Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  16 See Susan Roosevelt Weld, “Covenant in Jin’s Walled Cities: The Discoveries at Houma and Wenxian” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1990), pp. 401–405.

  17 Zengzi is said to have self-planted melons. Another student of Confucius, Min Zijian, is said to have helped his father push carts on the road.

  18 This point has been fully demonstrated by Andrew Meyer in a recent paper. See Andrew Meyer, “The Baseness of Knights Truly Runs Deep: The Crisis and Negotiation of Aristocratic Status in the Warring States,” paper presented to the Columbia University Early China Seminar on October 1, 2011.

  19 See Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), pp. 115–135.

  20 On this point, see Laura Skosey, The Legal System and Legal Tradition of the Western Zhou (ca. 1045–771 BCE) (Chicago: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 1996), pp. 284–287.

  21 According to Crispin Williams’s new analysis, the covenant tablets from Houma were buried between 441 and 424 BC. See Crispin Williams, “Dating the Houma Covenant Texts: The Significance of Recent Findings from the Wenxian Covenant Texts,” Early China 35 (2012), forthcoming.

  22 For further reading on the migration of the various Rong and Di groups, see Jaroslav Průšek, Chinese Statelets and the Northern Barbarians in the Period 1400–300 B.C. (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), pp. 70–87, 119–149.

  23 See Lothar von Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2006), 224–233.

  24 On this point, 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), pp. 279–296; see also Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius, pp. 164–167.

  9 The age of territorial states: Warring States politics and institutions (480–221 BC)

  The overall political and military situation in the centuries following the eastward migration of the Zhou royal court can be characterized as big fish eating small fish. If the rulers, particularly those who had achieved the respectable status of “hegemon” in the Spring and Autumn period, still had at least some sympathy towards their brotherly states of common Zhou origin when coming to the matter of conquest, such feelings of affection would seem to have been a sign of misconceived political naivety in the face of the brutal military reality of the Warring States period. By the beginning of the fifth century BC only a little more than twenty of the original some sixty to seventy or so states seen in the record had survived the conflict of the previous three centuries. At the end of the century only about two dozen were still struggling for survival. Such a tendency to ruthless conquest and annexation was further intensified in the fourth century BC, and by the early third century there had emerged a relatively stable multipolar power structure in China dominated by seven powerful territorial states, Wei, Zhao, Hann, Qi, Qin, Chu, and Yan, together with a few much smaller polities sandwiched between them (Map 9.1).1 The major states rose to dominance one after another through political and social reform, and all had become too large to be easily swallowed by their enemies. As China was irreversibly organized into seven gigantic killing machines, there had also developed a realization that, as expressively stated by philosophers and politicians of the time, such a condition was not desirable, much less ideal, to anyone, and indeed many rulers had entertained the dream of being the sole ruler to conquer all others. This was eventually achieved by the king of Qin in 221 BC, the year of the founding of the Qin Empire. Therefore, the Warring States can also be seen as a period during which the skills and institutions that supported the future empire were gradually developed.

  Map 9.1 The Warring States period.

  The Concept of the “Territorial State”

  At first glance, the term “territorial state” would sound conceptually repetitive since “territory” is an indispensable element associated with sovereignty in any definition of the state.2 However, states as social–political organizations existed in different spatial forms, for instance, the Western Zhou states existed as layered clusters of settlements with no definite demarcating boundaries. Historians usually tend to envision the “territorial state” as the one developmental stage that preceded the empire, although they disagree, as in the case of Early China, on whether the “territorial state” emerged from a precondition that can be best characterized as the settlement-based state, or it was created through the expansion of the “city–state.” This author is of the opinion that although a “city–state” system did probably exist for a short period of time during the early to mid Spring and Autumn period and only in the core area of the eastern plain, by and large the “city–state” model is unfit with regard to the political and economic situation of Shang and Western Zhou China.3 In general, the “territorial state” as a higher stage of political and social development refers to a relatively large continuum of a territorial entity over which the relatively small core (the capital) exercised uninterrupted administrative control. It usually has clear boundaries defended by troops the passing through which is strictly checked and within which the political order is simplified/unified. Because of its territorial integrity and the control by an absolute political power usually imposed on its entirety, the “territory state” is the qualified pioneer of empire.

  What had existed in Early China in the fifth to third centuries BC were actually such clearly demarcated territorial entities ruled by hereditary kings.4 Moreover, particularly in China, the “territorial states” had one more defining physical characteristic – the earth or rock walls that ran hundreds of miles on the borders of these states. Historians and politicians in Early China did not fail to understand the political and military significance of such imposing structures and left behind them systematic records on their construction. The earliest one was the so-called “Square Wall” (Fangcheng) which defended the entrance from the Central Plain to the heartland of the state of Chu in the middle Yangzi region (Map 9.1). The wall began to be constructed in the Spring and Autumn period and gradually extended over 300 km to form three edges of a square until the early third century BC. The wall of Qi was the first structure to gain the name “Long Wall” (Changcheng) and was constructed during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC, running over the ranges of the central Shandong Mountains for more than 400 km as far as the bank of the Yellow River, demarcating the south limit of the state of Qi in Shandong. Another long wall along the Luo River in Shaanxi was constructed in the mid fourth century BC by the state of Wei to defend its territory from the state of Qin to the west; Wei also constructed short sections of wall to protect itself from the state of Hann in central Henan. Other states such as Zhao, Yan, and the statelet Zhongshan had all constructed walls to defend strategic borders with others. Particularly those states such as Qin, Zhao, and Yan which had borders on the northern steppe constructed long walls in the north to protect themselves from the northern nomads (Fig. 9.1), and these early sections of the walls made the foundation for the construction of the Great Wall by the Qin Empire to defend its own northern border after its unification of China in 221 BC. In the transmitted literature from the Warring States period we frequently read stories of politicians and diplomats who traveled through passes on the walls between the states which usually required the payment of a toll. There seems little doubt that the rise of the territorial states is the result of the inter-state warfare in the preceding centuries already discussed in Chapter 8.

  Fig. 9.1 The long wall of Qin in Guyuan, Ningxia Autonomous Region.

  Thus, over the three centuries we see in China a very major geopolitical transition from the Western Zhou model of state as layered settlement clusters woven together by the power of the Zhou royal power (see Chapter 7, Fig. 7.3) to the new states with clearly defined territorial boundaries (Fig. 9.2). Certainly the counties (Xia
n) were the building-blocks of the new territorial state. As clarified already in Chapter 8, the counties were small territorial units with unitary administrative organization that emerged through the elimination of lineage structures as the result of the inter-state warfare and domestic conflicts. When the practice of counties became widespread and when the counties filled the peripheral regions distant from the previous state centers, the territorial state was the natural outcome. Therefore, the transition to territorial state was as much a process of military conquest as was the internal social reorganization through the expansion of the centralized administration of the state.

  Fig. 9.2 Territory-based states in comparison to settlement-based states in Fig. 7.4.

  Political and Military Development

  The most important objective of the territorial state was to acquire new territory and this was achieved almost exclusively through war. This overarching priority of the territorial state gave birth to an era whose main historical development was marked by a string of military victories, usually accompanied by large numbers of casualties, and we know from the excavated texts that famous military campaigns were used to mark the calendars of the time in a number of states. Statistical research identifies a total of 358 inter-state wars in the period of 535 to 286 BC, yielding a frequency of 1.37 wars per year.5 The historical records show that, in fact, rarely did two years pass without a major battle between two or more territorial states, and there were many years that actually saw multiple military campaigns. Such an enormous frequency of war must have had a profound impact on the policies of the states and the mentality of the people.

  The first 100 years of the Warring States period saw the supremacy of the state of Wei which was ruled by one of the three ministerial families which partitioned the former hegemonic state Jin. In 445 BC, under ruler Wen, the state of Wei employed the statesman Li Kui to carry out systematic reforms. Details of the reforms have not been transmitted in the contemporary records, but Han Dynasty texts indicate that it must have been wide-ranging with measures to regulate the use of land to maximize agricultural production, to stabilize market prices, and to establish a legal system based on the implementation of codified law. Empowered by the reform, ruler Wen dispatched the famous general Wu Qi to attack the state of Qin in 413 BC and captured from it the vast region lying to the west of the Yellow River. In the east, Wei combined its forces with those sent by the states of Hann and Zhao in a powerful strike on the Long Wall of the state of Qi, forcing its ruler to surrender in 405 BC. The sway of Wei’s military power reached as far as the state of Zhongshan in northern Hebei; in order to conquer it, the Wei army actually had to transverse the territory of the state of Zhao in 406 BC. These victories had firmly established the hegemony of Wei that was to last well into the early decades of the fourth century BC.

  However, the alliance between Wei, Hann, and Zhao collapsed when Zhao, envying Wei’s territorial gains to the south of the Yellow River, attacked the state of Wey in northern Henan in 383 BC, thirteen years after the death of ruler Wen of Wei. Seizing on the opportunity of Wei’s transfer of its main forces northeast to rescue Wey, Wu Qi, who had recently defected to Chu, directed the Chu troops on a swift campaign north, cutting Wei’s main forces off from their capital Anyi in southern Shanxi and effectively breaking Wei into two halves. The conflict involved five major states which engaged one another in a series of battles that completely changed the balance of power in North China. Forced by the overall circumstances but more directly by another recent military catastrophe inflicted on it by the state of Qin in 364 BC to whom Wei is said to have lost as many as 60,000 human heads, Wei moved its capital from southern Shanxi to Daliang in eastern Henan in 362 BC, thus marking a watershed in Warring States history.

  The waning of Wei power in the second half of the fourth century BC opened ways for the rise of Qin in the west and Qi in the east. For Qin, this was the age of great social and political transformation brought by the reform of Shang Yang between 359 and 338 BC (see Chapter 11). In 340 BC, the reformer Shang Yang himself led the Qin troops to defeat Wei and captured Wei’s Prince Ang; Wei was forced to cede the large area on the west bank of the Yellow River. After the fall of Shang Yang, Qin continued to conduct a series of battles against Wei and captured all towns that previously belonged to Wei in eastern Shaanxi. In other directions, Qin had conquered the “barbarian” polity Yiqu in the north, expanding its territory as far north as to the Lower Ordos, and added further to its proper the entire Sichuan region in the south by annexing the indigenous states Ba and Shu in 316 BC. By the closing of the fourth century BC, Qin had amassed a territory that was roughly equal to the three states Wei, Hann, and Zhao combined, and had become the indisputable superpower among the warring states. In the east, in two major battles the handicapped Qi commander Sun Bin devised superior strategies to first defeat the Wei armies in Guiling in 354 BC and then in Maling in 341 BC. Seizing on the opportunity of the domestic turmoil in the northern state of Yan, the Qi troops conquered the Yan capital in 314 BC.

  The inter-state politics in the late decades of the fourth century and early decades of the third century BC were guided by the dispute between two strategies of inter-state warfare known as the “Horizontal Alliance” and “Vertical Alliance.” Simply speaking, this was a debate about the grand strategy which the many centrally located states should adopt in a world that had become increasingly polarized into the power of Qin in the west versus Qi in the east. The “Horizontal” strategy, viewed from the standpoint of any eastern state, proposed to embrace one of the superpowers (more often Qin) for its own security in fighting against other states; the “Vertical” strategy emphasized the unity of those relatively weaker states located in the middle in a joint effort to guard themselves against the threat from Qin in the west or Qi in the east. In reality, the “Horizontal” strategy was usually devised by Qin diplomats and better served Qin’s territorial ambitions, such as manifested in the Qin–Wei alliance around 320 BC. An example of the use of the “Vertical” strategy was the joint attack on Qin in 318 BC by five states including Wei, Hann, Zhao, Yan, and Chu. But the Qin minister Zhang Yi was soon able to tear down the alliance and brought Wei and Hann over to Qin’s camp, thus further developing his “Horizontal” strategy as a powerful weapon against the states of Chu and Qi. This led to the great military disaster for Chu in 312–311 BC which had weakened Chu power once for all. The “Vertical” strategy was also demonstrated by two later campaigns of the eastern states against Qin in 296 and 287 BC. But two years later, the same strategy was employed by Zhao, Yan, and Hann, with help also from Qin, to attack Qi, resulting in the complete ruin of Qi power. In the end, the manipulation of strategies by the warring states left Qin as the sole remaining superpower.

  In short, the Warring States period was an important page in the military history of the world. The sustained condition of war and the constant regrouping of powers gave rise to great political wisdom and military strategies; it also gave rise to some of the best pieces of diplomacy in Chinese history. The dynamics of the inter-state conflict in the multi-state system of the Warring States with shared cultural and language background resemble closely that of the politics of early modern Europe which gave rise to norms and diplomatic conventions that still govern international relations of the present time.6

  Small Farmers as the Backbone of the New States

  Perhaps the most important effect of the social transition of the seventh to fifth century BC was the complete reorganization of Chinese society into hundreds and thousands of households of small farmers. “Small farmer” refers to the family of a couple with their immediate kindred, namely parents and children, in a household of not more than ten people, who usually cultivated lands they owned or rented from others. Such nuclear families as independent social units were the economic foundation of the ancient Mesopotamian and the Mediterranean world, but they were a new phenomenon in China in the Warring States context.

  Historians of
ancient and modern times have talked a great deal about the so-called “Well Field” system as the model of land ownership attributed to the Western Zhou. In the early account of the system by Mencius, the second great master of the Confucian tradition (see Chapter 10), it entailed a piece of land divided into nine blocks in an arrangement that looked like the Chinese character 井 (jing) for “well” with eight families each cultivating an outlying block, and together jointly cultivating the central block as the “public” land that provided revenues for use by the lineage head and his family. This theory has been retold for 2,000 years in traditional Chinese historiography as the hallmark of economic relations in Zhou China. Thus, in Marxist historiography the social transformation in the Spring and Autumn period has been viewed as a shift from the “Well Field” system to private landownership by free peasant households. Given the information we now have about the Western Zhou period, there is little possibility that such a rigid land management system could ever have existed.7 However, the Confucian interpretation of the “Well Field” distantly and somewhat also accurately transmitted two aspects of what might have been real Western Zhou practice: (1) labor service was given instead of taxation in kind; (2) this took place in a system where land was owned by the lineage at least in theory and the lineage head assigned pieces of it to individual households belonging to the lineage while keeping a large portion of it for lineage use. This portion of land, cultivated collaboratively by the lineage members, provided for the maintenance of the “public” functions of the lineage including sacrifice in its ancestral temple.