《社会福利思想》课程教学资源（书籍文献）施坚雅《中国的农民和封闭的村社》

Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community:An Open and Shut Case STOR G.William Skinner Compararive Studies in Society and History,Vol.13,No.3.(Jul.,1971),pp.270-281. Comnarative Smdies in Sacie and History is currently publishedt by Camhodee Universit Press have prior you may you may use content in the ISTOR archive ony for your personal,non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work.Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/joumals/cup.htmI. Each copy of any part conain the same notic that appearson the screcn printed page of such transmission. adigital archive of o u

Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community:An Open and Shut Case' G.WILLIAM SKINNER Stanford University 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 particu ular have played a major role in the development of models,bu t we have also hea 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 preoc upied with ourow peas nts to have time for anybody else More to the point,however,the whole body of inhe rited a thropologica wisdom concerning peasantries seems somehow alien and irrelevant to students of Chinese society. The situation echoes one with which we in academic life are rapidlv becoming familiar:the really radical youth resists a dialogue with authorit figures because he feels that the very lexicon of discourse commits him to the premises of the establishment.So it is with sinological anthropologists. We can hardly start talking with established authorities in peasant studies without committing ourselves to their assumptions,concepts,problems, and formulations. Consider two examples.In an important series of papers,Eric Wolf has drawn a useful distinction between closed and open peasant communities: the former corporate,self-sufficient,introverted,particularized,encysted; the latter noncorporate at the community level,relatively dependent on larger economic systems,socially extroverted,culturally open-a type of social system whos se bounds are blurred and whose boun sms are weak.In an analysis of Central Javan and sna ing mecha americar cases,Wolf shows the closed corporate peasant community in these areas to be in the first instance'a child of conquest',but he moves on immedi- ately to a more generic formulation,which holds that closed communities 270

CHINESE PEASANTS AND THE CLOSED COMMUNITY 271 are a product of 'the dualization of society into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native pe ants' In typologizing Latin American peasantries,Wolf employs exclusively economic criteria,and the open peasant community is seen as a straight- forward response to'the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe'.2 Harumi Befu,by contrast focus asserting-in what strikes me as ar overbold leap toward the generic-that closed corporate peasant communi ties are'typically found in nations that exhibit the character of the classical state',by which term he refers to the whole gamut of traditional agrarian societies whose rulers are literate and bureaucratically organized.This is so in large pa are told,because state powe impinges not t on the peasant household but on the village as a collectivity,taxes and corvee levies being imposed on the whole community,which is also collectively responsible for internal law and order.In the course of modernization. Befu argues,state power penetrates directly to the local level,and the auton my of he nity is ford diminished With cues of this kind running through the literature,it has become commonplace to equate the closed peasant community with the traditional village of premodern agrarian societies and to see the development of the com otealmode as a oncomitant of the early stages of co omic and nization.On this re ing,open peasant comn unities are in the course of depeasantization,whether economically,as villagers relate more (and in a more capitalistic fashion)to external markets,or politically, as they are caught up in extra-village political processes. It must be clear that I have set up this particular straw man in order to topple it with the facts of theCh case.My point is not simply tha peasant communities in traditional China-a classical agrarian society if there ever was one-were normally open.Nor is it merely that that open- ness long preceded 'the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the deve nent of apitalism in E ope'and that i it rested only pa tly on incipient capitalism within China.The intriguing aspect of the Chinese case is the recurrent cyclical trend whereby peasant communities changed from relatively open to relatively closed and back again.The Chinese case is also instructive on the relationship between conquest and community closure.In the case of alien dynast ties. pea sant co munitics at the point of maximum closure precisely when conquest occurred,and the fate of the new ruling house was in no small part determined by just how fast ist,V 3 ,452

272 G.WILLIAM SKINNER it could induce closed communities to open up-a pattern altogether unlike the one Wolf finds in Mesoamerica and Java. I have already succumbed to the captured lexicon of peasant studies. 'Peasant villages',we say,and'peasant communities'.But what if the local territorial communities of which the peasant is a member are in no sense limited dto peasants?This was the case in traditional China,as we shal see.+What might be called the basic ground plan of Chinese society was essentially cellular.Apart from certain remote and sparsely settled areas, the landscape of rural China was occupied by cellular systems of roughly hexagonal shape.The nucleus of each cell was one of ap market towns (as of the mid-nineteenth century),and its cytoplasm may be seen in the first instance as the trading area of the town's market.The body of the cell-which is to say the immediately dependent area of the town-typically included fifteen to twenty-five villages.usually but not ne ssari nucleated. This basic cell was unambiguously an autonome ous economic c system transport,trade,artisan industry,and credit were all structured within it spatially according to the principle of centrality,and temporally by the periodicity of its market davs.Yet whereas this cell was.in the usual case. given ape by the of marketing,its significance extended far beyond economic It delimited an importar t system of informa adminis tration and a crucial arena of local politics.It constituted the social world of peasants,whose brides normally came from another village within the marketing system and whose extended kin groups,voluntary associations, and clie e relationships were typically tained within it.Majo temples in the market town took the whole complex of villages in the marketing system as their parish. One must also consider these intervillage systems as the chief tradition- creating and culture-bearing units of rural China.Every few days the conve ned local dr to the center action representatives of households from villages throughout the system,and ir so doing facilitated the homogenization of culture within the intervillage community.At the same time,by meeting most of the needs of peasant households,the local market minimized the exchange of cultural material across marketing communities and thereby fostered cultural isolation and eren( The Chinese peasant,then,was a me f two communities:his village and the marketing system to which his village belonged.An important feature of the larger,marketing community was its elaborate system of stratification-differentiation by class,status,and power.Those who provided de facto leadership within the marketing community qua r CmVoNo

CHINESE PEASANTS AND THE CLOSED COMMUNITY 273 political system and those who gave it collective representation at its interface with larger polities were gentrymer anded leisured, and literate-the very antithesis of any reasonable definition of the peasantry. It was artisans,merchants,and other full-time economic specialists,not peasants,who sustained the heartbeat of periodic marketing that kept the community alive.It was oriests backed by ge ntry te peasants, who gave religious meaning to the peasants' al world Clearly,then,in the case of the peasant's larger community at least,what we see opening out and closing up were not in any strict sense peasant communities. Toget back tomy thesis,Ihave said that rural ommunities cyced from pen back again in traditional times.How id this Let me begin by describing in somewhat idealized terms a typical com- munity's internal structure and external relations at the phase of maximum openness,which I take to come during the heyday of a given dynasty-say second half of the fiftee nth century during the Ming and the two quarters of the eighteenth century during the Ch'ing. The basis of peace and prosperity had been laid during the preceding phases of the dynastic cycle.During the first phase,which might be characterized as Pacification,last-ditch defenders of the outgoing dynasty and challen s of the new had been succe armies,while at the local level banditry and feuding had been suppressed through the application of mutually supportive imperial and local power. During the second phase,Reconstruction,the salient concerns of the ruling house had shifted from pacification (order goals)to the recovery of production(econc g02 The reve ue sy em had been perfected,and massive investment in social overhead capital-at first primarily by the state but increasingly by local systems-had restored and extended irriga- tion works,waterways,and roads.Trade had been relatively unhampered by the state,whose needs for revenue and were fully met by agrarian taxes had be a po uraged by the lead ers of rural unitie Thus during the dynastic heyday,the external environment of loca communities was not only stable and relatively benign:it was seen as full of opportunity.To understand the nature of that opportunity we must look beyond the basic-level communities of rural society.We must glance in particular at the largert rial struct of which villa and ma keting communities were the base,and at the total stratification system, which was by no means exhausted by the peasants,local gentrymen,petty traders,artisans,and religious specialists of the marketing community. One feature of the anthropological literature on peasant societies that China specialists find mystifying is its tendency to refer three levels rially based stru reg -the something in between,and the state.Another is its dichotomization of

274 G.WILLIAM SKINNER class structure into elite carriers of the great tradition and peasant carrier of little traditions.It is not entirely clear to me whether traditional China's territorial and stratification systems were in fact markedly more complex than those of other peasant societies or whether the questions we are asking of Chinese society differ from those posed by anthropologists else -probably a little of both.In any case,a brie descripti f the Chinese situation may be useful. Basic-level market towns were but the bottom rung of a hierarchy of central places which in mid-Ming had five levels and by mid-Ch'ing six or seven.In ascending order,these centers may be tern med standard market towns, intermediate market towns central market towns, local cities greater cities,and regional cities.Place in this hierarchy was associated with economic function.In particular,as one ascended the hierarchy, credit,industry,commerce,storage,and transport were increasingly differentiated one from the othe and within each of these functio sph cupationa duct specializ and instit tionalization steadily increased.Economic centers at each ascending level must also be seen as the nodes of ever more extensive and complex territorial economic systems.such systems at any one level were articu- lated with those at the next higher vel through a comp ex network in which one center,say a standard market town, might be iented to one two.or three centers.say intermediate market towns.at the next higher level.A significant feature of the overall structure is that systems at each higher level overlap a number of systems at the next lower level and com- ral systems of the level below that In add n to this structure of natural systems,which developec historically from the bottom up,we must also take into account a func tionally different hierarchy of administrative centers and the territorial units administered from them,a system imposed from the top down by perial court.Th out mos of the ther were thre namely,the province,the prefecture,and the county.6 All the capitals of these administrative units were also natural economic centers,so that the two hierarchies were necessarily intermeshed.In the typical case,county seats were central market towns or local cities in the ec onomic hierarchy For a fuller an he gm' The City in Late In ford Univ par tth the ould less spe (pr and in any on n the h ccasiona De its see ent of go.1970)Chap.I ldin(Chicago

CHINESE PEASANTS AND THE CLOSED COMMUNITY 275 Now the opportunities for residents of villages and standard market towns wer trated in higher-level ce ntral p s.Those who climbed the central-place hierarchy to take advantage of them fell for the most part into one of two types-they went either to exploit business oppor- tunities in economic central places or to take advantage of the oppor- tunities for education and bureaucratic service in the administrative central in the latte track was far mo pre in the former:the status of scholars and especially scholar-offic als was far greater than that of merchants.But several features of the mobility process were common to both tracks,and the functional significance of mobility for the rural community was remarkably similar for scholar and trader Another feature of Chinese society that appears to set it apart from most other agrarian societies is that whereas an ambitious man was likely to leave his local community to work or study elsewhere,his family's resi- dence normally remained unchanged.Here I am distinguishing resider ce from abode.Residence was maintained in one's native place,and one' native place was in the short run of generations virtually an ascribed characteristic.Abode by contrast was an exigency of the moment,though the moment could easily stretch to decades.A man's abode varied;his residencpedA's class membership might change;his member ship in his ative l system persisted.We v perceive the o of a society in which upward mobility did not involve estrangement from one's native place.7 I argue.then.that Chinese society at the heyday of a dynasty was a high-mobility system.The high rate of upward mobility was a resp relatively e opportunity structu in higher-level centra places On the side of business opportunity,available evidence suggests that in the course of a dynasty commercialization as well as population followed a logistic growth curve-that is.an S-shaped curve-and that the period of steepest slope occurred during the period of heyday.The declining self-sufficj rural familie in conju nction with population caused a radical increase in the demand for exogenous goods within any given territory.In consequence,new rural markets were founded at the lowest level of the hierarchy,while in higher-level market towns and cities of vertical mob ng anly promate stem [Th nothing of the so evera agrarian soc hat leave out of ac Int the Chin se gu

276 G.WILLIAM SKINNER increased occupational differentiation,product specialization,and eco- nomic institutionalization led to growing opportunities for entrepreneurial talent. On the side of education and government service,the opportunity structure was grounded in the justly celebrated exami on system,wher by the state apparatus cultivated a vast pool of educated talent from which bureaucratic governor-administrators could be drawn.8 A series of graded examinations based on orthodox classical Confucian learning served,in any three-vear period.to draw into the lower reaches of the system hun dreds of tho nds of scholars throughout the realm and to e forth at the top a few hu dred.Three of the examinations were tied to quotas so restricted that on the average fewer than 3 percent passed.Success in these examinations conferred prestigious degrees that defined carefully graded status groups.In this manner,the state monopolized the distribution of status sym ols and thereby brought under indirect control ambitious talented,and powerful men throughout the realm.The se who manned the informal power structures embedded in the standard marketing systems were in large part holders of imperial degrees. One feature of the examination system is worth special emphasis here an aspir cessarily began his climb up the ladder of success ir the administrative seat of his native county.All examination sheds were situated in administrative capitals,and continued success carried a man up the hierarchy of administrative central places through the capital of his prefecture to the capital of his province,and finally on to the national capital In following those who rose by cither track up the cen ntral-place hier. archy,we discern a fact of utmost importance in understanding motivation within rural communities.My colleague Edwin Winckler,in speaking of the scholar track.has likened traditional Chinese society to'a giant roulette me in which local c nities are try ng to toss up into the bureaucratic apparatus a candidate will hit a winning bureaucratic slot and return benefits to his locality9 The benefits included power with which to protect the local system and further its interests. wealth to improve its living standards and productivity,and above all whichaning the commns reputation bromgh speifio li pa mpo vas th om parativ by a super nunity repu on in th competition for daughters-in-law of quality.The successful scholar reaped :orwphicreame of the nd its s3).for the ang.The Chines Ch'ing.Chung-li 195 economy or the tra Chinese ciy,unpublished

CHINESE PEASANTS AND THE CLOSED COMMUNITY 277 his ultimate rewards at home;his fame was enshrined in his local com- munities,and these unities in turn had claimson the riches,power, and prestige acquired in his sojourn abroad. Officials were required to serve in administrative systems remote from their own in order to escape the full force of particularistic demands from kinsm and neighbors. raders and cconomic specialists ,too tended to pursue their calling away from home,not t only because Chinese society's traditional disparagement of commercial transactions made them want to escape the prying eyes and sharp tongues of their neighbors,but also because the same particularistic demands that officials were sent elsewhere rchants trying e upwardly mobile Chinese in either the trader or the scholar track left his own locality to serve in other local systems,which in turn were plundered for the benefit of his own.Thus it was that local systems,peasants included, ger erally supported their ore able and ambitious me My argument,then,is that the opportunity structure prevailing during the dynasty's heyday led to high rates of upward mobility,which entailed high rates of geographical mobility out of and back into rural communi- ties-a mobility which,however,in no sense undermined the integrity of a successful man's local syste but rather ine ased its s and improved its competitive position. High mobility in turn lay at the root of the remarkably open structure of rural communities.The examination system,by bringing together in the same central place scholars from local systems throughout the relevant administrative unit,promoted the circula- tion of thin it. Similarly the markets and fairs tha brought merchants and traders from dispersed places to a common center fostered cultural exchange among local systems within the trading area in question.In addition,those features of the system that took the most successful of both merchants and scholars to cities remote from their own hier ar yor entral places ed their and cult versatility and enlarged the cultural repertoire from which they could draw on their return home.Thus were peasants,in the context of their wider local community,exposed to diverse customs,alien values,and exogenous norms-elements originating not only in other communities like their ow but also in cities,elemer not only fr m other little traditio ns bu also from the great tradition of the imperial elite.In normative terms, local systems during the dynastic heyday were wide open. And so they were also in economic terms.At no level of the hierarchy did local systems approach economic self-sufficiency.The economist's principle of compara ive advantage was illustrated throughout the bier archy from the hou ehold thre the village and standard rketing system to the econo omic region.Eac I system was penetrated by (as it

278 G.WILLIAM SKINNER were)alien economic specialists,while its economic specialists had penetrated others. We are now in a position to set the system in motion.My thesis is as follows.As the dynasty wore on,developments external to the rural nity led first to political opportunities,then to stricted economic opportunities,and finally to endemic disorder.In response,local communities began to close up,and in a specific sequence: normative closure first,then economic closure,and finally what might be termed coercive closure.Then,with the establishment of the next dynasty external developments were reversed.First peace and order were restored then a commercial revival recreated the structure of economic oppor- tunity;and finally,as the intricate bureaucratic system and the attendant examination system were brought to optimal working order,the structure of political opportunity was rebuilt.In response,local communities opened up again,re first the coercive aspects of their closure,ther the economic,and finally the normative. On this analysis,as the external environment of the rural community becomes less stable and more threatening,10 the mechanisms for maintain- be relaxed in the normative sphere the last to be strengthened and the first to be relaxed in the coercive sphere.The Chinese case,then,suggests the analytical virtue of considering the continuum from less to more severe closure to be cumulative.Mild closure is primarily normative,more severe closur both normativeand economic,and coercive Just what is meant by these three types of closure?u By normative closure I refer to the reaffirmation of local norms,a renewed emphasis on the particularized subculture of the local system,and an increased resis- tance to the influence of exoge nous cultural influence.Local particularism is a well-k nown feature of the Chines scene In its benign form it under- girded the basic integrative mechanisms of the total social system,for those who performed the crucial functions of governing and redistribution were motivated in no small degree by such considerations.In its more nalignant manifestatio s,hou ever,local pride and local-s svstem lovalty might b e characterized xenophobi chau vinism native closure by local systems entailed movement from the henign in the dired tion of the more malignant version. Why did the period of dynastic decline see a normative tightening up at the community level?In the first instance,because opportunities to get e This formula