This volume translates from Japanese to Chinese, and also extensively annotates, perhaps the most representative work (assembled writings from the later 1980s through the 1990s) of Kishimoto Mio (b. 1952), a prolific and renowned Japanese scholar of Ming–Qing socio-economic history.Footnote ¹ The translator, Wu Jingfang, who worked closely with Kishimoto in this endeavor, is herself a historian of society and medical treatment in the Ming–Qing era.

Wu’s introduction is helpful, first, in outlining Kishimoto’s career, especially the evolution of her approach to research. We learn that, beginning in the 1970s with a focus on silver circulation and its effects on commodity and land prices in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Kishimoto expanded in the 1980s to include the economic and political dynamics of late-imperial local societies, stimulated by the movement to study the histories of “regional societies” (diyu shehui 地域社會) initiated by Mori Masao 森正夫.Footnote ² Increasingly advocating that historians look “from below upward” (cong xia er shang 從下而上), Kishimoto came to address interrelations between stability and instability on the local/regional level and broader, countrywide developments, especially in late Ming and early Qing. Of key importance to her, as reflected in the title of this volume, has been discernment of constituent elements of “social order”—customs, morals, rituals, class identities, relations of production etcetera—and how those effected, or failed to effect, cooperation among disparate local interest groups under changing historical conditions.

Further, as this volume is more a collection of seven distinct studies than an integral monograph,Footnote ³ Wu’s introduction adds value by delineating themes and contributions that link certain parts. She points, for instance, to the way Kishimoto expands on scholarship’s approach to Jiangnan’s xiangshen 鄉紳 (“gentry”)—the locally resident, office-experienced or examination-certified stratum—by scrutinizing concretely the sources and means of their influence on local society; to her investigation (through a rich variety of materials) of how, under then-current modes of communication, people of different social stations in discrete places were moved to collective action by countrywide movements in moral philosophy (especially the thought of Wang Yangming 王陽明 [1472–1529]) and by news of far-flung political events (such as the fall of Beijing in 1644); and to her effective use of local denizens’ notebooks (biji 筆記) to discern how xiangshen responded to bewildering attempts by officials to uphold or reassert local authority during the tumult of the Ming–Qing transition.

Kishimoto’s substantial, original preface is important in three respects: it documents a salient aspect of Chinese studies—that is, historiography—in postwar Japan; it provides useful guidance for those interested in pursuing local history in premodern China; and its personal reflections on the interplay between prior assumptions and consciously or unconsciously adopted “-ologies” (especially methodologies), on one hand, and the often unexpected (even unwelcome) evidence of primary sources, on the other. Those personal reflections will edify historians of all orientations. From nearly two decades of pursuing research under an evolving “methodology of regional/local history” (diyu shehui lun 地域社會論), Kishimoto offers an insider’s critique. She calls out unclarities in basic concepts (such as “region” and “society”): scholars use conceptual terms as if they shared a common understanding of what they mean, yet they do not. And she acknowledges pressures to construct or confirm large national or transnational generalizations while always starting from the immediate experience and subjective consciousness of multifarious people in given times and societies. She defends against charges of subjectivity in her search, in people’s insecurities, for the fundamentals of social cohesion, and for the new relationships—the new order—that such insecurities might move people to form, in times of disruption and disintegration. And she asserts that historians must set aside judgmental questions of whether people’s everyday consciousness is “false” because it is imposed by power relationships. Rather, we should take a phenomenological approach, asking plainly, what did ordinary people, under certain historical conditions, intersubjectively perceive as regular or aberrant? She concludes by crediting such socio-biological concepts as self-organization, reflexivity, and autopoiesis with bolstering her curiosity about both the frailty and the self-regeneration of human societies. In these ways, reflecting at mid-career on her preoccupations and received influences since childhood, Kishimoto shows not only exceptional perceptivity as a historian but also admirable self-awareness as an intellectual.

Chapter 1 is key in laying out, using Songjiang Prefecture 松江府 as representative of Jiangnan, Kishimoto’s vision of an arc: from one configuration of local order in the mid-sixteenth century through dissolution to a different configuration of local order in the late seventeenth. She does this by tracing shifts in the social elements to which common people, with their anxieties and concerns, turned for protection, information, and problem-resolution under changing conditions, using sources that reflect local ambient viewpoints (yulun 輿論—not equated with Western-associated “public opinion”). She finds that in the mid-Ming (mid-fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries), local society was relatively stable under the leadership of tax-captain (liangzhang 糧長) households. But in the course of the sixteenth century, agrarian society came under pressures that induced people to move from the countryside and attach themselves to xiangshen households, who increasingly resided in towns and cities, and to serving local officials, who of course were also stationed in cities. As the effectuality of such relationships depended on the highly changeable bureaucratic status of the patrons, this configuration of order was less stable and the allegiances of the clients were more fluid than before, opening the way to a variety of social disturbances. Then, as the Qing conquest undercut the standing of Ming xiangshen and local officials, many common people “cast in” (tou 投) their lot with the only other elements capable of providing protection: local bully households and both civil and military officials who had gained and continued to exercise power by force. This resulted in a great deal of abuse on the local level, which continued until the Kangxi emperor’s clean-up campaigns of the 1680s. With the success of those campaigns, locals looked more often to higher-up Qing officials to assure a livable social order, and in this way, Kishimoto asserts, local allegiances became set on the “single pole” of imperial authority, thereby stabilizing the dynasty.

The subsequent chapters delve more deeply into various aspects of this basic vision. Chapter 2 focuses on the nature of xiangshen prestige and influence. Setting aside the binary question of whether the xiangshen derived their power from “above” (imperial state sanction) or from “below” (e.g., landowning, education) in favor of an approach focused on situational functionality, Kishimoto asks how different local groups with influence and power—yamen personnel, xiangshen, kinship groups, etc.—responded to different problems, under varying conditions, with the common aim of maintaining a reasonable level of order and livability. A key problem was the increasing burden of taxes and corvée that agrarian producers bore in the sixteenth century, and the attendant breakdown of the stable but inflexible lijia 里甲 system. Tremendous increases in state extractions of revenues from the countryside, in order to meet threats on the northern border, contributed significantly, Kishimoto finds, to the rapid expansion of commerce and cities. And cities, with their merchants and officials who handled the revenue flow, concentrated the goods of affluent living, thereby attracting the xiangshen. Another factor she emphasizes is the development in that period of a world economy driven by (mainly New World) silver. As the Ming state’s defense-need for silver vitiated its own policy to limit seaborne trade, the bullion influx both further stimulated commerce and destabilized social relations between erstwhile farmers and increasingly urban-dwelling power elites.

In Chapter 3 Kishimoto obviates another binary, here in the presumed relationship between the flourishing Wang Yangming moral philosophy and the growth in modes and degrees of popular dissent during the latter half of the Ming—that is, whether the relationship indicates a period of “relaxation” in continuing “feudal” control of society, or whether it constituted premodern China’s greatest extent of a relatively individualistic “early modern” (jindai 近代) zeitgeist. She cuts across this binary in two ways: (1) by looking at how Yangming-influenced figures wrote about individuals’ behaviors in relation to society, particularly during social disruptions (such as the “Kaidu 開讀 Incident” of 1626); and (2) by drawing analogies between modalities of popular self-organization and the Yangming tenet that “all things [are] one body” (wanwu yiti 萬物一體). She finds concurrence between Yangming thought and the writers’ validation of spontaneous, natural outbursts of “true feelings” on the part of classless crowds of “child-like” people. And in the binding threads of expanded kinship, fictive kinship, and blood-oath rituals she sees a general sense of society as an internally self-coordinated organism comprised of different parts—some more important than others but all of one body. This, she points out, fits neither the conception of “feudal” authoritarianism nor that of individualism. She sees Yangming thought not as a cause of late-Ming social instability but as a philosophy that met a certain moment in Chinese socio-economic history and both magnified that moment and was itself magnified thereby.

Kishimoto follows this chapter with a lengthy addendum that open-mindedly engages with criticisms of it (after original publication) by Mizoguchi Yūzō 溝口雄三,Footnote ⁴ a specialist, unlike Kishimoto, in the history of Chinese thought. Addressing his main caveats—that she was too selective and oversimplifying in her picture of late-Ming thought trends, and that there is insufficient evidence for direct links between Yangming learning and the ambient mood to seek coordination with others (xietongxing de ganjue/quxiang 協同性的感覺/趨向) in the general populace—Kishimoto uncharacteristically eschews the challenge of specification for the comfort of abstraction. Her resort to discussing, for instance, the social implication of the intense interiority of Yangming moral philosophy, or the degree of similarity between the Yangming view of society and Durkheimian “organic solidarity,” while conscientious and interesting, does not squarely meet Mizoguchi’s desire for more cogent connection between intellectual thought trends and populistic social actions.

Chapter 4 returns to the “Kaidu Incident” of 1626 with an aim to discern the elements that so captured people’s attention in this not-unprecedented mass attempt to prevent the unjust arrest of a prominent critic of the eunuch clique then in power, Zhou Shunchang 周順昌 (1584–1626). Kishimoto focuses on the images of five named men out of the thirteen commoners who were executed for their roles in the rioting. Examining an array of portrayals of the Incident and its commemoration, from early to late Qing, she notes the emergence of and elaboration on “The Five Men” as heroic representatives of popular, righteous outrage. Parsing between writings by upper-class (shidafu 士大夫) figures and performance scripts intended for commoner audiences, she interprets the shidafu enthusiasm for vaunting the commoners’ spirit as an attempt to shore up their own class-defining, Heaven-bestowed morality and patriotism, which had been diminished by cowardice during the eunuch-led reign of terror. On the other hand, she illustrates through Qing-period dramas how the Kaidu Incident gradually lost its aura of political tension in popular culture and became just a backdrop for entertaining displays of knight-errantry.

Perhaps best known among scholars of the Ming–Qing transition is Chapter 5, Kishimoto’s outstanding study of the transmission to Jiangnan of news about the fall of Beijing to rebels and the suicide of the Chongzhen emperor in 1644. By meticulous use of varied sources, she maps the speed, content, quality, and response to that news—conveyed by refugee witnesses (mostly commoners), military messages (tangbao 塘報), and transmitted rebel-regime notices (gongdan 公單)—from Cangzhou 滄州 south of Beijing, through areas contiguous to the Grand Canal, into Jiangnan and Zhejiang, and as far south as Zhangpu 漳浦 in Fujian. She finds that, under severely disrupted conditions on the ground, especially north of the Huai River, accurate news took three weeks to reach officials in the Southern Capital, Nanjing, who delayed public announcement for another two weeks until a successor-monarch could be lined up. Meanwhile, unofficial news, spreading rapidly by hearsay and flyers through Jiangnan towns and cities, prompted slave revolts and other challenges to law and order, as well as self-defense measures on the part of wealthy households.

Of particular interest to Kishimoto is the extent to which accusations of collaborating with the rebels (congni 從逆) were mounted to justify attacks on the persons, families, and property of officials who had been serving in the Northern Capital, an obsession that, when factionalized, added to the instability of the rump Hongguang 弘光 court (1644–1645) in Nanjing. She devotes the latter half of this chapter to examining the dissemination in Jiangnan of information (often dubious) about Beijing-stationed officials’ comportment under duress: its sources, media, and speed; its destructive effects on local social order; how people responded (whether aggressively or defensively); and how the “congni” label was used specifically in Suzhou, Jintan 金壇, and Jiashan 嘉善. Her study shows that, although mobs of commoners were disruptive, the congni cases largely were mounted and sustained by licentiates (zhusheng 諸生); both accusers and accused tended to be associated with the “righteous circles” of the former Donglin and Fushe associations; and that personal animosities often provided the underlying motivation. Unlike other contemporaneous revolts, she opines, the anti-traitor cases were not anti-establishment; rather, the aim—at least ostensibly—was to reinforce the political elite’s shaken moral tenet of ruler-loyalty. The revolts did resemble others of late Ming, however, in revealing local resentments and publicly expressing a high degree of acrimony.

Chapter 6 focuses on the severely disrupted period from mid-1645, when the Hongguang court disintegrated under Qing invasion, to circa 1680 when enduring stability returned. The chapter aims to discern the “reality of local officials’ power” through the intersecting perspectives of residents and the central (Qing) government. Kishimoto documents through contemporaneous diaries and journals the rapid and publicly manifest collapse of xiangshen privileged status under the intimidations and blatant discourtesies of incoming Qing civil and military officials. She also shows statistically how achievement levels in the civil service examinations plummeted in importance for official appointment, and the concomitant rise in numbers of military officials—shown deference by their civil colleagues—assigned to govern locales. A material indication of this sudden reversal of late-Ming patterns is the large percentage of opulent xiangshen properties that were turned into personal residences or offices by Qing local officials, and the extent to which former civil-governmental structures were turned to military use. Yet Kishimoto demonstrates that this imposed “state power” had its own instabilities, as quasi-independent Qing entities themselves attracted lawless elements and perpetrated the same sorts of abuses as had local xiangshen in the late Ming.

Using a combination of local accounts and official documents, Kishimoto shows that a concerted effort “from the top” to clean up local governance in the central Yangzi delta ensued, lasting for roughly a decade, circa 1651 to 1662. She further argues significantly that the much-noted Tax Arrears Case, usually interpreted as the very early Qing court’s effort to cow the country’s gentry class by making an example of the Jiangnan xiangshen, correlated with the court’s nearly simultaneous campaign to discipline the region’s Qing-appointed local officials. The later adulation of certain Jiangnan viceroys and governors that one finds in residents’ writings of the 1680s, Kishimoto argues, was a longer-range result of this drive.

The final chapter is a close study of a primary source that Kishimoto cites frequently in other chapters: Linian ji 歷年記, the seventy-year chronological memoir of an otherwise obscure denizen of Shanghai County, Yao Tinglin 姚廷遴 (1628–after 1697).Footnote ⁵ She singles out this work as an extremely rare, detailed account of the quotidian life of a man who was neither an official nor a well-known scholar, but who lived in a critical place during a pivotal time in Chinese history. Using the text of the Linian ji itself alongside genealogical, gazetteer, and other historical records, she first situates the author in his youth within a matrix of fairly advantageous family and other relationships. With her excellent knowledge of the region’s economic history, Kishimoto then offers impressive insights on how Yao Tinglin earned—or failed to earn—a livelihood during and following the Qing takeover of Jiangnan, as his memoir recounts. Only from the late 1660s onward, she finds, was Yao able to live stably and contentedly as a gentleman farmer and private teacher in his own home. Before that, Yao’s unhappy ten-year stint as a yamen functionary in charge of requisitions for military and public-works expenses strongly corroborates Kishimoto’s points about oppression by local civil and military officials in the very early Qing period. We see how Yao’s experience as a yamen insider works to his advantage afterward, as family and friends often called upon him to shepherd their disputes through the intertwining systems of legal adjudication and clan mediation. The Linian ji shows that, despite progressive early-Qing reforms to the corvée and taxation systems, local anxieties over meeting those obligations continued. Kishimoto sees in those anxieties and the need for intermediaries like Yao an adumbration of the baolan 包攬 pattern of local-elite hegemony that became characteristic of the Qing period.

She concludes the book briefly by reiterating that, from mid-Ming onward, Chinese local social order collapsed, which imparted greater freedom to people but also necessitated the formation of many sorts of new organizations—and the reinvigoration of some old ones—to deal with the insecurities attendant on that freedom. She asserts that the general motivation behind the late-Ming surge in “statecraft” discourse was to find new means of effecting social order, and that the aim of early-Qing policies was to contain under official regulation the self-actuating, self-regulating potential of those organizations.

This immensely rich volume, representing the central interests, approaches, skills, insights, and intellectual acumen of one of the most important sinologists of the postwar period, Kishimoto Mio, is now available to those who read Chinese more easily than Japanese. This is thanks to Wu Jingfang, whose role goes beyond that of translator. In addition to rendering Kishimoto’s original notes, she provides a great deal of valuable information in her separately printed annotations, especially on the scholarship of the many fellow researchers whom Kishimoto generously acknowledges throughout. All sinologues who are interested in the local history of later imperial China will appreciate not only Kishimoto’s findings, but also the tremendous significance in the past several decades of Japanese historical discourses on Chūgoku no chiiki shakai 中國の地域社會 (China’s regional societies).