Introduction
Following their defeat of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–c. 1045 bceFootnote 1) of Early China, the royal clan of the Zhou established the Zhou Dynasty—the longest dynastic period in Chinese history. Lasting from the eleventh to the third centuries bce, it saw the establishment of key pillars of what would later become known as “Chinese” identity and culture—including the birth of concepts like the Mandate of Heaven, the philosophies of Ruism (Confucianism) and Daoism, and the rise of state structures which would grow into the Chinese imperial system— persisting in some form or other until its collapse in the early twentieth century. While each of these factors has been and continues to be extensively studied, one particular factor of Zhou history remains undervalued in the magnitude of its influence on later developments. The collapse of Zhou royal power in the eighth century bce and the ensuing collapse of the religious and political world order they embodied subsequently resulted in a political, social, and cultural situation that is, to my knowledge, nearly unique in history and which has serious implications for how we ought to interpret the period. Acknowledging the fraught discourse around the term “colonial” in the study of Early China, I label this unique situation as a “colonizer’s diaspora.” By this I mean that the foundations of the “Western” Zhou state (∼1045–771), the regional statelets of China’s Central Plain located east of the Zhou heartland, suddenly found themselves cut off from their colonial motherland.Footnote 2 Postcolonial and diasporic perspectives applied to understanding the conditions of these states can help to explain the cultural development of these polities. Following the terminological categories established by Robin Cohen, the experience of many of the Central Plain polities initially fit the category of having been an “Imperial Diaspora” (diasporas such as white Canadians in the British Empire, where a powerful polity sends out settlers to acquire lands outside of a homeland) before suddenly taking on key dynamics of “Victim Diaspora” (such as the Jewish Diaspora, wherein communities are scattered and forced to reckon with a kind of cultural dispossession) without the communities involved actually moving anywhere.Footnote 3 In this article, I will show how several transmitted texts and inscriptions of Early China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (collectively spanning from 771–221 bce, with the transition from one period to the other occurring in the fifth century) display both the concerns of colonizers and those associated with disruptive events that create victim diasporas. In so doing, I will open a new avenue for the study of Early China by the application of sociological theories long developed and applied in other areas, allowing greater insight into the concerns that are reflected in received texts from the Zhou Dynasty. This will allow for revisions to the interpretations of philosophical texts and provide further factors for understanding interstate behavior, though the examples I provide in this article merely outline the possibilities of this new interpretation of Zhou history. As a secondary result, this new reading will add complexity to Cohen’s categories of diasporic experience by demonstrating a case whereby one form of diaspora partially transitions into another form.
To do this, I will first go over the relevant theoretical framework of postcolonial theory and diaspora studies to establish known patterns of cultures in diasporic situations. I will clarify exactly how one can conceive of the Zhou polities in the Central Plain as “colonies.” I will outline features of cultural disruption apparent in the creation of known victim diasporas, and will then show how the Western Zhou collapse can be conceived of as a cultural disruption of comparable significance for those polities which experienced it. I will then point out numerous cases wherein Zhou literary expressions contained signs and indicators of a diasporic mentality of the shared culture producing those works. Lastly, I will briefly explain what the consequences of this new reading of Eastern Zhou (771–256) texts entail for understanding the works of the period.
Postcolonial Theory and Diaspora Studies
Diaspora studies have come a long way from their origins. The word “diaspora,” a Greek term derived from a word meaning “scattering,” was first attested in the third century bce in the Septuagint (the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) to describe a divinely ordained scattering of a people across the world as punishment. From its origin onwards, it was used virtually exclusively to describe the situation of contemporary/modern Jewish communities scattered far and wide and separated from their homeland.Footnote 4 From this point until the twentieth century ce, the term was primarily religious.Footnote 5 With the rise of postcolonial frameworks of analysis, the inherent link between colonialism and diasporic identities entailed a constituent growth of diasporic studies in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 6 The term “diaspora” itself was generally expanded in these studies, firstly to Greeks, then Armenians, the Irish, Africans, and Palestinians—all groups with scattered populations due to highly disruptive and traumatic historical events.Footnote 7 The interplay between imperial activities and the subjugation and scattering of ethnic groups and the consequences of such dynamics for group identities provided the impetus for numerous and continuing studies of empire and imperial consequences in the last several centuries.Footnote 8
In the last thirty years, however, the “diasporic concept” has exploded in relevance with the expansion of the concept to include all scattered peoples for a much wider variety of reasons, including mercantile or colonial diasporas.Footnote 9 Significantly for our purposes, certain forms of diaspora de-emphasize a supposed homeland, maintaining features of diasporic identity but largely without the spatial focuses of other diasporic types.Footnote 10 For purposes of clarity, this article makes use of Brubaker’s three core criteria of defining a diaspora—the fact of dispersion, cultural orientation towards home, and an emphasis on maintaining group coherency in the face of forces acting to erode it.Footnote 11
What is relevant about such a definition for the study of Zhou history as diasporic? This category is quite broad, and I will demonstrate below how each of those factors were in play in Zhou Dynasty China, but it may be helpful to continue to specify and delineate forms of diaspora before proceeding. Robin Cohen has subcategorized diasporic communities into five ideal types, of which two are relevant for the purposes of this study and must be here introduced: the diasporic modes known as “victim” and “imperial.”Footnote 12 As noted above, the origins of diaspora studies constitute what are now understood as “victim diasporas.” That is to say, populations were—and are—moved largely or entirely against their will to new locations they may or may not have had any hand in choosing. Victim diasporas have several features in common, summarized by Cohen as consisting of the recollection of being forced from home becoming deeply embedded in the folk memory of the diasporic group, such that “restoring the homeland or even returning there becomes an important focus for social mobilization,” i.e., the loss of connection to home creates a dynamic within cultural discourse centered around that loss being made whole or made good.Footnote 13 The second such category of diaspora relevant to our study is that of the “imperial diaspora.” The term essentially refers to settlement colonization, or as Cohen summarized it: “Diasporas by design.”Footnote 14 For instance, British emigration to colonial territories was largely facilitated by the state or organizations closely adjunct to the state. People moved largely but often not entirely voluntarily to lands formerly held by others.Footnote 15 Many modern European colonial efforts effected this kind of diaspora, leading to diasporic populations of Europeans with clear homeward facing links and strong conceptions of the self against the native other. It must be pointed out that homeward facing links in cases of such detachment were emphatically not restricted to individual expressions of “longing for home,” but could often be seen at the institutional level.Footnote 16 These diasporic populations displayed not just cultural, but explicitly political and economic orientations firmly directed towards the colonizing motherland. Cohen notes that the British imperial diaspora is gradually fading away in tandem with Britain’s greatly diminishing role in maintaining the motherland–colony structures required for imperial diasporic cultures to exist.Footnote 17 In this and most modern European cases of imperial diaspora, one finds a gradual rather than sudden decrease in intensity of colonially charged diasporic links, fading gradually as the institutions of empire that drove them diminish in potency. Elements of both of these models apply to the experience of Zhou regional states to differing degrees and at different times.
It is important to note, accordingly, that just as the notion of diaspora is now understood as broad, with varying classifications and features, it is equally the case that diagnosing a society as diasporic is not a matter of finding a singular ‘silver bullet’ in their practices or rhetoric. Indeed, nearly every single piece of evidence that I will raise in this work can be individually isolated and shown to be present in non-diasporic societies as well. However, one does not diagnose a diaspora from multiple elements devoid of context; other than the fact of dispersion, there is no single factor that is intrinsic to diasporic identities and found in no other kind of cultural identity. Like diagnosing an ailment, one works with the symptoms as a collection, because any individual symptom may be evidence of several disparate conditions.Footnote 18 It is the presence of multiple different symptoms together that makes the diagnosis clearer. Thus, where hostility to “foreign” influence may arise from diasporic cultural concern over a cultural identity’s self-preservation, it may equally indicate nativism, or even racism, however motivated.Footnote 19 That a culture has endured catastrophe and shows signs of that catastrophe in its textual remains does not necessarily make it diasporic either—the scars of World War II run deep in Russia, but trauma is not intrinsically diasporic. Golden-age thinking and nostalgia are apparent in many diasporas pining for earlier states of being, but longing for a real or imagined state of being of the past is not only to be found in diasporic societies: the cliché of American pining for the 1950s is proof enough of this.Footnote 20 However, the Jewish diaspora, the concept’s Ur-example, is generally identified by the mixture of these features.Footnote 21 To aid in clarity, I have attached footnotes to the discussions wherein objections may be raised as to whether or not a given cultural dynamic is diasporic. Dispersion is a necessary precondition, but diaspora is to be recognized by its manifestations taken collectively. The specifics of these manifestations, their contexts, and the unique nuance of their expressions, allow one to classify which kind of diaspora one is actually dealing with. As I show in this article, the boundaries between different kinds of diasporas are at times blurred, and it is precisely the blurred lines of the Zhou diasporic experience that I posit has led to this experience being overlooked as diasporic in the first place. The Zhou cultural practices I identify as diasporic reflect attachment to an identity and a time rather than being entirely predicated on a lost homeland, aligning with Avtar Brah’s idea that for some diasporic communities, “home” can be a mythic and desired place where the state of being associated with it is more prominent than geographic location.Footnote 22 Robin Cohen’s concept of deterritorialized diasporas, seen in groups like the Afro-Caribbeans and Roma, highlights how cultural identity can persist without a direct connection to a homeland.Footnote 23
As I will now show, the diaspora experienced by the Zhou regional states was such that an imperial diaspora was established in the Western Zhou period, which saw state authority send rulers and settler groups that were, in effect, colonists, into the Central Plain of northern China. This imperial diaspora then took on qualities and dynamics of victim diaspora after the collapse of Zhou royal power at the end of the Western Zhou period. This transition in circumstances resulted in a unique admixture of power, culture, and identity essential in the development of Eastern Zhou, and by extension, later Chinese civilization.Footnote 24
Before proving the diasporic nature of Eastern Zhou culture, I will first show how the Central Plain states existed in a colonial relationship with their government. Before even that, however, a clear definition of “colonialism” must be provided. It is not the aim of this article to dive into the fraught disputes as to the exact definition of “colonialism,” which would require a much larger study across a wide variety of cultures and time periods. Accordingly, I will base my approach on Ronald Horvarth’s definitional work, whereby, for our purposes, colonialism is a form of intergroup domination in which a significant number of settlers migrate permanently from a colonizing homeland to a colony, with “domination” being the control of one group over the territory and/or behavior of another group.Footnote 25
(How) Was the Western Zhou a Colonial Regime?
This article is not the first to argue that the Western Zhou state was a colonizing power—this point has been made elsewhere, though as yet has failed to garner significant traction as a means of understanding Early China.Footnote 26 However, in spite of numerous observations and remarks as to its colonial activities, postcolonial-studies-informed approaches to the Zhou Dynasty have remained few and far between.Footnote 27 The aim of what follows is merely to show that colonialism is a valid framework to understand the Zhou regime in the Central Plain, in order to demonstrate that an imperial diaspora is itself a valid framework for understanding the Zhou settlements throughout that region. In so doing, I aim not to propose a complete alternative to the extensive list of conceptions of Western Zhou state structure, but to provide a further angle by which their “state” activities may be seen.Footnote 28
The conquest of the Shang polity by King Wu of Zhou (r. 1046–1043) was rapidly followed by the breakout and suppression of the Wu Geng Rebellion 武庚之亂 of 1042–1039, causing a tremendous shift in strategy for the newly conquered territories of the nascent Zhou state.Footnote 29 To solve the problem of controlling the eastern conquests, the Zhou authorities decided on what is known as the fengjian 封建 system. In this system, royal clan members and worthy vassals were recognized by the Zhou king and sent out to conquered lands with populations of Zhou subjects who were given to the enfeoffed individual as part of the land award, made subservient to that individual and their progeny in perpetuity unless the Zhou king decreed otherwise.Footnote 30 As Li Feng has argued, it is important to note that it was only after a serious revolt against Zhou authority in conquered lands that colonies were introduced.Footnote 31 The specific contexts of each colonial foundation likely saw varying approaches to the task of control and extent of domination, but, in Yan, for example, the colonial population remained materially distinguishable from local groups it controlled through marriages and selective cultural integration.Footnote 32 Some local groups even resisted violently.Footnote 33 Moreover, some of the colonial populations sent out included traditional allies of the defeated Shang regime; the impetus of sending them to distant locales under the control of loyal Zhou-aligned lineages and mixed into groups of colonists including Zhou-aligned peoples suggests a mentality wherein colonial foundations reinforced Zhou domination of both colonized and colonist alike.Footnote 34
With this, it is already clear that the Zhou were a colonizing people according to the definition of colonialism stated above: the Zhou conquered some peoples and lands, and, in an effort to dominate them more effectively, sent out a large number of settlers and loyalist elites into the newly conquered lands. However, for the purpose of arguing for diasporic impacts of the severing of this colonial relationship, we must still seek to understand the nature of the colonial relationship between the Zhou government and their colonial states.
At the elite level, then, this distribution of land allotments paired with administrative authority can be seen as a process of extending the geographic reach of the Zhou royal household. Many of these settlements, given to direct relatives of the king, thus can be understood as an extension of royal clan power to new lands. Despite the fact that exact population demographics of the Central Plain in this period are unknown, it is clear that settlements of Zhou transplants existed alongside numbers of settlements of local non-Zhou natives.Footnote 35 The rulers of these colonial establishments and the people taken with them as settlers together formed the guoren 國人, or “people of the capital.” They were distinguished from the yeren 野人, “people of the countryside,” who lacked the close ritual ties that bound the colonial settlement to the Zhou regime and accordingly were cultural outsiders.Footnote 36
In 771, a people identified in Western Zhou bronze inscriptions as the Xianyun 獫狁 invaded the Zhou homeland in league with some rebellious vassals.Footnote 37 Their alliance defeated the Zhou army, killed King You of Zhou (r. 781–771), and drove out his heir, King Ping of Zhou (r. 770–720) as well as numbers of his more loyal vassals, and overran the Guanzhong plains, the heartland of the Zhou culture and royal authority.Footnote 38 The military and political power of the Zhou king was effectively shattered and, as I will now show, the impact of this event greatly shifted the cultural developments of the Zhou colonial settlement-states in the Central Plains.Footnote 39 The fall of Zhou rendered these polities, in effect, colonies of a suddenly evaporated power, constituted a sudden, disruptive and severe injury to the body of state and society that transmitted texts described in terms of severe emotional distress. Admittedly, it is correct that the central states were gradually moving away from Zhou royal control, and that 771 did not necessarily mark an immediate change in day-to-day occurrence for the courts of the Zhou settlements of the Central Plain. However, this should not be overstated: these states clearly saw value in their identity attachments to the Zhou court, even—or perhaps especially—when it was no longer capable of marshalling hard power to protect them or meddle in their affairs directly.Footnote 40 To gauge the impact of this sudden homeland collapse on these colonial Zhou states, their prior relations to the royal realm of the Zhou domain in the Guanzhong plain must be properly understood, or else the depth of consequence of this disruptive experience will not be fully appreciated. One immediately runs into the problem, however, that evidence for the Western Zhou period is generally poor, and outside of bronze inscriptions, subject to potentially significant emendation and alteration in later eras. Working around these limitations insofar as possible, I will show in specific dynamics how colonial discourse is in fact appropriate to describing these polities and their relations with the Western Zhou central government.
First, I will note that the colonial dynamics between settler and indigenous groups in the Western Zhou context have been studied already by Yan Sun.Footnote 41 My own article, in focusing on the relationship of colonist groups to the homeland, does not engage the question of the colonial relationship to the colonized natives, but it is important to note that such relations were maintained. Sun has examined various sectors of the Zhou northern frontier through analysis of archaeological evidence and has shown how local groups cooperated with or resisted Zhou colonization.Footnote 42 The Zhou colonial population of Yan, meanwhile, asserted its Zhou ancestry in material culture over the centuries of the Western Zhou and early Spring and Autumn period, even when political contact appears to have been severed for a time between Yan and the Zhou court.Footnote 43 Sun, writing on Yan’s fate after its rescue at the hands of Duke Huan of Qi 齊桓公 (r. 685–643) in 664, observes that, for Yan at least, “the aggression of the Rong and Di prompted the formation of a shared identity among Zhou regional states and the acceptance of Yan into the newly formed Huaxia cultural and political circle.”Footnote 44 This is to say, the cultural disruptor that caused the Western Zhou collapse (foreign invasions) led to the tightening of a group identity involving the colonial states of the central plain. The unique dynamics of this colonial identity-tightening are what I identify as diasporic and discuss below. But before that, I suggest that Sun’s work, based primarily in archaeological interpretation and mostly around the northern Zhou state of Yan, can be supplemented. We can go further in drawing out the paradigms of colonial relationships and structures in the Western Zhou.
First, Lei Jinhao has recently reconstructed the route and features of the so-called “Zhou Dao” 周道, a royal road supposedly built during the Western Zhou period to facilitate military and aristocratic access to the capital from their holdings and colonial settlements in the Central Plain, and maintained at the expense of local vassal settlements.Footnote 45 Admittedly, Lei’s specific reconstruction is based primarily in close reading of later textual evidence from sources like the Zuo zhuan, and archaeological evidence for the road is scant, though sufficient to confirm its existence and at least loosely correlated with how it is described in later texts.Footnote 46 However, beyond transmitted texts, that the Western Zhou government took care in the use of road networks is clear even from excavated bronze inscriptions.Footnote 47 If Lei’s reconstruction of its functionality and features (based admittedly on later texts like the Zuo zhuan) is at all close to correct, then the system should be distinguished from well-known Roman roadworks in that the former was never intended for a mass “public” use.Footnote 48 Lei argues that the road incorporated ferry systems and rest stops which were intended only for the use of Zhou elites, who were expected to return at times to the Zhou capital.Footnote 49 This road should not, however, be thought of as primarily a tool of economic extraction, for, as Maria Khayutina has pointed out, “the larger Western Zhou polity embracing the territories of the regional states never represented an integral economic entity.”Footnote 50 Economic considerations in Zhou colonial frameworks are nevertheless indicated in copper and salt extractions from colonized regions for the benefit of the royal household.Footnote 51 These extractions may have formed a kind of tribute brought to the Zhou king in the Guanzhong.Footnote 52
However, beyond economic colonialism, the Zhou were much more clearly involved in military colonialism. This is in itself not unique; military colonialism involving directed settlement of politically or militarily sensitive locations was practiced elsewhere in other times, such as the activities of Alexander the Great (356–323) and his successors in Asia.Footnote 53 Regional rulers were expected to return to the presence of the king for confirmations of their loyalty and to report on the execution of instructed tasks.Footnote 54 Khayutina has pointed out a transition that occurred over the course of the Western Zhou, whereby Zhou kings began to travel themselves on tours to visit rulers of the regional states.Footnote 55 The justification for these expensive trips was that meetings with regional rulers functioned as confirmations of the king’s authority in circumstances where the regional lords may have been increasingly hesitant to make the trip to the Guanzhong themselves. In effect, elite trips of this sort whether to the king or by the king acted as confirmations of the political hierarchy in conditions where regional rulers were effectively autonomous. In a colonialist reading of the Western Zhou, these visits facilitated the maintenance of the colonial hierarchy, and it is not necessarily the case that the homeland was the legitimating source of power, but rather, the person of the king themselves.Footnote 56 This is not actually the obstacle to a colonial reading that it may appear to be; comparison with cases contemporary and modern reveals that colonialism could very much be based around (and emanate from) the figure of a singular monarch. Alexander’s settler colonialism, though on a smaller scale, functioned similarly.Footnote 57 While not based on settler-colonialism, the Congo was legally understood as a colony in the personal possession of Leopold II of Belgium.Footnote 58 Conceiving of the Zhou Dao along similar lines allows us to understand it as a kind of colonial infrastructure, in that it facilitated the colonial relationship of its constructors and users. Indeed, when the power of the Zhou king collapsed and these regional states were left to their own devices, the royal road lost its integrity—where once there had been a universal carriage gauge, this universality was abandoned, and access to segments of road became politicized.Footnote 59 In effect, what had been previously more like a circulatory system of arteries became more akin to a link of chains.
Secondly, the primary engine of the elite memory culture of these regional states was located in the Zhou heartland. Much work has been done on the significance of Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, whereby elite Zhou individuals would commemorate decrees of the Zhou king through the commissioning expensive ritual bronzeware inscribed with the words or context of the royal decree.Footnote 60 What is significant here, however, is that these bronzes were so uniform in their craftsmanship that formerly it was thought that they may have all come from a single casting hub in the Zhou capital region.Footnote 61 While this view has been updated, many bronzes indicate an intense coordination of elite material cultural production between regional states and the capital area.Footnote 62 This would mean that Zhou elites commemorated their achievements through interaction with the capital and its workshops, confirming a kind of homeland connection for distant Zhou elites in the Central Plain. These vessels must also be seen as socio-political tools which bound servants to the Zhou king through the central role played by capital workshops in their casting.Footnote 63 While the majority of bronzes were not inscribed, the addition of inscriptions would have been another layer binding production to the king’s court. These commemorations in the form of ritual vessels were generally placed in lineage shrines at the heart of a Zhou-aligned polity and in tombs as burial items.Footnote 64 Of the inscribed bronzes, several are unlikely to have been intended to be read by humans (as opposed to spirits), with inscriptions cast on the interior and thus illegible as far as an observer would be concerned, though others, like the San shi pan 散氏盤, with its inscription prominent on the face of an open plate-like shape, clearly are meant to be displayed and read by the living.Footnote 65 Further, the possession of and access to these vessels was a matter of no small ritual importance in the ensuing Spring and Autumn Period, where improper possession of these items was seen as an affront to the normative order of the aristocratic hierarchy.Footnote 66 In effect, these cast objects confirmed elite linkage to the royal house, and in cases where inscriptions were legible, these functioned similarly to inscriptions in Greek temples.Footnote 67 However, the mere possession and display of one of these items, regardless of the visibility of an inscription, should be considered as a kind of creation of elite memory culture, as its mere existence implies key links of the holder to the elite world of the Zhou royalty. The loss of access to this central hub for the production of elite cultural memory and hierarchical legitimation led to regional deviations in the forms of bronzes throughout the regional states.Footnote 68 Moreover, it entailed that a key form of ritual activity (going to the capital and casting bronzes) for Zhou elites had been interrupted, and that the king’s power (expressed in the act of giving out bronze to be cast) had been significantly diminished.
There may even have been a Zhou cultural-political preference for individuals from the Zhou homeland over those who had origins in the Central Plain. The Shi jing poem “Da dong” 大東 (The Great East), part of the Court Songs (Ya 雅) usually dated to the later part of the Western Zhou period, recounts the condition of abusive exploitation that the central government in the west wielded over the eastern states.Footnote 69 Taking an aggrieved tone, the author of the poem writes in first person of weeping (潸焉出涕 “weepingly flow out tears”) and heartache (使我心疚 “causes my heart desolation”), noting the resource poverty of eastern states connected with higher standards of living and ingratitude on the part of those from the west, before bluntly exclaiming:
The poem expresses deep dissatisfaction as it elaborates on the lopsided economic relationship between the east and west from an eastern perspective. The extent of the exploitation described in this poem can be read in two ways. First, the author of the poem no doubt believed that the eastern states were suffering economic hardship linked to the demands of their distant western government.Footnote 71 The echoes of this situation with other settler–colonial conditions are clear: a distant region has been filled with settlers who are culturally akin to the population of a homeland, but their well-being is seen as less important than populations of the homeland, and they are economically exploited accordingly.
One might at first seek to look to economic extraction from settler colonies as practiced in New Spain and the American colonies as a model by which this was done, but this would be in error. As has been mentioned above, the relationship between colony and colonizer in the Zhou realm may well not have been primarily economic in nature—but, it was definitely heavily military-political. Accordingly, what are we to make of economic poverty in the context of east–west differentiation? I follow Ma Yinqin and suggest that the poem was not referring to resource extraction as practiced by European colonizing powers, but perhaps, tied to demands made by the presence of the Zhou king and his entourage during a royal tour or military campaign.Footnote 72 To engage in a bit of speculation, perhaps the poem refers to the reign of King Li of Zhou (r. 877–841), whose transmitted reputation indicates a preference for recklessly profiteering off of his subjects to the extent that the regional lords no longer came to his court.Footnote 73 In any case, the basic premise of geographic distance, subordination, and oppression shine through in “Da dong,” informing us that not just the natives, but even the colonists, held critical perspectives on their condition.
Secondly, I suggest that the poem indicates a difference in standing between those Zhou elites of the heartland in Guanzhong compared to those in the settlement states. On the assumption that the author of this poem is not a commoner but an elite of some capacity, this poem should not be read along exclusively class lines—this is not just a matter of the rich exploiting the poor, but of one area exploiting another.Footnote 74 The repeated complaints about the treatment of the author at the hands of the elites of the west suggests that Zhou aristocrats of the colonial region were of a lesser status than those of the homeland. One might even slightly stretch the reading of the line regarding employment to indicate a preference among Zhou elites that personnel for higher or more rewarding posts be sourced from the Zhou heartland rather than from the local population.Footnote 75 Indeed, it is not beyond reason that non-ruling elites of the heartland would have been seen as preferable and of higher status than ethnically and culturally identical individuals raised in the eastern settlements.Footnote 76 This would not be a unique dynamic in colonial situations—recall that native Spaniards were given preference over ethnically and culturally fully Spanish criollos men in the social hierarchies of Spain’s eighteenth century ce colonial enterprises, though both were clearly of higher standing than natives and Africans.Footnote 77 One need not introduce racial categorizations to understand this dynamic in the Zhou case.Footnote 78 Instead, the Zhou ruling framework of making the state an extension of the household meant that any individuals in closer proximity to the king were of a higher status by virtue of that proximity alone. Further, where some colonial elites may have once been close kin to Zhou rulers when the dynasty was founded, after several generations, there would necessarily arise a kinship distance among these elites if not actively maintained by marriage ties.Footnote 79 Even the elites of a regional state, if not making regular trips to the Zhou court (and, based on the current distribution of known inscriptions, they were making these trips less often even than the sporadic trips of the rulers of the states), would likely have been viewed as proportionally lesser in importance, at least from the perspective of the colonial governing body embodied in the person of the Zhou king.Footnote 80 This last assertion is unfortunately unprovable on the current evidence. Maria Khayutina, in personal correspondence, summarized the situation, saying that “Given the nature of bronze inscriptions, inscriptions that would directly deal with issues of higher or lower prestige cannot exist.”Footnote 81 Indeed, given Yan Sun’s work showing the varying interactions of Zhou settlements and their neighbors, it is likely that local status and status in the larger Zhou system may not have been always one and the same, and the former could have been achieved by local marriages or activities apart from their direct connections to the larger Zhou state structures.Footnote 82 Regardless, in this system, relations to the ruler formed the basis of stability of the larger political and social apparatus, and closeness to the Zhou king was worthy of celebration. It seems, then, that likelier than not that elites would be, if unable or unwilling to reforge close links with the Zhou royal clan, forced to seek status through other connections or means, or else be diminished in standing in the eyes of their own polity and in the wider Zhou milieu.
Imperial Diaspora and Victim Diaspora?
The trips to the Zhou heartland, the centrality of the Zhou capital region in the creation of a memorial culture, the key role of ties to the homeland (or more accurately, ties to the ruling clan through marriage or blood relations) being worthy of celebration, and the basic fact that these regional states relied on the authority of the king for their very reason for being must be taken together. Collectively, they indicate a power dynamic between the Zhou royal administration and the eastern regional settlements that can be called colonial. Accordingly, the transplanted populations of these colonies can be understood as having comprised an imperial diaspora. I have thus shown that the Western Zhou was colonial, and thereby was diasporic as well, but the changes in identity that followed the Western Zhou collapse require exploration as well. With the invasion of the Xianyun in the eighth century bce, the Zhou colonial framework was degraded, with the Zhou king clinging on in a kind of rump state and incapable of exercising the role of geopolitical master through force of arms.
This transition was culturally catastrophic for those who experienced it firsthand, and its remembrance in transmitted texts is comparable with the traumatic experiences that shape victim diaspora identities like those of the ancient Hebrews. Like the Hebrew experience, the fact that the number of individuals who actually experienced the traumatic loss of homeland directly was small is of no consequence to our classification of the experience and its consequences. In the Zhou case, it was an uncertain number of elite families and their servants accompanying the king and his household, while in the Hebrew exile, the number was between 5,000 and 10,000 at most.Footnote 83 The small numbers of people involved have a magnified cultural echo given that these were in both cases literate elites. In a further parallel, those who undergo the experience of dispersion firsthand are not the people as a whole, but a fraction that include these elites. It resulted in similar cultural consequences as well.Footnote 84 The intense emotions around the collapse come to us in certain poems of the Shi jing, such as that of “Zheng yue” 正月 (Mao 192), “Yu wu zheng” 雨無正 (Mao 194), and “Zhao min” 召旻 (Mao 265).Footnote 85 “Zheng yue,” among the longer poems of the Shi jing, exclaims frustration with corrupt governance bringing down the Western Zhou, at one point explicitly laying blame on the infamous temptress Bao Si 褒姒 (fl. late eighth century), which dates the poem to necessarily some time after the 780s.Footnote 86 “Zheng yue” includes numerous first person exclamations of stress and sorrow regarding the situation, including the author lamenting that he was born in such times and expressing at numerous points a deep concern for the welfare of the larger population.Footnote 87 “Yu wu zheng” expresses frustration with corrupt governance and explicitly describes the ruling lineage of Zhou and/or the capital city as “wholly obliterated” (ji mie 既滅).Footnote 88 Its author describes how the strain of it causes him to “weep blood” (qi xue 泣血).Footnote 89 “Zhao min” describes the chaotic conditions of the late Western Zhou, opening with lines exclaiming that “Merciful Heaven overawes with its afflictions/Heaven relentlessly brings down destruction” (旻天疾威、天篤降喪).Footnote 90 The lands of the Zhou are afflicted with famine and disorder, and the author laments that the Zhou king has filled the state official posts with “vile maggots” (maozei 蟊賊), who mislead the state and bring destruction upon it.Footnote 91 The author ends with the frustrated claims that in the past, good ministers would “in a day expand the kingdom a hundred li./Now indeed it diminishes in a day a hundred li” (日辟國百里。今也日蹙國百里).Footnote 92 The tension of bad governance, economic hardship, and state instability would be on their own enough to presume a horrendously stressful experience, and the author speaks of the catastrophe “consuming his body” (災我躬) regarding the situation.Footnote 93 In these and other poems, authors describe conditions towards the end of the Western Zhou period, and we see the emotional burden that living through those events put on the authors (and the broader elite whom they represented). Key to a diasporic understanding of the Zhou experience is a sense of spatial distance to the homeland. While this is not prominent in the poems above, it is very much a factor in others.Footnote 94 Consider “Du ren shi” 都人士 (Mao 225).Footnote 95 “Du ren shi” is an ode to the superior ways of the people of the old Zhou capital, with the author expressing grief at no longer seeing them. While understandable as a love poem, the poem has also been specifically interpreted as a lament over the political chaos bringing an end to the magnificence of the Zhou capital and the distance in both a spatial and temporal sense of that time and place to the author themselves.Footnote 96
The lamentations of these works decrying corrupt government and its catastrophic consequences resonate with memorials to lost homelands and traumatic collapses found in the biblical poetry of Lamentations and Psalms pertaining to the Babylonian Exile.Footnote 97 As the Hebrews are considered the quintessential diaspora, an aside on the context and nature of the Babylonian Exile is called for.
After a series of diplomatic-political intrigues that left the Hebrew kingdom of Judah a client of Babylon, it revolted around 598. The revolt went poorly; Judah was conquered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562) in 597 and the capital of Jerusalem was razed.Footnote 98 An uncertain number (likely between 5,000 and 10,000) of Hebrew elites, including priests and artisans, were forcibly removed in several waves from their homes and sent into exile in Babylon.Footnote 99 They remained there under the power of the Babylonian empire until it was itself conquered by Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530) in 539. Cyrus, seeking to ingratiate subjects to his rule, allowed the Jews to return home and rebuild their society, though those Jews who returned brought with them an understanding of Jewishness that was fundamentally rooted in their diasporic experience, leaving a permanent mark on Jewish identity that persists to this day.Footnote 100
The poetics of bitterness in reaction to these political catastrophes are quite similar between the Zhou and the Hebrews, but before this brief comparison, I will specifically highlight that I am not arguing that the Early Chinese are “just like Hebrews.” The following analyses highlight the distinctions in the Zhou experience sufficiently to show their clear differences. I raise the comparison nevertheless because the Hebrews are the poster-children for diasporic experience, and while distinct, the Zhou experience shows quite a few fundamental similarities, especially when examined in light of the newer approaches to diaspora studies.
The Book of Lamentations recounts at length the destruction of Jerusalem and the seizure of its people and their deportation to Babylon. Jerusalem itself is depicted to be, like its priests and women, “in bitter anguish.”Footnote 101 The cause of the devastation is explicitly identified as deriving from the will of the Hebrew god.Footnote 102 It is laid out that god is bringing catastrophe on Israel because of Israel’s own impiety.Footnote 103 Lamentations 3 speaks to the physical misery endured by those who experienced the events, with the author decrying that God has “made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship.”Footnote 104 Most infamously, Psalm 137 exclaims the bitter misery of exile in Babylon, recounting the destruction of Jerusalem and the declaration that the author will always remember the city, in spite of their present onerous circumstances. It recalls the “day Jerusalem fell,” and already one sees catastrophe turning into remembrance culture with vows such as “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.”Footnote 105 Expressing a deep well of anger and bitterness, the Psalm declares that “Happy is the one who repays you [Babylon] according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”Footnote 106 Without engaging in a full comparison of these Hebrew and Chinese poems, only the following needs to be highlighted for our purposes: First, it is clear that both the descriptions of the fall of the Western Zhou and the destruction of Jerusalem and Babylonian Exile are filled with expressions of highly personal suffering, suggesting that the memory, at least, of these events was similarly infused by long-lasting feelings of duress or even trauma. These works both are included in compilations of texts that would become extremely commonly read in the ensuing eras.Footnote 107 Moreover, it has long been noted that the cultural disruptions introduced by becoming a victim diaspora through the destruction of Jerusalem and Babylonian Exile provided a key impetus for the proliferation of textual production and editing engaged in by literate Hebrews.Footnote 108 That victim diaspora groups often seek to preserve earlier memories or traditions of lost time periods and homelands has been noted above. If, as we have seen, there was a Zhou imperial diaspora created through colonial practices, and there were texts produced that show a level of strain and duress comparable to what created a victim diaspora in the case of the Hebrews, can we understand the Eastern Zhou period as exhibiting some dynamics normally found in a victim diaspora? We must look beyond just expressions of the inciting event and into both the practices of Zhou textuality and the topics of those same texts, whereupon we note the frequency with which Eastern Zhou textuality bears marks of concerns commonly found among diasporic groups.
Diasporic Cultural Expressions of the Zhou
The flight of the Zhou king eastwards preserved the form but not the substance of pre-existing political frameworks and relationships, and the regional states were forced to reckon with a dramatically changed world going forward. Wang Mingke has highlighted how much of the Western Zhou period was “forgotten” by Eastern Zhou sources, including key details like the fact that the “king” of the Western Zhou was one among many thus-titled rulers in Guanzhong instead of a singular figure of unchallenged moral and political authority.Footnote 109 However, the “forgetting” of the past was also a key element in opening a space for creative remembering. Mingke highlights that in several cases, the re-conceptualization of Zhou history could be undertaken opportunistically, such as occurred when the state of Wu 吳 joined the Zhou cultural oikumene partly through an alteration to a pre-existing narrative about the flight of Taibo 泰伯 (∼1150), a Zhou royal lineage scion.Footnote 110 Into the memory space left by this historical amnesia were inserted “remembered” traditions of the Western Zhou that display concerns regarding identity which closely resemble those of diasporic groups. Relevant contemporary concerns were thus attached to events too prominent to be forgotten—including those pertaining to the collapse of the Western Zhou itself.
Judging by Shi jing poems associated with the fall of Zhou, regional lords were actively avoiding rendering aid to the Zhou king, and in such a light, many of these regional lords may not actually have been much aggrieved at the change of circumstances. With the benefit of distance from the situation, however, the distinctive trajectory of Chinese textual transmission preserved the extreme strain and anxiety of the collapse in those Shi jing poems, thus making them a kind of encoded memory for the larger Zhou cultural realm. In Early China, the victim-diasporic mentality grew up over time in reaction to the memory culture around the catastrophic event involved, rather than emerging quickly in conditions of subjugation. Moreover, it did so as a component of the aforementioned “forgetting” of the Western Zhou that took place over the duration of the Spring and Autumn period.
Consider that victim diasporas often display clear tensions related to the maintenance of in-group identity relative to the populations of natives surrounding them.Footnote 111 This is because in such circumstances, questions of intermarriage or cultural assimilation may pose existential risks to subaltern cultural groups. As nominally dependent but in-practice-autonomous polities, the Zhou regional states were not necessarily at an immediate risk of destruction just because the Western Zhou homeland had fallen. Wai-Yee Li has noted that the Zuo zhuan abounds with cases where the rulers of Zhou states intermarry and ally with foreign leaders, become infatuated with foreign styles, and practice other modes of cultural borrowing.Footnote 112 Western Zhou culture had been comfortably syncretic, adopting elements of its Shang predecessor and practicing intermarriage with non-Zhou elites.Footnote 113 After the fall of the Western Zhou, new models of Zhou ethnic identity appear clearest in texts like the Zuo zhuan, whereby proper cultural-ritual customs marked one properly Zhou, while essentially nothing else factored into this identification. Wai-Yee Li has described the cultural attitudes as “an us-versus-them formula in Zuo zhuan (and early Chinese texts in general) [that is] cultural rather than ethnic.”Footnote 114 However, the matter of the actions recorded, and the matter of the attitudes of the text towards those same actions, are in fact two separate things. Due to its compilation likely occurring in the Warring States period, attitudes to events derive from later contexts.Footnote 115
Thus, concerns over preserving cultural unity and togetherness are clearly detectable, though our clearest literary evidence for these attitudes issues from centuries after the collapse of the Western Zhou realm.Footnote 116 The seemingly long time delay of evidence aside, the dynamics by which this attitude developed are again similar to those of the Hebrews during the Babylonian Exile. In the Zhou case, literate elites of the regional states drove a significant shift in the makeup of Zhou identity, while the same dynamic occurred for the Hebrews in Babylon lasting even after their return from Exile. These elites evince clear worries about the preservation of Zhou practices and identities.Footnote 117 As the Warring States period began, these attitudes became further entrenched rather than dissolving. By that era, one’s “Zhou” identity was based on proper cultural–ritual activities, and very little else. As Yuri Pines and I have separately argued, the case of Qin indicates that the lack of proper ritual–cultural activities could remove one from being considered Zhou in the minds of Warring States authors.Footnote 118 Such concerns, as noted above, are known from other victim diasporas, but here they occur without the identity being necessarily under threat from a foreign oppressor.Footnote 119 Instead, the worry derives from a particular understanding of the past that was reached by Zhou ministers and intellectuals over the course of the Eastern Zhou. Intimately familiar with the poems of the Shi jing, and attempting to reckon with the political chaos of their age, a kind of golden-age thinking reached a full growth by the Warring States period. Such revisionism was only made possible by the historical amnesia described above—had memory of the Western Zhou been perfectly transmitted, there would have been little space for reinvention and reimagination of the past. This thinking is obvious in the transmitted sources, which express a belief that the Western Zhou and its precedent states were (at the time of their foundations) morally superior and that the political framework of the current era was neither natural nor just.Footnote 120 It is also the case that both the Hebrews and the early Chinese preserved the clear memory that the disaster that separated their contemporary situation from the imagined superior period was their fault (stemming largely from in-group political misconduct more than blaming the collapses squarely on the evils of the Babylonians or Quanrong, that is), giving a sense of agency to the cultural survivors and reinforcing a sense of necessity for proper actions moving forward.Footnote 121 In using the past as a call to proper conduct in imitation of earlier modes of cultural identity, early Chinese texts such as these are in effect imitating the processes of victim diasporic identity-building. Identities built in this way emphasize the conservation of the ways and means of the earlier, imagined golden age. In this way, dilution or deviation from these norms, especially in the form of cultural integration with foreigners, becomes actively immoral.
Cases of philosophical texts disparaging the value of “local” traditions or customs and insisting on a kind of idealized remembered Zhou standard abound. Zhou identity described in these texts, especially in Ru (“Confucian” or “Classicist”) works, comes across as in this light as a form of high culture restricted to only those few who would intentionally practice it. A clear and influential line of Ru thought embodied in the Xunzi indicated the belief that acting according to emotion or innate tendency was a mark of savagery and baseness, and to be avoided.Footnote 122 This resonates with an anecdote in the Lun yu that depicts Confucius as exclaiming that it took him (and therefore, can be expected to take others) an entire lifetime of study and self-control to act morally without needing to consciously try to do so.Footnote 123 While this indicates that it requires a lifetime of study to become a virtuous person, one need not stop at that interpretation. Remembering that what is morally right in Ru doctrine is overwhelmingly identical to whatever the practices of the earlier Zhou culture were imagined to be, the following can be said: Ru ideology holds that it takes a lifetime of effort to naturally embody the cultural and ritual practices of the former Zhou. For Ru philosophical texts, the obsession with maintaining the imagined culture of the Zhou led ultimately to the studied maintenance of traditional practices and rejection of “foreign” influences inextricably linked to larger discussions of ethical and moral philosophy. Again, because this Zhou diaspora was not one of oppressed minorities under foreign yokes, but a victim diaspora of colonizers, these rejections can take on a particularly elite character. Consider, for example, how Xunzi notes a court position, the dashi 大師 (preceptor), whose job entails “preparing model pieces and instructions, examining odes and note pitch, proscribing lewd tones, and following the appropriate season in his preparation so as to keep barbarian customs and unorthodox music from presuming to bring confusion to the ‘elegant standards.’”Footnote 124 Again, here one sees attitudes that local customs and deviation from the Zhou standards are seen as degenerations from a kind of perfect standard set by the Zhou, and must be guarded against by a court specialist.Footnote 125
As I see it, there are two potential stumbling blocks to accepting the Eastern Zhou elite culture as constituting a clear case of a diasporic cultural identity. First, there is the question of power relations. Classifying the Zhou regional states as constituting an imperial diaspora is to my eyes a certainty, but the categorization of their Eastern Zhou period existences as embodying a victim diaspora might make some uncomfortable. By far, most cases studied of diasporic experiences involved subjugated and oppressed populations living usually as minorities under the power of others. Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer have noticed a trend in diaspora studies to shorthand refer to people within a diaspora simply as being “subaltern.”Footnote 126 The Zhou case is not that. The Zhou elites ruled their own domains, with their own armies, and were not themselves conquered by the Rong. Living as exiles under the rule of others is often taken to be a critical factor in the diasporic experience, but in the Zhou case, this does not bear out: Subalternity is thus extremely common among victim diasporic communities, but this case indicates that it is not necessary, or, at the very least, that some new category between imperial and victim diaspora must be created to classify this case.Footnote 127
Second, one might suggest that the patterns discernible from Zhou cultural output show attachment to Zhou cultural practices but not necessarily to a physical geographic homeland. This is to say, they are not “exiled” enough. This is not necessarily a problem for my interpretation: recent works in diaspora studies have affirmed the existence of diasporic communities whose attachments to signifiers of home do not entail attachment to the homeland itself. Avtar Brah explains that for these diasporic communities, “‘home’ is a mythic place of desire … it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin.’”Footnote 128 Though most of what Cohen calls “deterritorialized” diasporas are groups such as Afro-Caribbeans, Parsis, or even Roma, the core element noted in these cases, a fluid relationship with the idea of home that does not attach itself to specific geographic place, is key, and it is this dynamic that best explains the Zhou relationship to an imaginary home of perfect Zhou order.Footnote 129
Not all diasporas focus on the notion of a spatial “return” to a geographic homeland.Footnote 130 In the case of the Roma, a dispersed population claims origin in a place it has lost any connection with (India), and now expresses no particular interest in a “return” there.Footnote 131 Cohen upholds the Afro-Caribbeans and Sindhis in Bombay as two prime examples of “deterritorialized” diasporas. He considers them diasporic in four ways:
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1. Cultural retention of or affirmations of an origin in a location different than where the community resides (Africa/Sindh).
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2. At minimum, a symbolic interest in retaining links to the original identity.
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3. Cultural artifacts, products, or expressions that show shared concerns and cross influences between the new and the old locations (Africa and the Caribbean/Sindh and Bombay).
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4. Behavior in ways consistent with a deterritorialized diaspora.Footnote 132
For our purposes, we can check these points off one by one. First, earlier in this article I noted and discussed the Zhou discourse of Shi jing poems, as well as the archaeological evidence of conditions of the early colonial settlements, which indicate a strong affirmation of the original identity of the elites sent away as retaining an identity of having been sent out and emplaced in their current positions by the king of Zhou. The symbolic interest in maintaining links to cultural identity is clear from the discomfort in the Zuo zhuan and Xunzi with deviating from the imagined norms of the Western Zhou. Cohen’s sense of cultural artifacts entails a sense by which the events and culture of the homeland retain at least some relevance to the “diasporic” group’s identity. While Cohen shows this with vernacular slang, I would suggest once again that the Shi jing provides us the clearest view of this. Qin, the Zhou foundation “left behind” in the homeland while it was overrun, reclaimed the Guanzhong basin in a series of military campaigns through the seventh century bceFootnote 133 While distant from the northern plains that would become center-stage for “Chinese” history in the ensuing centuries, the Shi jing does significantly include the Qin Feng 秦風 (The Airs of Qin) as a ‘decade’ of poems. The Zuo zhuan, while showing a distinct focus on the events in the northwestern state of Lu, sees fit to at least mention the state of Qin often, though it rarely foregrounds events there.Footnote 134 The last of these categories, behavior fitting the vision of a deterritorialized diaspora, Cohen expresses some reticence about, given how vague and difficult to verify such a category necessarily must be.Footnote 135 For Cohen, the proof of this is in cultural behaviors rooted around short-term visits of Caribbeans abroad in the USA, UK, and elsewhere back to places like Jamaica (and not Africa). The situation for the Zhou is more complex. Qin retook the homeland, but while the Guanzhong became the Qin heartland, Qin did not become an imagined home or place of return.Footnote 136 Just as in the case of Afro-Caribbeans, the location of origin eventually became a place one could return to, but geographic return was not widely desired. Instead, the new royal court at Luoyang, the seat of a now vastly diminished king wielding only symbolic authority, became the new focal point for elites making official visits.Footnote 137
Conclusion and Consequences of a Diasporic Reading
There are several major consequences of reading diasporic dynamics into Eastern Zhou cultural developments. Historiographically, the model of the Zhou regional states and the development of an elite identity obviously working to secure not just its political, but its cultural survival, ought to be included in any larger study of diasporic dynamics. For the study of early China itself, the diasporic lens creates a new angle by which to understand how Chinese rulers and elites saw each other, and goes a long way towards explaining the particularities of the permeable Zhou identity—an identity which saw discourse capable of letting in foreigner entities, such as Wu, and casting out former compatriots, such as Qin, predicated upon steps taken to maintain cultural identity. The diasporic lens is worth applying to the analysis of a number of other dynamics which could easily fill a monograph. I have here tried to show only that it is a valid lens to use. Still, to demonstrate its validity further, I will apply it to two dynamics for analysis. First, I note the continuing comparisons between Chinese and Greek city states and the matter of civic participation and citizenship. Diasporic cultures have strong traditions separating in and out group identities, and this surely has some impact on participatory communality (or the lack thereof) in Spring and Autumn polities.Footnote 138 This is to say, in attempting to understand why Greeks developed citizenship structures and why China, for example, did not, one notes that Greek citizen communities did not base a sense of a shared Greekness around memories of a superior past that placed burdens and expectations on their present conduct. Greek ethnic identities remained primarily oriented around ancestry, and custom differences could muddy the waters, but in-or-out ethnic group identification even in the case of the disputably-Greek Macedonians never broke from rhetoric surrounding ancestry.Footnote 139 Greek social and governmental change or experimentation at the local level was not therefore an attack on one’s Greekness. For the Zhou regional states, whose sense of themselves as a quasi-ethnic group became inextricably bound up with the maintenance of an identity tied to reclaiming a moral (and thus political) superiority in the world, deviation from received norms would have been constituted an attack on group identity.Footnote 140
Secondly, just as the Exile in Babylon is now considered to have prompted massive editing and additions to existing textual materials of the Hebrews, it is no doubt significant that several literary compositions are claimed to have been produced during the Spring and Autumn period as well.Footnote 141 It is especially worth re-examining textual histories and the works of Chinese philosophy through a diasporic lens: Much of the Ru (Confucian) literary tradition can be re-read in this light. There remains continuous work being done both in Asian and Western scholarly circles aimed at understanding the moral-ethical expressions and implications of the Ru texts.Footnote 142 The diasporic understanding of the Zhou identity helps to explain the emotional/anthropological dynamics at work underneath such key ideological stances across numerous Zhou texts, most prominently represented in Confucius’ assertion that “I transmit and do not create, believing in and loving antiquity” (述而不作，信而好古).Footnote 143 It is not new to note that for much of Early Chinese cultural discourse, imitation of the ancients was a moral good in itself, but a diasporic angle can help explain why: imitating the sages, lionizing the former rulers, and accepting the downfall of the Zhou royal clan as morally justified were aids in preserving a culture that had developed a sense of being endangered, a sense rooted in the sudden disruption of Zhou colonial structures.Footnote 144 Appreciating the factors that undergird a uniquely Chinese-Ru variant of diasporic drives to cultural preservation is a necessary step to tackle the larger question of the longevity of a recognizable “Chinese” culture in world history as well as to highlight broad paradigmatic similarities to the Jewish tradition, which has itself seen a remarkable longevity in the world. The diasporic lens opens comparative angles for studying the ethical philosophies and texts of diasporic peoples such as those of the Hebrews in Babylon, a question that must be left for a further comparative paper. It is thereby clear: the postcolonial, and indeed the diasporic perspective as well, when applied to early China has much to offer. It is past time to apply it when engaging with the texts of the era.
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