Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community:An Open and Shut Case STOR G.William Skinner Compararive Studies in Society and History,Vol.13,No.3.(Jul.,1971),pp.270-281. Comnarative Smdies in Sacie and History is currently publishedt by Camhodee Universit Press have prior you may you may use content in the ISTOR archive ony for your personal,non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work.Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/joumals/cup.htmI. Each copy of any part conain the same notic that appearson the screcn printed page of such transmission. adigital archive of o u
Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community:An Open and Shut Case' G.WILLIAM SKINNER Stanford University Our repertoire of concepts and theories concerning peasantries has been built up through contributions from scholars working in many parts of the world.Latin Americanists and India-wallahs,in particu ular have played a major role in the development of models,bu t we have also hea from specialists in Indonesia,Japan,Europe,the Mediterranean world, and even Africa.But where is China in all this?Why are students of the world's largest peasantry silent?In part,it is because we are so few and too preoc upied with ourow peas nts to have time for anybody else More to the point,however,the whole body of inhe rited a thropologica wisdom concerning peasantries seems somehow alien and irrelevant to students of Chinese society. The situation echoes one with which we in academic life are rapidlv becoming familiar:the really radical youth resists a dialogue with authorit figures because he feels that the very lexicon of discourse commits him to the premises of the establishment.So it is with sinological anthropologists. We can hardly start talking with established authorities in peasant studies without committing ourselves to their assumptions,concepts,problems, and formulations. Consider two examples.In an important series of papers,Eric Wolf has drawn a useful distinction between closed and open peasant communities: the former corporate,self-sufficient,introverted,particularized,encysted; the latter noncorporate at the community level,relatively dependent on larger economic systems,socially extroverted,culturally open-a type of social system whos se bounds are blurred and whose boun sms are weak.In an analysis of Central Javan and sna ing mecha americar cases,Wolf shows the closed corporate peasant community in these areas to be in the first instance'a child of conquest',but he moves on immedi- ately to a more generic formulation,which holds that closed communities 270
CHINESE PEASANTS AND THE CLOSED COMMUNITY 271 are a product of 'the dualization of society into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native pe ants' In typologizing Latin American peasantries,Wolf employs exclusively economic criteria,and the open peasant community is seen as a straight- forward response to'the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe'.2 Harumi Befu,by contrast focus asserting-in what strikes me as ar overbold leap toward the generic-that closed corporate peasant communi ties are'typically found in nations that exhibit the character of the classical state',by which term he refers to the whole gamut of traditional agrarian societies whose rulers are literate and bureaucratically organized.This is so in large pa are told,because state powe impinges not t on the peasant household but on the village as a collectivity,taxes and corvee levies being imposed on the whole community,which is also collectively responsible for internal law and order.In the course of modernization. Befu argues,state power penetrates directly to the local level,and the auton my of he nity is ford diminished With cues of this kind running through the literature,it has become commonplace to equate the closed peasant community with the traditional village of premodern agrarian societies and to see the development of the com otealmode as a oncomitant of the early stages of co omic and nization.On this re ing,open peasant comn unities are in the course of depeasantization,whether economically,as villagers relate more (and in a more capitalistic fashion)to external markets,or politically, as they are caught up in extra-village political processes. It must be clear that I have set up this particular straw man in order to topple it with the facts of theCh case.My point is not simply tha peasant communities in traditional China-a classical agrarian society if there ever was one-were normally open.Nor is it merely that that open- ness long preceded 'the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the deve nent of apitalism in E ope'and that i it rested only pa tly on incipient capitalism within China.The intriguing aspect of the Chinese case is the recurrent cyclical trend whereby peasant communities changed from relatively open to relatively closed and back again.The Chinese case is also instructive on the relationship between conquest and community closure.In the case of alien dynast ties. pea sant co munitics at the point of maximum closure precisely when conquest occurred,and the fate of the new ruling house was in no small part determined by just how fast ist,V 3 ,452
272 G.WILLIAM SKINNER it could induce closed communities to open up-a pattern altogether unlike the one Wolf finds in Mesoamerica and Java. I have already succumbed to the captured lexicon of peasant studies. 'Peasant villages',we say,and'peasant communities'.But what if the local territorial communities of which the peasant is a member are in no sense limited dto peasants?This was the case in traditional China,as we shal see.+What might be called the basic ground plan of Chinese society was essentially cellular.Apart from certain remote and sparsely settled areas, the landscape of rural China was occupied by cellular systems of roughly hexagonal shape.The nucleus of each cell was one of ap market towns (as of the mid-nineteenth century),and its cytoplasm may be seen in the first instance as the trading area of the town's market.The body of the cell-which is to say the immediately dependent area of the town-typically included fifteen to twenty-five villages.usually but not ne ssari nucleated. This basic cell was unambiguously an autonome ous economic c system transport,trade,artisan industry,and credit were all structured within it spatially according to the principle of centrality,and temporally by the periodicity of its market davs.Yet whereas this cell was.in the usual case. given ape by the of marketing,its significance extended far beyond economic It delimited an importar t system of informa adminis tration and a crucial arena of local politics.It constituted the social world of peasants,whose brides normally came from another village within the marketing system and whose extended kin groups,voluntary associations, and clie e relationships were typically tained within it.Majo temples in the market town took the whole complex of villages in the marketing system as their parish. One must also consider these intervillage systems as the chief tradition- creating and culture-bearing units of rural China.Every few days the conve ned local dr to the center action representatives of households from villages throughout the system,and ir so doing facilitated the homogenization of culture within the intervillage community.At the same time,by meeting most of the needs of peasant households,the local market minimized the exchange of cultural material across marketing communities and thereby fostered cultural isolation and eren( The Chinese peasant,then,was a me f two communities:his village and the marketing system to which his village belonged.An important feature of the larger,marketing community was its elaborate system of stratification-differentiation by class,status,and power.Those who provided de facto leadership within the marketing community qua r CmVoNo
CHINESE PEASANTS AND THE CLOSED COMMUNITY 273 political system and those who gave it collective representation at its interface with larger polities were gentrymer anded leisured, and literate-the very antithesis of any reasonable definition of the peasantry. It was artisans,merchants,and other full-time economic specialists,not peasants,who sustained the heartbeat of periodic marketing that kept the community alive.It was oriests backed by ge ntry te peasants, who gave religious meaning to the peasants' al world Clearly,then,in the case of the peasant's larger community at least,what we see opening out and closing up were not in any strict sense peasant communities. Toget back tomy thesis,Ihave said that rural ommunities cyced from pen back again in traditional times.How id this Let me begin by describing in somewhat idealized terms a typical com- munity's internal structure and external relations at the phase of maximum openness,which I take to come during the heyday of a given dynasty-say second half of the fiftee nth century during the Ming and the two quarters of the eighteenth century during the Ch'ing. The basis of peace and prosperity had been laid during the preceding phases of the dynastic cycle.During the first phase,which might be characterized as Pacification,last-ditch defenders of the outgoing dynasty and challen s of the new had been succe armies,while at the local level banditry and feuding had been suppressed through the application of mutually supportive imperial and local power. During the second phase,Reconstruction,the salient concerns of the ruling house had shifted from pacification (order goals)to the recovery of production(econc g02 The reve ue sy em had been perfected,and massive investment in social overhead capital-at first primarily by the state but increasingly by local systems-had restored and extended irriga- tion works,waterways,and roads.Trade had been relatively unhampered by the state,whose needs for revenue and were fully met by agrarian taxes had be a po uraged by the lead ers of rural unitie Thus during the dynastic heyday,the external environment of loca communities was not only stable and relatively benign:it was seen as full of opportunity.To understand the nature of that opportunity we must look beyond the basic-level communities of rural society.We must glance in particular at the largert rial struct of which villa and ma keting communities were the base,and at the total stratification system, which was by no means exhausted by the peasants,local gentrymen,petty traders,artisans,and religious specialists of the marketing community. One feature of the anthropological literature on peasant societies that China specialists find mystifying is its tendency to refer three levels rially based stru reg -the something in between,and the state.Another is its dichotomization of