Wei Guangqi, a professor at the School of History of Capital Normal University, is the author of "Law and Impossible: The State and County System and Its Operation in the Qing Dynasty", "Selection and Reconstruction: The Historical and Cultural View of Modern Chinese Elites", and "A Collection of County Systems and Finances in the Republic of China in the Qing Dynasty". (Infographic/Figure)
(This article was first published in Southern Weekend on August 15, 2019)
In the 1980s, there was a cultural boom in China, and my reading life was particularly rich. Among the theoretical and academic works I read during this period, several of them had a great impact on my thinking and concepts.
First, let's talk about Wang Yanan's "Research on Chinese Bureaucratic Politics.". First published in 1948, this work explores the characteristics of the political and social structure of post-Qin China. When I read this book in the early 1980s, I felt that it went beyond the class theory of social structure that I was familiar with, and clearly explained the political and social structure of Post-Qin China that was different from that of the European Middle Ages.
This work argues that traditional Chinese politics after the Qin Dynasty was a bureaucratic politics that existed not merely as a "technical aspect" of political operations, but as a "social system." Its basic feature is that "the power of the government is in the hands of the bureaucracy, which has the power to usurp the freedoms of ordinary citizens, and the bureaucracy regards government measures as a work of self-interest." In such a society, the bureaucratic or scholar-like class does not simply "represent" other classes, but "has its own special interests" and "is itself the dominant class." As a "class", the bureaucratic class's unique way of survival lies in the use of political power in its hands for economic benefits, that is, the so-called "use of power for personal gain". "Being an official" and "getting rich" are inextricably linked, and "being an official is regarded as a means of getting rich, making a big official a big fortune, being a small official and making a small fortune, and not even officially obtaining an official rank, but in the countryside, as an official and a non-official, he takes advantage of any opportunity to make a fortune." This work points out that the "abuse of power for personal gain" of the traditional Chinese bureaucratic class is inseparable from the combination of land rights, commercial capital, and usury capital. Mr. Wang Yanan, one of the earliest translators of the Chinese full translation of Capital, did not regard commerce, merchants and commercial capital as the antithesis of the feudal system, as some "dogmatists", and even indiscriminately associated it with capitalism. He pointed out that under the Qin system, the prosperity of commerce was not a manifestation of the new mode of production, but the result of the brutal expropriation of the peasants by the bureaucratic class, "the more the bureaucracy uses super-economic extraction, the less the part of the necessary labor production that the agricultural producers occupy, the greater the scale of the commercial circulation cycle." The policy of suppressing commerce implemented by a few dynasties such as the Western Han Dynasty for a certain period of time was actually ineffective, and he attached great importance to Sima Qian's words that "the law is cheap for merchants, and the merchants are already rich and noble." As a result, bureaucrats, landlords, merchants, and usurers often "four in one," and "commerce, usury, land rights annexation, service, apportionment, and embezzlement are all very well coordinated." He emphatically said: "I have determined that the 'official' who 'forces the people to rebel' should not be understood as a certain or some special official, but as a whole bureaucratic rule. The mere fact that certain officials, or even the entire bureaucratic stratum, exploit the peasants through corruption or other means will not be forced to the point where they cannot survive. If, in addition to directly using political power to encroach on the fishermen and peasants, bureaucrats, together with the local minions who are related to them, engage in extortion and then use commerce, usury and even land power activities to expropriate them, then it is really the time for the peasants to be cornered and 'desperate to take risks'. ”
In addition to the perspective of "class", the structural characteristics of traditional Chinese society that are different from Western society can also be seen from the perspective of "unity" and "pluralism". For this question, the first thing that struck me was Zhang Taiyan's "Theory of Representation and Denial."" The article was published in Minbao in 1908, when anti-Manchu revolutionaries and constitutionalists were debating China's political future. Zhang Taiyan's view is that china is unable to establish a constitution because it does not have a pluralistic social structure. He said: The representative form of government in modern democracies is a "disguise" of the feudal system in Western Europe, and "the non-feudalists are also the same." Specifically, what Western Europe under the feudal system has in common with the modern constitutional state is that it "divides classes horizontally" and "the people have the distinction of nobility and nobility." Zhang believes that China until the Han Dynasty "went to feudalism", and the social situation after the Wei and Jin Dynasties went farther and farther away from feudalism, except for the existence of clan and untouchable systems in remote areas such as Fujian and Guangdong, "all people are equal". Under such circumstances, if representative politics is practiced, it is equivalent to retrospection, not only "not enough to support the people", but first to make China lose its "beauty of peace and razion". Here, Zhang Taiyan's view of beautifying China's post-Wei and Jin societies is not enough, but he said that representative politics originated from the feudal system and must be conditioned on the "horizontal division of classes" in society, but it is very insightful.
The so-called representative politics is formally said to be "representatives" who deliberate as representatives of others. Since the representative must exist before the "representative", the decomposition of society into certain subjects that can be "represented" by the representatives constitutes the premise for the emergence and existence of representativeism. As a socio-political unit, this "subject" cannot be a natural person individual, but must be a social entity with its own interests and requirements, and a certain capacity for social behavior--they can be embodied as individuals with economic, political, and ideological abilities, and can also be embodied in certain blood, geographical, karmic, and aspirational classes or groups. If a society is composed of these independent subjects, it is a so-called pluralistic society, and the society of "horizontal division of classes" mentioned by Zhang Taiyan is a manifestation of this pluralistic society. History proves that representative politics can only arise in such a society because each "yuan" has the power to reflect their own interests and express their demands through representatives. However, traditional Chinese society has been melted by the powerful "official government", and there is no such pluralistic subject for "parliamentarians" and "deputies" to "represent", so in the political system with a representative form in the early years of the Republic of China, parliamentarians can often only represent themselves, or can only represent the interests of a certain political sect, and will only become some shameless politicians who covet fame and fortune. At that time, because representative politics did not have powerful social classes, ranks, groups, and individuals as a backing, instead of performing the farce of the "representatives" pulling chairs and flying ink cartridges, it was reduced to a "rubber stamp" played by absolute administrative power.
The "structure" determines the "function", and the historical evolution trajectory of the country rooted in the soil of the traditional Chinese social structure is also different from that of modern Western countries. Let's go back to "A Study of Chinese Bureaucratic Politics." This work attaches great importance to the "two-tax system" that began to be implemented in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, believing that it is the economic basis of the bureaucratic system in subsequent generations. Under the uniform field system and the rent system of the early Tang Dynasty, the bureaucracy had the function of organizing the social economy. However, on the one hand, because bureaucratic politics itself has a tendency to corrupt, and on the other hand, because its rigidity is difficult to adapt to the development of the circulation economy, its "law" has become increasingly "malpractic", and by the middle of the Tang Dynasty, it finally lost its function of guaranteeing state taxation. It was in this context that Liu Yan's reforms and the "Two Tax Laws" came into being (the latter was continued in the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties). They have ensured state tax revenue by using the circulation economy and recognizing the gap between the rich and the poor, and have also allowed the economy to develop temporarily. However, such reforms only weakened the function of the state in organizing the economy, but did not weaken the oppressive and parasitic nature of bureaucracy as a "social system". On the contrary, its character of relying on commercial mechanisms and the division between rich and poor to benefit the imperial power and the bureaucratic class has instead inflated this oppression and parasitism. Therefore, a little longer-looking can see that this kind of reform, which does not touch bureaucratic politics, but only weakens the economic functions of the state and uses commercial mechanisms, actually only conforms to the trend of decline and demise of a dynasty, and does not talk about any "historical progress", which is proved by the history of the collapse of the Tang Dynasty after that.
Around the same time, I read Max Weber's Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism and learned something about it. After the 1960s and 1970s, much of the attention paid to Weber's work focused more on the universality of its basic view (that is, the "spirit of capitalism" was based on the "Protestant ethic") and that it faced the challenge of the rise of Japan and the "Asian Tigers" within the "Confucian cultural circle". In my opinion, this is a complex issue that needs to be explored slowly. Weber's greatest revelation to me at the time was that behind any social movement there is an invisible spiritual force, and only when this force has a deep, benign socio-cultural basis can the social movement as a psychological driving force have the possibility of success. Such a spiritual force is like the psychic treasure jade in "Dream of the Red Chamber", without it, Jia Baoyu will lose his soul and fall into disrepair, take shape in vain, and even go into the fire. If a social movement lacks a spiritual mechanism with a benign socio-cultural foundation, it will also be lifeless and even unrecognizable.
Out of the spirit of "worrying about the country and the people", I was very concerned about the question: In China, which has been launching reforms for ten years, did it choose the "principle of personal material interests" as a spiritual mechanism? In the West, this "principle" is only a derivative of its spiritual individualism, which centers on the idea of the individual soul. If we "don't know China's feelings in the near future, but do not perceive the reality of Europe and the United States from afar" (Lu Xun), and use it as the spiritual mechanism of China's reform, will it fall into the trap of traditional Chinese cultural materialism, thus causing evil consequences in the political, economic, social, and ideological fields? For years, this worry has been lingering in my head.
Wei Guangqi