@秦楚刊号
Please pay attention to the next issue
I saw an article in NetEase: "Don't open your mouth, the country laid by our fathers". I will casually talk about the difference between a dynasty and a country today, and why we called it a dynasty instead of a country in ancient times.
We first need to understand what is the essence of the state? In this regard, there has long been a relatively unanimous statement in mainland ideological and theoretical circles, that is: "In an exploiting class society, the state is by its very nature. It has always been the dictatorship of one or a few exploiting classes. For society as a whole, the state is an instrument of leadership and management of the ruling class, and for the ruled class (or the majority of the population in a society of the exploiting class), the state is an instrument of repression and violence. "Exploitation and being exploited are the essence of the state, so there are always contradictions.
However, foreign scholars believe that there are two aspects to the definition of the state. First, the state is composed of multiple members, but is regulated by force by a third party. Second, the members reside within a geographical boundary, and this boundary is within the reach of the overseer's force. This shows that the power of the state needs to be monitored, while the power of the individual needs to be laissez-faire.
Let's start by distinguishing between kingdoms and dynasties. First of all, the kingdom is based on the concept of geography, such as the Kingdom of France, which refers to the country established in the part of France that is now a political system with a royal system.
Dynasties are based on the concept of the family, such as the Bourbons, which were founded by the Bourbon family who ruled the Kingdom of France. There are many countries in Europe, but their dynasties are often not obvious, such as the Kingdom of France and the Bourbon Dynasty, which are often equivalent.
China is different, since the First Emperor, there has been only one "state", and the ruling families have changed and changed. The family system has influenced China for thousands of years, and through the development of the family system, it has become a gate valve clan, and this social organization still exists in modern times.
In ancient China, dynasties were a kind of social organization. In human society, there are various kinds of social organizations. Some social organizations only constitute or cover a part of society, while others cover the whole of society. The state is a social organization that covers the whole of society. In human history, apart from dynasties, the only organizations that covered the whole of Chinese society were clans. Thus, in order to illustrate the characteristics of the state, it is not necessary to compare the social organization of the whole society in which the dynasty does not cover the whole society, but only the clans in which the dynasty covers the whole society, and the clan becomes the individual who makes up the dynasty.
The first thing that distinguishes the dynasty from the old clan organization is that it divides its people by region. The division by region is used as a starting point and allows citizens to exercise their public rights and obligations in the places where they live, regardless of the clan or tribe to which they belong. This method of organizing groups according to their place of residence was common to all dynasties. ”
The second difference is the establishment of public power, which is no longer directly the inhabitants who have organized themselves as armed forces. This special public power was needed because since the division of society into classes, the automatic armed organization of the inhabitants had become impossible. This public power existed in every dynasty. This power is constituted not only by armed men but also by material appendages, such as prisons and various coercive facilities, which were not present in the previous clan society.
It should be noted that the term "public power" here is preceded by a qualifier, i.e., "no longer directly the inhabitants who have organized themselves as armed forces". Public power is not new, it has existed in clan societies in the past, except that at that time it was directly composed of the inhabitants who had organized themselves as armed forces, and in the dynasty the public power was no longer composed of such inhabitants, but was held by a group of elites. Therefore, the establishment of public power is not a characteristic peculiar to the state, only the fact that public power is no longer directly composed of the inhabitants who themselves are organized as armed forces is a characteristic peculiar to the state, and it is something new that distinguishes the dynasty from the organization of clans.
The term "public power" was also proposed in the West, and in China there is only "power" and no concept of "public power". The embodiment of power is the dynasty, and the state will have "public power". Public power is supervision, and what supervision depends on can only rely on the system.
That is, the essence of the dynasty is the statement that class oppression, the instrument of class rule. It does not reveal the essence of the state, but only one of the two aspects of the special contradictions inherent in the state.
What binds the two sides of the contradiction together is the independence of public power. If the state is not independent of society, it cannot be controlled by a part of society, i.e. individual classes. If the state is not the official representative of society as a whole, then it is impossible for those who control it to rule over society as a whole and thus legitimately oppress other classes.
Here, we need to pay special attention to the concept of "domination". The so-called rule is to exercise public management functions over all members of society with the help of the public authority such as the state. A class is the ruling class only if it is able to exercise public administration over all members of society. Otherwise, this class, no matter how powerful, will at most be able to oppress other classes, not the ruling class.
For example, at the end of the feudal dynasty, the nascent landlord class oppressed the peasant class before it seized state power. Although it was an oppressor class, it was not a ruling class, because at this time it itself was still under the rule of the feudal lord class. It can be seen that domination and oppression are two different concepts.
It is true that there is oppression in domination, but oppression cannot contain domination. If we emphasize only the nature of the class oppressive instrument of the state, and ignore the fact that it is oppressed through the exercise of public administrative functions, we will fail to grasp the special nature of the state as an instrument of oppression, which is different from other instruments of oppression. In other words, ignoring the nature of the public power of the state, it is impossible to truly grasp its exercise of class oppression, and the dynasty becomes a special form of an instrument of class oppression.
Westerners make a clear distinction between countries, and they use the two words 'country' and 'state' to refer to countries. The former refers to 'the people with property rights and citizenship + elected government + land, and the latter refers to a political structure, specifically a party and government structure. In modern political science parlance, the former is the "official state" and the latter is the suspected state. So our ancient "state" was called a dynasty and not a state.