I am teaching a tutorial this year, the first time I have taken up this kind of class.  A small group of students and I will read and discuss – and they will write about – ancient Chinese political thought.  The challenge for me will be to shut up.  I tend to talk, but in a tutorial I am supposed to sit and listen as students read papers and frame the discussion.  It will tax my nervous New York-ish habit of wanting to weigh in with my two – or three or four – cents.  I will have to practice the Taoism I preach!

     We met last night all together (tutorials eventually break down into pairs of students meeting with the teacher) to review some historical background.  I gave them several chapters from Jacques Gernet’s, A History of Chinese Civilization, a fairly straightforward account of the politics, economics and culture of pre-Qin China, moving from the neolithic age to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, right down to 221 BC.

     One of the things that comes out of this reading is the extent to which everything was changing at this time.  We tend to think of ancient China in static terms: the emergent state, settled agriculture, ancestor worship – all the various things that we take to constitute historical continuity.  Gernet reminds us otherwise:

The age of the Warring States, from the end of the fifth century to the imperial unification of 221 B.C., is one of those exceptional periods when successive and concomitant changes, provoking and reinforcing each other, speed up the course of history and cause a complete transformation of society, manners, economics, and thought.  The movement was slow at first; scarcely perceptible in the sixth century, it accelerates as we approach the end of the third, to such an extent that differences grow deeper from one generation to another. (62)

     I don’t know about "speeding up the course of history" – that has a bit of a teleological tinge to me – but the notion of accelerating change, in all facets of life, is something familiar.  We like to think of our own time in those terms.  While I might agree that the pace of change is faster now, I think it is important to keep in mind that ancient societies, and perhaps especially ancient China, also experienced destabilizing transformations.  There is no such thing as "changeless China."

       Confucius and Mencius were obviously reacting against what they saw as a decline of morality; change, for them, was bad in many ways.  Whatever we think of their philosophy, the point to bear in mind is the sense of anxiety and opportunity that was prevalent in the society around them.  Things were changing.  Political leaders had to find new ways of reacting to new social and economic and military realities.  Some of them reached back to reinvent tradition; others, goaded by Legalists, swept the past away and seized power with ruthlessly new forms of government.  These schools of thought were fundamentally different, but they were all operating in, and struggling to understand and control, the same transforming context.

     I see a parallel here with our own time.  In my quixotic effort to make ancient Chinese thought relevant to modern life, I am constantly thinking about the difficulties of taking ideas from an ancient historical context and applying them to a radically different time and place.  But here is a trans-historical similarity: the great texts of the Warring States period were produced in and reacting to changing circumstances, and, at least abstractly, that is the context we find ourselves in today.  Society, politics, culture, economy are all changing around us, at times with bewildering speed.  Perhaps texts produced in one time of change have something to say in another time of change.

     Gernet also has something interesting to say about the effect of large-scale historical change on the possibilities of collective identity.  In analyzing the rise of the Qin state, he writes:

The effects of the state revolution were profound and extended to every sphere.  In the process the Chinese world no doubt lost much of its past, and much of its past became incomprehensible to it. (82)

     He goes on to say that this was an uneven process: the past was lost especially in the Qin heartland.  In other parts of the new empire, in the East, texts and traditions were preserved.  But Gernet is suggesting that, even with this preservation, some things were irretrivably lost.  "The Chinese world" was transformed.  And, if this is true, what does it mean for the way we understand "China" today.  When did "China" take on the historical characteristics we usually associate with it?  Do we rely too much on reinventions of traditions dating from the Qin and Han?  Are we projeting back into the past and creating a "China" that we want to believe existed but which may have, in reality (a reality lost to us), looked much different than our limited understandings?