The Generation Mechanism of Traditional Agrarian Society and an Analysis of the Dynastic Cycle

The intrinsic driving mechanism of traditional agrarian society is the concentration and diffusion of agricultural labor power; their mutual promotion and restraint together generate the center-periphery structure of villages and cities. Villages and cities, as agglomerations, have concretely similar functions: villages possess the functions of elder-based moral instruction and rule, defense against invasion, and exchange and communication, and the functions of towns in traditional agrarian society are merely an enlarged version of the village. In traditional Chinese society, surplus labor was often stripped out of the reproduction system, and the "positive feedback mechanism" manifested in the interaction between land concentration and peasant landlessness became the internal law of the rise and disintegration of dynasties. Only when a new mode of production in which capital dominates the world emerged did the logic of accumulating land gradually come to be replaced by the accumulation of capital, and this cycle was broken.

1. The center-periphery structure of villages, garrison towns, and farmland

For the people of agrarian society, "in the traditional manner, laboring purely with physical strength, people's understanding of the world is conditioned by dependence on factors such as the seasons, the nature of the soil, and the quantity of water. The rhythm of life is formed by these contingent events,"[1] and the people of this society are highly dependent on natural resources. Among these, in this society of agricultural civilization, the most important means of production is land, and land is distributed in a dispersed manner; the location and resource endowment of different plots of land have different effects on production. Assuming that land resources are evenly distributed, the question we must raise is: why, even when land resources are evenly distributed, do people still concentrate to form villages? There are three advantages to the simple spatial concentration of population: first, forming the agglomeration of the village helps economize on land resources and share the village's public facilities, that is, the agglomeration of the village relative to dispersed residence can utilize externalities; second, it facilitates daily communication among village members, the transmission of knowledge and empirical techniques, and the exchange of products, that is, the agglomeration of the village facilitates the creation and spillover of knowledge and technology, and facilitates the promotion of the division of labor and thereby exchange; third, it helps protect the safety of village members and the fruits of their labor; by concentrating in the village, villagers can build defensive works and jointly deal with invading enemies. Population concentrated in the village is more economical than being dispersed over the surrounding land. This phenomenon is similarly verified in the animal world of Africa: many animals of the African savanna appear in herds, while animals living in areas with relatively large geographical differences are more likely to be solitary.

An important condition for the evolution of human civilization is the ability to maintain population reproduction and material and cultural reproduction. How can reproduction, or even expanded reproduction, be maintained? The basic logic is that every member of a village must strive to maximize the production of surplus labor and maximize the transformation of surplus labor into the means of reproduction; with the development of the productive forces, surplus labor must also be transformed into the means of reproduction as rapidly as possible through forms such as merger and association. Under the domination of this logic, if no external resistance is encountered, then with the development of the productive forces the village population continuously expands, the land and labor tools at the village's disposal also expand, the capacity to protect the safety of village members and the fruits of surplus labor gradually expands, and the village's capacity for agglomeration continuously strengthens. However, as the population increases, the land at the village's disposal may no longer be able to feed so many people, and thus the village's diffusion force may come into play, with new villages generated one after another around the old village. The agglomerating force produces a self-inhibiting effect, expressed in monetary terms as rising land rent, and rising land rent has a demand-suppressing and crowding-out effect. Population needs to move outward, and the degree of this outward movement is closely related to transportation conditions. The old village gradually becomes the center, forming a distribution pattern of a village-center-periphery hierarchy, which is also the natural and ideal state for the formation of a city. However, this is only one model; it is also possible that the old village declines due to various natural challenges and challenges from other tribes, and a new settlement center is established.

Where a village agglomerates, that is, the question of the path of village formation, is closely related to the principles of site selection. The main paths of village formation include the following: high-quality resources, water sources, special abilities, the church, planning, and so on. This is mainly because in the era of agricultural civilization, on the one hand, the distribution of land resources was not homogeneous; for example, favorable water sources, mineral deposits, and other resources were not evenly distributed; on the other hand, in the process of production people gradually shifted from being dominated by natural division of labor to being dominated by social division of labor, and the state of village agglomeration may have accelerated. As for village site selection, because water sources are necessities for agricultural production and daily life, under normal circumstances villages were generally sited near rivers and lakes. For example, Chinese civilization is also called a river civilization; the distribution of great rivers is not even, and people often gathered on both sides of great rivers for cultivation. The great rivers brought people fertile natural power, but also brought them floods; in order to deal with disasters, cooperation was needed. There were two modes of cooperation in traditional society: one was cooperation through family ethical relations, and the other was cooperation through a top-down command system, and this large-scale social cooperation accelerated village agglomeration. Yu the Great's flood control was not merely a matter for one village or even one tribe, but required the union of many tribes. As surplus labor increased, seizing the surplus labor of others became profitable, tribal warfare ensued, and village agglomeration proceeded even faster, even forming higher-level garrison towns and city-states. The basic logic is: a larger village slowly swallows smaller villages, or makes smaller villages submit to them, and some larger village becomes a city; this city may no longer engage in production, but instead specifically extracts the surplus labor of other villages and builds city walls to protect this surplus labor. This city then has two main functions: first, a ruling function, and second, a defensive function. Of course, the emergence of towns also adapted to the development requirements of human exchange of surplus products, providing a market platform for exchange. A large number of villages were dispersed around it, becoming the satellite distribution of the garrison town. Cities gradually became differentiated into levels, and the distribution of cities acquired a graded pattern.

It can thus be seen that the agglomerating and diffusing forces of agricultural civilization are mainly embodied in the use of land. Some people, through plunder, merger, and other means, gained control of the means of production in land, and could then concentrate labor power on the land for production, or concentrate laborers as dependents around the landowner, forming manors. In this way, large numbers of manors surrounded the farmland, and cities were surrounded by the countryside, which is what Marx called the countryside dominating the city. The formation of cities in the agricultural era had various paths; here we have mainly explained the distribution of the garrison town-village-farmland model of agricultural civilization from the typical form of spontaneous agglomerating force to artificial agglomerating force.

The hypotheses and inferences drawn from the agglomerating and diffusing forces of spatial economics have been partially verified by historical experience. As far as prehistoric Europe is concerned, "for most of the period and in most regions, most inhabitants lived on isolated farms or in small villages centered on nuclear or extended families." These prehistoric Europeans' "farmsteads and village dwellings usually had kitchen gardens suitable for growing food, with fields cultivated outside the dwellings, and pastures farther away. Some towns and hillforts also had fields, but in some core settlements houses were mostly enclosed by side walls, and all fields were placed outside the settlement."[2] The theory of the Thünen rings, at a more micro level, corresponds even more closely to the manors of medieval Europe. These typical manors were a closed system, and this system was like a complex spider web.[3] "The typical medieval (planned) village form was a radial village (in the Elbe-Saale region), with manors arranged in a ring around an open space, villages situated along the road (along the highway), villages centered on a square (located at a road fork, with a pond or a square), or - especially in the colonial areas of eastern Germany - farmsteads beside the forest, with arable land extending from the farmstead to the hinterland. The ring-shaped village (like a ring) had gardens, arable land, uncultivated arable land, grassland, cleared forest, and primeval forest."[4] Of course, the Thünen rings are a typical distribution on a homogeneous plain, and the distribution of many villages is also closely related to the geographical environment; for example, they may be distributed along river courses.