4—
Feudalism in Chinese History

As the controversy on Chinese social history grew directly out of revolutionary analyses, so the issue of feudalism provided its starting point and remained at the heart of the debate. To bolster their own arguments against the Stalinist view of contemporary Chinese society as feudal, critics of the Communist party's position turned to Chinese history to prove that China had traversed the feudal stage of history deep in the past: It was only due to certain peculiarities in the dynamics of Chinese society, they argued, that traces of feudalism had never been eradicated and China had not made the transition to the next, capitalist, stage of history; these remnants, however, were not significant enough to justify the use of the term feudal to describe contemporary society. Viewing Chinese society as suspended in a postfeudal, precapitalist transitional stage for most of its history, these authors stressed the role commerce had played in China's socioeconomic structure. Over the next decade, commercial capital, its role in social evolution, and its status in Chinese history persisted as a focal point of contention. The social historians concentrated most of their attention on the changes wrought by commerce in the late Chou period when, they assumed much in the fashion of their Confucian and New Culture predecessors, Chinese society had taken the form which had endured until the nineteenth century. They also engaged in acrimonious, if often tedious, infighting over views that did not differ significantly from one another in content but had important differences in their implications for revolutionary strategy. Beneath the seeming anarchy of interpretation, the controversy followed a number of paths delineated by the more influential participants.

The controversy over the past appeared simultaneously with the revolutionary debates discussed in the last chapter. Kuomintang Marxist arguments in particular required a historical perspective to enhance their plausibility: If China were a special society that did not readily fit available Marxist historical categories, the specialness could be demonstrated only through the peculiarities of its historical development. Kuomintang theoreticians argued that the source of China's ills was not the "feudal system" (feng-chien chih-tu ), which had disappeared long ago during the Chou period, but "feudal forces" (feng-chien shih-li ) which survived in the political superstructure of society.^[1] This, however, created certain problems. Kuomintang Marxists, like all others in the controversy, adamantly insisted on the validity of the basic premises of Marxist social theory, one of which was that the political superstructure was an outgrowth of the economic basis of society. The Kuomintang interpretation, giving this idea a deft twist, suggested that the superstructure could exist independently even though it must owe its origins to the appropriate economic basis; the surviving superstructure could even become an obstacle to the further development of the foundation itself. The authors of this view, chief among them T'ao Hsi-sheng, proceeded to back it up with historical analyses. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Hsin sheng-ming took the lead in publishing the first major materialist analyses of Chinese history.

Until 1930–1931, the discussion of history attended the needs of current revolutionary analysis; only then did some of the participants shed the preoccupation with the present to turn to the study of history in its own right. By the mid-thirties, when political developments had rendered the question of revolutionary strategy superfluous, Marxist historians concentrated

[1] Liang Yuan-tung later identified this view with the concept semifeudal . See "Chung-kuo she-hui ko chieb-tuan ti t'ao-hui," TSTC , 2.7–8:14. There was nevertheless an important difference between the KMT view and the ordinary usage of semifeudal by defenders of the Communist position. The latter used the term to mean that although feudalism had disappeared from the political structure, it persisted in the basic social-economic relations. The KMT view, by contrast, relegated feudal "remnants" to the realm of politics. T'ao even criticized the term, although he himself used it on occasion.

almost exclusively on historical problems. This change was probably what prompted Wang I-ch'ang to divide materialist historiography after 1928 into two periods.^[2] Nevertheless, Wang's metaphysical-scientific (research) distinction underestimates the importance of the initial years of controversy and abolishes the essential unity of Marxist historical inquiry through the post-1928 decade. While there was considerable diversification after 1930, these interpretations for the most part addressed questions that had been raised in the period immediately after 1927 and, at least in the early thirties, remained tied to the problem of revolution.^[3]

A more fruitful way of examining the historical trends after 1928 is by way of some of the major authors whose works introduced new interpretations of the past and launched controversies within the framework of the larger discussion.^[4] The earliest and one of the most challenging interpretations was that of T'ao Hsi-sheng, whose studies of Chinese history dominated the initial years of controversy and continued to fuel debate for the rest of the decade; most of the writing on imperial China in the controversy was inspired by Tao's ideas or motivated by the desire to refute him.^[5] T'ao's view of Chinese history may have owed its original inspiration to Karl Radek's interpretation of

[2] This impression is confirmed by the fact that Wang described Kuo's book as properly belonging in the research stage, even though it was published in the earlier period (1930).

[3] Wang Li-hsi's introduction to the controversy in the Tu-shu tsa-chih pointed out that the studies in the journal would address questions raised in the earlier period. See Chapter 6, this volume.

[4] For the controversy as a whole, the major works must include two books by Jen Shu and Yen Ling-feng discussed in the last chapter, which attracted a great deal of attention. Since these works have already been discussed, we will restrict the discussion here only to those works relevant to history.

[5] T'ao Hsi-sheng (b. 1899) received his training in law and came to Marxist history via studies in Chinese law. His work was heavily influenced by Henry Maine and Franz Oppenheimer. T'ao joined the revolutionary movement in 1927. In the next few years he was associated with the Wang Ching-wei faction in the KMT. In 1930, he accepted a position in Peking University, where he taught until 1937. After that date he established close relations with Chiang and spent most of his time in politics. Recently, he revived in Taiwan the Shih Huo , which was one of the foremost journals on social and economic history in China in the thirties. For more information on his career and thought, see A. Dirlik, "T'ao Hsi-sheng: The Social Limits of Change," in C. Furth (ed.), The Limits of Change in Republican China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

China's historical development, but T'ao emerged as the foremost proponent in China of the view that China's historical experience had been conditioned by the operation of commercial capital and the participants in the controversy associated the view with his name (T'ao Hsi-sheng chu-i ). His two earliest books, Chung-kuo she-hui chih shih ti fen-hsi (The Analysis of Chinese Social History) and Chung-kuo she-hui yu Chung-kuo ko-ming (Chinese Society and the Chinese Revolution), compiled from articles in the Hsin sheng-ming, met with immediate acclaim, went through a number of printings (including Japanese), and received constant attention in the controversy.^[6] Non-Marxist historians, and even his most fervent opponents, acknowledged the influence of these books, which contained the core of T'ao's interpretation.^[7]

Equally significant as a landmark in the controversy was Kuo Mo-jo's Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu (Research in Ancient Chinese Society), which launched the discussion on slavery in China.^[8] The significance of Kuo's work, of course, reached beyond the period under discussion here; the view he presented still dominates historical interpretation in the People's Republic of China.^[9] Kuo's historical studies were first published as articles after 1928, but it was not until they were compiled into book form in 1930 that they made an impact on the controversy, instigating the turn to the study of the past in its own

[6] These books were published in 1929 and 1931 respectively. The first book went through eight printings between 1929 and 1933, each time between 2,000 and 5,000 copies.

[7] Ku Chieh-kang, Tang tai Chung-kuo shih-hsueh (Contemporary Chinese Historiography) (Hong Kong, 1964; first published, 1947), p. 100, and Teng Ssu-yu, "Chinese Historiography in the Last Fifty Years," Far Eastern Quarterly , 7.2 (February 1949):148. T'ao's most violent critic, Li Chi, also acknowledged the popularity of his work. See "Tui-yu Chung-kuo she-hui shih-lun ti kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing" (Contributions to and a Critique of the Controversy on Chinese Social History; hereafter, Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing), TSTC , 2.2–3 (March 1932):1–150, 2.7–8 (August 1932):1–62, 3.3–4 (April 1933):1–86. See 2.7–8:2.

[8] Published in 1930. Like T'ao's first book Kuo's book was immediately popular and went through three printings in as many months. Wang I-ch'ang, himself a major advocate of slavery, credited Kuo with having "planted the seeds" of the question of slavery. See "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui fu-lun," TSTC , 2.7–8:2.

[9] See Peter Moody, "The New Anti-Confucian Campaign in China — The First Round," Asian Survey , 14.4:307–324.

right.^[10] While T'ao had been concerned mainly with the changes in Chou society and their implications for the present, Kuo was concerned exclusively with the early stages of Chinese civilization in the Shang and early Chou periods.

The contributors to the Tu-shu tsa-chih, while they debated the issues raised by these works, introduced interpretations of their own which drove the controversy in still different directions. Most notable among these interpretations were Li Chi's^[11] view of imperial China as a "precapitalist" (ch'ien-tzu-pen chu-i ) society and Wang Li-hsi^[12] and Hu Ch'iu-yuan's^[13] application to imperial China of Pokrovsky's concept of "despotism" (chuan-chih chu-i ). Li Chi's long article in the Tu-shu tsa-chih, expanded and published as a book in 1933, represented the foremost Trotskyite contribution to the discussion of history.^[14] Wang and Hu were possibly inspired, on the other hand, by contemporary debates in the Soviet Union over the validity of the concepts Asiatic society and despotism, although Hu Ch'iu-yuan in particular had evinced an interest in these ideas earlier through the work of Plekhanov.

The discussion involved debates over specific periods as well as over alternative schemes of periodization. An overview of the controversy indicates disagreement between two basic structures of periodization. The first of these, referred to as "four-stage development" (ssu-tuan lun ), was represented by Kuo Mo-jo, Wang I-ch'ang, and T'ao Hsi-sheng, after he had revised

[10] The articles were published in the Tung-fang tsa-chih and Ssu-hsiang .

[11] Li Chi, a close associate of Ch'en Tu-hsiu, was one of the most knowledgeable Chinese Marxists. He spent the mid-twenties in Germany and gained a formidable knowledge of Marx and Marxism in general. His Ma-k'o-ssu chuan (Biography of Marx) was a standard work.

[12] Wang Li-hsi (b. 1901) started as a poet and joined the revolutionary movement in the mid-twenties, working in the Chung-yang nung-min yun-tung chiang-hsi suo (Central Peasant Movement Training Institute). After 1927, he apparently got involved with Ch'en Ming-shu and the Social Democratic party.

[13] Hu Ch'iu-yuan (b. 1910) arrived at Marxist history through his interest in art history. He was impressed from the beginning by Plekhanov's art historical work, and Plekhanov's influence remained with him when he turned to the writing of history. Wang and Hu had similar views on Chinese society, and both acknowledged Pokrovsky's work in Russian history as a source of inspiration.

[14] Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chuan p'i-p'an (Critique of the Chinese Social History Controversy) (Shanghai, 1936). First published in 1933.

his earlier views in 1932.^[15] The scheme offered by these authors differed from the second scheme, "three-stage development" (san-tuan lun ), in its acceptance of the slavery stage of development.

Second, the periodization of Chinese history in terms of Marxist social formations largely corresponded to the historical divisions that had characterized traditional historiography: pre-Chou, Western Chou, Spring-Autumn and Warring States, and the imperial period. For most of the participants in the discussion, the dividing lines along the course of Chinese history were not fundamentally different from traditional ones — with the exception of dynastic divisions which many in the controversy disregarded, although some did try to explain them through the general socioeconomic characteristics of the imperial period. The period that received the greatest attention was the late Chou, which was taken to be the formative period of China's social development. The social historians paid little attention to imperial Chinese society, taking it as a unit of two thousand years' duration; their observations on the imperial period mostly represented extrapolations from the social-political structure that, they claimed, had come into being in the late Chou and the early imperial periods. Some of them, frustrated with the course the controversy was taking, turned in the early thirties to more detailed studies of the later phase of Chinese history, stimulating the production of an increasing number of monographic studies on various aspects of the imperial period by the middle of the decade.

The Chou period was regarded as the last time in pre-nineteenth-century history that Chinese society had embarked on a transition from one historical stage to another, although only a few suggested at the time that the transition had been completed. Agreement on the nature of the changes stood in striking contrast to disagreement on the extent of change; in other words, while most agreed on the basic features of the transition (T'ao's explanations set the model here), there was

[15] T'ao Hsi-sheng, "Chung-kuo she-hui hsing-shih fa-ta kuo-ch'eng ti hsin ku-ting" (A New Estimation of the Process of Development of Social Formations in China), TSTC , 2.7–8 (August 1932):1–9.

strong disagreement on its results. Their evaluation of the transition depended on what they perceived to be the nature of early Chou and imperial Chinese societies. The major alternatives for the Western Chou period were feudalism and slave society.^[16] For the imperial period, the participants were divided between a feudal or "semifeudal" society versus a "special" or "transitional" society. The proponents of the latter view were them-selves divided over the definition of "special" and generally subscribed to one of the following alternative descriptions.

1. A commercialized society corresponding to the postfeudal, precapitalist society of Europe, in one of the following variations:

a. A protocapitalist society dominated by feudal forces (feng-chien shih-li chih-p'ei chih hsia chih ch'u-ch'i tzu-pen chu-i she-hui ) advocated by T'ao Hsi-sheng and the Hsin sheng-ming group .

b. A precapitalist society (ch'ien-tzu-pen chu-i she-hui ), as expounded by Li Chi-Tzu.

c. A despotic society (chuan-chih chu-i she-hui ), as postulated by Hu Ch'iu-yuan and Wang Li-hsi.

2. A special Asiatic society (ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch'an fang-shih ). The major proponents of this view were foreign theorists such as Madgyar, Varga, and Wittfogel, with Madgyar the most influential author at this time. This view was not popular in China and the reactions to it were mostly negative. Most Chinese who argued for "special" development took "special" as a variant of one or the other forms of production, as in a special feudal society suggested by Ho Kan-chih.

These views of the boundaries of the Eastern Chou period conditioned the social historians' explanations of the changes that had taken place during that period. In the discussion, there were four major opinions on the nature of the late Chou transition. (1)The first was from one form of feudalism to another, usually referred to as semifeudal.^[17] Outstanding names

[16] Few, including T'ao in his later periodization, regarded early Chou as a gens (that is, primitive) society.

[17] The participants usually made a distinction between feudal and semifeudal. B. Schwartz stated in his article on the controversy that the semantic content of semiwas slight. But however difficult it may be to ascertain what exactly semi denotes, the connotations were fairly obvious — that China was not a pure feudal society, but feudal features were still dominant in the composition of society. Thus, the advocates of this view distinguished their own position (as Li Chi noted) from other interpretations that argue for a postfeudal, precapitalist society.

associated with this view were G. Safarov in Russia and Li Li-san in China. Chu P'ei-wo, the most fervent advocate of this position, went farther than anyone else in minimizing the significance of the changes that had taken place.^[18] (2) A second view was from feudal to one or another of the postfeudal, precapitalist transitional forms just listed. In this case, the late Chou was taken as the formative phase of a transitional period that lasted over two thousand years. (3) A third view on the transition was from slave to feudal. Kuo Mo-jo and Wang I-ch'ang were the chief proponents of this view, although they also disagreed on the timing of the transition. (4) Fourth was from gens to slave society. This view, suggested by T'ao Hsi-sheng after 1932, did not make much impact on the controversy.

The sharpest debates on Chou transformation in the discussion centered on the first two alternatives. This issue was most conspicuous in the initial years of the controversy, after T'ao Hsi-sheng challenged Communist formulations on the subject. T'ao's major antagonist was Chu P'ei-wo who, although he was alienated from the Communist party by this time, stuck to the view that Chinese society had been feudal for nearly three thousand years. Chu's main interest was in contemporary society, and this position remained the most sparsely defended one in the controversy; nevertheless, his arguments, brief though they were, indicate the premises that underlay this description of Chinese society.

[18] Chu P'ei-wo (1907–1945) was one of the few proletarian participants in the controversy. He became disillusioned with the CCP and led a shady career after that, possibly working for the KMT and, as one detractor charged (Hu Tzu, probably Hu Ch'iu-yuan), for the Japanese as a spy. He was nevertheless executed by a KMT commander in 1945 after spending four years in jail, allegedly for being a Communist spy. He was a prolific writer who used a number of pseudonyms. In one curious episode he wrote to the TSTC renouncing all the works that had been published there by Chu Hsin-fan (which included three major works), saying that these had not been written by him. Hu Tzu's letter in the next issue, in addition to charging him with being a spy, rejected this and asserted that Chu was the author of all those works. Hu Tzu, "Chan-ch'ang shang ti Han-chien" (Traitors on the Battlefield), TSTC , 2.7–8 (August 1932). These works are treated as one here because there is little theoretical and interpretive difference among them.

T'ao Hsi-Sheng, Chu P'ei-wo, and Feudal Society in China

In criticizing T'ao Hsi-sheng's emphasis on the role of commercial capital in Chinese history, Wang I-ch'ang accused T'ao of having introduced "Bogdanov's poison" into the discussion, causing it to deviate from scientific materialism.^[19] It is difficult to estimate in the absence of more concrete evidence the extent to which Bogdanov's theoretical formulations shaped T'ao's analysis of Chinese society or the importance of T'ao's role in disseminating Bogdanov's ideas within China. T'ao himself did not refer to Bogdanov to any noticeable extent, and the internal structure of his periodization bore only the remotest resemblance to Bogdanov's periodization of history. Wang himself attested, on the other hand, to the popularity of Bogdanov's A Short Course of Economic Science from the moment it was first translated into Chinese in the mid-twenties, long before T'ao gained any kind of a reputation as a historian.^[20]

The controversy over the role of commercial capital was ultimately a consequence of certain ambiguities in the statements of Marx himself and not one between "true" Marxists and "false" Marxists. It is nevertheless possible to speculate on the reasons for Bogdanov's appeal to Chinese Marxists without becoming enmeshed in the polemics of the period. In his study of the social history controversy in 1954, B. Schwartz remarked that if imperial Chinese society resembled any period in European history, it was the period following the demise of feudalism, when the pressure of the rising market economy had forced the conversion of land from a monopolistically held subsidiary of feudal privilege to a commodity regulated by the market, undermining the economic buttress and, with it, the political

[19] Wang, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun shih," p. 25. Bogdanov was the pseudonym of A. A. Malinovskii. His A Short Course of Economic Science was first published in 1897 in Russian. The version referred to here is the English translation published in 1927 by the Communist party of Great Britian.

[20] Nevertheless, there may be a connection with T'ao. Wang identified Chou Fo-hai as one of the original translators of Bogdanov's work. T'ao was very close to Chou after 1927, and it is possible that he acquired an appreciation for Bogdanov through Chou. This, however, is highly circumstantial.

power of the nobility.^[21] The social historians reflected their awareness of this process in their descriptions of imperial China as a postfeudal, precapitalist society. Bogdanov's typology of historical development provided a certain flexibility in dealing with this type of society which the more rigid Marxist periodizations did not. In A Short Course of Economic Science, Bogdanov divided societies into two types, "natural self-sufficing" and "commercial."^[22] Capitalism in this scheme was relegated to a mere subdivision of commercial societies and was itself divided into three phases — commercial capitalism, industrial capitalism, and finance capitalism. This scheme multiplied the possibilities of categorizing societies such as the Chinese, which did not obviously fit either the feudal or the capitalist formations of the more rigid Marxian schemes of development.

It is possible, therefore, that Bogdanov's views informed the application of the concept of commercial capitalism to Chinese history, even though no one at this time openly subscribed to his scheme of periodization.^[23] Those involved in the debate quickly turned to the work of Marx to furnish their advocacies with the requisite authority, and the dispute revolved largely about Marx's statements on the subject. The most important of Marx's various references to the relationship between commerce and structural changes in society was his explanation, in the third volume of Capital, of the disintegrative impact of commerce on self-sufficient societies.

Commerce, therefore, has a more or less dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organization which it finds at hand and whose different forms are carried on with a view to use-value. To what extent it brings about a dissolution of the old mode of production depends on its stability and internal structure. And whither this process of dissolution will lead, in other words, what new mode of production will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production.^[24]

[21] B. I. Schwartz, "A Marxist Controversy in China," Far Eastern Quarterly, 13.2 (February 1954):149.

[22] "Natural self-sufficing" included primitive and feudal societies; "commercial" included "slave," "serf," and "capitalist" societies.

[23] It was only by the mid-thirties that some advocated accepting commercial society as a historical stage proper.

[24] Karl Marx, Capital , vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 331–332.

This statement, frequently quoted in the discussion, is indicative in microcosm of certain ambiguities in Marx's approach to the function of commerce in social change which permitted conflicting interpretations of its role in Chinese history. Commerce here is taken by Marx to be a dynamic factor in a self-sufficient society that is capable of dissolving the existing social structure. Yet what follows the dissolution is determined not by commerce but by the old mode of production, which is in keeping with Marx's general ideas about the mechanism of social development. He confirms this in a subsequent statement, when he explains that in the ancient world commerce and merchant's capital led to slavery, in contrast to the "modern world" where it has led to "the capitalist mode of production."^[25]

The statement, however, raises immediate questions about the role of commerce in the transition from one social formation to another: How much dissolution is necessary before the old mode of production disappears? At what point does a new mode of production arise? Can the features of this new mode of production be isolated from the effects of commerce which, to say the least, were catalytic in the whole process of transformation? Marx himself recognized the problem — the major aim of Capital would seem to be to delineate the dissolution of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism in Europe and the preceding statement, coming in the third volume of Capital, was in some ways the result of those very investigations.

We will return to this problem at the end of the present chapter; it should be noted here, however, that the latent ambiguities in this statement were not apparent to the social historians, who accepted it as a universal rule with but a single interpretation. The difficulty of applying this interpretation to Chinese society was compounded by their commitment to schemes of periodization derived from another (European) history. The assumption that capitalism inevitably followed the dissolution of the feudal system in a society where this pattern had not occurred made the questions of how much dissolution constitutes dissolution and what follows the dissolution extremely

[25] Ibid., p. 332.

important, and the focus of passionate disagreement. The social historians agreed that late Chou society had experienced the rise of commerce and that commerce had persisted through-out imperial times; they differed vehemently in the significance they attributed to the effects of commerce on social structure. The group who insisted that imperial China had been feudal relied on Marx's statement to declare commerce incidental to social formations; not only could commerce not create a new mode of production but even the dissolution of the old mode was independent of commerce, depending mainly on its own "internal structure." Chinese society during late Chou had experienced the impact of commerce, but this had not been sufficient to change the nature of society since no new mode of production (capitalism by definition) had come into existence. Opponents of the feudal view, with the lone exception of Li Chi, argued that even though commerce could not create a new mode of production, it definitely had the power to dissolve the old, which it had accomplished in China. Feudalism had disappeared even though a new mode of production (capitalism) had not arisen to take its place. China had embarked on the long trek in the direction of capitalism, by historical necessity, but it had not arrived there because of certain historical factors.

The most complete and provocative account of the changes in this period was offered by T'ao Hsi-sheng, and many in the discussion agreed with his version of the process even though they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from it. By the time T'ao formulated his ideas, he was familiar with Marx's ideas on commercial capital; he was responsible, in fact, for introducing to the reading public the chapter from Capital that contained the important passage just cited.^[26]

Nevertheless, there is still some question as to whether T'ao evolved his analysis of Chinese history independently or whether he owed the inspiration, and even some of his argu-

[26] Fang Yueh, pseud. T'ao Hsi-sheng, "Shang-jen tzu-pen hsiao-shih" (A Short History of Merchant's Capital), HSM , 3.4 (April 1930). This was the translation of chapter 20, volume 3 of Capital , "Historical Facts about Merchant's Capital." T'ao introduced his translation as "a systematic exposition of merchant's capital by a famous nineteenth-century European economist."

ments, to Karl Radek who, in his lectures in Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow in 1927, had offered the original interpretation of Chinese history using the concept of commercial capital.^[27] T'ao did not refer to Radek in his own work, and it was not until 1930 that he offered any public acknowledgment of his familiarity with Radek's interpretations.^[28] Furthermore, Radek's lectures were not translated into Chinese until 1928, about the same time that T'ao was formulating his own ideas. On the other hand, both Wang I-ch'ang in 1932 and, more importantly, T'ao, in the interview previously referred to here, have testified that Chinese radicals were familiar with Radek's lectures in 1927 and debated some of the same issues them-selves. Also, from the perspective adopted in this study — that the interest in history was an outgrowth of revolutionary analysis — it seems likely that Radek's interpretation would have appealed to T'ao if for no other reason than their common intention to refute Stalinist interpretations of Chinese society. Finally, T'ao's analyses bore some resemblance to Radek's even though the two authors disagreed in their conclusions concerning the class structure of Chinese society in accordance with their differences over the most appropriate revolutionary strategy for China; on occasion, authors in the controversy conjoined T'ao and Radek in their critiques of this view of Chinese history.^[29] In the absence of more concrete evidence, however, one can do no more than suggest that the implications of Radek's analysis for revolution, combined with the appeal of

[27] According to Radek's biographer, Warren Lerner, these lectures exist only in the Chinese version transcribed by Radek's students. As a book they were first published in 1928 (?) under the title Chung-kuo ko-ming yun-tung shih (History of the Chinese Revolutionary Movement). The version used here is La-te-k'o (Radek), Chung-kuo li-shih chih li-lun ti fen-hsi (A Theoretical Analysis of Chinese History), tr. by K'o Jen (Shanghai, 1933).

[28] Fang Chun-feng (pseud. T'ao Hsi-sheng), "T'uo-lo-ssu-chi p'ai chih Chung-kuo she-hui lun" (The Views of Trotskyites on Chinese Society), HSM , 3.5 (May 1930).

[29] Nevertheless, Radek agreed with T'ao on the role of imperialism in Chinese society as a force that impeded (after World War I, according to Radek) the development of capitalism, an interpretation which angered Chinese Trotskyites. The main difference between T'ao and Radek lay in their analyses of the class basis of politics in imperial China. For references to T'ao and Radek jointly, see Chang Heng, "P'ing T'ao Hsi-sheng ti li-shih fang-fa lun" (Critique of T'ao Hsi-sheng's Historical Method), TSTC , 2.2–3:9; also see Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 3.3–4:51.

commerce as an explanation for the history of Chinese society, may have impressed T'ao and others sufficiently to undertake similar analyses of their own.^[30] It is worth looking at Radek's interpretation briefly here because it offered for the first time a view of Chinese history that occupied a crucial place in Marxist historiography at this time.

Radek proposed two questions as central to understanding the nature of Chinese society before the imperialist intrusion in the nineteenth century:^[31] What was the basis of landownership in imperial China, and what was the nature of the Chinese village economy: The answers he offered rejected the idea that a feudal economy still prevailed in China. With respect to the first question, he argued that land was under private ownership with the market regulating distribution; the existence of sizable landholdings, on the other hand, indicated the existence of a powerful landlord class, contrary to the opinion of those who held that landlordism was a negligible problem in China.^[32] On the second question, he answered that a flourishing commerce had long ago done away with the natural economy, making both production and consumption in the village dependent on an outside market.^[33] Cash economy, in fact, had characterized Chinese economic life since the beginning of the Christian era.

According to Radek, China had gone through the feudal stage early in the Chou dynasty. Nomadic pressure on sedentary Chinese society at the time had led to the emergence of military protectors of the farming communities, who subsequently established their power over those communities in a feudal political arrangement.^[34] Over the next few hundred years, infighting among the lords had depleted their power and undermined the

[30] Mei Ssu-p'ing was the HSM author whose interpretation corresponded most closely to that of Radek. See "Chung-kuo she-hui pien-ch'ien ti kai-lun" (An Outline of Social Change in China), HSM , 1.11 (November 1928):1–12.

[31] Radek's lectures were intended, like the Chinese works discussed in the preceding chapter, to shed light on the strategic problems of the Chinese revolution. Apparently, he was unable to finish his lectures and dealt with this problem only briefly. The major part of his book deals with the question of China's historical development.

[32] Radek, Chung-kuo Li-shih chih Li-lun ti fen-hsi, p. 7.

[33] Ibid., pp. 15–16.

[34] Ibid., p. 41.

feudal state, but ultimately it was the advance of crafts and the cash economy due to improved productive tools and communications that had sealed the fate of the feudal system.^[35] Nevertheless, Radek continued, the transformation had never been completed because of the limitations placed on commercial expansion by the restricted nature of the market in China. There had been crucial changes in social and political structure such as the subjection of property relations to market regulation, the replacement of feudal lords by a class of landlords and merchants who acquired their power through participation in the market economy, and the emergence of a centralized despotic state built upon the new classes and expressing their interests. But China had been unable to move on to the stage of industrial capitalism, and the potential for the recurrence of feudalism had not been eliminated.^[36] The Pax Mongolica had expanded the scope of operation of Chinese merchants in the thirteenth century with the result that Chinese industries had taken a major leap forward. The expansion had been cut short before it could stimulate industrial capitalism, however, when Mongol power declined and the international market collapsed. The net effect of the Mongol interlude had been to consolidate merchant-landlord power and to augment the absolutism of the monarchy. China on the eve of Western intrusion, Radek concluded, had been at a stage of development that corresponded to Europe in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the industrial revolution.^[37]

Hsin sheng-ming analyses followed similar reasoning, although they 'did not show as much confidence in placing Chinese society and, for the most part, disagreed with Radek's views on the class basis of the imperial state.^[38] This is evident in the work of T'ao Hsi-sheng.

[35] Ibid., p. 51.

[36] Ibid., pp. 51–69.

[37] Ibid., p. 56.

[38] In the introduction to a collection of essays published in the HSM, T'ao enumerated the various positions on Chinese society as follows: (1) China is a society with a feudal or semifeudal system; (2) in China, the feudal system has disappeared but feudal forces remain; (3) China is a merchant society or a capitalist or protocapitalist (ch'u-ch'i tzu-pen chu-i ) society under the control of feudal forces; (4) Chinahas been a capitalist society for the past hundred years; (5) China is a small landlord, merchant society (petit-bourgeois) under the control of feudal political power; (6) China is one of the Asiastic societies that Marx talked about. Views 2, 3, and 5 were most commonly found in the HSM articles. See T'ao Hsi-sheng (ed.), Chung-kuo wen-t'i chih hui-ku yu chan-wang (The Chinese problem: Retrospect and Prospect) (Shanghai, 1930), preface, pp. 1–2.

T'ao described the dynamics of the institution of feudalism in the early Chou period in terms derived from Franz Oppenheimer's theories on the historical evolution of the state.^[39] Oppenheimer regarded the feudal state, the first form of the state, as the product of the conquest of a sedentary society by nomadic herders who took advantage of their military superiority to impose political dominance on the conquered farmers and to extract the fruits of their labor, or what has been described elsewhere as "superstratification."^[40] According to T'ao, the political system that had arisen when the nomadic Chou conquered the more advanced S.hang state was identical to the feudal system of medieval Europe: "The feudal system of Chinese antiquity was very similar to the feudal system in Europe and differed from the latter only in minor details. These differences were comparable in degree to the regional differences within European feudalism."^[41] He offered a full description of the general features of this system in a book he wrote in 1930:

The feudal system is founded upon agriculture and handicrafts conducted within the boundaries of the local collective [ti-fang kung-t'ung-t'i ]. A single village or a number of villages constituted the local collective which possessed in common forest and pasture land, water resources, and arable land. In this local collective, the common land and the fields which were distributed among the peasant households provided the necessities of life; for instance, the fields, hunting and fishing, and domestic animals [provided the necessities for consumption] while materials such as timber and sheep wool provided the raw materials for household industries. This kind of local collective was ordinarily a self-sufficient economic organism and had little economic interchange with the outside world . The local lord nurtured within the collective awe for his powers. The king was only an elevated lord and did not have the power to subject other lords to his will;

[39] Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically , tr. by J. M. Gitterman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1914).

[40] Ibid., p. 52. For a similar view which uses the concept of superstratification, see Wolfram Eberhard, Conquerors and Rulers (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), chap. 1.

[41] Fen-hsi, p. 31.

hence the feudal state had an extremely loose organization. [Emphasis in the original.]^[42]

Working through traditional sources, T'ao proceeded to argue that the feudal system that had emerged from the Chou conquest of the Shang displayed all these features of feudalism. The main characteristics of the Chou system were as follows. (1) The economic organization of society based on the manor (chuang-yuan ), which in China was represented by the "wellfield" (ching-t'ien ) system. The manor was made up of farming land, pastures, and hunting grounds surrounding the fortress of the lord. Part of the land was divided among the serfs and constituted their private holdings; the rest was public land. The serf had three obligations to the lord: rent in the form of a fraction of the produce (rent-in-kind), forced labor, and occasional tributes of diverse articles of consumption such as wine or poultry. (2) The hierarchical nature of land rights — that is, the determination of the size of landholding by the political rank of the holder. Theoretically, all land was the property of the king and the lords held their land in trust; practically, military power and rank were the chief determinants of power over land. (3) The existence of a class of free peasants and landlords who did not pay rent to the lords but owed only military obligations. (4) A rigid adherence to the hierarchical system with periodic enforcement of its rules.^[43]

It is worth reiterating the elements that T'ao perceived to be essential to feudalism, for the absence of these elements provided him with the basis of his rejection of feudalism in imperial China. Economically, he stressed the self-sufficient manorial organization as the foundation of the feudal system. Agriculture and cottage industries constituted the primary economic activity in such a society and labor devolved upon the shoulders of peasants attached to the manor, in other words, the serfs. The owners of property were those who also monopolized the

[42] T'ao, Ko-ming li-lun ti chi-ch'u chih-shih (Basic Knowledge of Revolutionary Theory) (Shanghai, 1930), p. 49.

[43] T'ao, Feng-chien she-hui , pp. 16–20. Also see Chung-kuo she-hui yu Chungkuo ko-ming, pp. 120–121.

functions of government, the feudal lords who were organized in a hierarchical structure of power. The latter, a feature peculiar to feudalism, also accounted for the decentralization of power under the feudal system. T'ao emphasized repeatedly the concentration of economic and political power in the same group in society as a feature of feudalism. These economic, social, and political characteristics, he believed, characterized both medieval European and early Chou society.

The Chou system was in disarray by the Spring-Autumn period, due to the advance of production, which created population pressures on the system and at the same time contributed to the rise of trade. During the Western Chou period there had been only slight changes in productive techniques but, with the use of iron from the Spring-Autumn period, deep plowing came into practice and increased efficiency and productivity, resulting in a surplus population both among the serfs and among the nobility.^[44] The more important technical improvement that undermined feudal organization was the application of irrigation to agriculture. Irrigation systems required the concentration of labor and a precise demarcation of field boundaries that conflicted with the loosely structured manorial organization; at the same time, the scale of organization required led to increasing consolidation of power in the central government. "The spread of irrigation," according to T'ao, "was one of the decisive causes of the overthrow of the feudal system."^[45] The need for greater organization and the pressure of population increase generated strife over land, within and between the states, which eventually destroyed the nobility, liberated serfs, and facilitated the concentration of land in the hands of a new group of landlords: "According to what we have narrated above, we can see the disintegration of the manor. The nobles were trans-

[44] Chung-kuo she-hui yu Chung-kuo ko-ming , p. 23.

[45] Fang Yueh, "Feng-chien chih-tu chih hsiao-mieh" (The Demise of the Feudal System), HSM , 2.3, 4, 5, (March-May 1929). This is in part 3, p. 4. It is difficult to say if T'ao's stress on irrigation was original with him. Radek referred to the problem of irrigation in his book. T'ao was also familiar at this time with Wittfogel's ideas from a translation in HSM ; see "Chung-kuo chieh-chi chih shih ti k'ao-ch'a" (Historical Examination of Classes in China), HSM , 2.8 (August 1929).

formed into landlords and landless rovers. Serfs were transformed into free peasants, slaves, tenants, and laborers. The knights [shih ] became landlords or lost their employment. Feudal rent changed into state tax and land rent. Land rights went to landlords, governing rights to the states."^[46]

The most conspicuous evidence of these changes was the rise of urban centers. As commerce advanced, cities expanded and began to dominate the countryside. Commerce had existed in China from the earliest times but it had been negligible in volume. Most of the population of early Chou lived in a natural economy where trade was restricted to the provision of luxury items for the nobility or exchange in surplus articles left over after consumption. The rise of production and improved communications resulted in a greater volume of trade, which in turn intensified the disintegration of the system through the spread of money economy. This, above all, adversely affected the independent producers, thereby aggravating the displacement of the surplus population already underway in rural China. This surplus now flowed into the cities, providing the labor force for the new industries emerging under the impact of commerce; conversely, capital flowed into the countryside, transforming property relations: Land became subject to the new market economy and was transmuted into a commodity.^[47]

Changes in property relations transformed the social and political structure of early Chou. The particular direction the changes took, however, aborted the fulfillment of the revolution they had promised. These changes ultimately led to the fusion of capital with land: Merchants who accumulated capital purchased land while landlords marketed their surplus product, becoming merchants. At the same time both used their capital in usurious activities. As a result, by the end of the period, landlordism, trade, and usury had become indistinguishable.^[48] This phenomenon retarded the growth of a new progressive class by inhibiting the maturation of the nascent bourgeoisie

[46] T'ao, Feng-chien she-hui , pp. 24–33. Quotation on pp. 32–33.

[47] Ibid., p. 23.

[48] Fang, "Feng-chien chih-tu chih hsiao-mieh," part 1, p. 7.

into an independent class capable of asserting its economic and political dominance of society. The beneficiary of the consequent class ambiguity was the newly emerging political elite.

It was this issue of the separation of political from economic power at the end of Chou that divided the social historians, even though they agreed on the basic mechanism of change just outlined. T'ao concluded from his observations that the feudal system of early Chou had disappeared by the third century B.C. The overthrow of the feudal nobility in the economic sphere was paralleled by the entrance of a new group into the political vacuum left by the destruction of the nobles. This new group was composed of three major elements: the nobles who had lost their positions, the shih who had been the independent "warrior farmers" of the feudal period, and commoners who had benefited from upward mobility. Together they constituted a group that engaged in a number of intellectual and political activities, becoming social and political theorists as well as retainers of large families and bureaucrats of the new states — a sort of floating intelligentsia that moved where fortune drove them. They were economically nonproductive and had little uniformity (as witness the different ideologies that they produced) except in the common characteristic of "parasitic" existence. They were not landlords themselves, but since land was their source of revenue, their interests coincided with those of landowners.

The social structure that assumed its final form in the imperial period manifested feudal features but was not a feudal system as such.^[49] In the economic basis of society the new landlord-merchant-usurer group dominated the primary source of wealth, land, which was now a commodity unlike its prior status under the feudal system when it had been allocated according to political criteria. In the political superstructure, those governing the country were not an economic but an educational-political elite, the shih-tai-fu who, in a manner of speaking, had one foot in landownership and another in the

[49] T'ao cited the power of the ruling class, the gentry, the military, tsung-fa , and Confucian thought as manifestations of feudal characteristics that had persisted.

state bureaucracy as a "status" (shen-fen ) group that intermediated between the economic elite and the state. The landlords and the gentry constantly encroached upon each other's spheres but their interests, though coincidental, were not identical. The function of the gentry that T'ao emphasized implied the "dual role" for the gentry that some recent studies have argued for: That is, while in the bureaucracy, the gentry represented state interests; once out of office, they gravitated to the defense of local power against central government interference.^[50] The emergence of this group abolished one central feature of feudalism — the concentration of economic and political power in the same group in society. Hence T'ao's celebrated, and to his opponents, notorious, statement on imperial Chinese society: "The feudal system has disappeared, feudal forces remain."^[51]

Whatever the resemblance in other areas, this view distinguished T'ao's analysis from that of Radek and his other rivals in the controversy. Radek had also noted the confusion of classes in imperial Chinese society; he insisted nevertheless on the class basis of the state which owed its foundation to the bourgeois-landlord economic stratum in which the bourgeoisie was the superior factor — "as must happen everytime there is such an alliance."^[52] T'ao separated political from economic power and regarded the former as an independent element that was above classes. By his own admission, he owed this distinction to Franz Oppenheimer, whose The State he translated into Chinese about this time and whose views he described as corresponding very closely to his own.^[53] Oppenheimer criticized Marx (whom he otherwise admired) for having confused the distinction between political and economic means to power. He himself took the "economic impulse" as the "principal force" of development but distinguished the means used to achieve economic ends: "Economic means" were the use of "one's

[50] As examples of this view, see Chang Chung-li, The Chinese Gentry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955), and Franz Michael, The Taiping Rebellion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), especially pp. 1–20.

[51] Fen-hsi , p. 26.

[52] Radek, Chung-kuo Li-shih ehih Li-lun ti fen-hsi, pp. 63–64.

[53] See Ch'ao-liu yu kien-ti (CLTT), p. 111.

own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's labor for the use of others," while "political means" represented the "unrequited appropriation of the labor of others" for the satisfaction of needs that were still basically economic.^[54] The foremost example of the latter was the domination of land by private interests, which found its best expression in the feudal system. This distinction dominated T'ao's analyses from the beginning. The gentry, according to T'ao, used political means to extract for themselves the benefits of the labor of others (hence their "parasitic" nature), retaining, therefore, a highly feudal trait even though they occupied a position in social and political organization that was vastly different from that of their predecessors in power.^[55] At one point he even suggested that while the gentry did not resemble the feudal lords in their surface appearance, the distinction was a moot one in terms of their respective relationships to the peasantry.^[56]

T'ao finally returned to the question that had provided the starting point of his historical inquiry and underlay all of his historical analysis: If feudalism had disintegrated in Chinese society, how was it that China had not progressed to the next step of development, capitalism, and instead had remained suspended in a transitional state for two thousand years? He offered a mixture of economic and political factors to explain China's historical failure.

In the economic sphere, T'ao discovered the answer in the general features of commercial capital: Commercial capital was destructive of the natural economy of feudalism but was incapable on its own of establishing a new mode of production; in the case of China, the very operation of commerce had been an important element in stunting economic growth. Taking his cue from Marx, T'ao argued that the "independent development" of commercial capital (that is, divorced from production) obstructed the development of productive forces by diverting surplus capital to unproductive uses.^[57] Since the overall back-

[54] Oppenheimer, The State , p. 25.

[55] Fen-hsi , p. 67.

[56] Ibid., p. 38.

[57] Ibid., p 46.

wardness of the Chinese economy and the poverty of the peasantry impeded the maturation of commerce into a force capable of fusing the various regions into an organically integrated national market governed by a network of urban centers, commerce (and cities) were themselves condemned to play a negative role as parasitic exploiters of the countryside. In the absence of a high internal demand for commodities or foreign economic intercourse of any significance, merchants had little motivation to invest in manufactures and restricted their operations to the limited but profitable trade between regional markets; hence, rather than serving to stimulate the specialization of production which in Europe had given birth to industrial capitalism, commerce in China remained attached to interregional specialization. Merchants, who served as go-betweens among regions or between cities and villages, led a parasitic existence, exploiting the producers and consequently threatening social stability. Commercial capital (in the synthetic combination of merchant's capital and usury) impoverished the peasantry and, even more seriously, undercut agrarian livelihood by encroaching upon land. Since commerce was marginal to the economy, merchants never acquired sufficient power to demand the establishment of an economic environment conducive to the conduct of business or even to defend their interests or wealth against arbitrary confiscation by the political elite. In response, they resorted to investing in land to guarantee and perpetuate their financial security, thereby causing the periodic concentration of land. Land concentration not only deprived large numbers of peasants of their livelihood, stirring unrest in the country; it also ate into government revenues as landlords exploited their legal and illegal privileges to take their hands off the tax rolls. When the state was in the greatest need of revenue in the face of increasing social instability, therefore, it found itself to be without the financial means necessary to exert its control over society.

T'ao discerned in this process the dynamics of the chronic disintegration of political power in Chinese history as manifested in dynastic changes. Peasant rebellions and the recurrent nomadic invasions, both of which became acutely threatening at

such times, resulted in the change of dynasties; given the persistence of the basic economic features of Chinese society, however, such changes remained superficial in their effects on the social-political structure. Moreover, he pointed out, as the economy retained its insular structure, the potential for the reemergence of feudalism was never totally eliminated; China, in fact, had reverted back to a feudal state on a number of occasions (such as during the Period of Disunity, third to sixth centures, A.D. ) when the nomadic herders of the north had invaded the country.^[58]

If commerce and the economy in general did not generate the requisite forces to transform Chinese society, it is clear from T'ao's argument that the political and ideological superstructure of society constituted the greatest obstacle to the realization of the potential suggested by the rise of a commercial economy. The subsistence of the political and military leadership depended on the exploitation of peasant labor, for which they competed with the central government. Hence the shih-tai-fu not only idealized peasant society but also actively sought to suppress the merchants and trade whenever it flourished (as during the Han and again during the Sung dynasties). This anticommercial attitude, which found its expression in Confucian political philosophy, was one of the important "feudal forces" that persisted in the empire.^[59] So was the patriarchal tsung-fa, which reaffirmed the centrality of family power and discouraged individual initiative in order to secure social stability. These forces proved so resilient that even in contemporary China they retained sufficient power to hinder the development of Chinese society, albeit in fusion with new forces. As T'ao summed it up in one of his essays, "Combining what we said above, the agricultural and handicraft economy of China, as well as the products of such an economy such as poor communications, unreliability of the money supply (literally shortage and overabundance), the exploitation [of the peasants] by

[58] "Chung-kuo feng-chien chih-tu chih hsiao-mieh," part 2, pp. 1–10. For these views, which are spread throughout T'ao's work, also see the references in the last chapter.

[59] Fen-hsi , p. 260.

landlords and usurers, the centrifugal activities of officials and militarists all combined to prevent the development of capitalism in China. China, all the way to the Ch'ing, remained a feudal society and its politics remained that of a military feudal state."^[60]

T'ao, then, saw the economic changes in the late Chou period as catalysts to a significant transformation of the social and political structure of Chinese society. In this new structure, economic power remained largely separated from political, a position that created difficulties in light of the Marxist commitments of the author and his opponents. This dichotomy, combined with the inability to find a Marxist category in which to fit the new society, resulted in the rather unfortunate description of a major portion of Chinese history as transitional. In the case of T'ao's own explanation of the problem, his dilemma was conspicuous in his inability to avoid reverting back to the description of China as feudal notwithstanding his rejection of the persistence of the feudal system and, equally significantly, in his apparent inability to determine whether or not the gentry constituted a class or a status group. This confusion, which is reminiscent of the confusion among the Chung-kuo nung-min authors referred to in the last chapter, led to serious criticism of T'ao's theoretical and analytical premises by his opponents.

T'ao's critics focused on his use of sociological concepts in their polemics against his views. Marxists who held more radical views on the problems of the Chinese revolution were quick to perceive the political implications of T'ao's arguments and, conversely, to attack his historical interpretations on the basis of his reliance on "bourgeois" sociologists such as Franz Oppenheimer, which, they claimed, led him to reject the central Marxist premise of the class basis of politics.^[61] Li Chi blamed the shortcomings of T'ao's interpretations on his restricted familiarity with Marx's writings; T'ao's lack of confidence on this score, he averted, was evident in his stubborn refusal to give

[60] Ibid., p. 136.

[61] Tu Wei-chih, "Ku-tai Chung-kuo yen-chiu p'i-p'an yin-lun" (Preface to the Critique of Research on Chinese Antiquity), TSTC, 2.2–3:58; also see Chang Heng, "P'ing T'ao Hsi-sheng ti li-shih fang-fa lun," TSTC , 2.2–3:5–6.

up certain historical concepts in spite of the inconsistencies such rigidity created in his argumentation.^[62] These inconsistencies, which other authors noted as well, related to T'ao's use of the concept of feudalism and his approach to the question of classes in imperial Chinese society. Li Chi pointed out that in spite of all his protestations to the contrary, T'ao believed imperial China to be a feudal society in its essence since he held that "feudal forces" had determined the course of Chinese history; the spurious distinction between the feudal system and feudal forces only betrayed T'ao's reluctance to recognize the changes in late Chou society for what they were — the disappearance of feudalism in China.^[63] Li was even more vehement in his criticism of T'ao's confusion of rank, status, and class in social analysis. Combing through T'ao's writings, he counted thirty-four instances where T'ao used the term class to refer variously to landlords, gentry, nobility, intellectuals, urban residents, and a number of other groups that were not at all defined by their economic position in society. With such confusion, Li pointed out, it was not difficult for T'ao to mistake the disappearance of social and political ranks in Chou for the elimination of the class basis of politics.^[64]

Li criticized T'ao from a standpoint which rejected altogether the survival of feudal traces in imperial China. The defendants of the feudal view approached T'ao's interpretations from the opposite perspective, accusing T'ao of formalism in his treatment of the problem of social change; T'ao's analysis, they complained, concentrated on the form of social and political organization to the point where he overlooked basic economic relations.^[65] The most extensive arguments in favor of the persistence of feudalism in imperial China were advanced by Chu P'ei-wo, who included many of his own views in his

[62] Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.7–8:49–53.

[63] Ibid., pp. 4–5.

[64] Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," in TSTC, 3.3–4:1–34.

[65] Tanaka Tadao, "Chung-kuo she-hui wen-t'i shih yen-chiu shang chih ji-ko li-lun wen-t'i" (Some Theoretical Questions Relevant to Research in Chinese Social History), TSTC, 2.2–3:10–13. Tanaka accused T'ao of stressing political relations or the form of labor or exploitation (serfdom and rent-in-kind respectively) rather than the nature of the relationship between property owners and labor, that is, dependency under feudalism and the market under capitalism.

prolonged polemics against T'ao's interpretations. Chu's theoretical rejection of a significant role for commercial capital in the dynamics of Chinese history was based on the same section in Marx (quoted here) employed by T'ao. Chu argued that commercial capital was powerless in the creation of a new society which depended on changes in the mode of production; T'ao was really suggesting, he pointed out, that the opposite was true even if he tried to cover his real position by calling the new society transitional. Chu conceded the undeniable existence of commercial capital in traditional Chinese society but minimized its disintegrative power: Commercial capital had existed in China and had even infiltrated the village economy, but its disintegrative effects had worked so slowly that at the end of two thousand years of disintegration, China had still not experienced the transformation of its feudal basis.^[66] Besides, Chu contended, commercial capital was itself not a mode of production but assumed the features of the social formation within which it functioned. The presence of commerce in feudal society did not signify change in that society, rather commercial capital in feudal society served the feudal mode of production, intensifying feudal exploitation.^[67]

Second, Chu denied that the changes in the pattern of landownership and political superstructure added up to a transformation of feudal society since neither of these signified a change in the mode of production and exploitation.^[68] Land may have changed hands, but neither the method by which it was worked nor the exploitation of the peasant by the landlord had changed. As for the separation of political from economic power, this was illusory because the officialdom which had replaced the nobility could hardly be distinguished from landlord interests.

At the basis of these arguments lay a definition of feudalism Chu derived from Marx. Feudalism as he interpreted it had two

[66] Chu Ch'i-hua, pseud. Chu P'ei-wo, Chung-kuo she-hui ti ching-chi chieh-kou (The Economic Structure of Chinese Society) (Shanghai, 1932), pp. 295–296.

[67] Chu Hsin-fan, pseud. Chu P'ei-wo, "Kuan-yu Chung-kuo she-hui chih fengchien hsing ti t'ao-lun" (Discussion of the Feudal Nature of Chinese Society), TSTC, 1.4–5 (August 1931):14–15.

[68] Chung-kuo she-hui ti ching-chi chieh-kou , p. 282.

essential features, a natural economy (self-sufficient, noncommodity) and the noneconomic (fei ching-chi ti ) or extraeconomic (ch'ao ching-chi ti ) exploitation of the peasant, with the latter foremost in his mind.^[69] In dealing with the relationship between Western Chou feudalism (which he did not elaborate on) and imperial China, two questions guided his inquiry: (1) Did the nominal owner of the land use noneconomic exploitation against the direct producers after the Warring States period? and (2) did natural economy remain dominant in the post-Ch'in period? The answer to the first of these disposed of the difference between the feudal lord of Western Chou and the landlord of imperial China; the answer to the second implied a rejection of any important role to commercial capital.

Evidence of noneconomic exploitation, according to Chu, were (1) high rents equalling 50 to 80 percent of the yield; (2) tribute obligations of the peasant to the lord; (3) coercive legal and political power of the landlord over the peasant; (4) status differences (hierarchical relations) between the two. With respect to land rent, Chu also took the persistence of rent-in-kind as further evidence of the persistence of feudal relations.^[70]

Primary evidence of the dominance of natural economy was to be found in the primitive development of a cash economy and the continued use of barter in trade.^[71] Ironically, using facts unearthed by T'ao Hsi-sheng, Chu argued that although the low development of a cash nexus did not mean the absence of trade, it demonstrated that trade was small in volume and restricted to commodities locally unavailable. Such trade was not capable of motivating the accumulation of capital and the improvement of production.

With land as the economic foundation of society, one would expect the dominance of landed interests in the political superstructure. Chu argued in support of this position that the suppression of merchants by the Chinese government and the primacy given to agriculture in government ideology were the

[69] Ibid., p, 277.

[70] Ibid., pp. 304–305.

[71] Ibid., p. 296.

most conspicuous manifestations of this power balance. The Chinese government did not emphasize agriculture out of altruism but only in order to perpetuate feudal exploitation of the peasants as its needs demanded.^[72] Aside from landlord control of the government, the feudal superstructure displayed two additional features, decentralization and hierarchy. The imperial government did not differ from the Chou state in these respects either. Centrifugal forces persisted into the Ch'ing period; Ch'ing governors and viceroys commanded such financial and political power over their localities that the authority of the emperor was only nominal. As for hierarchy, it continued intact, the only difference between the two periods being the change in the titles employed.^[73]

Chu regarded imperial Chinese society and the feudal state of Chou as essentially similar. Curiously enough, the key to China's nonemergence from feudalism in Chu's analysis was the stagnation of commerce, a factor he theoretically assumed to be of little consequence in social development. In Europe, capitalism had developed through the primitive accumulation of capital and the need to expand production in order to supply the foreign markets commerce opened up. The search for new markets itself was not accidental; the internal markets of European countries were limited and proved to be of insufficient scope with the advance of handicrafts, which produced a saleable surplus, and of exchange. China's "curse," on the other hand, had been her natural wealth! The various regions of the country had been largely self-sufficient, and the national market was capacious enough to absorb whatever trade there had been. A major motivation for improving the forces of production, the need for foreign markets, had been absent. Also, since the Chinese soil was rich, the peasants had been able to survive despite heavy exploitation; an unemployed labor force, the second condition for the growth of capitalism aside from capital, had never come into being.^[74] Characteristically, Chu could simultaneously reject the importance of commerce in China on

[72] Ibid., pp. 311–315.

[73] Ibid., pp. 309–310.

[74] Ibid., pp. 242–243.

general theoretical grounds and still use it as the central factor in explaining European development!

Chu justified his rejection of all significant change in Chinese history by a reductionist interpretation of Marxist ideas on feudalism. While it is true that certain statements of Marx and Engels encouraged the belief that natural economy and "extraeconomic" exploitation were defining characteristics of feudalism, a closer examination of the context of those statements reveals that the two criteria are not sufficient to define feudalism as a distinct historical category — at least not in the sense that Chu and other advocates of this view took them to be.

Marx's remarks on feudalism were scattered throughout his work within the context of his discussion of capitalist development.^[75] As such, they were not meant to define a universal social type but only to describe the process whereby European feudalism was transformed into European capitalism.^[76] These remarks, at the very most, express where he thought feudalism differed from capitalism within the European context; they are not exclusive enough to distinguish feudalism from other precapitalist formations. This ambiguity is apparent in what is apparently a definition of the feudal mode of production in the first volume of Capital :

Peasant agriculture on a small scale and the carrying on of independent handicrafts which together form the basis of the feudal mode of production and after the dissolution of the system continue side by side with the capitalist mode, and also form the economic foundation of the classical communities at their best after the primitive form of ownership of land in common has disappeared and before slavery has seized on production in earnest.^[77]

It is clear that even here Marx refers not to the feudal mode as such but to the basis which it shares with previous economic formations and which survives feudalism to exist "side by side" with the capitalist mode of production.

[75] This is true for his discussions in Capital and The German Ideology . Even in the Formen (Precapitalist Economic Formations), where Marx discusses social formations in detail, there is little that explains the feudal system as such.

[76] Schwartz, "A Marxist Controversy in China," p. 149.

[77] Quoted in ibid., p. 148.

Nevertheless, advocates of the feudal view in China ignored altogether the question of the mode of production (agriculture could hardly denote a mode of production in the technical sense) and stressed the natural economy and the form of exploitation as the characteristics of feudalism.^[78] The works of Engels and Bogdanov that were popular in China were possibly the sources for the idea that self-sufficiency was a feature of feudalism.^[79] Chu, like the Trotskyites discussed in Chapter 3, resorted to Engels to back up this criterion. The same point was magnified even more in Bogdanov's periodization, where feudalism was placed in self-sufficient society before the rise of commerce. Bogdanov's feudalism, however, had little to do with the European feudalism of the medieval period that Marx discussed. He distinguished feudalism from serfdom and placed it at the origins of history; slavery and serfdom in his scheme were the two routes whereby this primeval feudalism was transformed into capitalist society.

Engels's version is the more relevant in the present context. Self-sufficiency or the natural economy, according to Engels, meant that in feudal society production was geared to consumption, for the immediate use of the producer and his lord, rather than to the market. Within the Marxist framework, this amounts to a truism since the whole of Capital is devoted to the discussion of how the power of the market came to direct all economic activity with the rise of capitalism — that is, the conversion of production for use value into production for exchange value (the rise of a commodity economy, including the transformation of labor into a commodity).^[80] The important point for our purposes is that production for the market characterizes the capitalist economy alone; conversely, a low level of involvement in the market is a feature not only of feudal society but of all precapitalist societies, with the possible exception of slave society. It is clear that Marx in Capital and

[78] Li Li-san, for instance, consistently equated the "form of exploitation" (po-hsiao hsing-shih ) with the "mode of production" (sheng-ch'an fang-fa ), describing it as the foundation of society. See "Chung-kuo ko-ming ti ken-pen wen-t'i."

[79] See preceding paragraphs.

[80] The first volume of Capital is entirely devoted to this problem.

Engels in his later amplification of this point stressed the absence of commodity production in feudal society to contrast it to the capitalist economy, not to other social formations.^[81] When he discusses production for use, Marx in one paragraph refers to the feudal mode of production and in the very next one to the economic activities of the patriarchal family.^[82] The absence of production for exchange also characterized "ancient Asiatic and other modes of production" where commodities played a minor role in economic life.^[83] In short, when the advocates of the feudal view in China invoked these passages to prove that self-sufficiency was a criterion for judging feudalism, they were saying only that imperial China was not a capitalist society. The self-sufficiency argument certainly did not prove — in purely Marxist terms — that imperial China was feudal.

Possibly cognizant of this problem, Chu and others who held this view placed the greater weight on the relations of exploitation which, not incidentally, also lay at the heart of the antifeudal revolutionary analysis. Chu admitted the primacy of this criterion when he stated that to understand an economic system, "we must first examine the exploitative relations of that system."^[84] The feudal relationship of exploitation he described as that were "the nominal owner of the land, using noneconomic oppression, extorts the surplus labor of the independent producer." Chu and contemporary party documents invariably identified "noneconomic" or "extraeconomic" with the unduly harsh oppression of the peasant by the landlord. Harshness of exploitation, however, gives few clues to the nature of the social formation, and this particular interpretation of "extraeconomic" distorted the sense in which Marx employed the term.^[85] It is clear from the original context in Capital, which provided Chu with the statement on feudal exploitation quoted here, that Marx once again had in mind the contrast between

[81] It is clear that with respect to commodity production, slavery and capitalism are much closer to each other than either is to feudalism.

[82] Marx, Capital , vol. 1, pp. 77–78.

[83] Ibid., p. 79.

[84] Chu, Chung-kuo she-hui ti ching-chi chieh-kou , p. 277.

[85] Chu Hsin-fan, "Kuan-yu Chung-kuo she-hui chih feng-chien hsing ti t'ao-lun," TSTC , 1.4–5:5.

the exploitation of labor according to the mechanism of the market under capitalism and the exploitation of labor through other than purely economic means:

The direct producer, according to our assumption, is to be found here in possession of his own means of production, the necessary material labor conditions required for the realization of his labor and the production of his means of subsistence. . . . Under such conditions the surplus-labor for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from him by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be.^[86]

This passage simply distinguished the feudal serf from the proletariat who had only their labor to sell, for the serf at least retained the instruments of production necessary for his subsistence. Marx begins the passage with reference to the direct producer under feudalism — the serf — but in the course of the discussion he also applies the same characteristic to the "natural production community in India," where the exploitative relationship differed from that under feudalism only in that "in Asia" it was the state that was the supreme landlord so that land rent there appeared as land tax.^[87] As in the case of self-sufficiency, therefore, this second criterion defined not feudal society as such but characterized more than one precapitalist form.^[88] In this particular context, moreover, Marx's concern was not with the question of social formations but with the nature of labor rent as a form of ground rent. The point he stressed was that when the producer possessed the means of production (which he took to be the case in all societies except the slave and capitalist), "the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a relationship of lordship and servitude" in order for the nominal owner of the land to expropriate the surplus labor of the peasant.^[89] This constituted the content of extraeconomic coercion or extortion — meaning that it was some legal-political privilege that entitled the owner to the

[86] Capital , vol. 3, pp. 790–791.

[87] Ibid., p. 791.

[88] One finds this quite frequently in Marx. It is due to his primary emphasis on capitalism and the consequent tendency to lump together other social formations to bring features of capitalism into sharp focus.

[89] Capital , vol. 3, p. 790.

surplus rather than economic competition in the market which would constitute economic exploitation. This distinction obviously does not differ significantly from that drawn by Oppenheimer.

Chu justified his reductionism by dismissing all the politicallegal adjuncts of feudalism in Europe as mere superstructural trappings that had no bearing on the essential nature of the social formation. This "cavalier" attitude toward property relations, as Schwartz has remarked, was hardly warranted by Marxist theory where property relations were the "legal expression" of the relations of production which lay at the heart of economic-social organization, even though Marx himself was occasionally vague on the subject.^[90] I will take up this question of the relations among various aspects of society in Chapter 7. It is worth reiterating in this context, however, that those who claimed China to be feudal ignored all aspects of the social structure but the question of exploitation in an agrarian economy, which obviously does not suffice to distinguish social formations since through most of the historical period agriculture has provided the basis of economic existence and the degree and nature of exploitation has depended on a number of contingent factors that were not necessarily products of agriculture itself.^[91] "There is nothing in petty peasant production," Left has noted, "which of itself gives rise to the property relations of serf and lord."^[92] What distinguished feudal society from others founded upon an agrarian economy was the unique social organization that tied the peasant to the land as a serf dependent on the lord. The legal-political system of feudalism expressed and enforced this relationship. To reject all these relations as mere aspects of the superstructure resulted in an obscurantism that ruled out all change in Chinese history and

[90] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , tr. from 2nd German ed. by N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), preface.

[91] Maurice Dobb, in his Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1963), notes that in Europe the intrusion of capitalism even strengthened feudal practices, especially serfdom where population was sparse. See pp. 63–67.

[92] Left, The Tyranny of Concepts , p. 145.

eliminated all distinctions between Chinese society and other agrarian societies.

Feudalism, Commerce, and Social Change

The debate over feudal society involved two interrelated problems with theoretical implications: What was feudalism, and what were the dynamics of the transition from feudalism to capitalism? The protagonists in the debate accepted the validity of Marxist propositions with regard to these questions; the complexity of those propositions, on the other hand, afforded them some choice in the priority they assigned to the characteristics Marx and later Marxists had associated with feudal society and its evolution into capitalism.

The definition of feudalism was crucial to the whole debate because on it hinged the question of the placement of the feudal stage in Chinese history and, therefore, the question of China's historical development as a whole. T'ao Hsi-sheng's definition, which included legal-political criteria as well as economic ones in distinguishing feudal society from other social formations, led to the conclusion that feudalism as a system had disappeared in Chinese history with the establishment of imperial social-political organization; the definition employed by Chu P'ei-wo, by reducing feudalism to a "basic" mode of exploitation, obviated the need to take account of such institutional changes and enabled Chu to argue that feudalism had persisted throughout Chinese history.

The difference between the two positions, however, was not simply that the one emphasized the organizational "superstructure" and the other the economic basis; T'ao was able to account for the economic changes in Chinese history more successfully than Chu, who formalistically declared all economic changes inconsequential as long as they did not alter the "degree" of exploitation of the peasant by the owner of the

land.^[93] Although T'ao stressed the primary significance of the political component of feudalism, he did so not to downgrade the economic basis but to elucidate the role political power played in determining feudal property relations and exploitation, in the words of Oppenheimer, the use of "political means" to extract from the producers their surplus product. This position was not inconsistent with Marx's view on feudal property relations — contrary to that of his opponents who charged that T'ao overlooked the economic basis or that he interpreted Marx formalistically (in his emphasis on the form of rent and the manorial organization). Marx's analysis in the section on "ground rent" in Capital justifies the inference that when he wrote of the extortion of surplus labor from the peasantry by "other than economic pressure," he was referring to the use of political-legal and military means of exploitation. The example he used in his footnote to that particular statement specified military conquest as a route to such exploitation: "Following the conquest of a country, the immediate aim of a conqueror was to convert its people to his own use."^[94] In his most general statement on this type of exploitation, he remarked that political and economic relationships coincided indistinguishably under feudalism: "It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains the 'possessor' of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude , so that the direct producer is not free" [emphasis mine].^[95]

Engels was even more emphatic about the political-military nature of the feudal method of expropriating surplus labor from the peasantry; the conversion of the free peasant into the serf,

[93] Tanaka, who otherwise agreed with Chu's premises, accused Chu of "formalism" on this count, pointing out that it was the relationship of "dependency" (li-shu ), not the degree of exploitation, that identified feudal relations. Tanaka, "Chung-kuo she-hui wen-t'i shih yen-chiu shang chih ji-ko Li-lun wen-t'i," pp. 13–17.

[94] Capital , vol. 3, p. 791.

[95] Ibid., p. 709. As previously noted, Marx did not regard this relationship as an exclusive characteristic of feudalism but it did characterize feudal relations.

according to Engels, originated in military conquest, much in the same fashion in which Oppenheimer described the origins of the feudal state.^[96] Serfdom or the political-social relations of dependence were not, according to Marx and Engels, trivial appendages to the feudal mode of exploitation but the very conditions without which feudalism devolved into "small commodity production."^[97] T'ao's views, from this perspective, were much closer to those of Marx and Engels than those of his opponents who accused him of formalism.

These alternative views of feudalism conditioned the two protagonists' evaluation of the impact of commerce on Chinese society in the post-Chou period. To Chu P'ei-wo, who identified feudalism with harsh exploitation, commerce represented only one more factor that contributed to exacerbating feudal exploitation; T'ao, who viewed feudalism in more precise structural terms, saw in commerce a force that had transformed economicsocial relations and, therefore, marked the end of feudalism in China. It was here that the priority T'ao assigned to the political means of exploitation led him to downplay economic exploitation. T'ao's differentiation of imperial Chinese from early Chou society in terms of the devolution of political and economic power into different hands resulted in the denial of significance to class exploitation and struggle in Chinese history, in spite of the fact that he compromised his argument with ambiguous references to classes and "feudal forces." When he argued that the primary exploiters of society were the gentry, he was, in effect, claiming (as he did in the case of contemporary China) that the exploitation of the peasant by the landlord or the merchant was insignificant when compared to the exploitation of society as a whole by the state and its functionaries. This, in the eyes of his opponents, was what made T'ao's Marxist commitments tenuous. While it is true that Marx and Engels did not rule out the possibility of political power existing independently of and above classes, notably in transitional periods and,

[96] See Engels's essay in Socialism : Scientific and Utopian, pp. 77–93. Especially p. 87.

[97] Hobsbawm, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations , p. 42.

more importantly, in the notion of Asiatic society, the transitional periods in their case referred to temporary instances of social-political upheaval and Asiatic society comprised a special historical case.^[98] T'ao's transitional period, by contrast, covered two thousand years of history, and he was reluctant to acknowledge that there was anything "special" about Chinese society; T'ao, as Li Chi observed, regarded the imperial period as a continuation of the feudal period with the gentry substituting for feudal lords and with a partial commodity economy in place of the self-sufficient feudal economy.

Beyond the issue of political versus economic exploitation, however, T'ao's portrayal of the economic basis of imperial society bore a striking resemblance to that of the advocates of feudalism, which was attested to by Chu's ability to employ for his arguments the evidence that T'ao had adduced in favor of his analysis. Although T'ao distinguished the imperial from the feudal economy by the flourishing of commodities and exchange under the former, he was careful not to exaggerate his claims for economic change; he hedged his statements in this respect by observing that the commodity economy had never been able to abolish local self-sufficiency and that the resurgence of feudalism had remained a possibility throughout the period. What he did claim, however, was that "production for exchange" had come to exist side by side with "production for use" and, undermining the feudal economic system, had also overthrown feudal political and social relations.

The question of the nature of imperial Chinese society was bound up with the theoretical problem of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Regardless of all their differences, T'ao and Chu shared an important premise that shaped their view of imperial society: that the fall of feudalism must be accompanied by the emergence of capitalism. As this change had not occurred in China, they faced a common dilemma in explaining

[98] Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1967), chap. 7, especially pp. 121–122. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State , p. 168. Engels went even further when he suggested that even though the state represented classes, some measure of neutrality was necessary to prevent class struggle from consuming society. Ibid., p. 166.

the development of post-Chou society. Chu bypassed this dilemma by denying that any change of significance had occurred in the transition from Chou to the imperial period; T'ao, on the other hand, resorted to the idea of transitional society to cover the two-thousand-year gap between the feudal and the capitalist stages. The issue in both cases revolved around the role commerce had played in bringing about the change from feudalism to capitalism. It does not do, as Wang I-ch'ang did, to lay the burden for these questions on the heterodoxy of T'ao Hsi-sheng or of his alleged mentor, Bogdanov. As suggested here, T'ao followed Radek in introducing this concept to the analysis of Chinese society. Both authors, furthermore, could count on the blessings of no less an authority than Lenin who, in his only major analysis of Russian history, used commerce to explain the development of capitalism in Russia.

The question of the role of commerce in historical development is ultimately traceable to Marx's attempts to deal with the function of commerce in explaining the evolution of capitalism in Europe. Marx recognized the pervasiveness of commerce historically, but assigned to it different functions in different historical epochs. It is clear from chapter 20 of the third volume of Capital, which offers the most integrated discussion of this problem, that commerce (1) has existed since the beginning of mankind; (2) that it has a dissolving influence on self-sufficient society; (3) that its function changes according to the nature of the society within which it operates; (4) that it does not autonomously determine the new mode of production; and (5) that it is parasitic unless it serves industry, which is its function only in bourgeois society. Of these items, opponents of the view that China was feudal employed the second and the fifth, whereas its proponents used the first and the third to defend their position; both agreed on the validity of the fourth. The advocates of the feudal view also argued that Marx spoke only of "modes of production" and that commercial capital represented no mode; hence it was subsidiary to whatever mode prevailed at a given time (that is, commercial capital under feudalism represented a means of feudal exploitation while under capitalism it represented capitalist exploitation). Both of

these positions were defensible by resorting to the ambivalent attitude Marx himself adopted toward the role of commerce in different contexts of his work.

Beyond his recognition of the disintegrative effects of commerce on self-sufficient society, Marx made a further distinction between different forms of trade that was pertinent specifically to the emergency of capitalism out of feudal society. In The German Ideology, he distinguished commerce confined within a small area from commerce extending over large territories; the former remained negative and parasitic in its effects but the latter played a crucial role in historical development:

It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the productive forces achieved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for later development or not. As long as there exists no commerce transcending the immediate neighborhood, every invention must be made separately in each locality, and mere chances such as irruptions of barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are sufficient to cause a country with advanced productive forces and needs to have to start right over again from the beginning. . . . Only when commerce has become world-commerce and has as its basis big industry, when all nations are drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces assured.^[99]

In another context, Marx was even more explicit in the instrumental role he assigned to commerce:

There is no doubt — and it is precisely this fact which has led to wholly erroneous conceptions — that in the 16th and 17th centuries the great revolutions, which took place in commerce with geographic discoveries and speeded the development of merchant's capital, constitute one of the principal elements in furthering the transition from feudal to the capitalist mode of production.^[100]

Chu and T'ao agreed that commerce in China had never expanded to a volume comparable to that in early modern Europe. To Chu, this was reason enough to discount the transforming significance of commerce altogether; T'ao, on the other hand, argued that even small-scale commerce had been powerful enough to disrupt the feudal system although he conceded,

[99] K. Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 49.

[100] Capital , vol. 3, p. 332.

much as Marx did in his statement on localized commerce, that such commerce had not been capable of revolutionizing the forces of production and setting Chinese society on an irreversible course to capitalism.

The issue of the role of commerce in historical development is one of the most problematic aspects of Marxist social theory.^[101] If, as the Chinese Marxists suggested, the maturation of capitalism in Europe had been a consequence of the flourishing of international commerce, which in turn had been contingent on favorable environmental circumstances, then it could no longer be argued that capitalism was a necessary, universal stage of historical development. Furthermore, unless it could be demonstrated that large-scale commerce was a necessary consequence of the peculiarities of feudal socioeconomic structure, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that factors extraneous to the prevailing mode of production had affected a momentous change in history, a conclusion that subverts a commonly held materialistic premise that contradictions inherent in socioeconomic structure provide the sole motive force of history. The analysis of imperial Chinese society pointed to some of these questions but Chinese Marxists, rather inflexibly committed to certain schematic notions of Marxism, refused to draw the obvious conclusions. Chu, even though he recognized the importance of environmental factors when he attributed the emergence of capitalism in Europe to commerce which grew out of Europe's need to obtain commodities from the outside, insisted on the primacy of the mode of production when he dismissed the significance of commerce in China. T'ao was more willing to allow factors external to the mode of production a greater influence in shaping historical development but proved reluctant to face the conclusion that the divergence between Chinese and European historical development pointed to — the diversity of historical development.

The two interpretations of imperial Chinese society, therefore, differed on two general issues: the universality of class oppression and conflict in history, and the relative importance

[101] See Chapter 7, this volume.

of factors internal and external to the mode and relations of production in determining historical development. T'ao denied the importance of class conflict in Chinese history and emphasized, or at least conceded, the significance of external factors in China's historical development. Chu, whose position was more consistent with "orthodox" Marxist views on these questions, insisted that the mode and relations of production bore the sole responsibility for historical development and affirmed the prevalence of class oppression in China's past. It was not accidental that these two interpretations of Chinese history corresponded to the analyses of contemporary Chinese society by the two authors and the larger groupings they represented. Those who believed that China required a social revolution because class oppression impoverished the people and obstructed development sought to justify the revolutionary strategy they advocated by discovering in the past the root of the very conditions that they claimed existed in the present. T'ao and other Hsin sheng-ming writers, who opposed class struggle and gave priority to political revolution, rationalized their position by arguing, much as the first KMT Marxists had done in the early twenties, that not class conflict but political oppression had characterized post-Chou Chinese history. These arguments supported the alternative revolutionary strategies, but they also displayed certain important theoretical and interpretive inconsistencies in the treatment of Chinese history which instigated still other attempts to resolve the question of China's historical development in the next round of controversy.

One of the major weaknesses of the controversy in its first few years was the uncritical reliance on traditional materials. The picture T'ao evolved of early Chou feudalism was derived from materials dating back to the late Chou dynasty, many of which had been rendered suspect by modern textual studies. The next important step in the development of Marxist historiography was the publication in 1930 of Kuo Mo-jo's research which, utilizing a new set of materials, offered a picture of early Chinese society that differed radically from all previous interpretations and raised questions which deepened the Marxist examination of Chinese history.