领域：学术论文 · 人文科学

Another set of unresolved problems of interpretation concerns the traditional society – its social structure, the administrative institutions and ideology of its government and its economic growth. One widely held assumption is that this traditional society had created such an effective and balanced structure of ideas and practices that an innovative response to Western contact was difficult. In this view China’s ‘maturity’ was evidenced in her stability, her capacity to maintain a steady state almost like the homeostasis of physiology. To put it another way, the accumulation of vested interests was so great as to inhibit change. The result was a tremendous inertia or persistence in established ways, a tendency to change only within tradition. This notion of China’s inertial momentum and non-responsiveness is supported also by the concept of the autonomy of culture – that Chinese ways were different, mutually reinforcing, and therefore resistant to outside stimuli.

Broad conceptions of this sort may of course merely substitute for thought. No doubt they display the degree of our present ignorance. Yet if history is to give understanding to non-historians, it must use general ideas. The essential prerequisite for generalizing is a factual picture of the Chinese state and society, including its general conditions and institutional practices, about 1800. At this time China’s population was over 300 million, almost double that of Europe including Russia, and it is safe to say that her home market and domestic trade were also far greater than those of Europe.

The inertial momentum of China's social order was evident in the early nineteenth century at every level – among the common people in the peasant villages and market towns, among the dominant big families of the local elite or ‘gentry’, in the layers of imperial administration rising from the local magistracies all the way up to the court at Peking, and in the monarchy at the top of the human scene. This Chinese world (t'ien-hsia, ‘all under heaven’) was considered to be, and to a large extent was, remarkably unified, homogeneous and long-lasting.

The unity of the empire had been the first great achievement of Chinese civilization and it remained a major concern, for unity meant peace. And yet the mere size and diversity of the empire often made for disunity. The eighteen provinces were divided by nature into a number of discrete and clearly marked regions, each comparatively self-sufficient. The central Taiyuan plain and Fen river valley of Shansi province, for example, were bounded on two sides by mountains and on two sides by the Yellow River. The great irrigated basin of Szechwan was ringed by mountains and communicated with the rest of China mainly through the Yangtze gorges. Yunnan province in the south-west was a plateau not in easy touch with the rest of the country. The great rice baskets of the Canton delta, the Yangtze delta, and Hunan and Hupei provinces each provided a base for local power. South Manchuria, as foreigners have called it in the twentieth century, or in Chinese terms of 1800 Liao-tung, was another power base where the Ch’ing dynasty of the Manchus had built up its strength before taking over south China with the Wall in 1644.

Moreover, China stretched so far from north to south that the climatic difference created contrasting ways of life in the two regions. In the south and south-east, the heavy monsoon rainfall in summer facilitated double-cropping of rice. In contrast, the sparseness and unpredictability of rainfall on the north-western Great Wall frontier left people there constantly in danger of famine. The dry farmers in the north could live in houses of tamped earth walls or simple sun-baked brick with thatched roofs, while the wet farmers of the south had to use kiln-baked brick and tile roofs. They also wore straw sandals or clogs instead of cloth shoes, and broad plaited hats against rain and sun rather than the fur-covered caps of the north with ear flaps against winter cold. Much transport in the south was on waterways or, alternatively, on stone-paved paths not adequate for wheeled vehicles. Carrying poles, barrows and donkeys were universal, but the typical north China transport was by two-wheeled cart along dusty roads, frequently sunk several feet down into the loess soil scoured out by the wind. Most striking was the scenic contrast between the broad north China plain, dotted by walled villages that could defend themselves against cavalry raiders, and the typical hill country of south China where cavalry were useless and farmsteads might be more widely scattered in smaller units amid a lush cover of trees and vegetation. Since irrigated rice culture was far more productive than dry cereal farming, south China had a higher per capita food supply and more landlordism and tenancy among farmers.

The gradual spread of Chinese civilization, with its characteristic features of intensive agriculture, tightly-organized family life, and bureaucratic administration, had given an underlying homogeneity to the whole country north and south, east and west. Perhaps this homogeneity was greater in the minds of the ruling elite than a sociologist would have found it to be in fact. Nevertheless, it was generally assumed. Like political unity, cultural homogeneity was one of China’s great social myths, demonstrating the universality of the Confucian way of life. Consequently, regional differences and the forms of localism have not yet been much studied, for it had always been and still is the fashion to discuss the vast land of China as a unit.


The sense of unity and homogeneity had been fostered by the extraordinary continuity of the Chinese way of life, which came down undisrupted from neolithic times before the dawn of history. Hoe agriculture by family groups in settled villages had emerged by the fifth millennium BC in the Wei valley near the great bend of the Yellow River (as at the site of Pan-p’o outside Sian). Despite occasional invasions of warrior-rulers, Chinese village life had evolved steadily from that time with a continuity seemingly unbroken by sudden changes, either social or technological. The maintenance of peace and order among the village communities had been the special concern of China’s equally ancient ruling class. Under successive dynasties it had gradually created complex institutions of bureaucratic government. Until after 1800 the agrarian-bureaucratic empire of China thus preserved a social order more ancient than, and very different from, the commercial-military society of Europe.

The individual’s prowess and aggressiveness, including his use of violence, had not been fostered in China’s agrarian communities as much as in the seafaring, warfare, exploration and overseas emigration of the Europeans.

By 1800 we may assume that the ordinary peasants, who formed at least four-fifths of the population, were cultured individuals in the sense that they were well-schooled in the bonds of kinship, the duties of status, and the forms of politeness and social deportment, but generally illiterate or only semi-literate. Consequently their lives were less devoted to Confucian rationalism than to the lore, superstitions and Taoist-Buddhist religious observances of the folk culture. As farmers, most of them lived close to nature. They were accustomed to nature’s beauties but also suffered from epidemic diseases, for example, the prevalence of eye and skin ailments and intestinal parasites. As commoners, they were well aware of the ruling elite and its prerogatives, but they saw little of it directly and were chiefly absorbed in their own village-and-market-centre community.

The usual village, perhaps one hundred households, was below the market level and not self-sufficient. Its real community centred on the market town, which was, of course, within walking distance not more than two or three miles away, so that a family member might go there and return on a periodic market day. The schedule of markets in one town, say on the third, sixth and eighth days of the ten-day cycle, would be integrated with the schedules of the adjacent towns, which might have their markets on the second, fourth, seventh and ninth days, or the third, fifth, eighth and tenth days of the cycle. In this way itinerant pedlars and merchants who operated out of a still larger market centre, could make the rounds of the market towns in its region. The lowest level or standard market town was usually surrounded by a dozen or eighteen villages, totalling perhaps fifteen hundred households or seven thousand people. From one of these village households an able-bodied male through the years might visit the market town a thousand times, and thus in its tea houses, its local temple or its occasional fairs and holiday celebrations have an opportunity to meet a large proportion of his market community.

The basis of this community was not only economic – to exchange surplus farm or handicraft products so as to secure paper, iron implements, ceramic-ware or other imports – but also social. Since many villages were dominated by one kinship group, the rule of exogamous marriage led families to seek brides in other villages, usually through market town matchmakers. A secret society lodge, if present, would normally be centred in the market town, and there also the peasant would meet any local members of the ruling class or representatives of officialdom.

In this peasant society, the individual depended upon his own kinship group for his livelihood and for the security provided in modern societies through insurance, as well as for education, recreation and major social contact. From infancy he was trained to observe the proper familial relationships, especially filial piety. The three bonds (san-kang) of the classical teaching were authoritarian, enjoining obedience to parents, subordination of wives to husbands, and loyalty of subject to ruler. But the hierarchy of status within the nuclear family was only part of the kinship network that extended out into the common descent group or lineage with which most families were connected.

翻译考点：
考点1：assumption 应译为 认定，主张，看法。不应译为“假设”
考点2：inertia or persistence 应译为“惯性，或称为持久性”
考点3：resistant应译为抗拒或对……有抵抗力，不应译为“抵制”或“抵御”
考点4：substitute for thought推荐译为“替代深入思考”
考点5：market town应译为“市镇”
考点6：the eighteen provinces were divided by nature…… 应译为十八省因自然地理条件被分割为
考点7: and Hunan and Hubei provinces 应译为湖广，因为两地在此处连在一起表述
考点8：power base 应译为政权或势力的根据地
考点9：taking over south of the Wall 应译为占领了长城以南的地区
考点10：intensive agriculture在历史学里应翻译为精耕农业，而不是集约化农业
考点11: Confucian way of life应译为“儒家之道”“儒家的典型特征”等，不应直译为“生活方式”
考点12：hoe agriculture应意译为耕种农业
考点13：village-and-market-centre community应译为以村和市镇为中心的社区
考点14：insurance 应译为生活保障，指现代社会提供的生活保障，并非保险