China: A New History by John King Fairbank and Merle GoldmanIntroduction: Approaches to Understanding China's History
The Variety of Historical Perspectives
Geography: The Contrast of North and South
Humankind in Nature
The Village: Family and Lineage
Inner Asia and China: The Steppe and the Sown
PART ONE
Rise and Decline of the Imperial Autocracy
1. Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology
Paleolithic China
Neolithic China
Excavation of Shang and Xia
The Rise of Central Authority
Western Zhou
Implications of the new Archaeological Record
2. The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism
The Utility of Dynasties
Princes and Philosophers
The Confucian Code
Daoism
Unification by Qin
Consolidation and Expansion under the Han
Imperial Confucianism
Correlative Cosmology
Emperor and Scholars
3. Reunification in the Buddhist Age
Disunion
The Buddhist Teaching
Sui-Tang Reunification
Buddhism and the State
Decline of the Tang Dynasty
Social Change: The Tang-Song Transition
4. China's Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song
Efflorescence of Material Growth
Education and the Examination System
The Creation of Neo-Confucianism
Formation of Gentry Society
5. The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia
The Symbiosis of Wen and Wu
The Rise of Non-Chinese Rule over China
China in the Mongol Empire
Interpreting the Song Era
6. Government in the Ming Dynasty
Legacies of the Hongwu Emperor
Fiscal Problems
China Turns Inward
Factional Politics
7. The Qing Success Story
The Manchu Conquest
Institutional Adaptation
The Jesuit Interlude
Growth of Qing Control in Inner Asia
The Attempted Integration of Polity and Culture
PART TWO
Late Imperial China, 1600-1911
(Keep requesting book as I go, or buy my own.)
The Variety of Historical Perspectives
How to foster an American perspective on China.
China - 1636 - Qing dynasty - Manchu tribal leaders - 2 million Manchus - 120 million Chinese - governed for 267 years - population grew to 400 million - mid-1770s - conquered Mongolia, Central Asia, and Tibet
America - 1636 - founding of first New World college - Harvard - 1776 - a few million American rebels declared their independence
now "historical perspective is more necessary than ever"
In China, the United States' democratic market economy faces the last communist dictatorship, yet behind Chinese communism lies the world's longest tradition of successful autocracy. It is now trying to achieve economic modernization without the representative political democracy that Americans view as their special gift to the world's salvation. U.S. citizens who feel inclined to bash China's dictatorship may usefully recall their nation's own difficulties in the exercise of freedom and power, which call into question the appropriateness of the American model for China's modern transformation.1000-1500 - "China was once the superior civilization of the world" - Chinese Han - Ropp 1990
"From the time of the Industrial Revolution that began about 1750 in England, science and technology have been radically transforming the modern world."
What are the reasons China fell behind the West? - condemned in the late nineteenth century by "Western and even Japanese imperialists"?
Joseph Needham Science and Civilisation in China
Nathan Sivin - abacus useless for advanced algebra - "He suggests that the relative lack of Chinese mathematical innovations from the mid-1300s to the 1600s may have been the price paid for the convenience of the abacus."
"Indeed, I shall argue that the very superiority achieved by song China would become by 1800 a source of her backwardness, as though all great achievements carry the seeds of their ossification."
"By almost any definition, an autocratic state appeared in ancient China, with institutions of bureaucratic administration, record-keeping, selection of officials by merit on the basis of examinations, and central control over the economy, society, literature, and thought."
"If we wish to understand the social and human factors in China's falling behind the West in the modern period, we must look more closely at her prehistory, her rice economy, family system, Inner Asian invaders, classical thought, and many other features of her high civilization to see how they all may have played a part."
Major approaches to understanding China
Geography: The Contrast of North and South
Visual contract - north to south - two economic regions dictated by geography - rainfall, soil, temperature, and human usage create striking contrasts between these two economic regions
north - dry North China plain - every half mile a village of several hundred lives - dry wheat, millet - severe winter - growing season about half the year
south - flooded rice fields follow the contour of the hilly terrain with gray stone footpaths and small roadways - "six sevenths of the population have to live on the one third of the land that is cultivable" - "The inhabited part of China is roughly half as large as the inhabited part of the United States, yet it supports five times as many people." - 2000 people per square mile of cultivated earth - US 570,000 square miles and could greatly increase this area - China 450,000 square miles of cultivated land (less than one half acre of food-producing soil per person) with little prospect of increasing this area by more than a small fraction - 23% world's population on 7 % of the world's arable land - year around - with rice double- or triple-cropped
China's rainfall patterns are created by the terrain. The Asian land mass changes temperature more readily than does the Western Pacific Ocean and its currents, and the cold dry air that is chilled over the continent in the wintertime tends to flow southeastward to the sea, with minimum precipitation. Conversely, the summer monsoon of moisture-laden air from the South China Sea is drawn inward and northward over the land mass by the rising of the heated air above it, and precipitation occurs mainly during the summer. The southerly wind of summer crosses the hills of South China firs, and they receive a heavy, relatively dependable rainfall. North China, being farther from the South China Sea, receives less rainfall overall, and the amount of precipitation over the decades has varied as much as 30 percent from one year to the next. The average annual rainfall of the North China plain is about 20 to 25 inches, like that of the great American dustbowl, barely sufficient to maintain cultivation at eh best of times. This high variability of rainfall from year to year constantly threatens of produce drought and famine.
modern cities have grown up where sea trade met the waterborne commerce of the interior - Guangzhou, Shanghia, Wuhan, Tianjin - "Yet until recently China's foreign trade seldom lived up to the great expectations of the foreign merchants."
"Stretching so far from north to south, from the latitude of Canada to that of Cuba, China remains a subcontinent largely sufficient unto herself." - Shanghai - temperate latitude of New Orleans and Suez, Guangzhou - tropics of Havana and Calcutta
In spite of the immensity and variety of the Chinese scene, this sub-continent has remained a single political unit, where Europe has not, for it is held together by a way of life and a system of government much more deeply rooted than our own, and stretching further back uninterruptedly into the past.
Humankind in Nature
Since the Neolithic (12,000 years ago) - loess has a depth of 150 feet or more
Deforestation - erosion - flooding - water control - in prehistoric time, reclamation from primitive swamp and fen conditions - water control for drainage as well as flood prevention and irrigation - dikes, canals and roads, paths, use of streams and wells for irrigation, occasional remnants of grave lands in their groves of trees
"This land that modern China has inherited is used almost entirely to produce food for human consumption." crops 9/10s - only 2% for animal pasture in China proper
US - 4/10s used for crops - almost half of it put into pasture
The social implications of intensive agriculture can be seen most strikingly in the rice economy, which is the backbone of Chinese life everywhere in the Yangzi valley and the South. Rice plants are ordinarily grown for their first month in seedbeds, while subsidiary crops are raised and harvested in the dry fields. The fields are then irrigated, fertilized and plowed (here the water buffalo may supplement man's hoeing) in preparation for the transplanting of the rice seedlings. This transplanting is still done in large part by human hands, the rows of planters bending from the waist as they move backward step by step through the ankle-high muddy water of each terrace. This goes on in the paddy fields of a whole subcontinent - certainly the greatest expenditure of muscular energy in the world. When the rice has been weeded and is mature, the field is drained and the crop is harvested, again often by hand. Given an unlimited supply of water and of human hands, there is probably no way by which a greater yield could be gained from a given plot of land. In this situation land is economically more valuable than labor, or to put it another way, good muscles are more plentiful than good earth. Lacking both land and capital for large-scale agricultural methods, the Chinese farmer has focused on intensive, high-yield hand-gardening rather than extensive mechanized agriculture.
social repercussions - "A dense population provides both the incentive for intensive land use and the means. Once established, this economy acquired inertial momentum - it kept on going."
This unfavorable population-land balance had other implications as well. Pressure from rising population drove many Chinese farmers in the Late Imperial era to switch from grain production to the growing of commercial crops (such as cotton in the Yangzi delta). This offered a greater return per unit of land but not per indivicual workday. It was a survival strategy - Philip Huang (1990, 1991) calls it "involution" - in which substantial commercialization could take place without leading either to modern capitalist development or to the freeing of the Chinese farmer from a life of bare subsistence.
ecology of China - adaptation to the physical environment - hard life on the great river flood plains -
This different relation of human beings to nature in the West and East has been one of the salient contrasts between the two civilizations. Man has been at the center of the Western stage. The rest of nature has served as either neutral background or as an adversary. Thus Western religion is anthropomorphic, and early Western painting anthropocentric. To see how great this gulf is, we have only to compare Christianity with the relative impersonlity of Buddhism, or compare a Song landscape, its tiny human figures dwarfed by crags and rivers, with an Italian primitive, in which nature ia an afterthought.
ecology of Mediterranean and Europe - variegated topography - never far from water supply - could supplement agriculture for hunting or fishing - "From ancient times, seaborne commerce had played an immediate part in Western economies. Exploration and invention in the service of commerce became part of a Western struggle to overcome nature."
And put another way as for comparison and contrast
Living so closely involved with family members and neighbors has accustomed the Chinese people to a collective life in which the group normally dominates the individual. In this respect the Chinese experience until recently hardly differed from that of other farming peoples long settled on the land. It is the modern individualist, be he seafarer, pioneer, or city entrpreneur, who is the exception. A room of one's own, more readily available in the New World than in the crowded East, has symbolized a higher standard of living. Thus, one generalization in the lore about China is the absorption of the individual not only in the world of nature but also in the social collectivity.
challenges: modernization destroying balance between collectivity of Chinese society and its natural surroundings - water pollution - air pollution from unwashed soft coal - young population with increasing life expectancy - arable land being destroyed by deforestation and erosion, building of roads, housing, and installations
"The world's biggest and most populous country is heading for an ecological nightmare that will require a great collective effort to overcome."
The Village: Family and Lineage
Anthropology - looks at the village and family environment - China's ability to maintain a highly civilized life under these poor conditions - the answer lies in their social institutions
"The family, not the individual, was the social unit and the responsible element in the political life of its locality. The filial piety and obedience inculcated in family life were the training ground for loyalty to the ruler and obedience to the constituted authority in the state."
Pattern of authority within the traditional family - father supreme autocrat - family property and income - arrange marriages - from youthful vigor to the wisdom of age, the father dominated - by law, could sell children into slavery - execute for improper conduct - by nature loved small children - bound by reciprocal code of responsibility for their children as family members - little check on paternal tyranny
domination of male over female - baby girls, even today, to suffer infanticide - marriage arranged - domination of mother-in-law - might see secondary wives or concubines particularly if no male heir - repudiated by husband for various reasons - could not easily remarry if widowed - labor absorbed in household tasks - no opportunity for economic independence - illiterate - few or no property rights
"The inferior social status of women was merely one manifestation of the hierarchic nature of China's entire social code and cosmology. Ancient China had viewed the world as the product of two interacting complementary elements, yin and yang."
Yin - female - dark, weak, and passive
Yang - male - bright, strong, and active
"Status within the family was codified in the famous "three bonds" emphasized by the Confucian philosophers: the bond of loyalty on the part of subject to ruler (minister to prince), of filial obedience on the part of son to father (children to parents), and of chastity on the part of wives but not of husbands."
"The relationship of mother and son, which in Western life often allows matriarchal domination, was not stressed in theory, though it was naturally important in fact."
'In Jonathan Ocko's summary (in Kwang-Ching Liu, 1990), wives were "ineluctably destabilizing elements," promising descendants, yet always treatening the bond of obedience between parents and sons.'
"In addition to this common bond of loyalty to family, the old China was knit together by the common experience of a highly educated local elite, who were committed from childhood to studying and following the classical texts and teachings."
"Instead, as Jon Saari's (1990) study of upper-class childhood in the late nineteenth century reiterates, the training of youth was in obedience above all. Once a boy enterd his adolescent years, open affection from parents gave way to intensive training aimed a proper character formation."
Max Weber - China, "familistic state" - "One advantage of a system of status is that a man knows automatically where he stands in his family or society. He can have security in the knowledge that if he does his prescribed part, he may expect reciprocal action from others in the system."
"Within the extended family, every child from birth was involved in a highly ordered system of kinship relations with elder brothers, sisters, maternal elder brothers' wives, and other kinds of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and in-laws too numerous for a Westerner to keep track of. These relationship were not only more clearly named and differentiated than in the West but also carried with them more compelling rights and duties dependent upon status. Family members expected to be called by the correct term indicating their relationship to the person addressing them."
South China - anthropologist Maurice Freedman (1971) - found family lineages to be the major social institutions - "... -each one a community of families claiming descent from a founding ancestor, holding ancestral estates, and joining in periodic rituals at graves and in ancestral halls. Buttressed by genealogies, lineage members might share common interest both economic and political in the local society."
North China - ..."anthropologists have found lineages organized on different bases. Chinese kinship organization varies by region. Family practices of property-holding, marriage dowries, burial or cremation, and the like also have had a complex history that is just beginning to be mapped out."
"While the family headship passes intact from father to eldest son, the family property does not."
"The enormous significance of thi institutional change can be seen by comparing China with a country like England or Japan, where younger sons who have not shared their father's estate have provided the personnel for government, business, and overseas empire and where a local nobility might grow up to challenge the central power. In China, the equal division of land among the sons of the family allowed the eldest son to retain only certain ceremonial duties, to acknowledge his position, and sometimes an extra share of property. The consequent parcelization of the land tended to weaken the continuity of family land-holding, forestall the growth of landed power among officials, and keep peasant families on the margin of subsistence. The prime duty of each married couple was to produce a son to maintain the family line, yet the birth of more than one son might mean inpoverishment."
"The average peasant family was limited to four, five, or six persons in total. Division of the land among the sons constantly checked the accumulation of property and savings, and the typical family had little opportunity to rise on the social scale, Peasants were bound to the soil not by law and custom so much as by their own numbers."
"The farming village, which even today forms the bedrock of Chinese society, is still built out of family units that are permanently settled from one generation to the next and depend upon the use of certain land holdings. Each family household is both a social and an economic unit. Its members derive their sustenance from working its fields and their social status from membership in it. The life cycle of the indivicual in a farming village is still inextricably interwoven with the seasonal cycle of intensive agriculture upon the land. The life and death of villagers follow a rhythm that interpenetrates the grwoing and harvesting of the crops."
"Yet Chinese peasant live has not normally been confined to a single village but rather to a whole group of villages that form a market area." - market town with satellite villages - villagers would periodical visit with goods or to buy from local businesses or artisans - or from itinterant merchants that came periodically.
Prerevolutionary view of countryside vs what is occuring today
"Thus while the villages were not self-sufficient, the large market community was both an economic unit and a social universe. Marriages were commonly arranged through matchmakers at the market town. There, festivals were celebrated, a secret society might have its lodge meetings and the peasant community would meet representative of the ruling class - tax collectors and rent collectors."
"Prasenjit Duara (1988) has noted how villagers participated in several networks - of kinship relations, secret societies, religious cults, militia groups, or the security system of mutual responsibility - that were not necessarily coextensive with the market network."
Inner Asia and China: The Steppe and the Sown
The contrasts between North and South China are superficial compared with those between the pastoral nomadism of the plateaus of Inner Asia and the settled villages based on the intensive agriculture of China. Inner Asia denotes the originally non-Chinese regions abutting China in a wide arc running from Manchuria through Mongolia and Turkestan to Tibet. At various times of strength and conquest the Chinese empire has included Inner Asia, as indeed the People's Republic does today. Such Inner Asians as Mongols, Tibetans, and Manchus are counted among the 55 ethnic minorities that help to make up the People's Republic of China.
On the steppe, population is thinly scattered - only a few million Mongols - hardly more than that number of Tibetans - arid regions - more than equal the area occupied by over a billion Chinese who trace their ancestry to the Han dynasty
"Nomadism" - seasonal migration of camps and flocks from one known place to another
"Full nomads of this sort, dependent upon their horses and sheep, may have emerged from seminomadic societies on the edge of the grasslands that originally combined settled agriculture with hunting and warfare. Both acquired metallurgy in bronze and then iron."
dependent on a minimum amount of trade with settled areas - sheep, goats, camels, and cattle economy - with the horse for mobility
Succession to tribal leadership had to be settled not by simple inheritance as in a dynasty but more flexibly by tanistry - the election of an heir apparent for his (presumed) preeminent ability to carry on the leadership. Such a man might be found patrilineally among the chieftain's sons or laterally among the chieftain's brothers. Such an ambiguous system could justify any choice that the tribal leaders might make. They would accept an able leader, and so a charismatic chieftain like Chinggis (Genghis) Khan in the thirteeenth century might quickly organize a tribal conferation of great military strength based on the firepower of mounted archers. Until recently the nomadic and seminomadic peoples to the north and west of China were a continuing factor in Chinese military and political life.
Here lies one source of China's "culturalism" - that is, the devotion of the Chinese people to their way of life, an across-the-board sentiment as strong as the political nationalism of recent centuries in Europe. Where European nationalism arose through the example of and contact with other nation-states, Chinese culturalism arose from the difference in culture between China and the Inner Asian 'barbarians." Because the Inner Asian invaders became more powerful as warriors, the Chinese found their refuge in social institutions and feelings of cultural and aesthetic superiority - something that alien conquest could not take away.
We must therefore realize that Chinese history has embraced both the Chinese people and the Inner Asian non-Chinese who have repeatedly invaded the Chinese state and society and become integral components of them. In short, we must broaden our sights: The Inner Asian peoples have been a critical part of the history of the Chinese people. Even today the Chinese state assigns to the "autonomous regions" of the minority nationalities more land area than to the Han Chinese majority.
Continued at Fairbank, PART ONE, Rise and Decline of the Imperial Autocracy.
Note: Inner Asia - inner from China - includes Central Asia
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