The Origins of Chinese Civilization

       Civilization?

      Development from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic to the rise of early states, in China, shows a remarkably even progress. Local declines were balanced by local growth elsewhere. Village societies merged into larger-scale ones, and ultimately into the first states, showing a steady rise in complexity of settlement patterns and technology, a rise in the importance of cultivated crops and animals, and a slow, fairly steady spread of cultural developments from the Yellow River-Yangzi River axis to the rest of northern China and then to the south as well (see Liu and Chen 2012; Underhill 2013). Detailed local stories show fluctuation, but the wide view balances these out.

      Civilization, as the word suggests, is defined by cities. When a settlement not only reaches a large size, but also has big public buildings—“monumental architecture”—and other evidence of social and political differentiation on a grand scale, we speak of a “city.” In the Old World and North (but not South) America, cities were accompanied by writing. They showed evidence of complex political organization, and the first written documents are usually business and administrative materials, soon followed by law codes.

      The first cities were Uruk and its neighbors in Mesopotamia and the early cities of the Nile Valley in Egypt. The first identifiable kings and dynasties appeared. The first written law codes, official temples and government-dictated religion, standing armies, and other attributes of civilization followed soon after. Whether or not there was a Neolithic Revolution, we can certainly speak of a true Urban Revolution. Interestingly, cities were clearly a completely separate invention in the New World, and there they were more or less independently developed in Mexico and in Peru, but everywhere they had the same traits and characteristics, except for the anomalous lack of writing in Peru. So there is clearly something functionally necessary about the unity of traits that characterize these early urban formations.

      It seems that cities and organized formal governments go together and that such governments necessarily have armies. The government monopolizes the legitimate use of force. This became Max Weber’s definition of a state (see Weber 1946), and it would serve as a definition for civilization. When ordinary people cannot kill as they wish, but formal elites can call out the troops, a great divide is crossed. One remembers that the Marxist explanation for the rise of states is basically predatory: bands of warriors conquered large territories and had to deal with them—inventing formal administration for the purpose (Engels 1942).

      It has been repeatedly pointed out (notably by Carneiro and commentators on him, 2012a, b, and Lieberman 2009) that early states did not effectively monopolize violence and that even later ones often failed. Semi-autonomous lords—from feudal subkings to landlords—could call on violence up to a point, and often even ordinary people had rights of self-defense, feud, and duel. But Weber has a real point, even if we must often “take the intention for the deed.” From quite early, Chinese rulers realized that local autonomy could go only so far before being really threatening to the state. They thus tried to make sure that it did not get out of hand. Once the empire was established, they moved quickly to crush such autonomous power bases. The rulers were never wholly effective, but they did make it clear that they agreed with Weber in principle. Most important, states and cities arose at the central points or key control points of great trade networks. They also had to have large tracts of extremely fertile land around them, since early agriculture could not otherwise support urban-size settlements.

      Moreover, cities and states usually (if not always) arose in areas where people could not easily escape, as Robert Carneiro pointed out (Carneiro 1970, 2012b). Very fertile tracts surrounded by hostile desert land (as in the Near East) or mountains (as in China and central Mexico) were ideal. (An interesting exception is the Olmec-Maya civilization of south Mexico.) Carneiro views warfare as critical: the victims had nowhere to run and were incorporated into the winners’ polities. In areas with dispersed resources, states did not develop until forced to do so to deal with aggressive states formed in circumscribed areas. Even these “secondary,” or “reflex,” states tended to develop in relatively bounded areas.

      China’s early states, however, were not confined by the absolute boundary of a lifeless desert, as were Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and the Peruvian river valleys, or by the extremely high and rugged mountains that shut in the Mexican centers. In response to a thorough survey by Yi Jianping (2012) of the countless small local chiefdoms that moved toward statehood, Carneiro (2012a) notes that the states arose in the more circumscribed areas (the Wei Valley, the Yellow River where it enters the North China Plain, the Sichuan Basin; he could have added the Lower Yangzi Valley). But Carneiro has to admit that it appears that “resource concentration” was more important in this case than circumscription.

      Trade was clearly critical. All the pristine states, and for that matter, all the well-studied secondary ones, arose at trade nodes, and the more important and focused the trade node, the earlier and more important the state. At the Valley of Mexico, Mesopotamia, and the western North China Plain, all the natural trade routes of entire continents or subcontinents come together. Conversely, beautifully circumscribed areas that were peripheral to all trade, such as the Colorado River, the Central Valley of California, and the lower Rhine (including its delta), had no early states—but such areas shot into major prominence when major trade reached them. This phenomenon is visible in China, with the progress of civilization from the Yellow and Yangzi Valleys to the Pearl and Red