Dynamics of popular contentions in mid-Qing China.

摘要

In the last three decades, a spate of research brought to light the dynamics of popular contentions in early modern Europe. These studies suggest that surges of commerce and centralized state power led to a transition of popular contentions from reactive to proactive claims, and from violent to non-violent repertories. This literature assumes that the Western path of development of contention is unique, and non-Western paths of development following the "impact of the West" and the disintegration of the premodern "oriental despotic" system are simply repetitions of the Western experience. This research is an attempt to examine the patterns of popular contentious in late imperial China (c. 1600--1900), with a focus on c. 1740--1840, a period when China's political economy was characterized by a commercialized economy, centralized state, and looming ecological crisis. Based on a catalog of contentious events derived from archival sources, I find that the changes in the patterns and dynamics of different types of contention (including political protest, class conflict, heterodox revolt and organized predatory activities) are functions of the particular trajectories of commercialization, state formation, and ecological degradation in mid-Qing China. They are comparable with but also distinctive from the patterns and dynamics of contention in contemporaneous Europe. In sum, political protest changed from predominantly proactive, peaceful actions in the early eighteenth century to reactive violence in the early nineteenth century. Class conflict changed from predominantly intra-communal conflicts between haves and have-nots in the early eighteenth century to actions that protect local communities' rights to subsistence against profit-making activities of the merchants in the early nineteenth century. Heterodox revolts and organized predatory activities were kept at bay by the strong imperial state, but were never rooted out in the eighteenth century. I argue that the modern revolutionary movement in twentieth-century China was a continuation and convergence of the traditions of political protest, heterodox revolts, and predatory activities in the mid-Qing period. This study shows that "modernization" of contentious politics in non-Western civilizations is rarely a simple repetition of the Western way, but is rather a complex hybridization of the Western influences and indigenous tracks of development.