Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China

6. The Transformation of the Barbarians

2 To Assimilate or Not to Assimilate Much as people tend to keep their own way of life and thinking, in reality their attitudes and mentality are susceptible to outside influence upon contact with others. When contacts are made, changes in both directions are usually expected. The extent of change, of course, varies from person to person, from culture to culture, and from time to time. While ideologically a culture may consider itself the center of the civilized world—all three in our study in fact did—and therefore culturally self-sufficient, in reality changes upon contact with foreign cultures are more or less inevitable. How or to what extent these cultures assimilate foreign cultures is the question addressed in this chapter. The Confucian thinker Mencius once made a comment on cultural assimilation that later became the hallmark of the Chinese ethnocentric view: “I have heard of people using the Chinese (Xia) way to transform (bian) the barbarians, but I have never heard of any (Chinese) being transformed by the barbarians.”¹ What exactly is the meaning of bian, which literally means “change” and is translated as “transform” here? What was involved in this transformation? What was the difference between Chinese and “barbarian” culture? 6 The Transformation of the Barbarians When [King] Tang began his conquest, he commenced with Ge, and after eleven expeditions, there was no enemy left in the kingdom . When he fought in the east, the western Yi-barbarians complained , when he fought in the south, the northern Di-barbarians complained, saying, why does he make us last? —Mencius, c. 372–289 BCE 22 Enemies of Civilization An often-cited passage in the Confucian Analects regarding the contribution of Guan Zhong, the chancellor of the state of Qi who advocated and carried out the policy of “expelling the barbarians and honoring the Zhou kingship,” has the following comment by Confucius: “But for Guan Zhong, we should now be wearing our hair unbound, and the lappets of our coats buttoning on the left side.”² Another passage in the Zuozhuan, cited in chapter 4 above, has the Rong-barbarian’s confession that “We Rong people’s food and garments are different from those of the Chinese (Hua 華) people, . . . our language does not allow us to communicate (with the Chinese people).” Language and lifestyle, including dietary habits and dress, seem to be the major differences that caught the attention of people when they thought about the cultural differences between Chinese and barbarians. However, it should be clear that Confucius’s comment was only a figurative way of describing the condition under barbarian rule, for Guan Zhong’s contribution was to uphold the pivotal position of the Zhou court, the symbol of the feudal system that Confucianism ascribed to. The real issue was therefore not hairdo or dress style, but the political and ethical system of li (ritual) and yi (righteousness), which were the central concern of the Confucian political philosophy. Thus when Confucius was distressed over the ruthless politics of the contemporary states, he was known to have opted to live in the land of the barbarians, not because he thought that the barbarians were more civilized, but because a “gentleman (junzi)” could transform the rustic into the sophisticated: The Master wished to go and live among the nine Yi-barbarian tribes. Someone said, “They are rude. What are you going to do?” The Master said, “If a gentleman dwelt among them, what rudeness would there be?”³ Confucius was also known to have said that “The Yi and Di-barbarians have their rulers, yet they still are not equal to the Xia states that have no rulers.”⁴ The implication was that Chinese culture, based on li and yi, was superior to the barbarians even during a time of political confusion. The Confucian view of Chinese cultural superiority was followed by Mencius. In the above quoted passage, Mencius was referring to a Naturalist philosopher, Chen Xiang, who adopted the doctrine of another philosopher Xu Xing and advocated a simple and natural economy in which the prince cultivates the field together with his The Transformation of the Barbarians 23 people and consumes the fruit of their own labor. Mencius denounced this philosophy as barbaric because both Chen Xiang and Xu Xing were from the state of Chu, the traditional southern Man-barbarian country. Mencius’s denouncement not only focused on the impracticability of the naturalist...