Download FĒNGJIÀN (封建) is the political ideology of the Zhou Dynasty of

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FĒNGJIÀN
FĒNGJIÀN (封建) is the political ideology of the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. Fēngjiàn
is a “decentralized system of government,”1 comparable to European feudalism, though
recent scholarship has suggested that fēngjiàn lacks some of the fundamental aspects of
feudalism.
Ranks
The sizes of troops and domains a male noble would command would be determined by his rank
of peerage:
o gong (duke or prince, ch. 公(爵) gōng),
o hou (marquis or marquess, ch. 侯(爵) hóu),
o bo (count or earl, ch. 伯(爵) bó),
o zi (viscount, ch. 子(爵) zǐ),
o nan (baron, ch. 男(爵) nán).
While before the Han Dynasty a peer with a place name in his title actually governed that place, it
had only been nominally true since. Any male member of the nobility or gentry could be called a
gongzi (公子 gōng zǐ) or wangzi (王子 wáng zǐ) if he is a son of a king, i.e. prince).
Four Occupations
The four occupations, or “four categories of the people,” was a social structure developed from
Confucian and Legalist philosophers during the latter part of the Zhou Dynasty. The four
occupations were the shi (士) the class of “knightly” scholars, mostly from lower aristocratic
orders, the gong (工) who were the artisans and craftsmen of the kingdom and who, like the
farmers, produced essential goods needed by themselves and the rest of society, the nong (農) who
were the peasant farmers who cultivated the land which provided the essential food for the people
and tributes to the king, and the shang (商) who were the merchants and traders of the kingdom.
The four occupations under the fengjian system were different to those of European Feudalism
in that people were not born into the specific classes, such that, for example, a son born to a gong
craftsman was able to become a part of the shang merchant class, and so on.
Zongfa
Zongfa (宗法, Clan Law), which applied to all social classes, governed the primogeniture of
rank and succession of other siblings. The eldest son of the consort would inherit the title and
retained the same rank within the system. Other sons from the consort, concubines and mistresses
would be given titles one rank lower than their father.
As time went by, all terms had lost their original meanings nonetheless. Zhuhou (诸侯), Dafu
(大夫) and Shi (士) became synonyms of court officials.
Historiographic Implications
Fengjian is particularly important to Marxist historiographical interpretation of Chinese
history in China, from slave society to feudal society.2 This kind of feudalism was very
different from the kind of “feudalism” most people influenced by the theoreticians of the
PRC have viewed China, with the landlord/peasant relationship, as having.
Viren Murthy. “Modernity Against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought”,
Modern Intellectual History, volume 3, issue 1 (April 2006). Cambridge University Press.
2
Q. Edward Wang. “Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese historiography and the Soviet
influence, 1949–1963”, Journal of Contemporary China, (2000).
1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengjian