Violence is a part of every society's history, and China is no exception.
This chapter treats the period of Chinese prehistory and history that stretches from the Neolithic period to the beginnings of imperial rule (c. tenth to second centuries bce), and considers violence in the broad sense of a person or group's action or actions of force that deliberately cause physical harm to one or more other human beings.
Much of the discussion centres on violence in forms concerned with government. This is in large part the result of traditional historiography in China, which looked at the past primarily as a succession of rulers and dynasties. Historians were usually government officials writing to instruct other officials, and their works reflect this. My discussion incorporates the results of archaeological research, but its primary sources come from texts that have been transmitted over the centuries. These received texts reflect the transmitters' interests in intellectual history and government. Early Chinese history depends on a very limited number of sources, which precludes the sort of comparison and verification that modern historians would like.[841] Thus, inevitably, much of what follows concerns not violence but rather its presentation in the texts available to us.The discussion here excludes animals. This is obviously not because they cannot be subject to force, but in the intellectual world of early China the treatment of animals would, as a rule, be ethically and philosophically distinct from acts towards human beings. Due to the limitations of space, I also will avoid discussing violence as part of a formal legal process.
The position of violence in early Chinese history is equivocal. There is ample evidence of it in the area we now call China since remotest antiquity. At the same time, classical Chinese culture celebrated neither battle nor warrior heroism. Fighting was not the stuff of high literature, which tended to pass over the actual bloodletting in favour of discussing the preparations, the aftermath and the collateral damage. The literary scholar C. H. Wang called this tendency the ‘ellipsis of battle'. For Wang, China's culture heroes were peaceful agriculturalists, not the warriors of European epic poetry. David Keightley discussed the same tendency, concentrating on historical portrayals of heroism, especially in war.[842] War is, of course, not the sole form of violence. But its ambiguous place in early Chinese intellectual life in many ways encapsulates the place of violence overall and it receives historiographical attention that far outweighs that given to other forms of violence as I define it.