>>40333

>Now maybe it's counterproductive from my part to present this work,

Yes, it really was.

'Yet, in China, many of these features either did not last very long, or must otherwise be qualified. Moreover, such essential characteristics of European feudalism as vassalage and the fief seem to have been almost entirely absent in China.

Horse‐riding armored warriors dominated north China (but not the south) from the fourth century through the sixth, and then disappeared as a class. Chinese imperial unity was restored in 589, permanently ending the period of political fragmentation. The Age of Division through mid‐Tang might have been, as Naitō Torajirō claimed, an unusually “aristocratic” period in imperial Chinese history. Yet, Dennis Grafflin (1981, 66) argues vigorously “that the aristocracy described by Naitō did not exist,” and even Naitō himself noted the absence of feudalism (meaning fiefs and enfeoffment) (Mou 2011, 42). Although Japanese scholars since Naitō have generated an entire subfield of research into the supposed “aristocratic society” of the era, the Chinese Great Families of this period continued to derive their status primarily from office‐holding in the central imperial government (which was, furthermore, not itself normally directly hereditary), and locally important families remained merely large private landowners rather than medieval European‐style lords of semi‐autonomous domains (Kawachi 1970, 482–83). Beginning during the Tang dynasty the incipient examination system profoundly changed the nature of the late imperial Chinese elite and produced a society very different from medieval Europe.'

>but it really shows that the "norm" - if we can call that - is to consider medieval China a feudal state.

That seems to be more based in Ideology and trying to find comparisons to Europe.

'During the twentieth century, the Marxist variant of the standard European periodi-zation scheme, which identified a purportedly universal sequence of economically defined modes of production proceeding from an (ancient) slave society to (medieval) feudalism and then to (modern) capitalism, became common in East Asia. (The sequence has sometimes also been complicated by introducing Karl Marx’s vaguely conceived “Asiatic mode of production.”) Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, a Marxist framework has been more or less obligatory in mainland China—at least to the extent of automatically labeling much of premodern Chinese history “feu-dal.” Marxist approaches also tended to dominate post–World War II Japanese academic fashion. Because it was assumed that modern capitalism could not be arrived at without passing through medieval feudalism first, a truly astonishing amount of ink was spilt in East Asia trying to identify when the transition from slave society to feudalism might have occurred in China'