Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Selected Reading

  Honey, David, Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001).

  Franke, Herbert, “In Search of China: Some General Remarks on the History of European Sinology,” in Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1992), pp. 11–23.

  Schneider, Laurence A., Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

  Dirlik, Arif, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

  Creel, Herrlee G., The Birth of China: A Survey of the Formative Period of Chinese Civilization (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1937).

  1 We find analogies of this development in other world regions. For instance, in Mesopotamia early sedentary cultures began in north Iraq and then moved southeastwards to occupy the lower reaches of Tigris and Euphrates close to the Persian Gulf only during the Samara Culture period, dating to c. 5500–4800 BC.

  2 Even in the historical period, it was recorded that the Yellow River had changed its course some twenty-six times.

  3 The basic method is to drill hundreds of soil samples from riverbeds and lake floors. By analyzing the pollen samples and the various types of ancient plants represented by them, it is possible to reconstruct the outline of long-term temperature fluctuations of a region.

  4 BP (before present) is used in geology for long spans of time, whereas BC (before Christ) is used by historians and archaeologists to represent time in more recent millennia. The Pleistocene Epoch is the geological age in the Earth’s history that began in 2,588,000 BP and ended in 11,700 BP, to be followed by the Holocene Epoch (the recent epoch).

  5 See Shi Yafeng and Kong Zhaozheng, et al., “Mid-Holocene Climates and Environments in China,” Global and Planetary Change 7 (1993), 222.

  6 “Austronesian” is a language family widely distributed throughout the Pacific and the Southeast Asian islands and peninsulas as far west as Madagascar. On the linguistic divisions of Early China, see E. G. Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their Neighbors in Prehistorical and Early Historical Times,” in David N. Keightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 411–466.

  7 A clear temporal demarcation of “Early China” is found in the editorial remarks of the inaugural issue of the journal of Early China, by David N. Keightley, who explained the goal of the journal as: “Early China is a newsletter devoted to the dissemination of information and the testing of new ideas in the fields of pre-historic, Shang, Chou [Zhou], and Han China.”

  8 The development of human society and particularly the human body in the preceding Paleolithic period was shaped more by natural than cultural processes, to be dealt most effectively in the domain of science based on global contexts. Therefore, it is not tied to the cultural–geographical mass that we call “Early China.”

  9 In its anthropological definition, the term “complex society” denotes a society that had at least two and often more strata, and a centrally directed decision-making process, centering on the power of the chief.

  10 For the early history of Western sinology, consult: D. Honey, Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001), pp. 1–40; H. Franke, “In Search of China: Some General Remarks on the History of European Sinology,” in Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1992), pp. 11–23.

  11 Gu publicized the theory in his autobiography in the first issue of Gushibian (Debating Ancient History) in 1927. Seven issues of the journal had been published before 1941, standing as the central literature of the “Doubting Antiquity” movement. For an English literature on Gu Jiegang, see L. A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Tradations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

  12 The principle by which Gu and his followers operated is also undermined by another logic – the earlier we move up in time, the fewer sources have survived to the modern days. Given the impressive number of new texts discovered in Warring States tombs over the past three decades, one is only left to wonder just how much had vanished in history before the Qin unification of China in 221 BC.

  13 See h. G. Creel, The Birth of China: A Survey of the Formative Period of Chinese Civilization (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1937).

  14 Among these visitors the most significant were Dong Zuobin, a leading scholar of Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, and Chen Mengjia, a young and ingenious scholar of bronzes and bronze inscriptions.

  15 Early China 2 (1976), i.

  16 See Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History.

  2 The development of complex society in China

  When the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960) discovered the Yangshao culture in western Henan in 1921 (Map 2.1), he did not fail to suppose a connection over a few millennia between this early Neolithic culture and the cultures known to have been those of the Zhou and Han, but he was also quick to trace the origin of the Yangshao culture far to the West, pointing to western Asia.1 In our time that no longer favors diffusionist agendas,2 Neolithic cultures worldwide are more often than not regarded to have been products of particular regions and to be explained by regional environmental and ecological differences, rather than having a common origin. Regional cultures are related to one another through mutual influence or stimulation, and cultures in different regions have passed through similar stages of social development along a line of increasing complexity. Therefore, in the contemporary study of Neolithic cultures, “geographical regions” play a very important role in our understanding of the human past.

  Map 2.1 Major Neolithic archaeological sites in China.

  Theories of Neolithic Cultural Development in China

  The early cultural development of China has been traditionally considered as a process of continuing expansion of civilization from the so-called “Central Plain” (or North China Plain), roughly corresponding to present-day Henan Province on the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, inhabited by a core Chinese population, to the peripheral regions that were known to have been lands occupied by the various groups of “barbarians.” This view was of course inherited in the traditional historiography of China which represented the worldview of the unitary political states based for the greater part of Chinese history on North China. When Andersson discovered the Yangshao culture, its location in western Henan seemingly lent support to this theory, although Andersson gave the culture an origin farther in the west.

  In the 1930s, two sites of the Neolithic Longshan culture on the Shandong Peninsula were excavated which yielded finely made black or gray pottery wares, in contrast to the red–brown-surfaced pottery of the Yangshao culture, often colorfully painted with patterns representing plants or fish.This prompted archaeologists to popularize a bipolar paradigm of cultural development in Early China: it was argued that the Yangshao culture represented the culture of the Chinese nation in the distant past, which was located in the slightly western part of North China, and the Longshan culture represented the “barbarian” culture in the east coastal region. However, later work soon proved that this version of a Neolithic world divided into two halves was merely a reflection of the lack of knowledge in the early stage of Chinese archaeology about cultural developments in other regions. Breaking away from this bipolar paradigm, a new and much more complicated picture of Neolithic cultures gradually emerged from the 1970s onwards as the result of full-scale archaeological work in China and the application of scientific methods of dating. In this new picture, the Yangshao and Longshan cultures are best seen as representatives of two large stages
of development of the Neolithic cultures of various types in different regions of North China. In South China, a series of advanced Neolithic cultures contemporary to these two stages have also been identified and intensively studied to reveal their relations to each other and to their neighboring cultures in the north.

  This new “multi-region” model of Neolithic cultural development in China was described in a lengthy article published in 1981 co-authored by the senior archaeologist Su Binqi and his younger colleague Yin Weizhang in the Institute of Archaeology. Known as the theory of “Regional Systems and Cultural Types,” it divided China proper into six regions: the middle Yellow River, Shandong and eastern coastal region, Hubei and the middle Yangzi, the lower Yangzi Delta, central southern China and the south coast, and the north region along the Great Wall. The analysis emphasizes continuity of cultural traditions within each region, viewed as a gigantic and proto-independent sociocultural system posed in a distinctive environmental setting, and with distinctions between regions. Importantly in this new model, the Central Plain, the cradle of Chinese civilization in traditional historiography, has become just one among the several others that are considered equally important to the development of civilization in China.3 It has been said, mostly by Su’s disciples, that this was his most important contribution to archaeological theory. However, taking it more succinctly the new theory does little more than synthesize what had already been revealed by the extensive archaeological work in China. But it did provide a powerful analytical tool for explaining Neolithic cultural development in China, and it has been widely accepted since its publication.

  It is interesting that this “multi-region” theory was developed in complete isolation from Western academia, but it shows a strong resemblance to the “multilinear” model of social development as the cornerstone of the Neo-evolutionist theory popular since the early 1960s.4 Perhaps because of this theoretical orientation, the “multi-region” theory has also won some acceptance in the West. Developing from it, the late Professor K. C. Chang of Harvard University proposed his theory of the “Chinese Interaction Sphere” in 1986. In Chang’s model, the regions not only played the role of hotbeds for independent cultural development, but also provided the reasons for it. According to this theory, the regions, while maintaining their unique cultural traditions through much of the Neolithic period, had in fact stimulated each other to grow in complexity and to move on to higher stages of social development (Fig. 2.1).5 Although hardline critics may criticize Chang for the use of the term “Chinese” in this early period, few scholars have seriously wanted to reject his theory.

  Fig. 2.1 The “Chinese Interaction Spheres.”

  However, what the “multi-region” theory or the improved “Chinese Interaction Sphere” theory cannot explain is the question why, given that the Central Plain was only one among the many equally important regions in Neolithic China, early states emerged first in the Central Plain and continued to grow and prosper there afterwards, but not in other regions. This is certainly a major interpretive problem. Moreover, the “multi-region” paradigm has provided a limiting power which typified, if not simplified, the practice of Chinese archaeology into the sole pursuit of cultural chronology and genealogy. Therefore, since the 1990s there have been some important new trends among archaeologists in China to rethink the previous framework of Neolithic cultural development and to break the stranglehold of the regionalist theory in favor of new research paradigms. In an article published in 1998, Professor Yan Wenming of Beijing University argues that, although most regions in China show comparable cultural developments, the Central Plain region for the greater part of the Neolithic period was often if not always at a higher stage in social development. The Central Plain constantly generated and radiated new cultural elements to other regions while taking in stimuli from the latter peripheral regions. This advantageous position of the north in cultural development led to its arrival at civilization earlier than all other regions.6 However, what still needs to be explained is what really gave the Central Plain such an advantage in cultural development.

  Theories of Social Development

  The above theories dealt strictly with Neolithic cultural development within China and with the roles different regions had played in the process of the formation of Chinese civilization. What they have left out is the question of how and by what standard social developments in China can be measured. For a long time, particularly during the early decades of the People’s Republic of China, archaeologists in China had been strongly motivated to see social progress in Neolithic China in terms of a transition from a matrilineal society to patrilineal society according to Marxist theory. Thus there was a major split between the old Marxist theories that guided Neolithic studies in China and the research paradigms developed in the West since the 1960s, a gap that the Chinese archaeologists have struggled hard to bridge since the breakdown of the ideological confines in the 1980s. This trend continued through the 1990s as these latter theories were continuously brought to China by Western colleagues along with new methods of archaeological fieldwork. Although it came as no surprise that some senior archaeologists were still not ready to give up the old Marxist framework they were so used to, younger generations of scholars felt free to use new Western concepts and vocabulary in their research. As these new Western theories become more and more relevant to Chinese archaeology, it is necessary to offer a brief coverage of the ground here.

  In the Western world, the old evolutionist theory of social development put all existing societies from modern Europe to the Asia–Pacific region on a single evolutionary tree. This met a strong challenge in the 1930s–1940s from the so-called “Cultural Particularism” of Franz Boas (1858–1942), who opposed the rule of universal progress and the evolution of society from lower to higher levels. The Marxist theory about matrilineal and patrilineal societies arose from the same idea of universal progress. From the 1950s, however, as the West became more and more confident about the overall increasing living standards brought by advances in technology, the evolutionist view was revived. This “Neo-evolutionism” emphasizes technological advancement as the foundation for social progress and regards ecological factors as the ultimate cause of cultural change. Its “multilinear evolution” also allows the possibility of deviations from the main line of evolution. This theoretical reorientation taking place mainly in American anthropology gave rise to a Neo-evolutionist scheme of social development, described in the works of Elman Service and Marshall Sahlins as: band – tribe – chiefdom – state.7 Despite some recent critical reflections, this theory remains important to anthropologists and archaeologists alike worldwide who strive to understand social development in a comparative framework.

  The tribal organization in its most typical form, in Sahlins’s interpretation, can also be described as the “segmentary lineage system” which means a lineage with a shared ancestor but internally divided into many segments which stand equal to each other; there is also a correspondence between the genealogical distance of the segments and the geographical distance in the location of the segments.8 The “chiefdom” is a critical invention by the Neo-evolutionists who regarded it a social organization significantly higher than the segmentary lineage system. In chiefdoms a process of centralized decision-making already took place, so did regional control, associated with which was a certain degree of social stratification. The chief’s power is limited in comparison to that of a king as he exercises it through negotiation and by example, not by coercive means. The further development of power concentration would lead a society to reach the level of a state.

  However, to archaeologists such political processes as decision-making are simply not as immediately detectable in most contexts as they are to anthropologists who deal with societies that still operate; therefore, there is considerable difficulty in applying the above theory of social development to material remains, especially with regard to a distinction between chiefdom and state. The concept of “complex society�
�� was thus invented by archaeologists to study material cultures in terms of the degree of complexity without having to fit them into either the “chiefdom” or “state” model at the beginning of their research. In Norman Yoffee’s description, a “complex society” is qualified by the following relatively loose criteria: (1) a culture with subsystems performing diverse functions with relative autonomy; (2) the development of centrality; (3) social inequality leading to hierarchy in terms of health and social status; (4) increased number of occupational roles such as ruler, administrator, clerks, soldiers.9 It is apparent that “complex society” encompasses a complex array of societies at very different levels of social development, but it does not fail to be the first stepping-stone in understanding social changes across millennia of history.