The Primacy of the Political Order in East Asian Societies

One of the most striking characteristics of Chinese civilization is what might be called the centrality and weight of the political order within that civilization. As a historian strongly biased toward an insistence on the reality of historic change and the emergence of novelty within Chinese culture, it is with some hesitation that I here focus attention on what seems to be a more or less enduring dominant culture orientation. It is a general orientation which remains quite compatible with vast and significant changes operative within its wide boundaries!

Since this paper will deal with large but tentative generalizations, I shall allow myself to extend these generalizations to other areas of the East Asia culture sphere and to in particular whether the Chinese orientation did significantly affect the evolution of those societies in East Asia !

The idea of an all-embracing socio-political order centering on a particularly powerful conception of universal kingship seems to have emerged very early within in the Chinese culture world. The kingship or locus of the authority which he occupies is an institution which comes to constitute the major link between human society and the ruling forces of the cosmos. It is itself a cosmic institution!

When in the so-called feudal period of the Zhou, local power-holders shared a portion of the king’s politico-religious authority within their own domins, they also shared the king’s jurisdiction over the “spirits of mountains and streams” within their domains.!