Regional Variations in Chinese Local Elites

In addition to describing historical changes in local elites, the chapters in this volume illustrate regional variations in the course of treating elites in six of G. William Skinner's original eight macroregions (maps 1.1 and 1.2).^[38] Contrasts have often been drawn between the ecologies and social organization of the Lower Yangzi, the southeastern coastal provinces, and the North China plain. However, geographical context is so important to understanding local elites in China that it is worth both summarizing characteristics of elites in these three major regions here and commenting briefly on the less studied elites of the Middle and Upper Yangzi regions and peripheral and frontier zones.^[39]

The Lower Yangzi Elite . In late imperial times, the Lower Yangzi and its Jiangnan core was not only the wealthiest and most commercially developed region of China but also the most successful in producing degree-holding gentry.^[40] Since the Ming the Jiangnan elite had also amassed substantial landholdings, with one seventeenth-century estimate asserting (probably with some exaggeration) that nine-tenths of the people were landless tenants.^[41] By Qing times, the substantially urbanized gentry were living the leisured life of absentee landlords in administrative centers or the many small towns that lined the canals. Their scholarly and cultural activities set the standard for much of the nation, and our images of gentry society and literati culture are based on the Lower Yangzi region.^[42] Jiangnan was also the most secure and least militarized area of China, and its cultural prominence reflected that fact.

The wealth and official status of the Lower Yangzi, especially the Jiang-nan, gentry gave them exceptional power, which the imperial state seemed to struggle endlessly to control. This gentry influence was enhanced by considerable social and cultural cohesiveness. Complex networks based upon

Map I. 1.
Provinces of China, Showing Locations of Studies in this Volume

SOURCE: G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977).

Map I.2.
Physiographic Macroregions of China

SOURCE: G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977).

such practices and institutions as marriage alliances, philanthropic activities, academies, and poetry clubs, tied the Jiangnan gentry together and set them off in ways that promoted their cultural hegemony. Lower Yangzi elite families organized lineages and established charitable estates; but lineage lands were usually limited, and lineages less defensive and boundary-conscious than in the southeast. Networks linking the gentry generally outweighed kinship units dividing them.^[43]

Although Lower Yangzi elites epitomized the gentry as degree holders and cultural leaders, they also exemplified the gentry's involvement in trade. As the most commercialized region of China, the Lower Yangzi provided more mercantile resources for elites to draw upon. Because there were too many degree holders to be employed in government service, some supported themselves as teachers, scholars, and managers, but others turned to trade. As foreign trade and the rise of Shanghai as China's leading commercial city expanded opportunities in the nineteenth and twentieth century, merchants and gentry were virtually fused.^[44]

With such various resources to draw upon, Lower Yangzi elites were among those least dependent on the central state even though they had the closest connections with high officials. Their autonomy grew after the Tai-ping Rebellion when the numerous bureaus and agencies through which elites took charge of repairing the destruction permitted a qualitative new expansion of civil power, and the concentration of lijin (likin) taxes in the Yangzi valley (as in the southeast) provided more funds for local elite projects and greater tax-farming opportunities than in most of northern and western China.^[45] When treaty ports like Shanghai provided partial havens for political organizing, elites were well prepared to translate their autonomy into political activity, culminating in elite participation in the 1911 Revolution and continued autonomy during the Republic.^[46]

On the other hand, village elites with considerable land, managerial authority, and coercive power in their localities were relatively rare in Jiang-nan, although they might be found elsewhere in the Lower Yangzi. After the Jiangnan landlords moved to towns and cities, there was less of a truly rural, community-oriented elite and few rural militia. Instead, absentee landlords acted in the villages through their agents and rent-collection bursaries supported by county governments.^[47] In the southeast, rural landlords more closely tied to their local communities were more of a counterweight to county-level elites.^[48]

Local Elites in the Southeast . Strong lineage organization was the most distinctive characteristic of rural society in the southeastern provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Taiwan, largely related to the frontier quality of these societies in the Ming and early Qing. Land had to be developed, and communities had to be defended; however, the scale of predation was small

enough for an armed community to defend itself Massive nomadic attacks and rebellions destroyed villages and scattered families in northern and western China, but the more manageable threats to rural society in the southeast reinforced the effect of hilly topography in producing cohesive and exclusive rural settlements. Complex lineage organization came later, influenced by Confucian norms and the officially sanctioned form of the ancestral estate, but it took its unique strength from the defensive need for community solidarity.^[49]

Through lineage corporate property a foundation for the power of a characteristic local managerial elite was tied to kin-group constituencies. In many other ways, southeastern elites behaved much like those of the Lower Yangzi: turning to commercial ventures, following degree-holding strategies if they could move beyond the village level, and forming associations with other elites in the county seat or market towns. Foreign trade, developing from the sixteenth century onward, had more impact before the mid-nineteenth century than on any other region except Northwest China; in Fujian, it gave rise to absentee landlordism very similar to that produced by commercialization in Jiangnan.^[50]

If such patterns were similar to the Lower Yangzi, the ways in which rural elites in the southeast exploited commercial resources reflected important differences as well. One of the most common methods was to exercise monopoly control and collect fees over local markets, ferries, or docks.^[51] Clearly such exclusive arrangements would produce more territorial competition among elites than the commercial investments common in Jiangnan. Gentry associations frequently became "alliances" of kinship groups, rather than expressions of shared cuture and social interests.^[52] Thus in the southeast, the vertical, kin-based structure of lineages seems stronger than horizontal gentry networks.

North China Elites . The unirrigated regions of North China—growing wheat, soy, corn, sorghum, and millet—were much poorer and more vulnerable to natural disasters than the rice-growing areas of the Yangzi and the southeast. Landlordism was generally undeveloped in North China, where landlords owned only about 10 percent of the land in Shandong and Hebei. When local elites did develop substantial landholdings, they tended to be in more commercially developed areas, along the southern Shandong portion of the Grand Canal or the northern littoral of the Shandong hills. There, by the nineteenth century, we see a fusion of landed and commercial wealth similar to the Lower Yangzi and southeastern patterns,^[53] but in the vast regions without convenient water transport, and hence little commerce, local elites seem to have preserved more of the traditional Confucian disdain for mercantile activity.^[54]

Scholars working on the North China plain have been impressed by the

weakness of the degree-holding gentry elite in predominantly rural counties. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the fifty-three counties of western Shandong produced only 413 holders of the provincial juren degree. Thus the average county, with a population of about 250,000 people, had probably five living juren . Rural counties had even fewer, and most of these men probably did not stay in places with such limited cultural and commercial resources.^[55] Although there were many degree holders in North China, they were likely to concentrate in a few major cities, notably Beijing and the provincial capitals, in contrast to the wide dispersal of gentry in the towns of the Lower Yangzi.

Several consequences derive from the weakness of county-level gentry on the North China plain. First, village elites were more likely to deal directly with the local magistrate's yamen than to work through gentry intermediaries as in Jiangnan. Some of the most important rural leaders in this area were either village brokers or subbureaucratic functionaries such as lizhang or xiangbao whose task was to communicate between village and county yamen on fiscal, legal, or other public matters.^[56] Second, the power of the county government was greater than in Jiangnan or the southeast. North China elites had neither a strong economic base in land and commerce nor powerful networks to confront the imperial state. As a result, the state loomed larger in the north, and access to officials was, in itself, considered a mark of elite status. Thus one village informant in twentieth-century Shandong described the "village gentry" as those "who know the county magistrate."^[57] Third, the weakness of a strong degree-holding elite in precisely those poor areas especially prone to disorder weakened the checks on the nongentry village strongmen/militia leaders/bandits who emerged as governmental power declined in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Elites in the Middle and Upper Yangzi . We know much less about Yangzi valley elites above the delta, and the chapters by Rowe and Zelin in this volume represent some of the first detailed English-language studies of the subject. Structurally, Middle Yangzi elites looked like slightly less developed versions of their Lower Yangzi counterparts; the Upper Yangzi elites of Sichuan were perhaps even one step less developed—less urbanized, less uniformly commercialized, less culturally refined, and less successful in the examinations. The Middle Yangzi differed from North China in its stronger gentry and more widespread and complex patterns of landlordism, but we do not find the same development of large corporate estates as in the southeast. There were fewer degree holders compared to Jiangnan, and local elites retained more contacts with rural communities, continuing their considerable involvement in agriculture and water control and successfully rallying peasants into militia against the Taipings.^[58] However, like the Lower Yangzi elite, the elite of both the Middle and Upper Yangzi relied increasingly on mercantile wealth as well as land.

There is a likely explanation for these patterns: the rebellions at the end of the Yuan and the Ming dynasties had a particularly devastating impact on the Middle and especially the Upper Yangzi, which reverted to frontier status at the end of the Ming. These areas went through several phases of economic development during the Qing. At the beginning of the dynasty immigrants were resettling and reclaiming the land, but by its end the core cities of the Middle Yangzi were starting to rival the Lower Yangzi as centers of modern development. Considering this later timetable of development, it may be best to conceive of these elites as an earlier stage of a single Yangzi valley prototype.

Local Elites in Peripheral Zones . The regional elites that we have been describing are mostly the elites of regional cores. We must not, however, neglect the distinctions between elites in core and peripheral zones. Certain common characteristics of peripheral elites, not limited to any one region, deserve further comment.

Most obviously, peripheries tended to be more violent and disorderly. Elites were more likely to command militia units, and their coercive resources were generally greater than those of elites in the cores. Government officials, important figures in the county seat, might have virtually no leverage in the countryside. Merchants, too, often entered rural areas as unpopular outsiders controlling long-distance trade. They were vital to the local economy but were not integrated into rural society. The multiple waves of immigration and the transfer of some mercantile capital into landholding could result in complicated, multilayered tenancy systems and the development of large-scale defensive organizations like lineages.

Second, the county seat and the district magistrate appear more important to the urban-oriented segment of elite society. Both the hilly topography and the focus of trade on the export of hill products, like tea and lumber, to the economic cores discouraged the growth of numerous linked marketing centers. Indeed the county city was also likely to be the local economic center. Elites congregating there included few upper-degree holders. Without the upper degrees and connections that gave core-zone gentry access to higher bureaucratic arenas, it was more difficult to circumvent the authority of county magistrates even though local men did acquire lucrative fiscal posts in the twentieth century.^[59]

Third, the evidence regarding elite continuity is particularly contradictory. The instability of the Jiangxi periphery encouraged fluid elite structures with considerable downward mobility. On the other hand, there is contrary evidence for enduring local oligarchies in the Zhejiang periphery where some elite families remained locally prominent for centuries.^[60] The key variable may be the degree of social strife in an area, with more settled peripheries like Zhejiang's able to support long-entrenched elites; but the question deserves further investigation.

Frontier Elites . On the edge of Chinese society frontiers, still less socially and economically integrated with the cores, were largely beyond the reach of state power.^[61] Frontier elites had to establish their positions as leaders of settlements in rough, sparsely settled societies and lead their followers against indigenous non-Han natives and competing immigrant settlers. Leaders of minority peoples had to defend against the intruders as well as other minority groups. Hence military power was the most common resource of frontier elites—shared by strongmen on Taiwan, militia leaders in Guizhou, and Muslim elites in the ethnically divided, strife-riven northwest. In this respect, frontier elites were similar to those on the periphery; but because the power of the state was still weaker, elites relied more on their own local resources, whether material like landholdings or spiritual like the inherited charisma of the Muslim menhuan elites described in Jonathan Lipman's paper at the Banff Conference.

Frontiers developed through several stages in the Qing, starting with Han immigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, followed by mounting conflict with the indigenous populace, growing external commercial contacts, and increasing governmental efforts to pacify and control these societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The northwest also experienced rebellion and government suppression in the nineteenth century, although it did not follow quite the same pattern and timetable. As a result, a process of gentrification seems to have overtaken elites on widely separated frontiers toward the end of the nineteenth century. Despite its political and military weaknesses, the Qing state in its final years was proving unusually effective on the frontier and was serving as a catalyst for cultural integration. It is ironic that just as the Confucian consensus that had long sustained the cultural hegemony of the gentry was breaking down along China's coastal core, frontier elites began to gentrify.

The diversity of Chinese local elites illustrated by the eleven studies in this volume makes it clear that the image of a static and monolithic gentry society cannot encompass the range of elites in China. It is not enough, however, just to say that Chinese local elites were diverse. In the concluding essay we will return to factors behind this diversity. What environmental factors determined the nature of local elites and the basis of their local dominance? What resources did they rely upon? What strategies did they pursue? What structures did they build to maintain and bolster their power? What new attributes did they acquire during the period studied in this volume? Were there common characteristics amidst diversity? Answering such questions within the different historical and geographical contexts in which elites acted is a necessary prelude to addressing the broader comparison of Chinese and Western elites that dominated earlier studies of the Chinese gentry.