. This may also be the reason why Japan could successfully emulate western successes. But other feudal societies may not be so lucky.(Perhaps Mahakhitan feudalism has a chance
)I think the theory that Intransigent South once proposed here,about how there’s no government below the county level is correct.Landlords can evade taxes mainly because they were the ones collecting it.A bureaucracy in the village level once existed between Qin and Western Han.Another thing Is that the country’s so large that it’s difficult for the monarch to micromanage things,thus having to delegate a lot of authority,which decreases over time.Ray Huang once suggested that China’s dilemma was that resources could neither be concentrated on private hands (through land consolidation), nor on government hands (through tax increase), thus no services or enterprise could be created for the accumulation of wealth, and then the price for equality is prolonged poverty.
I believe that the problem with later Chinese dynasties was not land consolidation per se, but the fact that people who grabbed land and evaded taxes did not bear military duties according to their wealth, unlike European knights whose land came with their military duty.
I always held the opinion that Modernity of the West derives from its feudal traditions. This may also be the reason why Japan could successfully emulate western successes. But other feudal societies may not be so lucky.(Perhaps Mahakhitan feudalism has a chance
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Small is beautiful. Sadly this generation of Chinese love only grand narrative.
In Chinese ISOT novels,somehow the time traveler knows everything about Chinese history,they are also geniuses who are as politically and militarily astute as Napoleon Bonaparte.A lot of the times,they somehow also know how to develop advanced weaponry like muskets centuries before their development.Often they end up as emperor and founding their own dynasties.
These aren’t the worst ones. The worst ones in my opinion are those in early Tang or Song Dynasty where they don’t become emperor but the emperor takes up literally every one of the advice like they have no mind of their own.
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The government don’t manage land, but they can prevent landowners from consolidating land and creating larger, more effective estates.
A particularly notorious case is Ming Dynasty. With it gentry privileges, whenever someone gets a title in the civil service exam, there are always peasants who willingly become their “tenants” to avoid tax. Tax disappears from government revenues, and yet this new “landlord” cannot consolidate these farmlands for more effective use.
Song Dynasty should have been better than Ming.
I want to write a novel whereas the uptimer knows only a rough idea about what he want, and a vague sense of direction for future technology, and he has to rely on local downtimer scientists and craftsmen for their realization.
Better still, the uptimer creates an academy and lay down the rules of experiment, and fosters dialogue with foreign scientists, other than trying to recreate modern science all by himself.
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