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.