China Through The Ages

History Of A Civilization

Franz Michael

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429725753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Past studies of China have concentrated on specific events or have related a chronological history of the dynastic periods. These works have included aspects of cultural history but have underemphasized the country's great social, political, and intellectual movements and their ultimate expression in the art and literature of the time. By focusing on such themes, Professor Michael provides a new framework for understanding the Chinese cultural tradition. The author describes the evolving history of ideas in China, from ancient faith in powerful magic to more modern concepts of a logical moral order of the universe and mankind's place in it. He also explores the intellectual ferment following the dawn of the age of reason, the integration of Buddhism into the Confucian social order, and the social transformations accompanying the rise and fall of the centralized state. Throughout, he illustrates how the changing society's beliefs, values, and aesthetic sense were embodied in its art and literature. This portrayal of the Chinese cultural tradition not only puts Chinese history in a new perspective, it also illuminates the process through which China constructed a modern society from a non-Western foundation and serves as an essential tool for understanding modern-day China and its prospects for the future.

One
Beginnings:

The Geographical Setting

IT RAINED HEAVILY on that day in early March 1938, as a group of several dozen middle-aged Chinese college professors left the walls of the village of Shangt'ien—"up the fields"—in Kiangsi province to start the work on diking the river Kan, which flowed by the village. For them and the only foreigner among them, who had moved inland with their university in a retreat from the Japanese invasion, life in the Chinese countryside was a new experience, and the coming day's work was going to confront in practice one of the most important age-old problems of Chinese history: the necessity of water control.

During the last few years the Kan River, a southern tributary of the Yangtze River, had changed its course, and when the students and faculty of the National Chekiang University arrived by boat at the village a few weeks earlier and scrambled up the sandy bank, they could clearly see the marks of last year's flood upon the walls of the farmhouses. In a few months, when that flood would return, the villagers would be forced to take refuge under the roofs or on the nearby hills and wait for the waters to subside. For the several hundred members of the university who had crowded into the village, such a cramped existence was not enticing, and since the university had a department of hydraulic engineering, the decision was made to build a dike for the protection of the village. That day the professors who carried shovels, bamboo poles, and baskets were to give an example that Chinese intellectuals were no longer above physical labor; and even the dean, small and elderly, came along, too frail to dig, but holding an umbrella over the shoulders of one of his physically stronger, laboring professors. The next day the students took over, but the real work had still to be done by the local farmers as paid corvée labor as it had been done in China throughout imperial history.

Indeed, Chinese history is inseparably linked to the problems posed by the rivers that had to be tamed to prevent the ever-threatening floods, and to the skill in building canals for drainage, irrigation, and transportation. This skill logically developed from the experience in managing the river waters. Chinese civilization had its origin in Northwest China, in the valleys of the Wei and Fen rivers, tributaries of the Huangho, and in the North China plain, formed by the alluvial sediment of this large and turbulent river, named after its muddy color "Huangho"—Yellow River.¹ Throughout Chinese history this river has posed China's greatest engineering problem.

The Northwest and the North China plain, the cradle of the Chinese way of life, are covered by a special soil called loess, which occurs only in a few minor areas of the globe outside of China. Within China loess soil is of windblown origin, formed over centuries and indeed millennia by the strong seasonal winds that blow each spring from the high pressure areas of the plateaus of Central Asia toward the Pacific Ocean with its less variable temperatures. Passing over the Gobi Desert and the steppe lands of the Northwest, the winds collect sand and move on as sandstorms over the northwestern mountains and the North China plain, covering the land with layers of loose sandy soil that over time have reached varying depths of hundreds of feet.

This loess soil retains the minerals of the surface growth it covers, is fertile and porous, and although hard baked on the surface, is easily worked with simple tools, a fact that greatly facilitated primitive society's shift from hunting and food collecting to agricultural cultivation of the soil, provided enough water could be supplied. It was therefore for good reason that in this area Chinese civilization began.

Yet the very looseness of the soil created in the Yellow River system problems of water control that became a key factor in the development of Chinese civilization. The muddy waters of the Huangho and its tributaries carry an extraordinarily high percentage of sediments, far higher than any other large river. This sediment is collected and carried along in the rapidly flowing current of the upper course of the Yellow River. But when the river breaks through the mountain barriers of the Northwest and levels off in the alluvial plain, slowing down its course, its sediments begin to settle, forming sand banks and raising the bed of the river, which easily overflows into adjacent land. To protect the land and confine the river to its course were therefore from earliest time major tasks of the early kings.

According to Chinese historical myth, the Great Yu, who was the founder of the legendary Hsia Dynasty, dated 2205 to 1766 B.C., gained his reputation by taming the floods. He is said to have accomplished the monumental task of confining the rivers to their beds in thirteen years, traveling constantly, allegedly passing his home three times without taking time to enter it. This legend of the Great Yu and his extraordinary accomplishment, recorded much later by the philosopher Mencius, may well bear a kernel of historical truth.

As an engineering problem, the control of the Yellow River has never been permanently solved. All along its lower course the river had to be diked. But when the accumulation of sediments in the riverbed eventually raised the water within the built-up dikes above the level of the surrounding countryside even at the river's normal stage, any further rise or any neglect of dike repair would bring disastrous floods and the loss of millions of lives. During historical times, the river has changed course often over many sections of the North China plain, flowing into the Yellow Sea at places from Tientsin in the North to the Huai River estuary close to the Yangtze River in the South, each time devastating vast areas over long periods until its new course could be diked again.

Such catastrophic floods occurring throughout history into modern times earned the river the name "China's Sorrow." With its stupendous flood problem, the Yellow River has remained a testing ground for Chinese skill in hydraulic engineering, a skill that, once acquired, was applied to other rivers with various problems in drainage, irrigation, and canalization throughout the country.

In the Northwest and the North China plain, the spread of early agricultural settlements, denuding mountain slopes of their forest growth, contributed to the change of climate, which in turn altered the flora and fauna and aggravated the problem of lack of moisture, resulting in insufficient rainfall. To the necessity of diking and drainage was added the need for irrigation, as evidenced by the impressive irrigation canals built in the Northwest in early Han time in the second century B.C.

The pattern had been thus set by the time that Chinese civilized life spread to the system of the other great river of China, the Yangtze and its tributaries, and southward to the triangle of the West, the North, and the East rivers with their confluence in the Pearl River delta at the city of Canton. Southward was the logical course of expansion for the Chinese agricultural and centrally governed way of life, shaped in the Northwest and the North China plain.

Along the northwestern border, the arid climate of the high plateaus and steppes set a natural limit to Chinese agricultural incursion. This was the domain of a different form of life, steppe nomadism, organized in steppe empires that recurrently invaded the Chinese settled agricultural areas and at times established conquest dynasties over parts or all of China. To fend them off, Chinese emperors built the Great Wall and in turn, when they were strong enough, extended military control over the steppe people. Whichever side predominated, the line between agriculture and nomadism followed the climatic border. And in peaceful times the two different ways of life complemented each other through trade or tribute missions. The Inner Asian frontier thus became one of the major political, military, economic, and cultural factors in Chinese history.

While seeking to guard the northwestern frontier, the Chinese expanded their moving frontier southward. The geographical setting in Central and South China differed in various ways from the conditions that had to be met in the North and the Northwest. South of the Tsinling Mountains—an extension of the Kunlun range, which divides North and South China and terminates in the foothills near the city of Naking—the loess soil that so decisively affected for better or worse Chinese life in the Yellow River system does not occur. The Yangtze and its tributaries and the rivers further south had their own flood problems, but they were of different origin. The centuries of agricultural use had denuded the mountains and the hills of much of their forest growth, creating flood problems of a differing order. If heavy rains occurred simultaneously at the upper course of the Yangtze and in the valleys where the tributaries originated, the flood danger at the confluence of these rivers became particularly severe. Lessening the risk, two lakes, Tungting Lake and Poyang Lake, formed at such points of confluence, served as water reservoirs in time of flood danger. But most of the riverbeds had to be diked as the modern example of the Kan River demonstrates. Without the high sediment content of the Yellow River system, the Yangtze, its tributaries, and the larger rivers to the south, although occasionally flooding, retained their beds and served as major arteries of communication. Indeed, once developed, the Yangtze system provided cheap water transport for twelve out of the eighteen provinces of imperial China. In time, the Yangtze system became the richest agricultural area in China, particularly after centuries of neglect of existing irrigation systems and recurring invasions from the steppe had weakened the agricultural production of the Northwest and the North China plain.

The experience with water transport, gained in the South, was in turn applied in the North when later dynasties, retaining their political capitals in the old cultural areas of the Northwest and later at Peking, wanted to obtain access to the rice tax in kind of the fertile new area of Central China. From the seventh century A.D. on, great canals connected the Yangtze basin with the capitals in the North, culminating in the Grand or Imperial Canal, as rebuilt by the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century A.D. expressly for transporting the tax rice from the Yangtze area to the capital Khambalik—today's Peking.

With Chinese agriculture expanding into the Yangtze basin and southward, irrigation became even more important because a different staple crop was grown in Central China and the South. The northern staple had been chiefly wheat; in South and Central China it was rice, a crop that necessitates the flooding of the rice fields for long periods, from the time the seedlings are planted and transplanted until the crops ripen. The Chinese became masters of intricate irrigation systems in the lower Yangtze basin and the terraced rice fields that so characteristically cover the hills and low mountains of much of the center and the South of China.

This Chinese system of settling the land, developed in the North and adapted in Central and South China, depended on large-and medium-scale public works. In preindustrial time these required both the massive use of human labor, drawn from a dense population, and the intensive cultivation of the land. This combination made possible a rate of production per agricultural unit sufficient to feed such a dense population—larger in fact than that of premodern European rainfall agriculture. Socially, this pattern of agriculture encouraged the Chinese to settle in villages, not in isolated homesteads, wherever they spread their civilization. The effectiveness of this system also helps to explain to a large degree the vast population figures reported in China from earliest historical time on.

Of the territory of this traditional Chinese development, Central and South China is geographically more dissected by mountain ranges than the more compact North. The regions of the Center and the South were at times harder to control than the more cohesive northern plains, and this factor may help to explain why for most periods of its history the political center of China remained in the North, even after the key economic areas had shifted to the Yangtze region and the South. As North China's alluvial plain had few harbors along its coast but an endangered frontier toward Inner Asia, China remained inland oriented. In the North, the provinces of Hopei and Honan—north and south of the Huangho—the peninsula of Shantung and the northwestern provinces of Shensi, Shansi, and Kansu are the modern administrative divisions of the old heartland.

The regions of the center and the South formed recognizable units of their own that were more or less marked by political, i.e., provincial, divisions. The lower Yangtze region, from the city of Ichang to the outflow of the Yangtze into the East China Sea has long been the richest rice-growing area of the country. The rice fields are interlaced with irrigation canals and waterways, and the readily available and inexpensive transportation system has encouraged along its rivers the development of commercial cities and, in modern times, industrial centers. The steel city of Wuhan, the onetime capital of Nanking, and modern Shanghai (located at a tributary of the Yangtze, the Huangp'o River), the largest city of China and an important modern commercial and industrial center, flourished on the basis of this communication system within the rich hinterland. This central region of China, organized in the provinces of Anhui (Anhwei), Kiangsi, Hupei, and Hunan, is the area where the Western contact with China had its main impact.

Separated from the lower Yangtze through high, narrow river gorges known for their dramatic scenery is the highly irrigated fertile plateau of Szech'wan province, formed by the upper Yangtze and three tributaries, it is known also as the "Red Basin" on account of the red color of the sandstone and soil of the province. Divided from the other regions of China by high mountain ranges, this province has served during several periods in history as retreats and safe bases for autonomous governments. During the Japanese invasion in World War II it was the seat of the National Government with its capital at Chungking.

South of the Yangtze estuary, the coastal region of the provinces of Chekiang and Fukien forms an indented coastline with excellent harbors but is separated from the inland areas by mountain ranges that run in a northeast-southwestern direction, thus limiting communications with the interior. The harbor cities of these coastal provinces have therefore never gained the importance of Shanghai or even Canton in modern time. Although this was a major area of tea and silk production in addition to ocean fishing and coastal navigation, its overall impact on Chinese development remained limited.

Across the Taiwan Strait from Fukien, separated by one hundred miles of water, is the island of Taiwan (Formosa), the seat of the National Government after its retreat from the mainland. Its Chinese population migrated originally from Fukien and Kwangtung provinces. Primitive proto-Malay groups remain in the mountainous areas. Under the National Government Taiwan has enjoyed an extraordinary economic development and prosperity.

In the South the two "Kwang" provinces, Kwangtung and Kwangsi, form an economic unit, centered on the city of Canton at the Pearl River delta, the chief overseas trading center in imperial time. The semitropical climate of the region makes possible two or three growing seasons per year.

To the south of Kwangtung province, across a narrow channel of the South China Sea, lies the island province of Hainan, as yet only in the beginning of its economic development. Hainan is rich in minerals, coal, and forest resources, and its semitropical climate provides a great potential for cultivation of coffee, cocoa, coconut, hemp, and other tropical products.

The southwestern provinces of Yünnan and Kweichow were the last to be penetrated by Chinese settlement. High plateaus and a moderate climate provide good agricultural conditions. Pre-Chinese minority groups, living in the less accessible mountain areas, form almost half of the population, which includes a large Muslim group.

What linked together these varied regions, with their diverse climates, geographical conditions, communication systems, staple crops, and coastal access, was the application in different settings of the same basic concepts for civilized life. The beliefs and value system that have evolved in this geographical setting prevailed throughout time into the modern world.

This was the China of the Chinese way of life. Bordered by the ocean in the East, by high mountain ranges and plateaus in the West, a narrow passage between oceans and mountains in the North, and deep river gorges and tropical forests in the South, this Chinese geographical setting of roughly one-and-a-half million square miles has been called "China Proper" or "China within the Wall" (the Great Wall)—the territory where the Chinese way of life was formed and developed. It is an eastward sloping, vast bulge of the Asiatic continent, dominated by its rivers and the agricultural life affected by them.

As a political and cultural entity, however, China extended its realm beyond the area where the Chinese people formed their civilization. Having established their social order, the Chinese came to regard their system as the most civilized form of human communal existence. In the interplay between theirs and neighboring cultures, Chinese order came to influence and dominate the adjacent countries of Central, East, and Southeast Asia, with the result that China's military and political sway extended through much of historical time beyond China proper over the neighboring peoples of Inner Asia, Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

Imperial China was not a nation-state but an empire that was regarded by its rulers and its people as the only true civilization, very much as the medieval Holy Roman Empire was regarded as the civilized world by its inhabitants. According to this concept, China was Chung-kuo, the "Middle Kingdom" in a world of barbarians who, if enlightened, would recognize the role of the Chinese emperor, the ruler of T'ien-hsia, "All under Heaven"—the human world— and would submit to his authority.

In practice, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan, and Tibet in Inner Asia, Manchuria and Korea in Northeast Asia, and Vietnam (formerly Annam) in Southeast Asia were bound to the Chinese emperor through much of history in differing dependent, tributary, or patron-client relationships. After the Revolution of 1911 and the end of the empire, Chinese governments reinterpreted these relationships in modern terms: belonging to a unified Chinese nation of different nationalities. In this modern Chinese state the ethnic Chinese formed a vast majority, ruling not only their own areas, but the regions of the "minorities" as well. Some other countries of Southeast Asia occasionally established tributary relationships with the imperial court, which provided them with commercial advantages and political prestige for their rulers. Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, small Himalayan states like Nepal and Sikkim, or even the island states of Sumatra and Java, once in occasional tributary relationship, have long since cut any such ties. Some of the former dependencies, Outer Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, succeeded in breaking away from Chinese control; Tibet tried but failed and has remained like others, an "autonomous region" within the confines of the modern Chinese state, today the People's Republic of China. Including these former dependencies, chiefly Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) and Tibet, Chinese territory today encompasses about three-and-a-half million square miles.

Some of these non-Chinese territories and their people have become amalgamated or outpeopled by the Chinese in the twentieth century. Manchuria is a case in point. Its southern tip, the Liaotung Peninsula and the Liao River valley—even though outside the Great Wall—have been Chinese cultural territory since prehistoric times; but the Northwest, the Hsingan (Khingan) mountain range was Mongol steppe country, and the northeast forest land along the Korean border was the preserve of the Tungus tribes from which the Manchus originated. Because Manchuria was opened to Chinese immigration from China proper in the first decade of this century, its population of sixty million today has become almost entirely Chinese.

In Inner Mongolia, the Mongols have become a minority in their autonomous region. In Chinese Turkestan (today the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region—the former Chinese province of Sinkiang) the Uighurs, some of whom stil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introductory Note
• 1 Beginnings: The Geographical Setting
• 2 The Age of Magic: Legend and Archaeology
• 3 The Age of Magic: The Shang Dynasty
• 4 The Age of Reason: The Chou Dynasty
• 5 Intellectual Revolution: A Hundred Schools of Thought
• 6 The Unified Empire
• 7 The Empire Consolidated: The Han Dynasty
• 8 The Coming of Buddhism
• 9 Reunification: The Sui and T'ang Dynasties
• 10 A Chinese Renaissance: The Sung Dynasty
• 11 The Mongol Empire
• 12 Chinese Restoration: The Ming Dynasty
• 13 The Last of the Imperial Order: The Manchu or Ch'ing Dynasty
• 14 From Empire to Nation-State: The Great Rebellion, Reform, and Revolution
• 15 The Nationalists
• 16 Communism Under Mao
• 17 The Post-Mao Experiment
• 18 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index