The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 12: Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 1
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THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN INFLUENCE 5
special status and privileges. This volume devotes a chapter simply to
describing 'the foreign presence'. By any definition it had many of the
features -of a self-contained sub-culture transplanted and flourishing
symbiotically in Chinese surroundings.
From this picture of the foreign establishment with its own way of
life we can understand why the Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s
erupted in anti-imperialism. The imperialist presence served as a target
for a more unified revolutionary effort.
Yet this revolutionary effort itself represented other foreign influences.
The revolution had always had foreign helpers. The Revolutionary
Alliance led by Sun Yat-sen was organized among Chinese youths in
Tokyo in 1905 under Japanese prompting. It was financed by Chinese
merchant communities overseas and used the protection of the foreign
administrations in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Later the emissaries of the
Soviet revolution inspired both the founding of the CCP and the reor-
ganization of the KMT. Thus, the revolution used foreigners, their aid,
ideas and methods to attack the foreign establishment as its target within
the country.
A third distinction or proposition, however, is that China's history
had to be made by Chinese themselves, not by foreigners. Indeed, when
the history of this period was recorded in Chinese, a funny thing hap-
pened - the foreigners were almost lost to sight. The inspector-general
of customs, Sir Francis Aglen, might collect and even impound the Mari-
time Customs revenue. Sun's adviser, Michael Borodin, might draft the
KMT constitution. The Soviet General Blyukher ('Galen') might work
out Chiang Kai-shek's battle plans. But none of them, though in positions
of considerable authority, was Chinese. All were played down if not
pretty generally left out of the Chinese record. This historical facelessness
of the foreigners in China not only reflected modern patriotic pride,
denying outsiders a basic role in Chinese life. It also conformed with a
long tradition that the Marco Polos and Ibn Batutas who turned up from
Western Eurasia had no place in the Chinese record because they were
outside the culture. China's society retained its integrity. It was bounded
by the Chinese language and writing system. Foreign individuals figured
in its history only when, like Matteo Ricci or Robert Hart, they spoke
and wrote Chinese sufficiently well to be documented.
There was a colourful history of the foreigners-in-China, but it was
their history, not China's. When the Anglo-American ADC (Amateur
Dramatic Club) in the International Settlement governed by the Shanghai
Municipal Council put on the
Pirates
of
Penzance
with stentorian eclat,
it was an event in China, but not in Chinese history. The foreigners'
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
4 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
experience was separate from the Chinese experience. Ibsen's A doll's
house
had influence because Hu Shih brought it within the cultural gates.
This amounts to saying that Chinese history is not one's idea of what
happened in China but, rather, one's idea of what happened to the Chinese
people. According to this view, the vital entities of modern times are the
peoples with their national states and cultures. It is natural for most
national chroniclers of events to follow the thread of their own ethnic-
cultural development. Foreigners are extraneous and temporary. Witness
the fact that the missionaries, the foreign employees, and the treaty-port
residents all subsequently disappeared from the Chinese scene just as
thoroughly as the European colonial administrations of the late nineteenth
century disappeared from their colonies in the mid twentieth century.
A fourth proposition is thus in order: that foreign influences if they
were to affect the Chinese people must be conveyed in the Chinese lan-
guage and writing system. Here China's long experience of 'barbarian'
contact had developed time-tested ways of thought and response. For ex-
ample,
nei
(inside) and
wai
(outside) were very ancient Chinese categories,
widely applied both geographically and figuratively. Thus
wai-kuo
(foreign
states) lay outside China (Chung-kuo, the central state), but foreign rulers
who kotowed could become wai-fan (outer feudatories).
2
In his person
the Son of Heaven must be a sage within (in character) and a hero without
(in action), just as the superior man must first study to cultivate himself
Qisiu-sheri)
in the inner realm and then strive by his example to bring peace
to the world (p'ing
t'ien-hsia)
in the outer realm. The cognate categories
of nei and wai allowed Chinese thinking to respond to domestic or to
foreign stimuli, all the while remaining purely Chinese.' A similar pair
of terms proved useful in handling Westernization in the formula popular-
ized by Chang Chih-tung; 'Chinese learning for the fundamentals (/'/'),
Western learning for practical use (jung).' Since t'i zndyung, substance and
function, were really meant to be aspects of a single entity, Chang misap-
plied these terms. Never mind, it helped Westernize China.
Foreign influences invading China thus had to pass through the eye of
the linguistic needle. Translation of a foreign idea often verged upon
its Sinification. Just as the Indo-European languages modernized to meet
modern needs, so Chinese created new terms, many incorporated from
2
Lien-sheng Yang, 'Historical notes on the Chinese world order', in John King Fairbank,
ed.
The
Chinese
world
order:
traditional
China's
foreign
relations,
21.
3
On 'the inner and outer
realms'
in philosophy see Benjamin Schwartz, 'Some polarities in
Confucian
thought', in David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright, eds.
Confucianism
in
action,
54-8.
On
nei
and wai separating traditional and foreign-induced matters of
government,
see
for
example Chang Shou-yung it al.
comps.
Huang-ch'ao
chang-ku
hui-pien
(Collected historical
records
of the imperial
dynasty),
3
vols.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN INFLUENCE 5
Japanese, to carry new meanings. Yet the ancient characters, when used
for a new phrase, could not shed all of their accumulated connotations.
For example, foreign faiths entering China have had remarkable diffi-
culties over their key terms. Christian missionaries struggled long and
hard to find the best term for God, who was certainly central to their
enterprise. Catholics used 'Lord of Heaven' (T'ien-chu), Protestants
split between 'Lord on High' (Shang-ti) and 'Deity' (Shen). Again, the
sacred terms of Western liberalism, 'freedom'
{tzu-yu)
and 'individualism'
(ko-jen chu-i), when translated, as in Japan, retained a connotation of
wilful irresponsibility in the service of a doctrine of everyone for
himself.
Proper Confucians were appalled. The Western virtue of individualism
came through as selfish licence without a sense of duty.
The idea of rights was newly developed even in the modern West, but
in China it had so little background that a new term had to be invented for
it. The American missionary W. A. P. Martin in translating Wheaton's
Elements of International Law in 1864 used ch'iian-li and soon after it was
used in Japan
(kenri).
But of course these characters already had established
meanings and their combination seemed to say 'power-profit' or at least
'privilege-benefit'. This made the assertion of one's rights
(cWuan-lt)
seem like a selfish power play.
4
Witness finally the central Marxist term 'proletariat', which originally
meant the poor of ancient Rome and retains in English an urban con-
notation. Translated into Chinese as 'propertyless class'
(wu-ch'an
chieh-
chi),
the proletariat in Mao's China properly embraced the poor peasantry,
no doubt a useful adaptation. We have hardly begun to study the Sin-
icizing role of translation as a filter of foreign influences on China.
A fifth proposition
is
that foreign influences operated in China primarily
by affecting the conduct of Chinese individuals. Groups of persons play-
ing new social roles were the harbingers of
change,
but they emerged only
gradually in the late Ch'ing. To the classic quadrumvirate of scholar,
farmer, artisan and merchant were now added all manner of hybrid roles.
A trained officer-corps produced scholar-soldiers. Foreign universities
sent back a scholar-intelligentsia, many of whom were alienated from the
official establishment. Scientific training produced technicians who were
scholar-artisans. Meanwhile merchants not only continued to buy official
status,
some officials became merchant-entrepreneurs. Revolutionists
also arose as a distinct professional group, as well as journalists and
modern-style politicians.'
4 Wang Gungwu, Power,
rights
and
duties
in
Chinese
history,
the 40th George Ernest Morrison
Lecture in Ethnology 1979 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1979), 3-4.
j Cp. M. Bastid, CHOC, vol. n, ch. 10.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
6 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
In short, the specialization of modern life broke up the old social
structure. Specialization discredited the Confucian ideal of an elite united
by classical learning just as roughly as in the United States it had denied
the Jacksonian ideal of an egalitarian education for all.
6
All the new roles involved dealing with foreign matters or learning
from abroad. Compradors and Chinese Christians (sometimes identical)
emerged in the treaty ports, followed by journalists and returned students
who had been abroad, all of them under foreign influence. Technology
became the key to new developments whether military, industrial, ad-
ministrative or educational, and nearly all of it came from the West, even
when mediated through Japan. By the twentieth century, leaders of Young
China like T'ang Shao-i and Wu T'ing-fang, who negotiated the revolu-
tionary settlement in 1912, were speaking English, which they had prac-
tised respectively at Hartford, Connecticut and the Inns of Court,
London.
7
To the modern fragmentation of specialized social roles was added
the diversity of foreign models and stimuli now made available by the
expansion of international contact. Modernity, so various in
itself,
now
came at China in widely different national forms. Nineteenth-century
China had been subjected to the Anglo-American-French-Russian ex-
amples of patriotic naval and diplomatic officers, aggressively self-right-
eous missionaries, and merchants piously devoted to, material profit,
but all had been within the confines of one civilization from the West.
Now the scene was immensely broadened: ex-samurai ideals of bushido
were picked up by young patriots like Chiang Kai-shek at the Japanese
officers' training academy. Populist concerns of Russian
narodniki
animated
early Marxists like Li Ta-chao. Rabindranath Tagore brought his Hindu
message of mystic unity, though with few takers. A Buddhist revival was
promoted under the monk T'ai Hsu. A women's higher education move-
ment fostered contact with Smith College and others of the Seven Sisters.
Echoes of the New Poetry movement in the United States, the European
vogue of Esperanto as a vehicle for global communication, all sorts of
fashions and groundswells from abroad rippled among China's new
urban intellectuals and men of affairs. The resulting flux of values and
6
John Higham, 'The matrix of specialization', in Alexandra Oleson and John
Voss,
eds.
The
organization
of
knowledge
in
modem
America,
1860—1920.
7
Paul A. Cohen analyses the careers of early reformers of the 'littoral' and 'hinterland' in
ch.
9 of his
Between
tradition
and
modernity:
Wang T'ao
and
reform
in late
Ch'ing
China.
See also
Louis
T. Sigel, 'T'ang Shao-yi
(1860-1938):
the diplomacy of
Chinese
nationalism'
(Harvard
University,
Ph.D. dissertation,
1972),
92 't seq.; Linda
Shin,
'China in transition: the role
of
Wu Ting-fang (1842-1922)' (University of California Los Angeles, Ph.D. dissertation,
1970).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN INFLUENCE 7
morals, the blurring of self-images, made Chinese actors often ambivalent,
facing two ways, and confused foreign observers accordingly.
In the midst of all of this confusion, however, we may discern a sixth
proposition, that the Chinese when responding to foreign stimuli, whether
in the Chinese language or by their conduct, had to fashion their modern
ways out of Chinese elements, old or new, available within themselves
if not actually in the local scene.
To begin with, not even the most foreignized Chinese could lose his
sense of Chinese identity. Living abroad only increased it. Cultural
friction generated patriotic fire. The most sincere patriot was Sun Yat-
sen, who had had the least experience of Chinese tradition and the most of
modern nationalism abroad.
Something more is involved here than patriotic motives, however.
The mystery of human thought in general seems to be performed with a
generous use of analogy, as when location in time is expressed in the
terms of before and after (behind) originally used to denote location in
space. On time's ladder we 'see' historical events 'preceding' and 'follow-
ing' one another. Analogical and metaphorical thinking leads us to
imagine the lesser known in terms of the better known - in short, to
cross the cultural gap between native and foreign, we have to think
mainly with whatever is already in our heads.
8
Thus, we find one Chinese
patriot after another not only motivated by cultural pride but also required
by his own thought processes to find in China the analogues, equivalents
or Chinese counterpart of things perceived abroad.
9
Mid-nineteenth century xenophobes took refuge in the old rationale
that essentials of Western science must have been derived from ancient
China. In arguing for Western scientific training some accordingly de-
clared that Western sciences had borrowed their roots from ancient
Chinese mathematics. To outflank the xenophobes, the modernizer's
trick was to smuggle things Western into China as having been originally
Chinese. K'ang Yu-wei perfected it when he found the modern Western
ideal of Progress in the ancient Chinese theory of the three ages (see
volume II, page 288). Thus in their own minds Chinese modernizers
had to confront the foreign culture with whatever equivalents they could
muster from China. John Dewey's student Hu Shih, the most fearless
8 The psychology and thought processes of cultural contact seem extraordinarily under-
studied in the case of China. For a popular discussion of metaphoric thinking, see Julian
Jaynes,
The origin
of
consciousness in the breakdown
of
the
bicameral
mind.
Cp. p. 50: 'The concepts
of science are all... abstract concepts generated by concrete metaphors'; p. 5): 'under-
standing a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it'.
9 The Chinese search for equivalence with the West especially interested the late Joseph R.
Levenson,
Confucian China and
its modern fate.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
8 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
iconoclast
and
winnower
of
China's heritage, wrote
his
Columbia
Ph.D.
thesis
on 'The
Development
of
the Logical Method
in
Ancient China'.
Of course
the
early Westernization
and
later modernization move-
ments soon learned
to be
discriminating.
At
first Europe
and
America
had converged upon China
as an
alien society which (despite
its
extensive
internal variety)
had
developed
a
commercial-industrial-military
dy-
namism that seemed
to be a
product
of
its whole alien culture.
The
steam
engine, representative government
and
Christianity
at
first glance seemed
tied together,
and
'Western' culture came onto
the
Chinese horizon look-
ing more unified
and
therefore more menacing than
it
later turned
out
to
be. Its
menace seemed
to
require that China become commercial-
industrial-military
in
self-defence.
But
the
very diversity
of 'the
West' made
it
clear that Westernization
had
to be
selective;
and the
criterion
of
selection proved generally
to be
the compatability
of
Western ways with Chinese needs,
so
that imported
things could take root
and
become Chinese. Foreign borrowings
(wai)
had
to fit
into
the
domestic scene
(net).
Indeed,
one is
tempted
to
assert that even
in
modern China innovation
inspired from abroad still
had to
come
as
'change within tradition'.
10
For even
the
most startling break with tradition still occurred within
the
day-to-day continuum
of
inherited Chinese ways
and
circumstances.
The
end
of
footbinding
and the
emancipation
of
women,
the
writing
of the
vernacular
pai-hua,
loyalty
to
nation instead
of to
monarch, renunciation
of filial piety,
all
found support from within
the
Chinese cultural realm.
The pace
of
change might produce vertigo, alarm
and
iconoclasm
but it
was still change
in
China
by
Chinese people immersed
in
Chinese speech
and writing.
This suggests
a
final proposition, that
the
most natural
way to
meet
the West
on
equal terms was
to
follow
a
Chinese minority tradition which
had more
in
common with Western ways
of
commerce
and
violent
com-
petition than with Chinese ideals
of
bureaucracy
and
harmonious compro-
mise.
For
example,
one
peculiarly menacing aspect
of
the 'Western Ocean'
(Hsi-yang) people
in the
early contact
at
Canton
was
that their uncouth
and greedy ways appealed
to
tendencies deeply latent among
the Can-
tonese populace.
The
outright commercialism
of
the Western 'barbarians'
met
a
quick response among
the
shopkeepers
in Hog
Lane behind
the
opulent ghetto of the Thirteen Factories. Once Indian opium was brought
by
the
private merchants
in the
Country (local) trade from India,
com-
io
E. A.
Kracke,
Jr.
used this phrase (as distinct from modern Westernization)
to
characterize
Sung
urbanization
and
attendant changes
in
'Sung society: change within
tradition',
FEQ,
14.4
(Aug. 1955)479-88.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION 9
mercial greed fostered
the
growth
of
the opium trade
on
both sides.
It
became
the
great bilateral Sino-foreign joint enterprise
of
the nineteenth
century,
and it
succeeded
far
beyond anyone's fears
or
foresight.
It requires only
a
modicum
of
imagination
to
see
the
Cantonese opium
entrepreneur,
who did his bit to
usher China into modern international
commerce,
as the
inheritor
of
a Chinese tradition that
had
much
in
com-
mon with
the
Western trading world. Some
of the
seemingly 'foreign
influences'
on the
Republican Revolution may turn
out at
second glance
to have coincided with
or
grown from older Chinese trends that shared
certain traits with
the
foreigners.
In
what follows
we can
only indicate
the dimensions
of
this historical problem.
MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION
Under piecemeal fragmentation
by the
social sciences
and
humanities,
'China'
as a
cultural entity
has
been dissolving into
a
sub-universe
of
great diversity.
The
holistic image
is
being supplanted
by a
great variety
of discoveries;
and
research
now
deals with localities, cities, provinces,
regions
or
macro-regions
as
useful areas
for
analysis." Similarly
the
dominant agrarian-bureaucratic order
of the
Chinese heartland
is
being
contrasted with peripheral
and
minority traditions
in
areas
on
China's
frontiers.
The north-west Great Wall border zone
was a
peripheral area where
intensive
dry
farming gave
way to
pastoralism. South-West China
had
been
a
peripheral area where irrigated rice culture gave
way to the sub-
tropical slash-and-burn agriculture
of the
hill tribes. Other such areas
could
be
defined,
for
example,
on the
boundary
of the
semi-nomadic
mixed economy
of
hunting, fishing
and
agriculture among
the
Tungusic
tribes
in the
north-east.
Of
all these areas, however,
the
north-western
steppe frontier had been the most important in history because pastoralism
had produced
the
cavalry that could invade
and
rule North China.
In
contrast,
the
south-east coast
had
seen Chinese moving
out
overseas
but
no foreign invasions before
the
1830s.
Maritime China
was a
peripheral region along
the
south-east coast.
The swampy estuaries
of
the Yellow River north
of
Shantung
and of
the
Yellow
or
Huai Rivers
to the
south inhibit coastal settlement
and
seafar-
ing. North China generally lacks coastal mountains
and
rivers
of the
u
In G.
William Skinner's 'Regional urbanization
in
nineteenth-century China', nine macro-
regions were devoted
to
'sedentary agriculture'
(p. 212), 'in
essentially agrarian regional
systems'
(p.
253). Overseas trade
is,
thus
far,
peripheral
to his
study
of
urbanization.
See
G. William Skinner,
ed.
The
City in
l^ate
Imperial
China.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
io INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
sort that make harbours
on the
Chekiang-Fukien coast.
It
also lacks
export products such
as
tea, silk
and
ceramic ware.
By the
nineteenth
century there was an extensive coastal trade between the Shanghai-Ningpo
area
and
southern Manchuria.
But
Shantung
and
Liaotung
did not
bulk
large
in
international trade. By this criterion the main region
of
our con-
cern here stretched from the Yangtze delta
to
Hainan Island.
It
included,
however, the offshore islands of the Pescadores and Taiwan, with Kyushu,
the Liu-ch'iu (Ryukyu) islands, and Luzon as
an
outer fringe.'
2
In certain matters
of
style
and
tradition these peripheral
or
frontier
regions contrasted with
the
dominant agrarian-bureaucratic heartland.
Its distinctive
and
durable quality
of
collective cohesion needs
to be
recognized before we proceed with
a
lesser tradition. This majority order
was the great achievement
of
early Chinese genius, more finely wrought
than any other way
of
life in East Asia.
It
featured the imperial monarchy
as its 'order-shaping moral centre',•' and the Confucian three bonds (loy-
alty
to
the monarch, filial piety, wifely devotion to husbands) as its teach-
ing
of
social order. The bedrock
of
this society was
its
extended family
system. The oligarchic power
of
great clans was supplanted only
in
late
T'ang
and
early Sung
by the
power
of
government
to
select
the
ruling
class through
the
examination system.'
4
Thereafter
the
classically-indoc-
trinated officials were the emperor's local agents while landowning
and
degree-holding gentry families were the backbone
of
the local elite.
Modern studies have
of
course broken through
the
Confucian crust
of rule-by-virtue
and
normative harmony. They reveal
an Old
Order
in
which
the
mass
of
the common people were often wracked
by
natural
calamity
and
local disorder
-
periodic starvation, banditry, inter-village
feuds,
chronic misery
in
the village, tyranny within the family, rapacious
exploitation
by
landlords, corruption
in
officialdom." However, this
sordid picture
of
reality only highlights
the
persistence,
if
not
success,
of the classical propaganda
as to
how things ought
to
be.
Since
the old
China's normative ideals have contributed
so
heavily
to the available Chinese and foreign writings
on
China (see,
for
example,
volume
io,
chapter
i),
let us
note here only their comparative efficacy
in sustaining
the
dominant agrarian-bureaucratic tradition and
its
ruling
class.
12 As defined by John
E.
Wills, Jr.
in
'Maritime China from Wang Chih
to
Shih Lang: themes
in peripheral history', 203-38
in
Jonathan D. Spence and John
E.
Wills,
Jr.
eds.
From
Ming
to
Ch'ing:
conquest,
region
and
continuity
in
seventeenth-century
China.
See p. 206.
13
The
phrase
is
from
Hao
Chang
in
JAS,
39.2
(Feb. 1980)
260.
14
David
G.
Johnson,
The
medieval Chinese
oligarchy,
149-52.
E. A.
Kracke,
Jr.
estimated
the
civil
service
at
12,700
men
in
1046.
Civil
service
in
early
Sung
China
960-1067,
5
5.
15
See
for
example
the
grim details
in
Jonathan
D.
Spence,
The
death
of
woman
Wang,
39-48
et passim.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION II
China's ruling-class supremacy had come down from the most ancient
times.
The roles of warrior-rulers and of recording scribes (literati) who
assisted them in government appeared clearly at the dawn of Chinese
society in the Shang.'
6
The superior men of the upper class and the
ordinary men of the common people figured in the classics of the Chou
period. The universal kingship of the Son of Heaven and administration
by his bureaucracy become well-established under the Han.
17
Step by
step the ruling-class edifice was constructed, based on the philosophical
premises of the Confucian canon, buttressed by the many practices sub-
sumed under the examination system. The final emergence under the Ming
and Ch'ing of a degree-holding gentry class, indoctrinated in loyalty to
the throne and trained to sustain the socio-political order, is the best-
known aspect of Chinese social history.
lB
Much of the record (nearly all
of which was produced from the ruling-class point of view) illustrates
how comprehensively the scholar-official stratum, hardly 5 per cent of
the population, dominated the military, the commercial and all the other
groups in Chinese society.
This social order which every right-thinking Chinese strove to uphold
included the subordination of women by men, of youth by age, of the
individual by the family, of the peasant and the soldier by the scholarly
degree-holder, and of the whole society by the imperial bureaucracy. This
domination was all the more permanent because of its great flexibility,
which allowed peasants to buy land, let almost every man compete to
enter the examinations, acknowledged the indispensability of mothers and
mothers-in-law, and permitted merchants to buy their way into the
degree-holding class. The ruling class, in short, had learned how to per-
petuate itself by absorbing the talent of Chinese society. Landlords,
merchants, craftsmen and priests had little power independent of the
official class, partly, of course, because landlord, merchant and official
roles were normally represented among the sons of leading lineages.
Familism in fact cemented the society together both at the village level
and among the ruling class, and at the same time it provided channels of
16 By 2000
BC
cities had grown up in several regions of China, especially Honan, Shantung,
Kiangsu and Hupei, with 'city life, metallurgy, writing, and great art style made possible by
a highly stratified society'. Kwang-chih Chang,
The archaeology
of
ancient
China,
217.
17 'Mental labor became the symbol of superior status. . . . Mencius characterized those who
performed mental labor as "great men" or
chiin-tzu
in contrast to the "small men" or
hsiao-
jen.
This notion . . . had been widely accepted in Chinese society for centuries'. T'ung-tsu
Ch'ii, Han
social
structure,
64.
18 For a graphic account of examinations under the Ch'ing, see Ichisada Miyazaki, trans, by
Conrad Schirokauer,
China's examination
hell:
the civil
service examinations
of imperial China;
also Ping-ti Ho,
The ladder
of
success
in
imperial
China:
aspects
of
social mobility
1)68-1911.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
12 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
mobility between the two.
1
' The old China was not only agrarian-bureau-
cratic but also familistic and rooted
in
the land.
It
contrasted with the
sparseness of population and greater physical mobility of both the Inner
Asian and the seafaring frontier zones.
Stereotypes like these reflect the long practice of imperial Confucianism
in laying down normative principles
of
social order
to
socialize
and
indoctrinate
the
people. The diversity
of
Chinese life now appears
to
have been
far
greater than the chroniclers indicated. The great variety
of geographic environments, local customs, architectural styles, spoken
dialects, currency systems, crops, crafts, transportation and technology
is only beginning
to
be explored. Nevertheless, China's long unity as
a
state derived from the ubiquitous acceptance
of
the agricultural peasant
village, the lineage structure, the thin ruling stratum, the classical litera-
ture,
the official speech
(kuan-hua),
and the Confucian hierarchy of social
statuses including the imperial supremacy. Clearly we confront here
a
triumph
of
teaching and administration over local particularism, or per-
haps we should call
it a
symbiosis of universal and local, of high culture
and popular cultures.
In
short, the great central tradition enshrined
in
orthodox writings and imperial utterances had learned how
to
live with
and stay on top of minor traditions decentralized both among the villages
and on the frontiers.
Let us now try to establish the identity and trace the growth of Mari-
time China.
It
was distinguished first of all by features peculiar to the sea.
Thus fish crops under the sea's surface and the highways over
it
were
less restrictively located, less controllable in ancient times than crops and
highways on the land. Meanwhile the energy cost in overcoming friction
and moving vehicles was far less on water using the wind than it was on
land using the footsteps of man or beast. Consequently a ship was cheaper
to use and less controllable by others than a cart, pound for pound, and a
j
small group
of
sailors could move goods that on land would require
a
considerable caravan. For trading enterprise
the
sea offered economic
rewards superior to land trade. This principle was of course acknowledged
in the great Chinese development of waterways for river and canal trans-
port across the land.
At the same time, however, weather
on
the sea was more dangerous
than
by
land, where the installations
of
highways
or
post routes, inns
or caravanserai were
far
more reliable and supportive. Most
of
all, the
land ways (and land waterways) could be controlled by large-scale govern-
19 See
Maurice
Freedman,
The
study
of
Chinese
society:
essays
by
Maurice
freedman,
e.g. 'the
richer
and the
stronger
the
lineage,
the
more
it
was
likely
to
be
differentiated
into
rich
and
poor,
strong
and
weak',
339.
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