With regard to the relation between politics and ritual, China may well be an extreme case whose virtue is that it shows us what is true elsewhere, in varying and often lesser degrees. Perhaps because of the enormous extent of the territory governed by the Chinese state, or the length of time (over 2,000 years) it has maintained centralized control, the notion of power in the imagination of ordinary citizens is of only one sort in both the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ realm: the sort exercised by holders of hierarchical, bureaucratic offices. It is for this reason that the worlds of men and of spirits appear to be flat or uniform, with little to distinguish the kinds of effect on the world or other persons that operate in each. In a society with such tremendous depth between a peasant at the bottom and the emperor at the top, that distance must have seemed far more awesome than the distance between humans and spirits. From the perspective of peasants, the incorporeal earth-god must have seemed much more a part of the same social universe than the corporeal, but enormously far removed, emperor. And, for that matter, peasants would have had far more interactions with local spirits than with distant officials.

But if this characterization of the notion of power in China is generally true, its usefulness has scarcely begun to be tapped. What we need now are systematic studies within the Chinese political realm to see how placement in class, space, time, or political context causes the relation between political control and ritual to vary.