The term macro-history seems to be coined by me.If someone has used it before, please excuse my visit.In fact, the origin here has nothing to do with right and wrong, because even though the term is novel, it lacks creativity.Economists collectively refer to the most basic principle that the circulation of money affects materials and employment as "macroeconomics", while internally more sophisticated observations such as those involving price indexes and business cycles are referred to as "microeconomics." Microeconomics has a long history.No one has ever come forward to claim to be the first servant.The macroscopic and microscopic are just the difference between broadening the horizon and taking into account the subtleties.Changing the name to size and transferring it to history is obviously an imitation rather than an invention.

As for my own introduction of the concept of macro and broad perspective into the study of Chinese history, it has indeed gone through a long period of twists and turns. Most of the reasons come from the arrangement of fate.I was in the military for 10 years when I was young.After being discharged from the army, he went abroad to study. It can be said that "learn the sword first before learning books, and study after using the sword without success".With such a bumpy experience.I am still looking forward to the true meaning of the deeds I have seen and heard, but once I have a degree, as a teacher, I explain Chinese history to American students. : To what extent do they or they need to understand the well field system?What is the use of being in the world with them in the future?Must they or they know that HanFei Tzu's fellow worker was Li Ssu (Li Si), who encouraged Shih-huang-ti (Qin Shihuang) to burn books, and was later constructed by the eunuch Chao Kao (赵高)? kill? Empress Wu (Empress Wu Zetian)'s life story is only "dirty and chaotic erotic palace"?To my students, besides comparing her with Catherine the Great (Catherine II) of Tsarist Russia, or comparing her with the Empress Dowager (Empress Dowager) of the Qing Dynasty, is there any practical use of this knowledge?

Of course, I have no way of connecting every person, moment, and event in the thousands of years of history with today's West, talking about the use of the morning and the use of the evening, and providing references for architects and accountants. In this way, I feel the importance of synthesis. . In the 1960s, I felt that we should extensively use the induction method to compress the existing historical materials to a high degree, first to form a concise and coherent program, and to have the scope and level of comparison with Western European history and American history before talking about it. worthy of further research.

In fact, our own views on modern Chinese history are the same.So far, our views on Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping are nothing more than personal love and dislike.However, they represent a broad mass movement, and most of the achievements they have achieved have become a fait accompli and are irreversible. Then we should consider the positive nature of these mass movements and their coherent origins, and we should not regard all personal grievances as historical turning points. up. In 1970, I received a research fee from the East Asian Institute of Harvard University, and went to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study the fiscal and taxation of the Ming Dynasty, under the supervision of Professor Fairbank.Professor Fei's kind care for me personally and my family has been described in other books.However, in terms of academic methods, we also have fundamental incompatibility.He emphasizes analysis, while I advocate synthesis; he insists on taking 20 years as the research scope, and I often involve a century or a dynasty; he uses deductive method, and I use inductive method.Later, the book "Finance and Taxation in the Sixteenth Century of the Ming Dynasty" was completed, but it was not submitted to Harvard for publication, but was sent to Cambridge, England for publication, as a last resort.

Here is an obvious example. When I wrote "Finance and Taxation", I used 39 local chronicles of the Ming Dynasty, all of which did not include the standard nouns of the day's corvee taxation, such as "Lijia". "Junwei", "Yichuan" and "Minzhuang".If it is used for analysis, readers can see at a glance that there is no system, it can be regarded as messy and contradictory, and we can denounce it as incompetent bureaucracy, or we may blame it as corruption.But after a period of synthesis, what I saw was different.On the one hand, the tax regulations of the Ming Dynasty included a central system, and on the other hand, they took into account local realities. There were permanent rules and temporary clauses. Then don't do anything wrong.Because of this, the entire dynasty was able to last for 276 years without overall reorganization.But such central control has a negative effect: the system does not encourage local areas to develop their specialties, but creates an artificial balance.Whether this role is good or bad is still relevant to the problems we face today.Therefore, history does not only rely on memory, but also becomes a method of thinking.

In the future, when I write, I will pay attention to replacing administration with etiquette in the bureaucratic system, maintaining the coordination and harmony of civil servants at all levels, and disregarding the fair and free exchange of economic factors in each region. I generally benefit from my research on finance and taxation in the Ming Dynasty. In 1972, I went to Cambridge, England to assist Dr. Joseph Needham in his research work on a section of "History of Science and Technology in China", and I had the opportunity to get close to this "burly elder".He has been criticized for being eccentric and withdrawn, and in some cases he is.His books and notes are placed in four or five different places in the college, and the method of classification is all in his own mind. If he wants to find some information, he will leave before he finishes talking. The grass in the college has always been forbidden. Tong Xing, who used to be the dean's privilege at this time, disregarded taboos, and strode across the line in the most straight way, so that I followed closely and had to follow the foul.

After discussing and debating with him many times, I found that his method of academic research is also based on synthesis, especially when he told me: "In my opinion, the European religious reformation, the Renaissance, the establishment of nation-states, and the implementation of capitalism It’s a set of actions that have everything.” Then there is a tendency that induction is more important than analysis.He said to me again: "Everyone considers the calculation of Yin-Yang and Five Elements to be false science. Let's not just say it's wrong without interrogation. We have to check the logic first, and if it's wrong, we have to investigate it." Where?" I stayed with Li Gong for a year, and then went to Cambridge again in 1974, 1975 and 1978.The power I was inspired by him cannot be expressed in one word. In hindsight, I wrote "Capitalism and the 21st Century" in a comprehensive format, not following other people's corners. Its design began in the 1970s with Dr. Li. Take a leisurely walk along the Jianhe River and talk about the past and present.

By the late 1970s, I had revised my lectures in class section by section, and approached the existing layout step by step.The original data of the general history of China cannot be separated from the "Twenty-Four Histories".But this series of books is voluminous.Take the punctuation book published by Beijing Zhonghua Book Company. Although it is eye-catching and easy to read, it has more than 76,000 pages. That is, it takes four or five years for a scholar to read 50 pages a day without doing other things. The records have little to do with people today.Also using "Twenty-Four Histories" as a blueprint, but cutting and concatenating the programs listed in this Ji, Biographies, and Chronicles together with materials that are not in the previous chapters, the disadvantage is still too supportive of traditional social values.The English translation is Comprehensive Mirror for Aid In Government, and the literal translation is: "a complete mirror for aiding administration", which certainly does not abandon the traditional moral standpoint, and Sima Guang himself was involved in Wang Anshi's reform. You Zuo, his concept is inevitably a prejudice of the evolution of history "as it should be", rather than our eagerness to know the causal relationship of "how it is".

I have published it here and there again and again. The history I write is to look at history from a technical point of view, not to review history from a moral point of view.This is not to say that morality is not important, but that the morality of the new society depends on the structure of the society to determine its connotation. It is not as good as the relationship between people in the agricultural society in the past. All moral concepts and their standards can remain unchanged for centuries. To put it broadly, this means that the moral concepts of Sima Guang and others are equal to the European pre-Renaissance standards, and have not yet entered the realm of "Protestant ethics" as Weber called it.

When writing this book, of course I quoted the "Twenty-Four Histories" and other basic materials, and I still relied on the opinions of the masters who wrote the general history of China in the past, such as Qian Mu, Deng Zhicheng, and Zhou Gucheng, and also referred to Western secondary materials.But in many cases it is still unavoidable.The starting point for my own understanding of modern China was still in the late Ming Dynasty. In 1960, I read "Ming Shilu" while teaching.It took two and a half years to complete the 133 volumes of the book, and it has benefited so far.As for the outstanding features of this book, it comes from "Shihuo Zhi" in "Twenty-Four Histories".There are 12 articles in Shihuo Zhi in the Twenty-Four Histories.Although the content is different in complexity and simplification, and the author's insights cannot be compared with those of today's people, six of them have been translated and annotated in detail by Western and Japanese scholars, which constitute the best clues for today's economic historians.My greatest difficulty so far has been my inability to provide a "bibliography" that is appropriate without being pompous.If it is to be extensive, all the Western classics of the Four Books and Five Classics should be included (the article mentions it three times, and "Mencius" nine times), if it is to be short, even the basic works of Fairbank and Needham should not be mentioned.In short, it is not only a kind of big history, but also formed by comprehensive induction. The documents read and studied since the author's hair was taught have influence, and it is also included in newspapers and magazines in liberal arts and philosophy.

I left teaching in 1980, and have spent some time since then writing and revising the English version of this book.Some of the materials in it are not easy to compress, which made me hesitate for a while. For example, the "Juntian Order" from the Northern Wei Dynasty to the Northern Qi Dynasty, the Northern Zhou Dynasty to the Sui and Tang Dynasties was also different, and the castes of the "Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms" were also extremely confused. It is also repeated back and forth. I only introduce this as a concept or a phenomenon in the manuscript, because I have sorted out the finances of the late Ming Dynasty myself, and I know that many technical variables have no decisive influence on the long-term evolution of history. To trouble my readers with it.On the contrary, the experiences of Yuan Shao's family and his ancestors, and Huang Chao's marching route aroused the common curiosity of the author and readers because of their special circumstances, and the trivialities also represent a rare phenomenon, so they are written according to the facts.The difference is that this book focuses on imagination rather than mechanical memory.With such cuts, I can spare space to introduce the exterior and interior of the Longmen Grottoes in Dunhuang, and also write about the scenery of the West Lake and the "Legend of the White Snake" in a chapter of the Southern Song Dynasty. I think the biggest problem facing modern China is that the traditional society cannot produce a modern economic system. In the background, I said that the late Tang empire was expansive, and the Ming and Qing empires were convergent.Although this clue is placed behind many small stories, people with discerning eyes can see through it at a glance.I had just sent the book to Cambridge, and not long after I received a letter from Dr. Needham: "Oh," he wrote, "everything is transferred by taxation!" Radio Television Hong Kong recommended this book during an interview, mentioning that after the heyday of the Tang Dynasty, China had no effective taxation system to open up the situation.It can be seen that they already had the same consensus as me, so once they said it, it resonated. But not long ago, a book reviewer also wrote in a newspaper: Regardless of whether the history I write talks about ancient and modern China and foreign countries, I always write China as a capitalist country. This statement reminds me of a story: Nixon said that when he met Mao Zedong a few years ago, he complimented Mao: "Chairman, you wrote a few pamphlets, which actually changed the whole of China." Mao immediately protested: "How can I change China to its present state? I just turned Beijing around a little bit here and there!" Mao Zedong is still the same, how dare I hope that my words will change China?Moreover, the work of history practitioners is only to report the cause and effect of what has happened, not to plan for the future. The fact is this: I have just reorganized the organization, and it is in 1981. I don’t know how to end the article, and the Chinese leader is promoting "touch "Stones cross the river", news about their reforms often appears in American newspapers and magazines.This trend and phenomenon is consistent with my private imagination that Chinese history and Western culture converge, and that commercial organizations replace the previous agricultural organization system, and gradually enter the conditions for digital management.These conditions are not my own ideas, but originated from Sir George N. Clark, an expert on the British study of the 17th century. He believed that Britain entered this realm after the Glorious Revolution.It is not an easy task to transform an agricultural country into an industrial and commercial country. I often use a metaphor: there is a transformation of a beast into a bird.It was unthinkable before the 17th century that banks could be opened between villages and towns based on the agricultural foundation, social habits, and legal traditions of the UK, land could be bought and sold at will, turn-pikes could be established in various places, and the population could move freely.Just because the days have passed, we think that Britain has always been like this.It is unimaginable to treat such a country as a city-state, using currency as a tool to control the whole people, and it is impossible to avoid a period of struggle.This book has about 10 pages to introduce the procedures of Western European countries to enter this realm.Whether China has entered this state, the reader can see at a glance. As for whether China should call the current system capitalism or socialism, I suggest that modern pedants should debate. Speaking of which, in the first few years of the 1980s, although I had the above humble opinion, I did not dare to declare it. It was not until the "contract to household" policy was generally implemented in the mainland that the People's Dugong was no longer a production unit. The situation was indeed true. It cannot be reversed, so the conclusion of this book is written in a more affirmative statement. In addition, there are decades of planning and thinking in the background, so it cannot be said that I and the publisher have not taken things seriously. Why is it called "Great Chinese History"? China has undergone the largest revolution in human history in the past 150 years. It has transformed from a closed medieval country to a modern country. It has affected the beliefs, marriage education, food, clothing, housing and transportation of 1 billion people. The situation does not allow us to measure it by ordinary standards. .The author of this book is not Columbus, he did not discover the New World.But like an ordinary crew member, he sailed with Columbus 4 times, visited Jamaica and Honduras, and returned to Spain. When he said that there is indeed a new continent, people who listened to him said he was talking nonsense. Impatient. Huang Renyu August 18, 1993 Neupitz