Introduction to the History of China

Our word "civilization" goes back to a Latin root having to do with "citizen" and "city." The Chinese counterpart, actually a binom, wen hua, literally means "the transforming [i.e., civilizing] influence of writing." In other words, for us the essence of civilization is urbanization; for the Chinese it is the art of writing.

The ramifications of this capsulized distinction have been many and significant. Throughout their literate history, the Chinese have been much more interested in the written than the spoken word. Famous Chinese orators have been rare, famous calligraphers legion. Whereas in India it was the oral recitation of a sacred composition that made it efficacious, in China it was above all its reproduction in written or printed form. Papers bearing writing could not be indiscriminately discarded in the streets of the old China. This was not so much because they polluted the streets as that such an act showed disrespect to the written word. As late as the 1930s it was still possible, in Peking, to see public trash receptacles inscribed with the traditional exhortation: "Chinghsi tzu chih," "Respect and spare written paper."

No doubt this attitude stems from the nature of Chinese writing: a nonalphabetic and basically ideographic script whose thousands of separate symbols or characters each signifies a distinct object or concept and therefore, like the Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), are immediately understandable to the eye irrespective of the pronunciations the reader may attach to them. This fact explains why the Chinese script could become the written medium of peoples adjoining the Chinese: not only those, like the Vietnamese, closely related to the Chinese linguistically, but also peoples, like the Koreans and Japanese, whose spoken languages belong to totally different linguistic families.

Because each Chinese ideograph carries from its cultural past its own distinct connotations, the acceptance of Chinese writing by others meant, to a considerable extent, their acceptance of Chinese cultural and moral values as well. Conversely, the Chinese script proved a major barrier to the free entry of foreign ideas and values into Chinese culture, because it meant that these values and ideas could reach the Chinese consciousness only through the filter of the ideographs. Resulting frequent failures and distortions of communication were as well known to Buddhist missionaries fifteen hundred years ago as they were to those from the Christian West of the seventeenth century onward.

The prime place of calligraphy among the Chinese arts and its intimate relationship with Chinese painting are both well known. But the significance of their concern with writing has a far wider cultural range. There seems to be a consistent pattern, for example, in the fact that the Chinese were the inventors of paper (first century A.D.), of block printing (ninth century or earlier), and of movable type (eleventh century). Or that, prior to around 1750, they are said to have produced more printed books than the rest of the world put together.

Of particular interest to us here, however, are the social and political consequences. The high prestige of the written language, combined with the tremendous difficulties attached to its mastery, gave to the scholar in China a status unequaled in any other society. During the past two thousand years, speaking very broadly, the Chinese ruling elite consisted neither of nobles, priests, generals,. nor industrial or commercial magnates, but rather of scholar-officials. These were men educated from childhood in the Confucian classics who, ideally, became members of officialdom through success in the government's civil service examinations. These examinations, which were written, humanistic in content, and exceedingly rigorous, were conducted periodically throughout the empire at county, provincial, and national levels. In name they were open to all but a very few members of the total male population. In actuality, of course, it was only a tiny fraction of that total who were educationally qualified to take them.

If any single word can describe the imperial state system, it is bureaucracy. The government maintained a complex network of official positions which were specialized, ranked according to a fixed scale in the civil service, salaried accordingly, and staffed on the basis of demonstrated intellectual qualifications rather than birth. Career officials moved upward, or sometimes downward, on the bureaucratic ladder according to the merits or demerits regularly entered on their dossiers by their superiors; of course the usual principle of seniority operated as well.

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that these officials were commonly unimaginative, rigid, or lacking in initiative simply because some people today associate these characteristics with the word "bureaucracy." It should be remembered that governmental service was the most highly regarded of all professions for the Chinese educated man and that he came to it trained as a humanist rather than as a technician. As a rule, he had a good appreciation of the accepted literary and artistic accomplishments — notably poetry, calligraphy, and painting — and not infrequently he was a competent practitioner of them. Thousands of Chinese bureaucrats have been passable poets, and most great poets have at some time been bureaucrats.

Like every bureaucracy, that of China generated enormous amounts...