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TWO

Early Civilization in China:Reflections on HowIt Became Chineseavid N eightley

If we are to understand how the culture of China differs from that ofother great civilizations, two fundamental and related questions need tobe addressed: How did China become Chinese and how do we defineChineseness ? Answers to these questions not only aid ou r understand-

ing of the origins of Chinese culture but also, by implication and con-trast, throw light on how Western values and social organization devel-oped differently.

Before pursuing these questions, three prefatory comments are inorder. First, only in broad, comparative treatments such as this one aregeneralizations about Chinese culture permitted. Even for the earlyperiod, we need to remember that the re were many versions of Chineseculture that varied with time, place, and social level; I hardly do ustice toall of them in this chapter. n particular, 1focus less on the explicit philo-sophical tradition represented by such early thinkers as Confucius andmore on the religious, social, aesthetic, and political practices of the Neo-lithic to the early Bronze Age from which these philosophers d rew theirassumptions and values.Second, it must be stressed that my concerns as a historian are explan-atory, not judgmental. I emphasize this point because on occasion I de-scribe early China as having lacked certain features present in myMesopotamian and Greek touchstone cultures. But this negative ter-One version of this essay was given at Stanford University on 18November 1986 1 havedone my best to take account of the valuable criticism offered by many colleagues who arenot of course responsible for my errors. In particular should like to thank DavidJohnson Thomas Meuger. David Nivison.Jeffrey Riegel. Betsey Scheiner lnvin ScheinerRaphael Sealey David Ulansey Richard Webster and Yeh Wen-hsin for their careful read-ing of an earlier draft.

Keightley, David N. "Early Civilization in China:

Reflections on How It Became Chinese." In Paul S. Ropp,

ed., Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on

Chinese Civilization(University of California Press,

1990): 15-54.

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Figure 2.2. Drawing of the decor on an Eastern Chou (late sixth to fifth centuryB.c. hu wine vase from Chengtu, Szechwan. From Wen-wu 1977. 86. Movingup the vessel, we see: bottom register, a battle by land and sea; middle register,clockwise from b o t h4 rchers shooting at birds, a banquet scene, a bell-and-chime orchestra; top register, more archery (in the bottom h d f , the plucking ofmulberry branches (perhaps. or the making of bows), an archery contest. A tleast three examples of bronze hu decorated with these kinds of scenes havebeen found. See Jenny F So, 'The Inlaid Bronzes of the Warring States Period,in heGrealBronze Ageof China,ed.Wen Fong (New York: Metropolitan Museumand Knopf, 1980),316, and Esther Jacobson, The Structure of Narrative inEarly Chinese Pictorial Vessels, Represenfutions 8 (Fall 1984): 77-80.

Early Civilizutiottin China 9anonymous, have been subordinated by an equally anonymous masterdesigner to a larger order.

This Chinese vase expresses the ideals of organization that were beingapplied with increasing effectiveness durin g the period of the Wa rringStates 453-221 B.c.), a period when men fought less for individualhonor, as Achilles had do ne, an d more for th e survival of the state. Aes-thetic concerns were focused on the general, the social, and the non-heroic rather than on the particular, the individual, and the heroic. Thisstereotyping, this bureaucratization of experience , is implicit not only inthe decor of the Chinese bronze-for somebody was presumably over-seeing these soldiers and orchestra players-but also in its manufac-ture-for somebody had surely directed the nume rous artisans involvedin the industrial-scale casting of the vessel. Once again, this contrastssharply with the practices of the Greeks, who both admired the individ-ual and who organized their workshops around a series of acts per-formed by single craftsmen.

The Hands of th Hero: Dirty or Clean?The role of hero and protagonist was radically different in the two cul-tures. Achilles acts for himself. He feels the thrust of the blade as itpierces his opponent's breast; he is directly responsible; he has dirtyhands. Th e analogous Chinese vision of the hero , at least by the time ofthe Eastern Chou, was radically different. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, for example,the Herodotus of China, who wrote at the start of the first centu ry B.c.,presents five Chou and Ch'in case histories in a chap ter entitled Biogra-phies of the Assassin-Retainers. ' Th e leitmotif is that of a statesmanwho has an enemy he wishes to dispatch. Rather than undertaking thetask himself, as Achilles would have don e, the Chinese protagonist relieson th e charisma of his elevated social and political position to engage anassassin. The assassin, in tu rn, attempts to perform the deed (with re-sults fatal to himself in four of the five cases), not fo r monetary gain b utto requite the overwhelming social honor the lord had conferred bydeigning to entrust him with the task.The genesis of such characteristic social obligations is a theme towhich I return later. Here I simply note that the lord delegates what, inthe Greek case, would have been the heroic, the personal, and thu s thetragic, task. His hands a re clean; they are not on the sword; he is noteven near when the deed is undertaken. A bureaucratic chain of com-mand protects the initiator from the shock and consequences of hisdeeds. The lord is not the hero; he has become an administrator. Thehero, in these cases, does not act for himself; he is a delegate. Th er e is a

3. Burton Watson, trans., Rccwdc o the Hishia n: haphs rom th Shih Chi o Ssu maCh'ien New York: Columbia University Press, 1g6g , 5-67.

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2 David N Keightleydivision between the lord's original motivation for the deed and the pro-tagonist's heroic execution of it.

Anrbiguig and OptimismTh e pedagogical role of the hero (or the heroine-the role of gender insuch matters would be worth exploring) in the two cultures also differed.Th e heroes of the Greeks often served only as tragic, negative examples;few Greeks would wish to imitate Achilles by killing the woman he loved(or imitate Oedipus by killing his father, Orestes by killing his mother, orAntigone by killing herself-the examples are numerous). And whenGreeks in their hubris acted in the arbitrary and passionate ways of thegods, they met disaster. Achilles would have loved Penthesileia, but hekilled her; he did love Patroclus, but his arrogance as he sulked in histent led to Patroclus's death.

In early China, by contrast, heroes were heroes precisely because theywere models worthy of emulation; the universe of moral action, at leastas it was represented in the accounts of myth and history, was untram-meled by ambiguities. Th e basic, optimistic assumption of the Tso chuan,the massive semihistorical chronicle compiled in the fourth century B.c.,was that the virtuous man would be rewarded here and now-by promo-tions, honors, and status. Cause and effect in the universe were rigor-ously fair; the moral prospered, the wicked did not. The subversivethought that the best intentions might lead to chaos and regret-not, asin the cases of Confucius or Ch'ii Yuan, because those in power were toounenlightened to employ them, but because there was something flawedin the human condition itself-was rarely dramatized (see the discussionof theodicy below).

One could multiply many instances of this early, uncomplicated Chi-nese view of man as a social being, embedded in and defined by the obli-gations and rewards of a hierarchical, ethical, bureaucratic system. Thelarge-scale recruitment of labor by a centralized bureaucratic elite (assuggested by figure 2.2), the members of which, as Mencius (ca. 372-289 B.c.) pointed out, labor with their minds rather than their hands,may be discerned in the Chinese record from at least the early BronzeAge, if not earlie r (see the discussion of Neolithic burials below). EasternChou states were builders of major public works, particularly city wallsand the long, defensive walls that eventually culminated in the buildingof the Great Wall at the en d of the third century B.C. Th e massive re-cruitment of labor was idealized in semihistorical accounts in which the

4 The only direct expression of this subversive thought in early China appears inSsu-ma Ch'ien's Biography of Po Yi and Shu Ch'i in Watson. Records, I I - 15), in whichthe historian is sorely troubled by virtuous actions that are unrew arded and unrecognized.On Confucius's philosophical equanimity in a world where perfection is not possible, seeBenjamin 1. Schwaru, hcWorld o Thought n An Chino (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press. 1985). 80-8 1.

Early Ciui~izalionn China 21people, both elites and masses, had cheerfully flocked to serve virtuousrulers, often dynasty founders, who had won their allegiance not by co-ercion but by exemplary government. Virtue was again rewarded, in thisinstance by the loyal service of others.

Such optimistic faith in the comprehensibility and benevolence of theuniverse, which runs through the classical texts and which was explicitlyarticulated in the view of Mencius that man's natu re is basically good, canbe rel. at Thomas A. Metzger has termed the fundamental%piste=ptimism of early Chinese philosophy. This optimism-d~~ned as the willingness to accept large, roughly defined moralideas-like benevolence or righteousness -as reliable, universal ,and objective; Metzger contrasts this with the kind of pessimistic epis-temology represented by Descartes's clear and distinct ideasm5Opti-mism about man's lot helps to explain the lack of interest in dramatic de-tail found in early Chinese texts (discussed below). It also helps explainthe Chinese distrust of laws and constitutions, the traditional preferencefor jen-chih, government by men, rather than for fa-chih, governmentby laws.Later I consider the sources of this confidence, but i t was surely suchradical world ~p ti mi sm , ~uch trust in one's leader as a moral chun-tzu,

or noble man, and the optimistic assumption-by the recruiters, if notalways by the recruits-that such voluntary and nonproblematic stateservice was natural and proper that helps to explain the Chinese readi-ness to trust great leaders, whether Emperor Wu of the Han or MaoTse-tung of the People's Republic. This optimism also helps to explainthe lack of safeguards against the power of the state that has character-ized Chinese government for at least two thousand years. If leaders aregood-and if the good is unambiguous-who needs to be protectedagainst them? Achilles, his hand on the sword, his act regretted as it iscommitted, represents a more somber vision. To the Greeks, the heromight not be bad, but he might be fundamentally and tragically mis-taken. To the Chinese, a hero, by definition, was good; his mistakes, if hemade any, were likely to be tactical in nature. His intent was free fromerro r and regret.

T H E N E O L I T H IC T O B RO N ZE C E T R N S I T IO NI now turn to the evolution of Chinese culture in the Neolithic and earlyBronze Ages, with part icular attention to such subjects as individualism (or

5. Thomas A. Meuger, Some Ancient oots of Ancient Chinese Thought: This-worldliness, Epistemological Optimism, Docuinality, and the Em ergence of R eflexivity inthe Eastern Chou, Early k 1- 12 (1985- 1987): 66-72.6 The phrase is Max Weber's. ee Max Weber, Thc Re o China, trans. Hans H.Gerth, with an introduction by C. K Yang (New York: Free Press, 1951).XXX Z I P . 227-

28, 235.

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avid N eightlcyits absence), ritual an d decorum, bureaucratic control, dependency andobligation, and metaphysical optimism. Th e Neolithic is of fundamentalimportance because of the remarkable continuity of post-Neolithic cul-tural development in China. It is probably truer for China than for mostparts of the world that as the Neolithic twig was bent the modern treehas inclined.

Neolithic cultu res in China flourished during t he Postglacial ClimaticOptimum, when it is probable that temperatures were some LWQ to-fourdegrees Celsius warmer than they are today and rainfall, in a t least theMiddle Yangue and north China, was more abundant. The develop-ment of early Chinese culture must be understood in the context ofthese relatively beneficent natural conditions.

Socially, the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in China,as elsewhere in the world, witnessed t he evolution of urban forms, thegenesis of th e state, th e institutionalization of exploitation and servitude,the validation of characteristic forms of sacrifice, and the systematic ar-ticulation of religious beliefs. Spiritually and psychologically, this transi-tion witnessed the development of a temperament and mentality thatfound certain worldviews and cosmological assumptions natural andcomfortable, involving, in particular, the willing acceptance of hier-archy, filiality, and obedience.In the realm of religion, the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of theNear East, Greece, and East Asia-to say nothing of those of Egypt andIndia-developed belief systems and institutions that dealt in differentways with the one certainty that faces us all: eventual death. Death can,paradoxically, be a lively topic, for from Neolithic times onward the waypeople have treated death and the dead has been deeply expressive of,and has had a significant impact on, the way they have treated the living.

Neolithic ChinaArchaeological evidence provides considerable reason for thinking thatdistinctions between rich and poor, male and female, and the powerfuland the weak were emerging in China by the four th and thi rd millenniaB.C. Not only did grave goods become more abundant, but the generalegalitarianism of the early Neolithic burials was replaced by marked dis-crepancies in energy input , wealth, and ritual care in later burials (figure2.3). Similarly, certain houses and certain village areas begin to revealdifferentiation in the goods available to the living. The presence of gravegoods-which, although finely made, were generally items of daily life-presumably indicates a belief in some kind of postmortem existence.

Th e burial, particularly in Eastern sites, of superbly made polishedstone and jade tools, such as axes and spades, whose edges reveal notraces of use, also indicates that status differentiation was prolonged be-yond the grave. These objects suggest that certain members of the so

Early Civilization in China 23

Figure 2.3. Late Neolithic supine-extended burial with abundant grave goodsat Liu-wan, eastern Tsinghai. From K ao-ku 1976.6,plate 2.ciety had been the possessors of symbolic, rather than working, tools-emblems of the owner's power to control the labor of others, bo th in thislife and in the next. Th ere were already by about the mid four th millen-nium B C some people in China whose hands were not as dirty as thoseof others.

Th e Late Neolithic saw the emergence of scapulimancy and plastro-mancy, methods of divination in which the scapulas of animals (usuallycattle) or the plastrons of turtles were scorched or burnt, the d iviner in-terpreting the resulting cracks to foretell good or ill fortune. T he pres-ence of some of these oracle bones in cemetery areas suggests that theliving, by cracking oracle bones, were attempting to communicate withthe dead. One may assume tha t a consistently successful diviner wouldhave acquired increased political authority, an authority support ed byhis powerful kin, both Living and dead.

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24 David N . Keighlley

Figure 2 4 Secondary burials in grave Mqql at Yuan-chiin-miao, Shensi. FromYuun-chun-miao Yang-shm mu-ti (Peking: Wen-wu Ch'u-pan-she, 1983 ,plate 33.Th e Neolithic Chinese treated their dead with remarkable and char-

acteristic assiduity. Corpses were buried in orderly rows, oriented to cer-tain compass directions depending on the area of China in which theyhad lived. This orderly layout presumably reflected expectations of so-cial ord er among the living. The corpses were also generally buried inthe supine-extended position (see figure 2.3 , a practice that requiredmore labor for the digging of the burial pit than, for instance, a flexburial. Th e log construction of coffin chambers in certain Eastern buri-als, particularly a t the Ta-wen-k'ou site in Shantung, or of tomb ramps inthe northwest is a fu rther indication of the labor expended on mortuaryconcerns.

The practice of collective secondary burial, which, although neverdominant, flourished in the Central Plains and the Northwest dur ing thefifth millennium, is particularly revealing. Th e cleaning away of the fleshand the careful reburial of the bones-frequently arranged in the stan-dar d supine-extended posture of the primary burials, and with skullsoriented to the prevailing local direction (figure 2.4)-implies the abilityto mobilize labor resources for the collective reinterment of u p to sev-enty or eighty skeletons in one pit. It also implies that the dead musthave been kept alive in the minds of their survivors during the period ofmonths, if not years, between primary and secondary burial.

arly Civiliwtion in China 5

Figure 2 5 Grave n r j at Ta-wen-k'ou,Shantung. The eight tall pei goblets atthe bottom of the picture had been placed in the earth ill and had presumablybeen used in a farewell ritual. From Ta-wen-k ou: Hsin-shih-ch ishih-fai ntu-hangfa-chwh pao-h (Peking: Wen-wu Ch'u-pan-she, 1974 .plate 13.3.Other mortuary rituals were employed. The placement of some of the

jars and goblets in Neolithic burials, for example, suggests the existenceof farewell libations by mourners as the grave was being filled in (figure2.5 ; the precarious, tall-stemmed black goblets of the East (figure 2.6 -whose fine, eggshell-thin construction itself suggests some special ritua lfunction-may have been used for the consumption of millet wine at thetime of interment .

One of the most remarkable of all Neolithic burials is Q t the Liang-chu culture site of Ssu-tun in Kiangsu (ca. 2500 B.c.; figure 2.7 . whichgives ample evidence of ritual activity: the corpse had been placed atopten jade pi disks that had been burned; the body had then been sur-rounded by a variety ofjad e and stone tools and ornaments, including aperimeter of twenty-seven jade fs ungtubes; and five of the twenty-fourjade pi in the burial had been deliberately broken in two and placed indifferent parts of the grave. Given the difficulty of working with jade, amaterial that has been described as sublimely impractical, the presence

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8 David N . Keightley

Figure 2.8. Grave M y 7 at Liu-wan, eastern Tsinghai. The central corpse,buried n a flex position, is thought to have accompanied the other two corpsesin death. From Wen wu 1976. 75, figure I I.of large numbers of finely carved jade pi and ts'ung in other LowerYangtze burials of the third millennium-they have never been found inthe housing remains-is further indication of the way in which the la-bors of the living were exploited for the service of the dead.

Some burials also contained victims: animal and, occasionally, human.Human sacrifice was not widespread in the Neolithic, but there is evi-dence-both in a Yang-shao burial at P'u-yang in northern Honan (endof the fifth millennium?) and in Ma-ch'ang and Chi-chia burials in east-ern Tsinghai and western Kansu (toward the end of the third millen-nium)-that a small number of people were accompanying others indeath, further evidence of the kinds of payments the living were con-strained to offer the dead (figure 2.8). Th e presence of an occasional toolby th e side of the victim indicates, at least in the later sites, that a servantin this life was to continue as a servant in the next life. Ties of obligationand servitude were so strong that they persisted after death.

B r m ge ChinaBy the Late Shang period (ca. 1200- 1045 B.c.), represented by the ar-chaeological finds at Hsiao-t'un, near Anyang in the northern Honan

Early Civilization in Chinu 9

Figure 2.9. Late Shang royal tomb at Hsi-pei-kang. From Liang Ssu-yungand Kao Ch'ii-hsun, ~ c / t i a - c h w m ~ooz-hao t mu (~ai~e i :cademia in a,Institute of History and Philology, 1965)~late 3.panhandle, increasing stratification and the institutionalization of powerwere both represented and reinforced by a highly developed cult of thedead. The oracle-bone inscriptions reveal that the dead were worshipedas ancestors according to an increasingly precise ritual schedule. Neo-lithic mortuary traditions were amplified but not radically altered.

With regard to grave goods, for example, the unrifled burial knownas Mg-which has been linked to Fu Hao, a consort or royal woman as-sociated with the powerful king Wu Ting (ca. I 2 0 0 - I 18 B.c.)-con-tained over sixteen hundred grave goods, including 468 bronzes whosetotal weight was over one and one-half tons. Extrapolation from thisrelatively small burial suggests that the contents of the looted tombs inthe royal cemetery at Hsi-pei-kang, across the river to the northwest ofHsiao-t'un, would have been even more impressive. The tombs wereveritable underground storehouses of the finest products that Shan g civ-ilization could create; these great cruciform, ramped pits, up to forty-two feet deep (figure 2.9) and equipped with beamed, room-sized gravechambers up to nine feet high, were monuments to the affection and ob-ligation that linked living descendants to dead parents.

Such tombs are eloquent proof of the intensity with which the mortu-

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3 avid N e i g wary cult both exploited and stimulated th e labors of the community. Thedigging and refilling (with rammed earth) of such a pit alone, quite apartfrom the'labor involved in furnishing it with the wooden chamber, cof-fin, and costly grave goods like bronzes and jades, would have taken onehundred men well over two hundred days to complete. The continualdraining of wealth to provide goods for the dead was the early Chineseequivalent of conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence; itstimulated the productive powers of craftsmen and laborers by expro-priating the fruit of their efforts in a culturally rational manner. A sys-tem of exchange was evidently involved. Motivated by spiritualizedkinship ties, mortuary taxes on the immediate wealth of the living servedto guarantee the f uture prosperity of their descendants.

Th e number of huma n victims associated with the Shang royal burialsis impressive, as it was undoubtedly intended to be. I t may be estimatedthat some of the royal four-ramp tombs would have claimed the lives ofover three hundre d sacrificial victims and accompaniers-in-death andthat, over the course of the approximately one hyndred and fifty yearsin which it was in use, some five thousand victims may have been buriedin the Hsi-pei-kang burial complex; these figures, which do not includesome ten thousand human sacrifices recorded in divinations about theregular ancestral cult, represent a rate of about thirty-three victims ayear, or 550 per king. The mortuary victims were drawn from a crosssection of Shang society: elite accompaniers-in-death, placed near theking and buried whole, sometimes with their own coffins, grave goods,and even accompaniers-in-death; guards, buried whole with their we apons; and prisoners of war, the most numerous group, generally youngmales, decapitated o r dismembered and buried in the earth fill, in theramps, or in adjacent sacrificial pits. This last group, the sacrificial vic-tims, outnumb ered the accompaniers-in-death by a ratio of about twentyto one.

Similar large-scale immolations were not unknown in Mesopotamia-for example, in the royal cemetery of Ur, where from three to seventy-four attendants accompanied the ruler-but there the custom was short-lived and virtually unrecorded in texts. Human sacrifice was rarelypracticed in the Greek Bronze Age.' More significantly, there is virtuallyno evidence of accompanying-in-death. Elite Greeks were not linked toeach other by ties of obligation and dependency that bound them indeath as they had presumably been bound in life. In China, by contrast,

7 . That Achilles, in book n of the IW put twelve radiant sons of Troy to the swordat the funeral o f Patroclus was more a sign of i ury than common custom. (The quotesfrom the Iliad and th dyssey in this chapter are taken from the translations of RobertFiugera ld, which are published by Doubleday.)

the custom was practiced for a f ar longer period, continuing to a signifi-cant degree in the burials of local rulers and even emperors down to theCh'in-Han period and beyond, with the number of victims varying froma few to over a hundred.

Th e oracle-bone inscriptions-with their records of systematic offer-ings to dead kings, whose own powers and abilities to intercede with Ti,the Lord on High, extended to such fundamental areas as weather, cli-mate, and victory in battle-reveal the central, institutionalized role thatancestor worship played in the workings of the Shang state. This poweraccorded to dead fathers and grandfathers suggests, accordingly, thatShang lineages were strong and tha t kinship affiliation, reinforced by re-ligious sanctification, was a powerful force for allegiance an d motivation.It may be supposed that Shang ancestor worship, which promoted thedead to higher levels of authority and impersonality with the passage ofgenerations, encouraged the genesis of hierarchical, protobureaucraticconceptions and that it enhanced the value of these conceptions as moresecular forms of government replaced the Bronze Age theocracy.

ncestor Worsh ip and I ConsequencesTh e Late Shang state emerged by building upon and institutionalizing,rather than opposing, the ties of affection, obligation, and dependencyindicated by the mortuary practices of the Neolithic. The close fit be-tween dynastic and religious power that resulted had at least thre e sig-nificant consequences.

First, it meant that there was no independent priesthood that mightserve as an alternative locus of power o r criticism; the king, as lineagehead, was his own priest. Th e heads of all powerful lineages had accessto the independent and friendly religious power of their own ancestorswithout the mediation of oth er religious specialists. Second, it meant thatthe way in which the values of kinship obligation, ancestor worship, anddynastic service reinforced one another led to an enduring unitary con-ception of the state as a religio-familial-political institution that couldembrace, ideally, all aspects of one's allegiance, leaving little ideologicalground vacant as a base for dissent. Given the totality of the Chinesestate, it is no wonder that the only Eastern Chou oppositionists wholeft much of an intellectual mark, the Taoists of the Chuang Tzu school,had to reject conceptions of service and hierarchy. Confucius and his fol-lowers could certainly lament contemporary realities, but they were es-sentially meliorists working within the value system rather than radicalcritics of the system itself. It is also no wonder that rebels against thestate were frequently to appeal to the vast world of popular naturepowers, gods, and Buddhist saviors, who stood outside the normativepolitico-religious structure of the lineage. Third, it meant that the Chi-

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3 David N eightley Early Civilizationin China 33nese humanism of the Eastern Chou, represented by such great socialthinkers as Confucius, Mencius, and Hsun Tzu, d id not see any opposi-tion between secular and religious values and was able, in Fingarette'sstriking phrase, to treat the secular as ~a cr ed . ~he humanism that re-sulted, therefore , was based on social and kin relations sanctified by reli-gious assumptions. Ritual and hierarchical expectations were applied toall aspects of a monistic cosmos; ust as there had been no opposition be-tween king (or lineage head) and priest, so the re was no tension betweenthe counterclaims of god and man, between a Zeus and a Prometheus.The optimism of the Chinese tradition, which has already been noted,can be understood as both producing and being reinforced by this fun-damental sense of harmonious collaboration. Ther e was, once again, nosense of immanent moral paradox or conflict.

D E A TH A N D T H E B I R T H O F C I VI L IZ A T IO NNext attempt to integrate early Chinese mortuary practices with otheraspects of the cu lture , considering how the meaning of one set of cus-toms may be more richly understood when seen in th e context of others,how one set of assumptions about the human condition was reinforcedby, and would have reinforced, others.

Death and ContinuityShang burial customs helped to define what it was to be a ru ler (or a re-tainer). Th e wealth, the dependents, a nd the victims accompanying theking into the next world demonstrated that his superior status (and theinferior status of his retainers) would be unchanged after death. Thisview of death as a continuity rather than a new beginning had alreadybeen implied by the grave goods and mortuary customs of the ChineseNeolithic. Death offered none of the escape, none of the psychic mobil-ity offered by the mystery rel igions of the Near East or by Christianity it-self with its vision of a redemptive death an d rebirth as in Abraham'sbosom. In early China death provided an effective opportun ity for sur-vivors to validate the central values of the culture. No dead Chinese kingwould have been permitted the lament made by Achilles in book I ofthe Iliad- Better, 1say, to break sod as a farm h andi for some countryman, on iron rations,/than lord it over all the exhausted deadv-forsuch an admission would have undermined the respect and obedienceowed to the dead elites and thus to their living descendants. Once a king,always a king; death could not change that.

8 Herbert Fingarette. Conft(~~'u~:hc Secular sSacred (New York: Harper, 1972). Any-one reading this provocative ook should also read the detailed critique provided inSchwanz. heWorld o Thought A n d China.

Death s UnpoblematicOne striking feature of the early Chinese written record is its view ofdeath as unproblematic. Death was simply not the issue it was for theancient Mesopotamians or the ancient Greeks. Nowhere, fo r example, inthe ancient Chinese record does one find the mythical claim, found inMesopotamian texts, that death existed prior to the creation of both theuniverse and man. Nowhere does one find the angry and anguishedvoice of a Gilgamesh, horrified by the death of Enkidu and by Enkidu'sdepressing account of the life to come:

t h e h ou s e wh ere on e w h o goes in n ever comes ou t again ,t h e road t h at , i f on e t ak es i t , on e n ever com es b ack ,t h e h ou s e t h at , i f on e l ives t h ere , on e n ever s ees l ight ,t h e p lace wh ere t h ey l ive on d u s t , t h e ir f ood i s mu d .My b od y, t h at gave you r h ear t j oy t o t ou ch .vermin eat it up l ike old clothes .My body, that gave your heart joy to touch,Is filled with dirt.

The re is no ancient Chinese myth, like that of the Garden of Eden, thataccounts for the invention of death or that treats death as some flaw inthe divine plan. The re ar e no visits to, or descriptions of, the realm ofthe dead that would compare with the descriptions we have of the Neth-erworld fo r the Mesopotamians or of Hades for the Greeks. Nowhere dowe find the epic concerns of the Iliad and Odyssey which focus on themanner of death, the ritual treatment of the dead, and the unhappy fateof the shades after death and which express so powerfully the tragic(once again the word recurs) poignancy that death confers on the human condition. Nowhere do we find a philosophical discourse. like Plato'sPhuedo that is devoted to the nature of death and the soul.'UTh e very.silence of the Chinese texts about such matters suggests a remarkableChinese ability to emphasize life over death. Ancestor worship a nd theendurance of the lineage served to render the loss of the individualmore palatable. Indeed, these practices would have served to promote,as they were promoted by, a conception of the individual and his rolequite different from that held by the Mesopotamians and Greeks.

g John G ardner and John Maier. trans.. Gilgamcsh: Tramhted rom the Sin-kqi-tcnni~rniVmiol l (New York: Knopf, 1984). tablet vii, colunin iv, tablet xii. column iv. 178, 26510 . Th e ripostes and anecdotes about death found in the Chuung T z u merely confirnithis point. Chuang Tzu is arguing for a nonhuman view of dealh precisely because he isarguing for a nonhuma n view of life. H e is. in these passages, less concerned about deathitself than with the institutions and va lues that the civilized Chinese had d eveloped t dealwith it. Unlike Plato, he deals with death as a social problem, not a philosophical one , be-cause, in his view, society ilself is the problem. His cheerful acceptance of death m ight wellhave filled Plato with envy.

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4 avid N eighllcy

Morality and the Absme of TheodicyThe great mythic themes in China were not dying and death but socialorder and social morality; there is no Chinese equivalent to the heroicand adversarial universe of Gilgamesh or Inanna, Achilles or Hector.One is impressed and attracted by the general harmony that pervadesthe relations of the Chinese to their gods. For example, although the rehad been a flood, dimly described, its main function was to provide thesage emperor Yii with a sphere for his labors in political geography,delineating the borders for the various regions of China. The famoussaying, recorded in the Tso chuan, But for Yii we should have beenfishes, pays tribute to his having made the world habitable; the mythdoes not address th e issue of why the floo occurred. There is, in fact, acharacteristic lack of theodicy in early Chinese culture, its fundamentaloptimism seeming to render unnecessary any explanations for the pres-ence of evil.

Ther e was no sense in early Chinese mythology that the gods weremalevolent, that they resented human success, that they might conspireto destroy man, o r that man was becoming too numerous and too tire-some, themes that are all present in Mesopotamian and Greek myth andin the Old Testament. Just as there was no Prometheus, neither wasthere any Zeus. Given this lack of divine animus, of immanent man-godhostility, it was natural that death in China should not have been re-garded as an affront to mortals to the degree that it was in Mesopotamiaand Greece; rath er, it was part of the inevitable and harmonious order.In a kin-based society where the royal ancestors were in Heaven, therewas little discord between god and men. There was little need, in short,for a Chinese Gilgamesh or a Chinese Job, asking why a man who hasdone n o wrong should di e or suffer. Th e issue, when it did arise, as inthe cases of Po Yi and Shu Chi (note 4, this chapter) or of Confuciushimself, who was shunned by the rulers of his age, was usually conceivedin terms of employment, reward, and recognition rather than sufferingor destruction. Even in his moving letter to Jen An in which the greathistorian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, who had been punished by Emperor WU of theHan, laments his castration, his regrets ar e characteristically couched notin terms of his own loss but in terms of his having failed to serve theemperor and his colleagues effectively.

Death, th Individual, and the SupernaturalAttitudes toward death depend on cultural conceptions of what has beenlost. Just as the bitter reactions to death in the cases of the Gilgameshand

i I . The letter is translated in Burton Watson, Ssu ma Ch icn: Grand Histotian of C hNew York: Columbia University Press, 1958 , 57 67.

Early Civilizutiun in hina 5the Greek epics, for example, may be related to strong conceptions ofpersonal roles in the two cultures, so may the quieter, more acceptingresponses of the early Chinese, who were less anguished metaphysicallyby death, be related to their deemphasis on individual heroic action.The lack of emphasis on the individual may also be seen in the realmof the supernatural. By contrast with the Mesopotamians and Greeks,for whom misfortune and defeat stemmed from the harassment and dis-orderly interference of individual gods like Enki and lsht ar or Zeus andAphrodite, the Shang Chinese presumably would have explained suchevents in terms of improper sacrifices and dissatisfied ancestors. Thoseancestors would have been mollified not by the particularistic pleas ofhumans or by erratic interventions and divine favoritism but by ordere dsacrifices whose efficacy was tested in advance through divination andoffered in accordance with the status of the ancestors responsible. Giventhis protobureaucratic attitude toward the supernatural, it was entirelynatural that d eath itself would also be treated in a more matter-of-fact,more impersonal manner.The Chinese of the Western Chou, whose Mandate of Heaven doc-trine moralized the political culture, explained misfortunes and defea tsin terms of immoral behavior; some thinkers of the Eastern Chou, bycontrast, adopted the impersonal cycles of yin-yang and five-phase the-ory. No matter which of these explanations one turns to, the Shang andChou elites lived in a more ordered, more rational world of large, gen-eral forces that implemented the will of hierarchically ordered ancestorsor Heaven, on the one hand, or that were incarnated in natural cycles,on the other. By contrast to the Mesopotamian or Greek deities, Chineseancestral spirits were remarkably depersonalized, a point to which I re-turn later.

Origins and EschatologyTh e absence of origins myths until relatively late in the Chinese recordwas also surely related to conceptions of life and death. would suggestthat conceptions of creation ex nihilo are related to and stimulated by aradical, nihilistic view of dea th itself. Cultures that are less anxious abouteschatology, such as that of ancient China, are less likely to be concernedabout their origins; cultures that a re more worried about final destina-tions, such as those of Mesopotamia and Greece, are more likely to de-vote attention to the question of whence they came. Th e Greek concernwith questions of origins, first causes, and first principles is wellknown. In China, where identity was conceived as biological and social,the question of origins was often one of genealogy and history. A hierar-chy of ancestors leading back to a dimly perceived founding ancestor o rancestress was answer enough because it satisfied the kinds of questionsthat were being asked.

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36 David N Keightlqr

Critical DistanceTh e openness of Greek society, which was coming into existenceduring the Archaic period (ca. 760-479 B.c.) . has been called its mostprecious single legacy, serving to encourage both the intellectualspeculations of the few and individual freedom among the many. I2 Th echaracteristic Greek readiness to question and complain about the hu-man condition-whether that questioning was religious, metaphysical,or political-may be related to the marked difference that distinguishedmortals from immortals in Greek legend. This distance allowed theGreeks to take a stance more critical than that permitted a Chinese wor-shiping his ancestors, who were merely ex-humans, not radically differ-ent beings. A strong, hierarchical, lineage system does not encouragechildren to criticize parents or descendants to criticize spiritualized an-cestors; it also does not encourage the pursuit of radical innovations. Iwould not deny that, as Nathan Sivin notes in Chapter 7 of this volumeand as Joseph Needham's extensive work has revealed, ' Chinese crafts-men and technologists have been among the most inventive in the world.Th e point is, however, that such innovators were generally not rewardedwith or stimulated by commensurate social prestige.

For the early Chinese, as for their imperial descendants, it was thepast that was normative. The Greeks, like most traditional cultures, cer-tainly revered the past; yet they succeeded in a situation that M I Finleyhas referred to as one of compulsory originality in producing a seriesof unprecedented cultural innovations.15Th e past was accorded greaterrespect by the Chinese because the past was, through the lineage, the in-tegrated source of biological, religious, and political identity. This greatrespect helps explain the lesser emphasis placed on individual creativityand innovation; emulation of dead ancestors was all the originality re-quired. Such an environment encouraged what might almost be called aspirit of compulsory unoriginality. Once again we encounter thestrength of the lineage in early Chinese culture-already seen in themortuary evidence and the cult of ancestor worship-as one of its most

12. Anthony Snodgrass, rchaic Greece: heAge of E w Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press. 1980). 161.13. See Vermeule, Aspects of Death, 125, on the way in which the epic permitted theGreeks to laugh at and even despise their gods. Jasper Griffin has made a related point. Forthe Greeks the world makes less sense through moral self-examinationw-which wouldhave been the Chinese approach- than through recognition of the gulf that separatesmortal men from the serene superiority and shining gaze of the immonal gods ( FromKiller to Thinker, New Ymk RNinu of Books Q P , no. I 1 [27 June 19851: 32).14 loseph Needham. Science and Civilis m China, 7 vols. projected (Cambridge:Cambridge 'university press, ig54-).15. M Finley, he d reekr: An ntroduction toTheir Life and hought(New York:Viking, 1964). 23.

Early Civilizalian in China 3 7distinctive features. I t is no accident that the greatest innovations in earlystatecraft and social theory appeared in the Warring States period (453-2 2 I B.c.) of the hundred schools, the age when the great aristocraticlineages of the Spr ing and Autumn period (72I -479 B.c.) were disap-pearing from the scene.

A E S T H E T I C S A N D S T Y L EIngrainedness

Characteristically, there is no visual image or even textual description ofany early Chinese ruler or deity to compare with the images and descrip-tions of particular rulers, heroes, and gods we have from Mesopotamiaand Greece. There is no Chinese equivalent to the bronze head, whichmay depict King Sargon the Great, no Chinese version of a heroic, life-size, naked bronze Poseidon. In the Neolithic, the Shang, an d the West-ern Chou the iconographic tradition was, with few exceptions, pro-foundly nonnaturalistic. Combrich's formula, making comes beforematching, 16 was not only true of the designs painted on Chinese Neo-lithic pots but continued to be true until relatively late in the BronzeAge. Whatever the so-called monster masks on the Shang and Choubronzes (see, for example, figure I . 3 in Chapter I I ) represented-andit is by no means clear that they were intended to match any naturalanimal-they were primarily magico-aesthetic expressions of design,symmetry, and an almost dictatorial order.This concern with general order rather than particular description-manifested in the early aesthetics, social rituals, and philosophy of earlyChina-may also be seen, to return to one of our earlier themes, in rep-resentations of death. No early Chinese text provides vivid, unflinchingdetails like the worm crawling out of the dead Enkidu's nose in theGilgameshor the brains bursting from a mortal thrust and runni ng alongthe spearhead in book 17 of the Iliad The relative unconcern with mate-rial details can be seen as a fur the r expression of the epistemologicaloptimism refer red to earlier, the willingness to embrace ideas that weremore dependent on social custom and general category than on rigorousanalysis and precise description.

Both aesthetically and socially, the Chinese did not manifest what hasbeen called the Greeks' personifying instinct, that instinct that ren-dered Greek myths so rich in personalities and thus so un-Chinese. In-deed, if one word had to be used to describe early Chinese aesthetic, an d

16. E H ombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study h Psychology of u W c p ' e s ~(Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 9917. L R Farnell, Greek ero Cults and Ideas of nmodify (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 192 1). 359.

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38 David N . Keightkyeven philosophical, expression, would suggest ingrainedness. By in-grainednessI mean the willingness to concentrate on the symbolic mean-ing of a n event, usually moral o r emotional and frequently expressive ofsome normative ord er, rat her than to express, or derive comfort or in-sight from, its existential qualities for their own sake. Such ingrainednesshas nothing to do with abstractions or with the ideal forms of Plato's dia-logues. It is in the Chinese case entirely immanent. Th e patterns, sym-bols, messages, rules, and so on are entirely within reality; they do nottranscend reality metaphysically but merely render its existential detailsof minor importance. As Girardot has written of Chinese myths,

Mythic materials and themes have entered into Chinese literature as a se-ries of extremely abstract, and essentially static, models for organizing andevaluating human life.Mythic themes in early Chinese literature, in other words, often seem tobe reduced to their inner logical code or implicit cosmological structureof binary yin-yung cla~sification.'~Chinese ingrainedness, then, stands in sharp contrast to the passionate

Archaic Greek attention to individual detail for its own existential sake,the recognition of the quirky, ironic, indifferent, nonsymbolic, existential,nonessential natu re of reality, the outgazing bent of mind that seesthings exactly, each for itself, and seems innocent of the idea that thoughtdiscerps and colors reality. These traits are absent in the early Chinesetexts that have come down to us. John Finley has referred to this ArchaicGreek attitude as tha t of the Heroic Mind ; his account is worth quotingin full for th e contrasting light it throws on the Chinese evidence.

When in the sixth book of the IliadHector briefly returns to Troy andmeets his wife and infant son at the gate and reaches out to take the boy inhis arms, the child draws back frightened at his father's bronze armor andhelmet with horsehair crest; whereupon Hector laughs, takes off thehelmet, and lays it all-shining on the ground. In so deeply felt a scenesurely no one but Homer would have paused to note that helmet still shin-ing beside the human figures. It is as if in whatever circumstances it tookeeps its particular being, which does not change because people are sador happy but remains what it is, one of the innumerable fixed entities thatcomprise the world. Similarly in the heroic poems ships remain swift,I8. Norman J. Girardot, Behaving Cwmogonicallyin Early Taoism, n mg a n y ndE M rdm ew S h d k n o n r p a h E k , d. Robin W Lovin and Frank E. Reynolds(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1986 . I Girardotalso refers to SarahAllans judg-ment (The eir ndrh Sage: Dynusric Lcgmd nEarly hina [ an Francisco. Chinese Materi-

als Center,1g81].8 hat in using myth in politicaland philosophical argumentation. heChinese writer operatedat a highqr level of abstractionandwith greater self-consciousnessthan is normally associated with mythical thought. He did not narrate legend but at+strac~edrom it.

Early Civilization in China 9bronze sharp, the sky starry, rivers eddying. Though heroes fight and die,everything in the outflung world keeps its fit and native character.lgTher e are no comparable scenes, no shining helmets, in early Chi-

nese literature. Even in the Book of Songs Shih ching), where early Chi-nese lyricism is most prominent, the general supersedes the particular,and nature is pregnant with allegorical or symbolic meaning, usuallymoral. There ar e love poems but no great lovers. Nature is not indepen-dent but participates in man's moral and emotional cosmology; its role isto express human concerns. To put the matter anothe r way, early Chi-nese texts, like early Chinese bronze designs, reveal marks of what, to aGreek artist, would have seemed like severe editing, in which particulardetail had been sacrificed to abstract order. Either there never was a Chi-nese equivalent of the Heroic Mind or it has left no reflection; in eithercase the contrast with t he Classical Greeks, who were so deeply inspi redby the epics of the Archaic period, is significant.

The Heroic Mind is superficially reminiscent of the epistemologicaloptimism of the early Chinese thinkers. Both forms of thinking revealunquestioning acceptance. Th e differences, however, are fundamental.First, the Heroic Mind accepts existence without question; the epis-temologically optimistic mind, by contrast, accepts ideas and formula-tions. Second, the Heroic Mind in Finley's analysis yields by the ClassicalAge, to what he calls the theoretical mind and then the rationalmind ; what we may call the metaphysical optimism of Hom er is re-placed by the epistemological pessimism of Plato. No such radical evo-lution was to take place in China, whose thinkers were to remain consis-tently satisfied with their epistemological optimism, an optimism theywould characteristically reassert in the eventual Confucian response toBuddhism's nihilistic metaphysics. This lack of change, this satisfactionwith early, and hence ancestral, cultural forms, is a theme to which Ireturn.

Metuphysical and Technological CowelatesAlthough Plato's concern with ideal forms, which is so radically un-Chinese in its metaphysical assumptions a b u t a separate, nonimmanentrealm of perfection, is alien to the Homeric view of reality, one cannevertheless note the way in which it derives from the Homeric empha-sis on individual particulars, objects, and persons. When, for example,Plato employs metaphors of the workshop in discussing such matters, it

19.ohn H. Finley, Jr., Four Sfugcs of Creek Thought (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress 1966 , 3.4,28. imilar observations about Homer's stylein the O d p 9 may be foundin Odysseus Scar, the openingchapter of rich AuerbachsMinusir: Thr Rcps~t - oRcclity in Wu m Li raturc (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1953 .

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Figure 2.10. Schematic drawing of the piece-mold casting assembly used to casta Middle Shang tripod: 1) core, 2) mold d o n s , 3) completed bronze vessel.From Wen Fong, ed., luGreal Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition rom the Peopk sRepublic of China (New York: Metropolitan Museum and Knopf, 1980).72Drawing by Phyllis Ward.

Early Civilization in China 41is the shoemaker's inability to make individual and identical shoes eachtime, his inability to match the ideal conception of a shoe , that concernshim. Bronze-working in classical Greece would have man ifested the sametroubling variance; each wrough t object-such as Achilles' sword-would have been mad e singly an d thus differently by a smith, hamme ringand beating it into an approximation of the ideal form. Chinese piece-mold bronze casting, by contrast, pe rmitted no such individual variation.Th e technological process, involving ceramic molds placed aro un d a cen-tral core, guaranteed that when molten bronze was poured into the spacebetween the mold a nd th e slightly pared down or sh runken core, the ini-tial clay model would be duplicated virtually exactly (fig ure 2. Thisduplication of models is analogous, in the technical realm, to the emula-tion of heroes and ancestors referred to earlier, just as the Greek tech-niques of smithy bronze production are analogous to the Greek empha-sis on the individual hero.

Given this context, it is fitting that the problem of variance, of th e fail-ure to match an abstract ideal, did not occur to the early Chinese as amajor theoretical problem, as opposed to a practical one. They assumedthat individuals were identified and valued in terms of the human rolesthey played within the kinship group . There is good government, saidConfucius, when the fath er is a father and the son a son (Analecb12.1 I). They also assumed, with characteristic optimism, that peoplewere educable to the good and were capable of performing those rolesadequately; their epistemological optimism did no t require them to de-fine or analyze those roles, such as that of father an d son, with th e rigoran d precision th at a Plato, more pessimistic about t he hum an capacity toknow and understand, would have demanded.

heAbsence o ramaTh e central importance of dramatic performances in the Athens of thefifth century B.c. acted in theatrical competitions before audiences ofsome fourteen thousand citizens and challenging and lamp ooning someof the most cherished values of the state while being supported in partby public funds, needs no com ment here; the absence of such a n artisticand political form in China is another feature that separates the twocultures.

Th e absence of dramatic confrontation may also be discerned in othe rareas of Chinese expression. have already noted, for example, the lackof narrative tension in the pictorial representations on the Eastern Chou

20. For a brief introduction to piece-mold casting and its aesthetic consequences seeRobert W. Bagley. The Beginnings of the Bronze Age: Th e Erlitou Culture Period, inThe Grcat Bronze ge of Cham: n Exhibirkm from th PeoplcS Rgublic o Chitu , ed Wen Fong(New York: Metropolitan Museum and Knopf, 1980)~ 0-73.

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42 David N . Keightlcy Early Civilizolion in China 43hu vases (see figure 2.2). In the realm of expository prose one of thestriking differences between the writings of the early Chinese philoso-phers and Plato is the particularism with which Plato incarnates his argu-ments, describing the time, the place, and the persons to give dramaticforce to Socrates' conversations. Confucius's sayings, by contrast, areusually divorced from the emotional hurly-burly of debate with keenlydelineated individuals on particular historical occasions. There is littledramatic tension in early Chinese philosophical texts comparable to thetense liveliness, the dialectical friction, of Plato's dialogue^.^ Thissuccessful incarnation of the general in the particular characterizes

Greek art, philosophy, and conceptions of the immortals. In China, bycontrast, in art , philosophy, and religion the individual is submerged inmore general concerns.

This absence of dramatic tension in both philosophy and art relates tothe Chinese concern with ritualized social hierarchy that we see emerg-ing as early as the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang and that be-comes fully developed in the classical ritual texts of the Eastern Chouand Han. The Chinese li were canons of status-based, role-related socialdecorum, reciprocity, and ethical consideration that operated in the reli-gious, social, and political spheres ; they implied by their very nature thatbasic social questions had already been resolved in favor of a patriarchalstatus quo. Th e ideals of social behavior were known: Let the father bea father, the son a son ; the only point at issue-so well exemplified bythe early Han in the esoteric moral catechisms of the Kung-yang (lateChou) and Ku-liang (early Han?) commentaries to the Spring and AutumnAnnals, supposedly composed by Confucius-was how to fit particularcases to general rules.

Such a socio-moral taxonomy, eventually articulated in the doct rine ofthe rectification of terms (cheng-ming), is both impersonal and un-dramatic. Assuming that a familial-style commitment to shared values ispreferable to a society of adversarial relationships, the promoters of thel manifested a cast of mind that was uninterested in logical argumentdesigned to change opinions; they preferred instead to appeal in set-position speeches to the authority of hallowed books and traditions.

Art and Ancestor WorshipChinese aesthetic and even philosophical uninterest in particular detailmay also be related to ancestor worship. As Fortes notes, The ancient

I. he phrases are those o f Alvin W. Gouldner. En Plato: Clacsical Greece and thtOrigins of S o d T h e 9 (New York: Basic Books. 1965 . 61.385. Even in the Chuang Tzu,A. C. Graham notes the rarity of genuine debates in which spokesmen of moral-ism . . nd of worldliness . are allowed their say before being defeated (Chuang-fzu:The Seven Inner Chapfen and Ofher Wtin'ngs from t t Book Chuang-lzu [London: AllenUnwin. 19811,34 .

Greeks appea r to have had elaborate cults concerned with beliefs aboutghosts and shades, but no tru e ancestor cult. He emphasizes that an-cestor worship is a representation o r extension of the authority compo-nent in the jural relations of successive generations; it is not a dup lica-tion, in. a supernatural idiom, of the total complex of kin or o therrelationships. Ancestor worship, in short, does not simply involve beliefin the dead; it involves belief about the dead, who ar e conceived in a cer-tain way.

Following this line of thought, I propose that an inverse relationshipexists between an emphasis on hierarchical roles of authority, whetherfor the living or the dead, and the vagueness with which the a fterlife isconceived. Th e cultures that depict the afterworld, or even this on e, withsome attention to specific detail may not need, o r may d o so preciselybecause they do not have, a well-defined social hierarchy o r ancestralcult. When the authority of the elders and ancestors functions well inthis world, there is less need to depict the environs of the next. T his sug-gestion-which may be related to the earlier discussion of the imper-sonality of the dead-would also help explain the well-known fact that,although the re are many mythic personages alluded to in ancient China,the re is little evidence of a sustained, anecdotal mythology.PVn this viewthere would have been no need in China for the precision of event an dpersonality that we associate with the ar t and mythology of Mesopotamiaand Greece; the mythological issues, as it were, would have alreadybeen resolved by the invention of the ancestors, who were ancestors pre-cisely because they were not comprehensive or detailed representa tionsof personality and social role. Th e Mesopotamian and Greek concern inboth religion and art with personality, social role, and the chaos of un-structured, adversarial existence was replaced in China, if it had everbeen present, by a generalized concern with harmonious order a nd de-sign and with ingrained and symbolic meanings.

Harmony and Moral ChauvinismTh e emphasis on harmony in early Chinese art, literary expression, andphilosophy-a corollary to the absence of critical and dramatic ten-sion-may also be related to the deep-seated moral and epistemologicaloptimism an d confidence already noted. This optimism and confidence

22. Meyer Fortes. Some Reflections on Ancestor Worship in Africa, in African yslttnrof Thought, ed M. Fortes and C Dieterlen (London: Oxford University Press. 1965 .125, 133.23. Derk Bodde, Myths of Ancient China, in ythlogics of fhc A World, edSamuel Noah Kramer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961 . 369 70; Boddenotes that the gods of ancient China . . . appear very rarely or not at all in art. and arecommonly described so vaguely or briefly in the texts that their personality. and sometim eseven their sex, rema ins uncertain.

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David N Keighflcycould only-and here I speak as a child of the Western tradition-havebeen achieved by glossing over, frequently by general izing and classify-ing, those sharp, awkward, and frequently nonharmonious details thatcaught the attention of the Greek artist or philosopher.

One of the characteristic and nonGhinese features of the I l i u d forinstance, is that the audience hears, and has its sympathies engaged by,both sides of the story, within the walls of Troy as well as without. Simi-larly, neither Creon in Antigone nor Oedipus in Sophocles' trilogy is pre-sented as an unsympathetic or unremittingly evil figure. This ambiguityabout what and who is right lies at the essence of the tragic vision; oursympathies are not, should not, and cannot all be on one side.

Greek epics derive much of their complexity and dramatic tensionfrom the frank recognition that unresolvable conflicts exist in the world,that choices are frequently made not between good and evil but betweentwo goods. By contrast, noearly Chinese writings-with, asisso frequentlythe case, the possible exception of the Chwmg-tzu-take a similarly de-tached and complex view of the human condition. There is no passage inearly Chinese literature analogous to Antigones' wrenching cry, AhCreon, Creon, / Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked? ; theepistemological optimists of China thought that they could say. Th e van-quished were simply categorized as ingrainedly immoral and theirpoint of view was never presented as worthy of consideration, dramati-cally or historically. From the Book o ocuments(Shu ching) throughMencius and beyond, last rulers of dynasties were by definition bad andthose who overthrew them, whom we should unquestioningly trust, wereby definition good; there was no sense of a loyal opposition as evenconceivable, let alone desirable or human. T he re are few Trojans in earlyChinese literature; generally, there are only Achaeans, only victor^.^

R E L I G I O N , L I N E A G E , CITY, N D T R A D EAncestor Worship: The Strategu Custom

To the extent that it is possible to speak of one strategic custom or in-stitution in the mix of early China's cultura l variables-strategic because

24 Even in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's detailed portrayal of Hsiang Yii-the great antagonist ofLiu Pang, who eventually founded the Han dynasty-there was little tragic about his de-feat, which, if we take the Grand Historian at his word, was entirely ustified: "It was hardlysurprising that the feudal lords revolted against him. He boasted and made a show o f hisown achievem ents. He was obstinate in his own opinions and did not abide by establishedways. . It is Heaven,' he declared, 'which has destroyed me. . Was he not indeed de -luded " (Watson, Records 104). Even if Ssu-ma Ch'ien is being ironic here, h e in n o wayportrays Hsiang Yii with the kind of sym pathetic and dramatic detail that Homer accordsHector. A lthough Hsiang Yii's flawed character brings destruction, the destruction is no ttragic because his character is not presented as admirable.

Early Civilization in Chinu 5of its pervasive ability to sanctify all other aspects of life and to legitimateand reinforce the lineage-it would seem to be ancestor worship and itssocial and political corollaries involving hierarchy, ritual deference, obe-dience, and reciprocity. At some point, probably still in the Neolithic, thecommemoration of the dead-a feature common to many early cultures,including the Greek and Mesopotamian-probably became mor e or-derly and articulated in China, taking on an ideological and juridicalpower of its own. Th e values of this new ancestor worship would havebeen intimately related to, and could not have been generated without,the existence of strong lineages. Th e traditional Chinese ideal of the ex-tended family in which several generations were to live under on e roof isonly practicable when family members are trained to value grou p har-mony above personal independence. Indoctrination in the value of sim(filiality or obedience), whose roots can be discerned in the sacrificesmade by the Shang kings, if not in the offerings placed in Neolithic buri-als (see figures 2.3 and 2.5 , provided just such a training and socializa-tion. Forming part of a rich vocabulary of familial and religious depen-dence and obligation in which even rulers would refer to themselves as asmall child. presumably still under the eye of their dead parents , hriaowas precisely not the kind of lineage virtue that would have been vali-

dated by the independence and unpredictability of the Mesopotamianand Greek gods and heroes.In addition to its impact on mortuary practices and its validation of

filiality, ancestor worship had important demographic consequences. T othe extent tha t a cult of the ancestors requires the procreation o f cultiststo continue the sacrifices, the eschatology of death in early China en-couraged population growth in a significant way. This sanctification ofposterity, and especially of male progeny, is a constant theme in thebronze inscriptions of the Western Chou, many of which end with aprayer such as, For a myriad years, may sons of sons, grandsons ofgrandsons, long treasure and use (this vessel). Th e multiplication ofprogeny recurs as a theme in the Book o Songs (Shih ching) and is given itsmost articulate emphasis in Mencius's famous dictum that nothing ismore unfilial than t o fail to produce descendants. Th e supreme obliga-tion to one's ancestors was to become an ancestor oneself.

Th e considerable demands of the ancestral cult, visible in the gravegoods of both the Neolithic and the Bronze Ages, also served t o stimu-late the production of material wealth. In social rather than economicterms, however, the orde r being revitalized by Chinese mortuary cultswas the lineage, the power of senior kin over unior kin, and the conser-vative and ascriptive ties of affection, obligation, and exploitation thatwere stronger than life itself.

Belief in ancestors had additional consequences. Although there is nodoubt that the Shang and Chou Chinese worshiped nature powers or

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6 David N eighlky Early Cidiralion in China 47spirits-rivers, mountains , and fertility figures like Hou Chi (Prince Mil-let), the legendary ancestor of the Chou-the argument that these spiritshad originally been local deities, the ancestors of particular tribes, hasmuch to recommend it.P5 imilarly, there is some evidence that Shang Ti,the Lord on High, may have once been a progenitor of the Shang royallineage. And it is clear that the Chou ruler came to regard himself as theT'ien Tzu, Son of Heaven. Even though the biological relationshipsare murky in many of these cases, the general conception of man's rela-tionship to the spirits of the universe was implicitly genealogical. Rulerswere thought to have a special, quasi-familial relationship to the su-preme deity; man was the-offspring of the spirits, ancestral and other-wise. Accordingly, there was no sense of a radical difference betweenspirits and humans. The spiritual universe was unitary and man's rela-tionship to that universe relied less on personal observation and explora-tion and more on participation in the social groups that were the pri-mary focus of religious feeling.

The Ancient Chinese CityDespite its ability to focus and accentuate cultural values, religion is notan independent variable. Because religion operates within society and isa product of society, we cannot ignore the environment and the eco-nomic context that produced the Chinese form of lineage dominance.The ancient Chinese city is instructive in this regard because it differedsignificantly from the city found in Mesopotamia or Classical Greece.Not only was it visually and aesthetically different, being built largely oframmed ear th, timber, thatch, and tile rathe r than of stone, but its politi-cal composition was different too. Early Chinese cities may be regardedas politico-religious embodiments of lineage and dynastic power, cen-tered on a palace-temple complex and existing primarily to serve theneeds of the ruling elites whose ancestors were worshiped there. Thesesettlements were characterized by a regulated layout and unitary powerstructure in which merchants and artisans, subordinate to the elite lin-eages, played a relatively minor political role.

In Mesopotamia, by contrast, the sprawling cities grew by accretionand housed large and diverse populations. Secular power an d religiouspower were clearly distinguished and often in opposition; the palace wasconfronted by countervailing sources of authority as represen ted by thetemple, the military, private wealth, and merchants. Lineages, in par-ticular, do not seem to have played the significant political role they didin China; the character of Mesopotamian urbanism appears to have dis-solved the social and religious strength of the kinship units.

Ancient Chinese cities stand in even sharper contrast to those of Clas-25. ee David N. Keightley, Akauuka Kiyoshi and the Culture of Early China: AStudy in Historical Method. H a d ournal o zioric Studies 42 (1982): 2qq-gg.

sical Greece. Greek cities were character ized by their variety of changingpolitical forms, such as tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, their empha-sis on overseas colonization and commerce and the consequent exposu reto the challenge of other cultural traditions, their reliance on citizens,who had both rights and duties in the state, their emerging conception ofequality before the law, their dependence o n legal and economic slave-labor and the corollary discovery of personal freedom. In Athens thelack of any permanent officialdom, the preference f or direct citizen par-ticipation in government-once more the reliance on dirty handsw-rather than on representation and bureaucracy, is particularly notable.Th e Eastern Chou analogues of the Greek citizens, the Ruo-jen, peopleof the state (the state being conceived primarily as the walled capital it-self), may have had certain privileges, but they appear to have had noseparate corporate or legal existence.

Notable also is the absence in China-so puzzling to Marxists inspi redby the Greek case-of the stask, or social conflict, between the few andthe many that was a characteristic feature of the Greek city states. Th erare urban upheavals recorded in the Tso c h w n involved factionalstruggles among the noble lineages and their supporters; they did not

involve class interests and were not fought over economic issues.26This nonpluralistic Chinese urbanism helps to explain why the shiftfrom kin-based to class-structured society that is associated with the rise

of states in general seems to have taken place less completely in tradi-tional China, where the government at both the dynastic and bureau-cratic level continued to be marked by its familial nature in terms of bothideology and personnel. Despite the remarkable commercial activity thatcharacterized many cities of post-Sung China-Marco Polo, for ex-ample, was astonished by their size and wealth-merchants in China didnot achieve the kind of political, legal, and economic independence thatthey did in the West. This is a distinction of fundamental importancewhose deep and ancient roots are partly to be found in a political systemthat gave kinship ties and their political extensions priority over com-mercial and legal ones.

T H E U L T I MA T E Q U E S T I O NThe ultimate question is, Why did early China develop in these particu-lar ways? Why did its values and cultural style differ from those of theancient Near East o r ancient Greece? Speculation is tempting.

26 See or example. the struggles in the state of Wei in 470 B C (James Legge, trans.,heC k hFsLs vol. 5 heCh'un TS N z h th Tso Chtun [Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1 8 7 ~ 1 ,56-57); the palace workers, of relatively high status themselves. providedthe manpower, not the motivation, for the revolt of the great officers. Their role is in someways analogous to that of the assassin-retainers discussed earlier.

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8 David N eighllqFirst, the great abundance of Neolithic sites in China suggests greater

population density than in Mesopotamia and Greece, even at this earlydate. If this impression is confirmed by subsequent excavations and bystatistical analysis, we may conclude that Chinese experience would havebeen more peopled and that such peopling is congruent with a lessindividualistic, more group-oriented social ethic.

Second, one can speculate that the Chinese environment, which en-couraged such population growth, togethe r with the population growthitself, helped to set the basic mood of t he culture. If one can relate thetrusting and self-confident mood of the ancient Egyptians to the benevo-lence of the Nile valley, and the pessimism and anxiety of the ancientMesopotamians or ancient Greeks to the comparative harshness and un-certainty of their environment, then one may argue that the com-paratively favorable Neolithic climate in China would have encouraged acharacteristic optimism about the human condition. The agrarian na-ture of the civilization also suggests that the characteristic dependenceon superiors was related to the inability to move away from coerciveleaders once one's labor had been invested in clearing the land andrendering it fertile.

Third, the nonpluralistic nature of early Chinese culture is a trait ofgreat significance for which we should try to account. 1 have noted therelatively undifferentiated character of the early cities. We may furthernote the lack of significant foreign invasions and the absence of any plu-ralistic national traditions; the challenging linguistic and cultural con-trast that the markedly different Sumerian and Akkadian traditions pre-sented to the inhabitants of early Mesopotamia, for example, was simplynot present for the early Chinese literati. Also, to the degree that thetrading activities of merchants and the value placed on them in Meso-potamia and Greece can be explained by their relatively resource-poorhinterlands, then private merchants would have been less powerful inChina because they would have been less needed. in this case geographymay have played a role. Because the major rivers in north and centralChina-the Yellow, the Huai, and the Yangtze-flow from west to eastrather than along a north-south axis, trade, to the extent that it followedthe river valleys, would have generally been between regions in the samelatitude whose crops and other natural products would have been sirni-lar; the distinctive ecogeographical zones in China are those of northand south, not east and west.

In this view the market economy would not have had the strategicvalue in China that it had in other parts of the world. significant pro-portion of Chinese trade in early historical times, in fact, seems to havebeen tribute trade-reciprocal or redistributive in character, political infunction, and dealing in high-cost, luxury items reserved for the elites,who controlled the merchants by sumptuary regulations and by co-

Early Civiliurfion n China 4 9opting them as necessary into the administrative bu rea~cra cy.~ ' he lackof an inland sea like the Mediterranean, the absence of rocky shores andgood harbors along much of the north and central China coast, the ab-sence of major trading partners across the China Sea to provide culturalas well as economic stimuli, and the presence of deserts and mountainsseparating north China from Central Asia, would have fur ther encour-aged the noncommel-cial, agrarian bias of the early Chinese city andstate and the self-confidence of its isolated, indigenous culture.

Theseconsiderations, which are basically geographic, suggest that char-acteristically Chinese formulations of property and legal status wouldhave developed in a culture where economic power was primarily agrar-ian power. Although there is no early evidence to support Karl Witt-fogel's view of an agromanager ial despotism running the state's essentialwater-control works, one can nevertheless see that wealth in the earlystate would have depended less on control of land-there was probablya surplus-and more on control of a labor force that could clear thatland and make it productive. Social control-originally motivated andlegitimated by religious and kinship ties-rather than technological ormilitary control, would have been the key to political success. Access tolineage support, ancestral power, and divinatory reassurance wouldhave been more important and more inheritable than mere claims onunpeopled, and thus unworkable, property. The problem, as revealedby King Hui of Liang near the star t of the Mencius ( I .A.3) in a conversa-tion that is purported to have occurred ca. 320 B.c. , was how to attractpeople to serve a ruler and his state: 1 do not find that there is anyprince who exerts his mind as do. And yet the people of the neighbor-ing kingdoms do not decrease, nor do my people increase. How is this?This problem was one of the major concerns of the Eastern Chou phi-losophers. It is worth recalling that the kind of bronze-casting industrythat the Shang elites patronized and that expressed both their militaryand their religious power had depended on the ability to mobilize laboron a large industrial scale.28These early patterns of behavior and legit-imation subsequently made possible the larger water-control projects ofimperial times; it was not the projects that created the patterns.

27. These speculations need to e treated with caution for at least two reasons. First,the traditional Confucian bias against trade has meant that commercial activity has notbeen well recorded in the ea rly texts. Second, the kinds of archaeological techniques thatwould enable us to finger-print he sources of poa and jades, for example. have not yetbeen applied to the Chinese evidence. For both reasons the commercial role of early citiesin China and the kinds of exchange networks that linked them to one another and to otherregions of China still remain to e explored.28. Ursula Manius Franklin, The Beginnings of Metallurgy in China: A ComparativeApproach, n The Cred Br ow Age o China:A Synrpacium ed. George Kuwayama (Los An-geles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1983). 94-99.

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5 David N KeightlySpeculations of this sort encourage us to seek fbr still earlier, moreecological, more geopolitical, more material explanations for the ori-gins of Chinese culture. They do not, however, satisfactorily explain whyearly Chinese culture took the precise forms that it did. That question, infact, unless we narrow its scope, is unanswerable because cultures are to

a large extent self-producing, the products of a virtually infinite com-bination of interacting factors. Many of these factors are mental andmany of them ar e unidentifiable in the archaeological or early historicalrecord. To put the matter another way, with the exception of the mostbasic precultural factors, such as climate and geography, which can onlyprovide the most general of answers, there is nothing but dependentvariables. It is tru er to what we understand of cultural development-and truer, perhaps, to Chinese than to traditional Western approachesto explanation-to think in terms of the gradual coevolution of manyfactors rather than of a few prime movers.lg

Because we cannot explain everything, universal laws of deve lopment with a specificity sufficient to explain the genesis of Chinese, or anyother, culture must elude us. Nevertheless, we can, as I have attemptedto do, suggest some significant and characteristic features of early Chi-nese culture whose interrelat ionships were strong and whose subsequentinfluence on the civilization of imperial China was large.

C O N C L U S I O NWhat then do we mean by Chinese from the Neolithic to the early im-perial age in the Han? Impressionistic though any attempt to define aworldview or cultural style must be, it may be suggested that Chinesereferred in p an to a cultural tradition permeated by the following fea-tures (listed, on the basis of the above discussion, in no order of causalpriority):

1 Hierarchical social distinctions-as revealed by opulent Late Neo-lithic burials (see figures 2.3 and 2.7), by the high status of theBronze Age elites both in this life and in the next , and by the hu-man sacrifices demanded, both in blood and in obligation, by thoseelites.

2 Massive mobilization of labor-as revealed by the early BronzeAge city walls, the royal Shang tombs (see figure r.g , the industrial29. On the correlative or organismic Chinese view of the world in which conceptionsare not subsumed under o ne another, but placed side by side in a fxaltma and things influ-ence on e another not by acu o f mechanical causation, but by a kind of 'inductance, ' seeJoseph Needham, with the research assistance of Wang Ling. Scimce nd Cavilisalia nChina vol. 9 History o Scvntrfic Thoughf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956).280-81.

Early Civilization n Chinu 51scale of Shang bronze-casting (see figure 2. lo), and the large-scalepublic works, such as the long walls and tombs of imperial times.

3. An emphasis on the grou p rather than the individual-expressedin the impersonality and generality of artistic and literary repre-sentation (see figure 2.2) and generated and validated by a religionof ancestor worship that stressed the continuity of the lineage anddefined the individual in terms of his role and status in the systemof sacrifice and descent.

4. An emphasis on ritual in all dimensions of life-seen in Neolithicmortuary cults (see figures 2.5 and 2.7). in the emphasis o n ritualpractice revealed by the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang, andin the classical cult treatises of the Eastern Chou and Han.5. An emphasis on formal boundaries and models-as revealed bythe constraints involved in rammed-earth construction, by the useof molds in Neolithic ceramic technology and in the bronze tech-nology that evolved from it (see figure 2.10), by the dictatorial de-sign system of the bronze decor (see figure 1 .g , by the use of mod-els in both bronze technology and social philosophy, and by thegreat stress on social discipline and order in ethics and cosmology.6. An ethic of service, obligation, and emulation-consider the buri-als of accompaniers-in-death and human victims in Neolithic (seefigure 2.8) and Shang times, the elevation of sage emperors andculture heroes who were generally administrators rather thanactors, the motivations of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's assassin-retainers, andthe obligations and unquestioning confidence that the princelyman might engender. T he endurance of this ethic is dramaticallyexpressed by the army of some seven thousand life-sized ter ra-cotta soldiers, buried ca 2 10 B.c. proud and confident as they ac-companied the First Emperor of China in death (figure 2 1 1).

7 Little sense of tragedy or irony-witness the evident belief, welldeveloped even in the Neolithic, in the continuity of some form oflife after death. Witness, too, the general success and uncompli-cated goodness of legendary heroes and the understanding of hu-man action as straightforward in its consequences. Confucian opti-mism about the human condition was maintained even in the faceof Confucius's own failure to obtain the political successes that heneeded to justify his mission. The optimism, both moral an d epis-temological, was a matter of deep faith rather than of shallowexperience.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but 1 am proposing that par-ticular features such as these, combined in the ways 1 have described,help to define what we mean by Chinese for the early period. I t must bestressed that other scholars could well emphasize different features of

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Early Ciuilizaiion in hina 53

Figure 2 11 Part of the seven-thousand-manarmy of terra-cotta figuresburiedwi t h the First Emperor of China, ca 2 1 B C From Ch in ShihHuanglingping-mayung (Peking: Wen-wu Ch'u-pan-she. 1989 . no. 7

the culture-such as the influence of millet and rice agriculture, the ac-ceptance of a monistic cosmology, the influence of a logographic writingsystem, the nature of early historiography, the role of shamanism, andConfucian conceptions of benevolence and good government. As 1indi-cated at the start, do not focus on the Eastern Chou philosophers notonly because they have already been studied extensively by WesternscholarsMbut also because my main concerns are prephilosophical ; Iattempt to relate legend, history, aesthetics, and political practice to theculture of the Neolithic-to-Bronze-Age transition. My analysis, accord-ingly, is neither definitive nor comprehensive; it does not p ropose to ex-plain everything.

Furthermore, in making cultural comparisons, we should generallythink in terms of emphasis or nuance, not absolute distinctions. I d o notclaim that the ancient Chinese had no sense of individual heroism, thatno leader ever did things fo r himself, that death was not a source of ter-ror, that t he early Chinese ignored details, or that merchants played norole. But if one imagines a series of axes on which individualism, per-sonal involvement, attention to detail, anguish at the death of lovedones, service to the group, and so on could be plotted, one would findthat the Chinese responses differed to a significant degree from those ofother seminal civilizations.Finally-to return to a caution raised at the start of this chapter-Iwould remark that the very nature of cultural comparison, which in-volves moving from the familiar culture to the unfamiliar o ne, results ina rhetoric that seems critical of the target culture, which is describedas deficient in certain features. But should such features have beenpresent? Is what has been called the Greek lust to annihilate attrac-tive? Are gods who masquerade as swans to rape their victims? Aresons who overthrow their fathers? What we may regard as the good andthe bad features of any cu lture a re inextricably linked. All great civili-zations have their costs as well as their benefits, and it would be in-structive-indeed, it is essential if full cultura l understanding is to beachieved-to rewrite this chapter from the Chinese point of view, stress-ing and seeking to explain all the features that early Greek culture , forexample, lacked. Th e most notable of these would surely include th e em-phasis that many early Chinese thinkers placed on altruism, benevo-lence, social harmony, and a concern with human relations rat her thanabstract principles,

The cultural traditions established in the Neolithic and the Bronzego. Themost recent comprehensive study is that of Schwartz, The orld ofThmghc in

Ancient China.31 Eli Sagan, The url to An : A Psychoanalyhc Study of V w h e n Ancicnl GreekCulture New ork: Psychohistory Press 1979 .

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5 avid N eighUeyAges of China were ancestral to all that followed, continuing to exerttheir influence down to recent, if not contemporary, times. It could beargued-as the discussion about the extensive ramifications of ancestorworship has suggested-that the Chinese were relatively slow to de-sacrilize their world. Ancient social practices tied to the lineage con-tinued to be attended with powerful religious qualities throughout impe-rial times. major question-in our own case as well as that of theChinese-is to what degree will the older, deeply seated traditions helpor hinder th e search for new solutions? Recent claims that traditionalChinese cultura l values may be conducive to the economic life typical ofthe modem epoch suggest that the answer is by no means a foregoneconclu~ion?~he combative individualism of the West may yet provemore costly than the harmonious social humanism of China. To addressa question such as this, surely, is one of the reasons we study history andwhy it is important to understand the past as clearly as we can. As Ssu-maCh'ien wrote some two thousand years ago, He who does not forget thepast is master of the present. When we consider George Santayana'smore negative formulation that those who forget the past are con-demned to repeat it, Ssu-ma Ch'ien was the more optimistic. But thatwould have been characteristic. And how appropriate that his shouldhave been a confidence in the virtues of the past.

32. John C. H Fei. Th e Success of Chinese Culture s Economic N utrient : reehinaRNinu 36, no. (July 1986):43.

T H R E E

The Evolutionof Government in Chinaack L Dull

Americans, perhaps more than people uf other nations, need to remindthemselves from time to time that democracy is not the natural politicalcondition of humankind. Even in the West, democracy is relatively new.In the premodern West, and in the rest of the world as well, authoritar-ian patterns of government in which the governed have little peacefulinput into the political process have been common. Government in tradi-tional China was (and in many respects still is) h