Chiang Chin-kuo Associate Professor of Chinese Thought
University of California at Irvine
Around the year 1200, China had reached a stage in its book-culture that in many important ways mirrors our situation today. By 1200, China had been using wood-block printing for at least 200 years. By 1200, urban Chinese were at the point of having access to almost the entire textual legacy of their past. At the same time, because of a thriving commercial printing industry, current writings were rapidly disseminated throughout the realm. By 1200, thoughtful Chinese realized that they had achieved infoglut, the inability to meaningfully assimilate all the texts available to them.
What I shall argue today is that the problems Chinese literati encountered in their attempts to organize their textual culture raised the same questions of control we shall encounter in the organization and dissemination of electronic textual information. That is, as information grows ever more massive, it must be organized if it is to be used. But to bring information under control is not and cannot be a neutral act. Control cannot escape questions of power and ideology. By 1200, the Chinese had confronted this reality, and now it is our turn.
Let me begin, however, by filling in a bit of the background of the Chinese development of book culture in order to better explain the Chinese response. There are records of wood-block printing of Buddhist sutras as early as the seventh century.[1] But to our knowledge, large scale printing projects began around 930, during the Five Dynasties period, when the government of one of the brief dynasties commissioned the printing of the Confucian classics. From 960 onward, the Song dynasty (960-1280), which was to rule over China for 300 years, continued this printing project and greatly expanded its scope. The Song ministry of education printed the Confucian classics, then produced the complete Buddhist cannon on 130,000 wood blocks, then a compendium of the literature of the previous dynasty in 1000 volumes, then the legal codes and the official histories of former dynasties, then pharmacopoeia, Taoist texts, and so on. In this early phase the government tightly regulated the sale and reproduction of these texts. In the meantime, however, commercial printing houses grew ever more numerous and made an ever greater variety of texts available at an ever lower cost. This increasing availability of texts was both symptom and cause of a major transformation in Chinese society and culture. Previous dynasties had been ruled by a bureaucracy recruited from an aristocracy of great clans. Now the great clans were gone, and the dynasty created a meritocracy of officials recruited through competitive examinations that required knowledge of history and literature as well as a grounding in political theory and the Confucian classics.[2] The Song dynasty created the Chinese equivalent of the rags-to-riches story: a bright young provincial lad could study hard, pass the examinations, and rise to be prime minister. This egalitarian ideal was made possible through the broad dissemination of the texts that were at the center of the exam system. This new egalitarianism, moreover, had an intellectual as well as a political side. Young men without a long family history of scholarship got to study the classics, and they discovered that they could read them. They found they could interpret the ancient lore in ways that had immediate implications for their own lives and actions. The minds of the sages, they discovered, survived in the texts themselves, and each individual reader could attempt for himself to understand both what the sages meant and what it meant to be a sage. This was a heady time of intellectual ferment, but it did not last.[3]
Chinese literati now had access to the broad range of their past traditions. Yet they discovered very painfully that this textual inheritance did not speak with a single voice. From the late 11th century on, the vision of a unified culture based on the sage writings of the past gave way to increasingly strident partisan wrangling. In politics, philosophy, and literature, factions could validate their views with chapter and verse from the writings of former worthies and the historical record of the past.
The orthodoxies that were to dominate the next seven hundred years arose within this cacophony of texts. The instrument used to establish these positions, moreover, was editorial control. The faction that could give the most compelling and useful version of the past, as created through its anthologizing practices, could in essence claim the past. In claiming the past, they in turn controlled the categories through which to understand the present and future as well. The culmination of this process of editorial shaping was the work of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the great Confucian philosopher, writer, and educator. His Reflections on Things at Hand was a collection of the writings of his intellectual forebears that redefined the center of thought for the previous 200 years.[4] In addition, Zhu Xi in his role as educator selected and annotated four texts from the Confucian canon, a set that came to be called simply "The Four Books" that became the center of literati education until modern times. And finally, his annotations of the major Confucian classics provided the orthodox interpretations of those texts for later generations.
The enormous efforts of Zhu Xi and his students gave Chinese literati a coherent perspective through which to read the past as well as to engage in the culture of their own time. We have come to call this perspective Neo-Confucianism, or in Chinese, dao xue. The rise of Zhu Xi's dao xue marks a major shift in Chinese culture, but its creation of a coherent orthodoxy out of previous cacophony exacted a price from Chinese culture. That is, dao xue was not disinterested in its reading of the past the elevation of some texts and some views required the suppression of others. Not surprisingly, Zhu Xi's contemporaries largely knew what was at stake in these textual matters. When government censors sought to attack the political faction with which Zhu Xi was associated, they branded his writings "spurious learning" wei xue and proscribed them.
Chinese culture is not alone in finding ideological implications in all texts, from history to philosophy, to commentaries on ancient poetry, to the writing of poetry itself. But in the Chinese case, the connection has an especially long tradition. Indeed, the model for Zhu Xi's shaping of cultural norms through the collation of texts was Confucius himself. According to a very old tradition, for example, Confucius was said to have created the Classic of Poetry by selecting the 300 best poems from the 3000 songs used by Zhou dynasty ritualists. These 300 poems to which Confucius gave his assent were therefore studied as embodying sage wisdom and the right use of emotion. Similarly, Confucius wrote the Spring and Autumn Annals, a very terse account of events involving the state of Lu over a 250 year period (~770 B.C. to 481 B.C.) Here too, Chinese literati believed that each recorded event implied a judgment and revealed a moral message for later ages. Confucius even was credited by Zhu Xi and other scholars with compiling the ten appendices to the Classic of Change to point later readers towards right metaphysics.
So Zhu Xi's contemporaries, who shared this Confucian model, knew the implications of his anthologizing and rewriting of commentaries. Zhu Xi's particular genius, however, was the breadth of material that he, like Confucius, could assimilate to his synthesis. Unlike his immediate forebears, who had little patience for belletristic writing, for example, Zhu Xi welcomed it, so long as it made no greater claims for itself than as adornment or rhetoric. Zhu Xi included poetry and literary prose, gave them an honorable place and thereby controlled them. His coopting of the literary, moreover, was so successful that we only now are beginning to understand what disappeared in the recasting. We only now are realizing that the views of history, self, and the world embodied in the literary tradition were perhaps Zhu Xi's main rival for the hearts and minds of his contemporaries. We only now, after seven hundred years, realize that his rewriting of the intellectual history of his recent past reduced central cultural figures to bit-players and promoted erstwhile eccentrics to the role of philosophic spokesmen for their times. And finally, we just now are beginning to understand how fundamentally the literature of the next seven hundred years evolved within the rewritten history Zhu Xi had provided for it.
In concluding my account of Zhu Xi's editorial work, let me emphasize not its distortions but the fact of its success. His writings created a flexible yet powerful model for how to read, how to engage texts of all sorts from all periods. It committed men to applying their reading to their life in the world and, equally, to bringing reflection on their experience to the reading of texts. This web of words and world left little out. And if nothing could escape the power of its structuring principles, very little could not be accommodated somehow. Chinese print culture did not unravel after the Song. On the contrary, it flourished. The volume and variety of printed material continued to expand. And every few generations or so, anthologies were created in philosophy and poetry that once again asserted organizing principles derived in large measure from Zhu Xi that established priorities within the welter of contemporary voices.
As China now begins to make its textual heritage available in electronic form, it not surprisingly begins with a mix of collections traditionally printed by the imperial government and those selections of texts that defined and dominated the traditional discourse about the larger textual universe. As I look to the future, I think we have little choice but to reenact the double movement of the Song government's initial, optimistic project of making useful and important texts available followed by Zhu Xi's strategies for imposing order. That is, we will have to select text initially in accordance with some sense of priorities. It does not matter whether the priorities are conservative or guided by a concern to right old wrongs and give voice to excluded minorities. In both cases, selection must be made because of constraints in resources and time, and all selections will have ideological implications. Yet let us suppose that the text base gradually grows and escapes the onus of bias. As it becomes broader, it will come to include both the popular and the obscure, the great, the minor, and the utterly trivial. Then our queries of the database will give us more answers than we can hope to properly evaluate. What then? I do not counsel despair, nor do I suggest that we need a new Zhu Xi to organize the priority-weighting of the database.
I suggest instead that the allure of Zhu Xi suddenly becomes understandable. An article in the New York Times recently suggested that we need to construct electronic personalities to filter the information for us: the scholar, the libertine, the female mid-town New York lawyer, or even perhaps returning to Zhu Xi the sage. Until we can pick such constructs at will, all we can do is to proceed thoughtfully about our business of making texts available. When the texts are few, pick the best principles for selection we can, but know that selection is exclusion. It is power and therefore inescapably ideological. When the text base grows, we confront the same situation at one remove, for we still will need weighting procedures that reproduce the process of selection. There are no easy answers here, only provisional ones. There is no way around the need to choose. Indeed, we must specifically reject any promises of coherence that hide the process of selection from view. It remains imperative, I believe, that we live with the question of choice always acknowledged, always before us.
[1]A very good overview of the development of printed texts in Tang-Song dynasty China is Cherniack, Susan "Book-Culture and the Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Late Medieval China." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, June, 1994. In writing this paper, I consulted a draft of Cherniack's article and have taken the information in the following paragraphs from it.
[2]See Bol, Peter K. This Culture of Ours. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) for a history of the social and intellectual changes from Tang to Song dynasty.
[3]See Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt. Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) for an example of the shifts in the reading of the Confucian classics that were part of Song dynasty culture.
[4]For an English translation, see Chan, Wing-tsit, trans., Reflections on Things at Hand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).