I've been reading John Keay's "China: A History" and in it he mentions that nomadic tribes from the steppe periodically controlled much of northern and western China, and that they did in in a pluralistic way, being essentially both "Qughans" of the nomadic tribes they were the heads of, and Emperors in the Han fashion of their Chinese settled subjects.
Now, this may be a dumb question, but how would that have worked? Did they really just keep their nomadic tradition and just show up with a gigantic horde once in a while to check in and issue edicts? I'm sure its more complex than that (it always is) but I'm having trouble visualizing the subject.
Did they really just keep their nomadic tradition and just show up with a gigantic horde once in a while to check in and issue edicts?
At least in the early medieval Chinese period, dual states were more an aspect of having the land to have a nomadic warrior horse tradition with leadership willing to partake in those traditions, as well as lead a separate settled bureaucracy, than it was any complex merging of the two.
The intensity of agriculture in settled China prevented that same land from being used for horse pasturing, and considering the defining of Chinese identity with settled agriculture, it lead to the sort of "natural" borders between China proper and the steppe polities.
During the Northern and Southern periods, when you had semi-settled states that straddled both, they managed the two systems separately, although not without conflict, as in the case of the Tuoba Wei where warriors who used to be considered higher prestige were shoved aside for court aristocrats in the Sinicization efforts by one of the Wei leaders.
But this was better than the alternative, as purely nomadic tribes had a harder time keeping their political structure cohesive after the death of a leader, as their legitimacy was not gained through the affiliation with a long-term dynasty, but with the martial powers of the leader at hand. With the death of an old leader, factions would compete to see who would become the new leader, resetting the political structure each time.
This is why the most successful dynasties derived, from these semi-settled states, who were able to provide both the political stability of a settled state, and the warrior ability of a steppe tribe. However, after a few generations of settling down after the conquest of a settled state, that warrior ability would tend to be lost, as is the case of the Tang Dynasty.
One of the early Tang Dynasty emperors, Taizong, considered himself not only the Emperor of the Han people, but also the Qaghan of the Turks.
Much of this was due to his upbringing in the northwestern regions of China where there was great interaction with the steppe tribes, so that he was versed in not only their military tactics but their political structure. He took advantage of this knowledge to attack the Turkish tribes when they were fractured, and force their submission.
However, because later emperors were raised primarily in the court, they lacked this functional knowledge of steppe tribe politics and warfare, and reverted back to Han Dynasty patterns of bribing those nomads to keep the peace, with of course, the same alternating level of success.
Which repeats what I said earlier, once a semi-settled state conquers another state with a large taxable farm base, the state tended to shift from semi-settled to fully settled, leaving their military abilities lacking.
This would be a persistent trend seen repeated throughout Chinese history.
Sources:
Lewis, Mark Edward. China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2009.
Lewis, Mark Edward. China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2009.