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The Life of the Party: Theorizing Clients and Patrons in Early China

The Life of the Party: Theorizing Clients and Patrons in Early China HEN THE FIRST STABLE CHINESE EMPIRE (the Han) was established in 207 B.C.E., the intellectuals and statesmen who advised the rulers found themselves working through a number of philosophical issues that would aid in the ideological construction of a large polity—one that would claim universal domain over the Chinese ecumene. Han dynasty political thought had both a synthesizing and retrospective cast to it; it attempted to absorb the rich legacy of philosophical speculation that had occurred during the earlier so-called “Warring States” period, creating out of its unsystematic utterances a coherent view of the cosmos. At the same time, its concern over the almost continuous violence and social unrest of that earlier period, and what it perceived as a dangerous social mobility, led it to repress tendencies that it perceived as endangering a social “harmony” that would embrace all levels of private life, from the personal relations of the family to the functioning of a large state bureaucracy. Out of this was born what is often called “state Confucianism,” a world view that, for better or worse, tended to color all Chinese governments until at least the twentieth century. One of the side issues this project addressed was http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

The Life of the Party: Theorizing Clients and Patrons in Early China

ROUZER, PAUL
Comparative Literature , Volume 58 (1) – Jan 1, 2006
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2006 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-58-1-59
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Abstract

HEN THE FIRST STABLE CHINESE EMPIRE (the Han) was established in 207 B.C.E., the intellectuals and statesmen who advised the rulers found themselves working through a number of philosophical issues that would aid in the ideological construction of a large polity—one that would claim universal domain over the Chinese ecumene. Han dynasty political thought had both a synthesizing and retrospective cast to it; it attempted to absorb the rich legacy of philosophical speculation that had occurred during the earlier so-called “Warring States” period, creating out of its unsystematic utterances a coherent view of the cosmos. At the same time, its concern over the almost continuous violence and social unrest of that earlier period, and what it perceived as a dangerous social mobility, led it to repress tendencies that it perceived as endangering a social “harmony” that would embrace all levels of private life, from the personal relations of the family to the functioning of a large state bureaucracy. Out of this was born what is often called “state Confucianism,” a world view that, for better or worse, tended to color all Chinese governments until at least the twentieth century. One of the side issues this project addressed was

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Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2006

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