Abstract

Every nation possesses its own culture. Furthermore, the ethnic attributes of the nationality are deeply embedded in its national culture, and the latter, in turn, expresses and reveals the former in many facets. As Hegel once pointed out: "A nation's religion, as well as its political system, its ethics and human relations, its legal system, its mores and customs, indeed even its science, arts, and skills all possess the markings of the nation's spirit." Naturally, these "markings of the nation's spirit" do not come from the endowment of a Creator, or as the product of some a priori idealization and rationalization. Rather, they are grown out of the deep and rich soil of the nation's life. The discrepancies between characteristics among nations are created out of the plurality of the geographical environments in which the nations have been placed, the material modes of production they have pursued, and the forms of social organization they have erected. Therefore, when we conduct an investigation of the characteristics of a nation, we must first come to grips with the special natural and social conditions by which the nation's culture has been able to proliferate. As we carry out such a synthetic examination, we will discover that the culture in ancient China was a continental nation's culture, quite distinguishable from an oceanic culture