War and the Origins of Chinese Civilization

Archaeological discoveries since 1921 have established that complex societies, as represented by densely-populated walled cities, first arose in North China, not in the South, triggering the development of Chinese civilization. But it remains an open question as to what made the early cradles of civilization emerge. To answer this, we divide China’s landmass into 1,004 grid-cells of 100×100 km, containing 32,946 archaeological sites, 838 walled cities, 157,050 excavated graves and 53,780 military burial goods from both the Neolithic (8000 – 1700 BCE) and the Eastern Zhou (770 – 221 BCE). First, using our large archaeological database, we find that during both the Neolithic and the Late Neolithic (3000 – 1700 BCE), cells with lower terrain ruggedness had both more weaponry objects buried in the excavated graves and more walled cities. To the extent that warfare must have figured heavily in human lives in order for the locals to care so much as to carrying weapons into their graves, war threats and the early cradles of civilization must have been linked as weaponry grave goods have mostly been discovered in flatter regions along the Yellow and the Yangtze River valleys. Since no historical data on military conflicts is available for the periods prior to 770 BCE, our analysis then focuses on the Eastern Zhou, for which we find cells with flatter terrains to have had significantly more wars, which caused these cells to form more fortified cities. Our quantitative evidence indicates that warfare was a key trigger of the process creating the Chinese civilization, which started in the North, especially in the alluvial plains, because its flatter lands made the locals subject to more war threats and hence engage in more defensive fortification.

This working paper is co-written by Joy Chen, Zhiwu Chen, Peter Turchin and Wanda Wang.