6—
The Periodization of Chinese History

As Marxist historians concentrated their attention on the past, the issue of periodization moved to the center of the debates. As long as the problem of contemporary society preoccupied Chinese Marxists, the question of periodization had remained on the periphery of discussion, with only an occasional author expressing direct interest in the overall periodization of Chinese history. Kuo Mo-jo's work was partially responsible for provoking interest in the question by drawing the attention of Marxist historians to early history. Equally, if not more important in this respect were the disputes over historical periodization that got under way in the Soviet Union in 1928 in response to the problems encountered in the course of the Chinese revolution.

It will be remembered from Chapter 3 that some Comintern China experts blamed the fate of the revolutionary movement in the 1920s on the failure to recognize China as an "Asiatic society," with features that distinguished it from European society and, therefore, called for special considerations in the formulation of revolutionary strategy. This view was rejected by the political leadership in 1928 on the grounds that it denied the necessity of an antifeudal agrarian revolution, but the conflict instigated a major historical controversy over the status of the Asiatic mode of production in Marxist historiography which lasted until 1931, when a special conference convened in Leningrad to discuss the issue officially rejected "Asiatic society" as a

social formation in its own right.^[1] In the course of the discussions, the Marxist periodization of history was subjected to an unprecedentedly thorough reexamination.

Chinese Marxists were very much cognizant of the disputes in the Soviet Union, and the issues being discussed there, in particular the issue of China's historical particularity, loomed large in their writings in the thirties; one of their major aims in periodizing Chinese history was to demonstrate that Chinese society had obeyed the universal "laws" of development Marx had discovered in his studies of Europe. As Chinese Marxists welcomed the decisions of the Leningrad conference, it might be added, they also became more prone in the thirties to follow the Soviet lead in the interpretation of Marxist periodization; by the end of the decade, the most important Chinese Marxist historians, who differed in their background from those who had initiated the Marxist debates, accepted the view of historical periodization that dominated Soviet historiography after 1931.^[2]

This tendency toward uniformity in historical interpretation was tied in with developments in the Marxist debates in China in the thirties. Marxist historiography went through two phases after 1930. The first years of the decade witnessed proliferation of Marxist writing with the intensification of controversy, which reached its high point in the "social history controversy" in the Tu-shu tsa-chih in 1931–1933. As the debates intensified, they degenerated progressively into an intellectual free-for-all where social and historical issues, and even political ones, were lost sight of as the participants engaged in exaggerated historiographical squabbles over minor differences of historical interpretation for no apparent reason other than asserting the distinctiveness of their analyses from those of authors whom they

[1] For a discussion of this controversy, see K. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962), part 2. R. Thornton, The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–1931 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), gives a brief discussion of the policy debates over the question of Asiatic society (pp. 4–8). A detailed discussion of the debates is available in Ho Kan-chih, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan .

[2] See the last section of this chapter.

considered to be their "opponents."^[3] In some cases nevertheless, the contributors succeeded in bringing forth new perspectives on Chinese history, which enriched the diversity of Marxist interpretations of the past, even though their analyses did not altogether justify their claims to originality.

Due to a combination of factors which will be discussed further on, Marxist historiography entered a more placid academic phase after 1933. During the remainder of the decade, the names of most of the revolutionaries who first undertook historical analyses disappeared from the publications that continued to publish Marxist works. These publications, many of them with academic ties, abandoned the concern with contemporary problems that had characterized the journals of the revolutionaries and stressed detailed research over controversy. By the end of the decade, many of the earlier interpretations of Chinese history had disappeared from sight, along with those who had advocated them, yielding the field to the new historical "orthodoxy" from the Soviet Union.

Through all these changes Marxist historians were bound together by the questions that guided their analyses. The historical theses of T'ao Hsi-sheng and Kuo Mo-jo provided the point of departure for much of the Marxist historical writing in the thirties and it is possible, if not very charitable, to regard most of the contributions in the 1930s as footnotes to the works of these two historians. Wang Li-hsi's introduction to the social history controversy recognized their stimulating influence on the discussions and acknowledged openly that the Tu-shu tsa-chih would continue basically the same type of historical inquiry as had been pursued earlier in other journals, in particular, the Hsin sheng-ming :

This battle is getting hotter and hotter. If we were to combine the drafts [this magazine has received], they would add up to over eighty thousand words. Because of limitations of space, we have decided to publish this short piece first. In case we receive more [essays], it will do no harm to publish a special issue on this question; indeed, it would be worth publish-

[3] See table in text, this chapter. This judgment may seem somewhat harsh, yet it is justified, by the tone of the discussions and the truculent insistence on differences where none was apparent.

ing ten special issues on this question! The contents of the third issue will constitute a call to battle; the essays to be published will cross arms on every aspect [of the problem] with the works of the following authors:

(1) Ku Meng-yu, (2) T'ao Hsi-sheng, (3) Mei Ssu-p'ing, (4) Ch'en Tuhsiu, (5) Kuo Mo-jo.

The questions raised will cover the following:

(1) Did Chinese feudal society disintegrate in the Spring-Autumn period or not ?

(2) Should the gentry class be given special emphasis?

(3) What kinds of societies were Yin and Chou societies?

(4) What kind of society is contemporary Chinese society ?

We do not care at the moment what the conclusions will be, but we would like them to be objectively derived; we do not want subjective and arbitrary conclusions. We hope for the participation of those in broader and more universal areas of history.^[4]

The authors Wang named and the questions he specified as guidelines to the controversy indicate clearly the role earlier works, in particular those of T'ao and Kuo, played in instigating historical inquiry; the increase in the intensity of debate after 1930 was partially a result of the existence of antecedents in the application of Marxism to Chinese history, which provided ready-made "targets" for the controversialists. The issues that had been raised in the initial discussions, moreover, remained alive during the more academic phase of the discussions, although they were less frequently attached to the names of the authors who had first raised them.

However, there were two important factors which contributed to sharpening the debates after 1930, that had little to do with the historical issues per se. The first of these was the effect on the discussions of the Tu-shu tsa-chih which, in its open encouragement of controversy, was responsible for stimulating Marxist historical writing. For two years between 1931 and 1933, the Tu-shu tsa-chih served as a lodestar which attracted to it all radicals interested in questions of society and history. As was the case with all the Marxist journals in these years, the Tu-shu tsa-chih was a product of the revolutionary movement. Its editors were associated with the social democratic "third

[4] Editor's preface to the essay by Chu Po-k'ang, published under the sectional heading, "Chinese Social History Controversy." TSTC , 1.2 (June 1931): 7.

force" which opposed both the Kuomintang and the Communist party and sought a strategy of revolution that fell somewhere between the two extremes provided by the major contenders for power, one that would avoid the betrayal of the revolution by the Kuomintang without resorting to the tactical excesses of the Communists. The journal closed down in late 1933, when its editors were forced to go undergound in the wake of Ch'en Ming-shu's abortive rebellion in Fukien. It was indicative of the Tu-shu tsa-chih's impact on the discussions that when the journal closed down, and no comparable forum that could serve as an arena of theoretical conflict arose to take its place, the controversies among Marxists lost much of their intensity.

The vitality of the Tu-shu tsa-chih undertaking was itself nourished by the swelling number of frustrated revolutionaries around the turn of the decade. A good number of the contributors to the controversy were Trotskyites and other Communist dissidents who abandoned, or were expelled from, the party as a result of the internal conflicts of the late twenties. Unlike those revolutionaries with clear-cut political affiliations who had initiated the first theoretical discussions after 1927, the participants in the controversy were individuals or members of splinter revolutionary factions who, as far as it is possible to tell from the positions they adopted, lacked a clear ideological or political focus; their conflicts were often motivated more by a vague animosity against all rival revolutionaries than by any real differences over goals or strategy. Their revolutionary activities frustrated, they now poured into historical debates the energies they had been unable to channel in the cause of revolution. The warlike metaphors, "battle," "battlefield," "warrior" (and even the term for controversy which literally means "war of essays"), that pervaded their references to the debates provide constant reminders to the reader of the extent to which frustrations born out of the failure of revolution were injected into the writing of history at this time. The uncompromising attitude the participants adopted toward one another revealed the utter delusiveness of the desperate hope — which served as the outward justification for their participation in this metamorphosed revo-

lutionary activity — to fashion a revolutionary strategy that could once again unify all revolutionaries. The fate of the Fukien Rebellion, which as the last major attempt by non-Communist leftists to recreate the broad-based revolutionary movement of the 1920s, extinguished any lingering hopes in the rejuvenation of the revolution and, with them, the interest of the revolutionaries in history as the fountainhead of oracular wisdom.

Cheng Hsueh-chia has suggested that interest in historical materialism dwindled after 1933. The extensive, and futile, attempts to apply Marxism to Chinese history during the controversy, in his view, demonstrated to Chinese intellectuals Marx's ignorance of China, leading to a loss of confidence in the relevance of Marxist theory to Chinese society.^[5] While there was a definite decline in the intensity of discussion after 1933, and possibly in the density of Marxist writing as well, it is somewhat misleading to ascribe such changes to the disappearance of interest in historical materialism. In the first place, Cheng overlooks the fact that an important forum such as the Tu-shu tsa-chih did not close down for lack of interest but in the face of political repression. Even more importantly, a close examination of periodical literature after 1933 shows that interest in historical materialism did not disappear but rather assumed a more respectable, and for the same reason less conspicuous, academic guise. Marxist historiography lost a good deal of its distinctiveness as the questions first raised by Marxist historians, or their more refined offshoots, were absorbed into the flourishing social-historical research of these years, while many of the authors who continued to employ the formal structure of historical materialism turned from theoretical discussions to detailed historical research.

What disappeared after 1933 was not the interest in historical materialism as such, but the belief that historical analysis had an immediate relevance to revolutionary action, which had motivated Marxist historians in the early years of the discussions as it had heightened general interest in their work. The case of

[5] Cheng, She-hui shih lun-chan ti ch'i-yin ho nei-jung , p. 104.

T'ao Hsi-sheng, whose career as a historian spanned the whole decade, illustrates this shift. In 1928, T'ao turned to the study of history to resolve the questions aroused by the direction the revolutionary movement had taken, hoping thereby to bring the revolution back on a correct course. In 1934, in his opening editorial to the Shih huo pan-yueh-k'an (Food and Commodities Semimonthly), which was to become one of the foremost forums of social history as well as Marxist historiography over the next four years, he declared that the time had come to separate the study of history from the concerns of the present if a deeper understanding of Chinese history were to be achieved.^[6] Not all agreed with him, of course, but in the ensuing years the historians whose work raised Marxist historiography to a new level of sophistication were precisely those who, without openly admitting to it, followed the new trend toward the separation of the past and the immediate present.^[7]

The table here offers an overview of the various periodizations suggested by Marxist authors in the years 1928–1937. It confirms the thesis that most of the periodizations represented variations on the schemes suggested in the early years of the discussions. This chapter will focus on the more significant, and original, contributions to the social history controversy and the few conspicuous splinter controversies that lasted till the end of the decade. These contributions took as their starting point the critique of the interpretations first proposed (or most ably defended) by T'ao Hsi-sheng and Kuo Mo-jo and, in the process, offered alternatives of their own. First, however, it is necessary to look briefly at the question of Asiatic society. This view did not evoke any significant enthusiasm among Chinese Marxists; nevertheless, the repeated attempts to refute or to bypass it

[6] T'ao editorial, Shih huo , 1.1 (December 1, 1934). For a stronger statement refusing to publish works on contemporary China, see postscript, 4.2 (June 16, 1936):48.

[7] This is not to imply that these historians abandoned their belief in the relevance of history to contemporary society. One could even argue that the persistence of the notion of imperial China as a feudal society indicated that historical interpretation was still conditioned by contemporary revolutionary strategy, as Ho Kan-chih openly stated (see Chapter 2, this volume). But most of the historians preferred to concentrate their attention on ancient and early imperial history.

indicate clearly that it touched a sensitive chord in the consciousness of many of the Marxist historians and had a stimulating impact on the discussions.

Chinese Society and the Asiatic Mode of Production

The appearance of the first discussions of "Asiatic society" in China coincided with the debates in the Comintern. In 1928, Chung-kuo nung-ts'un ching-chi yen-chiu (Analysis of Chinese Village Economy) by L. Madgyar, the leading theoretician of the view at the time, was published in China, supplemented by an introductory essay by the publishers expressing disagreement with Madyar's views.^[8] In 1929, the Hsin sheng-ming published articles by Madyar and K. Wittfogel which applied the concept to Chinese history.^[9] The same year the views of a third important advocate of "Asiatic society," E. Varga, were introduced to the Chinese public.^[10] Nevertheless, references to Asiatic society by Chinese authors remained sparse until the time of the controversy in the Tu-shu tsa-chih , when a number of authors launched attacks on the concept, using arguments against it that followed closely the ones employed by Soviet critics of the Asiatic modes of production. In the remainder of the decade, occasional publication of discussions on Asiatic society by Russian and Japanese authors continued to appear in print. Chinese authors remained relatively quiet on the issue and tended on the whole to reject the validity of the concept in the form suggested by its major advocates.

[8] This information is given in He Kan-chih, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan, pp. 10–15. The version used here is Chung-kuo nung-ts'un ching-chi chih t'e-hsing (Special Features of Chinese Village Economy), tr. by Tsung Hua (Shanghai, 1930).

[9] Ma-ti-ya (L. Madyar), "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi" (China's Agrarian Economy), and K. Wittfogel, "Chung-kuo chieh-chi chih shih ti k'ao-ch'a" (Historical Examination of Classes in China), both in HSM , 2.8 (August 1929).

[10] E. Varga, "Chung-kuo ko-ming ti chu ken-pen wen-t'i" (Basic Problems of the Chinese Revolution), in Fan Chung-yun, Tung-hsi hsueh-che chih Chung-kuo ko-ming lun (Views of Eastern and Western Scholars, on the Chinese Revolution), (Shanghai, 1929), pp. 1–48.

The question of Asiatic society appeared in two different historical guises.^[11] One version, taking its cue from Marx's list of social formations in the Critique , placed it in the context of early society. This version found a number of adherents among Chinese Marxists, chief among them Kuo Mo-jo and Li Chi, who agreed on the validity of Asiatic society as a primitive social formation even though they disagreed in placing it in early Chinese history. The other version, the one advocated by the major foreign theorists, regarded Asiatic society as a postprimitive, precapitalist social formation that provided the counterpart in Asia to slavery and feudalism in European history. In the writings of Chinese Marxists, most of whom rejected the notion that there was anything peculiar or unique about China's historical evolution, this version was most conspicuous for the negative reactions it evoked. The few authors who used the term treated the Asiatic mode of production as an Asian variant of one of the other social formations, which accorded with the conclusions of the Leningrad conference in 1931.^[12]

The authors who viewed China as an Asiatic society agreed that stability or stagnation was the outstanding feature of Chinese history, but disagreed in placing Asiatic society with respect to other social formations. According to Madyar, the period of the Asiatic mode of production in China stretched from the breakdown of gentile society during the Chou era all the way to Western capitalist intrusion in the nineteenth century and represented a more backward stage than the feudal, at least in the extent to which the concept of private property had

[11] For a brief overview of the various attitudes toward Asiatic society, see Saku Tatsuo, "Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch'an fang-fa fun" (Discussion of the Asiatic Mode of Production), Wen-hua p'i-p'an (Cultural Critic), 1.4–5 (September 15, 1934): 196.

[12] See table for views of Ch'en Po-ta and Hsiung Teh-shan. Hsiung came closer than most of the other Marxists to accepting China as an Asiatic society, which he identified with a stagnant economy. See "Chung-kuo nung-min wen-t'i chih shih ti hsu-shu" (A Historical Narrative of the Peasant Question in China), TSTC , 1.4–5 and 3.3–4. An early advocate of the view in China was Wang Chih-ch'eng. See "Chung-kuo ko-ming yu nung-yeh wen-t'i" (The Chinese Revolution and the Agrarian Problem), HSM , 1.10 (October 1928). Liu Hsing-t'ang stressed the village commune in China (nung-ts'un kung-t'ung t'i ) for having retarded development. See "Chung-kuo she-hui fa-chan hsing-shih chill t'an-hsien" (Investigation of the Contours of Chinese Social Development), Shih huo , 2.9 (October 1, 1935):7–27, especially p. 27.

emerged.^[13] In contrast, Varga regarded it as a more advanced social formation than the feudal, and Wittfogel saw it as having developed in China out of an early feudal phase.^[14] It is not clear from these analyses what the authors believed would have been the future of Chinese society had it not been for the impulse to development provided by the Western intrusion; even Madyar conceded, however, that imperial Chinese society had manifested incipient tendencies toward the development of those elements that went into the making of capitalism in the West, surplus capital and labor. Now under Western pressure, Chinese society was undergoing a transition to capitalism, although traces of its Asiatic heritage still persisted and retarded its development.

State domination of society, according to these authors, was the universal feature of the Asiatic mode of production which eclipsed all the variations "Asiatic" societies displayed otherwise.^[15] Madyar discounted the significance of some of the criteria that were popularly employed to distinguish Asiatic society from other social formations: the low level of development of a commodity economy and currency of exchange, significance of merchant's and usury capital, rent-in-kind as the form ground-rent assumed, fusion of agriculture and industry in the household, and the communal organization of the village. All precapitalist societies' he pointed out, bore strong resemblances in these respects; conversely, identical social formations exhibited important variations with regard to these elements under different spatial and temporal conditions.^[16] The basic criterion for distinguishing one social formation from another, accordingly, was to be sought in property relations. In the case of Asiatic society, the predominance of the state stunted the growth of private property.

[13] Madyar, "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi," p. 14.

[14] Varga, "Chung-kuo ko-ming ti chu ken-pen wen-t'i," pp. 8–9; Wittfogel, "Chung-kuo chieh-chi chih shih ti k'ao-ch'a."

[15] Madyar, "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi," p. 20.

[16] Ibid., pp. 9–13. Also, Chung-kuo nung-ts'un ching-chi chih t'e-hsing (Special Features of the Chinese Village Economy) (Shanghai, 1930), pp. 8–9.

Madyar did not deny that private property had become pervasive in Chinese society from the late Chou onward, when the rise of an exchange economy had dissolved gentile society; nor did he claim that private property had matured fully under any precapitalist society. His distinction lay in the sphere of ideology: Although private ownership of property had existed in China from the earliest times, and the accumulation of property in the hands of individuals had reached impressive levels, the concept of private property had remained underdeveloped, with the consequence that there had been no strong pressure for the establishment of legal-political institutions to guarantee the right to ownership. A clear concept of private property, Madyar suggested, had not appeared in China until after the arrival of the West. This distinction may seem to be a moot one, and it certainly made the advocates of Asiatic society vulnerable to the charge that they argued from the superstructure of society to its economic basis: nevertheless, it effectively served its intended purpose of refuting the argument that China was a feudal society.

The concept of private property, Madyar conceded, had not achieved a dominant status in any society until the emergence of modern capitalism, but Western feudalism had institutionalized the idea of individual rights and privileges, which had prepared the ground for the maturation of the concept of property; in the case of China, by contrast, the existence of a strong state had curtailed the emergence of the notion of private rights into open rivalry with public power as represented by the organs of the state.^[17] Varga, even more explicitly, pointed to the state as the main distinguishing feature between imperial Chinese and feudal European societies when he argued that medieval Europe was characterized by the decentralization of political power in contrast to China where all power was concentrated in the hands of the state.^[18] The effects of a strong centralized state, in this view, had shaped all social and political

[17] Madyar, "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi," pp. 3–4.

[18] Varga, "Chung-kuo ko-ming ti chu ken-pen wen-t'i," p. 8. Varga also stressed the commercial dimensions of land ownership in China and the absence of serfs in distinguishing the two areas (p. 6).

relations within Chinese history, and accounted for the divergence between the evolution of Chinese and European societies.

The proponents of Asiatic society traced the roots of political power in China to the essential function the state performed in the economic subsistence of society. In contrast to the "dry" agriculture of Europe, Chinese agriculture was "wet"; that is, agrarian production in China (and other areas where the Asiatic mode of production prevailed) was heavily dependent on the regulation of water resources.^[19] This condition produced what Wittfogel has since described as a "hydraulic society."^[20] The organizational requirements of water control, according to all of these authors, were such that only a centralized government with a far-flung bureaucracy could have undertaken its management. Madyar added that that need for organization in the case of China was exacerbated by the perpetual threat of nomadic incursions into China from the north, which called for constant military preparedness.^[21] These two factors combined had created a situation where the political superstructure dominated society completely.

The advocates of Asiatic society, however, were unwilling to draw from their analyses the obvious conclusion that the Chinese state had led an existence above classes or, at the very least, that state power over society had dwarfed all social divisions in determining social and economic relationships. Madyar denied the possibility of state power existing independently of and above classes, and averred that the intimate ties between officialdom and the landlord-merchant elite in China led the state to behave in the interests of the ruling economic class.^[22] Varga went even further when he suggested, much as T'ao Hsi-sheng had done, that the officials of the Chinese government exhibited a feudal nature in their exploitation of society.^[23] To their opponents, however, such statements appeared

[19] Ibid., p. 7; Madyar, "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi," p. 18.

[20] K. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

[21] Madyar, "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi," p. 18.

[22] Ibid., p. 109.

[23] Varga, "Chung-kuo ko-ming ti chu ken-pen wen-t'i," p. 8.

as mere window-dressing. They recognized correctly that the main thrust of the arguments in favor of Asiatic society was to down play the role of classes and class conflict in the name of a deeper bifurcation between state and society. This view had certain implications for Marxist social theory, as well as for revolutionary strategy in China, that accounted for the opposition it provoked both in the Soviet Union and among Chinese Marxists.

The "pluralism" of historical development implied by the concept of the Asiatic mode of production was its most significant feature within the context of Marxist historiography.^[24] The crucial distinction between this view and others which allowed for some differences between Chinese and European development resided in the dissimilarity of the conception of historical development that informed them. The opponents of feudalism in China shared with its proponents the belief that historical development was uniform the world over, with differences restricted to the rate, not the nature, of development. The advocates of Asiatic society, on the other hand, held that historical development could, and did, follow different courses depending on the physical environment in which societies were placed; that multiplicity, rather than uniformity, characterized history. This view, which is seemingly at odds with the monist conception of history implicit in Marxism, has been the source of much disputation within Marxist historiography, mainly over the question of whether the distinction was first drawn by Marx or represented a distortion of Marx's views by later exegetes of historical materialism.^[25] The Marxist theoretician whose name

[24] One author noted in discussing the controversy that the many variants of transitional society proposed by Chinese Marxists did not differ in their essential arguments from Asiatic society. Wu Ming, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan ti chien-t'ao" (Examination of the Controversy on Chinese Social History), Chung-kuo wen-hua chiao-yu kuan chi-k'an (Quarterly of the Chinese Cultural and Educational Institute), 2.1 (January 1935): 169–190. While it is true, as a brief comparison shows, that these views all employed similar concepts (strong state, commercialized land ownership, a nonexpanding "simple reproduction economy"), they were different in their nuances as well as in their implications for the revolutionary struggle. The most important theoretical distinction of the Asiatic society view, however, was its implicit departure from historical monism.

[25] For a comprehensive review of Marxist literature on the subject, see K. Wittfogel, "The Marxist View of China," China Quarterly , 11 (July–September 1962): 1–20, and 12 (October–December 1962):154–169.

has been most intimately associated with the view is G. Plekhanov, "the father of Russian Marxism," who was the first to systematically articulate Marx's vague references on the subject, and whom the advocates of Asiatic society in the 1920s openly adopted as their mentor.^[26]

Plekhanov argued that historical development followed one of two major paths. In the first path, followed by European society, the dissolution of gentile society was followed by the emergence of slave society and, following that, the evolution into feudalism and capitalism, in that order. The other path was the one followed by "Asiatic" societies which proceeded from gens society to the Asiatic mode of production, characterized by a strong state organization and lacking the internal dynamics characteristic of European society. Plekhanov made no effort to conceal that the distinction he was making (or, as he saw it, Marx had made originally) was ultimately traceable to the differences between the geographical environments of European and "Asiatic" societies: The characteristic features of "Asiatic" societies were necessary consequences of the economic dependence of these societies on the regulation of water resources.^[27] His view, though he did not admit to this aspect of it openly, was in essence "geographical determinist." It hardly mattered whether he conceived of geography as cause or condition since, in either case, the geographical environment prescribed the course of history. Regardless of how one evaluates the virtues of this view, it obviously contravened a basic Marxist premise that the interplay of forces internal to society provided the basic motive power of social development. This was the important theoretical element in the criticism which Plekhanov's interpretation of historical materialism, and its application to Chinese history by his ideological progeny, provoked in the late twenties.^[28]

[26] S. H. Baron, "Plekhanov, Trotsky, and the Development of Soviet Historiography," Soviet Studies, 24.3 (July 1974):380–395. See Madyar, "Chung-kuo ti nung-yeh ching-chi," pp. 15–16, for his reliance on Plekhanov's views.

[27] G. V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York: International Publishers, 1909), p. 63, and The Monist View of History (New York: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 127–129. For Madyar's acceptance of the crucial role of geography, see Madyar, ibid., p. 16.

[28] Historians of Soviet historiography have stressed the needs of the state and embarrassment with the "resemblance" between the Soviet and the Asiatic state as acentral element in the rejection of the Asiatic mode of production. This view downplays considerations involving the Chinese revolution in the origination of the debate and, even more importantly, that the concept of the Asiatic mode of production creates genuine problems within the Marxist theory of historical dynamics. For an example of this view, see Shteppa, Russian Historians , p. 87.

The work that signaled the launching of the attack on the Asiatic mode of production in the Soviet Union was S. M. Dubrovsky's On the Question of an "Asiatic" Mode of Production, Feudalism, Serfdom, and Merchant Capital , published in Moscow in 1929. During the next few years, the controversy in the Soviet Union revolved around the theses Dubrovsky, director of the Agrarian Institute under the Communist Academy, put forward in this book; his theses also proved to be very influential among Chinese Marxists seeking arguments against Asiatic society.^[29] Dubrovsky avoided dealing with the specific evidence the advocates of Asiatic society had adduced to prove their contentions concerning Chinese society; nor did he deny the lack of private property and the existence of a supraclass state that derived its power from hydraulic activities in certain societies. Rather, using "abstract deductions," he attempted to demonstrate that those phenomena belonged to the "superstructure" and were not sufficient to define a social formation, since they could be found to have existed widely under different historical circumstances. Nevertheless, to accommodate the characteristics associated with the Asiatic mode of production within more "orthodox" Marxist social formations, Dubrovsky was himself compelled to stretch "orthodoxy" by multiplying the number of social formations beyond the orginal five or six enumerated by Marx: On the basis of references in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and possibly inspired by the earlier interpretations of such Marxist theoreticians as Bogdanov and Pokrovsky, he enumerated a total of ten social formations to encompass historical development in Europe and elsewhere.^[30]

The debates in the Soviet Union revolved mainly about the social formations Dubrovsky had suggested, in particular his

[29] Ibid., pp. 71–73.

[30] Ibid., pp. 67–80. The ten modes of production were primitive society; patrimonial society; slave-owning; feudal; serf-holding; economy of small producers; capitalism; economy of transitional period; socialism; economy of the period of world communism (p. 78).

chopping up of feudal society into feudal, serf-holding, and small producer phases. In the course of these debates, Soviet historians reached a tacit consensus that Asiatic society was not an independent mode of production but a variant of one of the other social formations; the majority took it to be a variant of feudalism, but there were also those who held that it was a modified form of slavery.^[31] After 1931, this interpretation dominated Soviet historiography, first tacitly and, following Stalin's exclusion of Asiatic society from the list of acceptable social formations in 1938, officially; it was not until the 1960s that the concept was once again revived in Soviet historiography.^[32]

Chinese Marxists who objected to the application of the concept Asiatic mode of production to Chinese society followed the lead of Soviet historians in the arguments they employed. They, too, accepted the validity of the crucial observations on the peculiarities of Chinese society drawn by the proponents of Asiatic society; but they refused to acknowledge that these characteristics marked China as a special historical case. Their efforts, as in the case of their Soviet counterparts, were devoted to demonstrating that those characteristics could be explained as manifestations of a society under transition from feudalism to capitalism.

The Social History of Controversy

The majority of the contributions to the Tu-shu tsa-chih were important primarily for the critical perspectives they brought to bear on earlier Marxist writings. Since many of these criticisms have already been mentioned in earlier chapters, the present discussion will be restricted to those works published in the journal that introduced significantly new views on Chinese

[31] Ho, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan , pp. 14–15. An advocate of Asiatic society as a variant of slavery was V. Reikhardt, who was popular in China in the thirties.

[32] S. H. Baron, "Marx's Grundrisse and the Asiatic Mode of Production," Survey , 1–2 (winter-spring 1975): 128–147.

history and will emphasize the aspects of these works that added to the complexity of the Marxist understanding of the past. It should also be remembered that these views were formulated by their authors in conscious efforts to refute the interpretations of those they considered to be their antagonists; many of these views were presented piecemeal as the polemics evolved. For the sake of clarity and brevity, they will be treated more systematically here than was the case with their original presentation.

Li Chi-tzu and Precapitalist Society : Li Chi was, by the common appraisal of his colleagues, one of the most knowledgeable Chinese Marxists at the time of the controversy and commanded an impressive knowledge not just of Marxist theoretical literature but also of German historical literature in general (he had studied in Germany in the twenties). None of the important Marxist historians, and only a few of the unimportant ones, escaped his criticism which, if somewhat petty and distempered on occasion, was always theoretically well-founded. Nevertheless, Li's success in applying Marxist theory to Chinese history did not match his critical acumen at detecting flaws in the works of others. His self-assurance enabled him to stretch theory to fit China's circumstances, an undertaking that most of the other Marxists shied away from; otherwise, he was no less selective in his use of Marxist theory than those whom he criticized on the same count.

As the table indicates, Li divided Chinese history into five major periods: (1) primitive communism to the time of P'an Keng (1402 B.C. ), (2) Asiatic society during Yin, (3) feudal society during Chou, (4) precapitalist (ch'ien-tzu-pen chu-i ) society from Ch'in to the Opium War, (5) capitalist society since the Opium War.^[33] Li's most original and controversial contributions to Marxist historiography were in his interpretation of the

[33] Li Chi, "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3:14–15. Li revised the early phase later. In his "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih ti yen-chiu" (1934), he expanded the period of Asiatic society to include Hsia and Yin dynasties (p. 260).

second and the fourth periods, to which he devoted most of his attention.

Li believed that social formations had overlapping features but that they were distinguishable with respect to the dominant form property relations and, therefore, class structure assumed in different periods. He did note at one point that the mode of production (sheng-ch'an fang-shih ) was the only proper standard to employ in historical periodization: nevertheless, it is clear that he took the mode of production to include more than technology, incorporating within its compass the organization of labor and, by implication, property relations. Although he recognized the significance of technology to social development, especially in early history, he deemed it insufficient to account for the progress from one social formation to another; in the case of capitalism, he rejected specifically the idea that the use of machines could explain the capitalist mode of production.^[34]

Li described the "content" of social formations in terms which gave primacy to the ownership of the means of production and its consequences for the organization of labor. Under primitive communism, he argued, land belonged to the communal kinship organization, and all members cooperated in production. The outstanding feature of the next, Asiatic, stage of history was state ownership of land; while the communal village survived the transition, it no longer owned the land, and production devolved onto the shoulders of individual peasant households which became the units of combined agrarian and industrial activities. Under the "ancient" (Greek and Roman) mode of production, land belonged to the aristocracy. Labor here took the form of slave labor within the boundaries of large estates (latifundia), and the products of labor were commonly destined for the market rather than for immediate use. With feudalism, landownership passed into the hands of the feudal nobility. Here production, which once again combined agriculture and crafts, reverted to small peasant production on feudal

[34] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC, 2.2–3:57.

estates, with immediate consumption as the objective. Peasants under feudalism owned the tools necessary for production; their subservience to the nobility, therefore, could be guaranteed only by attaching them to the land as serfs. This relationship of compulsory personal dependency provided the paradigm for social and political organization under feudalism. The rise of exchange within feudal organization led to the displacement of the feudal nobility by new-style landlords and a petite bourgeoisie. This new class, which owned both the land and the capital, liberated the peasantry but at the same time steadily reduced it to a mere laboring class. This relationship embodied the content of precapitalist society. Finally, as production took the form of large-scale production for the market and exchange of commodities flourished, precapitalist society was transformed into capitalism wherein the bourgeoisie established exclusive control over all the means of production and labor was transmuted into proletarian labor, that is, labor that was totally deprived of the means of production.^[35] Li noted in another context that it was only when property relations took an exclusively economic form, as they did under capitalism, that it was proper to speak of "classes."

As in the case of Kuo Mo-jo, Engels and Morgan provided the starting point of Li's inquiry into ancient history. Nevertheless, he differed from Kuo on the criteria of interpretation he adopted and, consequently, in evaluating available materials on early history. In the first place, he pushed the origins of Chinese civilization much farther into the past than Kuo was willing to do. He was highly critical of historians such as Ku Chieh-kang who, he believed, had been seduced by "positivism" and "empiricism" and cast doubts on the veracity of traditional records.^[36] He maintained that such records, though not history, reflected society as it had existed at the time and could, with the appropriate theoretical apparatus, be utilized to reveal historical reality. The theoretical apparatus, as it were, proved to

[35] Li Chi, Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan p'i-p'an (Critique of the Chinese Social History Controversy) (Shanghai, 1933), pp. 487–489.

[36] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3: 20, 37.

be the models derived from the comparative study of social development; Li was more than willing to discover in early Chinese history characteristics for which there was no evidence on the grounds that the experience of other societies indicated the "probability" of such characteristics.^[37]

The theoretically controversial aspect of Li's views on early Chinese society concerned his interpretation of the Yin period (later from Hsia to Yin) as the stage of "Asiatic Society" in China. As was the case with Kuo, Li adopted Marx's periodization in the Critique and placed the Asiatic mode of production in early history, but he disagreed with Kuo's equation of Asiatic and primitive (or gentile) societies since he took state ownership of land to be the outstanding feature of Asiatic society; that stage, he argued, could only have been realized after society had advanced beyond the primitive communist stage of history. He agreed with Plekhanov's observation that Marx had changed his views on the evolution of early society after he had found out about Morgan's research and had subsequently placed Asiatic society in the postprimitive phase of history. Li also employed Plekhanov's authority to argue that, in the new view, Marx had taken Asiatic society as an alternative path of development to that followed by Greek and Roman societies. Chinese society, he concluded, had never gone through the stage of slavery but instead passed directly from Asiatic to feudal society at the end of the Yin period.^[38] Rather conveniently, Li ignored the fact that Plekhanov had regarded Asiatic society not merely as an alternative to slavery but to the evolution of European society in general, which included feudalism as well as slavery. It was quite obvious from Li's writings that this omission was due not to oversight but to his rejection of Asiatic society as a stage that directly preceded capitalism.^[39]

Li Chi's treatment of feudalism in China did not differ in its basic features from that of T'ao Hsi-sheng, and neither did his views on the demise of the feudal system in late Chou, except

[37] "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih yen-chiu," pp. 260–270.

[38] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3:12–14.

[39] Ibid., pp. 11–12.

perhaps in the greater function he ascribed to the use of iron in increasing productivity and, therefore, stimulating the flourishing of an economy of exchange. Li was loath to give up the possibility of the use of iron as early as the third millenium B.C. , but he conceded that iron did not become a significant element in production until mid-Chou, after which it hastened the dissolution of the feudal system and the emergence of "precapitalist" society.^[40] This concept was Li's most significant contribution to Marxist historiography. Li, at least as he saw it, differed from T'ao Hsi-sheng and the advocates of feudal society most radically in his interpretation of the significance of commercialization for subsequent Chinese history — although, as Wang Li-hsi pointed out later, he exaggerated his differences from those authors, in particular T'ao Hsi-sheng, who was the target of some of his most virulent criticism.^[41]

Li Chi described imperial China from Ch'in to Ch'ing as a "precapitalist society," using the term not in the generic sense of a society that preceded capitalism but in the specific sense of a social formation that occupied a place between feudalism and capitalism and was a precondition of the latter. European history, he argued, had passed through a similar stage between the medieval and the modern periods, but whereas this phase had been of relatively brief duration in Europe, it had persisted without significant change in China for two thousand years.^[42] The precapitalist mode of production, as he defined it, was "a kind of transitional mode of production which contained within it the remnants of all the modes of production that had preceded it."^[43] Power in this society still resided with landlords, but the landlords of precapitalist society were not to be con-

[40] Li Chi, Hu Shih Chung-kuo che-hsueh shih ta-kang p'i-p'an (Critique of Hu Shih's Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy), (Shanghai, 1931), p. 12. For his insistence on the early existence of iron in China, see "Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih ti yen-chiu," p. 263, and "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3:44. Li relied extensively on the work of the German historian G. Schmoller in his arguments concerning iron in China.

[41] Wang Li-hsi, "Chung-kuo she-hui hsing-t'ai fa-chan chung chih mi ti shih-t'ai" (The Puzzle Period in the History of the Evolution of Social Formations in China; hereafter "Mi ti shih-t'ai"), TSTC , 2.7–8:12.

[42] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3: 54–55.

[43] Ibid., p. 51. Also see Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan p'i-p'an , p. 559.

founded with feudal landlords. Precapitalist society followed upon the breakdown of the self-sufficient economy of feudalism under the pressure of merchant's capital and commodity exchange; the "extraeconomic" dependency relations of feudalism, therefore, gave way in the precapitalist phase to social relations that were at least partially economic. Such a shift pointed to a crucial change in property relations and, therefore, the character of social classes and the dynamics of society. It was on this point that he distinguished his position from that of T'ao Hsi-sheng: "If we get to the essence of his [T'ao's] argument, we see that there is nothing in common between his precapitalist period and ours. His society of the precapitalist period is a feudal society, or at best a postfeudal [hou-feng-chien ] society. What we call precapitalist society is neither feudal nor postfeudal; rather it is a society where the precapitalist mode of production has taken hold following the demise of the feudal mode of production."^[44]

This distinction seems at first sight to be a moot one since Li's precapitalist society, as he described it, appeared to have the same general features as T'ao's commercial society: (1) the fusion of agriculture and home industries, with economic activity revolving around a number of local markets, (2) importance in the economy of merchant's and usury capital, (3) domination of commerce over industrial production, (4) existence of landlords and "other upper classes," (5) existence of independent artisans, (6) persistence of the production methods that had existed earlier, (7) concentration of the means of production in a few hands with a consequent impoverishment of peasants and artisans.^[45] There is no reason to believe that T'ao would have disagreed with the existence of these characteristics in imperial society. Nevertheless, the two authors stressed different aspects of imperial social structure: Where T'ao emphasized the continued predominance of political relations (or, following Oppen-heimer, political exploitation for economic purposes), Li held that social relations had come to revolve around a primarily

[44] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.7–8:48.

[45] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 2.2–3:51–52.

economic matrix by the time of the imperial period. The most significant consequence of this divergence concerned the problem of classes in imperial China. T'ao's views led him to conclude that the bifurcation between the political and the economic elite had overshadowed class divisions as the determinative datum of imperial Chinese history; Li, on the other hand, took class divisions within society as the starting point of his analysis. In fact, one might deduce from Li's distinction among rank (fa-yueh ), status (shen-fen ) and class (chieh-chi ), with the connotations respectively of basically political, social, and economic differentiation in society, that class divisions had become autonomous sources of social dynamics only with the onset of the imperial period, when economic relations had come to replace political relations as the foundation of social organization.^[46]

Finally, these differences resulted in divergent views of the dynamics of imperial China. Li had good reason to charge that T'ao, although he took imperial China to be postfeudal, regarded the retrogressive "feudal forces" or remnants as having determined the fate of Chinese society by holding back its progress. Li's concept of precapitalism, by contrast, implied a progressive, and necessary, stage falling between feudalism and capitalism without which capitalism, in China or Europe, would have been impossible.

Li was not able to overcome the proclivity most Chinese Marxists displayed to tailor Chinese history to fit the model provided by European history. Yet he was more flexible than most in the way he handled Marxist social formations and was willing to shift the relative significance of some of the ideas he found in historical materialism, the most important instance of which was his acceptance of precapitalist society as a social formation rather than as a mere transitional period. This view, along with his rejection of slavery, suggests that he came closer than most of his Marxist colleagues to treating social formations as "types" rather than as consecutive stages of historical devel-

[46] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC , 3.3–4:20–32. For his stress on the economic elements of society and the importance of class struggle, see pp. 33–71.

opment. Li himself, finally, boasted of his willingness to change Marx where necessary when he criticized T'ao and Chu for their reluctance to depart from the letter of Marx's writings, which he characteristically attributed to the ignorance of those authors of the basics of historical materialism.^[47]

Wang Li-hsi, Hu Ch'iu-yuan, and Despotic Society : Wang Li-hsi and Hu Ch'iu-yuan not only shared the editorial management of the Tu-shu tsa-chih but also held nearly identical views on Chinese history. Their most important contribution to Marxist historiography lay in their argument that imperial Chinese society had been a "despotic" or "absolutist" society (chuan-chih chu-i she-hui ). This idea was not unique to them, but they emerged in the course of the controversy as its most avid proponents.

It is evident from the journal discussion that the question of the nature of the state and its relationship to society emerged from the beginning as one of the fundamental concerns of Marxist historiography. Radek was the first to address the question of despotism and, thereafter, the question repeatedly intruded into the debates in various guises. It was not until the appearance of the analyses by Wang and Hu, which were clearly inspired by the debates in the Soviet Union, that the concept of despotism (as distinct from "Oriental despotism") acquired visibility. In their polemics against other Marxist interpretations, the two authors reserved their harshest criticism for the proponents of Asiatic society, following the lead of the opponents of Asiatic society in the Soviet Union, in particular that of Dubrovsky. Although Wang and Hu objected to some of Dubrovsky's theoretical formulations, they concurred in his view that Marx had not conceived of Asiatic society as a peculiar social formation and held the "geographical determinism" of Max Weber and Plekhanov responsible for this "deviation." In rejecting the idea that the Asiatic mode of production had prevailed in China, or anywhere else for that matter, Wang

[47] "Kung-hsien yu p'i-p'ing," TSTC, 2.7–8:52.

and Hu discovered the most appropriate substitute for explaining the features of imperial Chinese society in the concept of a postfeudal, precapitalist "despotism," which Pokrovsky had utilized to explain the development of premodern Russia.^[48]

The two authors agreed that after having passed through the primitive communist, gens, and feudal stages, Chinese society had evolved by the end of the Chou period into a transitional form that was the product of the dissolution of feudal society by commerce.^[49] As Wang described the mechanism of the changes at the end of Chou,

The natural economy was dissolved by commodity economy so that "old capitalism" [lao tzu-pen chu-i ] could be nourished within the womb of feudal society. Landlords, in order to undertake large-scale commodity production [for the market], began to forcefully annex land, that is, land concentration got under way. Once landlords and commercial capital were allied, commercial capitalists often became landlords and landlords engaged in commerce, with the result that feudal exploitation was deepened. The concentration of commercial capital undermined localized political power and prepared the circumstances in which despotism could arise.^[50]

Hu portrayed despotic society in greater detail. (1) The progress of commodity economy and commercial capitalism within feudal society undermined the power of the nobility and enabled monarchs to concentrate power in their hands. (2) The monarchy now took over as the protector of the nobles and the merchants, and served as the intermediary which harmonized their essentially conflicting interests; this complicated but did not negate the class nature of the state since (3) one of the duties of the state was to suppress peasant unrest which became more widespread as the oppression of the peasantry increased. (4) As the cash economy flourished, the extravagant demands of the rulers multiplied, increasing the exploitation of the

[48] Wang, "Mi ti shih-t'ai," p. 20. Hu, "Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch'an fang-shih yu chuan-chih chu-i" (The Asiatic Mode of Production and Despotism), TSTC , 2.7–8:1–7.

[49] For discussion of the early period, see Wang, "Ku-tai ti Chung-kuo she-hui" (Ancient Chinese Society), TSTC , 3.3–4 (April 1933):1–30, and Hu, "Chung-kuo she-hui — wen-hau fa-chan ts'ao-shu" (Draft on the development of Chinese Society and Culture), TSTC , 3.3–4 (April 1933): 1–96.

[50] "Mi ti shih-t'ai," p. 22.

people through taxes which were now instituted to meet the state's needs for funds. (5) The stability of state power was guaranteed by the use of bureaucrats and mercenary armies. (6) Peasant rebellions occasionally overthrew the monarchs but, with the low level of peasant political consciousness, power always reverted back into the hands of landlords, merchants, and bureaucrats, and the monarchy was invariably reestablished.^[51] According to Hu, the bureaucracy, standing armies, and cash rent and tax were the most important features of despotic society, and pointed to its essentially antifeudal nature, even though the system tolerated and perpetuated remnants of feudalism and feudal exploitation.^[52]

These features of imperial Chinese society described by Hu and Wang were essentially deductions from Pokrovsky's premise that "the absolute monarch, as a form of the state system, arose on the basis of commerical capitalism."^[53] Pokrovsky had argued that the centralized despotic monarchy could arise only in a commercial (in contrast to a natural) economy: In the natural economy of feudalism, the monarch remained dependent on his vassals for the exercise of power and, therefore, had to share power with them in order to guarantee their cooperation; only after the rise of commercial (and, presumably, directly taxable) economic activity could the monarchy financially afford to replace vassals by hired officials and armies. Once such a source of income had been guaranteed, the monarchs were quick to turn against feudal lords to enhance their own power.^[54] Furthermore, as Pokrovsky saw it, despotism not only sealed the fate of feudalism but also contributed dynamically to the emergence of capitalism.

Hu and Wang agreed with Pokrovsky's view of "merchant or commercial capitalism . . . as a lower stage of capitalism" and

[51] Hu, "Chuan-chih chu-i — chuan-chih chu-i li-lun yu Chung-kuo chuan-chih chu-i chih shih-chi" (Despotism: The Theory of Despotism and Its Reality in China), TSTC , 2.11–12 (December 1932). Summarized in Cheng, "Kuo Mo-jo Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu," pp. 76–77.

[52] Hu, "Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch'an fang-shih yu chuan-chih chu-i," p. 14.

[53] M. N. Pokrovskii, Russia in World History , ed. by R. Szporluk, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 47.

[54] Ibid., p. 48.

took the absolute monarchy founded on such an economic basis to be "an active participant in and organizer of primitive capitalist accumulation."^[55] Advocates of this view in China stressed the affinity of the despotic state with the urban commercial class and even suggested that the initial unification of China under the Ch'in had been made possible by merchant support for the dynasty; the dynasty had in return expressed its gratitude, they claimed, by permitting merchants (of whom the most outstanding was Lu Pu-wei) to gain access to the highest levels of power.^[56] Nevertheless, the despotic state extended its protection to the whole economic elite composed of landlords and merchants against the oppressed lower classes. Its mercenary armies were used to suppress peasant insurrections while its bureaucrats, serving as intermediaries between landlords and merchants, forestalled disruptive conflicts within the elite.

How did the view of imperial China as "despotic society" differ from the other views discussed here? The advocates of this view distinguished themselves not only from the proponents of Asiatic society but also from T'ao Hsi-sheng and Li Chi, whose analyses bore a great deal of similarity to their own. Wang claimed that both T'ao and Li had argued in essence that imperial China had been a postfeudal society whereas he argued for a society beyond that. There is no doubt that, like many other participants in the controversy, Hu and Wang exaggerated the originality and uniqueness of their analyses. Their views of the origins of the imperial economic structure, the composite elite based on that economic structure, the existence of a powerful state, and the transitional society that blended features of different modes of production did not differ significantly from those of T'ao and Li. In their treatment of the dynamics of imperial society, they were in fact closer to T'ao hsi-sheng's position than they were willing to admit. Even though Wang and Hu, like Li Chi, conceived "despotic society"

[55] Ibid., introduction by Szporluk, p. 17.

[56] Hu, "Chung-kuo she-hui — wen-hua fa-chan ts'ao-shu," pp. 78–83; Wang, "Mi ti shih-t'ai," pp. 20–25. Also see Li Mai-mai, "Chung-kuo feng-chien chih-tu chih p'eng-k'uei yu chuan-chih chu-i chih wan-ch'eng" (The Fall of Feudalism and the Maturation of Despotism in China), TSTC , 2.11–12 (December 1932).

to be a phase in the development from feudalism to capitalism that paved the way for the emergence of the latter, they could not ignore the weight of the past in shaping imperial China; Hu in particular stressed the feudal aspects of this transitional phase, and his statement of its dynamics did not differ significantly from T'ao's views on the subject: "In the womb of feudalism, the existence of commodity economy is at first exceptional but becomes progressively more conspicuous; the former obstructs the development of the latter while the latter dissolves the former, at first slowly but, as time passes, with increasing rapidity."^[57] This was no more than a rephrasing of T'ao's views, except perhaps in the increase he saw in the speed of transition in time; the latter was, however, a moot distinction since, in either case, there had been no significant change until the twentieth century.

There were, nevertheless, some differences in emphasis between this view and kindred ones proposed by other authors. Wang and Hu, in contrast to the advocates of the Asiatic view, stressed the class basis (or at least connections) of the despotic state. They also viewed despotic society as a postfeudal precondition to capitalism rather than as a stagnant special society. Finally, as in the case of Pokrovsky with respect to Russian history, they attempted an economic explanation of the existence of a strong state without resorting to explanations based upon peculiar geographical features. Their views contrasted to those of T'ao and Li, in premise if not in demonstration. While Li had regarded the state in precapitalist society as the protector of a protocapitalist landlord class, Wang and Hu emphasized the affinities of the despotic state with the urban, commercial classes. This also distinguished their views from those of T'ao, who emphasized state protection of landlords. Furthermore, they differed from T'ao in their view of the relationship between the monarch and the political elite, or the gentry. While

[57] Hu, "Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch'an fang-shih," p. 14. Hu argued elsewhere that imperial Chinese society was an Asiatic variant of feudalism. See "Lueh fu Sun Chuo-chang chun ping lueh lun Chung-kuo she-hui chih hsing-chih" (Brief Reconsideration of Mr. Sun Chuo-chang and a Brief Discussion of the Nature of Chinese Society), TSTC , 2.2–3, especially pp. 8–26.

T'ao emphasized the feudal, centrifugal aspects of gentry power, Wang and Hu saw the gentry primarily in their persona as officials and regarded them as functionaries in service of the absolute monarch.

Wang I-ch'ang, T'ao Hsi-sheng, and an Alternate View of Slavery in China : Wang I-ch'ang, joined after 1932 by T'ao, went beyond all the other Marxist historians in the effort to establish an exact parallelism between the evolution of Chinese and European societies. The periodization proposed by these authors was remarkable for the equivalence in historical development it suggested: They viewed the nature and order of social formations as having been identical in the two areas and also as having coincided almost exactly in time. The scheme they adopted was based on the list of social formations provided in the Critique : gens (primitive communist), slave, feudal, and capitalist societies, in that order. Wang I-ch'ang, openly, and T'ao Hsi-sheng, implicitly (through his analysis), suggested that Chinese and Western societies had proceeded through these formations at roughly the same points in time.^[58]

Wang, the original advocate of this view, argued that Chinese society had made the transition from gentile to slave society during the Western Chou period. The latter stage had lasted through the Period of Disunity (third-sixth centuries A.D. ) when, as a consequence of the barbarian invasions of China, slave society had been transformed into feudalism. Feudalism had lasted until 1911, when China had entered the capitalist stage of history.^[59]

In 1932, T'ao publically repudiated his former views on the development of Chinese society and proposed a new periodization that bore a remarkable resemblance to Wang's, and even

[58] Wang I-ch'ang, "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui shih fu-lun" (A Supplement to the History of Chinese Slave Society), TSTC , 2.7–8 (August 1932):77.

[59] In addition to the essay cited in footnote 58, see the following essays for Wang's views: "Chung-kuo she-hui shih tuan-lun" (A Brief History of Chinese Society), TSTC , 1.4–5 (August 1937), which discusses overall periodization, and "Chung-kuo feng-chien she-hui shih" (History of Chinese Feudal Society), TSTC , 3.3–4 (April 1933).

went further in the parallelism with Europe it suggested. T'ao gave two reasons for the change in his views. He admitted, first, that his former approach, which had treated imperial China as a society that had not changed for two thousand years, did not accord with historical data. Second, he noted, he had come to see recently that kinship had played a far more important role in the Chou period than he had recognized earlier; he felt obliged, therefore, to modify his views on Chinese feudalism.^[60] Another plausible explanation may have been T'ao's increased familiarity with Marxist literature, which led him to change his views on periodization; this would account for, as the two reasons he offered did not, his new emphasis on slavery in Chinese history. Earlier, his interest had been restricted to the relationship between feudalism and capitalism. The interpretation of Chinese antiquity by Kuo and other Marxist historians may have turned T'ao's attention to aspects of early history he had overlooked in his initial studies and led him to consider the question of slavery in China. His approach to slavery also showed the influence of Karl Kautsky, whose Foundations of Christianity made a significant impression on T'ao's thinking in the early thirties and left its imprint on the works he produced at this time.^[61]

Whatever the case, his new periodization of Chinese history broke radically with his earlier views, at least with respect to early Chinese history. He now suggested that Chinese society had been a gens society until the Spring-Autumn period, at which time the commercialization of society due to advances in production techniques had led to the rise of private property

[60] T'ao, "Chung-kuo she-hui hsing-shih fa-ta kuo-ch'eng ti hsin ku-ting" (A New Estimation of the Process of Development of Social Formations in China), TSTC , 2.7–8 (August 1932):1–9, especially pp. 3–4.

[61] T'ao had mentioned the existence of slaves in his earlier work but apparently did not consider them important enough to dominate economic production. For T'ao's acknowledgment of Kautsky's influence on his thinking, see CLTT , p. 111. Some of the ideas Kautsky used in the Foundations , in particular the ideas of Lumpenproletarian revolution and "consumer socialism" (both implying a shortsighted distributive orientation to revolution) found their way into a number of works T'ao produced during these years on contemporary and historical subjects. See Pien-shih yu yu-hsia (Dialecticians and Knights Errant) (Shanghai, 1931), where T'ao discusses the masterless intellectuals of late Chou, and Ko-ming lun chih chi-ch'u chih-shih , where he discusses the failures of past peasant rebellions (pp. 111–115).

and slavery. The slave system, which reached its apogee during the Han dynasty, had lasted till the Three Kingdoms period (third century A.D. ). Barbarian invasion of China at this time had led to the emergence of feudalism, which lasted for the next five centuries. Finally, a second wave of commercialization of society had gotten under way with the Five Dynasties in the tenth century. From the Sung dynasty onward, China had been a "protocapitalist" (hsien-tzu-pen chu-i ) society, with a brief reversion to feudalism during the Mongol Yuan dynasty.^[62]

Wang and T'ao both believed that slave society had been the product of the impact of commerce on gentile society. Wang placed somewhat greater emphasis on ethnic conquest in the origination of slavery, tracing its beginnings to the Chou conquest of the Shang.^[63] Nevertheless, the difference was not of major significance, for Wang himself located the emergence of the slave mode of production in the Spring-Autumn period and pointed to the state of Ch'i as the earliest among Chinese states to have made the transition from gens to slave society. Ch'i's advantage over other states, according to Wang, was its favorable maritime environment, which gave it access to commercial resources, as had also been the case with the city states of the ancient Aegean basin in Europe: In other words, it was the flourishing commerce between the coast and the interior which Ch'i mediated that had enabled it to progress to a new stage of development before other states.^[64] Once progress had gotten under way, commerce and production based on slave labor became forces that impelled each other toward the full maturation of the slave system. The process reached its culmination in the Ch'in-Han societies when slave production became the dominant mode both in agriculture and the production of industrial

[62] "Hsin ku-ting." Also see "Chan-kuo chih Ch'ing tai she-hui shih lueh-shuo" (A Brief Discussion of Social History from Warring States to the Ch'ing), Shih huo , 2.11 (November 1, 1935):17–19. T'ao reiterated the same views in his last major work during this period, Chung-kuo she-hui shih (History of Chinese Society) (Chungking, 1944). His periodization in that book was as follows: clan society to primitive feudalism (Shang-Chou), slave society (Warring States-Han), advanced feudal society (end of Han-T'ang), rise of an urban commercial society (Sung-Ch'ing). The primitive-advanced feudal distinction is traceable to F. Oppenheimer.

[63] Wang, "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui . . . fu-lun," p. 37.

[64] Ibid., pp. 49–50.

commodities. Han society, especially Eastern Han society, differed little, according to these accounts from the slave society of Rome. Slaves were enclosed in large estates ("latifundia") under the ownership of patriarchal families (the "Great Families"), which had replaced the gens and set to work on production for the market.^[65]

This organization of labor became the basis for feudalism once barbarian invasions had triggered the reversion to natural economy. The consequence of the invasions was to convert latifundia into self-sufficient manors (the "heart" of the feudal system) and slaves into semifree peasants, or serfs. With the need for self-sufficiency, the specialization of production that had characterized the latifundia gave way to the production of agricultural and industrial products for use on the manor, a characteristic, according to both authors, of the feudal mode of production.^[66] Wang I-ch'ang pushed the parallelism with Europe beyond the economic structure to the ideological superstructure of society, when he compared the Chinese acceptance of Buddhism at this time to the spread of Christianity in Europe during the medieval period.^[67]

The two authors agreed that another phase of commercialization set in with the T'ang dynasty, but disagreed on its consequences. Wang argued that due to the absence of an "inland sea" in China, commerce never reached full development and feudalism persisted until the coming of the West. T'ao, on the other hand, saw in the resurgence of commerce the beginning of a protocapitalist society in China: With the Sung period, the

[65] Ibid., pp. 64–65. For the "Great Families" (hao-tsu ), see L. S. Yang, "Great Families of Eastern Han," in E-tu C. Sun and J. DeFrancis (eds.), Chinese Social History (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1956), pp. 103–134.

[66] T'ao, "Chan-kuo chih Ch'ing-tai she-hui shih," p. 18; Wang, "Chung-kuo feng-chien she-hui shih," pp. 19–21, 39–59. In another essay, Wang stressed the mode of production (which he contrasted to productive or distributive relations) as the basis for periodization. He emphasized the centrality of the manor to the organization of agrarian labor in this context. The manor, in some ways, provided the model for the organization of feudal society as a whole, with its counterpart in the guilds of the cities and the monasteries of the religious order. See "Feng-chien lun" (Feudalism), Wen-hua p'i-p'an , 2.2–3 (January 10, 1935):301.

[67] "Chung-kuo feng-chien she-hui shih," pp. 25–34. In the same essay Wang criticized T'ao for overlooking the role of religion in Chinese feudalism.

economic center of gravity once again moved from the countryside to urban centers, which also set in motion the centralization of political power; Chinese society after the Sung was not only much more urbanized than it had been before, but also a great deal more centralized and stable in its political organization.^[68] Unfortunately, T'ao explained, the political elite undermined the growth of capitalism by imposing on China an isolationism that stultified the growth of productive forces until the coming of the West in the nineteenth century. It is interesting to note that although T'ao's new periodization represented a radical departure from his earlier views, it left intact his observations on the nature of contemporary Chinese society.

While Wang and T'ao could be (and were) faulted for the absurdity of their claims concerning the temporal coincidence of Chinese and European historical development, their periodization was superior to others discussed here in two important ways. First, theirs was the only systematic interpretation of the past to abandon the view that imperial Chinese history represented one undifferentiated unit; they were able, therefore, to take account of the significant reversion to a decentralized political organization following the Han dynasty and, in the case of T'ao in particular, of the important changes in Chinese society and politics after the Sung dynasty. Second, their placement of slavery within the context of the commercialized economy of late Chou and the Han dynasty conformed more closely to Marx and Engels's views on the historical preconditions of the slave mode of production than Kuo's discovery of the slave system under the primitive economic circumstances of early Chou. Unlike Kuo, whose evidence for slavery was sparse and extremely vague, Wang was able to uncover a considerable body of evidence concerning the existence of slaves and slave labor during the Han dynasty.

The problem in Wang's case lay with the evaluation of available evidence; as his critics pointed out, and as recent research has shown, slaves in the Han did not constitute more than a fraction of the total population and their labor was restricted mostly to domestic service. As for the "latifundia" of the "Big

[68] "Chan-kuo chih Ch'ing tai she-hui shih," p. 19.

Families" of Eastern Han, detailed investigation indicates that labor on these estates assumed a form that was more reminiscent of serf than of slave labor.^[69] These problems spun off further debate over Wang's work in the next phase of controversy.

The Devolution of Controversy

The contumacious mood that surrounded the social history controversy precluded the resolution of differences over interpretations of the past. Marxist historiography in 1934 still faced the task of resolving the questions that had instigated the controversy: the question of the existence of a postfeudal, precapitalist "commercial society," the question of the universality of the slave mode of production, and the question of Asiatic society.^[70] In the ensuing years, Marxists continued to debate the issues arising from these questions in splinter controversies; when the war with Japan broke in upon China, those questions had still not been resolved and, judging by the tendencies of the discussions, would probably have never been resolved even if circumstances had permitted continued debate.

It would serve little purpose to trace these controversies in detail. The arguments and counterarguments the various protagonists exchanged were mostly repetitions of earlier views on the same issues. A brief overview of the more conspicuous controversies will be sufficient to describe the dénouement of the first phase of Marxist historiography in China.

One relatively sustained discussion after 1933 concerned slavery. This discussion, a direct offshoot of the social history controversy, flared up when several authors, independently, criticized the application of that concept to Chinese history. In critiques directed mainly at Wang I-ch'ang but also including

[69] See the essay by L.S. Yang cited in footnote 65. For slavery, see C. M. Wilbur, Slavery in China during the Former Han Dynasty (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1943).

[70] See Lu Chen-yu, Shih-ch'ien ch'i Chung-kuo she-hui yen-chiu (Examination of Prehistorical Chinese Society) (Peking, 1934), pp. 12–31, for a detailed discussion of the problems.

the historical interpretations of T'ao Hsi-sheng and Kuo Mo-jo, these authors argued on theoretical grounds that slavery was not a universal stage of history and that, in the case of China, commerce, which was a precondition of the slave mode of production, had never expanded to a volume sufficient to induce the full maturation of the slave system. Some authors added that at no time in the past had slaves constituted a significant enough portion of China's population to dominate labor and, hence, to justify the use of the term slave mode of production .^[71] Wang I-ch'ang was the only one of their targets to rise to the challenge of this criticism. In a series of articles, he defended his position both on theoretical grounds and by adducing detailed evidence that, he believed, supported his contention that slaves had existed in China in large numbers and that they had played a crucial role in production all the way to the end of the Han dynasty.^[72] Briefly in 1934, these disagreements grew into an animated controversy between Wang and two of his chief critics, Liu Hsing-t'ang and Ting Ti-hao, involving the anti-Communist leftist journal Wen-hua p'i-p'an (Cultural Critic), where Wang and Liu published most of their essays, and the Li-shih k'o-hsueh (Historical Science) of the National Normal University in Peking, which published a special issue on slavery where Ting stated his views on the subject in two long detailed articles.^[73] The fervor of debate petered out rapidly, but the authors involved continued to resurrect their differences on and off until the very eve of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.^[74]

[71] For criticism of Wang's view, See the articles by Liu Hsiung-t'ang and Ting Ti-hao in the bibliography. Wang Hsiung-jui and Li Chi criticized Wang's view on the grounds of the small number of slaves. For Li's criticism of T'ao, see Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan p'i-pan , pp. 441–444. Wang's criticism is cited in Wang I-ch'ang, "Tsai wei nu-li she-hui pien-hu" (New Defense of Slave Society), Wen-hua p'i-p'an , 1.4–5 (September 15, 1934):131. In that article, Wang also cites some works by Liu and Ting that are not included in the bibliography here (p. 128).

[72] "Tsai wei nu-li she-hui pien-hu." Also see "Wei nu-li she-hui pien-hu" (Defense of Slave Society), weekly social science supplement to the Shih-chieh Jih-pao (World Daily), February 21, 1934, and "Chung-kuo nu-li she-hui yu feng-chien she-hui chih pi-chiao yen-chiu" (Comparative Examination of Slave and Feudal Societies in China), Wen-hua p'i-p'an , 1.6 (October 15, 1934).

[73] Li-shih k'o-hsueh , 1.5 (September 1933).

[74] See the essays by Ting Tao-chien in Shih huo , 5.7 (April 1937):1–9, and Liu Hsing-t'ang in Shih huo , 5.11 (June 1, 1937):6–9.

The second one of the "minicontroversies" that persisted beyond 1933 involved the question of commercial society, which once again came to the fore in 1935, long after the idea had been disavowed by its original proponent, T'ao Hsisheng.^[75] In this case, the controversy was occasioned by an article by Li Li-chung in the Shih huo where Li contended, going beyond anything T'ao had dared to claim openly during the earlier phase of the discussions, that the Ch'in-Ch'ing span in Chinese history represented the period of commercial capitalism, which was not a mere transitional phase but a mode of production in its own right.^[76] In the following issues of the journal, a number of authors published refutations of Li's views, arguing, as others had argued against T'ao earlier, that commerce served only the "counterfunction" (fan-tso-yung ) of dissolving a mode of production but did not constitute such a mode itself and could not, therefore, be utilized to define a historical stage.^[77]

Li eventually retracted some of his more extravagant claims and offered a compromise solution, identifying commercial capitalism as the transitional (primitive accumulation) first phase of capitalism which corresponded to what Marx had described as the "manufacture period" (shou-kung-yeh shih-tai ), or the premachinery phase, of capitalism.^[78] However, even this concession, which brought Li quite close to T'ao's earlier position, did not mollify some of his opponents, who continued to attack his views; the last such piece was published in May 1937, only a month before the Shih huo stopped publication with the outbreak of war in July of that year. The one interesting aspect of this discussion was Li's willingness to endow "commercial capitalism" with the status of an independent stage in history;

[75] For this controversy, see essays in the bibliography, by Li Li-chung, Ting Tao-chien, Fu An-hua, and Fan Chen-hsing. T'ao reiterated in his postscript to Shih huo , 2.9 (October 1, 1935), that he no longer held this view (p. 36).

[76] Li Li-chung, "Shih t'an t'an Chung-kuo she-hui shih shang ti i-ko 'mi'" (Discussing a "Puzzle" in Chinese Social History), Shih huo , 2.9 (October 1, 1935):14–16.

[77] Fu An-hua, "Shang-yeh tzu-pen chu-i she-hui shang-chueh" (An Evaluation of Commercial Capitalist Society), Shih huo , 3.11 (May 1, 1936):1-19, especially p. 2.

[78] Li, "Shang-yeh tzu-pen chu-i she-hui ti sheng-ch'an hsing-t'ai" (The Mode of Production of Commercial Capitalist Society), Shih huo , 5.2 (January 16, 1937):1–11.

otherwise, the discussion, unlike the one on slavery, was highly theoretical, with the authors placing greater value on quotations from Marx than on historical evidence, and contributed little that was new to Marxist historiography.

As noted, the third issue that had been inherited from the earlier phase of the discussions, the question of Asiatic society, was revived in an occasional essay but, so far as I have been able to determine, it did not become the subject of any sustained controversy. The majority of these essays, whether the authors were Chinese or foreign, rejected the concept on the grounds that have already been discussed.^[79] One compromise solution that came to the fore in the late thirties is of interest because it took account of the concept and its relevance to China without having to concede that China had departed from the universal laws of historical development. As explained by Ho Kan-chih, one of the proponents of this view, Chinese society before the Western intrusion was essentially feudal, but feudalism coexisted with remnants of previous modes of production; in other words, Chinese society had represented a blend of all the precapitalist modes of production. China, he argued, had gone through all the stages that the West had, but none of these stages had grown to maturity because of the persistence of elements of former stages: Thus, slave society had never reached completion because of the persistence of primitive elements, and feudal society had never matured because of the persistence of elements of primitive and slave societies. The dead weight of the past had held back social development and gave China the appearance of a peculiarly stagnant or "Asiatic" society.^[80] At one sweep, Ho was able to rationalize the problem of "Asiaticness" as well as to resolve the problem of why feudal society in China had never made the transition to capitalism, all the time retaining the basis for the antifeudal revolution he believed to be necessary to China's future progress.

[79] For a detailed discussion of the continuing concern with Asiatic society in China, Japan, and the Soviet Union, see Ho Kan-chih, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan , pp. 1–78.

[80] Ibid., preface, pp. 2–3.

Academic Marxism and Marxist Historiography

The more dominant, and in the long run more significant, trend after 1933 was the cooptation of historical materialism into academic history. An inadvertent statement T'ao made in 1935 provides a clue to the imperceptible shift in the temper of Marxist historiography. Calling for a revival of debate on periodization and social history in the July 1, 1935 issue of the Shih huo , T'ao remarked that now that the summer holidays were approaching, people could take time off from their curricular duties to concentrate on the writing and discussion of history.^[81] Marxist history, which had been a task of the utmost urgency to revolutionaries before 1933, now passed into the domain of academics as an "extracurricular" activity! Historiography in this period was academic in two senses. First, it was written mostly by academics or was published in journals with academic affiliations (this was true even of the "minicontroversies" discussed in the preceding section). Second, the major thrust of Marxist historiography was in the direction of detailed research and monographic study with only a minimal concern for the theoretical questions that had occupied Marxist historians earlier.

Academic Marxist historiography manifested three tendencies. The first of these was represented by T'ao Hsi-sheng and the social-economic historians gathered around him at Peking University and the Shih huo . T'ao emerged in these years as one of the foremost Chinese social historians, was one of the most popular teachers at Peita, and exerted considerable influence on his students and colleagues.^[82] One eminent Chinese historian, who started his career during this period, lauded T'ao's contribution: "Mr. T'ao Hsi-sheng is a man versed in Chinese political and social institutions. . . . T'ao's achievement is in his revelation

[81] Shih huo , 2.3 (July 1, 1935).

[82] T'ao himself recalls his popularity as a lecturer at this time (CLTT , pp. 132–134). His students attest to this fact. Ch'uan Han-sheng recalled in an interview in 1970 that T'ao was probably responsible for turning him to social history.

of the true conditions of Chinese social history as a whole."^[83] The emphasis of this group was on the investigation of historical sources and the production of specialized monographs. T'ao himself produced a number of monographs in the mid-thirties that were offshoots of his earlier speculations on Chinese history and represented significant contributions to social and political history.^[84] The Shih huo rapidly became a major forum of social and economic history; its contributors included a number of young historians who were later to achieve eminence as social-economic historians.^[85] The journal did not ignore theoretical issues, as the controversy on social formations shows, but partially as a consequence of editorial policy, treated theoretical speculation and historical investigation as related but largely separate spheres of inquiry.

The second tendency in academic Marxism was the eclectic use of historical materialism in conjunction with other sociological theories in the analysis of Chinese history. The foremost representative of this trend was Chou Ku-ch'eng, whose Chung-kuo t'ung-shih (A Comprehensive History of China), first published in 1939 and reprinted nine times by 1947, found its way into use as a textbook in a number of universities in the forties.^[86] Chou, who had published his first Marxist-inspired studies of China during the early phase of the discussions,

[83] Teng Ssu-yu, "Chinese Historiography in the Last Fifty Years," Far Eastern Quarterly , 8.2 (February 1949): 148.

[84] T'ao stressed the collection and analysis of sources as a major goal of the Shih huo (editor's preface, 1.1, December 1, 1934). His Ch'in Han cheng-chih chih-tu (Political System of the Ch'in and Han) (Shanghai, 1936) has been described as the "first systematic study" of Chinese political institutions. See the preface by Shen Jen-yuan to T'ao and Shen, Ming Ch'ing cheng-chih chih-tu (Political System of the Ming and Ch'ing) (Taipei, 1967). It was during these years that he built up the basis for his studies of political-social institutions, which he continues to publish. But the most impressive product of these years was the Chung-kuo cheng-chih ssu-hsiang shih (History of Chinese Political Thought), 4 vols. (Shanghai). T'ao completed the first draft of his book between 1932 and 1937. His research group also helped in the collection of materials for K. Wittfogel's History of Chinese Society, Liao (907–1125) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, dist. by Macmillan, 1949). See CLTT, p. 137.

[85] For example, Ch'uan Han-sheng and Yang Lien-sheng. It is noteworthy that six out of the twenty-five articles in the important collection by Sun and DeFrancis, Chinese Social History , were originally published in the Shih huo .

[86] Teng, "Chinese Historiography," p. 147.

utilized Marxist concepts for heuristic rather than prescriptive purposes, with due regard for evidence and a minimal preoccupation with questions of theory.^[87] He adopted the attitude, from his very first studies, that historical materialism represented a "historical outlook" (shih-kuan ) that guided inquiry and interpretation but should not be confused with history per se. In his introduction to the History, he drew distinctions among history, historical materials (shih liao ), and historical outlook; the goal of the historian, he argued, was to synthesize historical outlook and historical materials to produce a "living portrait" of the past, which was history.^[88] The History was written in this spirit. Chou addressed himself to much the same questions as occupied other Marxists, adopted as the framework for his history a periodization that was clearly Marxist in inspiration, and used Marxist concepts (especially class) extensively in his inquiry into the past. Nevertheless, his periodization was more precise than most in its sensitivity to change, his explanations took account of historical exigencies that had influenced the course of Chinese history, and he remained conscious of the need for evidence to the extent that one non-Marxist historian complained of his overuse of quotations.^[89] Whatever its specific successes or failures, his ambitious History provided an example of possibly the most fruitful way to use historical materialism in organizing and interpreting historical data.

The final trend in academic Marxist historiography was manifested in the works of historians whose names read like a roster of prominent historians in post-1949 China: Chien Po-tsan, Fan

[87] Chou's emphasis from the beginning was on the historical investigation of social relations rather than on periodization as such. See preface to Chung-kuo she-hui chih chieh-kou (The Structure of Chinese Society) (Shanghai, 1930).

[88] Chung-kuo t'ung-shih (Shanghai, 1939), pp. 2–3,4. It is noteworthy that, after 1949, Chou revised his statement to read "history is the 'process of class struggles.'" See A. Feuerwerker and S. Cheng, Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 8.

[89] Teng, "Chinese Historiography," p. 147. Chou's discussion traced Chinese society from its nomadic-tribal origins, through economic-political advance and the rise of private property, to the establishment of a "feudal" state with empire, and the origins of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Throughout he emphasized the effects of capitalism in China on relations with other peoples. His periods were also divided into substages as demanded by changes he identified in society and politics.

Wen-lan, Ho Kan-chih, Lu Chen-yu.^[90] With the exception of Lu Chen-yu, the names of these historians began to appear in print from the mid-thirties onward and did not become conspicuous in the historical field until the forties. Their interpretations of the past shared in common a scheme of periodization which foreshadowed the orthodoxy that was to be adopted in post-1949 historiography — the so-called five-stage view of history that was endowed with the status of orthodoxy among Communists when Stalin stamped it with his approval in his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1938: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism.^[91] It is less clear whether a tacit consensus underlay the adoption of a uniform scheme of periodization by these historians. One clue is provided by Fan Wen-lan's Chung-kuo t'ung-shih chien-p'ien (A Condensed Comprehensive History of China), published in 1947. This work, although it was edited by Fan, was the product of a joint effort by several historians and, more significantly, it was sponsored by the China Historical Research Association (Chung-kuo li-shih yen-chiu hui).^[92] The authors adopted the five-stage scheme of periodization; in the absence of disavowals to the contrary, it seems safe enough to conjecture that this periodization represented the consensus of the association and, therefore, that by the forties Chinese Marxist historians were well on their way toward some agreement on the most appropriate way of periodizing Chinese history.

The significance of this trend will be discussed in the next chapter. It will suffice to note in the present context that this trend toward uniformity in historical interpretation was not the unmitigated evil it might seem and, in some respects, represented an improvement over earlier Marxist historical work. Assuming one scheme of periodization as the valid one, these historians were able to lay aside theoretical questions on period-

[90] The various works on which the statements here are based are given in the bibliography. The periodizations referred to have already been given in the table.

[91] Leo Yaresh, "The Problem of Periodization," in C. Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History (New York: Random House Vintage, 1962), pp. 35–38.

[92] The preface, printed in the name of the China Historical Research Association (dated 1941), acknowledged the weakness of the book in its coverage but did not express any disagreement with its organization.

ization and social formations, on which their predecessors had expended an inordinate amount of their energy, and to proceed to the pursuit of historical research to back up their claims. In the process, they, like other academic historians, made valuable contributions to uncovering and explaining significant areas of Chinese history that had been ignored by earlier historians. In the long run, however, the stubborn insistence on the exclusive validity of a single scheme of history has obscured the problematic aspect of the Marxist analysis of Chinese history, which had become evident earlier in the possibility of constructing conflicting interpretations of the past, all of them defensible in Marxist terms. The incongruity between this scheme of periodization and China's historical evolution, moreover, created strains which have been manifested since 1949 in the many disagreements over the timing of transitions and the incipient tendencies of Chinese society.