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CHINA BEFORE THE EUROPEANS
China is the world’s most stable civilization. There is no other place on earth where one has to
start four thousand years ago to explain what is happening today, where aspects of today’s
culture were so recognizable as far before the birth of Christ as we are after it.
Three things necessary to know from the beginning of China’s recorded history: the concept of
yin and yang, ancestor veneration, and how Chinese is written. For the Chinese, the power that
drives the universe comes from the twin poles of yin and yang. Yin is female, weak, dark, feeling,
body, earth, war, death; yang is male, strong, light,
thinking, spirit, sky, peace, life. These dualities, these
polar opposites, make up the universe, and drive the
universe with the energy the flows between them, like
the poles of a magnet. They are opposite, yet they do
not exist in isolation, nor do they exist without the other.
This is beautifully summed up in the taijitu symbol,
where the black and white are, first, not a straight line
but one that curves greatly, and where the oppositeshaded dots represent the indivisible nature of their
union.
The universe only works well if the yin and the yang are
in balance, and one of these pairs of opposites are
heaven and earth. Earth is what we experience; heaven is that which we do not directly
experience in this life, but where we go after this life. Chinese ideas of divinity are very vague—
there are gods, but they are not the be-all nor the end-all—
but those forces that important are in heaven, and they do not
care what happens on earth. Those who do care are our
ancestors, as long as we continue to respect them. Thus every
year, for as long as we have records, the Chinese have paid
respect to their ancestors, gathering at their graves, leaving
them food, leaving them money, tidying things up, so that
they will look after us and listen to our requests and our
prayers.
Chinese writing has also not changed greatly, at least in its
general outlines, in four thousand years. Most writing
systems began as ideographic systems, which is to say that
one symbol equaled one idea. In most places, the earliest
writing was keeping track of business transactions or
warehouse inventories. For example, three dashes would mean “three,” a square with outwardly
rounded sides could stand in for a barrel, and a mug with suds could represent beer, and thus you
knew there were three barrels of beer in the warehouse that day. As the utility of writing became
apparent, however, and since this system could not easily keep track of the necessary
grammatical changes—i.e, the difference between man, man’s, men, and men’s, or walk,
walking, walked—these ideographic systems quickly changed to syllabic or alphabetic systems,
related to sounds and not meanings.
Chinese grammar did work the same, and the writing system never changed. You can see in this
chart how similar some characters have remained since earliest dynasty to our time. This has had
tremendous effects on Chinese history. The most important is that education is simultaneously
both harder to obtain in China, and more important. Instead of mastering twenty-six letters, to be
literate in Chinese one must learn over three thousand characters for basic literacy; most good
dictionaries have fifty thousand characters. To be able to read a newspaper, one must spend years
learning characters. On the other hand, it has kept Chinese together as a language. Just as Latin
has broken down into a dozen different languages over the centuries, spoken Chinese is really
dozens of different languages, often not mutually intelligible. For example, when Winthrop
students take Chinese
101, they are really
learning Mandarin, the
version of Chinese
spoken in the north
around Beijing; since
most immigration to the
United States came from
southern China, where
Cantonese is spoken,
knowing Mandarin will
not help someone asking
for chopsticks. On the
other hand, you can just
write the characters,
which, since they represent the ideas and not the sounds, are the same for everybody.
All of these things come together at the beginning of known Chinese history, during the Shang
dynasty (second millennium BCE). The Shang kings justified their rule by having the bestconnected ancestors in heaven. While
individual families’ ancestors could help with
a child’s illness or finding a good husband,
only the Shang ancestors were important
enough and powerful enough to help with
issues of national scale, such as droughts or
floods or plagues. Indeed, the earliest writing
we have in Chinese are from the
conversations they had with their ancestors,
where they wrote questions down on bones,
threw those bones in a fire, and then
interpreted the patterns of the answers. Thus did the Shang claim power by helping to keep
heaven and earth in balance.
The problem came in the 1000s BCE, when the Zhou overthrew the Shang and established a new
dynasty. They did not have the really well-connected answers, and somehow had to explain why
they could kick out the people whose ancestors were the only hope to contact heaven. They came
up with a justification that shapes Chinese thought to this day: the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven
authorized (a mandate is an authorization; words usually do not mean what American politicians
think they mean) the Shang to rule as long as the Shang ruled virtuously, in the interests of all the
people and not themselves. The Shang, however, had lost that mandate, and the signs that a
mandate has been withdrawn were earthquakes, and floods, and other natural disasters. For shortterm political purposes, the Zhou developed an idea that took on a life of its own and which still
has tremendous force today. The major square in Beijing—the largest urban square in the
world—is Tiananmien Square, where the main entrance into the old imperial palace is located.
This symbolic place was called the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a symbol of that the mandate was
still in force and that China’s rulers were being virtuous; that is what “tiananmien” means,
“heaven-peace-gate.” That is why, in 1989, Chinese students specifically chose the square to
insist that the Communist authorities had lost the mandate, and why the military massacred
hundreds or thousands of students to show that it still possessed it.
But how do rulers rule with virtue in a way that will keep heaven and earth in balance? This
became a major issue in the 500s BC, when the Zhou dynasty’s unity had descended into a
chaotic situation of dozens of small warring states. Why had China gone to hell in a hand basket?
Many people put forth opinions on this, and the most persuasive was that of a man called Kung
Fuzi, known to Europeans as Confucius. Confucius said that the Chinese had forgotten what had
made them stable and united during the early Zhou, a time when everyone knew how they fit into
the larger tapestry of Chinese society. For Confucius, order was achieved when everyone
understood how they stood in relation to everyone else. There were five basic relationships, and
only the least important was a relationship of equals, namely friend to friend. The other four
were all relationships in which one person had clear authority over another: father over son,
husband over wife, older brother over younger brother, and, the most important, ruler over
subject. Those in a subservient position had to obey those in a position of power absolutely and
unquestioningly: if your older brother told you to jump off the Bank of America Building, you
had no choice but to jump off the Bank of America Building. On the other hand, those who had
authority could only use that power virtuously. It had to be for the greater good of all. Your older
brother could only jump off of the Bank of America Building if it was in the best of interests of
all concerned.
So how did you become virtuous? How did someone with authority know what was in
everyone’s best interest, how did he know how to keep heaven and earth in balance? It was
through education. For Confucius, this meant reading books, like the I Ching, that were already
ancient when he was writing, and which possessed the knowledge of the early Zhou, when China
was whole and stable and everyone knew their place. For Confucius’s students, and other who
would follow, it was also reading Confucius’s books, and then, after a generation or two, the
books of his earlier disciples. If one read these books, one would have the wisdom to be virtuous.
The Han would permanently united China again just before 200 BCE, and the new rulers needed
a new ideology of rule. They adopted Confucianism: they liked its stress on absolute obedience,
but the importance on education gave them the chance to bring in advisors who were not
hereditary nobles or aristocrats. For the first time, examinations were used to fill some
government positions.
After the end of the Han, there were long periods when China was disunited, but there was
always the idea that there should be a China, with an emperor who would keep heaven and earth
in balance. In the 600s, a new dynasty, the Sui, was able to reunite all of China and made a
tremendous innovation in how China was governed, namely the ministry system. In world
history, a ministry has nothing to do with religion (well, one does, as we’ll see), but is an
institution through which government functions are rationally organized and carried out. Today,
all governments have ministries, headed by ministers, and in parliamentary systems, the head of
the government is called the prime minister; in the United States, we call them departments,
which are headed by secretaries. This, however, was an innovation under the Sui. While some
government functions were rationally organized in different offices, there had been no real effort
to organize the entire state on this basis. The six ministries of the Sui (a dynasty that did not last
very long) would be taken up by the Tang who succeeded them, and then reconstructed by the
Song dynasty in the 900s into the longest-lasting state structure in human history, one that lasted
until 1911. Even when, twice, China was conquered by outsiders, the victors kept the
bureaucratic system, since it worked so beautifully and rationally.
The six ministries were:
1) Personnel. This ministry decided where employees should work. It rotated state
employees on a regular basis. It promoted and demoted state employees. It made sure
state employees were paid.
2) Revenue. This ministry made sure that taxes were apportioned, that they were collected,
and that they were properly disbursed to the other ministries, so that everyone was paid
and that everything was paid for.
3) Rites. This ministry performed three main functions. One was that, during the period of
disunity between the Han and the Sui, religious establishments, especially Buddhist
monasteries, had become very rich and powerful (much as we will see with the church in
Europe). It was decided that religion was too powerful a force to be left to its
practitioners, and all Buddhist and Daoist priests and monasteries were licensed by the
government. Another, and possibly the major function, was that it made sure all the
religious ceremonies occurred when they did, especially those that concerned the emperor.
It was actually a lot of work to keep heaven and earth in balance, especially to always
have to seem to be keeping heaven and earth in balance, and immense chunks of
emperors’ lives were absorbed with ceremony. The Ministry of Rites was also
responsible for conducting the imperial examinations, about which there is much more
below.
4) Defense. This ministry made sure the army was paid, that borders were defended, that
generals did what they were told, that fortifications were strong, and that, if some
province did not want to pay its taxes to the Ministry of Revenue, soldiers would go to
collect either the taxes or the rebels’ heads.
5) Justice. This ministry wrote laws, enforced the laws, and prosecuted those who broke the
laws.
6) Public Works. The Chinese government always recognized the importance of
infrastructure. You cannot have a functioning economy, or a functioning military, if the
roads are impassable, if bridges fall down, if harbors silt up, if rivers flood at the wrong
time.
To fill these ministries, the Tang great expanded the concept of the examination system that had
first been pioneered by the Han. While the system broke down at the end of the Tang, after a few
decades the Song, as they did with the ministries, resurrected it, and made it far more important
than it had ever been.
To have any hope of an important government position, one had to pass a grueling test that could
take anywhere from one to three days. Those taking the exam would gather in the provincial
capital, often in little cubicles where they were both fed under the door, and had questions
slipped under the door. They would spend entire days answering one or two questions that
required an intimate knowledge of, and ability to quote a great length from, the Confucian
classics. Answers would then be copied before being graded, so that the evaluators would not be
able to recognize any handwriting.
The effects of this system cannot be overstated. The Chinese bureaucracy ended up being
completely staffed by people who had passed a grueling examination. They were thus very able.
More than that, to pass that exam, they had had to spend their entire life reading the same books.
These books all shared a philosophy that stressed stability, obedience, hierarchy, and order. It is
difficult to imagine a better recipe for constructing a bureaucracy that would last a thousand
years.
On top of this, the Ministry of Personnel made sure that, once an exam taker had received a
position, he never served in his home province, and that he was regularly transferred from one
province to another. Chinese bureaucrats needed to have only one obligation, and that was to the
state. They needed to be removed from the demands of any social or family network, whether
ones they had grown up with, or others that would form from staying too long in one place.
In general, the examination system and practice of rotation were very effective in destroying the
importance of any nobility in China Nobilities develop when large landowners—often those who
had been granted land in return for governing a region—passed on that land to their sons, along
with the right to rule that region. Everyone is related to them, and everyone owes them
something, and they can be very difficult for a central government to work around. The
examination system meant, however, that any role in government demanded an ability to pass the
exam. While passing the exam generally required wealth—an applicant had to come from a
family where his labor was not required in the field or the shop, and which could afford tutors
and books—wealth could not assure passing the examination. No matter how great and powerful
a family may be, there will eventually be that generation where no one can think their way out of
a paper bag (think about the Hiltons). Without someone in government, your family will have a
hard time defending itself. Since more people passed the examinations than there were jobs for,
even local government positions came to demand that qualification. If your family had no one
determining local taxes or deciding which roads and canals were repaired, the very bases of your
family’s wealth would erode. This is how the gentry arose: a wealthy landowning class whose
power depended more on education than on birth. Their importance depended on the state
instead of opposing the state; the class that produced constant opposition to central power in
Europe in the Middle Ages was instead submissive; indeed, a condition of its position was
educating itself to respect the authority of those above them.
There were other effects of the enshrinement of Confucianism as the official belief system. One
was directly related to the examination system: the Chinese invented the printing press to mass
manufacture the books that were needed to study for the exams. Another was the Confucian
social hierarchy. The gentry put itself on top, but then valued those who actively produced things,
first the peasants, then the artisans. Merchants, who depended only on the labor of others, were at
the bottom, a necessary evil but not a respected one. Below them, however, was the military. The
violence and chaos of war was the opposite of good Confucian values, and despite all the efforts
of the Ministry of Defense, the army never received a great deal of respect. This is one reason
that China, which so dominated its neighbors, was easily conquered twice during the period of
this course by smaller groups of men on horseback coming out of the north.