Ming-Ch'ing Studies in Japan: 1979

Ill MING-CH 'ING STUDIES IN JAPAN: 1979 Fuma Susumu &.%]!& , "Min-Shin" ?/fofj , Shigaku zasshi f >HèÌK&Vt 89·5 (May 1980), 205-11. *~*"**¦,"i' Translated by Joshua A. Fogel, Harvard University. The publishing world and the world of historical scholarship in China are showing great activity at present. Books such as the Ch'en-ch'ueh chi ?%^t??3 which Japanese scholars have rarely seen are being revised and published; the Symposium on Ch'ing History /a^Etfcalfe has begun publication and is full of solid research. Inscriptional materials of various kinds have and will continue to be published. Furthermore, little by little the ice is being broken for meaningful exchange between Japanese and Chinese scholars who work in the history of the Ming-Ch'ing period. Clearly this tendency will flourish in the future. In Japan, on the other hand, European and Japanese historical studies are now stressing "social history." We do not yet have a precise theory about just what sort of history "social history" is. But, having, for the present, freed itself from simplistic economic determinism and not concerned only with class relations, it apparently aims to delve also into popular consciousness and lifestyles. Thus, it has become a necessary and welcome direction to pursue. For nearly a decade in the field of Ming-Ch'ing history, "gentry theory," which has dealt with the problem of 112 large-scale gentry land ownership, occupied the mainstream of discussion, oblivious to the trends in the study of European and Japanese history. However, even hothouse-variety Ming-Ch'ing historical research is without a doubt now approaching a turning point. The most straightforward explanation of this tendency appears in an essay by Mori Masao jfov£-?^- , "Disorder in Social Relations in the Late Ming" d%jfj)fa&tj$fyV&UafäJi'V^^filz 1 ^T (in Sanju shünen kinen ronshu ? -f /J)j£- &fi %S) -i, , Nagoya university). In 1977, Mori published his "The Uprising of the Wu-lung hui in She-ch'i, T'ai-ts'ang Prefecture in 1645" -fc%.%»'*'/2,|%^Olßjfk I* '1T. In that article he gave a practical demonstration of how, by avoiding a methodology which gives pat explanations based on the conventional wisdom, socio-economic history was in the process of turning a sharp corner. His latest article criticizes more explicitly the methods used in Ming-Ch'ing socio-economic history since World War II. Yet Mori does not conclude merely with a critique. He addresses the concrete problem of what this disruption of order in the late Ming entailed, and he investigates it on the basis of selections from the "feng-su" /jJLi Ku sections of local gazetteers. According to Mori, the disorder of the late Ming was a disruption in all social relations: high and low status j Jf ? regular commoner-declasse ft, »!4 , old-young*. «V' , superiorinferior X. 4[ T Ä , landlord-tenant ¿'(o) , master-servant J. ?5 , gentry-commoner ???,?^'J¦>£ which held that "gentry control" was established in the late Ming-early Ch'ing period. Mori's criticism is severe. Scholars who have hitherto sought to reduce all phenomena to relations of production, and moreover scholars who, even while attaching conditions, understand the landlord-tenant relationship to be the primary relation of production and try to explain all phenomena deductively from it, will have to respond to Mori's critique. Mori does not draw any hasty conclusions. But there is a need to persist in putting that age-old question both to Mori and to ourselves: What happened after the late Ming (which he cites for its disruptions in the social order)? And even more concretely, shouldn't we be asking: What route did changes in the social order and customary practices in the Ch'ing dynasty follow? What sort of social order was envisioned in the late Ming by these low status, declasse, young, and commoner elements if it was not an expression of their customary practices? In the late Ming-early Ch'ing period, Huang Tsung-hsi 4#M^.e)/^0ÎÛ^ . Hitotsubashi ronso -^^J|_ 81, #3) resolves the problem of where Huang Tsung-hsi's political and social thought differ from "populist" vL/p" thought advocated by a succession of thinkers...