“Disputers of the Plough”: Reflections on Political Agrarianism in Early China

Political language of rulership in early China drew widely on the pastoral and agrarian imaginary. Being able to transform barren, unproductive and inhospitable lands into cultivated and productive sites of regularised human settlement was a common feat of effective rulership. This manifested itself in three ways: through the idiom of “shepherd-rule” as a simile for governing; through the idea that farming was a form of conquest by non-military means; and through the image of the ploughman and cultivator as both a symbol of order and tacit decrier of those who rule. Biographical narratives of China’s earliest rulers and eminent officials already insist that they rose from a peasant background, a trope that persisted into the 20th century. I argue that the origins of the peasant as a political figura were embedded in China’s earliest discussions of agrarian labour. The transformation of the peasant into the peasantry -- catalyst of multiple millenarian and revolutionary moments throughout China’s history-- may not have been so revolutionary after all.

Roel Sterckx is Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science and Civilization in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College. His monographs include The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (SUNY Press, 2002), Food, Sacrifice and Sagehood in Early China (CUP, 2009) and Chinese Thought: from Confucius to Cook Ding (Penguin 2020). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.