This chapter will concentrate on the problems of making war and making peace in early China during the Eastern Zhou dynasty of the late Bronze Age, during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, roughly 722 to 221. Before that time, in the late second millennium during the Shang dynasty, the purpose of war was primarily to capture enemy victims. They were sacrificed to appease the spirits of the dead ancestors of the Shang king and their blood was used to feed the altars of the grain and soil, the symbols of the state, which required blood sacrifices for their continued existence and ability to provide aid for the Shang living. Campaigns were also necessary to protect the harvest from raiding enemy tribes and to seize territory from them. Sacrifice and war were essential, almost daily activities of the aristocratic elite and there is no indication of any concept of or efforts to establish peace (Yates 1999: 9-11).
After the First Emperor of China, who had united all the states and founded the Chinese empire in 221, his successors in the Han dynasty (206 bce-220 ce) directed aggressive warfare primarily at external enemies, principally the nomadic Xiongnu people of the northern steppes. In this later period of unified empire, new forms of international relations and peace making came to be developed, known as the “tributary system” in which the Chinese emperor claimed to be the sole suzerain and foreign peoples who wished to have relations with the Chinese state had to bring offerings to him and recognize his ritual superiority (Fairbank 1968).1 Peace was maintained in this system by the ritual exchange of gifts, by the emperor conferring Chinese titles on the leaders of the subordinate peoples, and sometimes by marrying off a woman of the royal family to the leader of the tribe and conferring the imperial surname on him. Often the value of the Chinese gifts was greater than those they received from the tribute bearers and the latter used the Chinese goods to distribute wealth among their followers. The titles, marks of social prestige, were valuable commodities in the competition with other tribal leaders for dominance in their local areas and sometimes the chiefs could call in Chinese arms to support their political ambitions. In addition, tribute missions were often occasions of extensive trade by other members of the foreign delegation, thus the economic benefits were diffused more widely in the societies of the trading partners. If the Chinese refused to trade, or limited trade by closing their markets, the foreigners would initiate war until tribute and trade delegations were once again permitted. Thus war, peace and trade were intimately connected.
In the first part of the period under study in this chapter (722 to roughly 450), international relations were initially dominated by a system of ritual, but, as numerous city-states and coalitions of city-states led by hegemons (ba) fought with each other for control of human and natural resources, for territory, for survival, and for a variety of other reasons, a system of covenants led by the Master of Covenants (mengzhu) tried to impose order and stability.
In the second part (450-221), after massive consolidation of the warring city states into a few large regional city-state systems (Yates 1997), warfare was conducted primarily among shifting alliances of coalition partners each trying to achieve hegemony over the others and each trying to prevent its rivals from achieving the same hegemony (Lewis 1999: 632-34). Peace was, therefore, “an interim condition between wars” (Caplow and Hicks 1995: 23), and lasting peace was only achieved when the warring parties were defeated and incorporated into larger political units, ultimately the unified empire of the Qin and Han dynasties.
Nevertheless, despite the chronic conflict during the Eastern Zhou period, statesmen and political and military theorists developed techniques and rituals to try to maintain peace and harmony between rival political entities, and elaborated theories of how rulers of states should act to ensure the survival of their states and how they should interact with their peers. These rituals and ideas had a profound impact upon the ways in which the later Chinese imperial state interacted with rivals and with peoples that were unwilling to be assimilated into the Chinese culture sphere. While the exercise of naked military force and the promotion of pure self-interest were encouraged by a series of peripatetic statesmen, called the Vertical and Horizontal Alliance Specialists (Zongheng jia) and by some military experts, another group advocated general disarmament, others that the ideal system of ritual of earlier times should be re-instituted, yet others that all behavior, military and otherwise, should be based on the patterns of the cosmos or in harmony with principles of virtue and righteousness and in accordance with the Dao, the origin of all things. It is these various systems of international relations and modes of grappling with conflict that will be the focus of this essay.
World History
