Competing Systems 8
Overview: The Two Systems
I have argued above that much of the standard view of the Spring and Autumn period is derived from Warring States theoretical agendas, and have cited the alleged ba system as my chief example. The point so far is that the Spring and Autumn system differs from the Warring States idea of that system. It remains to give a sense of how the Spring and Autumn system contrasts with the actual Warring States system. It hardly needs to be said that this picture is a simplified and contrastive one. Though some of the changes may have been sudden, others doubtless took time to manifest themselves fully.
Spring and Autumn
The Spring and Autumn period, as a whole, was characterized by a multi-state system in which the Jou King was acknowledged in certain ceremonial ways, but in which any claim of the King on the states beyond those limits was ignored or resisted. The states operated essentially on their own, by improvisations in which conflicts and alliances, ceremonial exchanges, and other lateral relations, most of which were not mediated by the Jou residual presence at Lwo-yang.
The states included some of "Jou" lineage and culture, which we may call proto-Chinese, and others with a non-Jou heritage. Both types were part of the system. They intermarried, formed alliances, and warred with each other. There was no systematic opposition between the Jou and non-Jou states as groups, and no clear geographical line separating them. The residual non-Jou populations in the Jou-dominated eastern garrison states, such as Lu, were in this period steadily eliminated or absorbed, and the cultural homogeneity of those states thus steadily increased throughout the period. This did not immediately affect the situation between Lu and other Jou-culture states on the one hand, and the non-Jou states on the other.
In Lu in particular, the suppression of the indigenous population and the exchange of discontiguous lands with other states produced a state which could conceive of itself as having a continuous area, and surrounded by boundaries.
Agricultural advances continued throughout the period. Land was increasingly deforested and converted to farming. Dependence on a few plant types, though it evidently supported an increasing population, also led to the danger of famines. States stockpiled grain supplies against that possibility. Double-cropping was introduced during the period, and permitted further population growth and the eventual emergence of a surplus rural population. Agriculture rose above the subsistence level, and new social structures based on the rural population would eventually become possible. By the end of the period, unfarmed land was reduced to limited game preserves monopolized by the rulers, and many types of forest game had already become rare.
The military power of these states, both large and small, rested on an elite group of chariot warriors, with a code of loyalty and an obligation of service; these seem to have held resident landholdings from the ruler, and to have been responsible for maintaining their own chariot and other equipment. There were apparently no elaborate rituals for conferring or renewing a landholding, but the exchange of land (allotted by the ruler) for military service (rendered thereafter by the warrior and his heirs) is essentially that of more familiar feudal systems.
The basic fighting unit was a chariot with driver and archer, supported by up to 10 footmen. The military force of the state was only realized in full when these units were called together for a campaign; in normal times, it was dispersed among the various strong points and landholdings. In this period, it was sometimes possible for a small state to successfully attack a large state. This seemingly absurd result can be explained if we realize that the whole actual force of a small state could achieve local superiority over those elements of the larger state's potential force which happened to be in the vicinity. To this dispersion factor is probably to be attributed the success and long survival of some strategically placed small states.
The ruler was in principle the leader of the mobilized force of his state. Command might be delegated, but only for the duration of one campaign, and typically to a relative or other high-ranking person. The permanent loyalty of the elite warriors was to the person of the ruler, not to his delegate (beyond the limits of one campaign), or to the state, which hardly existed as a concept.
Land communications among the states improved noticeably in the late middle 07c, corresponding to the reign of Lu Syi-gung. A camaraderie, and a certain common culture, arose among those members of the chariot elite who were engaged in interstate diplomacy. The heritage of precedents for the diplomats of any one state (see for example the Lu elite lore tradition which can be glimpsed behind LY 5) was made up of diplomats and ministers from many states.
Trade undoubtedly existed, but it was of small volume, and it was presumably in the hands of venturesome individuals. The state had no role in it, and so far as the evidence goes, took no official notice of it. This was shortly to change.
The typical culture complex of these centuries seems to have been that of a proto-state, ruler-centered, with an elaborate culture of amusement centering on the ruler, and supported by the joint military power of a chariot elite individually obligated to, and personally loyal to, the ruler. Major changes within the period are its increasingly complete domination of its hinterland, its gradual integration through improved communications, and its accumulation of surplus rural population resources.
Warring States
The fundamental change defining the Warring States period seems to have been the realization of the previously untapped military potential of the larger rural population. This meant a shift from reliance on the personally loyal chariot elite, to a new and difficultly achieved reliance on the rural masses, whose identification, if any, tended to be with the state and not the ruler. One of the great public questions of the 04c was how to motivate the larger population to fight and die for the state. Among the social accommodations that apparently figured in this process was access to law, including central review of local decisions. Some social theorists, such as the Mencius group, went further, and defined the state as based on the people, and the ruler as responsible for their welfare, and liable to be overthrown if he failed in that duty.
The previous situation of the chariot elite was undermined early in the period when their landholdings were first subjected to taxation. They thus became more dependent on their court salaries, and over time tended to evolve toward a civil rather than a military ethos. By the late 04c the Lu Confucians in particular had become the antiwar party in court politics.
The fighting unit of the new style army, which was fully realized only in the 04c, was an infantry company of 70 men with one command chariot. Tactics of maneuver and deception not possible for the smaller army were elaborated, and a group of military experts who were not relatives of the ruler came to exist. The army was still called into being only for specific campaigns, but once in being, it could exert much more pressure on an enemy state than the older force could do. This is the situation reflected in the Sundz and later texts, with their emphasis on the costs of campaigns, and on tactical frugality in actual combat. Halfway through the period, cavalry, with its still greater potential for rapid maneuver, was introduced from the steppe. The sword replaced the bow as the principal weapon of the regular army, and chariot driving and archery increasingly became stylized accomplishments rather than first-line military skills. The business of killing became more technically efficient, and conquest rather than mere victory became the goal of military operations.
In civil government also, there was a marked trend toward larger structures, and to greater professionalism in those holding office in them. The greater numbers of bureaucrats assisted the emergence of a bureaucratic ethos. The new positions were largely filled by what the Analects calls "little people," with skills of technique and persuasion, but lacking the integrity ethic of the warrior. Lateral relationships developed at court and elsewhere in society, at the expense of the vertical relationships typical of the earlier period. Friendship, for example, came to be acknowledged as a social form, whereas the early Analects still speaks with approval of those who maintain strict formality toward colleagues even after years of association in office.
Among cultural changes which may be related to the greater incorporation of the larger population into the state are the new emphasis on family morality, a greater visibility (in the high culture texts) of elements from popular religion, and the appearance in the court vocabulary of new words which may in part be remnants of the non-Chinese languages of the old subject populations. The ritual culture of which inscribed bronze vessels were a part seems to have suffered a marked eclipse. The Mician movement represents the rise of a significantly organized group with no roots in the old elite ethos, and in fact challenging that ethos as socially wasteful and bureaucratically nonfunctional. The Micians also became associated with specialists in defensive warfare, whose purpose was to slow or stop the process of conquest of small states by larger ones. The military manuals themselves testify to their considerable success in this purpose.
The social broadening involved in staffing the larger state bureaucracy involved the spread of literacy. This gave rise in the middle 04c to an unprecedented public exchange among rival theoreticians of state and society, traditionally called the Hundred Schools, which was not mediated by appearance at a court and before a ruler (though those forms were still significant), but through direct mutual exchange of writings. By the 03c, literacy had reached the servile population, and the reactionary primitivist movements, which arose as the process of conquest and consolidation reached new levels of success and suffering, also expressed themselves in written form (echoes of such views are preserved in the Jwangdz).
Trade grew greatly, and was noticed and in large part co-opted by the new style state. A merchant class was delimited in Chi, complete with military exemption and social restrictions. Supervised markets appeared. Luxury was no longer confined to the court of the ruler, but spread also to the mansions of the successful. Currency appeared, shortly after its introduction in West Eurasia, and trading blocs of several states became the significant economic units. A lively trade with the steppe also developed, and various export wares were produced in quantity for that market. Silver, previously absent in the art of the Jou states, was introduced from the steppe for both export and domestic markets. Trade in other directions is less abundantly documented, but probably existed at a lower level. Agricultural schedules were closely regulated by the state, to maximize both food and silk production. Increasingly intensive agriculture led to greater ecological pressure (the overgrazing of uplands is vividly portrayed in MC 6A8), and the further reduction of animal protein in the common diet. A proposal by the late Mencian economists, to utilize irrigation waterways for fish cultivation, appears not to have been widely taken up,
With the absorption of the former indigenous population, the overthrow of the small non-Jou states within the Jou area, and the granting of Jou surnames to the few large but culturally non-Jou states, a new perception emerged in which a center zone of "Sinitic" (Hwa/Sya) culture was seen as surrounded, and threatened, by a periphery of non-Sinitic cultures and polities. This "embattled center" model gave rise to such terms as jung-gwo (the "Central States"), which are typical of Warring States rhetoric, and common in the Dzwo Jwan, but are unknown in, and are seemingly contrary to the reality of, the Spring and Autumn centuries. The growing hostility with the northern border peoples, expressing itself in increasingly hostile form on both sides, was to remain a theme of all later Chinese history. Despite these tensions, long-distance trade continued to grow, and Chinese traders had certainly reached the entrepot of Bactria by the 04c. Scraps and echoes of foreign ideas filtering back over these probably tenuous trade routes had a stimulating effect on many areas of Warring States thought.
Though novelty thus characterized many aspects of Warring States life, there was a countervailing tendency for advocates of new ideas to justify them by ancient precedents, real or imputed. The practice of forging texts for citation in the resulting authentication wars lent a special quality to the period's intertextual dialogue. The Mencians famously complained of some of the more obviously forged Shu documents. One result is that modern historians of the Warring States are forced to interpret with extreme care a body of surviving documents whose major purpose was not to document reality, but to counterfeit and reconceptualize it. A leading feature of the thought trend of the time was the linearization of traditions previously perceived as parallel, or as successive but contrasting. The addition of five alleged Shang hymns to the Jou-culture poems supposedly preserved in the Shr corpus is one of the more dramatic examples of this tendency. The social changes of the 04c itself were projected back into the Dzwo Jwan account of the preceding Spring and Autumn period, thus obscuring for later readers the true contrasts between the two periods.
All lectures and abstracts posted on this site are Copyright © by their authors.
24 Sept 2000 / Contact The Project / Exit to Lectures Page
