TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
Stagnation, Feudalism, and Periodization
Although Japanese scholarship on Chinese history reached stunning heights of intellectual discovery and erudition in the early decades of this century, in the eyes of postwar academics Japanese military aggression on the Asian mainland has tainted much of prewar scholarly efforts. Most major scholarly enterprises—an obvious example being the Research Bureau of the South Manchurian Railway Company or Mantetsua —were funded by the same government that pursued the military occupation of China. Many scholars either approved Japan's invasion or silently left "politics" to the "politicians." Only an infinitesimally small minority in Japan, in any field, openly disputed their nation's claims in Asia. It was far more common for scholars either to say nothing and use the guise of nationally funded research to do fieldwork in China—as in the case of many Mantetsu researchers—or to justify Japanese advances into Asia for reasons of "history," "national fate," or "national necessity"—as in the cases of Yano Jin'ichi,b Inoue Tetsujiro[*] ,c and Shionoya On.d
Scholarship in the postwar period has been dominated in Japan by Marxists of varying inclinations but intent as a group on purging the prewar demons from their midst. This has entailed a long battle with the tremendous guilt arising from the knowledge that prewar sinologists went along with military aggression, openly or passively, and displayed a deep contempt for China and her people. Why did sinologists, they ask, so badly misunderstand the nature of Chinese history and society?
One widespread academic direction has been against the notion, identified with prewar Japanese sinology, that China was ageless and demonstrated no historical development—that is, a static conception of China's past. This response has led to debates on the periodization of Chinese history, for once the
various eras in the Marxist schema of historical development could be plotted for China, she would then be shown to have a history no different from that of any other country. Particularly, focus has been directed at identifying the parameters of China's feudal period and the essence of Chinese feudalism. As Niida Noborue passionately explained in a brilliant essay first published in 1946, the very act of proper periodization, the assignment on the basis of research of the feudal period in Chinese history—the period that was in the process of being overcome ever since the Taipings, according to Niida—was itself an attack on stagnationist conceptions.[1] Periodization along Marxist lines thus became a task that sought to redress Japan's debt to China by rehumanizing the Japanese view of Chinese history.
The great majority of Japanese scholars, even the non-Marxists, felt deeply sympathetic to the rebellious and revolutionary activities of the Chinese people in the century from the Taiping Rebellion through the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949. These events themselves constituted proof to contradict any notion of a passive, undynamic nation; and they necessitated a search farther back into Chinese history to assess fully the "feudal" period which, over this past century, was finally being overcome.
Why Japanese scholars have spent so much time and energy on the issue of feudalism deserves some consideration. For Marxist scholars, feudalism itself was an issue, the source from whence emerges capitalism (under which most academic Marxists were living). A people might skip the capitalist stage of development, according to some theorists, but no people ever skipped the feudal stage of societal development.
Feudalism as a more general historiographic problem had specific import for Japan. Virtually every modern Japanese scholar has the Meiji Restoration of 1868 looming in his or her consciousness as a distinct model for the orthodox transcendence of feudalism or the failure to do so. Be that for better or for worse—and most Japanese Marxists regard the legacy of the Meiji Restoration as a two-edged sword at best—the issue of feudalism has occupied a central position in their thoughts. The failure of the Meiji reforms to transcend Japanese feudalism has repeatedly been blamed for the lingering feudal ele-
ments (or remnants) that played such a heinous role in the 1930s and 1940s when the military was ascendant. Had feudalism been fully sublated, many scholars argue, the Japanese might not have had to go through that frightful and destructive era.[2]
To a certain extent, Japanese schollars have projected this concern (or obsession, perhaps) with feudalism onto Chinese historical research, although historians from the People's Republic of China are equally obsessed with feudalism and periodization. Similarly, Japanese studies of the French Revolution, the quintessential bourgeois-democratic revolution, often involve intricate comparisons with the Meiji Restoration, as in some of the work of Kuwabara Takeo, Kobayashi Yoshiaki, and Inoue Koji[*] .[3]
The problem of stagnationist theories and of reassessing Chinese history in such a way as to afford China the same principles of historical development as the West was considerably deeper than at first conceived. The Italian historian Frederico Chabod (whose work has been translated into Japanese but not into English as yet)[4] has shown that the idea of "Europe" itself emerged from a self-comparison with Asia in Greek times. Europe (i.e., the Greeks) was represented by the spirit of freedom, Asia by despotism, with a conscious separation intended. By extension, it was argued, European freedom was linked to progress, whereas Asian despotism had resulted in stagnation. This idea, according to Chabod, was revived in the eighteenth century by thinkers from Montesquieu to Voltaire. With the Enlightenment, capitalist production, the development of ideas of political democracy, science, and the like all contributed to strengthen this Europocentric world historical conception. These distinguishing notions—freedom vs. despotism, progress vs. stagnation—became inseparably linked to Europe's concept of its own modernity. Namely, where there is "modernity," one can find concomitant freedom and progress; but, where there are difficulties that crop up on the road to modernization, there one will be able to point to despotism and stagnation.
Nonetheless, to demonstrate that Chinese history was not simply the rise and fall of despotic empires, Japanese sinologists set out to provide Chinese history with an image no different from that of the West or Japan. China, too, it would be shown,
had gone through the universally applicable stages of ancient slavery, medieval feudalism, and modern capitalism. In this way China would be integrated into an evolving world history. One of the first efforts in this regard, discussed by Tanigawa Michio,f was the notorious case of Nishijima Sadao.g In a 1950 essay, Nishijima argued that slavery was the mode of production that characterized Chinese society under the Ch'in-Han Empire. After a critical rebuttal from such scholars as Masubuchi Tatsuo,h Nishijima was compelled later to reassess this hasty appraisal and eventually to withdraw it altogether.[5]
The mechanical application of labels to different periods in Chinese history as a means of identifying historical development began to run aground of its own accord in the mid- to late 1950s. Tanigawa Michio raised his doubts in public about the label "ancient" for T'ang at the 1955 annual meeting of the Rekishigaku kenkyukai[*] ,i the established Marxist organization of historians in Japan. In a 1961 essay and later in his surveys of Japanese research for 1961 and 1966 on the Six Dynasties period, Tanigawa expressed concern at the lack of scholarly productivity caused by the intellectual strangulation of a predetermined periodization.[6] Tanigawa had himself followed the general trend in believing that the Sui-T'ang marked the close of Chinese antiquity, but no one had yet offered detailed and empirical studies of the institutional issues involved here to substantiate the theory. Before one could designate a priori a name for the Sui-T'ang era, should not one first have asked: "What happened during the Sui-T'ang?" "What reality gave form to its historical world?" For, if the task before Japanese sinology was to integrate Chinese history into world history, how could one ignore such questions, Tanigawa wondered.[7]
There was another critical problem Tanigawa noted. The Marxist periodization also assumed that the state in the "ancient" Sui-T'ang era was inseparable from its institutions; substructure and superstructure were inextricably united. Institutions were merely the means by which the state controlled its main object, the masses of the people, but there was no significant component at the root of these institutions. Because this identification remained at the level of a presupposition, no penetrating studies were forthcoming from Marxist historians in the 1950s in Sui-T'ang institutional history, according to Tanigawa. For
example, the T'ang legal code (lü-li )j was assumed to support a "slave" society, but when one separated it from the Marxist assignment of the "ancient-slave" label, it certainly appeared to have remarkably feudal elements. Without understanding the nature of the link between the people and the state, Tanigawa came to believe, it would be impossible to understand the nature of a subsequent break or opposition between them, as occurred so fiercely at the end of the T'ang. So, he began to do research on the pre-Sui state and society—namely, the Northern Wei dynasty—as a means of studying the formative process of Sui and T'ang. He has since devoted twenty or more years to this long period of division in Chinese history, principally to the houses that held sway for varying numbers of years in the North.
The Six Dynasties Period in Chinese History
The period from the fall of the Latter Han dynasty through imperial reunification under the Sui and T'ang, a period of nearly four centuries, has until recently attracted little in the way of historical research in the West. While the literature and religion of this long interregnum have received scholarly attention, historical studies lag behind.[8]
This era, known as Wei-Chin-Nan-Pei-ch'aok (Wei, Chin, and Northern and Southern dynasties) or more handily as the Six Dynasties, was for a long time seen as a kind of black hole in Chinese history for several reasons. First, the difficulties posed by studying China at a time when no state held control over the entire empire seemed overwhelming. Sources abound but they are often corrupted; constant warfare, attacks from the North and conquests by people of non-Chinese origin, institutions established, but with questionable authority, all militated against the development of a clear picture of the Chinese state and society in these years. Second, traditional Chinese historiography was essentially political history, and the lack of central imperial authority constituted a giant lacuna (and, consequently, a possible source of embarrassment) in a history that otherwise boasted great dynasties usually punctuated by only short intervals. As a result, the Six Dynasties era came to be regarded as a Chinese analogue of the Dark Ages in Europe
after the fall of the Roman Empire, a time when no significant intellectual advances could be cited, certainly none worthy of serious study—and, like the Dark Ages in Europe, the Six Dynasties were not studied in depth.
That such a view of China is bankrupt no longer requires a great deal of contemplation or extensive explanation. Though China suffered four centuries of political disorder, Chinese history and culture made significant advances. This was the period when the mass migrations from North China, due to the "barbarian" invasions from farther North, caused the spread of Han Chinese society and culture into South China. This development would have repercussions through all of subsequent Chinese history. South China has for the past millennium been seen as the center of Chinese culture, society, population, and the economy. In the Han dynasty, though, the South was only sparsely populated by ethnic Chinese and was still largely jungle land.
The move south by so many men and women from the North brought along the importation of Northern sedentary agricultural ways. Unlike the North, however, South China could boast extraordinary potential riches in agricultural production. The coming of metallic agricultural implements to the South and the phenomenal socioeconomic development of Kiangnan by the time the Sui and T'ang dynasties reunified China, would have enabled the South, in the words of Kawakatsu Yoshio, to jump right into the tenth century had it not had to contend with military pressures from the North.[9] Who knows what advances Kiangsu, Chekiang, or the whole of South China might have made if they had not been compelled to feed the rest of China?
The invasions of Hsiung-nu,l Hsien-pi,m and others into North China provided the opportunity for the first Sino-barbarian cooperation in the building of regimes, one of which, the Sui, eventually reunited China. We can see the remarkable attraction of many Chinese ways to these previously nomadic peoples once they conquered and occupied some part of China. Almost always they realized the necessity of relinquishing nomadic ways for sedentary agriculture, and often even the need to afford the military a secondary role in a society stressing the civil arts. These two met with considerable consternation, resistance, and occasionally civil war, but ultimately won out.
So thoroughly "civilized" did the previously martial and nomadic Northern Wei become that they made lasting contributions to Chinese society and agriculture of a distinctly civil bent—the fu-pingn or militia system for compulsory military service, as opposed to a professional army, and the chün-t'ieno or equitable field system for the fair parceling of arable land by the state.
The forerunner of the examination system, the primary route to official power throughout the last one thousand or more years of Chinese history, got its start in the early third century under the state of Wei created by Ts'ao Ts'ao.p This system, the chiu-p'in chung-chengq (Nine Ranks and Arbiter), has been studied in great depth elsewhere and needs no further discussion here.[10]
We also see the growth and efflorescence of Chinese culture in the Six Dynasties period. Calligraphy and painting emerge as artistic forms, while new poetic styles and the compilation of the Wen-hsüanr poetry collection appear. And, because Confucianism was not predominant, we see an age in which a freer atmosphere existed for other religions and schools of thought, such as Buddhism and Taoism.
One remarkable difference between the Six Dynasties and the so-called Dark Ages in Europe is that, while both witness the preponderance of military types because of ceaseless warfare, the military in China proved unable to form a dominant social class, even in the warrior states of the North, through which to rule over China. It might be possible militarily to create a state, even to make oneself emperor. But to rule China, or any part of it, almost always required educated bureaucrats, and in the process the "military" rulers became "civilized." This process was particularly troubling in the North where racial antagonisms often flared.
The first scholar to delve into the morass of materials for the Six Dynasties and to emerge with a conceptual understanding of this era was Naito[*] Konan,s one of the giants of prewar Japanese sinology and a founder of the Kyoto school.[11] In a celebrated article entitled "Gaikatsuteki To[*] -So[*] jidai kan" (A comprehensive look at the T'ang-Sung period),[12] Naito offered his periodization of "medieval China," which corresponded roughly to the third through the ninth centuries. He also de-
scribed the characteristics of medieval culture and society, which set it off from the subsequent "modern" or "early modern" era (Sung and thereafter). Although the latter part of this periodization, that the Sung dynasty commences the "modern" (kinsei )t era in Chinese history, is the more famous, Naito[*] invested considerable time into research on the middle period.
In Naito's overall scheme, China's antiquity was a period of the emergence and flowering of Chinese culture, as well as its flow to the neighboring states on China's periphery. As this period came to a close in the late Latter Han, the outward flow of Chinese influence came to a halt. The alien peoples along China's borders, particularly in the North, having become racially aware of their own non-Chineseness by virtue of the confrontation with China, now reacted against a much weaker Chinese state. They built kingdoms in the North and were in continual strife with influences and forces from the South where so many Han Chinese had emigrated. Naito characterized this middle era as "aristocratic" because, he argued, the society and culture were dominated by a peculiarly Chinese aristocracy, not based in land or military might or wealth, but in letters.[13]
Several Japanese scholars who continued to work in this area were Okazaki Fumio, Utsunomiya Kiyoyoshi, and Miyakawa Hisayuki, all graduates of Kyoto University and intellectual disciples of Naito Konan. Miyakawa also contributed the first essay in English on Naito and his theories.[14] Okazaki worked on a wide variety of topics, particularly social and economic institutions, but cultural history as well. Miyakawa has also studied issues in social, political, economic, and especially religious history. The importance of Utsunomiya's work on society and culture in the Six Dynasties period is discussed by Tanigawa in the body of the volume here translated.
No serious debate over Naito's periodization occurred until after World War II, especially after the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, when a freer atmosphere existed in Japan and new issues appeared on the scholarly agenda. Naito Konan became the object of scholarly invective as he too was associated with a concept of stagnation—that is, if the "modern" period began way back in the Sung and continued through till the present, then the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held no special significance, for the institutions of Sung had already set the stage for what was to come.[15]
The Six Dynasties and the "Community"
Not everyone in the scholarly world concurred in the attack on Naito[*] Konan, but a number of years would pass before there emerged a sustained critique of the Marxist rejoinder to Naito and of the Marxist emplotment of Chinese history along universal lines of developmental stages. In the process of studying the wealth of sources relevant to research on the Six Dynasties period—historical, literary, philosophical, and poetic—Tanigawa and his colleague at Kyoto University, Kawakatsu Yoshio, began to develop their own theory of Chinese society at that time, a theory that did not deny classes and conflict but sought first to look at the society and draw conclusions from the evidence. They shared with most Japanese sinologists a common concern that, in addressing this period in Chinese history, one try to understand history developmentally. Thus, periodization itself was not discarded, only significantly reformulated.
Tanigawa and Kawakatsu characterized China in the Six Dynasties (and Sui-T'ang) as "medieval" (chusei[*] ).u The medieval period had "overcome" the ancient period, and in turn it became the womb for the formation of modern China. Traditional Chinese society had not ceased with antiquity but had progressed to medieval and modern times by "overcoming" its own inner contradictions. Tanigawa and Kawakatsu both use the language of dialectical analysis but without the economic reductionism often characteristic of Marxist materialism. Thus, periodization—when the underlying principles of antiquity were "transcended" (shiyo[*] or chokoku[*] )v,w by those of medieval times—becomes a central concern. This concern, however, is devoted less specifically to the dating of this transcendence than it is to those "underlying principles," the essential social fabric in ancient and medieval times.
The Marxists argued (and still argue) that these "principles," which unite everything from the individual peasants through the society to the state and its institutions, are the ascending phases of modes of production, as applicable in their universality to European as to non-European societies. For the reasons outlined earlier, Tanigawa and others sought to go beyond the labels of class and production mode and to locate the central elements that linked the people in local society. Tanigawa
argued that it was "the historian's responsibility to capture the living universe (sei no sekai )x of the common people." To focus solely on production relations and systems of ownership, he claimed, ignored how people actually interacted in their day-to-day lives.[16]
The conceptual tool he developed was kyodotai[*] y or "community," originally a Japanese neologism devised in the early twentieth century as a translation in the field of sociology for the German term Gemeinde.[17] The term kyodotai and theories concerning its application to virtually every society in the world abound.[18] Generally speaking, Japanese Marxists of a firm Weberian inclination (or Weberians with a Marxist predilection) have used the concept of kyodotai as a means of explaining those elements of social life that seemed to transcend class distinctions. For example, polder-watching was an activity of great importance to Chinese landlords and peasants alike, in that both relied on production from the land and could ill afford uncontrolled flooding. Thus, this activity was of a "communitarian" (kyodotai teki )z nature.
The uninitiated Western reader may be somewhat at a loss here, for most Western sociologists, philosophers, and historians (with the major exception of the Frankfurt School) have seen Marx and Weber as antagonistic opposites, as representative of entirely contrary points of view. Many Japanese scholars, however, with their unique capacity for bringing a variety of seemingly opposing strains together, did not pose Marx against Weber, but looked rather for ways they could complement each other.
The case of Otsuka[*] Hisao, the foremost theoretician of kyodotai in Japan, is point in fact.[19] According to Otsuka, the "community" is not a classless, primitive, communal organization. Rather, at various stages of societal development, the "community" (the locus of subjective, everyday life and the bonds it creates between people) gives rise to class differentiation by its own internal necessity. It then changes its base and structure to support its class relations, a process that continues through the collapse of successive forms of production. Thus, classes emerge from the internal contradictions within the "community," and it is the unity, in class society, of these contradictions between private and public systems of owner-
ship, between class and communal institutions, that comprises kyodotai[*] . Modern capitalism tends to destroy kyodotai, according to Otsuka[*] , although recent debate leaves this issue a theoretically open question.[20] There are also differences among Japanese historians and sociologists who employ the concept of kyodotai in their research concerning whether kyodotai really ameliorated class conflict or simply masked it.
Tanigawa and Kawakatsu have adopted this theory with modifications for the study of social relations in the Six Dynasties period in China. They argue that "communitarian" bonds remain more basic to the historical process, more logical, and ultimately more fundamental than classes over China's long-term social development. Following Otsuka's model, they show that principles of class different from those of kyodotai are born of the self-development of kyodotai, and that a specific historical "community" constitutes the unity of contradictory elements formed by these two opposing principles. Because kyodotai of necessity subsumes contradictions, it will develop of itself through history. Thus, they argue, kyodotai becomes the primary element for historical analysis.[21]
It is important to reiterate that Tanigawa and Kawakatsu do not deny the existence either of classes or of class conflict. Kyodotai[*] in the hands of most postwar theorists assumes classes in society and looks in societies like China for the reasons the elite was able to prevent the explosion of conflict for such a long period. It looks, in other words, for the cohesive elements that bind potentially antagonistic classes or groups, for better or for worse, rather than the disruptive elements. Tanigawa goes a step further by relegating class tensions a secondary role to the primacy of the "communitarian" bonds between literati-aristocrats and commoners in the Six Dynasties period. To the Marxists, this is tantamount to denying the motive force in history, the most basic force for progress—class struggle. For this reason, which remains tacit, Tanigawa is often attacked by them as some sort of apostate.
Japanese Marxist historians regarded the entire period of Chinese history from Ch'in (and the inception of a unified empire) through T'ang as China's ancient age, because their sole criterion for historical demarcation was the system of ownership that demonstrated no significant change, they claimed,
until the Sung introduced new forms of relations on the land. When we delve deep into the nature of social bonds, using kyodotai[*] as a standard for analysis, Tanigawa argues, then the Ch'in-Han period immediately must be distinguished from the Sui-T'ang. The breakdown in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras of the clan (shih-tsu )aa kyodotai from the Shang-Chou period did not develop into a system of slavery. Rather, it led to a society of self-producing peasants who managed their families' lives on a local, small-scale basis. They formed relatively small population centers known as liab or hamlets whose reasons for materializing concerned rituals, defense, cooperation in production, and the like. This corresponds to the "hamlet community" (or ri kyodotai ac in Tanigawa's phraseology). The leaders of the li were generally experienced, older men of local repute known as elders (fulao )ad who shared blood or fictive kin ties.
Over the four centuries of the Han dynasty's rule, though, a bifurcation within the local "community" developed between the large landowners (hao-tsu )ae who continued to amass everlarger tracts of land and the increasingly large number of propertyless peasants who had lost their families' lands to hao-tsu. This development Tanigawa sees as the primary cause for the weakening of the public authority of the Han state, eventually bringing about its collapse. In the Six Dynasties that followed the disintegration of the Han, a new kyodotai emerged in local society. It featured an aristocracy of neither birth nor wealth, but rather one that owed its distinction to its cultured, intellectual quality, to its ability to rule in a human and humane way in times of serious strife, to its capacity to provide succor to the people in time of need, and (as Kawakatsu Yoshio put it) to its understanding of the need to restrain its own tendency toward limitless annexation of lands, a lesson from the Han experience. The new kyodotai thus embodied an ethic or a spirit of Confucian morality and Taoist selflessness in daily life. For these reasons, Tanigawa and Kawakatsu have argued that the fundamental distinction between the nature of the local "community" through the late Latter Han and that which developed in the Six Dynasties era deserves recognition as a basic point for periodizing Chinese history—from ancient to medieval times.[22]
It is this quality, the ethical-moral basis for the cohesion of
the local community in the Six Dynasties, which has caused the most critical consternation over Tanigawa's application of kyodotai[*] theory. Before we examine the debate over this issue, we should look a bit more closely at what this quality entails analytically as well as historiographically. As mentioned earlier, Tanigawa's reliance on kyodotai theory was born of a dissatisfaction with the highly influential Marxist "class conception of history" (kaikyu[*] shikan )af that had risen to virtual sanctity among Japanese scholars. The intent was not to deny class relations in society, but to reach down to a more basic level and thus understand the specific role of class in medieval China.[23] Chinese society in the Six Dynasties period produced an aristocratic system with ranks of pedigree and all the associated trappings. But, Tanigawa argues, it did not develop the kind of territorial feudalism seen in Western Europe and Japan because of the nature of the bond between aristocrat and "commoner." Chinese aristocrats of this era were literati or men of letters (wen-jen )ag whose talents as such were respected in virtually every "dynastic" house of this long period of division. Despite nearly four centuries of military fighting and chaos, China never evolved the ethos for a military ruling class or a feudal military society. Because of the priority accorded these men of letters by state and local society alike, and because they were judged on the basis of their performance of their ethical creed in action, Chinese culture and civilization emerged from this long period advanced and enriched. Its sphere expanded beyond its own borders or, as Naito[*] Konan put it, Chinese history became the history of East Asia.[24]
There is something of surpassing import in this notion of "community" and the social bonds it fostered. The mechanistic manner in which class labels were attached by Japanese Marxists to various stages of Chinese social development obscured far more than it illuminated. In a critical summary of the kyodotai debate as applied to studies of the Six Dynasties period, one Japanese scholar cited the letter of an early eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary (admittedly at a much later time in Chinese history) who observed with profound incredulity how Chinese from neighboring villages managed to cooperate in times of trouble, such as when roads became impassable because of inclement weather, and to treat each
other with respect and understanding, the exact opposite of what this man had often observed in Europe.[25] In short, kyodotai[*] in Tanigawa's usage bespeaks an effort to study Chinese society as the social relations of real human beings, not subsuming this concern to a standardized litany, but looking directly at what the available sources tell us in order to reconstruct the human element, which is of course the basis of society.
Many a non-Marxist scholar will find Tanigawa's assessment of the roles played by the "aristocracy" in the Six Dynasties period difficult to accept. One need not be a Marxist to be considerably less sanguine than Tanigawa in this regard. The reader of this volume will be struck by the author's apparent willingness to bend over backward to understand the aristocracy. And, in fact, Tanigawa's arguments do seem inordinately naive, particularly when he discusses the nature and composition of the Six Dynasties aristocracy and its relationship with the people. Several reasons can be suggested to explain this.
One should point first to Tanigawa's great irritation or anger with Marxist writings on Chinese history and particularly on the so-called "ancient" and "feudal" periods. He sees their imposition of models from abstract theory or political considerations onto the fabric of the development of Chinese society as inimical to understanding Chinese realities. In his view, they blur, obstruct, and ignore a great deal in their efforts to explain; and he shows parallels with American "modernization" theory in this area. In order to combat the dominance of Marxist historiography, he has purposefully overstated a non-Marxist argument that grants much to the consciousness and good will of a class the Marxists instinctively view as repressive. It is important to note this in advance, because the Western reader who comes to the debate midstream will surely find Tanigawa's views idealistic, unless something of the development of their background is known. Tanigawa also expects that his readers will not assume him to be a monarchist or an apologist for rule by an aristocracy, even a cultured one, or for that matter an idealist.
Part of the reason that one may find Tanigawa's argument naive also harks back to the earlier point that kyodotai theory assumes class conflict, and Tanigawa talks almost not at all
about tensions between aristocrats and commoners but rather concentrates on how aristocrats sought to overcome conflict. Part of the problem, though, is simply that Tanigawa has overstated the case and does tend to present a rather rosy, perhaps idealistic, conception of aristocratic morality in the Six Dynasties period. As yet, his critics have all come from the Marxist camp. We await a non-Marxist critique to open the debate in a nondogmatic direction. Whatever the faults of his theory, Tanigawa has gone a long way toward overcoming the Marxist manner of applying preconceived colors and painting by the numbers in their work on this period.
The Kyodotai[*] Debate
Tanigawa's reformulation of the central issues for studying Six Dynasties China led to a caustic exchange, what one author recently called "an unusually fierce debate in modern historiographical circles,"[26] often illuminating less than one might have hoped. Because of the vituperative and concomitant exaggerations by the participants, uninitiated readers may feel as though they have been dropped head first into a pit of vipers. The first respondent to take up the gauntlet against Tanigawa, Kawakatsu, and their allies raised an unfortunate issue at first that influenced much of the animosity in the subsequent exchange—Tanigawa's apostasy from Marxism. This critic was the accomplished Ming-Ch'ing social historian Shigeta Atsushi, and his views represented the position of the Rekishigaku kenkyukai[*] .
In 1969 Shigeta launched an unmitigated frontal assault on Tanigawa and Kawachi Jozo[*]ah for their calling the Six Dynasties period "feudal" (and medieval), rather than ancient, and by insinuation having strayed from the laws of historical materialism laid out by the Rekishigaku kenkyukai. Shigeta clearly saw conversion (tenko[*] )ai to a non-Marxist methodology as condemnable in and of itself, scarcely needing empirical proof to the contrary of the new methodology. Particularly hard to stomach for Shigeta was how kyodotai[*] was presented by Tanigawa and others for historical analysis. He saw Tanigawa's concept as suprahistorical, impossible to ground in the language of class, excessive in its emphasis on ethical-spiritual
qualities, and ultimately just a matching assumed for the societal base that reflected the aristocratic system. In other words, he claimed that they looked at Six Dynasties society, saw an aristocratic superstructure, and posited a corresponding kyodotai[*] substructure. This approach failed, Shigeta argued, because it ignored the truly important economic system at the base of society, which really was the substructure after all.[27]
There was another damning element in the Tanigawa thesis from Shigeta's perspective. Tanigawa's reperiodization of medieval Chinese history fit precisely with Naito[*] Konan's of two generations ago—Six Dynasties, Sui, and T'ang. Also, the stress on culture in Tanigawa's picture of the new aristocracy in this period struck a respondent note at the very heart of Naito's conception of history, bunkashiaj or cultural history. It is well known and needs little explication in Japanese historical circles that Naito was not a Marxist, did not analyze Chinese "feudalism," has been vilified by many Japanese Marxists as a prewar intellectual apologist for imperialism, and believed the development of culture to be the central process in historical development. Thus, from the Japanese Marxist perspective, it is sufficient to associate someone's name (in this case, Tanigawa's) with that of Naito to establish guilt.[28]
One of the things that makes this debate interesting and particularly guiling for the critics of Tanigawa is that, despite obvious differences in their theories, Tanigawa will not disown Naito; on the contrary, he writes in glowing terms of Naito's remarkable vision concerning key issues in Chinese history, such as the dynamic element he sees in Naito's view of historical development (by implication, a refutation of the idea that Naito popularized a notion of "stagnant China"). He also explicitly claims to follow Naito's periodization of the medieval period.[29]
Shigeta's attack was less scholarly than it was ideological, and it elicited several immediate responses from Tanigawa and Kawakatsu. In one coauthored essay, they sought to address Shigeta's critique by elaborating the importance of understanding medieval Chinese society in their way, the postwar intellectual milieu from which it emerged, and the significant elements of kyodotai.[30] Tanigawa then penned his own direct rebuttal to Shigeta in which he argued again that adherence to a fixed formula (teishiki )ak for historical development hindered
our further understanding of Chinese historical realities. He agreed that he had once believed the Rekishigaku kenkyukai[*] line of ascending historical stages and their corresponding modes of production, but its failure to address crucial scholarly issues had led to reflection and eventually to criticism. Why, Tanigawa rhetorically wondered, was Shigeta harping on this apostasy and not on concrete scholarly problems?[31]
Kawakatsu pulled no punches in this regard. He compared Shigeta's overzealous concern with Tanigawa's change of views to the "trial of a heretic." Shigeta's continual attack on the notion of an aristocracy of culture drove Kawakatsu to the limit: "His [i.e., Shigeta's] astonishing ignorance of the history of scholarship on the Six Dynasties period and his attempt simply to employ categories only he himself trusts [i.e., categories of historical materialism] while discarding everything, which fails to fit into this scheme derive from a bearing unbefitting a scholar."[32] Both Tanigawa and Kawakatsu also sought to defend their notions of the aristocracy, the "community," and the interaction of the two.
Shigeta's essay proved an unhappy first thrust at a Marxist rebuttal because it was so thoroughly tendentious. Later, though, more studied critiques of Tanigawa and Kawakatsu appeared in print; in fact, a flood of essays inundated the scholarly press in the early 1970s. Goi Naohiro, Tanaka Masatoshi, Hori Toshikazu, and a host of others all attacked Tanigawa's notion of kyodotai[*] for the injustice they perceived it had done to class theory. All argued that class was more important than kyodotai. Tanaka alone did not dismiss Tanigawa's idea as the ravings of an illogical madman. He argued instead that what Tanigawa had identified as kyodotai was in fact an "ideological form," a "phenomenal form," or a "reflection of the superstructure." Before Tanaka could accept this notion, Tanigawa would have to elaborate in full materialist detail the essence of this kyodotai. When he reviewed the debate in 1974, Tanigawa noted that although he did not agree with Tanaka, at least he felt Tanaka understood what he was trying to do with kyodotai theory and Six Dynasties history, which Shigeta had not.[33]
One criticism raised by a number of scholars was the lack of precision in Tanigawa's defining of kyodotai. Tanigawa agreed
that this was a task still being worked out, but that did not preclude its use as a sociological tool in historical analysis. By using this sociological term to help uncover and explain historical facts, its methodological structure would become more refined. An even more prominent criticism of kyodotai[*] which even Shigeta had noted, was that Tanigawa and Kawakatsu had overplayed the ethical or spiritual element at work in "community" dynamics. It must be understood that positing the "ethical" or the "spiritual" as historically significant is anathema to hard-line Marxist critics or, at best, is considered by less dogmatic Marxists to be mistaking a reflection of reality for reality itself. However, the crux of the matter for either group, and the large area in between them, is that nothing can be more important than class in history.[34] If kyodotai were made secondary to the role of class in history, no one would have any theoretical problems with it, but Tanigawa and Kawakatsu have argued for its primacy in premodern Chinese history. For that reason, and particularly since Tanigawa once counted himself within the historical materialist fold, they have received a virtual barrage of criticism.
Although the volume translated here was not specifically meant to address the outpouring of criticism, it effectively did just that by reviewing not the history of kyodotai debate but the issues involved in the study of "medieval China." This task necessitated a reinvestigation of the major schools of thought regarding Chinese "feudalism" and the dating of China's "medieval age." It also allowed Tanigawa to describe more fully how kyodotai might best be understood in the concrete realities of the Six Dynasties period. The book divides into these two major sections.[35]
Kawakatsu has long maintained an association with French sinologists and in fact spent a period of time studying in France. Two of his essays have appeared in French, the most recent being a brief explanation of his and Tanigawa's conception of Six Dynasties history. A German analysis of Tanigawa's notion of kyodotai for the study of medieval China was published several years ago. Recently, a balanced exposition of Tanigawa's (and the "Kyoto school's") analysis of the place of the "medieval era" in Chinese history appeared in the foremost
journal of Soviet Asian studies. It was almost immediately translated (for internal consumption only, nei-pu-fa-hsing )al in the People's Republic of China. Furthermore, the theories of Tanigawa and Kawakatsu figure significantly in a recent study of postwar Japanese sinology to emerge from Taiwan.[36] The publication of this volume of Tanigawa's marks the first serious discussion of his work in English[37] and the first translation into English of any of his writings. It is hoped that the issues raised here will provide food for thought not only for "medievalists" but also for students of other eras in Chinese history.