Culturally speaking, people like Father Mikhail did not have much resistance to this plan.
For them, anyway, they have to use Greek characters instead of Chinese characters. There is not much difference. But these days, there is actually no common understanding of "Russian culture" among the people. For most ordinary people, the oppression and suffering brought by the Prince of Rus far outweighed their sense of identity with the common people. For local nobles, this "Russ community" is more like an excuse used by powerful parties such as Moscow to annex themselves.
In fact, this kind of thing is not uncommon. In this era, being of the same ethnic group does not mean that they will be treated well. This is political common sense that all Mongolians know - Mengge Khan conducted an investigation back then, and was surprised to find that the annual tribute paid by Mongolian military households was theirs. 1.5 times the total annual revenue. Even the Great Khan himself couldn't stand the result, so he could only urgently issue an order to lighten the burden on everyone.
As for the Ross area, let alone this era, even in Guo Kang's previous life, different "Russians" had the same sense of identity with each other...
Their main concern is religious differences. However, this matter is not a big deal at the moment, because the Roman Church characterizes these doctrinal contradictions as different understandings of theology and academics, and does not believe that this offends the foundation of the church. Therefore, compared to the Poles and Hungarians who used the same scriptures, the Purple Horde Khanate, which directly changed the scriptures, was more friendly to them.
As for the principle, Guo Kang also knows it very well. Other churches insist on excluding heretics because this is the only common belief they have to sustain their organization. But the foundation of the faith of the Roman Church is "the religion of Rome", and the foundation of faith that maintains the organization lies in "Rome", so as long as there is a common belief in this aspect, the religious details do not need to be so concerned.
From this perspective, the religious foundation of the Purple Horde Khanate is more solid than that of Eastern Rome: the churches of Eastern Rome were just subordinates of the imperial court, often fighting among themselves, even affecting the political situation and hindering foreign wars: but the churches of the Purple Horde Khanate , is the biological son brought out by the Khan himself, and the relationship between the two parties is much closer.
With this foundation in mind, the language issue itself is not that difficult.
Examples can be found in places that have been ruled by the Central Plains regime, and even in places that have been affected. For example, in Guo Kang's time, the most familiar Vietnamese phrase for Central Plains people was probably the slogan "Nuo Song Kong Ye".
This sentence, written in Vietnamese characters, is "Na Gun Kong (Destroy)". Na and 铳 are both words from Chinese, meaning to hand over firearms; Kong is an auxiliary word in the local language, indicating negation; Mie is a variant of the character for annihilation, which also comes from Chinese, which means to annihilate or kill. The four words put together mean "hand in the gun and don't kill."
In other words, three of these four characters are actually Chinese words, and their pronunciation is close to the ancient Chinese pronunciation. If someone from the Ming Dynasty shouted this, they would still understand...
There are many similar examples. In Vietnamese, a large category called "Sino-Vietnamese words" has formed. Even if Vietnam later switched to Pinyin, it would not be able to eliminate so many words. Especially in the military field, things like weapons, siege, and prisoners are almost the original pronunciation of Chinese.
In fact, Vietnamese and Chinese are not even in the same language family in terms of linguistics. They are on the same level as Chinese and Greek. But even so, Chinese has successfully adapted and penetrated into the local language.
Chinese is still the dominant language here. Maybe the Greek language is a little more resistant, but people from other places don't even resist it that much.
Of course, the performance of the Greeks was actually a matter of attitude. To put it bluntly, the Purple Horde was too lenient towards them. Historically, the Greeks in Asia Minor accepted the Turkic language brought by the Seljuks within two generations - it stands to reason that Greek has an advantage in terms of cultural level, which in turn affects the Turkic language. Even those Turkmen tribesmen who led them were reluctant to speak Turkic. However, the Greeks have always been quite flexible in this regard...
Under such circumstances, Guo Kang believed that Greek could not take on a major role and that promoting Chinese was indeed effective.
For the lessons learned here, just refer to the Qing Dynasty.
When Yongzheng was in power, he tried to promote Mandarin throughout the country, and even issued a mandatory order for this purpose, stipulating that people who did not know Mandarin could not participate in the imperial examination. The trigger for this incident was the inconvenience of communication between officials in Guangdong and Fujian and other people. However, there was also a whole set of considerations and measures behind this.
The biggest difficulty of the Qing Dynasty was the low legitimacy brought by foreign rule. In order to solve this problem, Yongzheng tried to start from the aspect of ethnic differentiation. The core of his theoretical conception is to replace ethnic divisions with regional divisions.
According to Yongzheng's discussion, Huaxia and Yidi are actually the same group of people. There is not much difference in blood, and there is no distinction between superiority and inferiority in culture. Their differences are due to regional distinctions. Manchuria is also a place of origin, not a nation. Like other parts of China, it is a name for the people living in specific areas and should not be excluded.
On this basis, we should rely on virtue, rather than looking at specific regions, to decide who will serve as the ruler, and ultimately establish a unified regime of the "Hua Yi family" covering Han, Manchu and Mongolia, and realize that "the barbarians and Di are advanced to the lords, and the world The Confucian ideal of great unity is that "near and far, big and small are as one".
The promotion of Mandarin is one of the supporting measures. In theory, breaking down regional barriers through Mandarin can provide this new dynastic model with greater legitimacy and stability.
To be fair, this idea actually has many merits, and it will also have an impact on future generations. But it also faced the same embarrassing situation as many other strategies of the Qing Dynasty.
In other words, many policies and theories of the Qing Dynasty were actually not backward, some organizational methods were even very advanced, and the government and the people did not lack sufficient wealth and vitality as a basis. The biggest problem of the Qing Dynasty was the Qing Dynasty itself...
The first problem Yongzheng faced with his conception was that he could not truly treat Manchuria as an ordinary place of origin, as he said. Not only that, in order to maintain the existence of the Eight Banners organization, we must constantly emphasize the study of Manchu, otherwise the bannermen will soon forget all these.
Similarly, since it is proved that Yi and Di are not inferior, supporting measures must be taken. Yongzheng himself was aware of this, and changed the original two-tiered structure of Chinese and barbarians to three-tiered: Chinese, barbarians, and beasts. He believed that geography distinguished Chinese barbarians, and whether they abided by natural principles and human relations distinguished humans and beasts. This is used to offset the traditional view of "barbarians = beasts".
(End of chapter)
