Date: Thu, 25 Mar 93 19:40:43 -0700
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From: "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.sunysb.edu>
To: chriscd@jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu
Subject:      chinese peasant wars as the great 'experimental control', etc.
 
   In reviewing the history of European peasant wars, one finds them
remarkably concentrated: Fourth and fifth centuries (Gaul and Spain);
post-1350 (i.e., aftermath of the Bubonic Plague) in France, 1358; England
and Switzerland, 1381; Bohemia, 1419-1433; the explosion in Germany in 1525
by what I call "emergent contradiction" within the Reformation construed as
a social movement; Absolutist France with its Camisards and other rebels up
to the Great Fear and the Vendee; Russia as *sui generis*. But compared to
China, we have quite small-scale, pitiful stuff. When spectacular peasant
wars do occur, they do so when the control apparatus is in abeyance, as in
the Bagaudae of the fifth century. Or where the control apparatus is
rudimentary and in regions quite remote from power centers, Razin in Russia,
1670s, Pugachev, 1773-4. Or where the control apparatus is both remote and
has broken down, Russia in 1603, 1905-1907, 1917-1919.
 
   Consider the background of the Bagaudae. The Roman Empire very nearly wnet
under in the third century due to pan-Eurasian epidemics of smallpox and
measles, with ensuing collapse of the commodity economy in large regions of
the Western part of the empire. A succession of drastic measures enacted by
emperors from Diocletian (285-305) to Valentinian I (364-375) enserfed the
entire peasantry regardless of prior legal status or legal relation to the
means of production; doubled the paper strength of the army; exacted nominally
staggering increases of taxation; enormously increased the repressive apparatus
of officials required to extract the surplus from the direct producers posited
by the foregoing; and restricted the state's guarantee of property to the
largest properties only such that it facilitated the devouring of smaller
(if themselves formerly rich) landlords by the greatest landlords: The
expropriated middling landlords were in turn enserfed to their magisterial
posts to shore up the repressive and fiscal apparatus.
 
   By so doing, the state cut its own throat, as it put in the hands of the
greatest landlords, in whose ostensible interest the state was acting, the
means of evading taxes and the supply of conscripts (to landlords, a precious
supply of extremely scarce labor power). The result was a reversion of Western
Europe to the condition wherein the Romans found it, the abode of Fierce and
Warlike Tribes. The Eastern Mediterranean, the economic core of the former
Hellenistic Civilization, whereto the political core was transferred from
(indefensible) Italy, was enabled nevertheless to lurch on and even recover
a modicum of prosperity by the late fifth century.
 
   Compare China. The political crisis of unification was almost exactly
contemporaneous to the definitive Roman hegemony over the Hellenistic world,
221 BC for the elimination of the last rival state, Yen, by Qin; 202 BC for
the Battle of Zama. Yet the Qin regime was overthrown by a peasant war (and
opportunist intervention by aristocrats dispossessed by Qin) which broke out
in 209 or 210 and which attained victory in 207, leaving the main class forces
to fight it out culminating in the Han.
   The Han underwent dynastic crisis in the form of the regime of Wang Mang,
9-23; this was contemporary with the crisis of the Roman Republic. Where
the latter was resolved by civil war, the Chinese crisis entailed the huge
peasant war of the Red Eyebrows. The latter were directly responsible for the
downfall and death of Wang Mang, though by the year 35 it was the Han nobility
who reaped the reward, betrayed their peasant allies, and wiped them out.
 
   The smallpox and measales epidemics mentioned above (I am of course
following McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 1976) hit China as well, but the
era of the onset of crisis in the Medterranean, the regns of Marcus Aurelius
(161-180) and Commodus (180-192) were the period of the Yellow Trubans war,
specifically, the 180s. The Chinese Empire of Classical Antiquity did not
survive its Classical Antiquity. The Han were shoved aside by the great
warlord Cao Cao (a commentator on Suzzi's Art of War) in 220, whereafter
the Chinese civilization-area divided into the Three Kingdoms (to 280) and
after 317 lapsed into political fragmentation and accompanied by barbarian
invasions.
 
   There is as I have previously mentioned no European counterpart to the
overthrow of the Tang mailed cavalry aristocracy. When in 1358 the French
peasants at last had the effrontery to challenge their nobles' right to
rule, the latter having lamentably failed in their function of protectors,
the rebels of the Jacqueries were still slaughtered like rabbits. The same,
ultimately, was the fate of the Hussites in Bohemia; there were just too many
Germans. (Only in Switzerland, with the death of Leopold II of Habsburg, was
the victory of the peasant infantry decisive and final, 1381.)
 
   The contemporaneity of these events with the third victorious social
revolution of the so-called "traditional" society, that of Zhu Yuanzhang,
founder of the Ming after fighting lasting from 1351 to 1368, has already
been mentioned on this network. Zhu Yuanzhang's revolt had its origin in
the Huai River Valley, cruiously the origin-place of that led by Liu Bang
against the Qin.
 
   We are presented with something of a mysterious historical constant. The
supposition that continuity was imparted by a tradition of clandestine
subversive sects and secret societies, White Lotus in the North and Triad
in the South, has been challenged by Elizabeth Perry, Rebels and
Reviolutionists in North China, 1845-1945, Stanford, 1981. At least, this
is true of the peasants themselves. The historical memory of the state and
gentry classes was, has always been, far longer than that; and even antedates
the appearance of historical peasant wars themselves. The threat of revolution
informs the moralism of Mencius and the subsequent, grimly repressive,
functionalist sociology of Xunzi, both Confucians. Internal security is a
conscious factor in state fiscal or military policy thereafter, when it would
seem that quiescence of the popular masses is taken for granted in the states
of the Mediterranean and Europe.
   In Mediterranean Classical Antiquity it was the fear of losing military
manpower through debt bondage; or the displacement of *assidui* eligible for
military service by slave estates; or the threat of political violence to
exiting socila privilege posed by demobilized veterans returned home to find
their families economically ruined which dominated the political conflicts
of the ancient republics; not fear of victorious peasant armies, Spartacus
or the Sicilian slave rebels or their contemporaries in the former Attalid
Kingdom of Pergamon inherited by Rome as its Province of Asia notwithstanding.
 
   Not even the First Emperor of Qin would have dared to what Rome got away
with, and worse besides.
   Let us, the plural is deliberate, try to suggest why this could have been
so.
 
Daniel A. Foss