China's Gentry. Essays in Rural-Urban Relations. by Hsiao-Tung FeiReview by: Arthur W. HummelThe Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May, 1954), pp. 333-334Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2942285 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 333

were used to put them into effect. The story is based on a great wealth of evidence including, beyond the voluminous printed sources, the original rec- ords of the State Department, those records of our military action in the China- India-Burma Theater of war used by the Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army in writing the official history of that effort, the perti- nent Hopkins, Hurley and Roosevelt papers, and the Morgenthau Diaries, to mention some outstanding items.

Despite the subtitle, this study cannot be regarded as a comprehensive history because, for example, the resolving of many controversial questions in particular areas of specialty such as military history is left for others to settle. Nor does Mr. Feis present the complex and difficult problem of how policy between 1941 and 1946 was affected by the inflexible traditions and the background of our policy toward China running back for forty and more years. What he has done is well set forth when he says that

It is natural that we should dispute among ourselves as we seek to locate the errors and place the blame. But we must not allow this examinatior of the past to distort the nature and meaning of what we tried to do. [p. 429.]

The China Tangle is the most enlightening account we have yet had of "what we tried to do."'

PAUL H. CLYDE Duke University

China's Gentry. Essays in Rural-Urban Relations. By HSIAO-TUNG FEI. Re- vised and edited by Margaret Park Redfield. With six life-histories of Chinese Gentry Families Collected by Yung-teh Chow and an Introduction by Robert Redfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Issued in cooperation with the International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations. V, 290. $5.75.

The seven essays which make up the first half of this book appeared origi- nally in Chinese newspapers. At the close of 1948-before the communists took control of Peking-Fei dictated them in English to Mrs. Redfield who, with her husband, was then in that city. No word has since come from the author, though he is said to be teaching at Tsinghua University. The gentry of China fare badly at Mr. Fei's hands. Rightly pained at the hardships of men who till the soil, and keenly conscious of class, he blames the scholar- literati, the merchants, the landlords, and the active and retired officials for most of his country's economic and political ills. 'This heterogeneous group he designates, in the jargon of our day, the "power structure" of traditional Chinese society. One of their failings through the centuries was that they did not bring the emperor under the rule of law as the English did King John under Magna Charta. Instead of restraining his power directly, they supinely at- tempted by various means to neutralize and soften it. They expected him to rule by a set of ethical principles based on the classics, and reaching back

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334 FAR EASTERN QUARTERLY

to Confucius and Mencius by a kind of apostolic succession known as tao- t'ung. This was the method of persuasion. Another device of this class was the Taoist one of laissez faire which is here inexactly termed "do-nothing- ism." Thus an imperial edict that was discovered to be unworkable at the local level was politely ignored or explained away. Mr. Fei is on more solid ground when he attributes the collapse of the Chinese economy in modern times to the impact of foreign machine-made goods which destroyed the home industries by which tenant farmers had long managed to supplement their small incomes. Here again the gentry are reproached for exacting rent from the land while ignoring home industries. They bought goods from the great port cities and left the farmer to his plight. Much that is said here is true, and the story makes sad reading.

The six "life histories" in the last half of the book which describe certain "gentry" in the remote province of Yunnan, read much like select biographies of city bosses, unscrupulous politicians, ruthless merchants, or gangsters in one of our great urban centers. Such types certainly existed in China, but it would be wrong to take them, as Mr. Fei evidently wants us to do, as typical of China in normal times. Conditions were better in the older, more enlight- ened provinces. The bitterness of our times tinctures this author's work and leads him into strange distortions. What shall one make of his statement that the walled city, or county-seat which for milleniums was the people's refuge in times of disturbance, "was an instrument of the ruling class"? And is it really true that "production and leisure are mutually exclusive"? Was it wrong for a rural family to train a talented son for the competitive civil service examinations, which were open to any one, and ask its other sons to work on the farm? Many of the gentry-if there be such a class-rose just that way. To denounce this class for being "without technical knowledge"; to laugh at it for stressing ethical principles and persuasion is not only to fail in his- torical perspective, but to disparage a valuable feature of Chinese culture. One wonders how a civilization as unattractive as Mr. Fei portrays it managed to persist for four thousand years.

ARTHUR W. HUMMEL

Library of Congress

A History of Chinese Philosophy. Volume 11: The Period of Classical Learn- ing (from the second century B. C. to the twentieth century A. D.) By FUNG YU-LAN. Translated by Derk Bodde. With introduction, notes, bibli- ography and index. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. xxv, 783. $7.50.

Derk Bodde, one of the most earnest and indefatigable members of our sodality, is to be congratulated on the successful completion of an imposing task. A comprehensive survey of the philogeny of Chinese thought is now made accessible to the non-sinological reader with this second volume of his translation of Fung's bulky History forming a handsome set with the reprint

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