The Four Classic Texts: An Introduction to Sinology and Its Contemporary Relevance

A civilizational gulf still lies between the West and China

“Ancient though Zhou may be, its mandate is forever fresh.”

— King Wen, Greater Odes, Shijing (11^th century BCE), quoted by Xi Jinping in 2018

Sinology, known as national studies in modern China, is not only the study of classical Chinese culture and history, but also the cultural framework that unified China and the broader Sinosphere for two millennia. In China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, it was the foundation of elite education and the basis of civil service examinations until major Western contact in the 19^th century.

Albeit much younger in surviving writings than Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Chinese civilization is unique in its largely unbroken cultural lineage, dating back to the founding of the Zhou dynasty in 1046 BCE if not earlier. Unlike Greece and Iran, where Christianity and Islam combined with long periods of foreign rule have radically reshaped their cultures, China has preserved.

Beginning in the European Age of Discovery, the West has led the world with its technological superiority. Faced with challengers of a distant culture, be it Japan or Iraq, it did not respond with intelligent policy informed by history and culture, but with military domination. In the case of China, however, it’s neither feasible nor desirable. To understand the puzzle that is China, in addition to a grasp of its political economy (article here), a basic knowledge of Sinology is essential. From the masses to the highest levels of the CCP, its imprint is subtle yet profound.

Below are the four classic texts that in this writer’s opinion serve as the best entry point. Composed by masters in Sinology, they cover literary Chinese, traditional Chinese literature, ancient Chinese history, and classical Chinese philosophy, respectively. Traditionally, the first is known as minor studies (小學), and the rest are known as major studies (大學).

“Introduction”, Chinese (1988) by Jerry Norman

The Chinese language, especially in its written form, has always been one of the most powerful symbols of this cultural unity. The aptness of language as a symbol of cultural and even political unity was facilitated by the use of a script that for all practical purposes was independent of any particular phonetic manifestation of their language, allowing the Chinese to look upon the Chinese language as being more uniform and unchanging than it actually was. Such a view was no doubt also reinforced by the use of a literary language which changed but little from century to century and from dynasty to dynasty.

Despite disparate oral speech and national origins, China and its environs relied on a mostly static written language for thousands of years. In China, the transition from classical Chinese to written vernacular Chinese only began in 1917 with the New Culture Movement. Based on logograms and simple grammar, classical Chinese exerted an innate centripetal force that eluded Latin, an alphabetic language with complex inflections. As the author, a great scholar on Chinese, observes, even centuries of political disunity in China did not lead to a divergent script. At least not once the Qin dynasty was established in 221 BCE. As a result, Chinese texts from before the birth of Jesus are still accessible to and consumed by educated Chinese and East Asians, whereas Beowulf is only read by English experts without translation. In fact, 52% of the articles in the middle-school Chinese textbook mandated nationwide by the Ministry of Education are in classical Chinese. Written in a highly concise form resting upon contexts and allusions, classical Chinese frequently bedevils Western translators.

In recent years, leveraging a strong central government and modern media, China has achieved a broadly shared spoken language, an unprecedented feat.

“On Chinese Lyrical Tradition”, Tamkang Review (1971) by Chen Shih-hsiang

The Chinese lyrical tradition stands out, when it is juxtaposed against the Europeans, which by contrast I would characterize as epical and dramatic. We have evidence in both literary creativity and critical canon. Everyone is wonder-struck by the great Homeric epics and then tragic and comic drama, which marked the first full flowering of Greek literature. But equally striking by contrast is the conspicuous absence of anything like an epic, when Chinese creative literature arose, in its own way no less impressive, we’d like to think, and matured contemporaneously with the Greek since about the 10th century B.C. And there was no drama to speak of until more than 2000 years later. Its glory lay elsewhere, in lyrical poetry. Its origin is exemplified by the Shih Ching, Book of Songs, which, with Shih by definition as “song-words”, part and parcel identified with music, and with its pervading personal tone, its common human concern and immediate appeal, fitted in every way the entire essence of the lyric, long since acclaimed.

In contrast to the Greeks and the Vikings, who prized epics, dramas, and sagas, the core of classical Chinese literature is lyrical poems. In Shijing and Chuci, the two foundations of traditional Chinese poetry, we generally don’t see stories of heroic warriors, tragic love, or meddling gods. Instead, the main theme is deep secular concern for human suffering and desire for moral government, similar in spirit to Byron’s The Isles of Greece. In Europe, such poetry did not achieve high standing until the Romantic Age in the 18^th century. Confucius argued one central goal of poetry is political critique, even if vague or indirect. In Classical Chinese, one word typically corresponds to one syllable, which is written in one character. This intrinsic musicality makes lyrical poetry the natural choice.

Why did China neglect fiction? In Poetics, Aristotle says epic “agrees with tragedy” in being an imitation of serious action. In place of invented stories, the literate class has drawn upon China’s rich stock of historical stories of “serious action” for lessons on the human condition. These stories may be idealized, but not imaginary.

“Introduction”, The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (1999) by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy

In the Chinese tradition, the Western Zhou (1045–771 B.C.), the conqueror of and successor to Shang as the third of the Three Dynasties, was always regarded as China’s finest and most noble age. In comparison to Shang, it boasts a richer array of evidence, both textual and artifactual, on which the historian may call: bronze inscriptions, poetry, speeches by the rulers, as well as artifacts from sites throughout North China. By weaving all of these sources together, it is now becoming possible to show just how much has been left out of the traditional “dynastic cycle” model that focused almost exclusively on virtuous founders and evil last kings. Political rivalries now show through the cracks of the monolithic textual tradition, suggesting the first conflict between royal rule ordained by Heaven and government by worthy administrators — a conflict that would long beset China’s rulers. Poetry no less than bronze vessels tells the tale of a major reform of ritual practice that took place ca. 900 B.C., a reform that not only had broad implications for contemporary intellectual and social development, but that would continue to influence conceptions of social status for many centuries thereafter. Excavations at the capitals of the states of Jin 晉, Guo 虢, Lu 魯, and Yan 燕, all states established in the eastern part of the Zhou realm to serve Zhou interests there, are now suggesting how the multistate system of the Spring and Autumn period (770–481 B.C.) began to develop.

If the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE) defined the cultural foundation of Imperial China, the Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–256 BCE) gave rise to its political foundation. In a classically preserved speech corroborated by modern archeology, King Wu, the founder of the Zhou dynasty, rallied his rebel armies by arguing tyrants had no right to rule. He and his successor reorganized and expanded China proper under a feudal kingdom. In the West, when Brutus deposed the last king of Rome for criminal conduct five centuries later, it was still a small city-state. King Wu was later memorialized as a paragon of kingship that later emperors are exhorted to emulate. The zongfa system, where the patriarch heads a family of one or more spouses and children ordered on seniority, solidified during the Western Zhou. It persisted until the 20^th century. Eschewing the previous dynasty’s emphasis on theocratic divinations, the Western Zhou elevated secular ancestral worship into the principal rite; the kingdom had no official clergy or theology to speak of. By 771 BCE, archeological and textual evidence shows the elite class, from the Yellow River down to the Yangtze, had assimilated into the Zhou-defined Chinese culture.

Presaging the Holy Roman Empire, intense inter-state competition during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) ushered in tactical innovations, universal conscriptions, and the substitution of feudalism with centralized bureaucracy. By the reign of the first emperor (221–210 BCE), who unified all the Warring States, China had transformed into a post-religious, post-aristocratic centralized state, with strong cultural homogeneity. It taxed the population and drafted them into service without middlemen. Military command and administration are split apart and overseen by civilian officials, a principle adopted by the U.S. in 1986 and revived by the CCP in 2015. These fundamental features distinguish the Qin-Han Empire from the contemporaneous Roman Empire in all but size. Citing the incessant warfare, the first Chinese emperor refused to reinstate feudalism. Two millennia later, on the other side of Eurasia, trauma from the warring states brought about the semi-centralized European Union.

“Chapter 1: The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy”, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948) by Yu-lan Fung

According to Confucianism, the daily task of dealing with social affairs in human relations is not something alien to the sage. Carrying on this task is the very essence of the development of the perfection of his personality. He performs it not only as a citizen of society, but also as a “citizen of the universe,” t’ien min [天民], as Mencius called it. He must be conscious of his being a citizen of the universe, otherwise his deeds would not have super-moral value. If he had the chance to become a king he would gladly serve the people, thus performing his duty both as a citizen of society, and as a citizen of the universe.

Since what is discussed in philosophy is the Tao (Way) of sageliness within and kingliness without [內聖外王], it follows that philosophy must be inseparable from political thought. Regardless of the differences between the schools of Chinese philosophy, the philosophy of every school represents, at the same time, its political thought. This does not mean that in the various schools of philosophy there are no metaphysics, no ethics, no logic. It means only that all these factors are connected with political thought in one way or another, just as Plato’s Republic represents his whole philosophy and at the same time is his political thought.

Although markedly weaker than its Western counterpart on logic and liberty, classical Chinese philosophy has a special focus on political economy on a civilizational scale, unconfined to a city- or nation-state. In the process, it developed a secular humanist worldview that predated European humanism by 1,500 years. Even Buddhism, the only major foreign philosophy in China before the Opium Wars, was secularized by the literati. Centered around the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BCE), it teaches an ideal society is built on hierarchical relations between the ruler and the bureaucrat, the father and the son, and the husband and the wife. The former are obligated to treat the latter justly. If the ruler fails to honor such duties, Mencius (c. 371–c. 289 BCE) says, he is no longer a true ruler and that an overthrow is warranted. Mencius, quoting the founder of the Zhou dynasty, stresses the mandate of heaven is reflected in the popular will, not in a divine being or his earthly priests as believed in feudal Europe and Japan. Far from a fringe thinker, Mencius was endorsed as the second highest sage teacher by the Chinese state from 1330 CE to 1911 CE. Except for Mao and Deng, all subsequent Chinese paramount leaders have spoken highly of him. In 2014, Xi Jinping quoted the founder of the Zhou dynasty through Mencius on the same point, in the exact words as recorded more than 2,200 years earlier.

Modern CCP ideologies have been borrowed from ancient Confucianism. Building a hexie shehui, or a harmonious society, added to the party platform in 2004, officially derives from Confucius’s sayings and the seminal Confucian text Zhongyong. Achieving xiaokang, or moderate prosperity, adopted as an official goal in 1982, is civilizational aim attributed to Confucius in the classic Liji and pursued by the emperor and the literati for millennia. The CCP talks about the Sinicization of Marxism and the promotion of fine traditional culture; in many ways it’s reversion to China’s Confucian tradition, which has proto-socialist features. In international relations, China’s non-expansionism (article here) can be traced back to the teachings of Confucius and Mencius criticizing grandiose conquest and advocating soft power. Both favored an inclusive cultural identity of China, not an exclusive racial one.