CHAPTER 1
The Singularity of China
SOCIETIES AND NATIONS tend to think of themselves as
eternal. They also cherish a tale of their origin. A special
feature of Chinese civilization is that it seems to have no
beginning. It appears in history less as a conventional
nation-state than a permanent natural phenomenon. In the tale of
the Yellow Emperor, revered by many Chinese as the legendary
founding ruler, China seems already to exist. When the Yellow
Emperor appears in myth, Chinese civilization has fallen into
chaos. Competing princes harass each other and the people, yet an
enfeebled ruler fails to maintain order. Levying an army, the new
hero pacifies the realm and is acclaimed as emperor.1
The Yellow Emperor
has gone down in history as a founding hero; yet in the founding
myth, he is reestablishing, not creating, an empire. China predated
him; it strides into the historical consciousness as an established
state requiring only restoration, not creation. This paradox of
Chinese history recurs with the ancient sage Confucius: again, he
is seen as the “founder” of a culture although he stressed that he
had invented nothing, that he was merely trying to reinvigorate the
principles of harmony which had once existed in the golden age but
had been lost in Confucius’s own era of political
chaos.
Reflecting on the
paradox of China’s origins, the nineteenth-century missionary and
traveler, the Abbé Régis-Evariste Huc, observed:
Chinese civilization originates in an antiquity so remote that we vainly endeavor to discover its commencement. There are no traces of the state of infancy among this people. This is a very peculiar fact respecting China. We are accustomed in the history of nations to find some well-defined point of departure, and the historic documents, traditions, and monuments that remain to us generally permit us to follow, almost step by step, the progress of civilization, to be present at its birth, to watch its development, its onward march, and in many cases, its subsequent decay and fall. But it is not thus with the Chinese. They seem to have been always living in the same stage of advancement as in the present day; and the data of antiquity are such as to confirm that opinion.2
When Chinese written
characters first evolved, during the Shang Dynasty in the second
millennium B.C., ancient Egypt was at the height of its glory. The
great city-states of classical Greece had not yet emerged, and Rome
was millennia away. Yet the direct descendant of the Shang writing
system is still used by well over a billion people today. Chinese
today can understand inscriptions written in the age of Confucius;
contemporary Chinese books and conversations are enriched by
centuries-old aphorisms citing ancient battles and court
intrigues.
At the same time,
Chinese history featured many periods of civil war, interregnum,
and chaos. After each collapse, the Chinese state reconstituted
itself as if by some immutable law of nature. At each stage, a new
uniting figure emerged, following essentially the precedent of the
Yellow Emperor, to subdue his rivals and reunify China (and
sometimes enlarge its bounds). The famous opening of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a
fourteenth-century epic novel treasured by centuries of Chinese
(including Mao, who is said to have pored over it almost
obsessively in his youth), evokes this continuous rhythm: “The
empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it
has ever been.”3 Each period of disunity was viewed as an
aberration. Each new dynasty reached back to the previous dynasty’s
principles of governance in order to reestablish continuity. The
fundamental precepts of Chinese culture endured, tested by the
strain of periodic calamity.
Before the seminal
event of Chinese unification in 221 B.C., there had been a
millennium of dynastic rule that gradually disintegrated as the
feudal subdivisions evolved from autonomy to independence. The
culmination was two and a half centuries of turmoil recorded in
history as the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.). Its European
equivalent would be the interregnum between the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Second World War, when a
multiplicity of European states was struggling for preeminence
within the framework of the balance of power. After 221 B.C., China
maintained the ideal of empire and unity but followed the practice
of fracturing, then reuniting, in cycles sometimes lasting several
hundred years.
When the state
fractured, wars between the various components were fought
savagely. Mao once claimed that the population of China declined
from fifty million to ten million during the so-called Three
Kingdoms period (A.D. 220–80),4 and the conflict among the contending
groups between the two world wars of the twentieth century was
extremely bloody as well.
At its ultimate
extent, the Chinese cultural sphere stretched over a continental
area much larger than any European state, indeed about the size of
continental Europe. Chinese language and culture, and the Emperor’s
political writ, expanded to every known terrain: from the
steppelands and pine forests in the north shading into Siberia, to
the tropical jungles and terraced rice farms in the south; from the
east coast with its canals, ports, and fishing villages, to the
stark deserts of Central Asia and the ice-capped peaks of the
Himalayan frontier. The extent and variety of this territory
bolstered the sense that China was a world unto itself. It
supported a conception of the Emperor as a figure of universal
consequence, presiding over tian xia,
or “All Under Heaven.”