History of China & Japan 1 HISTORY Subject : History (For under graduate student) Paper No. : Paper - VIII History of China & Japan Unit No. & Title : Unit- 1 History of China Topic No. & Title : Topic - 1 China & Imperialism during 19 th Century Lecture No. & Title : Lecture - 1 Social Classes & Groups in China Script Chinese Society: part 1 Social classes and groups in China China is admittedly one of the largest countries of the world, her territory being about the size of the whole of Europe. She has had the longest historiographical tradition in the history of the world. Of all countries of the world, she also has had the experience of going through the feudal epoch for the longest period of time. She is the home of
History of China & Japan 2 fifty-six nationalities. About ninety-five percent of her people belong to the Han nationality. There are, besides the Han, fifty-five other minority nationalities such as the Mongol, Hui, Tibetan, Uighur, Miao, Yi, Chuang, Chungchia, Korean, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tazikh, Tatar, Uzbek, Tungshiang, Salar, Pao An and others. The overwhelming majority of the population of China consisted of the peasantry, who along with artisans and other toiling people stood at the bottom of Chinese society and formed the exploited classes in China. At the top there were the landowning aristocracies, military oligarchy and the gentry (or scholar-gentry) who comprised the ruling classes. Besides these, there were merchants who, though affluent, got a low rank in the social hierarchy. The ideology of Confucius and the value system he advocated bound the feudal society of China. The basic unit of the Chinese society was the family rather than the individual. In fact, it was the state in miniature. The main function of the family was to raise filial sons. Within the family respect was claimed and given according
History of China & Japan 3 to age and sex, the older members enjoying a status superior to the younger ones. Within the family, the father was all-powerful. He was the supreme autocrat, enjoying absolute control over the use of all family property and income and a decisive voice in arranging the marriages of children. Patriarchy was all pervasive in the Chinese family. What is evident in the Chinese family is the domination of age over youth. This domination of age over youth was matched by the domination of men over women. In the family, a woman had no rights whatsoever. They were universally illiterate. They had no rights over family property. They had no say in their own marriages. The widow was generally expected not to remarry, although the husband could take a concubine even if his wife was still alive. The status within the family was codified in the three bonds emphasized by the Confucian philosophers, namely, the bond of loyalty on the part of the subject to the ruler, of filial obedience on the part of the son to the father and the bond of chastity on the part of the wives but never of the husbands. What is most interesting about this doctrine is that two of these three
History of China & Japan 4 relationships were clearly within the family and all were between the superior and the subordinate. Chinese society was highly stratified. Eighty per cent of the population was constituted of the peasantry, while the remaining twenty per cent represented a composite stratum of scholars, gentry, officials, artisans, merchants and militarists. Confucius preferred to distinguish between the ruling groups from the ruled on the basis of mental as opposed to menial work. The peasantry was not an undifferentiated class, but spit up into rich, middle, poor and landless. Most of them were under the grip of landowners who subjected them to exploitation of various types. The extraction of rent by the landlords to the maximum possible extent was the typical form of feudal oppression. The Chinese feudal system had created its own tax collectors, courts, the police force all of which served the interests of the ruling classes and it was the oppressed sections that had always been at the receiving end. Joseph Needham has suggested the term
History of China & Japan 5 bureaucratic feudalism to emphasize the unique combination of economic and political power. The town-dwelling artisans were organized into guilds which controlled production and marketing in each professional sector such as weaving, shoe-making, bamboo-handicrafts, gold-working and so on. Besides these, there were parttime rural manufacturers who also acted as peasants during some part of the year. Thus there was a blending of agriculture and handicrafts in rural China. There was another large section in rural society made up of day-labourers, vagabonds, boatmen, peddlers and porters, who together with the peasants, artisans and other working people, formed the oppressed classes in Chinese society. The merchants were at the bottom of the social scale. They included the wealthy monopolistic traders, small shopkeepers, clerks and apprentices. Powerful tea and silk merchants who controlled the distribution of these commodities were enormously rich. But by and large commercial activities were regarded as beneath the dignity
History of China & Japan 6 of the scholar-gentry, and the pursuit of profit was frowned upon by Confucian society. Chesneaux observes that the inferior status assigned to them represented the defensive reaction of an agricultural society against economic forces that were threatening its equilibrium. However, the Chinese society accommodated its wealthy merchants by the backdoor, through the special quotas that enabled them to buy Confucian degrees. In this way they could bring their social status into harmony with their economic power. The term shen-shih or scholar gentry refers to those who had passed the governmental examinations. They played a dominant role in society and enjoyed many privileges. The Chinese gentry should be distinguished from the English gentry of the late-feudal period. Unlike the English gentry who emerged out of the dissolution of the monasteries and had capitalistic tendencies, the Chinese gentry were basically feudal in character. J.K.Fairbank holds that they could be understood only in a dual political and economic sense, as they were connected with both landholding and office-holding. It was this class
History of China & Japan 7 which constituted the real land-owning ruling class in China. They possessed power, knowledge and land. The gentry were distinguished from the commoners in style of dress and embellishments. They wore black gowns with blue borders and decorated their saddles and reins with articles like fur, brocade and fancy embroidery. None of the commoners, no matter how rich were allowed the same privilege. Gentry status made one immune to action by the local magistrate, because the gentry member was his equal. A commoner who offended a gentry member was liable to receive a harsher punishment than what he would have got if he had done the same to another commoner. The gentry were exempt from labour service as well as the poll tax to enable them to concentrate on their studies. They called their households scholar-households or ju-hu, so as to make a differentiation in tax payments. In times of hardship or poor harvest the gentry often requested for and got an official remission of taxes, which benefited them but was not passed on to the poor peasant. The gentry families lived mainly in the walled towns, not in villages. The towns were walled because (as Jean Chesneaux observes), of the
History of China & Japan 8 constant threat of peasant revolts. The gentry formed a stratum of families based on landed property. Privileged as they were the scholar-gentry were not part of the ruling bureaucracy; they were the intermediary between the local magistrate and the people. The magistrate was usually a degree holder from another province, and had no great interest in local affairs. Local projects and programmes therefore customarily fell to the gentry, who raised money for the construction and repair of public works. They were also involved in local charity and welfare work. The gentry also considered themselves as guardians of the cultural heritage. In times of turmoil and unrest, when government troops were unavailable to afford protection to local areas, it was the gentry who assumed the responsibility of arranging for the defence of the area. From arbitration of disputes to the sponsorship of public works to the organization of local defence, the gentry therefore played an indispensable role in their home areas. If the worst was to come the gentry might even organize an uprising in righteous protest against government
History of China & Japan 9 oppression. It is thus not without good reason that China is sometimes described as a gentry-state. In practice there were some educated people who failed in the Confucian examinations and others who refused to sit for it. Only a fraction of the gentry directly assumed political and administrative duties. As for ownership of land, it was no doubt the main source of economic power in ancient China. It was generally possessed by people holding Confucian degrees and occupying public office, although there were landowners with no degrees as also impoverished scholars. However, the interesting point is that membership in the gentry offered many chances to grow rich. In reality, the gentry constituted the big landowners,- the economic base of the ruling class. Confucius and value system It was during the rule of the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) that Confucianism became the official doctrine of the ruling state, and Confucius was transformed from a model for scholars into the patron saint of the scholar-officials. In this way for about twenty-four centuries, Confucian doctrines
History of China & Japan 10 had been the theoretical basis for the unity and continuity of China and her culture. Confucius (or Chhiu Khung) was born in 551 BCE in the town of Tsou, in the county of Ch angping in the Shantung province of China, then a part of the state of Lu, in a slave-owning family. During his youth, Confucius was for a time a low-ranking official, managing warehouses. For the most part of his life, Confucius was a private teacher. The rulers of different states received him courteously and consulted him. Since success and honour in the Ching system was based so predominantly upon scholarship, an attitude came to prevail in society that all activities are unworthy; only learning is lofty. Chinese students spent their entire youth getting ready for the civil service examinations. The ability to compose what was called the eight-legged essay was essential to success in the examinations, which also required great literary skills and a rigid style of writing. The examinations were conducted at the district, provincial and metropolitan levels. Chinese scholars throughout history spent most of their lives studying and re-studying Confucian classics. They also annotated and re-annotated those
History of China & Japan 11 classics. All of them were very proud of their heritage as the highest culture in the world. Some among them had the wealth and leisure to study for years until they passed a series of Imperial examinations and became officials. These officials then utilized their administrative position to amass wealth and power. They wrote the dynastic histories of the emperors or rulers, they interpreted philosophical meanings to the rulers and in this way acted as their political advisors. They acquired landed wealth, maintained the bureaucracy and ruled the people. They were known as the scholar-gentry-officials who were tools of the rulers from one dynasty to another. Although stratified, Chinese society was egalitarian in that there was no caste system like in India. Except for the degraded whose descendants were barred from appearing at the civil service examinations for three generations, the ladder to success was available to everyone, regardless of family, birth or religion. There was considerable movement among the different social groups, with powerful or high status families falling because of incompetent offspring,
History of China & Japan 12 while men of humble circumstances were able to rise up in the social ladder through success in the open competitive examinations. Confucius stressed the importance of benevolence and regarded it as the highest ideal of morality. Yet, according to him, benevolence meant different grades of love more love for those who were close and less for those who were distant, more for the highly placed and less for the lowly. On the one hand, he emphasized that rites should be combined with benevolence. On the other, he held that benevolence should be practised within the strict boundary of rites, i.e., Chou rites. Bai Shouyi holds that while aspiring to be a statesman, he defended the interests of the slave-owning nobles without being able to break through the shackles of the old order. The rulers of China inherited the legacy of Confucius and formulated the three obedience and four virtues. The obedience required that a woman must obey the father when young, obey the husband when married, and obey sons when widowed. The four virtues were: A woman
History of China & Japan 13 should possess the feudal moral ethics: her speech should conform to the feudal ethical code: her clothing should suit feudal customs: and she should be able to do household chores and wait on parents-in-law, husband and sons.