The Development of Conceptions of Chinese Feudalism
The issues raised by Ishimoda exerted a forceful influence among historians of East Asia. He apparently fueled the tendency to pursue the development of theory by using the empirical research of other scholars. In addition to Kato[*] Shigeshi and Sudo[*] Yoshiyuki, there was Maeda Naonori's essay, "Higashi
Ajia ni okeru kodai no shumatsu[*] " (The end of the ancient period in East Asia),[10] which argued for the first time the notion that Sui and T'ang were part of antiquity.
Ishimoda's thesis was incorporated as early as 1949 into Matsumoto Shinhachiro[*] 's paper, "Genshi kodai shakai ni okeru kihon teki mujun ni tsuite" (On the fundamental contradictions in primitive and ancient societies),[11] presented at the annual meeting of the Rekishigaku kenkyukai[*] (The Historical Research Association). Yet, it was Nishijima Sadao's paper, "Kodai kokka no kenryoku kozo[*] " (The power structure of the ancient state)[12] and Hori Toshikazu's paper, "Chugoku[*] ni okeru hoken[*] kokka no keitai" (The formation of the feudal state in China),[13] both delivered the following year, 1950, at the second annual meeting of the Rekishigaku kenkyukai, which developed these issues in a scholarly, empirical manner.
Hori's paper was part of a symposium entitled "Hoken[*] kokka no honshitsu to sono rekishi teki shokeitai"e (The nature of the feudal state and its historical forms); and Ishimoda offered the panel's summary report, entitled "Hoken kokka ni kansuru riron teki shomondai"f (Theoretical issues concerning the feudal state), which was based on the papers given by Hori and Nagahara Keiji.[14] Insofar as Chinese history was discussed, this conference is worthy of our attention, for the Rekishigaku kenkyukai worked out its lines for research most explicitly.
One issue that came up in Ishimoda's paper was whether the centralized bureaucratic state can be regarded as a feudal state, if we consider the era from the Sung onward as medieval, for the feudal state usually assumes a decentralized state form. In his earlier essay, "Chusei[*] shi kenkyu[*] no kiten," Ishimoda saw this as a relic from the ancient state, but in his 1950 paper he changed his perspective in the following way. The form of the decentralized state, he argued, is not a necessary condition of the feudal state. Even under feudalism, which assumes an anarchic political form, because the state is the mechanism for class rule, it spawns a unified segment of power. Royal power in the feudal states of Western Europe followed this pattern. Thus, it was not strange that feudal society in China constructed a centralized bureaucratic state.
The fact that this state structure was carried on after the
Sung has to be seen rather as a reflection of the severe class relations of that time. For example, there were many peasant rebellions in the transitional era from T'ang to Sung, with a high point being reached by the Huang Ch'aog uprising. That uprising was on a massive scale, to which the rebellions of late antiquity in Japan could not compare, and revealed a popular energy in medieval China which had been accumulating over a long period. In the fear that these peasant uprisings could not be suppressed by the might of individual large landowners or local powers, the establishment of a centralized, bureaucratic state became a necessity.
These are the general contours of Ishimoda's paper. In sum, we should note that by stipulating that China had an "incomplete feudal state," Ishimoda set up a "Chinese form of the feudal state" in tandem with those of Western Europe and Japan. Although this theory of the Chinese feudal state was based on the contents of Hori's paper,[15] Hori's work went well together with Nishijima's paper on the ancient Chinese state. The issue Nishijima raised was the Chinese form of ancient slavery, which I would like to consider now.
Nishijima began with the following premise: when we consider the phenomenon of the ancient state, we have to assume the ruling relations of an appropriate slave system. But, since a wide variety of slave systems are predictable depending on their origins, we have to analyze both the general and the specific aspects of slave systems in history. In the past, theories of stagnation did not recognize a slave stage in China, but in order to do away with the concept of stagnation and come up with a progressive nature to Chinese society, it was necessary to recognize the existence of a period of slavery.
If there was such a Chinese form of slavery, Nishijima asked, in what way did it emerge and exist? The use of iron implements, which began in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, caused an epochal development in agricultural productive power. It broke up the clan "community" that had formed the basis of the Chou "feudal" system and brought into existence a patriarchal-familial slavery. The united bodies of the clans of these patriarchal-familial slave owners were known as hao-tsuh or great clans. Family slaves were thus used to manage the land of the great clans, but with a certain limitation:
we see a "borrowed land"[16] system in the form of tenancy around the borders of the clan lands, without the evolution of a slave labor system as had been the case in classical antiquity.
On the surface, this resembles feudal serfdom and many had seen it that way in the past. However, such tenancy relations did not exist by themselves but emerged within the familial slave system. Thus, the mutually complementing structure of familial slavery and tenant farming constituted, according to Nishijima, the Chinese form of slavery.
The problem then arose as to why this particular form took shape in China. Nishijima found the answer in the nature of the imbalance in the development of productivity. The imbalance in the spread of agricultural implements made of iron gave rise to an imbalance in the development of productive power and thus did not uniformly break down the earlier clan "community." The result was that an institution from the past, the "hamlet" (li )i unit from the Han dynasty, continued to exist. Although it obstructed the diffusion of the power of the patriarchal-familial slave owners, when small peasants under this "hamlet" structure came under the rule of the great clans, these peasants were not fully enslaved but emerged as tenant farmers.
The superstructure for such a socioeconomic system was formed by the Han empire. From its very inception, however, the Han empire did not take shape as the controlling force of the great clans. In the Former Han empire, state power itself was that of a single great clan. As can be seen in the case of Liu Pang,j the emperor and his ministers created a structure that the great clans imitated in their relationship with their family slaves. In this sense, state power and the great clans under its control possessed the same unidimensionality, and thus the two grew into a fierce antagonism.
The Former Han, Nishijima continued, tried a variety of policies to suppress the great clans, but without success. In the Latter Han dynasty, the hao-tsu gained a superior hand. This is best illustrated by the changes in fiscal systems. As Kato[*] Shigeshi had explained it, the financial structure of the Former Han was a dual system of imperial household finances and state finances; in the Latter Han, this structure was unified under the state.[17] Thus, the state shed its personalistic, great clan charac-
ter and completed itself as the power mechanism of a ruling order by a collective of great clans.
The ancient Chinese state witnessed effective completion in the Latter Han dynasty, but what then is the thread that links it to the Sui-T'ang empire? Nishijima dealt with that problem as follows. Ch'in-Han society was established on the basis of an imbalance in the development of agricultural productive power; the subsequent equalization of productive power predictably removed this foundation. The "hamlet" as a vestige of the earlier clan "community" disintegrated, and the tenancy system under the control of great clans also crumbled. For the great clans this spelled a serious crisis. The great clans as a class, he went on, sensed the need for a reorganization of the structure of peasant control; and this urge was linked to the later land systems: military colonies (t'un-t'ien )k in the Three Kingdoms era, "lands in possession" (chan-t'ien ) and "assessment lands" (k'e-t'ien )[18] in the Western Chin, and the equal field system of the Sui and T'ang dynasties.
Accordingly, in Nishijima's view, the Sui-T'ang period was a reorganized form of the ancient state and signified as well the final phase of the ancient state.[19] Hori's view of the feudal state also started from this conception of the Sui-T'ang empire. I should like now to consider the main points of Hori's thesis.
Hori began by reconsidering whether, as Ishimoda had argued, it was appropriate to regard the character of centralized power in the state from the Sung on merely as a reflection of a carryover from antiquity. State power from the Sung dynasty on became increasingly centralized in conjunction with the growth of a tenancy system. Thus, Hori wondered if the immaturity of this tenancy system as feudal land ownership only implied a reemergence of a system of centralized power or may have itself possessed a character demanding centralization of power.
For example, he argued, did not the extraordinarily fierce suppression of peasant rebellions, as seen in the Huang Ch'ao uprising, force the landlords to demand centralization of power? We can estimate from this the tenacity of the peasants' inclination to independence. This tenacity in the late T'ang was attributable to gradual changes within Chinese antiquity itself, for the ancient period in China took form very early on and,
unlike the situation in Greece or Japan, was uninfluenced by forces from without. The T'ang was the final state in Chinese society's long ancient period. Its ruling class, the great clans, became bureaucrats and lived off the state. The "equal field" system was a structure by which the great clans depended on the state. (Hori and Nishijima agreed on the parasitic nature of the bureaucrats.)
The immensely independent nature of the peasants, which spawned the parasitic bureaucratization of the great clans, was backed by the growth in peasant productive power. Examples include the materialization of three crops biennially in North China, advances in the opening of wet-land rice paddies in Kiangnan, and the development of a general commodity circulation. These developments eventually shook up the equal field system and led to political dislocations from the mid-T'ang onward.
The emergence of regional commanderies that were military in structure with decentralized power, Hori claimed, revealed the rise of local feudal centers of power. In response to this state of affairs, the T'ang government implemented the new economic structure of the double tax and the system of monopolies. However, the regional commanderies and these new economic systems did not of themselves negate antiquity. The emergent forces that matured under this structure grew while continuing to rely on state power and ran into no basic contradictions with the T'ang dynasty.
The proletarianization of the peasantry advanced conspicuously under a dual (new and old) governance. It carried within itself severe contradictions because there was commodity circulation backing it up. The Huang Ch'ao uprising was one explosion of these contradictions, and the old aristocratic influence was exterminated. Since individual landlords were unable to restrain the energy of these peasant rebellions, the necessity emerged for a centralized state power, but the extent of the expansion of commodity circulation could not be ignored as an economic condition that enabled this to happen.
These points were the essence of Hori's paper and he reinvestigated and deepened his analysis of them in subsequent articles. He devoted particular energy to structural elucidations of peasant rebellions and the regional commanderies. In one
essay, "Tomatsu[*] shohanran no seikaku" (The nature of rebellions in the late T'ang),[20] he argued as follows. The T'ang dynasty witnessed the bureaucratization of the aristocracy into a full grown officialdom, but this structure was shaken by the intense power struggles over bureaucratic position. These were a result of the fact that at this time the route to advancement in the world was guaranteed only by establishing a favorable relationship on an individual basis with the Son of Heaven, the despot, who stood at the pinnacle of the bureaucracy. While such court favorites came to control T'ang politics, a path toward advancement through imperial favor was opened even for non-Chinese and commoners, and this was the first step in the dismemberment of the aristocratic system. The An Lu-shanl Rebellion arose from a power struggle among such court favorites, as can be seen in the opposition between An Lu-shan, a man of non-Chinese origins, and Yang Kuo-chung,m a man of commoner background.
The link between the emperor and his favorites at court, Hori continued, was based on a personal connection. This same kind of personal bond can be found in the internal structure of An Lu-shan's power as well as that of other regional commanderies. The best illustration of this is the fictive family ties of "adopted son" or "sworn brothers" which linked the military governor to his troops. An Lu-shan, for example, had his own private army of eight thousand non-Chinese "adopted sons," and he additionally supported a "family army" of over one thousand men as attendants. Thus, the nucleus of a military governor's troops possessed a fictive familial structure in which the autocratic control of the regional commander was rendered thoroughgoing by the personal protection and favors offered the troops. In one respect, this might be seen as relations of slavery.
After the An Lu-shan Rebellion, a semi-independent regional commandery appeared north of the Yellow River, and in fighting with the T'ang dynasty it succeeded in gaining powers of territorial inheritance, control of tax collection, and the freedom to appoint and dismiss officials. At the same time, the internal structure of the regional commandery was exposed to the danger of a ceaseless overpowering of superiors by inferiors. The military governor was always left open to the danger of
being toppled by the troops under his command. Thus, because the military governor's position was extremely unstable, he was unable to cut his ties with the central power. While the regional commandery structure of the T'ang spawned personal bonds of cohesion, in the end it could not overcome the ancient bureaucratic system.
The Huang Ch'ao uprising destroyed this dependency between the regional commanderies and the T'ang court. Huang Ch'ao's insurgent forces were composed of an immense number of impoverished, displaced persons and centered around heroic types who harbored a discontent for the contemporary political state of affairs. Since these bands of roaming banditti did not aim at overthrowing the T'ang dynasty and were poorly organized, even though they did succeed in capturing Ch'ang-an, they were headed straight for destruction. Although Huang Ch'ao's forces had these weaknesses, they still destroyed the T'ang and made possible the independence of regional commanderies. Thus was born the Five Dynasties period.
Hori concluded his analysis as follows. Why was it that China did not produce a feudal political structure but rather assumed the form of inferiors supplanting superiors (i.e., the bureaucracy) if the tenancy system was regarded as serfdom? Although the starting point of feudalism, the lord-vassal relationship, was a personal protective bond in the early period, it rose to the status of official authority with the security of landholding. While feudalism arose as the mutual relations of landowners and it acquired public authority as the preserver of the social order, when this feudal system matured from within ancient society, it negated and finally toppled the ancient bureaucratic order in which the ancient great clans, large local landowners, were the apex of the hierarchy.[21] Nonetheless, it was impossible for a feudal political structure to be formed in China because of its complete bureaucratic system and the aristocracy that lived totally off the bureaucracy. Without being brought to an end, the bureaucracy inclined toward a mode that would change in accord with the rising of inferiors to oust their superiors.
In short, according to Hori, a feudal political structure did not materialize in China because of the thoroughness of the bureaucratic system. Although this development was predi-
cated on the expansion of productive power, such a growth did not necessarily accompany the historical newness of this personalized structure in the political and military spheres. Thus, it could not sweep away fictive familial slave relations, and the structure of the patriarchal-familial slave system, as Nishijima had described Ch'in-Han society, was, if not revitalized, unable to be overturned.
In Nishijima's view, the ruling structure of Ch'in-Han society centered around patriarchal-familial slavery with peasants living in "communities" outside this system. These two forms of mutually complementing ties among the people constituted for Nishijima in concrete form the ancient Chinese slave system. Hori later dealt with this issue in two detailed essays: "Ko[*] So[*] no hanran: Tomatsu[*] henkakki no ichi kosatsu[*] " (The Huang Ch'ao uprising: A study of the changing times at the end of the T'ang),[22] and "Hanchin shin'eigun no kenryoku kozo[*] " (The power structure of the personal defense forces in the regional commanderies).[23]
In these two essays, Hori strove to support more fully the main points of his earlier work. He analyzed power in the regional commanderies and the groups in the Huang Ch'ao rebellion, both of which emerged as the antithesis of the ancient bureaucratic system of the T'ang. And, he looked at the internal power structure of rich merchants and strong local families who may have controlled the authority of these two groups (regional commanderies and Huang Ch'ao rebel bands) and who later, from the Sung on, became the mainstays of the centralized bureaucratic state. Hori argued that patriarchal-familial slave relations made up the central element of their authority. Examples include the regional commander and his personal defense forces army, Huang Ch'ao and his immediate family and protégés, or the locally powerful families (heads of estates) and their workers. Outside this central system of relations were mercenary troops, impoverished peasants, and perhaps a class of villagers.
Relations in these peripheral groups make one think of the actual human control, in the form of two bonds, that the ancient state exerted on self-cultivating peasants. These bonds—one personal, one official—differed in form, but both were ties of slavery in the sense that there was a unilinear
control of superiors over inferiors and of actual human control unmediated through land. Although the regional commanderies destroyed the official bonds of control that were the basis of the T'ang legal system by creating these personal cohesive bonds, they also relied on them. Thus, these personal bonds were insufficient to build their own political structure—a feudal political structure—by subsuming the official bonds; and in a sense they allowed the founding of a centralized bureaucratic state, itself a revival of the ancient state.
So went Hori's argument. However immature were the two strata of locally powerful families and rich merchants who controlled the state, they ran the tenancy system, which was a feudal mode of production. In this sense, he argued, the period from the Five Dynasties and Sung on should be considered a feudal era in China.[24]