The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857-1942

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harrison, Henrietta.

The man awakened from dreams : one man’s life in a north China village, 1857–1942 / Henrietta Harrison.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8047-5068-8 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 0-8047-5069-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Harrison, Henrietta—Travel—China—Chiqiao Village. 2. Chiqiao Village (China)—Description and travel. 3. Liu family. I. Title.

DS797.75.C45H374 2005

951′.17—dc22            2004018647

Original Printing 2005

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

14   13   12   11   10   09   08

Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/14 Janson

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-6746-0

The Man Awakened from Dreams

One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942

HENRIETTA HARRISON

THE MAN AWAKENED FROM DREAMS

Liu Dapeng. Used by kind permission of Liu Niuzhong, Chiqiao.

CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Preface

1.    Writing

2.    The Confucian Scholar

3.    The Filial Son

4.    The Representative of the People

5.    The Merchant

6.    The Farmer

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to David Faure for persuading me to work on Liu Dapeng and thus giving me the opportunity to learn so much. St Anne’s College, Oxford, gave me a Junior Research Fellowship that allowed me to do most of the initial research, while the Leverhulme Trust and the Institute for Advanced Study gave the opportunity to spend a stimulating year in Princeton writing the final version of the book. Friends and colleagues in Oxford, Princeton, and Leeds have all dedicated a great deal of time to my work. I am particularly grateful to Penny Francks, Joan Judge, Nicolas Standaert, Joan Scott, and Emma Shore for reading large amounts of the project in unfinished form. Chen Huaiyu provided help with the translations and at a greater distance, May Bo Ching, Jacob Eyferth, and Kate Edgerton provided discussion of important points.

This project would not have been possible without the opportunity to spend considerable amounts of time in Shanxi. I am grateful to the British Academy, the Universities’ China Committee, and the European Union-China Academic Network for funding my visits. Nor would my research have been possible after I arrived in Shanxi without the endlessly generous help of Professor Zhang Zhengming of the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences. Bi Yuan of Beijing Normal University accompanied me on many interviews and discussed them with me afterward. Wu Jiongsheng of Jinci No 2 Middle School not only arranged many interviews and gave me copies of inscriptions he had transcribed, but afterward kindly interviewed his neighbors and relatives himself and sent me detailed reports. Finally, I am grateful to all those who have spent time telling me about their lives, histories, and villages. As any reader of this book will see, my deepest thanks go to Liu Zuoqing for the many hours he has spent talking to me about his grandfather, conversations which not only ironed out many of my difficulties with the written texts and informed me on the details of the family’s economic situation, but above all made Liu Dapeng come alive for me.

Map of China in 1908, showing places mentioned in the text

Central Shanxi. Source: ABCFM. Shansi Mission.

Adapted from Shen Guifen’s map of Shanxi Province, 1881.

THE MAN AWAKENED FROM DREAMS

Preface

These days one can get to Chiqiao village by bus. The first time I came, in 1996, the bus driver let me off at the end of the track that runs across the rice paddies to the village. Many of the buses are owned and operated by Chiqiao families, but the bus crew was surprised that I wanted to go there. The village lies on the edge of the plain and its main street, which winds up the hill, is the old road that ran from Taiyuan, the provincial capital of Shanxi, to the southern part of the province. Most of the houses along the road are low traditional courtyards and, like the long-abandoned shops, are much the same color as the dirt road along which they are built. One of these was the home of Liu Dapeng, which I had come to see. Before Liu’s father bought it the house had been a pawnshop, and it is solidly built with a small gateway over the entrance. The talkative old man who took me into the house told me that hanging under the eaves of the gateway there was once a large board saying Father and Son are both graduates. Today the board is gone and the elaborate carving on the wall behind the gate has been hacked off and roughly plastered over. Lifting a bamboo screen we come round the corner into a paved courtyard with four rooms round it. The old man calls out to the family and jokes that this was the only courtyard in the village whose stone paving was laid by graduates. Standing here we are facing the main rooms, which were once inhabited by Liu Dapeng’s parents and now belong to the family of his eldest son. On our left is the slightly smaller south-facing building where Liu himself lived all his life. An old woman dressed in black comes out, introduces herself to me as Liu Dapeng’s fifth daughter-in-law, and takes us inside. It is a long narrow room with a wide brick bed at one end and cupboards and tables set against the back wall. The far end is separated off to provide a small inner room, which once had a heated brick bed like the main room but now has two iron bedsteads. Directly facing us as we enter is a large portrait of Liu Dapeng: a serious man—his solidity and stature emphasized by a thick padded silk jacket—frowning slightly down at us.

Liu Dapeng’s home was not what I expected. When the old man joked that the paving stones had been laid by graduates, I did not believe him. Surely Qing dynasty degree-holders did not lay paving stones. I was also surprised at the size of the house. My notes on the occasion record a string of questions: Was this the only courtyard Liu lived in? Did all his sons live here as well? Liu’s daughter-in-law and a young woman who had married into the family of his eldest son were surprised in their turn but quite clear: Liu, his wife, parents, five sons and their wives and children all lived in the one courtyard. I knew that Liu and his son had both held prestigious provincial degrees in the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Although neither ever achieved the final national-level degree that provided access to official employment, even the holding of provincial degrees made them both members of what Chang Chung-li, writing in the 1950s, described as the upper gentry.¹ Below them were the many holders of the preliminary degree who had never been able to progress further. Together these degree-holders formed a group that writers of Chinese history have traditionally referred to as the gentry and described as taking a mediating position between the state and the general population.² This group is seen as being infused with a Confucian culture acquired through the education and examination system. Later studies have emphasized the importance of other sources of power. They describe degree-holders and others, such as those who had made money through trade or banking but did not hold degrees, as members of an elite.³ Other scholars have looked at the lifestyles of this group and described how members of the elite differentiated themselves from other people through, for example, writing poetry, painting, and collecting rare books.⁴ The effect of reading this literature had been to produce in my mind at least an image of the gentry as wealthy, cultured families living in large houses.

There is of course another image of traditional Chinese degree-holders: the impoverished schoolteacher. Penniless scholars desperately trying to pass the exams that would bring them an official position are famously satirized in the eighteenth-century novel The Scholars. This is the category into which my Chinese acquaintances invariably fit Liu Dapeng. Men like Liu Dapeng did not necessarily teach and the impoverished school teacher is a stereotype, but it is one that reflects a reality that has too often been overlooked. Educated but poor families do appear in the English-language literature on China, but their voices are often lost in the simplicity of the division between the elite and the common people.⁵ This division appeals to us. We want to be studying either the power-holders or the subalterns. When we make that division we are making an alien society more comprehensible to ourselves, but we are also filtering out the difficulties.⁶ Part of my aim in this book is to question some of the classifications we apply to Chinese society: gentry, merchant, peasant, elite. What do we mean when we use these terms? Does any individual, let alone a family, fit neatly into any one category? If identities are multiple and shifting, then how does this affect the historical narratives we relate?

Coming to Liu Dapeng’s house and meeting his family also made me wonder about what happened to the degree-holding gentry after the 1911 revolution. On my second visit to the village, in 1997, I was introduced to the landlord’s son, an old man named Wu who had become a paper maker in the years after the Communist revolution of 1949. Despite his reputation as a skilled craftsman, he was nervous and avoided answering questions, an unsurprising result of his status since 1949. Liu Dapeng’s family showed no such characteristics. Indeed, on one occasion Liu’s elderly daughter-in-law took advantage of my presence to berate the village Party Secretary loudly and at length for the destruction during the 1960s of the carving on the decorated wall behind the main gate of the house. Family members were proud of Liu Dapeng and told me how many books he had owned (a whole cupboard full) but made no claims to school learning and clearly considered themselves to be quite ordinary members of the village community. Social mobility is known to have been an important characteristic of Chinese villages, but historians have tended to focus on those members of the elite who succeeded in preserving their status and in adapting to change. They see members of local elites becoming increasingly involved in social activism and in attempts to mobilize the population to support change and modernization.⁷ It has also been suggested that traditional elites who had acted to protect their villages from government extortion lost their legitimacy as taxation increased in the early twentieth century, and that when this happened they migrated to the towns.⁸ In all these scenarios traditional local elites still preserved some of their economic and social status. Liu Dapeng’s case was much less positive. As his descendents’ current situation suggests, the family had declined well before the Communist revolution of 1949. Given the picture we have of the preservation of existing elites, why did Liu’s family fail? And how did men try to preserve the status they had earned as members of the gentry when the 1911 revolution destroyed any remaining hope that they might attain government office? These questions have led me to two stories, the first about Confucianism and the second about the province of Shanxi.

What role did Confucianism actually play in people’s lives? And how did that change after the state abandoned its longstanding commitment to Confucian orthodoxy? Liu Dapeng was personally committed to the ideas he learned first as a schoolboy and later as a student in an academy in the provincial capital. He agonized endlessly over his failure to live up to the high standards he had learned, particularly what he saw as the inadequacy of his care and affection for his parents. His attempt to play out the role of a Confucian gentleman was unusual: his classmates in the academy, many of whom came from wealthier backgrounds, teased him for his earnest enthusiasm, while his neighbors in the village often disagreed with him over what constituted proper behavior. But even though few people shared Liu’s personal commitment, they tolerated and even admired it because it was recognized and promoted by the state. Then, from 1900 on, the state gradually abandoned its Confucian values in favor of a new emphasis on nationalism and a vision of modernity tied to international trade and large-scale urban industry. The rhetoric of Confucianism lost its political currency to such an extent that officials would no longer even listen to arguments couched in those terms, and Liu lost the public voice that his education had once given him. But Confucianism was deeply embedded in local society and did not simply disappear. For Liu himself, the effort to behave like a Confucian gentleman was a crucial part of his identity, one that marked his status even after his educational qualifications became politically worthless. The ways in which he attempted to convert this identity into an income for his family suggest the extent to which Confucian ideas remained part of local institutions long after the state had abandoned them. In particular, in the absence of a strong legal framework, Confucian values continued to play an important role in business, where Liu found employment as a coal mine manager and investment manager. His status among the county’s merchants was confirmed through his extensive work as a mediator in business disputes, where his value system was recognized and accepted. Confucianism continued to be part of many aspects of life: business, the family, agriculture. But in the absence of the state as a unifying force, Confucian values developed and changed in different ways in each of these institutions.

Throughout the book I use the word Confucianism as shorthand for the ideology promoted by the Qing government in the late nineteenth century, which Liu Dapeng usually referred to as the principles of the sages and worthies or the way of Confucius and Mencius.⁹ In his opinion this represented the authentic teaching of Confucius and his disciples. This view is not shared by modern scholars, who might prefer to call his philosophy neo-Confucianism, emphasizing its origins in the thought of the twelfth century, but was shared by most of his contemporaries. I have used the term Confucianism partly because it reflects Liu’s opinions, but also because Song neo-Confucianism, like Qing orthodoxy, was itself merely a moment in the great philosophical stream. Nor was Liu’s Confucianism a pure version of twelfth-century ideas; it was shot through with ideas that came from the Daoist philosophical tradition as well. But both philosophies came to him through the same textual tradition, and he never explicitly differentiated between the two, accepting both as his heritage as a scholar and potential official and always referring to himself as following the way of the ancient sages.

In an earlier generation Liu Dapeng might have defined his Confucianism against some form of popular culture, but in fact he came increasingly to set it in opposition to what he refers to as the new policies. So, for example, he states,

In recent years scholars have all been divided into two groups, called those who hold to the old and those who hold to the new. Those who hold to the old cleave to the way of Confucius and Mencius, while those who hold to the new seek only after Western methods.¹⁰

From the 1890s through to the 1940s, he saw and lamented the inexorable political rise of those who hold to the new and their policies. I have chosen to refer to these people as modernizers and to their policies as modernization because in our language any government policy can be new, whereas what Liu saw was a particular political agenda, based on a Western-inspired vision of the future. He understood this agenda as being opposed to his own Confucianism, which looked back to the way of the ancient sages.

This brings me to the other story, which is about the Shanxi countryside and its gradual exclusion from commercial prosperity and political power as a result of changes that were closely linked to this vision of modernity. When I visited Chiqiao and then the village of Nanxi where Liu worked as a tutor for many years, it was immediately obvious that these villages had once been wealthy. The main street in Chiqiao is lined with buildings that were once shops but have long been bricked up for use as housing. Off the street the narrow lanes run into large yards with dilapidated chimneys and collapsing sheds that once housed the village’s paper-making industry. In Nanxi and the neighboring village of Chewang, vast and once beautifully decorated halls and courtyards were locked up or inhabited by impoverished villagers who looked almost as if they were camping in them.¹¹ This was, of course, partly the result of Communist party policies of the 1950s and 60s, which redistributed wealth through land reform and the absorption of rural industry into the state; but it was also part of a longer process. In some cases Communist policies actually had the effect of preserving buildings of the kind that before 1949 were being broken up and sold for timber. The impoverishment of the once wealthy Shanxi countryside began well before 1949 and was the result of a series of political changes that transformed Shanxi’s geography. Mongolian independence, the Russian revolution, and the refocusing of both national security concerns and trade from inland northwest China to the southeast coast—together these developments turned Shanxi from a major trading corridor into an isolated and inaccessible province. Meanwhile the vision of modernity shared by provincial and national governments emphasized urban industrialization and export-oriented commerce as the foundation for a strong nation.¹² Some parts of the country benefited from these changes; Shanxi villages did not. Between 1900 and 1980, the villages of central Shanxi were transformed from prosperous centers of commerce and industry into impoverished and largely agricultural communities.

These are large topics, but I have focused them round the story of one man, because that is how I came to them. This approach also allows me to focus on the details of everyday life where we can see how social structures and ideologies interacted in practice. Only at the level of the individual is it possible to see, for example, how the ideology of filial piety was put into practice and how this was affected by political changes; if we leap to the collectivity too quickly, we lose much of what is interesting. For the same reason I have by and large avoided narratives of the great political events of the day. Uprisings and revolutions punctuate everyday life, they add drama to it, and ultimately they may change it, but most people participate only as observers and the changes in their lives take place over a much longer term. Moreover, much of the book is based on Liu Dapeng’s diary, which is missing the volumes for 1900 and 1908 to 1912. It seems that before the manuscript reached the Shanxi Provincial library, someone took out the years that he or she thought of greatest historical value: those covering the Boxer uprising in 1900 and the republican revolution in 1911. It is possible to reconstruct these events in some detail from Liu’s other writings, indeed Liu is one of the major sources for the Boxer uprising in Shanxi; but I have chosen instead to take this as an invitation to focus on the everyday, the domestic, and the personal.¹³

This focus on a single person inevitably brings with it the question, was Liu Dapeng typical? The obvious answer to this question is no. It is not normal in any society to keep a diary for fifty years, let alone to leave the amount of other writing Liu did. Even in his later life, when he was laboring in the fields, Liu wrote about what was going on every day and sometimes several times a day. Nor was his devout commitment to Confucianism particularly widespread, though other people’s reactions to it do give a sense of how it fitted into a broader community. The family’s economic situation, on the other hand, was perfectly ordinary: in Liu’s father’s lifetime, that is to say up to the 1900s, they were comfortably off though never among the richest families in the village. They were the kind of people referred to as the middling sort by historians of early modern Europe and as rich peasants by Communist land-reform cadres. From the early 1900s on, the family declined and, by the late 1930s, when Liu ate sorghum porridge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and could not afford coal for heating, they were poor by anyone’s reckoning. Their decline was part of a larger process that involved much of Shanxi, and I have used their story to illustrate economic changes that have been discussed in greater detail by Chinese historians.

Liu Dapeng’s situation was not unusual. He refers frequently to friends who shared his predicament, and his ideas and patterns of thought grew out of the social and cultural environment in which he lived. But I have not chosen to write about him because I think that he is typical. Real people are never typical. As I read his diary I began to feel a sense of commitment to him as a person, and when I talked to his family and neighbors that sense was strengthened. I admired his attempts to live up to his ideals, even though much of his thinking remained quite alien to me. (I doubt he would have approved of being studied by a foreign woman: he complained about the endless streams of women from all the foreign countries who come to travel in China, since women are supposed to be chaste, quiet, and secluded, and they cannot be that if they leave home and travel.)¹⁴ Real humanity in historical accounts is all too often restricted to great leaders, famous writers, or original thinkers.¹⁵ Liu Dapeng was none of these. As a young man he did indeed hope to be a great leader, but like most people he never achieved that goal. I have written about him because I hope that the very fact that he was a real person and not some abstract personification of a class or type may teach us to rethink our understanding of what it was like to live through some of the changes that transformed China in the twentieth century.

ONE

Writing

On 25 November 1925 Liu Dapeng was awakened by the sound of his baby daughter crying. She and her young mother slept in a small inner room that opened off the far end of the main room where Liu was sleeping. It was still completely dark, but the village cocks had begun to crow so morning was on its way. Liu got up and went into the little inner room where the baby and mother were now sitting up on the big brick bed and the baby was smiling and laughing. A short time later Liu’s youngest son, Hongqing, who was seven, called to his mother that he wanted to get up. Then, as the first thin rays of the sun were just appearing, two grandsons, Quanzhong and Jingzhong, who slept with Liu on the big brick bed in the outer room and must have been awakened by all the activity, also got up and began learning their lessons. They were at school in the nearby town of Jinci, where they studied from the new modern textbooks, but Liu also occasionally taught them the old texts at home. In either case learning their lessons meant chanting the texts aloud. Another grandson, Shuzhong, heard the noise from the small room across the courtyard where he lived with his father, Liu’s younger son Xiang, and his family. He came in to join his cousins in reciting their texts.

Surrounded by his children and grandchildren and the sound of their recitations, Liu was delighted. This was the time of day when he usually wrote his diary. He sat down alongside them on the big brick bed and got out his brush, ink stone, ink stick, and diary from the big wooden cupboard that stood on the end of the bed. The brush was old, but it would have to do. (A few days later he dreamt that he had been given four new writing brushes; when he woke up he meditated on the sad fact that people never did give him writing equipment.) He had made the notebook for the diary earlier in the year from scraps of whatever paper he could come by: a few plain white sheets, but also sheets of newspaper (which were flimsy but only printed on one side), the backs of funeral announcements, flyers advertising medical stores in the nearby town of Jinci, and advertisements for patent medicines. He cut them to a regular size, pasted them together, and folded them up in a concertina