The Shang clan ruled with a system of central government, while the Zhou established independent feudal states, allowing power to local rulers instead. The Zhou Dynasty focused on the success of their people in order to gain strength as a community.
The Shang Dynasty (also called the Yin Dynasty) succeeded the Xia Dynasty, and was followed by the Zhou Dynasty. It was located in the Yellow River valley during the second millennium BCE. It featured a stratified social system made up of aristocrats, soldiers, artisans and craftsmen, and peasants.
We are accustomed to a capitalist economy, good communication and transportation, and to solving our problems at the state or national level, so we tend to think that decentralized authority is primitive and ineffective. This is not necessarily so, and feudalism is not completely foreign to American society. Let me try to discuss feudalism from three different aspects. The paragraphs in bold will provide the sort of discussion that you are likely to find in the average college textbook; those in regular print will provide some idea of the historical conditions under which the feudal organization of society arose; and those in red will discuss the growth of an example of American feudalism with which most of you are familiar, if only through films and TV.
I believe the answer is ‘TEN MILLION’.
