Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

This imperial group, in its turn, had to accept this system of inefficiency and diversion of incomes and its own basic remoteness from the peasantry because of the great size of China, the ineffectiveness of its systems of transportation and communications, and the impossibility of keeping records of population, or of incomes and taxes except through the indirect mediation of the bureaucracy. The semiautonomous position of the bureaucracy depended, to a considerable extent, on the fact that the Chinese system of writing was so cumbersome, so inefficient, and so difficult to learn that the central government could not possibly have kept any records or have administered tax collection, public order, or justice except through a bureaucracy of trained experts. This bureaucracy was recruited from the gentry because the complex systems of writing, of law, and of administrative traditions could be mastered only by a group possessing leisure based on unearned incomes. To be sure, in time, the training for this bureaucracy and for the examinations admitting to it became quite unrealistic, consisting largely of memorizing of ancient literary texts for examination purposes rather than for any cultural or administrative ends. This was not so bad as it sounds, for many of the memorized texts contained a good deal of ancient wisdom with an ethical or practical slant, and the possession of this store of. knowledge engendered in its possessors a respect for moderation and for tradition which was just what the system required. No one regretted that the system of education and of examinations leading to the bureaucracy did not engender a thirst for efficiency, because efficiency was not a quality which anyone desired. The bureaucracy itself did not desire efficiency because this would have reduced its ability to divert the funds flowing upward from the peasantry.

The peasantry surely did not want any increase in efficiency, which would have led to an increase in pressure on it and would have made it less easy to blunt or to avoid the impact of imperial power. The imperial power itself had little desire for any increased efficiency in its bureaucracy, since this might have led to increased independence on the part of the bureaucracy. So long as the imperial superstructure of Chinese society obtained its share of the wealth flowing upward from the peasantry, it was satisfied. The share of this wealth which the imperial group obtained was very large, in absolute figures, although proportionately it was only a small part of the total amount which left the peasant class, the larger part being diverted by the gentry and bureaucracy on its upward flow.

The exploitative nature of this three-class social system was alleviated, as we have seen, by inefficiency, by traditional moderation and accepted ethical ideas, by a sense of social interdependence, and by the power of traditional law and custom which protected the ordinary peasant from arbitrary treatment or the direct impact of force. Most important of all, perhaps, the system was alleviated by the existence of careers open to talent. China never became organized into hereditary groups or castes, being in this respect like England and quite unlike India. The way was open to the top in Chinese society, not for any individual peasant in his own lifetime, but to any individual peasant family over a period of several generations. Thus an individual’s position in society depended, not on the efforts of his own youth, but on the efforts of his father and grandfather.

If a Chinese peasant was diligent, shrewd, and lucky, he could expect to accumulate some small surplus beyond the subsistence of his own family and the drain to the upper classes. This surplus could be invested in activities such as iron-making, opium selling, lumber or fuel selling, pig-trading and such. The profits from these activities could then be invested in small bits of land to be rented out to less fortunate peasants or in loans to other peasants. If times remained good, the owner of the surpluses began to receive rents and interest from his neighbors; if times became bad he still had his land or could take over his debtor’s land as forfeited collateral on his loan. In good times or bad, the growth of population in China kept the demand for land high, and peasants were able to rise in the social scale from peasantry to gentry by slowly expanding their legal claims over land. Once in the gentry, one’s children or grandchildren could be educated to pass the bureaucratic examinations and be admitted to the group of mandarins. A family which had a member or two in this group gained access to the whole system of “squeeze” and of bureaucratic diversion of income flows, so that the family as a whole could continue to rise in the social and economic structure. Eventually some member of the family might move into the imperial center from the provincial level on which this rise began, and might even gain access to the imperial ruling group itself.

In these higher levels of the social structure many families were able to maintain a position for generations, but in general there was a steady, if slow, “circulation of the elite,” most families remaining in a high social position for only a couple of generations, after about three generations of climb, to be followed by a couple of generations of decline. Thus, the old American saying that it took only three generations “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” would, in the old China, have to be extended to allow about six or seven generations from the rice paddy’s drudgery back to the rice paddy again. But the hope of such a rise contributed much to increase individual diligence and family solidarity and to reduce peasant discontent. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did peasants in China come to regard their positions as so hopeless that violence became preferable to diligence or conformity. This change arose from the fact, as we shall see, that the impact of Western culture on China did, in fact, make the peasant’s position economically hopeless.

In traditional Chinese society the bureaucrats recruited through examinations from the gentry class were called mandarins. They became, for all practical purposes, the dominant element in Chinese society. Since their social and economic position did not rest on political or military power but on traditions, the legal structure, social stability, accepted ethical teachings, and the rights of property, this middle-level group gave Chinese society a powerful traditionalist orientation. Respect for old traditions, for the accepted modes of thought and action, for the ancestors in society and religion, and for the father in the family became the salient characteristics of Chinese society. That this society was a complex network of vested interests, was unprogressive, and was shot through with corruption was no more objectionable to the average Chinese, on any level, than the fact that it was also shot through with inefficiency.

These things became objectionable only when Chinese society came directly in contact with European culture during the nineteenth century. As these two societies collided, inefficiency, unprogressiveness, corruption, and the whole nexus of vested interests and traditions which constituted Chinese society was unable to survive in contact with the efficiency, the progressiveness, and the instruments of penetration and domination of Europeans. A system could not hope to survive which could not provide itself with firearms in large quantities or with mass armies of loyal soldiers to use such weapons, a system which could not increase its taxes or its output of wealth or which could not keep track of its own population or its own incomes by effective records or which had no effective methods of communication and transportation over an area of 3.5 million square miles.

The society of the West which began to impinge on China about 1800 was powerful, efficient, and progressive. It had no respect for the corruption, the traditions, the property rights, the family solidarity, or the ethical moderation of traditional Chinese society. As the weapons of the West, along with its efficient methods of sanitation, of writing, of transportation and communications, of individual self-interest, and of corrosive intellectual rationalism came into contact with Chinese society, they began to dissolve it. On the one hand, Chinese society was too weak to defend itself against the West. When it tried to do so, as in the Opium Wars and other struggles of 1841-1861, or in the Boxer uprising of 1900, such Chinese resistance to European penetration was crushed by the armaments of the Western Powers, and all kinds of concessions to these Powers were imposed on China.