Other doctrines played a lesser role in Chinese state formation. In the first century BCE, ancestor worship that revolved around the founder of the Han dynasty was replaced by the cult of Heaven, which placed the emperor at a pivotal position between Heaven and Earth. This cult grew in importance under the Eastern Han but remained limited in scope and largely confined to the capital region. Confucianism, by contrast, was more organically connected to the widespread and steadily growing custom of ancestor worship. It maintained its dominance among elite circles in competition with rival perspectives such as Daoism. Although the imperial collapse of the fourth century CE weakened political Confucianism and the early northern conquest regimes favored Buddhism, the subsequent restoration of centralized state power went hand in hand with a growing commitment to traditional elite Confucianism within the rebuilt administrative apparatus.
From the late Tang period onward, Confucianism underwent a more general revival and gained momentum under the Song, which presided over a massive expansion of the imperial examination system. At the expense of hereditary elites, officials came to be equated with scholars. The gentry class claimed status based on immersion in the canonical texts. As the number of learned graduates greatly exceeded that of available positions in the civil service, many of these individuals operated at the local level in unofficial capacities, where they disseminated Confucian thought among larger segments of the population. Its preeminence thus secured, this system of norms and beliefs remained of central importance until the end of the monarchy.25
Confucianism’s impact on economic development will be considered in chapter 10. At this point, the question is how it was related to state formation and especially to the persistence of large-scale empire. Prima facie, the Chinese arrangement ought to have supported state stability and capacity: its principal tenets were “government-friendly,” and the fusion of political and ideological power in the hands of the administrative class helped check both military and economic power bases.
Just like the imperial state itself, this dominant belief system became more deeply entrenched over time. Once again, much in the same way as in the cases discussed earlier in this chapter, the arrow of causation points primarily from state formation to beliefs. The Confucian-Legalist system was first set up under unified rule. It was revived when state power recovered in the north during the later stages of the Period of Disunion. And it greatly gathered strength under the Song dynasty, which had established the strongest state in China thus far.
This belief system did best when the state was strongest and the empire was intact—and thus able to provide sponsorship and material and status benefits to rent-seeking elites. It was at its most stable during the second millennium CE, when China was essentially either united or, at worst, split in two. All this speaks strongly in favor of explaining the success of this particular brand of elite Confucianism’s success with reference to the fortunes of empire, rather than the other way around.
This, however, is not the whole story. In a series of fascinating studies, Yuri Pines has argued that the idea of imperial unity preceded actual political unity, and that it persevered also when China was more fragmented. This would complicate the proposed link between state formation and hegemonic beliefs. According to Pines, a paradigm of unity had already developed during the Warring States period, perhaps in response to the increasingly violent failure of its multistate order. Most of the surviving texts that engaged with these issues favored political unity and rejected the existing competitive state system.26
In this reading, thinkers promoted universal empire as it were avant le fait, as the best or only way to bring about peace. Their reasoning was often embedded in the past, harking back to conditions under the hegemonic Shang and Western Zhou dynasties. The main question was not whether but how to unify the various states. Pines notes that not a single surviving text openly endorsed a regional state’s independence. Even though we have to allow for the possibility of later redactions or censorship under imperial rule that might have suppressed such unwelcome preferences, this overall preoccupation with imperial unity is certainly worthy of attention.27
At the time, rather limited geographic horizons may have made it possible to “consider the creation of a state unifying the whole known world to be a feasible goal,” although China’s actual geographic isolation would deserve some credit for this perspective. But even later, the concept of imperial unity enjoyed “political-cultural hegemonic status.” It also endured under regional conquest regimes.28
The idea of a single emperor formed a natural corollary: early sources such as the Mengzi already attributed to Confucius himself the adage, “There are neither two suns in heaven nor two monarchs on earth.” Pines notes that there could be many gods in China but only one legitimate ruler, as opposed to the One God and many rulers of Christian Europe—a telling contrast, even if this analogy misrepresents the Chinese emperor’s standing, which was nothing like God’s.29
Overall, these notions were reinforced by an ongoing project of streamlining elite thought that can be traced back to concerns about division as early as the late Warring States period and to the overt support of the Han authorities for Confucianism. This “drive toward ideological uniformity” greatly strengthened during the second millennium CE. Moreover, the longevity of the gentry class whose socialization was so heavily influenced by these beliefs helped preserve and spread them in the long run.30
All of this is well and good as long as we are interested in the history of ideas about political unity and the hegemonic role they played in elite thought. Pines is surely right to remind us that an exclusive focus on texts produced by and for the ruling class is not a problem as long as we seek to understand dominant notions specifically in those circles rather than among the population as a whole.31
The possibility that later revisions would have allowed the early literary tradition to be adjusted in the light of the later imperial unity represents a more serious concern. I must leave to the experts the question of the extent to which the impression of an ancient normative commitment to a single empire is a function of selective transmission, retrospective state-sponsored production of literature, and other constraints. What I am interested in here is what this tradition could tell us if we were to accept it as representative of actual elite preferences.32
In that case, how (much) did such beliefs influence state formation? On this point, Pines is coy. On the one hand, he makes it clear that he does not seek to give a comprehensive interpretation of “the empire’s exceptional prowess”—which (he notes) would need to take account of geographic, economic, military, religious, and (other) cultural features—but elects to home in on ideas of unity. On the other, there is considerable slippage from merely foregrounding this feature to effectively privileging it in explaining overall outcomes: thus, the reasons for imperial persistence “and, most of all, for its regeneration after periods of division,” “should be sought primarily in the realm of ideology.”33
The problem with this approach is immediately apparent: a research design that concentrates only on ideas while ignoring other factors cannot, by definition, establish the relevance and relative weight of this or any other factor—and, strictly speaking, cannot even show that ideas mattered at all. For instance, when Pines curtly dismisses the notion that geographic properties might have been decisive by averring that “clearly, preserving the empire’s unity was as challenging a task in the Chinese case as it was for other continental empires,” nothing is in fact less “clear”—not because this observation is right or wrong, but because in order to tell whether it is right or wrong we would have to engage in systematic cross-cultural comparison well beyond what I have been attempting in this section of the chapter. Talking about ideas alone, as Pines does, provides absolutely no basis at all for such a sweeping judgment.34
Throughout his discussion, a particular relationship between ideology and actualization is assumed rather than argued, let alone demonstrated. T
hus, while it is indeed remarkable that notions of imperial unity predate its existence, it in no way follows from this that “the Great Unity paradigm was not an outcome of, but rather a precondition for the imperial unification of 221 BCE”—which may or may not be the case.35 Pines’s claim that “insofar as everybody expected unification, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy” amounts to yet another non sequitur.36
The fact that the violent Qin unification unraveled almost immediately ought to discourage notions of self-fulfilling prophecies. No matter: according to Pines, even as the empire fractured a number of times, it was invariably saved by an “inherent understanding that political fragmentation must inevitably be reversed.” This is a gloss on the famous saying from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that “they say that the great forces of All-under-Heaven after prolonged division must unify, and after prolonged unity must divide.” It should hardly be necessary to point out this is merely an empirical observation of what happened in Chinese history and not a causal analysis.37
Nor is it a given that “this ideological paradigm deeply influenced political behavior in the ages of unity and division alike.” Consideration of basic counterfactuals shows us why. If dynasties in charge of all of China had lacked this ideational input, would they have failed sooner? Or not arisen at all? If polities in times of division had lacked it, would they have refrained from trying to conquer each other, or been less successful at it? All of this is perfectly possible but would need to be argued rather than blithely assumed. It is objectively true that in times of disunity, Chinese states failed to develop a durable state system along European lines and were keen to launch mutual wars of extermination that left unity as the only viable solution. Yet this outcome might just as readily have been a function of factors other than normative elite beliefs, just as the European state system was itself an anomaly derived from very specific circumstances in a variety of different domains.38
It may well be true that thanks to the administrative class’s deep immersion in canonical texts that endorsed imperial unity, “The empire … throughout its history had been primarily an intellectual rather than merely a sociopolitical construct.” Yet Pines’s plausible rejection of an exclusive role for the latter does not logically establish the former’s primacy—and once again it does not tell us anything tangible about how empire came about.39
None of my observations detract from the likelihood that ideology contributed meaningfully to imperial longevity, actuated by the attitudes and behavior of elite members that sought to ally themselves to a powerful state and thereby increased its capacities. However, there is nothing to suggest that empire on this scale would not otherwise have existed, or that elite preferences were a critical driving force. The former notion entails extravagant counterfactuals, and the latter is better replaced by a dialectical dynamic of empire and ideology mutually reinforcing one another over time, alongside other features such as cultural learning—which taught the central authorities what worked best—and the elite’s symbiotic dependence on state support and vice versa.40
I belabor the pitfalls of Pines’s approach so as to clarify the risks inherent in prioritizing ideology. Scaled back to a more reasonable level, the idea that, all other things being equal, beliefs made China’s political unity more likely than, say, Europe’s is perfectly unobjectionable. But other things were not at all equal. Was Chinese-style ideology more likely to flourish in a physical environment that otherwise facilitated unity?41
Apart from geography and ecology, institutions also mattered. The Greco-Roman world, with its city-state ecosystem and precocious republicanism, was not only less likely to develop a belief system akin to China’s Confucian-Legalist blend, but such a construct would also have been less likely to succeed. By contrast, once the Warring States period had centralized and homogenized territorial polities with an intensity unknown in ancient western Eurasia, beliefs that showed strong affinity to this political order had a better chance to prosper than the many other schools of thoughts that had once bloomed, not least because they were stronger candidates for sponsorship by the state.
Philip Hoffman provides a parallel in his speculative attempt to link post-Roman European polycentrism and belligerence to cultural evolution rooted in the absence of a strong state. This helped give rise to an unfettered warrior ethos that might otherwise have been stifled by more intrusive political institutions. Cultural norms that prized martial prowess and victory worked best for elites and their retainers that operated within rudimentary governance structures, which in turn reinforced fragmentation. This trend can be set against a different trajectory of cultural evolution in China that tended to pacify elites, a process that would presumably have been more difficult to sustain in a war-oriented competitive state system.42
The cumulative weight of history was bound to make itself felt. Whereas empire had been unheard of in most of Europe before the Romans came along, city-state culture had long been entrenched across the Mediterranean basin as an alternative—and thriving—mode of social organization. As part of its expansionist project, the Roman imperial state actively disseminated this tradition into Western Europe, encouraging local communities to organize themselves according to a quasi–city-state template.
Conversely, the early Chinese experiment of self-governing city-states was short-lived, and never produced a comparable ecology of inclusive micro-polities. Much the same was true of feudal relations as another alternative format of sociopolitical organization. They effectively disappeared from China during the Warring States period. Peter Lorge invokes their absence for more than a millennium when he notes that by the tenth century CE, when China entered another phase of fragmentation and renewed restoration, “the only higher-order political structure intellectually available was the imperial one”—and that had arguably been true for a long time.43
Trying to detach the formation of belief systems from the formation of states is a quixotic endeavor, an idealist game that privileges high-end thinking simply because it can. One does not need to be a hardened materialist to grasp this fallacy, and the critical response to Pines’s work demonstrates that it is in fact widely understood, even in an academic field as traditionally text-centered as the study of early China: “What Pines is describing and explicating is the endurance not of an eternal empire, but rather the persistence of a common discourse of imperial authority.”44
CULTURE, STATE POWER, AND STATE SCALE
So what about culture? As we have seen, it is not hard to identify a whole range of differences: between a single script and elite language in China and the multiple writing systems and languages in the Roman empire; and between the persistence of the elite Chinese tradition and the gradual marginalization of a shared elite language in Latin Europe as vernacular languages and literatures emerged. Latin Europe hosted an initially and then once again increasingly autonomous church that simultaneously partnered with and checked the state. In China, Buddhism, which had the potential to play a similar role, operated under tighter constraints imposed by a stronger state. In the secular ideological sphere, China boasted a unifying elite belief system that Europe utterly lacked, and that helped draw the gentry into sustained cooperation with the central state.
Setting aside the question the extent to which these features were secondary—a function of state formation—there can be little doubt that on balance, the Chinese traditions offered greater support to the integrity and capacity of the state than those that prevailed in Europe. Some of the Chinese traits, such as commitment to public service, favored the state as such. Others, from language and writing to the hegemonic emphasis on universal empire, lowered the cost of large-scale political unity.
In medieval Europe, ideological features limited state capacity while linguistic diversity impeded unity. Even so, empire generally accommodated variety: multilingualism may have raised the threshold for imperial unification and persistence but did not by itself prevent imperiogenesis. In that sense, cultural constraints on
universal empire in Europe were weak, especially given that the most serious ruptures within Latin Christendom did not arise until the sixteenth century. By comparison, traits that restricted state capacity more generally were more potent, interacting with other sources of power dispersion that I discuss in chapter 10. In the end, it was low state capacity rather than an insufficient degree of cultural unity that impeded large-scale state formation.
This assessment is consistent with what we observe in other parts of the Old World. The Islamic world was divided by the use of Arabic, Persian, and later, Turkic languages but held together by the religiously dominant Arabic script. The religious establishment exercised considerable influence yet remained subordinate to militarized conquest regimes. Rifts within the umma appeared very early on, just as they had among Christians. Nothing like the medieval papacy ever evolved in Islamic societies, nor did a secular belief system of the Chinese variety. Overall, and putting it very crudely, key cultural features contributed more to state capacity than in Europe but less so than in China. Outcomes in empire-building likewise occupied an intermediate position.
Much the same was true of South Asia: characterized by considerable linguistic as well as alphabetic diversity, it featured a deeply entrenched religious establishment, lacked a secular ideology associated with the state, and experienced a rift between Hindus and Moslems just when Hinduism had supplanted Buddhism. Self-replicating castes and self-regulating temples did not rely on state authority, and unlike the Chinese gentry, Brahmins were assured high status without joining a civil service. In all these respects, as far as integrative cultural traits are concerned, India bore a greater resemblance to Europe than to China. And its largest empires often proved brittle.45
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