Self-presentation of sotheren China’s rulers in the context of frontier cultural interaction (vth c. B.C.)

Abstract

The article discusses political culture of the South China frontier at the turn of the periods of Spring and Autumn and Warring States. The research is based on the analysis of historical chronicles: the periods of the Warring States and the early Imperial period. The authors single out and analyze the models of self-presentation of Wu and Yue rulers in their interaction with Northern China’s Zhou culture, and explain how these methods of self-presentation on the one hand, served the political goals of the southern elites, on the other, ensured the preservation of ethnic and cultural identity of the South during integration into the dominant civilization project. The chief agents of cultural interaction were representatives of the South Chinese states’ social top; with military and diplomatic purposes they had to study philosophy of management of central Zhou kingdoms and to learn presenting themselves according to those methods. It determined their success at contacts with the northerners who enjoyed cultural hegemony. Besides, princes and ministers of the kingdoms Wu and Yue didn't forget their own roots that gave them certain variability at a choice of self-presentation strategies. Depending on their goal, their presentation could be modelled in two opposite ways: the declarative type "I am one of US" or the manipulative type «I am the Other». Thus, the ruling elite of the southern states managed, while keeping their own cultural originality, consistently to include their countries into the frame of the Chinese civilization project. As a result the local history non-Chinese ethnicities Wu and Yue didn't remain a subject of merely local interest, it was included into the semantic and political center of the Chinese culture.