Written by The geographer George B. Cressey has observed some ways in which the Chinese patterns have been distinctive.
More people have lived in China than anywhere else.
Up-wards of 10 billion human beings have moved across her good earth; nowhere else have so many people lived so intimately with nature.
A thousand generations have left their indelible impress on soil and topography, so that scarcely a square foot of earth remains unmodified by man.
With so many people to be fed, only the most painstaking care can provide an adequate harvest. Few landscapes are more human. It is also obvious that climate and topography have influenced the pattern of life. . . . Other lands are older, but none have developed a more mature adjustment between man and the environment.*
Writers have applied all kinds of environmental determinism to Chinese history. One historian of
Chinese thought, Fung Yu-lan, has said that the landlocked character of China’s agrarian life determined the fundamental concepts of the early thinkers: the soil-bound agricultural life was concerned with real values rather than with abstract concepts; the environmental conditions were not conducive to commerce, which in other early civilizations induced concern for numbers and abstract mathematical concepts; the forms of agricultural production produced family-centered values and promoted cooperative
rather than individualistic and competitive norms;the consciousness of the natural cycle enhanced the role of nature in the value scheme, and so forth. This is a very interesting view. Yet, such simplistically deterministic views have their faults as total explanations. This one fails, among other things, to point out how consequence can become cause in a spiraling development that makes cause and effect difficult to distinguish.
Agriculture became a supreme value in the Chinese scheme, and that was indeed an effect of the environment. But it also became a supreme cause, a motive force in the further development of Chinese civilization. As an established value, it competed against other values. The high place of the farmer in Chinese idealizations of society reflects this. The moral value set upon agriculture as an honest man’s proper activity also reflects it, and that value helped prevent the use of human effort, water and water power, and animals on “nonproductive” and dubious undertakings like commerce and industry. So, what determined what?
But our concern here is not to argue a theory of history; rather it is to call attention to the setting and to stress the distinctive character of the Chinese accommodation to it.
* George B. Cressey, The Land of the Five Hundred Million: A Geography of China (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955)
