The aristocratic age

Archaeological discoveries of recent decades have revolutionized our understanding of China’s past. The previously widespread uncritical acceptance of Chinese political mythology, which postulated the existence of a single legitimate locus of power on China’s soil since the very inception of civilization there, gave way to a polycentric perspective.Footnote ⁷ It is now widely accepted that multiple Neolithic cultures interacted for millennia in the basins of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, and beyond, none of them obviously superior to others.Footnote ⁸ This situation changed, albeit slightly, at the beginning of the Bronze Age. Whereas China’s first historical dynasty, the Shang 商 (circa 1600–1046 bce), was not an extensive empire as was later imagined, it definitely enjoyed cultural, technological, and military superiority over its neighbours. Politically speaking as well, the Shang became the major locus of gravity in the East Asian subcontinent.Footnote ⁹

The Shang’s superior position was inherited and further strengthened by its successor, the Zhou dynasty. For over two centuries, the Zhou enjoyed indisputable dominance in the Yellow River basin and further to the south into the basins of the Han 漢 and Huai 淮 rivers.Footnote ¹⁰ Even as the dynasty’s military power waned, it maintained its prestige as the religious and cultural centre of the oikoumenē. No other ruler—even those who proclaimed themselves ‘kings’ (wang 王)—dared to appropriate the appellation used exclusively by the Zhou kings, ‘Sons of Heaven’ (tianzi 天子). And when, in the ninth century bce, the Zhou court initiated major ritual reform aimed at solidifying the sociopolitical hierarchy and preserving the kings’ superiority vis-à-vis the regional lords (zhuhou 諸侯), this reform was duly implemented throughout the entire Zhou realm.Footnote ¹¹ Crises and problems notwithstanding, the Zhou kings remained the realm’s leaders.

The collapse of the Western Zhou polity in 771 bce and the ensuing turmoil marked the end of the realm’s political unity. The waning centuries of the Bronze Age—the Springs-and-Autumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 bce)—were marked by accelerating political disintegration. First, the Zhou kings lost the semblance of control over the regional lords; these lords were in turn eclipsed by their nominal underlings, the heads of major ministerial lineages; and in due time, the ministerial lineages themselves became engulfed in endless inter- and intra-lineage feuds. All too often a minor dispute between two nobles resulted in an armed clash between their houses, evolving into rebellion against the local lord, and eventually bringing the military intervention of the polity’s neighbours. The resultant war of all against all and the loss of basic political stability may be considered the deepest systemic crisis in Chinese history prior to the first half of the twentieth century.

What was the impact of political fragmentation on elite identities? On the one hand, we observe an interesting phenomenon of the aristocrats’ strong loyalty to their home state. In their capacity as hereditary ministers, the leading nobles conceived of themselves as ‘masters of the people’ (min zhi zhu 民之主), who owed allegiance primarily to the ‘altars of soil and grain’ (sheji 社稷), that is to the state, in the name of which they could even defy the ruler himself.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, this state-focused allegiance did not result in cultural parochialism. On the contrary, aristocrats from across the Zhou world maintained remarkable cultural cohesiveness based on their common adherence to the ritual norms inherited from the Western Zhou age. The most unequivocal manifestation of this common adherence can be observed archaeologically. Aristocrats’ tombs display strong commonalities in terms of the correlation between the occupant’s rank and the size of their tomb, ritual paraphernalia, the size of mortuary assemblages, and the like. Inscriptions on bronze vessels coming from all parts of the Zhou realm display similar commonalities in their ritualistic language.Footnote ¹³ Regional differences in the shape of the bronze vessels and even in the shape of written characters existed, for sure, and increased in the wake of what Lothar von Falkenhausen calls the ‘Middle Springs and Autumns Ritual Restructuring’,Footnote ¹⁴ but these were modifications within the common ritual framework rather than abandonment of this framework.

It is worth emphasizing here that the common ritual culture encompassed not only the core Zhou states but also peripheral polities, such as Qin 秦 and Chu 楚. In the latter years of the Springs-and-Autumns period, this culture was adopted even by the elites of the non-Sinitic states of the southeast, Wu 吳 and Yue 越. Their acculturation, which eventually resulted in the expansion of the Zhou oikoumenē, was a complex process. Even the adoption of favourable genealogy that connected the ruling houses of Wu and Yue to the Zhou dynastic founders and the sage demiurge Yu 禹 respectively was not enough to immediately shed the image of cultural Otherness associated with the southeasterners. However, pejorative attitudes notwithstanding, the ruling elites of Wu and Yue—as well as of some other non-Sinitic polities, including the Rong 戎—were eventually absorbed into the Zhou cultural sphere. What mattered was not ethnicity but rather mastering ritual norms.Footnote ¹⁵

The peculiar situation of ongoing social and cultural cohesiveness of the Springs-and-Autumns period nobles, notwithstanding political cleavages, can be better understood once we recall that the aristocrats’ identity was primarily social rather than based on their polity. Aristocrats from different polities routinely intermarried, which was mandated by the norms of clan exogamy, but, with a very few exceptions, did not marry the commoners of their own state. They interacted during frequent diplomatic meetings, and even on the battlefield often displayed adherence to common norms of ritualized chivalry. Under duress, a noble could escape to a neighbouring polity where his original rank was recognized and he could expect to be employed and granted an allotment; some of these fugitives forged impressive careers in the new state.Footnote ¹⁶ Judging from the depictions in Zuozhuan, nobles from across the Zhou world shared a common textual culture, spoke a mutually intelligible language (which was evidently significantly removed from the colloquial language of the commoners), and performed common ceremonies. In all likelihood, they felt much closer to a foreign noble than to the ‘wilderness men’ (yeren 野人, i.e. those from outside the capital) of their own polity.Footnote ¹⁷ It is time to see what happened to these trans-Zhou sociocultural identities in the new, post-aristocratic age of the Warring States.

China’s early modernity? The age of the Warring States

The Warring States period was witness to the most profound economic, social, administrative, and intellectual change. Loose aristocratic polities of the Springs-and-Autumns era were replaced by centralized and profoundly bureaucratized entities. The hereditary aristocracy of the Bronze Age was absorbed into a much broader meritocratic elite of men-of-service (shi 士, originally the term used for the lowest segment of nobility). The new shi ministers were less powerful than their aristocratic predecessors, allowing the rulers to restore firm control over the governing apparatus. And this apparatus itself became incomparably more active than before. The ‘iron revolution’, which had brought about a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity, gave birth to the new agro-managerial state, dedicated to bolstering agricultural output through the development of fallow lands, initiation of irrigation and water conservancy projects, controlling the production of iron tools and their dissemination to peasant households, and the like. Parallel to these, the replacement of aristocratic chariot-based armies with mass infantry armies staffed by peasant conscripts prompted yet another dramatic change in the state’s functions. Administrators had to learn how to mobilize, train, and motivate the entire male population; how to monitor its movements; and how to apprehend and punish absconders. Henceforth the state had to control its subjects to an extent unthinkable during the aristocratic age.Footnote ¹⁸

These developments unmistakably resemble those in modern Europe between circa the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. There we also encounter profound socioeconomic revolution, replacement of loose aristocratic polities with centralized bureaucratic states, mass conscription and new modes of warfare, an unprecedented degree of state intervention in and control of the lives of its subjects, and the like. Parallel to this, Europe witnessed consolidation of the territorial state, fixation of the state boundaries, ideas of state sovereignty, strengthening of separate ethnonational identities, and, eventually, the formation of a nation-state, based on the presumption of desired congruence between the state and ethnicity. The features of the newly emerging European nation-state are conveniently summarized in a recent study by Opello and Rosow:

The seven features enumerated above can be grouped into three: first, territoriality (geographically defined territory, clearly separated from other polities, within which the government exercises exclusive jurisdiction; features one, two, and four), the government’s direct control over its territory (features three and five), and the population’s display of national identity which ensures its obedience and loyalty (features six and seven). It is remarkable that the first two sets are fully present in Warring States China.

Let us start with the most notable parallel between the Warring States-period polities and the modern European entities, namely, the territorial integration of the newly formed Warring State. This integration was a natural by-product of the state’s need to control all of its land resources and all of its inhabitants. Not only all the arable lands had to be measured, recorded, allocated to peasants, and taxed, but the state also sought to oversee its ‘mountains, forests, marshes, swamps, valleys and dales’ from which benefits could be extorted.Footnote ²⁰ All the inhabitants had to be registered for the sake of taxation, conscription, and general surveillance. These tasks were performed by the increasingly assertive government apparatus, which penetrated society down into the tiniest hamlets, resembling what Eric Hobsbawm considers the hallmark of the modern state, namely reaching ‘down to the humblest inhabitant of the least of its villages’.Footnote ²¹ This apparatus in turn was subjugated to strict, centralized supervision, with meticulously designed rules regulating the officials’ performance. Vestiges of the autonomous power of aristocrats, the hallmark of the Springs-and-Autumns period, were eliminated. The central government attained full control over the land and its dwellers.Footnote ²²

Territorial integration of individual states was accompanied by the increasing separation from rival polities. The separation was instituted through administrative regulations that monitored movements of population and merchandise into neighbouring polities; legal distinctions between the native and foreign populations; and, most visibly, long protective walls, which separated the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ realms. These walls were defensive in their nature, but they had far-reaching symbolic significance, changing not only the physical but also the mental landscape. The land outside the boundaries became a dangerous terra incognita, departure into which was considered an inauspicious event that required a special exorcist ritual, similar to the ritual performed upon leaving one’s native settlement.Footnote ²³

The above trends demonstrate remarkable similarities between the state-building process in the Warring States era and in modern Europe. But what about the third group of nation-state features outlined by Opello and Rosow, namely, the formation of separate national identities? Here, China’s trajectory was different, but even this difference should be qualified. The political, physical, and legal separation among the competing polities was conducive to cultural separation as well.

New social realities could contribute towards cultural alienation among competing states. Recall that with the demise of hereditary aristocracy, the appeal of the Zhou ritual culture weakened. Common ritual norms were not abandoned altogether, but they could no longer serve as the glue that held together the elites’ transregional cohesiveness. The new elites, some of whose members had risen from the lower social strata, were more diversified culturally than their Bronze Age predecessors. The incremental divergence in the material and, to a lesser extent, written cultureFootnote ²⁴ of major states is well documented by material, paleographic, and textual evidence. This diversification is particularly evident in the changing image of powerful peripheral states, Qin in the northwest and Chu in the south. Their case studies exemplify the impact of centripetal forces on the Zhou world.Footnote ²⁵

A common misperception, based on an uncritical reading of a few statements scattered in the Warring States-period texts that are echoed in Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (circa 145–90 bce) Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記), is the identification of Qin and Chu as the perennial cultural Other of the Zhou world.Footnote ²⁶ However, recently discovered material and paleographic data allow us to correct this view. The state of Qin in particular was the staunch ally of the Zhou house and the custodian of Zhou’s ancestral lands in the Wei 渭 River basin. Whereas early Qin rulers attempted to position themselves as surrogates of the Zhou kings, they were careful not to cross the Rubicon of overt subversion. In fact, well into the fourth century bce, Qin was a relatively conservative state, which preserved the Western Zhou culture more than its eastern peers.Footnote ²⁷ The case of Chu was different: its relations with the Zhou house had already soured by the tenth century bce, and its leaders’ appropriation of the royal title early in the Springs-and-Autumns period was a major breach of ritual decorum. That said, judging from early Chu mortuary assemblages and inscriptions on bronze vessels from Chu tombs, it is clear that this state was an inseparable part of the Zhou cultural oikoumenē.Footnote ²⁸

Textual evidence supports the above picture. With regard to Qin, not a single text dated prior to the fourth century bce hints at its alleged ‘barbarianism’ (although Zuozhuan records the surprise of a Lu statesman about Qin not being ‘uncouth’ [lou 陋]).Footnote ²⁹ Concerning Chu, the attitude is more ambiguous: whereas in Zuozhuan it is never identified as a ‘savage’ (manyi 蠻夷) state, it is clearly treated as somewhat separate from the Xia 夏 core and as the ultimate challenger of the Zhou royal clan (the Ji 姬).Footnote ³⁰ Yet once we move into the Warring States period, we encounter a clearer enmity and strongly pronounced pejorative attitude. In particular, Chu’s association with ‘barbarians’ becomes commonplace. This association is reiterated throughout Discourses of the States (Guoyu 國語), even though the overall view of Chu in this text is far from negative, and some of its sections even contain laudatory comments.Footnote ³¹ A pejorative view of Chu is more explicit in the Gongyang Commentary 公羊傳 on Chunqiu, composed in the second half of the Warring States period. Chu is consistently identified there as a ‘barbarian’ (yi 夷 or yidi 夷狄) state; it is oddly claimed to have no ranked nobles (which is patently wrong, judging from the Chunqiu itself), and it is frequently treated with undisguised enmity.Footnote ³² One of these statements in Gongyang is particularly notable:

This statement—which, after the canonization of the Chunqiu and its commentaries early in the imperial era, shaped the image of Chu for millennia to come—marks Chu as the epitome of the cultural and political Other. Chu is the malevolent polity which can be subjugated only during the reign of the True Monarch (wangzhe 王者, i.e. the monarch that rules All-under-Heaven rather than a regional state), and even then will forever remain prone to rebel. Coupled with a few other pejorative statements towards Chu, e.g. in Mengzi 孟子 and Records of the Historian,Footnote ³⁴ Gongyang’s statement represents a profound change in Chu’s image among segments of the educated elite of northern states. A state that was originally placed somewhere on the spectrum between the Huaxia and the malevolent savages, by the Warring States period Chu was more readily identified with the latter.

In the case of the state of Qin, the change is even more stark. Again, the Gongyang commentary may be the earliest text to identify Qin with aliens, although the compilers seemed to remain unsure where Qin’s real cultural belonging was.Footnote ³⁵ Yet this hesitancy disappears once we come to the Stratagems of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce 戰國策), a first century bce compilation largely based on Warring States-period anecdotes. Qin is portrayed in the text as a state that ‘has common customs with the Rong and Di [“savages”]; a state with a tiger’s and wolf’s heart; greedy, profit-seeking and untrustworthy, which knows nothing of ritual, propriety and virtuous behavior’ 秦與戎、翟同俗, 有虎狼之心, 貪戾好利而無信, 不識禮義德行.Footnote ³⁶ Elsewhere it is designated as ‘the mortal enemy of All-under-Heaven’ 秦, 天下之仇讎也.Footnote ³⁷ This exclusion of Qin from the civilized All-under-Heaven (tianxia 天下), situating it beyond the pale, recurs elsewhere.Footnote ³⁸ The harshness of these pronouncements can be explained by their context—bitter polemics between supporters and opponents of Qin at the courts of rival Warring States. Polemical context aside, it is clear that, much like Chu, the image of Qin in the eyes of Zhou elites had changed profoundly.

What are the reasons for this new image of Chu and Qin? To a certain extent it could be a by-product of new cultural traits that appeared in both states and distinguished them from their peers. For instance, Chu burials of the Warring States period show plenty of new distinctive features, such as the proliferation of painted lacquer and silk artefacts at the expense of ritually important bronzes, distinctive ornaments with ‘a curious blend of the fantastic with the real’,Footnote ³⁹ and an abundance of religious motifs, unseen elsewhere in the Zhou world.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the case of Qin, the change was more dramatic. The reforms associated with Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 bce) brought about a complete social overhaul. Old aristocratic ranks were abolished and replaced by a new system of ranks of merit granted to valiant soldiers and diligent tillers.Footnote ⁴¹ All of a sudden, Zhou ritual paraphernalia vanished from Qin tombs; instead we encounter entirely new forms of burials, mortuary assemblages, and even tomb shapes.Footnote ⁴² These archeologically observable changes were undoubtedly part of a broader sociocultural transformation that brought about the markedly pronounced cultural distinctiveness of Qin’s dwellers vis-à-vis the rest of the Zhou world.

The novel cultural traits promulgated by the ruling elites of Qin and Chu were not necessarily a result of their conscious desire to distinguish themselves from the rest of the Zhou realm. Some of these changes may reflect unrelated religious, technological, and aesthetical developments.Footnote ⁴³ Others might have emerged due to the influence of the recently subjugated non-Zhou population on Qin and Chu elites. Furthermore, the influx of people from previously marginalized lower strata in the elite ranks, most notably in Qin in the aftermath of Shang Yang’s reforms, can explain the greater visibility of previously unnoticeable local customs.Footnote ⁴⁴ Whatever the explanation, however, it is plausible that the newly acquired cultural traits contributed to the estrangement of Qin and Chu dwellers from the rest of the Zhou world.

Objective differences aside, what prompted the outburst of anti-Chu and, more notably, anti-Qin sentiments was the context of ever-escalating warfare. Perpetual bloody conflicts, especially those initiated by the exceptionally aggressive Qin state, fuelled mutual hatred among dwellers of rival states. Warfare, as insightfully analysed by Anthony Smith,Footnote ⁴⁵ is a powerful agent of ethnic cohesiveness, on the one hand, and inter-ethnic cleavages, on the other, and it was doubly so during the Warring States period. By then, the aristocratic chivalry of the Springs-and-Autumns period was all but forgotten. Armies of peasant conscripts acted with deplorable—almost ‘modern’—violence against both enemy combatants and civilians.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the case of Qin, which made the decapitation of enemy soldiers the surest way for combatants to climb the social, economic, and even political ladder, armies became particularly notorious for their ruthlessness. Large-scale execution of prisoners of war, destruction of the enemy’s infrastructure, expulsion of the occupied population from its lands, and so on generated bitterness and mutual alienation.Footnote ⁴⁷ A letter of a Qin conscript stationed in the recently occupied Chu lands in which he complains about the defiant natives and warns his addressee not to travel to the ‘new territories’, the inhabitants of which are ‘bandits’ (dao 盜),Footnote ⁴⁸ provides us with a rare glimpse of sentiments among the lower strata. Scattered textual evidence show that these sentiments were not exceptional.Footnote ⁴⁹ Plausibly, it was among the lower strata of peasant conscripts, who were also the main victims of bloody conflicts, that the inter-state cleavages of the Warring States began visibly to acquire ‘national’ dimensions.

I have argued in the above discussion that a variety of cultural and political processes, some of which resemble those in early modern Europe, contributed towards the formation of nascent local (‘national’?) identities in the Chinese world of the Warring States period. And yet, as noted at the beginning of this article, the subsequent development trajectory of the Warring States world differed markedly from that of modern Europe. While in Europe nation-states became accepted (at least throughout most of the twentieth century) as the only legitimate form of state organization, in China territorial states were replaced by the unified empire established by the state of Qin after it conquered the Chinese world in 221 bce. Henceforth, local identities rapidly lost their political importance; they became a source of intellectual curiosity for the imperial literati rather than a matter of political concern.Footnote ⁵⁰ What happened to the localism of the Warring States? Why did it wane? To answer this, we shall turn now to the role of pre-imperial thinkers in diluting local identities.

Transcending local identities: The intellectuals’ choice

The role of European intellectuals in fostering, strengthening, or even forging national identities of their peoples is well known.Footnote ⁵¹ Insofar as our above discussion is correct, and parallel developments between Europe and China did take place, it is time to ask what was the reaction of Chinese intellectuals—that is, the intellectually active segment of the shi stratum—to the process of cultural and political fragmentation of the Zhou world? Do we have evidence of the endorsement of local identities in the texts of the ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’ (zhuzi baijia 諸子百家)? To answer this question, let us start with a statement by Mengzi 孟子 (circa 380–304 bce), one of the leading thinkers of that era:

Mengzi divides the men of service into four groups. At the apex stands the superhuman ‘great man’, who exemplifies Mengzi’s personal ideal. Three lower stages are occupied by normative men of service who seek self-realization in the political realm. Of these, the lowest position is occupied by personal retainers whose allegiance is offered exclusively to their master. Above are average ministers, who are concerned with the welfare of the state. Yet above them we find ‘the people of Heaven’ (tian min 天民), whose focus is All-under-Heaven rather than a single polity. The term ‘the people of Heaven’ is rarely used in pre-imperial texts, and when it is employed it usually just means ‘all the people’. In the above context, however, it can be read as a Chinese equivalent to the Greek kosmopolitēs, ‘citizen of the world’. These men of service—the second best segment of their stratum—transcend the boundaries of their state and are committed to realizing their ideals in the entire subcelestial realm.

Mengzi’s laudation of the ‘people of Heaven’ as standing above the regular ministers of an individual state reflects a common perception in the Warring States-period political thought. The political discourse of that age is strongly oriented towards tianxia (All-under-Heaven) as the ultimate goal of political action. The term tianxia itself was quite marginal in the Western Zhou to the mid-Springs-and-Autumns period. It becomes more visible in the second half of the Zuozhuan narrative, where it refers primarily to the Zhou oikoumenē as the realm of common cultural norms.Footnote ⁵³ By the Warring States period, by contrast, the usage of the term tianxia increases exponentially and the term becomes much more politically meaningful. Take, for instance, one of the earliest Warring States-period texts, the core chapters of the Mozi 墨子, which are perhaps the closest in terms of their dating to Mozi’s lifetime (circa 460–390 bce).Footnote ⁵⁴ These chapters repeatedly refer to ‘possessing All-under-Heaven’ (you tianxia 有天下, 14 times), ‘being a king of All-under-Heaven’ (wang tianxia 王天下, eight times), ‘ruling All-under-Heaven’ (zhi tianxia 治天下, 23 times), and the like. This political usage is prevalent in most of the later Warring States-period texts.

Then what about an individual state and its ‘altars of soil and grain’? They do remain the focus of concern of most thinkers. Chapters of texts such as Guanzi 管子 and the Book of Lord Shang 商君書, as well as many speeches scattered throughout the Stratagems of the Warring States discuss at length about how to benefit a specific state (e.g. Qi or Qin) by fostering economic, military, or even demographic policies that would strengthen it at the expense of its neighbours. Notably, however, even in these cases, an individual state is not the ultimate goal of political action but rather an instrument to attain universal rule. Defending one’s state against predatory neighbours is a legitimate goal, but it is a temporary means only; nobody seems to concern themselves with the state’s ultimate ‘independence’. Not a single Warring States-period political or historical text of which I am aware displays any interest in maintaining, not to mention bolstering, a local (‘national’) identity; nowhere do we encounter anything akin to ‘patriotism’. The only notable exception is the famous Chu Songs (Chuci 楚辭). Without entering into discussions about their authorship and dating, we can state that at the very least some of them—such as ‘Lamenting Ying’ (‘Ai Ying’ 哀郢) or ‘The Fallen for the State’ (‘Guo shang’ 國殤)— display a strongly pronounced Chu identity.Footnote ⁵⁵ But it is precisely this exception that highlights the complete absence of such identity-focused texts elsewhere.

Sceptics may question the legitimacy of argumentum ex silentio, especially as it is well-known that most pre-imperial texts were collated and possibly edited by the early imperial scholars, who could have eliminated politically ‘subversive’ passages from ancient works. Yet nowadays the above observations can be validated thanks to a series of major paleographic discoveries, specifically from the state of Chu, the focus of the Chu Songs’ lamentations. Take, for instance, historical and quasi-historical texts unearthed (or looted) from Chu tombs. Sarah Allan was the first to note their ‘cosmopolitan’ content.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, most historical anecdotes discovered in Chu tombs deal with events and personalities from other polities and are not related to Chu history. My own study demonstrated that even when these anecdotes do deal with Chu’s past, they do not display anything that can be remotely identified as Chu sensitivities (such as lamenting its defeats, lauding its military successes, or bolstering the prestige of its royalty). The same observation is applicable mutatis mutandis to the entire corpus of heretofore published Chu historical texts. Overwhelmingly, these texts present Chu history in such a neutral manner that some scholars doubt whether they were produced by Chu scribes at all. Speculation aside, it is clear that these texts are simply identity-neutral. They neither present the kings of Chu as rightful replacers of the Zhou kings, nor do they treat Chu as an ‘alternative civilization’ to that of Zhou. Such discourse in all likelihood did not exist in the Warring States period.Footnote ⁵⁷

We search in vain in historical and quasi-historical texts from the state of Chu for anything akin to an emphasis on ‘blood, land and the nation’s honor’, which became the hallmark of modern European nation-state-oriented thought, as exemplified, for instance, by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872).Footnote ⁵⁸ Nor can we find there ideas of Chu’s exclusivity. Chu is treated as part of the larger oikoumenē from which it cannot be meaningfully dissociated. Even the historical text that deals purely with Chu local history—the Chu Residences (Chuju 楚居)—emphasizes Chu’s connection to the Shang dynasty and, through it, to the broader Huaxia world.Footnote ⁵⁹ In other texts, we cannot even find any concern with Chu local history. For instance, the Rongchengshi 容成氏 manuscript from the collection of Shanghai Museum presents the early history of the realm from primordial rulers to the dawn of the Zhou dynasty as if the realm had always been unified. Regional states—either Chu or others (it is possible that the text was composed outside Chu)Footnote ⁶⁰—do not play any role in the narrative. The realm was unified in the past, and it should be unified in the future.Footnote ⁶¹

This brings me to the political bottom line of the competing thinkers—their unanimous emphasis on political unification of All-under-Heaven as the only way to bring peace and stability to the war-torn Zhou world. Since I have explored this discourse of political unity elsewhere, I do not want to repeat myself here. Suffice to say that the quest for political unification of the realm became ‘the one that pervades the all’ in Warring States-period political thought.Footnote ⁶² From peace-loving Mengzi to the war-mongering Book of Lord Shang, from Mozi to Laozi 老子, from the Gongyang tradition to Han Feizi 韓非子—all the texts agree that ‘stability is in unity’ (定于一);Footnote ⁶³ the debates revolve only around ways to attain unification, not around its ultimate desirability. This by itself suffices to explain why local identities were not endorsed by the competing thinkers. These identities would simply hinder the attainment of the glorious goal of unification, and as such they were undesirable.

The tianxia focus of pre-imperial China’s thinkers is self-evident; but should it be viewed as a truly cosmopolitan outlook or just as promulgation of transregional pan-Huaxia (‘Chinese’) identity? To put it differently: what were the contours of the due-to-be-unified subcelestial realm? Did it include the entire known world or, rather, was it confined to the Zhou oikoumenē? The answer is not simple. Certain thinkers clearly endorsed a limited view of would-be unification as focused on the Zhou lands only. This conservative vision is represented for instance in ‘The Tribute of Yu’ (‘Yu gong’ 禹貢), now a chapter in the canonical Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經). The text (composed in the Warring States period) explains how the legendary demiurge Yu, having subdued the flood, organized the world into Nine Provinces (jiu zhou 九州). The Nine Provinces (the precise location and names of which vary from one text to another) are fundamentally congruent with the territories of China proper, i.e. with the Zhou realm. This terrestrial organization implies that the entire known world is a complete and closed system, organized in a grid of 3X3, which cannot be meaningfully altered.Footnote ⁶⁴ The immutability of this scheme is even more explicit in the parallel ‘field-allocation’ (fen ye 分野) astrological system, which divides the sky into nine partitions associated with each of the provinces below. As noted by Paul R. Goldin, this association meant that ‘no tenth region [to the Nine Provinces] could ever have been added. There would simply have been no tenth part of the sky to identify with it.’Footnote ⁶⁵

The Nine Provinces scheme (the origins of which may well precede the Warring States period) is purely Sinocentric, as it glosses over the areas associated with alien ethnicities. An alternative Sinocentric vision, which is also present in ‘The Tribute of Yu’ as well as in several other texts, is more attentive to the aliens’ presence. It divides the world into five (elsewhere nine) concentric zones: the internal ones are ruled directly by the Son of Heaven and his regional lords, while the external ones are inhabited by the aliens and banished Chinese criminals.Footnote ⁶⁶ Here the alien periphery is incorporated in the realm under the control of the Son of Heaven, but this incorporation is primarily symbolic.

Both the Nine Provinces and the Five Zones models represent a particularistic and partly or fully exclusivist vision of future unification. Yet this particularism was challenged in other texts where the true universality of the ancient paragons’ deeds was emphasized, leading to the understanding that future unification should equally encompass both the Central States and the alien periphery.Footnote ⁶⁷ The inclusive vision is most clearly pronounced in the Gongyang Commentary. In commenting on the Chunqiu record about the northern lords’ meeting with a Wu envoy, the commentary states:

The ultimate target of the unification is the entire world, encompassing both Chinese and aliens. Current divisions into ‘internal’ (Chinese) and ‘external’ (alien lands) are a temporary means to facilitate unification. This inclusive view of future unification clearly dominated the discourse of the Warring States period, cautious voices notwithstanding.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is time to ask: what were the sources of this optimism of pre-imperial thinkers with regard to truly comprehensive unification? Did they not expect insurmountable difficulties in attaining this goal?

I think that this optimism reflects two peculiarities of pre-imperial Chinese thought: the thinkers’ good historical but limited geographical knowledge. History provided multiple examples of erstwhile ‘barbarians’ who became fully assimilated into a broader Chinese culture. During the Warring States period in particular, the Sinitic states expanded into peripheral areas inhabited by alien ethnicities, and although this expansion was not necessarily peaceful, it did not encounter prolonged resistance by the local populations. The successful incorporation of areas such as the Sichuan basin, Liaodong peninsula, and the southern reaches of the Yangzi basin into the Zhou world proved the feasibility of assimilating aliens.Footnote ⁷⁰ A similar conclusion could be drawn from an equally successful assimilation of multiple alien ethnicities who inhabited enclaves in between the Sinitic states during the Springs-and-Autumns period, but vanished from subsequent historical accounts. Moreover, even powerful polities established by non-Sinitic ethnic groups, such as the southeastern Wu and Yue or later northern Zhongshan 中山,Footnote ⁷¹ eventually adopted the written and ritual culture of the Central States, losing much of their Otherness in the process. The resultant expansion of the Zhou civilization was conducive to the optimistic belief that the entire known world should eventually become ‘a single family’.Footnote ⁷²

Another possible reason for the thinkers’ universalistic optimism is their meagre knowledge of the outside world. China was never hermetically isolated from civilizations in central, southern, and western Eurasia, as can be demonstrated by technological transfer and the import of prestige goods from afar already seen during the Bronze Age.Footnote ⁷³ Yet China’s contacts with the outside world remained too limited for the elites to be well-informed of the existence of faraway loci of sedentary civilization. Wherever the outside world is mentioned in pre-imperial texts, it is invariably confined to areas in the immediate vicinity of China proper.Footnote ⁷⁴ Even the steppe nomads do not merit particular attention. All this was to change in the aftermath of the imperial unification of 221 bce, when the encounter with the steppe and, later, the realization that ‘All-under-Heaven’ is incomparably broader than the East Asian subcontinent, caused a major reappraisal of the nature of ‘universalism’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Meanwhile, an optimistic expectation of a complete unification of the entire human habitat—that is, true ‘cosmopolitanism’—was still warranted.

Cosmopolitan identity: Intellectuals in the talent market

Having ascertained the decisively ‘cosmopolitan’ outlook of pre-imperial Chinese intellectuals, and their rejection of the political and cultural fragmentation of their age, it is time now to assess the reasons for this extraordinary choice. How did it happen that none of the known thinkers of the Warring States period ever endorsed local identity? Why did these thinkers repeatedly proclaim their commitment to ‘All-under-Heaven’ and not to an individual state? Which factors ensured the intellectual hegemony of the inclusive and pro-unification view during the pre-imperial age?

I can think of three major factors that prompted the intellectuals’ rejection of the centrifugal political and cultural trends of their age. One can be considered an ‘idealistic’ factor, namely the realization that peace and stability are simply unattainable at the level of an individual state. Recall that the Warring States inter-state arena was that of the zero-sum game. Without acceptable rules of inter-state coexistence, endless bloody struggle among competing polities was inevitable, and the fate of all but one polity was doomed.Footnote ⁷⁶ Any domestic turmoil, such as a succession struggle or an inter-ministerial feud, could be exploited by foreign powers who would intervene directly or indirectly, rendering domestic stability in an individual state unattainable. Recall also that many ministers routinely sought to ingratiate themselves with foreign powers with a view to receiving allotments and appointments from a different polity. This situation poisoned relations at the top of the government apparatus, as no ruler could be sure of the loyalty of even his chief ministers and generals.Footnote ⁷⁷ Given these circumstances, one can easily understand why the authors of Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, composed at the court of Qin shortly before imperial unification, postulated: ‘When All-under-Heaven is in turmoil, no state can be secure’ 天下大亂, 無有安國.Footnote ⁷⁸ Prioritizing universal solutions over narrow domestic focus was a reasonable choice.

Moving on to more selfish factors, we should consider the employment patterns of the Warring States period men of service. Unlike the aristocrats of the Springs-and-Autumns period, the shi were not bound to a specific state; they were free to cross state boundaries in search of better appointments. This pattern developed early in the aristocratic age when the shi were still lowly retainers of powerful aristocratic lineages, and it continued into the Warring States period, even when some of the shi climbed to the very top of the government apparatus. This employment pattern had profound consequences on the world view of the shi.

In marked contrast to modern Europe, where the idea of employing nationally bred cadres gradually prevailed over the erstwhile openness of the boundaries (peaking during the Great War and in its aftermath), the Zhou world of the Warring States was more akin to the current global market of talent in the extra-political sphere. Employees frequently crossed state boundaries in search of better work opportunities. This behaviour was acceptable: not accidentally, any known thinker of the Warring States period served more than one state. The legitimacy of border crossing by men of service contrasts with the attempts of contemporaneous states to prevent emigration of their subjects. To be sure, there were critics of the intellectuals’ cross-boundary employment pattern: the Book of Lord Shang (6.6) in particular lamented the situation where ‘peripatetic men of service’ take ‘All-under-Heaven as one home … can empower themselves anywhere abroad, and … flock to any place as if to their home’ 天下一宅…偏託勢於外…歸偏家.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet this indignation aside, the authors of the text seem to conveniently forget that even the person to whom the text is attributed—Shang Yang—was a scion of the Wei 衛 ruling house, who sought career opportunities in the neighbouring state of Wei 魏 before moving to Qin. Crossing borders in search of better employment was a norm, not an aberration.

This state of affairs was not just tolerated; it was in fact morally sanctioned by Confucius 孔子 (551–479 bce) and his followers, who frequently (and perhaps justifiably) positioned themselves as the moral leaders of men of service. Confucius had not just set an example by constantly moving from one state to another, but also provided the ideological rationale for these shifts:

For Confucius, government service was not just for the purpose of employment but also a means of moral self-realization; hence the choice of an employer was intrinsically linked to the latter’s willingness to adopt the minister’s moral vision. If the employer failed to do so, proving that his state lacks the True Way (Dao), he—and his state—should be abandoned. In that case, seeking appointment in another country was an acceptable recourse, as Confucius’s follower, Mengzi, explained:

Elsewhere, Mengzi put forward what may be the boldest defence of what he conceived of as a minister’s inalienable right to move to a new state:

This exchange is illuminating not only with regard to Mengzi’s audacity vis-à-vis the rulers, but also with regard to what he considered normal, if not normative, ministerial behaviour. The minister had no fixed obligations towards the ruler and the state: he served only insofar as his political and moral demands were satisfied (which would, for sure, benefit the people below), or insofar as the ruler treated him with due politeness. Otherwise the ruler—and by extension the state—could not expect the minister’s loyalty. With a remarkable measure of chutzpah, Mengzi even demanded that the ruler respected the right of the minister to leave the state in search of a better employer.Footnote ⁸³

The lofty moral discourse of Confucius and Mengzi may reflect their genuine conviction, but for many other men of service it served simply as a convenient veneer behind which they bargained with the rulers for better job opportunities. Han Fei 韓非 (d. 233 bce), a cynical thinker and a brilliant political analyst of the late Warring States period, summarized:

Han Fei employed the market simile to ridicule the hypocrisy of his contemporaries who justified crossing the boundaries on moral terms; for him this was purely a matter of benefit calculation. For our discussion, the debate about the ministers’ motivation is less important. What matters more is the impact of the interstate market of talent on political and intellectual dynamics of the Warring States period. This impact is twofold. First, it meant that a man of service had no reason to devote himself wholeheartedly to a single state. To justify their readiness to resign and serve an adversary of their former employer, the men of service, and particularly their intellectual leaders, the Masters, advocated commitment to a broader entity rather than a single polity, that is All-under-Heaven, as exemplified in Mengzi’s statement cited at the beginning of the previous section. Second, this frequent border-crossing in search of better employment undermined the idea of ministerial loyalty, unsettling ruler-minister relations, as discussed above. The very employment pattern of the intellectually active shi made the multi-state order intrinsically unstable and bolstered the intellectuals’ resolve to seek universal solutions of stability for all.

The third factor that may have strengthened the tianxia-oriented outlook of the intellectually active men of service is a social one. By promulgating their commitment to tianxia, intellectuals wanted to distinguish themselves from the lower strata and even from some of their rivals within the elite ranks. Recall, first, that the very right to move freely across the boundaries was a privilege of shi, which distinguished them from the bulk of the population who were more tightly controlled. Recall, secondly, that within every state, the peripatetic men of service had to compete with local cadres, be it members of the ruling lineage (as in the state of Chu) or commoners who ascended the social ladder by gaining ranks of merit (as in the state of Qin). Both groups—even if for different reasons—were naturally more strongly attached to their native states. It was perhaps to weaken their rivals that intellectually active men of service adopted a discourse that postulated the superiority of the whole over its parts, of common Zhou culture over local customs, or of tianxia over individual states.Footnote ⁸⁵

This point brings me to the last observation: a common stance of intellectuals of different ideological convictions against local identities, as reflected in the intellectuals’ joint crusade against local customs. The term ‘customs’ (su 俗), which never appears in the Bronze Age texts, proliferated in the Warring States period (especially in its second half), quickly attaining pejorative connotations of both ‘localism’ and uncivilized behaviour of commoners. In contrast to early modern European intellectuals, such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who was fascinated by the discovery of the ‘Volk’,Footnote ⁸⁶ intellectual elites of the Warring States considered the manifestation of local customs to be undesirable and base. Thus, competing thinkers invariably advocated ‘reforming’ (gai 改), ‘unifying’ (yi 一 or tong 同), ‘beautifying’ (mei 美), ‘altering’ (yi 移 or yi 易), ‘changing’ (bian 變 or hua 化), or ‘correcting’ (zheng 正) diverse customs; tolerating local customs was permissible only as an ad-hoc temporary measure to gain the subjects’ trust. As Mark E. Lewis has correctly observed, the very term su (‘custom’) became a pejorative adjective (akin to ‘vulgar’) in contemporary texts.Footnote ⁸⁷ The contrast with Herder’s valorization of the ‘Volk’ could not be clearer.

Epilogue: Intellectuals, identities, and empire building

In a few of my earlier studies, I argued that the exceptional durability of China’s imperial enterprise comes from its peculiar intellectual background: the empire was envisioned (even if not preplanned) many generations before Qin’s unification in 221 bce.Footnote ⁸⁸ This in turn allowed the ideal of the unified empire to retain its hegemonic position in Chinese political culture well into the beginning of the twentieth century. This, in my eyes, was the remarkable achievement of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

The discussion above shows that, aside from being the empire’s architects, the thinkers of the Warring States had a less noticeable, but nonetheless similarly important, contribution to the success of the imperial enterprise. By rejecting the legitimacy of local identities, they prevented those identities from developing into a politically potent factor that could have effectively hindered unification. Thus, despite widespread hatred of Qin across the Warring States, after the unification by Qin, most of the elite members of the occupied states cooperated with the conquerors and were effectively co-opted into the Qin (and later Han) government. As a staunch critic of Qin, Jia Yi 賈誼 (200–168 bce) admitted, a common awareness of the advantages of unification caused ‘the men of service under Heaven to docilely bow before [the First Emperor’s] wind 天下之士斐然鄉風…The common people hoped that they would obtain peace and security and there was nobody who did not whole-heartedly look up in reverence 元元之民冀得安其性命, 莫不虛心而仰上.’Footnote ⁸⁹

The relative ease with which the new imperial entity submerged local identities and incorporated elites of the conquered states sheds some light on the role of the intellectuals in the politicization of collective identities. Above I demonstrated that the Warring States period witnessed the growth of separate identities among the lower strata. Conceivably, members of the ruling lineages in at least some of the states (Chu immediately comes to one’s mind)Footnote ⁹⁰ were similarly committed to their home polity. Yet without intellectual legitimation, nascent local identities ultimately faded and became a source of ethnographic curiosity in the unified empire rather than a politically dividing force. Bitter enmities of the Warring States period, important as they were in the immediate context of fierce inter-state struggle, remained short-lived. Aside from a very brief and inconsequential attempt to restore some of the Warring States in the aftermath of Qin’s collapse (circa 208–202 bce), there was no attempt whatsoever to appeal to, for example, Zhao, Chu, or Yan identity as a meaningful political factor.Footnote ⁹¹ In my eyes, this suggests that local identities were moribund, politically speaking, because they were neither fostered, nor rationalized, nor strengthened by the educated elite.

This brings me back to the comparison with the modern European experience. It may be useful at this point to make a brief excurse into the Europeans’ engagement with cosmopolitanism, a topic of the recent monograph by Leigh Penman. As Penman shows, in early modern Europe cosmopolitan ideas emerged first in the context that resonates well with China, namely as a possible justification for a universal (Catholic) empire. These views, most notably evident in the writings of Tomasso Campanella (1568–1639), had little political impact, however.Footnote ⁹² Later, in the eighteenth century, as a ‘cosmopolitan vocabulary’ proliferated, there was yet another opportunity for its political utilization, especially in revolutionary France, which indeed toyed with it for a short while.Footnote ⁹³ However, as is well known, this cosmopolitan orientation was duly rejected by French revolutionaries, who opted to strengthen the idea of patria (Fatherland) as the glue to consolidate the citizens’ fight against foreign intruders.Footnote ⁹⁴ Lacking sufficient intellectual endorsement, European cosmopolitanism (even if by this term we understand a narrowly conceived trans-ethnic unity of Christian Europe) did not become a political force to reckon with—at least not until the carnage of two world wars caused many Europeans to re-evaluate the advantages of Mengzi’s dictum, ‘Stability is in unity’.

Back to China: as noted above, the concept of the unified polity was duly realized there in 221 bce. Its success would never have been possible without the intellectuals’ unwavering rejection of local (proto-ethnical?) identities as politically illegitimate. This choice contrasts conspicuously with the localist strategy adopted by the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals. But here comes the bitter irony of history. Chinese intellectuals—the empire’s architects—were, arguably, among the major victims of the imperial unification. The end of the multi-state world meant the closure of the transregional market of talent, which was replaced by a solid state monopoly on career and social prestige. In the new regime, the power of the intellectuals vis-à-vis the throne diminished, as was dramatically demonstrated shortly after the Qin unification, when the First Emperor launched his infamous biblioclasm of 213 bce.Footnote ⁹⁵ Whereas under the subsequent regimes the intellectuals succeeded in reasserting their position as the empire’s custodians, and severe suppressions on a par with the Qin’s biblioclasm were relatively rare, overall, freedom of expression was thenceforth considerably curtailed. Speaking from the perspective of the intellectuals’ narrow class interests, political unification of All-under-Heaven may have been a bad gamble.

And yet, I want to end on a more optimistic note (at least from China’s point of view). It is true that the ideal of ‘stability is in unity’ was only partly realized, and the First Emperor’s proud proclamation upon the conquest of the rival states that ‘warfare will never rise again’ 兵不復起Footnote ⁹⁶ appears in retrospect as hollow propaganda. It is also true that the Chinese empire suffered from manifold weaknesses, which brought about periodic malfunctioning, recurring crises, bloody rebellions, and intermittent fragmentation. And yet one cannot but be impressed by the empire’s remarkable vitality, as demonstrated by its repeated resurrection after decades and even centuries of turmoil. In the final account, a unified empire on the East Asian subcontinent not only survived for longer periods than its counterparts elsewhere, but also ensured relative stability and prosperity for many more people than would ever have been possible under the Warring States. As such, the Chinese intellectuals’ desire to benefit All-under-Heaven was partly realized. In retrospect, the cessation of the Warring States era can be hailed as their major success.