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Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Cultureedited by Victor H. Mair,
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For many students, this book will be part of their first systematic exposure to learning about China. As such, we wanted to make it as comprehensive as possible within the limits naturally imposed by the amount of material that can reasonably be absorbed within a single semester. One of our main goals has been to help the student realize that China is not a monolithic state with a monotonous culture and a static past. The myth of a thoroughly homogeneous, ultrastable empire, although widespread and persistent, is far from true. China never existed as a "nation of uniformity." To the contrary, we are faced with a multifaceted country that possesses an extremely complicated history and a richly varied mix of regional and ethnic traditions.
Take language, for example. When one thinks of what defines "China," perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that it is a place where the people all speak "Chinese." But what is this "Chinese" that everyone is supposedly speaking to each other? Unfortunately, China does not today possess, nor has it ever in the past possessed, such a universally understood tongue. For starters, we have to take into account the tens of millions of speakers of non-Sinitic languages who make up a significant proportion of the population of the Chinese nation as it is currently configured. Among the bewildering panoply of languages in question--in no particular order--are Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur, Yugur, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Zhuang, Korean, Dai, Sibe (akin to Manchu), Tajik, Tatar, Shui, Bai, Yi (also called Lolo, Ne, Nosu, Nasu, etc.), Lisu, Lahu, Miao (Hmong), Mulam, Naxi (also known as Naxhi, Nashee, Lukhi, Luhsi, Luxi, Moso, Nachri, Nahsi, Nashi, Na-khi, Nakhi, Nari, Nasi, Nazo, Hlikhin, and so forth), Gelao (Klo or Klau), Blang, Pumi, Wa, Achang, De'ang, Akadaw, Russian (!), and countless others (the list could effortlessly be extended manyfold). These languages belong to such disparate groups and families as Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Turkic, Tungusic, Iranian, and Slavic. These are the "minorities" of the Peoples Republic of China, all of whom have roots that lie deep in the past of East Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia.
And then there is the so-called majority group who, it is claimed, speak a language called "Hanyu" or "Chinese." While the current government and its predecessor (the Republic of China, now restricted to Taiwan) have energetically promoted what is variously called Mandarin (Language of the Officials [a name that accurately betrays its origins]), Putonghua (Common Speech), Guoyu (National Language), or Huayu (Language of the [Culturally] Florescent [People]) as a lingua franca, there is as much mutual unintelligibility within Hanyu/Chinese as there is outside of it. The designation "Hanyu" (literally, "language of the Han [people]") as the language of China is problematic in many respects, not the least of which is arriving at an accurate and acceptable definition of Han ethnicity. That, of course, is far too big and nettlesome an issue to tackle here, so we shall merely focus on the question of the homogeneity of Hanyu itself.
However we ultimately choose to define it, Hanyu is related in some fashion (not yet well understood by scholars) to Tibeto-Burman. Since the combined family is customarily styled Sino-Tibetan, we may--for the sake of linguistic precision--refer to Hanyu as "Sinitic" in English. Sinitic is often said to have eight (or more) major fangyan ('topolects'--see the discussion of terms at the conclusion of the Preface). Among these fangyan are "Northern" (i.e., Mandarin in the broadest of terms; it actually stretches to the far southwest), Wu (typified by Suzhou and Shanghai), Xiang (Hunanese), Gan (spoken in Jiangxi), Hakka (the language of those displaced "guests" from the north who have played a particularly important role in modern Chinese history), Northern Min, Southern Min (including Amoy and Taiwanese), and Cantonese. If analyzed by the standards applied to languages in Europe or South Asia, these fangyan would be classified as branches of the Sinitic group.
Speakers from any one of the major fangyan are incapable of conversing with speakers from those of any of the other major fangyan. Even within the major fangyan or branches of Sinitic, there are numerous more or less unintelligible varieties of speech. What is more, it is essential to note that, throughout history, the fangyan have never been written down in their unalloyed form, except latterly by missionaries using alphabets. Traditionally, there have been only two acceptable forms of writing in China: Literary Sinitic (wenyan or Classical Chinese), strictly a book language about which we will have more to say at the conclusion of this essay, and Vernacular Sinitic (baihua[wen]), a written manifestation of Mandarin that developed--largely under the influence of Buddhism1--out of a presumed Tang-period koine. Despite their lack of a written form, the fangyan are still vibrant. As clear indications of the continuing vitality of fangyan, Taiwanese is now the preferred mode of expression on Formosa, and the Chinese government on the mainland is constantly threatening to cashier officials and teachers who fail to learn Mandarin.
Sinitic evolved through a complex process of interaction with the non-Sinitic languages mentioned above, borrowing (and lending) not only words, but also structures and phonemes. The internal development of Sinitic is equally intricate, such that historical linguists are still seriously puzzled over the relationships among the various fangyan, the phonology of their earlier stages, and the identification of the fundamental etyma for the group en masse.
Linguistic multifariousness is only one of the more obvious features of "the Chinese mosaic."2 The same may be said of almost any other aspect of Chinese culture and society. Perhaps the most obvious symbol of Chineseness in the larger world is cuisine. Yet it is impossible to point to any particular type of fare that stands for Chinese cooking in general. Hot pots have a Mongolic ancestry, pasta products are derived from Central and Southwest Asia, tea is ultimately from the hills of the Assam-Burma-Yunnan "Golden Triangle," and so forth. Milk products are anathema to most lactose-intolerant denizens of the Central Kingdom, yet they are a staple of the people living along its northern reaches. The more sophisticated American aficionado of Chinese cooking knows very well the difference between Szechwanese and Cantonese cooking, staying clear of the former if he or she does not like spicy hot food and avoiding the latter if his or her palate is not attracted to gelatinous, gooey comestibles.
When we watch a Chinese film and see the heroine encased in a tight sheath slit to the thigh, she is basically sporting an item of Manchu dress. Some Chinese (those who wanted to ride horses) began to wear trousers in the latter part of the fourth century B.C.E., but only because they wanted to ward off the steppe peoples who introduced the domesticated horse (and the trousers) to their land, with devastating consequences. In premodern times, it would not have been difficult to recognize the ethnicity of a citizen of the Chinese empire by his or his costume.
As for Chinese empires, there was not one of them, but a long series of dynasties, more often than not erected on the ashes of their predecessors. Also more often than not, those who established new dynasties were--a supreme incongruity--groups from the north and northwest who either were themselves "barbarians" dreaded for their awesome military prowess or who had exceptionally close affinities with them. Numerous recent archeological discoveries have led to a salutary reconsideration of the nature of the millennial interactions between the inhabitants of the East Asian Heartland (EAH) and their septentrional neighbors.3 As a result, it is no longer possible to think of the latter only as "traders or raiders." Instead, what we are finding is that--already at least from the late Neolithic period and continuing right through to the twentieth century--the northern peoples were involved not only in state formation, but also in the importation of vital cultural elements such as bronze metallurgy and the chariot. Consequently, in this Reader we place far greater emphasis than is usual upon the northern peoples, for we believe that, unless one takes them duly into account, one's comprehension of Chinese history and appreciation of Chinese culture are bound to be flawed.
The intricacy of Chinese involvement with wide-ranging steppe peoples can be demonstrated by the derivation of Gesar (see selection 87) from Caesar. How, why, and when this originally Etruscan title of the Roman emperors came to be applied by the bards of a Central Asia nomadic confederation to their greatest hero is an intriguing story. What is not in doubt is that the Tibetans contested with the Chinese for hegemony during the Tang period (618-907).4 Indeed, the Tibetans not only occupied the strategically crucial Gansu Corridor for a century, but even invested the capital, Chang'an, for a while during the year 763 in western China and were dislodged only when the Tang authorities pleaded with the Uyghurs (see selection 55) to drive them off. Thus, a dynasty that was initially founded by individuals in whose veins ran nomadic blood and who maintained intimate ties with their northern ancestors found temporary salvation from destruction at the hands of northwestern nomads by a confederation of Turkic tribes (whom the Tang actually detested)--a typical series of events that recurred over and over again during the more than three thousand years of known Chinese history. We should remember, moreover, that the Tang dynasty represents the acme of cultural cosmopolitanism in East Asia. It should further be noted that the location of the Tibetans was by no means restricted solely to that of their current nation, which is occupied by Chinese troops. During the medieval period, they were also identified with the border areas to the northwest of the East Asian Heartland, and still today there are large concentrations of Tibetans in the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.
Just as due consideration of the non-Sinitic peoples of the north and northwest is essential for any adequate study of the development of Chinese civilization, the same may be said for the non-Sinitic inhabitants of the south. Chinese culture (including Sinitic languages) marched southward slowly during the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E., gained momentum during the first millennium C.E., and was far from reaching its culmination even by the end of the twentieth century. The large and small pockets of non-Sinitic speakers that pepper all of the provinces south of the Yangtze River attest to the ongoing presence of peoples from radically different traditions within the territory of the modern Chinese state. The fusion of Chinese culture with the indigenous populations has led to a distinctive mix of regional cultures and ethniticities that is conspicuous in customs, languages, surnames, and physical types.5
The ramifications of the sharp distinction between north and south--played out in art, poetry, theories of enlightenment, social values, business practices, burial customs, and endless other respects--may be examined in the person of Gu Yanwu (1613-1682; see selection 83), arguably the foremost exponent of Qing-period philological scholarship. Gu was born into a distinguished family of Kunshan (Suzhou Prefecture), itself renowned as the birthplace of southern drama. A staunch Ming loyalist who witnessed the fall of the last Chinese dynasty to the despised Manchus, Gu spent the last quarter-century of his life as a sojourner in north China. There he experienced an agonizing psychological alienation between north and south China, arising from and reinforced by the fault line between northern and southern topolect groups. Sensing that China could not possibly hold together as a strong nation if this dramatic rift were not somehow surmounted, he threw himself into research on the geographical and phonological sources of division. Strange as it may seem, statecraft was the primary motivation for Gu's phonological studies.
Although Gu made many valuable contributions to the study of ancient Chinese, his basic premises were flawed by the same misconceptions that had limited language studies ever since the Han period. Namely, Gu was unable to realize that fixation on the supratopolectal, semantosyllabic characters masked the tremendous contrasts in morphology, phonology, and grammar among Sinitic languages. Merely devoting attention to rationalizing the pronunciation of the characters against a hypothetical ancient standard was useless for effecting a reconciliation between north and south. Nonetheless, we must admit that Gu was well intentioned and that he clarified much about the nature of pre-Tang initials and finals. Given the constraints of the scholarly apparatus with which he was endowed, Gu Yenwu must be judged an outstanding exemplar of the best Chinese scholarship, a worthy successor to the long line of thinkers passionately committed to the preservation of "this culture [of ours]" (si wen).6
Standing at the beginning of the line and counted among the glories of Chinese civilization are the scintillating intellectual debates that went on during the Warring States period (475-221 B.C.E.). Well represented in this volume, the contending schools of thought--with their starkly discrepant proposals for solutions to the problem of how to organize a successful state--demonstrate that Chinese thinkers were far from being boring epigones of some mythical (in every sense of the word) founder figure.
As for philosophy, so for religion--but with even more exuberant dissimilarity. Among spiritual traditions that have flourished in China during the last three millennia and more are Magianism, shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism), Nestorian Christianity, Hinduism (among Indian emigrants), Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, and--above all--ancestor worship. It is immediately apparent that most of these traditions entered China from abroad. Although adherents of some of them were persecuted (and even extirpated) from time to time, several of the traditions took root in Chinese soil, found sustenance there, and--in turn--enriched the lives of the people.
We could go on in this vein--citing evidence from science, medicine, architecture, music, dance, the performing arts, folklore, social structures, and other areas--but the picture should be clear by now. Chinese civilization is richly varied and, as eloquently explained by Valerie Hansen,7 very much open to influence from outside and change from within. To reiterate a point made at the outset of this essay, China's society was not static and its culture was far from unvariegated. Coupled with the cyclical collapse of dynasties, this sociocultural volatility might well have led to the utter disintegration of Chinese civilization. What, then, held it together? What was the quintessential glue that prevented the dissolution of "this culture [of ours]"? We have no hesitation whatsoever in declaring that it was none other than dedication to the hallowed culture itself, bearing in mind that wen means both "culture" and "writing." That is to say, it was the traditional culture (wenhua) and all its attendant values, as embodied in the sacred script (wenzi) that bound Chinese civilization in a cohesive and enduring whole.
But to whom exactly did "this culture/script [of ours]" belong? In other words, who were the implicit "we" that lay claim to the role of proprietors of the culture/script that both symbolized and sustained traditional Chinese civilization? The answer is simple: the literati. And who were the literati? How did one become a literatus and thereby gain access to the ranks of those who were the powerful custodians of the culture/script? The answer is likewise straightforward: master fine writing (wenzhang) and belles lettres (wenxue).8 By dint of diligence and through the good fortune of privilege, approximately 2 percent of the populace in premodern China attained full literacy and all the perquisites that pertained to it, which were not inconsiderable.
Given that full literacy normally brought with it both prestige and pecuniary benefit, it is small wonder that many men devoted their lives to the acquisition and exercise of the ability to write well. (With a few very rare exceptions, women were excluded from the enterprise of fine writing.) Those accustomed to universal literacy using an alphabetic script and a living, vernacular language, may find it hard to imagine the exceptional effort required to gain an advanced degree of competency in a highly allusive, dead (i.e., not used for speech) language written with an elaborate logographic script.9 For those who did put forward the required exertion, their command of the script, plus the satisfaction of knowing that they were contributing to the preservation of Chinese culture, made it all worthwhile.
With the twentieth century, however, the combination of culture and script began to unravel. With the overthrow of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in 1911 by revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925),10 the institutional support for the examination system that upheld "this culture [of ours]" evaporated. By 1919, progressive intellectuals were promoting writing in the vernacular, and radical activists were proposing the adoption of an alphabetic script. A direct assault on the script itself came with the promulgation of thousands of simplified characters by the Communist government during the 1950s and 1950s. An outrageous affront to those who cherish the script and all that it embraces, the simplified characters were seen by reformers as essential for expanding literacy to workers and farmers and necessary for the sake of efficiency in diverse types of communication.
By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new threat to the traditional script was emerging: the computer. IT (information technology) specialists are acutely aware of the tremendous stumbling blocks in the way of free and easy access to electronic data processing by users of Chinese characters. The input, storage, and management of a script consisting of tens of thousands of discrete elements poses mind-boggling problems in comparison with the couple hundred letters and typographic characters of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The economic costs in terms of vastly larger memories, slower manipulations, more frequent crashes and bugs due to overly intricate programming, and so forth are staggering.
One of the most poignant ironies of the saga of characters in computers is that the alphabet has come to their (partial) rescue. Of the hundreds and hundreds of schemes that have been devised for inputting Chinese characters in computers, by far the most popular are those relying on the alphabet. And, of the alphabetic schemes, those that rely on whole words rather than single syllables are much more user-friendly and computer-friendly. For example, both computers and human beings find it easier to analyze the following eight syllables of a journal title as Zhongguo lishi dili luncong (Collected Papers on Chinese Historical Geography) than as zhong guo li shi di li lun cong (central kingdom successive scribe/history ground principle discussion cluster). Herein lurks a danger. Once computers and human beings get used to parsing strings of syllables into words rather than resolutely keeping them separate, alphabetic inputting is on its way to becoming an independent script.
The defenders of the characters, who also view themselves as defenders of the last bastion of Chinese culture, have not been slow to recognize this threat, and they have been adamantly opposed to any hint of a move toward legitimation of the formal establishment of what is called fenci lianxie ('word division'). Throughout history, Chinese scholars have always resisted the insertion of spaces between words. In fact, until the twentieth century, there was no concept of ci ('word'), only that of zi ('[syllabic] graph/character'). Despite the vociferous opposition of the defenders of characters, the Chinese government has officially established a set of Basic Rules for Hanyu pinyin Orthography11 and private software companies and individuals are producing their own refinements apace.12
Willy-nilly, pinyin orthography is becoming a reality. This leads to a host of thorny questions. What will happen when the character system is weakened still further (after the twin enactment of vernacularization and simplification)? We have argued that the writing system which perpetuated "this culture [of ours]" was the matrix that held the mosaic in place. If the matrix dissolves or is irretrievably weakened, what is to prevent the multitudinous pieces of glittering color in the Chinese mosaic from flying off in a thousand different directions?
The battle lines have been drawn between the defenders of the "old order" and the proponents of the "new vision." Lu Xun, the greatest Chinese writer of the twentieth century, was an ardent advocate of romanization (see selection 91). Xu Bing, perhaps the best known artist at the dawn of the twenty-first century, has boldly tampered with the characters, simultaneously recognizing that their acquisition by generations of Chinese youths constitutes the most fundamental kind of cultural conditioning (see selection 92).
Should the character system falter or fail, is there something else that might serve as a substitute matrix for the Chinese mosaic? That depends upon the ingenuity of China's citizens and their collective will to stay together as one nation. In the end, however, the determining factor for Chinese civilization may prove to be ecology, not culture.13 The precarious environment, distinctively shaped through the centuries by the Chinese masses of diverse ethnicities, is extraordinarily sensitive to natural disasters. Now, even more gigantic transformations of the landscape are being wrought than ever before in China's past. A good example is the damming of the Three Gorges on the Yangtze and the diversion of its waters to the north. Not only is this environmental engineering of unprecedented proportions, it is also a geopolitical act of more far-reaching consequences than the construction of the Grand Canal in 605-606, which the Sui emperor Yang Di (r. 604-617) had built to transport southern grain to the relatively impoverished (but militarily mighty) north.14 Also operative in Yang Di's mobilization of tens of thousands of workers to build the Grand Canal was the same sort of psychological anxiety about the lack of a linkage between the Yellow River Valley and the Yangtze River Valley that plagued Gu Yanwu.
While adherence to historical veracity demands that we emphasize the complexity of Chinese culture, we by no means wish to deny its commonalities. Hence, we have adopted an integral and, we hope, balanced approach that bears testimony to the unity in diversity in Chinese civilization. We have seen how China is a congeries of varied constituents. Traditionally, they have been kept together by "this culture/script [of ours]" whose ever-alert guardians were the impressively accomplished literati. For a succession of twenty-five15 dynasties, they did their job surprisingly well.
--VHM
1. Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages," Journal of Asian Studies 53.3 (August 1994), 707-751.
2. Here we borrow an apt expression from The Chinese Mosaic, an extraordinarily perceptive, but regrettably poorly known, volume by Leo J. Moser (see under Ethnography and Folklore in the list of Suggestions for Further Reading).
3. Nicola Di Cosmo's new book, Ancient China and Its Enemies marks a watershed in thinking about the historiography of Sino-"Barbarian" relations (see under Neighboring Peoples).
4. Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (see under Neighboring Peoples).
5. See"China's Vernacular Cultures," the brilliant inaugural lecture of Glen Dudbridge, which was delivered at the University of Oxford on June 1, 1995 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and the statistically documented study of Ruofu Du, Yida Yuan, Juliana Hwang, Joanna Mountain, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Chinese Surnames and the Genetic Differences between North and South China, Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series, 5 (Berkeley: University of California, 1992).
6. We are obviously indebted to Peter Bol for this felicitous rendering of the phrase, although he is not responsible for our clumsy brackets. For a nuanced discussion of wen, see Haun Saussy's "The Prestige of Writing: wén, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography," in his Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), chap. 3, pp. 35-74.
7. See Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000).
8. We are grateful to Jidong Yang for the first insight and to Zong-qi Cai for the second.
9. Strictly speaking, the Chinese characters are not logographs, because not every character is equal to a word. Much less are the characters ideographs, a term that is often irresponsibly applied to them. Technically speaking, the Chinese script may be designated as morphosyllabic or semantosyllabic. The grounds for such a designation are outlined in John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language (see under Languages and Scripts).
10. It is an intriguing fact of history that a disproportionately large number of the core leaders of the 1911 revolution, including perhaps Sun Yat-sen himself, were Hakkas. The same is true of many of the main generals and chief supporters of Mao Zedong (1893-1976).
11. Conveniently published as appendix 1 (pp. 835-845) in John DeFrancis, ed., ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996).
12. No scholar has done more to perfect and promote pinyin as a fully functioning orthography than the late Yin Binyong (1930-2003). See his Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation & Orthography, written with Mary Felley (Beijing: Sinolingua, 1990), and the landmark Xinhua Spelling Dictionary (Xinhua pinxie cidian) (Beijing: Shangwu, 2002).
13. Two thought-provoking works on this subject are Leon E. Stover, The Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization: Peasants and Elites in the Last of the Agrarian States (New York: Pica, 1974) and Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts'ui-jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14. The actual designer of the canal was Yuwen Kai (555-612), who was of Xianbei (Särbi) ethnicity. Yuwen also supervised the construction of the capital cities that served as the foundations of the Tang metropolises of Chang'an and Luoyang and oversaw many other large and important public works projects.
15. The exact number is difficult to pin down, since there were numerous small dynasties, and two or more dynasties often ruled concurrently in different parts of what is now referred to as China. The number twenty-five is taken from the official dynastic histories.
© 2004 University of Hawai‘i Press · Modified: 10 February 2004