A Perspective on the Study of Chinese Culture and Society
David Faure
Institute for Chinese Studies
University of Oxford
If I have to sum up what I have been studying since I left graduate school in 1975, I
would like to say I have been trying to understand the implications of China’s ritual
transformation in the sixteenth century. I wouldn’t have thought in 1975 that this was
what I was embarking on. It came by accident, but, in hindsight, a strand of thought of
sorts linked the accidents one to another. That probably is my perspective on the study of
Chinese culture and society.
John Lagerwey wrote in his notes about paradigm change. The paradigms which gave
way for me were the 1960s class theory of Chinese society (peasant, landlord, etc.), and
the theory of social control as propounded by Hsiao Kung-chuan, which really derived
from the political theories of the late Qing. I went into graduate school as Freedman and
Skinner reminded us that Chinese society existed independently of official control, and
that its structure was not necessarily class-based. I made my first foray into the village
world by studying the Nian bands in the Shandong-Henan-Jiangsu border area and the
Triads in Guangdong, but it was in the New Territories of Hong Kong that I had to
confront Freedman and make my own discovery of the importance of religion as the
means whereby social relationships might be established, among which was the lineage.
Up in the Pearl River delta, I had to work out how the lineage as a social institution came
to be accepted from the sixteenth century and how it was popularised in the centuries to
follow so that by the nineteenth century, pseudo-lineages (such as the Triads) could make
sense to contemporaries. In the process, I came to realise the centrality of ritual in the
integration of local society into the state. All this is going into the book I am now
completing, enriched by observations outside the Pearl River delta, thanks to a CCK
research grant.
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Putting ritual in central position in state-local society relationships represents for me a
second paradigm shift. Although the centrality of rituals answers Freedman’s question
about the role of the lineage in a strong state such as found in imperial China, it urges us
to go beyond the geographic and economic in generalising about Chinese society.
However, the economy comes into the argument in a roundabout way. It was Freedman
who observed that lineages were corporate groups, founded upon the holding of landed
properties, and the corporation of the lineage is exactly the sort of state-local society
relationships which came out of the ritual transformation of the sixteenth century. Yet,
we have to go beyond Freedman if we are to recognise this to be of arch importance in
any understanding of China’s economic history. To come to a realisation of how
important the history of incorporation must have been to China’s economic development,
it is necessary to posit Karl Polanyi’s famous remarks about the state and the market:
markets operate freely when kings let go of their prerogatives to trade. In Europe, kings
achieved this by granting charters, first individually, then en masse via company law. In
imperial China, there was no company law, corporations were defined through ritual.
The territorial links of lineage taken away, ritual, therefore, points the way to an
interpretation of China’s commercial revolution in the sixteenth century. Again, John
Lagerwey has pointed out the importance of comparison across society, and for me, the
comparison with Europe at this point is vital. Both went through a commercial
revolution, at about the same time, but out of it Europe built its law on individualism
while China followed its rituals by building many of them around the lineage. The
magistrate’s court did not rule simply by law; the law he maintained was the law of a
ritual-legal order (re Shiga Chuso). The introduction of company law into China, is
therefore, for me, the fascinating history of the conversion of the ritual-legal order to a
different sort of law. I think I can fairly say that only by understanding how religion
operates can I understand the ritual-legal basis of business, and only if I can understand
that can I detect the markers in China’s modernisation (I won’t quibble about the use of
the word). That, of course, takes me into contemporary China. We historians have seen
the process of Chinese society opening up three times, the first time in the sixteenth
century, the second time from 1870s to probably the 1930s, and the third time from 1979.
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So, I am saying our interest in ritual, in law, in Chinese society and economy, and no
doubt in politics (if only I knew more about how the Ming, Qing and Republican states
operated) are all rolled into one in the sixteenth century ritual transformation. For a
research programme, I’d like to see it extended both ways, both into the Southern Song
and towards contemporary China. In these broad terms, ritual is not restricted to the
practices of the lineage or the local temples, and must be defined to include
institutionalised religious orders such as Buddhist sects and their monasteries. I realise in
saying this we may be rehashing the Confucianisation of Chinese society thesis. Perhaps
not quite, in the local context, we shall probably find that Confucianism does not conform
to any mode but, as rituals, it grants legitimacy to institutions which take different forms.
More specifically, I think we need two broadly different sorts of research. First, the lead
from the general theme of the integration of local society into the Chinese state moves
rapidly into intellectual archaeology. I expect the Pearl River delta to look different from
Putian, or central Shanxi, or Yunnan and Guizhou, because they were integrated into the
state at different times when different theories were employed. In the case of Yunnan, I
half suspect (I say this because I have not studied it) the difference comes also from the
fact that many parts integrated not only into the Han state, but also into the southwestern
states of Nanchao or Dali. There is a history in how different parts of China gelled which
has to be written if we are to understand how China became China. A corollary of this
approach is that the more we know about other parts of China, the more the centrality of
Jiangnan fades away.
In short, we need local history in a context that goes beyond the locality as a unit in
itself.* In this spirit, we have to collect and document, and there is a very broad range of
questions which must be considered dealing with how graduate students might be
inducted and how local scholars might be included in the intellectual exercise. Needless
to say, there is a great deal of urgency in the collecting of local documents and the
documentation of architecture and local practices. Yet, I think it is important to
I’d like to say we want to involve Taiwan history in the process: the documentation found in Taiwan is far
too important to be left to a local interest, but it is probably as hard to persuade Taiwan historians to see
how Taiwan fits into a broad Asian context as to persuade our China colleagues (both on the mainland and
outside) to learn enough Taiwan geography to wade though the important findings on Taiwan.
*
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consolidate, that is to say, to compare notes across local areas, and to see how practices
might relate to broader changes. In this context, a better understanding of historical
geography seems imperative.
Second, given the central place of ritual, I don’t think we should ignore the obvious
changes in the twentieth century, that is, the erosion of this ritual with the passing of
dynastic China and the rise of the Republican nation state. (I say this because I think
much as the Qing was an empire, the Ming behaved in many ways like a nation state.
This is another area where comparative work with Europe would be quite interesting.)
Part of the flow of this argument may be found in Henrietta Harrison and John Fitzgerald,
but I think it can be taken very much further. I don’t underrate the importance of ritual
continuation in the villages (how else have many of us been able to get hold of
documentation), but we have to recognise that in twentieth-century China, a city-based
ideology and imported social theory took over the lineage- or village-based state-local
society ritual of the imperial state. I don’t want to wander too far on this line of thought,
but the point I want to make in the context of this paper is that much as many of us are
interested in rituals which have survived in the villages, it would be irresponsible of us as
scholars not also to keep an eye out for the institutions which have arisen in China’s cities
throughout the twentieth century and to appreciate how with those institutions, it was the
city and not the village which now legitimizes varied practices.
While I would like to see, therefore, a continuation of the ethnographic documentation
and gathering of sources (land deeds, religious texts, stele inscriptions) all over China, I
think it is important also to balance that with some appreciation of changes in Chinese
culture and society based in the twentieth-century cities. Shanghai comes to mind, but not
only Shanghai. Quite the contrary, because Shanghai taught us to see China through
Shanghai’s lenses, research in other cities is needed to dislodge this uni-centre approach
to Chinese history which so much duplicates the Jiangnan-centred view characteristic of
late imperial history.
The world wants us to see China in a global context. Maybe we shall be more ready to do
that when we have understood a little more of how China has hung together in the past.
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