Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Hereafter, unless indicated otherwise, all dates are Before Common Era. 2. The term “Chinese” is anachronistic with regard to pre-imperial “China” and is used here only as a scholarly convention to designate the Zhou 周 cultural realm, the educated elite of which usually referred to themselves as the Xia 夏. 3. I adopt the term “thearch” for di 帝,since this neologism aptly conveys both the divine and the mundane aspects of di’s power. 4. For the geographical heterogeneity of China (even if we talk only of “China proper,” the boundaries of which are roughly similar to those of the first imperial dynasty, the Qin), see McNeill, “China’s Environmental History.” China’s ethnic heterogeneity is twofold.First,it always comprised groups of more or less unassimilated minorities (for the complexity of which,see,for example,Crossley,“Thinking about Ethnicity”). Second, even the so-called “Han” 漢 people appear much less homogenous than it is often imagined, and the distinctions among different subgroups of the Han may well be defined as “ethnic” ones (see, for example, Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity; Leong, Migration and Ethnicity). 5. For the various self-proclaimed offspring of the Roman empire, see, for example, Moreland, “The Carolingian Empire”; MacCormack, “Cuzco, Another Rome?” 6. Practical aberrations from the above model were manifold. Emperors could become hapless pawns in the hands of powerful courtiers or generals; military rule could alter the composition of the elite, while popular rebellions shattered the very foundations of the sociopolitical order.Remarkably,however,the imperial discourse and arguably the imperial ideology, at times of calamity and crisis, remained basically unchanged, which may in turn have contributed toward restoration of the “normative” principles of the empire’s functioning after ages of disorder. 7. For Gramsci’s notion of hegemony,see,for example,Femia,Gramsci’s Political Thought;Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution. 8. For studies of the metaphysical and cosmological foundations of Chinese political thought, see, for example, Peerenboom, Law and Morality;Wang Aihe, Cosmology and Political Culture.The single least-represented topic in studies of ancient Chinese political thought is certainly that of the state-society relations in preimperial China. 9. The basic English “textbook” of ancient Chinese political thought is the translation of A History of Chinese Political Thought by Hsiao Kung-chuan (Xiao 223 Gongquan).This text, originally written in the mid-1940s, is fairly outdated, but it can be supplemented by two excellent textbook-level studies: Schwartz, TheWorld ofThought; and Graham, Disputers of theTao. 10. For the early history of the notion of a “school” or “scholastic lineage,” see Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan, “Constructing Lineages”; Smith, “SimaTan.” For classical presentations of Chinese intellectual history in terms of the competing schools of thought, see, for example, Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy; Hsiao, A History of Chinese PoliticalThought. For the ideological “modernization” of ancient Chinese thought in the early 1970s, see, for example, translated articles in the Chinese Studies in Philosophy in the 1970s; for an opposite, but similarly biased approach,see,for example,Rubin, Individual and State.The attempt to directly connect the Confucian-Legalist controversy with contemporary inner-party struggles was made by the Cultural Revolution leaders Jiang Qing (江青, 1914–1991) and Zhang Chunqiao (張春橋, 1917–2005) during a crucial meeting with scholars engaged in studies of “Legalism” on August 7, 1974 (see details in Liu Zehua, “Zhi shi guannian”). 11. Liu Zehua employs the “school” labels in his textbooks (for example, Zhongguo zhengzhi sixiang shi), but not in his major studies, such as Zhongguo chuantong zhengzhi sixiang fansi, Zhongguo chuantong zhengzhi siwei, and later publications. 12. See Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan, “Constructing Lineages,” 61. 13. In dating the relevant texts, I tried to outline their relative sequence, employing both assessments of other scholars and my own methodology based on lexical changes in Zhanguo writings. For my dating methodology, see Pines, “Lexical Changes”;for other studies,see the relevant footnotes.To avoid needless controversy , I have confined my study to those texts, the pre-imperial provenance of which is accepted by most scholars, leaving out some of the hotly disputed texts, such as Wenzi 文子, Shizi 尸子, Guiguzi 鬼谷子, and certain portions of the Guanzi 管子. Similarly, I have avoided focusing on those texts that may have been heavily edited in the early imperial period, such as the Zhou li 周禮. 14. See Boltz, “The Composite Nature,” 61; Lewis, Writing and Authority, 58. 15. My understanding of archeological approaches, for which I am indebted to Gideon Shelach,is based on the discussion in Drennan et...