Gentry's power and its operation in rural society of the late Qing Dynasty
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D691.7;K252

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    Abstract:

    From the late Qing Dynasty, the war rose in the Xian-Tong Period and the rural order became at risk. The state power had to resort to the reliable social force to go through the bad time when it continued weakness and the gentry's power became the first choice. The long-standing gentry power has become a useful choice because of its powerful pipeline entity function, that is, as a pipeline to replace the functions of public power to maintain rural stability; As an entity, it gathers the people and dominates the rural autonomy. From the perspective of genetic theory, the reform of the school allocation system in the late Qing Dynasty created a large-scale gentry class, and the increase of school allocation further stimulated the confidence of rural scholars to become officials. They combined Neo-Confucianism with pragmatism, which made the academic atmosphere of statecraft in the late Qing Dynasty a new one. Once these enterprising gentry values were effectively released, they alleviated the political crisis encountered by the Qing court to the greatest extent. Of course, the evolution of the main body of gentry power also brought about the positive expansion of the extension of gentry power. The symbolic event of this expansion was that the power of the gentry spilled over into the military and financial fields monopolized by the state power. In the granting of military power, the squire was able to play a greater role in the war because of the trust from top to bottom; In the acquisition of financial power, the financial crisis caused by the political turmoil made the central government have to rely on local economic support, and the squires obtained the legal right to raise money in the process of mobilizing the countryside to resist the Taiping Army. As a kind of institutional consideration, the gentry gained the power that was unimaginable in the previous three hundred years when they helped the Qing government tide over the crisis in the mid-19th century. With military and financial privileges, the gentry could maintain stability through public administration and regiments, and play an active role in rural social governance. Although the rural gentry power in the late Qing Dynasty had already been hidden in the dust in terms of legal prescription, this period of history presented a beautiful picture of the operation of gentry power. From this, we can get some institutional enlightenments, such as the property, the boundary, the standard of the gentry power and the rural autonomy, which are mainly manifested in the transformation of the rural gentry power in the late Qing Dynasty from informal power to quasi-formal power, from disorderly expansion of power to normative expectations, and from formative autonomy to constitutive autonomy.

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徐祖澜.晚清乡村绅权及其运作[J].重庆大学学报社会科学版,2023,(3):152~164

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  • Online: July 13,2023
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