Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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      Tombs included tableaus that represented ordinary life, with the food, furniture, and even the (fewer) sacrificial victims arranged as if to show how life should be when carried on in an ordinary way in the other world (Falkenhausen 2006). We seem to be dealing not with frightening ancestors in a vague sky but rather with an afterlife almost like ordinary life here. This view is, mutatis mutandis, the approach and ideology of Chinese folk religion today, and we see its formative stages in Eastern Zhou tombs. The reforms of Shang Yang, the authoritarian consolidator of the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE, established the new view for all time. Funeral offerings were more concerned with making the dead comfortable in the next life than with pacifying lineages of ancestors (Falkenhausen 2006: 321–23). The tomb became “a microcosmic representation of the world of the living” (382). Moreover, it seems clear from Shang Yang’s writings that he knew perfectly well that the real purpose of these rites was to bring the living together and show the living social order, whatever the dead may have thought.

      Also evident in sacrifices from Eastern Zhou through the Warring States period is a shift in the class system. Western Zhou had a small and only somewhat differentiated elite. Eastern Zhou, and above all the Warring States period, had a definite class society in which a high-ranking elite ruled over a vast middle range consisting of noble-born but not very wealthy individuals (Falkenhausen 2006). This should not be confused with a middle class—it was a lower-ranking elite—but it certainly had many of the characteristics one associates with a middle class, including an earnest desire to rise through education, sophistication, and proper behavior. This was the class from which most of the philosophers came. It is no accident that the Chinese word for “gentleman,” junzi, means “son of the non-royal nobility.” (Comparisons have often been made to Spanish hidalgo, “son of somebody.”) It evolved the way “gentleman” did in English: from a class marker to a compliment on one’s civil behavior. In any case, the high elite got fancier and fancier tomb goods, the lower elite got rather little. At worst, the lower elites would sink into commoner status.

      One important development in Zhou and Warring States was the linguistic form we call Classical Chinese. This was an extremely terse, even telegraphic, language. Grammar was shown by rigid word-ordering rules rather than by function words; few such words existed, and they were highly regular and formulaic in placement and use. Redundancy and bisyllabic words were even less evident. Nobody could actually speak such a language. We need redundancy, grammatical function words, and “fillers” (including “filled pauses”) to give our hearers time to process what we are saying. Classical Chinese was a form of speedwriting, evidently developed for taking down court records and orders, in an age when everything had to be laboriously written on bamboo strips or carved into tortoise shells.

      One proof of this is that actual verbatim speech, recorded (though still somewhat summarized) for example in the Records of the Warring States, has fairly normal human redundancy and grammar. But for 2500 years all scholars in China had to learn to read, think, and above all write in Classical Chinese. They learned to exploit its distinctive traits. In particular, the telegraphic form makes for ambiguity, and later poets learned to cultivate deliberate ambiguity and multiple implication.

      In 690 BCE, Chu, in modern Hunan, developed a bureaucratic system with governors and high officials reporting to the ruler. In 594 the state of Lu remitted the labor that farmers owed to local feudal lords, thus effectively turning partial serfs into yeoman farmers. They had to pay taxes and could be liable for military service (Morris 2010: 251). This was one of the beginnings of China’s evolution from quasi-feudal and slave labor systems to the overwhelming importance of free yeoman farmers.

      China’s cultivators have long been called peasants in the West, but in the strict sense, they were rarely peasants—at least not after the Warring States period (though the situation in Han is somewhat unclear). They may have been small-scale farmers, producing for their own subsistence a good deal of the time, but they were not usually in a separate, servile class, as European serfs and peasants were. “Peasant” is a term correctly used for farmers with fewer rights and privileges than full citizens. Chinese farmers were usually full citizens (though sometimes slaves; slavery persisted, diminishing in frequency, to the end of Imperial China). Serfdom apparently diminished after Han. The vast majority of Chinese farmers, and a greater and greater majority over time, were free yeoman farmers, not peasants.