Elite Power and Conflict

As the foregoing description of elite stratification indirectly indicates, local elites in the Jiangxi hill country maintained social dominance through intertwined webs of power whose important strands included educational achievement; wealth earned through land, commerce, and usury; access to state authority and resources; and private control of the means of coercion. Elite dominance was likewise typically exercised through a variety of institutions,

many of which had a long history in the region. All these various sources and expressions of elite dominance constituted limited resources to which elites had differential access, and keen competition over them often led to violent conflict. It is impossible to discuss here all the ramifications of elite power. Nevertheless it is important to highlight certain aspects of the structures and uses of elite power and of the strife they generated, for it was amid these entrenched institutions and nagging insecurities that the revolutionary movement eventually emerged.

The Maintenance and Exercise of Elite Power . Lineage ties constantly entered into social calculations, and lineages are one of the first arenas to consider when examining how elites maintained dominance. Lineages in Jiangxi, like those elsewhere in southern China, often served as the institutional focus for many activities other than defining and perpetuating kinship relations. Thus lineages commonly owned and managed collective property, ran local schools, helped finance higher education for worthy members, established and enforced codes of social behavior, mobilized armed forces, and sometimes helped the state collect taxes, spread its ideology, and maintain local order.^[21]

Although these functions were carried out in the name of the collective good, elites within the lineage frequently gained disproportionately from them. Most lineage land and other collective property, for example, was managed by elites, who, habitually used their positions to profit financially in various, mostly illicit, ways. Elites likewise appear to have received disproportionate benefit from lineage-run schools and scholarship funds because their children were more likely than peasant youths both to attend school and to seek advanced education outside the community. Lineage codes of conduct generally expressed sentiments congenial to, and were interpreted and enforced by, lineage elders who were usually also local elites; they also mobilized and directed (often for their own purposes) armed lineage forces and served as intermediaries between lineage members and the state. Controlling the means of coercion and opportunities for mediation further enhanced the power and prestige of local elites.^[22]

Whether in lineages or other arenas, elites differed among themselves in how and why they exercised power. Money lending provides a clear example of these differences. Hill-country elites of all strata made loans, but their ways and purposes differed. The few upper and numerous middle elites who made loans wanted either safe investments or (in the event of default) the chance to acquire property used as collateral. Therefore, they loaned relatively large amounts at moderate interest rates, mostly to lower-level elites rather than directly to peasants. Lower-level elites, particularly the aggressively entrepreneurial "newly emerging households," sometimes sought such loans as capital for small-scale commercial enterprises. More often, however, they sought interest income and so reloaned the money at moderate interest

rates to other lower elites or in small amounts at high rates to peasants. Lower elites who controlled small lineage trusts or other collective property also often loaned part of the resources they managed to peasants, expropriating part or all of the proceeds. The variable amounts and interest rates in this elite loan "industry" were doubtless based primarily on relative investment security, but they probably also helped strengthen patron-client links among elites of different strata; they certainly helped perpetuate overall elite economic domination of the peasantry.^[23]

Similarly differentiated patterns of elite activity almost certainly existed in other institutional contexts—such as management of different public bodies (gonghui or gongtang ) or relationships to the state—though it is difficult to determine their precise extent. Merchants and landlord/merchant hybrids, for example, often dominated the management of temple associations and other organizations in market towns. Members of the middle and upper elite probably managed most large lineage and social welfare associations, and small branch-lineage associations appear frequently to have been dominated by lower-level elites.^[24] Likewise, upper-stratum or urban-oriented elites doubtless had much better access to benefits provided by the state (and may therefore have reciprocated with greater support) than did the more rural lower-stratum elites.

How does this pictures of elite structure and power relate to recent scholarly emphasis on the long-term stability and continuity of the local elite?^[25] According to this scholarship, elite power and status were more frequently and reliably attained and maintained via landholding, lineage development, and other localistic methods than through the rewarding but unpredictable route of examination success and high bureaucratic office. Lending support to this view we see in Xunwu (and doubtless other southern Jiangxi counties as well) that some surname groups persisted for centuries in the elite-centered historical record despite the county's poor overall record in the examinations and despite the underrepresentation in the degree-holder lists of some of the county's most powerful and well-known surnames.^[26]

However accurate the general argument for continuity may be, the frequent references to "former great households" now fallen in wealth and status that fleck Mao's accounts of the Xunwu middle elite, and the large number of "declining households" he found in the county's lower elite, suggest that we must be wary of viewing the complex question of elite continuity too simplistically. Most analyses of elite mobility have studied imperial rather than twentieth-century elites and dealt with lengthy time spans. They have also focused on prosperous core regions, and their authors have been forced by the nature of their sources to give more exclusive coverage than does this essay to the great-household stratum of the local elite. Mao's comments remind us that in more peaceful times and more prosperous areas, some rise and fall of elite households must have occurred, even within the

most dominant and enduring lineages or patrilines. In troubled times and out-of-the-way places, and among the volatile lower elites whose lives are so much less well-documented, both the actual occurrence and (equally important as a factor in elite behavior) the subjective fear of downward mobility must have been a constant fact of life.

Intra-elite Factional Conflict . As one might expect given the complex classification of hill-country elites and the intense pressures to obtain scarce resources and avoid the disastrous consequences of family fragmentation, elite relationships were often characterized by competition and strife. Although information on it is limited, this intra-elite conflict is important to our understanding of political behavior in the hill country and demands at least a few remarks.

Let me again begin with some examples. In Chongyi county, in southwestern Jiangxi, two major elite cliques struggled with one another during the 1920s. Adherents of one clique lived in the vicinity of the county capital and the market town of Yangmei. According to the Communist reminiscence that is our main source on the subject, this group had long "colluded" with county magistrates and had a firm grip on all "public property." The other clique was based in a group of market towns on branches of a river system separated from the county capital by a range of hills. In the mid-1920s this clique, considered more progressive than its rival, supported the local GMD organization.^[27]

In Yudu county north of Xunwu there were also two cliques, the Changcun and the Yushui factions, named after the middle schools that served as their headquarters. According to another CCP leader, the Changcun faction was based in parts of the county—largely in the east and north—where lineages were large arid strong, and its adherents were the large landlords and "local despots" (tuhao ) who controlled these lineages. The Yushui faction had its strength in the county capital and in the western and southern sections of the county, where lineages were relatively weak. This faction included many middle and small landlords who were also engaged in commerce. Around these cores, each faction gathered various "poor intellectuals" and students, presumably recruited from their respective middle schools. Both cliques competed for influence within the county government and access to profits from proxy remittance and pettifogging.^[28]

In Xingguo county just north of Yudu, factional conflict also revolved around different middle schools. Here a coalition of elites from around the county capital controlled the county's public middle school, while rural elites, organized into a body called the Federated Township Self-Government Assembly (Lian xiang zizhi huiyi) controlled a nearby private middle school. The city elites had better access to successive county magistrates and with their support obtained a larger share of local spoils and

forced the rural elites to pay a disproportionate share of local government costs. As in Yudu, students in the local schools became involved in the factional struggle started by their eiders.^[29]

Several points emerge from these examples. First, elite conflict focused on the county capital and government, most obviously because the magistrate's yamen and the center for such government functions as public security, tax collection, and education were in the capital. Elites interested in obtaining government office, profiting from tax collection or litigation, or protecting their private activities from government functionaries or other local elites had good reason to compete for influence with the county bureaucrats. For their part, officials also inevitably became more involved in local elite politics. Because Qing magistrates could not be regularly appointed to serve in their own provinces, magistrates serving in Jiangxi were unfamiliar with local conditions and perforce relied upon local elites to help them govern. After the fall of the Qing, people often served in their own provinces, but magistrates in Jiangxi were rarely assigned to their home counties and still required local advice. Magistrates lived and worked in the yamen, so they were naturally most likely to come in contact with members of the elite who lived nearby, a fact that gave such elites definite advantages in local factional struggles.^[30]

Second, economic and social centrality of the county capitals and their immediate surroundings also made them the focus of factional strife. Although some county seats in Jiangxi, including Xunwu, were not the largest commercial centers in their counties, the majority were. Virtually all were well located along transportation routes, surrounded by fertile and densely populated lowland paddy lands. By contrast, much of the remaining hill-county territory consisted of rugged mountain country, with difficult access, low productivity, and sparse population. Moreover, the county capital was generally the site of the region's largest temples and lineage halls and its most prestigious schools. The vicinity of the county capital was thus likely to be both a base of important elite interest groups and a prize to be competed for. In many Jiangxi hill counties, elite conflicts also replicated and intensified general and long-standing divisions between urban and rural or between established communities and later-arriving "guest people" (Hakka) immigrants.

The Yudu county example also indicates another type of intra-elite competition, namely interlineage factionalism and feuding. That such feuds were often really disputes between the respective lineage leaderships rather than the mass of lineage members is underlined by a conflict in Ruijin county, where in 1923-24 two upper elites quarreled over whether to establish new local transit-tax stations and eventually mobilized more than a thousand men from each lineage to settle the issue through armed conflict.^[31] At least as common as open fighting between leaders of large lineages, however, were

situations similar to the Yudu case: one or more large lineages and their leaders seeking to dominate surrounding areas inhabited by many small lineages.^[32]

The Yudu case is particularly intriguing because social and economic attitudes seem linked to elite type, with large lineage leaders representing older, more "feudal," landlord attitudes and the small landlords-cum-merchants opposing them embodying more modern "bourgeois" sensibilities. Agriculture and handicrafts in the Jiangxi highlands had been highly commercialized well before the twentieth century, and elites at all levels were substantially involved in trade; thus, we must be careful not to overdraw such distinctions. Nevertheless, as we shall see shortly, elite attitudes toward revolution were often affected by their economic and social circumstances, and it is plausible that some such factors influenced earlier elite factionalism as well.