Origins of the Modern Chinese State (review)

Philip Kuhn's elegant series of essays on the origins of the modern Chinese state is aptly dedicated to the late Benjamin I. Schwartz, whose influence on—or resonance with—Kuhn's own thinking about Chinese history is clear throughout. The polarities in Chinese thought that Schwartz loved to probe¹ and the deep linkages between the society of the old empire and the configuration of the new nation-state that Schwartz identified in his work on Yan Fu and Mao Zedong² are the same problems that animate Kuhn's historical inquiries. Admirers of Kuhn's own writings will find in this book a consummate summing up of decades of research in late imperial and twentieth-century Chinese history. The chapters move constantly back and forth, across the twentieth-century divide and over to European and American intellectual history, seamlessly meshing archival gems with insights from wenji, gazetteers, and other published sources.

The book's chapters began as lectures presented at the Collège de France in 1994. They were first published in French, and they were developed, Kuhn tells us, in the course of close interactions with his colleague Pierre Etienne-Will. To the specialist reader of this English-language edition, the core question Kuhn poses is this: how and why did largely successful efforts to broaden political participation among late imperial literati act paradoxically to strengthen and extend the hand of the central government? Or, what was (and what is) the hope for the development of democratic institutions in China? Like Wm. Theodore de Bary, who in a similar series of essays has pondered the dependency of China's learned elite on a strong authoritarian ruler,³ Kuhn is not optimistic. At the same time, his book takes note of enduring legacies of late imperial culture that may, ironically, check some of the most powerful antidemocratic influences in contemporary China. Finally, he continually cautions against reading the Chinese evidence through an ethnocentric historical lens. Properly understood, leaders who seem "progressive" to Western eyes, such as Wei Yuan or Feng Guifen, are actually responding to the "older" agendas that shaped China's constitutional history (pp. 31, 47, 51, 55).

From start to finish, the book uses the language of contemporary politics to discuss problems in both the late empire and the modern state: "national" problems and "constitutional" issues identified in the eighteenth century are traced through the nineteenth and twentieth. The term "constitutional" is given a specific definition on page 2, making it critical to the logic of the rest of the book: by constitutional, Kuhn simply means "a set of concerns about the legitimate ordering of public life." These constitutional matters, in Kuhn's reading, may be summed up as the following enduring problems: how to extract an agricultural surplus to feed the cities and support the government, and how to govern at the local level while maintaining a centralized bureaucracy and a flourishing commercial economy.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the national scope of eighteenth-century social, political, and economic problems, from unemployment (and the immense new constituency of out-of-office literati that it produced) to what Kuhn depicts as the courtier Heshen's "extractive machine," which siphoned off bribes and surcharges to vast networks of middlemen and officials engaged in tax collection; and from there to the inherent structural weaknesses of local government, found everywhere in Qing China, despite creative attempts at reform. This, in other words, set the stage for the struggle to redefine the relationship between locale and center that unfolded in the centuries to come. In conjunction with this "national" picture, Kuhn locates a "national" consciousness within the eighteenth-century civil-service elite, and in this national awareness or consciousness he identifies a complex of literati self-perceptions. Learned men who passed the...