Public Interest And State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, And China

>> Stephen Kotkin: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. And I'm thrilled that we have today with us Wenkai He from Hong Kong University science and Technology, although on sabbatical this year in Tokyo, we got him in from Tokyo. He's the author of a brand new book, Public Interest in state legitimation, as you'll see in here.

For those here in our live studio audience, I'm going to pass around a copy of the book as we speak, and you're gonna return it when you're done because it's inscribed to me, so.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You can't take it. Anyway, those of you who already know Wenkai scholarship know that he wrote an absolutely breathtaking book on the fiscal military state, comparing Asian countries and the UK, which is not usual, as we know, language barriers and everything else.

Empirically rich, theoretically ambitious, and just so indispensable that it's must read on the syllabus. Now he's got another book which expands the conversation to legitimacy, not just the functional operation of the fiscal military state, as important as that is and where that comes from through time, but adding to that, the ideational legitimacy values aspect of the state.

So we couldn't be luckier today, and so please join me. Warm welcome, Wenkai He.

>> Wenkai He: Thank you very much, Steve, for hosting me here and fabulous place, and also for this very generous introduction and thank you everyone, for coming. This book talk is actually about this public interest and state legitimation, a book just published two months ago.

The structure of this book is actually trying to make arguments that there's a public interest based discourse of state legitimations actually serve as the common platform for state and society to collaborate over the specific public goods provisions. And then I'm trying to demonstrate this kind of collaborations as common to early modern England, Yokkao, Japan and Qin, China.

And this dynamic equilibrium actually allows these three fiscally limited states to deliver good governance despite a very significant socioeconomic change. And then the second half of the book is actually about how such discourse of state legitimacy open the space for political participation, for the sub-audits through collective actions such as petitioning.

So the idea is like the subject could use the discourse of the state legitimacies to make active demand claims on the state to fulfill its publicly proclaimed duties. And then this kinda collective actions could actually even demand for fundamentally political change, but still justified by the state duty to protect public interest.

So why I started this project is actually, I'm not happy with this over emphasis on warfare and state formations because I think in this kind of mainstream literatures. It is very hard to put legitimations of the state powers into the pictures, because how could the state justify its power, its violence to the society seats, if it just wants to exactly extract resources from the people to fight external warfares?

But legitimation is actually quite important part in Liberian definition of the state, and I think it's actually quite important for us to understand the state. So how should we connect legitimacies and public goods provisions? The issue here is like again in the dominant literature, like the provision of public goods was entrusted to the local self governed communities, in the mainstream of new institutional, political economy, and also in Microman's series of infrastructure power of the state.

So the idea is like the self governed local communities was in charge with these local public goods provisions. In return to this political power to govern themselves, they are more willing to pay taxes to the state. So in this case, it's like mostly the public goods provisions was entrusted by the local self governed communities.

And this was considered as origins of the representative constitutionalism. And this theory has been further developed by Acemoglu and Jim Robinson in their recent work, is about a kind of by evolution of strong state and strong societies. The idea again starts with local self governed communities in charge of local public goods provisions.

And then because the civil society was so strong, and then they are nothing freed to actually demand the state to develop its capacities. In this case, we have this competition between states and societies, and then with this result of strong state and strong civil societies. But I think in those Acemoglu and Robinson series, and also in the previous representative constitutionalism, missed one scene, which is hobby goods has different scopes.

A lot of infrastructure facilities are just too big and too expensive for local communities to show there. And also large scale infrastructure facilities also generated a lot of cooperation, of conflict of interest. And how do you resolve this conflict of interest? They actually demand some higher political authorities to provide fair adjudications.

And that has something to do, I think, with the authority of the state, and this is the cutting angle to bring legitimacy into this discourse. So what I'm trying to see here is like to see, on the one hand, legitimation could be a discourse. The state proclaimed, has a duty to protect and safeguard the public welfare or the public interest of the people and its governance.

And this could be a normative platform to make the societies at least accept the violence of the state in terms of collecting taxations. But this is not just a discourse, because public interest has to be embodied in many specific public goods, such as transportations, family reliefs, and all this defense on all these specific issues.

And in the early modern state, the concept of public interest has been conceived as organic conceptions, which, in which case different regions and different segments of society could present their interests as a component of the general organically conceived the public interest. So in this case we do see there's a kind of interactions between local interests and more general public interest, and more importantly, by performance in providing specific public goods.

And all these specific performance of these public goods provisions could be independently evaluated by the people. So in that case, it's like, if you are starving, you are starving, you cannot be relieved by any empty words of ideologies. If your field is emblatting, then that's the fact. So in this case, it's very different from the ideology or symbols of legitimations that the state could manipulate.

So in this case, we do see there's autonomy in state social actors to evaluate state performance in specific public goods provisions. And then actually provided a very good platform for the state and society to interact mutually independently. So this is general pictures, and now I'm trying to. I'm trying to use three cases of early modern state to demonstrate these interactions of states and societies upon commonly accepted public interest based state legislations.

Why I use this early modern state? The reason is like early modern state is early because they did not have centralized institutions in public finance yet, so the fiscal capacities of state remain very limited. But on the other hand, early modern state is a state in the meaning of the state is conceived as the impersonal governing apparatus of the whole.

Which is different from the king or the empress as a person. So this is very famous thesis of the king's two bodies as a public figures and as a private persons. And I think this public figures of the king of empress actually convey a very strong normative implications in terms of like the whole.

How do you justify the whole impersonal governing apparatus for moral terms connected to the general welfare of the peoples? And this is something I think we can bring them together. Three cases of to do and early throughout England. Tokugawa Japan started from 1640, and then Qing China started with 1684.

And I am trying to argue that they share the same public interest based discourse of state education. And then the performance was actually embodied in very specific public goods. So a little bit explanations of the case selection here is like the starting year of England is clear. So 1563, the British was wrong and it was still a very weak state in terms of fighting external wars.

But in terms of domestic governance, it's actually trying to justify these new powers by improving the welfare of the subject. And in all these social policy makings since 1853, terms like Commonwealth and public wealth, well, the good of the public just appeared frequently in social policy discussions and in legislations.

And then talk about Japan starting from the 1640s, this is the end of domestic rebellions. And then starting up more than 200 years of domestic peace, and I think this is very rare case of state formations without fighting any war. And this ideology of benevolent rule, proclaimed by both the shock shogunates and also the daimyos, provided a platform of public needs of its respective governments.

And the Tokugawa Japan is also different compared with other cases like it has a quasi federal system by the end of 18th centuries. Which means a lot of daimyos, especially the outside daimyo, Tozama daimyo has very high autonomy in governing their own territories. But the shogunate is actually serving as higher political authorities over daimyos to protecting the larger public welfare.

So this is a very interesting case. And then Qing China, starting with the annexing of Taiwan, which means end of the large scale domestic warfare, 1684. And then in Qin dynasties, meaning of heavenly mandate was mostly embodied in safeguarding the general public welfare of the subjects in China proper.

I'm not talking about the Qing as an empire, just China proper as a state. And this is very important because this is like, not connected to any celestial virtues of dynasties, it's purely on domestic welfare. So in this case, the meaning of all under heaven actually conveys very strong normative implications, is like the benevolence of the rulers covers all the subjects, just like heaven covers everything below.

And this is actually quite similar, I think, to the meaning of Commonwealth, common to all the subjects governed by the English. So this is the similarities, and there's another similarities, is the development of economics. This is well known in economic history. The reason I bring this is to show that to safeguard public welfare is not an easy job for the rulers for these three cases, because of the.

You see this expansion of urban populations, the develop of long distance trade, and then the penetration of the money economy into the countryside. That means there's a lot of new welfare challenges to the rulers to resolve. You just think about, the urban population depend on purchasing food from the market, and what if the market prices of food is too high?

And then what are we going to do? So this is the real challenge, a lot of new welfare challenge to the state. And in the meantime, there's a development of mass popular education, which means the popular literacy rates was higher enough for the ordinary people to use. To actively use the discourse of state legitimacy proclaim through wars, through laws, through regulations and education, and then to make demand to the state.

So the population is not passively waiting there, but could be actively engaged with the state, but use the same discourse of the state onto the state. And then each early modern state has quite serious effects in their fiscal institutions. So in England and in Tokyo, Japan, it's like highly decentralized fiscal systems.

The central government or the royal government did not have higher fiscal capacities to do a lot of things. And then the China's case is opposite, it's highly centralized and even the provincial government did not have its independent budget and it's very rigid. Any official spending over 500 tails of silver need to have central proving and central financial auditing, this is just like a university like Stanford.

If you spend every $50 you have to get the central approval from the university administrators, it will not work. So that means the Chinese state could not really accommodate a lot of demand for public goods in societies. And in this case how could they really maintain a good governance over time?

And that is the beginning of the empirical chapters. So in the chapters of family relief, I'm trying to show that actually England and Japan has a highly decentralized granular system, maintained by the cities and villages, but mostly just for their own use. And this kind of decentralized system was very efficient to preserve the stocks, but unable to handle large scale or nation scale famines.

And then the royal government and the shogunates, as higher authorities, has to intervene to protect the larger welfare, to make sure the food is across different regions. And China's case is opposite. China has a highly centralized state granary systems, called epidermal granaries, which means the state actually has large resources to fight with large famines.

But this is very difficult to maintain the quotas, especially if you have to do not have a good storage technologies. So the Qing state actually tried to encourage local society to build their own granaries to complement the defects of these state granaries. And also in the meantime, trying to mobilize private grain merchants to devote into this family relief process, by giving them a lot of economic incentive to motivate them to ship the grains to the famine striking areas.

So in this case, we see the similar patterns in state and society collaborations, but the direction is opposite. In the decentralized systems, you have these interventions of the higher authorities for the larger welfare of the people. And then in the case of highly centralized China, they actually tried to incorporate the local social actors to complement the defects of the central system.

But the same collaborations over the importance of family relief. And then similar story about the public goods in terms of large water control infrastructures. England and Japan is much smaller than China for sure, but its countries are big enough to have a lot of large scale hydraulic project, which just local society just simply could not maintain.

And in those cases, the central government, the royal government, and also the shogunate, has to use a lot of de facto fiscal measures to finance this larger scale of infrastructure facilities to protect the larger welfare of the people. And then the case of China, again opposite. It has a high centralized fiscal system to allow the state to manage large scale hydraulic project.

But in the meantime, it actually did not have enough fiscal facilities to take care about every water control project. So it encouraged local society to contribute to their own, for their own welfare. But for the project that is too big for the local society to handle and too small to be incorporated into the state finance, they actually have innovations to state advance the money to the local society to build the project first.

And then when the project was finished, and all the benefited communities actually return the money back to the state interest free by paying some extra tax duties. So again, similar collaborations, but different opposite directions. What I'm going to focus a little bit more on in this talk is actually how this kind of legitimation of state legitimacy actually empowered common people to make claim to the state.

Because the state claim you have this duty to protect the welfare. But if you did not do this in practice, and actually you gave a chance to the common people to make claim to you, to, hey, you have to fulfill your duties as benevolent protectors, but you didn't do this in practice.

So in this case, this is provided a very, I think, very important space of political participations for the common people. And all this political participation is very different from the Harvey Martian's concept of public sphere, of public sphere, because it's mostly about the very general political issues. This is like over very specific public good provisions, but it actually used a lot of general terms of state legitimations to justify their demand.

So that has actually quite general moral implications. So in this case, I think what is important for me is to distinguish two rights. This is a concept I borrow from intellectual historians. So the active rights is you conceive rights of individuals independent of state, and actually set the boundaries on state actions.

And this is actually quite new. But the passive rights is the rights you can derive from the state proclaimed duty to protect general welfare. This is derived, so this is passive, but the passive rights could actually instigate it, very active collective actions in the form of petitions, protests and riots, to ask the state to fulfill its proclaimed duties on very specific issues, on specific circumstances.

But all these collective actions did not reject state authorities, but actually borrowed the state authorities to make their claims. So that is very different from the active rights. And then I'm trying to argue that this passive rights actually across common to three cases. So in the case of individual petitions, this passive rights was granted to the people across the three cases.

But individual petitions did not really matter in terms of changing the political system, so we ignore that. And the crowded petitions against the state, against the state policies, against state officials was tolerated across these three cases. And the case for Japan, like the size of proud petitions, even like four people, in case of England and China, 40 to 50, this room is in danger in some cases.

So, but the most interesting case is like this. When you have cross regional conflicts of interest or cross sector interest. And then both sides claim they are the same lawyers loving subject of the state, and then they actually invite the state to intervene to adjudicate their conflict in a fair and impartial way.

And this kind of collective actions is generated by the cross regional and cross intersectional conflict of interest could be from the use of water. You think about the downstream, upstream, a lot of conflicts of interest. And then it could be generated by the development market economy and also could be generated by industrial development, the disputes between employers and wage labor.

So if the state was tolerated to this kind of collective distance, and then story would be different. That means there's a room of political participations could actually expand with socioeconomic and urban development. And then we see the case in England, like this is case about the waivers. So when the export market was in slam and then the closest was not willing to hire more waivers and even cutting the wage of the weavers.

And then the weaver complained that their welfare was in dangers. And then, they actually collectively petitioned the privileged council to protect them, because their welfare is a component of the general public welfare, general public interest. And then, the privy council reacted by asking the local justice of the peace to intervene on the ground of protecting the good of the public.

By providing some wealth relief measures to the unemployed, waivers and then to put the pressures on the employers to give a reasonable wage for them. So this is almost the early industrial policy measures we can talk about. So, the organizers of this collective petitions of weavers was not punished by the state.

In the case of Japan, this is mostly in the form of province based partition. Province is the old unit, which contain a lot of different daimyos territory. So, the interesting thing is like this. So, when the peasants in the areas near Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, they actually purchased fish meals as fertilizers in their growing cash crops.

So when the prices of fish meal increased, they complained that their economic welfare was damaged. And all the peasants that grow this rib seed for pressing oil, for lightning, they also complain the purchasing prices for the foreign merchant was too low, and then damage to their economic welfare.

So, they claim the petitions, the shogunate intervene. And the scale of these petitions is huge, often, thousands of villages, have assemblies, have represented representatives. And then, to deliberate how to drop their petitions to the shogunate and raise money for their representative to bring their additions to the shock natives.

This is very, very impressive phenomenon in terms of the Japanese historian Yabuta, Yutaka's words is, political representation without political parties. And then the leaders and organizers of these large-scale petitions was not punished at all. So this means this is really expanded legal political participations. And in reactions, shogunate actually reacted by not holding the welfare of peasants as a whole.

But actually try to balance the welfare of peasants against welfare of merchant, and welfare of the urban citizens. Why, the case is like they are all different component of this general public interest or public welfare of the whole country. So, when the peasants of receipts complain that the purchasing price is too low, and then the shocked has to make sure if the purchasing price is too high.

Was that leads to the rising prices of lightning oil, which was the most important daily necessities for the millions of urban citizens. So, reaction is trying to balance, different parts of institute and Zen rich agreement, very different from the harsh repressions of crowd petitions by shogunate. And we found similar case in Qing China.

This is mostly in the use of water, so, I'm using one case here, like this one river. It's called Niutou rivers, which has not been drenched for years, which means the downstream county Yutai, the people could actually farm on this suited soil. So, once the central government decided to dredge this river to allow waters into the Grand Canal, which is very important river to carry a greens from southern China to feed the large populations in Beijing.

And then this Yutai people was complaining, they said, their land would be flooded. So, they have actually collected petitions to Beijing to say, you should not dredge this river, because that would damage our welfare. And in reaction, the Qing state actually sent officials to conduct field service, to really make sure what is going on.

And then, their response to this petition from this Yutai counties, they're trying to argue that we have to consider the welfare of the five county people in upstreams. Because their interest is also our considerations and also the interests of the navigation of Grand Canal. And all these interests actually trumped this narrow interest of one country downstream.

So, the interesting picture here is the state is trying to argue, and to deliberate, to reason with the petitioners, and then to try to convince them. If the petitioner is not happy with the judgment, they could actually launch counter petitions, and then there's a new round of service.

So, all these cases shows that when you have this cross regional, cross sectoral conflict of interest. And then, this space of political participation could really expand, and this is the legal political participation. So, the remaining question is, to what extent, this increasing political participation, could really change this system or not?

So, the issue here is, are they going to focus only on address their specific grievances? Or with this increasing number of increasing scale of these collective petitions, are they going to demand for some political change? So this is the questions, I'm trying to answer in the last chapters.

The answer seems to be no. The answer is, large collective actions generated by this concept of passive rights focus on very specific welfare grievances, would not automatically escalated to demanding political change. They only focus on address specific grievances, no matter how many people are involved in these grievances.

And in the case of England, I found is in this long time, from the late 17th century to early 19th century. Collective actions, protests are justified by active rights, was just constantly rejected by English states as radicalism. And even in the national chartist petitions actually has a lot of political demands, such as manhood, suffrage, and they are all rejected.

And then the leaders was charged with seasons or even high treasons. But their expressions of specific welfare grievances was actually received with very sympathetic ears by the state. In terms of the factory conditions and the English states trying to show that I also fulfill my paternalistic protection of the welfare of my subject.

So in this case, the argument here is the quantitative increase of the collective actions on this welfare grievances. Justified by the state duty to public general interest, would not lead to demand for fundamental political change. But public interests could also have other dimensions. This is like dimensions not related to specific welfare grievances.

Could be some known material, but the intangible public good. So, in the case of England, the Church of England was conceived as a public good that the Crown has a duty to protect against Catholicism and continental Protestantism. So these issues could actually generate cross regional mass petitions over very general political issues, political systems, like the rise of the authority of the parliament.

That is very different from the welfare grievances that restricted to particular regions, a particular segment. And when, after the glorious revolutions, we see the serious conflict between the international dimensions of public interest and domestic welfare, in terms of the massive military spending, huge state debts, and then very heavy indirect taxes on the consumers.

But in the meantime, widespread corruptions in government spendings, and that conflict of international and domestic dimensions of public interest began to generate the mass petitions in the 1760s and 1780s. Which demand for parliamentary reform, but justified by the state duty to protect the better, protect the interest of the general interests of the people.

So they petition the crown as the father of the people, or as a common parent or beneficiaries of his royal subject. So justified by these passive rights derived from the state duty to protect it public interest, but demand for fundamental political change. A similar case happened in Japan after the Meiji restorations, the Meiji government justified legitimize its power over two dimensions.

One is to recover the domestic orders by ending the hyperinflation, but the other is actually on the intangible, non material public interest of public good, which is the national honor of Japan. How do you defend the national honor of Japan? Reforms are all the unequal treaties signed by the previous yoga natis.

And these failures to reform the treaties began to motivate the politically conscious acts, summarized the demand, have elected parliament to better negotiate with western power to revise treaties. But the common people did not really participate. But when the state tried to centralize its public finance, and then radically reduce its expenditures on the local welfare, and increasingly spend money on military expansions, this is like the major Japan spend very, very little on domestic welfare.

This is just like water control project, but in the meantime spent more than 30% of its annual budget on military expansions. So this again is a tension conflict between the international dimensions and domestic dimensions of the public interest of Japan. And that generated again like the cross regional mass petition from both the common people and also from the externalized demand for elected parliament for the state to better protect the public interest of Japan.

So again, the conflict between international dimensions and domestic dimensions of international of public interest. And China is the opposite, negative case. In this case, it's like it did not have the issues like Church of England, and did not have these issues about the national dignities, as the major Japan has.

So even with the rising state capacities after 1870s, the concept of public interest was mostly on domestic welfare. So on domestic welfare, we see the collaborations between the state and societies could actually expand in terms of like, even the civil society could expand, and then to intervent, participate into a lot of family relief project.

But all this would not affect demand state to fundamentally change its system, it's just like the very high level equilibrium. I'm not going to talk about this natural experiment of using indemnities as proxies to international dimensions of public interest here. But if you are interested in this causal identification, This is for social scientists.

So this is mostly what this book is about. So from the early modern to modernization, there's continuities and discontinuities in terms of passive power, justified by the state duties to protect the public welfare. Domestically, you see the continuities over the specific welfare grievances. But the big divergence occurred when you have this intangible dimension of public interest, or serious conflict between international dimensions and domestic dimensions of public interest.

And then the same idea of passive rights could actually generate mass petitions for fundamental political change. And methodologically, I think what I'm trying to do here is to go deep into these three cases, which looks so different at the surface. When you go deep into this specific context, then the three cases begin to really talk to each other, as they have a lot of similarities, and then discontinuities.

And in this case, I think also you can see the state capacities was not measured only by the direct resources controlled by the state. Could also be measured by the indirect resources mobilized by the state, but not recorded in the state. And then finally, the expansion of political participations in early modern states has its limits and also has its potentials.

And that seems to be similar to the contemporary authoritarian regime. Both share this organic concept of public interest. And then I hope maybe we have some dialogue between the early modern scholars with the contemporary authoritarian scholars. Yeah, that's the end of my talk.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, thank you so much.

A couple of things going on, primitive summary for me.. So maybe it's not true anymore, but seemed like forever. The state making and the state functional literature was all about the European cases. People didn't have the expertise to get beyond Europe. When we talked about the Chinese state, that's what it was.

It wasn't the state, it was the Chinese state or the Qing state. In other words, it was a specific case that wasn't really included in our generalizable, larger picture of the state. The Japanese case was always more complex, people couldn't understand what happened there. Local rule, state making, no external war there for a while.

So here now we have them all jumbled together really nicely where you're transgressing these normal boundaries in the state making literature. So that strikes me as very bold, and maybe it's more usual now because people understand the limits of the European statement, the European case only state making literature, but I still think it's bold.

Okay, and then instead of bringing in the philosophical treatises that people write about legitimizing the state, in other words, there's all these wonderful philosophical traditions of how you justify state power. You've got the public goods provision to deal with the legitimacy problem and claims of the state. So continuing the functional side of the state that you're expert on and bringing that into legitimacy instead of Rousseau wrote this and Montesquieu wrote that and fill in the blank on the China side, okay.

And then your time periods don't overlap exactly, right, just like in your first book, the time periods are different, but the processes, you're catching in a certain time. So where we come out is not the democratic or the liberal state, but the performance state, right? The state of able to perform and deliver, or not.

Not the state is the consent of the governed, or the state is limited power, or whatever it might be, but that the state is getting better, or should get better, or we'll ask it to get better, and it does certain things, okay. That strikes me as something one would write, living in contemporary China.

In other words, the contemporary regime in, let's call it Beijing, has a notion that its legitimacy derives from the fact that it's a better performer in addition to claiming the mandate of heaven, right? So therefore, it's kind of the pre-liberal era jumping to, I don't know if you would call it the post-liberal era or the, you see what I'm saying.

 

>> Wenkai He: Yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay. My primitive mind extracted that at a basic level from the presentation, which leads me to the question of, well, okay, what if they fail at the provision of the public goods?

>> Wenkai He: Yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: So I understand that they do provide a canal or two, and there's some famine relief, and some other things, infrastructure for market exchange.

Okay, but what if they mess up on that? Is there the same relationship, legitimacy, claims on the state, provision of welfare? In other words, do the people writing petitions have sufficient recourse if the state doesn't uphold its side of the bargain. If the state fails to perform at a level that's expected, what happens then?

Anyway, maybe that's too primitive, but that's sort of my initial response to what you delivered.

>> Wenkai He: And I think the last question is actually quite important. In the prologue to the part two of the book, I actually tried to argue that this equilibrium is based on the collaboration of the state and societies in jointly providing public goods important to the governance.

So if the state failed to do its basic job, and that it lost legitimacy completely, and so this is Qing China before the Taiping Rebellion.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right.

>> Wenkai He: Or after the massive indemnities, the state just could not even play with these basic functions in public provisions. And then the same case with the late Tokyo, Japan, hyperinflation, deprived the shocked artists to play even the very basic functions that could have played before.

And in the case of England, it's a little bit different in the outbreak of civil war, it's mostly religion, you cannot really resolve that. So, to some extent, the second part of this book is political companion of my first book.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah.

>> Wenkai He: Which is when you enhance your state capacities by building the modern physical state, that allow you to resume your basic functions in a public goods provisions, thematically.

But the issues like, how are you going to use your increased state capacities for international power struggles or for domestic welfare? And that conflict, again, generated.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah, so you're right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, we have a number of questions coming from the Zoom audience. I will take one now because it's a clarifying question on the presentation, and then we'll let Ana come into the picture here.

So from Zoom, can you explain more your classification of Japan as a case of state formation without fighting a war, when the Tokugawa period was preceded by the century-long era of civil war. Which ended only with an agreement to maintain the domain sovereignty, vis a vis the Tokugawa, whose real authority extended only to their own home domains.

So a little bit more on your classification of the Tokugawa state.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah, this clarification question is mostly about how did the Warring state end in Japan and then started with Tokugawa era. And he's right, actually, the shogunate's authority did not really penetrate it into every part of Japan.

So, after the 1640s, this is a very common term in Japanese called the Tenka Taihe, it's like, this is great domestic peace for over 250 years. This is a fact, so there's no clarification on that. But over the domestic piece and with increasing market economy and then the challenge of the welfare and the authority of shogunate has actually increased.

In terms of coordinating resources from different daimyos for the welfare of the larger scale, which neither sides could actually handle. And that part is, again, something has a lot of literature on, especially in the Japanese history and also, to some extent, in the English literature as well, yeah.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, thank you.

>> Speaker 1: Okay, thank you so much for a wonderful talk and for a wonderful scholarship. I had a question about the periodicity or comparing these different time periods.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah.

>> Speaker 1: So there's two different variants of the question.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah.

>> Speaker 1: The first one is about sort of the placement in time and how international pressures, economic pressures, technology of governance would differ very much between the 16th, 18th, and 19th century.

And the second question is I wonder if you're sort of not giving a nod towards modernization theory.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Because in effect, what you're suggesting is that these cases are comparable because even though they occur at different points in time, they occur at a similar stage of state development.

And that, of course, raises questions about teleology, etc. So I'm wondering if you could talk more about how you periodize and how you justify that periodization.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah, that's a good question. In terms of the periods, I think, yeah, this is important, as Steve just mentioned. I'm trying to see maybe the process is similar across different episode.

So in this case, it's the first slide for the first part, right? Two towards early throughout England and then the Tokugawa Japan and Qing China different episodes. But in terms of the governing technologies and even the accounting technologies are not very different across history episode at the time.

And the ending of this year for Japan at 1853 is like the opening of Japan and China, 1840s opening after the British. So the ending years by this ending year, I'm trying to see what I observed is like the indigenously developed state society interactions. So this is my concern.

And the second question is about, is this another like, modernization theory coming from backdoor? My understanding, modernization is like, they take modernizations as very unique Western development. And then all the non-Western are just backward, and then they need to learn from Western countries and then become modernized. So this is my understanding of the modernization at a school.

But the recent progress in economic history and political history in both Japan and China is trying to find. Actually, they try to say, we identify similar elements of market economy or political development in China and Japan before they were opened by Western countries. So, this is like, they use this term called early modernities in Eastern Asia.

So in this case, it's like these modernities indigenously, not imposed and copied and learned from Western experiences. So in that case, I think this is a little bit different from the previous modernization paradigm. But on the other hand, if we continue to question this, the concept of modernities and early modernities, I think the question could be like this, suggest a kind of teleological trajectory of political development?

My answer to this, this is deep questions. My answer is, I think there are different categorizations, but then from the early modernities to the modernities, there's no predetermined paths, there's no pre determined trajectories. So we still see very different trajectories in different contexts and different time. And for that part, I think we can use them just as categorizations, but not as a kind of any predetermined trajectories.

Yeah, so this is.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, I have three people on the list, Keo is next.

>> Keo: Thank you for this wonderful piece of historical comparative sociology. I'm not an expert in this period, but I know a little more about Japan than the other two countries. And it's interesting that you start this periodization, start in Japan in 1640.

 

>> Wenkai He: Yeah.

>> Keo: And I'm also curious about the previous, preceding 100 some years of domestic warfare. And I'd like to raise a couple of factors that might be relevant to this discussion. One is capacity among the public for violence, populist government. The second factor is religion. So in Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi took weapons away from farmers of the public in 1588.

By the way, around the same time he engaged in external warfare that may have helped the state formation in Japan invaded Korea with an intention to go to China. And that is related to taking weapons away from the public. So that really defanged the Japanese public, because they continued to not have weapons, at least not in a mass scale.

So that helped the shogunate and daimyo be more benevolent for them. Actually, the act for taking the weapons away from the farmers included a clause, if I'm not mistaken, promising the farmers that if they focus on farming and don't try to think violent things and give weapons away.

Then they'll live well, so it was actually kind of a social contract, arguably. So that may have played a role, and I'm wondering how that factor may or may not matter in the other two cases. The second factor is religion. It's interesting you start in 1640, because I think it was 1637, the last mass uprising took place.

And it was preceded by a lot of Buddhist sect violence in the Sengoku era. So I think Lord Tokugawa shogunate was particularly worried about this kind of thing, and they banned Portuguese, Chinese and all of that. So that probably played an important role. And with that kind of alternative world vision kind of band, all of these petitions and small whatever uprisings did not really have kind of intentions or capacity to overturn the Tokugawa government or any daimyo rule.

So I'm wondering how those two factors might play out in the other two countries, or even beyond the three countries, and how they might matter in your argument.

>> Wenkai He: You're right, so this is why I started only from 60 40. And actually, there's another reason, is that in that year, there's large scale famine.

And large scale famine, a lot of peasants died in starvation, and that actually threatened the governing of samurais as warriors. And in that case, all the skills of killing people that they learned practice had no use to dealing with large-scale famines. So after that famine, they have to try to incorporate a lot of the Chinese administrative handbooks of how do you better nourishing shepherding your own people?

Because if they don't grow in populations that did not increase productivities, the samurai as a class just could not survive. So I think that is the major reasons, like they turn to this benevolent ideologies. And in terms of whether all the weapons was confiscated by the daimyo and shogunate has a role to play here, I think if you examine all the ickies or petitions or the crowd petitions at the time.

In their documents of petitions, they emphasizing very much on like, I'm your lawyer loving subject, but now, because of famine, because of bad harvest, but the heavy taxation, we could not survive. And you have this duty as a benevolent ruler, as you claim to rescue us. So in that case, they are not in their protests, they actually carry their farming tools, which could be used as a weapon.

But they use those to identify, to actually emphasizing their status as their farmers, that my likelihood should be taken care of by you. So this is like in reading all these documents, I have this argument. It's not about just violence or the means of violence. There's a lot of negotiations and renegotiates between the peasant and the rulers.

And especially on those important economic issues, which is like, prices are persistent, and all these new grievances are generated by the market at the time. And then, you could not really use violence to resolve all these conflicts. So this is why I'm emphasizing the legitimation of state power actually provided the platform for the commoners, merchants, peasants, urban citizens.

To make new claims on the state, on the rulers, to improve their welfare. And that is not something that they have to, because they have no other options to use violence, And then they have to use this. I think they use that very conscious like, I know this is your discourse, I can use this discourse to make my demand, and this is very conscious efforts.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah. Thank you, Phil.

>> Phil: So, I thought this was an arresting presentation, thank you. And really interesting. My comment or suggestion is the fundamental conceptual structure of the presentation posits the state on one side epitomized by the crown or the emperor or the shogun, and then on the other side, the common.

I think actually that bipolar conceptual structure might work better if it's tripolar, all right? In the sense of the three estates, or actually I, rather than the French example which emphasizes the church as the second estate, a better version of that is are pawns. So, in which basically you've got the intermediaries, the second group is composed variously of nobles, church, towns, incorporated towns, and merchant guilds, depending on the society.

In all cases I know of, this second group asserts active rights in the early modern period.

>> Phil: Active rights vis a vis the crown right? And of course, much discussion about the extent of those rights and the contests. And in these three societies, different things happen in that tension.

There is significant tension between the crown and these groups in which there is then these battles back and forth in which the commoners are sometimes used as pawns. We could also go through many examples in the Hispanic world, they have a version of this, including in Spanish America, independent Spanish America, too.

Now, so this has some value. I don't think this actually necessarily undercuts the basic approach you're taking to looking at legitimation or, as Steve put in, performance, I think that's still a really powerful tool. But the value here is that it gets you into basically things like, who's got the taxing power and the property rights concretely, which are, of course, the means and the resources for any performance?

And then the battle over control of taxing and property, and the crown's effort to win that battle actually by seizing and controlling other sources of revenue, including trading monopolies and things like that. But then the demands like if you take more of that, then there are demands for performance from the second estate in exchange, right.

Cuz they're the ones who are then being the object of these requests for tax money and so on, or other support. But then when you give these examples later on about how people begin to assert their passive rights by trying to pose the crown as arbiter, as the parent who should choose among the children.

I think what you wanna pick up here in this tripolar structure is that this is a crucial form of politics in this period. Is both nobles and the common people are actually often using the crown as arbiter to check the power of others. So the commoners are petitioning the crown to check the power of a local lord.

And it's the way in which the commoners exert political power by playing the other two off against each other. And if you pick up the tripolar conceptual approach to this, I think it actually might be able to enrich your approach, while still keeping with your theme.

>> Wenkai He: This is a great suggestions, actually, this question about bipolar interactions.

I spent a lot of time to read English histories, especially the Tudor histories and the urban histories. And relationship between the incorporated towns, and their relationship to the court. And then the conflict of interest between, among these incorporate towns, which has their distinctive rights granted by charters from the court.

So my reading of that part of history is, all these rights claimed by this specific groups, such as all the rights of the particularly incorporated towns. So, first, they are not general, so they are very specific, but only applying to their own resident. Not to the outsiders or to their group meeting of group members of the fields, but not to any outsider.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in that case, it's not a very general concept of rights, as general, as active rights, so this is one point. A second point here is, because all these urban rights was actually granted and approved by the charter of the Crown. And if there's any conflict between them, I see that actually the crown authorities actually, if claim from the perspective of larger welfare of the kingdom, can do trump the individual rights.

The rights of individual in corporate terms, such as in a lot of, like the flooding project, which incorporate towns away from the flooding areas, just refuse to contribute any money for that project. But then the privy Council press them like, you have to contribute something, because this is for the welfare of the larger countries.

So in that case, I think there's still a hierarchy in terms of political authorities, but that higher authorities has to be justified by a larger welfare of the kingdoms. Not just by the welfare of the incorporate towns, or they call it the little Commonwealth. There's a lot of Commonwealth and little Commonwealth, so in that case, I think the story of my legitimation actually could apply to the early modern England.

But I'm not sure whether this story could be also be applied to France or other part, I don't have the knowledge as detailed as I know about English history. But I think the story is there.

>> Phil: Yeah.

>> Wenkai He: But in my presentation, I cannot go deep on that chapter.

But I I try to address the issues that you raised in my chapters on England on that part.

>> Phil: Yeah, Japan has a version of this, too.

>> Wenkai He: Yes, so in this case, again, like Japan and England, they have the long tradition of local governance, so even for the granaries like the lords.

But that's my second point, is, like, when you have larger welfare concerns and larger welfare grievances which could not be handled by this unit of self governed communities, and then you need some higher authority to coordinate. A lot of rivers in Japan flow to different territories of domains, so you need to have this larger authority to maintain a large welfare of the infrastructure facilities along the major rivers.

The same case for England, so this is why I'm trying to see there's some higher authorities over the self-governed organizations in both Fuka, Japan, England. But these higher authorities was actually backed up by some normative reasons for the larger welfare, not just by violence.

>> Phil: Yeah, yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, I have three people on our list, we're gonna take each one of them, so if you could take notes and not respond immediately.

First we have Matt S, then we have Yumi Moon, and then we have Matt L.

>> Matt S: Thank you for a very interesting and, dare I say, provocative presentation, I look forward to reading the book. I was going to call you out on your prioritization in Japan also, but other people have already done that, so I won't.

You said at the outset that in China, after the acquisition of Taiwan by the Qing empire in 1683, there was peace in China proper until 1840, I think you said or it was 1838. And I just wanna say I think you're wrong about that, the Qianlong emperor called himself the Srinivasan Ren, the old man with the ten great victories, these were military victories.

Some of them were external wars, many of them were suppressing internal rebellions. I don't know if you count Taiwan as part of Taiwan proverb of just one of several major. And then under his son, of course, the eight trigrams rebellion in 1813 killed about 50,000 people on the North China plane, roughly the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War.

And so I don't know why you say that this was a period of peace and why you need that for your argument, in a way that may be the more important part, so that's my first question. My second is, I know that I'm sympathetic to the project of making these large global comparisons, I think there's a very worthy and legitimate thing to do.

But of course, the challenge is coming up with commensurate categories to compare, and so I wonder, for example, your use of terms like the state. Others have mentioned how different the states are, the fact that in Japan, you had what you might call a federal system, but also your terms, the public, which implies public interest, public opinion, perhaps.

So how do you define the public in these cases? Also, you referred to the people several times, so you referred, for example, in the Chinese case of the people of Utah County, I wonder which people? Because in some of the specific examples you cited, very specific interest groups, economic in other words.

I'm just wondering, for the early modern period, does it make sense, setting aside England, does it make sense for Taiwan, Japan or Qing dynasty China to talk about the people in a unit or the public as a unit, so I'll stop there, thank you.

>> Yumi Moon: Thank you, I came in the middle of your talk, so maybe I couldn't understand.

So I like to hear your discussion of the ending or the end of early modern period and the pattern, different patterns, perhaps, that English I mean, the UK, Japan and China took. So meaning that your argument on state legitimation on welfare provides the platform for people to participate in this kind of negotiation or public interests, but it's by passive rights.

But when active rights, notion of active rights came in the end of these kind of traditional or early modern states, and then the management state performance changed really, really dramatically. Press, major pending, well, Even with the active sense of active rise, China, Korea was very catastrophic result and performance was different.

So how you're in your model, how you explain this in these different trajectories?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Got it.

>> Matt L: Great, yeah, so, Professor Hub, this is a really fascinating talk, I really enjoyed it. I have two questions, the first is kind of a special case of the other, Matt's question, which is how do you define and how do you measure public goods?

Because the examples we got are basically infrastructure, famine prevention, and then the Church of England, and these are very, very different institutions.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah.

>> Matt L: And so if a public good is any institution at all that supports the state, then are we in danger of kind of a tautology here?

And then famine prevention seems pretty straightforward, but the other two seem pretty hard to measure. So how does a state, and how do people know when they're getting enough public goods if not through some kind of mechanism of interstate competition? So that's one, and the other question I have is we've been to sort of a, I'm afraid, again, there's a wary of a potential tautology here where we don't have an independent measure of legitimacy.

So, if the state's there it's legitimate, if it's collapsing it's not legitimate, which seems fair enough but doesn't allow us to make a lot of predictions. So how do we know that legitimacy is indeed the goal?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, professor.

>> Wenkai He: Yeah, these are great questions to Matt.

First, you are definitely right, yeah, there's a lot of domestic rebellions and also the war in the frontiers and definitely right. Yeah, but I think in my presentation maybe I overemphasizing the domestic peace part. But the point here is like all these domestic rebellions and also suppress of domestic rebellions and also the frontier war did not cause much fiscal difficulties for the state.

So in other words, I mean this is.

>> Phil: White Lotus rebellion made this fiscal budget of the state go from the black to the red.

>> Wenkai He: But that's a different issue is like whether you should remove all the money used on suppressing all the warfare for the other domestic welfare.

That's an interesting question, I can ask the same question for contemporary United States, like whether this United States should use all the ministry expenditures for domestic welfare but we keep these questions as open questions. So I mostly emphasizing on the domestic welfare part, but I should not overemphasizing it's completely domestic deceit in China, you're right.

Fortunately I think this is not my expression in the book, This is my fault in presentation and this is I think related to the other Matt's questions about like how do I measure public goods in different terms and this is also. So your question about, what do we mean by this concept of the state, the public and the people?

And what do you mean by the people? So again, I think when I use the people here, it's a misuse, it's basically resident of that village, and they have this collective petition signed by a lot of the villagers. But I don't have local archives to know, the process of how such petitions are reached and how the money was reached.

I only know the representatives are either the gender degree holders, or just commoners, could be representative to bring these petitions to the state. And fortunately, I have the original copy of their petitions, along with the official archives. But, so I can read their original petitions and the phrases and, but I don't know how this, how representative of this whole, contest.

So in that case, I should use, more carefully, the resident or part, so that is, again in the book I mentioned, this is a weak point. We don't have local archives to have a different voices to see the negotiation process. I could only say the state tried to negotiate, but I don't know how this negotiator of the state could be questioned.

And there's some cases of questions but, we just don't have independent sources to, check with the official archives. This is the limitation of China's case, and in the case of Japan, all these villages, documents of petition software preserved. So they have much detailed studies here. In terms of public, I think you're right.

I think in both China and Japan, they use public, at different scopes, and even the general empress said. The welfare of one province could be a narrow, a private interest compared with the whole country, in terms of the circulation of food. So this is why he said that we, prohibited any provisional governors to stop the private merchant to bring grain across their territories.

Because we have to take care about the larger welfare, not just the narrow welfare of one province. So they do use this public to go at different scopes, and the same case for Japan, for the early modern England, the concept of public has different scopes. So when you have the, conflict between the narrow conceived conflict, little commonwealth.

With the more general commonwealth, that's a situation that the higher authority has to step in, and all was invited to step in. So I think it's fine to use this public here, and again, public opinions here, the, definitely in this case, in this cross three cases. Mostly means the common welfare grievances shared by all the common states.

So, the farmers of the peasants of all the land are flooded, inundated, and they actually have the common public interest. So they have some public opinions among themselves, but this is among themselves only. So, in this case it's related to the mat's questions about how do we differentiate different kinds of public goods in this case, right?

I use this term public good to refer to Church of England for the people at the time, they use this. They use this in their documents in their justification to the crimes like, Church of England is a public good of England, and you are the crown you have the duty to protect.

So if you have the successant, who is widely recognized as Catholics, legitimate in royal successions but illegitimate in terms of public good of England. So this is a petition over this, yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: All I can say is, so many big issues, so much more to discuss, you gotta to read the book, it's fabulous, let's give it up, professor Wenkai He,