PDF《INTRODUCTION》

s younger fellow provincial and friend, Liang Qichao 梁启 超(1873C1929), was an in?uential advocate of the European three ages model. In his proposal, ancient (shangshi 上世) was from the Yellow Thearch (Huangdi 黄帝) to the Qin;

medieval (zhongshi 中世), from Qin to Qianlong;

and modern ( jinshi 近世), from Qian- long to the present (§68.1). The attraction of this three-age model was that it predicated a progression from antiquity via the middle ages to the modern, with the modern age marking an advance on the previous two. In other words, all value was no longer placed in a remote past, but in the present and future. Table

1 Japanese Periodizations of Chinese History In 1914, Naitō Konan 内藤湖南 [Torajirō 虎次郎] (1866C1934), the in?u- ential member of Japan'

s Kyoto school of Sinology, adapted the threefold scheme ( jōko 上古, chūko 中古, kinsei 近世) by situating the start of the Chinese middle ages (chūko) at the fall of the Han and the beginning of the modern age after the fall of the Tang. Later, in his lectures of 1921C22, he nuanced this as follows: 1. Antiquity (up to the Later Han) >

Transition: Later Han to Western Jin (316 CE) 2. Medieval: Eastern Jin to Late Tang >

Transition: Late Tang to founding of Song (960) 3.1 Modern (1): Song and Yuan (to 1368) 3.2 Modern (2): Ming and Qing (Fogel 1984, 200) The Naitō thesis makes the Song and Yuan early modern (kinsei zenki 近 世前期) and the Ming and Qing, late modern (kinsei kōki 近世后期) on the grounds that the Song and later times saw (1) the decline of aristocracy and the rise of absolute monarchy, (2) the rise in the status of the people from slaves and tenants of the aristocrats to subjects of the emperor, (3) the intro- duction of civil service exams, which in theory were open to every subject of the emperor, (4) the appearance of political parties based on di?erence in government policy or intellectual background, (5) the growth of a money economy, (6) the tendency toward independent interpretation of the Classics, (7) the rise of a plebian culture, with new forms of literature and art;

see also Zhang Guangda (2005), Liu Yiyan (2006), and Luo Yinan (2006). The Tokyo school identi?ed the late Ming as the beginning of the mod- ern. The Chūgokushi kenkyūkai 中国史研究会 (Chinese history society) group rejects both the Kyoto and Tokyo analyses and instead sees all of Chi- nese history from the Warring States in terms of the rise and fall of the auto- cratic state, which was eventually undermined by the petty commodity production economy that emerged in the late Ming, early Qing, without giving birth to a capitalist society. Recent Western scholarship has developed the early modern paradigm (coinciding with and characterized by the increasing monetization of society

2 INTRODUCTION in the late Ming);

see Huang (1991), Pomeranz (2002), and von Glahn (2004, 160C6........