Chapter 11 - Chinese civilization in comparative perspective

Summary

We are in the midst of a Golden Age of Chinese archaeology, because we have the opportunity to witness the creation of a completely new body of knowledge concerning the prehistory of a quarter of all humanity.

Kwang-chih Chang 1986a: 412

Throughout this book we have noted marked diversities among regional cultural traditions in China. If viewed from a global perspective, however, are there any unique characteristics that distinguish early Chinese cultures from those in other regions? In this final chapter we will broaden our scope, while attempting to understand ancient Chinese civilization in comparison with civilizations in other parts of the world.

INTERPRETING CHINESENESS

Scholars from various intellectual backgrounds have been fascinated by questions like the following: How was Chinese civilization different from other civilizations in the world?What made Chinese “Chinese”?What held Chinese society together for so many centuries? These broad issues have been addressed by anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, who often have used various analytical methods and reached different conclusions.

It is commonly acknowledged that some features characteristic of many civilizations in the world were also developed in ancient China by the second millennium BC. These features include urbanization, palatial structures, temples, metallurgy, a writing system, and institutionalized social stratification. Some of these traits, however, are only superficially similar among civilizations. When investigating each attribute in detail, marked differences are observable. As outlined by K. C. Chang (1983, 1984, 1986a) in several publications, in ancient China bronze metallurgy was applied to politics, in the form of ritual vessels and weapons, rather than to food production, whereas stone tools for agriculture remained the same from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age; the earliest surviving Chinese written records, dated to the late Shang, appear in oracle-bone inscriptions and are mainly concerned with divination; and the earliest cities were built as political centers rather than as economic foci.