Unlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title:<p>> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.<p>Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.<p>> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.<p>"We're just asking questions", etc.
Travellers from Asia journeyed to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom of Ghandara (whose name is a corruption of Alexandria) and took Buddhism back with them to the east. This is fictionalised in the story 'Journey to the West'. Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day. If you spend enough time wandering around the British Museum you learn all this stuff.
Scouring trade route history is a two-edged sword: which way did influence run?<p>I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. <i>That</i> path also has a lot of history.
Yes, sometimes research is funded due to political motivations. The researchers could discover and publish interesting historical facts anyway. Hopefully they will still be able to do good work? It’s good that <i>someone</i> funds it, even if their motives aren’t pure.<p>It’s unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it’s more of a side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics, and moon landings.
You see this in cross-Atlantic history education too. In US and European history, everything seems to flow out of Europe, or at least the Mediterranean. Menes becomes king of Egypt around 3150 BC. Then we fastforward to Honer and the Olympic games in 7th century Greece. Then there are the Punic wars and Rome wins the Battle of Cornith in 146 BC. Then the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and so on. With some things like the revolts in Judaea against Rome as a kind of dialectic counter-narrative.<p>If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening.<p>From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.
FTA:
“We are studying the past to understand and shape the present and future,” said Wang.<p>I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that.<p>I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.<p>I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion.<p>So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?
The next step is to start taking "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" seriously.<p>Vide <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies</a>