What are the characteristics of China's history and culture?

What are the characteristics of China's history and culture?

Characteristics of China culture

The emergence of any cultural type can not be separated from specific natural conditions and social and historical conditions.

This is the material production mode and social organization structure under the specific natural geographical environment.

We will discuss these three aspects in detail in the next chapter.

In short, from the geographical environment, China is located in a semi-closed mainland area, which is very different from the multi-ethnic groups along the western Mediterranean; From the perspective of material production mode, China culture is rooted in agricultural society, and the feudal small-scale peasant economy has a history of several thousand years in China, which is quite different from nomadic peoples in Central Asia and West Asia and marine peoples with relatively developed industry and commerce. From the perspective of social organization structure, the patriarchal clan system has become an important link to maintain social order in the long history of China, and the autocratic system has lasted for two thousand years in China, which is extremely rare in the history of world culture.

The characteristics of China culture can be roughly reflected in the following aspects:

1. Strong vitality and cohesion

Among the world's cultural forests, there are four ancient civilizations and many excellent cultural systems.

According to the British historian Toynbee, in the nearly 6,000 years of human history, there are 26 forms of civilization, but only China's cultural system in the world is a long-term and uninterrupted culture.

This strong vitality is an important feature of China culture.

The strong vitality of China culture lies in its assimilation, integration, continuity and cohesion.

The so-called assimilative power refers to the fact that after foreign cultures entered China, most of them gradually became China and became a part of China culture.

In this respect, the most representative examples are the introduction of Buddhist culture and China.

Buddhism began to spread in Nepal, India and Pakistan, but it was not native to China. /kloc-0 was introduced to China in the Han Dynasty in the 20th century. For hundreds of years in Wei, Jin, Sui and Tang Dynasties, Buddhist monks traveled eastward, translated Buddhist scriptures, and China monks traveled westward to seek dharma, all of which failed to make Buddhist culture completely conquer China literati.

As a result of the spread of Buddhism, part of it became China Buddhism (such as Zen Buddhism), and part of it was integrated into Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties, becoming a part of China culture.

Jews are all over the world and maintain their own religious beliefs and ways of thinking. When they came to China, they were lost in the Wang Yang sea of China culture.

The so-called cohesion means that Chinese culture is not a simple Han culture or Yellow River valley culture, but organically absorbs the cultures of various nationalities and different regions in China, such as Chu culture, Wu culture, Bashu culture and western region culture, and forms a rich Chinese culture.

The cultures of various ethnic groups in China, such as Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jiedi, Biandi, Qiang, Qidan, Liao and Jin, all flow in the blood of China culture.

Without this integration, there would be no profoundness of China culture.

Of course, the integration of cultures of various regions and ethnic groups also contains the meaning of "assimilation".

The assimilation and integration of China culture is formed by history, so it is not a simple accidental cultural phenomenon, but a manifestation of cultural vitality.

A nation with such a strong cultural vitality is rare in world history.

In the early 1970s, Toynbee had a famous dialogue with Daisaku Ikeda, a Japanese scholar, in which he pointed out, "As far as the people of China are concerned, for thousands of years, hundreds of millions of people have successfully United politically and culturally than any other nation in the world.

They have realized this ability of political and cultural unity and have unparalleled successful experience. "

In human history, cultural tragedies caused by alien invasion are common. For example, Indian culture was Aryan because of Aryan invasion, Egyptian culture was Hellenistic because of Alexander the Great invasion, Romanized because of Caesar occupation, and Arabs moved in and Islamized. Greek and Roman culture died out because of the invasion of Germanic barbarians and slept for thousands of years.

But in China, this has never happened.

There is only one culture in China, which has lasted for thousands of years and never stopped, showing unparalleled continuity.

There are many reasons for this strong continuity of life.

One of the reasons is that the special geographical environment of East Asia continent provides a relatively isolated state.

China culture "assimilated" the northern nomadic people who entered the Central Plains by force for a long time with obvious advance, and repeatedly staged the drama of "the conqueror was conquered", which is also an important reason.

In the long historical years, although China's culture has not been threatened by Europe, West Asia and South Asia, it has also been repeatedly invaded by nomadic people in the north, such as "the invasion of barbarians in the north before the Spring and Autumn Period", "Five Wild Flowers" in the Sixteen Countries Period, the Khitan, Nuzhen and Mongolia in the Song and Yuan Dynasties went south one after another, and entered the customs in the late Ming Dynasty.

Although these brave nomads gained the upper hand militarily, and even established a powerful ruling regime for many times, culturally, they were always assimilated consciously or unconsciously by the advanced Central Plains culture represented by China farming culture.

Almost all of these nomadic or semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral peoples have experienced a transition or leap from clan society to feudal society in the process of contact with advanced Central Plains culture.

The result of military conquest is not the cultural destruction and extinction of the conqueror, but the cultural conversion and progress of the conqueror.

In this process, China culture has absorbed fresh nutrients from many aspects, such as nomadic riding and shooting technology, products and skills in border areas, thus adding new vitality.

The strong vitality of China culture also lies in its lasting cohesion.

This cohesion is reflected in the self-identity of cultural psychology and the sense of belonging of cultural groups beyond regions and national boundaries.

During the Western Zhou Dynasty, the ancestors of China had the concept of "if they are not my race, their hearts will be different" and expressed their self-confirmation from the cultural and psychological characteristics.

Because of this, tens of millions of overseas Chinese roaming the world today, some of them have children in foreign countries and carry on the family line, but their cultural umbilical cord is still closely related to Chinese mothers. In their minds, they never forget that they are children of the Chinese nation and descendants of China people.

Generations of overseas Chinese who have settled in Panama and gained a prominent position in politics put it this way: "Although we don't know Chinese at all, our thoughts and manners are very China.

Yang Zhenning, a famous Chinese-American scientist, also said, "I think China's traditional social system, ethics and outlook on life are all very binding on us."

2. The agricultural cultural mentality of emphasizing reality and seeking stability

China culture is an agricultural culture.

The so-called agricultural culture does not mean that there are no products from other industries in the material composition of this culture, but that the leading aspect and force of the material basis of the whole culture is agriculture running on the track of natural economy.

The fertile land in East Asia nurtured by the Yellow River and the Yangtze River provided excellent conditions for China ancestors to engage in intensive agricultural production.

For thousands of years, farmers, the main body of the people in China, have devoted themselves to farmland and engaged in simple reproduction for generations, becoming the basic undertakers of national services year after year.

This established the characteristics of the agricultural material state of China ancient culture, and formed a unique "practical-empirical rationality" on this basis, such as attaching importance to agriculture, respecting agriculture, social consciousness, pragmatic spirit of attaching importance to reality and abandoning illusion, peaceful and happy life interest, including the concept of cycle and eternal change, and so on.

In China, where agriculture is the foundation of survival, the rhythm of agricultural production has long been linked with the rhythm of national life.

Traditional festivals in China, including the most solemn Spring Festival, all come from farming and evolved from agricultural solar terms. Unlike many other ethnic groups, most of them come from religion.

In such a cultural atmosphere, it is natural that the idea of attaching importance to agriculture comes into being.

China people have long recognized that agriculture is the source of wealth.

"Don't plow, not rich.

Pragmatic spirit is a group trend triggered by the farming life of "no pains, no gains".

In the process of agricultural labor, the people of China have realized a simple truth: without profit, one's strength will not be wasted, and empty talk will be of no help, but if one does things in a down-to-earth manner, one will gain something.

This peasant's pragmatic style has also infected the scholars. "Adults are flashy, gentlemen are pragmatic" is the spirit advocated by China and Tessa.

It is this national character that makes China people develop practical-empirical rationality without paying much attention to pure theoretical metaphysics. Aristotelian intellectuals who are driven by curiosity to explore the mysteries of nature are rarely produced in China.

As a farming nation, the mindset and thinking method formed by China people in the simple reproduction process of small-scale peasant economy is to pay attention to practical understanding, rather than to pursue precise and rigorous thinking system. They are called "the nation that is best at handling practical affairs" by westerners.

People in agricultural society are satisfied with maintaining simple reproduction and lack the ability to expand social reproduction, so the social operation is slow and sluggish.

In such a living environment, it is easy to breed eternal consciousness that the world is long and static, and China people often show the inertia of doing what they are used to doing.

Reflected in the folk mentality, it is the pursuit of "durability" of instruments, the hope of stable acceptance of the ruling style, the prayer of the family for eternity, and the expression of the consciousness of seeking "long".

3. Family-based patriarchal collectivism culture.

The development of China's ancient history is not to replace the patriarchal society linked by clan blood with a slave country, but to move from family to country, and to maintain slavery by blood, forming a pattern of "integration of family and country".

In this way, the disintegration of clan society in China was not completely completed, so the patriarchal clan system and its ideological remnants accumulated in large quantities. For thousands of years, the whole society did not have the strict hierarchy as in ancient India and medieval Europe for a long time, and social organizations were mainly established under the guidance of patriarchal principles of father and son, monarch and minister, and husband and wife.

The patriarchal clan system is deeply rooted in China, not only because of the incomplete disintegration of clan society, but also because of the long-term continuation of natural economy since then. "The voice of a cock and a dog hear each other, and people don't communicate with each other until death" constitutes the cell group of China society, and these village societies include two major networks, namely, family clans and neighboring township parties, which are assembled one after another into clans, forming a society and thus forming a country.

(China people pay attention to the origin of surnames)

The basic unit of family-based social relations is the clan.

Within the clan, everyone is not regarded as an independent individual, but at least related to the upper and lower generations (that is, father and son), so that the father, himself and son form three generations, which is the most basic "clan" with "self" as the core.

So you can draw concentric circles.

Under the patriarchal concept, individuals are surrounded by groups. Therefore, everyone should first consider their own responsibilities and obligations, such as fatherly love, filial piety, brothers and friends, and younger brothers.

Starting from the concept of "kiss", we can derive a set of principles to deal with the relationship between monarch and minister, husband and wife, young and old, friends and so on. These principles are based on the concept of "obligation".

It is precisely because traditional culture values family more than individuals and groups more than individuals that it always emphasizes the obligations and responsibilities of individuals in groups and ignores the rights of individuals in society, making the sense of moral equality such as "everyone can be Yao and Shun" just an ideal, and "legal system" is useless in such a system.

4. Respecting the monarch and valuing the people are opposite and complementary political cultures.

China's long-term agricultural natural economy is an isolated economy with little commodity exchange.

The extremely dispersed society that grew up in this soil needs to be integrated by high-level centralized politics to resist foreign enemies and natural disasters, and the personalized integration power comes from autocratic monarchs.

On the other hand, the normal operation of the agricultural patriarchal society depends on the people with farmers as the main body to live and work in peace and contentment, so that the country can be preserved, otherwise it is in danger of collapse.

Therefore, the ideological tradition of "people are the foundation of the country" is also the inevitable product of the agricultural patriarchal society.

"Respecting the monarch" and "valuing the people" are complementary to each other, and * * * has become the two wings of China's traditional political culture.

China's agricultural society consists of thousands of similar and extremely scattered villages and towns.

However, resisting the invasion of nomadic people abroad and maintaining social stability at home are the national needs of this agricultural society (weather, location, harnessing the Yellow River, disaster relief and caring for neighbors) and the necessity of establishing a unified and authoritative empire.

For example, Han Feizi put forward the centralized political design of "everything should be in the four directions, in the center, the saints should persist, and the four directions should work" from the concept of "the world is respected".

Accompanied by totalitarianism, China's agricultural society has cultivated another far-reaching political consciousness, that is, "people-oriented".

The people-oriented principle strictly distinguishes between "governing the people" and "being governed by the people". Starting from the long-term stability of the ruling people, it pays attention to the people's strength and people's hearts.

On the one hand, the feudal rulers in China and their intellectuals emphasized "the country is people-oriented", on the other hand, they emphasized "the people are monarch-oriented". In their view, "respecting the monarch" and "valuing the people" are unified.

5. Get rid of dogmatic life beliefs.

Like any other nation in the world, in ancient China, primitive religion and absolute worship of fate ghosts and gods appeared.

Until the Shang Dynasty, there was still a feature of "respecting heaven and ghosts" in thought, and the "Oracle" recorded the religious divination activities of the nobles in the Shang Dynasty.

However, great changes have taken place since the Western Zhou Dynasty. In the popular concept of the Western Zhou Dynasty, morality originated from patriarchal clan system and became the fundamental link to maintain the whole society.

The establishment of patriarchal morality weakened or even got rid of theological dogmatism.

This is a remarkable feature that distinguishes China's traditional culture from western culture and Indian culture.

In Europe and India, religious gods or gods and buddhas are the highest beliefs and spiritual sustenance.

The highest goodness, the goal of life and the code of conduct of human beings all come from the commandments or revelations of religious gods.

Judaism, for example, describes the "Ten Commandments of Moses" as eternal moral norms and basic social norms, saying that God and the Lord personally promulgated Moses and made a Covenant with the Jews (Old Testament).

Another example is the Christian Jesus, who is considered to be the son of God and the incarnation of God. He preached the gospel, educated the world and became an example and model of human ethics.

In short, in western and Indian cultures, morality comes from religious revelation, and religious gods are sacred and inviolable.

Compared with this theological dogmatism in European and Indian cultures, China culture shows a rational side.

It does not lead people's moral feelings to external objects of worship or unpredictable realm, but dissolves in interpersonal relationships with parent-child relationship as the core, that is, ordinary people, ordinary things and normal hearts, and there is no need to build another theological belief building.

Moral education abandons discipline and cold preaching, affirms the rationality of normal lust and emphasizes reasonable guidance.

Since the pre-Qin period, there has been no theological dogmatism in China's traditional culture, so in the history of China, there has never been a "dark age" in which medieval Christianity dominated Europe.

China's traditional folk religious beliefs are very practical, but in the folk oral language of "burning incense and worshiping Buddha", the meaning of "Buddha" may be Sakyamuni and Guanyin Bodhisattva, or it may be "land", "old gentleman", "descendants" and "Mazu".

This is very different from the strict exclusiveness of religion in western culture.

6. Academic tendency of valuing human relations over nature

China culture takes "people" as its core, which is manifested in philosophy, history, education, literature, science, art and other fields. It pursues human perfection, human ideal, harmony between man and nature, and shows the distinctive characteristics of attaching importance to human nature and interpersonal relationship.

However, in the understanding and transformation of nature itself, it has been ignored.

Confucianism is particularly obvious in this respect.

Take Confucius as an example. According to statistics, there are 54 articles about nature in The Analects, which involve phenomena in astronomy, physics, chemistry, animals and plants, agriculture, handicrafts and so on. It is not rich, but its content is "using natural knowledge to explain political and moral concepts, rather than studying nature itself."

For example, Confucius said that "the benevolent enjoys Leshan and the wise enjoys water".

On the contrary, Fan Chi's questions about farming were despised as "little people".

This academic tendency of Confucianism, which values human relations over nature, has had a far-reaching impact on China culture.

Emperor Taizong's evaluation of ministers is "one is virtue, the other is loyalty, the third is erudition, the fourth is resignation, and the fifth is writing".

Of course, we should see that from Han and Tang Dynasties to Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties, China's science and technology occupied a leading position in the world for a long time. However, when modern natural science rose in the west in the 16 and 17 centuries and made great strides, China fell behind.

There are many reasons for this. From the perspective of cultural history, China's traditional culture tends to attach importance to human relations and ignore nature.

Due to the extensive influence of Confucianism in traditional culture, the theory of strict logical structure, the experiment of technical control and the operation of mutual verification between them have not been paid attention to and developed in ancient academic history.

7. Confucian classics take precedence, covering all cultural fields.

China's ethical culture also has a prominent external formal feature, that is, its tradition of Confucian classics.

The so-called Confucian Classics means that China culture has been dominated by Confucian Classics for a long time, with a consistent tradition and formed its own characteristics.

China's academic development, in terms of its differences, is the study of hundred schools of thought in the pre-Qin period; In the Han dynasty, it was a Confucian classic; Then came metaphysics in Wei and Jin Dynasties, Buddhism in Sui and Tang Dynasties, Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties, and Puxue in Qing Dynasty.

But objectively speaking, from the Han Dynasty to the May 4th New Culture Movement, China's academic development for more than 2,000 years was dominated by Confucian classics.

The development of China culture, whether in philosophy, history, education, politics, sociology, religion, medicine, science and art, is closely related to Confucian classics.

It can be said that in ancient China, as an intellectual, regardless of his study interest and research direction, his primary task was to study classics, and there was no other choice (for example, many new culture experts in the May 4th period).

These characteristics of China culture are quite different from those of western culture.

In ancient Greece, although the development of culture still has comprehensive characteristics, there have been obvious branches of disciplines, almost all of which have relatively independent development in mathematics, geometry, astronomy, medicine, physics, biology and so on.

An important academic contribution of Aristotle is his contribution to the classification of knowledge.

"At this time, the scientific community has been big enough to configure one of the few outstanding tasks of profound enlightenment to write extremely specialized astronomy and mathematics works, which are so specialized that even citizens with average education level can't read them, and the lower classes have to look at them with awe and suspicion.

In this way, scientists can boldly explore complex and subtle arguments and make great and rapid progress through mutual criticism.

"In contrast, the development of China culture, more than two thousand years after the Qin Dynasty, has been shrouded in the atmosphere of Confucian classics.

Classics (also called "Yuan Dian" by some scholars) were originally ancient cultural classics compiled by Confucius.

Confucius was the first great educator who founded a private school in China. His collection and arrangement of ancient documents became the content of his education, and at the same time, he continued and preserved the ancient culture of China.

The ancient books compiled by Confucius are called Six Classics, namely Zhouyi, Shangshu, Shijing, Li, Yue and Chunqiu.

These ancient records contain rich connotations such as politics, history, philosophy, literature, music, laws and regulations.

Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty adopted Dong Zhongshu's suggestion, deposed a hundred schools of thought and respected Confucianism alone, which greatly improved the status of "Jing".

The knowledge of explaining and expounding the Six Classics and Confucian Classics, called "Confucian Classics", is the overwhelming knowledge in the field of academic culture and has become the official learning of successive dynasties since the Han Dynasty.

According to the catalogue of Sikuquanshu in the Qianlong period of Qing Dynasty, there were 1773 volumes, and "Jing Bu" was 20427 volumes.

It can be said that Confucian classics are the most important form of cultural development in China after the Han Dynasty.

What influence did this tradition of Confucian classics in China culture have on the development of China culture?

First of all, it is the extensive infiltration of Confucianism into all aspects of China culture.

In the pre-Qin period, Confucianism was only one of hundred schools of thought, but once it became a classic, it penetrated into all fields of spiritual culture and material culture under the impetus of political forces.

History, philosophy, education, science, art and law are all influenced by Confucian classics.

Secondly, under the influence of Confucian classics, science is not completely independent.

Confucian classics is a general subject, although it does not exclude natural science. On the contrary, rationalism and some thinking methods in Confucianism even inspire natural science.

But the crux of the problem is that Confucian classics are self-contained and above knowledge, which virtually excludes the independence of science.

Thirdly, the Confucian classic tradition has a certain influence on the development of religion in China.

Religion plays an important role in all cultural systems in the world.

For example, Christianity in Europe, Islam in the Middle East, Buddhism in Arabia, India and Southeast Asia all have far-reaching influences.

In ancient China, the influence of religion was relatively weak.

Although the reasons can be explored in many ways, from the historical facts, the restriction of Confucian classics tradition on religious development is an obvious reason.