The Italian historian Croce once said: ".All history is contemporary
Reality is always in the same vein as history, and many of the phenomena that occur in modern societies have existed in ancient societies for a long time. To a certain extent, to read history is to read reality.
Wang Jiafan, a tenured professor at East China Normal University, summarized the eight characteristics of traditional Chinese society in his "General Theory of Chinese History". These eight characteristics have far-reaching influence, and some of them have not disappeared to this day
Chinese civilization was precociousFrom the origin of agriculture, the agricultural management mode of intensive cultivation, the level of industry and commerce, the degree of urban agglomeration, as well as the social factors such as the first-class centralized system and the establishment of ideological culture, China has shown that it is precocious compared with other nations in the world, and it is good at learning from history and constantly correcting and filling in the gaps, and improving it thoroughly.
It is no exaggeration to say that in terms of the historical period of the world's traditional agricultural society, China's traditional society belongs to the most advanced, well-thought-out and mature minority type. Unfortunately, overdevelopment, just as gibbons are the most difficult to evolve into humans, "precocious children do not grow up". This is destined for a long period of difficult labor in the transformation of China's modern society.
Vague property rights in agriculture
There are three levels of property rights: the right to use (the right to operate), the right to occupy (the right to benefit), and the right to ownership (the right to dispose of).
Many people mistakenly believe that in China's history, land property rights are in the form of "private ownership", but it is not difficult to find that it is not independent and incomplete in terms of the right to benefit and the right to dispose of, and whether it is a homesteader or a landlord's private land, it has always been controlled by the political power system's concept of "sovereignty is the highest property right", whether strong or weak, explicit or implicit, and is under the shroud of "state-owned".
Until the Ming and Qing dynasties, the three powers were still in a state of separation, and there was no pure private ownership of land that could be freely disposed of, transferred, and sold by the owner without any interference of will. In short, in traditional China, the development of private ownership is not too early or too much, but too little and too insufficient, and lacks the legal guarantee for sound development.
Everything depends on the relationship
Although there have been different degrees of changes and evolutions in the historical social interaction mode, the kinship relationship with paternalism as the core has always been the most original interpersonal interaction template in Chinese society, and it belongs to the deep structural nature of society.
The ideology of kinship (clan) ethics is highly developed. At the beginning of civilization, the blood ties were not broken, which may be a crux of the misguided history of China and the West.
FloodingThis kind of *** is not manifested in the worship of the prophetic god in religion, but in the pursuit and admiration of the political authority of the moral personification of the world. Mencius said, "In five hundred years, there will be a king." The dream of reversing the tide and opening a new heaven by the Holy Monarch has reappeared again and again, disillusioned again and again, and resurrected again and again, and it is difficult to wake up from the dream.
"Good Emperors" and "Sages and Virtuous Ministers" became the backbone of ancient history, and everyone from the intellectual elite to the common people regarded this as the bright side of history and the pride of the nation. Now to ask: how did this mental stereotype come about?Why is it so unbreakable?
Politics is all-encompassingSociety has three major systems: political, economic, and cultural. Ancient Chinese politics was condescending, inclusive and dominating the economy and culture, resulting in a special structural type of so-called "political integration".
The economy is the economy of big power politics, that is, the economy that focuses on the centralized system of large powers, and the private economy has no independent status;Culture is a culture of high political ethics, focusing on the function of ideological integration with the unification of major powers as the main purpose, and heretical ideas and formal speculation are not absent, but always obscured and dishonorable. Everything is politicized, everything is politically diverted.
There are no dissidentsThe intellectual elite has always been the mainstream force in society. However, the relationship between the ancient intellectual elite and society often showed two extreme trends: either it was closely linked to the political entity, and it was constantly provided with human and ideological resources, which was transformed into social dominationEither passively retreat into seclusion, escape from politics, indulge in the artistic conception of solitude and self-appreciation, and detach from society and the people.
In ancient China, there was hardly a third political force in sight, and there was no real social "alien" force. The intellectual elite has never produced the new role of "social alien" in the Western sense.
The country is unifiedThe state integration system of traditional Chinese society, on the one hand, is a monarch with a high degree of centralization of power, all orders come from the palace, the implementation is rigid, and the local government has no independent will and lacks enthusiasm;On the other hand, the actual state administration is only at the level of the county government, and in addition, the territory is vast, the whip is beyond the reach, and the development is uneven.
The name is "great unification", in fact, "unification" is also limited, the solid shell of unity, but there are many loose and loose, pluralistic and ambiguous plates, "mashing" type of integration is both false and fragile, the climate is suitable, and it will often weaken into the existence of the name and even the first separation, the result is "unification is dead, and chaos is released".
The concept of change and circulationFor thousands of years, the political wisdom of the Chinese has been a view of "change". The schema of "change" is a "circular (concentric) circle", which is a closed type, with six reincarnations, so that it can not deviate from its origins, so it cannot get out of the strange circle of history by itself. This is qualitatively different from the theory of evolution introduced from the West. "Evolution" is "genetic variation", "the old and the new are constantly coming and going", and its schema is an upward spiral, showing an open type.
The concept of "change" is characterized by the tendency of people to tend to be optimistic and conservative, which is a true portrayal of the self-sufficiency psychology of the developed Chinese agricultural society and the well-ruled feudal empire. Only when China loses its advanced position in the world and suffers from being backward and beaten will it have the psychological basis for accepting the theory of evolution. This is why external factors play a particularly important role in driving the transformation of Chinese society.
To sum up, it is not difficult to find that the eight characteristics of traditional Chinese society are not only the cold reality that ancient people had to face, but also the stubborn diseases that modern people have to continue to deal with. If we want to understand the root causes of the problems in Chinese society today, we must know the history of Chinese society.
To this end, I sincerely recommend the "Three Books of Chinese Social History" - including: Wang Jiafan's "General Theory of Chinese History", Wang Di's "Lulu Youwei", and Liang Gengyao's "Chinese Social History". These three books are all handwritten and classic works, constituting three observation perspectives of macro, micro and meso, and answering the eternal problem that currently lies in the hearts of the Chinese people - the dilemma of China's modernization and transformation. All three books embody the care of historians and the true meaning of historical research, and are the preferred reference books for contemporary Chinese people to gain insight into Chinese social history. Click on the product card below to collect it with one click: