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.
 

What then do we mean by "Chinese" from the Neolithic to the early imperial age in the Han? Impressionistic though any attempt to define a worldview or cultural style must be, it may be suggested that "Chinese" referred in part to a cultural tradition permeated by the following features (listed, on the basis of the above discussion, in no order of causal priority):

1. Hierarchical social distinctions—as revealed by opulent Late Neolithic, by the high status of the Bronze Age elites both in this life and in the next, and by the human sacrifices demanded, both in blood and in obligation, by those elites.

2. Massive mobilization of labor—as revealed by the early Bronze Age city walls, the royal Shang tombs, the industrial scale of Shang bronze-casting , and the large-scale

public works, such as the long walls and tombs of imperial times.

3. An emphasis on the group rather than the individual—expressed in the impersonality and generality of artistic and literary representation and generated and validated by a religion of ancestor worship that stressed the continuity of the lineage and defined the individual in terms of his role and status in the system of sacrifice and descent.

4. An emphasis on ritual in all dimensions of life—seen in Neolithic mortuary cults, seen in the emphasis on ritual practice revealed by the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang, and in the classical cult treatises of the Eastern Zhou and Han.

5. An emphasis on formal boundaries and models—as revealed by the constraints involved in rammed-earth construction, by the use of molds in Neolithic ceramic technology and in the bronze technology that evolved from it, by the dictatorial design system of the bronze decor, by the use of models in both bronze technology and social philosophy, and by the great stress on social discipline and order in ethics and cosmology.

6. An ethic of service, obligation, and emulation—consider the burials of accompaniers-in-death and human victims in Neolithic and Shang times, the elevation of sage emperors and culture heroes whb were generally administrators rather than actors, the motivations of Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s assassin-retainers, and the obligations and unquestioning confidence that the princely man might engender. The endurance of this ethic is dramatically expressed by the army of some seven thousand life-sized terra-cotta soldiers, buried ca. 210 B.C., proud and confident as they accompanied the First Emperor of China in death.

7. Little sense of tragedy or irony—witness the evident belief, well developed even in the Neolithic, in the continuity of some form of life after death. Witness, too, the general success and uncomplicated goodness of legendary heroes and the understanding of human action as straightforward in its consequences. Confucian optimism about the human condition was maintained even in the face of Confucius’s own failure to obtain the political successes that he needed to justify his mission. The optimism, both moral and epistemological, was a matter of deep faith rather than of shallow experience.