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Yoritomo And The Founding of the First Bakufu
The Origins of Dual Government In Japan
By Jeffrey P. Mass STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3591-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Tale of Two Chinas
There are myriad ways to describe modern economic development. The most dramatic image is of smokestacks rising in large urban areas, where factory production heralds the dawn of a new era in the organization of labor and rapid, sustained gains in economic growth. But how best to analyze development? Should we be content with the standard narrative in which economic progress is synonymous in all times and places with the accelerated commercialization of rural economies, the end of peasant-family production, and the rise of an urban-based industrial order? Or should we respond to the calls of a new generation of historians for a different kind of emphasis, in which the focal point of early industrialization becomes the countryside, where merchants and artisans, and men and women in production, struggle for control of new economic processes?
Neither of these alternatives is entirely suitable for a study of economic development in modern China. We need, first of all, to erase old ideas about Chinese development before we can begin afresh to reconceptualize the issues. We have considered China a slow "responder" to international proddings for economic change, unlike Japan, which seemed to understand exactly what modern Western economies were all about by the end of the nineteenth century. Some have seen China as more problematic than Japan because of its domination by a conservative Confucian-oriented elite and its control by a backward and corrupt government with little will to promote significant economic change. Others have focused on exploitation by a rapacious West, eager to strip China of its political dignity and economic resources. From such visions have come efforts to apply dependency theory or world systems analysis, with China placed at one of the "peripheries" of the larger context of global capitalism. But in reality, by the turn of the twentieth century, some areas of China were building new industries and entering successfully into the world marketplace, becoming part of new trends in the internationalization of modern development.
This study, which focuses on one of China's earliest and most successful new industries, modern silk production in Wuxi County in the Yangzi delta, carves out new terrain for analyzing modern development in China on its own terms. This is not to deny that the external pressures of imperialism made some difference in how these processes evolved or that the processes were in some ways predictable, guided by the "invisible hand" of modern market forces. But what was most distinctively Chinese about modern silk production in Wuxi can be summed up in the aphorism, "One industry, two Chinas" — a shorthand method for getting at the structural backbone of modern development in the Chinese setting. "One industry" speaks of a single developmental continuum taking shape by the turn of the twentieth century in places at the forefront of modernity in China, a continuum in which many private investors and an increasing number of state bureaucrats gave priority to new forms of mechanized factory production. Representing factories in China's developmental continuum in this study are Wuxi County's modern silk filatures, where steam-powered equipment spun silk yarn, or "raw silk," for export. At the same time, however, "two Chinas" emerged as part of the continuum — one populated by sophisticated, urban-based merchants and industrialists, the other by peasant families who remained in the countryside, producing the raw materials upon which silk filatures depended. In short, what was most distinctive about Chinese development in the early twentieth century was the fusion of modern factory production with peasant-family production, and the interdependence of the two systems.
Part of this book is based on quantitative analysis of economic data, especially from the Wuxi countryside. Peasant women were the majority work force within the silk-industry continuum. It is well known that peasant women went to work in significant numbers in China's early silk filatures and cotton mills, as they did in early textile industries worldwide. But the fact that peasant women also produced the raw materials for silk filatures, raising silkworms and cocoons in the context of peasant-family farming, has thus far received little analytic scrutiny. Some of the major quantitative questions posed in this study concern not just how peasant families fared as a result of their involvement in modern silk production but, more specifically, how peasant women fared. As a result of this approach, gender-related issues in the context of modern development come into sharper focus. Such issues include how labor was gendered overall in the context of peasant-family farming in Wuxi, and the implications of gendered labor patterns for peasant family structures and incomes.
To analyze China's new developmental continuum at the turn of the twentieth century also requires a sensitivity to the politics of industrial development. As governments came and went in China over the period covered by this study, the political landscape at the local level changed dramatically. In a place like Wuxi, where some members of the local elite were becoming prosperous merchants and industrialists in an important new export trade, the political stakes were significant. Silk-industry elites needed to discover how best to ally with new governments in the central China region and how to use their favor to bring about desirable policies in taxation and industrial regulation. It was also necessary to manage the peasantry politically, since silk-industry elites depended upon local peasant women for a steady supply of cocoons to keep their filatures operating. Struggles among silk-industry elites, peasants, and government over taxation, regulation, and prices produced a new political subculture in Wuxi through which state-directed industry under the Nationalists emerged. This outcome was one of the most significant features of China's developmental continuum by the 1930's, with important reverberations in China's economy and polity down to the present day.
THE DEBATE ON CHINESE DEVELOPMENT
Most of the previous literature on Chinese development has been mired in contentious debate. This debate first emerged in the 1920's, as Chinese intellectuals wrote prolifically about the problems of Chinese peasants. Many authors were particularly concerned with the effects of both imperialism and landlord-tenant relations on peasant livelihoods. For such writers, the roots of peasant poverty lay in the oppressive nature of imperialist domination and class relations, and these writers viewed revolution against both as essential if development was to proceed. At the same time, other Chinese intellectuals were conducting quantitative investigations of Chinese agriculture with the help of foreign agricultural experts such as American John Lossing Buck. Although the studies and thinking produced as a result of such investigations did not deny that Chinese peasants were poor, they tended to emphasize the need for institutional reform rather than revolution, so that peasants could have better access to credit and modern technology. Rural banks and cooperatives might thus pull peasants out of poverty, with the implication that violent revolution was unnecessary to move Chinese development forward.
Revolutionary options eventually won the day in China with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, but the ongoing debate on Chinese development did not subside. A generation of Marxist historians in China argued, for example, that indigenous "sprouts of capitalism" had emerged in China during the Ming (1368 — 1644) and Qing (1644 — 1911) dynasties, but that the Western intrusion of the nineteenth century had nipped them in the bud, forestalling successful native industrialization. In the United States, the devastating interventionist policies of the Vietnam War prompted a generation of young China scholars to take aspects of the revolutionary analysis of the Chinese economy more seriously as well. Western imperialism became an emphasis for many young writers in their wake-up calls to a senior generation of China scholars, in which they argued that China had not been shaken out of its conservative doldrums by the West, but had been forced onto a new developmental path that destroyed older patterns of production, to the detriment of an already poor and suffering peasantry. To make such arguments more convincing, new scholarship was needed. No matter where one stood in the debate in an ideological sense, there was simply an insufficient empirical base for arguing that the West had done in the Chinese peasantry with its new style of economic imperialism.
Thus, a new round of scholarship in the United States attempted to fill in some of the empirical gaps about Chinese development. Victor Lippit's important studies on the size of the economic surplus siphoned off by the Chinese landlord elite, or gentry, argued that even without the added stresses of Western pressures to restructure the economy, Chinese peasants were deprived of the ability to accumulate savings for new forms of investment by a corrupt class system. Philip Huang's pivotal studies on the Chinese countryside also provided new empirical insights into the internal dynamics of Chinese small-peasant-family farming. Huang demonstrated how the system of production in the Chinese countryside was predicated on intensive use of family labor, resulting in steady gains in total output, but at declining returns to labor. Huang thus provided an entirely new way of viewing the structural dilemmas of the rural economy — as long as the system of small-peasant-family farming was in place, China would continue to experience "growth without development," Huang's shorthand for referring to rising levels of output at declining marginal returns to labor.
Despite the important new empirical ground broken by such studies, the atmosphere of contentious debate about Chinese development still refused to subside. Studies by Loren Brandt and David Faure, for example, provided new empirical data on peasant wages and incomes in areas of accelerated commercialization in the early twentieth century, arguing for the positive benefits of increased incomes among the peasantry as a result of Western-oriented production and market growth. A new all-encompassing argument about Chinese development was also provided by Thomas Rawski, who argued, through careful reassessment of nearly all the quantitative data for both industry and agriculture in the early twentieth century, that China had, in fact, reached a "take-off" stage of economic growth, characterized by rising per capita incomes in both rural and urban areas. The juxtaposition of Huang's and Rawski's sharply different views sparked a round of detailed critiques and counterarguments by a wide range of China scholars, in which Huang's negative arguments and Rawski's positive ones became representative of two seemingly irreconcilable points of view on Chinese development.
This study enters the debate on Chinese development, but with a different approach and a revised agenda. Its central premise is that quantification of Chinese development, in and of itself, will never provide sufficient information to characterize China's developmental path. In addition to ongoing efforts to quantify, we need a new window into Chinese development that includes consideration of complex political struggles among elites, peasants, and the state that conditioned economic performance in the late imperial and Republican periods. Once issues of class, culture, politics, and gender in the Chinese setting are factored into the debate, we can begin to generate a new, more fully nuanced picture of exactly who gained and who lost as new industries were built in the early twentieth century, and how the developmental continuum shaped both private economic decisions and state planning for the economy over the course of the twentieth century.
This book has taken shape in a period in which writing about development issues, especially early industrialization, has reached new levels of sophistication among European historians. Debates about protoindustrialization in the European context, about the ways in which peasant-family structures affected development, about the roles of guilds, and about female labor have all reshaped the contours of thinking about early modern development in various European locales. At the same time, however, this study also constantly has had to return to the specific context of an underdeveloped China at the dawn of the twentieth century, and to aspects of the development experience that were different from Europe because of China's third-world status as a relative latecomer to modern development. Thus, though some of the ideas here take inspiration from the new gains in European scholarship, I have had to adapt and reformulate arguments to make sense of these issues in a specifically Chinese context. Elites in China were not the same as elites elsewhere; likewise, peasant-family farming in China had its own distinctive contours, with gender relations within families and assumptions about male and female roles in labor processes very different from those in various European settings. Perhaps most different of all was the Chinese state, if one can say it existed at all at the turn of the twentieth century. How did rising and falling governments support or hinder development in the Chinese case, and what did the rise of the Nationalists in the 1930's, a government nearly universally condemned by its former analysts, really have to do with supporting or harming Chinese agriculture and fledgling industry?
ELITES, POWER, AND DEVELOPMENT
An important component of the analysis in this book is a new approach to the study of Chinese local elites and their roles in modern development. The central premise of this approach is that elites built on an evolving cultural repertoire in the local setting in Wuxi, enabling them to actively, and successfully, promote modern development. At the core of this cultural repertoire were power relationships embedded deeply in local society, and used very profitably by some local elites to maintain and elaborate ongoing patterns of local social dominance. Dissenting from much of the previous literature on Chinese local elites, this study argues that such individuals were not interested in local autonomy from the state, nor in the creation of a new public sphere of bourgeois activity; rather, they wanted to find new ways to collaborate with, and gain added legitimacy from, rising governments in the Yangzi delta region to promote industrialization.
Most local elites in Wuxi were men who came from locally prominent families of the Confucian-dominated, bureaucratic-office-seeking past. But during the late nineteenth century, some such men became the primary investors in new forms of cocoon marketing and silk-filature development. As they proceeded along their new career paths, they at once became more political as well, entering into new forms of intraelite association designed to promote the cocoon trade and the local filature industry. These new silk-industry elites needed both the peasantry and the support of local governments in Wuxi to make their new investment paths work. They needed peasants to produce cocoons, and they needed local government to help them achieve favorable tax policies. Without satisfactory performance in these two critical areas, their fledgling silk filatures stood no chance of success in the long term. Moreover, these new elites also needed to generate ongoing methods of raising capital among themselves, to guarantee that investment in silk filatures would become a permanent part of the economic landscape. For all of these needs, guild-type organizations arose within the context of local elite participation in silk-industry development in Wuxi, and I devote considerable time to analysis of their goals and performance. In addition to such formal organizations, informal modes of association based on personal networks served these elites well. By the 1930's, there were fifty silk filatures in Wuxi, with a full complement of well-networked local elites operating at their core.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yoritomo And The Founding of the First Bakufu by Jeffrey P. Mass. Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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