Non-Autocracy in Pre-Qin China1

It is thirty years ago that Anatoly Khazanov discussed forms of po-litical organizations of early states in The Early State (Khazanov 1978: 87–89). He doubted whether the fairly popular belief that despotism was the most widespread form of political organization in early states, as as-sumed by Wittfogel (1957), was dependable. He said that there was no direct connection between early states and despotism, and therefore the assumption that despotism was the first and earliest form of state power was questionable. In his view, there were many early states whose gov-ernments could not be classified as despotic ones. The examples he gave were of the states founded by pastoral nomads, Sumerians, ancient and medieval Western Europeans. Basically, I agree with him. In fact, non-despotic political organization is found not only in the early states of pas-toral nomads, Sumerians, and ancient and medieval Western Europeans. In my view, democratic, or at least non-despotic government was the most widespread form of early state power in the world. For example