Introduction to the History of China

Our word "civilization" goes back to a Latin root having to do with "citizen" and "city." The Chinese counterpart, actually a binom, wen hua, literally means "the transforming [i.e., civilizing] influence of writing." In other words, for us the essence of civilization is urbanization; for the Chinese it is the art of writing.

The ramifications of this capsulized distinction have been many and significant. Throughout their literate history, the Chinese have been much more interested in the written than the spoken word. Famous Chinese orators have been rare, famous calligraphers legion. Whereas in India it was the oral recitation of a sacred composition that made it efficacious, in China it was above all its reproduction in written or printed form. Papers bearing writing could not be indiscriminately discarded in the streets of the old China. This was not so much because they polluted the streets as that such an act showed disrespect to the written word. As late as the 1930s it was still possible, in Peking, to see public trash receptacles inscribed with the traditional exhortation: "Chinghsi tzu chih," "Respect and spare written paper."

No doubt this attitude stems from the nature of Chinese writing: a nonalphabetic and basically ideographic script whose thousands of separate symbols or characters each signifies a distinct object or concept and therefore, like the Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), are immediately understandable to the eye irrespective of the pronunciations the reader may attach to them. This fact explains why the Chinese script could become the written medium of peoples adjoining the Chinese: not only those, like the Vietnamese, closely related to the Chinese linguistically, but also peoples, like the Koreans and Japanese, whose spoken languages belong to totally different linguistic families.

Because each Chinese ideograph carries from its cultural past its own distinct connotations, the acceptance of Chinese writing by others meant, to a considerable extent, their acceptance of Chinese cultural and moral values as well. Conversely, the Chinese script proved a major barrier to the free entry of foreign ideas and values into Chinese culture, because it meant that these values and ideas could reach the Chinese consciousness only through the filter of the ideographs. Resulting frequent failures and distortions of communication were as well known to Buddhist missionaries fifteen hundred years ago as they were to those from the Christian West of the seventeenth century onward.

The prime place of calligraphy among the Chinese arts and its intimate relationship with Chinese painting are both well known. But the significance of their concern with writing has a far wider cultural range. There seems to be a consistent pattern, for example, in the fact that the Chinese were the inventors of paper (first century A.D.), of block printing (ninth century or earlier), and of movable type (eleventh century). Or that, prior to around 1750, they are said to have produced more printed books than the rest of the world put together.

Of particular interest to us here, however, are the social and political consequences. The high prestige of the written language, combined with the tremendous difficulties attached to its mastery, gave to the scholar in China a status unequaled in any other society. During the past two thousand years, speaking very broadly, the Chinese ruling elite consisted neither of nobles, priests, generals,. nor industrial or commercial magnates, but rather of scholar-officials. These were men educated from childhood in the Confucian classics who, ideally, became members of officialdom through success in the government's civil service examinations. These examinations, which were written, humanistic in content, and exceedingly rigorous, were conducted periodically throughout the empire at county, provincial, and national levels. In name they were open to all but a very few members of the total male population. In actuality, of course, it was only a tiny fraction of that total who were educationally qualified to take them.

If any single word can describe the imperial state system, it is bureaucracy. The government maintained a complex network of official positions which were specialized, ranked according to a fixed scale in the civil service, salaried accordingly, and staffed on the basis of demonstrated intellectual qualifications rather than birth. Career officials moved upward, or sometimes downward, on the bureaucratic ladder according to the merits or demerits regularly entered on their dossiers by their superiors; of course the usual principle of seniority operated as well.

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that these officials were commonly unimaginative, rigid, or lacking in initiative simply because some people today associate these characteristics with the word "bureaucracy." It should be remembered that governmental service was the most highly regarded of all professions for the Chinese educated man and that he came to it trained as a humanist rather than as a technician. As a rule, he had a good appreciation of the accepted literary and artistic accomplishments — notably poetry, calligraphy, and painting — and not infrequently he was a competent practitioner of them. Thousands of Chinese bureaucrats have been passable poets, and most great poets have at some time been bureaucrats.

Like every bureaucracy, that of China generated enormous amounts of paper work, often in multiple copies. These documents, preserved in the official archives, provided much of the raw material that was periodically incorporated into the official or dynastic histories. These histories, normally compiled under imperial auspices from dynasty to dynasty (hence their name), constituted a historical record more continuous, detailed, and precise than those available for any of the other long-lived ancient civilizations.

Although the Chinese bureaucratic system formally began with the creation of the first centralized empire in the third century B.C. (about which more below), tendencies toward bureaucratism may be already detected in the feudal period centuries earlier. If, in fact, the Chinese were not the world's first bureaucrats, they can at least be credited with the creation of governmental forms more complex, more sophisticated, and longer-lived than anywhere else prior to the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, recent research increasingly indicates that certain features hitherto deemed unique in modern bureaucracies were anticipated, and in some cases perhaps even inspired, by Chinese example. There is little doubt that the Chinese form of government has been a major factor in the remarkable continuity of Chinese civilization, both culturally and politically. Another, less formal institution of sterling importance for the lengthy maintenance of Chinese social stability, of course, has been the famed Chinese family system.

We began these pages with the proposition that the Westerner sees civilization as a process of urban development, the Chinese as that of spreading the written word. The role of the city-based bourgeoisie in the rise of modern Western society is known to all. In traditional China, on the contrary, society was strongly rooted in the countryside, cities served often more as administrative than as commercial centers, and the scholar-officials, though necessarily spending much of their lives in an urban environment, usually continued to regard the small rural village of their ancestors as their real "home." Many of them invested their surplus capital in farmland, which they rented to tenant peasants. Perhaps they might retire to their rural communities as landlords or, if continuing an official career, might allow their estate to be managed by a rural branch of the family. Thus our earlier definition of China's dominant elite as consisting of scholars and officials needs to be broadened to include rural landlords as well. Because of the extraordinary cohesiveness and dominance of this interlocking scholar-official-landlord class, Chinese traditional society has sometimes been referred to as Chinese gentry society.

The orthodox ideology of the gentry was Confucianism, but its social and political norms widely permeated all social classes. At the same time, however, the Chinese, perhaps because of their closeness to the soil, were unusually aware of the intimate relationship between man and nature, and the consequent need to harmonize man's movements with the cosmos. Taoism (pronounced "dow-ism") was the major philosophy for achieving this goal. Its spirit imbues much of Chinese imaginative literature, especially poetry, and Chinese art, especially painting.

Despite gentry dominance, a great many merchants and entrepreneurs individually succeeded in acquiring great wealth. Never, however, did they achieve sufficient class cohesiveness to seriously challenge the status and values of the dominant elite. On the contrary, in the very course of reaching success, they tended to adopt these values for themselves and thus eventually to convert themselves into members of the elite. Traditionally, Confucianism favored agriculture as the prime basis of national wealth, while showing suspicion toward large-scale private commercial activity. The history of imperial China is filled with examples of the imposition of bureaucratic limitations upon such activity. The resulting contrast with Japan is instructive. Probably it is no accident that modern Japan, with very little bureaucratic tradition, moved successfully from feudalism to massive industrial capitalism, whereas modern China largely jumped the capitalist stage by moving directly from preindustrial agrarian bureaucratism to what might be called socialized bureaucratism. (Of course there is very much more to the present government than this rather forbidding term by itself would suggest.)

How old is Chinese civilization? Roughly, perhaps, the same age as that of India but considerably younger than the major civilizations of the ancient Near East. Neolithic cultures have been uncovered in China, some of them probably going back to the early third millennium B.C., or possibly earlier. They have produced some artifacts of amazing beauty (notably the burial urns of the "painted pottery" culture), but none of the cultures can as yet be identified with any stages of early Chinese history as recorded in later traditional historiography. The earliest confirmation of history by archaeology comes only in the second half of the second millennium B.C., with the discovery of the divination bone inscriptions pertaining to the bronze civilization of the Shang dynasty.

Many major hallmarks of ancient Eurasian civilizations — among them the use of bronze and later iron, the invention of the wheel, the idea of writing, and the cultivation of wheat — all appear many centuries earlier in the ancient Near East than they do in China. This fact has led to a continuing and inconclusive debate between the diffusionists (most of them, unsurprisingly, Westerners), who believe that these techniques and ideas were invented only once in the Near East and then transmitted across the continent to East Asia, and those other scholars (most of them, unsurprisingly, Chinese) who believe in independent invention.

What are the major patterns or movements of Chinese history? Space permits a summary description of only four. By far the most important is the passage from feudalism to empire during the first millennium B.C. During most of this millennium, the then "China" consisted of a coterie of small principalities mostly clustered in the north around the Yellow River valley and westward, plus one or two others in the Yangtze valley farther south. These principalities were ruled by hereditary noble houses. The social and political relationships operating within and between them, as well as with their nominal overlords above, the Chou dynasty kings, were in some ways remarkably similar to those characterizing feudal Europe during the Middle Ages. Endemic warfare, coupled with other factors, gradually produced increasingly acute social, political, and economic changes. The later centuries of the Chou (fifth to third centuries B.C., appropriately named the Warring States period) were the age of China's greatest intellectual diversity, when many competing schools of thought, including Confucianism and Taoism, arose in response to the needs of the time.

The most important single date in Chinese history before the abolition of the monarchy in 1912 is 221 B.C. In that year the state of Ch'in brought Chinese feudalism to an end by conquering the last opposing principality and creating for the first time a truly universal Chinese empire. (The name "China," from Ch'in, commemorates the Ch'in achievement, but has never been used by the Chinese themselves, who have always termed their land Chung kuo, "the Central Country.") This event begins the age of imperial China and with it the bureaucratic state — the roots of which, however, as indicated above, actually go back centuries earlier.

Since the founding of empire, the historical pattern most emphasized by Chinese historians themselves has been that of the dynastic cycle: a sequence of major dynasties, each having a usual duration of somewhat under three hundred years, in the course of which it would come into being, flourish and expand, then decline, and finally disintegrate. Each such cycle would usually be closed by a much briefer period of political disorder and warlordism, out of which, eventually, a new dynasty would arise. Overemphasis on this recurrent pattern has created the traditional belief that nothing much has ever changed in China. That this notion needs correction should, in art at least, be apparent to anyone who turns these pages.

A third pattern has been that of the recurring tension between the agrarian Chinese and the pastoral peoples of the steppes and deserts north and northwest of China proper. The Great Wall was first built under the Ch in empire as an arbitrary and only partially effective attempt to demarcate the two ways of life. In the long run, neither the Chinese nor the nomads could impose their life patterns on each other, but in the short run (which in China might mean a century or more), China proper repeatedly expanded to embrace greater China during the peaks of major dynasties, but contracted again under "barbarian" pressure during the intervening troughs. Twice in late imperial times, all of China fell under barbarian rule: first under the Mongols (the Yuan dynasty, 1279-1368) and again, more effectively, under the Manchus (the Ch'ing dynasty, 1644-1912).

A fourth and very significant but little understood development is that of the growing urbanization and commercialization of Chinese life beginning during the late T'ang dynasty (ninth century) and perhaps reaching its peak under the Sung (960-1279). During these centuries, commercial and industrial activity, especially in Central and South China, enormously increased. The circulation of metal coins reached a level never equaled before or since, and was supplemented in the eleventh century by extensive issues of the world's first paper currency. A new bourgeois class swelled the population of the great cities, which became major centers of trade as well as administration. The spread of printing brought literacy to a widening sector of the population and fostered the growth of new popular forms of literature. In short, what was to begin in Renaissance Europe several centuries later seemed already to be beginning in China, with all the potential changes this implied. But then something happened or rather failed to happen: the forces that were to lead to capitalism and industrialism in Western Europe failed to achieve ongoing momentum in China. The West was to change into a modern society, China did not. Why this should have been — whether it resulted from the Mongol invasions or the resiliency of the Confucian bureaucratic state or other factors — is one of the major unanswerables in Chinese history.