Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften

Contents

1. Introduction:

The Elimination of Sinology by Means of General Methodology

2. Science as a Rational Endeavour and Its Objects

3. China's Past and Present: The Search for the Link

4. A Chinese Pattern of Social and Economic Change

5. Sinology and China in the 21st Century

References

1. Introduction: 
The Elimination of Sinology by Means of General Methodology

For sinology this means that one should, of course, study the Chinese language and that one should be able to extract empirical data from Chinese sources. However, this does not imply that there are conceptual approaches needed to get access to those data which are specific to sinology. There is no longer the "Sinologist" but the "Social Scientist", e.g. "the economist", who is able to gather data under the peculiar conditions of the region and then to apply her tools which are not constrained by space and time. Basically, this means that there is no need for "Verstehen" in order to be able to "Erklären". The task of the scholar dealing with China is "Erklären" by means of theories which are universal. The special knowledge of sinology is only regarded to be instrumental for the application or testing of theories (being able to read Chinese and hence to read e.g. Chinese statistics).

Although this is a topic filling whole libraries I have got the impression that the lack of methodological reflection in sinology has given rise to an incapability to defend its independent methodological status from the intruding claims of social science. In Germany, this causes palpable consequences in terms of funding, in particular of designing courses and the task of chairs. Sinology is "out", "contemporary Chinese studies" with a strong methodological foundation in social science is "in". Although this movement against traditional sinology is partly motivated by the demands of the labour market, its seems to be that many people act also with a certain disdain of sinology, having the clichee of the crazy professor in mind who knows some ten thousands of Chinese characters and who is able to read books of a past far away from today, and who does not care for modern times and modern methods.

It may be therefore helpful to give a definition of sinology. Basically, sinology is the activity of translating texts and statements done in Chinese. I choose this rather simple definition because I know of many social science colleagues as well as Chinese pointing at a sinologist (of course, behind his back) and calling her a "mere translator". So this is just my definition. A footnote can be added:

I regard a translation as an activity which leads to the establishment at least of an implicit framework for conveying intersubjective meaning to certain words and concepts used in two different languages. This framework may be called the "theory" underlying the actual translation. Translations then are checked by empirical testing either by means of entertaining a recurrent social interaction between users of the two languages (i.e. Chinese and English) or by means of proving the internal consistency of the semantics of the translation when translated back. The first way of empirical testing means that success in social action demonstrates that the translation made mutual understanding possible. The second way is the only possible way when translating texts, in particular from past times. It can be a daunting task because the single translation has to be put into a very broad range of other texts where usages of the term in question occur within another context. So we could also say that the second way of empirical testing means checking on internal consistency of context-dependent connotations. My footnote concludes with the observation that, of course, one can also translate Chinese expressions into the language of certain social sciences and vice versa. In that sense, "Erklären" is translating, too, because reference is established between theoretical terms of social science and certain concepts describing social phenomena in Chinese.

Hence, in the following I want to write an essay in defence of sinology as translation. I will do this as a student of sinology and economics who is now in charge of managing courses in "Chinese economic studies" which means precisely applying a special social science on China. Of course, I am not an expert in the field I am going to talk about now, and I will simply draw on some well-known authors and contributions. At the same time, I would like to develop a framework for nine pieces of original scholarly work realized within a research project on China's modernization and which focuse on Late Qing social and cultural history, in particular referring to the Weber hypothesis on China's failure to modernize endogenously. Our main aim was to get more detailed insights into the starting point of China's economic and cultural modernization as far as popular culture is concerned. I will refer to those works in the footnotes at the appropriate places.

But I want to propose some substantial arguments why we do need an independent intellectual endeavour of "sinology" in order to be able to proceed with the other project of applying social science on China. More exactly, I want to discuss the issue whether our knowledge of late Imperial China and its social and economic history can help us to understand contemporary China. Acquiring knowledge about Imperial China is the task of sinology if simply because of the tough demands directed at the capability to read original sources. But as we shall see, there is something more.

2. Science as a Rational Endeavour and Its Objects

Social types and Webers paradigm

Weber's sociological method argues that in order to be able to explain social action one needs to understand it as a rational action. That means, the "rationalization" of all social phenomena serves as a methodological benchmark which helps us to distinguish between those social pheonomena which can be explained at all and those ones which cannot be explained because they are driven by mere chance and irrational human behavior. Social science as a rational project presupposes the assumption of rational social action. Weber does not argue that this means that social action is rational by essence or that it can be divided into a "rational" part and an "irrational" one. Social behavior needs to be conceived as being rational because only then social science as a rational endeavour can be applied meaningfully.

In that sense, Weber's idea of "rationality" is a phenomenological concept, and not an ontological one meaning that people "are" rational. If there are phenomena which cannot be reconstructed as being "rational" then this does not imply that they are not existant or that they are not important for social life. But it does imply that they are not a possible object of "science". They can be an object of art, poetry, music and similar activities which are supposedly "irrational" and "unscientific", too. I should stress that this is not an evaluation, simply a basic epistemological difference.

From such a perspective one could, for instance, reach the conclusion that there would be a deep cleavage between "social science" and "sinology" if one were to argue that the former tries to apply a most general concept of "rational action" on social phenomena which is by definition completely independent from its peculiar object of application, whereas the latter tries to deal with the characteristic, singular features of the object which cannot be grasped by the general idea of rationality. Hence the former is science, the latter is art. Sinology would be no science.

However, if we look at the way how Weber continued with the elaboration of his method then we realize immediately that he had to use conceptual tools which grasp both rational and irrational aspects of social action at the same time. The simple reason is that any treatment of history has to refer to certain historical phenomena as entire wholes, as when introducing a certain view of the system of rule in Confucian China. Otherwise the gap between the historical account and the general conceptual tools would be too large because the historical account would be fragmented into myriads of data just from the outset. Weber therefore introduced concepts on an intermediate level of analysis, the co-called "types" (whether real or ideal does not matter here). Types of social action serve to systematize the historical record before the concept of rationality is applied on particular aspects (in simple terms this means applying theory on the so-called "stylized facts").

For instance, within the Weberian discourse relevant to sinology this refers to the well-known ideas about "protestantism" and "confucianism" and the more specific concepts like "inner-wordly tension" which do by no means designate "rational" phenomena exclusively, but, as Metzger stressed, "states of mind". As a matter of fact, the literature on China has made evident that those concepts are heavily loaden with semantics which are very difficult to interprete. The reason is simply that they stay in-between "rationality" and "irrationality" since they have been coined by Weber in order to be able to grasp certain complex patterns of social action as wholes, e.g. as "protestant ethics". There is no way to reduce those concepts completely on the most general idea of rationality and individual behavior guided by interests. Hence the concepts cannot be fully explained by means of social science (in Weber's sense) which means that the types either are accepted as a given or are constructed by methods which transcend social science in the meaning defined above.

So within the Weberian approach we could argue that sinology is a necessary precondition for applying social science because only sinology might be able to construct meaningful types of "Chinese" social action. At least an interactive methodology is needed even if one clings to the view that sinology is art and social science is science, such that any "type" would be a fusion of art and science.

Social types and contemporary Chinese statistics

But just during 1994 doubts were raised regarding the quality of the data, and the Chinese government organized small-scale campaigns and dispatched many working groups in order to check the data and to ensure quality of statistical work on the local level. Indeed, if one really starts to deal with the data more seriously one meets many obstacles against a clear-cut interpretation. For instance, there are impressive national figures but, alas, they might be very different from the provincial ones, and if one tries to aggregate the national data starting out from the provincial ones, the result might be different from the official national figures. Continuing with similar exercises, it proves to be a nightmare reaching so-called "real" figures from the nominal figures on the provincial level because the deflators need to be different ones (given diverging provincal inflation rates). But in order to check the quality of deflators ones already needs to know real figures e.g. on output. And the most pessimistic turn might take place if one gets insights about how the data are collected at the local level, with almost everybody cheating, acting unprofessionally, hiding, simply fulfilling tasks without diligence and so on. So I face a daunting contradiction between the clarity and quantity of the national statistics of China on the one hand and my knowledge about the process how those data are generated. Therefore many people invest a lot of effort into getting direct access to primary data, organizing samples, panels and case studies. But given the vast size of China, it is almost impossible for many questions of interest to gather primary data which can be interpreted as being representative of China in the statistical meaning of the term.

So we face the problem that the construction of economic data is a social process, too, which might show distinct qualities in space and time, depending on the societies in question. Of course we can apply general methods of social science on the Chinese data in order to explain certain phenomena. In that case one does not need sinology, and the people using econometrics might even never know how the characters of "tongji" are written or might not be able to use chopsticks. But there is the serious problem whether the data from different regions in the world have the same quality in terms of "connotation", whether figures belonging to a certain statistical category really can be compared, and whether the approach to statistical work is the same one in all societies. With "quality" I do not refer simply to the technical aspects of, for instance, defining a comparable basket of goods making the measurement of inflation possible. On a more deeper level, I refer to the complex social process of gathering, aggregating, processing and interpreting data within a certain society and its formal and informal social institutions. Depending on the nature of the data, figures can be more or less universally interpreted. Physical figures, for instance, are presumably truly universal if the people use true weights. But figures on occupational structure, inflation or income tax are "softer", meaning that interpretation and hence, "translation" is much more difficult.

In China, for instance, the quality of data is determined partly by the complex dynamics of the interaction between local interests and central control as well as of local identity and nationalism. Already the construction of data is a process loaden with value judgements stemming from changes in Chinese society. Hence in order to deal with the data it is necessary to understand those changes. But this is not possible for the econometrician who does not know how to use chopsticks. For instance, data on grain production are difficult to interprete because grain is a very special product in China, and the concept is imbued with historical and national values. For a regional government in China it is therefore a political act of great importance to publish a certain figure on grain production, and depending on the current state of politics at the Center, same figures can be of very different quality in different regions and at different times. Assessing the figures therefore presupposes long experience in understanding China and Chinese statistics. For instance, managing statistics through the Central government sometimes seems to be akin to managing the symbolic universe of folk beliefs in Imperial China, an observation which might be helpful so put the data into the right proportions.

Thus, finally both our exemplary reflections meet each other since in the case of data one could argue that it might be useful to grasp the peculiar quality of the data by means of a typological feature along Weberian lines. "Chinese statistics" is a type of "statistics" with general features of statistical method and peculiar features of the statistical process taking place in China. In order to produce reliable statistical work on China one should know both, which means in the case of the latter that one should practise sinology at least as a laywoman. So we have an additional intermediate concept which belongs to the epistemological level neither of the figures nor of the tools of general statistics and econometrics. On the one hand, there are those general scientific tools of the realm of universal rationality, on the other hand our empirical data might belong to the specific realms of culturally and historically contingent social action.

This is a very basic and important issue because we realize that the clear-cut distinction between sinology and social science is in fact a naive positivistic attitude that presupposes that we can arrive at certain data without any theory, only in order to apply theory on the data in the next step of analysis, logically as well as temporally. That we cannot proceed in this way is a fact which has been acknowledged since the gone days of the "Vienna circle". But this is just done when, for example, econometrics is applied directly on data generated by the Chinese statistical authorities, without referring to any theory about the social action taking place on part of the Chinese statistical authorities. So the real problem is whether the "theory ladenness" of data means that "theory" proper is a universal concept like "rationality" in the Weberian meaning and like econometric method or whether it means that the process leading to the construction of data has to proceed with theories contingent in space and time, so that there are two different kinds of theories with different scope and range of application. In our example of statistics, both approaches are needed to assess Chinese data. For example, general social science (i.e. international economics) has to be applied in order to interprete the real meaning of the observation that after adjusting the Chinese GDP in US$ according to the official exchange rate and the national deflator we reach the conclusion that per-capita GDP actually declined during a decade of economic refoms in the eighties. But then we face the need to go an additional analytical step is which pays special attention to singular features of the social, political and cultural framework of statistics as well as the special pattern of growth prevailing in China. Then general theory of international economics is enriched by a Weberian type.

In the field of social science this would mean that our theory, which is applied on a certain social action in space and time, is the result of an ongoing interaction between the observer and her/his object which gives rise to the construction of intersubjectively valid, yet not universal concepts transcending the data in the sense of being theoretical but nevertheless specific to the peculiar pattern of social action observed. Precisely this endeavour is "translation" according to the idea introduced above. For instance, "translating" a figure on grain production means that not only the bare figure is given in both languages but that the Chinese connotations linked with those figures are also made explicit. Thus, what we referred to as being the framework for intersubjective understanding by means of translation can be conceived of as a Weberian type. Hence sinology obtains a methodological status of its own, without falling into the trap of relativism.

The task of sinology is to offer an intersubjective approach to Chinese social action which leads to the construction of data which show singularly "Chinese" features but which can be understood intersubjectively. On those data we can apply general methods of social science. But the result of both steps will not lead to the elimination of sinology as a discipline analytically independent from social science because there is no way to use data directly in order to prove the general laws of social science without translating those data by using sinology.

Let us try to make this general conclusion more explicit by means of a discussion of certain problems in interpreting recent Chinese history. But before doing that, I will consider some general pathways between history and present in China.

3. China's Past and Present: The Search for the Link

But can we really dispense with history and hence with sinology even in the narrow meaning if we try to understand contemporary China? Let me give some brief examples which show the practical relevance of history.

First, structural change proceeds very slowly so that in order to explain certain problems of China today it will be helpful to know about their historical roots. That means, real world phenomena show different inherent speeds of change so that constraints for modernization might finally lead onto peculiar paths of change that cannot be fully understood by general laws of social science. The most obvious example is nature and climate. But there are other "hardware" aspects of social action which cannot be changed by human action but slowly. For instance, the very thin extension of the railway network is a major bottleneck for China's economic development today. This can be analyzed in purely technical and economic terms leading to certain conclusions regarding the needs for restructuring and expansion. However, building railways is also a social action with very far-reaching institutional preconditions and implications. Hence, understanding the structural legacy of a thin railway network presupposes knowledge about the role of railways in Chinese recent history. This, in turn might help to reap some insights into problems of railway building in modern China because there can be a similarity between certain institutional features (e.g. the role of railways in the political relation between the provinces and the central government). Those features might change with higher or lower speed than the structural constraint of the railway system proper. Hence there is a chain of different constraints linking past and present.

Second, this leads to the next point, i.e. the analytical usefulness of mere "family resemblances" between past and present. As we will see, there are many features of contemporary China which show a remarkable similarity between past and present, e.g. regarding the funding of local governments. Understanding the past will help to generate distinct hypotheses about the present. Those hypotheses might prove to be wrong, but it might be that the family resemblances help to get closer to the truth just from the outset because they serve as means to formulate "types" as hypothetical statements which can be checked empirically. Yet, this does by no means explain the reasons for those similarities.

Third, those reasons can be structural determinants mentioned at the beginning. For instance, we observe today that many Chinese villages are able to continue with very old traditions in handicraft manufacturing which give rise to a certain link between the regional patterns of production in the past and the distribution of rural enterprises today. This is a family resemblance which seems to be heavily dependent on structural constraints in the transport sector because the competitive advantages of low-productivity rural industries depend on the relative high transportation costs leading to barriers between different local markets. There can be complex causal relations between certain structural determinants and social phenomena, like, for instance, the relation between a certain size of the population and the costs of government because contingent social institutions shape those relations.

Fourth, but another important reason for family resemblances, of course, is culture defined as a set of behavioral norms handed over between generations by means of socialization. Culture can be analyzed by general social science e.g. when investigating into patterns of socialization of the child. But when referring to the past, there is no way aside from the explicit attempt to give historical records an intersubjective meaning, in particular by means of the translation of terms describing social behavior. Thus, social science cannot completely explain socialization patterns in the present because we need to assess the current state of tradition in terms of social change and in the next step by means of comparisons to past practice. Practice of the parent, the grandparent and elder generations, however, is not accessible to general social science methods but only to diachronic analysis rooted in the analysis of interviews of the contemporary elder generation and, of course, interpretation of texts of former times. Hence if we want to talk about "social change" today there is no standard of reference exclusively founded in synchronic, universal theory.

Fifth, yet an interesting point results to be that such a reconstruction of the past and of tradition is done not only by "Westerners" but by the Chinese, too. History becomes relevant for the present simply because present social action might be partly determined by the view on their own past which guides the decisions of the agents of social action. Analyzing this view of history is a difficult task because we need some external yardstick in order to assess both aspects of history, meaning history being reconstructed by the observer, history being reconstructed by the observed, and history as an "objective account" being possibly reconstructed through the interaction between the observer and the observed. The place of historical consciousness in present social action can only be understood by means of translation, and we face the problem of a double, interlocking framework, namely the framework between historical accounts and contemporary Chinese dealing with their own history on the one hand and the framework encompassing both levels and the Western observer on the other hand.

Sixth, this leads us to the more general question how to reach a clear view on starting points of current developments, which is the general task of the historian: where does the present come from? This is almost inevitably linked to the question of the legitimacy of social action. For instance, the evaluation of the potential consequences of increasing migration and mobility in contemporary China might depend on our knowledge about migration in the past because here we could reap some insights into the inherent potential of migrant societies in achieving self-organization and preventing disorder from emerging. If we argue that in former times China was a migrant and frontier society and that social structure was adapted to this fluid state we might ask whether today a similar structure will possibly emerge because there are still traditions of self-organization rooted in tradition. Another example is the ongoing controversy over pre-49 economic growth since our evaluation of communist economic development depends on our assessment of the starting point, not only in terms of the level reached but, more important, in terms of the institutional structures and growth patterns prevailing. Hence, any kind of value statement on the present, even if based on social science, presupposes some related value statement on the past, based on translation.

Seventh, as we see, referring to history is not only crucial because we do need to know about the past as a starting point for the present, but also because there might be scientific progress in our knowledge about the past, as in the case of the controversy over China's economic development after 1911. As a matter of fact, perspectives on late Imperial China do change and this will have implications for our view of contemporary China.

Eighth, let me turn to the last and most obvious point. Even economists today agree that ideas move the world. Social action is not only determined by external constraints but also by the way how those constraints are perceived. Hence it is important to learn how the people think about the world, and it is not possible to explain those ideas in turn by means of external constraints (which, actually, was a major tenet of classical Marxism). Ideas are not the field of social science but of "Geisteswissenschaften" in the narrow meaning of the term. This final point is relevant for all the other ones. Railways are not simply railways but railways perceived by the people acting upon them. History is also history of ideas about history. Hence even if all the other arguments may fail to convince the reader of the importance of the exercise of translation as an activity completely autonomous from social science, sinology will have enough work to do in trying to learn how the Chinese think and how they thought about the world. This cannot be done by social science because describing thought is the core task of translation. But the results of translation then have to be fed as data into, for example, models of institutional change and growth in the economy. Yet those data have a theoretical foundation which is completely independent from the subsequent application of, say, neoclassical institutionalism in economics, viz. the framework of translation or the Weberian type is the theory, and not the other way round.

Let us now turn to several issues which are important for understanding China today and which refer to basic problems of sinology at the same time, as far as social and economic history is concerned. Those are:

elementary structures of social action and long-run patterns of economic growth,

state/society interface and the institutional framework of the economic process,

migration and social order,

regionalism and integration of society,

state building and modernization.

All those topics are linked with certain core issues of economic development in contemporary China. At the same time, they refer to ongoing scholarly work in the history of Late Qing and Republican China. We try to answer the question whether the latter work hence is meaningful for contemporary Chinese studies. Of course we will only give some superficial hints at a more elaborated investigation, and we will discuss all those issues with one big stroke, like certain kinds of Chinese calligraphy. This is taken literally.

4. A Chinese Pattern of Social and Economic Change

Involutionary growth may be linked with the traditional family...

Both strands of thought are linked in a certain way because the most recent idea of involution proposed by P.C.C. Huang presupposes that primary groups redistribute income between their members so that single members of the group may work with a marginal productivity of labour which moves towards zero, yet maximizing average output for the group. The main reason contributing to such a constellation is the vast surplus labour which can be offered with zero opportunity cost. By this a pattern of factor allocation emerges which leads to a maximization of labour input in order to maximize output but neither with productivity increases nor with incentives to increase productivity. Since redistribution in primary groups presupposes that members of the group with higher productivity earn an effective wage below their marginal productivity, this growth pattern is not efficient. Moreover, primary group production outcompetes production by organizations using wage labour because those have to pay the market price reflecting marginal productivity of labour. In Krugman's words, the resulting developmental pattern is "extensive growth" akin to the growth pattern in the Soviet Union but relying on a differently mixed set of factor inputs, viz. human resources and not natural resources.

Precisely this point might be linked with some approaches towards the traditional family because it can be observed that indeed the so-called Confucian values lead to a strong motivation for labour effort within the family but to seemingly inefficient larger economic organizations which are then described e.g. as being the root of a lack of innovative activity e.g. in Taiwan and of a technological dependence on Japan. So we are back with the Krugman point from another angle. We observe a certain pattern of growth where economic change is strongly shaped by certain basic structures of social action within the family and primary groups. This point could be made even more explicit by comparing Japan and China. In recent contributions to the study of long-term growth in Japan, several arguments also stress the role of traditional primary groups in the rise of modern corporate organization.

Thus two questions emerge. First, is our view of the traditional family the right one, and second, was the family indeed the core economic institution in the traditional growth pattern? In both cases, recent studies on traditional China achieve considerable importance for contemporary Chinese studies. It should be stressed just from the outset that all those studies of course presuppose some processing of historical texts and thereby the construction of a framework of translation. Suffice to mention that the simple translation of the word "family" in different societies and languages raises very complex problems of semantics which make the full-fledged exposition of that social institution necessary, thereby constructing an intersubjectively valid meaning of the different terms.

...but in Late Imperial China there were corporate structures emerging out of the family...

The point has already been made very early by Mark Elvin that institutional or ideological explanantions of China's failure to industrialize are inherently weak. This proves to be true in the case of economic organization because today we know that institutions like the charitable fund were remarkably similar to the organization of large Chinese multinational companies of our days, in the sense of "family resemblances" mentioned above. For instance, in Madeleine Zelin's study of a late Qing salt merchant family it becomes evident that the charitable estate not only served as an institution giving separate identity to the family's capital as compared to the claims of individuals. The estate was a well-designed centralized bureaucracy were the family tried to preserve control and at the same time to give lower layers of decision making freedom for action. In the last decades of the Qing this also included the management of all important offices by professionals who were not kin. As a matter of fact, there are examples of lineage trusts which in the 20th century indeed developed into industrial holdings, thereby establishing a direct causal link between traditional and modern Chinese organizations.

Another more general point should be mentioned, namely that all those activities took place within the framework of an informal customary law independent from the law of the state but formalized and binding, too. This has been and still is also very common even under the rural population and is completely obscured by the common talk about the lack of a concern for written law and written contracts in China. As a matter of fact, even in the core family contracts were very often used in order to prevent conflicts to emerge and in order to settle obligations for the future. In that sense traditional China was a contractarian society to a degree perhaps even greater than Europe. We may therefore conclude that the main difference was not the role of the contract or the role of formalized organizations per se but the role of the state in guiding and speeding up the development of those institutions. For instance, in Europe the development of accounting was strongly driven by the intrusion of the state's taxation into business practice. Until today, accounting and financial management are not too formalized in Chinese companies, and the state in a Chinese cultural setting faces considerable problems in taxing the economy. But it seems to be an ethnocentric conclusion to argue that without formal and exact accounting business cannot be efficient.

...whose societal role should be reconsidered like other issues as the status of women and affinal kin in order to understand the institutional foundation of the economy...

Whereas in Europe in particular the Church launched a long-term battle against the extended family, in China the state fostered the growth of a particular type of the extended family even against sometimes widely diverging customs in popular culture. Hence one could even follow Goody's radical argument that the basic historical substrates of the European and the Chinese family are closely related with each other but that emerging structures of political power changed both into a different direction, with Europe going the way towards the more constrained nuclear family and China going the way towards the extended family and the lineage in particular. However, if popular culture is scrutinized historically, differences in term of essence might be not as large as commonly supposed.

Goody's point is of interest because we learn that one of the most important fields of progress in sinology seems to be the growing capability of research to distinguish between the view of China as represented in written sources produced by the Confucian elites on the one hand and social reality on the other hand, which means distinguishing empirically between Redfield's "Great" and "Little tradition". Our view of the traditional Chinese family is heavily influenced by the peculiar mixture of reality and normative judgements which is implicit in all accounts of social life in traditional China written by the users of the Chinese script, namely people trained by Confucianism. Social practice could not only be different from those seemingly objective accounts but, in particular, social practice could vary considerably on the local level. Hence, in the strict meaning of the term "traditional Chinese culture" one should refer to the interactive system of elite culture and beliefs on the one hand, which were fairly uniform because of the Imperial examination system, and popular culture and beliefs on the other hand, which can only be defined in local terms. This interactive system is Chinese tradition, and not "Confucianism" or what else. There is, for instance, the need for a reassessment of the role of the woman in traditional society.

As Goody argues, there was a systematic misunderstanding of the process of marriage in traditional China when the transfer of wealth between wife-taking and wife-giving families was regarded as being equal to paying a bride price for the complete abandonement of the property of the daughter by the wife-giving family. This was only the account within the Confucian language system. Real transactions meant that there was an indirect share of the wife-taking family in financing the dowry of the wife-giving family and, furthermore, this meant that first, the new nuclear family got their own property not only by endowment of the wife-taking but by the wife-giving family, and second, this property formed the core of the wife's property as wealth independent from the wife-taking family, yet embedded into the framework of the new nuclear family. The rise of the dowry seems to have been linked with the social changes taking place during Northern Song times and had lasting effects on the real organization of Chinese kinship structure and social interaction between kin. Most important, the normative strengthening of agnatic principles in Confucian ethics does not mirror the great importance of cognatic (affinal) interaction in real life. Until today, our view of Chinese kinship is distorted by this Neo-Confucian view and does not pay enough attention to the flexibility by which agnatic as well as cognatic relations can be mobilized e.g. in order to organize business activities.

Aside from the fact that in the past other social interactions have been assessed in a distorted way, too, we should not take Confucian obsession with diminishing the role of the women in society as social reality. If we want to understand why today, for instance, in Chinese business emancipation of women takes place at a much greater speed than in Germany, leading to a much larger role of women in business, than we have to look at those traditional structures. Hence, again, misperceptions of the starting point of social changes might lead to misunderstandings of what is going on today. Furthermore, there is even the possibility that remnants of the Confucian discourse still influence the self-perception of Chinese today, giving rise to descriptions of social reality which might be partly normative and which thereby distort reality.

...such that the societal framework for economic activities is recognized to have been much more complex including many kinds of self-organization and networking activities...

This view is now challenged by a new generation of business historians. Even in the West there is no necessary connection between the rise of modern business organization and the decline of the family as a nexus of business. But if we realize that the Chandlerian perspective implicitely presupposes a certain kind of the family, namely the European nuclear family as an economic unit, then it becomes evident that the whole argument might be even weaker in case of other structures of family and kinship. But regarding the critique directed at the Chandlerian perspective a more general point should be stressed that opens the opportunity to discuss another aspect of Chinese tradition which puts the whole issue of the family into the appropriate dimension. Business historians also complain that the Chandlerian perspective does not pay enough attention to the complex role of informal social relations for organizing cooperation and communication between firms. There is only the family firm and the big rational corporation and nothing in-between. However, obstacles against e.g. expanding the capital basis of business can also be overcome by means of mobilizing resources within a web of personal relationships.

Fairly obviously, this point hits in the core of all attempts at analyzing modern Chinese business, with, for instance, Gary Hamilton arguing that the basic units of Chinese business are not family firms but networks of family firms ("the so-called "guanxi-capitalism"). In the context of our reflections, where do those phenomena come from? Indeed, the Chandlerian view in a very general sense has also been implicit to most Western attempts to understand China. Chinese society was depicted as consisting of a sea of families and a bureaucratic superstratum imposing order on society by direct force and indirect influence. Between the family and the state, there are no other things.

Of course, this is plainly wrong. There were and still are many other things. But as recent complex thoughts in sinology demonstrate, it is very difficult to grasp this so-called "third realm". The matter has turned even more complicated after being linked with the elusive topic of "civil society" since first one had to realize that there was a Chinese society at all, in the meaning of being distinct from the state and the family, and second, because one immediately started to compare Chinese society with the European one christened "civil". Before looking at some details of those reflections, let me make my ground position as clear as possible.

The crucial difference between European and Chinese society in the last couple of centuries cannot be understood simply by comparing "China's" society with a stylized European one (e.g. "France") in the narrow meaning and then looking at state-society relations. The most elementary fact about European state-society relations is that there was a European society on the one hand and a system of competing states on the other hand. Competiton between states led the rulers to discover certain aspects of society which might be useful in the scramble for power, thereby even supporting certain autonomous developments of society. But I do not think that there is a fundamental qualitative difference in state-society interactions aside from the effects resulting from that elementary fact of political competition taking place in Europe and being absent in China. This should be stressed because the idea of "civil society" confers a certain inherent qualitative difference even in terms of a value judgement onto our image of both societies. If one compares one European state and the respective "society", artificially delineated according to political boundaries, on the one hand with the Chinese state and the Chinese society on the other hand, this establishes a wrong system of reference because in Europe "society" was a cross-border phenomenon.

This being said, let us turn to the blind eye of our earlier view of China's traditional society. One of the most conspicious examples which brings this point to the fore is the history of Hong Kong. Until today there is a majority of people viewing the Chinese as being focused on business and the family, with no political motivation and with no interest for the common good. This is a very common remark on Hong Kong people who are supposed to be the most capitalist ones of the world, at least according to the views of the arch-liberal economics laureate Milton Friedman who, in turn, receives rock-star treatment by the Hongkongese. Hence we have precisely that view of Chinese society reproduced within the special reference system of colonial government. It should be mentioned that this argument is also often used to provide legitimacy for authoritarian politics in a Chinese cultural setting.

However, there is much more in contemporary Hong Kong society which has deep historical roots in the potential of traditional Chinese society to organize itself. But both Chinese as well as British historical writing on Hong Kong had no need to pay attention to this because this would immediately affect the issue of legitimacy of government today. As a matter of fact, after its establishment in 1842 Hong Kong colonial society only needed four decades to change into a complex system of two interacting societies, a Chinese and a British one, with the Chinese showing the strong potential of self-organizing collective action. This does not mean that the colonial government had no decisive role to play in changing many aspects of Chinese society. The interesting point is that out of a somewhat desparate situation of a colony of refugees which were constantly fed from the mainland very quickly a Chinese society emerged that was able to present a countervailing power to British rule. Of course, until today this meant that elites organized themselves in pursuing their commercial interests. But aside from this drive towards "government by principals" the Chinese business elite in Hong Kong very early also overtook social responsibility in preserving peace and order in the Chinese community.

But not only the elites proved to be capable of self-organization. It seems highly probable that today the suspicious treatment of Hong Kong by the Communist government in Beijing stems from the fact that they know about the real capabilities of political organization in Chinese society. The British had to learn this when after the emergence of government by consent of elites the strike of the seamen in 1922 shook the foundations of the colony. One should be clear about this point: Although neither Chinese business elites nor the British took any small steps towards an early appeasement of the situation, the potential for collective action in a highly mixed and fluid Chinese society was nevertheless so strong such that a complete breakdown of the colonial economy and government came in close reach.

The Hong Kong example highlights the serious failure of reducing Chinese society to a mere family/state interface. Just by doing that it becomes difficult to realize the many social phenomena beyond the family. After being acknowledged, the next failure maybe searching for value judgements in terms of "civil society" or not. But the whole issue is also important for our construction of a traditional Chinese pattern of economic development conceiving the family as core institution.

There are many topics which are now discussed when trying to assess the quality of the so discovered traditional Chinese society between state and family. Arguments stressing the weak "bourgeois" or "civil rights" aspects of Chinese self-organization seem to forget that the assertiveness of rights in European society simply mirrored a much more intrusive state. As we see from the Hong Kong example, if there was a real need to organize against the ruling class it could be well done. That means, if the state is weak, "civil" society will be weak, although society in general will be strong, and not the other way round, which suggests that just because there is no tradition of a "civil" society, the state is presumably strong.

...which are closely related to the fluid state of Qing China as an extremely mobile society of migrants and soujourners...

Let me make my analytical stance as clear as possible: If we want to assess the potential for self-organization of a certain society even in terms of a frank value judgement, first we have to look at the nature of the challenges. There is no way of assessing the quality of the response without knowing about the challenge.

As the case of the restrictive treatment of settlement on Taiwan until the middle of the 19th century demonstrates, controlling migration was a very demanding problem for the Chinese state. But for the migrants, too, and hence many of the institutions that are the object of civil society debate belong to this realm, like native-place merchant associations, guilds and so on. Outside the administrative centres, which actually means, outside the seats of xian governments, social order grew out of those institutions. One should simply imagine that there was no government in many thriving commercial centres in Qing China and that furthermore precisely in those bustling centers many people from different regions of China lived as soujourners. That is to say, there was no primary commitment to the place, and order emerged from immediate challenges of managing society, like fire protection. But it seems to be that this worked quite well, since traditional culture offered a universe of possible symbolic actions which might serve as a nucleus for collective action.

But what does this mean for the state-society interface? The Chinese state of Late Qing was a state constantly preoccupied with institution-building within a fluid and mobile society. The main instrument of integration was fostering "Chineseness" in terms of a common value system and of common beliefs because this was the only way to reach a certain match between society and the traditional polity. As far as we know, Chinese officials basically knew what a full-fledged state machinery in taxation, juridical system, police and so on could mean, given the almost mythical experience with legalism and totalitarianism, and given the long history of reform attempts and proposals of Chinese governments. But the costs of establishing such an intrusive state in the context of a societal network of interlocking frontier societies in constant flux would have been prohibitively high. So the Confucian state chose a way of government which might be called "management by exception" and "management by identity".

...a society which transcended fragmented economic regions through cultural regionalism as a means of informal institutional integration...

The crucial aspect of this observation results to be that fragmentation of social areas in terms of language, behavioral norms, religion and so on is an obstacle against economic integration of its own quality. In economic terms, this means that culture is a determinant of transaction costs, as distinguished from transport costs. Only the sum of both kinds of cost determines the density of economic interactions in space and time. China's vast society was integrated by means of "layered loyalities" embedded into a shared universe of certain symbols the meaning of which was not identical, yet interrelated. Managing those symbols as a medium for social exchange was a foremost task for the government. Although people did impose their own meaning on the symbols they still could serve as a tool for establishing a common identity by means of discourse over the meaning. Chinese food, of course, is very different in the regions of China, but certain basic beliefs about the healthiness of certain ingredients could and can be shared and moreover, people can talk about the difference and just by recognizing this difference establish a common framework for understanding.

Hence, from the economic point of view, China's layered identity fostered economic integration, lack of infrastructure notwithstanding. This is why Skinner's analysis of marketing systems could achieve an almost paradigmatic status in Chinese studies. His crucial insight that the standard market and not the village was the minimal unit of a cultural space in China reflects just this close interaction between culture and economy in Late Qing China. This is also valid for the macro-patterns.

China's fragmented economy was therefore integrated through culture, such that there was a strong regionalism as well as a societal integration by differences which was also mirrored by interregional flows of goods and people. In that regard migration was in fact a stabilizing factor because the landscape of China as a society of soujourners was covered by a network of moving people always being linked with each other by a chain of native-place relationships, even after many generations. Such a society poses completely different challenges for the growth of a so-called modern state as compared with a static society consisting, say, of myriads of isolated villages and a superstratum of a traditional ruling elite. Hence the Chinese state had to be different from the states emerging out of the system of competing states after the Peace of Westphalia.

...a fact which has been neglected by recent theories on involutionary growth...

But just because migration is not a static phenomenon it can also be a source of fundamental change. If we look, for instance, at the "civil society" discussion regarding Late Qing China, this is immediately obvious. Native-place associations and guilds can be and were the roots of an emerging urban government, and movements of people out of a region in the direction of another one could have provided an impetus for capital formation in order to substitute locally scarce labour for capital. If we broaden our view beyond the family as the alleged core institution of the economy, we realize that the dynamism linked with migration and population growth in China did propel many changes in institutions and agrarian technology. As a matter of fact, China was a more "progressive" society as Europe taken in terms of an average until the late 18th century.

...and which highlights the crucial aspect of economic, social and cultural change in the 20th century, namely China's disintegration into an urban and a rural society with distinct economic and cultural features finally leading into the trap of Communist immobilism.

Almost every aspect of China's political turmoil and dynamics in the 20th century led her changing order away from that kind of societal integration. This is true, for instance, for intellectual change and political leadership as well as for the agrarian crisis of the thirties. Although there are conflicting views on the Communist attempt at restoring order in the economy and the polity, in these pages I join the school of thought that regards the policy of the CCP towards the peasants as exploitive and being oriented towards a model of urban industrialization. Even the Dengist agrarian reforms should be interpreted as favouring the peasants by default. As a matter of fact, Communist economic policies preserved the disintegration of the traditional order in terms of freezing certain fissures and ruptures between the peasants and the new elites as well as between economic structures. Main instruments were the coercive procurement system, the hukou-administration and the rural government by Communist cadres.

But in a certain sense this kind of "freezing" social change in the vast rural areas of China means that today, when the economic reforms of the eighties eventually led to a stepwise retreat of the state from controlling the peasants, the past returns to the present in many respects. The re-emergence of certain traditional forms of social organization and, above all, economic behavior, in many rural areas of China seems to be closely linked with the failure of the Communist government to proceed with the task of state-building outside the urban world. To oversimplify, Communist modernization led to a fundamental dualism between an urban state and the rural society in terms of economic structure as well as social and political change. "Oversimplification" means that there are of course many linkages between both worlds, established, for instance, through personal networks which were built by the rusticated urban youths of the seventies and by the military which before 1978 offered the single way out of the villages. But in terms of formal political institutions, like e.g. ordered relations between communities and the provincial government, there is no systematic integration between the two worlds of China.

Then we realize an important, maybe crucial point, namely that local-central political relations and the urban-rural relation are intertwined in a very complex way in China. In both regards, the traditional social order of Late Qing society had provided institutional solutions which were peculiar to China. Modernization in the 20th century did not offer any new solutions but mere coercive action by an urban state which, basically, grew out of establishing a countervailing power against local coercive action epitomized in the infamous "local bullies" of Nationalist China. So what will happen if that coercive state changes in some fundamental respect? It seems to be clear that this will deeply affect both central-provincial as well as urban-rural relations, and that the outward sign of this is migration. Migration will pose the crucial challenge for the state which is in a certain way alienated from the peasantry, meaning that outside the former cadre system there is no stable and systematic network between the emerging local elites and the urban national elite. So the future of China depends on a creative response to a changing social structure that indeed features family resemblances with the past.

So we learn that understanding the economy, polity and society of Late Qing China can be important for us in order to assess China's future development. But in order to draw all the loose ends of our reflections together, let us turn to sinology again.

5. Sinology and China in the 21st century

First, all the topics mentioned in the preceding paragraph raise intricate issues of translation in the sense that we need an intersubjective framework for comparing China's past with Europe's past and for doing the same for past/present and present/present analyses. In particular, in order to apply general theories in social science we need first to decide whether the reference of certain concepts is the same which means, basically, that we need to know what our facts are at all. For instance, what is a "peasant"? Or, what is the "family"? Or, what is a "city"? What does it mean if one talks about "state-building"? Simply changing the translation of certain concepts will alter the framework for reference completely. Hence it remains to be of crucial importance to do sinology, meaning that one constantly tries to discover new aspects of meaning more or less independently from established social science theories. Otherwise, our theories will always prejudice our translation. The intellectual autonomy of sinology is a necessary prerequisite for defining "reality" on which social science might be applied.

Take, for example, the analysis of traditional religion. This is of utmost importance for assessing the behavioral foundation for economic change, given the still strong influence of the Weberian approach on our views of the rise of the modern economy, as well as for the assessment of the distinct qualities of the traditional Chinese state, because from the comparative perspective a fundamental aspect of social order is the relationship between the religious and the political realm (the spiritual power and the secular power). But in order to analyze traditional religion one has to delve into its symbolic realm, trying to understand the meaning of certain concepts, first, in terms of their systematic relationship with other concepts, and second, in terms of their translation into "Western" concepts. This is sinology, not social science. The result of such an activity will be the construction of a certain "type" characterizing traditional Chinese society and, in our example, religion, with a limited number of analytical strokes, viz. by means of sinological hypotheses about the meaning of certain religious symbols.

Second, such a type might be the result of linking all the different aspects mentioned in the fourth section of this paper. But just at the beginning of this procedure, translation is crucial because we need to describe the type according to different special and defining features. But there is the possibility that certain aspects cannot be grasped with an English term, that is to say, any approximating English concept cannot be understood if the reader has not already fairly complete sinological knowledge about the referent. Suffice to mention the long history of different attempts at naming the ruling social elite of traditional China and thereby assigning them to a certain functional place in society. Regarding contemporary China we face a similar difficulty. As is well known, some authors argued earlier that the Communist cadre might resemble a member of a Confucian elite. Such comparisons were wrong without doubt precisely because they were not based on clear translations of all the terms in question and because they did not pay respect to the sequence of historical events linking the different referents with each other. A similar confusion might have arisen with the frequent arguments that there is a continuity between the Confucians and today's intellectuals. Such a hypothesis should not only be checked in terms of semantics but also in terms of a possible causal chain of socialization events. Perhaps the result of such an analysis will be that today's intellectuals use the symbol of the traditional scholar in order to reflect about some aspects of their own behavior and political status. This might not give rise to some behavioral family resemblances but only in the next step, i.e. intellectual mimicry, not heritage.

Third, as we realize there is a need to assess any kind of using our knowledge about the past for constructing hypotheses about the future in a way which takes our different channels of possible links as a yardstick. First we might recognize a certain family resemblance, but then we have to discover particular reasons why this might occur. Those reasons can be structural ones, they can be linked with the self-perception of today's societal agents, to patterns of socialization, the peculiar characteristics of the starting point or many other aspects of social change.

Fourth, now let us have a look again at our one-stroke-sentence that symbolizes the complex structures of Chinese calligraphy (albeit in ugly English): Involutionary growth may be linked with the traditional family - but in Late Imperial China there were corporate structures emerging out of the family whose societal role should be reconsidered (like other issues as the status of women and affinal kin) in order to understand the institutional foundation of the economy such that the societal framework for economic activities is recognized to have been much more complex, including many kinds of self-organization and networking activities which are closely related to the fluid state of Qing China as an extremely mobile society of migrants and soujourners, a society which transcended fragmented economic regions through cultural regionalism as a means of informal institutional integration - a fact which has been neglected by recent theories on involutionary growth and which highlights the crucial aspect of economic, social and cultural change in the 20th century, namely China's disintegration into an urban and a rural society with distinct economic and cultural features, finally leading into the trap of Communist immobilism.

In what way could we think about learning something about China's future from looking at the past reconstructed by sinology? Taking our terribly long statement as a point of departure, the crucial question seems to be what will happen if during the transition to the 21st century the urban-rural dualism breaks down. I venture the hypothesis that this will lead to a society which will be very similar to late Qing society, but where, however, many outward symbolic realizations of still comparable social functions will be other ones. For instance, today cultural integration may not work through traditional religion but through the global Chinese mass culture. In order to compare both and, most important, to compare the role of the state within both symbolic systems of past and present, one needs to do thorough sinological analysis of meanings and referents.

Already today we can firmly forecast that China will become a highly mobile society again as well as being regionalized. There are clear structural and institutional factors leading to such a development which I have analyzed in depth in several other contributions. This is foremostly linked with the rise of the peasantry as a social force of its own, however including local elites in the rural areas. The flow of migrants and soujourners is already by no means a "blind" flow but is well organized, and like in China's past, native place relations play an important role in providing the normative framework e.g. for collective action. So far the state is not able to cope with that challenge by administrative and institutional means but only by trying to impose the dualistic order again. But finally the state will have to go back to old patterns of state-society relations. The main issue then is whether state-local and elite-society interactions will be embedded into a normative framework akin to the symbolic universe of traditional Chinese society, in particular in moral terms. Otherwise, the problem of legitimacy on the local as well as on the national level might not be solved, and social order might break down.

So the real question is whether modernization will entail "Chineseness" or not. Looking from the perspective of Late Qing China, we may assume that Chineseness is not simply a contingent matter but refers to a systematic pattern of establishing social order within a certain context of structural constraints and historical legacies. Hence I think that Chineseness is indeed a precondition for successful modernization. But then we cannot do without sinology in the 21st century.

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