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2 History Lessons Early Dynastic History A cultural outsider studying Chinese history might be struck by the early emergence and persistence of particular themes in that ancient kingdom’s notions and practice of statecraft—some of which may have no small relevance today, particularly in a culture so devoted to finding in ancient practice the keys to contemporary legitimacy and understanding. Among these is the recurring theme of Chinese statecraft as an unending cycle of struggles for supremacy within the political universe. The earliest kingdom identified in Chinese history was the Xia (Hsia) dynasty, probably a preliterate, neolithic tribal confederacy of some sort in the middle reaches of the Yellow River. In the Chinese historical tradition , it is said that the Xia originated with the legendary sage-king Yü and existed from about 2205 to 1766 b.c.e.1 The Xia were succeeded by the Shang dynasty, which is traditionally said to have existed from 1766 to 1122 b.c.e., at which point it was destroyed by an invasion from the semibarbarian West by a chariot-borne army of the Zhou (Chou) tribe led by one of the Shang king Di-xin’s former vassals, Wu Wang (King Wu).2 Wu’s conquest led to the creation of the third kingdom of Chinese history, the Zhou dynasty—a feudal system in which Zhou princes and royal kinsmen were set up as lords over the lower reaches of the Yellow River, owing allegiance to the king in his capacity as t’ien-tzu (Son of Heaven), said to be a lineal descendant of the supreme deity and founder-ancestor of the Zhou people.3 The Duke of Zhou, who subsequently ruled this kingdom as regent for Wu Wang’s young son, is remembered in the Confucian tradition as a paragon ruler of antiquity.4 Over time, however, the Zhou feudal system declined, and the equilibrium that it had struck between central kingly power and local feudal autonomy began to slide decidedly in favor of the latter. In 841 b.c.e.— what Rodzinski has called “the first firmly established date in Chinese his- 20 THE MIND OF EMPIRE tory”—a revolt drove the Zhou king Li Wang from power.5 The dynasty struggled on, however, until the traumatic year 771 b.c.e., in which Yu Wang was killed when a tribe of barbarian Quanrong nomads sacked the Zhou capital of Hao in the Wei Valley, forcing his successor, P’ing Wang, to flee to the city of Loyang.6 This upheaval marked the end of what was thereafter known as the Eastern Zhou period. The succeeding Western Zhou period saw the further decline of Zhou fortunes, with the Zhou wang (king) reduced from the status of feudal overlord to merely the head of one of a number of rival kingdoms that grew out of the remnants of his former domains. This decline from primus sine paribus to a merely ceremonial primus inter pares was solidified by Zhou’s defeat by the Duke Zhuang of Zheng in 707 b.c.e.7 The period of increasing Zhou decline—and the corresponding rise of de facto independent states in China—is also known as the Spring and Autumn (Ch’unch ’iu) period, so-called after the title of the historical annals by that name from the kingdom of Lu in Shantung that record events between 722 and 481 b.c.e.8 During this period, following the lead of the Duke of Zheng, there emerged a series of rulers of princely states who exercised “a general primacy over the other states in the name, at least, of the Zhou emperor.”9 These rulers, among them Duke Huan of Ch’i, who ruled from about 686 to 646 b.c.e., were known during their preeminence as the pa (or ba)—a term variously translated as overlord or (more commonly) hegemon—of China. Theoretically, each pa acted on behalf of the Zhou king, but such “protestations were rarely more than a cloak for his own policies.”10 The role of pa shifted variously from Ch’i to Qin (629 b.c.e.) and Ch’u (613 b.c.e.), but the hegemon system was not long-lived, for, after the hegemony of Duke Chuang of Ch’u (613–591 b.c.e.), no state ruler remained with enough power to preside as pa by coercing the others. Thereafter, individual rulers increasingly adopted the old title wang (king), which had previously belonged...

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