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Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies《哈佛亚洲学报》最新一期
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社会科学中的中国历史数据
----包弼德评黄亚生、王裕华、张泰苏三部新著
Chinese Historical Data in the Social Sciences: Three Cases
Peter K. Bol
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
Harvard-Yenching Institute
Volume 83, Number 2, December 2023
pp. 365-377
10.1353/jas.2023.a938223
Review
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Chinese Historical Data in the Social Sciences:Three Cases
Peter K. Bol
The Rise and Fall of the EAST: Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today by Yasheng Huang. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 440. $35.00 hardcover, $35.00 e-book.
The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development by Yuhua Wang. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii + 352. $120.00 hardcover, $35.00 paper, $35.00 e-book.
The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions by Taisu Zhang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii + 421. $120.00 hardcover.
From today's perspective, in contrast to that of a century ago, China is a success story. Once more, as has happened every 250 to 300 years since the seventh century, a wealthier and stronger state has resurrected centralized bureaucratic governance over a large and diverse population spread across diverse regions, successfully addressed the problems that led to the demise of its predecessor, and made itself competitive with any threatening foreign powers. Witness the histories of Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, and the PRC. One could imagine studies devoted to theorizing this repeated success and what the rest of the world should [End Page 365] learn from it. However, now, for the first time, the usual tale of collapse and rebuilding coincides with the Western European expansion that has defined modern life, with the result that the failure of the Qing has been seen relative to the power and wealth of some foreign states generalized as "the West" …In the eyes of some this is something that should not have happened.
The three books…synthesize scholarship and add much new data.
Yuhua Wang is a political scientist who sees through the lens of social history—"we need a better understanding of how society works before we can grasp how politics works" (p. 220)—and traces China's weakness to a change in the relationship between the central and local elites. Yasheng Huang is an economist who finds a political institution—the civil service examination system—at the heart of China's development since the seventh century. Taisu Zhang is an institutional and legal historian who finds the explanation for the Qing failure in ideology. Wang and Huang make extensive use of quantitative data. Zhang less so but has fine-grained accounts of fiscal policy and debates. What marks these works as social science is the desire to make a theoretical contribution. I turn to these first.
Theories
Wang begins from a paradox: later imperial emperors were secure on the throne and had long reigns, yet the state was weak. For him the explanation lies in state development, the evolution of state strength and form. (State form consists of relationships between ruler and ruling elite, and between state and society.) But that in turn is a function of the form of elite networks. "Whether the state is strong or weak (state strength) and how it is structured (state form) follow from the network structure that characterizes state-society relations" (p. 7). Wang posits that three kinds of network were operative in China's history. The "star network" depicts a cohesive central elite whose kin networks are geographically broad and densely interconnected. It prefers a strong state capable of defending the interests of elites' kin. Its cohesiveness constrains and thus weakens the ruler, and the concentration of power [End Page 366] in the center makes the state vulnerable to attacks on the capital. The medieval oligarchy—the aristocratic clans of Tang (618–907)—were in a star network. In a "bowtie network," the emperor divides and conquers: the capital elite are divided, yet they limit the state in the interest of strengthening their local elite kin as in Song, Ming, and Qing. But when the balance tips too far to local elites as at the end of Qing...
来源：全球研究Global Studies Forum
