pp.
78 - 87
Chapter 3
China In Antiquity
The
Master said: "If the government seeks to rule by decree, and to maintain order by the
use of punishment, the people will seek to evade punishment and have no sense of shame.
But if government leads by virtue and governs through the rules of propriety, the people
will feel shame and seek to correct their mistakes."
That
statement is from the Analects, a collection of remarks by the Chinese philosopher
Confucius that were gathered together by his disciples and published after his death in
the fifth century B.C.E. Confucius (Chinese name KungFuci, or Master Kung) lived at a time
when Chinese society was in a state of growing disarray. The political principles that
had governed society since the founding of the Zhou dynasty six centuries earlier were
widely ignored, and squabbling principalities scuffled for primacy as the power of the
Zhou court steadily declined. The common people groaned under the weight of an oppressive
manorial system that left them at the mercy of their feudal lords.
In the midst of this confusion, Confucius traveled the length of
the kingdom observing events and seeking employment as a political counselor. Although he
had little success in his job search, Confucius attracted a number of disciples, to whom
he proposed a set of ideas that in later years served as the guiding principles for the
Chinese empire. Some of his ideas are strikingly modern in their thrust. Among them is the
revolutionary proposition that government depends on the will of the people.
The
civilization that produced Confucius had originated more than fifteen hundred years
earlier along the two great river systems of East Asia, the Yellow and the Yangtze. This
vibrant new civilization, which we know today as ancient China, expanded gradually over
its neighboring areas. By the third century B.C.E., it had emerged as a great empire, as well as the
dominant cultural and political force in the entire region.
Like
Sumer, Harappa, and Egypt, the civilization of ancient China began as a collection of
autonomous villages cultivating food crops along a major river system. Improvements in
agricultural techniques led to a food surplus and the growth of an urban civilization
characterized by more complex political and social institutions, as well as new forms of
artistic and intellectual creativity.
Like
its counterparts elsewhere, ancient China faced the challenge posed by the appearance of
pastoral peoples on its borders. Unlike Harappa, Sumer, and Egypt, however, ancient China
was able to avoid destruction at the hands of the invaders
and survived intact down to the formation of the Chinese empire in 221 B.C.E. The institutions and cultural values that had taken
shape at the dawn of Chinese history were inherited by the empire and formed the
foundation of traditional China until the beginning of the twentieth century. For that
reason, Chinese civilization is sometimes described as the oldest continuous civilization
on earth.
The
Land and People of China
According
to Chinese legend, Chinese society was founded by a series of rulers who brought the first
rudiments of civilization to the region nearly five thousand years ago. The first of
these was Fu Xi (Fu Hsi), the ox-tamer, who "knotted cords for hunting and
fishing," domesticated animals, and introduced the beginnings of family life. The
second was Shen Nong (Shen Nung), the divine farmer, who "bent wood for plows and
hewed wood for plowshares." He was the first to teach the people the techniques of
agriculture. Last came Huang Di (Huang Ti), the Yellow Emperor, who "strung a piece
of wood for the bow, and whittled little sticks of wood for the arrows." Legend
credits Huang Di with creating the Chinese system of writing, as well as with inventing
the bow and arrow. Modern historians, of course, do not accept the literal accuracy of
such legends, but view them instead as part of
Such
is the case with the legendary "three sovereigns" of prehistoric China. Although
there is no clear evidence that any of them actually existed as historical figures, their
achievements symbolize some of the major characteristics that would define Chinese
civilization throughout history: the interaction between nomadic and agricultural
peoples, the importance of the family as the basic unit of Chinese life, and the
development of a unique system of writing.
Human
communities have existed in China for several hundred thousand years. At first, like
their contemporaries throughout the world, the early Chinese lived a simple existence,
fishing, hunting, and gathering food. Eventually, however, perhaps driven by the growing
aridity of the climate in northern China, they began to settle along riverbanks in the
transitional zone between the forested areas and the grasslands. There, sometime around
the eighth millennium B.C.E., these early Chinese began to master the cultivation of
crops. A number of these early agricultural settlements were in the neighborhood of the
Yellow River, where they gave birth to two Neolithic societies known to archaeologists as
the Yang-Shao and the Longshan cultures (sometimes identified in terms of their pottery as
the painted and black pottery cultures).
Historians
once thought that these Neolithic settlements were the earliest farming communities in
China and that civilization, including such characteristics as organized government and a
written language, spread gradually from this nuclear area to other regions of China.
Recently, however, archaeologists have discovered the remains of similar agricultural
settlements in the Yangtze valley in central China and along the coast to the south. These
settlements were based on the cultivation of rice rather than dry crops such as millet,
barley, and wheat, but they are as old as those in the north. Thus, agriculture, and
perhaps other elements of early civilization, may have developed spontaneously in several
areas of China rather than radiating outward from one central nuclear region.
At
first, these simple Neolithic settlements were hardly more than villages, but as the
inhabitants mastered the rudiments of agriculture, the little communities gradually gave
rise to more sophisticated and complex societies. In a pattern that we have already seen
elsewhere, civilization gradually spread from these nuclear settlements
in the valleys of the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers to other lowland areas of eastern and
central China. Government emerged, along with a writing system and other forms of
technology. As wealth increased, the societies began to amass armies and build walled
cities. The process took several thousand years and finally reached a climax in the third
century B.C.E. with the creation of the first state unifying most of China under a single
ruler, the Qin (Ch'in) Empire.
The
two great river valleys, then, can be considered the core regions in the development of
Chinese civilization, and it was in these densely cultivated valleys that East Asia
began to emerge as one of the great food-producing areas of the ancient world. But China
is not just a land of fertile fields. In fact, only 12 percent of the total land area is
arable, compared with 23 percent in the United States. Much of the remainder consists of
mountains and deserts that ring the country on its northern and western frontiers.
This often arid and forbidding landscape is a dominant feature of
Chinese life and has played a significant role in Chinese history. The geographical
barriers served to isolate the Chinese people from advanced agrarian societies in other
parts of Asia. The frontier regions in the Gobi Desert, Central Asia, and the Tibetan
plateau were themselves sparsely inhabited by peoples of Mongolian, Indo-European, or
Turkish extraction. Most were pastoral societies, and as was the case in the other river
valley civilizations, their contacts with the Chinese were often characterized by mutual
distrust and conflict. Although fewer in number than the Chinese, many of these peoples,
like other nomadic societies throughout the steppes of Central Asia, possessed impressive
skills in war and were sometimes aggressive in seeking wealth or territory in the settled
regions south of the Gobi Desert. Over the next two thousand years, the northern frontier
became one of the great faultlines of conflict in Asia, as Chinese armies attempted to
protect precious farmlands from marauding peoples from beyond the frontier. As in other
areas where pastoral and agricultural peoples came into contact, the struggle was a
continual one, and the outcome at any given time depended on the ability of the settled
peoples to fend off the threats of the invaders. When China was unified and blessed with
capable rulers, it could usually keep the nomadic intruders at bay and even bring them
under a loose form of Chinese administration. But in times of internal weakness, China
was vulnerable to attack from the north, and on several occasions, nomadic peoples
succeeded in overthrowing native Chinese rulers and setting up their own dynastic regimes.
From other
directions, China normally had little to fear. To the east lay the China Sea, a
lair for pirates and the source of powerful typhoons that occasionally ravaged
the Chinese coast, but otherwise rarely a source of concern. South of the
Yangtze River was a hilly region inhabited by a mixture of peoples of varied
language and ethnic stock who lived by farming, fishing, or food gathering.
They were gradually absorbed in the inexorable expansion of Chinese civilization.
The
Dawn of Chinese Civilization: The Shang Dynasty
Historians
of China have traditionally dated the beginning of Chinese civilization to the founding
of the Xia (Hsia) dynasty more than four thousand years ago. Although the precise date for
the rise of the Xia is in dispute, legend maintains that the founder was a ruler named Yu,
who is also credited with introducing irrigation and draining the floodwaters that
periodically threatened to inundate the North China plain. The Xia dynasty, in turn, was
replaced by a second dynasty, the Shang, in the eighteenth century B.C.E. Unlike its
predecessor, the Shang has been historically confirmed, since its capital at Anyang, just
north of the Yellow River in north-central China, has been located and excavated by
archaeologists. Among the finds at the Anyang dig were thousands of so-called oracle
bones, ox and chicken bones or turtle shells that were used by Shang rulers for divination
and to communicate with the gods. The inscriptions on these oracle bones are generally
considered to be the earliest form of Chinese writing and provide much of our information
about the beginnings of civilization in China. They describe a culture gradually emerging
from the Neolithic to the early Bronze Age.
Political
Organisation
According
to the available evidence, China under the Shang dynasty was a predominantly agricultural
society ruled by an aristocratic class whose major occupation was war. One ancient
chronicler complained that "the big affairs of state consist of sacrifice and
soldiery." Combat was carried on by means of two-horse chariots. The appearance of
chariots in China in the mid-second millennium B.C.E. coincides roughly with similar
developments elsewhere, leading some historians to suggest that the Shang ruling class may
originally have invaded China from elsewhere in Asia. But items found in Shang burial
Some recent support for that assumption has come from evidence
unearthed in the sandy wastes of Xinjiang, China's far northwestern province. There
Chinese archaeologists have discovered corpses dating back as early as the second
millennium B.C.E. with physical characteristics that are clearly European. They are also
clothed in textiles similar to those worn at the time in Europe, suggesting that they
may have been members of an Indo-European migration from areas much further to the west.
If that is the case, it is not improbable that they were familiar with advances in
chariot making that had occurred at least five thousand years ago in southern Russia and
Kazakstan. By about 2000 B.C.E. spoked wheels were being deposited at gravesites in
Ukraine and
Unfortunately,
we still do not know much about the nature of government under the Shang. From tantalizing
hints provided by the oracle bones and other scattered evidence unearthed at Anyang and
other nearby sites, it seems clear that under the Shang a sophisticated and relatively
centralized monarchy was already in the process of creation. The Shang king ruled with the
assistance of a central bureaucracy in the capital city. His realm was divided into a
number of territories governed by aristocratic chieftains, but the king's power was
evident in that he appointed these chieftains and could apparently depose them at will. He
was also responsible for the defense of the realm and controlled large armies that often
fought on the fringes of the kingdom. The transcendent importance of the ruler was
graphically displayed in the ritual
As
the inscriptions on the oracle bones make clear, the Chinese ruling elite believed in the
existence of supernatural forces beyond the power of human beings and thought that they
could communicate with those forces to obtain divine intervention on matters pertaining to
this world. In fact, the purpose of the oracle bones was to communicate with the gods.
Messages were scratched on the bones. When the bones were exposed to fire, they would
develop cracks that were interpreted by sorcerers as responses to questions posed to the
gods. The questions inscribed on the bones often expressed practical concerns: Will it
rain? Will the king be victorious in battle? Will he recover from his illness?
This evidence also suggests that the king, through his court
sorcerers, was already being viewed as an intermediary between Heaven and Earth. In fact,
an early Chinese character for king consists of three horizontal lines connected by a
single vertical line; the middle horizontal
line represents the king's place between human society and the divine forces in nature.
The early Chinese also had a clear sense of life in the hereafter. Though some of the
human sacrifices discovered in the royal tombs were presumably intended to propitiate the
gods, others were meant to accompany the king or members of his family on the journey to
the next world. From this conviction would come the concept of the veneration of ancestors
(commonly known in the West as "ancestor worship") and the practice, which
continues to the present day in many Chinese communities, of burning replicas of physical
objects to accompany the departed on their journey to the next world.
One
further point is worthy of mention. The Chinese also believed that divine forces,
including a god of the harvest, existed in objects of nature. In fact, spirit worship in
various forms has survived in China down to the present century. But Shang dynasty Chinese
had already come to believe in the existence of one transcendent god, known as Shang Di
(Supreme Emperor). Thus, like peoples of other ancient civilizations, they were gradually
turning to a form of anthropomorphism.
Social
Structures
In
the Neolithic period, the farm village was apparently the basic social unit of China, at
least in the core region of the Yellow River valley. Villages were organized by clans
rather than by nuclear family units, and all residents probably took the common clan
name of the entire village. In some cases, a village may have included more than one clan.
At Banpo (Pan P'o), an archaeological site near modern-day Xian that dates back at least
eight thousand years, the houses in the village are separated by a ditch, which some
scholars think may have served as a divider between two clans. The individual dwellings at
Banpo housed nuclear families, but a larger building in the village was apparently used as
a clan meeting hall. The tribal origins of Chinese society may help to explain the
continued importance of the joint family in traditional China, as well as the relatively
small number of family names in Chinese society. Even today there are only about four
hundred commonly used family names in a society of more than one billion people.
By
Shang times, the classes were becoming increasingly differentiated. It is likely that
some poorer peasants did not own their farms, but were obliged to work the land of the
chieftain and other elite families in the village. The aristocrats not only made war and
served as officials (indeed, the first Chinese character
for official originally meant warrior), they were also the primary landowners. In addition
to the aristocratic elite and the peasants, there were also a small number of merchants
and artisans, as well as slaves, probably consisting primarily of criminals or prisoners
taken in battle.
The
Shang are perhaps best known for their mastery of the art of bronze casting. Utensils,
weapons, and ritual objects made of bronze have been found in royal tombs in urban centers
throughout the area known to be under Shang influence. It is also clear that the Shang had
achieved a fairly sophisticated writing system; the oracle bones provide concrete evidence
of the existence of a system of ideographs and pictographs that is the direct ancestor of
the written language used in China today.
The
Zhou Dynasty
In
the late twelfth century B.C.E., the Shang dynasty was overthrown by an aggressive young
state located somewhat to the west of Anyang, the Shang capital, and near the great bend
of the Yellow River as it begins to flow directly eastward to the sea. The new dynasty,
which called itself the Zhou (Chou), survived for more than nine hundred years and was
thus the longest-lived dynasty in the history of China. Like their predecessors, the Zhou
rulers were apparently the direct descendants of the Neolithic civilization that had
emerged earlier throughout the Yellow River valley and ruled over a frontier region on
the western fringes of the Shang state. According to tradition, the last of the Shang
rulers was a tyrant who
The
Zhou located their capital in their home territory, near the present-day city of Xian.
Later they established a second capital city at modern-day Luoyang, farther to the east,
to administer new territories captured from the Shang. This established a pattern of
eastern and western capitals that would endure off and on in China for nearly two thousand
years.
Political
Structures
The
Zhou dynasty (1122-221 b.c.e.) adopted the
political system of its predecessors with some changes. The Shang practice of dividing
the kingdom into a number of territories governed by officials appointed by the king was
continued under the Zhou. At the apex of the government hierarchy was the Zhou king, who
was served by a bureaucracy of growing size and complexity. It now included several
ministries responsible for rites, education, law, and public works. Beyond the capital,
the Zhou kingdom was divided into a number of principalities
But
the Zhou kings also introduced some innovations. As described by the Rites of Zhou, one of the oldest surviving
documents on statecraft, the Chinese now began to develop a theory of government.
According to this document, the duke of Zhou, brother of the founder of the Zhou dynasty,
asserted that the Zhou house ruled China because it possessed the "mandate of
Heaven." According to this concept, Heaven (viewed as an impersonal law of nature
rather than as an anthropomorphic deity) maintained order in the universe through the Zhou
king, who thus ruled over all humanity (the Chinese term tian xia literally means "all under
Heaven") by a mandate from Heaven. The king, who was selected to rule because of his
talent and virtue, was then responsible for governing the people with compassion and
efficiency. The duke of Zhou used such ideas to justify the Zhou conquest of the Shang,
since the last Shang ruler had allegedly mistreated the people. Eventually, the concept of
the heavenly mandate would become a cardinal principle of Chinese statecraft.
But,
as one historian has noted, the mandate of Heaven was double-edged. The king was expected
to rule according to the proper "Way" (called the Dao and roughly reminiscent of the Hindu concept
of dharma). It was his duty to propitiate
the gods in order to protect the people from natural calamities or a bad harvest. Later
this role would be embodied in a ritual ceremony conducted once each year by the Chinese
emperor at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. If he failed to rule effectively,
theoretically at least he could be overthrown and replaced by a new ruler. Such a concept,
of course, had first been asserted by the duke of Zhou.
This
theory has strong political implications, because it not only sets forth a "right of
revolution" to overthrow a corrupt or evil ruler, but also makes clear that the king,
though serving as a representative of Heaven, is not a divine being himself. In practice,
of course, each founder of a new dynasty would routinely assert that he had earned the
mandate of Heaven, and who could disprove it except by overthrowing the king? The
pragmatic Chinese would later enshrine this view in an ironic proverb: "He who wins
is the king; he who loses is the rebel."
Later
Chinese would regard the period of the early Zhou dynasty, as portrayed in the Rites of Zhou (which, of course, is no more an
unbiased source than any modem government document), as a Golden Age, when there was
harmony in the world and all was right under Heaven. And the key to that harmony lay in
the character of the ruler, who operated as an intermediary between Heaven
Whether
the system functioned in such an ideal manner, of course, is open to question. In any
case, the Golden Age did not last, whether because it never existed in practice or
because of the increasing complexity of Chinese civilization. Perhaps, too, its
disappearance was a consequence of the intellectual and moral decline of the rulers of the
Zhou royal house. The power of the central government began to disintegrate, giving rise
to bitter internal rivalries among the various principalities. Whereas the Rites of Zhou had described a monarch who was
both strong and benevolent, in actuality by the sixth century R.C.E., the officials who
governed had succeeded in making their positions hereditary at the expense of the king.
They had amassed the enormous power of the principalities in a society that was
characterized by a rigid demarcation between powerful nobles and a downtrodden
peasantry.
Economy
and Society
During
the Zhou dynasty, the essential characteristics of Chinese economic and social
institutions began to take shape. The Zhou inherited and continued the pattern of land
ownership that had existed under the Shang. According to the ideal described by Confucian
scholars of a later day, the peasants worked on lands owned by their lord, but also had
land of their own that they cultivated for their own use. The practice was called the
"well field system," since the Chinese character for well resembles a simplified
picture of the division of the farmland into nine separate segments. Each peasant family
tilled an outer plot for its own use and then joined with other families to work the inner
one for the hereditary lord. How widely this system was used is unclear, but Communist
historians would later cite it as an early form of Chinese socialism. As the following
poem indicates, life for the average farmer was a difficult one. The "big rat"
is probably a reference to the high taxes imposed on the peasants by the government or
lord.
Big
rat, big rat
Do not eat my millet.
Three years I have served you,
But you will not care for me.
I
am going to leave you
And go to that happy land;
Happy land, happy land,
Where I will find my place.
Big
rat, big rat,
Do not eat my sprouts!
Three years I have served you
But you give me no comfort.
I am going to leave you
And go to those happy fields;
Happy fields, happy fields;
Who there shall long moan?
In
addition to the nobles and the peasants, there was a class of artisans and merchants,
living in walled towns under the direct control of the local lord. A passage in a
classical text called the Book of Changes
remarked that the rulers in ancient times set up markets and ordered "all the people
under Heaven to gather their goods there for exchange and then to return home, in order
that all goods might find their appropriate destinations."
At
first, commerce was limited to the exchange of local products in daily use, but
eventually trade expanded to include goods imported from distant regions, such as salt,
iron, cloth and various luxury goods. Merchants did not operate independently as
autonomous individuals, but were considered the property of the local lord and on occasion
could even be bought and sold like chattels.
There
was also a class of slaves, who performed a variety of menial tasks and perhaps worked on
local irrigation projects. Most of them were probably prisoners of war captured during
conflicts with the neighboring principalities. Scholars do not know how extensive slavery
was in ancient times, but slaves probably did not comprise a large proportion of the total
population.
The
period from the sixth to the third centuries B.C.E. was an era of rapid change. This
period was marked by the growth of large autonomous states owing only a loose allegiance
to the Zhou ruling house. As these states grew in size and power, they began to regulate
the local economy and seek reliable sources of revenue for their expanding armies, such as
a uniform tax system and government monopolies on key commodities such as salt and iron.
Behind
such political developments, an economic revolution was taking place. The period of the
later Zhou was an era of significant economic growth and technological innovation,
especially in agriculture. During the Neolithic period, farmers were still dependent upon
rainfall to water their crops. In the Yellow River valley and
Perhaps
the most impressive technological achievement of the period was the construction of the
massive water control project on the Min River, a tributary of the Yangtze just above the
city of Chengdu (Ch'eng-tu) in Sichuan (Szechwan) Province. This system of canals and
spillways, which was put into operation by the state of Qin a few years prior to the end
of the Zhou dynasty, diverted excess water from the river into the local irrigation
network and watered an area populated by as many as five million people. The system is
still in use today, over two thousand years later.
Food
production was also stimulated by a number of advances in farm technology. By the
mid-sixth century B.C.E., the introduction of iron had led to the development of iron
plowshares, which were more advanced than those used elsewhere and permitted deep plowing
for the first time. Other innovations dating from the later Zhou were the use of natural
fertilizer, the collar harness, and the technique of leaving land fallow to preserve or
replenish nutrients in the soil.
The
advances in agriculture, which enabled the population of China to rise as high as 20
million people during the late Zhou era, were also undoubtedly a major factor in the
growth of commerce and manufacturing. During the later Zhou, economic wealth began to
replace noble birth as the prime source of power and influence. Utensils made of iron
became more common, and trade developed in a variety of useful commodities, such as cloth,
salt, and various manufactured goods.
One
of the most important items of trade in ancient China was silk. There is evidence of
silkworm raising as early as the Neolithic period. Remains of silk material have been
found on Shang bronzes, and a large number of fragments have been recovered in tombs
dating from the mid-Zhou era. Silk cloth was used not only for clothing and quilts, but
also to wrap the body of the dead prior to burial. Fragments have been found throughout
Central
With the development of trade and manufacturing, China began to move toward a money economy. The first form of money may have been seashells (the Chinese character for goods or property contains the ideographic symbol for "shell"), but by the Zhou dynasty iron money had developed in the form of pieces of iron shaped like a knife or round coins with a hole in the middle so they could be carried in strings of a thousand coins. Most ordinary Chinese were not involved in the money economy, however, but simply used a system of barter. Even taxes and rents, as well as the salaries of government officials, were normally paid in grain.