In many ways, the ancient history of China is sui generis among Old World civilizations. Unlike the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus, the Chinese civilization that developed first in the Yellow River valley and later in the Yangtze river valley emerged during the of the third millennium BC had little early contact with the other ancient civilizations. The Neolithic history of early China starts about 6000BC, producing petroglyphs that have been interpreted as proto-writing. The early Yangshao (c.5000-3000 and Longshan cultures (c.3000-2000) were based on millet and rice cultivation in decentralized villages. Bronze metallurgy was independently developed around 3,000 BC. The later history of China is conventionally organized around ruling dynasties. The Xia dynasty, which in mentioned in ancient Chinese sources, left no surviving records, but the Shang dynasty, centered in the Yellow River valley, lasted from approximately 1600BC until 1046BC. The Shang was succeeded by the Zhou dynasty (1046 to 256BC). The Zhou introduced the claim of political legitimacy based on the “Mandate of Heaven”, which was analogous to the religious/political claims made by rulers in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Unlike these other civilizations, the “Heaven” that approved the Zhou emperors was impersonal and not anthropomorphized, which is a uniquely sophisticated idea.
The Late Zhou era was an Iron Age marked by political instability and fragmentation. The “Spring and Autumn Annals” describe the conflicts between numerous local military leaders between 722 and 476, which took centuries to resolve into seven major powers. Thereafter for more than two hundred years, these powers fought inconclusively among themselves, with shifting balances of power and considerable destruction. Despite, and perhaps in response to this political turmoil, the most important thinkers in Chinese tradition lived between the Late Zhou and Era of Warring states. This intellectual flowering, called the era of the “Hundred Schools of Thought” ended in 221, with the terrifying repression of the first emperor, Qin Shih Huang Di. Confucianism was suppressed during Qin Dynasty in favor of the more authoritarian Legalism.
The very complex history of ancient Chinese thought embraces at least as many intellectual tensions and moves in at least as many directions as that of ancient Greece. The proliferation of the “Hundred Schools” of thought between the seventh and third centuries BC was driven by the political turmoil of the “Era of Warring States” (475-221BC) and then by the abolition of feudalism under the Qin Emperor. Chinese scholar-officials, dismissed from their posts and in need of income, became teachers who often had the intellectual habits and characteristics inculcated by their former political positions. Six recognized schools of thought emerged: the Ying/Yang school of naturalists, the Confucian literati, the followers of Mozi (who advocated universal love), the School of Names which taught a sort of sophistic eristic, the Legalists who advocated strict laws and draconian punishments, and the Taoists who embraced nature mysticism and pantheism. Four Books became the canonical Confucian classics, The Analects, the Book of Mencius, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean.
Chinese mysticism and practices of divination are found very early, during the second millennium BC. The earliest surviving text of Chinese Archaic Physics is the I Ching, which was a handbook of divination as well as a meditation on the patterns of change in nature. Taoist mysticism and naturalism combined about 800 BC to form this archaic manual of divination, the Book of Changes. Laotzi, the traditional founder of Taoism, was generally considered the author or compiler, but he probably collected and connected earlier folk beliefs. In the sixth century BC. Laozi advocated a quietism, renunciation, pantheism and harmony with nature that had deep roots in Chinese folk cultural traditions. Laozi was traditionally described by the pious as the teacher of Confucius (551-497BC) but this is uncertain. The Tao, usually translated as “The Way”, has no perfectly satisfactory translation because even in Chinese, it is on the cusp of the sayable and the unsayable. In this the Tao is reminiscent of Parmenides “One” and Heraclitus’ “Zeus which does and does not like being called “Zeus””. The Tao was immanent, not transcendent, and it resists direct articulation and conceptualization. Laozi was in some sense the personification of Tao and his teachings were indirect, obliquely hinting at more than stating the properties of the Tao. The ancient Chinese intellectual tradition always focused on aphorisms, parables, paradoxes, and conceptual gestures rather than encyclopedic systematic treatises, like those of Aristotle or Aquinas.
Most Chinese views of history and politics shared with Hesiod a nostalgia for a lost Golden Age which involved a search for archaic virtue. The greatest figure in Chinese culture, Confucius (551-497BC) claimed that he was a transmitter of ancient doctrines rather than an inventor of new ideas. Confucius was both a political official and a philosopher. There was no distinction between theory and practice. He emphasized tradition, familial obligation, ritual observance, moral virtue, sincerity and love of learning. Occasionally Confucius referred to Heaven and an afterlife, but he primarily advocated a this worldly emulation of the virtue exemplified by the ancient sages. He taught his students the importance of doing right thing for the right reason. Confucius taught his followers: “Li” which involves propriety and tradition, “yi” which is righteousness and “ren” which is duty to others and is related to humaneness, selflessness and benevolence.[1]
The five Confucian virtues “kindness, sincerity, generosity, diligence and knowledge” are, along with the four Platonic Virtues or the three Christian Theological Virtues, among the great achievements of our species. Confucian ideals sustained scholar-officials for generation after generation. The great conservatism of Chinese civilization is the product of numerous overlapping causes. The continental sized realm of China was a society well suited to rule by an Emperor and administered by mandarins. Every ancient civilization treated “innovation” as an accusation, an evil, which was perfectly rational since most attempts in most places and times to improve on traditional, tried and true practices were harmful failures. Confucius’ reputation for conservatism and traditionalism was well deserved. Today, eighty-three generations, which is currently more than two million people, trace their genealogy back to Confucius. They are found not only in China but also in Chinese diasporas worldwide.
The Era of Warring States was period of intellectual ferment and introspection despite the internecine political conflicts. Mozi (470-391BC) was the idiosyncratic founder of an optimistic school of moral naturalism, Mohism, which advocated the idea of disinterested benevolence and meritocracy. His followers contributed important advances in mathematics, formal logic (especially paradoxes) and engineering before being absorbed into rival schools. Mozi criticized both Confucianism and Taoism. His “all embracing love” was a universal agape which went beyond the quietism of the Taoists and the ritual formality and focus on family obligations of Confucius. Mozi advocated austerity and self-discipline along with compassion, but his school was eventually absorbed into the syncretism of Chinese intellectual life. Mencius, the fourth century BC interpreter of Confucius owed much to Mozi as well. Mencius believed in the innate moral sense of people and he saw spontaneous compassion in human nature. He was an advocate of “jen” a “human heartedness” that would force each person to enlarge the self beyond the ego and “extend himself to include others”[2] Mencius was unusual in Chinese tradition in that he claimed there existed a popular right to rebellion against an evil ruler.
The poetic Zhuang Zhu elaborated Taoism into a kind of quietism with clever wordplay in the fourth century BC. Like Socrates, he combined a great playfulness with profound seriousness that was in the West called hilaritatis causa. Zhuang Zhu satirized Confucians and Mohists. His witty epigrams and his stunning parables gestured toward an aloof, apolitical individualism. He was one of the very few true mavericks in the very conservative Chinese intellectual milieu. He refused the offer of high political position with a distain worthy of Diogenes or Epicurus, slyly preferring the independence and solitude of a hermit to the attractions of power. His elegant parables and biting criticism of the opportunism of the intellectuals and political functionaries are among the most instructive and valuable in Chinese or any other intellectual history.
Chinese Ancient Physics was separated spatially from the other ancient river valley civilizations, and early Chinese civilization was less influenced by outside contributions than most. In China, most early scientific focus was on processes rather than things, verbs rather than nouns.[3] This may, in part have been fostered by the immense differences between the Indo-European and Chinese languages, but it was also the consequence of very different social and political conditions as well. Chinese thought about nature posited the existence of “chi”, which is sometimes described as “energy”, but in fact is not perfectly translatable into English. It was used for things that were “perceptible but intangible”.[4] This term is still used in some of the traditional Chinese martial arts and in traditional Chinese medicine. Ancient Physics, nonmythical and based on careful observation, was developed independently in Greece and China. Both cultural traditions were investigating the same natural phenomena, but China focused on transformations, Greece on entities. Where the Greeks focused on ice, the Chinese examined freezing, where the Greeks focused on steam, the Chinese examined boiling.
Daoism was also associated very early with Zhou Yan (305-240 BC) and the school of naturalists, who made the first halting transitions to Ancient Physics. Zou Yan was a polymath who made connections between the dynamism of ying/yang and the nonmythological materialism of the “Five Phases”, which may have emerged from the tradition of Taoist alchemy. The Ying/Yang School emphasized the dynamic opposition and a flux of self-negation. This started out as various kinds of occult lore pertaining to astrology, divination and numerology.[5] He synthesized ancient traditions concerning matter and energy to form an independent version of Ancient Physics. Zou Yan speculated about energy, “chi” manifested in processes of transformation and juxtaposition as the interaction of opposites yin (soft, dark, wet, cold, female, negative) and yang (hard, hot, light, dry, male, positive). In this he was comparable to the Greek Empedocles, with his account of energy and change as the opposition between love and strife. Zou Yan connected his ideas about dynamism and change to a five-part account of matter that might better be described as “phases” of matter rather than “elements”. He posited the existence of air, fire and water plus two kinds of solid, organic (wood) and inorganic (earth). These phases were transient and there was no unchangeable “atomic” substrate as posited in Greece or India. Tsou Yen’s five phases were only partially analogous to the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) posited by Empedocles.
Zou Yan’s five “phases” were locked in a predictable, temporal flux that danced to the choreography of nature: a cyclical Tao of time. In every year, winter was the time of water. In early spring, water yielded to wood, which yielded to the fire of midsummer. Earth then dominated the late summer, which was supplanted when iron dominated the fall. The rhythms of nature were a predictable cycle of transformations and matter was not static but sequentially modified by yin, which dominated winter, and yang, which dominated summer. This transformative cycle repeated endlessly, an affirmation of the ancient conception of time as cyclical. Tsou Yen’s doctrines applied to space as well as time. The five phases corresponded to the cardinal directions (water/north, fire/south, iron/west, wood/east and earth/center). He claimed that China was one of nine continents, not the only place “under heaven”. The five phases were also associated with characteristic colors, tastes, heavenly bodies, and symbolic animals. Zhou Yan also developed a naturalistic philosophy of history, which linked cyclical time from the beginning of the world and later political revolutions and transformations to the cyclical passing of the Five Phases.
The development of nonmythological, Ancient Physics understandings of nature in ancient China contain many instructive contrasts with early Greek science. Ancient Chinese sciences were only partly homologous with presocratic physics in Greece. In China, the institutional context, the relations between students and teachers, the habits of thought and the politics of knowledge all combined to encourage different emphases, such as a preference for scholarly consensus over radical discontinuities. Every inquiry is inevitably theory laden and not all terms are equally translatable, but it does not follow that different accounts of nature are incommensurable or unreal, only that comparisons must be sensitive to context and suitably nuanced.
Because of its uniquely long history, Chinese traditions placed great demands on ancient religious ritual. These rituals had to be performed at the exact point of the annual cycle so to maintain the mandate of heaven, and celestial events like meteors, comets and eclipses were dangerous portents, carrying cautionary messages to the government. There was a unique bifurcation in Chinese “sciences”. The terrestrial sciences moved from archaic to ancient, with extraordinary, largely autarchic, achievements in medicine and engineering while celestial sciences, like astronomy/astrology persisted as spooky archaic traditions. It was the 16th century Jesuit Matteo Ricci who brought modern astronomy to China. When he arrived, the Chinese officials in charge of the calendar still had archaic physics in which the earth was assumed to be flat, and the universe, of course, geocentric. Getting the calendar right was a matter of state concern; a competition was arranged predicting eclipses and the new heliocentric physics proved far more accurate.
Every society needs to modify nature to serve its purposes, and the ability to predict and control nature is required for survival itself. In China, there was no single term for “nature”, what the Greeks called “physis”. It might be more accurate to refer to ancient Chinese “sciences” rather than “science”.[6] China achieved political unification very early in its history and the sociopolitical influences on Chinese sciences were very different than those in Greece. The Chinese imperial government was the major patron on scientific studies and this has no Greek counterpart. Like its earlier river valley civilization predecessors, the dynasties which ruled imperial China had a vested state interest in the investigation and prediction of nature, because astronomy and astrology were not completely disentangled, the accuracy of the calendar had both practical and ritual importance, and eclipses or earthquakes were portentous matters of political concern.[7] Various terrestrial sciences in China, moved from archaic to ancient, but the celestial sciences in China remained archaic mostly for political reasons.[8] Popular beliefs about astrology and portents had to be considered because they were connected to the legitimacy of the ruler. The sciences in China were bureaucratized, standardized and only alchemy lacked governmental subsidy. As scientific traditions ossified into a single set of doctrines, the conservative influence of imperial patronage reinforced traditional orthodoxy, and the consensus of sagely beliefs about nature was rarely questioned. It is not accidental that the Chinese term for “pathogen” was the same one used for “heterodoxy”.[[9]](applewebdata://F01FC755-BEF7-427C-8BA2-1EF041DC19DD#_ftn9)
The last great doctrine that emerged from the “Hundred Schools” was Legalism. It was first formulated first as a kind of Hobbesian Realpolitik by Hsun Tzu (310-235BC). He articulated a kind of realist totalitarianism focused on power and force, demanding severity and fear from a ruler. These ideas were later developed by Han Fei Zi (280-233BC), an aristocrat with a Confucian education. Han Fei Zi had an almost Augustinian view of human depravity, inverting the doctrine of Mozi, he insisted that human nature was intrinsically evil. Only draconian laws scrupulously enforced could prevent the evil intrinsic to human nature from erupting into violence and chaos. The Era of Warring States was a calamitous centuries long stalemate of mutual destruction which demanded a remedy. Driven by a Hobbesian fear of death and running scared, Legalism employed strict laws and draconian punishments to maintain order. Surprisingly derived from earlier Mohist emphases on disinterested benevolence and compassion, Legalism was associated with meritocratic officialdom and enlightened despotism as the proper means of restraining disorder. Unlike most of the thinkers in the Chinese intellectual tradition, the Legalists had no sentimental attachment to a mythical Golden Age. Like their fellow realist, Thucydides, the Legalists saw history as a progress, not a regress, and they both emphasized how fragile political order is and acknowledged that violence and politics can never be fully disentangled. The conservatism of China is in many ways comparable to Egypt. Both were ancient political traditions located at the end of long trade routes which were understandably biased in favor of the familiar and traditional and against unrule.
Qin Shih Huang Di (259-210BC), the first emperor of China, ended the Era of Warring States and unified China, crushing his opponents with extraordinary ruthlessness and unrestrained ambition. The official doctrine of the Qin state was Legalism. Qin was sufficiently important in Chinese history to have the country named after him. He ruled by tyranny and terror, violence and death. The first emperor was an avatar of what the Greeks called hybris; he was represented by Chinese historians as vindictive, arrogant, paranoid and megalomaniacal, prone to gestures of extravagant cruelty. In the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian relates a traditional account of the first emperor’s ferocity.[10] Distrustful of intellectuals, he was legendary for ending the “Hundred Schools of Thought”, ordering a mass burning of books across his realm then burying 460 scholars alive in an extravagant show of force. Modern historians regard this account of his atrocities as factually dubious, but it is indicative of the extreme rapacity attributed to the first emperor that was regarded as believable by the consensus of Chinese historical tradition. Qin Shih Hwang Ti, like other great conquerors, such as Tamburlane, Napoleon, Shaka or Hannibal found terror useful and deployed it as necessary and sometimes far beyond what was necessary, threatening in very convincing fashion to exterminate entire populations.
Unbounded ego leaves no room for the subjectivity of others. It can only see people as objects, purely as a means, to their own purposes and desires. They are disposable and replaceable, there is no love not directed toward another subjectivity. Once after a defeat that cost him thousands of casualties, Napoleon shrugged and said that Paris replaced his loss in one night’s amours. The great conquerors like Qin Shih Huang Di, Alexander, Genghis also had maximal ego, but their dynasties proved ephemeral. Unbounded ego in Qin Shih Hwang Di or Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Napoleon seduced with the nearly irresistible illusion of being in control of destiny. This Great Man heroism is a poetic idealization as Chuang Tzu knew. Abraham Lincoln, whose ego was tragically human, is a useful tonic to the megalomaniac conquerors. He candidly insisted that the events of the Civil War had made him far more than he made events. He was one of the greatest of the great modern conquerors and his Second Inaugural Address, anticipating the reconciliation necessary to postwar peace, is one of the great speeches of modernity. “With malice toward none, with charity to all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…” he proposes to reunite the country in a minimally punitive way. Without posturing or pretense, this speech was one of the great exercises in magnanimity by a conqueror anyplace or anywhere, and one of the great documents in the history of politics.
Minimal ego sets the opposite boundary to human life Jesus, Buddha, Chuang Tzu seek perfection in the nucleus of the psyche, with minimalist selves, free of desire and distraction. They were the great avatars of peace, benevolence and quietude. All three wished to conquer the inner world of subjectivity, with little interest in externalities like family, wealth or politics. Minimal ego allows maximal space for compassion, which moves even a hermit like Chuang Tzu. Enlightenment requires even dispassionate Buddha to compassionately offer Enlightenment to those in darkness. Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, yet He weeps for Jerusalem. These minima and maxima of the ego set the boundaries for self and others. The aggregation of these selves contributes to society a moral ecology. Pessimism and optimism about human nature determine the consensus about risks worth taking to improve social life, revolutionary or evolutionary. Political order and change are not separable from ethics and psychology.
Legalism in China argued very early for an absolute state on the basis of a pessimistic theory of human nature like that proposed by Hobbes many centuries later. In practice, maximal government catalyzes maximum ego in the rulers. The most important single figure in Chinese history was famous for his draconian punishments, and he enforced law as harshly as the Legalists recommended. The first Emperor, Qin Shi Huang Ti ended the catastrophic Era of Warring States and unified China. He was feared by all and hated by some. No one doubted he was a despotic megalomaniac. He survived multiple assassination attempts. Living at a time when the abolition of human finitude by magically obtaining immortality was viewed as an intellectually serious, practical possibility, the First Emperor went to extraordinary lengths to obtain the fabled “Elixir of Eternal Life” described in Daoist alchemy. Completely cut off from the rest of humanity, his grandiosity seriously and literally aspired to divine status and this entailed a lofty disregard for the ephemeral lives of his merely human subjects. He sent scouts in every direction to find the Elixir or sages who knew the recipe. Because returning without the sought for prescription for immortality incurred the First Emperor’s displeasure, and this often meant a summary encounter with the scout’s own mortality, many of those sent searching kept going and never returned. Among those that did, the ones who survived actually presented him with various recipes for the elixir. These recipes included an array of exotic ingredients, including liquid mercury. Mercury is toxic and causes brain damage. Ironically, it was Qin Shih Huang Di’s desperate search for immortality that drove him mad and eventually killed him. Aida is a wonderful piece, but the story of Chin Shih Hwang Ti might have been the libretto for an even greater Verdi opera. It would necessarily be outside the human scale, like the Requiem, and Like Chin Shih Huang Ti himself.
The first Emperor thought long term and he tried to make himself comfortable as he was planning to stay. He focused on security and standardization. He began the construction of the Great Wall, connecting various smaller walls and fortifications into the largest sustained public works project in human history, which took centuries to complete and extended for thousands of miles. He also ordered the construction of transportation infrastructure. Logistics were crucial for China’s long term prosperity. The mobility of his military required an extensive system of roads and canals, and since he set China to work. The Lingqu Canal was an immense undertaking, but water transport was by far the quickest and most efficient in the ancient world. Qin Shi Huang Di also busied himself standardizing weights and measures, the size of cart axles (to facilitate road traffic), coinage and the written Chinese language.
PIX OF TOMB
Trusting nothing and no one, Qin Shi Huang Di hedged his bets, constructing a mausoleum for himself so vast as to be completely outside the human scale, supplied with a massive 6,000 man terracotta army equipped with 40,000 bronze weapons. This tomb, which is the size of a small city, required immense manpower, traditionally numbered in the hundreds of thousands, to construct, and after it was completed he ordered the construction workers massacred, so the tomb’s secrets would forever remain hidden. This grandiose tomb, which would have seemed excessive to Ozymandias, has been located by Chinese archaeologists and has not yet fully excavated. Chin Shih Huang Di was sui generis, the Qin dynasty ended with him. Perhaps the unification of China required an utterly ruthless megalomaniac who ruled with blood and iron, but one wonders if the Qin emperor’s paranoia and madness led him to use more violence and terror than was necessary. Even for those not sociopathic the ghastly logic of terror is a bargain with the Devil, because once terror is embraced for whatever political end, then forever after the safety and wisdom of the terrorist demands that in cases with any doubt they employ too much, rather than too little, terror. So terror intrinsically threatens to spiral out of control like a forest fire.
The Han dynasty (206BC-220AD) succeeded after a period of conflict and fragmentation. The Han centuries were contemporaneous with Rome at its peak and these two regional civilizations were nebulously aware of each other and conducted long distance trade. Both Rome and Han China were intellectually dynamic and highly accomplished in large-scale practical projects that required sophisticated engineering. The scholar Dong Zhongshu (179-104BC) created a successful synthesis of Confucian ethics and the physical theories of the School of Naturalists. He established Confucian orthodoxy in civil service exams, requiring a focus on classic texts. He connected the movements of the seasons with the cycles of government and he developed a cyclical philosophy of history. When Zou Yan’s account of nature was institutionalized it became particularly important in the development of traditional Chinese medicine.[11] The extremely influential Han emperor Wudi (reigned 141-87BC) made Confucianism the official ideology of the Han state. Wudi required Confucian works in civil service exams starting in 140BC. The Chinese canon of classics that emerged during the Han dynasty became ossified into a kind of traditional scholasticism that lasted for centuries. It was during the Han dynasty that Confucius was promoted from a sage to a god. Because the Confucian intellectual tradition straddles the boundary between what Westerners usually refer to as two distinct categories, religion and philosophy, the sacred and the secular, there is no chance of shoehorning Confucianism into one procrustean Western category or the other. It was a belief system that syncretized with Taoist, Buddhist and other traditions and reinforced the connection between politics and ethics. It sustained a society of millions for a period of centuries and molded generation after generation of scholar-officials in what was arguably the most successful political regime in world history.
During the Han dynasty the most important advance in practice was the Chinese invention of paper, which was less laborious to produce and thus far cheaper than the alternative writing materials. Chinese astronomy was associated with ongoing concerns about the calendar, because exact dates were politically critical for the Confucians. In the centralized circumstances of China, the state was always more concerned with investigation than the politically decentralized Greeks. Harmony between Heaven Earth and Mankind as well as political stability was thought to be contingent on the exact performance of traditional rituals. As in Archaic Physics, comets, earthquakes, and other unusual natural phenomena were regarded both as portents and as the consequences of failed rituals.
The Ancient Science of Zhou Yan and the School of Naturalists was most influential in practical endeavors like metallurgy, agriculture, harmonics and engineering. Mathematics also flourished during the Han dynasty, but unlike Greece, there was little interest in axiomization. The Theorem of Pythagoras was proven, square and cube roots and approximations of pi were developed, and the first known use of negative numbers was introduced. The Han dynasty was marked by prosperity, commerce grew and the most famous trade route of the Old World, the Silk Road, connected China with East Africa, the Mediterranean and all the civilizations in between.
Buddhism in China was disseminated beyond its home in India during the second half of the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD), probably overland through the Silk Road trade routes. The efforts of Ashoka in extending Buddhism helped it expand from Japan to the Egypt to Tibet and Mongolia. Perhaps the most important cultural change in ancient China was the introduction of Buddhism from India in the first century AD, probably by missionaries that proselytized in central Asia. Translations of Buddhist sutras were made, and the bilingualism it required facilitated further cultural connections between China and India. Despite the fact that Hinduism all but extinguished Buddhism in India, it flourished when adapted to China. By the second century AD, Buddha was described as a student of Laozi. Syncretism between Buddhism and Daoism, on the basis of common traditions of asceticism and quietism and mysticism, made the new doctrines more widely accessible to the Chinese. Buddhist texts proliferated, even as Buddhism disappeared in India and the world’s first known printed book is a Diamond Sutra dated to 868. Syncretism, which generally has characterized the religious traditions of China, created a partial overlap between the imported Buddhist, Taoist, and the official Chinese state doctrine of Confucianism.
The history of China was marked by greater stability and continuity than most ancient states because the construction of the Great Wall kept the steppe nomads that plagued Mesopotamia at bay for centuries. Internally, the administration of government was handled consistently and capably. The result was a gradual demographic and spatial expansion. Though marked by intermittent setbacks due to flooding or epidemic disease, Chinese population and wealth trended upward. Chinese civilization achieved important technological achievements, sometimes called the “Four Inventions”. Papermaking was independently developed in China during the Han dynasty and became widely used for writing documents in the third century AD. The Egyptians anticipated Chinese papermaking with their development of papyrus much earlier, but the Chinese did not derive their papermaking from Egyptian sources. Paper, combined with the Chinese invention of printing, was a revolution in the technology of information storage and retrieval, and knowledge is power. Taoist alchemists stumbled upon gunpowder in the ninth century AD, and it was fully weaponized by 1000. The magnetic compass was developed earlier than anyplace else during the Han dynasty, but it was initially used in divination rather than navigation. Evidence for the use of the mariners compass dates back to the eleventh century AD, and this important new invention must have greatly facilitated the seven expeditions of Zheng He between 1405 and 1433. These voyages ranged as far as East Africa, and there exists a contemporary picture drawn of a giraffe that Zheng He brought back with him which contains Chinese characters no doubt expressing amazement at such a curiosity. In the first millennium AD, all the most important technological breakthroughs came from China, the practical dividend paid by Ancient Physics when it was combined with political stability and capable administration.
Unlike Greece, which was geographically divided into city-states, China was from very early in its history a continental sized domain. This imposed intrinsic constraints on the practical possibilities of political order, favoring strong central authority and well-organized, highly competent administration. All schools of thought in ancient China, Taoist, Confucian or Legalist, supported the idea of a sage emperor supported by highly trained, well-educated scholar/officials. This recognition of the need to avoid the disjunction of knowledge and power was the central idea of Plato’s Republic and it was put into practice in China. The sheer size of the area being administered, taxed and organized meant that China needed an extensive and highly capable bureaucracy. The Chinese did not experiment with different political forms, finding “imperial meritocracy” answered their needs. The stakes were very high and there was a consensus that only an emperor who enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven could create stability, prosperity and good order. Effective rule demanded able administrators. The most important sage in the Chinese tradition, Confucius, was deeply committed to tradition and at the same time was the great exemplar of the morally and intellectually superior scholar/official. The Chinese commitment to “virtue” in government bureaucrats, defined as knowledge of, and facility with, the classic texts of the Confucian tradition, dates back at least as early as the Han dynasty. Chinese officials were not chosen on the basis of heredity but on character and intellect, and the administration of the mandarins was one of the most successful political regimes in world history. It produced a steady supply of capable men to administer the largest single civilization on the planet.
Starting in 605 AD, the standardized imperial examinations, written, administered and graded by mandarins, were offered every few years to any young man who had some degree of education and wished to try his mettle. Although some degree of corruption inevitably crept into the system, as is true of any bureaucracy, the examination system was exceptionally effective in advancing test takers on the basis of effort, learning, character and demonstrated intellectual achievement. As a result, the mandarinate became a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, indispensible to effective government in China. Even the later Mongol “conquest dynasties” of the Yuan (1271-1386) and Ming (1368-1644) could not function without this class of scholar/officials. The last mandarin examinations were given in 1905. One of the reasons that the Chinese Communist Party in the twenty-first century has successfully outlasted Communism is because standards for admission to the CCP have significant similarities to the extraordinarily successful mandarin tradition.
The central concern of Greek political theory, the polis, was irrelevant in China. Instead, Chinese political theory focused on the family as the natural model for governance. In Mandarin Chinese there are approximately one hundred different terms indicating kinship and the vast majority of these have no synonymous English translation. The term for one’s paternal younger great uncle is different from the term for one’s paternal older great uncle, which of course involves different terms for the older and younger maternalgreat uncles, plus separate terms for all of their wives.
Among the Greeks the demands of family, with a few exceptions like Antigone, are less important than the bonds of friendship, as was the case with Achilles and Patroclus or Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. As in China, family life is the most important element in the political theory that connects all three monotheisms.
[1] Bryan W Van Norden, An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy, Indianapolis, Hackett, 2011
[2] Fung, History of Chinese Philosophy, 69.
[3] GER Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, 78.
[4] Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, 196.
[5] Fung, History of Chinese Philosophy, 129.
[6] Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, 227
[7] Lloyd and Sivin*, The Way and the World*, 180.
[8] Rovelli, Anaximander,
[9] Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, 246
[10] Sima Qian
[11] Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, 73, 80.w