Broadening the Horizons of Chinese History

Discourses, Syntheses and Comparisons

Ray Huang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317475668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

Gathered here are research papers, speeches, and lecture notes, a multifaceted survey of Chinese history embracing a wide range of subjects, from historical antecedents, relevant Western experience, and recent revelations to locus classicus and statistics. All lead to Huang's grand synthesis: That the one-and-a-half-century-long Chinese revolution is nearing fulfillment as Chinese civilization merges with Western history. While not everyone will agree with Ray Huang, no one who is seriously concerned with these issues can afford to ignore the provocative and erudite challenge of his vision.

1

The Structural Approach to Modern Chinese History

In the past several decades I have spent some time examining the financial management of the Ming dynasty. If I must single out one element as its most distinctive feature, I would say that the lack of logistical capacity at the middle echelon of the government was rather astounding. Unlike the Tang and Song, which assigned transportation commissioners to the field, who in turn accumulated material and funds in large geographical areas and disposed of them on broad directives from the imperial court,¹ the Ming system on the whole omitted such an operation.

Under the Ming dynasty the empire’s financial resources were broken into numerous small segments. Lateral transactions between the revenue collecting agency and the disbursing agency were kept at the lowest level possible. Often the fiscal responsibility fell on the taxpayers who made the interprovincial deliveries. Likewise, on the Grand Canal the army personnel who operated the grain boats, down to squad leaders and first sergeants, were held responsible by imperial granaries for the last peck of rice in their custody. Thus the nation was thickly covered with short but crisscrossing supply lines. A frontier army post might receive supplies from a score of counties, a county might also make deliveries to dozens of installations.² The Ministry of Revenue ceased to be an operating agency; it was an accounting office, undoubtedly the largest in the world by then.

This basic organization should alarm the present-day reader for its negative influence over China’s growth and development in modern times. So long as the aforementioned mode of governmental logistics prevailed, the service sector of the national economy had little opportunity to take the first step. Transportation and communication, being delivery vehicles, could not have gone ahead by themselves at a time when the materials and goods were not even packaged for consolidated delivery. Banking and insurance, instruments for commercial transactions, could not have thrived when the potentially largest customer—the government—acted so much in contradiction to commercial practice. The legal service supporting a modern economy of course had no reason to exist when business activities requiring court protection at such a level had not yet come into existence.

Given all this, it must be noted here that private capital in economically advanced societies usually owed its creation to public functions of some kind. From the Italian bankers who handled the papacy remittance to Rome to the Japanese military contractors in service to the daimyo lords, the accumulation of wealth was always facilitated by taking governmental offices as clients or by entering into partnership with them. China’s fiscal organization under the Ming dynasty, in part reflecting the deliberate design of the dynastic founder, left no such avenue open. It is easy to imagine that when public function managed to carry on without developing the service sector of the economy, the yamen officials were least enthusiastic in working on it for private interests, and such service facilities could not have been effectively installed without governmental action, in the form of formal legislation or otherwise.

Indeed, changes did take place during the five centuries following the founding of the Ming. By the sixteenth century, the use of silver for tax payments led to the consolidation of some of the accounts, precipitating the Single Whip Reform. Salt dealers began to appear as an element to be reckoned with, to be followed by the Cohong merchants of the Qing. With the change of dynasty, the Manchus introduced a number of reforms. The most outstanding was the regularization of the collection of melting charges on silver payments ordered by the Yongzheng Emperor. Prototype banks managed by Shansi merchants became prominent after 1800. With the treaty system confirmed in the later part of the nineteenth century, new revenues such as maritime tariffs seemed to overtake the old-fashioned finances, not to mention the inland transit tax instituted during the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion.

But all the additions and revisions enumerated above did not substantially alter the outlook of China during the later imperial period. The Single Whip Reform did not abandon, to borrow Liang Fangzhong’s phraseology, the “Hongwu Model” of governmental finance. The reforms of the early Qing were largely managerial and disciplinary, not institutional and structural. The consolidation of the melting charges, as a recent study points out, had a limited and temporary effect only.³ Neither the salt dealers, nor the Cohong merchants, nor the Shansi draft bankers had generated enough influence to establish a new trend for China’s mercantile capitalization. Nor did the new revenue derived from the treaty system widely effect the complete fiscal changeover of the empire’s inland sector. In any case, the bulk of the receipts had been set aside to pay foreign loans and war indemnities. In the absence of a change of the character of governance, the Ministry of Revenue under the Qing differed little from its forerunner under the Ming in keeping accounts of dozens of territorial units. The lack of a central treasury, the scattered receipts of revenue, and lateral transactions at the lower levels for the most part persisted through the Qing until the dawn of the present century.⁴

If I have not assembled sufficient evidence at close range to sustain this broad assertion, logical deduction from the circumstances within a wider context may serve the same purpose. In order to convert the management of China during the late imperial period into a system which we would consider rational today, we must realize, would first have required the establishing of regional treasuries in the provinces by the central government. But the separation of imperial revenue from provincial income would have shattered the monolithic structure of the government and along with it its monolithic administration. To promote commercial income as public policy with government backing would have required a degree of functional specialization which would have divided the bureaucracy, affecting its entire personal management system, including recruitment through literary examinations, training, evaluation, and transfer. Orderly administration could not have been accomplished without strengthening the judiciary branch of the government, whose professionalism would have separated it from the civil service proper. Above all, governmental service with elaboration and proficiency would have significantly increased its cost, which first and foremost had to be paid by the taxpayers, a dominant majority of whom were peasants. To make the system work, therefore, it would have been necessary to elevate their educational level. In sum, those prerequisites would have generally but distantly echoed the demands clamored for by the Hundred Days’ Reform, a movement arising only close to the last decade of the Qing dynasty. Yet, despite the loud appeal of the reformers, few of the programs they advocated could have been put into effect. A sober fact remains that even to this day not all the requirements named above have been fulfilled by China.

A modern state differs from traditional China under the Ming and Qing primarily in the fact that its government is an active participant in the works of the national economy. Its influence over the central bank and stock exchange can affect the trend of commerce. Its monetary policy induces or restrains investment and employment. It can float bonds for deficit financing. It can sell public properties to create a deflationary influence. Its taxation, aside from collecting revenue, carries certain regulating power. There are other means of economic interference at its disposal. When these monetary and fiscal tools are perfected, the government can gradually substitute service for governance, thus relaxing the police power hanging over the head of the general population. Needless to say, China under the Ming and Qing never came close to such an eventuality. What makes the reading disturbing is that the fiscal setup did not even show a matrix from which parts of a formative modern state could have emerged.

The originator of the antiquated system was the Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming. His peasant background undoubtedly had something to do with his political philosophy, but there is also evidence that he reacted adversely to the Song experience of Wang Anshi, who had tried without success to partially commercialize the dynasty’s fiscal operation.⁵ During Hongwu’s reign, many large landowners were being persecuted. When things settled down, there was a dominant majority of small self-cultivators throughout the realm. Tax assessment was set at a very low level. In the sixteenth century, when surtaxes already inflated the initial assessment, the most heavily taxed districts of south Zhili registered only about twenty percent of the income from land as tax revenue. In other districts, less than ten percent was the general norm. There were cases when the tax take consisted of less than five percent of the crop yield. Apparently this general pattern was inherited wholesale by the Qing.⁶

Why, then, was there such a large volume of protest against excessive taxation? The answer is that while the general rate of taxation was low, it was horizontally assessed on all taxpayers, on a person who owned five mou of land no differently from those who owned five hundred mou. The low rate of assessment in fact created a large number of marginal landowners, whose tax delinquency was often pointed to as an example to encourage delay of payment by other taxpayers, which alarmed the officials. Moreover, affluent landowners could detach tax liability from their real estate by buying and selling land. They might pay premium prices for large tracts of land with less tax liability, or conversely, offer small parcels of land for sale at giveaway prices to unload a disproportionally large tax liability. As a rule, the untaxed benefit was not reinvested for production; it became an inducement for several interested parties to live off the same piece of property. The huge population increases from the fifteenth century on, which coincided with a diminishing standard of living, could not have been unrelated to this sequence.

Hongwu’s obsession with localized economy was also reflected in the requisitioned services instituted during his reign. Although regular tax payment was low, peasants were obligated, collectively, to answer service calls from the government. Numerous office attendants from the chief clerk down to the doorman were drafted from the general population and remained unpaid. Office stationery, transportation, furniture, utensils, and even building maintenance were provided by the village communities according to elaborate procedures. The most cumbersome features of such levies were later eliminated by substituting them with surcharges overriding the land tax, which provided the basis of the Single Whip Reform. But that came later in the sixteenth century, almost two hundred years after the founding of the Ming. Nor was the reform as broad and sweeping as some scholars wish us to believe.⁷ Consequently, the “Hongwu Model” of governmental finance remained in being during the rest of the dynasty and beyond.

What constituted the Hongwu Model of governmental finance? A lack of vision and imagination. Compulsory thriftiness from the viewpoint of a village economist to the point of putting the crude method of production ahead of circulation, distribution, and qualitative growth. And egalitarianism for the short term at the expense of investment for a better future. When the historian applies the present-day perspective to review the records of the sixteenth century, he can hardly agree with the majority opinion of his contemporaries who lament the passing away of the golden age of the Hongwu era (which under the circumstances reflected the state-sponsored orthodoxy anyway), but feels compelled to endorse the view of a handful of independent observers, hitherto unnoticed, that undertaxation which deprives the government of the capability to provide the needed services to the populace does more harm than good in the long run.⁸

Direct taxation on a multitude of small self-cultivators, a feature of the Chinese imperial order, continued through the Ming and Qing. Yet aside from the acts of Hongwu, no large-scale land redistribution was ever executed until the present century. Some historians, using inexact statements in the contemporary sources, built up theories of the concentration of landownership in a few hands during the late Ming. Most of the cases cannot stand serious investigation.⁹ For the sheer interest of qualitative growth of the national economy, such concentration, had it taken place, probably would have been better than universal ownership on a small scale. As it happened, tenancy in China during the past five hundred years seems to have maintained a remarkably constant pattern. That is, it occurred atop parcelization of land. Thus large estates, say in excess of two thousand mou per household, were rare cases. Even medium holdings from that amount downward to two hundred mou do not appear to have been numerous. If they had been, it would have affected tax law and local administration. But the egalitarianism at lower levels did not exclude the situations that peasants and small owners were indebted to one another, held liens against one another’s holding, and became part tenants or full tenants. Some empirical data on landholding in the early twentieth century (see appendix) give the impression of a close semblance to the conditions of several hundred years earlier. It leads us to think that taxation and fiscal policies in those several hundred years, treating the nation as a conglomeration of village communities, must have compelled the economy to expand in linear dimensions with few qualitative changes, while at the same time ownership of the modest-sized holdings was rotated, so that the system could perpetuate itself.

For the premodern society of the Ming and Qing, governmental finance in the early years virtually set up a permanent budget that had the effect of an unwritten constitution. For one thing, it defined the functions of the civil service and settled the disposition of the military. This we shall spell out in the following paragraphs. For another, it provided a general ceiling on the land tax, the revenue from which always tended to remain inelastic. Not only did after-tax income from the landed properties help to determine land price, tenancy conditions, farm wage, and local interest rates, it itself was also interlocked with these factors after the tax law was in effect for some time. The key to understanding this is that farm surplus, if any, lacked external outlets for investment, while at the same time the small cultivators had no other place to borrow except f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Structural Approach to Modern Chinese History
• 2. The History of the Ming Dynasty and Today’s World
• 3. The Rise of Capitalism in Venice, the Dutch Republic, and England: A Chronological Approach
• 4. The Merger of Chinese History with Western Civilization
• 5. Capitalism and the Twenty-first Century
• 6. Proposals for the Revision of Modern Chinese History
• 7. A New Direction for Modern Chinese Historiography
• 8. A Second Look at the Year-end Revenue Data in Ming Taizong Shilu
• Index