The Mobile Space: The Qing Dynasty Jiangnan Towns And Rural Relations Research

In previous years, the studies on Jiangnan market towns always put more attention to the comparison between ultra-regions and the economic relation between national or international markets. Most scholars tried to find their research space besides the certain region and appeared a kind of deflexion, such as market study or village study only. Especially, the thought of "economic determinism" governs almost the whole studies of Jiangnan region. This dissertation putting its researching interests on the relationship between the market towns and their surrounding villages, observing each aspect of Jiangnan society from the "interior" viewpoint instead of the "exterior", and melting the economic, social and cultural factors into a kind of flowing and lively historical macrocosm, using a "vague" interpretative methods to avoid the simple pattern of "the sameness of towns and villages" (城乡一体) or "the duality of towns and villages"(城乡二元)..This dissertation has pandect and case studies also. The pandect made up the defects in previous studies, such as the discrepancy of distance-feeling of different people, and the function of yitian-liangzhu - 田两主(one plot, two masters) to the modern town-village relationship. There has no systematic research to the former question yet and the present studies on the latter are limited within the land ownership and property right. This dissertation also regarded the flowing boats and the immobile tea houses as the bridges connecting the market towns and the countrysides, and reviewed the structure of xiangjiao 乡脚(the radiating range of market towns) by means of the economic and religionary approaches. Chapter 5 has presented a case study of Wujiang County, it backdated the developing history of several years since the stage of 'yeshi-dianli " 业食佃力(landlord provides food and peasant supplies labor) to "Jiangcun society" 江村社会 and pointed out the transition of living space of gentries and its influence into the country society. Chapter 6 reviewed an important phenomenon in the regional institution of Jiading and Baoshan since "Jiading three ?slaughters" 嘉定三屠 to the period of local autonomy in early 20th century, that is, the union of Chang 厂 (relieving sites) and Zhen 镇 (market towns) and the Chang directors 厂董 intervened into the local governmental affairs completely. This chapter discussed the long-termbackground of the forming of local institution and did not neglect the function of haphazard events.Based on the researches above, this dissertation tried to prove such a picture: in the Suzhou-centered Jiangnan society during Qing Dynasty, there has frequent communications between the market towns and countryside and a flowing spatial pattern has appeared already.