Classical Chinese Primer | Historical Background

Classical Chinese Primer
Historical Background

The Warring States, China's classical age, follows the three centuries of the Spring and Autumn period, during which several dozen significant states, some Sinitic in culture and some not, contended for influence in the region between the Yellow River area and the Yangdz River. These were aristocratic states, with a palace-centered government, and their strength was accordingly limited to what their elite population could provide. At the end of Spring and Autumn, we can see signs of reorganization of the state itself (a conversion to bureaucracy) and also of its military machine (which was to be increasingly based on large infantry armies of commoners, rather than small elite chariot forces). That process produced a revolution in both war and politics, whose full realization required three centuries to complete. Those centuries are the Warring States period. It ended in 0221 with the unification of all the states under the universal Chin Dynasty. Beyond that point lies the Chinese Empire. Our concern here is with what led up to the Empire: the soil of conflict out of which it grew. Here is a sketch which will place some of the texts we will read within that long development. All of those texts came out of, and comment on, and in some cases attempt to shape, or else to evade, the tremendous social metamorphosis which was going on around them.

This is the time of early transition, a transition whose first steps Confucius (0549-0479) lived to witness. The first social changes are being made. In Lu (Confucius's state), positions in government are now available not only to members of the old military elite, but to "little people" of other backgrounds. Elite landholdings are taxed, and members of the elite come to depend increasingly on their court salaries, not on income from their land, for their livelihood. The Confucian school of Lu takes on the task of orienting members of the new group for careers at court. There is a fascination with the imported technique of meditation, and a hint of commercial developments (coinage, first invented in Lydian Greece, began to be generally used). Almost the only text we have from this period is the early portion of the Analects, along with the earliest of the Shr poems, which later were expanded into a repertoire of 300.

A takeover within the Confucian school displaces the former series of disciples and their successors and, and puts Confucius's kin, the Kung Family lineage, firmly in charge. The state comes to be involved in all areas of life (including commerce, which it had previously ignored). Theorists of government, whose ideas are preserved in early portions of the Gwandz text, continue to strengthen the state. The transition to the new mass infantry army is complete. Warfare itself becomes professionalized, and its handbooks, such as the Sundz, spell out the answers to such novel questions as how to handle an soldier army in the field, the needs of leadership, and the relation between civil and military power. The expanding machinery of war brings out the anti-war Mician movement, the followers of the unknown but sub-elite individual Mwo Di, who speaks on behalf of the people who just want to live profitably in a peaceful world. One meditationist group develops to the point of raising its own voice in the debate on government; its text is the Dau/Dv Jing. Ritual, eventually including a new emphasis on ancestral and domestic piety, is the new emphasis of the Confucians; it forms the background for most of the middle chapters of the Analects. In politics, the Confucians recommend a benign populism as a solution to the problem of the proper relation between the state and its lower population. In these arguments, the past, real or invented, begins to be invoked as sanction for policy recommendations, first by the Micians and then by all factions. This is the beginning of China's pronounced antiquity focus. Supposedly "ancient" texts are forged in great number simply for the purpose of being quoted in these policy arguments. Cosmologym or the way the nonhuman world itself works, is first invoked in these debates by the end of the century as a model for how the human world should work. Linking the ruler with the order of the universe effectively places the ruler himself above the discussion, and his position is going to be secure however the statecraft argument comes out. The discussion itself, with its many and sometimes eloquent competing views, is the the most philosophically exciting interlude in all of Chinese history: its intellectual Golden Age. As a backdrop to that excitement, the peoples of the northern steppe begin to assert themselves militarily toward the end of the 04th century, forcing the Sinitic states to adopt cavalry warfare in their defense.

The cosmological principle gains ground among the Chinese states, and their armies gain increasing success, at least against each other. All other philosophical tendencies recede, though not without continued opposition by proponents of other views. Prominent among these resisting viewpoints are the Mencians, whose populist theory of government had been rapidly made obsolete by the course of events,and who are pushed into a posture of justifying revolution. There is also a whole spectrum of protest and withdrawal groups whose texts were later gathered into the work called "Jwangdz." Like one faction of the Mencians, many of these groups explore the possibility of retreat into the self as a response to the evil times. The mainline voices of the period are those of Sywndz, who most successfully adapted Confucian ideas to the coming superstate order, and Lw Bu-wei, a minister of Chin. Sywndz's school produced a large number of surviving essays and controversialist statements, most of them by Sywndz himself. Lw Bu-wei ordered the compilation of what is now called the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou, a digest of extracts from contemporary thinking arranged to define the coming universal order as somehow inclusive of all the various tendencies of thought. Warfare with the steppe peoples became a defining element of the century, though by an agreed taboo it is almost never mentioned in the texts.

Chin conquered the last of its rivals in 0221, and for fifteen years headed the first of the Chinese empires. Almost everyone has now seen the contents of the First Emperor's tomb, with its army of terra-cotta soldiers. Chin quickly collapsed after the succession of the Second Emperor. Following a four-year period of general warfare (0206-0202), Han emerged as the successor. Though positioning itself as a restorer of all that Chin had destroyed, including local rulership and a simple and intuitively natural set of laws, Han actually inherited and improved the Chin foundation, and with an interregnum in the middle, Han dominion lasted for a total of four centuries. We will not read texts from the Empire, but we will need to refer to it in the Lesson notes. One of its monuments is the Shr Ji, China's first and only universal history, which gives sometimes imaginary information about the persons and intellectual movements of our period.

In these Lessons, and in other publications, we have endeavored to get behind Han and later interpretations, and to let the Warring States speak for themselves, through the medium of the preserved texts. This Primer is one way of giving the texts a voice.