The Cultural Nexus of Power

In Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China, Philip Kuhn probed ways of distinguishing dynastic decline from the fall of a civilization in 19th-century China. He concluded that although the imperial administration was disintegrating, the power of the local gentry, an important foundation of the old order, had by no means been undermined. In its time, this was a novel and powerful argument, not least because it rooted the analysis of the polity in the social order. The notion of the "cultural nexus of power" seeks to widen the framework for understanding the polity of a civilization still further — to encompass the realm of culture, especially popular culture. In so doing, I go beyond such obviously important but partial concepts as gentry society and Confucian ideology.

The cultural nexus formulation enables us to understand the imperial state, the gentry, and other social classes in late imperial China within a common frame of reference. It achieves this by grounding the analysis of culture and legitimacy within the organizational context in which power is wielded. In its organizational aspect, the cultural nexus serves as the framework that structures access to power and resources in local society. It also serves as the arena in which politics is contested and leadership developed in this society. Since its other roles rest on this organizational foundation, I consider this foundation first.

The cultural nexus integrates a variety of organizational systems and principles that shape the exercise of power in rural society. These include hierarchies of a segmentary or nested type, found, for instance, in the organization of lineages and markets. Hierarchies may be composed of territorial groupings whose membership is based on an ascriptive right, as in certain temple organizations; or they may be formed by voluntary associations, such as watercontrol or merchant associations. Also part of the nexus are informal networks of interpersonal relationships found, for example, between affines, patrons and clients, or religious teachers and disciples. Organizations may be inclusive or exclusive, singlepurpose or multipurpose, and so on.

The point is that these principles cannot exhaustively be understood by a single overarching system, such as the marketing system or any other system. Rather, together they form an intersecting, seamless nexus stretching across the many particular boundaries of settlements and organizations. Thus, from an objective point of view, the nexus appears not to be a very useful construct. But its coherence lies within a subject-centered universe of power. Persons and groups who pursue public goals do so within it, and it is their reach within this nexus, and not a geographical zone or a particular hierarchical system, that defines the parameters of local politics and the perimeters of local society.

Organizations in North China were rarely fully isomorphic with each other. That is to say, it is hard to find both identical centers of coordination and identical spheres of jurisdiction among them. Rather, they were interlocked in various ways, including personal relationships in informal networks that acted as the weft linking key points in these organizations. Power in local society tended to be concentrated at the densest points of interaction — the nodes of greatest coordination within the nexus.

From a historical point of view, these nodes of coordination constantly shifted over time, moving from within the village to outside of it, or gathered density, sometimes concentrating at one point, such as the village or market town, and sometimes becoming much more widely diffused. I believe that the changes of the 20th century reshuffled the points of coordination. One important result of this reshuffling was the rise, for the first time in the recent history of China, and the subsequent decline of the village as a nodal unit of great significance. Below, I examine how these developments were in no small measure bound up with the fiscal and political imperatives of state penetration.

The Cultural Nexus and the Marketing System

One can scarcely venture far into the study of local society without encountering the magisterial work of G. William Skinner on marketing systems. At first sight, the idea of the cultural nexus appears to represent a step backward in our understanding of this society. If local social systems can be explained by the principles governing the marketing system, as Skinner initially claimed, then why encumber an elegant model with complications? In fact, however, as Skinner himself later acknowledged, there is no isomorphism between the marketing system and the social system. In The City in Late Imperial China, he wrote:

Local organization above the village is a vastly complex subject. It is clear from work published in the last decade that the internal structure of the standard marketing system was more variegated and interesting than my 1964 article began to suggest. Extravillage local systems below the level of the standard marketing community were variously structured by higher-order lineages, irrigation societies, crop-watching societies, politico-ritual societies ... and the jurisdictions of particular deities and temples; many if not most were multipurpose sodalities manifesting more than one organizing principle.

My purpose, therefore, is not to flog a dead horse. Instead, I hope to salvage the most valuable insights of the marketing system model and rework them into the cultural nexus formulation. In the analysis of marriage networks and irrigation associations in this chapter, I demonstrate two different ways in which the marketing system was assimilated within the cultural nexus; and throughout the book, I indicate ways in which this system was articulated with other organizational systems in the nexus. I begin by looking briefly at the role of markets in the villages of the CN survey, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.

Most of the CN villages were located near the county capital, which also served as their market town. Consequently, they were oriented to a larger marketing center — usually an intermediate market, rather than the standard markets. A notable exception to this was Hou Lineage Camp, in Changli county, Hebei, whose principal market was Nijing, a standard market that also became the headquarters of the administrative village in 1940–41. Villagers mostly frequented this market, which operated on a five-day cycle, but they...