KEIGHTLEY, David N. "Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How it Became Chinese." In Heritage of China. Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, edited by Paul S. ROPP, 15-54. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
 

THE ULTIMATE QUESTION

The ultimate question is, Why did early China develop in these particular ways? Why did its values and cultural style differ from those of the ancient Near East or ancient Greece? Speculation is tempting.

First, the great abundance of Neolithic sites in China suggests greater population density than in Mesopotamia and Greece, even at this early date. If this impression is confirmed by subsequent excavations and by statistical analysis, we may conclude that Chinese experience would have been more "peopled" and that such "peopling" is congruent with a less individualistic, more group-oriented social ethic.

Second, one can speculate that the Chinese environment, which encouraged such population growth, together with the population growth itself, helped to set the basic mood of the culture. If one can relate the trusting and self-confident mood of the ancient Egyptians to the benevolence of the Nile valley, and the pessimism and anxiety of the ancient Mesopotamians or ancient Greeks to the comparative harshness and uncertainty of their environment, then one may argue that the comparatively favorable Neolithic climate in China would have encouraged a characteristic optimism about the human condition. The agrarian nature of the civilization also suggests that the characteristic dependence on superiors was related to the inability to move away from coercive leaders once one’s labor had been invested in clearing the land and rendering it fertile.

Third, the nonpluralistic nature of early Chinese culture is a trait of great significance for which we should try to account. I have noted the relatively undifferentiated character of the early cities. We may further note the lack of significant foreign invasions and the absence of any pluralistic national traditions; the challenging linguistic and cultural contrast that the markedly different Sumerian and Akkadian traditions presented to the inhabitants of early Mesopotamia, for example, was simply not present for the early Chinese literati. Also, to the degree that the trading activities of merchants and the value placed on them in Mesopotamia and Greece can be explained by their relatively resource-poor hinterlands, then private merchants would have been less powerful in China because they would have been less needed. In this case geography may have played a role. Because the major rivers in north and central China—the Yellow, the Huai, and the Yangtze—flow from west to east rather than along a north-south axis, trade, to the extent that it followed the river valleys, would have generally been between regions in the same latitude whose crops and other natural products would have been similar; the distinctive ecogeographical zones in China are those of north and south, not east and west.

In this view the market economy would not have had the strategic value in China that it had in other parts of the world. A significant proportion of Chinese trade in early historical times, in fact, seems to have been tribute trade—reciprocal or redistributive in character, political in function, and dealing in high-cost, luxury items reserved for the elites, who controlled the merchants by sumptuary regulations and by coopting them as necessary into the administrative bureaucracy. The lack of an inland sea like the Mediterranean, the absence of rocky shores and good harbors along much of the north and central China coast, the absence of major trading partners across the China Sea to provide cultural as well as economic stimuli, and the presence of deserts and mountains separating north China from Central Asia, would have further encouraged the noncommercial, agrarian bias of the early Chinese city and state and the self-confidence of its isolated, indigenous culture.

These considerations, which are basically geographic, suggest that characteristically Chinese formulations of property and legal status would have developed in a culture where economic power was primarily agrarian power. Although there is no early evidence to support Karl Wittfogel’s view of an agromanagerial despotism running the state’s essential water-control works, one can nevertheless see that wealth in the early state would have depended less on control of land—there was probably a surplus—and more on control of a labor force that could clear that land and make it productive. Social control—originally motivated and legitimated by religious and kinship ties—rather than technological or military control, would have been the key to political success. Access to lineage support, ancestral power, and divinatory reassurance would have been more important and more inheritable than mere claims on unpeopled, and thus unworkable, property.

Speculations of this sort encourage us to seek far still earlier, more "ecological," more geopolitical, more material explanations for the origins of Chinese culture. They do not, however, satisfactorily explain why early Chinese culture took the precise forms that it did. That question, in fact, unless we narrow its scope, is unanswerable because cultures are to a large extent self-producing, the products of a virtually infinite combination of interacting factors. Many of these factors are mental and many of them are unidentifiable in the archaeological or early historical record. To put the matter another way, with the exception of the most basic precultural factors, such as climate and geography, which can only provide the most general of answers, there is nothing but dependent variables. It is truer to what we understand of cultural development— and truer, perhaps, to Chinese than to traditional Western approaches to explanation—to think in terms of the gradual coevolution of many factors rather than of a few prime movers.

Because we cannot explain "everything," universal laws of development with a specificity sufficient to explain the genesis of Chinese, or any other, culture must elude us.