From the Zhou to Qing Dynasties)
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Journal of Chinese Humanities � (�0�5) �-3 brill.com/joch Editor’s Note After more than a year in preparation, the first edition of Journal of Chinese Humanities has finally arrived. Our intention behind creating this new journal is to allow the entire aca- demic world to better understand and observe China, to allow all scholars to follow the academic trends happening within China, to provide scholars with a way to stay abreast of the current thought and research coming out of China. If we are successful in providing such service to the reader, we have become what we sought out to be: an intellectual bridge between China and her out- side observers, in other words, a bridge between those who study China and the China that they study. It is important to understand China. China is not only ascending to the world stage, but also solidifying her central position on that stage. And as has been the case every time a new power emerges, the world order changes with it. There is no reason to believe that China’s ascension will be any different. China has had an increasing presence and influence on world affairs over the last few decades, but this has not changed the fact that, in the eyes of too many, China and all that her long culture entails remain a mystery. It is ironic that a nation so large can remain behind a cloud mystery for so long, yet China never ceases to confound and astound the outside world in what it has achieved and how it has endured. The continued development that so many experts claim to be impossible has proven to be a reality. China’s unique path—politi- cal, economic, social—continues to defy Western theories that use their own cultural histories to predict how, when, and why China will meet its next crisis. All this demonstrates to us that there is still so much to China that needs to be explained and clarified to the Western world. Paramount among what needs to be shown to the Western world are the intellectual trends taking place right now inside China. For much of the history between the East and West, there has been a disparity of mutual understand- ing. That is to say, China’s knowledge of the West has far exceeded the West’s knowledge of China. And if we take this one step further, we can attribute this lack of understanding to insufficient channels for understanding. In the face of China’s recent and undeniable influence on world affairs, the need for chan- nels of understanding is greater than ever. The creation of Journal of Chinese Humanities is our attempt to provide such a needed channel. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�35��34�-0�0�000� 2 Editor’s Note With this in mind, the uniqueness of this Journal of Chinese Humanities lies in the fact that the majority of research articles and book reviews that we introduce to Western sinologists are from Chinese scholars working in China. Instead of focusing on what Westerners have to say about China, we show the English-speaking world what China says about China. In the face of so much (Western-language) literature available to us about this complex country, research coming out of China itself seems conspicuously underrepresented. This problem needs to be remedied if the East and West are to have a proper dialogue in the hope of real mutual understanding. But our Journal of Chinese Humanities was not born simply from good inten- tions. Behind its inception is the long-standing Chinese-language humanities journal Wen Shi Zhe (文史哲) published at Shandong University, also known by its English name, Journal of Literature, History and Philosophy. Wen Shi Zhe has been one of the pillars of academic discussion in China since its first issue in 1951. Its broad range of humanities topics and dedication to creative research value have kept it at the vanguard of intellectual trends for more than half a century. Drawing upon the resources and high standards of Wen Shi Zhe, Shandong University has decided to carry forward this tradition to the outside world, and has thus created an English-language journal on Chinese humanities. In this effort to make China’s voice heard in international dialogues, we select and translate for the Western reader articles from top Chinese scholars in their fields. Each issue has a specific theme pertaining to literature, history, or philosophy, and the majority of articles concentrate on topics related to this theme. Each issue will also include a limited number of contributions from Western authors, in order to ensure multiple view points and inspiring dialogues. The theme for this inaugural issue is “Forms and Formation of Chinese Society.” This has been an important topic of philosophical and historical debate in China for the last one hundred years, as it has much to say not just about our past but also our future. The articles in this first issue focus primarily on the formation of ancient Chinese society and its evolution over the two thousand year span between the Qin and Qing Dynasties. With articles such as “The Society of Patriarchal Clan System,” “The Era of Prefectures and Counties,” “The Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Course of History since Middle Antiquity,” and “New Thoughts on the Social Forms in Ancient China,” these Chinese authors attempt to find theoretical frameworks that can accurately explain China’s unique course of history. This issue also includes Journal of Chinese Humanities 1 (2015) 1-3 Editor’s Note 3 articles that study the more recent history of Chinese society, how it changes, and how these changes are perceived and manifested. “From kang to kongtiao: China’s Twentieth Century Cooling” and “The Refracted Moment: Photo- graphing Chinese History in the Making” both attempt to capture the nature of Chinese society’s recent changes from a very particular vantage point. We hope that our readers will enjoy Journal of Chinese Humanities, whether the reader is a professional sinologist or simply an interested China observer. Despite having set lofty goals for ourselves and this journal, it is our humble hope that Western readers will be able to benefit from the academic literature offered here, and in turn contribute to this journal and contribute to the impor- tant ongoing discussion between the East and West. Wang Xuedian Journal of Chinese Humanities Editor-in-Chief Journal of Chinese Humanities 1 (2015) 1-3 Journal of Chinese Humanities � (�0�5) 4-�4 brill.com/joch The King’s Power Dominating Society— A Re-examination of Ancient Chinese Society Liu Zehua Translated by Wang Jingqiong and Josh Mason Abstract In terms of social formation, the most important characteristic of traditional Chinese society was how the king’s power dominated the society. Ever since the emergence of written records, we see that ancient China has had a most prominent interest group, that of the nobility and high officials, centered around the king (and later the emperor). Of all the kinds of power exerted on Chinese society, the king’s was the ultimate power. In the formation process of kingly power, a corresponding social structure was also formed. Not only did this central group include the king or emperor, the nobles, and the bureaucratic landlords, but the “feudal landlord ecosystem” which was formed within that group also shaped the whole society in a fundamental way. As a special form of economic redistribution, corruption among officials provided the soil for the growth of bureaucratic landlords. At the foundation of this entire bureaucratic web was always the king and his authority. In short, ancient Chinese society is a power- dependent structure centered on the king’s power. The major social conflict was there- fore the conflict between the dictatorial king’s power and the rest of society. Keywords king’s power – landlord – social classes – despotism – social form A long-held and popular theory claims that the economic base determines the social superstructure. In this scenario, power relations belong to the super- * Liu Zehua is Professor of History in the School of History, Nankai University, Nanjing, China. E-mail: [email protected]. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�35��34�-0�0�000� The King’s Power Dominating Society 5 structure and political forms are a result of the concentration of economic resources and processes. Unlike that theory, the idea of “the king’s power dom- inating the society” centers on how dictatorial power operated as a system and controlled ancient Chinese societies. A narrative of history based on this idea will be different from a narrative formed on the theory of base and superstruc- ture, sometimes with a total reversal of cause and effect in describing some specific historical processes. Such a shift in theory and the resulting narratives do not simply come from my own arbitrary decisions, but is a result of many years’ accumulation of aca- demic research. It first started with Mr. Wang Yanan’s outstanding idea. In his book, A Study of Chinese Bureaucratic Politics, he made an insightful argument about political power determining the economy. He wrote, “The absolutely dominant power of the emperors and kings in Chinese dictatorial bureaucratic politics was established on the basis of absolute control of land, which was the basic productive means for the whole society, and furthermore on the exploi- tation of the surplus of agriculture labor and the possession of the products of the labor. The dominant power showed its economic power through the con- trol and possession; it showed its political power through taking the control and realizing the possession.”1 However, Mr.