英文摘要
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Based on a longtime study of primary sources and fieldwork in the Lower Yangzi Delta, the author discusses the longstanding problem regarding the characteristics of Chinese society from the perspective of state-society relations. In what is also a review of his own scholarship, the author points out that the Lower Yangzi Delta is a region where water resources were abundant and flooding or droughts rarely became a problem. Under these circumstances, there was no “hydraulic community,” and even a “village community” did not exist. From the ninth to the early seventeenth century, the development of dike systems varied in different sub-regions. It was nonetheless true that there was no self-organizing mechanism for cooperation or collaboration between landlords and tenants, or among peasants whose fields were located within the same area surrounded by dikes. Consequently, state intervention was needed to build a system able to solve hydraulic problems that the local population had no efficient means to handle. This is the core reason behind the three major hydraulic reforms – in the early fifteenth, late fifteenth, and late sixteenth century respectively – which took place in this region. The challenge of the late fifteenth century arose from conflicts between sub-regions that varied in regard to their development. In sub-regions where the dike system had been fully developed and the lowlands surrounded by the dikes had been equally cultivated, levying corvée service according to the area of owned land was a fair measure. However, in relatively under-developed sub-regions, where the lowlands were not equally cultivated, corvée service according to where the owned lands were located would have been considered an appropriate measure. In what was called the “field-frontage system,” landlords whose lands were adjacent to the dikes would shoulder a heavier responsibility. In other words, the late-fifteenth century reform was to solve the horizontal conflicts and antagonism. The result was a set of hydraulic rules, set up through the state’s intervention, the implementation of the “field frontage system,” and supplementing by corvée based on the area of owned land. By the late sixteenth century, it would have been natural to adopt the principle of corvée based on the area of owned land, since the lands in this region, in general, were equally cultivated. However, new challenges arose from the conflicting views held by gentry-landlords and by commoners and independent peasants regarding the exemption privilege that urban gentry-landlords enjoyed. This resurfacing of the hierarchical conflicts and antagonism was eventually solved again through the state’s intervention and carrying out of reform: levying corvée service according to the area of owned land, demanding landlords to pay their tenants for doing labor service for them, and putting restrictions on the exemption privilege. This article concludes with an elaboration of how the author's argument differs from Oyama Masaaki, who emphasized the independence of tenants in the late sixteenth and early seventh centuries. The author concludes that in China, without intermediate groups and associations, the intervention of the authoritarian state was the only means by which local consolidation could be achieved and through which local cooperation could take place.
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