So how were the defenses of the Great Wall of China staffed for two millennia?
There's some description at [1]. At peak, it took a million soldiers to defend the wall. That's huge. China today has a military only about twice that size, and a far bigger population than in the days when the Wall mattered. Staffing the wall was using up a huge amount of manpower.
That article, by an American, says the soldiers spent most of their time farming near the wall. So they were what the original posting calls "military settlers".
How was that huge army kept from taking over the country?
Simply put, the Great Wall of China (as we know it today) didn't exist for two millennia.
What many people now see as the Great Wall of China was built by the Ming dynasty in the late 1400s and lasted at most 200 years before the Ming dynasty fell (they were still constructing it when the Ming dynasty fell, and the subsequent Qing dynasty declined to continue building it).
Before then, the walled fortifications were generally more sporadic, more temporary, and definitely more lightly manned. It would have required much fewer men to defend it--probably looking at say 20k for the Qin or Han era walls--and the Chinese state was, well, a state during much of this time period (by Weber's definition, that it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force), unlike most of Medieval Europe.
Even then, the Chinese state failed several times over the course of two millennia, and a few of those times were quite literally people manning faraway places going "why are we doing this?" and sacking the capital.
I would go with something like Habsburg's military borders and Pandurs or Registered Cossacks. Different religions were not a problem within these groups.
Funny you mention the Habsburg because it reminds me one of the reasons pointed for the Austria-Hungary empire’s disaster in WW1. It was precisely the lack of cultural and ethnic cohesion.
The author channels a lot of clash of civilisation, which I am very fond of.
True. Oddly, I totally blanked on the spelling of the word, like I knew something was up and tried to tweak spell-checker to get it, but I didn’t get it to go.
Anyway, I think I was mostly downvoted for expressing a negative idea than for the spelling error. He does contrast against Game of Thrones quite a bit, though, which I really appreciate. Game of Thrones has a lot of sort of unpleasant aspects that GRRM tries to pass off as realism; and while the past was full of unpleasantness, the voice that says “actually this is a bit over the top and unrealistically grim” is always appreciated.
Maybe that would have been a more well received version of my post… oh well.
There's some description at [1]. At peak, it took a million soldiers to defend the wall. That's huge. China today has a military only about twice that size, and a far bigger population than in the days when the Wall mattered. Staffing the wall was using up a huge amount of manpower. That article, by an American, says the soldiers spent most of their time farming near the wall. So they were what the original posting calls "military settlers".
How was that huge army kept from taking over the country?
[1] https://www.china-mike.com/china-tourist-attractions/great-w...