When Tawney went to China

I am currently reading Land and Labour in China, by the great British Christian socialist Richard Henry Tawney. Apart from being a fine read in its own right, still germane to contemporary issues and problems going on 90 years later, it also contains quite a few pleasant surprises. Imagine my delight, gentle readers, when I found among the dedications, of which Tawney had compiled quite a lengthy list – including such notables as John B Condliffe, Zhang Boling 張伯苓, Fang Xianting 方顯廷, Franklin He 何廉, Tao Menghe 陶孟和, Chen Liting 陳立廷, Liu Dajun 劉大鈞, John B Taylor and William L Holland – rural education activist Dr YC James Yen 晏陽初 and the Dingxian 定縣 Mass Education Movement, as well as the great novelist and civil rights activist Pearl S Buck and her then-husband Dr John L Buck. Great minds don’t merely think alike, it seems. They actively influence each other.

This study is the result of a trip Tawney took to Shanghai in November 1931, to attend a conference of œconomists, agronomists and rural specialists on the topic of development in China. In it, Tawney undertakes to describe and diagnose the œconomic problems facing rural Chinese society. To be sure, he takes a slightly-patronising patrician British perspective, but for all that one motivated by sincere and heartfelt empathy – and thus also bears the profundity of that empathy.

Tawney acknowledges the obvious difficulties for the layman in attempting to study China’s rural culture, including the immeasurable and omnipresent civilisational history and the internal diversity of such a vast and densely-populated landmass. Even so, he undertakes to make some insightful generalisations. Though a bit horror-stricken at the way Chinese peasants have historically depleted their forests, he expresses a just and heartfelt admiration at the vast and decentralised irrigation system, ‘among the greatest achievements of the art of the engineer’, and for the ‘technical expertness’ and ‘miracles of ingenuity’ which mark the Chinese peasant’s ability, through labour-intensive techniques, to wring enough food and cash crops to survive off a marginal allotment of family land. For this reason Tawney refers to the Chinese peasantry, not as serfs nor as yeomen, but as a ‘propertied proletariat’. He is also an admirer – alongside Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 – of the unique ‘communism of the [patriarchal] Chinese family’, even as he understands it to be a necessary survival technique for a class constantly under threat of starvation and penury. The picture Tawney paints of rural China is vivid, and in some ways quite familiar. He describes the political proclivities, for example, of Jiangxi and Hunan, which today form part of China’s ‘red belt’ and which were traditional strongholds of Maoism during the Civil War:

[Jiangxi and Hunan,] with an abnormally high percentage of tenants, and acute agrarian discontent—form enclaves of revolution, where such government as exists is conducted by communists.

He is sensitive to the uniqueness of rural China’s overall plight, and repeatedly warns against the lazy-but-ubiquitous (at the time) comparison of contemporary China to the European Middle Ages, though he does acknowledge certain parallels in outlook and overall temperament. Simplifying his argument somewhat, in this measure he separates China’s agrarian problems into two broad and overlapping categories: the ‘natural-historical’ and the ‘œconomic-social’. Natural-historical problems include flood and drought, deforestation and desertification (yes, Tawney was prescient here too!), physical limitations of the carrying capacity of land, trends of population growth, and other inherited problems. Tawney by and large, but not completely, approaches these problems with a traditionalist Anglican resignation in the face of the ‘brutal facts of nature’ and the ‘inexorable limits’ of human action. Œconomic-social problems, on the other hand, include land tenure, ground rents, usury, exploitation, banditry, government corruption and underdeveloped agricultural and communications technology. Tawney stresses that solving the problem will take decades and sensitivity to local conditions and institutions, but he reads as hopeful about the means of ameliorating these latter with selective borrowing from the experiences of other countries which underwent similar rural privation.

His prescription? What amounts to an endorsement of rural reconstruction. Mass education; a coördinated plan of government protectionism for agriculture; investment in rural roads and rail; grassroots organisation of mutual aid, credit, marketing, consumer and insurance coöperatives; legal prohibitions on abusive rent, lending and mercantile practices; improvements in agricultural technology; small-scale industrialisation. Education, to the Fabian Tawney, was the key and linchpin. In this, it is small wonder he spoke in glowing terms of Jimmy Yen’s work, and complained of the Dingxian model only that it was as yet so rare elsewhere in China. It was on this basis that he thought coöperative efforts among farmers could be built on a strong foundation. If this advice went unheeded, his predictions were dire and, as it turns out with the benefit of hindsight, eerily discerning:

The revolution of 1911 was a bourgeois affair. The revolution of the peasants has still to come. If their rulers continue to exploit them, or to permit them to be exploited, as remorselessly as hitherto, it is likely to be unpleasant. It will not, perhaps, be undeserved.

His diagnosis of the cities of the coast is a bit more dismal. He has little affection for Shanghai, an ‘optical delusion’ which exemplifies and epitomises the ill-fated attempts to import and impose Western institutions onto a Chinese cultural structure. (He does, however, admire – however grudgingly – its progress in industrial development.) And despite being a proud patrician Briton, his attitude toward the Concessions is one of contempt born of moral approbation. In his few references to them, he cites them as hubs of exploitative tenancy practices, pawnshop usury and speculative finance capital, parasitically draining wealth away from the countryside which still urgently needs it.

He sees little hope for an organised urban proletariat in November 1931. He sees much to admire, both æsthetically and from a standpoint of internal organisation, of the Chinese variant of the guild system present in the cities. But he points out two things: firstly, that it has proven far less politically efficacious than its Western mediæval counterparts; secondly, that it is dying – particularly in the Concessions. Tawney notes that the industrialisation in China which is replacing it is still embryonic in nature and confined to the coasts, and also that this nascent industrialism is deepening the divide between inland and coast. Infrastructure improvements, protectionism, industrial policy and land reform can help. But to depend on these measures alone, Tawney cautions, ‘is to court disappointment’, so vast are the socioœconomic hurdles involved (including a huge population of cheap migrant labour), and so meagre the weapons to address them. What few labour unions there are, have been quashed by the government as readily as peasant self-organisation has.

From here Tawney segues into China’s political issues. Tawney deserves praise for correctly speaking of China as a civilisation-state rather than as a nation-state. But he overstates his case slightly when he argues that China has not had a political life, per se, until modern times. Here he would have been better-advised to read Kang Youwei, or his antecedents in the statecraft tradition of Ru learning. China’s political life was not brand-new; it was being rediscovered in the Ming and Qing after a long dormancy that had lasted since the end of the Han, at the time the presence of Western ideas was beginning to make itself felt.

This oversight is forgiveable given that Tawney’s focus is not on history but on the present political situation. On the surface, it appears that Tawney is being coy about where he stands on political issues. However, this surface-level placidity hides several radical diagnoses of China’s malaise which amount to a damning indictment of the current Guomindang and its policies. Barrington Moore, who wrote the introduction to my edition of the book, has this to say:

The party had already become based on the type of exploitation that Tawney himself described and condemned. To ask that it put into effect the reforms he suggested was almost to ask it to commit political suicide.

If this is an exaggeration, it isn’t much of one. Tawney notes that effective government is a rarity in China of 1931, and even the idea of government lies discredited among the peasantry for whom it does nothing but tax and conscript them, without so much as providing effective protection against banditry or Japanese rapine. If an effective government is to form in China, it will first have to be localised in those provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Hebei and Shandong which have seen some growth of industry and are firmly under government control. Rather than the ‘military despotism’ decried by the Chinese intelligentsia (and by Tawney himself), that government needs to place greater emphasis on provision of basic policing, health and education services, rather than funnelling more money to the warlords or to a fight against Communists in Jiangxi and Hunan which it cannot win by bayonets alone. It is noteworthy that Tawney does not speak of democracy, and of constitutionalism only briefly, but instead focusses his attention more on questions of basic civil competence.

If Tawney seems prescient in some of his descriptions and diagnoses of China here, and if much of his analysis sounds in certain ways painfully contemporary, that’s well. But it’s worth bearing in mind, too, that he is in some ways closer to the norms of the old society of China than the Chinese contemporaries he works with and cites as authoritative. Like Jiang Qing 蔣慶 today, he decries the ‘fever for imitation’ in young China. Instead, he places a great deal of trust in the education of a new cohort of intelligentsia. Also like Jiang Qing, he would not have them look to Western institutions or ideas for guidance. ‘The machinery is useless or destructive in the absence of a philosophy of life to control and direct it,’ Tawney writes. ‘The West cannot give to the East what it does not possess. It can bring to China, in the realm of ideas, little but uncertainty and confusion.’ Call this position radical or reactionary as you will; but Tawney appears to find himself in full agreement with his contemporary Liang Shuming here, that China must rediscover and resynthesise the values of her own civilisation in order to rejuvenate herself.