The acute Chinese consciousness of history had two further rami-
fications. One was that history had a pattern: each dynasty moved
inexorably from the heroic exploits of its founder to the miserable exit
of the last emperor in the dynastic line. The second was that the model
to be emulated by each new dynasty lay in the past. History provided
no record of progress for the Chinese. What it provided was moral
example, established in the ‘golden age’ of the early Zhou kings. His-
torians sat in judgment over the past, and on those judgments rested
future policy—in foreign relations, as in government.
The kingdom over which the early Zhou kings ruled was by
no means a centralised state. Rather, it was feudal in structure, made
up of dozens of principalities whose aristocratic rulers acknowledged
Zhou suzerainty. In 771 BCE, the power of the Zhou kings was
forever destroyed when their capital was overrun by an alliance of
barbarians and rebel vassals. Powerful feudal lords rescued the
dynasty and established a new capital further to the east, but
the Eastern Zhou kings were thereafter mere figureheads. The
Chinese cultural area fragmented politically into a number of
autonomous principalities which, by the fifth century BCE, were in
a state of almost constant conflict with each other. This was the time
of the ‘warring states’. It was also a time of innovation in technology,
in culture, and in philosophy.
The Confucian worldview
The greatest of China’s philosophers, judged by the influence he has
had on Chinese civilisation, was Kung Fu-zi, known to the West as
Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BCE. The importance of
Confucius lies in the direction he gave to Chinese thought, to its
rationalism, to its humanism, and to its social and political focus. Con-
fucius had one overriding concern: to restore social order and moral
propriety in an age of growing political anarchy and social chaos. For
The Chinese view of the world