5—
Kuo Mo-jo and Slavery in Chinese History

The discussions over feudalism outlined in the preceding chapter had a direct bearing on the problem of change in contemporary China. Even where they restricted their analyses to early Chinese history, the protagonists in these discussions viewed the past through the prism of the present. As the debates proceeded into the thirties, there was a noticeable shift in their content toward greater emphasis on the past. Marxist historians continued to insist that the need to understand the present remained the most urgent goal of historical analysis. Nevertheless, the past came to hold a place in its own right in the discussions, and by the middle of the decade when memories of 1927 had faded away, interest in the past overshadowed concern with the present in Marxist historical writing.

No single work contributed more to stimulating interest in early Chinese history than Kuo Mo-jo's Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu (Research on Ancient Chinese Society). Kuo's portrayal of late Yin-early Chou society (circa 1000 B.C. ) as a slave society comparable to Greek and Roman societies in the West matched in its seminal status in Marxist historiography T'ao Hsi-sheng's provocative analyses of the nature of imperial society. Kuo's studies were first published as articles in 1928–1929, but it was not until they were compiled and published in book form in March 1930 that they made a serious impression on the discussions. The book sold out immediately and went through three printings in as many months. By fall 1931 there were seven thousand copies in print. Moreover, its audience extended beyond the circle of Marxist historians. Ku

Chieh-kang, who had little personal or ideological reason to exaggerate the significance of Kuo's contribution, observed in his 1947 survey of modern Chinese historiography that the Research had for the first time "delineated the contours of the true visage of ancient society."^[1] Kuo's interpretation provoked prolonged debates over ancient history in and outside of China throughout the thirties.^[2] Some of the issues he raised at the time continue to enliven contemporary Chinese historiography, with his active participation.^[3]

It is possible that the response the Research generated was at least partially due to Kuo's stature as a writer. In spite of his protestations about the contemporary relevance of historical study,^[4] Kuo's book lacked immediate political implications, in contrast to T'ao Hsi-sheng's analyses of Chinese society. Kuo himself did not encourage controversy; the polemical tone that pervaded much of the Marxist historical writing at this time was absent from his works, and even the view that Chinese society had gone through the stage of slavery found more vocal champions in the thirties. On the other hand, as a major figure of the Chinese literary scene in the 1920s, Kuo was the only Marxist historian who enjoyed a reputation that predated the debates. His literary experience, moreover, stood him in good stead both in the type of research he conducted — which included deciphering and analysis of archaic materials — and in the effectiveness with which he presented his arguments. The prosaic and tedious bickering that detracted from the effectiveness of many of the Marxist analyses at this time gave way in his writings to a warm and sensitive tone which endowed his work with a living quality. Occasionally, as in his analysis of the Shih Ching or his study of Ch'u Yuan, his writing left a striking impression of

[1] Ku Chieh-kang, Tang-tai Chung-kuo shih-hsueh (Contemporary Chinese Historiography) (Hong Kong, 1964; first published, 1947), p. 100.

[2] Ho Kan-Chih, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan, part 2.

[3] See the discussion of Kuo Mo-jo's role in the recent anti-Confucian campaign in Peter Moody, "The Anti-Confucian Campaign in China — The First Round," Asian Survey 14.4:307–324. Also see Kuo's article, "Chung-kuo ku-tai fen-ch'i wen-t'i," Hung Ch'i (Red Flag), 7 (July 1, 1972):56–62.

[4] Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu (hereafter, Research ) (Shanghai, 1930 ), preface.

communion between author and subject across the centuries. Not all appreciated his dramatic style, of course, and one of his critics was inspired to observe sarcastically that Kuo derived his theories from "songs of flowers and the moon."^[5]

Beyond his literary reputation and abilities, however, two features of Kuo's work deserve credit for the influence he exerted on Chinese historiography. One was his innovative use of historical sources. Kuo was the first author in the discussions to make use of evidence on ancient society unearthed by recent archeological discoveries. In fact, the lasting value of his work resided in his skillful deciphering of oracle bone and bronze inscriptions. His rigid commitment to Marxist categories occasionally led to tendentious interpretations of these materials; otherwise, it provided him with insights that illuminated the meaning of ancient inscriptions.^[6]

More significantly for Marxist historiography in particular, Kuo's views on ancient society raised certain important questions about the Marxist periodization of Chinese history. The discussions on feudalism had questioned the relevance of Marxist social formations to Chinese history. Until the appearance of the Research , however, Marxist historians had restricted their queries by and large to the question of whether or not capitalism had made inroads in Chinese society comparable to its progress in modern Europe. Kuo's was the first significant effort to extend the analogy with European development over the whole of Chinese history. Kuo cast his analysis of the origins of Chinese civilization within a scheme of periodization he derived from the list of social formations Marx had enumerated in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as the four "progressive epochs" in historical development: Asiatic, ancient, medieval, and modern bourgeois modes of production. The assumption of universal validity for this scheme was integral to Kuo's justification of his analysis of

[5] Hu Ch'ieh, "Chung-kuo she-hui chih li-shih ti fa-chan chieh-tuan" (Stages in the Historical Development of Chinese Society), Kuang-ming chih lu (The Road to Enlightenment), 1.7, 8 (1931).

[6] Ma-po-lo (H. Maspero), "P'ing Kuo Mo-jo chin chu liang chung" (Critique of Two Recent Works by Kuo Mo-jo), Wen-hsueh nien-pao (Literature Yearly), April 1936, pp. 61–71.

early Chinese history; conversely, objections to his discovery of slave society in early China raised questions by implication about the status of slavery in the Marxist periodization of history and threw doubts on the universality of the scheme of progress Marx had offered in the Critique . The emergence of the debates over slavery coincided with the issue of "Asiatic society" which filtered through to China at this time from contemporaneous debates in the Soviet Union. These two issues combined to transform the hitherto peripheral interest in the general problem of periodization into a central concern of Marxist historiography in the thirties.

Although the post Western-Chou period received little attention from Kuo at this time, it is worth discussing his overall periodization of Chinese history briefly, not only to place his analysis of early society in perspective but also to elucidate its seminal role in the controversy in the thirties and in later Chinese Marxist historiography. Kuo's transplantation of Marxist categories into Chinese history seems crude and mechanical in retrospect when compared to the more flexible adaptations of Marxism achieved by some of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, the scheme which he popularized achieved the status of orthodoxy by the late thirties and has presided over Chinese Marxist historiography since then.

Kuo's Periodization of Chinese History

Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu was thoroughly infused by Engels's ideas on historical development as presented in The Origin of the Family, the State, and Private Property (1884) and, through Engels, Lewis H. Morgan's categorization and periodization of primitive societies in his Ancient Society (1877).^[7] Kuo imprudently acknowledged his own research to be the continuation in Chinese history of Engels's work on early soci-

[7] References here are to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960) and Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1907). The two books were published in 1884 and 1877 respectively.

ety, evoking considerable sarcasm among his opponents, who readily responded with facetious jibes at "China's Engels." He followed the suit of his intellectual mentors, especially Morgan, in restricting his research almost exclusively to the early period of Chinese history when Chinese society had first emerged into civilization. Marx's own works played no significant role in his analysis beyond the periodization he offered in the introductory chapter.

Kuo's periodization synthesized the social formations Marx had identified in the Critique with the technological view of progress that figured prominently in the analyses of Morgan and Engels. It is important to note in evaluating Kuo's approach to the problem of historical development that while he eagerly accepted Marx's social formations as stages in a universal scheme of development, he ignored altogether Marx's formulation of the dynamics of historical progress in terms of the periodic contradiction between the mode and the relations of production. Technological innovation appeared in his work as the unilateral motive force of historical evolution. In his own words, "the development of the economy of mankind [was] premised on the development of tools."^[8] It is almost certain that Kuo acquired this view of historical dynamics from Morgan and Engels, but he outdid both of those authors in endowing technology with a causative significance. Morgan and Engels had been content to indicate a correspondence between technological and social change without deliberating on causation. Morgan considered it "probable that the successive arts of subsistence [that is, technological accretions to the means of securing livelihood] which arose at long intervals will ultimately, from the great influence they must have exercised upon the condition of mankind, afford the most satisfactory bases for the division [of social evolution]." But, he admitted, "investigation has not been carried far enough in this direction to yield the necessary information." He added further that "it is difficult if not impossible, to find such tests of progress to mark the commencement of these several periods as will be found absolute in

[8] Research, p. 176.

their application, and without exceptions upon all the continents."^[9]

It must be remembered, moreover, that all of the periods Morgan referred to belonged in the primitive, precivilized phase of historical development, when the impact of technological innovation on society appeared to be more pronounced than in later times as increasing social complexity introduced other sources of historical dynamics. This may also account for Engels's ready acceptance of the primary significance of technology as a motive force of development. The "precivilized" phase of society corresponded to the stage of primitive communism in Marxist periodization which, as both Marx and Engels agreed, was the classless phase of history. Rightly or wrongly, it was possible to deduce from this premise that the forces of production eclipsed the relations of production as the motive force of social progress at a time when humanity existed in a precarious relationship with nature and the ability to cope with the problem of physical survival rendered social conflict trivial by comparison as a datum of history. This position characterized historical materialists such as Bukharin, who stated explicitly that different criteria should be employed in explaining social development in the primitive and civilized stages of history.^[10]

In the case of Kuo, however, the causative role technology played in history was not restricted to primitive society but was extended over the whole historical period. Kuo employed social structure to distinguish the various stages of Chinese history, but he ignored it when it came to questions of historical dynamics and placed his emphasis exclusively on technology. Accordingly, he correlated the social formations he derived from the Critique with technological innovations. He associated stone tools with the stage of primitive communism (or Asiatic society), which in China corresponded to the period before the Chou dynasty.^[11] The discovery of metals — with iron as the turning point — had led to the emergence of slavery around the time of the Chou conquest of Shang. He was less clear about the

[9] Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 9.

[10] Bukharin, Historical Materialism, chap. 5.

[11] Research, p. 176.

technological innovation that accounted for the transition from slavery to feudalism and ascribed it to advances in the technique of iron-smelting.^[12] In the case of capitalism, he resorted to the authority of a statement Marx had made in the Poverty of Philosophy : "The handmill [in other translations, the wind-milli gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."^[13] Capitalism, Kuo concluded from this statement, originates with the use of the steam engine; China had never made the transition from feudalism to capitalism because the Chinese had failed to discover the steam engine.^[14] Similarly, Kuo cited a casual remark Marx had thrown out on seeing an electric locomotive in a Regent Street exhibition to infer that electric power heralded the age of socialism.^[15]

Kuo described the various stages in terms of the prevalent modes of subsistence and the dominant social relations.^[16] In the primitive communist stage, production was based on the use of stone and, later, copper (t'ung ) instruments. The basic mode of subsistence was hunting and fishing with some domestication of animals. Socially, the characteristic organization was the matrilineal gens.

Primitive society was transformed into slave society with the discovery of iron, which marked the commencement of fullscale agriculture based on slave labor. This stage constituted a revolutionary turning point in human history. For one thing, the agrarian economy and increasing commercial intercourse necessitated the division of labor (handicrafts-agriculture and urban-rural) which led to the emergence of classes, private property, and the state. The gens organization persisted as the collective owner of property, which now included the class of

[12] Ibid., p. 6.

[13] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 109.

[14] Research , p. 21. The assumption, of course, was not quite valid. The Chinese were aware of steam power, if not the steam engine, very early in history. See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Taiwan reprint of Cambridge University Press 1954 ed.), vol. 4, part 1, p. 70.

[15] Research, p. 7. For Marx's comment, see Martin Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 9.

[16] For the scheme discussed here, see the introductory chapter to the Research .

slaves, but politically it was subjected to the power of the state. Second, the agrarian-herding economy altered the relationship between the sexes; their function in the new economy enhanced the status of males in society and enabled them to subject women to their power within the clan organization.

Feudalism, the third stage of development, followed upon advances in iron technology and, therefore, productive power. As previously noted the technological change which was responsible for the emergence of feudalism did not mark as clear a break with the past as in the case of the other formations. Likewise, Kuo minimized the distinction between the slave and the feudal social organizations:

There is definitely not much difference between society under the feudal system and society under the slave system. The slave system grew out of gens society and retained many features of consanguity; the feudal system, on the other hand, was. [essentially] a slave system shaped by greater regionalism [literally, "containing an abundance of regionalism"]. Peasants contra landlords, apprentices contra masters within the guild system, officials and peasants contra feudal lords in administration all represented no other than metamorphosed slaves [pien-hsiang ti nu-li ].^[17]

This distinction was widened a few years later, either because Kuo had a deeper understanding of the categories by that time or because, as we shall see, he revised some of his views on the technological dividing line between slavery and feudalism: "In the new conception, the feudal system is based upon the relationship between landlord and serf [nung-nu ]. The differences between serf and slave [nu-li ] are that the former is physically free while the latter is not, the former is at least a semi-person [pan-ko jen-ko ] while the latter is purely a means of production; the former emerges out of the latter." Nevertheless, possibly with those who rejected slavery as a historical stage in mind, he maintained the existence of a necessary relationship between the two systems: "If [society] did not go through the slave system following gens society, serfdom could not emerge."^[18]

[17] Ibid., p. 23.

[18] Kuo, "Ch'u Yuan shih-tai" (The Time of Ch'u Yuan) in Mo-jo wen-chi (Collected Essays by Kuo Mo-jo), vol. 11 (Peking, 1959), p. 5. First published in 1937.

He continued to hold that serfs were in essence slaves who had commandeered the means of production and gained a measure of independence. In feudal society as a whole, tribes merged with the weakening of blood ties and proximity rather than consanguinity-shaped social relationships. In social-economic organization, the manorial organization in the countryside and guilds in the cities replaced the gens in importance. Politically, all power now resided with feudal lords.

Finally, the invention of the steam engine had made possible the transition to capitalism. The unprecedented increase of production and the accumulation of capital in this stage propelled capitalists toward the expansion of the market available for their enterprises and pushed capitalism to its final stage of imperialism.

Kuo, after discussing these premises within the context of Chinese society, offered the following table in summary of his periodization of Chinese history.

Of these various periods, the ones that became the subjects of controversy were the slave system of early Chou and, to a lesser extent, the pre-Chou period. Some of the Marxist historians objected to Kuo's identification of Asiatic and primitive communist societies. As this debate involved alternative interpretations of the concept "Asiatic mode of Production" which I will consider later, it seems best to postpone its discussion. The more important controversy to grow out of Kuo's periodization

in the years 1931–1933 revolved around the issue of slavery. In the rest of this chapter, I will look at Kuo's statements on early Chou society, the objections they aroused, and Kuo's revisions of his view in the thirties.

The Case for Slavery

The essays incorporated into the Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu were devoted to the single end of demonstrating that in its ascent to civilization Chinese society had traversed a course identical to the one Morgan and Engels had discovered in the case of other societies at a comparable level of development. Kuo concentrated his attention on the period covering the latter half of the Shang dynasty and the first half of the Chou dynasty (roughly 1500–500 B.C. ), when Chinese society had experienced the only two revolutionary transformations it was to undergo prior to the modern age. He described the nature of these changes in Marxist categories: "Broadly speaking, before Western Chou [Chinese society] was a so-called 'Asiatic' primitive communist society. Western Chou corresponded to the slave society of Greece and Rome. With Eastern Chou, especially after Ch'in [255–206 B.C. ], China truly entered the feudal period."^[19] It was the first of these changes in China's evolution from a primitive to a civilized society that interested Kuo the most and occupied the dominant portion of his research. Combing through historical sources that included venerated classics — which purportedly were products of this period (the I ching the Shih ching , and the Shu ching ) — as well as oracle bones and bronzes that had been discovered in recent archeological excavations, Kuo set himself the task of documenting this transition.

The period Kuo's research embraced, in particular the Western Chou period (roughly the twelfth to the eighth centuries B.C. ), was widely held to have been the feudal period of Chinese history in contemporary historiography. In his earlier

[19] Research, p. 176. Also see p. 177.

essays, Kuo ignored this alternative interpretation. It is quite possible that since he left China in early 1928 and spent most of the remainder of the decade in Japan, he was out of touch with developments in Marxist historiography in China. He addressed the question of feudalism directly for the first time in late 1929 and when he did so, he aimed his rejoinders more at traditionalistic views of Chinese history than at contemporary Marxist interpretations.^[20]

Kuo blamed the persistence of the view that Western Chou was a feudal society on the verbal confusion created by the Chinese term feng-chien chih-tu , used both to describe the social formation that prevailed in medieval Europe and to depict Chou society. This confusion, he pointed out, originated in the initial Confucian distortion of feng-chien . The two components of the term had existed in the early Chou dynasty. In their archaic usage, however, feng and chien carried concrete meanings that did not anticipate the systematic significance with which later usage endowed the composite term. Feng originally denoted either rows of trees utilized to draw boundaries of estates or simply mounds of earth; chien meant to set up or to establish. The two characters used in conjunction designated variously the planting of trees to delineate boundaries or the religious ceremony that involved the transplantation of a clump of earth from the ruler's ancestral altar on the land of the recipient of a land grant to affirm his title to the endowment.^[21] The significance of this vestige from a primitive period had been blown out of all proportion by Confucian thinkers toward the end of the Chou dynasty when they read back into the early Chou their vision of ideal society. Fengchien , and the ceremony to which it referred, became bound up at this time with the elaborate system of political ranking and a corresponding system of land distribution according to rank

[20] One author remarked later that Kuo had criticized T'ao's views in an essay in the Hsin ssu ch'ao . I have not seen this essay. See Li Mai-mai, "P'ing Kuo Mo-jo ti 'Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu'" (Critique of Kuo Mo-jo's Research on Ancient Chinese History ), TSTC, 2.6 (June 1, 1932): 1–30, especially p. 28.

[21] Research, pp. 309–310. For a brief discussion of this problem, see Herlee G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 322–323.

that Confucians claimed existed in the Western Chou period.^[22] Following this tradition, the term had been employed in Confucian historiography to depict not just the ceremony but the complete sociopolitical system ascribed to early Chou. The recent Chinese discovery of the medieval European feudal system had compounded the traditional distortion. The external resemblance of the alleged Chou system to the European had resulted in the application of feng-chien to Western feudalism; the term, on the other hand, had acquired additional connotations from the association.

The majority of scholars, Kuo complained, overlooked the evolution of feng-chien and used it as if it had meant the same thing in the early Chou dynasty as it did in medieval Europe. To bolster this argument, Kuo challenged the historical reality of two phenomena that had provided the mainstay of the Confucian view of the past and were also important criteria in contemporary evaluations of the period (such as in the work of T'ao Hsi-sheng): the "well-field" (ching-t'ien ) system of land distribution and the rationalized hierarchy of ranks and land patterns (wu-teng wu-fu ).^[23] He used archeological materials to repudiate the veracity of classical records of the past. He pointed out, first, that in spite of their many references to land grants, bronze inscriptions did not once employ the term well-field . Second, although these inscriptions mentioned noble titles, the use of the titles did not indicate anything like the rationalized hierarchy that Mencius had attributed to the Western Chou.^[24] Kuo did not conclude, as a Western scholar recently has, that the traditional portrayal of early Chou was a product of Mencius's "lively, not to say creative, imagination,"

[22] The most systematized view of early Chou feudalism was offered by Mencius: "To the Son of Heaven there was allotted a territory of a thousand li square. A Kung and a Hou each had a hundred li square. A Pai had seventy li, and a Tsze and a Nan had each fifty li ." The Works of Mencius, in James Legge (tr.), The Chinese Classics (Taiwan reprint of the Oxford University Press 1971 ed.), vols. 1 and 2, p. 374. For the rest of Mencius's remarks on early Chou, see pp. 373–376.

[23] The reference here is to the organization of the "world" accomplished by the mythical Yu the Great, founder of the Hsia dynasty (of which there is no reliable evidence), after he had brought the floods under control. See the "Yu kung" section of the Shang shu, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 142–151.

[24] Research, pp. 299–313. Also see p. 131.

but he considered the lack of evidence in the bronzes sufficient to deny the existence of a feudal system during that period.^[25]

Nevertheless, there was more to Kuo's rejection of feudalism in the Chou than the lack of archeological evidence to verify traditional accounts of a sophisticated system for allocating political and economic power — especially as he himself did not hesitate to evolve a highly systematic picture of Chou society. More significantly, his views on the period were informed by an understanding of historical evolution that precluded the possibility of feudalism at this particular stage of Chinese history: "Chou society has historically been regarded as a feudal system but this view does not accord with the order [ch'eng-hsu ] of social development. The fall of gens society must be followed by the stage of the slave system — which is also when the state emerges — before society can proceed to feudalism."^[26] Consequently, aside from his brief digression to challenge traditional interpretations, Kuo devoted his major effort to adducing evidence to prove that Western Chou was a slave society.

Kuo's assumptions on the nature of slave society directed his inquiry into the early Chou period. These assumptions remained implicit in the Research ; unlike most other Marxist historians at this time, Kuo eschewed prolonged excursions into questions of theory and definition. Even his references to Morgan and Engels were few and far between and were restricted to specific informational points rather than to the problematic of the concept of slavery. Except for his brief discussion in the introductory chapter, he did not spell out the criteria that qualified a society as a slave society. It is nevertheless possible to discern from the themes he pursued the characteristics which he considered to be the defining features of the slave stage. It is evident from his periodization that he took the completion of the transition from the primitive to the slave mode of production to be contingent upon the progress of the means of subsistence to

[25] Creel, Origins of Statecraft, p. 326.

[26] Research, p. 293. Later on (in 1952), Kuo conceded that developments in the early period were uneven, occurring at different rates in different areas of China. See Kuo, Nu-li chih shih-tai (The Period of the Slave System) (Peking, 1972), p. 283. This book is a compilation of essays written mostly in the early fifties.

agriculture, which in turn presupposed technological break-through to the use of iron tools. Iron technology, the existence of advanced agrarian production as the basis of subsistence, and slave labor as the dominant form of labor, therefore, provided the "basic" (used in the double sense of essential and pertaining to the material base) components of the slave system. The emergence of the state in the political superstructure and of the patriarchal family as the unit of social organization attended the maturation of the slave mode of production. Finally, these changes were reflected in the realm of consciousness in the transition from animistic-polytheistic to ancestral-monotheistic notions of divinity and in the increasing stress on values that encouraged obedience to authority and moderation. These economic, social, political, and ideological features of slave society provided Kuo with a variety of avenues that he explored in different essays to prove his contention that Western Chou had been a slave society.

Kuo was explicit on the economic conditions of slavery: "The transition of primitive gens society to slavery begins with the discovery of herding: [it] reaches completion with the advance of agriculture."^[27] On the basis of evidence from the Shih Ching and the Shu Ching , he traced the origins of agriculture in China to the time of Hou Chi, the legendary founder of the Chou house who was presumed to have lived sometime around the twenty-third century B.C. and who bore all the characteristics of a mythological god of agriculture (the name literally meant Lord Millet). The Chou people had advanced continuously thereafter, and by the time of Wen Wang (twelfth century B.C. ) agrarian economy was flourishing in the Chou domain.^[28] The Shang — the ruling house at the time — had become familiar with agriculture about the time of P'an Keng (fourteenth century B.C. ), but agriculture there had remained primitive and secondary to herding as a means of subsistence.^[29] This difference in the mode of production had given the Chou

[27] Research, p. 112.

[28] Ibid., p. 13. Also pp. 117–125.

[29] Ibid., pp. 114–115.

the edge in their competition for power with the Shang rulers and accounted for their final victory.^[30] By the time of the Chou conquest of Shang (1122 B.C. ), in short, China had realized the prerequisites to the maturation of the slave mode of production.

The discovery of iron, according to Kuo, was responsible for the surge in the status of agriculture in the economy. Even though his remarks on iron remained speculative and highly uncertain, he asserted with confidence that "the discovery of iron is required by theory to date back to the beginnings of the Chou [dynasty]; otherwise there would be no way to explain the causes of the advance of agriculture or the great revolutionary changes in Chinese society at this time."^[31] The application of metal to agriculture dated back to the Shang dynasty. The metal used then, however, had been bronze and throughout the dynasty stone and bronze implements coexisted.^[32] The Chou continued to use bronze; in fact, Kuo was compelled to conclude at one point that there was no trace of iron in the Chou and in another context he described the Chou dynasty as the Bronze Age in Chinese history.^[33] Nevertheless, in spite of his inability to uncover evidence of iron in contemporary sources, he insisted on inferring from theory that iron existed in the Chou and had played a crucial role in agrarian production.^[34]

These changes in the economy induced revolutionary changes in Chinese society and politics by the time of the Shang-Chou succession. The most significant of these was the division of the hitherto classless society into two hereditary classes of aristocrats and slaves. Kuo approached the question of social bifurcation from two directions. One was to identify evidence for the existence of slaves in contemporary sources; the other was to

[30] Ibid., p. 15.

[31] Ibid., p. 127.

[32] Ibid., introduction. Also p. 220.

[33] Ibid., pp. 43, 295.

[34] Kuo conceded that the evidence for the use of iron dated back only to the middle of the Chou dynasty; but this itself, he claimed, proved the antiquity of iron because the making of iron weapons was the product of long experience. According to his view, iron was used first in agricultural implements, then in crafts, and only after technological advance in the manufacture of weapons. See Research, p. 13.

trace the evolution of kinship structure to demonstrate the transition at this time from the communal gens (shih-tsu ) organization to the nuclear family founded on private property.

According to Kuo, slavery in China originated during the Shang dynasty. In the oracle bones he identified at least three terms that were used interchangeably to refer to slaves. The form of the characters also indicated that the first slaves in China were members of alien tribes taken prisoner during war. The Shang period saw only the infancy of slavery, however, and the full value of slave labor went unappreciated; although slaves performed some productive duties in households and were even employed for military purposes, the majority were slaughtered in sacrifices.^[35]

The economic changes China underwent toward the end of the period created the potential for the productive use of slaves and the conquered Shang provided the Chou with a ready supply of slave labor. It was the Duke of Chou who recognized the significance of slave labor and incorporated it into the economic foundation of the Chou political system. Kuo observed with bitter irony that the real sagacity of this venerated sage of Confucian historiography lay in his formalization of the slave system; his professions of virtue were comparable to those of the Japanese in contemporary China, Kuo thought, and only represented attempts to "con" the Shang people into believing that their enslavement was a heaven-sent act of grace.^[36] His reforms officially sanctioned the divisions of Chinese society into two classes of aristocrats and slaves. The division was reflected in the literature of the period: the ta-jen and chun-tzu of Western Chou texts referred to the nobility; hsiao-jen and hsing-jen denoted slaves; with a few exceptions, the so-called commoners (shu-jen ) were all slaves at this time.^[37] Slaves served the nobility on largely self-sufficient estates. Since life in the Chou was still relatively simple, with industrial production and exchange close to their primitive levels, agrarian labor consti-

[35] Ibid., p. 283.

[36] Ibid., p. 138–143.

[37] Ibid., pp. 54–55, 296–297.

tuted their single most important function. Their involvement in other productive activities such as crafts or in military duties remained seasonal or occasional. In fact, Kuo placed Western Chou society in the precivilized phase of social development, between the middle and upper levels of "barbarism" in the scheme Morgan had evolved.^[38]

The other approach Kuo employed was to trace these social changes through the evolution of kinship structure. It should be noted that kinship held a more exalted place in Kuo's analysis than that of a mere analytical instrument used to demonstrate the transition from communal to class society. As befitted a disciple of Morgan, Kuo believed the family to contain within it a dynamic force that was an autonomous source of historical change. In his survey of the development of the Chinese family, Kuo adopted verbatim the evolutionary scheme Morgan had provided in Ancient Society . According to Morgan, following the lowest stage of savagery when mankind was indistinguishable from beasts and "promiscuity" characterized intercourse between the sexes, the family had developed through a number of progressive stages which corresponded to stages of social development universal to all mankind: the consanguine, the Punaluan, the Syndasmian, the Patriarchal (a transitional stage), and the monogamian stages.^[39] Sometime in the "middle status of savagery" the gens organization had come into being, possibly in conjunction with the Punaluan family which had for the first time abolished incestual relations between the sexes. The significance of the gens organization extended beyond its implications for the family, for once it had come into being, it served as the organizational matrix of all social relationships until the emergence of "political society," or the state, with mankind's rise to civilization. The greater part of Ancient Society was devoted to tracing the evolution of gentes among different peoples. Between the middle status of savagery and the emergence of civilization (when the monogamian family had rendered the gens irrelevant), the gens underwent two major

[38] Ibid., pp. 37–41. For these stages, see footnote 65.

[39] Morgan, Ancient Society, pp. 498–499.

changes: the change from matrilineal to patrilineal descent, made possible by the Syndasmian family, and the change in "the inheritance of the property of a deceased member of the gens from his gentiles, who took it in the archaic period, first to his agnatic kindred, and finally to his children."^[40] The last stage in the evolution of inheritance corresponded to the maturation of the monogamous family dominated by the male, and the attendant rise of private property and the state during the upper status of barbarism, which was the highest stage of precivilized society.

Tracing these kinship forms in early Chinese history, Kuo assigned the stages of promiscuity and consanguinity as well as the origins of the Punaluan family to the pre-Shang period (which placed the sage emperors and the Golden Age of tradition in the period of savagery).^[41] The Punaluan family, which "was founded upon the intermarriage of several brothers to each other's wives in a group; and of several sisters to each other's husbands in a group,"^[42] persisted to the end of the Shang dynasty. Kuo adduced as evidence of the Punaluan family in the Shang traces in the oracle bones of the acceptance of "multiple mothers" (tuo-mu ) and "multiple fathers" (tuo-fu ) and the persistence of agnatic inheritance of kingship. Furthermore, matrilineality continued to dominate kinship relations, as evidenced by the worship of female ancestors and the reckoning of agnatic inheritance through females.^[43] This conclusion on the nature of inheritance accorded with the views of Morgan, who had inferred from his research that in the Punaluan family, "descent would necessarily be traced through females because the paternity of children was not ascertainable with certainty."^[44] Finally, the prevailing social organization was the gentile (shih-tsu she-hui ), based on common ownership of property. Kuo found evidence for all of these characteristics of early

[40] Ibid., p. 64.

[41] Research, p. 267.

[42] Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 27.

[43] Research, pp. 43–45, 267–275.

[44] Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 434.

Chinese society in the famous classical passage from the Li Chi (ascribed to the late Chou or the Han dynasty!), which described the "universal commonwealth" (ta-t'ung ) that had supposedly existed in antiquity.^[45]

This system was on the decline by the end of Shang as a result of the transition from communal to private ownership of property which accompanied the rise of the monogamous family. Although the kings and nobles of early Chou could not be considered wealthy by later standards, they did control private property, which signaled the end of primitive communism. The emergence of trade, however miniscule in volume, was another manifestation of the change in property relations.^[46] These economic changes were bound up with changes in kinship structures. In his study of the I Ching , Kuo discovered "unmistakable" symptoms of the Syndasmian or pairing family, which consisted of "the pairing of a male with a female under the form of marriage but without an exclusive cohabitation" (temporary monogamy — ou-hun or i-shih ti i-fu-i-ch'i , as Kuo translated it). The practice of males leaving the household to get married and the continued existence of female household chiefs indicated the persistence of matrilinealism, but there were also signs of patrilinealism in the cases of females leaving the household to get married, in the practice of polygyny, and the emergence of inheritance through male offspring.^[47] Whatever the case, the breakdown of gens society led to the emergence of inequality in all aspects of society: economic and political relations and relations between the sexes. The subjection of

[45] Research, p. 279.

[46] Ibid., p. 280.

[47] Ibid., pp. 43–45. The evidence Kuo based his conclusions on in his discussion of the family was of the flimsiest nature, and only a predetermined view of this period could endow it with the meaning that Kuo did. A few examples of "pairing" Kuo derived from the I Ching (The Classic of Change) will suffice to demonstrate his approach. "A decayed willow producing shoots, or an old husband in possession of his young wife" (Hexagram: Ta kuo, Nine in the second place); "A decayed willow produces flowers, an old wife possesses a young husband" (Ta kuo, Nine in the fifth place); "Husband and wife look on each other with averted eyes" (Hsiao ch'u, Nine in the third place). The translations are from Legge, Chinese Classics . See Raymond Van Over, I Ching (New York: Mentor, New American Library, 1971), pp. 83, 160.

females to males in the family paralleled the emergence of class oppression in the economy and politics. Given Kuo's view of social development, with slave society following primitive communist-gens society, the appearance of inequality inevitably pointed to the transition to the slave mode of production.^[48]

With the rise of private property and the monogamous family — albeit in the primitive form of the Syndasmian family — the stage was prepared for the emergence of the state. As the gens broke down, the gentile organization of society yielded to the political. Up to the end of Shang, political authority had been concentrated in gens or tribal assemblies which indicated a primitive form of democracy; with the Chou political power shifted to the ruler and the nobility, as did property in the economy. The state now took over the functions of administration, war, and the distribution of justice. Nevertheless, Kuo pointed out, society in early Chou was still not distant from its tribal origins; the kuo (states) were still much like tribes, and "political society" was more a tendency than an accomplished fact.^[49]

Finally, Kuo turned to the ideological changes that had taken place during the Western Chou period to round off his argument. He averred that social and political tranformation during this period were reflected in contemporary literature, religion, and thought. The proliferation of status terminology in works of the period pointed to the intensification of class consciousness. The very flourishing of literature and the arts was indicative of the emergence of a leisure class.^[50] Especially significant were the changes in religious conceptions. T'ien (Heaven) and Shang Ti (Sovereign-on-high) emerged at this time as supreme deities, paralleling the concentration of power in politics; conversely, rulers used. these concepts as imperial propaganda to bolster their claims to power. In society in general, the polytheism of the primitive period gave way to ancestor worship as private property gained in social and economic significance.^[51]

[48] Research, pp. 109–110.

[49] Ibid., pp. 45–47.

[50] Ibid., pp. 53–54.

[51] Ibid., pp. 58–60.

The most profound changes, and the most subtle part of Kuo's analysis, however, related to changes in world view. From his analysis of the I Ching , Kuo concluded that the transplantation of dialectical change in nature to society in that work discouraged ideas of progress, curtailed radical thought, and obviated efforts to change society. Since the notion of change in the I Ching posited that one extreme always led to another, it propagated the belief that wisdom rested with the pursuit of the "middle way" (chung-hsing ), thereby creating an ethic that served the wishes of the ruling class to perpetuate its power by discouraging demands for change. The I Chuan , which Kuo regarded as the product of the ensuing period when the slave mode of production was being replaced by the feudal, took this tendency a step further — this time consciously. The Confucian authors of that work transported the idea of change beyond the social to the metaphysical realm by portraying a Taoist creation, the Tao or the Way, as the source of all change that preceded society and was, therefore, beyond the reach of human influence. They consciously used the ethic of the "mean" or the "middle way" to undercut the social radicalism that was on the rise at the end of Western Chou. Kuo never said why this body of thought was particularly suitable to slave or to feudal society, but his message was clear otherwise: With Western Chou, Chinese thought had come to stress the hopelessness of efforts to achieve progress and thereby served the ruling class by enjoining people to think that contentment with the status quo — which now included the oppression of one class by another — was the ultimate wisdom.^[52]

This summary distorts Kuo's argument by endowing it with a cohesiveness it did not have. The essays that constituted Chungkuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu were written as separate works and did not permit an integrated argument. Kuo made no effort to evaluate the relative weight of his various criteria as defining features of slave society. Whether this omission was intentional or not, the absence of a clear definition of slave society in particular detracted from the coherence of his presentation.

[52] Ibid., pp. 64–96.

Furthermore, he was unable to demonstrate that the conditions which he took to be the universal prerequisites of slave society had been realized in early Chou. His observations on crucial points often contradicted one another, and it was only through the tautological interpretation of circumstantial evidence that he was able to build a case for his view of Chou society. Most embarrassingly for a Marxist, he was on the whole compelled by the lack of direct evidence to deduce the mode and the relations of production in Chou society from the characteristics of its organizational and ideological "superstructure." His opponents were quick to catch on to these weaknesses in his argument.

Kuo's Critics and His Revision of His Views on Early Chinese History

The criticism directed at Kuo's work was of two types. The more theoretical critiques concentrated on Kuo's periodization of history, his understanding of social formations, and his use of Morgan's categories. The critiques of this type inevitably bore the stamp of the particular author's views on the Marxist periodization of history. The other type of criticism spoke to Kuo's interpretation of the data of Chinese history. Although most of Kuo's critics did not separate these two categories or simply treated them as 'two faces of the same coin, such a distinction is necessary to correctly evaluate Kuo's achievement as well as the validity of the criticism to which it was subjected.

One widespread charge brought against Kuo was his "mechanistic" (chi-hsieh chu-i ) handling of Marxist categories. His critics argued that Marx had suggested the list of social formations in the preface to the Critique as a general typology of societies without claiming universality for all the formations or stipulating a necessary order of succession. Kuo's analysis, con-

trarily, was predicated on the assumption of identical evolution for all societies.^[53] These authors, in particular the Marxist ones, focused on the questions of Asiatic and slave societies to criticize Kuo's periodization of Chinese history. With respect to Kuo's identification of primitive, gens, and Asiatic societies, his critics accused Kuo of ignorance of the evolution of Marx's ideas on historical development. They conceded that Marx had viewed these societies as historically identical in his earlier work but argued that he had changed his mind and distinguished them as different categories after he had found out about Morgan's research. Kuo, oblivious of this shift, used a periodization that was obsolete in Marx's own eyes.^[54] Li Chi, who offered the most detailed criticism of Kuo's analysis, argued further that the outstanding characteristic of Asiatic society was the existence of a strong state. Kuo's use of the appellation "Asiatic" for the period before the emergence of the state only betrayed his profound lack of comprehension of what constituted Asiatic society.^[55]

More significant were the criticisms of Kuo's view of early Chou society as a slave society. The critics attacked Kuo variously for having converted slavery into a universal stage of history, for his reversal of the order of historical development, and for his inability to cope with the definition of the slave mode of production. Ting Ti-hao rejected categorically that slavery constituted a necessary stage of history in Marxist periodization.

[53] Ch'eng Ching, "Kuo Mo-jo Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu" (Kuo Mo-jo's Research on Ancient Chinese Society), Tu-shu p'ing-lun (The Book Review), 1.2 (October 1932): 8–9. Also see Ting Ti-hao, "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui ti p'i-p'an" (A Critique of Slave Society in China), Li-shih k'o-hsueh (Historical Science), 1.5 (September 1933):2–3.

[54] Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3:90; Tu Wei-chih, "Ku-tai Chung-kuo yen-chiu p'i-p'an yin-lun" (Introduction to Critique of Research on Ancient China), TSTC , 2.2–3:16; Hu Ch'iu-yuan, "Chung-kuo she-hui — wen-hua fa-chan ts'ao-shu" (Rough Draft of the Development of Chinese Society — Culture), TSTC , 3.3–4: 22–23.

[55] Chi Tzu (pseudo Li Chi), "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih ti yen-chiu" (Examination of the History of Ancient Chinese Society), Chung-shan wen-hua chiao-yu kuan chi-k'an (Quarterly of the Sun Yat-sen Institute of Culture and Education), 1.1 (August 1934): 277.

Kuo, he argued, ignored the inner workings of Chinese society and simply imposed upon early Chou the characteristics associated with slavery in Greece and Rome.^[56] Ch'en Pang-kuo and Wang Po-p'ing, who criticized Kuo in the same vein but were themselves more ambivalent on the question of slavery, described slave society as a transitional phase between primitive and feudal societies that did not deserve to be treated as an independent stage of history.^[57] Other authors, while accepting slavery as a universal stage, criticized Kuo for having transposed the order of slave and feudal societies. Li Mai-mai argued that slavery was historically posterior to feudalism by virtue of the fact that the slave mode of production was more advanced than the feudal. The reversion to feudalism after the classical period in Europe represented a regressive development which could not be generalized to other societies. The true feudal stage was the one between gentile and slave societies in early history.^[58] Finally, some authors pointed out that Kuo never defined his criteria for slave society. Ting Ti-hao averred, first, that the mere existence of slaves did not constitute proof for the slave mode of production. Slavery had existed throughout history; were that criterion to be adopted as the defining feature of the slave mode of production all society would have to be described as slave society.^[59] Furthermore, he argued, Kuo did not make a distinction between household slaves and a slave class which provided the labor force in society; most of the slaves he described in China belonged in the first category. For lack of evidence of slave production, Ting noted pointedly, Kuo deduced slavery from inequality between the sexes.^[60] Inevitably one author observed that Kuo's whole argument was shaped by his "belief" that slave society necessarily followed primitive

[56] Ting, "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui ti p'i-p'an," p. 2.

[57] Ch'en Pang-kuo, "Chung-kuo li-shih fa-chan ti tao-lu" (The Path of China's Historical Development), TSTC , 1.4–5:5; Wang Po-p'ing, "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu chih fa-jen" (Prolegomena to the Examination of Ancient Chinese Society), TSTC , 2.7–8:13–14.

[58] Li Mai-mai, "P'ing Kuo Mo-jo ti 'Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu,'" pp. 3–8.

[59] Ting, "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui ti p'i-p'an," p. 13.

[60] Ibid., p. 4.

society; to those who did not share this faith his argument was transparently devoid of substance.^[61]

Aside from the question of periodization, Kuo was also attacked in the theoretical sphere for his interpretation, or more accurately, misinterpretation of Morgan's views on the evolution of kinship structure. Li Chi charged that Kuo confounded the relationship between kinship groups and deviated from Morgan's scheme in his treatment of the evolution of the family. His particular reference was to the overlap in Kuo's work of the periods of promiscuity and the Punaluan family and his extension of promiscuity over the whole period of savagery. Second, Li pointed out that Kuo erroneously took the gentile organization of society to be conterminous with the Punaluan family. This was contrary to Morgan's ideas, since Morgan had suggested only that the Punaluan family had prepared the ground for the germination of the gens without tying the fate of the latter to any specific type of family: Within the limits set by the Punaluan family in the middle stage of savagery and the monogamous family in the upper stage of barbarism, the gens had encompassed different types of familial organization in different societies. More crucially, furthermore, in its various manifestations the gentile organization had contained both matrilineal and patrilineal systems of inheritance. Kuo's identification of the gens with matrilinealism was simply a distortion of Morgan's views. Equally serious was Li's charge that Kuo had used Morgan's stages of the development of precivilized society arbitrarily. Kuo, he argued, claimed universality for the stages but showed no compunction in skipping over those that did not suit his purposes. The case in point was Kuo's description of the Shang as the middle stage of barbarism and Western Chou as slave society. Where, Li wondered, had the stage of upper barbarism disappeared to if Morgan's periodization was valid as Kuo proclaimed it to be! Or if Western Chou was in the middle stage of barbarism, as Kuo suggested at one point, had Chinese society then entered the upper stage of

[61] Ch'eng, "Kuo Mo-jo Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu," p. 17.

barbarism with the next change, the empire, and remained in that stage until recently?^[62]

I will discuss the questions raised by the scheme of periodization Kuo employed in the context of the general problem of the Marxist periodization of Chinese history in Chapter 7. It is necessary here to say a few words about the justifiability of the charges Kuo's critics brought against him in the light of Morgan's work. At least the first two of the criticisms Li directed at Kuo's interpretation can be substantiated by evidence from Ancient Society . In the case of promiscuous intercourse, for instance, Morgan identified "this . . . lowest conceivable stage of savagery" with the period when man "could scarcely be distinguished from the mute animals by whom he was surrounded" and when even the notion of the family did not yet exist.^[63] Kuo, however, identified promiscuity (tsa-chiao ) with the totality of the period of savagery (meng-mo ) which encompassed the first three stages in man's rise to civilization after mankind had transcended its beastlike existence or, in Morgan's words, lasted from the "infancy of mankind all the way to the invention of the art of pottery." Morgan observed, furthermore, that the transition to the Punaluan family occurred deep in the period of savagery.^[64]

Kuo's conclusion that promiscuity had persisted in China until the third millenium B.C. was made possible by assigning to promiscuity a much longer share of human history than Morgan had intended. Even more serious was Kuo's confusion of gentile organization and matrilineality, for he employed the transition from matrilineality to patrilineality as one of the indications of the breakdown of the gens and the emergence of slave society. Kuo's tabulation of Morgan's developmental scheme in the Research provided irrefutable evidence that he had indeed misread Morgan's ideas. In his table (and the analysis based on the table) Kuo subsumed gentile society under the broader category of matrilineality whereas, as Li pointed out, the relationship

[62] Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC, 2.2–3:72–90. For similar arguments, see also Ch'eng, "Kuo Mo-jo Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu," pp. 9, 11–12.

[63] Morgan, Ancient Society , p. 540.

[64] Ibid., p. 425.

was the other way around in Morgan's formulation.^[65]Ancient Society left little doubt that Morgan regarded the gens in its

[65] Tabulation of Morgan's scheme by Kuo and Li to clarify their differences over this crucial issue:

later development in the upper stage of barbarism (such as in Greece and Rome) as a patrilineal organization. Nevertheless, this confusion was not as subversive of Kuo's argument as some of his critics claimed. Morgan took the rise of the patrilineal family to be a consequence of the emergence of private property and to coincide with the appearance of "systematic slavery."^[66] There was, therefore, an ambiguity in his treatment of the relationship between the gens and patrilineal descent that Kuo, had he defended himself, might have used to advantage. The gens, according to Morgan, could contain patrilineal descent, but it could also be concluded from his treatment of the subject that the emergence of patrilineal inheritance eventually undermined the gentile organization by strengthening the monogamous family and giving birth to class differences in economic and political power. The stage of upper barbarism, when these phenomena allegedly first appeared, was also the period of decline of the gentile organization of society.^[67] The ambiguity of the developments in this period was also responsible for Kuo's telescoping of the period of middle barbarism with the stage of slavery. As this was a problem that grew out of Engels's fusion of Marxist periodization with Morgan's views on precivilized society, I will delay its discussion until the next section when this question will be taken up.

The second major area of criticism involved Kuo's use of evidence, especially the way he employed classical sources. H. Maspero, the eminent French Sinologist, expressed the views of many when he pointed out that Kuo disregarded all problems of authenticity when he used these texts as sources.^[68] It must be noted that Kuo displayed greater conscientiousness on this issue than many other Marxist historians, including those who criticized him on this count. His analyses of ancient texts were invariably prefaced by an evaluation of their historical veracity

[66] Morgan, Ancient Society , p. 540.

[67] Ibid., p. 345. See chapters 10, 13 in part 2 and chapter 2 in part 4.

[68] Maspero, "P'ing Kuo Mo-jo chin chu Liang chung," p. 69; Liang Yuan-tung, "Chung-kuo she-hui ko chieh-tuan ti t'ao-lun" (Discussion of the Stages of Chinese Society), TSTC , 2.7–8: 3–4.

and dating. Nevertheless, he held with other Marxist historians that even though these texts and the myths they contained could not be accepted as historically accurate, they offered clues to the nature of archaic Chinese society.^[69] He arbitrarily designated some texts to be genuine, while he rejected as forgeries those that did not support his position.

Another criticism directed at the Research questioned the sufficiency of archeological materials as sources on early society. Calling to mind a charge that had been brought against Ku Chieh-kang in the twenties, some critics protested that the oracle bones and bronzes provided only limited data and that in most cases Kuo was forced to argue from absence; that is, these materials did reveal certain features of ancient society but where they were silent on a phenomenon, this lack of reference did not constitute proof that the phenomenon in question had not existed.^[70] Finally, the critics argued that the evidence Kuo proffered did not disprove the existence of feudalism in Western Chou or prove that the slave mode of production had prevailed at this time. Ch'eng Ching pointed out that the basic flaw in Kuo's reasoning was his either/or approach to society: "If it is not feudal society, it must be slave society." Furthermore, he continued, the refutation of the existence of the "well-field" system or the systematized system of ranks did not disprove feudalism for feudalism was not contingent on either of these elements; rather the status of labor was the decisive factor in this regard. Some of Kuo's own statements proved that the peasants of early Chou had a great deal of freedom in the use they made of their lands, which was more characteristic of the feudal serf than of the slave. With respect to slaves, Ch'eng, like Ting Ti-hao, contended that the existence of slaves was not necessarily inconsistent with the feudal structure of society.^[71] Li Chi and Ch'en Pang-kuo added that Kuo rejected feudalism

[69] Research , p. 106. Also see "Ta Ma-po-lo hsien-sheng" (Response to Mr. Maspero), Wen-hsueh nien-pao (Literature Yearly), 2 (April 25, 1936):4.

[70] Chi Tzu, "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih ti yen-chiu," passim.

[71] Ch'eng, "Kuo Mo-jo Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu," pp. 13–16. Quotation on p. 15.

because he identified feudalism with the guild system and, not finding guilds at this time, decided that Western Chou could not have been feudal.^[72]

It is somewhat surprising that Kuo's critics did not place greater emphasis on the inconsistency of some of his data with the conditions that he deemed to be the universal prerequisites of slave society. His inability to discover any evidence of iron or sufficient evidence for the use of slaves in production as well as his conclusion that agriculture was still primitive in early Chou negated the assumption that Chinese society at this time had realized the necessary conditions for the establishment of the slave mode of production. As a consequence, he could claim with "certainty" only that in its social and political features did Western Chou society manifest those theoretically universal characteristics that appeared in the stage of slavery — that is, his argument was highly circumstantial.^[73] In the final analysis, Kuo inferred the existence of the slave mode of production from the emergence of the state, the patriarchal family, and inequality between the sexes. His efforts to find direct evidence for slavery yielded some fruit, but even there he had to deduce the slavery of peasants largely from their slavelike existence; he was unable to verify that the peasantry was held in bondage as slaves.

The reason Kuo's critics overlooked his inability to prove the existence of the material conditions of slavery was that they were too busy trying to prove that he had erred on the side of portraying the Western Chou society as a society not far advanced beyond the primitive. For one thing, they argued from Morgan that the existence of writing as early as the Shang dynasty proved that China had entered the period of civilization earlier than the Chou period.^[74] More to the point, most agreed that the agrarian economy was much more advanced in early

[72] Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," pp. 88–89; Ch'en, "Chung-kuo Li-shih fa-chan ti tao-lu," p. 12.

[73] Kuo admitted about twenty years later that due to lack of direct evidence he had had to rely on indirect evidence in most of his research. See Nu-li chih shih-tai , pp. 286–287.

[74] Morgan gives the definition on p. 12.

Chou than Kuo proposed.^[75] Li Chi, who was a great deal more unscrupulous than Kuo in the reliance he placed on ancient myths, traced the origins of both civilization and the centralized state to the third millenium B.C. He insisted, despite the lack of archeological evidence, that iron must have existed in China as early as this time.^[76] Others argued that China had evolved out of gentile society and matrilineality long before Chou; the existence of an aristocracy during the Shang proved that private property, patrilineal inheritance, and the state had all come into being by this time.^[77] While it is possible (though there is no evidence for it) that some were disturbed out of national pride by Kuo's description of this traditionally venerated period as primitive or precivilized, it must be remembered that many foreign specialists then and later agreed with Kuo's critics on many of these points. Maspero was one who criticized Kuo for picturing Western Chou agriculture as primitive.^[78] There was sufficient evidence incorporated into Kuo's own work, moreover, to indicate that Kuo, in his attempt to be loyal to a schematic view of history, downplayed the complexity of the Shang social and political organization.^[79]

It is difficult to say if these criticisms of the Research motivated Kuo's revision of his views in the late thirties and the early forties. He occasionally referred to those who described early Chou as feudal without naming names. It is also possible, as previously noted, that he was oblivious of the criticism directed at his work for the simple reason that he did not return to China until 1937. His revision may have been, therefore, simply the product of the deepening of his research; by the mid-thirties he had secured a name for himself as one of the

[75] Maspero, "P'ing Kuo Mo-jo chin chu Liang chung," p. 67; Chi Tzu, "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui ti yen-chiu," p. 269; Li Mai-mai, "P'ing Kuo Mo-jo ti 'Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu,'" p. 4.

[76] Chi Tzu, "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui ti yen-chiu," pp. 260–268.

[77] Wang Po-p'ing, "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu chih fa-jen," pp. 10–11.

[78] H. G. Creel, of course, came to the same conclusion in his 1937 work, The Birth of China .

[79] Wang Po-p'ing, for example, relied almost entirely on the evidence that Kuo had provided to show that Shang society was more complex than Kuo had admitted.

foremost authorities on oracle bones and bronzes.^[80] His general tendency during these years was to move away from theoretical issues toward traditional-style textual analysis (k'ao-cheng ). He increasingly placed more value on archeological materials than classical sources; he continued to use the latter but declared openly that where they conflicted with archeological sources they had no value whatsoever.^[81] Also, references to Marxist authorities became even more inconspicuous in his writings than they had been earlier. He refused to alter the scheme of periodization he employed in 1928–1930; the substantial revisions in his analysis were restricted to the timing of the periods in China and the refinement of his argumentation that grew out of his research in ancient sources.^[82] Nevertheless, these changes were not inconsequential for his views on early China and obviated many of the criticisms that had earlier been directed at his work.

The most important change to take place in Kuo's views concerned the duration of the stage of slavery. By 1937 at the latest, he decided that this stage occupied a much longer portion of early Chinese history, extending from about the middle of the Shang dynasty (circa 1400 B.C. ) to the Spring-Autumn and even the Warring States period.^[83] The slave mode of production had reached its zenith in the transition from Shang to Chou and began its decline soon after. This change of timing had far-reaching implications for his views of early Chinese society. In the first place, Kuo was now more willing to acknowledge a much higher level of development in the Shang dynasty than he had been in his earlier work. He still insisted

[80] Ho Kan-chih, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan , p. 95. Kuo's fame derived from works he published during these years: P'u-tz'u t'ung tsuan (Compilation of Oracle Bone Characters); Liang Chou chin wen tz-u ta-hsi (Collection of Characters on Chou Bronzes); Chia-ku wen-tzu yen-chiu (Research on Oracle Bone Writings); and Ch'ing-t'ung yen-chiu yao-tsuan (Compilation of Research in Bronzes). Bronzes).

[81] Kuo, "Lun ku-tai she-hui" (On Ancient Society), Mo-jo wen-chi (Collected Essays of Kuo Mo-jo) vol. 12 (Peking, 1959; first published, 1943), p. 276.

[82] See Kuo's article on the problem of periodization, one of his few theoretical contributions: "She-hui fa-chan chieh-tuan chih tsai jen-shih" (Review of the Stages of Social Development), Mo-jo wen-chi , vol. 11 (originally published in 1936), pp. 21–27.

[83] "Ch'u Yuan shih-tai," p. 4.

that the Shang had been nomadic — as evidenced by the frequent shift of capitals — until the end of the fifteenth century but conceded the full development to agriculture after that period. His references to matrilineality and gentile society, accordingly, also became extremely sparse. In his new view, the Chou had been backward until the reigns of kings Wen and Wu and had inherited the higher culture of the Shang people only after the conquest. He now attributed the Chou victory over the Shang to the use of slaves in the Shang armies, which had diminished the fighting spirit of the Shang military before the more unified Chou.^[84]

Second, he conceded that he had earlier exaggerated the profundity of the changes in the transition from Shang to Chou. This, he explained, had been due to his uncritical acceptance of the interpretations of Wang Kuo-wei, who had regarded this dynastic change as one of the most radical in Chinese history.^[85] Finally, Kuo's treatment of slavery in his later work was a great deal more precise than it had been in his previous work. He now made a clear distinction between the mere existence of slaves and the slave mode of production: "Clearly, household slaves do not make a slave system; unless there is large-scale slave production, there can be no slave system."^[86] His efforts to prove the existence of large-scale slavery were aided by archeological materials (bronzes) that provided evidence for the sale and purchase of slaves in early Chou. The veracity and timing of these documents aside, there is no doubt that Kuo now made a methodological distinction between direct and circumstantial evidence.^[87]

Kuo's drift away from theory and circumstantial evidence was also visible in his treatment of iron, which he had earlier

[84] "Lun ku-tai she-hui," pp. 279–280.

[85] Kuo, "Ku-tai yen-chiu ti tzu-wo p'i-p'an" (Self-Criticism of My Research on Antiquity), in Shih p'i-p'an shu (Ten Criticisms), Mo-jo wen-chi , vol. 15 (Peking, 1961; first published, 1945), pp. 7–8.

[86] "Lun ku-tai she-hui," p. 280.

[87] The inscriptions Kuo utilized pointed to the sale of human beings or their use as rewards along with animals and other commodities. The major bronzes he cited were the "Hu Ting" and the "Ta Yu Ting." While these inscriptions indicated that human beings were at times regarded as less valuable than animals, they did not say anything about their labor functions.

considered essential to slavery. He now resigned himself to the absence of evidence for the existence of iron is Shang and even in early Chou. The earliest evidence for iron, he conceded, was in the late Spring-Autumn and the Warring States periods. The appearance of iron weapons at this time, he still argued, pointed to its anterior use in agricultural implements, but he was unwilling to push back its origins beyond Western Chou. Whatever the case, he now identified the transition to iron with the change from slave to feudal society with the establishment of empire.^[88]

Perhaps the most symbolic of Kuo's departures from his earlier views was his acceptance of the existence of the well-field system in early Chou. He concluded that Mencius's statements on early Chou erred only in the attribution of common ownership to the Chou system of land distribution; otherwise, there was good basis for the historicity of the well-field system. The most important evidence for it was the character for the word field (t'ien ), which was a pictograph for well-field. But, Kuo interjected, it was a mistake to conclude, as some historians had, that the well-field was the equivalent of the manor in the feudal system. All land belonged to the state in early Chou and private property was still insignificant; t'ien (or ching-t'ien ) was only the unit utilized for purposes of land distribution.^[89]

Kuo also elaborated on his objections to the description of this period as feudal. The source of confusion, in addition to the terminological one, he suggested, was the confounding of slave and serf on the basis of personal freedom. Many argued that since the peasants of early Chou had some freedom, they could not be slaves. In fact, Kuo countered, this was not a valid criterion, for agrarian slaves had greater freedom than their counterparts in crafts or trade simply because their placement on land of itself limited their mobility. In this sense, serfs and agrarian slaves did not differ significantly and were thus confused by most historians.^[90] Nevertheless, it was obvious that

[88] "Ch'ing-t'ung ch'i shih-tai" (Period of Bronze Implements), in Ch'ing-t'ung shih-tai (The Bronze Age) (Hong Kong, 1958; first published, 1945), pp. 297–308.

[89] "Ku-tai yen-chiu ti tzu-wo p'i-p'an," pp. 26–28.

[90] Ibid., pp. 39–40.

Kuo's rejection of feudalism was still based on reasons other than his conviction that he had found sufficient evidence to prove that Chou peasants were slaves and not serfs. He continued to insist that ranks were not systematized in Shang and Chou, but he was unable to refute their existence. He worked his way out of this dilemma by resorting to a definition of feudalism that rendered the nobility and even serfdom irrelevant. This definition foreshadowed the handling of the concept of feudalism in later Chinese historiography. As in the case of Chu P'ei-wo's definition of the term, this usage had little to do with the use of the concept in its application to medieval Europe and even with Marx's own approach to the problem, although it was in keeping with the development of the term in later Marxist historiography:

My feudalism is a stage that has evolved out of slave society. The producers are no longer slaves but liberated peasants and artisans [nung kung ]. The important means of production in agriculture is the formally divided land which is now under the private ownership of an exploitative class of landlords. Crafts and trades are free of official control and organized according to guild enterprises. The state that is founded upon these classes subsists on the taxes paid by landlords, craftsmen, and merchants. This is the feudal society we speak of now [emphasis mine.] ^[91]

By the time Kuo had revised his views, the controversy of the 1930s had abated. In his 1937 history, Ho Kan-chih noted that although many historians had objected to Kuo's interpretations at first, the number of those who concurred in his views had been on the increase over the last few years. Irrespective of its merits, therefore, Kuo's views of early Chinese society pointed to the dominant trend in future Chinese historiography.

Morgan, Engels, and Kuo Mo-jo

Kuo's Marxism, one of his critics in the Tu-shu tsa-chih remarked, was skin deep; he used sociology merely as an

[91] Ibid., p. 16.

embellishment for traditional-style textual analysis.^[92] One might argue back from the same metaphor that the "skin" is not to be scorned, for it shaped the data from the past into a corpus that was clearly Marxist in its physiognomy. Nevertheless, the point was well taken with regard to the depth of familiarity with Marxist theory Kuo displayed in the Research . If he was aware at this time of alternative interpretations of social development in Marx's work, he did not show it in his study of Chinese society.^[93] Furthermore, whether out of disdain or simply due to oversight, Kuo ignored foreign scholars' interpretations of early Chinese society.^[94] The only two authors whose works played important roles as guides to Kuo's analysis were Morgan and Engels. As far as it is possible to tell from the book, Kuo acquired his understanding of Marx from Engels's interpretations in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (hereafter, The Origin ).

The Origin consisted essentially of an abridgement of Ancient Society supplemented by Engels's commentaries. Engels saw no need to evaluate Morgan's work from a Marxist perspective, for he believed that "Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilization was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx had arrived at."^[95] Nevertheless, his incorporation of Morgan's work into historical

[92] Tu Wei-chih, "Ku-tai Chung-kuo yen-chiu p'i-p'an yin-lun," p. 9. Tu remarked in the same context that people had been wary of criticizing Kuo because of his literary reputation !

[93] Kuo was introduced to Marxism through Kawakami Hajime's work. In his memoirs, he claims he made an offer to the Commercial Press to translate Capital but was turned down. Ko-ming ch'un-ch'iu (Annals of Revolution) (Shanghai, 1951), p. 205. This, of course, does not prove that he actually read the book at the time. In his diary of early 1928 he refers to being in the process of reading the first volume. The one work with which he was thoroughly familiar, as far as I have been able to ascertain, was the Critique which he translated into Chinese in 1931. The scheme of history in this work proved to be the most important for Kuo's historical views.

[94] Research , preface. Maspero chided Kuo for not having read M. Granet's Chinese Civilization (published 1929), where that author had pursued similar themes to those in the Research . Kuo admitted with a humility not typical of his general tone that his learning was still too narrow. See "Ta Ma-po-lo hsien-sheng," p. 14.

[95] Engels, The Origin , preface to the first edition.

materialism introduced new ambiguities into Marx's ideas on social dynamics and the nature of early society. Some of the views for which Kuo was faulted by his opponents were in fact traceable to the fusion of Marx and Morgan in The Origin .

This was the case with respect to the role sexual relations and kinship structure played in historical development. Eric Hobsbawm, who refuses to distinguish the work of Engels from that of Marx, has observed that "pre-class society forms a large and complex historical epoch of its own, with its own history and laws of development, and its own varieties of socio-economic organization, which Marx tends now [that is, in his later work] to call collectively 'the archaic Formation' or 'Type.' "^[96] In The Origin , Engels adopted for Marxism the dynamics of development of primitive society Morgan had outlined in Ancient Society . He was, if anything, more direct than Morgan in assigning kinship structure a central role in this respect:

According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a two-fold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one hand, and of the family, on the other. The less the development of labour, and the more limited its volume of production and, therefore, the wealth of society, the more preponderatingly does the social order appear to be dominated by ties of sex [emphasis mine.]^[97]

In other words, it was only with the increase in productivity that economic forces came to serve as the primary motive force of progress. Throughout the prehistorical period, it was the refinement of sexual practices that accounted for changes in the form of the family and, therefore, social organization. Following Morgan, Engles observed that the prohibition of sexual intercourse between parents and children had eliminated

[96] Eric Hobsbawm, Introduction to K. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 51.

[97] Engels, The Origin , p. 6.

promiscuity in the beginning of the period of savagery while the prohibition of marriage between siblings had marked the transition from the consanguine to the Punaluan family during savagery. The gentile organization which "arose directly" out of the Punaluan system had given further impetus to the narrowing of the circle of permissible sexual relations. The result was the rise of the "pairing family" at the beginning of the period of barbarism. It was at this time that economic factors began to play their important role in social development. Until the period of barbarism, according to Engels, descent was matrilineal (as it had to be in group marriage), and inheritance was not in the family but the communistic gens. With the advance of production property had gained in value, encouraging the growth of patrilineal descent and inheritance by the middle stage of barbarism. This new development had reinforced the tendencies implicit in the evolution of familial relations. The two combined signaled the ultimate dissolution of the gens and the concurrent emergence of class society.^[98] Engels, even more than Morgan, saw in the rise of sexual inequality implicit in the patrilineal family the first instance of "class antagonism" in history and the paradigm for social inequality in general: "Thus in the monogamous family, in those cases that faithfully reflect its historical origin and that clearly bring out a sharp conflict between man and woman resulting from the exclusive domination of the male, we have a picture in miniature of the very antagonisms and contradictions in which society, split up into classes since the commencement of civilization, moves, without being able to resolve and overcome them."^[99]

Furthermore, in adopting Morgan's view of precivilized history, Engels pushed slavery back into the prehistory of mankind. He agreed with Morgan that slavery had appeared first in the period of middle barbarism and reached its full development with the flourishing of production in upper barbarism.^[100] From the viewpoint of the scheme of periodization in the

[98] Ibid., pp. 47–55.

[99] Ibid., pp. 66–68. Quotation on p. 68.

[100] Ibid., p. 159.

Critique , this fusion of gentile society and slavery altered the dividing line between prehistorical and historical society, since slave labor stretched over both periods. Or, to look at it differently, the distinction between prehistory and civilization no longer corresponded to the distinction between "primitive communism" and "slavery"; "primitive communism" constituted only the early part of prehistory, the latter part being absorbed into class (slave) society.

Nevertheless, in writing the Origin Engels utilized Marx's notes on Ancient Society, and there is no reason to believe that his treatment of slavery distorted Marx's views on the subject. Marx did not stipulate that slave society was confined within the limits of classical society at its zenith, even though it is true that when he discussed slavery he referred mostly to the highly advanced Roman society. In a narrow sense, the defining feature of the slave mode of production in Roman society was the concentration of slave labor in large agrarian and industrial enterprises to produce commodities for the market: Flourishing commerce was, according to Marx, a precondition of slave society.^[101] The economically primitive phase of slavery that Morgan and Engels spoke of (and on which Kuo based his formulations of early Chou history) appears at first sight to be a far cry from Marx's slave mode of production. Closer examination of Marx's work reveals, however, that, as in the case of Morgan and Engels, Marx regarded the mature slave society of Rome to be the product of a long process of development.^[102] His notebooks on Ancient Society , moreover, contain no indication that he disagreed with Morgan's views on the origin and evolution of slavery.^[103]

As Marx discovered Morgan's work in the last years of his life, Engels related, he was unable to work Morgan's findings into his own ideas on the transition from gentile to slave society, and it was left to Engels to undertake this task. It is

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

[102] Hobsbawm, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations , p. 34.

[103] S. Krader, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972).

evident, at any rate, that it was Marx, tacitly, and Engels who telescoped the middle stage of barbarism and the slave stage of history and not, as Li Chi charged, Kuo Mo-jo. What Kuo did was to treat early Chou society, which by his own admission was economically backward, as the high point of the slave mode of production in China. The innovation that marked the advent of civilization, under the circumstances, had little to do with production but lay in the realm of culture: the invention of writing. Engels accepted this criterion, which had been suggested by Morgan,^[104] but possibly because he recognized the problem it created within historical materialism he did not assign it a significant place in the book. When he discussed the emergence of civilization in the last chapter, he confined himself to describing the economic and political changes registered at this time: increased complexity of the division of labor, explosive progress in productive power, the conversion of primitive barter into full-scale commerce, the development of slavery to its "fullest" maturity, and the substitution for gentile organization of the "territorial" state administered from new urban centers. Whatever the case, the transition to civilization was not marked by any fundamental break in the economic structure of society but simply represented the further development of forces generated in prehistorical society.^[105]

Engels's modification of the place of slavery in Marxist periodization presented Kuo with a dilemma he was unable to resolve. According to the scheme of periodization Kuo adopted, the slave mode of production constituted the first stage in the period of civilization — the "ancient" mode which corresponded to the highly developed societies of classical Greece and Rome. Engels stretched slavery from the middle period of barbarism, when mankind had taken the first steps toward the conquest of nature, through the first stage of civilization preceding feudalism and capitalism. Rather than recognize that the slave mode to which Engels referred represented a departure from Marx's "ancient" mode of production in the Critique , Kuo

[104] Engels, The Origin , p. 27.

[105] Ibid., chap. 9.

in his first work tried to overcome the inconsistency between the two versions of slavery by squeezing the long and complex developments Engels described into the initial phase of civilization. This accounts for the confusion, noticed by Li Chi, that marked his treatment of Western Chou, which was supposedly comparable to classical Greece and Rome and yet was primitive and which he described on different occasions variously as the middle stage of barbarism, the upper stage of barbarism, and the initial stage of civilization. It also explains the inconsistencies in his handling of the kinship categories he had derived from Morgan.

Nevertheless, Kuo parted ways with Engels (and Morgan) on other crucial points. Most important was his assumption of universality for the process of development described earlier in this chapter. While it is true that Engels and Morgan posited the evolution of mankind to be unidirectional, they conceded that such development was only a general trend and did not represent the actual historical experience of all peoples. Societies had evolved differently in the different physical environments of the eastern and western hemispheres. Also, they developed at varying rates according to circumstances, and only exceptional ones had managed to move out of primitive society into civilization. Morgan treated different societies separately and noted their divergences as well as their similarities. Universality entered into his analysis only in his placement of different societies on successive rungs of a universal ladder of progress.^[106] Engels followed Morgan in this respect, but he also raised a challenging question in his treatment of the relationship between Roman society and the Germanic tribes that had inherited Rome's

[106] Morgan believed that societies, if they achieved progress, would necessarily advance through universal stages. But not all were capable of progress (at least as far as the evidence of history showed), and progress did not occur at the same rate in all societies. Furthermore, once one society had achieved a certain level, the question of others following in its exact steps became academic because of intercultural diffusion. Morgan even suggested that the universality of the gens might be a consequence of cultural diffusion: "Whether the gens originates in a given condition of society, and would thus repeat itself in disconnected areas; or whether it had a single origin, and was propagated from an original center, through successive migrations, over the earth's surface, are fair questions for speculative consideration." Ancient Society , p. 377.

political power in Europe: What did the existence of a society that had already entered civilization imply for its more backward neighbors? In other words, what was the role of cultural diffusion in history? The Germanic tribes, having stepped into the vacuum left by the declining Roman empire, proceeded directly from gentile organization to the feudal state without going through slavery. While it is true that Engels regarded the conditions for serfdom to have been prepared in the decline of Rome, this did not change the fact that the Germanic tribes did not on their own follow a path of development identical to that of Greece and Rome, but found themselves in a more advanced stage of progress by virtue of the conditions prepared by Rome. This development, of course, creates problems within the scope of historical materialism; it is nevertheless significant that Kuo denied the possibility of divergence altogether, even though The Origin implicitly pointed to at least one important instance of its occurrence.

Another intriguing aspect of Kuo's analysis involved the transition from slavery to feudalism. It will be recalled that Kuo minimized the distinction between the two formations and suggested that the major difference was the dominance of consanguinity in one and territoriality in the other. In Morgan's formulation, this distinction applied not to the slavery-feudalism transition but to the replacement of gentile organization by political society at the threshold of civilization; territoriality was not the characteristic of any social formation but of the state throughout the period of civilization. The direct transition from consanguinity to territoriality coincided with the transition to feudalism only in the case of the Germanic tribes, which had bypassed the slave mode of production; in the case of Greece and Rome, the emergence of the territorial state corresponded to the rise of slavery. To the extent that consanguinity was associated with slavery, it was in its initial phase in precivilized society.

In the absence of elaboration by Kuo, we can only speculate on the reasons underlying the misapplication of this very prominent point in both Ancient Society and The Origin . Kuo, in his treatment of the Chou period, could not but observe that

aristocratic clans gained in political power at a time when, according to his premises, they should have been disappearing. The clans did not begin to disintegrate until the late Spring-Autumn and the Warring States periods, and it was only with the establishment of the empire that the central government crushed these organizations which had supplied the basis of localized aristocratic power.^[107] Since in Kuo's periodization of Chinese history the establishment of empire corresponded to the transition to "feudalism," it appeared in China's case that consanguinity was associated with slavery and the territorial state with feudalism. In employing the distinction he did, Kuo was in effect generalizing China's experience (and that of the Germanic tribes) into a universal characteristic of feudalism. His association of feudalism with territorial political organization was nevertheless of variance with Morgan and Engels. His association of consanguinity with slavery, on the other hand, contradicted his own observation that gentile organization had yielded to the state in late Shang or early Chou. Possibly out of his awareness of this problem Kuo was silent on Chou clans even though they formed an important facet of social-political organization in that period.

Kuo Mo-jo has revised his views a number of times since 1930. These revisions, however, have been restricted to matters of timing; his periodization of Chinese history retains the basic outline he first devised in Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu .^[108] In spite of the fact that references to Morgan and Engels, sparse to begin with, gave way after 1949 to quotations from Stalin and Mao Tse-tung as sources of authority, the view of historical development that he derived from those authors has shaped the structure of his historical thought since he first turned to the writing of history.

[107] See Hsu Cho-yun, Ancient China in Transition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), chap. 2, for a recent sociological analysis of this question.

[108] Kuo, "Chung-kuo ku-tai shih-ti fen-ch'i wen-t'i." Kuo summarizes the three major changes in his periodization of Chinese history and the reasons behind the changes. It is worth noting that although Kuo revised the Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu for publication after 1949 (1954), his revisions were mostly organizational, clarifying the themes discussed. All his basic arguments remained unchanged, even his table of primitive development derived from Morgan.