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Comment by no_butterscotch | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you read more into this and maybe added in your own biases.

I don't think these archaeologists are interested in worshipping society's elites. Maybe hundreds of years ago when you had to be an elite to be an archaeologist.

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The Chinese government funds archaeology in the hope it legitimizes the Chinese state as the most ancient. Pointing to a time when the state wasn’t there, yet society flourished, would delegitimize the Chinese state in their eyes.

Perhaps they want to avoid another: "Century of humiliation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

The trouble is that the presence of a state doesn't prove anything. There is no such thing as a stateless society. Every society is governed, even if the governing isn't formalized in some way that is identifiable to a particular understanding. Families, tribes, etc. are societies that, too, are governed. You just have to define "govern" accordingly, and the Chinese state is very keen to understand "the state" as overbearing, master of initiative, controlling, intrusive, etc. But when you look at societies in the past, something also reflected in the writings of Thomas Aquinas in which he discusses the duties of the state and its citizens, the role of the state was and was seen in rather restrained terms (the total sum of concrete things a given state does is partly dependent on circumstances, of course). It functioned more like a referee. And that makes sense. Citizens live their lives in time and place and so on, and the state responds when something concerning the common good requires its attention. It is bottom up, in this sense (though we cannot reduce society to the sum of its individuals). But the state isn't "running" things as if it were some godlike puppet master that animates the universe.

The trouble with the present Chinese state is the manner in which it governs and the deeply flawed presuppositions about society, the state, and the individual that it is founded on. And so in this sense, it is clear why they would want to emphasize centralization to argue in favor of their particular vision of statehood, a kind of Tsarist, or as Koneczny would say, Turanian domination.

Societies do need a state, but it does not follow that they need something like the crushing behemoth that bears down on China.

Sounds like you’d have a hard time getting funding (or staying out of a reeducation camp) in China right now.

“State” has a more specific definition than government.

It usually means a bureaucratic, meritocratic, and stable administration.

China supposedly developed the first state as a result of constant warfare early on.

You're kidding right? Chinese philosophy always talks about a golden age prior to when the state didn't exist. Even the current Chinese Communist government believes in the idea of primitive communism, that is before the slave societies of e.g. the Shang dynasty, there were more or less stateless societies. Although already by the Zhou dynasty philosophers were stating that societal changes, specialization, etc. made going back to such ways close to impossible.

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