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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
From kung-fu to tofu, tea to trade routes, sages to silk, China has influenced cuisine, commerce, military strategy, aesthetics and philosophy across the world for thousands of years.Chinese history is nothing if not messy. Heroes are also villains; prosperity mingles with violence; cultural vibrancy coexists with censorship and repression. Modern China is seen variously as an economic powerhouse, an icon of urbanisation, a propaganda state and an aggressive superpower seeking world domination.Jaivin distils this vast history into a sparkling narrative, from mythical origins to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a story in which China's women, from the earliest warriors to 20th-century suffragettes, receive long overdue attention.As historical spectres of corruption and disunity continue to haunt the People's Republic, Jaivin discusses what may lie ahead – not just for China but for the world.
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Further Praise for The Shortest History of China
‘So many people, so much history, so much culture… China’s a challenge – but like a jade snuff bottle, this book holds it all in one finely chiselled vessel.’ Jasper Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine
‘It’s no mean feat to cover the entire history of China in fifteen chapters, but Jaivin manages it with panache. Succinct, lucid and with a keen eye for detail, this slim book is an indispensable primer on China.’ Louisa Lim, author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia
‘An electrifying and erudite ride through Chinese history – Linda Jaivin has written an illuminating history that is also a real page-turner.’ Alice Pung, author of Her Father’s Daughter
‘Minimalist but immersive… Jaivin cleverly segues from ancient to contemporary, back and forth, always injecting novel insights and nuances while cleverly stitching together China’s meandering past. That’s a feat.’ Jaime FlorCruz, CNN Beijing Bureau Chief
‘War, revolution, rise and fall, emperors, tyrants: China is more than a nation and bigger than a myth. It demands a great storyteller, and in Linda Jaivin, it has one.’ Stan Grant, author of Talking to My Country
THE SHORTEST HISTORYofCHINA
Linda Jaivin
Contents
In memory of my parents, Lewis and Naomi Jaivin, who encouraged me to study whatever interested me.
What interested me was China.
Gaps and overlaps in dates represent times of chaos, rebellion and division. Pre-Han dates are approximations.
Introduction
There is no Chinese curse that goes ‘may you live in interesting times’. In any case, it would be redundant. Chinese history simmers with larger-than-life characters, philosophical arguments and political intrigues, military conflicts and social upheavals, artistic invention and technological innovation. It progresses in twists, turns, leaps and returns. Chinese historical records are long and deep, stretching back at least 3500 years. Their themes and lessons, as well as the memories of wounds and triumphs, pulsate under the surface of contemporary Chinese life, language, culture and politics. The increasingly key role the People’s Republic of China (PRC) plays in global affairs makes an awareness of this history essential, for it is the key to understanding China today.
Take, for example, the insistence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that Hong Kong and Táiwān, along with Tibet, Xīnjiāng and islands in the South China Sea, are part of China. The intensity with which the CCP pursues ‘re-unification’ has roots in the humiliation and semi-colonisation of China by imperialist powers in the nineteenth century and the civil war of the twentieth century. It also speaks to violent periods of division that occurred as long as two thousand years ago, but have left their stamp on the national psyche. That the first great unification, in 221 BCE – which also involved the epic standardisation of weights, measures and the written 2 language – came with a high dose of tyranny is also part of this history’s complex legacy.
Nothing about China is small in scale. With some 1.4 billion people, the PRC boasts the world’s largest population – nearly one in every five people on Earth (not counting another forty-five million people worldwide who identify as Chinese). At 9.3 million square kilometres, it occupies the third-largest landmass of any country after Russia and Canada, and shares borders with fourteen nations. The PRC is the world’s largest trading nation and second-largest economy, a manufacturing powerhouse and an assertive military power, its army bigger than any other national armed force. It plays a steadily increasing role in global institutions and international affairs.
The PRC’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative – with projects in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Ecuador, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Ethiopia and Vietnam – is the most ambitious global infrastructure-building project in history. Domestic schemes are often no less monumental, whether they involve constructing giant dams, establishing pervasive systems of surveillance or creating the longest open-sea fixed link on the planet, the 55-kilometre-long Hong Kong–Zhūhǎi–Macao Bridge. The PRC is also a leader in artificial intelligence, green technology and communications network infrastructure, and aims to become a world leader in science and technology by 2050.
The rise of the People’s Republic has inspired a range of reactions abroad, including concern about political influence operations and human rights violations. Běijīng’s insistence that it defines human rights differently to the West does little to reassure its critics. Although the CCP claims to speak on behalf of all 1.4 billion Chinese nationals, history makes it clear 3 that the people of this great land have always embraced a range of intellectual, philosophical, political and cultural positions.
China is diverse in numerous ways. If more than 90 per cent of the population claim Han ethnicity, the rest belong to fifty-five other ethnic groups including Uyghurs, Mongolians and Tibetans. Many speak distinct languages and retain their own religious and cultural practices, despite pressure to assimilate. The Han, too, may identify with different regional cultures and subcultures, and speak discrete and even mutually unintelligible dialects including Shanghainese and Cantonese – the last claiming more native speakers (over sixty-two million) than Italian. The national language, Pǔtōnghuà, sometimes called Mandarin in English, is a constructed tongue. The PRC’s own Ministry of Education admitted in 2013 that it was spoken with native fluency by less than 10 per cent of the population, and barely at all by 30 per cent, though it aimed to change that.1
Northerners prefer wheat and southerners rice, but not always; some Chinese never touch chilli, while others can’t cook without it. Beijingers complain that Shanghainese are mercantile and petty; Shanghainese snipe back that Beijingers are big-hearted but crude. All stereotypes fall apart in the face of Chinese diversity. The citizenry of the PRC includes subsistence farmers and jetsetting billionaires, Buddhist monks and nightclub owners, passionate feminists and steely patriarchs, avant-garde artists and aerospace engineers, yak herders and film animators, pro-democracy activists and loyal Communists. They may live in towering apartment blocks, courtyard houses built to a 2000-year-old design, European-style villas, long-houses, stilt houses, yurts or even modified caves. They may be fans of Peking opera, Western opera, punk, throat-singing, 4 Canto-pop, chess, video games, Korean soap operas, calligraphy, photography, ballroom dancing, fan dancing, all or none of the above.
The heavily urbanised landscape of China’s twenty-three provinces and five ‘autonomous regions’ (Guǎngxī, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Níngxià and Xinjiang) is as varied as its people, ranging from frozen steppes to tropical islands, jungles, deserts, fertile farmland, tall mountains and low floodplains. The PRC boasts several of the most populous cities on Earth. Its four provincial-level municipalities include Chóngqìng, home to more than thirty million, and Shànghǎi, with over twenty-six million. Aside from the Yangtze – the third-longest river in the world – six of Asia’s major rivers originate in Tibet: the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong. The construction of upstream dams, mines and irrigation projects, and even the afforestation of the Tibetan Plateau, all have implications for the water security of almost half the world’s population. President Xí Jìnpíng’s pledge to the United Nations in September 2020 that China will reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060, if followed through, could help address climate change and determine the future of the planet itself.
―
A disciple once asked Confucius (551–479 BCE) the first thing he’d do if he were in charge. Confucius replied, ‘Rectify the names.’ He explained: ‘If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible – and therefore, all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible.’2
5 The first appearance of the name ‘China’ in a European language is in a sixteenth-century Spanish text.3 The word seemingly derives from references to the ancient Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE), via Sanskrit चीन (cīna) and Japanese 支那 (shina). In Chinese, the most common expression for China in the sense of a nation is Zhōngguó 中國 (中国 in simplified characters – more on those shortly). This expression dates back 3000 years to the ancient compilation of poetry and song, the Book of Odes 詩經. Zhōng 中 means middle, or centre. The second character, guó 國, contains a mouth, kǒu 口, representing the people, and a dagger-axe, gē 戈, signifying defence, within an enclosure, wéi 囗. Guo originally referred to a fortified city, only later coming to mean a kingdom and finally a nation-state. Although Zhongguo is often translated as ‘Middle Kingdom’, zhong originally referred to the centre of the kingdom or city, rather than implying that the kingdom itself was at the centre of the world.
Another popular way to refer to China is Zhōnghuá 中華. Huá 華 can signify splendour, radiance or prosperity. It was the name of one of the two ancient tribes of settlers along the Yellow River from which Han Chinese claim descent. Zhonghua is less about a specific territory than a civilisation, encompassing notions of myth, legend, history and culture. It embraces the broader Chinese world, radiating out from the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong to diasporic communities, from Canberra to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore to Senegal. Although there are other phrases that signify China, it’s reasonable to say that the idea of China lies somewhere between Zhongguo and Zhonghua. The outline maps that appear in this book are not of the PRC, but of territory that either is now or at one time has been part of something understood as Zhongguo or Zhonghua. 6
For most of history, people identified with their dynasty – as a man or woman of the Táng, for example, rather than as ‘Chinese’. It was only after a republican revolution overthrew the last dynasty, the Qīng, in 1911, that the country incorporated ‘China’ into its name. Both the Republic of China, founded in 1911, and the post-1949 People’s Republic of China use Zhonghua rather than Zhongguo to stand for China.
Confucius also intended the principle known as the rectification of names to indicate who was privileged to speak. It was more than forty years ago that I began studying Chinese history and language, and I have lived and travelled extensively in the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Although I am not Chinese, I take encouragement from the words of the historian Liú Xù (887–947), who drew this lesson about the writing of history from chess: ‘Those in the game see less clearly than those observing from outside.’4
Controversy swirls around many Chinese historical events and actors. Confucius promoted moderation in all things and a strict social hierarchy. Did his ideas ensure the stability and continuity of Chinese civilisation, or hold China back from progress? Chinese thinkers have hotly debated Confucius’s ideas for thousands of years. I’ll do my best to represent fairly, or at least note the existence of, diverse perspectives on this and other issues. Some readers might find this politically inconvenient or confronting. My loyalty is to historical truth as I best understand it.
For transcribing Chinese words and names in this book, I use Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, the official romanisation system of the PRC, except where an older spelling will be more familiar to readers – Confucius rather than Kǒngzǐ, Sun Yat-sen instead of Sūn 7 Zhōngshān, Chiang Kai-shek over Jiǎng Jièshí, the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers rather than Chángjiāng and Huáng Hé, and I Ching for the ancient book of divination Yì Jīng, for example. I do use Dào Dé Jīng instead of the perhaps more familiar Tao Te Ching for the Daoist (‘Taoist’) classic, as it is closer to the actual pronunciation; ditto Sūnzǐ rather than Sun Tsu for the author of The Art of War. The terms ‘chancellor’ and ‘prime minister’ both indicate the chief minister in an emperor’s court.
Chinese is a tonal language – the contoured pitch at which words are spoken is integral to the meaning. When using Pinyin, I add diacritics to indicate the four tones of Putonghua in the first instance a word appears, as well as in the index, where you’ll also find the Chinese characters for individuals’ names.
Pinyin is a relatively straightforward guide to pronunciation for speakers of European languages, with a few quirks: X (as in Xi Jinping) is pronounced like the sh in ‘she’; C (as in Cáo Cāo) is pronounced like the ts in ‘its’; Q (as in the Qin dynasty) is pronounced like the ch in ‘cheese’; Zh (as in Zhōu Ēnlái) is pronounced like a j, but with the tongue curled almost to the roof of the mouth; and Z (as in Zūnyì) is like the ds in ‘adds’.
When the CCP came to power in 1949, less than a quarter of the population could read or write. To promote literacy, they simplified many of the 10,000 most commonly used characters, including some of the 2000 to 3000 characters necessary for basic literacy. I use the traditional, complex forms until we reach 1949, and the simplified forms thereafter – except in reference to Taiwan and Hong Kong, where complex forms are still in use.
Chinese surnames come before given names – Aì is the surname of the artist Aì Wèiwèi and Sīmǎ the surname of the ancient historian Sīmǎ Qiān. Scholars, writers and emperors 8 typically went by several names or titles over a lifetime. To avoid confusion, I choose the most common, identifying emperors by their reign titles (‘the Qiánlóng emperor’), using ‘Lady’ for imperial concubines (secondary wives) of different ranks and referring to authors by their pen-names.
The shape of the diacritic roughly corresponds to the tone in Putonghua – high and steady for the first tone, rising for the second and so on.
‘China’ and the adjective ‘Chinese’ here mainly refer to China in a historical or cultural sense: the China of the Tang dynasty, or Chinese calligraphy, for example. I use the acronym ‘PRC’ when referring specifically to the People’s Republic of China, and ‘the mainland’ to indicate that part of the Chinese world over which the CCP has exercised direct rule since 1949. ‘Hong Kong’ signifies the territory encompassing Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, formally known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. ‘Taiwan’ indicates the geographical and political entity that officially calls itself the Republic of China, and the CCP insists must be referred to as Taiwan, China.
9 Another thing: the s in ‘Great Walls’ and ‘Silk Roads’ is not a typo. The Great Walls are a series of discontinuous and sometimes parallel fortifications constructed over different historical periods. Similarly, there were several trading routes for silk and other goods in ancient times, including one also known as the Tea Road, originating in China’s southwest, where tea was first cultivated.
In writing a short history, a wise person might focus on a few key themes or personalities. I’m not so wise. Faced with deciding between key individuals, economic and social developments, military history, and aesthetic and intellectual currents, I choose… everything. I highlight themes, events and personalities that I think illuminate the essence of their time and the evolution of Chinese civilisation and nationhood. I don’t name-check all of China’s many emperors, rebels, thinkers, artists, eccentrics, inventors, politicians or poets. I do introduce you to some of the most influential and interesting ones and, to the extent possible in such a short volume, let them speak for themselves. You’ll read quotations from the work of ancient historians, modern politicians, poets and satirists. History is of course herstory as well – expect to meet a few more women on these pages than you may find in other general histories.
China contains a multitude. Its unruly complexity is part of its grandeur.
NOTES
1. ‘Beijing Says 400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin’, BBC News, 6 September 2013. Original Ministry of Education press release in Chinese: http://old.moe.gov.cn//publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s8316/201409/174957.html
2. Confucius, The Analects of Confucius (trans. Simon Leys), p. xxvi.
3. Juan González de Mendoza, Historia del gran Reino de la China, 1585.
4. In Chinese: 當局稱迷旁觀見審
1
ORIGINS
An Egg Hatches and a Civilisation Is Born
Far, far back in time, a popular Chinese creation story tells us, primal chaos congealed into an egg, in which the complementary cosmic energies of Yīn 陰 and Yáng 陽 thickened around a hairy, horned giant called Pángǔ. Eighteen thousand years passed. Pangu hatched fully formed, holding an axe, with which he hacked apart the Yin and Yang. The Yin became the earth beneath his feet, and the Yang, the sky. As he grew taller, he pushed the two further and further apart. After Pangu died, his flesh turned to soil, his sweat to rain and his breath to wind. His blood flowed as rivers and seas. His eyes became the sun and the moon. From his hair sprang plants and trees, and the fleas in his fur became animals and people.
Eons flew by. Warring deities laid waste to the heavens. Then Nǚwā, the daughter of the celestial Jade Emperor, repaired the sky with coloured stones. Some say it was Nüwa who created humans, fashioning them from clay.11
around 780,000 years ago, the Yellow River flowed much closer to the place we call Beijing than it does now, creating a fertile alluvial plain. Wild pigs, buffalo, sheep and deer roamed the lush meadows that spread out from China’s second-largest river, and birds nested in forests dense with nut and fruit trees. In caves in the surrounding mountains, Peking Man (homo erectus pekinensis) and other of humankind’s Stone Age ancestors sheltered from sabre-toothed cats, wolves, bears, panthers and other predators, coming down to the flats to hunt and gather.
Two tribes, the Huá and Xià, from whom the ethnic majority Han Chinese claim descent, settled around the river’s middle and lower reaches. At some point around 13,000 years ago, one of them carved a bird from singed bone, two centimetres in length and balanced on a pedestal – the most ancient animal sculpture ever found in East Asia.
This carved bird, East Asia’s most ancient animal sculpture, was found in a pile of dirt left behind by a construction crew digging a well in Língjǐng, Hénán province, in 2020.
12Farming heralded the beginning of the Neolithic (New Stone) Age. In the relatively arid north, people cultivated millet and in the fertile ground of the south, rice. Farmers raised pigs, sheep and cattle, and they domesticated wild dogs. They built homes of mudbrick, mud-plastered wood and stone. In some places, their dwellings featured glossy red pottery walls and roofs of fired mud and wood. The houses clustered in walled communities that would eventually dot the central plains. With more time for leisure, people crafted bowls, goblets and musical instruments of fired clay, decorating them with abstract patterns and zoomorphic figures. They carved jade, turquoise and bone into jewellery and objects for use in worship or burial rites.
A fragment of silk from the Yellow River Valley, the oldest in the world, shows that the Chinese practised sericulture – the production of silk – as early as 3630 BCE. Sericulture seems to have been largely women’s work from the start, from chopping mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms – the larvae of the Bombyx mori moth – to collecting the cocoons and boiling them to loosen their threads before spinning, dyeing and weaving them into cloth.
Silk would eventually play an important part in China’s diplomacy and trade, as well as in fashion, communications and art (serving as paper and canvas). But how did anyone think of boiling moth cocoons in the first place?
One story goes that Madame Xīlíng, the principal wife of the semi-mythical Yellow Emperor, was sipping tea under a mulberry tree when a cocoon dropped into her cup and began to unspool. Gathering up the shimmering thread, she realised it was strong enough to weave. 13
The care and feeding of silkworms (which eat mulberry leaves) is the foundation of sericulture, which dates back to Neolithic times in China.
Other legends say it was Xiling’s husband, the Yellow Emperor himself, who figured this out. Similar legends credit him with inventing many other things, from carts, boats, wooden houses and the pottery wheel to the calendar, and even a bamboo pan flute tuned to the song of the mythical phoenix (a totem of the south, as the dragon is of the north). A mighty general, the Yellow Emperor fought fierce battles against his rivals – said to include horned demons and giants – to unify the tribes north of the Yellow River.
Accounts that also credit the Yellow Emperor with inventing writing underlie the popular claim that China has 5000 years of recorded history. The earliest hard evidence of Chinese script, however, dates back 3500 years, which makes it the third-or fourth-oldest system of writing in the world, after those of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, the Egyptians and possibly the 14 Minoans (whose writing system developed around the same time as the Chinese).
It’s unclear if the Yellow Emperor was an actual individual who, in the telling and retelling of his story, acquired god-like characteristics, or if he began as a god and was later given a human face. He has been a cult figure since the fifth century BCE. Han Chinese consider the Yellow Emperor and his successor, Yán Dì, the Fiery Emperor, their oldest ancestors.
Another semi-mythical dynasty, the Xia, began around 2100 BCE, after the reign of another three legendary emperors, Yáo, Shùn and Yǔ. Historical records firm up around five or six hundred years later, when the Bronze Age began and, with it, the Shāng dynasty, which lasted more than 600 years, beginning in the sixteenth century BCE.
The Shang ruled over the fertile land on the lower reaches of the Yellow River from its capital of Ānyáng, in today’s Henan province.15
RECORDS ON SHELL AND BONE
The rulers of the Shang dynasty were warlike and highly superstitious, worshipping a number of gods and conducting human sacrifices to them. They kept slaves, including musicians and dancers. Each king had a primary wife and many secondary ones, or concubines – for most of Chinese history, men with the means to provide for more than one wife were free to take concubines. (In the Chinese language, a man ‘takes’, qǔ 娶, a wife, whereas a woman is ‘given’, jià 嫁, in marriage.)
The Shang used a calendar based on both the cycles of the moon and the solar year, and invented a system of timekeeping that divided days into twelve two-hour blocks – a system that, with some revisions, remained in use for the next three and a half millennia.
We know all this because their shamans would anoint the shoulder blades of oxen and the plastrons (undershells) of tortoises with blood and heat them until they cracked. They interpreted the pattern of the cracks to answer such questions as, how will the harvests be this year? Should I go to war? Does my tooth hurt because I offended my ancestors? The shamans inscribed the answers on the bones in the earliest recognised versions of Chinese characters, jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 – shell bone writing, also called oracle bone script.
Chinese characters may be concrete or pictorial: for example, rì 日 for sun and yuè 月 for moon. They may be conceptual: combining sun and moon makes míng 明, meaning ‘bright’. Other characters are constructed from a ‘radical’, or signific – typically a stylised form of a simple character indicating a class of meaning (‘jade’, ‘human’, ‘fire’ and so on) – and a phonetic, which suggests its pronunciation, but gives no 16 indication of tone (which, like pronunciation, can vary from place to place).
The character for horse 馬, mǎ, is highly pictorial: you can see the horse’s galloping legs and flying mane. It can also be used as either a radical or a phonetic. It’s a radical in the character yù 馭, which means ‘to drive a horse-drawn chariot’, and a phonetic in the character mā 媽, meaning mother, where the radical is 女, woman.
Oracle bone script is the earliest form of Chinese writing. Unlike alphabetic languages, which use letters to represent sounds, Chinese writing is logographic, using characters to represent words or ideas.
17 Oracle bones tell the story of a formidable woman, Fù Hǎo, who was the consort of the Shang king Wǔ Dīng (r. 1250–1192 BCE). A hunter and a warrior, she once led 13,000 men into battle against the king’s enemies. (Some sources say her dowry included an army.) She also presided over divination and other ceremonies. When she died, she was buried with four battleaxes. Her military activities may or may not have been exceptional for the time, but her independent fortune and burial in her own tomb suggest that the Shang may have been a semi-matriarchal society.1
Fu Hao’s enjoyment of hunting was typical of the Shang ruling class, who were often buried with their favourite hunting dogs. Sometimes they were buried with their servants as well, to ensure comfort in the afterlife. Fortunately for the servants, figurines eventually took the place of real people.
The common people had a lot to say about the behaviour of the ruling classes. We know this thanks to one of the oldest collections of poetry in the world, the Book of Odes. Its verses and folk songs speak of love and courtship, sorrow and grief, housework, farming, the life of the soldier or soldier’s wife – and exploitation:
You neither sow nor reap,
So how do you fill so many bins with grain?
You neither hunt nor trap,
So from where come the quail hanging in your courtyard?
The superior man
Eats not the bread of idleness.2
18 The invention of writing enabled rulers to govern a large kingdom, with couriers galloping from one part of the realm to the next, bearing transmissions brushed onto silk or strips of bamboo. Advanced communications, along with horse-drawn chariots and bronze-tipped spears and battleaxes, made the Shang a formidable military power. But, setting a pattern that would repeat itself many times throughout China’s long history, its rulers grew corrupt, cruel and negligent, and the people, suffering under misrule, rebelled. The Zhōu, originally a vassal state of the Shang, rose up and conquered the Shang around 1122 BCE.
The Zhou’s first rulers reputedly governed so wisely that they presented future sovereigns and thinkers with a conundrum: how to re-create that perfect polity?
NOTES
1. See Minna Haapanen, ‘The Royal Consort Fu Hao of the Shang’, in Kenneth J. Hammond (ed.), The Human Tradition in Premodern China, Scholarly Resources, Wilmington, 2002, pp. 1–13.
2. Book Nine, Odes of Wei, Ode 6, Verse 3, Book of Odes (trans. the author).
2
THE ZHOU
From Ideal Rule to Warring States
After the death of the first king of the Zhou, King Wū, the throne passed to his young son, with his brother, the Duke of Zhou, as regent. The rule of the Duke of Zhou was reputedly a time of such peace and stability that for more than forty years not a single crime was committed. The hereditary, landowning nobility expressed their submission to the Zhou through an exchange of gifts and ritualistic ceremonies. It was China’s first golden age, and it lasted until around 770 BCE, when nomadic tribes invaded from the northwest, forcing the Zhou’s rulers to flee eastwards – following which their dynasty rapidly declined in strength and glory.
the first, halcyon era of the zhou became known as the Western Zhou. The second, the Eastern Zhou, which divides into the Spring and Autumn (771–476 BCE) and Warring States (475–221 BCE) periods, was a violent and volatile time. Once-loyal vassal states entered into increasingly violent conflict with both the rulers of the Zhou and one another. Large states 20 swallowed smaller ones until only seven were left, these fighting ferociously among themselves for hegemony.
At its height, the Zhou’s dominion stretched from south of the Yangtze River to the northern steppes.
The era, perhaps unsurprisingly, produced one of the world’s most famous books of military strategy, The Art of War by Sunzi. Its thirty-six stratagems are primarily aimed at avoiding combat:
The highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities. Thus one who excels at employing the military subjugates other people’s armies without engaging in battle, captures other people’s fortified cities without attacking them, and destroys other people’s states without prolonged fighting.1
21 It was also an exceptionally fertile time for philosophy, and not just in China. In the lands to the west, the young Siddhārtha Gautama (circa 450 BCE) acquired the spiritual insights that would earn him the title of Buddha, or Enlightened One. In Asia Minor, a Grecian, Thales of Miletus (c. 624–548 BCE), explored ways of explaining the world that didn’t rely on mythology, becoming the West’s first philosopher, followed less than a century later by Socrates, then Plato and Aristotle. In China, a number of thinkers came along who would influence thought and politics there, and in other parts of Asia, to this day. Prime among them was Confucius.
SAGE ADVICE
Confucius, or Kongzi (‘Master Kong’), was born in 551 BCE in Qūfù, in today’s Shāndōng province. Living in an age of extreme violence and disorder, he idealised the rule of the Duke of Zhou. He believed the duke’s success was due to his attention to ritual and moral example. Confucius, who promoted education, believed that the jūnzǐ 君子, the educated or cultivated man, stood at the top of the social order, and was duty-bound to use his knowledge to help guide his ruler. An intrepid traveller in dangerous times, Confucius wandered from place to place, trying to find a ruler to serve while expounding his ideas about society and governance in conversation with his talented disciples. He reportedly asked seventy-two different rulers if he could advise them. Briefly given a post as a minister in his home state of Lǔ, he irritated the other men at court with his insistence on moral rectitude so much they conspired to get rid of him.
Confucius considered loyalty a prime virtue. Loyalty involved speaking truth to power: ‘Can you spare those whom 22 you love? Can loyalty refrain from admonishing?’2 The ideal of the loyal yet critical ‘scholar-official’ would endure, even if rulers didn’t always welcome it in practice. If loyalty determined relations in the public sphere, filial piety – respect for and obedience to one’s parents – was its analogue in the personal realm. The notion of ‘ancestor worship’ – which in its most elemental form involved bowing before tablets inscribed with the names of male ancestors – preceded Confucius, though its rituals are strongly associated with his teachings.
He believed that if everyone in a society knows their place – if women respect and obey their husbands, sons their fathers, and men their prince – things are bound to go well for family, society and state. It wasn’t easy for those on top: ‘Women and underlings are especially difficult to handle: be friendly, and they become familiar; be distant, and they resent it.’3
Another Confucian tenet was the ‘golden mean’, zhōngyōng 中庸: moderation in all things. Told that a certain nobleman thought thrice before acting, he remarked that twice was enough. He frowned on vulgar displays of wealth as both distasteful and socially disruptive. He was also something of a realist: ‘I have never seen a man who loved virtue as much as sex.’4
Confucius thought that rites reinforced moral teachings and embedded them in daily life. When his disciple Zǐgòng questioned if it was necessary to sacrifice a sheep on a particular occasion, Confucius replied: ‘You love the sheep – I love the ceremony.’5
