Peace (14 page)

Since ancient times, the model for long-lasting peace has been essentially to ensure people's livelihood. To achieve this is to have land reclaimed for farming so that surpluses are produced and income become inexhaustible.
⁶

Yu ruled, if he did at all, roughly as the archaeological Erlitou culture arose. His successors, the Xia (
c
. 2205–1766) who may be more fiction than fact, were at the threshold of small warrior chiefdoms, becoming powerful palaces that could coordinate, if not yet control, others.

The Shang Dynasty (
c
. 1766–1122 BCE), China's earliest historical one, took power by coup. Their palaces included courts and their many ministers and workmen. Wizards and warriors were thus slowly being replaced with bookkeepers and bureaucrats, by training and disposition less violent, though no less cunning. But citizen-soldiers who once did battle for themselves now became paid or conscripted armies who campaigned on their commanders' behalf and behest. Before long, Shang capitals like Yin on the Yellow River became religious, administrative and political centers that could levy and expend taxes for the people's welfare, but also for conquests near and far. As in Ancient India, if the duration and quality of peace increased with the size of Shang rulers' dominions, so did the scale and intensity of warfare. With the Shang, natural spirit and ancestor propitiation developed into full-fledged systems of belief, from whom guidance, assistance and consolation were sought in peace and war alike through meditation and ritual. Sacrifices led by Shang rulers were made to the weather-god Di, without whose goodwill no enterprise could thrive, peaceful or otherwise. The labor and logistics required to produce the large number of bronze religious vessels found attest to the Shang's technical sophistication and organization. But few ties bound the traditional elite of distant regions together, and hardly any did the diverse
conquered peoples to each other or to their rulers. This lack of social cohesion on a large scale led to the decline of Shang's authority in making and maintaining peace, which the Zhou Dynasty (
c
. 1122–256) that overthrew the Shang sought to restore.

The Zhou redefined statecraft and morality while revitalizing family relations during the longest and arguably the most illustrious reign in pre-Imperial China. Historians divide the Zhou Dynasty into four overlapping periods with distinct cultural profiles. Three traits unite them: the Mandate of Heaven, the Fengjian system and the Zongfa, each having a complex relationship with contemporary and subsequent socio-political peace in China. The Mandate of Heaven was a belief that a ruler's legitimacy derived directly from Tian, the god of heaven the Zhou restored from the Xia in place of the Shang's Di. Tian showed support for rulers, called Sons of Heaven, by making their reigns peaceful and prosperous. Conversely, a lack of peace and prosperity was considered proof that Tian no longer supported his Son, so that another may rightfully take his place. Divinations thus began losing ground to rituals, a reliance on precedents and continued spirit and ancestral propitiations, all aimed at maintaining peace and prosperity through socio-political order, or at least its appearance. The Fengjian socio-political structure is often compared to European feudalism for its stratified conflations of property and people, at the top of which were Sons of Heaven. Below them were aristocrats of various ranks who received their fiefs by inheritance or as gifts for services rendered and were responsible for keeping them peaceful and productive. Below them were the masses who paid dues in labor, cash or kind; professionals like doctors, scribes and clerics were somewhere in between. Fengjian reciprocal obligations and mutual limitations of action, spheres which are today seen as precursors to the “ideology of peaceful coexistence” put forth by Confucius, are discussed below.
⁷

The foundation of the Fengjian social structure was its lineage system, the Zongfa or clan law, governing all but the lowest classes: ranks, titles, professions and primary possessions were passed on to eldest sons, whose families and descendents were called main lineages, while those of younger sons, minor lineages. The Zongfa entailed a jealously guarded exclusivity of ancestor worship, by which branches of the royal lineage reproduced legitimizing rites in their realms, and branches of aristocratic lineages did so within their clans. In time, the verticality of the Zongfa was supplemented with horizontal segmentations, so that the “principle of collective liability for punishment on the basis of households was the legal expression of a new institutional order.”
⁸
Sanctions were not limited to individuals but could be collectively extended to family and clan; in the case of crimes by officials to superiors, subordinates or to those who had recommended them to office. Strict as they were, inter-class loyalty and
social cohesion set in place by Mandate of Heaven, Fengjian sociopolitical structure and Zongfa were considerable improvements on the Shang, bolstering Zhou authority and legitimacy and so their ability to make and maintain peace, when they so chose. Until the early eighth century BCE, descendants of the Zhou's first family, the Ji, ruled from their western capital on the Wei River, Hao, near modern Xi'an. During this first period, called the Western Zhou, the three preceding traits were still taking shape and gaining ground, and the rapid and extensive territorial annexations they made possible mark the first pinnacle of Zhou power. Following a war over the Mandate of Heaven, in which Hao and the western fiefs were captured by nomads, the Zhou capital was moved east to Luoyang in 771 by the remaining Ji, a self-made Son of Heaven and inaugurator of the Eastern Zhou period.

Displaced from their stronghold, the Zhou now needed the support of local Fengjian lords and their fiefs more than ever before, which these were willing to give to keep intact the systems that also supported them. At this point the three traits became ubiquitous in, and synonymous with, Ancient Chinese civilization, and the Zhou reached their second apogee before their long decline. The Eastern Zhou period is subdivided into the Spring and Autumn Period and that of the Warring States. The former gets its name from a chronicle attributed to Confucius, about one of these Fengjian states. At first the mutual support between the Ji and the ruling clans served its purpose of maintaining the peace and prosperity of the Fengjian system in the face of internal unrest and external threats. Aside from interstice wars between the Fengjian, inter-state diplomacy and law was often successful. Hundreds of treaties (
meng
) creating trading and defensive alliances between fiefs were ratified by Fengjian ambassadors representing their lords. A precise diplomatic vocabulary came into being, with specific words for ambassadorial meetings, friendly envoys sent by one fief to another and even trust-building hunting events for visiting officials. But major Fengjian lords became overlords themselves by interventions and annexations, and power-sharing with the Ji turned into a power struggle as fiefs grew into states. The Seven Warring States that fought ceaselessly for the next three centuries were the Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, Wei and Qin, the last of which eventually reunited all of Ancient China by employing new philosophies and practices of peace to create its lasting Imperial form.

The hostile environment of the Eastern Zhou period was the unnatural habitat of Chinese philosophy's golden age, what Sinologists rhetorically call the Hundred Schools of Thought. The Hundred Schools of Peace these schools of thought spawned were direct or indirect responses to wars happening all around them, at least four of which ineradicably influenced the rest of Ancient Chinese history and the East as a whole. Not
first but foremost among them was that of Confucius (
c
. 551–479 BCE), founder of the school that bears his name. Tradition tells he was the son of a destitute nobleman who was forced to flee to the Fengjian fief of Lu before it was subsumed by one of the Seven Warring States. Fascinated by ritual from an early age, he committed himself to studying his being in the world at fifteen, holding odd jobs till his twenties, when he married, had a son and became a Lu administrator, rising to Justice Minister by age fifty-three. But he soon resigned this position in protest at the Lu's unjust policies, and travelled to neighboring states in search of a ruler who would take his advice. After several failed attempts, he returned to Lu, where he edited the
Five Classics
of Ancient Chinese literature. His teachings are collected in the
Analects
and
Great Learning
, posthumously assembled snippets of conversation and aphorisms. Far from proposing a systematic philosophy, he challenged his students to think for themselves, study the world around them, and respectfully reinterpret rather than reject tradition. If there is “single thread binding my way,” as he claimed, it is the enterprise of pacific harmony within and between individuals in society.
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As a moralist, Confucius focused on three traditional, interconnected concepts:
li
, mores or rites;
yi
, reciprocal respect; and
ren
, humane responsibility. From these stem the so-called Silver Rule he articulated: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”
¹⁰
Of crucial importance to his philosophy of peace was social order through loyalty and meritorious self-mastery, which, as we have seen, the Zhou initiated and Confucius, building on their principles, came closer than anyone to perfecting. For Confucius, loyalty comprises duties of children to parents and, analogously, the ruled to the ruler; meritorious self-mastery is an auto-limitation of rulers' powers by the Mandate of Heaven and incentives for prescribed public service. Perhaps the clearest encapsulation of Confucius'
philosophical imperative
for peace is to be found in the following passage, of which the reverse is also true:

When the world is investigated, knowledge is extended. When knowledge is extended, wills becomes sincere. When wills are sincere, hearts are redressed. When hearts are redressed, individuals are cultivated. When individuals are cultivated, families become harmonious.When families are harmonious, states becomes orderly. And when states are orderly, there is peace in the world.
¹¹

Confucius had only a small circle of students in his lifetime, but during the Warring States period his teachings were studied and debated by a growing number of intellectuals in high and low official positions, who like him were seeking a stable way out of war. One of these, Mencius (fl. fourth century BCE), codified Confucian thought and presented it to numerous Fengjian lords, some of whom began to apply it systematically
early on. Mencius regarded those who engaged in war as being below beasts, proposing that they should be punished by the death they inflict on others. He also emphasized the concept of
de
or moral virtue as humanity's innate and universal quality, innately non-violent but which can and usually is corrupted by unjust institutions. By the second Imperial Dynasty, the Han, Confucianism was synthesized with the preceding Qin's Legalism and became official Imperial policy, remaining so in evolving forms until the early twentieth century CE, when nationalism, then communism displaced it. As Ancient China's sphere of influence expanded, so did Confucianism, making it and Buddhism the two most widespread peaceful forces of the Ancient East and, geographically speaking, the world.

Unlike the early Confucian school, which held that social harmony came from within individuals, the Legalist school held that it came from outside them. After Mencius, the third great Confucian countered that
de
was neither innate nor universal but developed by self-cultivation, upbringing, education and lifelong discipline. His star student, Han Fei (
c
. 280–233), was a Han prince who used this theory in building a pragmatic political philosophy of peace that made law the formative and decisive force in shaping individual behavior and social norms. Apparently Han Fei stuttered, so he presented his ideas in elegant prose instead of at court. The cornerstone of his school of peace is the legal code, which he argued should be precise, publicly available and the final word on everything for everyone. In the words of a modern scholar, the Legalist's law code was thus set up to be the “all-powerful instrument which makes it possible to guide everyone's activity in the direction most favorable to the power of the state and the public peace.”
¹²
Accordingly, the law itself is authority, not the individual who applies it, who from high to low is bound by it, motivated by its punishments for disobedience and rewards for compliance, the basis of Legalist morality. Legitimacy, peace and power, then, rest in legally prescribed and -delimited positions, not people who hold them. It was thus a ruler's duty to heed his ministers' advice and consider his people's pleas just as much as it was for them to obey his commands. In practice, this tended to give rulers the upper hand. Legalism became Imperial policy with the Qin Emperors, whose chief minister Li Si (
c
. 280–208) competed intellectually and politically with Han Fei. Li Si bolstered state bureaucracy to administer the law and standardized as much as he could, including writing, money, weights, measures and the civil service testing system that lasted for three millennia. Though wondrous in stabilizing society after the chaotic Warring States period, his policies brought about a conformist culture that saw creativity and tradition as threats. After outlawing other schools of thought and peace, burning their books as well as historical records, and burying nearly five
hundred Confucians alive, Li Si had Han Fei, who had joined the Qin court at the Emperor's request, killed. This was the negative image of the Legalism Han Fei had hoped would bring peace and harmony to where there was recently the disarray of war, a misguided authoritarianism that brought down the Qin.