OPINION

China's beautiful wall

From the moment he launched his campaign for president, Donald Trump compared the barrier he wanted to build along the U.S. southern border to China’s Great Wall. With the U.S. government shuttered by the standoff over funding Trump’s wall, both he and his Democratic opponents might want to take a closer look at the Chinese fortification and why it failed.

The Great Wall is the handiwork of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), primarily constructed in the mid-to-late 16th century. The common perception is that the wall was conceived as a single massive infrastructure project to protect China’s tumultuous northern border from foreign invaders. It was nothing of the sort. The Great Wall was built mostly by default, by a political system too paralyzed by infighting to come up with anything better.

Border security had been a preoccupation of China’s imperial court from its earliest days. “Barbarians” from the northern steppe routinely threatened the Middle Kingdom. Some, such as Genghis Khan’s Mongols in the 13th century, managed to overrun the entire empire.

The long northern boundary ran through inhospitable terrain that made it difficult to defend. Chinese emperors had tried a variety of methods to secure the border, from buying off the barbarians to mounting massive military expeditions against them. The problem would always return when a new batch of tribesmen appeared across the frontier.

The Ming Dynasty compounded the usual difficulties of securing the border with a combination of arrogance, division and indecision. That led it to build defensive barriers to keep the barbarians out. “Unwilling to trade with the Mongols, and unable to defeat them militarily, by the middle of the sixteenth century the Ming had no policy choice left but ... to attempt to exclude the nomads by building walls,” historian Arthur Waldron wrote in his exhaustive study The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.

The strategy proved effective in blunting Mongol raids—where walls were built. The problem was that the mobile horsemen could easily shift their assaults to undefended areas of the border. That’s exactly what a large Mongol force did in 1550 when it penetrated to the Beijing suburbs. The response of the court was to build more walls. The Great Wall was the result of this haphazard defense policy.

The tragedy is that the Ming’s big, beautiful wall failed to fulfill its sole mission: to protect China from invasion. The Ming were still tinkering with the massive structure when the dynasty collapsed in 1644. Amid the resulting chaos, a new steppe power, the Manchus, descended from the north, snatched Beijing and ruled as the Qing Dynasty.

The Ming contributed to their own catastrophe. Emperors, coddled in luxurious palaces and lacking knowledge of conditions along the border, preferred looking tough on foreigners to compromise. Resistance to mutually beneficial trade deepened causes of instability. Treating others as bandits to be thwarted rather than poor people in need doomed Ming policy to failure.

The ultimate lesson of the Great Wall of China is that a physical barrier, no matter how expensive and impressive, will fail if detached from a broader set of policies to alleviate the sources of insecurity along the border. The Ming never figured that out. Hopefully Washington’s mandarins will.

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