The Center Cannot Hold: A Cultural History of the Emergence of the State in Early China

Abstract

The development of a centralized and legalistic form of statecraft in the state of Qin is often taken to be representative of the political changes that occurred during the Warring States (475-221 BCE) period, and of the Chinese political tradition as a whole. In order to complicate this view, this dissertation draws on a wide array of received and excavated texts to reconstruct the sociopolitical importance of gift-giving in early China, both as praxis and in terms of the political and social imaginary. Gift-giving rituals were central both to the mutual recognition of sovereign and subject, and the attempt to propose an emic set of norms surrounding gift-giving in terms of ritual li 禮. The social logic of the gift, which demanded reciprocation, situated material goods and services within a decentralized web of ongoing human relationships and promoted a discourse of altruism (which in reality was often driven by self-interest). At the same time, it gave both lords and local communities the power to negotiate and manipulate social and juridical realities. This framework existed in immense tension with the Qin legal order, which sought the rigid classification of people, property, and actions; promoted a discourse involving the direct pursuit of self-interest; and ultimately became a vehicle for the ruler to monopolize all forms of political gift-giving. As the state of Qin expanded, it created an institutional structure to ensure the uniform interpretation of the law and overcome the resistance of intellectuals who tried to assert an independent hermeneutic authority. At the same time, the state of Qin’s broad application of the legal concept of “theft” dao 盜 became important as a means of defining the rights and duties associated with state and private property. As a noun, dao also became the term for rebels, bandits, and other enemies of the state who were excluded from the political community defined in terms of the gift. Qin Shihuang drew on the rhetoric of the gift to justify his rule, but many Han intellectuals criticized the brutal expropriation that characterized his reign. In contrast, Liu Bang, the rebel dao 盜 who established the Han dynasty, was successful in large part because he and his successors restored the centrality of gift-giving to the political order. In reexamining early criticism of the authoritarian political model of the Qin dynasty in relation to the broader political, intellectual, and legal context of early China, this dissertation offers a new perspective for understanding and theorizing both the legitimization and critique of state power in later periods of Chinese history. At the same time, by drawing on Marcel Mauss to explore the centrality of gift-giving to the political order, it complicates understandings of Chinese officialdom rooted in Weberian conceptions of impersonal bureaucracy.