Transformation of China's relations with the nomadic peoples of Central Asia in the Middle Ages

This article considers various aspects of China's relations with the nomads of Central Asia, which are associated with the relocation of neighboring peoples to the northern border of the empire. The major feature of this ethno-political situation was that the state and political union of northern China provided objective conditions and opportunities for close interaction and most progressive cultural unification of various peoples of the empire on the basis of the ancient culture. China's policy in relation to the surrounding nomadic peoples, especially in Central Asia, is significantly different in some historical periods, although the strategy was always the same: to maximize the sphere of influence in the surrounding area and, at the same time, to protect the population of their state against external aggression. At the initial stage, China solved this problem trying to distance the nomads from their borders and to maximally fence off from their penetration. However, protection of the borders with defensive constructions was expensive and did not bring the desired results. Then policy towards nomads was revised and a new tactics of struggle was used. For its implementation some of the tribes were moved to the borders of China. Their coming to the Chinese land was due to the resettlement policy carried out by the Chinese court in order to use nomads in the fight against external enemies. This helped to reduce the armed invasion that China's nomadic neighbors made in times of its weakening. However, it was the direct cause which marked the beginning of the rule in China of nearly two dozen public entities of nomads. These events led to the beginning of mass migration of the Chinese to the south of the Yangtze basin. The "southern barbarians" also moved. The migration of different ethnic groups fundamentally changed the population in large parts of Eastern Asia. This time is characterized by mutual coexisting of fundamentally different ways of life of nomadic and agricultural civilizations. Thus, the problem of ethnic and cultural contacts with the non-Chinese peoples on the territory of China in the early medieval period reveals an important feature of the Chinese civilization that consists in the fact that all the introduced elements gradually adapted and became elements of the Chinese culture. On the other hand, the rule of the steppe peoples who invaded the north of China had a significant impact on the formation of the Chinese ethnicity in the early Middle Ages.

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