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he state is shattered; mountains and rivers remain.” These poetic
words, written 1,200 years ago, express both a sense of the eternity of
the Chinese landscape and the yearning for a stable centralized state
that has characterized Chinese culture for over two millennia (Van Slyke
1988:43). More than any other people in human history, the Chinese have
achieved a continuity of social and cultural identity even during periods when
the state itself collapsed into anarchy or was grabbed by alien conquerors. To
imagine a comparable achievement in the West, let’s suppose that the Greeks
of Homer’s time (900 B.C.E.), with their small territorial chiefdoms, survived
through the golden age of fifth-century Athens when Socrates, Plato, and Aris-
totle lived and wrote; and then further suppose, in this scenario, that all the
small Greek city-states and chiefdoms were eventually unified by a conqueror
who carried this culture north and west through all of Europe, founding a state
that continued to survive and call itself “Greek” for the next 2,100 years, so
that even now, all the peoples of Europe consider themselves one “Greek
nation.” Suppose further that all the languages derived from Greek and Latin
came to be identified as mere dialects of Greek, allowing everyone to believe
that in some sense they all speak the same language. Imagine further that as
other ethnic groups came into the orbit of “Greek” culture, they assimilated
and came to call themselves ethnically “Greek,” abandoning their earlier
French, German, Danish, Swedish, and other ethnicities. (We shall allow Eng-
land to be Japan in this scenario, retaining its distinctive identity but borrowing
extravagantly from “Greek” culture.) The capital remains at Athens for long
centuries, then perhaps shifts after a period of social disunity or conquest to
Rome or Paris or Berlin, but it continues to view itself as “Greek” society. Dur-
ing the invasion of “Greece” [Europe] in 1237–1242, suppose the Mongols
succeeded in conquering the whole continent and ruling for several hundred
years, eventually becoming as “Greek” as everyone else, losing their separate
cultural identity. And throughout these two millennia, the social philosophy of
Socrates is continually elaborated, becoming a kind of civil religion throughout
this vast realm.
Of course it didn’t happen this way in the West, but something much like
this hypothetical European history is what actually occurred in China with the
early unification of small states, the spread of Chinese culture outward through
the territories you now see on a map of China, the absorption and Sinicization
of peripheral peoples, and the defining of nonmutually intelligible languages as
mere “dialects” of Chinese with a text everyone can read (see chapter 2).“
T
Chapter opener photo: Chinese scholar.