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Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

G. William Skinner
G. William Skinner
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

Our repertoire of concepts and theories concerning peasantries has been built up through contributions from scholars working in many parts of the world. Latin Americanists and India-wallahs, in particular, have played a major role in the development of models, but we have also heard from specialists in Indonesia, Japan, Europe, the Mediterranean world, and even Africa. But where is China in all this ? Why are students of the world's largest peasantry silent? In part, it is because we are so few and too preoccupied with our own peasants to have time for anybody else's. More to the point, however, the whole body of inherited anthropological wisdom concerning peasantries seems somehow alien and irrelevant to students of Chinese society.

Type
Peasantry
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 1971 , pp. 270 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1971

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References

1 Wolf, Eric R., ‘Closed corporate peasant communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 13, 1 (Spring 1957), 1–18; quotations from p. 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Wolf, Eric R., ‘Types of Latin American peasantry: A preliminary discussion’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 57, 3 (06 1955), 452–71; quotation from p. 462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Befu, Harumi, ‘The political relation of the village to the state’, World Politics, Vol. 19, 4 (07 1967), 601–20; quotation from p. 610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For a fuller statement and some documentation, see Skinner, G. William, ‘Marketing and social structure in rural China, Part I’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24, 1 (11 1964), 3–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For a fuller presentation of the relation between mobility processes and the central-place hierarchy, see Skinner, G. William, ‘The late traditional city: a paradigm’, in Skinner, G. W., ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

6 Three-level systems of field administration prevailed from T'ang through Ch'ing, the Yuan excepted. My phraseology should properly be less specific (provincial-level units, prefectural-level units, and county-level units) since the terms used varied from one era to another, and since in any one period units at the same level were occasionally differentiated terminologically. For a broad survey of changes in the hierarchy of territorial administrative units see Whitney, Joseph B. R., China: Area, Administration, and Nation Building (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1970), Chap. III.Google Scholar

7 Sociologists are prone to see estrangement from local systems as a necessary concomitant of vertical mobility. Thus, according to Kingsley Davis, individual mobility not only promotes intergenerational discontinuity and thereby undermines the family, but ‘also tends to release the individual from the grip of the local village and neighborhood’, perverts the village's authority structure, and leads to disorganization of the local system. [‘The role of class mobility in economic development’, Population Review, Vol. 6, 2 (07 1962), 67–73; quotation from p. 70.] Clearly it did nothing of the sort in traditional China. Several of Professor Davis's ten ways in which ‘economic modernization requires a large amount of individual movement in the social hierarchy’ rest on assumptions about the nature of agrarian societies that do not hold for premodern China, thereby illustrating the dangers of generic formulations that leave out of account the Chinese quarter of mankind.Google Scholar

8 Major monographic treatments of the examination system and its consequences for mobility are: for the Sung, Kracke, E. A. Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar, for the Ming and Ch'ing, Ho, Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, and for late Ch'ing, Chang, Chung-li, The Chinese Gentry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955).Google Scholar

9 Winckler, Edwin A., ‘The political economy of the traditional Chinese city’, unpublished paper, Sept. 1968.Google Scholar

10 This formulation echoes James D. Thompson's concepts for analyzing the task environment of organizations; see Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), esp. Chap. 6.Google Scholar

11 This typology of system closure derives from Amitai Etzioni's theory of compliance; see A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (New York: Free Press, 1961), esp. Chap. 1.Google Scholar

12 Polanyi, Karl, ‘The economy as instituted process’, in Polanyi, Karl, Arens-berg, Conrad M., and Pearson, Harry W., eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), pp. 243–70.Google Scholar

13 See Chiang, Siang-tseh, The Nien Rebellion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1954), esp. Part I, Section 3.Google Scholar

14 Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London: Athlone Press, 1958), pp. 105–13Google Scholar, and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London: Athlone Press, 1966), pp. 104–17.Google Scholar

15 A similar cycle, though with a radically different time scale, can be seen in the history of Communist China since 1949. See Skinner, G. William and Winckler, Edwin A., ‘Compliance succession in rural Communist China: A cyclical theory’, in Etzioni, Amitai, ed., A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), pp. 410–38.Google Scholar