Into the Daily Structure of History: Huang Renyu and "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar"

In the 1980s, "Fifteen Years of Wanli" was the historical enlightenment of many people. In 1587, the historian Huang Renyu spied the fate of history and the trajectory of China's historical development. For readers who were accustomed to the class view of history and peasant history at that time, it was tantamount to a loud spring thunder. It turns out that history still has such poetic brushstrokes, the grand narrative of the original "great historical view" has such charm, and the original lazy Wanli, the stubborn Hai Rui, and the ambitious Qi Jiguang are still familiar to us today.

Huang Renyu embarked on the path of professional historical research, which is not unrelated to the fact that he was once a witness to history. Having experienced the dense forests of Burma and the wars in the northeast, history is for him a intellectual and emotional impulse from the world. He wanted to explore the ups and downs in the fate of countless people of his age, and why the homeland with a thousand-year-old civilization was so weak under the tide of the west and the east. Everything he has experienced personally points to distant history, but he hopes to use historical writing to meet a future that is no longer bleak.

In "The Management of Numbers and Characters", "Moral Substitution Technology", and "The Great View of History", we not only see the suffering and struggle of modern China, but also the suppressed enthusiasm and loneliness of a historian who longs to understand. Perhaps, from today's perspective and the significance of academic history, Huang Renyu's judgment is too rough and arbitrary, full of a lot of self-esteem and hindsight. But Mr. Huang still has irreplaceable value, and his deep sense of history and deep insight into bureaucracy and structure may not be out of date today. Perhaps when we reopen the Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar again today to revisit the details that are already too familiar, we will remember that history is driven by the conventions and rules of the daily operation of those concrete people.

The following is an excerpt from "Chinese History told to Everyone" with the permission of the publishing house, with deletions.

The author | Yang Zhao

"Chinese History for Everyone 11" Author: Yang Zhao Edition: See City-State CITIC Publishing House April 2022

Mr. Huang Renyu's "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" is a very peculiar book in the study of Ming history. This book combines two completely opposites of each other subtly, if not incredibly. In this book, we will read a lot of details, from very basic and cumbersome historical materials, such as the Records of the Divine Sect. The Records of the Record of The Record of the Emperor's daily activities, who he met and what he spoke, and the materials reserved for writing the "true history" of future people are extremely complex and difficult to use. Even when historians use this kind of low-level first-hand historical material, they usually have specific topics to explore in mind, and then go through and look through them, so that they can quickly eliminate irrelevant parts and find out what they think is important. When Huang Renyu read the "Records of Reality", he had a very different vision, and the details that were dug out and written into the book were often details that others thought were not important. However, such a book, which provides many details, has an extremely broad vision of observation. Basically, it is necessary to use the length of a book to explain the overall structure of the Ming Dynasty from politics to society to literati thought, and with a high degree of problem awareness, it is necessary to let the reader clearly feel what is wrong and what kind of problems are wrong in such an era, such a politics, and such a society.

This book seeks to change the way we look at the history of the Ming Dynasty, and is more ambitious to offer a different perspective on the history of China after the Ming Dynasty. Huang Renyu himself said this: although the book "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" only recounts a short period of deeds at the end of the Ming Dynasty, it belongs to the category of "macro-history" in terms of design. The difference between "big history" and "micro-history" is that the author and the reader do not worry about the short-term one-sided meritocracy of the characters in the book. The focus is on corroborating these deeds with our situation today, not only grasping a word and a thing, borrowing the topic to play, but also trying to outline the social contours of the day as much as possible, so as not to cause an extreme impression due to the uneven materials. This is the first paragraph. In the second paragraph, he goes on to say: The Chinese revolution, like a long tunnel, takes 101 years to pass. Our lives are no longer than 99 years. In the short and long, our partial reaction to history is not enough to become a big history. If the reader wants to be far-sighted, he must first postpone the historical background by three or four hundred years. The purpose of the "Fifteen Years of The Wanli Calendar" is thus, so that we can accurately see that the traditional Chinese society, politics, economy, thought, etc. have their structure and rhythm, and also have their inextricable characteristics. Compared with the conditions that should be in the new era, the distance is too large, and when it is necessary to reform and create, it is inevitable that a situation will be turned upside down.

These are the first two paragraphs of the Chinese edition of "Fifteen Years of Wanli" (Taiwan Food Publishing House). The book was first written in English, published in the United States, and later with the participation of students and assistants, Huang Renyu himself led the translation of the contents of the book into Chinese, and wrote a preface for the Chinese edition that the English version did not have. In the English version he mentions the concept of "macro-history", but in the Chinese version, he emphasizes that "the revolution is like a long tunnel". Chinese version of the statement has Huang Renyu's own special experience and is written with strong feelings. Readers of the English version cannot appreciate that the subject of this book is the history of the Ming Dynasty, but Huang Renyu's motivation for writing is definitely not simply to understand the Ming Dynasty. It can even be said that it is precisely because of this motivation that goes beyond understanding the Ming Dynasty that this book is written so brilliantly and brilliantly.

Of course, "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" is a wonderful study of the history of the Ming Dynasty, but any historical researcher who only cares about clarifying the history of the Ming Dynasty will never write such a book. Huang Renyu said that the revolution is like a tunnel with a length of 101 years, and our life expectancy will not exceed 99 years. Why does the history of The Ming Dynasty involve revolution? Because what appears here is not the background of history and historical knowledge, but the background of Huang Renyu's life. What he explores and presents in the book is not purely objective knowledge, but an answer to an existential problem.

Why has China failed to respond successfully to Western shocks?

The author profile of the Chinese edition of "Fifteen Years of Wanli" tells us: Huang Renyu, born in 1918 in Hunan, graduated from Nankai University in Tianjin. He didn't finish college. According to the normal academic schedule, he should have graduated from college at the age of 22, and if you calculate, the year he was 22 was 1940, which was the period of the War of Resistance. So he left Nankai University and entered the Chengdu Central Army Officer School. Because he entered the late stages of the War of Resistance, the Pacific War broke out, and China and the United States fought side by side, he was able to have the opportunity to go to the United States. He received official degrees, one was "Graduated from the U.S. Army Staff University" and the other was the "Doctor of History from the University of Michigan.".

He didn't normally go to university to get a bachelor's degree, then a master's degree, then a doctoral program, and finally a doctorate. Among them were "successive officers at all levels, including platoon commanders, company commanders, and staff officers of the Nationalist army," followed by "General Zhu Shiming, head of the Nationalist government delegation to Japan, who was dismissed from his post and discharged from the army." After retiring from the army, he was able to pursue graduate school in the United States and eventually received a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan. He grew up during China's most turbulent times. 1918 was the year before the May Fourth Movement and the first three years of the founding of the Communist Party of China. In the words of Yin Haiguang (born in 1919), their generation is a "post-May Fourth figure", who did not catch up with the glory of "May Fourth", but was deeply influenced and molded by the new culture created by "May Fourth". The youth of the "post-May Fourth figures" could not be used in cultural creation, but experienced the tribulations of war, and Huang Renyu still witnessed the war as a soldier on the front line, and he was called into the army without graduating from college, and then entered the officer school. As a soldier, he went to the United States for training, and he was able to connect with the cultural background of "May Fourth" and come into contact with Western knowledge and life.

War and military careers delayed Huang Renyu's pursuit of academic culture. He didn't find a teaching position in the United States until 1968, and if you count, he was 50 years old. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, and his teacher was Yu Yingshi, who was then teaching at the University of Michigan, who was born in 1931, 13 years younger than Huang Renyu! Huang Renyu is an uncompromising old doctoral student.

Fifteen Years of Wanli by Huang Renyu Version: Zhonghua Bookstore April 2022

It can be said that the first half of Huang Renyu's life was delayed by the times and the country. His experience is, in the traditional parlance, "reading at the end of the year", putting down the achievements of the military, and quieting down again after middle age to do learning. So not only is there a thirst for knowledge that a normal reader would not have, but his particular life experience must have influenced how he views history and how he studies it.

He was thinking: Why is China so miserable? Why is there such an era, when the present seems to be unsuccessful reforms, a series of revolutionary setbacks? When he was born, the Xinhai Revolution had been successful for 7 years, but he had never enjoyed the benefits of the success of the revolution.

Why can't the revolution be completed? In the preface, Huang Renyu wants to tell us that this is the fundamental big question in his heart, and the reason why he studies history is to seriously pursue the answer to this big question. Many people are confused by this question, but the general answer is limited to the limited time scale of an individual's life, and finds out the reasons why Yuan Shikai is very hateful, the warlords are spoofing and dividing, Chiang Kai-shek is not anti-Japanese, and Wang Jingwei is traitorous.

But Huang Renyu perceives that the ins and outs of the revolution are not the same time scale as our personal lives, and with a personal time scale, we tend to find answers from reality, but if we want to use different scales, we must explore history. Pushing back, it is easy to see the Opium War and the influence of Western imperialism on China.

Huang Renyu also took classes with Fairbank in the United States and was familiar with the most popular view of the time, "Western shock, Chinese reaction". After 1840, the most important phenomenon in Chinese history was that Western forces brought waves of unprecedented challenges, prompting China to grope for various reactions, and the revolution was one of them. The defeat of the revolution, like other reactions before it, such as the self-improvement movement and the reform of the law, was the result of the inability of this tradition to cope with the challenges of the West.

However, it is clear that Huang Renyu's question cannot stop at such an answer. He carefully went back further: Why, then, was it that when the Western shock came to China, China could not respond successfully, thus brewing all kinds of pain that Huang Renyu and his generation had to endure personally? One of the specific pains was fighting the Japanese.

Huang Renyu is a Chinese who has calmly fought with the Japanese. One of the Chinese of his generation, who had experience in war, hated Japan all their lives and were so excited that they did not want to have anything to do with Japan; the other, although they also hated Japan all their lives, thought about Japan and kept pondering a question in their minds: Why did Japan respond so much better and more successfully than China, that in the end, they even used China as a stepping stone after they successfully responded to the rise of the West's power?

Obviously, Huang Renyu belongs to the latter kind of person. Comparing China and Japan, he asked more explicitly: Why did China walk through this long revolutionary tunnel that could not be walked out for a long time, but Japan came out? In the preface to the Chinese edition of the Fifteen Years of the Wanli Dynasty, he says:

When we were young, we always thought that after the Meiji Restoration, Japan had made everything a mess in a short period of time. As everyone knows, Japan was at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate... Its society is already in the process of commercialization. Moreover, the Meiji Restoration made too much progress, and its internal imperfections still had to be baptized by artillery fire and painstakingly transformed after the Second World War.

Such a simple paragraph expresses Huang Renyu's attitude. After comparing it with Japanese history, he realized that the reasons for the failure of the Chinese revolution must go further up, to see the Chinese society before the Western shock came, to see what factors made China unable to effectively cope with the Western shock, and it was devastated by the Western shock.

He kept looking forward and finally found the answer: If we can see clearly and explain China in 1587, at the end of the 16th century, we will not be surprised that China will be so difficult to adapt to new challenges and will be slow to promote new reforms.

"Big history" focused on a specific scale

Huang Renyu put forward the concept of "big history" in contrast to "small history", and in his own words, the emphasis was on "the author and the reader do not worry about the short-term one-sided gains and losses of the characters in the book." This has two meanings.

On the one hand, it is to tell us that the book "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" mentions Ming Shenzong, Shen Shixing, Qi Jiguang, Li Zhen, and Zhang Juzheng, not to discuss who is good and who is bad, who is doing the right thing here and who is wrong there. Rather, it is to look at what they represent from a longer-term "big history" perspective. On the other hand, he also wants to get rid of looking at modern history from a realistic and narrow perspective to explain the successes and failures of the Chinese revolution.

The preface was written in 1985, just over a decade before Huang Renyu's death. In those ten years or so, he repeatedly and continuously discussed the "big history" in various ways and using various historical materials. He wrote "Capitalism and the Twenty-first Century" from the perspective of the changes in modern Western history, and "On Chinese History on the Hexun River" from the perspective of China's general history.

The concept of "big history" put forward by Huang Renyu looks similar to the ideas of the French "almanac school," but they are fundamentally different. The history constructed by the "Almanac School" is relatively close to complete history: history has a variety of different rates of change, which should be measured and viewed on different time scales, and various changes of different rhythms should be observed and recorded according to the time scale. Only by putting together these different rhythmic changes can we clearly explain many aspects of history.

French annals school historian Braudel

For example, geography, seemingly completely immovable factors, will inevitably affect or even determine the quality of a country's military development strategy and conditions. The "Almanac School" also emphasizes that the slower parts of change cannot be ignored, but in contrast, Huang Renyu pays more attention to the social structure of a model of interpersonal interaction, and he does not care so much about geography, agriculture, urban and rural dynamics, etc. that are slower than this change. That is, his "great history" is concentrated on a specific scale, and the ambition of the "annals school" to integrate various scales is still obviously different.

Huang Renyu studied the history of the Ming Dynasty with the awareness of the "revolutionary historical view" of modern China. He did not want to look at what happened in the Ming Dynasty itself, but to explore the social structure formed by the Ming Dynasty. Understanding his fundamental and profound intentions, we can better appreciate Huang Renyu's remarkable historical writing skills.

Ordinary historians and narrators will use a set of structural language when they want to explain the structure of Chinese society. "Imperial power," "phase power," "Confucianism," "bureaucracy," "merchant class"... Use this abstract, collective vocabulary to describe and explain the social structure. Talking about structure, just like building a house, the house is divided into foundations, beams, columns, walls, roofs, etc., before discussing how the relationship between these parts is formed.

Huang Renyu's way of thinking is: The so-called structure is hidden under the surface change, but it is more fundamental and more important than the surface change, and even determines and influences the various factors and forces of the surface change. Then look in the opposite direction, the really decisive structure should have a clear connection with the surface changes. That is, if the structure is basic, and it is really so basic, then the phenomenon of extracting the surface, even if it is a small phenomenon, should be able to link the structural factors under the bottom. If the superficial phenomenon does not relate to the underlying structure, doesn't that mean that the structure is not fundamental enough, not really fundamental?

So he had a bold idea: to pick out a year in history, sort out the various phenomena that occurred in that year, and then use these phenomena to push back to understand and show the structural determinants of that period of history. This is a highly original form of theory, and Huang Renyu also uses the same highly original narrative text to express the theoretical creativity.

1587 —a year of inconsequential, no major events?

Originally written in English and published in the United States by Yale University, the book is titled 1587: A Year of No Significance. Printed by the University Press, indicating the scholarly nature of the book, it was not printed in paperback for the first eight years after its publication. This is very common in the field of academic books, because it is aimed at libraries or professional readers, people who want to read and buy will not change their minds for the sake of price, and publishers certainly do not need to expand sales at low prices in paperback, and maintaining high hardcover prices can have higher incomes.

A book about China, which is neither general in nature nor related to current affairs and real issues, is about the Ming Dynasty, which most Americans have never heard of, and it is conceivable that even a relatively low-priced paperback edition will not attract many readers.

However, Huang Renyu's book set a bestseller record for hardcover academic books in Yale University Publishing, selling more than 100,000 copies, and the results were better than many paperback books. This is a peculiar phenomenon that deserves attention and needs to be explained. Why is it so popular? And obviously it is a best-seller, why does the publishing house not produce paperbacks?

Because the publisher accurately judged the people who would buy this book, not only because they had research and interest in Chinese history, they basically came because of word of mouth recommendation, mainly because of the historical research method and historical writing method shown in the title of the book. That is to say, this is a group of readers with considerable humanistic knowledge and professional training, who know very well what they want to read from this book and what they will get, and they have a strong motivation to pay a little more for hardcover books.

The most enticing of the title is "A Year of No Significance," which is missing in the Chinese edition. An insignificant year, a year in which no big things happen. It is unusual for a history book to choose to tell only one year of history, and even stranger, it has deliberately chosen an unimportant year.

This is a clear violation of the common sense of historiography, and even the more general principle of documentation. When you were a child, your teacher taught you to start writing a diary, and you must be warned not to write about washing your face, brushing your teeth, eating and sleeping. That's everyday, that's ordinary, and the diary should write about today's different and other days, special things that have happened, or special feelings.

Historical records are also expanded from this principle, things are long, nothing is short, and before the record must be judged whether it is important or not. But the history book written by Huang Renyu is clearly written in the unimportant year. This is a clever and effective strategy that immediately attracts the attention of readers of these books, and naturally provides the reader with the focus of introducing and discussing the book with others.

The content of the book is not really limited to the year 1587, but the title shows a very different historical attitude and historical approach. Choosing an insignificant year means not being dazzled by superficial "big events" and allowing us to see the structural makeup of an era and a society.

The reason why "big events" are dizzy, because there are many accidental factors involved, and it takes a lot of effort and length to describe "big events" on these accidental factors, and because of accidental intervention, it is difficult to give a complete explanation of "big events". From the narrative to the interpretation, there must be words such as "just right", "unfortunate", "unexpected", "just "just", indicating the difficulty of interpretation.

Only by doing so can we see the rules of political, social, and economic operation of an era from the superficial normality and calmness. At such a moment, nothing really happened, so you can also see from another perspective that some things that are not valued from the perspective of "small history" have a great impact if you change the perspective of "big history". In this way, "No Significance"—insignificant," is turned into a paradoxical, uncertain description, from what point of view of historical research and understanding is judged to be irrelevant?

Don't look at the short-term one-sidedness of the characters, look at the more fundamental structure

In January 1588, but in December of the previous year, according to the lunar calendar, a generation of famous generals Qi Jiguang died. According to Huang Renyu's judgment, Qi Jiguang's most important historical position was based on the creation of a special military organization for the Ming Dynasty, which did not appear before and could not be recreated after that.

Qi Jiguang in the movie "The Storm of the Rock"

It cannot be recreated. Huang Renyu explains very clearly in the book that it is because Qi Jiguang's army is not something that China's traditional social structure can bear. When Qi Jiguang died, no one could see that it was the end of an era and that China's only experiment in military reform had come to an end. It is only later, with a broad historical vision, that we can see that the coincidence of history is so closely connected. The most important thing that happened in Europe during the same period was the defeat of the British Navy over the Spanish Armada, bringing world history into a new era of sea power, and China had just missed the key conditions for possible participation.

Another example is a small thing that seemed at the time in 1587, a matter of No Significance, in the northeastern border of Jianzhouwei, there was a tribal leader who dared to attack his neighbors, and the news reached the imperial court, and the ministers divided into two factions to dispute whether to suppress or care. The idea of suppressing it once prevailed, but the army sent was defeated, so the idea of turning into a fight was adopted, in essence, it was a long distance away and ignored.

The leader of the wu yong tribe, named Nurhaci, first appeared in Ming records in 1587.

What were Nurhaci's actions, and the process of discussion and decision-making by Ming courtiers to execution and turning? And what are the structural, near-inevitable phenomena or problems? Looking back at history, from the perspective of hindsight, we often strangle our wrists, how can we be so careless at that time, how can we let go of the great opportunity to restrain and suppress the rise of Houjin?

It is difficult to buy early knowledge, but we always like to use "early knowledge" to look at and comment on history, which is what Huang Renyu said about the attitude of "calculating the short-term one-sided meritocracy and foolishness of the characters in the book."

In the book, Huang Renyu tries to let us see that this is not the wrong judgment of a few people, but: First, the military organization and military operation of the Ming Dynasty at that time did not have the conditions to go out and fight Nurhaci. Second, in order to establish enough military forces to suppress Nurhaci, the Ming Dynasty needed to complete the reforms that Qi Jiguang was engaged in, but Qi Jiguang's experience has proved that such reforms cannot be completely and cannot be replicated. Sending Qi Jiguang to fight Nurhaci could not win.

It was not a question of Qi Jiguang's ability, not whether the judgement of these ministers was correct, but determined by a more fundamental and larger structure that was difficult to change.

What is a structure? For example, state finance is an important part of the structure, and before Huang Renyu wrote "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar", his published works, expanded from his doctoral dissertation, were to explore the financial situation in China in the 16th century. The book clearly lists the intricacies of that system.

"Border Town Grain" by Lai Jiancheng Edition: Qizhenguan Zhejiang University Press, August 2010

The financial basis of the modern state is the principle of total income and total output. The various revenues of the state, the various taxes paid by each person and each company, go into the treasury, which then pays for all the public expenses needed. In this way, there can be budget and settlement, and both budget and settlement must be divided into the total items of "income" and the total item of "expenditure", and only then can we calculate whether the income and expenditure are balanced, how much surplus or how much is short.

The finances of the Ming Dynasty were not arranged in this way. Military expenses were borne by local governments, and planning was made by the central imperial court. If there were 20,000 soldiers in Jizhou, the imperial court ordered Hebei and Shandong to take charge of Zhang Luo's needs. But if hebei and Shandong encounter drought at this time, they need relief, and they also ask the imperial court for money. This means that different projects are handled separately, and without unified revenue and expenditure, it is impossible to adjust reasonably and effectively between projects. New projects are constantly being produced, and new administrative procedures are produced for each project, and in the future, neither the central nor the local governments will be able to calculate their own financial situation, which means that everyone can only see trees and no one can see the forest, not only can no one grasp the overall financial situation of the country, but even the accounts of local units are a mess.

Originally, Hebei and Shandong had raised military funds with troops, but if the war was transferred to Shanxi, Shanxi would not be able to raise military expenses, but at this time it would not be possible to allocate the military expenses from Hebei and Shandong provinces to Shanxi for use, so they could only watch as the battle to Shanxi was turned from victory to defeat because of the shortage of military funds in Shanxi, and then they would be able to investigate the personnel responsibility for Shanxi's defeat. The political system at that time held accountable in this way, and it was easy for future generations of people who read history to follow such "heavy weights and minds about the short-term one-sided meritocracy and foolishness of the characters in the book." This was an attitude that Huang Renyu tried to avoid.