Ten Essays on Tradition

Ten Essays on Tradition is an interim result of historian Qin Hui's research on "traditional society" (Chinese society before modern times), consisting of ten long essays and related discussions. The author is dissatisfied with the "rent-tenancy myth" and the "clan myth"—two long-popular explanations: one that sees traditional China as a bipolar opposition between landlords and tenant farmers, and the other that sees the countryside as governed by clan autonomy, with imperial power stopping at the county level. The book uses a method in which social-economic analysis and intellectual-cultural analysis are integrated, re-examining the rules that actually governed traditional times. In "Rural Grassroots Control in the Traditional Chinese Empire: Rural Organizations Between the Han and Tang Dynasties," the author draws on materials such as the Zoumalou Wu slips to argue that between the Han and Tang there was a highly "de-clanized" state of registered commoner households at the grassroots level; "The 'Great Community Standard' and Traditional Chinese Society" proposes that post-Qin China was a society based on the state as a "great community" that suppressed small communities, unlike the European path in which clans, guilds, and other small communities served as intermediaries; "The Strange Cycle in Chinese Economic History: 'Suppressing Land Annexation' and 'Not Suppressing Land Annexation'" analyzes the cycle in which land policy swung back and forth between two poles; "From Traditional Folk Public Welfare Organizations to the Modern 'Third Sector'" compares the history of public welfare in China and the West; "The Convergence of Western and Confucian Thought: Deconstructing the 'Complementarity of Law and Dao'" and "In Poverty, Benefit the World; In Success, Cultivate Oneself" discuss cultural-symbolic systems and personality resources; there are also a review of Frank's ReOrient, a reconsideration of agricultural collectivization, the evolution of Marxist peasant theory, and an examination of the shifting referents of the Chinese word for "equality." The 2019 expanded edition from Shanxi People's Publishing House adds a preface to the expanded edition and two appendices ("A Discussion of 'The Convergence of Western and Confucian Thought: Deconstructing the Complementarity of Law and Dao'" and "The Swiss Road") to the old edition, and corrects a number of errors. The book has a strong sense of problematic and is regarded as a systematic challenge to existing interpretive paradigms of traditional society.