Two—
Chinese Historical Studies in the Postwar Period and the Development of Conceptions of Feudalism
The Two Paths to Feudalism
One of the goals set by Japanese studies of Chinese history in the postwar period has been "to overcome the theory of stagnation." The defeat of Japanese imperialism in the war had the effect of thoroughly dismantling the Japanese people's sense of superiority with respect to China. The subsequent victory of the Chinese revolution was seen as factual proof of the fallacy of the theory of stagnation, which had been propounded even from within the Marxist camp. Thus, the problem became one of how to understand in a consistent manner the progressive nature of Chinese society from antiquity through modernity. The investigation of this problem was advanced on the basis of a belief in a rational scientific comprehension of history. Antithetical to the wartime ultranationalist conception of history, historical materialism as a method gained general currency. Max Weber's methodology also offered a powerful stimulus to the academic world.
Between the war and the postwar period, however, there was a large gap in historical research. Studies in history did not immediately develop in response to the new social conditions following the war. The scholarly world was utterly despondent, and the publication of Ishimoda Sho[*] 's painstaking work, Chusei[*] teki sekai no keisei (The formation of the medieval
world)[1] played a great role in filling this gap. This book was the result of wartime research by the author, himself a Marxist. It vividly and substantively described the historical process by which the temple-owned estates of ancient Japan grew through class conflicts over a long period of time into rule by medieval fiefdoms. In other words, Ishimoda attempted to demonstrate in concrete terms the transformation from the ancient slave system to medieval feudalism in Japan, a process characterized by the generation and growth of a system of domination by medieval territorial lords.
The ancient slave system spoken of here differs from the prototypical slavery that flourished in the classical ancient world. It was what might be called an Asiatic slavery in that it was strictly regulated under the ritsuryo[*] system.[2] In its emergence, Japanese patriarchal-familial slavery displayed the same origins as the typical slave system while simultaneously preventing its further development. As a result one finds at that time the existence of a wide body of self-sustaining peasants. In this regard, the ancient Japanese imperial system was in many instances characterizable as feudal. The research of Watanabe Yoshimichi prior to the war, however, argued for a Japanese variety of slavery (or rather, more generally, an Asiatic slavery).[3] Ishimoda, who was a member of Watanabe's study group, traced the process through which a feudal-serf system was formed, using the thesis of a Japanese style of slavery.
The homeland of the ritsuryo system (this Japanese brand of slavery) was, needless to say, China in the era of the Sui-T'ang empire. Thus the emergence of a feudal domain system in Japan involved a process whereby Japan broke away from the ancient world in East Asia and forged her own distinctive path. This meant that Japan and China would subsequently diverge and proceed along different routes. In medieval China, social relations did not give rise to a system of territorial domains or to bands of warriors, as in Japan.
In 1939 the late Kato[*] Shigeshi analyzed the historical differences between China and Japan. He argued that whereas in Japan a feudal system remained in existence over a long period of time, China had only experienced it early on in the Chou dynasty and that thereafter civil officials in a state bureaucracy had become the basis of Chinese government.
Kato[*] 's argument goes as follows. The Six Dynasties and late T'ang eras witnessed for a time the growth of private armies and the energetic activities of military men, but we do not see the development of a warrior class based on hereditary, lord-vassal relations, as in Japan. In China they were swallowed up into a civil government where power was centralized. The expression pu-ch'üa had originally meant an army, but by the Sui-T'ang period it was a way of referring to the outcasts of society; this would indicate that military hierarchical relations did not mature into feudal hierarchical relations. Furthermore, this difference prescribed the nature of the social development of the Chinese and Japanese peoples, so that the evolution of a sound superior-inferior (lord-vassal, ruler-ruled) ethic in Japan nurtured the distinctive nature of the Japanese—profound in human emotions and firm in moral principles. It formed the basis for the sound development of the Japanese people.[4]
This observation by Kato offered a pioneering foreshadowing of the problem of the relationship between feudalism and modernization, to be discussed in a later section. What circumstances gave rise to this divergence between the Japanese system of warrior feudal domains and China's bureaucratic rule by civil government? Kato did not address this issue, but it is dealt with in Ishimoda's book.
Ishimoda found the reason for this difference in the nature of Chinese clan and in the differentiation of classes within the "village community" (sonraku kyodotai[*] or kyodotai ).b,c In China, class distinctions developed within the "community," giving rise to the opposition between landlord and tenant farmer, rich peasant and poor peasant. Yet China was characterized by the fact that while "community" relations worked well, they caused a blurring of class relations. For instance, organs of mutual aid within a single-clan village—such as relief offered by rich families or the systems of manorial or ceremonial lands—stressed one's place as a "community" member over class relations within the clan. Also, the cohabitation of many small families (numerous generations living together prevented any decisive rupture) gave rise to the same set of circumstances. In medieval Japan, however, familial cohesion was the product of families that had once branched and were reuniting; and the heads of the branches retained their high degree of indepen-
dence as the nuclei for cohesion. This difference in how clan cohesion came about was expressed as Chinese passivity and Japanese activity.
Thus, Ishimoda argues, although there did materialize in China as well the basis for domainal or feudal production relations, the political form corresponding to these production relations did not take shape because it was restricted by clan ties. This fact applies as well to the problem of the formation of warrior bands. As witnessed by clan feuds[5] of modern times, in forging a fighting organization for village self-defense, the relationship between the commanders and the commanded could not transcend relations within the "community" of clan patriarchs and their offspring, and transform itself into personal hierarchic relations.
China developed neither domainal nor warrior relations not because she lacked the appropriate conditions; rather, those conditions existed but were restricted by the bonds in the "community" order. In Japan, feudal relations broke through such restrictions, matured rapidly, and eventually followed a distinctive historical course separate from the East Asian world. The foundation stone of modern Japan was laid here.
This comparative historical analysis of Ishimoda's raises several problems. He failed to take into account the independent role exercised by the superstructure on the base; and he tried hard to understand in a unified fashion the fulfillment of world-historical laws within the history of these two peoples as well as both peoples' unique expressions of this process.
Ishimoda developed his views more fully in his later work. In his essay, "Chusei[*] shi kenkyu[*] no kiten: hokensei[*] e no futatsu no michi ni tsuite" (The starting point for research into medieval history: On the two paths to feudalism),[6] he argued that the T'ang was an empire of the ancient world comparable to the Roman empire, and the peoples living along China's frontiers were subsumed within this world empire. With the collapse of the T'ang empire came the individual formation of each of these nations and cultures. In this process, Japan developed from an ancient state within the orbit of the T'ang toward a feudal state. Chinese society, however, gradually underwent a serious transformation through the transition from T'ang to Five Dynasties to Sung. One aspect of the shift from ancient empire to feudal
state can be seen in the decentralization of power under the system of regional commanderies and the sharply militaristic nature of it. However, the Sung dynasty, which emerged after this transitional period, took shape as a far more despotic, bureaucratic, and centralized state than any preceding dynasty. The aristocracy who had been the ruling class in ancient times collapsed precipitously, and a feudal domainal class did not crystallize as independent political forces.
Thus, the fall of the T'ang empire led to divergent paths in the development toward feudalism for the peoples of East Asia, particularly for Japan and China. Why did these two routes—the maturation of feudalism and its absence—emerge? In Chusei[*] teki sekai no keisei, Ishimoda locates the key to this in the nature of "community" relations that existed between territorial lords and peasants. Yet, the problem remains unresolved as to why China's system of territorial lords was unable to transform its ancient and "communitarian" society in the rural villages, and to construct a medieval, feudal political structure, as proved to be the case in Japan. This problem has to be addressed from an analysis of the structure of the territorial system of medieval China itself. Realizing this, Ishimoda based himself in the empirical research of Kato[*] Shigeshi and Sudo[*] Yoshiyukid and sought to establish the nature of the Sung-Yüan period in its system of tenant farming.
In terms of their legal status, tenant farmers were free commoners, but in reality they could be bonded to a landlord. Tenant farmers were independent managers after a fashion, but they relied on the landlord for plowing oxen, farm implements, seed, fertilizer, and even housing. Thus, the tenant farmer's position was truly like that of a slave. There were no contractual tenant relations at all, but something rather closer to slavery. Ishimoda thus identified this with the early Japanese manorial system and the Colonate system of ancient Rome. In other words, it indicated a transitional phase from slavery to serfdom. Although the demise of the T'ang empire signaled a shift from slave society to serf society, China remained at a stage that could not be fully sublimated into a medieval, feudal structure.
What sort of internal linkage existed between such a system of tenant farming and the centralized, bureaucratic state structure from the Sung dynasty onward? Generally speaking, the
management of landholding under the feudal system ordinarily was a bifurcation away from direct management under slavery into land tillage by peasants and land cultivation by the landlords. Under the tenant farming system, however, landlord cultivation and management of the land was fairly rare. This, at least, was Ishimoda's answer.
In Ishimoda's view, landlords under the tenant system were extraordinarily parasitic in nature. Although a widespread body of bankrupt peasants was produced by the breakup of the ancient empire, these peasants formed the pool to supply an unlimited labor power for the tenant system. Since the landlords were able to take control of the peasants through debts owed them, they were able to be parasitic in the administration of their very own land. At the same time, they were parasites in that their production relations were guaranteed by state power. In sum, without the cohesion of landlords as an independent political force vis à vis state power, the ancient state was not fully transcended but continued as a state with power centralized. Commercial and urban relations did develop and exhibited early modern[7] signs. The feudal state in China manifested a complex visage in which ancient, medieval, and early modern elements overlapped and intertwined.
This is an overall summary of Ishimoda's essay, "Chusei[*] shi kenkyu[*] no kiten," which developed ideas from his book, Chusei[*] teki sekai no keisei. Particularly worthy of our attention here is that the question of the periodization from antiquity to medieval times in Chinese history was discussed through the concrete historical process of the T'ang-Sung transformation. In this connection, he attempted to prove the existence of serfdom in China on the basis of substantive production relations in a system of tenant farming. The shame associated with lack of a thoroughgoing feudal system in China, as compared with its conspicuous development in Japan, is consistent with Ishimoda's earlier work. His argument that China had followed a distinctive path to feudalism was here substantiated. As Ishimoda put it, contrary to his earlier work, which inclined toward a theory of stagnation by emphasizing the deep-rootedness of "community" relations in China, his later work aimed at breaking away from it.[8]
This desire in 1949 to disavow a theory of stagnation was
undeniably bound up with Ishimoda's corresponding position in the contemporary political scene. In the essay, "Chusei[*] shi kenkyu[*] no kiten," he wrote: "The establishment of an inseparable linkage and solidarity between the advancement of the Chinese revolution and the Japanese revolution in the postwar period means that we have reached the final stage of the historical exchange between [our] two nations over a long period of time." He went on to say: "In order to understand the world-historical importance of this, we must reevaluate the historical connection between China and Japan within the history of East Asian peoples from the changing perspective of the present."
To accomplish this, Ishimoda proposed as central subjects for research: (1) the contemporary consolidation of the Chinese revolution with the Japanese revolution; (2) the mid-nineteenth century, the period in Japan of the Meiji Restoration and in China from the Taiping Rebellion through semicolonization; and, together with these two eras, (3) the period of the collapse of the empire of the ancient world in which both Japan and China established medieval feudal societies. Thus, it was Ishimoda's intention in this later work to try and capture the commonality and linkage between Chinese and Japanese history from the position of the political solidarity of the two peoples and not simply by addressing the differences in their respective societies as he had done in Chusei[*] teki sekai no keisei. This aim was, needless to say, mediated by various actual issues of the day, such as the loss of the war, the rapid successes of the Chinese revolution, and the issues of a revolution in Japan. The theoretical problem of overcoming the theory of stagnation was fixed precisely at the base point of the junction between politics and scholarship.[9]
The Development of Conceptions of Chinese Feudalism
The issues raised by Ishimoda exerted a forceful influence among historians of East Asia. He apparently fueled the tendency to pursue the development of theory by using the empirical research of other scholars. In addition to Kato[*] Shigeshi and Sudo[*] Yoshiyuki, there was Maeda Naonori's essay, "Higashi
Ajia ni okeru kodai no shumatsu[*] " (The end of the ancient period in East Asia),[10] which argued for the first time the notion that Sui and T'ang were part of antiquity.
Ishimoda's thesis was incorporated as early as 1949 into Matsumoto Shinhachiro[*] 's paper, "Genshi kodai shakai ni okeru kihon teki mujun ni tsuite" (On the fundamental contradictions in primitive and ancient societies),[11] presented at the annual meeting of the Rekishigaku kenkyukai[*] (The Historical Research Association). Yet, it was Nishijima Sadao's paper, "Kodai kokka no kenryoku kozo[*] " (The power structure of the ancient state)[12] and Hori Toshikazu's paper, "Chugoku[*] ni okeru hoken[*] kokka no keitai" (The formation of the feudal state in China),[13] both delivered the following year, 1950, at the second annual meeting of the Rekishigaku kenkyukai, which developed these issues in a scholarly, empirical manner.
Hori's paper was part of a symposium entitled "Hoken[*] kokka no honshitsu to sono rekishi teki shokeitai"e (The nature of the feudal state and its historical forms); and Ishimoda offered the panel's summary report, entitled "Hoken kokka ni kansuru riron teki shomondai"f (Theoretical issues concerning the feudal state), which was based on the papers given by Hori and Nagahara Keiji.[14] Insofar as Chinese history was discussed, this conference is worthy of our attention, for the Rekishigaku kenkyukai worked out its lines for research most explicitly.
One issue that came up in Ishimoda's paper was whether the centralized bureaucratic state can be regarded as a feudal state, if we consider the era from the Sung onward as medieval, for the feudal state usually assumes a decentralized state form. In his earlier essay, "Chusei[*] shi kenkyu[*] no kiten," Ishimoda saw this as a relic from the ancient state, but in his 1950 paper he changed his perspective in the following way. The form of the decentralized state, he argued, is not a necessary condition of the feudal state. Even under feudalism, which assumes an anarchic political form, because the state is the mechanism for class rule, it spawns a unified segment of power. Royal power in the feudal states of Western Europe followed this pattern. Thus, it was not strange that feudal society in China constructed a centralized bureaucratic state.
The fact that this state structure was carried on after the
Sung has to be seen rather as a reflection of the severe class relations of that time. For example, there were many peasant rebellions in the transitional era from T'ang to Sung, with a high point being reached by the Huang Ch'aog uprising. That uprising was on a massive scale, to which the rebellions of late antiquity in Japan could not compare, and revealed a popular energy in medieval China which had been accumulating over a long period. In the fear that these peasant uprisings could not be suppressed by the might of individual large landowners or local powers, the establishment of a centralized, bureaucratic state became a necessity.
These are the general contours of Ishimoda's paper. In sum, we should note that by stipulating that China had an "incomplete feudal state," Ishimoda set up a "Chinese form of the feudal state" in tandem with those of Western Europe and Japan. Although this theory of the Chinese feudal state was based on the contents of Hori's paper,[15] Hori's work went well together with Nishijima's paper on the ancient Chinese state. The issue Nishijima raised was the Chinese form of ancient slavery, which I would like to consider now.
Nishijima began with the following premise: when we consider the phenomenon of the ancient state, we have to assume the ruling relations of an appropriate slave system. But, since a wide variety of slave systems are predictable depending on their origins, we have to analyze both the general and the specific aspects of slave systems in history. In the past, theories of stagnation did not recognize a slave stage in China, but in order to do away with the concept of stagnation and come up with a progressive nature to Chinese society, it was necessary to recognize the existence of a period of slavery.
If there was such a Chinese form of slavery, Nishijima asked, in what way did it emerge and exist? The use of iron implements, which began in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, caused an epochal development in agricultural productive power. It broke up the clan "community" that had formed the basis of the Chou "feudal" system and brought into existence a patriarchal-familial slavery. The united bodies of the clans of these patriarchal-familial slave owners were known as hao-tsuh or great clans. Family slaves were thus used to manage the land of the great clans, but with a certain limitation:
we see a "borrowed land"[16] system in the form of tenancy around the borders of the clan lands, without the evolution of a slave labor system as had been the case in classical antiquity.
On the surface, this resembles feudal serfdom and many had seen it that way in the past. However, such tenancy relations did not exist by themselves but emerged within the familial slave system. Thus, the mutually complementing structure of familial slavery and tenant farming constituted, according to Nishijima, the Chinese form of slavery.
The problem then arose as to why this particular form took shape in China. Nishijima found the answer in the nature of the imbalance in the development of productivity. The imbalance in the spread of agricultural implements made of iron gave rise to an imbalance in the development of productive power and thus did not uniformly break down the earlier clan "community." The result was that an institution from the past, the "hamlet" (li )i unit from the Han dynasty, continued to exist. Although it obstructed the diffusion of the power of the patriarchal-familial slave owners, when small peasants under this "hamlet" structure came under the rule of the great clans, these peasants were not fully enslaved but emerged as tenant farmers.
The superstructure for such a socioeconomic system was formed by the Han empire. From its very inception, however, the Han empire did not take shape as the controlling force of the great clans. In the Former Han empire, state power itself was that of a single great clan. As can be seen in the case of Liu Pang,j the emperor and his ministers created a structure that the great clans imitated in their relationship with their family slaves. In this sense, state power and the great clans under its control possessed the same unidimensionality, and thus the two grew into a fierce antagonism.
The Former Han, Nishijima continued, tried a variety of policies to suppress the great clans, but without success. In the Latter Han dynasty, the hao-tsu gained a superior hand. This is best illustrated by the changes in fiscal systems. As Kato[*] Shigeshi had explained it, the financial structure of the Former Han was a dual system of imperial household finances and state finances; in the Latter Han, this structure was unified under the state.[17] Thus, the state shed its personalistic, great clan charac-
ter and completed itself as the power mechanism of a ruling order by a collective of great clans.
The ancient Chinese state witnessed effective completion in the Latter Han dynasty, but what then is the thread that links it to the Sui-T'ang empire? Nishijima dealt with that problem as follows. Ch'in-Han society was established on the basis of an imbalance in the development of agricultural productive power; the subsequent equalization of productive power predictably removed this foundation. The "hamlet" as a vestige of the earlier clan "community" disintegrated, and the tenancy system under the control of great clans also crumbled. For the great clans this spelled a serious crisis. The great clans as a class, he went on, sensed the need for a reorganization of the structure of peasant control; and this urge was linked to the later land systems: military colonies (t'un-t'ien )k in the Three Kingdoms era, "lands in possession" (chan-t'ien ) and "assessment lands" (k'e-t'ien )[18] in the Western Chin, and the equal field system of the Sui and T'ang dynasties.
Accordingly, in Nishijima's view, the Sui-T'ang period was a reorganized form of the ancient state and signified as well the final phase of the ancient state.[19] Hori's view of the feudal state also started from this conception of the Sui-T'ang empire. I should like now to consider the main points of Hori's thesis.
Hori began by reconsidering whether, as Ishimoda had argued, it was appropriate to regard the character of centralized power in the state from the Sung on merely as a reflection of a carryover from antiquity. State power from the Sung dynasty on became increasingly centralized in conjunction with the growth of a tenancy system. Thus, Hori wondered if the immaturity of this tenancy system as feudal land ownership only implied a reemergence of a system of centralized power or may have itself possessed a character demanding centralization of power.
For example, he argued, did not the extraordinarily fierce suppression of peasant rebellions, as seen in the Huang Ch'ao uprising, force the landlords to demand centralization of power? We can estimate from this the tenacity of the peasants' inclination to independence. This tenacity in the late T'ang was attributable to gradual changes within Chinese antiquity itself, for the ancient period in China took form very early on and,
unlike the situation in Greece or Japan, was uninfluenced by forces from without. The T'ang was the final state in Chinese society's long ancient period. Its ruling class, the great clans, became bureaucrats and lived off the state. The "equal field" system was a structure by which the great clans depended on the state. (Hori and Nishijima agreed on the parasitic nature of the bureaucrats.)
The immensely independent nature of the peasants, which spawned the parasitic bureaucratization of the great clans, was backed by the growth in peasant productive power. Examples include the materialization of three crops biennially in North China, advances in the opening of wet-land rice paddies in Kiangnan, and the development of a general commodity circulation. These developments eventually shook up the equal field system and led to political dislocations from the mid-T'ang onward.
The emergence of regional commanderies that were military in structure with decentralized power, Hori claimed, revealed the rise of local feudal centers of power. In response to this state of affairs, the T'ang government implemented the new economic structure of the double tax and the system of monopolies. However, the regional commanderies and these new economic systems did not of themselves negate antiquity. The emergent forces that matured under this structure grew while continuing to rely on state power and ran into no basic contradictions with the T'ang dynasty.
The proletarianization of the peasantry advanced conspicuously under a dual (new and old) governance. It carried within itself severe contradictions because there was commodity circulation backing it up. The Huang Ch'ao uprising was one explosion of these contradictions, and the old aristocratic influence was exterminated. Since individual landlords were unable to restrain the energy of these peasant rebellions, the necessity emerged for a centralized state power, but the extent of the expansion of commodity circulation could not be ignored as an economic condition that enabled this to happen.
These points were the essence of Hori's paper and he reinvestigated and deepened his analysis of them in subsequent articles. He devoted particular energy to structural elucidations of peasant rebellions and the regional commanderies. In one
essay, "Tomatsu[*] shohanran no seikaku" (The nature of rebellions in the late T'ang),[20] he argued as follows. The T'ang dynasty witnessed the bureaucratization of the aristocracy into a full grown officialdom, but this structure was shaken by the intense power struggles over bureaucratic position. These were a result of the fact that at this time the route to advancement in the world was guaranteed only by establishing a favorable relationship on an individual basis with the Son of Heaven, the despot, who stood at the pinnacle of the bureaucracy. While such court favorites came to control T'ang politics, a path toward advancement through imperial favor was opened even for non-Chinese and commoners, and this was the first step in the dismemberment of the aristocratic system. The An Lu-shanl Rebellion arose from a power struggle among such court favorites, as can be seen in the opposition between An Lu-shan, a man of non-Chinese origins, and Yang Kuo-chung,m a man of commoner background.
The link between the emperor and his favorites at court, Hori continued, was based on a personal connection. This same kind of personal bond can be found in the internal structure of An Lu-shan's power as well as that of other regional commanderies. The best illustration of this is the fictive family ties of "adopted son" or "sworn brothers" which linked the military governor to his troops. An Lu-shan, for example, had his own private army of eight thousand non-Chinese "adopted sons," and he additionally supported a "family army" of over one thousand men as attendants. Thus, the nucleus of a military governor's troops possessed a fictive familial structure in which the autocratic control of the regional commander was rendered thoroughgoing by the personal protection and favors offered the troops. In one respect, this might be seen as relations of slavery.
After the An Lu-shan Rebellion, a semi-independent regional commandery appeared north of the Yellow River, and in fighting with the T'ang dynasty it succeeded in gaining powers of territorial inheritance, control of tax collection, and the freedom to appoint and dismiss officials. At the same time, the internal structure of the regional commandery was exposed to the danger of a ceaseless overpowering of superiors by inferiors. The military governor was always left open to the danger of
being toppled by the troops under his command. Thus, because the military governor's position was extremely unstable, he was unable to cut his ties with the central power. While the regional commandery structure of the T'ang spawned personal bonds of cohesion, in the end it could not overcome the ancient bureaucratic system.
The Huang Ch'ao uprising destroyed this dependency between the regional commanderies and the T'ang court. Huang Ch'ao's insurgent forces were composed of an immense number of impoverished, displaced persons and centered around heroic types who harbored a discontent for the contemporary political state of affairs. Since these bands of roaming banditti did not aim at overthrowing the T'ang dynasty and were poorly organized, even though they did succeed in capturing Ch'ang-an, they were headed straight for destruction. Although Huang Ch'ao's forces had these weaknesses, they still destroyed the T'ang and made possible the independence of regional commanderies. Thus was born the Five Dynasties period.
Hori concluded his analysis as follows. Why was it that China did not produce a feudal political structure but rather assumed the form of inferiors supplanting superiors (i.e., the bureaucracy) if the tenancy system was regarded as serfdom? Although the starting point of feudalism, the lord-vassal relationship, was a personal protective bond in the early period, it rose to the status of official authority with the security of landholding. While feudalism arose as the mutual relations of landowners and it acquired public authority as the preserver of the social order, when this feudal system matured from within ancient society, it negated and finally toppled the ancient bureaucratic order in which the ancient great clans, large local landowners, were the apex of the hierarchy.[21] Nonetheless, it was impossible for a feudal political structure to be formed in China because of its complete bureaucratic system and the aristocracy that lived totally off the bureaucracy. Without being brought to an end, the bureaucracy inclined toward a mode that would change in accord with the rising of inferiors to oust their superiors.
In short, according to Hori, a feudal political structure did not materialize in China because of the thoroughness of the bureaucratic system. Although this development was predi-
cated on the expansion of productive power, such a growth did not necessarily accompany the historical newness of this personalized structure in the political and military spheres. Thus, it could not sweep away fictive familial slave relations, and the structure of the patriarchal-familial slave system, as Nishijima had described Ch'in-Han society, was, if not revitalized, unable to be overturned.
In Nishijima's view, the ruling structure of Ch'in-Han society centered around patriarchal-familial slavery with peasants living in "communities" outside this system. These two forms of mutually complementing ties among the people constituted for Nishijima in concrete form the ancient Chinese slave system. Hori later dealt with this issue in two detailed essays: "Ko[*] So[*] no hanran: Tomatsu[*] henkakki no ichi kosatsu[*] " (The Huang Ch'ao uprising: A study of the changing times at the end of the T'ang),[22] and "Hanchin shin'eigun no kenryoku kozo[*] " (The power structure of the personal defense forces in the regional commanderies).[23]
In these two essays, Hori strove to support more fully the main points of his earlier work. He analyzed power in the regional commanderies and the groups in the Huang Ch'ao rebellion, both of which emerged as the antithesis of the ancient bureaucratic system of the T'ang. And, he looked at the internal power structure of rich merchants and strong local families who may have controlled the authority of these two groups (regional commanderies and Huang Ch'ao rebel bands) and who later, from the Sung on, became the mainstays of the centralized bureaucratic state. Hori argued that patriarchal-familial slave relations made up the central element of their authority. Examples include the regional commander and his personal defense forces army, Huang Ch'ao and his immediate family and protégés, or the locally powerful families (heads of estates) and their workers. Outside this central system of relations were mercenary troops, impoverished peasants, and perhaps a class of villagers.
Relations in these peripheral groups make one think of the actual human control, in the form of two bonds, that the ancient state exerted on self-cultivating peasants. These bonds—one personal, one official—differed in form, but both were ties of slavery in the sense that there was a unilinear
control of superiors over inferiors and of actual human control unmediated through land. Although the regional commanderies destroyed the official bonds of control that were the basis of the T'ang legal system by creating these personal cohesive bonds, they also relied on them. Thus, these personal bonds were insufficient to build their own political structure—a feudal political structure—by subsuming the official bonds; and in a sense they allowed the founding of a centralized bureaucratic state, itself a revival of the ancient state.
So went Hori's argument. However immature were the two strata of locally powerful families and rich merchants who controlled the state, they ran the tenancy system, which was a feudal mode of production. In this sense, he argued, the period from the Five Dynasties and Sung on should be considered a feudal era in China.[24]
Logical Contradictions in the Conceptions of Feudalism
As we have seen, the issues raised shortly after the war by Ishimoda Sho[*] were picked up by Nishijima Sadao and Hori Toshikazu, who pursued empirically the study of slavery in China, the forms it took, and its transition to feudalism. It was their substantive intention to try and overturn the "theory of stagnation" by showing that Chinese society had developed according to the laws of world history. Were they successful?
Characteristic of Nishijima's and Hori's theses was the attempt to demonstrate the progressive nature of Chinese history by applying the two theoretical categories for world history—slavery and feudalism—to the concrete historical process from Ch'in-Han to T'ang-Sung times. Both men, of course, did not feel that these categories could be applied to Chinese history in their ideal forms. They argued that slavery was limited to a patriarchal-familial slave system and did not develop into the system of slave labor that we see in classical antiquity in the West. It was hence a limited slavery. On the issue of the formation of feudalism as well, they concluded that it was limited to the patriarchal structure and the centralized bureaucratic state, without having produced the mutual lord-vassal bond mediated
by fidelity and obligation, as we see in the medieval West, or the feudal political structure built on this bond.
This was how they dealt with the distinctiveness of slavery and feudalism in China. It is noteworthy that both men expressed themselves only in a negative fashion with respect to these issues. I would like to address this problem a little more fully now.
According to the "theory of stagnation," which both men sought to overcome, the European world and the non-European world differed in their historical dispositions. It claimed that the former was by nature progressive and the latter by nature stagnant. Thus, the yardstick of history was placed in the European world. Nishijima and Hori tried to show that the principles of progress common to the European world were fundamentally realized in Chinese society. The more they worked at demonstrating this proposition, the more the essential Chinese social realities proved lacking. In his discussion of the Ch'in-Han empire, for example, Nishijima argued that the slave system, a product of the dissolution of "communities," was a progressive element, and on this basis he set the historical stipulations of the Ch'in-Han empire. Yet, the "communitarian" universe of the wide body of small, self-cultivating peasantry who supported the empire itself could only impede the development toward the prototypical slave system and thus presented an obstruction. In other words, the era could only be cast in the role of a shadow to the light. Hence, it was merely a vestige of an earlier era lagging behind, which prevented the full development of its progressive essence.
The same can roughly be said about Hori's work. While he focused on a variety of the elements of a new era—regional commanderies, the tenancy system, rebel groups, and so on—which arose in the late T'ang, from the perspective of European feudalism China could only be assigned the role of an expression of the underdevelopment of feudalism. The realities of history seemed to be missing. For example, unable to locate just what it was that Huang Ch'ao was trying to conquer, Hori ended up offering a structural analysis mainly from the point of view discussed earlier.
Furthermore, the problem of the formation of the central-
ized state was only assigned significance by Hori as the mechanism of repression against an intensely independent peasantry, whereas the actual content of the world formed by the peasantry—this may have provided the structural foundations for the centralized state—was scarcely considered. His calling the centralized state a feudal state was based on the recognition that the tenancy system, which was characterized as serfdom, formed its cornerstone. Its import as a feudal state originated merely in the abstract sense that it was the preservative mechanism for serfdom.
Why was it that the European feudal state of the Middle Ages took a decentralized form? As Hori said, this was owing to the form in which the ancient empire was transcended. If this is so, then to the extent that the centralized bureaucratic state in China from the Sung is considered a form of the feudal state, should he not have to demonstrate in the same way that this was the form of transcendence over China's antiquity? But, Hori continued to argue that China had not been able to overcome the ancient empire fully. Thus, his designation of it as a feudal state was not the result of an analysis of the state itself (the superstructure), but its economic base, the tenancy system, which he understood as serfdom. Although his efforts to apply the principles of historical materialism to Chinese history were acknowledged, he actually made a comprehensive understanding of Chinese history more difficult.
Roughly speaking, the efforts of both Nishijima and Hori to overcome theories of stagnation were unable in the final analysis to go beyond the framework of Western European historical formulations. When both men sought to fix the entirety of Chinese society upon the basis of the common elements of Chinese and Western societies, the elements most basic to Chinese society had to fall through their sieve. This basic difference between Chinese society and that of the West lay in the enduring existence of "communal" society among the small, self-cultivating peasantry. This obstructed, even perverted, the overall structural development on which was predicated private systems of ownership, slavery, and serfdom.
Not that either of them failed to recognize this problem, for Nishijima had included "community" ties as one part of the social structure of slavery. But, when they attempted to explain
the progressive nature of Chinese society with slavery and serfdom as historical prescriptions, the world of the "community" finally had to be driven into a negative position and theoretically abstracted. It was the obstinate persistence of this world of the "community" upon which had been based a notion of stagnancy in Chinese society. In the final analysis, Nishijima and Hori had been unsuccessful in their objective of transcending the conception of stagnation, itself the height of Europocentrism. And here we see one of the barriers with which postwar historiography collided.
Of course, Nishijima and Hori are not the only ones to be blamed in this regard. Conceptions of slavery and feudalism faced an inevitable dilemma any time one tried to grasp Chinese history in its totality. One such theory was put forward by the late Niida Noboru, who shortly after the war argued that China was a feudal society from the Sung dynasty onward. He presented his thesis in its most complete form in his essay, "Chugoku[*] shakai no 'hoken[*] ' to fyudarizumu[*] " (Feng-chien and feudalism in Chinese society).[25] I shall now discuss Niida's theory of feudalism, making reference primarily to this essay but also to other articles included in his major work, Chugoku[*] hosei[*] shi kenkyu[*] (Studies in Chinese legal history).
Niida began his essay with this statement: "Feudal (medieval) society, i.e., serf society, comprises one social formation in the stages of development, i.e., a historical category." The prescription that saw medieval, feudal, and serf society as synonymous and as one of the universal stages of development shows that Niida shared Ishimoda's and Hori's conception of feudalism and their theoretical underpinnings. From this position, Niida argued as follows. Three points were of major importance in formulating the feudal stage in Chinese history in the manner cited: (1) it constituted a critique of the notion of stagnancy in Chinese society; (2) it made possible an overall structure for a world history, East and West; and (3) it offered a scientific explanation for the modern Chinese revolution as an antifeudal struggle. Niida's ways of attaching significance to these ideas of Chinese feudalism indicate the currents of thought he shared with others at the time rather than his own unique conceptions.
In any case, Niida sought to establish the period for feudal-
ism in Chinese history. The prime feature of Chinese feudalism, as might be predicted from his definition, was considered to be tenant farming as a system of serfdom. Thus, the T'ang-Sung transition, from the eighth to the tenth centuries, marked the dividing line between antiquity and medieval times. Prior to the T'ang, slaves and not fully enslaved tenant farmers (these designations are based on Nishijima's conceptions) were the basic agricultural labor force under the management of large landholders known as yu-hsing ta-tsun (great clans). Niida recognized the quantitative prevalence of slavery as well, but he argued that the rise in productive capacity in the T'ang caused slave production to develop into serf production, and it brought about the emergence of a new stratum of large landlord-bureaucrats who replaced the yu-hsing ta-tsu who had stood over the slave system.
The most typical expression of this serfdom was what Niida called zuiden denkyakuo (land-bound tenancy). When a landlord disposed of land, tenant farmers of this sort were turned over to the buyer along with the land. Thus, they were bound to the land of large landlords and lacked the freedom to change their place of residence. They differed from slaves, however, in that whereas a slave submitted to the unspecified and unlimited control of his owner and was obliged to labor without compensation, the tenant farmer submitted to the somewhat more specified control of a master, owned his own means of production, lived according to his own calculations, and thus a part of his labor was his own. Landlord control over tenants was an indirect control in which land served as an intermediary, not a form of direct control over their very person, as in a slave system.
Niida's and others' analyses of tenancy relied to a considerable extent on the research of Sudo[*] Yoshiyuki,[26] but Niida worked particularly hard at reinforcing the tenancy-serfdom thesis from the angle of legal history. According to Sung law, he argued, the status of a tenant farmer was carefully worked out: between a landlord and tenant there existed a "master-servant" relationship; and the law governing the general populace did not apply to adultery between a landlord and the womenfolk of a tenant. Thus, although the tenant farmer differed from the slave or the pu-ch'ü or the higher ranks of the poor, he still did not have the same legal status as the general populace.
The tenancy system itself, however, underwent historical development. Niida argued that changes were apparent in tenancy between two eras: the early medieval Sung-Yüan period and the later medieval Ming-Ch'ing period. For example, Ming and Ch'ing law did not make provision for inequality between tenant and owner, so that the punishment for tenant violence against a landlord was no different from that of the general populace. Nor in cases of adultery between landlords and the women of a tenant household was the status of the tenant afforded particular attention, as it had been in the Sung; it was treated in the same way as cases involving the population at large. Furthermore, whereas in the Sung they stressed a "master-servant" relationship between landlord and tenant, in the Ming and Ch'ing the ritual of the "younger serving the older" (i shao shih chang )p became the model for this relationship. The latter case meant that they had merely fixed a metaphorical relationship on the basis of age, while the status relationship disappeared.
According to Niida, this development—from a status tenancy system to a nonstatus tenancy system—revealed a stage in which the bonds of the tenant-serf were being overcome. (He argued they were finally destroyed by the modern Chinese revolution.) Yet he pointed out that behind this development was a multiplicity of peasant rebellions, bond servant uprisings (so-called nu-pien ),q and rent-resistance movements in the Ming and Ch'ing. Thus, the struggle of tenant farmers against the landlords' undue influence by law and the increase in tenant might caused the tenancy system to change into a nonstatus relationship, and this struggle ran through the modern Chinese revolution from the Taiping rebellion onward.
What were the distinguishing characteristics Niida assigned to Chinese feudalism? As we have noted, he cited a "master-servant" relationship between landlord and tenant, and claimed that Sung Neo-Confucianism systematized the idea of this "relationship" as a general ethic in human relations. Like pre-Sung Confucian thought, Sung Neo-Confucianism regarded as absolute the control of sovereign over subject and father over son, and it considered the Five Human Relationships centering on these two to be everlasting, immutable truth. One of the further characteristics of Sung Neo-Confucianism was the effort to ground this immutable truth in the "heavenly
principle" (t'ien-li )r or natural law of a universal order. To understand all human relations as established a priori by this heavenly principle was in fact the idea of being contented with one's place in the world (shou-fen ).s By rigidifying the sovereign/father–subject/son relationship, Sung Neo-Confucianism aimed at stabilizing the existing social order.
In this manner, Niida understood Sung Neo-Confucianism to be the intellectual formulation of a feudal ideology, but he also noted that it had the following traits. Sung Neo-Confucianism advocated the obligation of the subject or son to repay the kindness bestowed on him by the sovereign or father. The emphasis placed on the bond between this kindness and its repayment did not indicate that the control exercised by a sovereign or father over his subject or son was necessarily unconditional, but that to a certain extent a mutual relationship existed. However, the consciousness in which this kindness of sovereign or father was called for and the consciousness of power that seemed to overlay this kindness were conspicuous. They were not terribly far from effectively expressing a conception of unconditional control.
Niida argued that this was owing to the patriarchal authority that had been inherited from antiquity, and these were not feudal bonds of the medieval European kind. One of the characteristics of medieval European feudalism was that the sovereign-subject bond was a contractual and legal relationship entered into by independent parties with conditions placed on both sides, whereas medieval China lacked the freedom of consciousness in this sense. The controlling bond of the bloodline patriarch made a two-sided relationship one-sided.
In this connection, Niida severely criticized the view that equated the Chou feng-chien system with medieval European feudalism. Although the two systems were similar in that sovereign and subject were linked by a relationship in which the former "enfeoffed" the latter, this was merely a superficial similarity. What supported feng-chien ties in the Chou period were natural ties of blood. In China, this patriarchal bond functioned as a controlling tie and later regulated the societies of ancient and medieval times. Accordingly, Chinese society in this sense may not have experienced feudalism. But, Niida went on to argue: "This control itself [patriarchal control] does not
mean that medieval Chinese society lacked a feudal base—serfdom. I shall test for the existence of feudalism in medieval China on the grounds of whether such a base existed."[27] In other words, the existence itself of serfdom, he claimed, was the key to resolving unmistakably whether feudalism had existed or not.
We have now discussed in general terms Niida Noboru's ideas on feudalism. But no explanation was forthcoming when it came to describing the nature of the link tying the patriarchal structure as a system of control with the tenancy system as the feudal base. Generally speaking, we are left with the impression that this problem had been discarded without any attempt to unify the general progressive aspects of Chinese society with its particular stagnating elements. This is most clearly indicated by the following statement of Niida's. Having noted the lack in China of a contractual bond between sovereign and subject as, Niida claimed, had existed in European feudalism, he added this conclusion: "From these points, we can only deny that feudalism existed in Chinese society. However, there is no need to force feudalism narrowly into the mold of European feudal society. European and Japanese feudalism are only one type of feudalism. Might we not say in a broad sense that the Chinese case illustrates yet another type?"[28]
This was clearly a rather careless statement. The points of Niida's argument cited earlier indicate that we were aware his theory of feudalism shared the same dilemma as Hori's. That is, by fixing a period of feudalism in China, he was promoting the notion that Chinese society was part of a world historical universality, but he was then faced with the underdevelopment of feudalism in China. In order to deal with this problem, Niida stressed the existence of a serf system in feudalism at the societal base (the tenancy system), but this made it difficult to explain how such a base conformed to the superstructure (the bonds of control) from the Sung dynasty onward.
Ishimoda (in his book, Chusei[*] teki sekai no keisei ) and Nishijima had considered the remnants of strongly rooted "community" ties as something that inhibited the typical development of slavery and feudalism in China. How did Niida deal with this issue? In his essay, "Chugoku[*] no dozoku[*] mata wa sonraku no tochi shoyu[*] mondai" (Chinese clans and the prob-
lem of village land ownership),[29] Niida claimed that the tenth and eleventh centuries were a great turning point in the history of "communities" too. In this period, various groups with a new historical consciousness emerged and grew to replace the ancient kinship groups and gave medieval society its distinctive character. Guilds were one of these new groups, as were reconstructed clan groupings. The latter were characterized by their mutual aid activities through a system of clan lands (charitable estates, ceremonial lands, etc.).
These clans can be seen particularly in central and South China, and in the final analysis they were the mainstay of the large landlord system of the day. He argued that the landlord, fearful lest class differentiation within the clan disrupt the feudal ruling system, provided these mutual aid functions in order to stabilize the feudal order by stabilizing the villagers' livelihood. Furthermore, there was also the aim of returning profits to the clan by offering educational funds from the charitable estate revenues to promising sons, which enabled them to sit for the examinations and allowed as many as possible among them to become officials. In this way, the system of clan lands was inseparably bound together with landlord control. The significance of the reorganization of clan groupings, Niida concluded, lay in stabilizing the social order through the landlord system.
We know from the plethora of clan genealogies[30] that clan groups existed in various places from the Sung dynasty on, and that they set clan regulations and operated mutual aid functions, as Niida pointed out. He used these materials to discuss in detail the structure and function of clan groupings. He showed that, in addition to the communal management of charitable estates and ceremonial lands, clans exclusively ran such operations as the fertilization of fields with cut grass, irrigation, and cemeteries through control over ties of acceptance into the clan. When a conflict of interest arose with another clan, they did not hesitate to use force (as in clan feuds). On the use of the power over acceptance into membership in the clan, "communitarian" regulations were in effect internally so that, for example, the allocation of time and the quantity to be harvested were set in the grass fertilization that were communal land. Stipulations were even added for produce from private hills and
forests (such as rules for the harvest time of bamboo shoots, tea leaves, and camellia blossoms).
The clan "community" was the arena for the regeneration of the livelihoods of individual clan members, and its management was undertaken by a system involving the head of the clan. Clan heads were known by such names as tsung-tzu,ttsu-chang,utsung-chang,v and tsu-cheng,w sometimes alternately, but in any case their power transcended that of any individual family or its head, the patriarch, as they assumed control over the entire clan body. Their duties included clan ceremonies, resolution of disputes within the clan, and sanctions against those who violated clan regulations. Clan members were obliged to follow the orders of the clan head, but the clan head also had to follow the clan regulations and be upright and honest with the clan. In cases where the clan head himself acted improperly, he might be recalled by members of the clan. Cases where this power of recall were clearly recorded in the clan rules are not rare. Thus, the clan head did not possess the qualification of merely being a clan elder; he had to be sufficiently moral to earn the popularity of the clan members.
This should indicate that clan cohesion was based not merely on vertical ties of control and submission, but that horizontal ties of companionship and solidarity were also at work. One issue in this connection is the situation of the individual families within a clan. Although clan ties tended to supersede the independence of individual families, this is not unrelated to the lack, which Niida noted, of dominance, exclusiveness, and absoluteness of the patriarch's power. The principle of the equal distribution of family property also caused the weakening of the patriarch's power. Thus, the Chinese family itself was not permeated by vertical ties of control and submission, but showed a diffusion of power and privilege among the individual members of the family. (According to Niida, allocations of family property were strictly observed for women as well. In the Kiangsu-Anhwei region in the Southern Sung, women inherited one-half as much as men.) Such circumstances seem to indicate the fact that the lack of complete family cohesion enabled individual family units to form ties of clan cohesion, that is, horizontal bonds of solidarity.
As we have now seen, Niida argued that the historical significance of clan cohesion was the policy of stabilizing the social order on the basis of the large landlord system. Yet, as Niida himself described in detail, the clan was well furnished with a "communitarian" nature and was understood as embodying an autonomous system of regulation in village life among the people. Although we speak of large landholders, elders, and clan heads within clans, we cannot ignore this system of regulation. Seeing it only as a means of stabilizing the social order under large landlords will inevitably lead to a superficial view. In spite of this, Niida remained stubbornly committed to this position derived from his argument that the social bonds of the day were based on his tenancy-serfdom thesis. After he described the "communitarian" reality of clan cohesion, Niida concluded: "In any case, however, clan cohesion was the mainstay of the large landlord system. It served the function of stabilizing the feudal order and the village order through clan self-interest and was a means for the large landlords to use the peasantry."[31] He scarcely looked at the internal structure that linked "communitarian" bonds and bonds of the landlord system. One cannot escape the feeling that he forced a linkage between the two only at the level of words.
Disputation over Conceptions of Feudalism
As we have thus far seen, the primary basis from which Ishimoda, Hori, and Niida around 1950 derived their conceptions of Chinese feudalism was tenancy as a system of feudal serfdom. Although they pursued the tenancy-serfdom-feudalism proposition, they still left something unaccounted for in Chinese society of the post-Sung era. They encountered the same problem as the inability to explain the Ch'in-Han empire with the category of slavery, for the greatest difficulty lay in comprehending China's distinctive superstructure, despotic state power. The state from the Sung dynasty forward was a system of "monarchical autocracy"—a bureaucratic state in which power was highly concentrated. Hori's arguments were not persuasive as to how the tenancy system, as serfdom, corresponded to this. If tenancy did not beget a "feudal political structure," then we must investigate whether tenancy actually
constituted the reality of serfdom. This leads to questions about the bases themselves on which these conceptions of feudalism were formed. Thus, clearly an explanation of serfdom in conjunction with the centralized state subsumes this major dilemma surrounding conceptions of feudalism.
Niida dealt with this issue by claiming that we see the existence and even the decentralization of bodies with a closed nature, such as guilds and clan villages, from Sung times on. However, he did not address at all whether this tendency toward decentralization gave state power itself a decentralized feudal character. As we have noted, in order to formulate a notion of feudalism, not only the socioeconomic base but also the overall social structure that this base created through mutual interaction with the superstructure must be demonstrated as having nothing short of a feudal organization. The conceptions of feudalism that emerged around 1950, though, were problematic in this regard and in actuality ushered a host of problems into the scholarly world.
First, on the question of tenancy, Miyazaki Ichisada offered an opposing thesis[32] to Sudo[*] Yoshiyuki's explanation that had been considered a convincing basis for a theory of feudalism. Leader of the so-called Kyoto school of sinology, Miyazaki understood the T'ang-Sung transition as the movement from medieval to modern times; this response to Sudo was one part of the view in which he saw tenancy in this period as a modern tenant system. Miyazaki's main points included the following: (1) Although the medieval estates through the T'ang formed large unified entities in China, from the Sung on shrinkage in the size of plots increased owing to the breakup of ownership rights. (2) As a result, the landlord's bond to the tenant ceased to be of a territorial, personal nature, and the two became linked by economic, contractual ties. (3) Existing documents that seem to provide evidence that tenants were forcibly bound to the land may have been a means merely to prevent tenants from discarding contracts and leaving the land, or perhaps to ensure for landlords whose local work force was insufficient that they would have manpower. (4) The existence in the Southern Sung of two-layered tenancy rights (landlord-usufructuary-cultivator) indicates the establishment of usufructuary rights on the land. Sudo wrote a response, but we shall put aside for a
moment the issue of whether his understanding of tenancy was correct, for the major advantages of Miyazaki's thesis were that he was able to explain how the base and the superstructure conformed to each other.
The well-known periodization of the Kyoto school, put forth by Naito[*] Konan,x designated the era through the Han as ancient (joko[*] ),y through the T'ang as medieval (chuko[*] ),z and from the Sung on as modern. One of the differences between medieval and modern times, he argued, was between aristocratic government and monarchical-autocratic government. In the former, an aristocratic class ruled the people by virtue of its personal and status qualities, and the sovereign was merely the common property of this aristocratic class.
The T'ang-Sung transformation, however, swept away aristocratic rule. The newly formed monarchical autocracy linked the ties of power between the sovereign and the people directly, without the intermediary of the aristocracy. This change also spelled the extinction of rule by status or personal quality. Thus, in the periodization of Chinese history offered by the Kyoto school of sinology, the T'ang-Sung transition removed medieval bonds and gave rise to a new stage of history. Miyazaki saw the tenancy system as one of small cultivators who emerged at this new point in history—modern society. This system was understood as a contractual, nonstatus economic structure that corresponded to the superstructure of monarchical autocracy.
Miyazaki's position was a critique aimed directly at the thesis that this tenancy system constituted serfdom, and Sudo[*] took up the gauntlet. Later, various views were raised surrounding this debate, and critiques by both sides were exchanged, but the final results remain unclear.[33] However, this situation shows at least that the idea that the tenancy system was serfdom has ceased to be generally accepted among scholars. Even those who had argued the case for feudalism now began entertaining misgivings about equating Chinese tenancy with the Western conception of serfdom.[34]
In another approach, Chinese society from the Sung dynasty on was examined in an area somewhat different from the nature of tenancy. Attention was focused on the problem of whether we can unmistakably deduce the overall nature of society simply
from the tenancy system of private management. Concretely speaking, attention focused on the social arena that superseded individual management or generalized it—village society. One study in this vein was Yanagida Setsuko's "Kyosonsei[*] no tenkai" (The development of the village system).[35] While agreeing with the notion that the landlord-tenant system embodied the basic production relations from the Sung forward, Yanagida argued that state power at this time did not materialize simply and directly on top of these relations of production without any intermediary. Her point was that local villages, as the bases of control by state power, were not completely covered by this landlord-tenant bond alone. The system of large landholdings that took form at the end of the T'ang could not absorb all the impoverished peasants from the equal field system as tenants and could not mold manor society on a nationwide basis. Thus, a majority of middle-level and small landowners (double tax households)[36] who could not be incorporated into the large landholding system existed widely throughout Chinese villages. These self-cultivating peasants needed horizontal, mutually cohesive bonds in order to support themselves. In other words, Yanagida argued that there existed simultaneously a vertical control relationship between landlord and tenant as well as this horizontal bond of solidarity; it remained necessary, in her view, to elucidate how these two relations intertwined to form the basis for state power.
Yanagida's proposition did not necessarily, of itself, conflict with a conception of feudalism. But, if we compare it to Niida's view of the clan village (discussed earlier), the originality of her position becomes clearer. In Niida's view, clan cohesion (i.e., "community") was only a means of control over the tenancy system. According to Yanagida, however, village cohesion (i.e., "community") was a different sort of social bond than that of tenancy, and she pointed to how this cohesion in the village interlocked—namely, the formation of its internal bonds—as a problem that need be addressed. Thus, the thesis that China from the Sung dynasty on was feudal was still incomplete for Yanagida. With future research on the problems she raised, we can fully anticipate an unknown world to unfold.
When we predict the existence of an unknown world in Chinese history, what is first of all assumed is the world of the
"community," which appears in many and varied forms. It is the strongest opponent of theories of Chinese feudalism (as well as theories of Chinese slavery), as I have mentioned several times. Both Nishijima and Hori later came to understand this.
As is well known, Nishijima withdrew his ideas from around 1950, after receiving a number of critiques, and thereafter built a thesis of the Ch'in-Han empire around new conceptions. His new position did not see the Ch'in-Han empire as a ruling structure based on slavery, but hypothesized the empire as an extended form of the "communitarian" order made up of self-managing peasants. Hori seems recently to have become deeply concerned with looking for the foundations of state power of the Sui and T'ang in "communitarian" bonds as one side of the great clan system. One example is his view that the equal field system restrained the large landholdings of the great clans by the state's assuming control over the "communitarian" order of the peasant village that had been under great clan control.[37] In the next section, I would like to look at whether such a perspective is appropriate, but for now it seems as though this "community" is not simply the residue of the past but the foundation for the formation of the state.
This change in Nishijima's and Hori's views influenced conceptions of feudalism in a major way. In particular, the debate over Nishijima's earlier thesis and his subsequent repudiation of it gave rise to profound doubts about how well understood the "slave period" was in Chinese history. This in turn struck a severe blow at the new postwar intellectual system by raising the problem of a method with which to understand Chinese history. It spelled the end of "the postwar period"[38] for Chinese historical research. In the next chapter, we shall look at the situation that followed the one just described.