reporter | Lin Ziren
editor | Zhu Jieshu
How did ordinary people in the Ming Dynasty deal with the obligations imposed by the state? To answer this question, Michael Szonyi, professor of Chinese history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and director of the Fairbank Research Center, turned his attention to the military households of the Ming Dynasty and more than twenty Ming Dynasty health stations along the coast of Fujian.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang formulated a strict household registration system for the sustainability of the empire. People were divided into a series of household registration categories such as farmers, military households, craftsmen households, and kitchen households. It stipulated that people with these household registrations This identity must be passed down from generation to generation to ensure the stability of social order. Among them, military households refer to those soldiers who were drafted into the army and their relatives. Each military household must guarantee to provide a male for the national army at the same time, and this obligation is hereditary. After men join the army, they are assigned to "guards". "Gui" is a military unit. According to regulations, a guard should have 5,600 people. It has five "thousand-household stations" under its jurisdiction, and each thousand-household station has 1,120 people. In order to solve the logistics supply problem for the army and achieve self-sufficiency of the army, the imperial court also restored the farming system and opened military camps near each guard post.
In the book " The Art of Being Dominated ", Song Yiming restored the details of the life of military households in the Ming Dynasty by studying genealogy and family documents, showing how these military households living on the southeast coast of China cleverly designed various strategies , while seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages as much as possible while meeting the country's human resource needs. The title of the book, "The Art of Being Governed," hints at the "strategies of everyday politics" that people in the Ming Dynasty practiced in dealing with state institutions, regulations, and state agents. The title is also a tribute to the work "The Art of Escape from Domination" by James C. Scott, professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University. Song Yiming wrote in the introduction:
"There are essential differences between the people of the Ming Dynasty (and all previous Chinese dynasties) and the highland residents (zomia) described by Scott. The former's 'art of being ruled' is not a simple or It is a multiple-choice question of 'being ruled' or 'not being ruled', but making decisions on the following issues: when to be ruled, how to be ruled 'most appropriately', and how to maximize the benefits of being ruled while minimizing its disadvantages. Minimize, etc. "
For those of us living in the 21st century, the "life wisdom" of the Ming Dynasty people five or six hundred years ago - in Song Yiming's words, "system arbitrage" - is not only not unfamiliar, but There is a sense of déjà vu. Some of the modern financial concepts we are familiar with can be found in the daily political practices of military households in the Ming Dynasty: In order to encourage tribesmen to serve with peace of mind, some military households would allocate a portion of their ancestral property and subsidize this part of their income to those who served, just like the establishment of the Ming Dynasty. A "family trust" was established; a contract was made within the family to stipulate the rights and obligations of each family in the form of a contract, and even "outsourced" the obligation to serve to outsiders; military households who moved to military camps in order to reduce discord with the local community , integrate into the local society, will establish a "joint venture company" to participate in temple construction, introduce new gods, build and strengthen the ritual network, and its influence can even be seen in the rituals of wandering gods to this day...
is in the hit drama "Celebrating More Than Years" "", the male protagonist starts the story of "killing everyone" in a world similar to ancient Chinese society with the question "if life is lived again, how do modern ideas and ancient systems collide?" "The Art of Being Dominated" uses real Ming history to tell us that by understanding how people moved around in the past, we may be able to better understand the present.
As Song Yiming said, "We often think that people in the past were not as smart as modern people, but historians don't think so. We subconsciously think that life in the past was simpler. I use this book to tell people that this is not the case. ."
"The Art of Being Dominated": How people in the Ming Dynasty "system arbitrage" between "obedience" and "resistance"
Interface Culture: I can give a brief introduction to this book for those readers who have not read "The Art of Being Dominated"
Song Yiming: First of all, I need to apologize to the readers. This is actually a book for scholars and experts. I hope that ordinary readers can also find fun in it. To put it simply, the core questions I raise in this book are. , how did ordinary people during the Ming Dynasty cope with the challenges that the government created in their lives? We usually tell the history of the Ming Dynasty in two ways: Some scholars believe that the Ming Dynasty was the peak of autocratic rule, when Zhu Yuanzhang forced everyone to live in a specific way. ;Other scholars believe that the Ming Dynasty was a free era in which the state had weak power and people could live as they pleased, and was the budding period of modern society. These scholars often compare the Ming Dynasty with the current period of reform and opening up. Both periods were the beginning of social change. A period of tight control and relative freedom.
But the fact is that when we look at the lives of ordinary people in the Ming Dynasty, the situation is much more complicated. The state is a presence that cannot be ignored in ordinary people's lives, but it does not have the ability to discipline them in all aspects. life. So this book is about how the citizens of the Ming Dynasty negotiated between obedience (complete compliance with the rules of the state) and resistance (launching rebellion). The group I focused on was the military household of the Ming Dynasty. It is composed of military households inherited from generation to generation. There are a series of means to become a military household. If you belong to a military household, one of your family members will need to serve in the military. This is a responsibility inherited from generation to generation. The book tells the story of how these ordinary families with special responsibilities use various amazing strategies to satisfy their own interests and their obligations to the country. You probably won't read about these families in many history books. They don't. Jinshi or Juren were not historical celebrities, but they were able to devise very complex and sophisticated strategies to deal with the service obligations required by the country. The most noteworthy example is that they were able to convert the obligation to provide services to the country into monetary transactions.
Interface Culture: What does the title "The Art of Being Dominated" mean? What does it have to do with James Scott's "The Art of Escape from Domination"?
Song Yiming: Obviously I am referring to Scott. To me, Scott is a very illuminating thinker. I don't agree with all of his points - I can always find points that I disagree with - but every time. Every time he publishes a new book, it makes me think about my own work in a new way, and I am very grateful to him for this.
Scott proposed "not to be ruled" when studying Southeast Asian societies and parts of southern China. The concept of "art" refers to people being able to find ways to escape state control. It's a very interesting concept, and I don't think it's wrong, but if you study China, you'll find that his theory doesn't quite apply. For most Chinese, most of the time—and certainly during the Ming Dynasty—the challenge was not how to escape the state, but how to interact with it. So I use "the art of being dominated" to express Scott's concept which is very useful, but it is not the best way to understand China.
Interface Culture: "Everyday politics" is an important concept you raise in this book. In the book, you talk about how military households in the Ming Dynasty used various strategies to cope with the obligations and pressures imposed by state institutions. You made it very clear that this book is not about military history but social history. So what new ideas can this perspective provide us with in understanding the Ming Dynasty?
Song Yiming: When we talked about the historical outlook just now, I have already answered a little bit of this question, that is, our narrative of the Ming Dynasty has always been either extreme dictatorship or pure freedom, but neither of these is the true situation of the Ming Dynasty. Let me next talk about the contribution of this book to social history.
"Everyday politics" exists in all societies that have ever existed in the world, but what impresses me is that ordinary people in the Ming Dynasty were able to devise such complex and sophisticated strategies when facing the heavy pressure of life, and fully mobilize the cultural resources and organizations at hand. resources to solve very complex and challenging problems. They have formed a corresponding discourse system. As I said in the book, if you want to deal with the country, you'd better start by learning to speak the country's language. Is it really because they are loyal to the country that they act in the official language of the country? Is it really because they think Zhu Yuanzhang understands his country and his governance strategy? no. That's because they realize it would be to their advantage if they looked a certain way in front of the country.
So I think the main contribution of this book is not only the development of historical perspective, but also that it can make ordinary readers marvel at ordinary people who lived in the past. It’s so cool that those people can come up with so many strategies in their own lives! We often think that people in the past were not as smart as modern people, but historians don't think so. We subconsciously think life was simpler in the past, and I use this book to tell people that wasn't the case.
Interface Culture: In the Ming Dynasty, one of the main reasons why ordinary people were able to use strategies for institutional arbitrage was that the country was not strong enough to penetrate into all aspects of people's lives. But what we are worried about now is an omniscient and omnipotent country powered by big data and other advanced technologies. Do you think there is less and less space for people to practice "everyday politics" today?
Song Yiming: I think people feel that way, but what is actually happening, and it is difficult for us to see clearly but it will become more and more obvious in the future, is that people are finding new ways to create this kind of space for themselves. It will take time to reveal them. I completely agree with your observation. On the surface, people's agreement space is shrinking, but I think new agreement spaces are also being created, but it's just difficult for us to see clearly yet.
China’s modernization path: In China, commercialization is largely a local product
Interface culture: I was deeply impressed by the various strategies shown in the book to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages. What is particularly noteworthy is that for the people at that time For military households, commercializing land, obligations, and social relationships was a natural choice. To what extent can we explain that modern times are a commercial society?
Song Yiming: Many scholars have pointed out that in the Ming Dynasty, you could commercialize anything and you could measure anything with money. This will obviously give us the urge to compare the Ming Dynasty with contemporary China, which is how many people criticize today's society. It also makes us want to compare China with other places in the world and think about whether this idea of commodifying everything is a uniquely Chinese idea. I think it also makes us think about the cause and effect here. I hint a little bit in the book that it's a chicken-and-egg problem. We know that people in the Ming Dynasty were very good at doing business, and they were also very good at converting one resource into another. Did they get inspiration from the market, or did they apply strategies developed in their dealings with the government to an expanding market? Obviously we cannot say which of the two is right, but it is meaningful to think about this issue. Most people believe that the market can positively change people's lives, change culture, change social relationships, etc., but perhaps the market itself is constructed from established social relationships and established attitudes and concepts.
The Chinese have a long tradition of using contracts. There is even a type of contract that people sign with the earth god when they bury their parents. Valerie Hansen, a scholar at Yale University, has written about this topic, so we see that the relationship between the Chinese and the gods has even become contractual. But one interesting thing is that China’s thousand-year contract tradition is different from that of the West. One of the key differences is their understanding of land ownership. Land ownership in China is much more complex.
A research project I am currently doing is about some deed documents found in Yongtai County, Fuzhou City, Fujian Province. We can see that the Chinese people's understanding of land ownership is very complicated, and it is very different from the absolute ownership of land in the West. There is a land system in southern China called "one field, two owners", which means that there are several different owners of the same piece of land, and they all have ownership of the land, and in many cases they are not relatives. This is also important for understanding contemporary China. Many economists believe that rapid economic development requires absolutely clear land ownership, but China is an exception to this theory. Land ownership in China is very complicated. The state owns the land, and individuals only have the right to use the land temporarily, but the use rights can be traded. Somehow this did not interfere with rapid economic development, and economists lack an explanation. This must be related to the land ownership system in Chinese history.
Interface Culture: In the book you write: “In many parts of the world, the commercialization and commodification of property rights, obligations, and social relationships have completely subverted the existing social order. There are a few exceptions, such as China in the Ming Dynasty. An obvious one The reason is that the process of commercialization and commodification did not occur at the same time as colonialism, nor was it the result of colonialism. "Can you elaborate on this point?
Song Yiming: What I mean is that in many places in the world, commercialization and colonialism happened at the same time, and the result of them was the complete subversion of the existing social order. In Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, it was colonialism that promoted commercialization. The best example of this is in Southeast Asia, first the Dutch and then the British, whose arrival forced the locals to start growing commercial crops in exchange for Western colonizers. rations. Commercialization means that the concept of money transactions transcends the scope of economics and enters interpersonal relationships, culture, art, aesthetics and philosophy. In places where commercialization was born and the existing political order was destroyed, its impact was huge. But in China, commercialization is largely a local product. It did not occur because of foreign invasion. It happened gradually, so its impact is smaller than in many other places in the world. Much more.
Interface Culture: As for why China in the Ming Dynasty did not become a "modern society" that fully embraced the market economy as we see today, my guess is that it is because individual rights have never been officially recognized by the state. In the book you point out that in land lawsuits, military households tended to have a higher chance of winning, no matter how unreasonable their claims, because judges tended to leave the land in the military settlement system, which meant they left the country needs before individual rights. What do you think about this?
Song Yiming: Yes, that’s right. What you asked is actually a question about legal philosophy, which is a little far from my field. I dare not say that my views are absolutely correct. If you read the history of Western law, you will see the concept of "natural rights": every individual has his or her own inherent rights. These rights are not granted by the state, but by God. , are part of the laws of nature, so what the law has to do is protect these rights. The situation in China is - I need to refute something you just said - it is not that the judge puts the rights of the country above the rights of the individual. Individual rights are not within the scope of the judge's consideration at all. Even in the West, individuals Rights do not always win cases, but rather that judges need to take individual rights into consideration when making decisions (but individual rights are often in conflict with each other in lawsuits).
But Chinese people’s understanding of the law is different. We can now see a large number of judgments, which record how the judges decided the cases. Judges never talk about rights, they talk about law, emotion and reason. "Li" refers to rules of conduct that may exist outside the law, and "qing" refers to "situations" and "emotions."So when the judge awarded the land to the military household, he followed "reason", not exactly "law", because according to the law, both the plaintiff and the defendant have ownership rights, but what the judge pointed out is that we need to respect here certain rules.
There are also many cases that have nothing to do with national interests, such as marriage lawsuits. Judges must also comprehensively consider law, reason and emotion. There is a lawsuit like this: a father first sold his daughter to a man as a bride, and then sold the same daughter to a second man after taking the money. The judge obviously did not consider the personal rights of the female client when making his decision, but he also did not consider the personal rights of the two husbands. He first examined the provisions on marriage in the law. In fact, there are no provisions in the law to deal with this situation, and there is no answer. So what should we do based on "reason" and "emotion"? The judge made a decision after comprehensive consideration. Because one of the husbands is older, we should sympathize with him. This is another judgment that combines law, reason and emotion. Obviously, this is a more complicated legal system, and it is definitely not a legal system that I would like to live in, but it is indeed a legal system that once existed, but the basis of this system is not "rights."
Interface Culture: So is this the reason why China did not make a natural transition to modern society?
Song Yiming: Sorry, this is a rather outdated way of asking questions about China. In my field, a big question that has faced scholars for a long time is: What happened to China? What went wrong with China? Why did China fail? But from the current perspective, we can no longer use a success/failure narrative to understand China. What we see are different paths to modernity, different speeds of becoming modern society. So we can't say what makes China "different", we can only do comparative research. We cannot say which society is better and which society is worse. What we need to ask is why the consciousness of rights did not sprout in China but in the West?
Interface Culture: You also make a point in your book that the abolition of informal institutions that once drove political operations was the reason for China's many traumas in the 20th century. Can we talk more about that?
Song Yiming: Historically, China has been a highly organized society. China has many institutions that can solve problems. Some of them are even used to solve some very modern problems. For example, China has provided public services in history. institutions, including hospitals, orphanages, charities, and people raised funds to build bridges and roads. But at a certain point, the Eurocentric reformers in China decided that the only path to modernity was to completely break up all of China's existing institutions. This concept began to sprout in the 19th century and became a common consensus among intellectuals during the May 4th Movement. It had extensive political influence from the 1930s to the 1940s, but it ignored the efficiency of some traditional Chinese organizations. I do think that This brought many tragedies to China in the 20th century.
Chinese familialism : The emergence of clans is not because Chinese people love their ancestors, but out of practical considerations
Interface culture: As a scholar of Ming and Qing Dynasty and modern Chinese history, you paid great attention to genealogy early in your career. Your first book, Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China, was related to this. We all know that kinship, clan and family play a very important role in Chinese culture, but how do we understand their importance in historical research?
Song Yiming: If you were in my class, I would respond like this: Everyone knows that Chinese culture values family, so do Chinese people have some special preference for family in their genes? This is ridiculous. So what we should ask is, how did it become part of Chinese culture? The usual answer is that this is the result of Confucianism and the promotion of the literati and bureaucratic classes.But the reality is that the vast majority of Chinese people in history were illiterate and could not read "The Analects" in their lifetime. Although this cannot deny the importance of Confucianism, we need to ask, what is the underlying mechanism that triggers cultural transformation? How did the concept of attaching importance to the family emerge from the works of scholars and enter the words and deeds of parents to their children? "Twenty-Four Filial Piety" is a means of promoting the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, but what is interesting is that "Twenty-Four Filial Piety" describes a China that has never existed. People tell these stories precisely because it is impossible for people to be so filial in life, not ? Therefore, the implementation of a certain concept depends on the integration of norms, goals, visions and actual conditions.
So we need to explain how these ideas, institutions and practices became part of ordinary people's lives. This is not my first initiative. My teachers David Ke and Zheng Zhenman are the pioneers of . We want to understand how clans became part of people's lives, not just because some Confucian scholar told you you should, which is not a convincing explanation from a historical perspective, and this is my first book The core idea of the book is how ordinary people realize the importance of strengthening family organization and clan ties.
To a certain extent, "The Art of Being Dominated" is also about this. In this book, I put forward a point of view that clan, as a symbol of Chinese culture, actually does not have that long history. It doesn't have a history of five thousand years, or even a thousand years. I don’t mean that clans didn’t exist before the Ming Dynasty. What I mean is that clans, a form of community organization, took shape relatively late in history, and their emergence was based on very practical considerations—not because Chinese people love their ancestors. , but because there are practical reasons for the clan's survival. This is a very materialistic view of history.
Interface Culture: Can we say that the "familialism" of Chinese culture is a myth that has been shattered?
Song Yiming: Family is indeed very important in the principle level of Chinese culture. This is true. But the specific forms and expressions of its existence are not universal, eternal, or essential. The latter is a myth.
Interface Culture: Will kinship, clan and family still constitute an important aspect of Chinese history in the future?
Song Yiming: Two years ago I wrote an investigation report on Chinese clans in the 20th century for a book. Surprisingly, family is still important in China today. A common assumption is that modernity will put an end to the clan, so the situation in China is a mystery. Perhaps familialism is really engraved in the DNA of the Chinese people. This is indeed possible.
To answer your question, we need to look at historical evidence: In past years of instability and uncertainty, a natural response for the Chinese was to gain security by building personal networks. We've seen this happen again and again in Chinese history, and I think it's still happening today. The real question is, does “online familialism” still count as familialism? What is clear is that no matter how you interact with other people in your family, it will take a very different form than the way your ancestors interacted with each other in rural communities. But what is surprising is that a large number of young people today still regard surnames and relatives as important principles in their lives. Of course, they use a lot of modern technology. To be honest, I don’t know whether traditional forms of familialism will continue. The more important question is whether new forms of familialism will emerge. I'm not sure about this.
interface culture: Anthropologists would say that familialism is a way to resist risks.
Song Yiming: is exactly like this! I think historians would say the same. I said "uncertainty", but you could also say "risk". When risk increases, it makes perfect sense for you to look for ways to hedge against it.
Historical Anthropology: To connect the past with the present, the key lies in fieldwork
Interface Culture: How did you develop your interest in Ming history?
Song Yiming: My fate with China started a long time ago. I have been to China as early as the early 1980s. Because Toronto and Wuhan are sister cities, I was able to come to Wuhan in 1984 to teach English at a university. At that time, China was undergoing rapid changes. I was very interested in China's potential and wanted to understand what was going on. After returning to Canada to attend university, I began to learn Chinese. A few years later, I went to Taiwan to further my studies. At that time, I was not very clear from what angle I wanted to study China. Although I knew that I was full of interest in this country, I certainly did not think that China would be the subject of my future career.
As my study progresses, I feel more and more that history is the angle that interests me the most. I studied for a PhD in history at Oxford University . My research topic is directly related to my research experience in rural Taiwan. While in Taiwan, I became interested in family organization and began to study how families, genealogies, and clans were formed in China. I find the Ming Dynasty to be a very important turning point for the above. So, I first had a historical question, and in the process of looking for the answer, I discovered the Ming Dynasty. It can be said that I became a scholar of Ming history by accident.
Interface Culture: What impressed me deeply is that you used a lot of materials that have never been noticed before in your research, including genealogy and family archives, and you also spent a lot of time on field research to obtain these materials. Fieldwork is actually a typical research method in anthropology, but our impression of historians is of scholars studying books in libraries and archives. So is there such a subdiscipline as "historical anthropology"? What does it mean for historical research?
Song Yiming: Historical anthropology does exist. The other name of the South China School is the School of Historical Anthropology. But the questions that interest us are very different from those that interest anthropologists. One of my academic seniors, Fu Yiling, once said a very famous saying: "Our knowledge cannot be done in the library alone, we have to run in the field." What is running in the field? Its meaning is very different from that of anthropologists' "fieldwork." Instead of living in a village for a year, as anthropologists do, we travel the countryside collecting material that has been neglected by libraries and archives. As I said in this book, I actually created my own archive during my field trips. What I collected was documents that previous generations of scholars considered non-existent or unimportant. The second aspect of
running in the field is that we need to read these files in the countryside. We need to draw on the knowledge of local villagers. They can tell us the background of the production of these documents. Through such reading, we need to understand how these documents affect local society, what they are used for, and the impact they have on society. What are the consequences.
The third aspect of fieldwork—also closely related to the academic philosophy of the South China School—is to understand local customs, rituals, and religions (including ancestor worship, Buddhism, and local popular beliefs) as a research material that can be mined local history. The best example that can be given in the book is Chapter 6: I use a 21st century wandering god celebration to tell how the local community developed in the 15th century. Of course, we cannot say that religious ceremonies in 2017 or 2018 are exactly the same as 500 years ago, but it provides an important reference for us to understand the historical lineage of local communities.
Interface Culture: That chapter is really impressive. I'm still curious, how do you connect what's happening now to what happened 500 years ago?
Song Yiming: To connect the past with the present, the key is fieldwork. You have to discover the gaps between contemporary rituals, local people’s understanding of history, and ritual experts—those Buddhists and Taoists—interpretations of rituals. relationships, and then connecting them to historical material, and that’s how the story emerges.A big challenge is that many rituals are actually very recent. For historians, when we use an ancient book from 1500 years ago, we know that what happened after that time will not affect the creation of the text. But when we are examining a ceremony, we have to ask, was this created in 1400, 1900, or 2019?
A good example is "intangible cultural heritage". All villagers will tell you, including those without any education, that our local intangible cultural heritage is very beautiful. Of course we know why they said that. This statement appeared four or five years ago. When people needed to prove that what they were doing was not feudal superstition, they came up with this statement. They know that feudal superstition is bad and intangible cultural heritage is good, but this way of interpretation is completely a product of the present.
We must also realize that local religious rituals have been suppressed for twenty or thirty years, so what we see now is not the natural continuation of tradition, but the revival of tradition. Helen Siu, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, believes that we cannot study history through today's rituals. What we see now are creations salvaged from the past solely for today's purposes. I think her views are too extreme, and Chapter 6 of the book illustrates this well.
Interface Culture: I noticed that you talk a lot about your historical perspective and research methods in the book, which seems to imply that this way of working (focusing on local knowledge, local experience and agency rather than general narratives about society and the country) is also It needs to be promoted, is that right?
Song Yiming: You are right. This research method does need to be promoted. It is not yet mainstream in Chinese history circles, and it is even more special in the United States. In fact, I often joke to myself that the reason I am at Harvard is to become the "South China School's agent in the United States." This is why I talk about so many research methods in this English book. I feel the need to encourage other scholars to consider using these research methods, and at the same time, I am advocating for myself and my colleagues. It is easy to criticize these research methods. Some people will say that the questions I asked are very "small". It should be noted that the above criticism is a misunderstanding. I'm actually not interested in the history of a particular family, I don't care if they actually did this, if they actually have this descendant. What really interests me is the historical context in which this knowledge was produced. So in a way, I'm asking a very "big" question - what is historical knowledge? Where does this historical knowledge come from? What are we going to do with it?
There is another reason why I encourage scholars to use this research method: given the current situation in China, there is not much time left for this research method to be applicable. China is changing rapidly (the subject of my next book), transforming from a rural to an urban society. We still have a precious opportunity to capture some of rural history before it disappears. I think this is really important.
