Competing Systems 5
The Populism Argument
Those concerned, in our own time, with the question of a right of political expression in China have often cited passages from the classic works in support of their contention that this concept existed in early China also, and is thus not an intrusive foreign concept, but is within the natural range of the culture in the period of its philosophical golden age. I will here examine seven of the passages most commonly cited in this connection. They are Gwo Yw 1:3, a Dzwo Jwan story of the year 0542 (Syang-gung 31), Analects (LY) 12:19 and 13:16, and Mencius (MC) 1B8, 5A5, and 5B9.
If we date these passages as is conventionally done, assigning each one to the period in which it is set, or to which it is implicitly ascribed, by the standard view of the text in which it occurs, we find them strung out in real time over a period of more than 500 years:
Year Story Date c0850 Gwo Yw 1:3
[about three centuries between examples]
c0542 Dzwo Jwan: Syang 31
c0500 Analects 12:19, 13:16
[about two centuries between examples]
c0320 Mencius 1B8, 5A5, 5B9
Vivid as some of the stories are, this is a terribly thin total showing over half a millennium. Those who dismiss the whole matter as fictional certainly have a point. On the other hand, if we arrange the stories not by their narrative settings in antiquity but by the dates which my colleague and I assign to the texts in which they are presented to us, we get the following quite different picture (the previous picture is retained in column 2 for ease of comparison):
Year Story Date Text Date c0850 Gwo Yw 1:3
c0542 Dzwo Jwan: Syang 31
c0500 Analects 12:19, 13:16
c0326
Analects 12:19
c0322
Analects 13:16
c0320 Mencius 1B8, 5A5, 5B9
c0312
Dzwo Jwan: Syang 31
c0316
Gwo Yw 1:3
c0290
Mencius *1B8, 5A5, 5B9
The configuration on the right, which presumes that the works in question are contemporary polemic rather than ancient documentation, has three things in favor of it: (1) It clusters the stories more closely, over a period of 40 rather than 560 years, which makes a more plausible impression as reflecting a genuine political issue rather than a permanent philosophical concern. (2) It brings these stories into temporal conjunction with other passages, in these and other texts, which discuss, as though it were new at the time, the question of the relation of the mass army's commoner soldiers to the state. The populist theory in the present seven passages in effect offers the new soldiers a voice in the conduct of state affairs, guarantees them the right to be heard concerning their own grievances against the state, and provides them with a means of redress (an admittedly drastic one) if the state is unresponsive to those grievances. The emergence of something resembling a social contract, with social membership offered in return for military service, seems to be implied. The question asked by the set of military passages finds a counterpart in the civic accommodations of the present group. (3) Archaeological evidence has always suggested a late date for the transition from the elite to the mass army. The present solution of the text problem brings the text evidence for the first time into conjunction with the general trend of the archaeological evidence.
I take it, then, that these seven passages, while not recording real incidents or conversations, do reflect a social concern of the time, and that the time of this concern, and the social and military change which apparently gave rise to it, is the late 04c and early 03c.
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24 Sept 2000 / Contact The Project / Exit to Lectures Page
