Contents
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION - WHAT IS CHINESENESS
CHAPTER 2 - WHAT LIES BEHIND – CHINESENESS – THE EARLY YEARS
CHAPTER 3 - WHAT LIES BENEATH – LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
CHAPTER 4 - WE ARE ALL FAMILY
CHAPTER 5 - WE ARE ALL BROTHERS AND SISTERS…
CHAPTER 6 - WHAT MANIFESTS ITSELF
CHAPTER 7 - CONFUCIAN VALUES AND CIVIL SOCIETY
CHAPTER 8 - ANOTHER CHINA METAPHOR
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PREFACE 11
CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION - WHAT IS CHINESENESS 17
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… Through a glass, darkly
“If we were to characterize in one word the Chinese way of life for the last two thousand years, the word would be ‘Confucian’. No other individual in Chinese history has so deeply influenced the life and thought of his people, as a transmitter, teacher and creative interpreter of the ancient culture and literature and as a moulder of the Chinese mind and character.”
Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Trouble With Confucianism. Harvard University Press, 1996
What Chinese people worship is the family and clan, so China only adheres to the doctrines of family and clan, not to the state-nation. Foreign observers say that Chinese are a sheet of loose sand yipan sansha 一 盘散沙
Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian, Sun Zhongshan) speech on the Three Principles of the People, 1924 ___________________________________________________
How to use this book 28 pick me up, anywhere …
What is Chineseness? 29 a working definition …
CHAPTER 2 - WHAT LIES BEHIND – CHINESENESS – THE EARLY YEARS 31
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Heaven and the Yellow Emperor … a point distant in time … to about 1000 BCE
You may have heard it – Chinese extolling their 5000 years of continuous Chinese culture wuqiannian de wenhua and it gets a bit old for Americans, whose principal contributions to world culture, I tell students, are basketball and time zones. But 5000 years seems a rather extravagant claim. That would take Chinese culture back before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh. Yes, to the emperors, the son of heaven, and the palaces, and the art and sculpture and Confucius. But all that takes us back about 3600 years. Is there any justification for the ‘5000 years’ meme? ____________________________________________________________
Ancient History 101 32 Rousseau or Hobbes?
Settlements Become Proto-States big man to chief to king … 40
Cultures 42
Longshan and Liangzhu 44
The Bronze Age, State Formation, and Rise of the Other War Makes the State, and the State Makes War 51
From Archeology to Myth the 5000 years story needs this myth … 62
Erlitou and Erligang 64
Gods and Kings and Anthropocosmology the leader as the north star 69
Cosmography 69
Di 78
Nature gods 82
Ancestor veneration 84
Archeology and Myth 89
What it meant to be a dynasty and civilization 93
This section needs fixing
Was Shang an Empire? 99
Cultural beliefs – A Sense of Chineseness 105 Administration 121
Shangdi and Tian 124
Zhongguo, Huaxia, Chin-a, Yi and Wuwei means what? 128
Zhongguo, Huaxia 128
Chin-a 132
Yi 134
Wuwei 142
Oracle Bones and the Long Duree Why are Greeks not Chinese? 144
So, 5000 years? Continity of the System, Culture, Conflict, and Chineseness For China, no Bronze Age Collapse 167
The Bronze Age Collapse 169
What Survived Gone With the Wind? culture, rooted in place. Farmers go on forever. 174
Long term micro, macro, and institutions 179
Institutions = Culture + Organizations 198
Durability of Chineseness 204
CHAPTER 3 - WHAT LIES BENEATH – LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 207 _______________________________________________________________________________
Why do they behave that way? Why can’t they just tell the truth? And when I ask, why do I get accused of this ridiculous, ‘hurting the feelings of the Chinese people?’ – an American rant on “lying, cheating foreigners.”
“I will give thee tables of stone, a law and commandants which I have written.” - Exodus 24:12
“… look west for science, China for culture.”
What evolved in the next 2000 years …__________________________________________________________________
What is it that we call China? 209
Language, Writing, and Culture You speak Chinese so wonderfully … 215
Reading and Writing Chinese 215
Indirectness in Communication 225
Translation of Chinese to English 233
No I in Team, and It Depends Upon What the Meaning of “is” Is 237
Indirectness in Creation 242
Correlative Thinking 243 What kind of reasoning is that? Our fate is in the stars …
Correlations, Orality, and Imperial Rulemove or delete 253
Harmony 276 James Dean, George Carlin, and School’s Out, by Alice Cooper - not
Why All the Attention on Harmony? 279
Harmony Today 285
Imperial Control of Information Randy Newman, circa 1000 BCE … keepin’ the peasants down 295
Writing from Above and Below 296
How to Ensure Compliance 303
Literacy and Control 317
Beyond Word-Pictures - Trade 325
The Levant and the Mediterranean 326
China 327
Technological Change – The Alphabet 328
Why The Stability of Imperial Rule Why return to an authoritarian single leader? why no representation? 331
Authoritarian rulers – and empires – as response 340
Rhetoric and Truth 350 Talk that is not so cheap …
Rhetoric Today 360
Political and Moral Truth 364
Where does political truth come from? 368
Two Systems 374
All Under Heaven tianxia But That was Then, and This is Now 378
Why No One Wrote “Decline and Fall of the Chinese Empire Hint: If you don’t have traditions of civic virtue or salvation, you can’t lose them … The few. The proud. The literati. Semper fi. 386
Rome and China – Similarities and Differences 388
Geography – The big argument 400
The nature of earlier governmental institutions 401
The ideological argument 405
The buy-in argument 407
The stationary bandit argument 408
Some Conundrums 411
Confucian Morality and Legalistic Rule 412
Enterprise and lethargy 414
Trade as morally corrupt, but it pays the bills 421
Clan versus city 444
American Empire v CCP 452
Roman-ness v Chineseness 455
The Needham Question 461 sci. in general in China – why not develop? To be written
No Questions 485 don’t ask questions you don’t already know the answer to … Ever try to conduct a class in which students are afraid to ask questions? How do you know if you are being understood?
The civilization state 492 Is China sui generis?
The Civilization State and Freedom 516 What do you mean, Chinese lack freedom?
Moral What? 517
Freedom for what? 522
The Tradeoff in Modernity 538
Political Epistemology 546 When you know something, why do you think you know it? Lake Wobegone in China
Performative Declamation 569 speech acts
CHAPTER 4 - WE ARE ALL FAMILY 587 ____________________________________________________________________
… the first circle … the past is prologue (1) …
leader a leader, husband a husband, brother _____________________________________________________________
Family Values 559 but without God or guns …
The incredibly Extended Family 593 Are you related to your grandmother’s sister’s daughter?
The Clan 594
The Individual in Chinese Culture network and circles 605
CHAPTER 5 - WE ARE ALL BROTHERS AND SISTERS… 619
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… We are all han people … the second circle … the past is prologue (2)
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Mystery and Struggle 620 running against the wind …
The Mystery of Information 639 information really is power
Traditional Chinese Medicine 651 repeated later?
Fate 655 you don’t play the role, you are the role
Wealth as Indicative of Moral Worth – Arête, of a
Sort 659 good Calvinists, all
The Mystery of Urgency 660 learning from McKinsey …
Fear 669 nothing to fear, but fear itself
Freedom to trust Confucius, Jesus, and Markets 677
Trade 681
We don’t trust nobody that nobody sent 687
Mystery and Double Binds 692 that which is forbidden is mandatory …
High School and College Freedom 699 those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer …
The Myth of the Social Volcano 703 and yet … and yet …
Understanding Chinese is like understanding Native
Americans 709 strangers in a strange land
CHAPTER 6 - WHAT MANIFESTS ITSELF 712 __________________________________________________________________
… what we foreigners see … the second circle and beyond … the past is prologue (3) _____________________________________________________________________
The Business of Government 713 the business of government is business
Land Use 724 location, location, location doesn’t matter when you create your own location and your own market
Management of Real Estate 732 what?
The Government of Business 743 why can’t we just all get along?
CHAPTER 7 - CONFUCIAN VALUES AND CIVIL SOCIETY 753
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Confucius in the modern era … a society of strangers …
The claim central to Marxist theory was that civil society is a fraud. The apparent plurality of nonstate institutions adds up to a system systematically slanted in favor of one category (“class”) of people, defined in terms of their relationship to the available means of production.
Ernest Gellner, The Civil and the Sacred, 1990
tianxia weigong – all under Heaven is held in common - comment on datong in Liji Book of Rites ________________________________________________________________________________
Confucian Values 746 if Jesus were just a man …
Environment and Stewardship 752
Public, Private, and Nothing in Between We serve the people 755
Guardians and traders 760
Non-History of Civil Society in China 767
The Chinese Idea 773
Government Legitimacy 780
Social Capital and Trust 783
If You Build It, They Will Come 790
Honor Code honor code among thieves 798
Nihilism and Sui Generis see, hear, speak no evil 808
A lot of this needs revision and adding and deletion
Civil Society – Innovation and Evaluation 845
The Spirit of deTocqueville 854 not volunteerism … but how to fail
CHAPTER 8 - ANOTHER CHINA METAPHOR 874 ______________________________________________________________
The varieties of Chineseness, as numerous as fish in the sea _________________________________________________________________
