All it requires, really, to envision China, circa 1290-1330, as the
Core of a capitalist world-system propriety of hyphen uncertainŲ *and*
as the hegemonic state in an Asian state system is *ignoring the fact of
regression*, at first quantitative, as in Europe and the Near East; then
qualitative, due to Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang's pursuit of what Ray Huang
calls "agrarian simplicity," by autocratic absolutism, legislation, and
massive terror. (I myself formerly believed that the numerous parallels
between the careers of Zhu Yuanzhang and Mao Zedong were sheer coincidence
or at most of structural and cultural origin, to be explained by social
science; but there is explicit evidence, from Dr Li Zhisui, The Private
Life of Chairman Mao, p. 441, otherwise.)
By "state system" I have meant, over the years I have written for this
list, states fighting, trading, and acculturating at the elite level to
one another (the latter known in archaeology by Colin Renfrew's coinage,
"peer polity interaction") for a prolonged if determinate and finite
historical period. This terminates, in *nearly* all cases, in either
*unification*, usually military and most often by a "marcher state";
or in "system collapse" (Renfrew, again). The Asian state system, to
be discussed here, one of the rare exceptions when one power perpetrated
what I call "picking up its marbles and going home," or perhaps, "I'm
not a hegemonic state, I'm a World Empire," following Plague, Revolution,
foundation of the Ming dynasty, and the banning, in 1370, of foreign
trade except under the guise of interstate gift exchange, the opportunity
wherefor presenting itself in the dearth of "private," ie, nonstate,
foreign trade to prohibit. The declaration of China as a World Empire
at that time was ideological and explicit.
Possibly the most symptomatic indicator of the qualitative difference
between Mongol Yuan China as a hegemonic state and Ming China as a World
Empire was the development of military technology. In 1241 the Mongols
introduced firearms, designed by Chinese engineers, into Europe at the
battle of Sajo, when they reduced the army of King Bela IV of Hungary
to a pile of rusting scrap. But these firearms were experimental stuff;
they were made of bamboo. The final stage in the development of the
handgun was not taken till the reign of the second Mongol emperor of
China, Temur (1294-1308), when metal barrels were introduced. As an
active participant in a state system where China had enemies and only
one ally, the Empire of the Il-khan of Persia, the authorities in
Beijing, who were actually far more rational and responsible than the
dissipated drunks they are still made out to have been, did not perceive
that the politico-military world had cut them any slack.
To their west were two hostile powers, so closely allied they may for
practical purposes be considered a unit. To the north was the Empire of
Ogodei, whose ideological mission and raison d'etre was to make incessant
war on the state ruled by Khubilai and his descendants, on grounds that
said Khubilai, in 1260, stole the Great or Grand Qanship from the House
of Ogodei at an irregular kuriltai, what we today would call a "rigged
election." Incessant raids into Yuan-ruled territory made for varying
degrees of danger, contingent upon the collusion of a fraction of the
Mongol ruling elite in China. Grave crises transpired in 1308 and 1328.
Which all merely illustates the opening for power-maximization conferred
by ideological legitimacy. This invariably has weird, screwball consequences,
eg, House of Lords, Electoral College, and Guelphs vs Ghibellines. In 1976
I met Werner Cahnman on the street near Columbia University and, faking the
polltaker, said, "It's the 12th century and, if the election were held today,
are you Guelph or Ghibelline?" "Ghibelline!" "I *thought* so." And meant
that.Ų
More serious was the Chagatai empire, which not merely backed the
Ogodeis; it also sat right over the Chinese Mongol silk pipeline between
the North China plain and Genoese Caffa on the Black Sea. Fortunalely
for the silk trade, the Chagatais, who controlled most of Central Asia,
had the empire of the Golden Horde to their north and west; trouble with
the Chagatais could be circumvented by alternative routes through Golden
Horde territory to the east of the Caspian. Golden Horde territory ran
through South Russia nearly to the Caucasus and the Black Sea shores,
where territorial disputes festered. I am certain that, when Eurocentrism
ends at last, the Golden Horde will be revealed as a wealthy and well-ruled
state: As is well-known, Modern Russian vocabulary dealing with quintessential
state activities, eg, "money," "prison," "whip," and "China" are of largely
Mongol derivation; whilst items of consumption and commerce, eg, "tea," are
Chinese. Russian *kitay*, "China," alludes to the Mongolish Khitan, or
Liao Empire, whose ruling-house scion designed the Mongol state administration
after a lifetime under the rule of the sinified Jurched or Ruzhen (Jin
dynasty).Ų Russians served side-by-side with Arabs in Mongol Beijing,
filling jobs Chinese believed rightfully theirs, to be sure. Mongols
were racists, but mixed up their categories of lesser races in a refreshingly
innovative way. Russians and Arabs, like Turks, were *semu*, Associated
Peoples, ranking just below the master race of Mongols themselves. (Northern
Chinese, *hanren*, were superior, racially, to Southern Chinese, *nanren*;
though the circumstance that the latter had much more money than the former
was hardly ignored.)
The other major powers were: the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria,
which had beaten the Mongols at tha battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 and driven
the last of the Crusaders into the sea in 1291. Hardly the least of the
great powers was the Sultanate of Delhi, which bordered the Il-khan empire
to the east as the Mamluks did to the east. These facts rendered Chinese
assistance to Persia of the utmost importance. Persia was the largest
Chinese export market, whereto it sent porcelains with arabesque designs,
specialized for the Near Eastern taste. Chinese hydraulic engineers rebuilt
irrigation works on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; but then, even if the
Chinese Mongols =Yuan dynasty, Chinese-speaking MongolsŲ didn't know it,
it was a Chinese general who led the army which sacked Baghdad in 1258
during Hulagu's campaign.
Shortly after Persia and China became part of a common political world,
Chinese acquired the art of cultivating cotton from Persia. In a trice, by
1292, some Chinese invented the cotton gin; and howbeit it would impress
you no end, and lend much-needed plausibility to this tale, I cannot give
you her name. My suspicion is that no Chinese male would have *bothered*
lightening women's work.Ų A hemp-spinning machine had been mass-marketed
in the *Wang Zhen nongshu* (1313), just before the bottom fell out of the
hemp market; and possibly there wasn't time prior to the Plague to invent
a cotton-spinning analogue.
Khubilai's finance minister had been an Arab (executed 1290, concession
to popular demand). Similarly, Chinese fiscal experts introduced the use
of paper currency into Persia, with disastrous results, according to Rashid
al-Din, vizir and historian. (The Il-khan regime officially adopted Islam
in 1306.) More substantial was the impact of Chinese art on Persian
miniatures.
No mention has been made of the Southeast Asian states and South Seas
trading emporia. Janet Abu-Lughod has covered the ground regarding the
latter quite well, if indeed she overestimates the autonomy of Majapahit
or Malacca or Penang with respect to China. They all lay within the Chinese
sphere of influence; though it is true that Khubilai's invasion of Java,
with six thousand Korean-built ships, was repelled. They did not evade
the zone of Chinese commercial dominance and settlement. I can find
assertions by historians, Mongolophopes every last one of them, that
the trade of, say, Chuanzhou, in Fujian, expanded; or that the Mongol
regulations for the Superintendency of Maratime Customs at Guangzhou
were more liberal than the Song, though inconsistently so, with allowances
for corruption and evasion, etc, there is not a single claim that commerce
shrank. Gernet says, "evidence dating from 1349 mentions existence of a
Chinese colony at Tomasik, on the very spot where the great Chinese city
of Singapore was to develop in the twentieth century."
The theoretical significance of the latter factoid is that Elvin's
hypothesis, alluded to in the preceding post, as to the cessation of
Chinese technical development after the "first third of the fourteenth
century" is that, prior to, let's call it December 31, 1331, because
1331-2 saw the outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the Beijing region, Chinese
had places to migrate into, which raised the average productivity of labour
in the frontier regions as well as in the regions emigrated from. Then, as
of January 1, 1332, the frontier closed, and the average productivity of
labour stagnated or declined. Had the Chinese, says Elvin, had places
more remote to migrate to, as the British did in the West Indies, taking
with them as they went a bunch of Africans who'd found Africa an unendurably
*boring* Experience, you see, they might have continued to increase the
average productivity of labour. Well, if Chinese were indeed migrating
into a Chinese sphere of influence at the time of maximum Chinese commercial
hegemony, hence expanding and diversifying Chinese international trade, then
Elvin's supposition is refuted.
The reader, if any, no doubt thinks me a crank for supposing *primitive
tribal savages* living in *stinking yurts* and *slobbering on yakfat* while
*drunk on kumiss* could possibly know what to do with *civilized people like
Arabs* who would *never* have lived in TENTS! Actually, the common denominator,
in all the Mongol-ruled states, is a certain harsh competence which brushed
aside local tradidions for expediency's sake, causing unpopularity. For
instance, Mongol officials favoured plowing over ancestors' graves to
increase the Chinese arable, and opposed foot-binding. They were doctrinally
eclectic, according the superstitions of all peoples equal status, contingent
on whim of the ruler. Khubilai's spiritual advisor was a Tibetan lama. Sayyid
Ajall of Bukhara was made governor of formerly Buddhist Dali, now Yunnan; his
descendants ruled it until 1380 when the Ming annexed it as unfinished
business of their liberation of China from Mongols; and by then the indigenous
population was substantially Muslim, including the boy eunuch subsequently
named Zheng He who in 1382 was carried off to the appanage of Zhu Di, Prince
of Yan, at Beijing.
China, it would seem, was cracked wide open, as it had never been before.
The Mongols made a single paper currency circulate north and south; writing
paper bank cheques came into general use everywhere. There was free circulation
of ideas to the utter horror of Confucian conservatives, who complained that
in these wicked days, the robes and trappings of the Confucian scholar were
in some cases no more than fake fronts for profitmaking business (Dardess,
Confucianism and Autocracy, p. 8). By suspending the famous Civil Service
examinations until 1315, the Mongol Yuan regime diverted an enormous amount
of intellectual talent into commerce, show business (Chinese theater or
opera), the fine and coarse arts, the military, and certain branches of
industry. (The fate of iron-and-steel, hence also coal, production is not
clear. Iron-and-steel reached a peak, which is controversial, of either
35,000 or 125,000 tons a year by 1100.)
"What about science and mathematics? You mean to tell me, the Chinese
could do *anything* without Aristotelian logic?"
"The Chinese got their Aristotle from the same place Regular people got
it: translation from the Origincal Classical Arabic into Archaic Classical
Chinese, which has been a deader language longer than Latin, Classical or
Church."
This is all not relevant. Chinese science and mathematics wore *funny
costumes*. By this, I mean that, whereas what might be called Formal Reason,
ie, making an argument to demonstrate the truth of something *authoritatively*,
was the exclusive monopoly of Confucians, whose objective in using it was
invariably arriving at eternal moral certainties or "general prinicples,"
science and mathematics were the preserve of avowedly *non-rational people*.
Mathematicians, for example, belonged to the Complete Truth Sect of Daoism.
These people do not appear to have given mathematics a subcultually distinct
appearance which identifies it as wordly, predictable, and unmysterious to
other mathematicians. All mathematics is inevitably an impenetrable mystery
to those who never learned it, and feel feel stupid, also persecuted by Jews
or Asian immigrants accordingly. But even to nonmathematicians, Western
methematics looks, uh, sciencelike. Chinese mathematics, when it was in
flower, looked like the Wisdom of the Mystic East.
For instance, right now I'm looking at a diagram, sloping off to the left,
of horizontal lines, vertical lines, T-symbols both upright and upside-down,
and in the lower-right-hand corner, a slashed circle a bit lika a Prohibited
symbol. The circle is a positional zero; the slash indicates a negative number,
and the diagram is to be read 2X**3+15X**2+166X-4460=0. To the right of that
diagram is a picture of Pascal's Triangle of the binomial coefficients,
published in a 1303 book entitled Jade Mirror of the Four Principles (in
sufficient quantity that, albeit nobody would understand it, or even care,
a hundred years later, it Came Down To Us.
Gunpowder was discovered by Daoist alchemists in the ninth century. At
first it was used to make flashes, loud noises, and the famous acrid stench.
It was customary, in the quest for the elixir of Immortality, to turn over
lethal poisons and explosives to the Ministry of War. The first use of
gunpowder in combat dates to the early tenth century. The explosive property
of the mixture was not discovered until much later: There is a fascinating
article, in a collection entitled Religion in T'ang and Sung China, entitled
"Strengthening the Seal of Office." This describes Thunder Rites, a Daoist
magical technique used in the twelfth century, at the behest of local
magistrates struggling against illegal shrines operated by sorcerers (*wu*)
on behalf of deities (*shen*) unrecognized or even marked for suppression
by the Ministry of Rites. It is not clear, from the text of the article,
whether the magistrates believed in the efficacy of the supernatural on
the Enemy side or on his own. The Daoist magician was charged with blowing
up the outlaw shrine, killing (*sha*) the officiating sorcerer along with
it. This is not exactly state-sponsored terrorism repressing the free
exercise of religion, as it cannot be established that the magistrates,
or their superiors, were aware that the efficacious ingredient was gunpowder.
There can be no doubt of that. There is mention of explosions, acrid smoke,
danger to the practitioner, and the mixture of "realgar, charcoal, sulfur
and honey." The presence of honey in this list is not explained.
Confucianism sacralizes kinship and deference rituals, politely ignoring
the supernatural except for the cult of Heaven, explicitly associated with
rulership, and those deities explicitly recognized and given titles by the
state. In the Song and Yuan (Mongol) periods, all deities were ranked by
length of title, eight characters, six, four, and two. The bureaucracy thus
made a supernatural in its own image, illegal sects excepted. Yet it was
still taboo for the Confucian official to engage in invocation of the
supernatural in doing his job; the Daoist did this for him. The wording
of the Thunder Rites manual, as cited, gives no inkling that the Daoist
supposed that gunpowder without talismans, spells, incantations, and such,
was efficacious; or of course vice versa.
Yet, it works.
****
Qualitative concepts are slippery. In Marxist scripture, for example, the
criteria for attaining the exalted (relative to feudalism) degree of Capitalist
Mode of Production are given as (1) generalization of the circulation of
commodities; and (b) capital-labour relation as the dominant relation. What
these mean is not merly qualitative but "historically relative." There is
no doubt, for example, that the "generalization of the circulation of
commodities," etc, is greater in contemporary Equatorial Guinea than in
seventeenth-century England. Yet the latter was an advanced-bourgeois power
for its time and place.
A Marxist theorist asked me only yesterday whether I could rightly say
that "the capital-labour relation was the dominant relation" in the Song
and Yuan periods. I told this person that, in the Southern Song capital
of Hangzhou, population 1.25 million, the Chinese restaurant was invented
by the twelfth century, and for the explicit purpose of affording to the
working class a place to have affordable lunch. Furthermore, on the landed
estates, the qualitative distinction in terms of proletarianization between
and among serfs, tenants, and landless labourers is a function of the overall
commercialization and industrializtion of the economy as well as the degree
of compulsion exercised by the master/employer. We may recall that, in
"Actually non-Existing Socialwasm" there was considerable scope for the
coercion of labour from disfavoured sectors of the very class whose
dictatorship was the pretext for such abuse. To put it one final way, stage
theories must allow for what I have called "funny costmes."
If I am conceded the right to define capitalism in terms of *qualitatively
changing production* including both products and productive techniques,
a "No Limits" ambience in some sector or subcultural pocket of the ruling-
exploiting class, and the occupational bifurcation, within that class, of
politico-military and entrepreneurial specialists, then: I am
most certainly entitled to state that the line, once crossed, may be
said to have been recrossed. History is not *unilinear* unless
*unilinearity is determined*. I am holding that, if the distinction
between a capitalist hegemonic state and a World Empire is empirically
valid, and the same society which, in 1200 had been the first, by 1300
is now the second, may by 1400 be the second given that, as Phil Austin
once said, "If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."
Am I making a mockery of theory? Certainly, because all theory gets a
little funny around the edges. All social-science theory must make provision
for having overlooked transitions that were ignored where they did not occur
twice. It must, further, make provision for sheer dumb luck, asteroids from
outer space, Bubonic Plague, and Zhu Yuanzhang. It must explain exactly why
and where it cannot explain.
Daniel A. Foss
<getting away for holidays--elves are gaining on me>