FILE PHOTO: Fu Yiling

Fu Yiling (1911–88) began his scholarly career at Xiamen University (XMU) in southeast China’s Fujian Province, graduating from its Department of History in 1934 before leaving for Japan to continue his studies the following year. After returning to China in 1937, he taught at Fukien Christian University (FCU), Fujian College, and other institutions. He later returned to XMU, where he held a succession of senior academic and administrative posts, serving as professor and head of the Department of History, director of the Institute of History, and vice president of the university.

A founding figure in the Chinese school of socioeconomic history, Fu made major contributions to the development of ancient Chinese history and specialized history—particularly Chinese economic history—at XMU. He also played an important role in building its scholarly community and training a new generation of researchers.

In 1982, he founded the Journal of Chinese Social and Economic History. His works include A Study of the History of Tenant Farming in Fujian, An Exploration of the Urban Economy of Jiangnan in the Ming Dynasty, Ming-Qing Merchants and Commercial Capital, Rural Society and Economy in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and Essays on Ming-Qing Socioeconomic History.

Distinctive style of ‘socioeconomic history’ research

Fu was born into the family of a native bank owner in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian, but lost his father at an early age. He went on to attend Fuzhou Zuohai Middle School, where he was a classmate of Deng Tuo, who later became a prominent Marxist historian. Together they ran a student journal and published articles, an early indication of Fu’s scholarly inclinations.

He later studied in the Department of Economics at FCU before transferring to the Department of History at XMU. After graduating, he went to Japan in 1935 and continued his studies in sociology at Hosei University. Upon returning to China, he joined a major economics research institute in Fujian in 1937.

During his time in Yong’an in central-western Fujian, while seeking refuge from the ravages of war at the hands of the Japanese invaders, Fu discovered a box of land contracts and documents among the ruins, a find that inspired him to investigate them further. Drawing on his knowledge of economics, history, and folklore, he went on to write A Study of Fujian Tenant Farmers in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, in the process developing his own distinctive approach to “socioeconomic history.” What set this approach apart from the earlier tradition of “national economic history” was its emphasis on unconventional historical sources, including privately held documents, stone inscriptions, genealogies, and even literary works.

Although Liang Qichao had previously observed that traditional historiography was essentially a “genealogy of emperors” and argued that local chronicles and genealogies could open up new sources of historical evidence, few scholars had actually put this insight into practice.

Fu was among the earliest to do so, and his approach closely paralleled the historiographical path of the French Annales School—particularly its emphasis on the lives of ordinary people, interdisciplinary inquiry, and total history.

Following this path, Fu rose to prominence in Chinese historical circles during the great debate over the nature of Chinese society in the 1950s. His distinctive findings established him as a leading scholar of both the nature of Chinese society and the sprouts of capitalism, while earning him considerable standing among historians at home and abroad.

After the founding of the PRC, he pursued an extensive body of research on traditional Chinese social structure, land ownership, class relations, and the development of the commodity economy. His scholarship won wide recognition from his peers both in China and overseas.

Engagement with Marxism

Fu’s engagement with Marxism began as early as his middle school years, when he studied and discussed it with progressive students such as Deng Tuo. After entering XMU, he initially enrolled in the Department of Economics, but lectures by Xiao Bingshi of the Department of History soon drew him toward historical study and prompted him to transfer departments. Xiao, an early underground member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) who publicly served as a professor of history at XMU, inspired in Fu a deep sense of affinity and admiration.

Even after Xiao left Xiamen for Beijing, the two remained in correspondence, with Xiao sending Fu progressive books and journals. During Fu’s studies in Japan, he also became acquainted with a number of Marxists, through whom he read several Marxist classics. Upon returning to China, he began consciously applying Marxist ideas and methods to his scholarship, including the method of class analysis.

This Marxist grounding gave Fu penetrating insight into class and class struggle in Chinese society. His research encompassed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement, the Nian Army uprising, and the tenant farmer struggles in southern China during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), as well as such phenomena as extra-economic coercion and hereditary slavery. Throughout this work ran an uncompromising condemnation of social systems founded on the oppression and exploitation of one person by another.

After the founding of the PRC, Fu found a kindred intellectual spirit in Wang Ya’nan, president of XMU. Wang’s translation of Das Kapital also exerted a profound influence on him, and the two shared many similar views on Chinese feudal society and the country’s bureaucratic system.

Fu remained committed to communism throughout his life, and in 1979, at nearly 70 years of age, finally fulfilled his long-held aspiration to join the CPC. He was subsequently invited to lecture at universities in the United States, Canada, and Japan, where he presented research shaped by Marxist theory and won wide recognition from his audiences. Some of these lectures were later compiled and published in overseas journals.

Fu thus became one of the earlier Chinese scholars to introduce the achievements of Marxist historiography in China to Western audiences. His commitment to the Marxist materialist conception of history evolved from “personal realization” to “conscious commitment” and ultimately to “sublimation.”

Broad academic influence

Fu kept a close watch on new currents and frontiers in historical research and had a keen sense of the questions emerging at the forefront of the field. At the same time, he remained rigorous in his scholarship, insisting that every argument be firmly grounded in historical evidence. Rather than trimming his sails to the prevailing winds, he stayed true to his own scholarly convictions. Many of his views have since gained broad acceptance among scholars in China and abroad.

Fu excelled not only at “wearing out iron shoes” in the search for evidence, but also at drawing broad comparisons and distilling them into penetrating theoretical insights. He argued, for example, that Chinese society was at once precocious and immature: precocious in the relatively early development of the commodity economy, yet immature in the persistence of remnants of slavery and feudalism.

Fu believed that successive Chinese dynasties invariably gave rise to a rentier stratum that reaped substantial profits through usury, developed into a parasitic social stratum, consumed wealth accumulated by society, and impeded social progress. In the later stages of traditional Chinese society, the rise of modern industry drew large numbers of surplus rural laborers into cities. This influx provided an abundant labor force while also enabling factory owners to suppress wages and intensify the exploitation of workers. These observations, grounded in the particular course of Chinese history, gave his analysis considerable explanatory force.

Fu’s scholarship has also exerted considerable influence internationally. By examining both new and old factors, he grasped the essential characteristics of the social economy. His major theoretical contributions—including the theory of the elasticity of Chinese feudal society, the theory of lineage communities, and the theory of the sprouts of capitalism in China—have since gained broad recognition in academic circles. Western scholars such as Joseph Esherick of the University of California and Timothy Brook of the University of British Columbia have acknowledged the profound influence of Fu’s scholarship on their own work.

Lin Ganquan, former director of the Institute of Ancient History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, once said that the Fu Yiling school was one of the few distinctive schools of thought to emerge after the founding of the PRC, marked by a recognizable scholarly style, substantial achievements, and a succession of researchers who continued to develop Fu’s intellectual legacy. The examples are too numerous to enumerate.

For instance, Li Bozhong, a professor from Peking University, explored early industrialization and regional economic history in Jiangnan. XMU Professor Chen Zhiping examined the history of the tax and corvée system in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) as well as Fujian lineage culture. Zheng Zhenman, also a professor from XMU, studied lineage organizations and communal economies, giving more concrete form to Fu’s theory of the “pluralistic structure” of traditional Chinese society.

Through the collective efforts of these and many other scholars, the Chinese school of socioeconomic history founded by Fu has been carried forward from one generation to the next, while continuing to open new chapters in the history of contemporary Chinese scholarship.

Wang Rigen is a professor from the School of History and Cultural Heritage at Xiamen University.