World History

Unit 1: The Beginnings of Civilization

Chapter 4: Ancient Chinese Civilization

10. Thu, Oct 3, 2013

The book duly goes through both the dynastic sequence down to about A.D. 500 and a few of the enormous number of schools of thought that arose during the first three thousand years of Chinese history. It is, however, distressingly sketchy on how these schools of thought and the dynasties influenced one another. In fact the connection was powerful and occasionally quite dangerous for those who held the wrong beliefs for the time (another respect in which twentieth-century Chinese history has been of a piece with what came before). The First Emperor, for example, was a Legalist — and he found the teachings of Confucius sufficiently troublesome that he had all known copies of his books destroyed — quite effectively, since none seem to have survived. He also had about four hundred scholars (many of them Confucian as well) buried alive as a token of his disapproval. After his time, the works of Confucius were reconstructed by those who survived and still remembered some of their master's sayings — but this is why we have no first-person works remaining by Confucius, and the Analects instead consist of a collation of sayings, most of them beginning “The Master said...”.

We'd like to discuss a range of things, including:

• How do the various intellectual schools shape and reflect the political realities of the time?
• How do these schools of thought correspond to political and intellectual positions in the modern world?
• Chinese concepts of law tended to dictate that the more highly placed people were more, rather than less, subject to it: an infraction that might merit a beating for a peasant could be a capital crime for a member of of the imperial household. What do you think of this idea?

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