Ancient China Unification

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China is one of the ancient civilizations that has outlasted its counterparts in antiquity. Great civilizations such as the Greek, Egyptian, and Roman among others have long ceased to be a major part in the global community. The Chinese civilization has endured for thousands of years because of their isolation from the rest of the world and is now beginning to open up as a major player in the international community.

The key factor in the unification of the Chinese people is their adherence to the standardized belief system employed by the empire. The prevalent system in the Chinese belief system is Confucianism. Confucius was born in an aristocratic family in East China in a small estate called Lu. Confucius was born and he lived in the period of the Zhou Dynasty.

The Zhou Dynasty was established on the system of feudalism under the central government the empire was divided into many feudal states, each one was headed by members of the royal house or those who were rewarded for having rendered outstanding service to the state. (Xinzhong 2000, 22) This system worked at the time that people were demanded to be obedient to the ruling family of the territories they occupied.

The need for military power increased as the centralized government needed powerful families in order to keep the people from revolting because the Chinese empire has one other concern that they would need to be wary of, those of the nomadic tribes of the north, the Mongols. Confucianism was adopted by the ruling elite of the empire as the teachings emphasized that moral goodness is depended on the part of each person has to.

What the person has to do is dictated by the ruling classes which were the ruling families and the administrators of the empire. (Ebrey 1996 65). Complete disobedience to the social norms was morally sound in Confucianism. This is vital in order to for the system of centralized government to check any outsider thoughts which would be sown in the minds of the citizens. Disarray and incoherence of the social structure were added upon the method of rectified as a solution.

Other thinkers set up different philosophies with Confucius being the most important of them. He believed the chaos and disorder developed from the misuse and abuse of ritual/propriety and music. He described these as the decay of ritual/propriety and the collapse of music. Unable to endure this state of affairs, Confucius embarked upon a life-long enterprise to restore the value of rituals and to propagate the rules of propriety. (Xinzhong 2000, 22)

Confucian thought dictated that in order to be maintained the social norms of the Chinese society should be synthesized in line with the nature of man, which is to do good. Those standards are adopted by the empire, its administrators up to the ruling families of the different territories of the empire.

It is assumed that man naturally needs to do good in order for harmony to be present in the society which he is a part of. In order to set up guidelines for good family and social life, Confucius reinterpreted the meaning and methods of learning and education of the traditions of the society he is a part of, and believed that the promotion of the tradition had a great leverage on improving the quality of social, was the key to overcoming the present problems, and would lead the people to a refined and redefined goodness and harmony.

Confucian thought emphasized the role of the state in order to lay down the guidelines of the society which it was administering. (Yu-lan 1953, 119) The role is vital for the central government to be able to control the ethical and moral standards which are important for the benefit of the empire.

In any society, language is the basic requirement of unifying its people. The culture of the people is reflected when everyone understands each other no matter how wide the territory of the land is. The Chinese made all the spoken languages of its territories the same writing system. Although any character might be pronounced differently in different regions of China, that character will be written the same way after the standardization undertaken under the Qin no matter where it was written.

This system of written characters could be read by educated Chinese from one end of the country to the other. It because of the language of the bureaucracy and the vehicle for the transmission of Chinese culture to all Chinese from the Great Wall to the southern border and even beyond.

The written language, however, was not identical with the spoken. Written Chinese evolved a totally separate vocabulary and grammatical structure from the spoken tongues, as a result, those who used it required special training. When the Confucian principles had been elevated to state ideology, the key works identified with the Confucian school were integrated into a set of so-called Confucian Classics.

These works became required reading for generations of Chinese schoolchildren and introduced them to the forms of behavior that would be required of them as adults. (Duiker and Spielvogel 2008, 70) The Chinese language was integrated into the state language in conjunction with the teachings of Confucianism. This was a perfect tool for the unification of the people of the Chinese empire for the consolidation of the territories of the empire.

Language is the single most effective tool for unifying a group of people because if everyone understood each other, the ideas would be freely discussed and transferred from one region to the other. The imposition of laws also would be benefitted with a single form of writing that was to be understood by all within the empires no matter where region each hails from.

In contrast to the divided and different languages employed by the European continent, such may be the cause for misunderstanding which may lead to small conflicts between different people of the continent.

This centralized form of government throughout the empire, as well as the building of the Great Wall to protect the empire against the nomadic invaders of the North in a sense, served as an incubation period of Chinese thought. Ideas were exchanged within the empire with some other philosophies opposing or adhering to Confucianism were brought forward.

The unity that the Qin dynasty established isolated China to the rest of the world and was fortified by the building of the Great Wall as well as improving on its fortifications. In contrast with the European countries where they were divided and at times were always at war with each other. China, on the other hand, chose not to be aggressive to their neighboring countries instead they set up trade with the other countries around in South East Asia and those directly below them.

They chose to assimilate their ways to the other Asian countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand (Siam) among others. Chinese influence can be seen in the cultures and society of these countries without China conquering them as opposed to the colonization trend by the European powers during the enlightenment. For the most part, it seems that China was left behind in technology which the European countries discovered.

Recent evidence shows that the Chinese were not too far behind in the development of technologies compared to their European counterparts during the same periods. (Ebrey 1993, 78)

For the most part, because of the self-imposed isolation of the Chinese rulers on the empire, it is easy to see that they lagged behind Europe in other aspects, the Chinese have developed a long-standing system of government, they have ethical and moral standards, infrastructure is not lagging as evidenced by the construction of the Great Wall, the only man-made structure which can be seen from outer space.

It is said that although the Great Wall is one of the major achievements of all human engineering, the reason for the Chinese in building the Great Wall is because of fear. The nomadic Mongol tribe, a fierce group of people has a vicious appetite for conquest and has been a troubling the Chinese for many years. To protect the newly unified Chinese empire from them is to build an enclosure of the land. For some, the building of the Great Wall establishes Chinese engineering as one of the best in the history of human civilization.

It is not accurate that the emperors built and improved the structure out of fear but also from a practical point of few it lessens the need for the deployment of soldiers in the northern border of the empire and focuses on maintaining order within the territory. (Tin bor-Hui 2005, 56)

Having a professional army patrol the border may be less costly than erecting such a structure but there will be a risk of spreading the army thinly within the empire which may lead to disarray and chaos among the rebellious citizens because of the lack of an authoritative figure walking around in the streets, just like today’s police force does. The Great Wall also boxed in Chinese citizens from venturing out of the empire and the empire benefitted from a unified human resource.

Their culture has also influenced other countries just as the European colonizers did, but they did it so with by trading with the other countries and having settlements from all over and not by conquering other people. The gunpowder was used in China a thousand years before the first cannons were constructed in Europe.

The Chinese have probably influenced other countries the same way as the other European countries did the glaring difference is the lack of the use of force in assimilating their culture to others, which the Europeans did so very well. Because of the Confucian guidelines and the adoption of the central government of a single writing system as well as the majority of the spoken language into the state policies transmissions of orders were easier between regions which lead to a more efficient way of running things.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans were becoming increasingly interested in other countries beyond their borders. The British and French empires spanned the globe, and their colonial agents sent home exotic goods and stories. Poets and painters put their own visions of the seductive Orient into paper and canvass. The last remote corners of the world were completing the list of European discoveries; mountains were measures and the sources of great rivers determined and mapped.

Tibet and other far-off lands were penetrated for the first time by Europeans, as British, Russian and German agents ventured into the most inaccessible reaches of Central Asia, attempting to pave the way for colonial claims. (Foltz 1999, 1) The Silk Road was not one road but many; it was actually a network of roads going east and west, but with spurts into southern Iran, the northern Eurasian steppe and south over the Hindu Kush to the Indian subcontinent.

In all of history, Richthofen appears to have been the first to conceptualize the land routes across Asia in such a singular way. The experience of Marco Polo, who did cover the whole distance from Venice to China and back during the thirteenth century told stories of a civilization of in the east that very much differs from that of Europe. (Foltz 1999, 3) For all its romantic allure, the Silk Road is where trade flourished between the east and the west, with the exchange of goods that both benefitted from.

China has been one of the main beneficiaries of the trade as the Chinese merchants traded with others for years, the Indians, Central Asia as which eventually led to Europe. Once the avenue for trade was discovered it is inevitable that ideas will be exchanged, religion also will be discussed as well as the customs of people will be observed and also be noted by the merchants and traders.

The goods traded will spark curiosity from the people as to how to make these things and maybe an exchange of technology between those of the state and the thinkers of that time will be put forward.

The isolation of China may have brought about a limited acceptance of foreign ideas to the Chinese empire but no amount of restriction would eventually trade between people especially if the profits of trade are tremendous. The Silk Road was such avenue for China and Europe to open trade relations after explorers as Marco Polo brought back news of the wonders of the Orient.

To say that China fell behind Europe, the trade would not flourish between them instead the westerners would have set out to conquer the land just like the Spanish did to the countries of Latin America. History showed that the exchange of goods was the starting point of relations between east and west although China would still maintain its isolation policy despite the exchange of ideas from the west.

The territories of the unified empire are consolidated and the goods of the Europeans and some technologies would have been distributed through the administrative channels of the empire.

The roots of Chinese bureaucracy reach back prior to the Qin unification. During Confucius’s time, China’s competing states worked hard to improve their administrative system by using hired employees rather than hereditary nobles to oversee their domains. In the 2nd century AD, the Han dynasty set up the first formalized bureaucracy selected by an examination system.

The Chinese bureaucracy rested on the gentry. Local government from public works to religious celebrations to legal matters easily could have swamped a state governing an area as large as China in the era before modern communications, was the gentry’s responsibility. And it did the job so well that at any given time the vast Chinese empire could be governed by at most 30,000 to 40,000 officials. (Grasso, Corrin and Kort 2004, 24)

The golden age of the Chinese bureaucracy and the medieval flowering of Chinese civilization ended with the final collapse of what is known as the Southern Song dynasty in 1279. This glorious era was followed by a national catastrophe, the first foreign conquest of all China by the nomadic Mongols. In China, the conquest was a bitter decades-long struggle that absorbed the energies of great Mongol conquerors, Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.

Although the Mongols were invincible as conquerors they were not good rulers, their dynasty the Yuan lasted less than 100 years before being overthrown by the Chinese rebels who went on to establish the Ming dynasty. The Ming dynasty represented a national vindication for the Chinese.

The new dynasty also had to its credit other major accomplishments, among them the rebuilding of the Great Wall and the reconstruction and extension of the Grand Canal, the latter reflecting major advances in engineering technology. (Grasso, Corrin and Kort 2004, 24) It was during this time that China began to isolate them once again.

The reason is that even though they were trading with other countries, most of which was between the Arabic countries, fear began to spread because of the Mongol invasion, and the Chinese rulers felt that they have to limit relations with others beyond their borders to prevent another conquest by a foreign invader.

The lack of technological advances which outside relations from other countries brought made the other aspects of Chinese society lagging apart from the military, areas such as agriculture; engineering and also the political structure became outdated. As a result of the decay of Chinese society, they fell to another foreign invader, the Manchu, who established the Qing dynasty.

Their conquest extended the Chinese empire to its greatest extent ever, and although some of that territory is eventually lost, the Manchu policies of replacing tribal rule with imperial administration and systematic signification deserve credit for welding several outlying areas from Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia into what China is today. (Grasso, Corrin and Kort 2004, 24) For the latter part of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth, China was the most populous and possibly the most prosperous country in the world.

The Manchu’s strengthened their interregional ties, promoting prosperity and unity. Meanwhile, their ability to impose order for over a century contributed to spectacular and unprecedented growth in China’s population. (Grasso, Corrin and Kort 2004, 25) The unification of a vast land area in Asia is a stark contrast to the divisiveness over the European precedent in terms of prosperity.

China cannot be taken for granted as a world power compared to the European superpowers of their time for one; their population can easily dwarf those of the European countries another point which favors the Chinese model is the strict adherence of the Chinese citizens to their laws and the state. (Gernet, 1996 68).

Because of Confucianism as adopted by the Chinese rulers, a person does well when his actions are based on the glorification of the State. Doing good for the empire is what every Chinese citizen is expected to do so. By having this type of mentality among the population one, it is easier for the administrators of the empire to impose laws that the citizenry will follow as long as it is good for the empire, if it is good for the empire then it is good for the people.

To say that the unity of the Chinese civilization is a major reason for it to lag behind the western powers is not accurate. The problem is that because of the adherence to Confucianism which relied heavily on memorization of the values set forth for the society set aside critical thinking which the European powers exploited. This is the reason why there were technological advances in Europe which led to the Industrial Revolution.

The scientific method which relies on the critical analysis of data, as well as the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula for rational thought, is founded upon is not present in the Chinese way of thinking. The Chinese views that knowledge comes from the established doctrines set forth by the ruling class and is adopted as the way which should be followed by all. Questioning established knowledge is not imbued in the Chinese psyche because of the adherence to the classical schools of thought propagated by the central government.

Reference List

Duiker, William J., Spielvogel Jackson J. 2008. The Essential World History Third Edition. Belmont. Clark Baxter

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. 1996. Cambridge Illustrated History: China. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Ebrey, Patricia B. 1993. Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2^nd Edition. Free Press

Foltz, Richard C. 1999. Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange From Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century. New York. St. Martin’s Press

Gernet, Jacques. 1996. A History of Chinese Civilization. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Grasso, J., Corrin J., Kort M. 2004. Modernization and Revolution in China: From the Opium Wars to World Power. New York. M.E. Sharpe

Johnston, Reginald Fleming. 2007. Lion and Dragon in Northern China. E.P. Dutton and Company

Tin-bor Hui, Victoria. 2005. War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Xinzhong, Yao. 2000. An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Yu-lan, Fung. 1953. Chinese Philosophy Volume II: The Period of Classical Learning from the Second Century BC to the Twentieth Century AD. Peking. Henri Vetch

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Ancient China Unification

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