What was the historical nature of social changes in the Ch'un-ch'iu (春秋) and Chan-kuo (戦国) periods which gave birth to the Ch'in (秦) and Han (漢) empires? This paper seeks to analyse this problem within the context of the formative process of the Chun-hsien system. Former studies have shown that the Hsien of the Ch'un-ch'iu period was established on large Yi (邑) s which controlled several small Yis based on the primary agricultural land. The relation of production in each Yi was so independent that the surviving tribal system of ruled tribes was kept intact and incorporated into the Old Hsien of the Ch'in and Han empires as they were, althogh the hereditary rule by the Hsien ruler was gradually eroded away. In other words, the remarkable change of Hsien in the Hsien-ch'in (先秦) period directly appeared in the erosion of the Hsien rulers' hereditary power. This paper studies how far this erosion had developed in the State of Ch'u (楚), one of the powers in the Ch'un-ch'iu period. Not all of the Hsiens in Ch'u during the Ch'un-ch'iu period were larger than the Old-hsiens of the Ch'in and Han empires. If there was any criteria for the "Hsien" of the Ch'in-Han period, there must have been also criteria for the Hsien of the Ch'un-ch'iu period, though local varieties must be taken into account. The Hsien ruler was called "Ch'un (君)" or lord and Hsien-Yin (尹) was equal to Hsien-ch'un, though there is the possibility that Hsien-kung (公) may have had a special siginificance. An investigation of these Hsien rulers clearly shows that their hereditary power had been widely eroded and the character of the Hsien in Ch'u during the Ch'un-ch'iu period had greatly changed. The advance of Kung-tzu (公子) and Kung-sun (公孫) overwhelmed the Shih-tzu (世族) in the central government and hindered the hereditary rule of these same Shih-tzu at the Hsien level. It is more important that the Wang-tzu (王族) themselves were denied hereditary rule, so that the advance of Kung-tzu and Kung-sun did not bring about a new breed of Shih-tzu. Therefore this advance is an important indication of universal penetration of the royal power of ch'u into Hsiens, even before the reform of Yi-yen (〓掩), the royal appropriation of hilly country forests, groves and marshes already had the full significance of starting the transformation of the Ch'un-ch'iu hsien at the time of King Chuang (荘王) when the power of Kung-tzu and Kung-sun was ascendant. How the Shih-tzu which preceded the Chan-kuo kingdom, like San-chin (三晋) and Tian-shi (田氏) of Ch'i (斉) ruled their Hsiens, and how the role Chao (昭), Ch'u (屈), Ching (景), the three big Shih-tzus of Ch'u played was to be interpreted in the light of the result of our investigation, is a problem to be clarified in future research.

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The Shijing 詩経, the ancient Chinese classic dealing with poetry, contains many verses ranging from popular songs to those sung by aristocrats at their feasts, indicating at what stage poetry was in at the time, what functions it performed, as well as how the Shijing itself came into existence and was compiled. Consequently, the actual places where the verses of the Shijing were recited as related in the historical accounts of the Zuozhuan 左伝 and the Guoyu 国語 were mainly confined to gatherings in the broad sense, including banquets, alliance negotiations, swearing in rituals, conversation, joint military action, etc. It is also clear that very important venues for poetry were communal ceremonies of both a religious and formal nature. According to the fables about how poetry was composed, the place where the Shijing itself was compiled was one of these ceremonial venues, closely related to where the kings of the Western Zhou would bestow bronze implements on their retainers as a symbol of their superordinate-subordinate relationship. During the Western Zhou period, marked by an era of city-states, the Shijing was composed of the oral tradition of musicians, when the Zhou kings dominated the rest of China in both knowledge and technology. However, after the move east by the Zhou, its intellectual monopoly ended as the knowledge and technology was disseminated far and wide by those same musicians to the other states, which soon adopted the ruling methods of the Western Zhou kings. From the last decades of the Spring and Autumn Period, regional rule progressed to the extent of governments with literate bureaucrats carrying on administration by documentation, and due to the fact that the Shijing had been utilized by the Western Zhou Dynasty and the other lords of the Spring and Autumn period, it came to play a valuable political role in legitimizing kingship during the following era characterized by rebellion and usurpation. It was also a time when the Shijing itself went through a transition from oral to written from, as the knowledge of it demonstrated by the followers of Confucius spread throughout the strata of would-be bureaucrats. It was under such a situation, as indicated by the archeological evidence, that during the Warring States Period, the Shijing became one of the ancient classics and changed along with Chinese society as a whole in the transition from the Zhou and Spring and Autumn Period to the world of the Qin and Han Dynasties.

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