Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy

CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND BUREAUCRACY : Variations on a Theme. By Etienne Balazs. Translated by H. M. Wright. Edited by Arthur F. Wright. 309 pp. New Haven and London : Yale University Press, Sixth Printing 1972 (1964). ISBN 0-300-00013-8 (pbk.)Arthur F. Wright, in his informative Introduction to this extremely interesting collection of Essays by the Hungarian sinologist Etienne Balazs (1905-1963), tells us that at the time of his death Balazs was a figure of major importance in the international community of Chinese scholars.Balazs was a very special kind of scholar. His study of the economic history of the T'ang Period (+ 618-906) "remains an astonishing achievement - the Pioneer Western work on Chinese economic history written before this field had begun to be developed by Chinese and Japanese scholars," while the essays collected in the present volume remain essential reading for any student of China.These essays explore major themes in Chinese history : the role of the scholar official class; the structure of Chinese institutions as they were shaped by these elite bureaucrats and modified as circumstances changed; the distinctive character of Chinese commercial and industrial life; the varieties of protest and dissent, etc. But because Balazs saw the Chinese past, not as mere object of scholarly curiosity, but as "a repository of relevant human experience," his essays have a great deal to teach all of us.Balazs had seen something that very few wish to see - the staggering importance to us of the longest continuous living civilization on the planet, wealthy with an abundance of cultural treasures, and creator of the most successful and long-lasting bureaucracy in history. We are told that he hoped the isolation of Chinese studies would end, and that "knowledge of the Chinese experience would become accepted as NECESSARY FOR ALL TYPES OF SCHOLARLY INQUIRY" (p.xiii, my capitals).This is a striking notion, but the rightness of Balazs' position will be blindingly obvious to those who, while knowledgeable about China, have peered into the mist in which Western thought gropes and staggers about in its Cartesian confusion. Few, however, will be prepared to accept, let alone act, on Balazs' premise.The shift that Balazs wished for could only come about "if Chinese studies became more vigorous, more creative, and more attuned to the major intellectual concerns of the modern world" (p.xiii). Sadly, from his Sorbonne Chair for the economy and society of ancient China, he saw no sign of this happening, and he was highly critical of the preference of sinology for trivial pursuits - "its lack of concern for basic problems of social and cultural history, its penchant for marginalia, which he described as "disquisitions on philological trifles, expensive trips in abstruse provinces, bickering about the restitutions of the names of unknown persons," and the trendy and "immoderate use of academic highbrow jargon"" (p.xiii). Anyone familiar wit