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Ever since men discovered how to live together in communities there have been two basic conceptions of social organization: (1) the horizontal division and (2) the hierarchical system. While a few primitive tribes may have organized their small societies only according to the first conception, all of the advanced nations have a hierarchical system. In the [Chinese?] feudal period [Shāng & Zhōu, periods 3-4?], the system was, in general, as follows: on top was the king, next the lords, next the nobles, next the lower ranks of the ruling class, then the free commoners, and at the bottom were the slaves, if slavery was in existence.
After the feudal period, many of the feudal systems were done away with, but the hierarchical nature of society has remained up to date. Every political organization is a hierarchical set-up, so is every social structure which has to have the manipulation of authority and the requirement of subordination, even voluntary organizations, where leadership and good following are necessary. The horizontal division is also important, of course. With the hierarchical system, the two are like warp and woof.
Chinese society, as we know, has been from the very beginning, a hierarchical organization. Gradations of rank have not only been practiced and jealously guarded by those in the position of manipulating authority or power, but have also been earnestly stressed by most of the social thinkers and tradition defenders from Confucius to the intelligentsia of the present time. The basic argument of orthodox scholars for a graded society is that no community life can be practical unless there is government in the group. The essential organizations and functions of a government, whether political, voluntary, or familial, are the framework of ranks, orders, and the inter-relations between the ranks and orders. They are also the arranging of people and things into the ranks and orders, so that the social life can get going. When the ranks and orders and the interrelations are definite and precise and the arrangement of people and things is binding, social life will be smooth and everybody will know how to act towards others and how to expect others to act towards him. So, and only so, people of a society will feel sure and have security. Only when people feel sure and have security will they be happy.
The foundation of the traditional Chinese social structure is the well-known wǔlún 五伦, five kinds of human relations. They are:
Except the last one, all the other kinds are graded relations. In the emperor and minister relationship, the former is superior to the latter and the latter must be subordinate to the former. Between father and son, father represents authority and son must obey or respect the authority. Between husband and wife, husband leads and wife follows and husband has a certain degree of authority over wife. Between older brother and younger brother, the former’s duty is to aid and protect the latter and, for that reason, the latter is obliged to have respect for the former. Until very recently, almost every educated Chinese felt that only when relations are so graded and every party in the relationship strictly adheres to the duties and status respectively prescribed by the grades will the government function well, the family have a prosperous and harmonious life, the society enjoy peace and progress, and the nation as a whole become rich and strong.
There are social classes in every society, be it aristocratic, democratic, or communistic. There is, however, a difference between considering the classes as merely categories identifying people with different occupations, different moral achievements, different intellectual merits, different social, status, or different amounts of accumulated wealth, or considering them as rigid, exclusive, inherited, un-interchangeable and impenetrable social strata. Every society has social classes of the first consideration, but only a feudal society, or a society like traditional India, has social strata of the second conception. In China, ever since the collapse of the feudal states, the conceptions and the actual forms of social classes have been essentially of the first kind. Due, however, to the existence of the scholar-official, or the gentry class, with their long established privileges, a certain degree of the second conception prevails in many people’s minds.
In almost every period of the past, the literati or shìdàfū 士大夫 class has been distinctively seated on the top of the society and it enjoyed numerous advantages of which other people were deprived. Some of the positions or advantages have even become inherited, as such, they were inaccessible to people who were considered, in the opinion of the shìdàfū or by law conceived by the shìdàfū, unworthy or mean. Certain kinds of merchants, domestic servants, certain entertainers, prostitute house operators, and the offspring of these people, for example, were barred from participating in the imperial examinations and consequently were kept out of the gentry class and officialdom. In social functions as well as in everyday life, the officials and gentry were entitled to use certain things, to wear certain kinds of clothes, and to live in certain types of houses, whereas the commoners were forbidden. Notwithstanding all the rationalizations made by the shìdàfū for these aristocratic practices, it could not but leave an impression that theirs was a class that cannot be reached by people of other categories.
Essentially, however, this impression is not true. The shìdàfū people, with all the privileges they have had, have never been able, nor have they ever intended to form an exclusive aristocratic class. The so-called “inferior people” have never been strictly or permanently excluded from entering an upper social class. A great number of the gentry in every period have followed Confucius’ example to become teachers in schools or in shūyuàn 书院 [private tutorial schools] in which the young people gathered not only from the shìdàfū group but also from the common people’s families.
A majority of these teachers held no prejudice against pupils of common or poor origins. They loved to take notice of specially talented boys and secure assistance for them if needed. In this way, not a few of the children of the lower class families got through the imperial examinations and became scholars. Being scholars meant they had entered the gentry-official class. On the other hand, offspring of the gentry class also had to study hard and behave well in order to pass the examination and to hope for appointments from the government. If they did not study hard, they would not acquire the degrees. Without the degrees they would sooner or later be dropped out of the gentry-official class.
Many of the gentry-official families declined and disappeared because of such failures of their progeny. It is true that there have been exceptions. There were cases in which the examination authorities made the tasks easier or the standards lower for the gentry children and thus let them pass under special favor. But these were merely exceptions. They should not be so overemphasized as to cloud the whole situation.
The so-called “inferior people” have not always been the down-trodden. The successful merchants often made their way up through material means. The practice that an academic degree or an official title could be purchased with money was a great advantage to the common but wealthy people, so far as social advancement is concerned. Domestic servants and entertainers did not always have to be domestic servants or entertainers. They could change their status by becoming journeymen, merchants, or farmers, and from there they could go on to the upper classes if they exerted themselves. Even the prostitute house operators could change their status in a couple of generations if they really wanted to, not to say that the change was easy, nor that it was a matter of course. It was possible, however, and can be verified by numerous historical cases.
A basic point in regard to social classes in China is that social classes have always been in existence but they have been social structures into which different people came and from which many people left. There has been, for example, always the shìdàfū social structure in the Chinese society, but who would be able to know how many kinds and how great a number of families have entered into it and how many families have had to leave it? The shìdàfū seats have not always been occupied by the same group of people or their offspring. To make an analogy, there have always been the White House and the Congress in the history of the United States. But the people in these two institutions have come from many different social origins. They all could stay there for only a certain period and then had to leave.
The Chinese farming and handicraft manufacturing were all institutionalized ways of life. They were not merely means of making a living. People who happened to be in either of these livelihoods belonged to a special social pattern, or a social structure. None of these patterns was absolutely binding. People who happened to belong to one pattern were not legally or socially bound to it. At least, they were not strictly bound to it. Anyone could change his way of life if he really wanted to. Who knows just how many farm families have left their fields to become members of the gentry class or holders of other occupations? And who knows how many members of the gentry class have returned to the cultivation of land? It was a widely accepted ideal that a family should have farming as its basic livelihood but take up study and the preparation for government offices in addition as a way of social advancement. Many parents actually gave their children such teachings and tried to build up such families.
Traditionally, there are five ways of classifying people in a Chinese society.
One way is to classify people into jūnzi 君子, or morally superior people, and xiǎorén 小人, or morally low people. Here the meaning of “moral” is broad. It includes not only good behavior but also wisdom, leadership, learning and the cultivation of etiquette. A xiǎorén means one who does not possess these qualities. This distinction of jūnzi and xiǎorén is clearly indicated in Confucius’ assumption that there are five kinds of people. This classification has a threefold meaning: moral, social, and political. Moral, because it has been applied in the teaching that everyone ought to endeavor to cultivate the virtues of wisdom, leadership, learning, and good conduct. Only a person so cultivated can become a jūnzi. Those who have such cultivation, or those who are considered as jūnzi, will enjoy social prestige and have high social standing. Since jūnzi are people who have wisdom, leadership, learning, and morals, they ought to be chosen or to be supported as a society’s or a nation’s rulers. According to the Confucian ideology, jūnzi should be the model of everyone who has the duty of ministering to the people. A king, a minister, or a magistrate ought himself to be a jūnzi. He ought to make it a rule that only people of the jūnzi type will be elected or selected to fill the public offices. One who wants to be holder of a public office must first make himself a jūnzi.
Later, however, the original meaning of jūnzi changed, or was considerably corrupted. Some people were called jūnzi simply because they were the rulers of a nation, regardless of whether or not they possessed those characteristics that make a person jūnzi. Since they were to be called jūnzi anyway, it was no longer prerequisite that they have the jūnzi characteristics. The idea of xiǎorén changed, too. It was no longer limited to persons who did not have moral conceptions, who did not select good people on whom to model their life and who would not exert themselves in making right decisions. All those who were not leaders or rulers were xiǎorén. In the diviated sense, xiǎorén means a little man, a lowly man, or a common person, even if this person has good character and leads a righteous life. Although common people have never been openly called xiǎorén, this status is nevertheless the implication.
The second social classification is based on the conceptions of guì 贵 and jiàn 贱, or worthy people and unworthy people. Here the word “worthy” implies no good character or moral and social achievements. It denotes only the occupation of political position. People who have political offices and those who are qualified for political candidates are guìrén 贵人, worthy people. Those who do not belong to the ruling class are jiàn, worthless. Again these concepts are deviations from the original moral ideas. The original moral ideas meant that people whose conduct can be a good example in inducing other people to behave likewise and whose achievements are useful to the society are considered worthy or indispensable. On the other hand, those who do not have such merits are considered worthless for they can contribute nothing of value to the society, and thus they are expendable persons. People with good conduct and valuable achievements ought to be rulers governing the nation. The conclusion is that, people who govern must be worthy people and people who cannot govern must be worthless. Later whoever was in the ruling position was guì, and whoever was being ruled was jiàn.
A third way of establishing social classes is to classify people into rich and poor. This kind of classification has been in existence ever since the institution of private property came into being. Needless to say that most, if not all, people like to be rich and loathe being poor, and that rich people are esteemed and poor fellows are looked down upon. Notwithstanding all the complaints made by the justice-minded Confucian scholars and all the discouragements advanced by the care-free Daoists about the undesirability of dividing people on the basis of wealth, the differences and classes between rich and poor grow sharper and sharper as time passes. The traditional ethics, however, teach that wealth is not necessary wrong but that getting rich through unrighteous ways must be condemned. The traditional attitude is especially critical toward those who have be-come rich by means of political offices or political privileges. Wealth resulting from immoral conduct is disgraceful to everyone. Nobody wants to be poor. But just being poor is not a shame provided that the person has done his best and is honest and contented with his condition.
According to tradition, young people are, however, taught and encouraged to exert themselves so that they will not remain or become poor. On the other hand, it is a common idea that people should not become rich after they entered officialdom. Officials are praised for their good achievements, they are also praised if they have not become rich while in office. A pleasant comment for an official and his relatives is that: “He was in government office for many years, but when he retired he had almost nothing except two sleeves of clean air.” or “He was very honest and clean during all the time when he was governor of Hunan. “ The traditional attitude not only recognizes that the existence of rich and poor classes is a matter of course; parents also implicitly use this distinction as subject matters in family teachings. The contrast between a rich family and a poor one is often taken up by parents as an instance to illustrate success or failure. No parents ever thought, or at least ever really believed that all people should be or could be equally rich or poor. It is true, as has been pointed out previously, that the traditional attitude condemns economic injustices or exploitation. It wishes that no one be in need of food, clothing, and shelter. But it is also true that it never had the concept of economic equality which forms the basic ideology of modern socialism and communism.
The fourth kind of social classification is the distinction between the educated people and the illiterates. Until very recently education in China was limited to a relatively small group of people. These people formed the educated class. All who did not have education belonged to the illiterate mass. It was not that the educated group had any legal or traditional right to monopolize education, or that the great mass of people were legally or otherwise excluded from the institutions of learning. The fact was that due to the kind of economy China used to have (an economy of not yet modernized agriculture, handicraft and town-country trades), a great mass of the people did not have the need or the incentive for getting education, especially the old fashioned types of education. There is no doubt that some people did not have education because they economically or otherwise could not afford it, not because they did not want to have it.
Educational distinctions have not just been limited to the difference between being educated and being completely illiterate. There was also the distinction between people who have an academic degree and those who have not. All the educated people had gone to school and studied the Confucian classics. But some of them had participated in the imperial examinations and got degrees while the others had either not taken part in the examinations or failed to pass any. Those who had the degrees formed the gentry class and assumed a superior attitude toward the ones who did not have any. The latter were called by the former báidīng 白丁, persons who do not have a “color” (a degree). A báidīng was not an illiterate, but a student without the minimum academic success.
Because formerly learning was closely connected to the becoming of jūnzi, of worthy men, of statesmen, and later of the shìdàfū, or ruling class, the educational distinction was considerably valued by families which had the ambition of training their children to be members of the superior class. People as a whole did not have the idea of extending education to everybody, but many had done their best to get their children get the best education so that their children could become the highest of the shìdàfū, or at least be distinguished from the great masses. Therefore, social distinctions based on the degrees of education have been held very desirable.
[Fifth,] From the very early days, Chinese social thinkers have noticed the existence of a ruling class and a ruled. The former included the officials themselves, both active and retired, and their families. Such families were called by the common people, the officials’ families. Official families, as a class were both admired or envied, and despised by the ruled. Most people wished that they themselves were officials and that their families were officials’ families. But at the same time there were many stories, folklore telling of the ordeals and dangers of being an official in this world and of the sad retribution suffered in the other worlds by the souls of bad officials. The stories told that not only the souls of the bad officials will suffer, but those of the good ones who mistakenly wronged people will also be punished by the cold justice which is the rule of the god of hell. Such stories are no doubt superstitious and fabricated, but they all served one purpose. That purpose was to warn the officials and their relatives not to exploit or wrong the humble people by their political power and not to exalt themselves too high and then look down upon the common people. It is true that bad officials and bad conduct of the official class were not effectively checked by such warnings, but there were officials who did take the warnings seriously and use them to teach their children and kinsfolk The letters which Zēng Guófān 曾国藩 wrote to his family members are filled with this kind of warning.
The stories had also effects on the common people. They were made to believe that to be an official or to have the job of ruling others was not necessarily a good thing . An official had glories and privileges, but he also was in danger of being severely punished — imprisoned, exiled, or executed. To many people, being members of an official family was something to be proud of. But when the official got into trouble, his family members and relatives would all suffer for his sake. In view of such dangers and the frightful possibilities, many people, including sophisticated gentry, concluded that they would rather have a humble but peaceful life than be an official. This attitude was widely shared by people of all social levels. The stories also made people more tolerant toward bad officials and their arrogant relatives, for they believed that bad officials and arrogant relatives would eventually suffer retribution for their behavior. If they did not suffer in this world, they would in the next; if they themselves did not suffer, their offspring would. Such attitudes and beliefs in turn helped to strengthen the wúwéi 无为 (nonaction) political philosophy, for it was believed that the less an official did the fewer would be the possibilities of making mistakes and wronging the people. On the side of the common people, such attitudes and beliefs must have diminished the number of revolutions, rebellions, and uprisings. It is a well-known fact that the Chinese as a whole are a people of greatest political tolerance.
In concluding, it is to be pointed out that the Chinese have traditionally thought that the existence of social classes is not only a matter of course but also a matter of necessity. That all the great Confucian thinkers have advocated social distinctions is a fact that hardly needs any expounding. The shìdàfū, educated people, intellectual leaders, and tradition protectors all believed that a society must have organization and that as long as there is social organization there must be social classes. It is obvious that in any organized society there must be people who are leaders and people who are followers. There must be different tasks to be undertaken. Some jobs are more important and have more esteem than others. That the people who undertake such jobs enjoy more and higher rewards than those of the people who can only undertake other jobs is social distinction. Then they also believed that men are born with different degrees of intelligence, different degrees of capacity, and different degrees of physical strength. People with higher degrees of intelligence, capacity and physical strength will by and large occupy social positions higher than those of the people who have only low degrees of these inborn characteristics. Revolutionaries may be able to have the established social differences suppressed or turned around, but the suppression or the change can last only a short time. Soon the same old pattern will reappear. Therefore, social distinctions and social classes may be undesirable from a socialist’s point of view, but nevertheless they are human affairs of which man cannot rid himself.
A familiar traditional social classification is the one that consists of the four categories:
This was chiefly a social arrangement according to the occupation in which each group is engaged. It was also based on Mencius’ (Mèngzǐ <<>>) conception of social distinction. Actually, however, the division was far from being clear-cut, or, in other words, there was a lot of mutual crossing and overlapping. At any rate, there were merely theoretical social classes. In practice the distinctions were far from being rigid.
In the first place, shì is not an occupation, and so it does not exactly represent a group of people who are in the same type of profession as are the farmers, the artisans, and the merchants. A shì may or may not work. He may or may not have a career. The shì who did work and have a career were usually either in teaching or in government service. The life of such a shì could generally be divided into two or three periods. In the first period he was a student or a candidate for shì. He devoted all his time to studying the classics and to practicing writing poems and essays. In other words, he concentrated on the preparation for the imperial examinations, This might take twenty or thirty years. After he passed one or more of the examinations and received one or more of the academic degrees or titles, he became a shì and entered his second period of life. In this period he could either be a teacher or be an official.
According to a statistical study (CHANG Chung-li; The Chinese Gentry, University of Washington Press, 1955), a comparatively small number of the graduates of the imperial examinations ever had the chance to become an official, for the number of government offices in imperial China was very limited. So, the graduates’ better chance was to get a teaching position in a school, or a wealthy home, if he was an eminent scholar, in a shūyuàn, a private institute of learning. If he liked the teaching and did not have the ambition of looking for a government position, he would probably remain in the job and keep it as a life career.
If a certain shì did have the luck to become an official and was able to keep at it, then his work or career would be one of the government service. Probably this career would carry him to the late part of his life. After twenty or thirty years he would then retire from the public service and enter his third period of life. The life of a retired official in traditional China was in most cases leisure and enjoyment, no more work. Teaching and government service are occupations. Therefore, for those who are engaged in such occupations, shì, can be defined as an occupational group.
But a majority of the traditional shì people were neither officials nor teachers. Many even did not have a job which could be legitimately called an occupation or a career. Others, having to make a living and support a family, took up farming or became clerks in business firms owned and operated by their own families or relatives. After they entered these kinds of life, or went into business directly related to the promotion of literature, the shì status gradually dropped and they became members of the respective occupations they entered. Those who did not have to have any kind of regular work were supported by their families or by inherited properties, or by means they received from people as a reward or as a commission for occasional services performed. Some of these people were good leaders in their own communities but others were just “parasites” of their family or clan.
In conclusion, one may say that the former shì group as a whole were people of no regular occupations. Confucius himself was once ridiculed by some of his contemporaries as a man of the kind who “do not use their four limbs and cannot distinguish the five grains.” The traditional shì in general were followers of Confucius. They not only studied his teachings but also took his example of not dealing with the material world and not having any occupation in which their four limbs could be used. Therefore, the shì as a group can hardly be identified as an occupation.
In the second place, while the farmers, the artisans, and the merchants are three different occupational or vocational groups, the demarcation between them is also not at all clear-cut, except for those in the cities. In the villages and market towns, a general phenomenon is that farming and handicraft manufacturing are simultaneously undertaken by members of the same family. In other words, many rural families have the farm business as an essential livelihood, but use handicraft manufacturing as a supplementary enterprise. The purpose is to utilize the surplus labor in the agriculturally slack seasons for the increase of the family income. In such cases it would be hard to separate a farm family from a handicraft manufacturing family.
In cities there is no farming. But handicraft manufacturing is linked with the business of buying and selling. Almost all the carpentry shops, blacksmith shops, and other manufacturing shops not only make their wares but also sell them. They sell their products in wholesale as well as in retail. Each shop maintains a front room or counter as a retail store. If the demand is large and their own products cannot meet it, they may order supplies from bigger producers in other towns. Thus, they become strong competitors of the retail business. An artisan family in the city may therefore at various times become a family of merchants. Under this condition, the difference between an artisan family and a merchant family is very insignificant. There are professional merchants, but there are few handicraft manufacturings which are completely out of the buying and selling business.
In the countryside the traditional economic structure is more mixed, for the farmer and his family not only make one or two kinds of the craft goods for their own use, but also take the surplus products to the regular markets or to the seasonal fairs for sale. The sale may be wholesale or retail. They are not merchants, but they do a part of the merchants’ business.
Primarily, the shì-nóng-gōng-shāng was a system of occupational division. But that it was also to a great extent, a series of social classes is indicated in the fact that the arrangement, according to general understanding, was hierarchical rather than horizontal. The traditional attitude was that shì was the highest category of people in the society. Nóng was lower than shì, and gōng was lower than nóng. At the bottom was shāng. Why this order? It is not hard to understand. As Mencius and Xúnzǐ point out, people must have a society or a nation in order to have a peaceful, stable, and community life. A society or a nation must be organized and ruled or it will be just a mob or a crowd. A mob or a crowd cannot give people any long lasting, peaceful, and stable community life. Then what are the basic and important factors in the organization of a society? Theyare the establishment of leadership, the laying down of orders, the maintaining of interrelations and cooperation, and, above all, the setting up and operation of a government. These are all tremendous tasks. Undertaking these tasks requires wisdom, knowledge, experience, intelligence, moral character, and in some cases physical strength. Only people who have these qualities can assume the responsibilities of organizing a society. Whoever are designated to such responsibilities must be essential and important people because the tasks they undertake are essential and important. Essential and important people always command respect of the common people, and they are put on top of the society. In traditional China it was the shì class of people who were capable of leading the social organization and governing the organized society. Therefore, they had been on top of the social classes.
The shì class of people did not always have the respect of people of the other three classes, nor were they always elected into the government offices by the common people. Oftentimes, the shì people were put in high positions by the despotic power of the emperor or by cunningness of their own against the people’s will. Such cases, however, had all been eventually put under a severe test. The test was that if the scholars really had the. qualifications for governing, they would continue to hold the high offices regardless of the way they had been brought into them. They would eventually win the people’s respect, or they would sooner or later be dropped from the offices and lose the shì status. There have been numerous periods in Chinese history in which the shì as a class became morally and politically weak and had therefore almost lost their position as the people’s leaders.
In other periods, however, they were strong. They exerted strong and healthy leadership in restoring the people’s moral strength and social morals. They cast strong influences upon the emperor himself and his court. A traditional motto for the shì goes like this: “The shì’s duties are to set straight the social morals and to lift up the people’s morale. When such duties are fulfilled or are being fulfilled, the shì will have the people’s respect and be safe on the top position. “
Confucius and his great disciples were founders of the shì class. Their conceptions about the shì are, (1) first, shì is a person who knows the principles or the Way, who sets up the norm of conduct and keeps it and persuades others to keep it too, who feels the obligation of teaching other people to see the Way, who tries to influence people of power to act according to the principles or the Way in governing the state, and who are glad to participate in the government if and when opportunity is available. (2) Second, a shì is a person whose inborn capacity and whose afterward learning and training are greater or higher than those of an ordinary person for otherwise he would not be able to fit himself to the tasks mentioned above. (3) Third, a shì should devote all his time, mind, and energy to the study of the early sage’s thinking and conduct recorded in the classics, to searching for the principles and the Way, and to teaching the people and influencing the government. Therefore, a shì has no time to spare for dealing with the material world and for this reason other people should provide for him all the material things he needs. (4) And, fourth, such a person need not hesitate to put himself in the leading position, or if other people wish to do so, he should feel obliged to accept the leadership.
All these conceptions were eagerly accepted by Mèngzi 孟子 (Mencius), Xúnzǐ 荀子, Dǒng Zhòngshū 董仲舒, Hán Yù 韩愈, Zhū Xī 朱熹, Wáng Yángmíng 王阳明, Zēng Guófān 曾国藩, and all other leading Confucian scholars. Eventually, they developed into an institutionalized social pattern called the shì tradition. With political authority’s sanction and with the people’s recognition, the tradition became stabilized and in many aspects legalized. Thus we have the exalted shì class. Lest this description of the founding and the emphases of the shì institution be accused of being too idealistic, some of the serious deviations of the tradition must be mentioned. One serious deviation was that the gate of the institution became too wide and the standard of measuring a shì’s qualifications too low. Consequently, many people who had only studied some of the classics and passed a few of the imperial examinations but had no understanding and appreciation of the shì principles or virtues were also admitted to the class. No doubt such people had done a great deal of damage to the reputation of the shì, A second great deviation was that after Tang and Sung the goals that a shì spent most of his time and mind to achieve were success in the imperial examinations and a position in the government office. It is said that in the imperial time study was to many a student the road leading to gold and women. For once a student passed the examinations and acquired the degrees he had the hope of becoming an official. After becoming an official he then had chance to make money and to marry beautiful ladies. This was the situation in the shì class in almost every period of decadence.
So much for the shì. As about the nóng there is not so much to be discussed, except that there is the question as to why they are listed the second instead of the third or the fourth in the order. Three reasons are presented here for speculation.
First, from very early time China has been an agricultural country. The people, including the rulers, had to depend for their living chiefly upon the cultivation of land. Therefore, next to shì, the land cultivators, or the food producers, should be the most important people. When Mencius says, “It is the mín 民 (people) who are valuable,” he must have meant that it is the farm people who produce the things on which we live and, therefore, it is they who are the most important people. Mín, at the time of Mencius, were the commoners, The shì or the aristocracy class, were not included.
Second, China has had a long tradition of looking down upon the gōng and shāng people. This is natural. For a nation that believes that it is the farmers who hold the life resources of its people, the artisans and merchants must be considered less important or next to the farmers. Before Qín 秦 and Hàn 汉 dynasties this distinction was by no means significant. The merchants’ and the artisans’ economic functions were taken into consideration and the successful ones enjoyed attention and even admiration of the rulers and shì. When Shāng Yāng 商鞅 became premier of the State of Qín 秦 and put his “agriculture-first” policy into practice, merchants and artisans suffered repercussion. They were pushed down to the bottom of the social and economic ladders. Henceforth, they have never until the beginning of the present century been able to make any advance in the social hierarchy, in spite of the fact that successful business men played very important roles in the economic world at various times. Numerous instances in the Sòng period [period 15, 960-1279] show how the shìdàfū people looked down upon the merchants and artisans and refused to have social relations with them. To introduce himself Yáng Jīnshào 杨金绍 submitted a letter to a high official named Máo Xiàn 毛宪. In this letter Yáng wrote “I am a humble man. But for many generations my family has been endeavoring in the career of study. So my name is not to be found in the census records of the farmers, artisans, and merchants.” In Lú Yòu’s 卢佑 essay about the yìzhuāng 义庄 [Note 1] of a prominent jiàn family are these words:
The ancestors’ idea was to love their offspring through providing for them the needed food and clothes and enabling them to bury and wed at the right time. Besides, they also hoped that their children will not have to slip down to join the artisans and merchants, or to be yamen (yámén 衙门) servants, or to follow the monks and Daoists.
[Note. An yìzhuāng 义庄 is a farmstead belonging to a kinship group and leased out so that the rental income can be used for the needy of the group. —DKJ ]
A third possible reason for having the farmers second to the shì would be that most of. the shì people were in one way or another related to the farmers. The term “farming” has oftentimes been very broadly interpreted. One who actually cultivated his land, either owned or rented, was of course considered engaged in farming, the family which lived on the farm or the production of the farm was also considered a family of farmers even though its members might not actually work in the fields. As has been mentioned previously, a traditional attitude toward the family is that one which has members engaged both in farming and in study is an ideal family.
The families of Fàn Zhòngyān 范仲淹 (989-1052), Zhèng Bǎnqiáo 郑板桥 (1693-1766) and Zēng Guófān 曾国藩 (1811-1872) were exactly such families. Every one of them had taught their kinsfolk to emphasize farming and to have respect for the farming people. The general fact is that most of the shì people came from farms and later either they themselves or their offspring would return to farming. While they were of the shì group they still maintained close relations with the farm kinsmen. Thus, there should be no wonder why nóng was considered of next importance in the social order.
This arrangement has changed considerably since the beginning of the present [20th] century. Under the Republic the shì, now called intelligentsia, still by and large occupied society’s top position, because the highly educated people still had more opportunities to go into the government services and to become leaders on either district level or national level and thus they were highly regarded by the people at large. Drastic changes have, however, occurred in the lower parts of the social ladder, that is, the order between the nóng (farmers) and the gōng (artisans) and shāng (merchants) has changed.
Briefly, the change was that now the gōng and shāng were in a position much higher than that of the nóng. The farmers were the down-trodden, living at the miserable bottom and being abused by all the other people. The modern gōng and shāng people were hailed as builders of a new China. At meetings and social gatherings the successful gōng and shāng leaders dressed in expensive suits were offered seats equal to, if not higher than, those offered to the officials and intellectual people. Because of their power of finance, the gōng and shāng people enjoyed the most lavish flattering from those who were looking for financial help. Under such circumstances, businessmen were seated on top of all other social groups. To be impartial, the modern gōng and shāng people, at least the successful ones, had a right to be regarded respectfully. They were highly educated people, and they had the cultural training of intellectuals. In addition to these, they had finance, technology, and business. All these were urgently needed in improving the people’s living conditions and in building up a new nation.
Actually, traditional Chinese society had a dichotomy as its basic structure. One half of the dichotomy included the patrician families with great influence and prestige and the gentry-bureaucracy. The other half was filled with the great masses of commoners — the farm people and the artisans. In addition to this dichotomy there were the special groups, such as the imperial house and the nobility, the merchants, the mean people, and the slaves. Cutting across the class barriers were numerous institutions, organizations, professional associations, secret societies, and religions groups. The composition and characteristics of these various segments are subjects of consideration in the following chapters.
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