Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Selected Reading

  Li, Feng, Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (1045–771 BC) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  Li, Feng, Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  Hsu, Cho-yun, and Katheryn Linduff, Western Chou Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

  Shaughnessy, Edward L., Sources of Western History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  Loewe, Michael (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993).

  1 For a recent discussion of the role of lineage system in the formation of the Zhou state, see Edwin Pulleyblank, “Ji and Jiang: the Role of Exogamic Clans in the Organization of the Zhou Polity,” Early China 25 (2000), 1–27.

  2 This process of lineage segmentation can be best seen in the case of the Jing lineage, located in the west part of the Wei River valley. During the mid Western Zhou, the Jing lineage had already been divided between the lineage’s two older brothers called “Jingbo” and “Jingshu,” terms that by then came to designate the two sub-lineages. Because the “Jingshu” sub-lineage held residences in the city of Zheng and the Zhou capital Feng, by the end of the mid Western Zhou, it was further divided into two branches – “Jingshu of Zheng” and “Jingshu of Feng” – terms that were used by the members of their respective branches.

  3 For a recent discussion of this rule in Confucian ritual texts and its relevance to Zhou lineage system, see Lothar von Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2006), pp. 64–70.

  4 The theory was originally proposed by Herrlee Creel, and followed by many others; see Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, vol. 1, The Western Chou Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 81–100; Cho-yun Hsu and Katheryn Linduff, Western Chou Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 101–111. In his study of the concept of “Heaven,” Robert Eno points out the possibility that “Heaven” as a sky-god already existed in Shang, but it was ultimately different from High God in Shang ideology. See Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 181–189.

  5 See David W. Pankenier, “The Cosmo-Political Background of Heaven’s Mandate,” Early China 20 (1995), 121–176.

  6 On this point, see Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven, pp. 23–27.

  7 For a new consideration of the Zhou temple system, see Martin Kern, “Bronze Inscriptions, the Shijing and the Shangshu: The Evolution of the Ancestral Sacrifice during the Western Zhou,” in John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (eds.), Early Chinese Religion, Part 1, Shang through Han (1250 BC–220 AD) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 156–164. Kern notes that the new rearrangement of Zhou temples may have played an important role in the so-called “Mid-Western Zhou reform.” On the Kang Temple and its importance for the study to Western Zhou bronzes, see Edward L. Shaughnessy, Sources of Western History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 199–201.

  8 See Nick Vogt, “Between Kin and King: Social Aspects of Western Zhou Ritual” (Ph.D. dissertation: Columbia University, 2012), pp. 35–48, 67.

  9 See Li Feng, Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (1045–771 BC) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 42–95.

  10 For a recent discussion of the official appointment ritual, see ibid., pp. 103–114.

  11 Ibid., pp. 190–234.

  12 See Jessica Rawson, “Western Zhou Archaeology,” in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 414–434. See also Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Late Western Zhou Taste,” Études chinoises 18 (1999), 155–164.

  13 See Vogt, “Between Kin and King: Social Aspects of Western Zhou Ritual,” pp. 316, 329–332.

  14 This is the Shan lineage whose bronzes were discovered in Meixian in 2003, including one, the Lai pan, which provide a complete family genealogy linked to the reigns of eleven Zhou kings.

  15 See Li, Bureaucracy and the State in Early China, pp. 271–299.

  16 This is the case of the inscription on the famous Sanshi pan, cast by the San lineage after a conference to resolve its territorial dispute with the polity of Ze, both located in the western part of the Wei River valley in Shaanxi. During the conference, the original treaty was signed.

  17 For a recent discussion of the nature of literacy in the Western Zhou, see Li Feng, “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing in the Western Zhou,” in Li Feng and David Branner (eds.), Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), pp. 271–301.

  18 See Edward L. Shaughnessy, “A First Reading of the Shanghai Museum Bamboo-Strip Manuscript of the Zhou Yi,” Early China 30 (2005–6), 1–24.

  19 For further reading on the contents and textual history of the three texts, see relevant chapters in Michael Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), pp. 216–228, 376–389, 415–423.

  20 For a recent reinterpretation of the political dynamics in the fall of the Western Zhou, see Li Feng, Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 193–232.

  8 Hegemons and warriors: social transformation of the Spring and Autumn period (770–481 BC)

  Historical events that happened in the three centuries following the collapse of the Western Zhou state in 771 BC are chronicled in the Spring and Autumn Annals (and further detailed in the Zuo Commentary) which gave the period its epic name.1 Whether Confucius’ authorship of the book was true or false, he lived towards the end of the period, and indeed died only three years after the annals ended in 481 BC. He reflected upon the Western Zhou and before as the cultural past for his time. Therefore, the transition from the Western Zhou (1045–771 BC) to the Spring and Autumn period (770–481 BC) in which Confucius lived represented the fine line dividing “antiquity” and “post-antiquity” in the intellectual conceptualization of China’s past in Early China.2 The changes that occurred across this line were wide-ranging and fundamental, and, when taken together, had the consequences of totally reshaping the Yellow River society for a new era of great empires to come.

  While previous scholarship has offered a valuable basis for analyzing these changes in different scholarly domains, the logical order in which the changes took place and the complex relationships between them have not been fully understood. This was due largely to the inaccurate understanding of the political and social systems of the late Western Zhou period as the starting point for all subsequent changes that took place in the Spring and Autumn period. Based on new knowledge acquired about the Western Zhou state in recent scholarship, discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, we can now reassess these changes and logically explain the origin of the social transition of the Spring and Autumn period.

  The Institution of Hegemony: Geopolitics and the Balance of Power

  The history of the Spring and Autumn period began with the relocation of the Zhou royal court, after its restoration by the new king, Ping (the formerly exiled Zhou prince), to Luoyang at the confluence of the Luo and Yi Rivers in western Henan in 770 BC. The move was the inevitable result of the collapse of Zhou defense in the west, particularly the loss of the upper Jing River valley, and it was also motivated by the new court’s political struggle with another pretender king in the old Zhou capital region supported by the lineage of Western Guo which had by now established its new base near the narrow passes separating present-day Shaanxi and Henan. However, the relocation of
the Wei River elites in the east, after they had hidden their treasured bronze vessels in hoards and caches in their home bases in the west, took on a much larger scale of movement that lasted for a much longer time. Followed further by the move of the various non-Zhou groups who had driven the Zhou elites out of the Wei River valley, the political transition to the Spring and Autumn period might have caused one of the major waves of population migration from the western highlands to the central and eastern plains in Chinese history.

  Thus, the political and military conflicts that were soon to overtake China for as long as some five centuries found their initial impetus precisely in such newcomer states which tried hard to consolidate for themselves a foothold in the east. The state of Zheng, the most typical, was initially founded by a brother of King Xuan who received from the king one of the royal centers, Zheng, in the western part of the Wei River valley. Taking advantage of his long period of service as a minister in the Zhou court, stationed in the eastern capital Chengzhou, Duke Huan of Zheng gradually transferred his possessions for temporary relocation in the suburb of Chengzhou. After the fall of the Western Zhou, his son Duke Wu conquered the statelets Kuai and Eastern Guo by 767 BC, re-establishing Zheng in the territory of the two states (Map 8.1). This transition meant not only the evacuation of the state’s properties from the endangered Wei River valley in the west, but also a stage through which an original elite lineage in the royal domain in the west acquired its membership in the class of the regional states in the east. In the next half century, Zheng was politically and militarily the most active state in all of China. At first, it was Zheng’s domestic strife that brought it into conflict with the older state Wey in northern Henan which supported the political rivals of its duke. Wey therefore called on the help of the states of Song and Chen which jointly attacked the eastern gate of Zheng in 719 BC; Zheng, on the other hand, expanded its alliance to include the larger and wealthier states Qi and Lu (after 715) in western Shandong to form a strong power axis. However, Zheng eventually waned both because of its internal instability and because of its vulnerable strategic location on the Central Plain, being exposed to attacks from all directions. This made it impossible for Zheng to sustain long-term domination.

  Map 8.1 Major states of the Spring and Autumn period

  Thus, in the long run the politics of the Spring and Autumn period were determined by the ambitions of the larger outlying states. Most of these states, located on the periphery of the Zhou world, protected by mountains and rivers, had their backs towards or even were located among the economically underdeveloped non-Zhou groups. They enjoyed the strategic advantage of being able to expand outwards and to absorb social and economic resources, among which most important was population, from the underdeveloped peripheral regions, needed for competition with their peers in the Central Plain.

  The first peripheral state to have achieved this goal was Qi. Located in northwestern Shandong near Bohai Bay, Qi was traditionally known to have had a natural surplus of fish and salt that it could easily sell to the centrally located states. This point has acquired strong support by the recent archaeological discovery of salt fields in the Bohai Bay region.3 By the middle of the sixth century BC Qi had annexed the states of Ji and Lai on the east coast and had effectively extended control over the greater part of the Shandong Peninsula. This meant that the previously active “Eastern Barbarians” in the Shang–Western Zhou period had now become the new citizens of Qi. In the event of 662 BC when the Northern Di tribesmen poured into the Central Plain from the north, destroying the states of Xing and Wey, it was only Qi that had the military power and political influence to form a “Chinese League”: fortresses were built along the south bank of the Yellow River all the way to the royal capital in present-day Luoyang. Two years earlier, when the Rong people attacked the state of Yan near Beijing, Duke Huan of Qi responded by personally leading his army north to rescue Yan. In 656 BC, after successfully repelling the assault on Zheng by the southern state Chu, Duke Huan led the many rulers in a joint effort to attack Chu. In 651 BC, Duke Huan called on an interstate conference in Kuiqiu in eastern Henan which was attended by the rulers of six other regional states; even the Zhou king sent his representative to deliver to the duke sacrificial meat from King Wen and King Wu’s temples, a sign of high royal favor, along with the royal sanction of Duke Huan’s status as “Hegemon” (Ba), the provisional leader of the Chinese (or former Zhou) states in the face of a weakened royal power.

  For a much longer time thereafter, the struggle for hegemony had taken place mainly between the powerful northern state Jin based on the Fen River valley and the emerging southern power Chu based on the middle Yangzi valley, both having conquered large portions of land in their respective regions by the late sixth century BC. Jin’s hegemony began with Duke Wen who had defeated Chu in the battle of Chengpu in 632 BC and received royal sanction of his hegemon status at a conference that took place in the same year, and it lasted for another generation until the death of his son in 621 BC. Chu’s hegemony was established by King Mu by defeating Jin in 597 BC and lasted until the resurgence of Jin power some twenty years later. For many decades, the minor Central Plain statelets that had suffered badly from the Jin–Chu conflict had tried to negotiate a peace treaty between the two superpowers, and this goal was eventually reached in 546 BC; the treaty ensured that there was no major war between them in the next three decades. However, both Jin and Chu were to see the decline of their own power and the rise of two new hegemonic states, Wu and Yue, in the Yangzi Delta in the southeast. The rulers of Wu and Yue, at the height of their powers, had each led an army north and hosted interstate conferences in the Central Plain.

  The historical development outlined above is meaningful and worth serious study in a number of ways. Historical political scientists see this development as having taken place in a stable structure wherein the rise of powerful states one after another was encouraged by the uneven chances of growth and particularly chances of acquiring new peripheral territories, and their decline was then called in by the “mechanisms of balance of power and rising costs of expansion.” This historical process was quite rare in China but is seen to have paralleled closely the historical development of early modern Europe.4 For historians, the institution of hegemony provided a new structure of authority, a new form of political unification ensured by the overlordship of the hegemon.5 As such, the role of the hegemon would have been more than his proven military strength and his influence to call other rulers to the inter-state conference; it was also the role which established and maintained social order in the absence of a legitimate ultimate power, the king.

  While the political role of the hegemon was well understood in earlier scholarship, recent studies have paid particular attention to the institutional aspects of the role of hegemon. For instance, what had come out of the conference in Kuiqiu in 651 as agreements between Duke Huan of Qi and the other six regional rulers was not so much concerned with their military alliance; instead, there were broad principles aimed at promoting social norms concerning the domestic policies of allied states, and some even interfered in the household matters of the elite such as “exalt no concubine to be the wife.”6 In another study, it was suggested that even the renowned “Five Ranks” traditionally attributed to the Western Zhou might indeed have been a by-product of the hegemon system, implemented in the Spring and Autumn period to regulate the relative statuses of the states and to determine the standards of tributes they were required to pay to the hegemon.7 In a more general sense or perhaps on a larger scale of history, the Spring and Autumn period has revealed a situation where new powers rose from the periphery of an old civilization rather than from its center, drawing on experiences from the civilization and on new resources lying beyond it, a process that has many parallels in the history of the world past and present.

  The Rise of Xian: Redefining the Administrative Framework

  The key to understanding the social institutional changes in the Sp
ring and Autumn period lies in the emergence of the “County” (Xian) system. The importance of the counties as the origin of the so-called “County-Commandery” system, the essential administrative infrastructure of the Chinese empires after Qin unification, has been fully recognized since the beginning of modern historiography,8 and recent scholars have devoted numerous studies to revealing the historical details of this system. But their social impact has only been superficially understood. Warring States period texts, especially the Zuo Commentary, explicitly describe the county in the prominent states since the early Spring and Autumn period as a new type of geo-administrative unit essentially different from the traditional aristocratic lineage estates discussed in Chapter 7. The texts also make it clear that the counties were administered by the magistrates, called by various terms, who were appointed by the rulers of the states and were responsible directly to them in the central courts.