Through much of the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century, scholars in China and in the West debated the nature of Chinese nationhood. In the West, the once dominant view was promulgated by Joseph R. Levenson and like-minded scholars, who depicted Chinese identity in terms of “culturalism,” that is belonging to a universalizing and inclusive civilization, defined by a common Confucian culture. A concept of national identity conceived in ethnic or racial terms was considered a modern phenomenon, closely related to China’s entrance into the world of nation-states.1 In the last decades of the twentieth century, though, this view was criticized by scholars who demonstrated the existence of traits of exclusive ethnocentric Chinese identity back in the past. Some went as far as to postulate racism as pertinent to Chinese civilization from its earliest stages.2

This chapter examines writings from Bronze Age China that might at first glance seem to be hidden, asking about their audience and the intentions behind them. It begins at the late second millennium Anyang site with a pit deposit of inscribed oracle bones in the royal precinct. Arguing that the pit was part of a representation of sacrifice, it suggests that the buried writing was offered to the royal ancestors in thanks for their replies to the divination questions. Next it looks at inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels. These originated in the late second millennium as display texts addressed to deceased ancestors but early in the first millennium came to be consciously written for the living as well. A third case is stone tablets inscribed with covenant texts and buried in sacrificial pits at the fifth-century BCE Houma site. Here it seems that rulers seeking to enforce loyalty not only called the spirits to witness but also kept duplicate copies of the covenants as witnesses that could be called in evidence. The chapter concludes with some camouflaged writings from the latter part of the first millennium. These were designed to entertain highly literate readers by provoking mental gymnastics.

The chapter describes how the Chinese imperial urban civilization emerged. The urban system developed from a loosely linked collection of cities into an imperial network with the main capital, Chang’an, as the political, economic, and cultural centre. Roads and waterways allowed goods and people to move around the empire, and trading routes to the west linked China to central Asia and beyond. From their origins as small settlements with earthen walls, Chinese cities developed according to prescribed plans that linked imperial power on earth with divine power in heaven. These were set out in the Record of Investigation of Crafts (Kaogongji), an ancient Chinese text. Chinese cities became nodes in an imperial bureaucracy, and although there was no autonomous municipal government, in Chang’an and other capital cities, officials were responsible for urban management. Chinese cities had an urban culture. Kings and emperors lived in their palaces, only emerging to conduct rituals such as sacrifices to ancestors and gods. An imperial administrative elite ran the empire, and merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans traded goods and set up businesses in markets in Chang’an and other cities, which were described in poems that reflected on urban life.

This chapter examines depictions of violence in the early period of Chinese history up to the second century BCE. Violence is widely present in works of history, literature and intellectual history from the period. What is distinctive about the Chinese case is the negative tone of most of these depictions. Early sources show violence, including martial violence, in at best equivocal and often unfavourable ways. This chapter explores depictions in classic texts such as the Book of Songs, which contains poems that pass over battle to deplore the loss and separation that war entailed. Prose descriptions of violence, whether in the Book of Documents or in bronze vessel inscriptions, tend to record fighting, its aftermath and the victors’ rewards without much celebration. Thinkers including Confucius and Mozi explicitly criticise violence, especially warfare. Sunzi, famous for his Art of War, considers the strategy and tactics of its topic, yet decries fighting as inferior to other methods of achieving victory. Even the proposals of Shang Yang, who is commonly seen as a proponent of government through force, have considerable non-coercive elements to them. Just one form of violence, namely revenge, gets much positive attention, and that comes relatively late.