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.