The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2
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GROWTH AND CHANGE
IN
THE ECONOMY
II
in 1937 began a full-scale war against all China. Japan's occupation of the
most developed areas near the coast, but not the entire country, completely
altered the terms of the Nationalist-Communist political competition. The
question became who could best mobilize the populace and build
up
military strength
in
the more rural and less modernized parts
of
the
country. War shifted the balance away from bureaucratic modernization
towards social revolution.
Third, the CCP established its Kiangsi soviet government in early 1931
and after escaping on the Long March to Shensi built up
a
new regime
at Yenan under Mao Tse-tung. Despite
a
long history of policy fluctuations
and intra-party power struggles, the CCP built a revolutionary movement
based in rural areas. During the Japanese War peasants in
a
number of
bases were brought into
a
revolutionary process to restructure the rural
social order, reorganize government, and bring the state further into
society. This revolution finally emerged from the countryside in 1949.
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE CHINESE ECONOMY
The question of what happened to the Chinese economy in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries
has
been
a
major focus
of
discussion. Such
problems are complicated because the economy during this time reflected
the external impact of Western trade and imperialism, as well as short-term
instabilities that
had
many different causes,
and
slowly progressing
internal changes that did not represent
a
complete break with the past.
Discussions
of
the nineteenth-century economy have
a
way
of
slipping
back
a
few hundred years
to
consider processes
of
commercialization,
urbanization, and monetization or changes in rural social relationships and
land tenure, traceable
to at
least the Ming dynasty during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
11
While some historians even still debate
whether or not the structural outlines of the late imperial economy and
society were fixed during the Sung, others focus on nineteenth-century
Western intrusion.
" For
a
survey
of
the literature see Ramon Myers, 'Transformation and continuity
in
Chinese
economic and social history', journal of Asian Studies (JAS), 33.2 (Feb. 1974) 265-77. Interpretative
trends in the People's Republic of China during the early 1980s are summarized in William Rowe,
'Review article: recent writing
in
the People's Republic
on
early Ch'ing economic history',
Cb'ing-sbib ven-t'i (CSWT), 4.7 (June 1982) 73-90. See also Mark Elvin,
The
pattern of the Chinese
past; Mi Chu Wiens, 'Lord and peasant; the sixteenth
to
the eighteenth century', Modern China
6.1 (Jan. 1980) 3—40; Robert Marks, 'Peasant society and peasant uprisings in South China: social
change
in
Haifeng County, 1630-1930' (University
of
Wisconsin, Ph.D. dissertation, 1978), ch.
6; Arif Dirlik, 'Chinese historians and the Marxist concept of capitalism: a critical examination',
Modern
China, 8.1 (Jan. 1982) 105—32. Summaries of both Chinese and American recent scholarship
on China's early modern economy and society are
in
Albert Feuerwerker, ed.,
Chinese
social and
economic
history from the Song to if 00: report of
the
American
delegation
to
a
Sino-American symposium.
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12 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Paucity
of
pre-twentieth-century data and
the
incompleteness
and
unreliability of more recent figures have handicapped analysis. Regional
diversity and the lack of an integrated national market mean that aggregate
figures can hide important regional variations, whereas local studies risk
describing atypical situations.
In
these circumstances historians have
reached no consensus. We do, however, need to consider debates over
such questions as the nature of the Chinese economy of the late imperial
period, the impact of imperialism, where and how the economy grew in
the twentieth century, and whether and in what way rural standards of
living were worsening. Answers given to such broad economic questions
have also affected interpretations
of
social and political history. These
economic issues, therefore, form
a
logical starting point.
Pre-capitalist
commercialisation
in late imperial China
Commercialization permeated the agrarian economy during the Ch'ing.
The overwhelming majority
of
the populace who farmed were free
to
move about and congregate in small villages linked to one another and
to larger trading centres through marketing structures. Peasants were
likely to produce
a
cash crop as well as basic foods, to supplement their
income by handicrafts, and to purchase some household necessities. Local
commerce was supplemented by long-distance inter-regional trade in basic
commodities.
By the
eighteenth century,
for
instance, Kiangsu
and
Chekiang
no
longer produced enough rice
to
feed their large city
populations, which were supplied from the rich agricultural basins of the
middle Yangtze.
12
Long before the opening of the treaty ports there was
a large inter-regional coastal and Yangtze valley trade.
In
the Shanghai
and Ningpo areas the number of market towns increased in the Ch'ing,
particularly from
the
second half
of
the eighteenth century. These
gradually filled
up
the landscape, indicating progressive integration
of
village economies with
a
metropolitan centre.
13
Commercialization and related urbanization did not, of course, occur
evenly throughout the country. Population density and city growth were
by far the highest in the Lower Yantze. Some estimates suggest this area
kept its lead despite the enormous number of deaths during the Taiping
Rebellion, and that disparities between the most and least urbanized
12
Han-sheng
Chuan
and
Richard
Kraus,
Mid-Ch'ing
rice
markets
and
trade:
an
essay
in
price
history,
59-65; Ho
Ping-ti,
Studies
on
the
population
of
China,
ijit—ifjj,
289-91.
13
Shiba
Yoshinobu,
'Ningpo
and its
hinterland',
in G.
William
Skinner,
ed.
The
city
in
late
imperial
China,
397-405;
Mark
Elvin,
'Market towns
and
waterways:
the
county
of
Shang-hai
from
1480
to 1910', in
ibid.
470-1.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY 13
regions widened during the nineteenth century.
14
The persistent economic
centrality of the Lower Yangtze shows it was a core area of development,
importing grain first from other parts of the country, and later from
abroad, and radiating its own goods to markets in other regions.
Commercial growth stimulated supportive structures, which by the
nineteenth century had become complex and sophisticated. Specialized
firms and brokers handled different phases of commodity production.
Networks of guilds and native place associations regulated business
practices and provided support for merchants. Banking institutions grew
up to meet different ranges of need. One of the first was the network
developed by Shansi merchants to finance their inter-regional transactions
by bank drafts. During the nineteenth century another system of credit
extension through 'native banks', or
cb''ien-chuang,
developed to finance
the growing coastal trade. These essential facilities continued to function
throughout the Republican period alongside larger Western-style banks
(yin-hang).
Still smaller transactions could be financed through pawnshops
and little moneylending shops. Meanwhile a considerable body of
commercial customary law was built up to regularize business practices.
15
The size of the total output of agriculture and handicrafts grew
significantly during most of the eighteenth century. It was encouraged by
population growth, the availability of arable land, the diffusion of the
' best' agricultural practices from more advanced to less advanced regions,
and the general absence of personal restrictions on the labour force.
China's Marxist historians have further raised the question whether the
late-Ming and early-Ch 'ing economy was beginning a qualitative reorgan-
ization that pointed toward indigenous development of 'capitalism'
before the introduction of modern industry from abroad in the nineteenth
century. Their studies have emphasized changes in the 'relations of
production'. Evidence of the separation of ownership of the means of
production from labour power has been adduced from mercantile
investment and the use of wage labour in mining, from the development
14
Tables
in
Skinner,
The
city,
213,
226,
229 indicate that although population density declined mote
in
the
Lower Yangtze after
the
Taiping Rebellion than
in any
other macro-region, urban
population as a percentage of total population increased relative
to
less urbanized regions between
184;
and 1893.
Population density
in
North China increased markedly during
the
Republican
period,
but
still
had not
reached Lower Yangtze levels
by 1953. For
China's macro-regions,
see
ibid.
214-15.
On
Taiping depopulation
see Ho
Ping-ti, Population, 236-47; Perkins,
Agricultural
development,
210—11.
15
On
cb'ien-chuang
see
Sbang-bai
ch'ien-chuang
sbib-liao (Historical materials
on
Shanghai native
banks);
Andrea McElderry,
Shanghai old-style
banks
(ch'ien-chuang),
rtoo—tfjj; Susan Mann Jones,
'Finance
in
Ningpo:
the
"ch'ien-chuang", 17J0-1880',
in W. E.
Willmott,
ed.
Economic
organization
in
Chinese
society.
On
smaller moneylending shops
see
Shiba,
415.
Examples
of
customary
law are
translated
in
Fu-mei Chang Chen
and
Ramon
H.
Myers,'
Customary
law and
the economic growth
of
China during
the
Ch'ing period', CSWT
3.J (Nov. 1976) 1-32; 3.10
(Dec. 1978) 4-27.
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14 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
of managerial farming by landlords and rich peasants using hired workers
in North China and parts of the Lower Yangtze, and from analogies to
the proto-capitalist European putting-out system in the organization of
silk weaving.
16
Such evidences, however, fit into a typical pattern of 'pre-modern'
economic growth, where population and total output both increase but
without any sustained increase in per capita output. We cannot say that
the production of grain and handicraft textiles or the extent of trade and
markets increased any faster than population. ' Capitalism' - or, better,
'modern economic growth' characterized by increments to per capita as
well as to total output - did not appear in early modern Europe (or in
Meiji Japan two centuries later) because of changes in the forms of
property ownership alone. Equally essential were developments in science
and technology, including the 'technology' of finance, investment and
management, that is, in Marxist terms, changes in the 'forces of
production'. It was on the foundation of the continuous application of
new methods of investment and reinvestment that Europe entered the
capitalist epoch. And a strong case can be made
—
both for Europe and
for Japan - that the critical starting point of modern economic growth
was an 'agricultural revolution', a breakthrough in technology and
organization that severed the age-old link between population size and
food production.
Indigenous science and technology in eighteenth-century China in most
important respects were elaborations of Sung discoveries.
I7
Where there
were significant departures, they were apparently not widely diffused or
applied. The limitations of China's pre-modern science, it would seem,
were as salient as its considerable achievements. The explanation of this
vital matter is probably beyond our present competence. But even had
the improved technology existed to produce, for example, large increases
in grain output, it is likely that the population-land ratio in early
Ch
'ing
China was already too high to permit easy increases in per capita
production. This was precisely the case in the Low Countries of Europe
in the seventeenth century, where the new technology that fostered
England's agricultural revolution among a sparse population could not
be profitably applied because of the density of the population. It appears
16
Ming
Cb'ing
t^u-pen
cbu-i
meng-jajen-cbiu
lim-wtn
cbi
(Collected
research essays on capitalist sprouts
in
the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties) and
Cbung-kuo
t%u-pa>
cbu-i
meng-ja
wm-t'i
lim-wen
cbi
(Essays
on
capitalist sprouts in China) contain the best recent work by China's economic historians on
this
topic.
17
This is evident in the all-important sector of
agricultural
technology, studied in much detail in
Amano
Motonosuke,
Cbugokx
nogyo
sbi
kenkyu
(A study of the history of Chinese agriculture);
see,
for example, 687-918 on agricultural implements and machinery, and 389-423 on rice
technology.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY 15
doubtful that the instances of 'capitalist sprouts' in agriculture and
handicrafts discovered by Chinese historians were either quantitatively
important in the country as a whole or that they were on the verge of
triggering a major socio-economic reorganization along capitalist lines.
The nineteenth-century economy can better be described as a considerably
commercialized agricultural economy which, within the limits of its
pre-modern technology, was highly 'developed'. The changes it was
undergoing were limited, but nonetheless capable of modifying social and
political structures within their existing frameworks.
Economic
stagnation
Because the Chinese economy did not of itself undergo
a
major institutional
reorganization or technological breakthrough leading to a period of
sustained per capita economic growth comparable to modern Europe and
Japan, attention has been focused on factors inhibiting such change. The
numerous explanations are usually grouped into two categories:
technological and distributionist. The latter concerns the use of the
surplus product among the populace and gives greater weight to a variety
of political, cultural and historical impediments.
18
Both distributionist and technological theorists recognize the import-
ance of population growth, although they assess its effects differently. It
seems evident that growth of output in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was accompanied by a substantial rise in agricultural productivity
per unit of land resulting from improved seed strains and better farming
methods, as well as by an increase in the area of cultivated and cropped
land (this last as a consequence of the spread of double-cropping). But
eventually there were fewer possibilities for increasing production by
traditional means, and at some point in time (widely estimated as between
the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries) agricultural production
per unit of land began to stagnate and fall behind population growth.
19
19
Some issues
under debate
are brought out
in
Victor Lippit et al.' Symposium on China's economic
history',
Modern
China,
4.3 (July 1978) and W. E. Willmott, '"Review" of
The development
of
underdevelopment in
Cbina',
JAS 41.1 (Nov. 1981) 113-15. Both views are represented in Dwight
Perkins, ed.
China's modern economy
in
historical
perspective,
with the article by Carl Riskin most
strongly representing distributionist perspectives, and those by Mark Elvin, Thomas Rawski,
and Robert Dernberger falling on the technological side. Related issues are discussed in Susan
Mann Jones, 'Misunderstanding the Chinese economy - a review article',
JX5"
40.3 (May 1981)
539-58. Distributionists in general agree that economic growth was inhibited by socio-economic
inequalities and maldistribution, socio-political structure and foreign imperialism, whereas
technologists stress technological levels, demography, and barriers to private capital investment
and accumulation. Marxist economic analysis in terms of relations of production predates this
dichotomy, but has been drawn upon by distributionist historians. In reality the two categories
need not be mutually exclusive, and comprehensive explanations combine aspects of both.
" Elvin,
Pattern,
308; Perkins,
Agricultural
development,
188.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
l6 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
This stagnation was caused partly by heavy population pressure, which
might undermine ecological balances (as in Hunan where excessive dike
building paradoxically caused flooding)
20
or lead to uneconomic
fragmentation of landholdings, lowering of peasant living standards, and
creation of an itinerant, socially marginal stratum of rural poor. The
abundance of cheap labour also lessened incentives to invent and spend
money on technological improvements.
The most sophisticated technological explanation for stagnation has
been formulated as a 'high-level equilibrium trap'.
21
This argument posits
that the impressively high levels of agricultural and water transport
technology combined with population growth and disappearance of
unused land to reduce the amount of surplus product that might become
available above the minimum needed for subsistence. Even though the
surplus never disappeared entirely, its fall per capita reduced demand.
Production and consumption entered into a circular flow that merely
maintained subsistence with little left over for investment. At the same
time,
the sophistication of existing technology mainly based on manpower
made it difficult to achieve the dramatic advances needed to reduce costs
with mechanical power and greatly raise productivity per capita. This
'trap',
therefore, produced stagnation at high levels of pre-modern
production technology.
Critics of this theory assert that there was, in fact, considerable surplus
within the Chinese economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
22
They point not only to conspicuous consumption, but also to commercial
investment, expenditures on local overheads and similar indications that
the problem was not lack of money but the failure to mobilize it for
development. Those accepting this view have looked beyond technological
problems for social, political and cultural factors that impeded develop-
ment. Marxist historians, led by the Japanese, have devoted a great deal
of research to the nature of rural class structure and landholding, topics
of field research in the 1920s and 1930s.
23
Though this work perhaps
produced contradictory evidence
—
in fact supporting both the distribu-
tionist view by elaborating a model of a prevalent' landlord society', and
20
Peter Perdue,' Official goals and local interests: water control in the Dongting Lake region during
the Ming and Qing periods',
JAS
51.4 (Aug. 1981) 745-7.
21
Elvin, Pattern, 298-318; Elvin, 'Comment'
in
Lippit
et
al. 319-30.
22
Carl Riskin, 'Surplus and stagnation
in
modern China',
in
Perkins, ed. China's modem economy,
64—81;
Riskin, 'Discussion and comments',
in
Lippit
et
al. 359-75-
23
An excellent survey of Japanese research
is
Linda Grove and Joseph Esherick, 'From feudalism
to capitalism: Japanese scholarship on the transformation of Chinese rural society', Modern China,
6.4 (Oct. 1980) 397-438. Republican studies include
J. L.
Buck, Land utilisation
in
China; Ch'en
Cheng-mo, Ko-sbeng nung-kung ku-yung bsi-kunrs chi bsu-kimg cbuang-k'uang (Hiring practices in
agriculture and industry and the supply and demand for labour in various provinces). See below,
ch.
5 (Myers).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY 17
the technological analysis by documenting the lack of sustained
investment - for the twentieth century at least it still provides the best
empirical data available to scholars outside China. The use made of the
surplus was important because successful industrialization has historically
been associated with either prior modernization of agriculture or
concurrent milking of it, and regardless of the size, or existence, of a
surplus, the economic growth experienced by China after 1949 would
come primarily from extractions from the agricultural sector.
Tenant-landlord relations were invariably complex, so that simple
allegations of exploitation as an explanation for why surplus was not
invested in ways that fostered economic development must usually be
qualified. Tenants in Central and South China (where tenancy rates were
highest) had gained various kinds of permanent-use rights that afforded
them an important degree of security. Tenancy per
se
was indeed not a
good measure of rural prosperity. Land ownership was more likely to be
equally distributed in economically peripheral areas where agriculture was
too unprofitable to attract investment in land. Alternatively some tenants
in core areas such as Szechwan or the Lower Yangtze might be wealthy
men who leased and then sublet or managed large tracts of land.
24
Rents varied but averaged about 50 per cent of the crop, though it is'
uncertain how much of the rent was actually collected. Urban landlords
around Soochow in Kiangsu established professional rent-collection
bursaries in the mid-nineteenth century and received official help in
making collections. However, some bursary managers evidently were
careful not to violate notions of fairness in collections. After the Taiping
Rebellion sharply reduced the population in the Lower and Middle
Yangtze provinces, landlords were for a time relatively weak and had
difficulty making collections.
25
Some twentieth-century observers suggested that tenancy was dis-
appearing, but land continued to be a profitable investment in the Lower
Yangtze until the 1920s or later. Despite regional variations (particularly
substantially lower tenancy rates in the north), approximately 40 per cent
of agricultural land in the country was rented. Moreover, ownership was
M
Grove and Esherick, 408, 412—13; Chen and Myers, 16-20; Marks, 'Peasant society', 76-90;
Elizabeth Perry, Ktbtls and
revolutionaries
in north China, tl^f-if^j, 25—33.
" On bursaries see Yuji Muramatsu, 'A documentary study of Chinese landlordism in late Ch'ing
and early Republican Kiangnan', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 29.3 (Oct.
1966) $66—99;
an<
^ Frank Lojewski, "The Soochow bursaries: rent management during the late
Ch'ing', CSW'l 4.3 (June 1980) 43-65. On rent forgiveness and reduced collections see Lojewski,
53—5;
Marks, 'Peasant society', 338, 362—3; Kang Qiao, 'New data on land ownership pat-
terns in Ming-Ch'ing China
—
a research note', JAS 40.4 (Aug. 1981) 733. On the effect of the
Taiping Rebellion see Grove and Esherick, 417-18, and contemporary reports, e.g. Sben-pao,
5 Mar. 1878, 3.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
18 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
unevenly distributed: about
10 per
cent
of the
populace were classified
as landlords
or
rich peasants owning over
50 per
cent
of the
land.
26
Detailed studies of several areas suggest that during the Republican period
landlords received more governmental help
in
collecting rents,
and
tenancy contracts gave tenants less security. Rents were often burdensome,
but
it is
difficult
to say
that tenancy
had any one
kind
of
economic impact.
More persuasive is the general argument that during most of the Ch 'ing
and Republican periods
the
rural economy
was
dominated
by an
interlocking elite of landlords (often gentry degree-holders
in
the Ch'ing),
merchants,
and
moneylenders.
27
This stratum absorbed
any
peasant
surplus through rent, interest
and
pricing mechanisms.
At the
same time
it partially financed peasant livelihood through loans
and
land purchases
and linked peasant households
to the
market
by
purchasing commercial
crops
and by
selling materials
to and
purchasing products from domestic
handicraft industries. This circular economic relationship, though flexible,
may well have discouraged development
of a new
class
of
rich peasants
or others
who
would have both capital
and
incentive
to
introduce
technological change. Fragmentation
of
holdings owing
to
population
pressure
and to the
social practice
of
distributing land equally among heirs
further inhibited concentration
of
agricultural wealth.
In
general, rural
people sought stable arrangements,
in
which
all
sides could protect rather
than expand their interests. These patterns could
not
easily
be
disrupted.
At
the
urban
end of
the marketing structure were analogous patterns
of
circular organization.
Chinese merchants were capable
of
entrepreneurial behaviour when
incentives existed.
The
Fang,
Li and Yeh
families
of
Ningpo pioneered
in
the
coastal trade
and
were
in on the
beginnings
of
foreign trade
in
Shanghai.
The
silk merchants
of
Kiangnan were quick
to
take advantage
of opportunities created
by
expanding exports.
An
outstanding example
of aggressive marketing behaviour
in the
late nineteenth century was
the
unsuccessful challenge
to the
foreign merchants' control over silk export
prices
by the
Hangchow financier
Hu
Kuang-yung,
who
went bankrupt
after buying
up
much
of
the northern Chekiang silk crop
for two
years
to hold
it off the
export market. Merchants were quite capable
of
reinvesting profits
and,
like
the
Fang family, maintaining business
interests
for
several generations.
The
Shanghai merchant, Ch'in Tsu-tse,
portrayed
by the
Japanese sociologist Negishi Tadashi, showed rectitude,
26
On land distribution and tenancy estimates see Joseph Esherick,' Number games,
a
note on land
distribution
in
prerevolutionary China', Modern Cbina, 7.4 (Oct. 1981) 587-411.
27
Juzo Kawashi's rendition
of
this theory
is
summarized
in
Grove and Esherick, 422-4.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY 19
frugality and devotion to duty worthy of the most dedicated samurai or
ethical Protestant.
28
Nonetheless, brokerage remained the dominant pattern of commercial
activity in the Ch'ing, and continued so into the Republic. Merchants
preferred to divide up markets and phases of marketing, to scatter their
assets among several enterprises and more than one line of business, and
to pursue profits in urban centres away from their family homes. Profits
not reinvested in business or used to maintain high living standards were
invested in land, education of family members, lineage facilities, and the
public overhead of their home
areas.
Such expenditures represented gentry
values as well as productive and profitable diversification of economic
interests. Nonetheless, the diffusion of risk and responsibility inherent in
this kind of economic behaviour militated against concentration of pools
of wealth and inhibited widespread capitalist entrepreneurship.
29
Public
or private institutions for mobilizing wealth, like the European joint stock
companies, corporations and stock markets or a funded national debt were
lacking.
In these circumstances of circular and self-perpetuating economic and
social organization, what was the role of the state? Much economic
development seems to have occurred outside state control. The state
extracted a relatively small amount of the surplus. The land tax during the
Ch'ing was light compared, for instance, with that of Meiji Japan.
30
Likin
and other commercial taxes in late Ch'ing did not fundamentally change
this picture. The Ch'ing state sought to regulate important monopolies,
maintained the grain transport to feed the capital, and supervised grain
markets because of
its
interest in price stabilization. However, the official
granary system broke down to some degree after the eighteenth century.
31
The monopolies were also functioning poorly and most of the growing
28
On the Fang, Yeh, and Li families see Cben-batbsim-cbib (Gazetteer of Chen-hai county),
26:31
b-3 2b;
27:12b—15a, 4oa~4ia;
Shanghai
cb'ien-cbuang,
730-4, 743—4; Susan Mann Jones, 'The Ningpo^aaj
and financial power at Shanghai', in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds. The Chinese city
between
two worlds, 84—); Negishi Tadashi, Sbanbai
no girudo
(The guilds of Shanghai), 142-6. On
Hu Kuang-yung see Robert Eng, 'Imperialism and the Chinese economy: the Canton and
Shanghai silk industry, 1861-1932' (University of California, Ph.D. dissertation, 1978), 112. On
Ch'in Tsu-tse, see Negishi Tadashi, 118-19.
2
° Investments of the Yeh and Li families illustrate business diversification. On the silk industry
see Lillian Li, China's silk trade: traditional
industry
in the
modern
world, li^-ifp, 61. On mercantile
sojourning see G. William Skinner, 'Mobility strategies in late imperial China', in Carol Smith,
ed.
Regional analysis, vol. 1, Economic systems, 343—8.
50
Yeh-chien Wang, Land taxation in imperial China, 17)0-1911,128; ch. 6 passim. The land tax burden
fluctuated, being relatively high in the mid-nineteenth century, and decreasing with inflation
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
31
Will,
Bureaucratie
et famine, 97-100. Lillian Li, 'Introduction' to 'Food, famine and the Chinese
state - a symposium', JAS 41.4 (Aug. 1982) 694-9.
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20 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
numbers of markets and burgeoning commercial organizations were
outside of, or only very loosely under, official Ch'ing control. In the
Republican period, both the numerous warlord governments and the
Nationalists extorted money from merchants, and there were constant
complaints about high and frequent taxation. But these governments did
not exercise comprehensive control over the economy. One estimate
suggests that all the government expenditures in 1931 were still below
the level of those of the Meiji government in 1880.
32
When merchants did come into contact with the government they were
subject to exactions in both the late imperial and Republican eras. But
they were not oppressed by the Ch'ing or they would never have
developed the wealth and status they enjoyed by the nineteenth century.
Detailed studies show Ch'ing officials willing to provide strong incentives
to obtain merchant cooperation in monopolies like salt.
33
Merchants who
met official requests for contributions or services often profited by
receiving contracts, bank deposits, or other indirect rewards to their
private business ventures.
Relations between bureaucrats and merchants could be worked out to
mutual advantage in stable situations of slow growth. On the whole,
however, government policies did not favour long-term, productive
investment. Lack of legal protection was one reason why merchants
preferred to disperse their assets. Moreover, high interest rates diverted
capital into short-term consumption oriented loans, in part because
members of the court and high officials who profited from money lending
did not enforce laws against usury.
34
Problems arose, however, when the
state tried to play a more active or developmental role. Bureaucratic
desires for control might then conflict with merchant interests in
autonomy and profit-making. Corrupt practices from both sides might
interact to undermine enterprises. The self-strengthening companies
founded by officials in the late nineteenth century showed how uneconomic
political and social behaviour might inhibit business growth. Merchants
soon learned to avoid involvement. After 1904 similar problems hampered
cooperation between the new ministries and business leaders. During the
last Ch'ing decades the government lacked the financial strength to
32
Thomas Rawski,
China's
republican
economy:
an
introduction;
Thomas Metzget, 'On the historical
roots
of economic modernization in China: the increasing differentiation of the economy from
the
polity during late Ming and early Ch'ing
times',
in Chi-ming Hou and Tzong-shien Yu, eds.
Modem Chinese
economic
history, 3-14.
" Thomas Meager, "The organizational capabilities of the Ch'ing state in the field of
commerce:
the
Liang-Huai salt monopoly, 1740-1840', in Willmott, ed. 23-7.
34
Wei
Ch 'ing-yuan
and Wu
Ch
'i-yen,
'
Ch
'ing-tai
chu-ming huang-shang Fan-shih ti hsing-shuai'
(The
rise and fall
of
the
Fan:
a famous Ch'ing imperial merchant
family),
U-sbihjen-chiu,
3
(1981)
I27-44-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008