Abstract
Because of the differing kinds of writing systems used, differences in the history of printing and different traditions of identifying individual texts with individual authors, the assumptions and methods of textual criticism when approaching early Chinese texts will be different from those aspects of textual criticism as they are conventionally understood in regard to classical western and early Near Eastern texts. In particular the nature of the Chinese writing system, fundamentally logographic (or morphographic), makes the distinction between graphic variation and lexical variation in a given instance considerably less obvious than typically is the case with texts written in alphabets, abugidas or abjads. Beyond this, recognizing authorial identification of a given early text as a proprietary matter is much less a central feature of the history of a given text in China than it is in the western tradition. For these reasons among others, textual criticism as a scholarly approach to early Chinese texts will necessarily take a form markedly different from its practice in the western scholarly tradition.
