The "World" is an open system that doesn’t reject "the other"
Six hundred years after the time of the story, the other story of five-Tartar-groups -entering-China occurred after a separate and splitting period in Chinese history. Consciously or unconsciously, the five Tartar groups transformed their cultures to settle on the soil and accept the Central Plains culture. Most of them finally integrated into China.
Among them, Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei Dynasty (AD386-534)was a radical leader in the wave of integrating faraway groups into China. He set about creating rites and music to reconstruct politics and culture in accordance with Chinese traditions. He recounted the history of his people as "descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the ancestor of the Chinese". In consequence, the northern nomads who wore Tartar-style costumes on horseback became Confucian scholars and bureaucrats in Chinese costumes. The reform is an epic of Sinicization. According to A Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Luoyang, Chen Qingzhi, a general in the Southern Dynasty(AD420-589), served as an envoy to the Northern Wei Dynasty from south of the Yangtze River. He thought that once he crossed the Yangtze, he would see a cultural wasteland under the rule of barbarians. When he walked into Luoyang, he was shocked: the city under the governance of the Xianbei ethnic group was "affluent in etiquette". He could not help exclaiming,"Only nowdoI know that Confucianscholars and bureaucrats arestill in the Central Plains."
Thus the history witnessed the other way of China's openness in the story of leaning classical Chinese poetry and wearing Chinese costumes different from the reform of Tartar-style dress, horse-riding and archery. It was an active integration into China of barbarians attracted by its culture. This attraction was not accidental; it originated from an endogenous characteristic of Chinese culture and can be traced back to the concept of "the World" formed during the Western Zhou Dynasty(1046-771 BC). In the eyes of Confucians, a unified World is composed of a five-sided pattern with China in the center and the others around it. In the World, who is Chinese is determined not by blood, lineage or race, but by agreement with Chinese culture.
Therefore, the "World" is an open system that does not reject the "other". A Taiwan historian, Cho-yun Hsu said that in Chinese culture, "there is no absolute 'other', only a relative 'me'." After dressing like Chinese gentry, Tartars confidently considered themselves as the orthodox successors of Chinese culture like those Xianbei people who broke through the Great Wall into the Central Plains. And they integrated their dynasties into Chinese historical line. The World is like endless concentric circles, open to the roads from the edge to the center. In this way, the idea of the World brings an infinite openness and attraction. It is precisely for this reason that the integration of neighboring ethnic groups into China is uncountable, frequent and dense in the course of Chinese history.
