Organizer: Bettine Birge, University of Southern California
Chair: Morris Rossabi, City University of New York
Discussants: Willard Peterson, Princeton University; Morris Rossabi, City University of
New York
Scholars have for some time recognized the Yuan dynasty as a crucial time in the development of the institutional and social structures that characterized late imperial China. Yet this period of significant change has still not been adequately researched. The three papers on this panel contribute to our understanding of the Yuan as a turning point in Chinese history by exploring both the steppe influences on Yuan society, coming from the Mongol conquerors, and indigenous changes promoted by Chinese literati who were often responding to the crises of the time by promoting a new moral order. The three papers clarify how social and institutional structures of later dynasties emerged out of a mixture of foreign ideas and indigenous controversies.
Yao Dali of Nanjing University reexamines institutions such as the "mobile secretariat" (xing sheng) as the integration of Mongol government systems with traditional Chinese institutions. Furthermore, he explores how both the Mongol relation of a khan to his ministers and concepts originating from the Chinese themselves contributed to aspects of Ming autocracy. Bettine Birge explores this negotiation between foreign and indigenous in the context of women and family. She finds that the introduction of alien marriage practices and a lack of established law governing marriage and property resulted in confusion that created an opportunity for proponents of the Zhu Xi school to impose a radically new social agenda on the population. Paul Smith further explores the nexus of money, morality, and procreation from the perspective of uxorilocal marriage. He brings us the views of both a father and an uxorilocal son in law, and describes how the crises of the time were perceived as the result of moral degeneration in family relations. His work shows how issues and conflicts getting played out in Yuan drama generated stereotyped responses by Ming times.
The two discussants, Morris Rossabi and Willard Peterson, bring to the subject expertise in Mongol steppe history and Chinese social and intellectual history. These two perspectives should help place the papers into the context of both steppe history and indigenous Chinese society.
Yao Dali, Nanjing University
The triumph of Khubilai Khan over Arigh Böke in the struggle for succession to the khanate throne marked the dissolution of the Great Mongol Empire and greatly hastened the localization of Mongol rule in China proper, Persia, Central Asia, and the South Russian Steppe. Localization in China was neither a process simply of "sinicization" of the Mongol regime, nor a one sided inclination towards so called "bureaucratization" inherent within the Mongol system, but was a consequence of both. As symbols of these two different political institutional responses, there existed throughout the dynasty two kinds of titles for kingdoms (guo hao), ways of numbering the years (nian-hao), temple titles for each emperor (di hao, or miao hao), ceremonies for succession to the throne, and national sacrifices: both Mongolian and Chinese in each case.
Nevertheless, the Mongol Yuan political system was not simply a dual system like the Nan Bei yuan system of the Liao Dynasty. Elements of the Mongol system and of the Chinese traditional system were mixed with each other and integrated into a single institutional structure. There were two distinguishing features during the transition from the Mongol Empire to the Yuan Dynasty. First, the influence of the Mongol system was usually brought into play from the upper levels of the administration down to the lower ones, and the influence of the Chinese traditional system in most cases was oppositely brought into play upwards from the lower administrative levels. Second, the new institutional elements which were introduced into the system relatively late (usually the elements of the Chinese traditional system) did not completely replace the original ones. The latter continued to exist, though their original functions were sometimes changed.
This paper will re examine the institution of the "mobile secretariat" (xing sheng) and of enfeoffment (feng feng) under the Mongol Yuan regime from the above perspective. It will analyze how the concept of the ejen boghol relationship between the Mongol khan and his ministers was introduced into the relationship of the Mongol monarch to his Chinese ministers. The concept of ministers being slaves of the monarch conceived by the Chinese was probably one of the elements that promoted an autocratic monarchy under the Ming regime.
Bettine Birge, University of Southern California
Towards the end of the Song dynasty, Zhu Xi and his followers articulated a program of personal and social transformation that came to have a profound influence on later Chinese history. The social agenda promoted by these men included a direct challenge to Song law and custom concerning marriage, inheritance, and women's property rights. This agenda, however, had little effect on laws and customs during the Song, and Song women of all classes continued to enjoy strong legal protection for private property within marriage, for remarriage with their dowry intact, and other privileges opposed by Zhu Xi's followers.
This situation may have prevailed had it not been for the upheaval of the Mongol conquest of South China and the change to a foreign ruled dynasty. The presence of non Chinese populations who introduced new forms of marriage and property relations, together with the absence of systematic laws and enforcement, led to general confusion and a vacuum of authority regarding women, marriage, and property. For instance, the levirate, most commonly in the form of a man marrying his older brother's widow, was soon practiced by Chinese in both the North and the South. Yuan documents record rapes of Chinese widows by their brothers in law and these widows suing to escape such forced levirate remarriages.
Local Chinese officials responded with repeated demands for clarification of the laws and frequent appeals to higher authorities to resolve marriage and property issues. Meanwhile, literati of the Zhu Xi school at court and in the provinces championed the need to transform customs and convert the people to their interpretation of the Confucian way. These ideas began to make headway, and chastity for instance emerged as an acceptable alternative to forced levirate remarriage. In the early Yuan, officials were lenient in their application of the law and allowed a range of solutions to family conflicts (even letting "illegal" marriages stand when circumstances warranted). But by the fourteenth century a body of edicts, decrees, and communiqués imposed on the populace a new hard line legal agenda consistent with the ideas of the Zhu Xi school. Written in the peculiar language of direct translation from the emperor's Mongolian speech, or more eloquently expressed by local Chinese officials, this body of legislation severely restricted a woman's ability to remarry and to control her private property. Widow chastity lost its link to levirate remarriage and became a popularized virtue supported by legal sanctions and coercion. The most significant new laws were copied verbatim into the codes of the Ming and Qing dynasties. What later Confucians took to be timeless standards were in fact the result of changes made possible by a confusing encounter between Chinese and Mongolian civilization.
Paul Smith, Haverford College
Chinese of all social strata have long shared a preoccupation with procreation, property, and ancestral rites. When procreation failed to produce the son thought necessary for passing on property or performing ancestral sacrifices, those couples fortunate enough to have a daughter might "call in a son in law" to live with the family, thereby preserving the patriline for another generation and perhaps providing heirs for the future. But these uxorilocal marriages, amply recorded from the Song on, were always considered a distasteful expedient that subjected the host family to the greed and divided loyalties of their imported heir, and opened the son in law himself to the ridicule and censure of family and peers.
In this paper, I will explore two Yuan sources that illuminate the social and psychological perturbations generated by uxorilocal marriage. The Yuan drama 'On distributing his wealth Heaven bequeaths an heir in old age' (San jiacai tian xi lao sheng'er) portrays the problem of "calling in a son in law" from the vantage point of the host father in law, who blames his daughter's husband for the disappearance of a boy child borne to the old man by a concubine. The focus on the intersection of money, morality, and fecundity that make the Yuankan edition of the play so powerful is augmented in the Ming version with scenes that underscore how the figure of the greedy uxorilocal son in law had become a caricature by Ming times. The second source, Kong Qi's Zhizheng zhiji, reverses the perspective by portraying the shortcomings of the host family as perceived by the uxorilocal son in law, in this case Kong Qi himself. In the midst of his wide ranging observations about life in Jiangnan during the collapse of the Yuan, Kong Qi pays particular attention to the foibles of his in laws, the Wus and Pans of Jinling and Liyang, in Jiangsu. For Kong Qi it is moral weakness that has brought about the social and political crisis of his time, and he finds few more enticing examples of moral turpitude than his wife's relatives, who consistently violate the guides Kong Qi hopes to restore when he gets to manage his family: the Precepts for Social Life of the Southern Song man Yuan Cai, and the Family Regulations by Kong's contemporary, Zheng Taihe.
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