Government in Republican China. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
bronzes from succeeding periods, and an interpretation of Chinese history with the technique of modern archaeology have upset the credibility of the records of the earliest periods. All that is established is the fact that the Hsia was a state before the Shang. It is unlikely that Hsia exercised any imperial hegemony over other peoples, since the empire system did not rise till Chou times.
Of the Shang dynasty (traditionally 1765–1123 b. c.) much more is known. Thirty years ago most Western scholars thought the Shang chronicles to be myth, but excavations in northeast China have located a Shang capital and have unearthed a large body of inscriptions on bone.3 The Shang culture must have been highly developed, possessing an urban life, writing, and a definite system of monarchical government. The germs of scholastic leadership were present. Power was in the hands of a single ruler (wang, or king), who claimed hegemony for an undetermined distance beyond the walls of the capital.
In the twelfth century b. c. the Shang dynasty was overthrown by conquerors from the west, the Chou. The Chou dynasty bridges the gap between the semihistoric and the definitely historic period of Chinese antiquity. Under the Chou the chief features of Chinese social and intellectual existence took on clear form. From the Chou conquest and their attempts to establish stable government China derived striking social and political characteristics. One of the astonishing facts about early Chinese history is the manner in which the Chou rulers utilized propaganda to make their conquest secure, and in which their propaganda furnished dynamic concepts of Chinese social thought and development.
The most important of these widely propagandized concepts was that of the Chinese Empire. The city of Shang had been the center of a dominion which could not possibly have included more than a fraction of what is known today as China. The civilized areas along the Yellow River were probably no larger than Palestine. Most of what is now China was conquered in succeeding centuries. Even in this small area, it is not known what relationship existed between the ruler of Shang and other rulers. The Chou monarchs built up the legend that the Shang rulers had occupied a position of primacy among the rulers of the civilized world, and then claimed the position themselves by right of succession through conquest. There was thus fostered the notion of one ruler, central and supreme.
Secondly, the Chou themselves taught the doctrine of the right of revolution. They identified their god with the Shang god instead of declaring that their god had overwhelmed the other. They asserted that this one god had been displeased by the profligacy and wickedness of the Shang and had called upon the Chou to overthrow the Shang rulers. Both these theories, refined and amplified, became fundamentals of Chinese political thought in later ages.4
The Chou established a system of government which left an imprint on Chinese politics for three thousand years. In relating their metropolitan administration to their occupation of the lands of North and Central China they were less successful. Lacking any other device of government, they turned to feudalism, and on the quasi-feudal foundations of the Shang they imposed a fief system. This led first to the division of China into many small feudal units and later to the appearance of powerful territorial states. The first of these periods-that in which feudalism predominated-was known as the Ch'un Ch'iu, or Spring and Autumn epoch (770–473 b. c.). The second—in which the states developed—was known as the Chan Kuo, or Warring States epoch (473–221 b. c.).
The rise of the Chou provided China with her first government on an imperial scale and with the beginnings of a theory concerning the nature of imperial government. The increasing disorganization during the Ch'un Ch'iu and Chan Kuo periods led to the development of the Confucian and other philosophies, wherein the Chinese, conscious of political shortcomings, sought the good society.
The Ideology Called Confucian
551 b. c. is most commonly given as the year of Confucius' birth. Confucius (K'ung Ch'iu; also Master K'ung—K'ung Fu-tzŭ, from which Confucius is derived) was a wandering scholar and would-be official whose life was spent in the advocacy of political and social reform. He was important because of his part in establishing the profession of teaching and for his doctrines upholding good government. Discontented with the present, he turned to the past—becoming conservative and aristocratic in outlook. His position in the history of political thought he owes to the bent which he gave aristocratic conservatism. He sought the leadership of the chün-tzŭ (the upright, superior, or aristocratic man) rather than the domination of laws. He developed an ethical system secular and practical in its orientation and humane in its tenets. He emphasized the necessity of the individual's appropriate self-consciousness in the society, and the need for following li (propriety), the established values. He stressed family loyalty above all others, and insisted on respect for tradition. After his death in 479 b. c. his ideas were elaborated, clarified, and revised into what is known as the Confucian system.5
This system underwent many changes. The Confucian influences came to prevail in the Han dynasty, in the second and first centuries b. c., but lost its official preeminence with the fall of the Han in the third century. It nevertheless retained a great share of intellectual leadership. In the Sung period (960–1279) the philosopher Chu Hsi developed Confucianism into its most recent accepted form. Others joined him in sharpening and refining Confucianism.
The Sung philosophers evolved a Confucianism which showed the influence of the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. They reinterpreted the classics by emphasizing works other than those hitherto regarded as preeminent. With reference to the concept li, they developed the notion of a truly complete order running through both spirit and matter. Metaphysics, alien to the mind of Confucius himself, became an operative part of Confucian thought. Through their ethical and psychological studies the Sung Confucians translated the Confucian rationale into an effective ideological technique for domination. It is not inconsistent to find them opposing any action definitely governmental. Furthermore, they showed themselves to be conservatives in politics, and through their commentaries on the classics—which were studied in succeeding centuries along with the texts themselves—imprinted their conservatism upon the Chinese mind.
The ideology called Confucian is not identical with Confucianism as the philosophic system proper. In the first place, it is not known how much of the social doctrines taught by Confucius and his successors was original and how much mere transmission of preexisting beliefs. Confucius himself regarded his work as that of a transmitter and not a creator. Secondly, the whole Chinese culture contributed elements of strength to the ideology to which the name of Confucius became attached by Westerners. Thirdly, the system developed in practice to an extent which Confucius could not have anticipated. The Confucian ideology and society bear the relation to Confucius which Christendom bears to Jesus Christ; both founders would scarcely recognize the derivations to which their teachings have led.
The Confucian ideology came to prevail in China just before the day of Christ. At the time of Christ, Wang Mang, a usurper and a zealous Confucian, shook the Han Empire with his experiments. A period of reaction against Confucianism set in. Taoism and Buddhism provided rival cults. After the twelfth century, Confucianism rose slowly to power over men's minds again—although it had never been wholly superseded by other doctrines, it had long lacked its all-compelling primacy. Not until the Ming dynasty (1368–1643) did it become the state philosophy of China, the ideology whereby China lived politically and whereby she was governed.
Descriptions of Confucian China apply, therefore, with particular cogency to the past five hundred years, if account is taken of the role of Confucianism as a state philosophy. But if those elements of Chinese culture which are subsumed under the name of Confucianism are considered apart from Confucian philosophy, the time may be extended indefinitely. Confucian doctrine is one aspect of Chinese culture which has in various centuries risen to the forefront. Underneath this doctrine there are tenets, near the level of unconscious habit, which apply to almost all ages of China. It is difficult to separate the two phenomena and to distinguish between Chinese culture and its most representative philosophy. An analogy, remote but suggestive, is the influence of Aristotle in the West. Periods of Aristotelian predominance can be distinguished from the general history of Western thought, in which Aristotle plays a consistent but lesser role. As Aristotle was interpreted by