6.6 The Chin watershed
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 dialects—we could really call them languages—has 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 missing—a 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 about—the 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 one—much 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 Mohists—antiaristocratic, 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.