Year of the Wall

The latter two strategies — war and conquest — are obviously not very relevant to 21st-century wall-building. As I observed in an earlier column, the main way in which ancient migrations differ from modern ones is the massive imbalance in power in modern times between rich governments and the people trying to cross their borders. Mexican migrants do not have the option of calling on armored divisions to clear their path to San Diego, let alone of annexing the United States and running it from Mexico City.

In the rare cases where something like a war has erupted across borders protected by walls, the walls themselves have never been more than just one part of the broader security strategy of the richer, more developed side. Just look at the Gaza Strip in 2014. Israel’s security barrier did shut out Hamas terrorists, but the Iron Dome anti- missile system and incursions into the strip arguably mattered even more.

This, too, seems to be part of a long-term pattern. Chinese rulers always combined walls with two other strategies, the first being pre-emptive war. In this approach to security, walls deterred lowlevel threats from individuals and families while massive military operations prevented higher-level threats emerging from rival nomadic states on the steppes.

The mastermind behind the walls-and-wars strategy was China’s first emperor, who united much of the country in 221 B.C. and was subsequently buried with the famous Terracotta Army. He saw wall-building as a means of offense rather than defense, and his original version of the Great Wall brought vast tracts of the steppes inside China, effectively annexing much of the nomads’ most important territory. But this approach actually had the opposite effect from what he intended: Threatened with starvation, nomads formed a great federation and mounted massive invasions of China. In 200 B.C. China hit back with its own invasion of the steppes, only to lose perhaps 100,000 men in battle and another 100,000 to frostbite.

Following this disaster, China added a second strategy — bribery — to wall-building and pre-emptive war. When nomads robbed and raided villages, the frontier provinces found it harder to pay their taxes, and responding by building walls or sending out armies cost a fortune. So, emperors reasoned, why not just pay the nomads to stay away? So long as the cost of bribes came to less than what the empire would lose through reduced tax payments or would spend on walls or troops, bribery paid.

Bribing nomads, however, had the same drawbacks as any other kind of extortion racket. There is a saying in Chicago politics that an honest man is one who, when you buy him, stays bought. But steppe chiefs did not play by these gentlemanly rules. Regularly, they took their bribes and then raided anyway.

‘Small of Virtue’

Managing the frontier was a delicate business. The most skilled emperors and civil servants learned to use carrots and sticks, handing out just enough bribes, going to war just often enough and building walls just strong enough to keep the plundering at the level of a tolerable nuisance rather than a threat to the empire’s integrity.

Relying on walls alone was a strategy of last resort. The brickand-stone version of the Great Wall you would see today if you took a tour bus from Beijing to Badaling, for instance, was the byproduct of a military disaster in 1449. That year, after a decade of mismanaging the frontier, Emperor Zhengtong launched a great invasion of the steppes that went so badly that the Mongols actually captured him. With all alternatives apparently having failed, work on a new and improved Great Wall accelerated, accompanied by an upswing in anti-Mongol racism. Mongol dress and speech were banned in Beijing, and ordinary Chinese increasingly looked at immigrants from Central Asia with suspicion. Violent attacks and expulsions became common as the wall went up.

The wall took more or less its modern form under Emperor Jiajing, who reigned from 1522 to 1567. By general agreement, he was a terrible ruler, a paranoid, narrowminded bully. To crack down on the Mongols, he cut off all trade and migration, but the consequences were disastrous on the Chinese as well as the Mongolian side of the border. Poverty soared, riots occurred regularly and the state budget spiraled into the red. And despite these disasters, the wall did not really work. Immigrants kept responded by building more walls, until by the 1570s a continuous barrier ran for 4,000 miles along China’s northern border.

The expense was staggering. In 1576, the wall absorbed 75 percent of government income. Unsurprisingly, it was always underfunded, undermanned and under construction, and when its biggest test came it proved useless. Morale had collapsed among the border guards, who, as the wall’s historian Julia Lovell describes it, “realized they were building endless, useless walls around an irredeemably decayed political centre.” Manchu attackers breached the wall in April 1644, entering Beijing less than three weeks later. There they found that the emperor had hanged himself, after pinning a note to his robes: “I, feeble of mind and small of virtue, have offended against Heaven … Ashamed to face my ancestors, I die.”

Lessons

Since then, no Chinese ruler has made much of the Great Wall — until 1972, when, in denial of history, Richard Nixon made it the symbol of China’s success.

President-elect Trump recognizes that there are lessons in the Great Wall of China. “You know the Great Wall of China, built a long time ago, is 13,000 miles,” he told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News in 2015. “I mean, you’re talking about big stuff. We’re talking about peanuts, by comparison, to that.” The lesson to draw from China’s Great Wall, he seems to be suggesting, is that building a Great Wall of America will be easy, because it will be shorter than China’s (“Well, it’s 2,000 miles but we really [only] need 1,000 miles,” he says) and modern technology will make the task simple. “They didn’t have Caterpillar tractors,” he correctly observes, adding “I only want to use Caterpillar, if you want to know the truth, or John Deere.” The construction of China’s wall, by contrast, was so arduous that — according to folktales — one worker died for every yard built. “If you have a son, don’t nourish him,” one ancient poet said. “Can’t you see, the Long Wall is propped up on skeletons?”

It seems to me, though, that the lessons of the Great Wall of China are rather different. Border walls have always been a way for rich, developed states to respond to the instability globalization creates, and we should not be surprised by their renaissance in the 21st century. However, no wall — certainly not China’s — has ever been a standalone solution. All have worked only as part of a larger security system, involving diplomacy (especially bribery) and force (especially pre-emptive war), both of which bring problems of their own. Further, although walls can curb the chaos that uncontrolled migration brings, they also generate chaos of their own, destabilizing both sides of the border and creating new sets of winners and losers. If 2017 does turn out to be the Year of the Wall, we should brace ourselves for a bumpy ride.