The texts in this chapter date from the pre-imperial Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties (ca. 1045-256 BCE) and the imperial Western and Eastern Han dynasties (206 BCE-220 CE). The Zhou-era texts include several of the most influential statements on “barbarians” in the classical Chinese language. The sacrosanct authority conferred by their origin in the “Confucian” classics led to their being quoted regularly through over two thousand years of imperial Chinese history, either to justify or to challenge ethnocentric attitudes, and often with little regard for their original context.
Read in chronological order, the texts translated here reflect a thousand-year trajectory in the development of Chinese (Hua-Xia) ethnic identity. The Western Zhou interacted with foreign peoples through warfare and conquest but does not seem to have formulated an ideological basis for asserting its superiority over these peoples, beyond military dominance. Texts from the late Eastern Zhou period, as well as Annals commentaries said to be based on late Eastern Zhou traditions, reflect an emerging stereotypical perception of ethnic “others” as barbarians who are immoral and inferior to the Hua or Xia people of the “Central States” (Zhongguo; on this term, see the introduction to source 1.2). But they also imply that these peoples are capable of earning equal treatment by learning civilized norms, aligning with Hua-Xia states against other barbarians, or showing respect for the Zhou king.
Moving into the early imperial period, some Western Han texts reflect an even-handed or relativist approach to cultural diversity that does not assume the ways of the “Central States” to be superior to those of foreign peoples. By the first century CE, however, attitudes toward the “barbarians” had begun to harden into ethnocentric disdain due to the growing dominance of Ru (Confucian) ideology, which held the “rites and music” of the Zhou court to be the only valid measure of civilization and morality and increasingly interpreted the Han empire as a kind of “civilization-state” (the Central Lands), surrounded by animalistic barbarism on all sides.
Sources
1.2 The Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan) 左傳
1.3 The Analects of Confucius (Lunyu) 論語
1.4 Mencius 孟子
1.5 The Gongyang and Guliang commentaries to the Annals (Chunqiu) 春秋公羊、穀梁傳
1.7 Huainanzi 淮南子 (Master Huainan), ca. 139 BCE
1.8 Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Scribe-Astrologer), ca. 95 BCE
1.9 Yang Xiong 揚雄, Fayan 法言 (Exemplary Figures), ca. 9 CE
1.10 Ying Shao 應劭, Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義 (Comprehensive Meaning of Customs), ca. 195 CE
Further reading
Bergeton, Uffe, The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China: History Word by Word (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Brindley, Erica Fox, Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE – 50 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 5.
Chin, Tamara T., “Defamiliarizing the Foreigner: Sima Qian’s Ethnography and Han-Xiongnu Marriage Diplomacy,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 70.2 (2010), 311-354.
Daniels, Benjamin, Wu Yue Scripts: a website with a searchable database and images of inscriptions from the Wu and Yue kingdoms, many of them on excavated bronze swords and spearheads.
Di Cosmo, Nicola, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Goldin, Paul R., “Steppe Nomads as a Philosophical Problem in Classical China,” in Paula L. W. Sabloff (ed.), Mapping Mongolia: Situating Mongolia in the World from Geologic Time to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2011), 220–246.
Li, Wai-yee, “Anecdotal Barbarians in Early China,” in Paul van Els and Sarah A. Queen, Between History and Philosophy: Anecdotes in Early China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), 113-144.
Li, Wai-yee, “Cultural Identity and Cultural Difference in Zuozhuan,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 7:1 (2020), 7-33.
Pines, Yuri, “Beasts or Humans: Pre-imperial Origins of the ‘Sino-Barbarian’ Dichotomy,” in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran eds., Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 59-102.
Poo, Mu-chou, Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005).
Ethnic Identity in Imperial China 
