The significance of this watershed is perhaps most
obvious in terms of
the political geography of China. The China of Shang times may have
been no more than a part of the Yellow River valley; its neighbors
could well have been non-Chinese. The Chou political order covered a
much larger region of the north, but did not extend to the Yangtze
Valley to the south. In this sense China down to the third century B.C.
was still what we now think of as the north. By now, however, the
people of the Yangtze Valley in central China had been strongly
affected by Chinese civilization, either because it was brought to them
by invaders from the north or because their own elites were rapidly
assimilating it. In the middle of the first millennium B.C., the state
of Ch'u (or Chu) in the middle Yangtze Valley looks like an example of
the first process, whereas the state of Wu in the lower Yangtze region
looks more like the second. But these processes may not have sufficed
to make these regions fully Chinese. Even in the late third century
B.C., there was a view that the men of Ch'u were "nothing but monkeys
with hats on"though one man who was injudicious enough to remark on
this was boiled alive for his pains. And beyond the Yangtze there were
vast non-Chinese territories to the south. The significance of the
imperial paradigm established by the Ch'in was that it had the effect
of placing the southward expansion of Chinese culture on a quite
different footing, combining direct northern domination with
immigration on a large scale. It still took time; as late as the ninth
century A.D. for a northern bureaucrat to be banished to the far south
was almost a fate worse than death. But in the last millennium Canton
has been as much part of China as the Yellow River valley.
The contemporary language map of China brings out the
degree of this
incorporation. Over most of central and southern China, non- Chinese
languages have been reduced to small islands in a sea of Chinese; only
in the far southwest have indigenous languages held out to a
significant extent. At the same time the distribution of the Chinese
dialectswe could really call them languageshas something to tell us.
Mandarin is spoken over a vast area in the north and west, whereas the
Chinese of a wide region in the southeast is fragmented into very
different dialects. In a way this is paradoxical: since Chinese comes
from the north, that is where, other things being equal,t ought to be
most deeply differentiated. Clearly other things have not been equal.
One aspect of this is environmental: the open plains of the north are a
homogenizing environment, in contrast to the fragmenting landscape of
the south. The other major point is that it has typically been the
north rather than the south that has constituted the core of the
Chinese state; and Mandarin, as its name suggests, is the talk of
officials. But these facts make it all the more remarkable that
thesoutheast should have come to speak Chinese at all. Moreover, the
study of the dialects spoken in this region can give us a sense of when
the process occurred: with the exception of the dialects of Fukien (the
coastal region opposite Taiwan), they seem to descend from the standard
Chinese of the T'ang dynasty.
All this is in stark contrast to what we find in India.
A central theme
in the formation of the Indian culture zone was the adoption of
northern civilization by the politically independent, ethnically
distinct states of the south. In the end such a process was to play
only a limited part in the making of China: Wu, if it was a case of
native elites importing Chinese civilization, turned out to be the
exception rather than the rule. It was only in a few areas beyond the
reach of sustained imperial rule, or of any imperial rule at all, that
such a process had lasting results. Northern domination made the rest
ethnically Chinese. The difference is writ large on the linguistic maps
of India and China. Whereas non-Chinese languages are residual in
southern China, non-Indo-Aryan languages dominate the south of India.
Likewise the breakup of Chinese into regional languages in the south
finds its Indian parallel in the linguistic fragmentation of the Indo-
Aryan north, and by the same token traditional India had no language
comparable in spread to Mandarin.
If the Ch'in watershed was fundamental to the political
geography of
China, it was also of central importance for its cultural history. One
aspect of this arose from Ch'in attitudes to the past. All ancient
cultures are subject to gradual attrition as bits of their heritages go
missinga ritual here, a book there. (In China before the invention of
paper in Han times, books were written on strips of bamboo held in
order with string; imagine what happened when the string broke.) But
the Ch'in experience was more like a bottleneck. It was not just
military and political upheaval that brought this aboutthe turmoil
inevitably associated with the violent transition from a plurality of
states to an empire. There was also a calculated element of cultural
revolution. The Ch'in statesmen were guided by a single value: the
maximization of the efficiency and power of the state. Whatever got in
the way of this had to go. Hence their standardization of much that had
previously been diverse in Chinese culture: weights, measures, law,
script. But the Ch'in authorities also made it their business to stamp
out any aspect of the inherited culture they judged hostile to the new-
style state. One of their theoreticians put it this way: "In the state
of an intelligent ruler, there is no literature of books and bamboo
strips, but the law is the only doctrine; there are no sayings of the
early kings, but the officials are the only models." A leading Ch'in
statesman accordingly made the practical recommendation that "those who
use the past to criticize the present should be put to death together
with their relatives." In other words, the past in itself had neither
authority nor value, and those who claimed otherwise were engaged in
subversion. The state therefore set about burning books and, allegedly,
burying scholars. The result of all this was that only a limited part
of the heritage of pre-imperial China survived.
This ruthlessly negative attitude to the past did not
last. Under the
Han and later dynasties, the imperial state renounced its cultural
radicalism, and what remained of antiquity was carefully collected and
preserved. What was not given up was the project of ruling China
through a unitary imperial order. As embodied in successive dynasties
down the centuries, this imperial order was neither totalitarian nor
even particularly intolerant. But its very existence tended to
circumscribe the range of approved elite culture.
It is for these reasons that the Ch'in unification
marks a key break in
the cultural history of China. The centuries prior to the break were a
period of remarkable cultural ferment. Two things helped to stimulate
this. One was the existence of many small states rather than one big
onemuch as in the Gangetic plain in the formative period of Indian
civilization. The other was that around the fifth century B.C. China
entered the Iron Age. The effect of this was to undermine the
aristocratic dominance that had marked Chinese society in the Bronze
Age. Battles were no longer won by aristocrats with their chariots and
expensive bronze armaments; when the Ch'in eventually prevailed, it was
thanks to massed infantry increasingly equipped with iron weapons. In
the interval the Chinese were unusually free to think.
This, then, was the period of the "hundred schools,"
when the followers
of Confucius (d. 479 B.C.) were just one school amon many. Culturally
they were the conservatives, committed to serving the elite political
tradition of the late Bronze Age as "best they
could in a changed
environment; but they were men of their own time in that they sought to
maintain the relevance of their tradition by subjecting it to
moralizing reinterpretation (we will get a taste of this when we come
to the ancestor cult in the next section). Within the political elite
the antithesis of Confucian thought was that of the Legalists, who were
the inspiration of the Ch'in statesmen. Outside the political elite,
with their roots among the craftsmen of the expanding cities, were the
Mohistsantiaristocratic, moralistic, and puritanical (their principles
included "economy in funerals" and "condemnation of music"). Their
surviving writings show a concern with formal logic and rigorous
scientific thought that was to have no place in imperial China. In
antithesis to all of these were the Taoists (or Daoists), with their
teasing, mystical, antirationalist philosophy of spontaneity and
withdrawal from public life.