This talk explores in how warfare in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periode contributed to the following patterns of Chinese history:

1) The Chinese imperial system persisted--with few interruptions-- from 221 BCE to the 20th century.

2) Ever since 221 BCE, China had been governed by a meritocratic bureaucracy.

3) China had the strongest state tradition among the world's major civilizations.

4) Military commanders played little role in politics except during civil wars.

5) Most world empires expanded through military expeditions, whereas China expanded its territory often through the "self-sinicizing" efforts of nomadic conquerors.

6) Transcendental religions did not have an impact on Chinese politics and the state showed tolerance for various religions.

7) Commercial classes had little role in politics.

The repetitive and inconclusive wars among the feudal states of the time facilitated the rise of instrumental culture and associated developments such as the rise of a monetary economy, bureaucracy, and philosophies. Yet the lack of a strong check by societal forces resulted in the harnessing of this dynamism by a unified Legalist state (Qin), whose brutality brought it to a quick demise. This historical lesson pushed the rulers of the subsequent Han dynasty to search for new ruling methods, and the whole process led to the rise of a Confucian-Legalist state whose rule was legitimized by Confucianism and whose bureaucracy was staffed by Confucian scholars. This alliance of the state and Confucian scholars provided a base for state legitimacy, a moral guidance to all, a check-and-balance between the ruling house and bureaucrats, a homogeneous ruling class culture, and a certain level of upward mobility for the lower classes to join ranks of the rulers. Such a fusing of political power and ideological power marginalized economic and military power, and shaped the entire history of imperial China.

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Dingxin Zhao is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and University Professors at Fudan and Renmin University. His research interests encompass political sociology broadly defined and comparative historical sociology, the sociology of emotion, ecological sociology, and sociological theory and methodology. He has published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociology, Problems of Post-Communism and China Quarterly. He has written an award winning book on the 1989 prodemocracy student movement in Beijing (The Power of Tiananmen: Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement; Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001 http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14155.ctl). He has also published two books in Chinese (Social and Political Movements and Wareful in the Eastern Zhou and the Rise of Confucian-Legalist State). For the past three years he has been working on a project aimed at understanding the history of the Spring-Autumn and Warring States period and its impact on later Chinese history up to the Republican Revolution in 1911.

RichardGunde
(626) 825-8683

www.international.ucla.edu/china

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies