INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method was developed within the Chinese textual and administrative tradition.
Geography: China and the Sinitic cultural sphere — the successive states, their bureaucracies, and the classical canon they transmitted and commented on.
Time: c. 1250 BCE to 1912, from the Shang oracle-bone archive to the end of the imperial system, together with practices that outlived it and are still performed. The span is three millennia because the tradition's continuity is textual: the Warring States texts remained live objects of commentary and application under every later dynasty, so a method's date of composition and its date of use come apart by centuries and the entry must give both.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- Attributable transmission: the text, school, or office that carried the method, and the period in which it was practised
- A procedure recoverable from the sources, not only a doctrine attributed to them
Not sufficient: A concept from the Chinese canon with no procedure attached — dao, qi, and tian are not methods. A modern management technique given a classical name. Sinological interpretation of a text, as opposed to the method the text specifies.
Boundary: Composition and practice are dated separately, and the entry gives both: the Thirty-Six Stratagems were compiled in the Ming or Qing from material a thousand years older, and the Art of War is a Warring States text applied continuously since. Living practices whose lineage is classical stay here — Guanxi is contemporary and is Chinese by transmission, not by date. The Mohist canons' logical apparatus belongs to Logical Systems where it is a consequence relation and to Argumentation and Rhetoric where it is disputation practice; the consequentialist decision procedure is a method and is here.