Globalized Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory by Xiaoying Qi

Author:Xiaoying Qi [Qi, Xiaoying]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Research, Political Science, Globalization
ISBN: 9781134691623
Google: nxWkAgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18148765
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The idea of the important place of trade in the intellectual heritage of the early Greek, Italian, Dutch and British nations and of the alternative significance of land, agriculture and irrigation for the Chinese is reflected in the ways in which the associated social structures of these civilizations contributed to different formations of their intellectual heritage. This is captured in Fung's (1966: 25–26) summary in which he says that while ‘the Greeks organized their society around the city state, in contrast the Chinese social system… [was organized around] the family state’. The importance of the family in understanding Chinese society and politics, as well as its intellectual heritage, arises from the agricultural nature of China's early economic organization. Agricultural activity requires an intensity of labor that is best supplied by the family formation. The family and kinship structures are thereby elevated in Chinese society to an importance that has many consequences for further social development and for the nature of China's intellectual heritage.

In a summary of comparative research on cultural and institutional development in China and Europe, Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini (2010: 137) show that large kinship structures had largely atrophied in Europe by the ninth century, and had no significance except on the social and geographical margins, while in China at that time they remained socially and politically important. Across Europe, favorable political, social and judicial developments no longer supported the social maintenance of large kinship groups. Legal codes by this time had ceased to link rights with kinship; also, the Church discouraged practices that sustained extended kinship, including adoption, polygamy, concubinage, marriage between distant kin and marriages without bride consent (Greif and Tabellini 2010: 137). By 1350 most cities in Europe had gained self-governance, which further undermined extended kinship structures as independent cities privileged individual autonomy (Greif and Tabellini 2010: 138). Non-kin cooperation and impersonal exchanges were thus supported by those legal, religious and urban developments in Europe that both required and reinforced a generalized morality and formalized infrastructure of enacted codes and regulations. The Christian dogma of moral obligation toward non-kin was fostered in these circumstances in which the legal system refined non-kin cooperation and provided legal protection for impersonal exchange (Greif and Tabellini 2010: 138). There were no parallel developments in China, however.

The Chinese trajectory of social innovation at this time was based on a consolidation of kinship solidarity and clan structure. Greif and Tabellini (2010: 137) explain that in China:

Clans provided their members with education, religious services, relief from poverty, and other local public goods. Cooperation was sustained by intrinsic motivation and reputation supplemented by formal, intraclan mechanisms for dispute resolution. The objective was not to enforce an abstract moral law but to arbitrate a compromise … Clans were responsible for tax collection, the conduct of their members, and the training of candidates for the civil service exams. Because it benefited from the clan, the state reinforced intra-clan cohesion … Intra-clan enforcement reduced the need for formal enforcement institutions.

In the circumstances described here

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