从“唐宋变革”到“大分流”:一种假说

From Tang-Song Transition to Great Divergence:An Untested Hypothesis

过去几十年以来,海内外学界很少有人试图将“唐宋变革论”和“大分流”这两大经典议题打通讨论。在大分流议题不断“近现代化”的大趋势之下,试图以唐宋变革论的某些组成部分去解释大分流,由此形成一个跨越千年的宏观历史叙事,无疑是一件很冒险的事,但它并非没有任何逻辑与叙事合理性。在当下的主流研究里,大分流的形成和清代的国家能力弱化趋势有着千丝万缕的关系,而这一趋势又似乎和某些源于宋代的政治地方化趋势有着各种功能性关联。如此,可以提出一些打通唐宋变革与大分流的初步学术构想:唐宋变革所引发的政治精英地方化潮流在之后的数百年里强化了地方社会的自我治理与救济能力,由此为清代的“国退民进”政治模式提供了必要的功能性条件。这一假说虽然目前只是假说,但确实呼应了过去几十年里的若干相关研究,也为大分流议题提供了一些值得进一步探讨的新思路。

Over the past several decades,there have been almost no attempts to explain the“Great Divergence”(大分流)through reference to the“Tang-Song transition”(唐宋变革),despite these being arguably one of the most prominent debates in Chinese historiography.Given the tendency of recent“Great Divergence”studies to push back the date of divergence to the Qing Dynasty,this is quite understandable.Nonetheless,whether the divergence had some institutional or political origins in the Tang-Song transition is a topic worthy of additional consideration:if we believe,as many now do,that the divergence had much to do with the weakness of the state capacity of the Qing Dynasty,then there is further reason to believe that weak state capacity in the Qing Dynasty had much to do with sociopolitical transformations set in motion by the Tang-Song transition.Specifically,the localization of political elites during the Song Dynasty caused a far higher level of local self-governance,which,over time,functionally enabled the Qing state to fiscally and administratively“retreat”from local governance without,for the most part,suffering overly serious sociopolitical consequences.For now,this remains an untested hypothesis,but it has significant synergies with the preexisting academic literature on both debates,and opens up substantial new possibilities for historical analysis and research.