The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions 131651868X, 9781316518687

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The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation

How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China’s relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China’s imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence. taisu zhang is Professor of Law and History at Yale University.

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The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions

TAISU ZHANG Yale Law School

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316518687 doi: 10.1017/9781108995955 © Taisu Zhang 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2022 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Zhang, Taisu, author. title: The ideological foundations of Qing taxation : belief systems, politics, and institutions / Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022002175 (print) | lccn 2022002176 (ebook) | isbn 9781316518687 (hardback) | isbn 9781009009904 (paperback) | isbn 9781108995955 (epub) subjects: lcsh: Taxation–China–History. | China–Economic conditions–1644-1912. classification: lcc hj2981 .z433 2022 (print) | lcc hj2981 (ebook) | ddc 336.200951–dc23/eng/20220120 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002175 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002176 isbn 978-1-316-51868-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To my parents, Zhang Xianglong and Zhang Dejia

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Contents

List of Statistical Tables Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Framing the Historical Problem Rationalist Explanations and Their Limitations Ideological Analysis in Decline Reinstating Ideology, but in a Different Form Paradigm Shifts and Institutional Reinforcement The Benefits of Reinstating Ideology Ideological Worldview as Proxy? Broader Implications Concepts, Methodology, Sources, and Settings Chapter Outline

1

A Short History of Qing Taxation A The Institutional Framework of Qing Taxation, 1644–1850 B A Statistical Sketch: 1644–1850 I Formal Taxes II Informal Surcharges C The Later Nineteenth Century I The Initial Response II Commercial Taxes and Tariffs III The Continued Stagnation of Agricultural Taxation IV The Inadequacy of the Response

2

The Uses and Limitations of Rationalist Explanations A A Typology of Rationalist Explanations

page xi xiii xv 1 2 9 13 17 20 25 27 28 31 33 37 38 48 49 51 59 60 62 65 70 76 78 vii

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Contents

viii I Demand-Side Explanations II Supply-Side Explanations III “Political Will” Explanations B Explaining Nonagricultural Taxation I The Early Qing II Mid-Qing Stagnation III Reform Efforts in the Early Nineteenth Century IV Late Qing Crisis and Adaptation C The “Irrationality” of Agricultural Taxation I The Limitations of Demand-Side Theories II The Limitations of Supply-Side Theories III The Limitations of “Political Will” Theories

78 82 88 90 91 92 94 97 108 108 110 119

3

Pre-Qing Fiscal Regimes A From Confucius to the Mongols B The Early Ming C Fiscal Reforms in the Mid-to-Late Ming D Late Ming Political Discourse

125 126 135 138 144

4

The Early Qing Paradigm Shift A The Ming-Qing Transition B The New Intellectual Paradigm I Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and Wang Fuzhi II Other Major Figures III Deontological Framing, Historiography, and the Rise of Pragmatic Fiscal Conservatism C Theoretical Exposition and Alternative Explanations I Theoretical Exposition II Alternative Explanations? D Fixed Tax Quotas and the Land Survey Problem I “Quotaism” II The Land Survey Problem

158 159 168 169 174

Mid-Qing Entrenchment A Yongzheng Era Fiscal Reforms B The Qianlong Reversion I Debating the Meltage Fee Reforms II The Land Survey Ban and Its Aftermath C “Malthusian” Entrenchment I “The Population Is Growing Day by Day” II Creating a Durable Myth III Institutional Consequences D Into the Nineteenth Century E Continuity and Change

211 212 220 220 223 231 231 237 244 248 258

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177 187 187 195 198 200 205

Contents 6

7

Late Qing Reforms

ix

A Mid-Nineteenth Century Intellectual Trends I The Rise of Shixue II Shixue and Fiscal Conservatism III Bao Shichen’s Challenge B Fiscal Crisis and Institutional Response I Grain Tribute Surcharge Formalization II Regional Agricultural Tax Cuts and Hikes III The Lijin Debates and Malthusian Conservatism IV The Return of Provincial Land Surveying C Endgame I Changing Attitudes II Institutional Implementation D A Final Summary

267 269 270 274 279 282 284 288 293 295 299 300 308 313

A B C D

Theoretical Implications Ideology, Culture, and Rationalist Models of Political Behavior Paradigm Shifts and the Politics of Ideological Change Law and Ideological Entrenchment “Constitutionalism”?

319 321 333 345 353

Conclusion Fiscal Capacity and Economic Divergence Fiscal Capacity and State Capacity Confucianism

360 361 368 371

Abbreviations of Sources

375

References

377

Index

417

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Statistical Tables

1.1 1.2 1.3 5.1 7.1

Formal tax revenue, pre-Taiping Rebellion Formal tax revenue, post-Taiping Rebellion Tax revenue, formal and informal, 1720, 1820, and 1908 Official population statistics Categories of interaction between law and ideology

page 49 66 69 239 350

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Preface

This is the second entry in a planned trilogy of books on how culture and ideology interacted with economic institutions – particularly legal ones – and how that interaction shaped the trajectory of Sino-European and Sino-Japanese economic divergence from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth. The first book, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism, was substantively completed in the summer of 2016 – it was formally published in the fall of 2017 – at which time I began to contemplate the possibility of expanding its core methodological framework onto a larger historical stage. It may have been somewhat foolish for an untenured junior scholar, two years out of graduate school, to plan for the long term in this fashion, but the idea that there is some sort of “grand strategy” behind the occasional mundanity of everyday work has given me much psychological comfort and a sense of direction over the years. I have always thought of the question of economic divergence as perhaps the central question in modern Chinese history: Almost nothing else – sociopolitical change, cultural evolution, intellectual adaptation – can be explained without at least some reference to the perception and reality that, by the late nineteenth century, China had economically and militarily fallen behind Western powers, and even behind Japan. In that sense, no account of modern China can be intellectually complete without an explanation for these divergences. If there was one research question that motivated me throughout my undergraduate and graduate school career, it was probably this one. It was also a question that could not be realistically tackled without an enormous amount of preparation and groundwork, which has thus far taken the form of two entire academic manuscripts, gradually building up to what I hope will be an adequate conclusion in the to-be-written third book. The particular strategy I have chosen involves focusing on the capital-side requirements of early industrialization – which, as discussed in the Conclusion of this xiii

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Preface

book, have been somewhat less thoroughly studied than the labor-side requirements, yet are at least as important – and then further breaking the capital accumulation process down into three different institutional mechanisms: bottom-up accumulation by private actors, mainly through land transfers; top-down accumulation by the state, mainly through taxation; and accumulation through the use of business organizations. Correspondingly, my first book tackled some of the first mechanism, this book addresses the second mechanism, and current plans for the final book involve a heavy dose of the third mechanism. When combined, they will hopefully produce a capital-side account of China’s relative economic decline, which may even offer some clues for understanding her rapid reascension after 1980. Beyond these historical questions, a number of theoretical and methodological themes also run through both completed volumes, and will likely underlie the third as well. More than fifteen years ago, I started off my law school studies with a strong interest in law and economics, but eventually found classical Coasean models and their strong assumptions of personal rationality insufficiently persuasive. Behavioral economics and cognitive theory offered some enormously helpful modifications, but as I made my way into the world of Chinese history, I increasingly desired a theory of sociopolitical and institutional behavior that was less universalist, and more capable of explaining cultural and ideological differences. At the same time, I also felt skeptical of the idea that there was no such thing as inherent human economic rationality, that all facets of human behavior were socioculturally constructed. Much of my academic writing, including both completed books, have therefore attempted to grapple with these deeper questions of cultural and ideological malleability and their limits – to strike, perhaps, a finer and hopefully more accurate coexistence between rationalist assumptions and cultural constructivist ones in the explanation of major institutional and economic phenomena. To some extent, this reflects my personal understanding of Sima Qian’s famous description of the historian’s craft: “to investigate the boundaries between the natural and the human” (“jiu tian ren zhi ji”).

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Acknowledgments

Any large academic undertaking like this book always accumulates a significant number of professional and personal debts along the way. Most importantly, a few of my teachers in law school and graduate school, who have more recently become senior colleagues – Peter Perdue, James Whitman, and Valerie Hansen – have continued to offer intellectual support and guidance through the years, well beyond what one could reasonably ask of them. I can only hope to eventually repay some of the kindness and wisdom I have received from them, but at present the debts are very, very steep. Throughout the years, I have enjoyed and learned from everyday conversations and collaborations with my brilliant colleagues at the Yale Law School and Yale GSAS, many of whom have offered comments on earlier drafts of this book. I owe especially large amounts of gratitude to Bruce Ackerman, Sergei Antonov, Jack Balkin, Rohit De, Fabian Drixler, Robert Ellickson, David Grewal, Henry Hansmann, Al Klevorick, Naomi Lamoreaux, Zachary Liscow, Daniel Markovits, Samuel Moyn, Nicholas Parrillo, Steven Pincus, Claire Priest, Susan Rose-Ackerman, David Schleicher, Alan Schwartz, Scott Shapiro, John Witt, and Gideon Yaffe. I also thank Ian Ayres, Daniel Botsman, Owen Fiss, Heather Gerken, Oona Hathaway, Denise Ho, Paul Kahn, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Anthony Kronman, Daniel Mattingly, Tracey Meares, John Morley, Robert Post, Roberta Romano, and Arne Westad, all of whom have discussed this project with me at one point or another. Some of the preparation for the project was done while I was still teaching at Duke University, and conversations with Matthew Adler, Edward Balleisen, Nicole Barnes, Stuart Benjamin, Joseph Blocher, James Boyle, Elizabeth de Fontenay, Sara Greene, Mitu Gulati, Paul Haagen, the late Jonathan Ocko, Barak Richman, Stephen Sachs, and especially Ralf Michaels and Jedidiah Purdy were an indispensable part of that. xv

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Acknowledgments

In the general intellectual community beyond Yale, a large number of friends and colleagues have given their time to read and discuss segments and drafts of the book, most notably Bian He, Cao Shuji, Pär Cassel, Albert H. Y. Chen, Chen Li, Chen Ruoying, Chen Shuang, Chiu Pengsheng, Donald Clarke, Maura Dykstra, Tom Ginsburg, Ron Harris, He Wenkai, He Ping, Nicholas Howson, Macabe Keliher, Jedidiah Kroncke, Lai Junnan, Assaf Likhovski, Ling Bin, Liu Han, Liu Sida, Joel Mokyr, Ni Yuping, Peng Kaixiang, Qiao Shitong, Mark Ramseyer, Aziz Rana, Matthew Sommer, Sun Haochen, Michael Szonyi, Wang Yuhua, Alex Wang, Wang Zhiqiang, Yan Tian, You Chenjun, Madeleine Zelin, Zhang Yang, Zhang Ying, Zhang Yongle, and Zuo Yilu. I cannot count the number of pitfalls they have saved me from, but can at least express some deep and heartfelt appreciation here. Material drawn from the book has been presented at, in reverse chronological order, Yale, Tel Aviv University, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Cornell University, New York University, the World Economic History Congress, Peking University, Tsinghua University, the American Society for Legal History’s annual conference, Hong Kong University, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Duke, the International Society for Chinese Law and History’s biannual conference, and the American Historical Association’s annual conference. I thank everyone who exchanged ideas and insights with me at those events, especially my hosts and panel organizers. I have employed a sizeable group of research assistants during this project, who provided essential aid on a number of critically important tasks, including the collection, vetting, and organization of archival material from the First National Historical Archives in Beijing and the online Gong Zhong Dang Archives, citation checking and formatting, and proofreading. They include Xu Cunjian, Wu Jingjian, Xiao Weilin, Yuan Youlin, Tian Yuan, Tang Yun, Song Zhi’ang, Peng Yuqian, Chen Boli, and Ling Yun. All remaining mistakes are, needless to say, mine alone. This is the second book project I have done with the Economics, Choice, and Society series at Cambridge University Press, and it continues to be a true pleasure to work with its excellent editorial team, now led by Robert Dreesen. Special thanks is owed to the two anonymous reviewers who provided extensive and extremely helpful comments over two rounds of review – during the COVID-19 Pandemic, no less. Even deeper gratitude is owed to the series’ academic editors, Peter Boetke and Timur Kuran, who have diligently read and commented on multiple drafts of a very long book. Timur, in particular, has supplied an incredible amount of generosity of spirit and good academic judgment throughout this process, and both the book and my general intellectual development have benefitted enormously from the wisdom he has shared. Support from family – material, psychological, and spiritual – is indispensable for almost any academic project, but doubly so during a global pandemic. My wife Xiaoxue has, as she always does, provided a nearly unlimited amount

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Acknowledgments

xvii

of patience, better judgment, good cheer, and general companionship during this process, without which I surely would not have been able to function as a professional scholar. My children, Adeline (Jianzhen) and Arthur (Yixuan), made no direct contributions whatsoever to my writing, except for, on occasion, leaving my office quietly when asked, but have been a consistent source of joy and spiritual discovery during otherwise tumultuous times in the world. Parenthood has also, perhaps inevitably, brought along much greater appreciation for one’s own parents. I would like to think that, since adulthood, I have usually managed to mentally and emotionally comprehend just how much my parents have done for, and mean to, me, but it is undeniably true that having children of my own has given me a greater willingness and ability to openly acknowledge it, even if still somewhat inadequately. I come from a family of stiff-lipped intellectuals who have always been better at expressing ideas than feelings, but at some point in one’s life, that is no longer an excuse for not trying. So, in that spirit, this book is dedicated to my father Zhang Xianglong and my mother Zhang Dejia. Their love, support, criticism, and guidance continue to sustain me in most aspects of life, probably to a much larger extent than I would have cared to admit five or ten years ago. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for everything.

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Introduction

This is a book about state institutions, political ideology, and the patterns of interaction between the two. It argues, first and foremost, that ideological belief systems imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final two centuries of China’s imperial history. These ideological constraints explain many of the Qing Dynasty’s unique fiscal weaknesses, which eventually had ruinous sociopolitical and economic consequences. Scholars of economic and institutional history have, for the past several decades, distanced themselves from cultural and ideological analysis, but some core features of late imperial Chinese fiscal history cannot be plausibly explained without it. The challenge here is to reintroduce ideology in such a way that makes sense of the Qing’s political and intellectual idiosyncrasies, relative to both other Chinese dynasties and other early modern Eurasian regimes, while also fluidly interacting with the numerous nonideological forces at work in its fiscal politics and institutions. Second, through the Qing example, the book combs through a number of interaction dynamics between state institutions and political ideologies. While ideologies have an inherent tendency to gain influence and reproduce through the manufacturing of cognitive frames and biases, their durability and resilience can be significantly reinforced by political and legal institutions, especially by those that regulate and manipulate the production of politically usable information. A politically successful ideology is generally one that effectively merges both normative and empirical beliefs into a unified system. As such, it can sometimes maintain its dominance over extraordinarily long periods of time by controlling the production of authoritative information, thereby rendering its core empirical predictions almost impossible to effectively refute. The history of Qing fiscal conservatism showcases all of these mechanisms in lucid and often dramatic fashion.

1

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Introduction

2

Although this book is mainly concerned with late imperial Chinese history, its arguments engage with theoretical questions of general interest: How should we understand the relationship between ideology and political economy? How do ideologies become sociopolitically influential, and how do they sustain that influence? How does ideological change occur, and how does it interact with constitutional politics? What kind of information is usable in high-level policymaking, and how is it manufactured? Qing fiscal history offers a number of insights into these issues that differ from conventional models. The book therefore attempts to think about the institutional politics of ideology in a somewhat generalizable fashion, primarily focused on the history of one state, but not intellectually constrained to it.

framing the historical problem By any measure, China’s comparative economic and technological decline during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – relative to both western Europe and neighboring Japan – was one of the most important events in modern global history.1 In the Asian-Pacific arena, it not only enabled the spread of European trade and colonization, but also set off a dramatic shift in the Sino-Japanese power balance that directly led to the rise of Japanese imperialism. Looking within the confines of Chinese history, relative material decline played a major, arguably decisive, role in destabilizing not only the Qing state, but the very idea of dynastic rule. China’s relative economic and military weakness, punctuated by its humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, shattered both the state’s sociopolitical prestige and the political elite’s faith in traditional institutions of governance.2 A Republican revolution eventually followed, then a Communist one. Increasingly, scholars believe that this relative decline was at least partially rooted in fiscal institutions and capacity.3 This is especially apparent when we 1

2 3

E.g., Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998); R. Bin Wong & Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (2011); T. J. Byres, The Agrarian Question, Forms of Capitalist Agrarian Transition and the State: An Essay with Reference to Asia, 14 Social Scientist 3 (1986); Loren Brandt, Debin Ma, & Thomas G. Rawski, From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History Behind China’s Economic Boom, 52 J. Econ. Lit. 45 (2014). William T. Rowe, The Great Qing, 231–253 (2009). E.g., Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014); Wenkai He, Paths towards the Modern Fiscal State (2013). Fiscal and state capacity is also discussed in the general context of economic and political decline in Rosenthal & Wong (2011); and Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, 547–565 (2005). On the role of state investment in Japanese industrialization, see Masayuki Tanimoto, Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization (2006).

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Framing the Historical Problem

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focus on the Sino-Japanese comparison: Around 1850, neither the Chinese nor the Japanese economy was substantially industrialized, but their trajectories diverged dramatically over the next half-century.4 Japanese industrialization gained momentum throughout the later nineteenth century, far outstripping the pace of Chinese industrialization by the 1890s. The Meiji state played a crucial role in this process, both through direct spending and by providing financial support for private industrial development.5 The late Qing state, in comparison, could do very little to alleviate the capital constraints that plagued Chinese manufacturing, or provide substantial support for the vulnerable banking sector.6 This was not because the late Qing government was somehow committed to laissez-faire economics. Quite the opposite – it badly wanted to provide greater support for industrial development and was, in fact, painfully aware of its inability to keep pace with Japan. Its meager revenue base – less than a tenth of Japan’s as a share of estimated GDP, and about half in absolute purchasing power – simply would not allow for more aggressive intervention.7 Different levels of state fiscal capacity, therefore, were a major cause of the Sino-Japanese economic divergence. Scholars have also attempted to explain the earlier SinoEuropean, particularly Sino-English, economic divergence by highlighting both the importance of state investment and lending to Western European industrial development, and the lack thereof in the nascent Chinese industrial sector.8 Fiscal weakness – in both domestic and comparative terms – was indeed a central feature of the Qing state throughout the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Recent estimates suggest that the government extracted between 1.5 and 2 percent of annual GDP during the nineteenth century, down from 3 to 4 percent in the later eighteenth century, but largely unchanged in absolute terms.9 By the 1840s, an average rural household in one of China’s most

4

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Frances V. Moulder, Japan, China, and the Modern World Economy: Toward a Reinterpretation of East Asian Development ca. 1600 to ca. 1918 (1979); He (2013). 6 He (2013). Id. As discussed below, China’s GDP during the 1870s and 1880s was roughly five to six times that of Japan’s, whereas its government revenue (as a share of GDP) was less than 10 percent of the Japanese state. Ron Harris, Government and the Economy, 1688–1850, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, 204 (Roderick Floud & Paul Johnson eds., 2004); Rosenthal & Wong (2011). For estimates of revenue figures, see Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), 67–68. For GDP estimates, see Stephen Broadberry, Hanmin Guan, & Daokui Li, China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850, 78 Econ. Hist. Rev. 4 (2018); Xu Yi et al., Chinese National Income: ca. 1661–1933, 57 Australian Econ. Hist. Rev. 368 (2017); Ye Ma & Herman de Jong, Unfolding the Turbulent Century: A Reconstruction of China’s Historical National Accounts, 1840–1912, 65 Rev. Income & Wealth 75 (2019). For other recent estimates of tax revenue as a share of GDP, see, e.g., Jason Qiang Guo, A Quantification of Fiscal Capacity of Chinese Government in the Long Run, Working Paper, New York University (2019).

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Introduction

4

heavily taxed macroregions probably paid only 1–2 percent of its annual income to the state, including both formal tax quotas and informal surcharges collected by local governments without central authorization.10 To put this into a horizontal comparative perspective, scholars estimate that state revenue accounted for some 15–20 percent of GDP in Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan,11 and 10–15 percent in eighteenth century England.12 Large, land-based early modern regimes tended to tax somewhat more lightly, but even within that comparison set, Qing taxation was unusually light: annual state revenue came to around 8 percent of GDP in pre-Revolutionary France,13 7 percent in the nineteenth century United States,14 some 6–7 percent in Tsarist Russia,15 and 4–6 percent in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire.16 Looking instead at vertical comparisons-that is, at other Chinese dynasties – the contrast is no less stark: historians generally believe that taxes accounted for 5 percent or more of GDP for most of the Ming Dynasty, and probably double that in the Song Dynasty.17 In other words, the Ming taxed 2–3 times as heavily 10

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13 14

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For a full rundown of the distribution of state revenue between formal and informal taxes, see Chapter 1. It is somewhat debatable whether the latter should count toward the state’s fiscal capacity, although it certainly added to the tax burden imposed on rural households. Kent Deng, China’s Political Economy in Modern Times, 36 (2011); Kym Anderson, Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, 104 (2009); Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920, 50–70 (1988). This counts only revenue delivered to the Crown. Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Historical Statistics (2010); P. K. O’Brien and P. Hunt, England, 1485–1815, in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c.1200–1815, 53–100 (Richard Bonney ed., 2012); Peer Vries, Public Finance in China and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, Working Paper, London School of Economics (2012); Mark Dincecco, Fiscal Centralization, Limited Government and Public Revenues in Europe, 1650–1913, 69 J. Econ. Hist. 48 (2009); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, 990–1990 (1990). On the formation of the English fiscal state, see generally, John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (1989). Rosenthal & Wong (2011). Gerald Scully, Taxes and Economic Growth (2006). Local government taxes constitute the bulk of this. This estimate is derived by combining the data in the Our World in Data database, https:// ourworldindata.org/government-spending, which shows imperial Russian government spending accounting for about 15–18 percent of GDP in the late nineteenth century, with the estimates in Stefan Plaggenborg, Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty in Tsarist Russia, 1881–1905, 36 Cahiers Du Monde Russe 53 (1995), which suggest that tax revenue accounted for about 40 percent of this spending. In other words, taxes amounted to about 6–7 percent of GDP. K. Kivanç Karaman & Şevket Pamuk, Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective, 1500– 1914, 70 J. Econ. Hist. 593 (2010); Sevket Pamuk, The Evolution of Fiscal Institutions in Ottoman Empire, 1500–1914, in The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 304–334 (B. Yun-Casalilla & P. O’Brien eds., 2012). Fiscal data from Ray Huang, Ming Fiscal Administration, in 8 Cambridge History of China, 106–171 (Denis Twitchett & Frederick W. Mote eds., 1998); Ray Huang, Fiscal Administration during the Ming Dynasty, in Chinese Government in Ming times: Seven studies (Charles O. Hucker ed., 1969); Robert M. Hartwell, The Imperial Treasuries: Finance and Power in Song

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Framing the Historical Problem

5

as did the Qing, and the Song 5–7 times as heavily. Among preindustrial states, whether Chinese or foreign, larger or smaller, land-based or maritime-oriented, Asian or Western, the Qing was an extreme outlier. As unavoidably crude as these comparisons and estimates are, they nonetheless resonate powerfully with the general academic consensus that the Qing state had extraordinarily limited administrative capacities. Historians now agree that it delegated a large swath of everyday governance – public security, tax collection, dispute resolution, commercial regulation, to name a few – to local communities, and possessed neither the will nor the resources, financial or personnel-wise18 to regularly intervene in sub-county affairs. A relatively weak and noninterventionist state has, indeed, long been one of the foundational conventions in studies of Qing law, society, and economy. Historians of property and contract law regularly focus, for example, on customary law and local practice over formal law, and justify that focus by pointing to the state’s apparent lack of both interest and ability to regularly enforce formal legal rules in noncriminal cases. Instead, reliance on communal self-resolution was usually the institutional norm, even when communal customs contradicted formal law, which speaks volumes about the relative weakness of state power.19 The consequences of fiscal deterioration went well beyond relative economic decline or bureaucratic miasma. A major cause of social unrest in the nineteenth century, including the Taiping and Nian Rebellions, was the state’s inability to provide adequate economic relief following natural disasters or economic downturns. The Qing state, like several of its predecessors, sustained a national granary system that, in theory, saved some of the surplus grain from good harvests for famine relief. By the nineteenth century, however, weak revenue streams had crippled the state’s ability to effectively restock these granaries, forcing it to leave many famine-stricken regions to their own devices.20 Unsurprisingly, this led to massive unrest and occasional rebellion in poorer regions, several of which snowballed into national crises. The fiscal inadequacies of the Qing state continued to have political and intellectual ramifications well after the dynasty’s end: Financial insolvency and depressed levels of infrastructure spending were persistent problems for the Republican governments that succeeded the Qing, much of which was directly attributable to the weak fiscal institutions they inherited from the Qing. Over

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China, 20 Bull. Sung-Yuan Stud. 18, 78–79 (1988). GDP estimates from Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018). See Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014) for a recent assessment that broadly agrees with this estimate. Gary G. Hamilton, Zhongguo shehui yu jingji (中国社会与经济) [Chinese Society and Economy], 120 (Chang Wei-an, Jai Ben-ray, & Chen Chieh-hsuan eds. and trans., 1990). Taisu Zhang, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (2017). Pierre-Etienne Will, Roy Bin Wong, & James Z. Lee, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (1991).

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Introduction

6

time, policymakers and intellectuals came to rail against fiscal weakness as one of the fundamental problems in both late imperial and early Republican governance – indeed one of the central causes of China’s economic and military weakness – and therefore argued that the state should remedy that problem through more aggressive taxation and state-financed entrepreneurship.21 These ideas arguably inspired not only the administrative and fiscal expansion of the 1927–1949 Nanjing government,22 but also the massive wave of economic consolidation and nationalization that followed the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949.23 It is quite possible, then, to see much of the institutional history of twentieth-century China as a political backlash against Qing’s fiscal weakness. Although the central institutional characteristic of the Qing revenue system was undoubtedly its exceptionally small size relative to its population and economy, this was not necessarily its most striking characteristic. That distinction probably belonged to its agricultural tax policies. Like in other dynasties, Qing taxation had two primary components: An agricultural tax directly levied on food production, and a mainly indirect nonagricultural tax – so-named here because the merchants and processors who paid these taxes directly generally did not engage in first-instance goods production themselves – composed primarily of excise salt taxes, foreign trade tariffs, and various kinds of domestic commercial taxes.24 The state took a fairly flexible approach to the latter: It

21

22 24

For detailed discussion, see Chapter 6, Section C. For more general discussions of these intellectual trends, see, e.g., Xiao Gongquan, Zhongguo Zhengzhi Sixiang Shi (中国政治思想史) [A History of Chinese Political Thought] 216–235 (2005); Zhang Yunwu, Minguo Zhengzhi Sixiang yu Zhongguo Zhengzhi Sixiang zhi Zonghe Yanjiu (民国政治思想与 中国政治思想之综合研究) [A Study of Republican Political Thought in the Broader Context of Chinese Political Thought] (1970); Zhang Jinjian, Zhongguo Zhengzhi Zhidu Shi (中国政治制度史) [A History of Chinese Political Institutions] (2006); Yu Zuhua & Zhao Huifeng, Zhongguo Xiandai Zhengzhi Sixiang Shi (中国现代政治思想 史) [A History of Modern Chinese Political Thought] (2009). 23 Zhang (1970); Yu & Zhao (2009). Peng (1986); Xiao (2005); Yu & Zhao (2009). Most, but not all, of these taxes were indirect: Salt excises, commercial taxes, and tariffs were indirect, but less important items like mineral extraction taxes were sometimes direct. “Nonagricultural taxes” did, of course, impose certain burdens on the agricultural population: For example, merchants could pass the burden imposed by commercial taxes onto farmers by paying them lower prices for their produce. This raises the question of how best to calculate the share of agricultural production extracted by the state. One way to do this would be to calculate the share of “non-agricultural taxes” that were passed onto farmers through price mechanisms, add that to “agricultural taxes,” and divide the sum by some estimate of what nominal agricultural production would have been without the imposition of “non-agricultural taxes.” This is, for obvious reasons, extraordinarily difficult to do for the Qing economy. Instead, the far superior way to calculate agricultural tax rates is simply to divide nominal direct agricultural taxes by the nominal value of agricultural production, which already captures the impact of commercial taxes on agricultural produce prices. Both nominal agricultural tax and nominal agricultural production estimates are readily available in the preexisting academic literature, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1. With some very minor exceptions (see discussion in Chapter 5, Section D),

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Framing the Historical Problem

7

started from a very low baseline after the Ming-Qing transition, and then grew slowly but steadily as the country recovered, roughly keeping pace with economic and demographic expansion. After 1850, when the Taiping Rebellion threw the state into a serious fiscal crisis, it immediately responded by raising nonagricultural taxes very aggressively, tripling them over the next halfcentury. This was not enough to fully meet its spending needs, but it was probably the most the Qing could have done under the circumstances. Throughout Qing history, nonagricultural taxes responded to economic expansion and fiscal crisis in a largely intuitive, even rational fashion. Agricultural taxation, in contrast, did not. The Qing economy was around 70–80 percent agrarian throughout its 268-year history, and until the dynasty’s final few decades, the agricultural tax accounted for the lion’s share of state income. Following some moderate fluctuations in the early dynasty, the agricultural tax, even after local informal surcharges are taken into account, experienced almost no growth in absolute volume from 1730 to 1900, falling from some 3–4 percent of gross agricultural production to 1–2 percent. This had serious consequences for state capacity: From 1730 to 1850, both the population and the nominal economy more than doubled, whereas the state’s gross income experienced only marginal growth, nearly all of it coming from nonagricultural sources.25 As a result, its administrative capacities at the local level plummeted, forcing it to rely ever more heavily on the self-governance of local society. After 1850, even in the face of a severe fiscal crisis, agricultural taxes remained stagnant, and may actually have shrunk in both real volumes and as a share of gross agricultural production – to perhaps less than 1 percent by 1900.26 As much as the state tried to compensate by aggressively raising indirect nonagricultural taxes, the overwhelmingly agrarian nature of the economy meant that it was, effectively, fighting the biggest financial battle of its life with one hand tied behind its back. Unsurprisingly, then, it sunk ever more deeply into a downward spiral, racking up significant debt while failing to adequately finance either bureaucratic reform or economic modernization. In fact, extraordinarily low agricultural taxes may well have damaged the state’s ability to ramp up indirect taxation: The creation and collection of new

25

26

there were no consumption taxes in the Qing, which meant that the only tax directly paid by the vast majority of rural households was the agricultural tax. For recent academic discussion, see Elisabeth Kaske, Austerity in Times of War: Government Finance in Early Nineteenth-Century China, 25 Fin. Hist. Rev. 71 (2018). Shi Zhihong & Xu Yi, Wanqing Caizheng, 1851–1894 (晚清财政, 1851–1894) [Late Qing State Finances], 210 (2008); Chen Zhen & Yao Luo, Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao (中国近代工业史资料) [Statistics on the early industrialization in pre-modern China] (1957); Albert Feuerwerker, The Chinese economy, ca. 1870–1911 (1969); Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018); Ma & de Jong (2019); Xu Yi et al. (2017); Debin Ma (2008).

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Introduction

8

commercial taxes in the 1850s and 1860s required significant investment in bureaucratic infrastructure, which had to come from a revenue system that was still predominantly agricultural, and therefore severely depleted at this point in time. It is a testament to the state’s resilience that it was nonetheless able to expand nonagricultural taxation as fast as it did, but it likely could have done much better with more revenue support from agriculture taxation. The near-absolute stagnation of Qing agricultural taxes had no precedent in Chinese history: Every other major dynasty since the Han (202 BC–220 AD) made a concerted effort to systemically expand its agricultural tax base before or around mid-dynasty, usually leading to significantly higher gross fiscal revenue, if not necessarily higher per capita tax rates. Turning instead to horizontal comparisons: While it is true that early modern fiscal systems, such as the eighteenth century British system, the Japanese system after 1875, or the late nineteenth century Russian system, often shifted away from direct agricultural taxation toward commercial or consumption-based taxation, rarely – if ever – did they simply give up on increasing the absolute volume of agricultural taxation. The Russian system, for example, relied predominantly on excise taxes by 1890, but the absolute volume of its direct agricultural taxes nonetheless continued to grow robustly.27 Similarly, English land taxes were no longer the primary source of state income as early as 1700, but continued to grow in volume throughout the eighteenth century.28 To a very significant extent, the unusually limited fiscal capacity of the Qing state was a direct product – pun intended – of its unusually stagnant direct agricultural taxes. This short summary identifies three major characteristics of the Qing tax regime that demand careful explanation: First, of course, is its relative weakness, whether compared to other early modern Chinese dynasties, or to other large early modern states. Second is its stubborn refusal to increase the agricultural tax for nearly two centuries, despite significant economic expansion and, later on, crippling fiscal crisis. Third is its fundamentally different approaches to agricultural and nonagricultural taxation: The former was essentially locked in place, whereas the latter was wielded quite flexibly, even before the fiscal crisis of the later nineteenth century. Preexisting scholarship has made significant progress toward understanding the first characteristic, but it has struggled to provide adequate explanations for the second and third characteristics – and without them, our understanding of the first characteristic is also fundamentally incomplete. The missing ingredient, as this book will argue, is ideology.

27

28

Plaggenborg (1995), 55; Yanni Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic, 313–314 (2014) (documenting growth in direct agricultural taxes in the later nineteenth century). Ronald Max Hartwell, Taxation in England during the Industrial Revolution, 1 Cato J. 129, 139, Table 4 (1981).

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Rationalist Explanations and Their Limitations

9

rationalist explanations and their limitations How to explain the unusually low level of Qing taxation has been the subject of considerable academic debate over the past several decades. Given the increasingly distant relationship between economic history and sociocultural history since at least the 1990s, it is perhaps unsurprising that most recent attempts to explain Qing fiscal policymaking have been predominantly rationalist in theoretical orientation: That is, they believe that it was driven by the largely rational pursuit of political or economic self-interest by the ruling class.29 This approach has the significant virtue of methodological clarity, and does indeed identify a number of serious constraints on Qing fiscal capacity. In fact, the Qing’s approach toward nonagricultural taxation conforms almost entirely to some combination of these rationalist models. They are less successful, however, when trying to explain why Qing fiscal behavior differed so profoundly from the fiscal behavior of other Chinese dynasties, and struggle in particular to explain the extraordinary rigidity of Qing agricultural taxation. The most common rationalist explanation is that the Qing state did not really need to raise taxes beyond what it actually collected – that is, there was no demand for higher taxes. For example, in a major 2011 study, R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal argue that the relatively low rate of internal military conflict in early modern China and the lack of cross-jurisdictional political competition led the state into a low-taxation, more laissez-faire mode of governance. In their words, “peaceful autocracies can have lower taxes than any regime in a war-torn region,” by which they meant Western Europe.30 Other scholars, such as Peter Perdue, have argued that, for most of its existence, the Qing simply had no need for large scale fiscal expansion: It could govern effectively with limited revenue, and would garner no substantial benefit from expanding the revenue base.31 Wenkai He further argues that, even after the Taiping Rebellion, a series of political and economic contingencies allowed the Qing state to get by without fundamentally reforming its financial policies and institutions.32 As a basic description of the early-to-mid Qing’s demand side fiscal situation, these accounts work reasonably well and, in fact, go quite a long way 29

30

Such trends are not exclusive to the Chinese context. Over the past two or three decades, scholarship on European state formation has also taken on a distinctly rationalist, political economy-oriented flavor, emphasizing factors like timing, military pressures, external sociological and economic conditions, institutional path-dependency, and so on. See, e.g., Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (1986); Tilly (1990); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern (1992); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1997); Mark Dincecco, Political Transformation and Public Finance: Europe, 1650–1913 (2011); Mark Dincecco & Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato, From Warfare to Wealth: The Military Origins of Urban Prosperity in Europe (2018). 31 32 Rosenthal & Wong (2011). Perdue (2005). He (2013).

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10

Introduction

toward explaining why Qing taxation prior to 1850 fell behind, say, Western European or Russian taxation. However, they cannot explain why taxation in the Qing was so much more conservative than, for example, taxation in the Ming, another unified, largely peaceful autocracy. Moreover, they understate both the size of the Qing’s nineteenth century fiscal problems and their crippling effect on its political and economic interests. The early nineteenth century was marked by constant tax shortages and, as a result, a systemic state withdrawal from sub-provincial governance that severely weakened the Qing Court’s control over local affairs, and its fiscal situation only tumbled further downhill from there. After 1850, the state was either fighting off major rebellions, or engaged in direct military and diplomatic competition with powerful foreign adversaries. The state’s revenue stream, even with the addition of new commercial taxes, proved unequal to the task, forcing it to run significant annual deficits, and eventually to borrow large sums from foreign powers at increasingly high interest rates. State revenue was primarily funneled into shortterm military spending and war indemnities, leaving, as noted above, very few resources for local administration and industrial investment, both of which suffered severely as a result. Clearly, demand side accounts cannot be the whole story here. Much to their credit, rationalist scholars seem to have recognized this problem, and have, in response, provided a number of supply side accounts over the past decade. Wenkai He and others have pointed out, for example, that many early modern states shifted from direct agricultural taxation to indirect commercial or consumption taxes both because some of their economies were becoming less reliant on agriculture, and because the latter, once the necessary administrative infrastructure was in place, allowed for easier, more cost-efficient taxation.33 The rapid outstripping of direct agricultural taxation by indirect non-agricultural taxation in China after 1850 should be understood within this general comparative context, rather than in isolation. This is undoubtedly true, but it, too, leaves behind a number of unexplained fact patterns: First, the Qing economy did not shift away from agriculture from 1850 to 1900 – some estimates actually suggest that agriculture’s share of the economy actually increased during this period – even as taxation did. Second, and much more importantly, it only makes sense to keep agricultural taxes untouched if raising nonagricultural taxes alone could fully meet the state’s spending needs, but this was clearly not the case: The late nineteenth century growth in nonagricultural taxes, while rapid, ultimately fell short of putting the state on solid fiscal or administrative footing. Therefore, the relative institutional advantages of indirect taxation cannot, by themselves, explain why the Qing state did not raise non-agricultural taxes even further, and certainly cannot explain why it did not raise agricultural taxes at all. As noted

33

He (2013).

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Rationalist Explanations and Their Limitations

11

above, other early modern states that made the shift to indirect taxation continued to expand direct agricultural taxation whenever necessary, but the Qing did not. Over the past couple of years, several scholars, including Debin Ma, Jared Rubin, Tuan-Hwee Sng, and others, have proposed political, economy-based models to fill in some of these gaps. They argue that the Qing’s unusual geographic size and population prevented it from acquiring the necessary administrative ability to increase agricultural taxes, and that any such attempt would set off socioeconomically destabilizing levels of local corruption and illegal extraction. The central mechanism in these models is the central government’s ability to monitor and control its local agents, which, ceteris paribus, decreases with demographic and economic expansion. The weaker these controls are, the more informal surcharges local agents will be able to collect, which, under certain circumstances, forces the central government to lower tax rates to avoid over-taxation. As a result, the Qing, due to its unusually large size, could not tax nearly as aggressively as smaller early modern states – even after 1850, when it badly needed to. Combined with some other factors mentioned above, these models largely succeed in explaining the limitations of nonagricultural tax hikes after 1850: There is considerable evidence that the creation of new commercial taxes was accompanied by large amounts of informal surcharges, which incited serious opposition to them among political elites, both within and beyond the bureaucracy. The central government did manage to overcome this opposition, but there can be little doubt that it slowed the pace of fiscal expansion. Commercial taxation could potentially have expanded more quickly had the Qing state invested more heavily in local administrative infrastructure, but the state’s overall fiscal weakness throughout the later nineteenth century left very few resources for such investment. However, when it comes to explaining the stagnation of the agricultural tax or the differential treatment of agricultural and nonagricultural taxation, even these political economy models fall short. First, they generally predict that tax rates will fall with demographic and economic expansion, but do not predict that the absolute volume of taxation will remain unchanged, and certainly not that it might decline over significant periods of time. Second, in most other Chinese dynasties, demographic and economic expansion was usually followed by significant agricultural tax hikes, at least in absolute volume – and yet the principal-agent dynamics illustrated by the models apply equally well to those dynasties. This suggests that there was something unique about the Qing that these generalist models do not capture. Third, and most importantly, there is simply no evidence that a significant agricultural tax hike during the nineteenth century – with the possible

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12

Introduction

exception of 1850–187034 – would have led to “overtaxation” in any real sense, even with the rise in informal surcharges that might have accompanied it. Quite the opposite: When the Qing state finally raised agricultural taxes after 1901 as a desperate final attempt to ward off bankruptcy, rural populations grumbled and occasionally resisted, but for the most part, they acquiesced with few significant economic consequences.35 Even more tellingly, the Qing’s Republican (1912–1949) successors were able to sustain significantly higher tax quotas for decades – up to three times the level of Qing extraction – without triggering unmanageable levels of local corruption, social backlash, or serious economic hardship. It is hard to believe that a similar policy change was either impossible or undesirable in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, when local administrative capacity was likely stronger than in the early twentieth century, the financial stress faced by local governments was already quite excessive, and the rural economy was at least as strong. One could ask, of course, whether political elites resisted higher agricultural taxes simply because they, too, would be subject to them. The preexisting literature does not seriously indulge this possibility, and for very good reason: Qing officials and prominent local gentry often enjoyed substantial agricultural tax loopholes due to their possession of imperial examination degrees and political influence. In fact, the creation of new commercial taxes after 1850 probably placed significantly larger financial burdens on political elites, who were heavily invested in proto-industry and commerce by at least the later eighteenth century, than any potential increase to the agricultural tax. While many elites were indeed opposed to the new commercial taxes, the Qing state’s ability to implement them strongly suggests that, at the very least, financially self-interested resistance by political elites would not have been an insurmountable obstacle to agricultural tax hikes either. All in all, the rationalist explanations discussed above are capable of explaining very large chunks of Qing fiscal history, particularly the development of nonagricultural taxation, but they struggle to explain the agricultural part of the story: the near-absolute stagnation of agricultural taxation, its contrast with nonagricultural taxation, and the sharp contrast between the Qing and earlier dynasties in this regard. The clear image that emerges from the above discussion is of a state – and a political elite – that was clearly unwilling, but not unable, to raise agricultural tax quotas, despite powerful incentives to do so. Not only was 34

35

That is, the Taiping Rebellion and its immediate aftermath. Recent data show significant economic recovery from the rebellion by 1870. There were a number of violent tax resistance movements, such as the one at Laiyang, Shandong Province in 1910, but historians tend to believe that these were scattered, local, and posed no serious threat to the Qing regime – at least, they played no significant role in its eventual collapse. See Roxann Prazniak, Tax Protest at Laiyang, Shandong, 1910: Commoner Organization versus the County Political Elite, 6 Modern China 41 (1980). Moreover, it is unclear whether these movements were triggered by higher taxes per se, or by new taxes that were created by unauthorized private collectors – that is, by the perception of local corruption.

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Ideological Analysis in Decline

13

the Qing state consistently unable to meet its financial obligations without additional revenue from the agricultural sector, but agricultural taxes were low enough that even a large increase would probably have been socially and economically tolerable. But if the state had both strong incentives and adequate capacity to raise agricultural taxes, why was it so reluctant to do so?

ideological analysis in decline For much of the past three decades, cultural and ideological analysis has been under siege in institutional and economic history. Scholars have challenged traditional Weberian or pseudo-Weberian theories of Asian, and especially Chinese, history, targeting, in particular, an early and mid-twentieth century historical and sociological literature that issued sweeping cultural and ideological explanations for the relative lack of “modern” and “rational” institutional change in East and South Asia. Academic writing in this tradition argued, for example, that Chinese lawmaking and governance were dominated by a Confucian moral ideology fundamentally opposed to alienability of land, commerce, and technological innovation, or that China’s Confucian elite lacked the kind of utilitarian mindset that drove state-building and legal modernization in Western Europe.36 Culture and ideology predetermined the opaque and archaic nature of Chinese politics, her economically irrational laws and institutions, and, consequently, her social and economic stagnation. Most of these arguments are no longer credible, and their deficiencies wellknown:37 Chinese individuals, whether commoners or elites, were not averse to utilitarian modes of sociopolitical behavior, and certainly were not above aggressively pursuing personal wealth.38 Legal and political institutions, too, were not nearly as nonsensical as they were assumed to be, and in fact, shared a number of fundamental similarities with European institutions.39 Even the 36

37

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E.g., Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society (Max Rheinstein ed., 1954); Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1920); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944). Strands of these ideas can even be found in Marxist scholarship, see, e.g., Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957). For a summary and critique of mainstream anti-Weberian positions, see, e.g., Dingxin Zhao, Max Weber and Patterns of Chinese History, 1 Chinese J. Soc. 201 (2015). See also Frank (1997); Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism (2014); William P. Alford, The Inscrutable Occidental: Roberto Unger’s Uses and Abuses of the Chinese Past, 64 Texas L. Rev. 915, 931 (1986). Pomeranz (2000), 91–105; Zhang (2017); Li Bozhong, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850, 107–108 (1998); Lynda S. Bell, Farming, Sericulture, and Peasant Rationality in Wuxi County in the Early Twentieth Century, in Chinese History in Economic Perspective 207, 226–229, 232–239 (1992). Taisu Zhang, Land Law in Chinese History, in Routledge Companion to Chinese Legal History (forthcoming 2023), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547494; Thomas Buoye, Manslaughter, Markets and Moral Economy: Violent Disputes over

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14

Introduction

supposedly sluggish pace of economic growth underwent a number of significant upward revisions, to the point where the Qing economy could plausibly be called a success story, at least by the lower standards of preindustrial economic growth.40 Traditional cultural-ideological narratives had empirically overextended, and were justifiably called out for it. This has led, in recent years, to a paucity of institutional analysis that makes serious use of cultural or ideological factors. Some have, in fact, openly denounced the use of such factors as “orientalist,” or even “racist.”41 In most other cases, scholars have emphasized economic or political interest as the major determinants of institutional change, and tend to neglect, but not necessarily expressly reject, ideology or culture.42 One can only guess at the underlying rationale, but the desire to distinguish oneself from stigmatized “cultural theories” is probably commonplace. The end result, in any case, is that Chinese sociolegal institutions are commonly explained – when they are explained at all – as the product of exogenous economic, ecological, and political circumstances.43 As with any general statement about an academic field, there are exceptions, but not many. Unfortunately, major academic paradigm shifts tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As a field, something important is lost when it no longer

40 41

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Property Rights in Eighteenth Century China 94 (2000); Kenneth Pomeranz, Land Markets in Late Imperial and Republican China, 23 Continuity & Change 101, 131 (2008); Robert Brenner & Christopher Isett, England’s Divergence from China’s Yangtze Delta: Property Relations, Microeconomics, and Patterns of Development, 61 J. Asian Stud. 609 (2002). Pomeranz (2000); Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018); Ma & de Jong (2019). Frank (1997); Ruskola (2014); Peter C. Perdue, China in the World Economy: Exports, Regions, and Theories, 60 Harv. J. Asiatic Stud. 259, 272–275 (2000). E.g., Buoye (2000); Rosenthal & Wong (2011); He (2013); Christopher Isett, State, Peasant and Merchant in Qing Manchuria: 1644–1862 (2007); Debin Ma, Economic Growth in the Lower Yangzi Region of China in 1911–1937: A Quantitative and Historical Analysis, 68 J. Econ. Hist. 355 (2008). For general theoretical influences, see, e.g., Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2010); Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, & James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth, 95 Am. Econ. Rev. 546 (2005); Patrick O’Brien, State Formation and the Construction of Institutions for the First Industrial Nation, in Institutional Change and Economic Development 177 (Ha Joon Chang ed., 2007). For a summary of the academic literature on property institutions, see Zhang (forthcoming 2023). Cf. Isett (2007); Buoye (2000); with Philip C. C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared 73 (2001); Melissa Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China 234 (1998). On commercial institutions, see, e.g., Christine Moll-Murata, Chinese Guilds from the Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries, 53 Int’l Rev. Soc. Hist. 213 (2008); Sun Lijuan, Qingdai Shangye Shehui de Guize yu Zhixu: Cong Beike Ziliao Jiedu Qingdai Zhongguo Shangshi Xiguan Fa (清代商业社会的规则与秩序”: 从碑刻资料解读清代中国 商事习惯法) [The Rules and Order of Qing Commercial Society: Interpreting Qing China’s Commercial Customary Law from Stele Inscriptions] (2005).

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Ideological Analysis in Decline

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conducts cultural or ideological analysis: the ability to explain the longevity of some institutions in the face of profoundly inhospitable socioeconomic circumstances; or an understanding of why certain people chose to act, systematically and meticulously, in ways that damaged their own material and political interests. The rejection of specific Weberian arguments about China does not logically entail the rejection of any historical thesis that makes significant use of Weberian theoretical insights. Moreover, prudent skepticism toward exaggerated claims of cultural or ideological hyper-determinacy should not bias scholars against substantively narrower, more theoretically self-aware cultural or ideological analysis that, whenever appropriate, seeks compatibility with rationalist or behavioralist models. In fiscal history, too, the past three decades have seen older claims about the fundamentally “Confucian” – and therefore ideological – nature of Chinese taxation gradually overtaken in both volume and influence by the rationalist explanations discussed above. Scholars in the former camp traditionally argued that a significant portion of the Qing political and intellectual elite believed, as did their Ming and Song predecessors, that it was simply morally wrong for the state to tax heavily – that, in doing so, it was selfishly “snatching profit away from the people,” and therefore unjustly harming their interests.44 Taxes were, by nature, a necessary evil, and should be kept as low as possible.45 Such observations have been made, for example, by Madeleine Zelin, Susan Mann, and William Rowe.46 Several times in Qing history, the emperor and his advisors initiated fiscal reforms that would strengthen and rationalize government finances, but, the argument goes, they encountered stiff resistance on dogmatic moral grounds, which imposed serious constraints on state capacity over the long run. These traditional arguments are not necessarily wrong – quite the opposite, benevolent governance ideals almost certainly mattered to Qing elites – but they are fundamentally incomplete in ways that significantly limit their explanatory power, and likely explain their falling influence. The most obvious problem is

44

45

46

The following works have made brief arguments to this effect, although, as argued below, they miss important parts of the ideological history (which, to be fair, was not a central concern of these books): Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China (1984); Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750–1950 (1987); Rowe (2009). It should be noted that this was, in many ways, the opposite of what mainstream Neo-Confucian ethics demanded from the father-son relationship: A father’s obligations to his children commonly included education and economic provision until manhood, whereas one of the state’s primary obligations to its people was to not “compete with them for profit” (zhengli) and, essentially, the leave them alone. That said, the state also had obligations to provide some moral education and famine relief – both of which were more natural fits with the state-father moral analogy. The tension between these various ideas remains an underappreciated and understudied aspect of late imperial Confucian political thought. Zelin (1984), 98, 264; Mann (1987), 96–103; Rowe (2009), 33, 43–44.

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16

Introduction

that they cannot explain the sharp differences between Qing fiscal policy and that of previous dynasties: As noted above, Qing taxation levels fell well below those in other major dynasties by the mid-eighteenth century, and never recovered thereafter. Moreover, unlike the Song and Ming, both of which significantly expanded their agricultural tax regime around or before middynasty, the Qing put the absolute volume of its agricultural taxes under near-total lockdown until the final years of the dynasty, despite a tripling of its population and economy. In other words, the Qing was far more fiscally conservative, especially with regard to agricultural taxes, than its predecessors, even though the Confucian moral bias against “profit-seeking political behavior” was no less powerful in those dynasties. If anything, the bias was probably much more powerful before the Qing: A major development in Qing political thought, compared to its Ming predecessors, was the rise of a more consequentialist, utilitarian, and pragmatic mode of analysis and argumentation. Many intellectuals who lived through the MingQing transition believed that the overly moralistic and metaphysical tendencies of Ming political thought were at least partially responsible for Ming decline and collapse: “hollow people speaking of empty ideas,” as Gu Yanwu argued, left the Ming state with a weak and distorted sense of socioeconomic realities.47 As a result, from the seventeenth century onward, officials and scholars tended to distance themselves, at least in their published political discourse, from similarly moralistic approaches toward governance and administration. Instead, they emphasized the need to “manage society” (jingshi) in a pragmatic and realistic manner: aware, tolerant, and even supportive of materialistic and profit-seeking behavior by both private and state actors.48 More generally, there was a powerful intellectual and political shift away from deontological moral argumentation in favor of more consequentialist and “realist” thinking.49 Fiscal discourse, too, changed accordingly. A systemic examination of Qing political and intellectual writings shows that elites tended to argue about state revenue and tax institutions in predominantly utilitarian and self-avowedly “realist” terms rather than moralist ones. There was a strong consensus that agricultural taxes, in particular, should not be raised, but most political and 47

48

49

Gu Yanwu (顾炎武), Yu Youren Lun Xue Shu (与友人论学书) [Letters with Friends on Learning], Huangchao Jingshi Wenbian (皇朝经世文编) [Collected Essays about Statecraft of the Dynasty] [hereinafter HCJSWB], ch. 1 (He Changling & Wei Yuan (贺 长龄, 魏源) eds., 1826). Wang Ermin, Wanqing Zhengzhi Sixiang Shi Lun (晚清政治思想史论) [On Late-Qing Political Thought] (1969). See Chapter 4 for detailed discussion. See also, Helen Dunstan, state or merchant: Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China (2006), Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (1984) for general discussion on the realist or pragmatic turn in Qing political thought.

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Reinstating Ideology, but in a Different Form

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intellectual elites anchored their arguments in the state’s need to avoid unrest and potential rebellion rather than in the innate justness, or lack thereof, of financial extraction. Thus, instead of arguing that “increasing agricultural taxes is an inherently unjust action,” as the Confucian morality thesis discussed above would have expected, Qing elites were more likely to argue, even in private debates and treatises, that “increasing agricultural taxes will lead to severe economic hardship among the general population, and therefore lead to social unrest and rebellion.” The latter kind of argument eclipsed the former in both volume and influence throughout the dynasty, and especially in the nineteenth century. These developments raise a challenging question: Why should we believe that Qing fiscal policymaking was “ideological” if Qing political elites saw themselves as fundamentally pragmatic and realist? The inability of rationalist explanations to explain the state’s approach to agricultural taxation may behoove us to give the ideological analysis a second look, but how can we square any sort of ideological narrative with the elite turn against “empty moralizing?” If we reject as overbroad the idea that Qing fiscal politics were driven by “Confucian morality,” what are we left with in terms of ideological explanation?

reinstating ideology, but in a different form This book argues that the Qing’s turn toward political pragmatism did not render its fiscal policymaking, at least in agricultural taxation, any less ideological than its Ming or Song predecessors. Instead, it merely rendered it ideological in a different sense: empirical and descriptive, rather than deontological and normative. Qing agricultural taxation was premised on the empirical belief that agricultural production was constantly in real danger of falling below subsistence levels, and simply could not support additional government extraction. By the early eighteenth century, the empirical validity of this belief had become deeply questionable, and would remain so for the rest of the dynasty, but it would maintain a vise-like grip over fiscal politics for another two centuries. Much more than any normative distaste for “snatching profit away from the people,” the longevity and political power of this dubious empirical belief was what made Qing tax policy ideological. In fact, only when we see Qing fiscal ideology through this empirical, rather than normative, lens, can we begin to explain the fundamental differences between Ming and Qing tax policies, or explain the latter’s differential treatment of agricultural versus nonagricultural taxation. From the very beginning of Qing rule, its political elites perceived a sort of fiscal “red line,” based largely on late Ming extraction levels, beyond which, they believed, rural households would take extreme measures to evade tax increases, including abandoning their land and rising up in revolt. Its

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Introduction

proponents usually made some combination of the following arguments:50 First, they suggested that the empire’s overall agricultural output was constrained by its limited arable land, and that the rural economy had likely reached its output ceiling by the late Ming, and again by the early eighteenth century. Second, they often argued that the Ming collapse – more on this shortly – was triggered by a series of tax increases implemented a few years before the Dynasty’s end, which pushed the peasantry below basic subsistence, and therefore forced them to revolt. Finally, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, they routinely argued that the Qing population had grown well beyond late Ming levels, which suggested that living standards were decreasing in a Malthusian combination of fixed agricultural output and demographic expansion. Therefore, if late Ming production levels were unable to sustain higher taxation without setting off massive rural rebellion, then surely the more fragile Qing economy was even less capable of doing so. These concerns involved, for their more sophisticated proponents, a number of fairly exact but often wildly inaccurate assumptions about agricultural productivity, arable acreage, and per capita income.51 In theory, they could be either verified or refuted by relevant economic data, but the Qing state, for reasons explained below, made such data systemically unavailable, leaving these problematic assumptions unchallengeable in the political sphere. Despite their empirical – and therefore “pragmatic” – veneer, these were very much ideological beliefs. Although a century-old Marxist intellectual tradition negatively understood ideology as “false consciousness” that misled oppressed social classes into internalizing beliefs contrary to their fundamental material interests,52 more recent generations of scholars have defined the term more neutrally: as an internally coherent “belief system” that produces a certain kind of intellectual or political rigidity,53 a “systematic model of how society functions,” or as a “worldview which is perceived as contestable by those who do not share it.”54 Under any of these definitions, there is an implied

50

51 52

53

54

Many examples are cited throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 4, Sections A, B, and D. See, for example, the discussion of Hong Liangji in Chapter 5, Section C. See discussion in, e.g., Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (1983); Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays 121 (1971). See Giovanni Sartori, Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems, 63 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 398 (1969). By the later twentieth century, even Marxist philosophy had begun to transition into somewhat more neutral understandings of ideology, which is readily apparently in the way that Althusser (1971) defines the term (as representing “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” and therefore having a “material existence”). Raymon Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory 10 (1981); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution 17–18 (1990); David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire 4 (2000).

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Reinstating Ideology, but in a Different Form

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willingness to assume these systemic beliefs without empirical verification.55 This is, as social scientists might notice, very similar to how institutional economists define “culture,” and one could therefore argue that the term “ideology,” as applied in this fashion, is simply political culture at a higher level of abstraction and systemization.56 Other scholars distinguish between ideology and mere intellectual hypothesis or oversight, noting that the former must contain some normative content that drives and organizes empirical assumptions.57 In other words, ideologies have both normative and empirical components. The former comment directly on the moral value of an action, while the latter shape – or, as some scholars have put it, “program”58 – one’s empirical beliefs about cause and effect, origin, and consequence. Whereas the normative elements often affect one’s objectives and ends, empirical ones tend to affect the logic one employs to realize those ends: “how” we pursue a particular goal, rather than “what” we pursue. Most often, these elements mutually reinforce, and come together to form a single, internally coherent worldview. These conceptual frameworks apply readily to the Qing fiscal context: The normative component of Qing fiscal ideology asked whether taxation was morally justifiable, whereas the empirical one predicted the socioeconomic consequences of tax hikes.59 The empirical belief that increasing agricultural 55

56

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58 59

It should be acknowledged, perhaps, that different disciplines still have a tendency to understand the term “ideology” in different ways. Historians and anthropologists may still insist on a thicker, more normatively well-defined concept, with “false consciousness” undertones, whereas political theorists, economists, and legal scholars – and some historians – are more likely to accept a thinner concept of ideology as merely systems of contestable beliefs. Note here the emphasis on “systems,” which implies the existence of a strong mutual reinforcementmechanism between different parts of the ideology, especially its normative and empirical components. This differentiates the idea of ideology from simple collections of contestable beliefs that are not systemically linked, and plays a crucial role in this book’s analysis. If historians find this too thin and non-substantive for their liking, I would ask them to suspend their definitional discomfort for the time being and attempt to understand the book’s thesis in light of the thinner definition. These conceptual matters are taken up again in Chapter 7 in greater detail. E.g., Avner Greif, Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection of Collectivist and Individualist Societies, 102 J. Pol. Econ. 912 (1994); Robert C. Ellickson, Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors: A Critique of Classical Law and Economics, 65 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 23 (1989). Jack M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology 111 (1998). Tommie Shelby defines ideological beliefs as beliefs that, among other characteristics, “form, or are derived from, a prima facie coherent system of thought, which can be descriptive and/or normative.” Tommie R. Shelby, Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory, 34 Philosophical Forum 153 (2003). Balkin (1998). There are, of course, many other examples: For example, the brand of Marxism that the Chinese Communist Party advocated during the later twentieth century not only argued that proletarian revolution was just, but also that, as a matter of historical development and social evolution, it was eventually inevitable. The former is a normative claim, the latter an empirical one. Similarly, many versions of capitalism argue that heavy state intervention with private wealth

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Introduction

taxes would trigger severe social unrest was often presented as one element of a comprehensive social model – a real “worldview” or “belief system,” in other words – that contained interconnected assertions about agricultural productivity, demographics, economic behavior, market efficiency, socioeconomic mobility, social obedience, and political ethics.60 More fundamentally, it owed much of its initial popularity, as explained below, to traditional “Confucian” skepticism toward state taxation, and could quite plausibly be seen as an empirical extension and reinforcement of those moral arguments. At risk of considerable understatement, these were clearly “contestable” beliefs that produced no small amount of political rigidity despite the selfprofessed “pragmatism” of Qing elites. To the extent that these beliefs prevented elites from maximizing their economic self-interest – for example, by persuading them to tax substantially less than what socioeconomic conditions allowed for – they might even be considered a kind of “false consciousness,” although the remainder of this book will only apply the more neutral understanding of ideology as a “contestable, systemic worldview,” with special emphasis on the “systemic,” internally coherent nature of these beliefs. To say, in this fashion, that something is ideological is not to say that it was unreasonable, or that modern scholars, armed with the analytical tools of contemporary social science, would necessarily have done any better than historical actors. An ideological actor may not be an fully, objectively “rational” one, if we assume a highly rigid, semi-mathematical ideal of self-interested rationality, but she can nonetheless be a fully reasonable one, in the sense that most sociopolitically consciousness human beings thrown into the same situation would likely have assumed the same kinds of ideological beliefs. Describing someone as ideological is therefore not necessarily a criticism, nor does it necessarily imply subpar decision-making. It is merely a claim that the person has internalized a coherent system of beliefs, at least some of which are assumed – as opposed to someone whose assumed beliefs lack such systemic intellectual coherence.

paradigm shifts and institutional reinforcement Good ideological explanations cannot be “just so” stories, but must instead uncover the deeper connections between ideological beliefs, political

60

accumulation is not only unjust – a threat against personal liberty or the pursuit of happiness, perhaps – but also leads to lower levels of economic productivity and technological innovation – which may or may not be desirable in any specific social setting. Discussed in detail in Chapter 4. In addition, such ideas were mutually reinforcing with the increasingly popular belief among Qing elites that “market flows” (liutong) unburdened by state regulation would generate stable growth and improved living standards. Margherita Zanasi, Economic Thought in Modern China, c1500–1937, 50–107 (2020); Dunstan (2006) 91–190; William T. Rowe, State and Market in Mid-Qing Economic Thought, 12 E´tudes chinoises 8 (1993); Man-houng Lin, Two Social Theories Revealed, 12 Late Imperial China 1 (1991).

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Paradigm Shifts and Institutional Reinforcement

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institutions, and intellectual change. In other words, they must give a satisfactory account of the ideology’s internal logic, and how it evolved. Conceptual gymnastics aside, what, specifically, explains the creation, influence, and longevity of these dubious empirical beliefs within the context of Qing politics? This book supplies a two-step answer: first, it explains how early Qing elites came to widely believe in the existence of a fiscal “red line” beyond which the state could not step without risking collapse. Second, it explains the belief’s continued popularity in later stages of the dynasty, well after it had lost any semblance of empirical accuracy. The two explanations rely on very different mechanisms: The former was most likely a case of widespread cognitive bias shaped by a priori moral preferences, whereas the latter was a complex mixture of cognitive bias with a variety of institutional entrenchment mechanisms, some created, in fact, by the assumption itself. The rapid rise of fiscal conservatism in the early Qing was largely fueled by a desire to avoid the Ming’s fatal mistakes.61 Late Ming decline and fall was, quite naturally, the paradigmatic event from which early Qing elites drew their core political and economic ideas, largely as a negative example of what to avoid. Motivated in this fashion, most officials and scholars rapidly coalesced around the position that over-taxation of a fragile rural economy was a major cause, indeed the major cause, of the Ming collapse. To the modern scholar, this interpretation is problematic and controversial. Many have argued that Ming Collapse was probably triggered by a lack of state fiscal capacity to provide sufficient economic relief in the wake of natural disasters,62 which would suggest that the Ming should have maintained a more robust revenue stream, not less, at least from those parts of the empire that were not famine stricken. For our present purposes, the most important point is not whether the historical interpretations of Qing elites were objectively right or wrong, but rather the speed and uniformity with which those interpretations became mainstream: Qing elites seemed overeager to accept certain kinds of narratives that were, at best, “contestable.” The driving force behind the rapid formation of a new consensus was, this book argues, ideological bias. In the decades surrounding the Ming-Qing transition, the moral and deontological condemnation of “profit-seeking” government behavior was still popular, if weakening. This created a deep and prevailing normative anxiety over late Ming tax hikes among political elites, even among those who supported the hikes, and the more they worried about the move’s moral legitimacy, the more likely they were to blame it if anything went seriously wrong in its aftermath – for example, if there were massive peasant rebellions that eventually overthrew the dynasty. This kind of cognitive inclination almost certainly colored early Qing analyses of Ming collapse. 61 62

See discussion in Chapter 4. Ray Huang was most prominent proponent of this argument. See Chapter 4 for more detailed discussion.

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Introduction

Indeed, reading elite reflections on the cataclysmic event, it is very difficult to escape the impression that the historical narrative of “high taxation triggering Ming collapse” was formulated both to abate this moral anxiety, and as a direct consequence thereof. Quite a few scholars and officials, in fact, expressly argued that the collapse validated preexisting moral skepticism of taxation. Social scientists and legal scholars familiar with cultural cognition theories will probably find these processes intuitive: Upon encountering new data, individuals tend to interpret it in a way that conforms to and reinforces their preexisting normative leanings.63 One can see further evidence of these biases in mid and late Qing political writings, which continued to interpret virtually any major episode of social unrest or revolt as evidence that rural taxes must remain low: The White Lotus Uprising in the late eighteenth century and the far more serious mid-nineteenth century rebellions all became part of this anti-tax increase narrative, reinforcing the paradigmatic lessons of Ming collapse. This expanded narrative was, if anything, even more problematic than the early Qing belief that tax hikes caused Ming collapse: The mid-nineteenth century uprisings, in particular, came at a time when taxation was already very low across the empire, and were far more plausibly fueled by natural disasters and the state’s fiscal inability to provide adequate famine relief than by over-taxation.64 Nonetheless, mid and late Qing elites continued to attribute serious social unrest to high tax quotas and, consequently, to argue for lower taxes. They seemed to share many of the cognitive biases of their early Qing predecessors. Because, however, we are talking about biases that had an unusually long lifespan of some 200 years, we must probe more deeply into the sources of their longevity. Most intellectual biases do not last that long, especially those that have extremely problematic empirics. The question becomes even more challenging when we remember that the moral condemnation of government taxation – which likely generated the early Qing interpretive biases discussed above – seemed to lose steam as the dynasty went on. How did the empirical biases retain their popularity despite this “moral erosion?” Part of the answer is, of course, that many mid and late Qing elites probably continued to harbor some moral distaste toward agricultural taxes, even after they became skeptical of the political utility of moral argumentation. Much more importantly, however, the notion that higher agricultural taxes would trigger massive social upheaval turned out to be institutionally self-sustaining: By the mid-eighteenth century, it had deprived the state of the financial resources and political will to extract and certify economic information from local communities, which made it virtually impossible to politically reverse, or even challenge, the state’s commitment to fiscal conservatism. 63

64

See, for example, the wide array of papers that Dan Kahan et al. have made available through the Cultural Cognition Project Website, www.culturalcognition.net/ (last visited June 28, 2021). See Chapter 1 for more detailed discussion.

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Paradigm Shifts and Institutional Reinforcement

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In most large political regimes, including modern ones, politically usable information – especially information about macro-level socioeconomic patterns – almost never organically emerge from social reality. Instead, they are usually manufactured by authoritative organs through highly institutionalized process: Think, for example, of the Bureau of Economic Statistic in the modern United States, or the National Bureau of Statistics in the People’s Republic of China. These institutions not only provide the necessary administrative infrastructure and resources for the collection, analysis, and processing of raw data, but also lend the final informational product an aura of rigor and authority, thereby facilitating its widespread acceptance and use in political discourse. At the same time, the highly institutionalized nature of political information production also renders it vulnerable to potential systemic bias, misperceptions, or even “disinformation,”65 should those institutions ever be tampered with. Within the late imperial Chinese political apparatus, nationwide land surveys were traditionally the most important means of obtaining information about local production capacities, living standards, and tax burdens.66 State officials had few means of collecting and verifying local economic information beyond centralized surveying: Because local populations usually disliked paying taxes67 – even when they were economically capable of doing so, and would not have rebelled against a tax hike – they were highly selective about the information they shared with state authorities: information that might encourage greater levels of extraction, such as productivity growth and land reclamation, was rarely reported, whereas famines and natural disasters were routinely exaggerated.68 Locally volunteered economic information tended, therefore, to severely underreport the actual level of agricultural production. If the government wanted better information, it had to collect its own. In response, all major Chinese dynasties after the eighth century AD – the Tang, Song, and Ming – conducted land surveys at multiple points during their history, usually as a prerequisite for substantial fiscal expansion. The Qing, however, attempted its last national land survey in 1688 and, in fact, formally

65

66

67

68

On the modern idea of political disinformation, see, e.g., Deen Freelon & Chris Wells, Disinformation as Political Communication, 37 Political Communication 145 (2020). For detailed discussion see Chapter 4, Section D.II and Chapter 5, Section B.II. See also, Zhang Yan (張研), Qingdai Jingji Jianshi (清代经济简史) [A Short History of the Qing Economy], 72–75 (2002). It goes without saying that disliking and attempting to evade taxes is not nearly the same thing as rebelling against tax hikes. There is an enormous behavioral gap between the two. See Kung-Chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (1960); Ch’u Tung-tsu, Local Government in China under the Ch’ing, 168–192 (1962); Bradley W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (2000); Ho Ping’ti, Zhongguo Lidai Tudi Shuzi Kaoshi (中国历代土地数字考 实) [studies on Chinese land statistics through the Ages], 21–52 (1995); Zhou Jian, Wei Zheng Zhi Gong: Qingdai Tianfu yu Guojia Caizheng (维正之供: 清代田赋与国家财 政) [land Taxes and state revenue in qing], 214 (2020).

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Introduction

banned provincial and local land measurements from 1740 onward. As a result, Qing political elites collectively had very little state-certified information about the rural economy, beyond some outdated data collected via seventeenth century surveys. This is reflected in the increasingly inaccurate assertions about arable acreage, productivity, and tax burdens in many court memorials and governmental records after the mid-eighteenth century.69 The economic worldview of most mid-Qing elites was, as noted above, essentially Malthusian – that the population had grown dramatically but total agricultural output remained fixed – when, in reality, total output largely kept up with demographic expansion due to technological changes and land reclamation.70 This empirical misconception and, more importantly, the lack of systematic surveying to refute it played a critical role in sustaining the Qing Court’s fiscal policies: In the absence of systemic, authoritative empirical evidence to the contrary, there was very little chance that political elites as a group could overcome their long-standing belief in the existence of a fiscal “red line,” which was only aggravated by the perception of Malthusian decline.71 Only in the late nineteenth century did provincial-level surveying resume in some parts of the country, shortly before the government finally began to rethink its refusal to raise agricultural taxes – and it was no coincidence that the former proximately preceded the latter. But why did the Qing state abandon land surveying? Surveying was, of course, very expensive and very labor-intensive, requiring many months of field work and accounting, but this was true of all Chinese regimes before and after the Qing. Much more importantly, the Qing Court believed, probably correctly, that extensive surveying would be socially received as the harbinger of future rural tax increases: everyone, from officials to commoners, knew that the only reason why the state would spend resources on a large-scale land survey was to raise taxes, and would respond to them just as they would to an actual tax hike. In other words, all the political and intellectual forces that directly pushed against tax hikes also indirectly pushed against land surveying. These institutional developments coalesced in the eighteenth century to create a political and intellectual environment where it was extremely difficult

69

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71

Looking only at official records of land usage and production, one can sometimes arrive at estimates of agricultural tax burdens that are several times higher than what more recent scholarship has generally agreed upon. For an example of such estimates, see, e.g., Kathryn Bernhardt, Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840– 1950, 47–49 (1992); Usui Sachiko, Shindai Fuzei Kankei Suchi no Ichi Kento [A Study on the Tax Rate in Qing], 1 Chugoku Kindaishi Kenkyu [modern china studies] 43 (1981). More accurate estimates, reflecting the near-consensus of the current academic literature, are laid out in Chapter 1. By the later Qing, official estimates of arable acreage were only 60–70 percent of the actual acreage, and estimates of productivity were also extremely archaic. See Chapter 5. Preexisting scholarship has sometimes raised this point in passing, but has yet to go more deeply into its political logic. See, e.g., Zhou (2020), 376.

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The Benefits of Reinstating Ideology

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for anyone, particularly risk-averse government officials, to challenge them. In fact, by around mid-dynasty, the mere suggestion of raising the agricultural tax became an almost automatically impeachable offense at court, with often serious consequences for the proponent’s career.72 By eliminating the primary institutional mechanisms that could have challenged its empirical assumptions, Qing fiscal conservatism had effectively become politically self-reinforcing.

the benefits of reinstating ideology In summary, this book argues that, although it is quite possible to explain the trajectory of Qing nonagricultural taxation through rationalist models, the Qing’s stubborn and highly unusual refusal to raise agricultural taxes ultimately requires an ideological explanation. Generations of statesmen locked agricultural tax quotas at very low levels not because they had to or could ultimately afford to, but because their ideological biases produced interpretations of real world events that largely overemphasized the socioeconomic dangers associated with tax hikes. This was not, however, a simple story in which “Confucian” political morality straightforwardly undermined rational fiscal politics. Instead, it involved a highly complex series of intellectual, political, and institutional interactions between traditional moral beliefs in low taxation, fiscally conservative empirical biases that these moral beliefs cognitively encouraged, and the political entrenchment of those empirical biases through the state’s informational self-mutilation – which was itself an institutional product of those very same biases. If there was something irrationally ideological about Qing fiscal politics, it came in small, subtle doses of cognitive bias and institutional reinforcement, rather than in sweeping moral commandments against taxation. It is hard to believe that modern politicians – or, for that matter, modern scholars – could have done much better had they been thrown into the same political and intellectual circumstances. Understanding the unusually small size of the Qing tax regime requires, therefore, a combination of both rationalist and ideological analysis. This book certainly makes no claim to full originality in its use of rationalist models – it merely applies preexisting models in a more specific fashion to explain nonagricultural taxation – but its ideological analysis is unique. The introduction of this ideological narrative provides three major benefits. First, and most obviously, it finally allows us to understand the near-total stagnation of agricultural taxation for almost two centuries, which has, as discussed above, eluded adequate explanation by rationalist models for some time now. Second, it explains why the nineteenth century Qing state insisted on keeping agricultural taxes flat even as it pursued significant nonagricultural tax hikes: 72

See discussion in Chapter 5, Section D.

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Introduction

The core empirical beliefs of Qing fiscal conservatism – that the peasantry was already overtaxed, and furthermore mired in Malthusian decline from the early eighteenth century onward – did not apply beyond the agricultural sphere, as many late Qing elites explicitly recognized and emphasized. In particular, because the Ming was brought down by peasant rebellions, the early Qing intellectual and political backlash against Ming’s fiscal policy focused almost entirely on agricultural taxation. As a result, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political elites were largely willing to let nonagricultural taxes keep pace with economic growth, while they fought to keep the absolute volume of agricultural taxes locked in place. This pattern of political flexibility toward one fiscal component coupled with absolutist conservatism toward the other persisted until the dynasty’s final decade. Third, unlike traditional claims about the inherent fiscal conservatism of Confucian political ethics, the ideological narrative presented in this book is capable of explaining why Qing fiscal behavior was so much more conservative than its Song and Ming predecessors. If we accept that the traditional moral bias against state taxation was significantly reinforced in Qing political thought by empirical assumptions linking agricultural tax increases to serious social unrest – and specifically to Ming collapse – then it is altogether unsurprising that Qing elites adopted a much more absolutist political stance against such increases. Neither Ming nor Song elites drew the same kind of fiscal lesson from the collapse of their immediate predecessors: Ming narratives of Yuan collapse were heavily colored by ethnic and civilization hostility toward Mongol rule, whereas Song narratives of Tang collapse focused on the accumulation of power by military fiefdoms.73 More interestingly, the shift away from deontological political reasoning actually made Qing fiscal institutions less flexible than what they were in the later Ming. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “raising taxes will lead to political disaster” was a clearer, more powerful, and more politically limiting mindset than “raising taxes is normatively wrong.” The more elites embraced realist and consequentialist political philosophies, the more they were convinced that raising agricultural taxes would lead to sociopolitical catastrophe, as opposed to merely being morally questionable. The result was increasingly risk-averse and rigid agricultural fiscal politics. Whereas moral anxiety over tax hikes was never quite powerful enough to prevent the later Ming government from aggressively pursuing agricultural tax increases in response to military or economic contingencies, the Qing Court almost exclusively addressed such contingencies through other means, even when it would have been far easier and more effective to also tap into the land tax.

73

See discussion in Chapters 3 and 5.

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Ideological Worldview as Proxy?

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ideological worldview as proxy? One could ask, of course, whether the ideological and intellectual history discussed above overlooks the potential influence of external material circumstances on ideological worldviews. Does it overemphasize moral biases at the expense of a more Marxist or functionalist, “economic (or political) foundations determine ideological superstructure” sort of narrative, and therefore overlooks the extent to which ideological worldviews were merely a proxy for economic or political circumstances? Did, for example, the utilitarian bias – or the skepticism of taxation – in Qing political thought emerge in response to an increasingly commercialized or mobile society? Historians have, of course, made many such arguments for European economic thought,74 but they fit awkwardly within the basic contours and chronology of Qing intellectual history. The early Qing was hardly as commercially sophisticated as the late Ming, but nonetheless experienced a rapid proliferation of both realist political thought and skepticism toward agricultural taxation. A more intriguing possibility is whether the conquest empire nature of the Qing affected its fiscal politics: Were Qing elites, particularly Manchu elites, more fearful of the social consequences of tax increase because, as a conquest dynasty, the Qing state had an inherently more strained relationship with its Han population? There is much intuitive appeal to this hypothesis, particularly in light of the rise of the New Qing History movement,75 but historical evidence fails to robustly support it beyond the dynasty’s earliest years. Although the sociopolitical challenges of ethnic conquest clearly supplied some of the political context for early Qing fiscal conservatism,76 from the late seventeenth century onward, such considerations very rarely appeared in either governmental or private writings on fiscal policy. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they had vanished almost entirely, even though government officials continued to discuss Han-Manchu ethnic tensions in other policy contexts. This is consistent with the conventional view that the “foreignness” of Manchu rule slowly wore off over time. At the same time, however, fiscal conservatism steadily deepened over the course of the eighteenth century: Whatever fiscal flexibility existed in the 1650s had largely disappeared by 1740, and had evaporated completely by 1800. There was, therefore, no significant correlation

74

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The History of Economic Thought: A Reader 1 (Steven G. Medema & Warren J. Samuels eds., 2003) (“It is a widely held, and probably substantially correct, view that the emergence and development of modern economic thought was correlative with the emergence of a commercial, eventually industrial, capitalist market economy.”); Eric Roll, History of Economic Thought (5th ed., 1992); Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 74–78 (1996). For a summary of major works, see, e.g., Joanna Waley-Cohen, The New Qing History, 88 Radical Hist. Rev. 193 (2004). See discussion at Chapter 4, Section C; Chapter 5, E.

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Introduction

over time between ethnic tensions and fiscal conservatism, even if they had enjoyed some amount of political synergy immediately after the 1644 conquest. None of this means that ideological and intellectual developments were unaffected by external political and economic circumstances. Quite the opposite, the above account emphasizes the sociopolitical trauma of the Ming collapse as a transformative moment in Chinese intellectual history. It also unravels the complex institutional circumstances that helped sustain agricultural tax skepticism throughout the mid and late Qing. These efforts cannot, however, be reduced to some sort of pseudo-Marxist “material foundations determine ideological superstructure” argument, which grossly understates the intellectual agency of the political and intellectual elite. Elites were absolutely aware of and concerned with some of their political, economic, and social circumstances – in fact, they made this a point of emphasis in their turn toward political realism – but this does not imply that those circumstances dictated a certain way of thinking, or any specific set of institutional and political outcomes. Instead, external circumstances were intellectually and politically processed through a set of ideological lenses.

broader implications The book’s historiographic ambitions are large but straightforward: It seeks to provide a fundamentally different and more complete way to understand the fiscal and administrative limitations that plagued the Qing state from the mideighteenth century onward. These limitations are the starting point for virtually any foray into Qing political and legal history, particularly at the local level. They are also a major reason why China experienced dramatically slower industrial development than the European imperial powers and Meiji Japan. The relative economic and military decline was, in turn, a fundamental cause of the dynastic collapse, and indeed a major reason why political elites, both Nationalist and Communist, came to reject not only imperial fiscal institutions, but also the dynastic model itself. The book seeks to highlight, therefore, not merely the ideological dimension of the Qing tax regime, but also an essential yet previously overlooked ideological dimension of global economic divergence and Chinese institutional “modernization.” Beyond these historical contributions, the book also makes a number of broader theoretical claims about the political role of ideology. First, it highlights the tendency of ideological change to occur in “lurches” or “lumps.” A central component of the book’s narrative is the paradigmatic significance of Ming collapse. The notion that agricultural tax increases would trigger severe unrest acquired near-axiomatic status in elite political consciousness largely because the traumatized ruling class vowed never to repeat the perceived “mistakes” of their late Ming predecessors. This underlines the way that political thought, legislation, and policymaking lurched from paradigm to paradigm in response to major sociopolitical shocks, and especially in response

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Broader Implications

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to dynastic change. Change came not in a continuous stream, but rather in concentrated bursts followed by long periods of consolidation and reinforcement. Ming collapse provided a “founding moment,” perhaps even a “constitutional moment,” for Qing politics in an intellectual and ideological sense. Scholars who work in a number of fields related to intellectual history – American and European constitutional history, the history of science, the history of nationalism, to list a few – will probably find the rhythm and pace of these developments rather familiar.77 More importantly, the book emphasizes the need to think about ideological worldviews in both empirical and normative terms, to recognize that seemingly empirical or utilitarian statements are not necessarily any less ideological than a normative statement of moral principle, and to examine the interaction between the two categories. The Qing tax regime did indeed have some deeply entrenched ideological foundations, but the specific content of those foundations was something that a Weberian scholar might have recognized as “rational” – realist, consequentialist, nominally empirical, and often selfinterested. In a similar vein, individuals or groups who profess to be “realists” are not necessarily any less biased, or truly pragmatic, than those who expressly claim allegiance to some religion or system of ethics. This book grapples, therefore, not only with the moral objectives people claimed to pursue, but perhaps more importantly, the socioeconomic logic they employed in their pursuit. Empirical beliefs, even when incorrect or inadequately verified, are quite frequently more durable and influential than normative ones: They seem objective, even if they owe a large part of their existence to cognitive biases created by the latter. Normative ideas therefore often reproduce by crafting compatible empirical assumptions and, in doing so, sometimes manage to extend both their lifespan and sphere of influence. Qing fiscal ideology is one such example, and there are many potential others: For example, early twentieth century Chinese intellectuals initially embraced Marxism primarily as a theory of social justice.78 Not until the 1950s did the intellectual mainstream embrace a new,

77

78

E.g., Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (discussing paradigm shifts in the natural sciences); Theorizing Nationalism, 225–227 (Ronald Beiner ed., 1999) (discussing the importance of “founding moments” to modern nationalism); Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow & Charles Tilly, Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution (1996) (discussing the political and intellectual paradigms developed by major social movements and revolutions). On the use of “paradigm cases” in constitutional interpretation, see Jed Rubenfeld, The Paradigm-Case Method, 115 Yale L. J. 1955 (2006). On “constitutional moments,” see Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (1991). See, e.g., Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo Sixiang de Xingqi (现代中国思想的兴起) [The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought] (2004); Li Zehou, Zhongguo Xiandai Sixiang Shi Lun (中国现代思想史论) [On the Intellectual History of Modern China] (2008).

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Introduction

“Marxist” interpretation of Chinese history and society, emphasizing wealthbased class divisions as the primary driving force of socioeconomic change. Since the 1980s, however, even as normative belief in Marxism has plunged across the country, the notion that Chinese society is fundamentally organized by economic class has remained enormously influential among highly educated Chinese. If we look instead at American intellectual circles, many twentieth century social scientists rejected the traditional normative pretenses of capitalism – for example, that wealth accumulation was just and praiseworthy – while accepting many of its empirical foundations, including the belief that most individuals are innately materialistic and self-interested.79 It is also tempting, especially with the potential comparison to capitalism in mind, to draw parallels between the “high tax versus low tax” discussions in Qing political thought and the “big government versus small government,” “welfare state versus capitalist competition” debates that have consumed so much political and intellectual energy in contemporary societies. This includes, for example, the American Tea Party, European clashes over austerity and fiscal discipline, Chinese and Japanese debates about modern infrastructure spending, and so on. The Qing example cannot offer any straightforward economic or political lessons, but it does offer a cautionary tale about the understated but potentially decisive role of empirical ideological beliefs in legislation and policymaking. Then, as now, the contestable empirical assumptions of political elites, particularly those related to the socioeconomic consequences of taxation, played at least as significant an institutional role as their normative beliefs. The book’s focus on empirical ideological beliefs also highlights a number of indirect mechanisms through which political and legal institutions can entrench ideologies. Most importantly, Qing fiscal conservatism owed much of its political longevity to the fact that the state institutionally stopped land surveying from the early eighteenth century onward, thereby entrenching elite beliefs in Malthusian economic decline. Contesting mainstream empirical beliefs in the political arena usually requires the provision of authoritative information to the contrary, which, for practical reasons, the state often enjoys a functional monopoly over. As a result, mere informational inaction by the state is often sufficient to entrench preexisting ideological beliefs, and can be just as politically manipulative – if not more so – than any direct ideological action it might take. From this perspective, the Qing state’s refusal to conduct land surveys is qualitatively comparable to, for example, the American federal government’s well-documented reluctance or inability to conduct adequate amounts of medical testing during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

79

Some of this history is discussed in Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (1977).

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Concepts, Methodology, Sources, and Settings

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concepts, methodology, sources, and settings The use of the term “ideology” has already been discussed and defended above, but the other question that many readers will probably have is whether the ideological narrative presented here is a “Confucian” one. In important ways, Qing political ideology was distinctly Confucian: At the most superficial level, political elites regularly supported their arguments with citations from Confucian classics, mastery of which was, of course, a basic qualification for ascension into officialdom. More substantively, the belief that state taxation had inherent moral problems was traditionally associated with Confucius himself – or at least a set of classics commonly attributed to him.80 The popularity of the idea fluctuated throughout the dynasties, and arguably not until the Song (circa 1000 AD) did it become accepted as a major political doctrine.81 But even so, one could safely call this a Confucian doctrine. As argued above, Qing fiscal thought eventually moved beyond this basic moral doctrine both intellectually and politically. Some scholars have ardently argued that the Qing intellectual turn toward realism and pragmatism amounted to a serious erosion of “Confucianism,” perhaps even an ideological betrayal.82 Others see the turn as simply the next chapter in Confucianism’s long history, and point to the continuing sociopolitical dominance of a distinctly “Confucian” literary canon. There is much truth to the claim that the Qing tax regime was a Confucian one, but the link was often indirect, and the brand of “Confucianism” at play was a distinctly realist one. The title “Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation,” rather than simply “Confucian Foundations,” is a conscious choice. The description of the Qing revenue system as a “tax regime” or “tax state” – the two terms are interchangeable in this book – is also a conscious choice: Economic historians have long drawn a distinction between “tax states” or “tax regimes,” in which the state relies primarily on institutionalized and monetized taxation to fiscally sustain itself, and a modern “fiscal state,” in which the state, generally a modernized state emerging in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, gains much stronger and more professionally managed revenue streams through the use of indirect taxation and public debt.83 While

80 81

82 83

See, e.g., Analects (论语) 4.12, 4.16. Wang Shengduo, Rujia “Bu Yu Min Zhengli” Sixiang de Xingcheng yu Yingxiang (儒家”不与民 争利”思想的形成与影响) [The Formation and Influence of Confucian Idea of “Do not Snatch Profit away from the People”], (1994)4 Chuantong Wenhua yu Xiangdaihua (传统文化与 现代化) [Traditional Culture and Modernization] 20. See Elman (1984) for discussion. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Crisis of the Tax State, in 4 International Economic Papers, 5–38 (International Economic Association ed., 1954); Richard Bonney & W. Mark Ormrod, Introduction, in Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830, 1–21 (W. M. Ormrod, M. Bonney, & R. Bonney, eds., 1999); Guanglin Liu, The Making of a Fiscal State in Song China, 68 Econ. Hist. Rev. 48 (2015).

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Introduction

this is certainly not the only coherent way to define “fiscal state,” there is no particularly compelling reason to resist this conventional categorization. Under these definitions, the Qing state was undeniably a “tax state” or “tax regime,” given its possession of a stable, institutionalized, and predominantly monetized system of taxation that funded the vast majority of its operations, but its consistently meager fiscal capacity would presumably have disqualified it as a modern “fiscal state,” even after its post-1850 expansion.84 At its core, the book is an exercise in what legal scholars might call “legislative history.” It employs rationalist political economy models to explain nonagricultural taxation, but its main contribution lies in its ideological account of agricultural taxation, and it is fundamentally concerned with how political elites argued and thought about agricultural taxes. There is a wealth of political writings from Qing elites on state revenue, in the form of edicts, palace memorials, administrative orders, and private treatises. The book surveys these writings – well over a thousand edicts and palace memorials that debated significant fiscal reforms and many private writings by major intellectuals – as systemically as possible. This is its evidentiary backbone. A large amount of fiscal data, central, provincial, and local, is also used to verify policy outcomes and trace the actual trajectory of government revenue, although, in the end, this is a qualitative, rather than quantitative, study of the relationship between ideology and fiscal institutions. Cliometric methods are avoided not because of any intellectual aversion, but rather because, given the subject matter and available sources, they are impossible to execute adequately. Finally, a word about temporal and geographic settings: The book attempts to study fiscal ideology and institutions throughout the Qing, and at a national level. Given the relatively centralized nature of fiscal policymaking and the surprising longevity of certain ideas and institutions, this is a necessary move. Nonetheless, it has some very specific focuses that help narrow and guide the analysis: The early Qing, the Yongzheng-Qianlong transition, and the later nineteenth century are given more attention than other periods, given the concentrated bursts of fiscal activity and debate that occurred around these times. Geographically, certain regions, such as North China and the Lower Yangtze, played an unusually large role in elite polite discourse, whereas the very same elites tended to treat other regions, such as Sichuan, as outliers. However, because the institutional and intellectual phenomena examined here are national and state-centered ones, the book emphasizes the central over the local, and a top-down political elite perspective over a bottom-up social one. This is, again, made necessary by its subject matter. Although the book is primarily focused on Chinese history, it makes substantial use of horizontal comparisons between China and other early modern regimes, usually to illustrate institutional mechanisms and theoretical linkages.

84

See He (2013).

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Chapter Outline

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Conventionally, when scholars place China in a comparative framework, it is usually vis-à-vis Western Europe, and particularly England.85 Such a framework makes sense given their longstanding and ongoing fascination with “the Great Divergence” and its geohistorical impact, but it can sometimes overlook the rich intellectual possibilities contained in intra-Asian or East-East comparisons, many of which are built upon a stronger set of political and cultural similarities that substantially strengthen the comparative method. While much of the original motivation for this book stems from Great Divergence-related questions about Chinese relative decline, its ambitions are ultimately broader and more theoretically generally: it hopes, as stated at the outset of this Introduction, to derive potentially generalizable insights on how ideology interacts with institutions and politics from the Qing example. It therefore does not limit itself to the traditional Sino-European comparison, but instead makes heavy use of Russian, Japanese, and occasionally Ottoman comparisons to flesh out some of the institutional alternatives that China could have pursued. By doing so, it joins a growing body of newer scholarship that emphasizes the importance of intra-Asian, East-East, or South-South comparisons.86

chapter outline Chapter 1 provides a general overview of Qing fiscal policy, focusing on major changes in the early eighteenth and later nineteenth century. After an attempt to reform the agricultural tax apparatus in the early eighteenth century lost steam amid accusations of “snatching profit from the people,” the central government made no further attempts to modify it until the mid-nineteenth century. In the meantime, nonagricultural taxes grew, but remained comparatively insignificant in total volume. As the economy grew, formal government revenue as a share of total economic output plunged from around 4 percent to barely 1 percent prior to the Opium War. Following a wave of mid-century political and financial crises, the government finally swung into action, implementing a number of major fiscal reforms, most notably the creation of a new commercial tax. The agricultural tax, however, remained stagnant at eighteenth century levels until the early twentieth century, when the Qing state was on the verge of total collapse. This stagnation had particularly crippling consequences for the Qing’s industrialization drive in the later nineteenth century. 85 86

See, e.g., sources cited at supra note 1. He (2013), which contrasts China with both Japan and England, is a major example of this, as are Ron Harris, Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation (2020); and Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (2011) (which contains a significant amount of intra-Asian comparisons). Note that a set of East-West or North-South comparisons assembled together, such as those in Acemoglu & Robinson (2010), do not necessarily amount to East-East or South-South comparisons.

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Introduction

Chapter 2 then considers and critiques a number of rationalist explanations for these developments, including geopolitics, financial necessity, administrative capacity, principal-agent problems, and potential collective action issues. It argues, first, that some combination of these factors is largely capable of explaining the Qing’s approach to non-agricultural taxation, which grew whenever the state faced significant fiscal pressure, but was subject to a number of political economy and administrative constraints that became increasingly apparent in the nineteenth century. The chapter then argues that these rationalist theories are unable to fully explain the stagnation of agricultural taxes from the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, which suggests that ideological factors should be brought in to complete the picture. Chapter 3 surveys Chinese fiscal institutions prior to the Qing, focusing on reforms implemented in the mid to late Ming. It makes two basic claims: First, the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming all taxed much more aggressively than the Qing, and in the Song and Yuan cases dramatically so. Moreover, the Tang, Song, and Ming all implemented major reforms to their fiscal institutions around mid-dynasty, which generally led to substantial increases in the total volume of government income. Second, fiscal conservatives relied heavily on deontological moral arguments to combat these expansionist policies, but had limited success in doing so. In, for example the later Ming, although moral condemnations of “pursuing profit” were visibly influential in court politics, they were largely ineffective in stemming the tide of fiscal reform. This was, at least in part, because fiscal conservatives were unable to clearly and powerfully predict the socioeconomic consequences of fiscal expansion, which limited their political persuasiveness until the final years of the dynasty. Chapter 4 examines institutional and intellectual trends in the early Qing, up to the end of Kangxi’s reign. It focuses on the intellectual and political response to the Ming collapse, which spurred a large wave of arguments, both scholarly and political, in favor of light taxes and a non-interventionist state. In contrast to the heavily moralistic tone of Ming fiscal conservatism, the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition drove early Qing elites toward a fiscal worldview that was both more “realist,” but also far more hostile toward state taxation. This hostility stemmed directly from a mainstream historical interpretation of Ming collapse that placed much of the blame on late Ming tax increases, which, in turn, seemed to have cognitive roots in Qing elites’ deep-rooted moral skepticism of state extraction. Mindful of this “history lesson,” and of ethnic tensions between Manchu and Han populations, the Qing political elite committed itself, both rhetorically and institutionally, to very low agricultural tax quotas. At the same time, however, no such commitment was made toward nonagricultural taxes due to the specific circumstances of the Ming collapse. Chapter 5 discusses the entrenchment of fiscal conservatism in mid-Qing politics, covering the Yongzheng to Daoguang eras (1722–1850). A spirited attempt by the Yongzheng Emperor to expand formal agricultural tax quotas and rationalize fiscal institutions had some success, but quickly encountered

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widespread opposition. By the late 1730s, the Qing Court settled into a set of fiscal institutions that would remain largely unchanged for the next 170 years. Formal agricultural tax quotas were, with the exception of the grain tribute, fixed in absolute values of silver, and could no longer be increased. Furthermore, provincial and local land surveying was made illegal by imperial decree, depriving political elites of their primary, and perhaps only, source of reliable macroeconomic information. Soon after – and arguably as a direct result – a “Malthusian” worldview began to gain popularity among political elites, arguing that, because the population was rapidly growing while total agricultural output remained unchanged, the amount of taxable surplus that the state could safely extract before rural incomes fell below subsistence level was actually shrinking. Driven by this deepening sense of insecurity, the Qing Court came to view nearly any proposal to raise agricultural taxes with deep suspicion. By the late eighteenth century, such proposals met with almost automatic rejection, and often carried serious political consequences for their sponsors. Meanwhile, nonagricultural taxes continued their slow upward trend, and became the focal point for fiscal reform efforts in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 6 takes the narrative from the Taiping Rebellion and its aftermath to the end of the dynasty. By the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional moral consensus that state taxation was inherently wrong had largely crumbled, and many of the most prominent statesmen in the country now openly embraced a new, pro-government investment mode of thinking. Nonagricultural taxes almost immediately began to expand rapidly once the Taiping Rebellion flared up in 1851, and continued to rise after it had been put down, despite the significant amount of political controversy and opposition that this generated throughout the later nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the “realist” assumption that the peasantry would not tolerate higher agricultural tax quotas remained firmly entrenched, unaffected – and even strengthened – by Taiping-era socioeconomic crises. Provincial land surveying made an institutional comeback in the late nineteenth century, but not until the Qing Court faced a complete fiscal collapse in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) did it finally throw caution to the wind and begin to systemically experiment with higher agricultural tax quotas. To the surprise of many contemporaries, these experiments were largely successful, and while they came much too late to save the Qing from political collapse, they nonetheless laid the intellectual and political foundations for a more robust tax regime in the Republican era and the People’s Republic. Chapter 7 discusses the potential theoretical ramifications of this ideological narrative. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of ideological analysis, seeking to identify a number of methodological “best practices.” From there, it considers whether the distinctions and interplay between normative and empirical elements of ideological worldviews studied here shed any light on the theoretical analysis of other major ideologies, or of

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Introduction

paradigmatic changes in modern politics. The creation of a descriptive and ostensibly empirical social theory to support normative positions is commonplace, but what is perhaps more interesting is that those empirical theories often develop an intellectual identity and sociopolitical lifespan quite separate from their original normative foundations. As the example of Qing fiscal policy demonstrates, empirical beliefs can often be more influential than normative ones. This has important ramifications for our general understanding of how political ideology affects legal and political institutions. In particular, it highlights and questions the role that the state plays in certifying and “discovering” politically relevant information, and how the state-driven centralization of information is as important a tool of ideological entrenchment as more normative kinds of state action, such as lawmaking. The Conclusion briefly identifies avenues for future research. In particular, it returns to the question of Sino-Western economic divergence mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, and explores the possible connections between Qing fiscal undercapacity and China’s relative economic decline in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The most promising of these appears to be that government taxation can be an effective – albeit not exclusively so – way to concentrate capital and acquire the economies of scale often necessary for industrial takeoff, and therefore that the Qing’s fiscal weakness deprived it of a capital accumulation tool that some of its main competitors, notably Japan, used to great effect. The Conclusion also discusses the various connections between fiscal capacity and the broader concept of state capacity, and whether the ideological narrative presented here offers more general insights into the sociopolitical decline of Confucianism in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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1 A Short History of Qing Taxation

This chapter traces the institutional evolution of the Qing fiscal state from its seventeenth century origins to its eventual demise in the early twentieth century. Changes to fiscal institutions were made in several bursts – one at the very beginning of the dynasty, another during the 1720s and 1730s, and a final stretch of frenetic reform after 1850. The latter two, in particular, were marked by concentrated attempts to increase government revenue to meet burgeoning financial obligations. In between these three periods of activity, there were long stretches of stability – stagnation, if one takes a more negative view – during which the state made little effort to keep its revenue base on par with demographic and economic expansion. Parts of this narrative are well known to scholars, but other parts – particularly the extreme inflexibility of the agricultural tax – are not. In any case, the preexisting historiographical literature in English does not yet provide a systematic narrative of Qing taxation. This chapter attempts to fill the gap, while also framing the core empirical question of the book. The core component of the fiscal state until the late nineteenth century was the “agricultural tax,” a constructed term that refers here to all revenue extracted directly from agricultural production. This included a “land and head” tax (diding yin) collected primarily in silver, a “grain tribute” (caoliang) collected in either silver or grain, and a number of surcharges that varied across time and geographical location. The primary empirical argument of this chapter is that the Qing agricultural tax experienced very little change in absolute volume from the mid-eighteenth century to the very end of the nineteenth, and actually declined in real terms due to inflation. As a share of total agricultural output, it plummeted to cripplingly low levels in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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A Short History of Qing Taxation

The truly counterintuitive portion of the narrative comes in the post-Taiping Rebellion era (1865–1911): Despite unprecedented financial pressures created by war indemnities and the need for military modernization, the reconsolidated Qing state resisted raising the agricultural tax for four decades, before finally caving in during the last 5 years of its existence. During this period, it scrambled to extract ever-increasing amounts of revenue from other parts of the economy, particularly domestic and foreign commerce, but steadily refused to touch the agricultural tax. Such restraint seems particularly strange when we consider that, despite taxing commercial and proto-industrial activity to arguably the fullest extent possible by the 1890s, the state nonetheless had to deal with nearperpetual deficits and snowballing debt. The easiest solution – indeed the solution taken by several previous dynasties in similar or even less precarious financial positions – was probably to increase revenue extraction from the rural economy: Agriculture continued to supply 70–80 percent of total economic output throughout the nineteenth century, but was taxed at only a 1–2 percent rate, whereas nonagricultural activity was taxed at dramatically higher rates. Indeed, as argued in Chapter 2, the administrative and legal tools to raise agricultural taxes were readily available. Given all this, what made this option so unattractive to late Qing lawmakers? The remainder of the book attempts to provide an answer. The chapter is organized as follows: Section A surveys the general institutional framework of Qing taxation and its evolution from the early dynasty to the later nineteenth century. Section B provides a statistical sketch of government revenue up until the mid-nineteenth century, and places these statistics within the broader context of demographic and economic expansion. Section C focuses on later nineteenth century efforts to boost government revenue, and highlights the peculiar stagnation – within this broader context of institutional expansion – of the agricultural tax.

a. the institutional framework of qing taxation, 1644–1850 Virtually all Chinese dynasties struggled, during their early years, with the challenge of reestablishing political and social order in a war-torn society. The Qing’s challenges were, of course, substantially exacerbated by the fact that it was a Manchu regime, established through military conquest of traditionally Han Chinese regions. The early Qing state went, therefore, to great lengths to both provide continuity with Ming administrative and fiscal institutions. Their revenue extraction apparatus, in particular, was essentially a continuation of late-Ming laws and policies, with some adjustments designed to further enhance the regime’s reputation among the general population.

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A The Institutional Framework of Qing Taxation

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Late Ming government revenue came from several sources, organized here into four major categories.1 Principal among these was what this book calls the “agricultural tax,” a multi-part revenue source drawn directly from agricultural food production that, in theory, extracted tax payments from farmers before their produce ever hit local markets. Its main component was a “land and head tax” (diding yin) assessed, theoretically, on the basis of both registered land and registered rural population, and paid primarily in silver following the Jiajing and Wanli era “single whip” reforms. Under this system, the average rural household would theoretically owe tax both based on the volume and quality of its landholdings and the number of registered male laborers it possessed. In years of bad harvests, the tax quota was routinely forgiven, in part or in whole, in the hardest-hit regions – making this effectively a land-based and productionbased tax – but, in general, it could not be adjusted upwards in years of good harvests. This system functionally required the state to conduct somewhat regular surveys of landownership, household size, and land productivity, or else the charged quotas could become outdated very quickly. A separate component of the agricultural tax was the grain tribute (caoliang) to Beijing, theoretically paid in grain and assessed on the basis of both landownership and actual production. This was primarily collected from the eight largest grain production provinces: Shandong, Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei. From the sixteenth century onwards, at least some of the grain tribute was actually paid in cash or silver, which local officials then used to purchase and ship commercial grain to Beijing.2 A major reform implemented by Zhang Juzheng in the late sixteenth century further shifted the balance of tax collection toward silver, but it was only partially implemented before the dynasty’s collapse in 1644.3 Apart from these two

1

2

3

The most important primary sources for this quick summary of Ming taxation categories are the following: Ming Shi (明史) [History of the Ming] (Zhang Tingyu et al., 1739), most importantly the Shihuo Zhi (食货志); Gu Yanwu (顾炎武), Tianxi Junguo Libing Shu (天下 郡国利病书) [Merits and Drawbacks of All the Provinces and Counties in China] (Shanghai Guji Press ed., 2012); Gujin Tushu Jicheng: Jingji Huibian, Shihuo Dian (古今 图书集成: 经济汇编 食货典) [Complete Collection of Pictures and Books of Ancient and Modern Times] (1725); several essays from the Huangming Jingshi Wenbian (皇明经世 文编) [Collected Writings on Statecraft of the Ming Dynasty] [hereinafter HMJSWB] (Chen Zilong (陈子龙) et al. eds., Zhonghua Shuju Press 1962); Zhongguo Lidai Shihuo Dian (中国历代食货典) (Jiangsu Guangling Guji Keyin She eds., 1989); Zhu Jian (朱建), Gujin Zhiping Lue (古今治平略) [Ancient and Modern Statecraft] (1638). Secondary sources include: Chen Guangyan (陈光焱), Zhongguo Caizheng Tongshi: Mingdai Juan (中国财 政通史: 明代卷) [A History of Public Finance in China: Ming Dynasty] (2006); Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (1974); Huang (1998). For basic quantitative estimates of the grain tax, see Guanglin Liu, Wrestling for Power: The State and Economy in Later Imperial China, 1000–1770 (2005) (unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University). For detailed discussion, see Chapter 3, Section C.

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A Short History of Qing Taxation

formal categories, the state reserved the authority to issue emergency surcharges, which it employed, for example, in the last few decades of the dynasty to finance military campaigns. The second major source of government revenue, and the most important component of nonagricultural taxation, was the salt tax. Ming salt production was predominantly the domain of state-licensed producers, who sold and shipped salt under close government supervision. For this privilege and the immense profits it carried, they paid relatively high taxes, again assessed both on the basis of production capacity – measured largely on the size and quality of the salt farm, but adjusted on a yearly basis – and the number of registered laborers. Beyond these formally assessed taxes, major salt merchants paid a regular “donation” to the imperial court, nominally as a token of appreciation, but in reality as a license fee. A third source of revenue came from tariffs (guanshui), assessed on both domestic and foreign commerce. Domestic interregional trade was primarily taxed at major water-based transportation hubs – Dahekou in Zhili Province, for example, or Shahukou in Shanxi – as a fixed percentage of total shipped value. Foreign trade, on the other hand, was theoretically monopolized by state agents operating out of a few major ports, who then paid a fixed share of their revenue to the government. Finally, the state also collected an assortment of minor taxes that some commentators have cumulatively referred to as “miscellaneous industrial and commercial taxes” (gongshang zashui). These included taxes on tea production, mineral excavation, alcohol production, and a variety of indirect commercial transactions, such as the selling and mortgaging of land, the selling and pawning of personal property, and financial services. While diverse, these taxes were light and assessed rather sporadically. In the case of land transactions, for example, there is good reason to believe that the vast majority of land sales and mortgages were never registered with the government, and therefore not taxed at all. In addition to these mandatory taxes, the state added another 3–4 million taels to its annual revenue through the selling of government positions and minor degrees. This system, known as juanna, had been standard governmental practice ever since the Qin dynasty in the third century BC. Both the Ming and Qing systems allowed wealthy individuals to purchase civil positions up to the fifth or fourth rank (out of nine, with the first rank being the highest), depending on region, and military positions up to the third rank. Purchased positions generally had less upward mobility than positions acquired purely through the examination system, and carried vastly less social prestige, but could nonetheless provide the foundation for a successful political or military career. As with most premodern and early modern states, the central government collected taxes by issuing annual quotas to county governments – “20,000 taels from Dingyang County,” for example – who would then collect and ship the

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quota, minus a small fraction they were allowed to keep for local expenses, to the provincial capital, and then to Beijing. Quotas were determined and refreshed on the basis of periodic land and population surveys, which were conducted once every few decades at the local or provincial level, and much less frequently at the national level. Taxing a fixed percentage of yearly personal income or production would involve annual data-collection at a scale far beyond the administrative means of an early modern state. As noted above, quotas could be lowered, or even waived altogether, if a region had experienced documentable natural disasters. Government expenditures, including official salaries, were largely determined by central authorities, although provinces were also issued an annual sum for discretionary spending. The bulk of local tax collection, particularly collection of the agricultural tax, was conducted through a village-level political institution known as the lijia system: Rural households were organized into units of 10 (jia), each led by a headman (jiazhang). Eleven jia constituted a li, led by a chief (lizhang), who then reported to the county government.4 For each round of tax collection, higher level authorities would issue quotas to the county, which then divided the quota among the various li. Theoretically, each household owed a specific amount, but in reality, the specific distribution of the quota beyond the county level was very much left to local negotiation, the bottom line simply being that the county as a whole had to meet its quota, or at least could give a formal reason (documentable natural disasters, for example) for failing to do so. Given that the state surveyed landownership rather infrequently, this allowed local communities some flexibility in distributing subcounty quotas. County magistrates risked demotion if they failed to submit the required sum to provincial supervisors, and therefore had large personal stakes in the process.5 Commercial taxes and levies, too, had annual quotas, but the nature of their assessment – collected primarily at major shipping hubs – made the quotas difficult to enforce. They were, in any case, a relatively minor component of total state revenue. On the expenditure side, the major item in virtually all imperial Chinese budgets was military expenditures, which accounted for over 50 percent of government spending even in times of peace.6 Paying off the salaries of titled officials required another 10 percent or so, and contributing to the living allowances of the imperial family – who also had some half a million taels of direct income through the landholdings and commercial investments of the

4

5 6

Huang (1966); Li Xinfeng (李新峰), Lun Mingchu Lijia de Shuyi Fangshi (论明初里甲的轮役方 式) [On the Staffing and Management of the Lijia System in the Ming], 2010(14) Mingdai Yanjiu (明代研究) [Res. Ming] 17. Huang (1998). Expenditures are discussed side-by-side with revenues in the sources cited in supra note 1.

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Internal Affairs Bureau (Neiwu Fu)7 – usually took another 5–10 percent. The remainder 30 percent was spent on maintaining major highways, canals, and state granaries, which provided emergency economic relief in the case of provincial-level natural disasters. The latter, in particular, was the primary social welfare function of the late imperial state, and its major safeguard against the massive social unrest that a serious famine could otherwise trigger. In years of military campaigning, military spending rose dramatically and welfare and relief spending fell, whereas the other two components were less malleable. By and large, this system continued to function after the Ming-Qing transition. The Qing state’s initial approach to revenue extraction was stability and continuity. Implementing large-scale changes risked additional social volatility, which an ethnically foreign conquest dynasty could ill afford, and was likely beyond the administrative means of the newly established state. Not only did the new regime copy the Ming’s tax collection procedure,8 it also continued to use the late Ming government’s land and household registries, meaning that the basic tax quotas for agricultural production – the “land and head” tax and the grain tribute – remained unchanged. The few substantive reforms that were immediately implemented were designed to enhance the state’s reputation among the general population, and usually came in the form of tax cuts. The Qing state quickly abolished the main wartime surcharges that the late Ming had added to the agricultural tax after 1618. Apparently agreeing with the popular argument – discussed at greater length in later chapters – that these tax increases were a major, perhaps primary cause, of Ming collapse, the regent Dorgon and his main advisors attempted to eliminate them wholesale immediately upon its seizure of Beijing in 1644. By 1661, however, the Imperial Court had come to the realization that fiscal sustainability was impossible to achieve under the reduced tax quotas, especially when the new dynasty needed to maintain large standing armies as a 7

8

See Teng Deyong (滕德永), Qingdai Hubu yu Neiwu Fu Caizheng Guanxi Tanxi (清代户部与内 务府财政关系探析) [Research on the Relationship between the Board of Revenue and the Imperial Household Department in the Qing Dynasty], 2014(9) Shixue Yuekan (史学月刊) [J. Hist. Sci.] 58. It did, however, make one somewhat unintentional modification to the tax collection infrastructure: Soon after the conquest, the Qing state reinstated an older system of village governance, the baojia system, to complement and reinforce the lijia. Like the lijia system, the baojia statutes also organized village households into units of 10, now called a pai. Ten pai constituted a jia, and 10 jia a bao. A thousand-household bao was therefore a supra-village unit that often covered a fairly large territory. Although the baojia system was initially conceived as a policing institution, functionally similar to the Medieval English Hundred, and would therefore exist separately from the taxation-based lijia apparatus, the two systems almost inevitably began to meld soon after the baojia laws were introduced. This introduced a new layer of responsibility and authority – the thousand-household bao, within which nine 110-household li could be subsumed – into the tax collection process, with varying effects on its efficiency. Over the long run, the central government ultimately had little interest in monitoring the implementation of the baojia law, allowing villages and clans to adjust and adapt based on local circumstances.

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safeguard against anti-Manchu sentiment and to suppress rebellion by Southern fiefdoms, and sought to reinstate a significant portion of the Ming surcharges as formal components of the “land and head” tax.9 Some of these expansionary movements were quickly revoked in the face of fierce opposition from within the bureaucracy, but the total agricultural tax quota did creep up by about 5 million taels from 1661 to the 1680s. During this period, the government also made a continuous effort to convert more of the agricultural tax quota from grain to silver. Although late Ming reforms had already made major progress on this front, around a quarter of the tax quota continued to be assessed and collected in kind throughout the Shunzhi era (1644–1661). The quota in 1661, for example, was around 21.5 million taels of silver and 6.7 million shi of grain. A government edict in 1646 had set the grain tribute quota to 4 million shi a year, which meant that some 2.7 million shi of grain was collected as part of the “land and head tax.” At contemporary conversion prices of some 1.5 taels for each shi, this meant that “land and head tax” provided the government with some 25–26 million taels of income a year. By the 1680s, the government’s total grain collection quota had receded to around 4 million shi – effectively, only the formal grain tribute quota was left – while the silver quota had increased to around 30 million taels,10 generating some 27–29 million taels a year in actual income. Actual collection of grain fluctuated between 4 million shi and 8 million shi for the next century, moving toward the higher end of that spectrum whenever there was a major military campaign – which was often.11 Revenue from the salt trade and commercial tariffs did muster some increase during this period, reaching 2.8 and 1.2 million taels per year, respectively, by the 1680s.12 From the 1680s to around 1725, Qing fiscal institutions experienced their first extended stretch of stability. Agricultural tax quotas for both “land and head” silver and grain tribute were largely unchanged throughout the period, modified primarily on the basis of famines and other natural disasters. No national land surveys were conducted, which meant that the state had no

9 10

11

12

Detailed discussion at Chapter 4, Section A. See Chen Feng (陈锋), Qing Chu “Qing Yao Bo Fu” Zhengce Kaolun (清初”轻徭薄赋”政策考 论) [Studies on the Light Corvée and Low Taxation Policy in the Early Qing Period], 1999(2) Wuhan Daxue Xuebao (武汉大学学报) [J. Wuhan U.] 79. Zhongguo Lidai Hukou, Tiandi, Tianfu Tongji (中国历代户口、田地、田赋统计) [Surveys of Household Registration, Land, and Land Tax in Chinese History] [hereinafter HKTDTFTJ], 530–588 (Liang Fangzhong ed., Zhonghua Shuju Press 2008). Qing Shi Gao (清史稿) [Draft History of the Qing], ch. 123 (Zhao Erxun [赵尔巽] et al. eds., Zhonghua Shuju Press 1998); Qing Shilu Jingji Ziliao Jiyao (清实录经济资料纪要) [Collection of the Economic Sources Provided by the Qing Shilu], 720–721 (1959); He Benfang (何本方), Qingdai Hubu Zhuguan Chutan (清代户部诸关初探) [Studies on the Ports of the Ministry of Revenue in the Qing Dynasty], 1984(3) Nankai Xuebao (南开学报) [Nankai Academic J.] 36.

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informational basis for adjusting the quotas.13 Other taxes continued to grow during this period – the salt tax, in particular, reached 4.5 million taels by the 1720s – but ultimately had limited impact on the state’s fiscal resources due to their much lower volume. The state managed to function on a largely stagnant budget, but by the early eighteenth century, increased commercialization, rapid demographic growth, and substantially higher levels of internal migration began to create serious shortfalls in governmental resources.14 Internal migration, for example, caused significant problems for the collection of the “land and head” tax: Residence registries became outdated very quickly, rendering the government unable to accurately assess the “head” portion of this tax. Updating registries on an annual basis to reflect demographic mobility proved administratively unfeasible, especially given the relatively limited staff that most county governments commanded. The additional tax burdens created by registering additional laborers created strong incentives for households, and indeed entire villages, to underreport their population. Identifying true information from false required the state to conduct independent surveys, which it had neither the manpower nor the financial resources to do on a regular basis. This put considerable pressure on central authorities to simplify tax collection procedures. They responded by essentially eliminating the “head” tax. This was done in two steps: First, in 1712, the Kangxi emperor decreed that the head tax would thereinafter be collected as a fixed annual quota of 3.35 million taels.15 This quota would no longer be responsive to demographic expansion: It might be lowered in years of famine, but never raised beyond its original level. The stated legislative intent was twofold: First, this would encourage population growth – “a prosperous age nurtures the population, and the head tax will never be increased” (shengshi zi ding, yong bu jia fu) – something that the Qing state considered a priority following the devastation of the Ming-Qing transition. Second, it would encourage local populations to accurately report their size, as there would no longer be any financial downside to doing so.

13

14

15

In fact, 1688 is the last year, until the early twentieth century, in which the Qing state conducted a national land survey. The reasons for this are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Zelin (1984). A recent survey of quantitative assessments can be found in Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 66–74. Donghua Lu (东华录), Kangxi 51st Year Second Month Yihai (Jiang Liangqi (蒋良骐) ed., Qilu Shushe 2005). While some scholars have claimed this decree locked both land and head taxes, that is a clear misreading. See Guo Chengkang & Zheng Baofeng (郭成康, 郑宝凤), Lun Qingdai “Bujiafu” jiqi dui Shehui Jingji de Yingxiang (论清代“不加赋”及其对社会经济的影响) [Studies on the Impact of the Qing “No Tax Hike” Policy on Society and Economy], 1995(2) Shehui Kexue Jikan (社会科学辑刊) [Soc. Sci. J.] 100. For refutations, see He Ping (何平), Lun Qing Dai Ding’e hua Fushui Zhidu de Jianli (论清代定额化赋税制度的建立) [On the Establishment of the Fixed Tax System in the Qing Dynasty], 1997(1) Zhongguo Renmin Daxue Xuebao (中国 人民大学学报) [J. Renmin U. China] 61.

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The second step, which functionally overrode the first, took place during the transition between the Kangxi and Yongzheng regimes, and led to the submersion of the “head” tax within the land tax.16 Beginning in 1716 with Guangdong Province, and then in 1723 in Zhili, the government transformed the “head” tax from a separate collection category to a fixed-rate supplement to the land tax. In other words, each unit of land would see its tax duties increase by a fixed amount, dependent on its productivity, whereas the head tax would no longer be assessed and collected. The overall revenue intake from agriculture would remain unchanged, and future adjustments would simply modify the newly increased land tax. This process, titled “distributing the head tax into the land” (tan ding ru mu), was completed in most provinces by 1729. Resistance came primarily from larger landholders, who, compared to their poorer neighbors, were generally able to farm larger plots with less labor, and therefore paid somewhat lower taxes under the old regime. In addition, although gentry families – those who had at least one living examination degree holder – enjoyed some legal exemptions from the “head” tax, Qing tax law granted them no formal exemptions to the land tax. The merging of the two into a unified land tax would therefore increase the tax burden on these families. As a result, implementation of the merger was often a contentious process that pitted local political elites against central agents. Central authorities eventually prevailed, but the tax increases for large landholders and gentry families were, in the end, fairly modest. In most parts of the country, the “head” tax, whether the original individually assessed “head” tax or the fixed rate that was merged into the land tax, only amounted to a fraction of the land tax. The merger’s financial consequences were therefore limited for the vast majority of large landholders, and most accepted it without serious resistance. Some grumbled about fairness, and about “rewarding” economic incompetence and laziness – modern scholars who study neoliberal capitalism might find these sentiments familiar – but later officials who wrote about the reform tended to agreed that it was a positive development, one that simplified collection procedures and lessened the burden on smallholders.17 The Yongzheng reign (1722–1735) turned out to be one of the most important periods in Qing fiscal history. Not only did it see the completion of the “head and land” tax merger, but it also experienced the only systematic attempt to raise the agricultural tax during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the early 1700s, the Qing economy and population had expanded to the point 16

17

See Dai Hui (戴辉), Qingdai “Tan Ding Ru Mu” Zhengce Yanjiu (清代“摊丁入亩”政策研究) [A Study of the “Tan Ding Ru Di” Policy of the Qing], 2007(2) Guangxi Shehui Kexue (广西社会 科学) [Guangxi Soc. Sci.] 118. See, e.g., Ge Tao (戈涛), Qing Dingyin reng Gui Diliang Shu (请丁银仍归地粮疏), HCJSWB, ch. 30 (summarizing some of the reasons for elite resistance and noting that they eventually subsided once the positive aspects of the reform became apparent).

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where the cost of administration far outstripped the formal financial resources provided to local and provincial magistrates. Local authorities dealt with the constant fiscal shortages by creating what amounted to an “informal funding network,”18 which involved multiple categories of local and informal surcharges attached to the collection of the agricultural, salt, and commercial taxes. Because the central government alone had the legal authority to levy surcharges, most of these were technically illegal, but local governments were simply unable to function without the additional revenue they provided. Combined, they could amount to as much as 80 percent or more of the formal tax quota, and paid for the salaries of most local government staff – who provided basic public security and legal services – and some small-scale infrastructure spending, such as dams and irrigation systems. Some of these surcharges involved mathematical manipulations – local authorities would, for example, collect the land tax in copper cash at a higher cash-to-silver rate than they reported, and then keep the surplus cash after shipping the requisite silver to the Ministry of Finance – whereas others were direct “additional taxes” created by local or provincial authorities, often referred to as “crude customs” (lougui).19 Among the most notorious of this latter category was the “meltage fee” (huohao), a common surcharge that nominally aimed to compensate the local government for losses incurred during the process of melting the smaller units of silver (suiyin) submitted by local communities into the larger ingots demanded by higher authorities. In reality, the surcharge far exceeded the actual meltage losses, and was often used to supplement the meager formal salaries of local government staff, and even the magistrates themselves. The lack of formal regulation and transparency in these surcharges naturally bred significant levels of corruption. One aspect of this was that local elites, including degree holders and large landholders, were largely able to avoid informal surcharges due to their sociopolitical stature and ties, whereas commoner smallholders were not. The central government’s response under the Yongzheng Emperor was to attempt to formalize informal surcharges and bring them under central oversight.20 The specific means through which this was accomplished varied from region to region, but all local variations shared a basic institutional framework, known as “collecting meltage fees for public use” (huohao guigong): The central government declared it would crack down on all informal surcharges, but also authorized a formal meltage fee surcharge amounting to, depending on the region, some 10–30 percent of the formal tax quota. Notably, this method allowed it to raise taxes without conducting a national land survey, as the new taxes were simply a proportional extension of old ones. Most of this formalized 18 20

19 Zelin (1984), at 25–71. Id. Id. at 72–115; Chen Guangyan (陈光焱), Zhongguo Caizheng Tongshi: Qingdai Juan (中 国财政通史: 清代卷) [A History of Public Finance in China: Qing Dynasty], 34–42 (2006).

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surcharge was used to provide much needed salary raises to local magistrates and staff, allowing them, in theory, to live relatively comfortably without having to resort to “corruption” – that is, informal fees and surcharges. The subsidy paid to magistrates, in particular, was distributed under a new fiscal category best translated as the “virtue nourishing fee” (yanglian yin), which was managed separately from other forms of government expenditure to ensure its long-term sustainability. In essence, the Qing state was attempting to replace unregulated informal surcharges with a more transparent, centrally administered one. The danger, of course, was that, in local practice, the informal surcharges would continue despite the higher formal tax and salaries. After all, the reason why informal “corruption” had become so prevalent in the first place was not merely because formal funding was inadequate, but also because the likelihood of detection and sanction by central authorities was low. Therefore, if the huohao guigong reforms were to actually have their intended effect, the state would have to find an effective means of cracking down on informal extraction. For a while, the Yongzheng regime was able to do this through targeted auditing of local finances, particularly in the Lower Yangtze, where tax corruption was notoriously prevalent. The system began to unravel almost immediately after Yongzheng’s death in 1735, and perhaps even before then.21 His son, the newly crowned Qianlong Emperor, soon received a wave of memorials asking him to reconsider the reforms, which, as more than one senior official claimed, had effectively amounted to a tax hike on the rural population. The reasons they gave ranged from the ethical to the highly practical, but implicit in many of these arguments was a belief that informal surcharges had begun to return – or had already done so – and therefore that the situation had largely reverted to a pre-1720s state, but with higher formal taxes. By the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps aided by the political domination of some notoriously corrupt councilors in Beijing, informal surcharges had most likely regained their former scale.22 The most fundamental reason for the collapse of fiscal oversight may simply have been the sustained expansion of the Qing economy and population. By 1750, the Qing population was, according to mainstream academic estimates, more than twice the size of Ming population, yet the size – both in terms of manpower and finances – of the bureaucracy had stubbornly remained 21 22

See Zelin (1984), at 247–252. Zhuang Jifa (庄吉发), Qing Shizong yu Fuyi Zhidu de Gaige (清世宗与赋役制度的改革) [The Shizong Emperor of the Qing and Tax Reform], 141–147 (1985) (documenting the reemergence of informal surcharges as early as the Yongzheng reign); Zelin (1984), at 278–301 (documenting the decline of the formalized huohao system over the course of the Qianlong and Jiaqing reigns). On estimates of informal surcharges in the early nineteenth century, see infra Section B.II.

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stagnant.23 Inevitably, more and more administrative duties were delegated to local communities, particularly to the large kinship networks that dominated village life in most Chinese macro-regions, leaving provincial and central authorities with ever weaker information and control over local socioeconomic life. As a result, local surcharges became increasingly difficult to monitor. A substantial expansion of the formal bureaucracy – with a corresponding increase in formal tax quotas to fund it – might have offered a solution, but none was attempted. In fact, from the 1730s onward, no structural changes were made to the fiscal and bureaucratic apparatus for over a century, not even during the expensive military campaigns waged periodically in Tibet and Xinjiang until the 1780s. The agricultural tax stayed largely where it was after the Yongzheng-era increases, with temporary and usually moderate adjustments made on the basis of famine or military expenditures.24 No land surveys were conducted, which meant that local “land and tax” quotas remained at pre1690 levels, with only the formal addition of the huohao surcharge. Revenue from salt taxes, tariffs, and commercial taxes experienced slow and steady growth until the 1750s, and then plateaued at around 10 million taels a year until the early nineteenth century, with occasional and temporary increases to support military spending.25 As a result, total formal government revenue experienced little growth from 1735 onwards, almost all of it due to nonagricultural taxation. This was despite consistent and fairly rapid economic growth and demographic expansion, which led to, as illustrated below, a sharp decrease in the ratio between state revenue and economic output.

b. a statistical sketch: 1644–1850 This section provides a quantitative outline of the institutional history provided in Section A. Officially reported revenue figures are periodically available throughout the dynasty, but as with most historical fiscal statistics, they provide only part of the story. The far more challenging issue, which only a handful of scholars have worked on over the past several decades, is how to estimate the 23

24

25

For population estimates, see, e.g., Kent G. Deng, Unveiling China’s True Population Statistics for the Pre-Modern Era with Official Census Data, 43 Population Rev. 32, Appendix 3 (2004); James Z. Lee & Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000, at Appendix (2001). HKTDTFTJ, at 542–555. See infra Section B.I for a more detailed presentation of reported statistics. Chen Feng (陈锋), Qingdai Caizheng Zhichu Zhengce yu Zhichu Jiegou de Biandong (清代财政 支出政策与支出结构的变动) [Changes in Qing Fiscal Expenditure Policy and Government Expenditure Structure], 2000(5) Jianghan Luntan (江汉论坛) [Jianghan Trib.] 60; Shen Xuefeng (申学锋), Qingdai Caizheng Shouru Guimo yu Jiegou Bianhua (清代财政收入规模与 结构变化) [Changes in the Size and Structure of Qing Fiscal Revenue], 2002(1) Beijing Shehui Kexue (北京社会科学) [Beijing Soc. Sci.] 84.

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table 1.1. Formal tax revenue, pre-Taiping Rebellion Year

1652 1661 1685 1725 1753 1766 1784 1812 1820 1841

“Land and Head” Tax

Grain Tribute

Huohao Surcharge

Salt Tax

Tariffs

Miscellaneous Taxes

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 shi)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

647 433 473 840 831 482

n/a n/a n/a 400 – 300 – 450

212 – 276 443 701 574 – 579

100 – 120 135 430 540 – 481

– – 91 99 142 149 – 151

–

747

435

–

2,126 2,158 2,727 3,007 2,938 2,991 2,964 2,953 3,020 2,943

740

volume of surplus charges. Given the relative paucity of systematic data, any estimate will necessarily involve significant guesswork. Drawing on recent work produced by Mainland Chinese scholars, this section utilizes a number of local sources to provide a bottom-up perspective. They suggest that the overall volume of agricultural surcharges remained largely stable from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, with perhaps a temporary dip during the Yongzheng reign. Over the same period, the Qing economy and population nearly doubled. All estimates provided in Table 1.1 are nominal unless otherwise indicated.

I. Formal Taxes The above table26 provides a basic sketch of the state’s annual silver intake at various points prior to the mid-nineteenth century: “land and head” taxes grew slowly and unevenly from 1644 to 1661, sometimes in silver, more often in grain. From 1661 to the late 1680s, the grain component, with the exception of the roughly 4 million shi of grain tribute, was gradually converted into silver, raising the silver quota to some 30 million taels a year. This quota remained in force until the 1720s, but actual collection was usually only about 90 percent of that. From the 1720s onwards, tighter enforcement of the quota led to a moderate bump of 2–3 million taels, to 29–30 million taels. The “meltage 26

HKTDTFTJ, 542–573; He (1984), at 42; Xu Tan & Jing Junjian (许檀, 经君健), Qingdai Qianqi Shangshui Wenti Xintan (清代前期商税问题新探) [Studies on the Issues of Business Tax in the Early Qing Period], 1990(2) Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Res. Chinese Econ. Hist.]; Chen (2006b), at 88.

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fee” reform added another 3–4 million taels to the agricultural tax beginning in 1725, the first year it was implemented on a national basis. From then on, official silver revenue from agricultural sources experienced no significant change. Compared to the general stability – stagnation, if viewed less charitably – of the agricultural tax, nonagricultural taxation grew at a relatively steady pace for much of the early to mid-Qing. Salt taxes and tariffs grew from around 3 million taels annually in the 1650s to around 6 million by 1725, to 11 million by the 1760s. They experienced a half-century of stagnation between the 1760s and 1810s, but began to increase once again after 1810: salt taxes increased by around 35 percent from 1812 to 1841, more than enough to offset a temporary drop in tariff income during the Opium War and bring the 1841 total to nearly 12 million taels. Miscellaneous taxes – including those assessed on tea, mineral extraction, land transactions, and shop licenses – were minimal throughout this period, and added perhaps 1 million taels each year in the late seventeenth century, and 1.5 million taels in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.27 Finally, the government also brought in around 3 million each year via the selling of official posts and degrees. In addition to its silver revenue, the state also collected, as noted above, as much as 6–7 million shi of annual grain income in the 1660s and 1670s. In following decades, the grain tribute fluctuated between the 4–5 million range and the 7–8 million range: It fell to 4–5 million shi during the early 1700s, but rose again to over 8 million shi in the late 1720s, and then declined to 4–5 million shi in the 1780s, where it tended to remain, with occasional spikes back into the 7 million range, until the mid-nineteenth century crisis.28 The main determining factor seemed to have been military campaigns: The initial spike during the 1670s funded the campaign against the Three Feudatories. Once the revolt was put down, the annual grain tribute immediately declined to around 5 million shi, and did not rise to the 7–8 million level until the Yongzheng and Qianlong campaigns in Xinjiang, Tibet, and the southwest, which continued until the later eighteenth century. Sharp spikes in government spending during the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804) and other minor rebellions would again lead to periodic increases in grain collection, but never beyond the 7–8 million shi ceiling. It would appear, then, that the pre-Opium War Qing state consistently collected grain tribute of roughly 4–5 million shi in peacetime, and some 7–8 million in times of war or other major fiscal needs. At a base market price of around 2 taels per shi – prices fluctuated around this baseline for much of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before falling in the midnineteenth century, and then skyrocketing after 1890 – this boosted the total agricultural tax to around 40–47 million taels per year from the 1720s to the 27

28

Chen Feng (陈锋), Qingdai Caizheng Zhengce yu Huobi Zhengce Ranjiu (清代财政政策 与货币政策研究) [Studies on Qing Fiscal Policies and Monetary Policies], 366 (2008). HKTDTFTJ, 539, 551, 555; Chen (2006b), at 71–72.

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eve of the Opium War in 1840, and the state’s total annual income to 54–61 million taels.29 II. Informal Surcharges So much for formal tax collection. The far more difficult task is to estimate, however crudely, the level of informal surcharges levied by local agents. The earlier the era, the more difficult this becomes due to lack of documentation. In the lead-up to the Yongzheng reforms, a number of provincial officials provided memos estimating that informal surcharges to the “land and head” tax amounted to at least 50–60 percent of the formal quota in their jurisdictions, but this is probably an underestimate, due to the incomplete surveys of informal funding that these central agents inevitably had to rely on.30 They also do not cover surcharges on the grain tribute, which generally were significantly larger, percentage-wise, due to the possibility of currency-conversion manipulation in the collection process. Indeed, a number of local sources complain about grain tribute collection that could reach three times the actual quota.31 There is no way to tell how prevalent such figures were, but if they were indeed representative, then that would suggest – assuming, say, a 60 percent surcharge on the “land and head” tax – that the “real” agricultural tax collected from rural households was about twice as high as the formal quota, and could reach some 50 million taels and 20 million shi a year in the early 1700s. Again, this is a highly speculative estimate, used only for illustrative purposes. Nonetheless, when the Qing court argued that it was actually lowering the actual tax burden on peasants by introducing the Yongzheng-era huohao surcharge of 10–15 percent, and strictly banning all informal surcharges, it was probably correct – so long as it actually eliminated informal surcharges. As discussed above, it did not manage to do so for very long. Somewhat better data become available once we turn our attention to the early nineteenth century: For the 1820s, valuable local data are provided by a set of private reports compiled in Northern Zhejiang by Ke Wuchi, a local scholar, and corroborated by statistics from local county archives.32 These indicate that the “land and head” tax in that region was collected at around 1.7 times the formal quota, and the grain tribute at 2–2.5 times the quota. The grain tribute in Zhejiang constituted a higher share of the total quota – around 29 30

31

32

For systemic estimates of formal taxation, see Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014). Wang Qingyun (王庆云), Shiqu Yuzhi (石渠余纪) [Records of the Shiqu Library], ch. 3 (Beijing Guji Press 1985); Zhuang Jifa (1985), at 111. Bao Shichen, Bao Shichen Quanji: Zhongqu Yishao (包世臣全集: 中衢一勺) [Collected Works of Bao Shichen: A Spoonful from the Middle of the Road], 113 (Huangshan Shushe Press ed., 1993); Bao Shichen, Bao Shichen Quanji: Qimin Yaoshu (包世臣全集: 齐 民四术) [Collected Works of Bao Shichen: The Four Essential Tactics of Social Ordering], 261 (Huangshan Shushe Press ed., 1997). For discussion in greater detail, see Zhou Jian (2020), at 30–35.

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40 percent – than it did nationwide, which meant that, once we put all the figures together, the “real” agricultural tax was around twice the formal quota. These figures are similar to the rough sketches provided by Yongzheng era officials, and also are broadly consistent with other observations provided in early nineteenth century private writings from North China and the Yangtze regions, which regularly complain of grain tribute collection at more than twice the formal quota, and of widespread surcharges added to the “land and head” tax. In addition, they are consistent with emergency surveys conducted during the Taiping Rebellion in Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, and Jiangxi, showing that the “real” grain tribute in these provinces came to around 200–230 percent of the formal quota.33 If we assume, based on these nineteenth century reports and anecdotes, that actual agricultural tax collection was somewhere in the ballpark – very generously construed – of twice the formal quota, this would mean that total state extraction from agricultural from the mid-eighteenth century to the midnineteenth may have come to some 80–90 million taels annually. Pairing this figure with recent academic calculations of Qing agricultural output, we arrive at the rough estimate that the state was extracting around 7–8 percent of agricultural output in the 1680s, perhaps 3–4 percent by the 1760s, and some 2–2.5 percent by the 1830s.34 33

34

An assortment of reports and writings from contemporary officials make use of these surveys. See, e.g., Hu Linyi (胡林翼), Hu Wenzhong Gong Yiji (胡文忠公遗集) [Collected Works of Hu Linyi], ch. 30 (1864); Li Huan (李桓), Baowei Zhai Leigao (宝韦斋类稿) [Collected Works of Li Huan], ch. 65 (1880); Zeng Guofan (曾国藩), Zeng Wenzheng Gong Pidu (曾文正公批牍) [Official Documents of Zeng Guofan], ch. 5 (1935). For modern scholarly analysis that makes use of these sources, see Li Wenzhi & Jiang Taixin (李文治, 江太新), Qingdai Caoyun (清代漕运) [Canal Transport during the Qing], 409–417 (1995). Agricultural production figures are found in Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018); Ma & de Jong (2019). Needless to say, there is controversy surrounding these macro-level estimates, see, e.g., Kent Deng & Patrick O’Brien, Establishing Statistical Foundations of a Chronology for the Great Divergence: A Survey and Critique of the Primary Sources for the Construction of Relative Wage Levels for Ming-Qing China, 69 Econ. Hist. Rev. 1057 (2016); Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 49–50. That said, other attempts to estimate agricultural output reach similar conclusions that only exhibit moderate differences, see, e.g., Xu Yi et al. (2017). The point here is only to provide very rough ballpark estimates for fiscal burdens that can illustrate general trends, not precise measurements. With that in mind, the scale of this estimated decline from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth largely matches the estimates in Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 67–68; and in Guo (2019). One concern I have encountered at workshops is that the imposition of commercial taxes may have had some trickle-down effects on the agricultural population, in the form of depressed prices for cash crops, and therefore that direct agricultural taxes only captured a portion of the economic burden imposed on them by state fiscal extraction. Tea, in particular, constituted a significant share of commercial taxes, and it is not difficult to imagine merchants passing some of the fiscal burdens down to tea farmers by paying them lower prices. It must be emphasized that these dynamics, to the extent they existed, are already captured in my measurements of agricultural tax burdens, which simply divide nominal total direct agricultural taxes by nominal agricultural output: Any decrease in nominal cash crop prices generated by higher commercial taxes is reflected in the nominal agricultural

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These macro-level estimates agree surprisingly well with the most detailed local tax collection records available to us: In Songyang County, in Southern Zhejiang Province, for example, recent estimates based on contract archives and gazetteers indicate that the total amount of agricultural taxes, both formal and informal, collected annually from the county amount to around 3 percent of total estimated production in the eighteenth century, and around 1.5 percent in the nineteenth century.35 The latter estimate, in particular, is derived directly from the total tax payment figures found on private sales contracts, and is therefore significantly more reliable than data culled from official land registries: given that virtually none of these contracts received any governmental verification or oversight, the transacting parties had no substantive incentive to cook the numbers. Quite the opposite, accurate reporting was a necessary precondition of functional land markets, and there is good reason to believe that the local community took great pains to ensure it through the use of middlemen and brokers. In addition, the currently available data on the personal income of local officials in the mid-Qing similarly dovetail with these estimates: Chang Chungli has estimated that the real income of local officials could reach a high of some 20 times their formal government salary, of which most came from landholding and other private economic activities, but a significant share from informal tax surcharges.36 Formal salary payments to local officials amounted to, more or less, 7–10 percent of total government expenditures throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which meant that, if local officials were able to buttress their income by, say, 7 times their formal salary through informal surcharges, then that would bring the total volume of informal surcharges to around 50–70 percent of the formal tax quota. Throw in payments to nontitled counselors, clerks, and yamen runners, and a crude estimate of informal surcharges at around 100 percent of the formal quota seems broadly plausible. It is not entirely clear to what extent a study of state capacity should include informal surcharges in its analysis. Being illegal, they were neither transferred nor reported to the central government, but were instead collected and dispensed directly at the local level. Most often, they subsidized the income of local government staff or funded local public works, such as dams, temples, granaries, or the compilation of county gazetteers.37 This created a fairly uncomfortable situation scenario for central authorities: They had to take these surcharges into account when estimating, however crudely, the “real” agricultural tax burden, but were unable to rely on them for any government activity that went

35

36

output figures in Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018); Ma & de Jong (2019); Xu Yi et al. (2017), which incorporate crop price data. Cao Shuji & Shan Li (曹树基, 单丽), Shicang Shuilu de Yanbian 1772–1952 (石仓税率的演变 1772–1952) [The Evolutionary Process of Agricultural Tax Rate of Shicang (1772–1952)], 3 Zhongguo Nongshi (中国农史) [Agric. Hist. China] 38 (2011). 37 Cited in Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 74. Zelin (1984).

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beyond basic local administration. In other words, apart from local magistrate and staff salaries, none of its major budgetary items – military spending, canal maintenance, cross-regional disaster relief, provision for the imperial family – could rely on funding from informal surcharges. Moreover, as demonstrated by the eventual erosion of the Yongzheng fiscal reforms, they were extremely difficult to monitor and regulate. Yet, despite all these problems, their collection was nonetheless an indispensable pillar of local government operations, without which the state’s rural administrative capacity likely would have collapsed completely. It is not difficult to understand why informal surcharges rarely ballooned to obscene levels even in the absence of effective central oversight. If local officials were unwilling to report or submit these surcharges to the center, they were also unable to rely on the center’s coercive authority to collect them. Quite the opposite, they needed to hide them from central oversight, which required a substantial amount of cooperation from local society. The collection of informal surcharges was therefore negotiated and executed directly between the local government staff and the local population – particularly its genealogical, economic, and religious leaders. As the formal fiscal and administrative capacities of the Qing state declined after the mid-eighteenth century, the power balance between local governments and social forces increasingly shifted toward the latter, until regular administrative activity fell almost completely into the hands of village and kinship based organizations by the later nineteenth century.38 These general circumstances could easily have kept the volume of informal surcharges within socially tolerable levels. One might ask, of course, why these increasingly powerful local communities nonetheless tolerated a substantial amount of informal surcharges, probably equal to or surpassing the volume of formal agricultural taxes. There are some obvious reasons for this: First and foremost, some basic level of surcharge was necessary to keep local governments minimally operational, and it was fully in the interests of local communities to do so.39 The magistrate and his staff did provide a number of social and political services – criminal and civil adjudication, dispute resolution for major social conflicts, inter-village coordination of famine relief and irrigation, and so on – that were highly important, and not easily supplied by local communities themselves. As a number of scholars have argued, with perhaps the brief exception of the early Yongzheng years, the official government budget generally did not pay county magistrates enough to sustain these activities.40 This created a strong incentive for both the magistrates themselves and the communities within their 38

39

40

William T. Rowe, The Significance of the Qianlong-Jiaqing Transition in Qing History, 32 Late Imperial China 74 (2011). Ch’u Tung-tzu, Local Government in China under the Ching (1962); Bradley W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing (2000). Zelin (1984); Ch’u (1962).

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jurisdiction to supplement their income through informal means. On the other hand, as local kinship networks and village organizations became more powerful and well-organized over time, they assumed many of the socioeconomic functions formerly provided by local governments, which would presumably have prevented informal surcharges from growing at the same pace as population and economic expansion. This is exactly what we find in the anecdotal evidence discussed above – and in the more systemic evidence presented below for the late Qing. Of course, not all surcharges were used for the public welfare, but local communities were probably willing to accept that. Although county governments became less powerful over time, they nonetheless maintained some coercive capacity and sociopolitical stature. It was usually better, then, to pay them off, so long as the surcharges were not excessive, than to escalate against any form of informal taxation, which risked drawing a formal military crackdown from higher authorities should the dispute spiral out of hand. At the same time, local magistrates, as noted above, had very little incentive to draw either bureaucratic scrutiny to their nominally illegal tax collection practices, or trigger serious local resistance. The equilibrium outcome of these sociopolitical constraints could easily have been informal surcharges that decreased as a share of agricultural output, but remained relatively stable in absolute volume. Another way to understand these constraints on bureaucratic behavior is to consider the scale and severity of other forms of local corruption: Theft of formal tax revenue by local officials was a chronic and major problem throughout the Qing, leading to nationwide investigations and crackdowns in the Yongzheng, Jiaqing, Daoguang, and Xianfeng eras that sacked hundreds of local magistrates.41 The practice was, of course, far more widespread than what the central government could realistically assess. The imperial court, probably correctly, attributed a substantial share of fiscal under-collection problems, periodically reaching several million taels a year, to straightforward local embezzlement.42 Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, this suggests that the collection of informal surcharges was not at all easy for many local officials: Compared with collecting informal surcharges, embezzling directly from formal tax revenue carried far greater risks. Whereas the latter would almost certainly show up in official accounting books once the imperial treasury in Beijing assessed its revenue intake, the former could be kept off the books entirely as long as the local population acquiesced. The fact that so many officials nonetheless risked the latter is only comprehensible from a political economy perspective if we assume that informal surcharges were subject to enough sociopolitical constraints that straightforward embezzlement, and all the political dangers it carried, was actually preferable from time to time.

41

Chen (2008), at 255–280.

42

Id.

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All in all, formal agricultural taxes plateaued at 32–34 million taels, including huohao, and 5–8 million shi of grain after the mid-eighteenth century, while salt taxes, tariffs, and various commercial taxes formally added another 11–12 million taels. Under the baseline two taels per shi conversion rate, the Qing state’s total formal tax revenue came to around 53–62 million taels. Adding in the roughly 3 million a year brought in via degree and post-selling, total revenue hovered at around 56–65 million taels. For reasons discussed above, it edged toward the higher end of this spectrum in years of war, and toward the lower end in peacetime. Until the mid-nineteenth century, this was the cumulative amount of annual revenue subject to central monitoring and control. The “informal fiscal system,” was, as far as available sources can suggest, roughly of a similar scale: As discussed above, informal agricultural taxes likely matched formal agricultural taxes in scale. Nonagricultural taxes, too, spawned a significant volume of informal surcharges – at least half the formal quota, according to some early Qing reports – which likely increased the total tax burden by a few million taels.43 If we add these crudely estimated informal surcharges to the formal revenue, then the total tax burden on the Chinese economy likely floated at around 100 million taels between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, which is broadly compatible with previous estimates of total government expenditure at around 80–100 million taels annually.44 Recent estimates of nominal GDP come in at 2.5–3 billion for the mid-eighteenth century, and over 5 billion for the mid-nineteenth, which means that government agents went from extracting – legally and illegally – around 4 percent of GDP to slightly less than 2 percent over the course of a Century.45 This was slightly lower than its extraction rate from the rural economy: Agriculture contributed 65–70 percent of GDP throughout this period, but around 75 percent of total government revenue. If we only look at legally collected revenue, the percentages plummet to around 2 percent in the mideighteenth, and only 1 percent in the mid-nineteenth. These figures reflect an extraordinarily limited – indeed increasingly so – fiscal apparatus. One could ask, of course, whether the decline in the “real agricultural tax rate” simply paralleled some sort of decline in per-capita rural income: For example, did China undergo a Malthusian process in which population growth outpaced production growth, leading to rising GDP, but also to decreasing percapita incomes? This could have created a scenario in which, once the aggregate cost of subsistence was subtracted from GDP, the leftover sum – that is, the 43

44 45

See, e.g., Cao Yin (曹寅) memorial, in Kangxi Chao Hanwen Zhupi Zouzhe (康熙朝汉文朱 批奏折) [Red-Marked Memorials from the Kangxi Reign], Kangxi 43rd Year 11th Month 22nd Day (1985); Li Wei (李卫) memorial, in Yongzheng Chao Hanwen Zhupi Zouzhe (雍 正朝汉文朱批奏折) [Red-Marked Memorials from the Kangxi Reign], Yongzheng 2nd Year 4th Month 12th Day (1991). Ma & de Jong (2019); Chung-li Chang, The Income of the Chinese Gentry (1962). Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018), at 986.

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“taxable surplus” – might have stagnated (or even decreased) despite overall GDP growth.46 This hypothesis is clearly incompatible with recent scholarship: Measured in 1840 silver prices, real per-capita income stabilized at around 17–18 taels during the 1680s, following a few decades of post-dynastic transition recovery. Rapid population growth had pushed this down to around 15 taels by 1750, and, depending on the estimate, to around 13–14 taels by the early nineteenth century. From 1800 to 1911, it fluctuated at around 15 taels, despite a near doubling of the population between 1750 and 1850.47 Land reclamation, more intensive land use, and technological innovation joined forces to keep per-capita income largely stable. In other words, the “taxable surplus” probably grew at only a moderately slower pace than did the population – yet state extraction remained locked at 1740 levels. A quick comparison with other early modern states further highlights how shockingly low Qing revenue figures were: As noted in the Introduction, scholars have estimated that state revenue accounted for some 15–20 percent of GDP in Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, 10–15 percent in eighteenth century England, 8–10 percent in pre-Revolutionary France, 7 percent in the nineteenth century United States, and even 5 percent in the highly decentralized nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. At the individual level, the average late Tokugawa farmer could owe some 35–50 percent of his annual produce in taxes and other tributes to his various feudal lords, not counting any rent he may have owed to local landlords.48 In comparison, an average rural household in Qing China’s most heavily taxed province (Jiangsu) likely paid no more than 2.5–3 percent in taxes – taking into account the fact that, as alluded to above, informal surcharges fell much more heavily on smallholders than on large, politically-connected landlords49 – including grain tribute, in the early nineteenth century. If we consider that, at this point in history, Jiangsu’s agriculture

46 47

48 49

For more detailed discussion, see Chapter 5. Numbers drawn from sources used in Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018) (estimating 1840 per capita GDP at 13 taels); and Ma & de Jong (2019), at Appendix Table 4 (giving a higher estimate of around 15 taels for the post-Taiping recovery period). It should be noted that aggregate rent-extraction by landlords does not theoretically affected the “taxable surplus”: The government could always – and did – tax the landlords directly if rent extraction left tenants with barely enough money for basic subsistence. A more detailed discussion of smallholder living standards and Chinese landlordism is provided in Chapter 2. To quickly summarize: Landlordism was much less prevalent, and rents likely somewhat lower, in China than in most other early modern economies. Deng (2011), at 36; Anderson (2009), at 104. If we assume that all informal surcharges fell on smallholder households – who owned some 55 percent of the land in rural Jiangsu, and accounted for a similar share of agricultural production – then they would likely be paying some 2.8 percent of their income to tax collectors. This is likely too high, as large landlords did pay some informal surcharge, and the actual figure was probably closer to 2.5 percent.

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productivity was broadly comparable to those of Japan’s core rice-producing regions,50 the contrast becomes stark indeed. Not only was the Qing fiscal state among the smallest in the early modern world, but it was also, by some distance, the smallest fiscal state in China’s post-Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) history. By most estimates, the Ming government managed to collect 5–7 percent even in its administratively dysfunctional later stages, and likely more than that in its early history.51 Compared to the Yuan and the Song, however, Ming taxes were already relatively low. The Song, in particular, was known for both rapid economic growth and very high taxes – which reached 20 percent or more in some accounts, and well surpassed 10 percent even according to the most conservative estimates.52 These crossdynasty differences in revenue extraction correlated to similarly dramatic differences in the size of the bureaucracy: The ratio of the population that held an official position in the late Ming was at least twice the mid-Qing ratio, whereas the Song ratio was likely at least twice the Ming ratio. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3, the political history of China in the Second Millennium was the story of an ever-shrinking government. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing state had reached the point where its fiscal constraints were so severe there was almost no room for error: As a number of studies have argued, it lacked the financial resources to deal with major natural disasters or famines, and struggled to scrape together the money for military campaigns.53 The slow but inevitable growth of the basic items on the budget – most importantly regular military upkeep and maintenance of major roads and waterways – due to demographic and economic expansion left the Qing court with very few resources for famine relief.54 Both local granary stocks and the volume of targeted central relief suffered substantial declines from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, and collapsed almost entirely after 1850.55 When we consider that, with demographic expansion and higher population density, the number of households affected by the average famine had actually grown since the eighteenth century, the declining volume of government relief seems even more problematic. Similarly, major military campaigns became more difficult to fund, and by the 1830s, the Qing court was having difficulty paying even the basic upkeep for its regular army. All in all, it was extremely ill-prepared for the geopolitical, economic, and social 50 53 54

55

51 52 Li (1998, (2011); Pomeranz (2000). Huang (1969). Liu (2015). Perdue (2005), at 549–559; Will, Wong, & Lee (1991). Famine relief was not entirely reliant on governmental funding – local donations played a significant role – but state revenue nonetheless provided the lion’s share of grain reserves. See Ni Yiping (倪玉平), Shilun Qing Chao de Changping Cang (试论清朝的常平仓) [On EverNormal Granaries in the Qing], in Zhongguo Gudai Zaihai Shi Yanjiu (中国古代灾害史 研究) [Studies on the History of Natural Disasters in Historical China], 186 (He Zhiqing ed., 2007). See Will, Wong, & Lee (1991); Carol H. Shuie, The Political Economy of Famine Relief in China, 1740–1820, 36 J. Interdisciplinary Hist. 33 (2005).

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turmoil of the 1840s and 1850s, and soon found itself mired in fiscal difficulties of unprecedented scope. The way it addressed these challenges was frequently impressive, involving sweeping institutional changes to its revenue structure, but also profoundly counterintuitive in critical ways.

c. the later nineteenth century During the 1830s, the Qing economy experienced serious deflationary pressures. An outflow of silver due to the British opium trade coincided with a drop in the silver supply from Japan and South America to create large monetary shortages, first in urban centers and eventually across the entire commercial economy.56 This led to a widespread decline in commercial activity and consumption, which drove both the urban and rural economy – which had become highly reliant on local produce markets and land markets by the mid-Qing – into a sustained period of stagnation and occasional recession, lasting until the 1840s. Two regional draughts in North and South China during the later 1840s further aggravated these economic problems, leading to significant famines in Shandong (1846) and Guangdong and Guangxi (1849). Major provincial-level famines demanded rapid economic relief, but the state had very little capacity by this point to provide it. This created significant levels of social unrest, particularly in Guangdong and Guangxi. When the Taiping Rebellion flared up in Guangxi in 1850, it rapidly swelled its ranks by recruiting from famine-struck areas.57 The Qing military response was slow and initially underfunded, giving the rebellion time to gather strength. Once it began sweeping across the southern provinces between 1852 and 1853, the massive military response it demanded almost immediately threw the Qing state into an unprecedented fiscal crisis. Fiscal crisis was, of course, brewing even before the outbreak of the Taiping: The roughly 30 million taels of military expenditure during the Opium War and the 14.7 million taels of reparations demanded by the Treaty of Nanjing had already significantly weakened the Qing state’s fiscal circumstances.58 One could argue, in fact, that these negative shocks contributed to its sluggish response to both the famines and the initial wave of uprisings. Nonetheless, it 56

57

58

Alejandra Irigoin, A “Trojan Horse” in Daoguang China?: Explaining the Flows of Silver (and Opium) In and Out of China (LSE Economic History Department, Working Paper No. 173, 2013). Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850, at 238 (1987); Philip A. Kuhn, The Taiping Rebellion, in 10 The Cambridge History of China, 264, 266 (John King Fairbank ed., 1978). Wang Tieya (王铁崖), Zhongwai Jiu Yuezhang Huibian (中外旧约章汇编) [A Compilation of Treaties and Agreements between China and Foreign Countries in the Old Period], 31, 144–147 (1957); Mao Haijian (茅海建), Yapian Zhanzheng Qingchao Junfei Kao (鸦片战争清朝军费考) [Studies on the Military Expenditure during the Opium War], 1996(6) Jindai Shi Yanjiu (近代史研究) [Mod. Chinese Hist. Stud.] 34.

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was ultimately the severe socioeconomic devastation and massive military spending caused by the Taiping Rebellion that finally forced the Qing state to revamp large parts of its fiscal apparatus: The Qing military response cost around 20 million taels in the first 9 months alone – almost half the central government’s disposable income for that year – and swiftly escalated after that. By 1853, not only had military expenditures reached unprecedented levels, but some of the major revenue-yielding regions had partially fallen under Taiping control, which led to a drastic reduction in fiscal revenue – by some estimates by as much as 60 percent of the regular total.59

I. The Initial Response Desperate times brought desperate measures. Some relief came in the form of loans from Western powers and a short-lived attempt to issue more copper and paper currency,60 but most of the slack would have to be picked up via domestic revenue extraction. The Qing Court’s response came in two major steps: First, it temporarily authorized local provinces affected by the rebellion to collect their own taxes without central review. The streamlining of provincial revenue collection and spending allowed governors to raise and fund militias, who were often more effective in local combat than central armies. Most governors found, after some experimentation and research, that the most effective way to raise emergency funds was simply to tap the informal surcharge system that they, and central level administrators, had long left unregulated.61 Thus, in 1855, an experiment in Xiangtan County, Hunan Province raised the county’s formal grain tribute by 130 percent through the imposition of new surcharges. This was followed by similar reforms in Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, and eventually in Henan, which boosted the formal grain tribute income in those provinces by 50–80 percent.62 These were all provinces in which the grain tribute had constituted around 20 percent of formal government revenue, meaning that the reforms boosted formal revenue by around 10–15 percent. At the same time, most of these provinces took great care to not increase the “real” agricultural tax burden on rural households. Quite the opposite, they vigorously attempted to lower it, under the rationale that lower tax burdens were necessary to secure the loyalty of the rural population in times of rebellion. They did this by, essentially, copying the Yongzheng huohao reforms in 59

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Stephen R. Halsey, Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft, 87 (2015); Peng Zeyi (彭泽益), Shijiu Shiji Houbanqi de Zhongguo Caizheng yu Jingji (十九世纪后半期的中国财政与经济) [Chinese Finance and Economy in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century], 139 (1983). 61 He (2013); Shi & Xu (2008), at 72–92. See sources cited at supra note 33. Yan Aihong (晏爱红), Qingdai Caoliang Jiafu Chutan (清代漕粮加赋初探) [A Preliminary Exploration into Surcharges on the Qing Grain Tribute], 2009(4) Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Res. Chinese Econ. Hist.] 59.

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attempting to clamp down on informal surcharges even as they raised the formal grain tribute quota.63 Effectively, some informal surcharges were formalized and brought under the control of provincial authorities, while a concentrated effort was made to temporarily eliminate the remainder. This brought additional revenue into the hands of provincial authorities, but at considerable cost to county-level governments. Provincial authorities believed, in any case, that these formal grain tribute quota increases should be temporary, and indeed, by the 1870s the quotas had begun to recede in some of these provinces.64 Although the creation of new provincial level surcharges was, all things considered, relatively moderate in scale, some regions took more drastic measures. The primary culprit was Sichuan, which imposed additional surcharges during the late 1850s and early 1860s that essentially doubled, and in some years tripled, the total agricultural tax collected from local farmers.65 Even by Qing standards, Sichuan had always been an unusually undertaxed province – by the mid-nineteenth century, it accounted for more than 10 percent of national population and a comparable share of production but supplied only 5 percent of agricultural tax revenue – so these new surcharges only added some 2 million taels a year.66 Nonetheless, they were such an outlier nationally that they immediately drew much condemnation within the bureaucracy, and could only be irregularly assessed.67 It is unclear whether the new surcharges were enough to compensate for the serious downturn in formal tax collection during the Taiping years. The loss of revenue from war-torn provinces depleted official revenue by at least 10 million taels a year throughout the 1850s, whereas the new surcharges that historians have conventionally identified amount to substantially less than that.68 There may have been other surcharges that we simply cannot observe, but all things 63

64 65

66

67

68

Sun Changfu (孙长绂) memorial, Chinese First National Historical Archives (中国第一历史档案 馆), Beijing [hereinafter FNHA] 03-4848-014, Tongzhi 4th Year 8th Month; Liu Kunyi (刘坤一) memorial, FNHA 03-4870-061, Tongzhi 11th Year 5th Month 28th Day. See, e.g., Liu Kunyi’s report in FNHA 03-4870-061. Ni Yuping (倪玉平), Cong Guojia Caizheng dao Caizheng Guojia: Qingchao Xiantong Nianjian de Caizheng yu Shehui (从国家财政到财政国家: 清朝咸同年间的财政与社会) [From State Fiscal Policy to a Fiscal State: Public Finance and Society in the Xianfeng and Tongzhi Periods], 147–149 (2017). Id.; HKTDTFTJ, 387 (on Sichuan’s tax quota relative to other provinces). Contemporary officials were cognizant of Sichuan’s relatively low tax burden. See Luo Bingzhang (骆秉章) memorial, FNHA 03-4897-097, Tongzhi 2nd Year 4th Month 1st Day. Luo Bingzhang memorial, FNHA 03-4897-097. See Chapter 6, Section B for detailed discussion on official discussions over Sichuan taxation. Additional taxes imposed on Sichuan seemed to supply the bulk of new agricultural taxation in the 1950s – surcharges imposed elsewhere were piecemeal, and usually amounted to only a fraction of the preexisting quota. They were, by most estimates, nowhere near enough to make up for the severe fall in formal quota collection. See Ni (2017), at 110, 149–153; Peng (1983), at 161–163, 173.

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considered, it seems extremely unlikely that the government’s total fiscal extraction from agriculture experienced any substantial growth during the Taiping years – quite the opposite, in fact. If it were to pay off its sharply escalating military expenditures, the money had to come from somewhere else. The Taiping Rebellion’s long-term impact on the agricultural tax came not in the form of increased volume, but rather in fundamental changes to how it was spent: Delegation of authority to the provinces, especially the Yangtze provinces and South China, became a semi-permanent feature of the late Qing fiscal state.69 From the 1860s onward, despite some initial efforts by the central government to reestablish the old centralized system, strong resistance from the newly empowered provinces led to the eventual entrenchment of a new structure, in which only around 10 million taels – eventually growing to 17 million as the total volume of government revenue increased – were shipped to Beijing, whereas the remainder, which constituted some 80–85 percent of total revenue, was collected and spent at the provincial level, with only final accounting records being submitted to the center. The center still controlled the basic quotas that each province could collect from taxpayers, and therefore the total scale of state finance, but no longer directly monitored how most of it was spent. In particular, it lost the ability to squeeze spending in well-off provinces to compensate poorer provinces in times of need.

II. Commercial Taxes and Tariffs The second major step the Qing court took was to create a new commercial tax called the lijin, which eventually proved to be one of its most important fiscal lifelines over the next half-century.70 The new lijin tax began as a fiscal experience in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province in 1853, was extended to the entire province in 1854, and then to the entire country over the next 8 years. In theory, it allowed provincial governments to collect 1 percent of the value of goods – primarily, textiles, ceramics, crafts, coal, tea, and condiments – passing through major transportation hubs. In theory, each shipment of goods should only be taxed once, but this soon proved impossible to enforcement, and many shipments were taxed at all major hubs they passed through. By the 1860s, lijin taxes were also collected, albeit somewhat irregularly, at the original place of production and at the final place of sale. Combined, these measures yielded as high as 10 percent of the value of interregional domestic commerce, and 69

70

Liu Wei (刘伟), Wanqing Dufu Zhengzhi (晚清督抚政治) [The Politics of Local Governors in Late Qing] (2003); Wei Guangqi (魏光奇), Qingdai Houqi Zhongyang Jiquan Caizheng Tizhi de Wajie (清代后期中央集权财政体制的瓦解) [The Collapse of the Centralized Fiscal System in Late Qing China], 1986(1) Jindaishi Yanjiu (近代史研究) [Mod. Chinese Hist. Stud.] 210. Mann (1987); Luo Yudong (罗玉东), Zhongguo Lijin Shi (中国厘金史) [The History of Lijin in China] (1936).

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provided over 10 million taels in annual revenue, most of it directly funneled into the military campaign against the Taiping. The rebellion ended, for the most part, after the retaking of Nanjing in 1864, but the Qing’s fiscal difficulties did not end with it. Successive defeats in the two Opium Wars and the drawn-out Taiping campaign had made the Qing state acutely aware of its military and economic shortcomings. It therefore undertook a three decade-long campaign, commonly known as the Yangwu (“Foreign Affairs”) Movement, to support domestic industrialization and military modernization. A properly equipped and trained modern military would require vastly greater amounts of money – perhaps 20–30 million taels a year – than its old revenue system was able to afford, not least because the necessary industrial infrastructure would have to be built from scratch. In addition, the repayment of war indemnities and foreign debt accumulated during the previous two decades – some 35 million taels in total, at annual interest rates of around 7 percent – also demanded several million taels a year. Combined, these fiscal pressures set off the largest increase of government revenue in Qing history. Not only was the lijin tax made a permanent component of the fiscal system, reaching some 13.5 million taels per year by the later 1860s, and 14–16 million taels by the early twentieth century,71 but several of the traditional revenue categories soon underwent dramatic expansions. Tariff income was arguably the most important source of revenue growth in the post-Taiping era, even outpacing the lijin tax.72 From 1842 onwards, the Qing opened a number of ports and internal transportation hubs to international trade, beginning with only Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Xiamen, and Shanghai, but expanding to 21 ports and hubs by 1890. Both imports and exports were taxed – the latter usually at a significantly higher rate than the former, due to restrictions provided by treaties with Western imperial powers. With the rapid expansion of foreign commerce, total tariff income soon exploded from around 5.5 million taels in 1845 to 8.5 million by 1863, to 11.7 million in 1872, to 15–20 million during the 1880s, and then to 20–25 million during the 1890s. Some 50–60 percent of this came from export taxes – that is, taxes on domestic production. Formal salt taxes and miscellaneous commercial taxes also grew substantially in this period. The salt tax, driven by the additional of a new “salt lijin,” grew from around 5 million taels per year around 1860 to 7 million during the

71 72

Luo (1936), at 463, 469. Figures from Yang Duanliu & Hou Houpei (杨端六, 侯厚培), Liushiwu Nian lai Zhongguo Guoji Maoyi Tongji (六十五年来中国国际贸易统计) [Statistics of China’s Foreign Trade during the Last Sixty-Five Years], 122–123 (1931); Liu Yueyun (刘岳云), Guangxu Kuaiji Biao (光绪会计表) [Accounting Tables of Guangxu Period], 1–2 (1901); Qingchao Xu Wenxian Tongkao (清朝续文献通考) [Another Encyclopedia of Official Documents of the Qing Dynasty], 8225 (Liu Jinzao (刘锦藻) ed., 1936).

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1870s, and some 12–13 million in the 1890s.73 “Miscellaneous taxes” (zashui) went from around 1.5 million per year in the 1840s and 1850s to some 5–10 million by the 1880s and 1890s, much of it collected from the now-legalized opium trade, mining, residential land transactions in towns and cities, and pawnshops.74 This latter category had quite a bit of substantive overlap as the lijin, and often relied on the same administrative infrastructure – although the lijin was somewhat more interregional in focus, whereas miscellaneous taxes tended to target local, intraregional commerce, and were therefore significantly more volatile in their annual yield. All in all, formal nonagricultural tax revenue expanded from 12–13 million taels per year during the pre-Taiping decades to some 45–50 million taels during the 1880s, and to around 55 million during the early 1890s. If we subtract the roughly 7–8 million taels brought in each year via import taxes, this meant that domestic nonagricultural economic activity yielded around 40 million taels each year in the 1880s, and some 48 million in the 1890s. Informal surcharges were, of course, rampant in lijin, salt tax, and miscellaneous commercial tax collection, with a particularly large number of allegations regularly levied at the former.75 Complaints that actual lijin or miscellaneous collection amounted to two or three times the amount formally reported were commonplace, whether in local complaints or official memorials.76 Although systemic statistics, even from the local level, are difficult to locate, it hardly seems unreasonable to assume that informal surcharges brought the “real” nonagricultural tax burden to at least 75–80 million taels per year, and probably more, during the 1880s – some scholars believe it came to some 95 million taels in the early 1890s.77 Recent estimates of nominal late Qing GDP place the size of the nonagricultural economy at around 1.8 billion taels per year in the mid-nineteenth century, and around 2 billion by the 1890s78 – meaning the “real” tax rate imposed on it leapt from perhaps 1.5 percent around 1850 (assuming that the “real” nonagricultural tax was around double the formal quota) to around 5 percent by the 1890s.

73

74

75 76

77

78

For salt revenue figures, see Zeng Yangfeng (曾仰丰), Zhongguo Yanzheng Shi (中国盐政 史) [The History of Salt Policy in China], 27–30 (1936). Qingchao Xu Wenxian Tongkao, at 8225–8228, 8248–8249; Wu Zhaoshen (吴兆莘), Zhongguo Shuizhi Shi (中国税制史) [The History of Taxation in China] 116–120 (1937); Shi & Xu (2008), at 262. Luo (1936). See, e.g., Tai Ying Lingshi Zhongguo Ge Kou Shangwu Bao (台英领事中国各口商务报), in Huangchao Jingshi Wen Xinbian (皇朝经世文新编) [New Collected Writings on Statecraft of the Qing Dynasty], ch. 10 (2) (Mai Zhonghua [麦仲华] ed., Wenhai Press 1967). Shi & Xu (2008), at 258–264; Zhou Zhichu (周志初), Wanqing Caizheng Jingji Yanjiu (晚清财政经济研究) [Studies on Late Qing Finance and Economy], 262–264 (2002). Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2014); Ma & de Jong (2019).

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III. The Continued Stagnation of Agricultural Taxation This, then, was the general fiscal context in which the Qing state made one of its strangest and arguably most destructive decisions: From the Opium War era to the end of the century, a period in which nonagricultural taxes more than tripled, the agricultural tax experienced virtually no growth in total volume – and may actually have decreased. As a share of total agricultural output, it plummeted from the pre-Opium War level of 2 percent (1 percent if we only count formal taxes) to 1–1.2 percent by the end of the century: Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the basic “land and tax” quota remained at around 30 million taels, but collection was consciously lax under the formal rationale that the rural economy needed time to recover from the mid-century rebellions, which had a death toll of at least 25 million – some 5–6 percent of the total population.79 A massive famine that swept across North China from 1876 to 1879 killed another 9–13 million, further delaying the restoration of rigorous collection practices. Thus, throughout most of the post-Taiping period, it yielded 23–24 million taels per year, down from the 29 million taels it yielded prior to the rebellion. The government’s silver income was reinforced by converting some of the grain tribute into silver, but this was partially offset by massive reductions to the formal grain tribute quota for the Lower Yangtze provinces, which shaved some 2 million taels off the government’s formal revenue each year.80 All in all, the converted grain surplus added perhaps 3–4 million taels to government coffers each year. Another 2 million shi or so of grain was still shipped to Beijing, mostly via sea, rather than through the increasingly unnavigable Grand Canal. Formal huohao surcharges still provided some 3 million taels each year, bringing the formal “agricultural tax” to around 30 million taels and around 2 million shi of grain – a decline of some 7 million taels, at mid-nineteenth century grain prices, from the roughly 32 million taels and 4–5 million shi of grain it collected annually in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.81 These estimates, along with other fiscal statistics, are summarized in the Table 1.2:82

79 80

81 82

Figures in this paragraph drawn from: Shi & Xu (2008), at 210; Liu (1901), at 1–2. This includes direct reductions to silver revenue and, more importantly, the estimated silver value of grain revenue reductions. See Liu Kexiang (刘克祥), Shijiu Shiji Wushi zhi Jiushi Niandai Qing Zhengfu de Jianfu he Qingfu Yundong (十九世纪五十至九十年代清政府的减赋和清赋运 动) [Qing Government’s Campaigns to Reduce and Sort Out Taxes, 1850s to 1890s], 7 Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Yuan Jingji Yanjiu Suo Jikan (中国社会科学院经济研究所集 刊) [Bull. Inst. Econ. Chinese Acad. Soc. Sci.] 321 (1984). Shi & Xu (2008), at 214. Figures followed by ~ are extrapolations from nearby years or contain subcomponents that were converted from grain into silver at official rates. Data compiled from a number of sources: Guangxu Kuaiji Biao, at 1–2; Qingchao Xu Wenxian Tongkao, at 8225–8228, 8245–8249; Deng Shaohui (邓绍辉), Wanqing Fushui Jiegou de Yanbian (晚清赋税结构的演

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table 1.2. Formal tax revenue, post-Taiping Rebellion Year

1861 1869 1875 1885 1894 1901 1903 1908 1911

“Land and Head” Tax

Grain Tribute (converted value

Huohao Surcharge

Lijin

Salt Tax (including salt lijin)

Tariffs

Miscellaneous Taxes

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

(10,000 taels)

– – – 291 300

1,229 1,366 1,346 1,281 1,295 1,600 1,625 1,842 4,319

550~ – 700~ 739 1,365 1,350 1,305 1,500~ 4,631

850~ 1,000~ 1,169 1,447 2,299 2,470 3,053 3,400~ 4,314

– – – 880 778 440 560 1,000~ 2,616

– – – – – – 2,302 800~ 2,317 840~ 2,960 total 3,540 total 2,736 1,700~ 4,967 total budgeted

300

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Informal surcharges continued to exist, of course, both at the provincial and local levels: The most systematic calculation of late Qing agricultural taxation – done by Wang Yeh-chien on the basis of a nation-wide tax survey conducted in 1908 – places total silver revenue from agricultural production at 71 million taels, of which 33 million came from formal sources, including the “land and head tax,” parts of the grain tribute collected in silver, and formal huohao surcharges.83 This leaves 1908 informal surcharges, provincial and local combined, at some 38 million taels a year, divided in a ratio of roughly 6–4 between locally created surcharges and provincially authorized ones. He then adds a formal grain tribute quota of 7.2 million shi. With various surcharges, this yielded some 31 million taels of converted silver income, bringing the total to 102 million taels. Several elements of this estimate are questionable, even though the final figure of 102 million taels was likely not far from the truth: First and foremost, most other studies of the in-kind grain tribute yield a much lower estimate than Wang’s 8 million shi figure. Instead, they emphasize the steadily decreasing importance of the grain tribute to Qing finances,84 which suggests that Wang overestimates both the formal grain quota and the surcharges attached to it. These other studies indicate that about half of the formal grain tribute quota

83

84

变) [The Evolution of the Tax Structure in the Late Qing Dynasty], 1997(4), Sichuan Shifan Daxue Xuebao (四川师范大学学报) [J. Sichuan Normal U. ], 104; Yang & Hou (1931), at 122–123; Wang Yeh-Chien, Land Taxation in Late Imperial China, 1750–1911, at 75 (1973); Zhou Yumin (周育民), Wan Qing Lijin Linian Quanguo Zong Shouru de Zai Guji (晚清 厘金历年全国总收入的再估计) [A Recalculation of the Total Annual Likin’s Revenue during the Late Qing], 2011(3) Qingshi Yanjiu (清史研究) [The Qing Hist. J.] 1; Luo (1936), at 436, 439; Zeng (1936), at 27–30. Tax revenues declined in 1901 due to the Boxer Movement and ensuing political turmoil. The government set its own grain-to-silver and grain-to-cash conversion ratios throughout the late Qing, which were often very different from market rates. For most of this period, the ratio was generally set at around 2 taels of silver for each shi of grain, which is the estimate I employ here. For example, during the 1850s and 1860s, the conversion rate in Jiangxi was set at around 3,400 cash for each shi, largely equivalent, at contemporary cash to silver prices, to around 1.9 taels of silver. For the discussion of various primary sources, see Yan (2009), at 63–64. After 1901, the government added around 7 percent to the cash conversion prices. Id. Market prices for grain increased to nearly 4 taels per shi between 1901 and 1911 in the richest parts of the country, see Zhou (2002) (citing Wang Yeh-chien), which meant government conversion rates were far too low, but they were nonetheless the measures that were employed in official budgeting. Wang (1973), 75. Note that, to reach the 37 million tael sum for formal taxation given on this page, one must add 4 million taels of converted grain tribute and 3 million taels of huohao surcharges to Wang’s estimate of the formal land tax quota, which was around 30 million. Hence, silver revenue alone came to 33 million. Dong Jihu (董继瑚), Qingdai Caoyun zhi Yanjiu (清代漕运之研究) [Studies on Canal Transport in the Qing Dynasty] (1944); Zhou Tang (周棠), Zhongguo Caizheng Lungang (中国财政论纲) [An Outline of Chinese Finance] 23, 297 (1911); Qingchao Xu Wenxian Tongkao, at ch. 68; 2 Zhongguo Jindai Jingji Shi 1895–1927 (中国近代经济 史 1895-1927) [Modern Economic History of China, 1895–1927], 987 (Wang Jingyu ed., Renmin Press 2000).

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had been converted to silver by the early twentieth century, adding, as noted above, some 4 million taels of formal income to government coffers. The physically shipped grain quota likely fellow below 2 million shi, which amounted to 6 million taels of income at 1908 conversion rates, bringing the formal grain tax burden to around 10 million a year. Assuming that, in line with Wang’s general estimates, informal surcharges basically matched the formal quota in volume, then, grain tax collections would have added a total of around 20 million taels to the total agricultural tax burden, bringing it up to 91 million, instead of 102 million. In addition, Wang’s estimates almost certainly left out some local surcharges that escaped the notice of government surveyors – the likelihood of overlooking provincial surcharges is obviously much lower. There is no way to accurately estimate their volume, but even if we believe that Wang underestimated local surcharges by as much as a third, and that their total volume was closer to 35 million than the roughly 23 million he estimates, that would still imply a nominal agricultural taxation level of only around 103 million taels – very close to Wang’s original estimate of 102 million taels. It represents a roughly 25 percent increase from the 80 to 85 million tael estimate for the early nineteenth century. Agricultural tax levels in 1908 were, in any case, substantially higher than pre-1895 levels due to the addition of massive war indemnities, totaling some 650 million taels, after the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Uprising, which forced the creation of new taxes at all levels of the bureaucratic ladder just to make annual repayments. Previous scholarship puts the total agricultural tax increase between 1895 and 1908, formal and informal combined, at around 15–20 million taels, which would place pre-1895 agricultural taxes at around 82–87 million taels.85 In other words, the total agricultural tax burden remained, in absolute volume, either at or below pre-Taiping levels for nearly the entire latter nineteenth century. County-level records largely corroborate this claim: Records from Ding County in Zhili Province, for example, show that formal and informal agricultural taxes alike remained largely stable between 1858 and 1899, but increased rapidly thereafter, by some 8–10 percent between 1899 and 1905, and then another 45 percent from 1905 to 1907.86 Across the country, formal “land and head” tax quotas actually fell by around 5–7 million taels from 1850 to 1895, but this was largely made up by a comparable increase in informal surcharges.87

85 86

87

Wang (1973), at 62–65; Shi & Xu (2008), at 277–290. Feng Dehua & Li Ling (冯德华, 李凌), Hebei Sheng Dingxian zhi Tianfu (河北省定县之田赋) [Land Tax in Ding County of Hebei Province], 1936(4) Zhengzhi Jingji Xuebao (政治经济学 报) [Bull. Pol. Econ.] 443. Xu Yi estimates that the total amount of new surcharges imposed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, prior to the first Sino-Japanese War, was around 10 million taels a year, of which half likely came from agricultural sources. See Xu Yi (徐毅), Wan Qing Juanshui Zonglun: yi 1851–1894 wei Beijing (晚清捐税综论——以1851–1894年为背景) [Summary of

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table 1.3. Tax revenue, formal and informal, 1720, 1820, and 1908 Year (All estimates in 10,000 taels) Formal agricultural taxes Formal nonagricultural taxes Agricultural taxes, formal and informal combined Nonagricultural taxes, formal and informal combined Total formal taxes Total taxes, formal and informal combined Total taxes as a share of estimated nominal GDP

Circa 1720

Circa 1820

3,500~ 675~ 7,000~

4,420~ 1,250~ 8,500~

4,736 7,742~ 10,300~

1,300~

2,500~

13,900~

4,175~ 8,300~ Around 4.5 percent

5,670~ 11,000~ Around 2 percent

1908

12,478~ 24,200~ Around 3.5 percent

At the same time, the rural economy had largely recovered by around 1880 in terms of cultivated acreage, total population, gross production, and real per-capita income, and had reached new heights in all but the last category by the end of the dynasty.88 More importantly, large influxes of silver in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to rapid inflation, increasing the price of rice in most parts of North China and the Lower Yangtze from roughly 0.04 taels per kilogram around 1880 – similar to early nineteenth century prices – to twice that by 1910. The nominal agricultural output therefore increased from around 3.5 billion taels in the 1840s to 10–11 billion by 1911, with nearly all the increase coming after 1890, when grain prices skyrocketed to their highest point in China’s late imperial history.89 This meant that, as a share of agricultural output, agricultural taxes declined from around 2 percent prior to the Opium War to a substantially lower level by the 1890s, and then to around 1 percent by 1908.90 The divergence between agricultural and nonagricultural tax rates – the latter had, as estimated above, more than tripled by the 1890s, and continued to grow rapidly afterwards – is simply astounding. Table 1.3 pulls together the above estimates of formal and informal taxation at three different points in time – around 1720, before the Yongzheng reforms,

88 89 90

Taxes and Levies during Late Period of Qing Dynasty 1851–1894], 2009(3) Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Res. Chinese Econ. Hist.] 98. Ma & de Jong (2019); Xu Yi et al. (2017). Ma & de Jong (2019), Appendix Table 4; Xu Yi et al. (2017). On potential concerns over the trickle-down burdens on farmers imposed by the creation of new commercial taxes, see discussion at supra note 34. Calculating agricultural fiscal burdens by dividing nominal direct agricultural taxes by nominal gross agricultural production already captures any burden the new commercial taxes may have indirectly imposed by farmers by lowering cash crop prices.

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around 1820, and in 1908, after the first round of early twentieth century tax increases:91 The growth in revenue from 1720 to 1820 was a result of steady growth of nonagricultural taxes, coupled with a short burst of growth in formal agricultural taxes during Yongzheng’s meltage fee reforms. From 1820 to 1908, formal agricultural taxes experienced almost no growth, whereas informal agricultural taxes experienced moderate growth – but primarily after the imposition of massive war indemnities in 1901, and only enough to barely keep pace with inflation. Nonagricultural taxes, in sharp contrast, grew explosively after 1850, and accounted for the lion’s share of state income by the early twentieth century. The contrast between the two categories could hardly be more vivid.

IV. The Inadequacy of the Response This might have been somewhat understandable if the Qing state had actually been able to adequately fund itself through raising nonagricultural taxes alone, but that was far from the case: The Qing treasury held around 1 million taels in 1865, when the post-Taiping recovery began. By 1894, on the eve of the SinoJapanese War, it held roughly 10 million taels. While this does suggest that overall silver intake outpaced expenses by some 9 million taels in the previous 29 years, it also overlooks the roughly 46 million taels of foreign debt, at 7–9 percent annual interest, that the government accumulated during those years.92 Taking that into account, formal government revenue likely fell short of meeting expenses by around a few million taels each year. The Sino-Japanese War then depleted treasury reserves by 5 million taels within the course of a year, 91

92

Sources and estimation methods have been explained above. Figures followed by ~ are extrapolations based on data from nearby years. The informal taxation estimates, in particular, are very rough ballpark estimates, and are used here only for illustration of basic trends. Grain tribute income has been converted into taels at contemporary official conversion prices. GDP estimates are from Ma & de Jong (2019); Xu Yi et al. (2017); and Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018), which provide largely consistent estimates of nominal GDP (in taels) for 1840, at around 5.5 billion taels, and offer basic extrapolation to both 1720 and 1905–1910. Needless to say, the “share of GDP” estimate is a very crude estimate, although it is broadly consistent with previous estimates, such as Guo (2019) and Yuhua Wang, Elite Kinship Networks and State Strengthening: Theory and Evidence from Imperial China (Harvard University, Working Paper, 2020) (on file with author), which only take formal taxation into account, and therefore arrive at roughly 1 percent estimates for the early nineteenth century. The general trend illustrated here is also broadly consistent with the longue duree estimates arrived at in Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 66–70. Shen Xuefeng (申学锋), Wanqing Caizheng Zhichu Yanjiu (晚清财政支出研究) [Studies on Financial Expenditure in Late Qing China], 92–91 (2006); Zhongwai Jiu Yuezhang Huibian, at 144–147, 343–347, 382, 615–618; Xu Yi et al. (许毅等), Qing Dai Waizhai Shilun (清代外债史论) [A History of Foreign Debt in the Qing Dynasty], 672 (1996); Xu Yisheng (徐义生), Zhongguo Jindai Waizhai Shi Tongji Ziliao (中国近代外债史统计资料) [Foreign Debt Statistics of Modern China, 1853–1927], 4–10, 21–25, 31, 52 (1962).

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even as foreign debt had skyrocketed by another 30 million taels.93 By the early twentieth century, after the indemnities from both the Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Movement had kicked in, the Qing state could no longer meet its financial obligations without taking on astronomical levels of foreign debt, reaching 1.2 billion taels by the Dynasty’s end.94 Debt figures tell only part of the story: The inadequacy of tax revenue severely depressed government spending on industrialization and administrative infrastructure, despite repeated and widely publicized efforts by major political figures to bolster such investment.95 This kept annual deficits at a fairly low level, but also undermined many of the state’s most important geopolitical and economic objectives, including the ability to build a modernized military force. At the peak of the Qing state’s industrialization push in the early 1890s, it likely spent no more than 5–7 million taels each year – amounting to around 6 percent of formal government revenue – on the roughly 71 military and civilian industrial factories that it sponsored, which, at this point in history, accounted for most of China’s mechanized heavy industry. The total amount of government spending on industrialization programs in the three decades prior to the Sino-Japanese War likely amounted to some 80 million taels.96 This produced some nominally impressive military achievements – the Beiyang Fleet, consisted mainly of imported warships, was among the best equipped navies in the world – but left the Chinese economy with very little real industrial capacity. Once the fleet was destroyed in the Sino-Japanese War, the

93

94 95

96

For estimates of treasury reserves, see Shi Zhihong (史志宏), Qingdai Hubu Yinku Shouzhi he Kucun Yanjiu (清代户部银库收支和库存研究) [Central Government Silver Treasury: Revenue, Expenditure and Inventory Statistics in the Qing Dynasty, 1700–1800] (2014). Xu (1962), at 52. On the further erosion of administrative capacity and the process of decentralization, see, e.g., Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-Chih Restoration, 1862–1874, at 125–147 (1957); Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Rebellion, 167–205 (1988). On the financial limitations of the Self-Strengthening Movement, see, e.g., Xia Dongyuan (夏东元), Yangwu Yundong Shi (洋务运动史) [A History of the Self-Strengthening Movement] (2010); Liu Jiyong & Zhang Nan (刘 济勇, 张楠), Caizheng Shijiao xia Yangwu Yundong yu Mingzhi Weixin de Bijiao Yanjiu (财政视 角下洋务运动与明治维新的比较研究) [A Comparative Study of the Self-Strengthening Movement and Meiji Reform from the Perspective of Public Finance], 2013(2) Xibu Luntan (西部论坛) [Western Forum] 95; Chen Xiuwei (陈秀尾), Lun Wan Qing Caizheng dui Yangwu Yundong de Yingxiang (论晚清财政对洋务运动的影响) [The Impact of Late Qing Finance on the Self-Strengthening Movement], 1994(1) Zhongguo Shehui Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国社会 经济史研究) [J. Chinese Soc. & Econ. Hist.] 67. Zhang Guohui (张国辉), Yangwu Yundong yu Zhongguo Jindai Qiye (洋务运动与中国 近代企业) [The Self-strengthening Movement and Modern Chinese Enterprises], 168–169 (1979); Zhongguo Jindai Gongye Shi Ziliao (中国近代工业史资料) [Historical Materials of Industrial History in Modern China], 886–887 (Sun Yutang ed., Kexue Press 1957).

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meager industrial infrastructure created over the previous decades was completely unable to rebuild it. Civilian industries fared even worse. The largest civil industrial factories, including the Steamboat Investment Bureau and the Hanyang Iron Factory, were chronically underfunded, and rarely managed to operate according to plan. The Hanyang Iron Factory, in particular, routinely operated at only half its planned capacity, largely due to financial and natural resource shortages, and did not turn a profit for the first decade of its existence. Provincial authorities openly acknowledged that government funding had fallen well below expectations, but simply could not find additional funds to invest. After the Sino-Japanese War, the government was unable to sustain even the low level of civilian industrial investment it had previously made, and regularly reneged on its financial commitments:97 The Cizhou Coal Mine in Zhili Province, for example, began construction under the initial assumption that the Treasury would provide 200,000 taels. By the end of the Dynasty, only 50,000 had actually entered its coffers. Similarly, the Ganzhou Copper Mine in Jiangxi Province had an initial government pledge of 200,000 taels, yet eventually received only 30,000. The combination of heightened foreign competition after the Opium War and inadequate state investment did not necessarily prevent Chinese industrial growth, but it certainly seemed to slow it down relative to other parts of the economy: One recent estimate suggests that, by 1911, with rapid inflation, the agricultural sector had grown nominally by some 200 percent from 1840 levels, whereas the nonagricultural sectors had grown by only around 100 percent. As a share of the overall economy, the latter actually declined from some 40 percent in 1840 to less than 30 percent in 1911.98 This is only one study, but other recent estimates also show that the growth rate of proto-industry barely kept pace with that of agriculture during the later nineteenth century, and only took off in the Republican era.99 Ironically, despite its professed desire to support industrialization, the Qing state was likely extracting many times more money from its nonagricultural sectors than it was reinvesting in it. The industrial and service sectors produced, according to some estimates, roughly 2 billion taels annually during the 1880s and 1890s, and supplied some 50–55 million taels in formal government revenue, and likely another 50–55 million or so in informal surcharges, which

97

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See Chen (1994); Wu Chengming (吴承明), Yangwu Pai Jingying de Jindai Minyong Gongye he Jiaotong Yunshu Ye (洋务派经营的近代民用工业和交通运输业) [Early Modern Industrial and Transportation Businesses Run by Yangwu Reformers], in 2 Zhongguo Ziben Zhuyi Fazhan Shi (中国资本主义发展史) [The History of Chinese Capitalist Development], ch. 3, Sec. 2 (Xu Dixin & Wu Chengming eds., 1990). Reports on specific factories are found in Shenbao (申报) [Shanghai News], February 27, 1910; Shibao (时报) [Eastern Times], May 3, 1907; Shibao (时报) [Eastern Times], September 6, 1909. 99 Ma & de Jong (2019), at Appendix Table 4. Xu Yi et al. (2017).

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suggest a real tax rate of over 5 percent – some 3–4 times the agricultural tax rate.100 Moreover, this tax burden was disproportionally extracted from the most profitable and technologically advanced parts of the sector, including the export economy and the major businesses that produced for interregional trade. In return, the government invested, on average, less than 3 million taels per year into modern industry. One could suggest, of course, that the government had better information and better institutional resources for investing those 3 million taels, but even so, when it reinvested only 5 percent of the taxes it extracted, it is rather difficult to argue that government fiscal policy was a net positive for China’s industrialization. Instead, for the most part, it funneled revenue at an increasingly high rate from the nonagricultural sectors to into military rations, imported guns and ammunition, official salaries, war indemnities, and foreign debt. Beyond those items, it had very little leftover cash. In fact, it was not merely heavy industry factories that were severely underfunded, but also virtually every kind of infrastructure investment, ranging from traditional famine relief infrastructures to railroads and waterways.101 The government’s famine relief system had begun, as noted above, to show signs of serious strain well before the Opium War, and soon descended into nearbankruptcy thereafter. The 1876 North China Famine, arguably the most severe in Qing history, triggered only 5 million taels of total state relief, scraped together from private donations, much of it coerced, and what little revenue the government could spare that year.102 Other major provincial famines during the post-Taiping period received only 150,000–300,000 taels, a serious decline from early nineteenth century levels, which were already much lower than eighteenth century levels.103 Railroads, on the other hand, were predominantly funded by foreign debt or investment: Some 80 percent of pre-1895 railroad building – and 93 percent of post-1895 construction – was funded this way.104 The Qing state was, therefore, only able to keep its pre-Sino-Japanese War finances in basic balance by severely underfunding industrial development and cutting infrastructure investment – and even then, it had to assume some 40 million taels of foreign debt at fairly high interest rates to make ends meet. Despite these mounting financial pressures, it kept the agricultural tax almost 100 101

102

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Ma & de Jong (2019), at Appendix Table 4. See Cong Bainian Quru dao Minzu Fuxing: Qingdai Waizhai yu Yangwu Yundong (从 百年屈辱到民族复兴: 清代外债与洋务运动) [Qing Government’s Foreign Debts and the Self-strengthening Movement], 205–333 (Xu Yi ed., Jingji Kexue Press 2002). Shen (2006), at 146. On the general decline in state famine relief capacity over the nineteenth century, see Will, Wong, & Lee (1991). Shen (2006), at 146–148. Zhongguo Jindai Jingji Shi Tongji Ziliao Xuanji (中国近代经济史统计资料选辑) [Selected Statistics of Economic History in Modern China], 190 (Yan Zhongping ed., Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Press 2012).

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completely stagnant, thereby placing the entire additional revenue burden on the industrial and commercial sectors of the economy – which, as its top administrators repeatedly acknowledged, were precisely the sectors that needed large amounts of state investment if the Qing were to regain its military security and geopolitical stature. In fact, even after the Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Movement almost completely decimated state finances, the Qing Court remained highly resistant to agricultural tax hikes: By 1908, in nominal terms, it had increased only around 35 percent from its pre-1895 levels, whereas nonagricultural taxes had almost doubled. By the eve of the Xinhai Revolution, following another round of major tax hikes in 1908 that affected both agricultural and nonagricultural sources, formal nonagricultural taxes had ballooned to nearly 150 million taels, almost triple their pre-1895 levels; whereas formal agricultural taxes had only grown to around 50 million taels, an increase of around 40 percent.105 The government’s continued reluctance to increase agriculture taxation in the face of fiscal collapse was nothing short of extraordinary. There is, moreover, at least some reason to believe that the enormous and ever-increasing discrepancy between agricultural and nonagricultural taxes directly contributed to the relative underperformance of the Chinese industrial sector over this period. It very likely drove significant amounts of capital investment away from proto-industry and back into agriculture: Land markets in nearly all macroregions boomed during this period, while commercial and industrial firms had an enormously difficult time attracting and retaining private investment.106 It is hard to imagine that the huge difference in tax levels played no role in this. One could argue, in fact, that the late Qing fiscal regime did the exact opposite of what economically rational governments should do to stimulate industrialization: raise taxes on the agrarian economy to support the growth of industry. Japan, for example, dramatically ramped up agricultural taxation – from an already high baseline – and used the massive fiscal surplus this created to finance industrial enterprise.107 Furthermore, this created strong incentives for private investors to do the same, thus greatly accelerating the accumulation of industrial capital. The late Qing tax system, on the other hand, 105

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Guan Jiyu (关吉玉), Tianfu Huiyao (田赋会要) [Essays on the Land Tax], 426–427 (1943); Luo (1936); Yang & Hou (1931), at 122–123; Zeng (1936), at 27–30; Wu (1937), at 116–120; Deng (1997); Zhao Renping (赵仁平), Jindai Zhongguo Fushui Jiegou Bianhua yu Xiandaihua (近代中国赋税结构变化与现代化) [Structural Change and Modernization of the Modern Chinese Taxation System], 1999(5) Yunnan Minzu Xueyuan Xuebao (云南民族学 院学报) [J. Yunnan Minzu Univ.] 89. See Zhang (2017); Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (2008); William C. Kirby, China, Unincorporated: Company Law and Business Enterprise in Twentieth Century China, 54 J. Asian Stud. 43 (1995). He (2013); James I. Nakamura, Meiji Land Reform, Redistribution of Income, and Saving from Agriculture, 14 Econ. Dev. & Cult. Change 428 (1966).

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incentivized private investment in agriculture over proto-industry, which, to a large extent, was exactly what happened. It was, in the end, simply impossible to deal with the kind of financial pressure that the late Qing state faced without substantially increasing revenue extraction from the agricultural sector – which, after all, accounted for over 60 percent of the economy in 1840, and may have accounted for over 70 percent by the end of the Dynasty. Yet this is precisely what the imperial court chose to do. It chose, effectively, to fight the single most daunting fiscal battle in its entire history with one hand, perhaps both hands, tied behind its back. The resulting decline and eventual collapse of governmental finances was therefore highly predictable, but still, we must ask why it was so stubbornly committed to this apparently suicidal fiscal strategy. Why was raising agricultural taxes anathema to Qing political elites?

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2 The Uses and Limitations of Rationalist Explanations

This chapter1 probes the efficacy of a number of “rationalist” explanations for the institutional history provided in Chapter 1, most of them drawn from the preexisting academic literature. “Rationalist” refers to historical accounts that assume political and economic rationality in legislation or policymaking. They assume, in other words, that political elites engage in the rational pursuit of individual and, under certain circumstances, collective utility.2 In nearly all cases, the substantive content of this utility consists of items that most modern readers can readily understand and perhaps sympathize with: the desire of rulers and their advisors to stay in power – which often aligns their incentives with the collective welfare, material and otherwise, of the governed population – the pursuit of higher political status by individual elites, their desire for wealth and financial security, and so on. These objectives need not be completely “economic” in some narrow, wealth-driven sense, but they are usually robustly “universalist,” in the sense that they possess strong, intuitive individual appeal that is not contingent on the internalization of any specific belief

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Parts of this chapter previously appeared (translated into Chinese) in Zhang Taisu (张泰苏), Dui Qingdai Caizheng Fazhan Mailuo de Lixing Zhuyi Jieshi: Lun Qi Gongneng yu Juxian (对清代财 政发展脉络的理性主义解释: 论其功能与局限) [Reviewing the Uses and Limitations of Rationalist Explanations for Qing Fiscal Development], 2021(1) Zhongguo Jingjishi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History] 40. Such theories have, in different branches of the social sciences, been labeled “rational choice theories,” “rational actor models,” or simply “rationalist” explanations of decision-making. See, e.g., Raymond Boudon, Limitations of Rational Choice Theory, 104 Am. J. Soc. 817 (1998); Robert C. Ellickson, Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors: A Critique of Classical Law and Economics, 65 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 23 (1989); Kristen Renwick Monroe & Kristen Hill Maher, Psychology and Rational Actor Theory, 16 Pol. Psychol. 1 (1995); James D. Fearon, Rationalist Explanations for War, 49 Int’l Org. 379 (1995); Amartya Sen, Rationality and Social Choice, 85 Am. Econ. Rev. 1 (1995).

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system, whether religious, ideological, or cultural. Once these objectives are identified, rationalist models then proceed on the assumption that they are pursued logically, given external constraints on information, material resources, and institutional feasibility. In other words, rationalist explanations assume human behavior that, in terms of both means and ends, exhibits no systemic bias, and is therefore not specific to any particular ideological or cultural context. Despite this conceptual dichotomy, this book does not consider rationalist analysis and ideological or cultural analysis to be mutually incompatible – although, admittedly, their relationship in the social sciences has rarely been harmonious. As explained in greater detail in Chapter 7, it sees the two as methodological complements that can share a relatively easy coexistence under certain models of human behavior. To the extent that some rationalist scholars are fundamentally skeptical of the need for ideological or cultural analysis, or that some cultural theorists consider rationality to be no more than a cultural construct,3 the methodological posture assumed here would agree with neither, but would instead seek to carve out middle ground for mutual accommodation. Nonetheless, such a posture does not absolve the book of the responsibility to explain, against a preexisting academic literature that has now shifted decisively in favor of rationalist models, why it is still necessary to bring ideology into the picture. In doing so, it does not seek to replace those rationalist models, but rather to complement them by filling in the gaps – rather significant gaps, it must be said. Rationalist explanations for Qing fiscal behavior broadly fall into three categories: First, scholars have proposed that the Qing state, either due to geopolitical circumstances or domestic governance needs, simply did not feel enough pressure to tax nearly as heavily as other early modern states. Second, others have emphasized difficulties in administrating and enforcing tax hikes, including potentially hostile responses by local communities and serious principal-agent problems between the imperial court and its local magistrates. Third, the incentives of individual political elites, even central-level officials, may not have been properly aligned with the Qing state as a whole, which could potentially have created serious collective action problems. To simplify, the first of these categories focuses on the lack of political demand, the second on the inadequate supply of administrative capacity, and the third on a structural lack of collective political will. Combined, these explanations go quite a long way toward explaining Qing fiscal behavior. Nonagricultural taxation, in particular, evolved in patterns that largely conform to their central predictions: As discussed in Chapter 1, prior to 1850, they expanded at a similar pace as the economy, but remained limited in both tax rate and absolute volume due to the state’s relatively low spending

3

These positions are discussed in some detail in Chapter 7, Section A.

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needs. After 1850, an explosion of fiscal demand immediately led to steep nonagricultural tax hikes, most notably through the creation of new commercial taxes. These measures were kept somewhat in check by a combination of feeble administrative capacity – both in the sense that the state could not effectively combat local corruption, and in the sense that its basic ability to collect new taxes was constrained by a lack of preexisting administrative resources – and the economic self-interest of political elites, whose families were often deeply invested in commercial activities. As a result, the new commercial taxes expanded very rapidly, but not rapidly enough to meet the state’s skyrocketing military and economic spending needs. None of this qualitatively distinguishes Qing nonagricultural taxation from fiscal practices seen in other large early modern states. An intelligent combination of demand, supply, and collective political will seems perfectly capable of explaining its basic trajectory. Agricultural taxation was a very different story. From nearly two centuries – including the fiscally volatile later nineteenth century – it was almost completely nonresponsive to the state’s fiscal needs, and sometimes even shrank while political demand for taxation escalated. As alluded to in the Introduction, this ultra-rigid fiscal conservatism defies adequate explanation under a purely rationalist framework. In fact, most of the supply-side or political will-oriented explanations for fiscal restraint apply more easily and powerfully to nonagricultural taxation than to agricultural taxation, yet the Qing state treated the former far less conservatively, and far more flexibly, than it treated the latter. There was something fundamentally “irrational” about the way the Qing state approached agricultural taxation – not in the sense that it was somehow incomprehensible or without its own internal logic, but in the sense that this internal logic cannot be adequately understood without the use of ideology. Rationalist explanations do help, but are ultimately insufficient. The chapter is organized as follows: Section A lays out the most plausible rationalist explanations for Qing fiscal behavior, organized into the three categories described above. Section B applies them, largely successfully, to Qing nonagricultural taxation. Section C argues that, while they also do apply to some extent to agricultural taxation, the long-term stagnation of Qing agricultural taxes cannot be fully explained through rationalist models alone.

a. a typology of rationalist explanations I. Demand-Side Explanations When it comes to explaining macro-level fiscal differences between China and other early modern states, recent scholarship has largely focused on demandside considerations. Several major works have argued that the Qing state simply lacked the political need to substantially expand its revenue base. It was able, the argument goes, to meet its core political objectives without

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substantial tax hikes from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, and did not need to raise the agricultural tax even after the mid-nineteenth century crisis. These arguments range from the very general to the fairly specific. At the most general level, R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal – perhaps taking a page from the famous “Tilly thesis” that dominated academic thinking on European state building for many years4 – have argued that, because the major early modern Chinese dynasties were relatively peaceful and unified compared to Western Europe – itself a product of SinoEuropean geographical differences – they had fewer incentives to tax heavily. Early modern taxes, Wong and Rosenthal argue, were predominantly raised to fund military campaigns, and a predominantly peaceful state such as the Qing had much less need to raise large sums of money than states that were constantly at war.5 They do note that this was no longer true after 1850, when the Taiping Rebellion and a series of ill-fated military campaigns against Western powers forced the Qing state to roughly double its income by 1890. Nonetheless, the post-1850 state continued to operate, they argue, under the same kind of fiscal logic as its predecessors: The level of taxation largely reflected the level of military expenditure. Once military spending went up during and after the rebellion, taxes increased as well. It would be hard to deny that the pre-1850 Chinese state faced significantly different political pressures, and therefore fiscal needs, than many of its European counterparts: Despite a number of highly expensive military campaigns into Xinjiang and Tibet, the eighteenth century Chinese state probably spent far less on its military as a share of GDP than major early modern European states. The geopolitical challenges it faced, while significant, were not quite as severe as what the major European powers dealt with: Russia’s attention was divided between the Western and Eastern borders, and the various Central Asian powers the Qing confronted were usually economically and technologically inferior. In comparison, the early modern European powers regularly faced opponents of comparable material strength, and were therefore under significantly greater pressure to boost military expenditures. In any case, as Peter Perdue has argued, with the conclusion of its Central Asian campaigns around 1790, the Qing faced very few geopolitical or domestic

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Charles Tilly, Reflections on the History of European State-Making, in The Formation of the National States in Western Europe, 3–83 (Charles Tilly ed., 1975). For recent discussion, see Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology (Lars Bo Kaspersen & Jeppe Strandsbjerg eds., 2017). Wong & Rosenthal (2010). They also flag a few other influencing factors, including representative politics (which drove up the cost of administration, and therefore demanded higher taxes), but suggest that, while states could circumvent the incentives or obstacles posed by these other factors – autocracies, for example, may have initially taxed less than representative states, but soon caught up once they became embroiled in conflict with a representative competitor – the impact of geopolitics was effectively permanent.

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threats, and therefore had relatively low demand for military spending until the 1840s.6 These explanations beg the question, of course, of why Qing taxation remained significantly lower than many of its Eurasian competitors even after 1850, when there certainly was no lack of military campaigning and geopolitical pressure. A recent book by Wenkai He offers perhaps the best demand-side account of this later history: He argues that early modern tax reform, whether in China, Japan, or England, was primarily driven by fiscal crisis, which may or may not have been related to geopolitical tension and military campaigning.7 Thus, the English government’s struggle to pay its military bills during and after the Civil War led to the fiscal centralization of the later seventeenth century and the creation of new commercial levies and customs. Similarly, the late Tokugawa state’s fiscal problems motivated the Meiji government to centralize finances, create the Bank of Japan, and issue paper currency. The Qing state also experienced serious fiscal problems during the 1850s, leading to the creation of the lijin and a failed experiment with paper currency, but eventually overcame them, and was able to enter into a 30-year period of stability after 1865. Fiscal stability meant, however, that the state lacked a strong incentive to further “modernize” its revenue apparatus. He’s account then goes beyond these demand-side incentives to consider the supply-side. It also argues that early modern states naturally turned away from agricultural taxes as their economies commercialized and urbanized, making commercial taxation administratively more cost-efficient and profitable. The stagnation of the Qing agricultural tax could therefore be interpreted as the joint consequence of commercialized industrialization and the relative fiscal stability of the postTaiping era. A fuller account of He’s supply-side argument about the natural transition from direct agricultural taxation to indirect commercial and consumption taxation – which, at its most generalized level, is shared by many fiscal historians – comes later in this section. For now, simply for clarification purposes, the question is whether, and in what sense, the 1865–1895 period, sandwiched inbetween the end of the Taiping Rebellion and the start of the first Sino-Japanese 6 7

Perdue (2005), 549–559. He (2013). He’s model generally treats fiscal crises as exogenous shocks, and focuses on their institutional consequences. Nonetheless, one might ask whether fiscal crises were merely symptoms of deeper socioeconomic or geopolitical problems. The answer, of course, is yes, but this does not necessarily mean that He’s approach is unjustified: Even within the small comparison set of England, Japan, and China, the causes of fiscal crisis were diverse, including structural erosion of preexisting fiscal institutions, civil war, famine, and foreign military invasion. Although all three fiscal crises were at least partially caused by domestic warfare, the extent to which such warfare disrupted economic production and tax collection was by no means uniform. The benefit of using “fiscal crisis” as the analytical catalyst, instead of “civil war” or “geopolitical tension,” is that it allows He to sidestep these complexities and focus on the institutional aftermath of severe fiscal shortages.

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War, truly was a period of fiscal stability. It was true, of course, that the Qing state’s financial circumstances during this period were nowhere near as dire as they were during the Taiping Rebellion or after 1895, and that its expenditures never dramatically exceeded its income. Nonetheless, the characterization of “fiscal stability” masks the fundamental inadequacy of governmental finances throughout the later nineteenth century: As discussed in Chapter 1, industrial and infrastructural investment, famine relief, and even basic administrative spending were all regularly depressed to make way for short-term military expenditures and debt and indemnity repayment, and even then the state had to accumulate large amounts of debt. Even if we look past the 40 million taels of foreign debt accumulated from the 1860s to the 1890s, the fact remains that the Qing state consistently fell short of its primary political objectives, including the creation of a modernized military substantially supported by domestic industrial production. This may not necessarily have qualified as a full-blown fiscal crisis, but it was more than enough to generate a widespread perception of fiscal inadequacy among political elites, as reflected by the sustained and rapid growth of nonagricultural taxes throughout this period: Lijin income grew by some 60 percent, while tariffs and miscellaneous commercial taxes both grew by more than 200 percent. Even with this additional revenue, the state still could not make ends meet without borrowing heavily and, more importantly, severely underspending on economic investment and administrative upkeep – relative both to what its geopolitical competitors, especially Japan, were spending on their military-industrial infrastructure, and to the subjective policy goals it set for itself. For He’s demand-side account to work, it must, therefore, explain the political difference between full-blown “fiscal crisis” and consistent fiscal inadequacy: The former tends to trigger serious “modernizing” reforms, whereas the latter does not. Needless to say, this is a tall order. This kind of “threading the needle” challenge is by no means unique to He’s account, but also applies to the broader geopolitical accounts of pre-1850 fiscal policymaking outlined above. Military spending, while always a central component of any fiscal apparatus, is not the only demand-side consideration that matters, even in early modern regimes. Population growth and economic expansion create their own share of administrative demands and fiscal pressures, and, as argued in detail in Chapter 4, Qing elites were fully aware that, due to its limited income, the state’s administrative capacities had fallen far behind what its rapidly growing population demanded by the 1790s at the latest. By the early nineteenth century, many elites perceived the state’s administrative decline as a serious threat to its rule. Indeed, as Wong and many others have argued, state-funded granaries were no longer able to provide adequate famine relief in the nineteenth century, which proved to be a major source of sociopolitical instability after 1850. The question, then, is why these kinds of domestic administrative pressures did not create the same kinds of expansionary fiscal incentives as did military spending. Or perhaps they did – in which case demand-side accounts that focus primarily on geopolitical circumstances

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need to incorporate a significantly larger array of political considerations, at least for the early nineteenth century. The basic model of fiscal policymaking assumed by these demand-side explanations seems to assume a certain level of inherent political conservatism: The state does not attempt to extract more than what geopolitical circumstances, military emergencies, or other exogenous fiscal crises force it to. One can perhaps justify this assumption by pointing out that no population likes to be taxed, and that nearly all states have a fairly strong incentive to keep their populations happy, but neither of these considerations are absolute: The political bottom line of a nondemocratic regime, as nearly all pre-twentieth century regimes were, is not to maximize its population’s short-term happiness, but rather to maintain its own rule. The population’s short-term happiness is, of course, a major determinant in the regime’s political sustainability, but it is by no means the only factor, or even the necessarily dominant one. So long as tax hikes do not threaten immediate political collapse – which they rarely do unless overtaxation pushes per-capita incomes below subsistence-level – the state may well decide that any short-term increase in public unhappiness is worth the long-term benefits of, for example, better infrastructural spending or administrative performance. Whether it takes this more proactive approach or the relative conservative approach suggested by the demand-side explanations is a genuinely political choice, and therefore demands an account of politics that goes beyond the state’s exogenous geopolitical or military circumstances. II. Supply-Side Explanations In contrast to demand-side accounts, supply-side accounts seek to explain the Qing tax regime’s limited size by pointing to the social and political costs of raising taxes, that is, to the costs of supplying fiscal reform. There are several possibilities here: First, the state may simply have been unable to muster the coercive power to actually enforce an agricultural tax increase. Local governments may have lacked the manpower or money to collect additional taxes, and the cash-strapped central government may have been too distant and weak to provide adequate reinforcements. This would suggest that fiscal restraint is institutionally self-perpetuating by creating a vicious cycle of administrative weakness. Second, even if the state had been able to enforce higher taxes, the sociopolitical costs could have outweighed the fiscal benefits. For example, the central government may have been unable to control local tax collectors, and could not trust them to fairly implement a major tax increase. The severe local corruption that almost certainly would have accompanied any such increase had the potential to provoke severe social backlash, and therefore carried unacceptable levels of political risk. Finally, the rural economy may really have been too fragile to sustain higher revenue extraction, and any substantial tax increase would have created enough economic suffering to automatically set off massive amounts of social backlash, independent of any corruption.

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Recent articles by two pairs of authors – Sng Tuan-Hwee and Moriguchi Chiaki, and Jared Rubin and Debin Ma – provide what is probably the most sophisticated version of the “social backlash” argument, known in some academic circles as the “Huang Zongxi thesis,” after the early Qing scholar who wrote extensively about these kinds of political dynamics.8 They argue that, in countries where the cost of interregional information transfer is high – something that would describe virtually all premodern regimes – the larger and more populous the country, the less control central authorities have over their local agents.9 In a very large domain, the central government’s lack of oversight would create opportunities for local corruption, and therefore allow local bureaucrats or tax farmers to financially exploit tax collection to their personal benefit. In other words, a 5 percent formal tax rate in a small, centralized state would only lead to around a 5 percent rate of actual extraction from the economy, but would probably lead to an 8 or even 10 percent rate in a large country due to existence of informal local surcharges. The larger the country, the higher the level of expected surcharge. To prevent potentially disastrous overexploitation – defined here as exploitation that drives local living standards below subsistence levels, and therefore causes rebellion – the state had to keep formal tax quotas low. This explains, these papers argue, why Chinese tax rates were significantly lower than Japanese or English rates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: China was a much larger country, and therefore needed lower tax quotas to keep local corruption at tolerable levels. Large parts of this argument are clearly plausible: China was obviously much larger and more populous, and its central government almost certainly faced greater principal-agent problems than either the Tokugawa Shogunate or the early Meiji state – or any of the English regimes during this period. In fact, as discussed in some detail later in this book, Qing officials were acutely aware of these problems, and struggled with them throughout the dynasty. Finally, trepidation over local informal surcharges did indeed weigh heavily on their minds when they contemplated tax reform, with the prevailing logic being that any increase in the formal tax quota would likely increase the “real” tax burden by twice, or even three times, that amount. As a general matter, this likely

8

9

Zhou Xueguang (周雪光), Cong Huang Zongxi Dinglü dao Diguo de Luoji: Zhongguo Guojia Zhili de Lishi Xiansuo (从“黄宗羲定律”到帝国的逻辑: 中国国家治理的历史线索) [From the “Law of Huang Zongxi” to the Logic of the Empire: The Historical Lead of the Logic of Chinese State Governance], 4 Kaifang Shidai (开放时代) [Open Times] 108 (2014). For an earlier version of this argument, see Iwai Shigeki (岩井茂樹), Zhongguo Jindai Caizheng Shi Yanjiu (中国近代财政史研究) [Research on the Financial History of Modern China] (Fu Yong trans., 2011). Tuan-Hwee Sng & Chiaki Moriguchi, Asia’s Little Divergence: State Capacity in China and Japan, 19 J. Econ. Growth 439 (2014); Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, Paradox of Power: Principle-Agent Problems and Administrative Capacity in Imperial China (and Other Absolutist Regimes), 47 J. Comp. Econ. 277 (2017).

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exerted some downward pressure on formal quotas, and may explain much of the general disparity between Chinese, Japanese, and English tax rates. Sections B and C will go into greater detail about the specific empirical applicability of this model to different components of the Qing fiscal system. There are, however, some observations about the model’s theoretical parameters that deserve more immediate attention: First and foremost, the model’s prediction that informal surcharges tend to grow with demographic and economic expansion relies on the assumption that the primary constraint on informal tax extraction by local officials comes from central monitoring and control. Thus, whenever central control weakens, local surcharges balloon. This is only partially true, and overlooks the substantial constraints that local social resistance can impose on informal extraction from the bottom up. As noted in Chapter 1, for much of the Qing, local officials were severely understaffed and underfunded relative to the populations they governed, and had to farm out increasingly large segments of their administrative duties to local social groups and lineages. This meant that they often lacked the administrative capacity to behave in a truly coercive manner vis-à-vis local society. This was especially true when it came to informal tax surcharges: Not only was the official unable to rely on the central government’s authority and coercive capacity when collecting technically illegal surcharges, but he often had to actively conceal it from the center under pain of severe institutional censure, which put even greater pressure on him to gain the local population’s consent – or, at least, gain the consent of local elites. Whenever the population expanded at a faster pace than the government’s size and capacity, which was all the time in the Qing, the coercive capacity of local officials over their governed populations would decline, bringing down their ability to coercively collect informal surcharges with it. What this means in theoretical terms is that a complete political economy model of informal surcharge collection should incorporate at least two kinds of constraints on local government corruption: top-down central control and bottom-up local resistance. The former does indeed weaken with population growth, as the “Huang Zongxi thesis” argues, but the latter may very well strengthen. Whether local officials can charge higher or lower levels of informal surcharge as the population expands – or whether we should expect any significant change at all – depends, therefore, on whether, and to what extent, the weakening of the central government’s control capacity is offset by the increase in local society’s resistance capacity. At this level of granularity, the theoretical analysis becomes highly contextspecific. Imagine, first, a locality where much of the local population is mobile, moving in and out of the region somewhat frequently. As a result, social and economic interactions tend to be impersonal, and social relations more distant. Stable and powerful local communal organizations are relatively unlikely to emerge under such circumstances, forcing the population to rely more heavily on state institutions for socioeconomic regulation and coordination – using

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Weberian terminology, gesellschaft rather than gemeinschaft.10 This places considerable power and responsibility in the hands of local officials, which enhances their coercive control over local affairs, while simultaneously making it more costly for central authorities to monitor and control their actions. In this context, a decline in the central government’s control capacity due to population growth will, in all likelihood, be far more sociopolitically impactful than any corresponding increase in local society’s resistance capacity, given that the latter was far less meaningful than the former to begin with. This suggests, therefore, that population growth will probably lead to higher levels of informal surcharge collection. When, however, the local population is largely immobile, socioeconomic interactions highly personal, and local communal institutions strong – gemeinschaft rather than gesellschaft – the tables are turned: In such cases, bottom-up local resistance may very well overtake top-down control as the primary deterrent against informal surcharge collection. Moreover, the eroding effect of population growth on central government control in a stable locality with low levels of interregional movement is probably significantly lower than in a more demographically mobile region. In contrast, the strengthening effect of population growth on local society’s resistance capacity is probably much higher in the former locality, due to the existence of strong social institutions, such as kinship networks or religious organizations, that can more readily convert demographic growth into sociopolitical muscle. Consequently, there is a much stronger likelihood in this kind of locality that population growth will strengthen local resistance capacity more than it erodes central control and, therefore, that it will lead to lower levels of informal surcharge collection. Within the Qing context, this analysis suggests that the “Huang Zongxi thesis” was probably more applicable to commercial tax collection than to direct agricultural taxation. The former was conducted primarily at major transportation chokepoints, usually in urbanized commercial hubs, whereas the latter operated almost exclusively in rural settings. In other words, the former is significantly closer to the gesellschaft ideal type, in which top-down control matters more than bottom-up resistance, whereas the latter is closer to the gemeinschaft ideal type, in which the opposite is true. Given the Huang Zongxi thesis’s focus on top-down control, it is significantly more likely to apply in the former context, rather than in the latter. In addition, if we truly wish to use the Huang Zongxi thesis to rationalize the near-total stagnation of the Qing agricultural tax, then this would necessarily entail arguing that any significant agricultural tax hike would likely have led to over-taxation in the rural economy. Like any other rationalist model of human behavior, the Huang Zongxi thesis assumes that political elites will continue to raise taxes as long as the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs – which, in 10

See, e.g., Niall Bond, Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, 12 Max Weber Stud. 25 (2012).

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nondemocratic regimes, primarily come in the form of massive social upheaval due to overtaxation. This begs the question: Would a substantial agricultural tax hike in, say, 1780, actually have produced a severe backlash from the rural population? What about 1820, or 1875? While these counterfactual questions may seem fundamentally unanswerable, a systemic attempt by the Qing state to raise agricultural taxes nationwide after 1901 actually provides some compelling reasons to believe that the answer was likely “no” for all three eras. This argument is taken up in much greater detail in Section C. Apart from the Huang Zongxi thesis, there are at least two other kinds of supply-side constraints that scholars have identified. The first, also discussed in the Sng/Moriguchi and Rubin/Ma articles, is the straightforward observation that effective tax collection requires some baseline amount of coercive state authority and administrative capacity.11 Simply due to its size and demographic complexity, the Qing inherently possessed weaker coercive capacity at the local level than some of its early modern peers, including other Chinese dynasties that governed a smaller population. That is, it had to invest greater administrative and fiscal resources just to obtain parity in terms of local coercive capacity. This also implies that fiscal weakness can be self-perpetuating: Lower levels of taxation can erode the state’s coercive capacities, which then hamper future efforts to raise taxes. One could argue, then, that perhaps the reason why the Qing could not raise agricultural taxes in the later nineteenth century is that they were too low to begin with. To some extent, these dynamics would predict the opposite of the Huang Zongxi thesis: If the Qing state knew, for example, that it was only able to collect around 60 percent of the nominal tax quota, then, assuming that the population could, in reality, sustain a 6 percent tax rate, it might impose a nominal 10 percent tax rate under the assumption that only 6 percent of production would actually be collected. The central challenge for this kind of explanation is to show that the Qing’s relatively lower coercive capacities over local populations actually made it impossible, or at least difficult, to raise taxes. The former does not automatically imply the latter: The late Qing might have lower coercive capacities than, say, Meiji Japan, but nonetheless might have enough of it to successfully implement a tax hike. If we assume both states taxed to the maximum level that their coercive capacities would allow, then we would indeed expect the Qing state to collect a smaller share of economic production than the Meiji Japanese state, but whether that assumption is true in the first place must be empirically verified, rather than taken for granted. There is some evidence to suggest that it may have been true for nonagricultural taxation in the late Qing, but no such evidence for agricultural taxation. The final kind of supply-side explanation found in the preexisting literature focuses not on explaining the small size of the Qing tax regime per se, but rather

11

Sng & Moriguchi (2014); Rubin & Ma (2017).

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on explaining its lack of enthusiasm for agricultural tax hikes. This kind of explanation, featured prominently in Wenkai He’s book, highlights the nearglobal shift in modern states away from the direct taxation of agriculture toward excises and commercial taxes.12 As many scholars have noted, such a shift occurred in most European states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including in Russia in the later nineteenth.13 It also occurred in Japan after 1875, and in China after 1855. In fact, the latter was actually the second time in Chinese history that indirect taxation had become the primary source of income for the state: The first, as Guanglin Liu documents, happened in the Song Dynasty during the mid-eleventh century.14 In some cases, such as Meiji Japan or early modern England, this shift occurred while the center of economic gravity was decisively moving away from agriculture.15 In many other cases, food production continued to supply the lion’s share of economic output even as the primary source of direct state revenue shifted elsewhere: For example, the late Qing shift away from direct agricultural taxation toward indirect nonagricultural taxation – that is, toward commercial taxes, salt taxes, and tariffs – occurred even as food production remained the dominant source of domestic economic output. As previously noted, these indirect taxes did impose burdens on agricultural production, especially on the production of major cash crops like tea, but they did so through depressing the nominal market value of agricultural goods, rather than by forcing agricultural producers to directly pay extra sums to the state. The core institutional rationale underlying these shifts is that, once the necessary administrative infrastructure is in place, it is far more cost-effective to ramp up indirect taxation on commerce or urban consumption than direct taxation on agriculture. The greater concentration of economic assets in urban centers, especially in major transportation hubs, offers significant economies of scale for tax collection that do not exist, for obvious reasons, in the rural sector. That said, the initial creation of the administrative infrastructure itself often requires a substantial investment of government resources, and can be difficult for unusually weak tax states like the Qing. Nonetheless, at some point, states ruling over sophisticated market economies will come to the realization that it is more cost-effective to shift to indirect taxation. Often, as He effectively demonstrates, this realization comes in the face of some pressing fiscal need, which places greater-than-usual pressure on the state to ramp up fiscal extraction through the most cost-effective avenues available. The Qing shift away from agricultural taxation should be understood within this broader pattern, so the argument goes, and is therefore unexceptional.16 Notably, this argument only predicts that agricultural taxation will eventually become less important in early modern or modern fiscal systems, not that

12 15

He (2013). He (2013).

13 16

Plaggenborg (1995), at 55; Kotsonis (2014), at 313–314. He (2013), at 2.

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14

Liu (2014).

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they will immediately cease to pursue direct agricultural tax hikes once indirect taxes begin to increase substantially in volume. States will have significant incentives to raise direct agricultural taxes as long as indirect taxation alone cannot meet its spending needs. Over time, these incentives will decrease as indirect taxes pick up more of the fiscal slack, but there is no reason to believe that they will cease to exist in short order. Quite the contrary, in most early modern or modern states that made the shift to indirect taxation – England, Russia, Japan, or Song China, for example – the absolute volume of direct agricultural taxation continued to grow for decades, and in some cases centuries, after the shift began in earnest. In the great majority of cases, only when indirect taxes became capable of independently funding nearly all governmental activities did direct agricultural taxes begin to truly stagnate, or even decrease, in total volume: For example, the decision by the People’s Republic of China to gradually eliminate agricultural taxes in the early 2000s was made in this context.17 From this perspective, what was exceptional about Qing agricultural taxes was not their relative decline in institutional significance over the course of the nineteenth century, but rather the fact that they began to stagnate and even decline well before indirect nonagricultural taxes were capable of adequately funding the state’s regular operations and primary political objectives – but more on this in Sections B and C. III. “Political Will” Explanations A final set of “rationalist” explanations that are qualitatively distinct from both demand-side and supply-side explanations are what this book calls “political will problems.” With a few exceptions,18 these are hypothetical explanations that are not part of the preexisting historiographical literature, but they offer some intellectually compelling possibilities, and should be taken seriously. More aggressively than the preexisting theories examined above, they disaggregate “the Qing state” into a collection of individual political actors, each possessing their own interests, preferences, and worldviews.19 The book labels these hypotheticals “political will problems” because they focus on incentive misalignment within the policymaking elite, rather than the external social and political costs of fiscal reform that supply-side explanations general focus on. The term “will” also distinguishes these theories from demand-side accounts, 17

18

19

Xiaxin Wang & Yan Shen, The Effect of China’s Agricultural Tax Abolition on Rural Families’ Incomes and Production, 29 China Econ. Rev. 185 (2014). See, e.g., Yuhua Wang, China’s State Development in Comparative Perspective, 29 Newsl. Org. Sec. Comp. Pol. Am. Pol. Sc. Ass’n 50 (2019), for a recent attempt – if still very early stage – at reviving these kinds of arguments. Early attempts at this include Ch’u (1962) and Ho (1977). A particularly strong collection of essays on local elite behavior and political incentives can be found in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Joseph W. Esherick & Mary Backus Rankin eds., 1990).

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which examined whether the Qing state, as a whole, had any incentive to raise agricultural taxes. In contrast, a “political will” explanation attempts to explain why individual political actors may have resisted tax increases even if it was in the collective interest of the state to implement them. From a collective, “state-centric” perspective, this can plausibly be called a lack of “political will.” It should be emphasized, however, that these are rationalist “will problems,” focusing only on the material or political self-interest of individual officials, rather than the ideological or intellectual influences discussed in later chapters. The simplest and arguably most powerful version of a “political will” explanation would probably be something like the following: All Qing officials owned land, indeed large amounts of it, and therefore would have incurred significant economic losses if the agricultural tax was raised. These personal economic incentives may have been powerful enough to override whatever commitment to the state apparatus as a whole they otherwise possessed. In short, they resisted raising taxes because they had to pay them themselves. Alternatively, any official who proposed a tax increase risked alienating his more economically self-interested colleagues, which meant that the individual political costs of doing so were very high. Replacing “economic self-interest” with “political self-interest” yields yet another variation of this hypothesis: Perhaps the reluctance of officials to issue agricultural tax reform was driven not by personal economic loss, but by their political loyalty to – or fear of – the socioeconomic interests of their “political constituency,” however defined. Perhaps some class of large local landlords was politically influential enough to consistently block legislation and policymaking in this area, or perhaps smallholders – who were, of course, reluctant to pay more taxes, even when they easily could afford to – were able to successfully lobby Grand Council members with local ties. Such hypotheticals focus on the political pressure that local communities or elites may have exerted on individual officials, despite not being prepared to engage in serious civil or armed disobedience. They do not assume that rural communities were unable to pay higher taxes, but merely that they did not want to, and that any tax hike would trigger short-term unhappiness, even if it did not lead to unmanageable levels of unrest. A final variation might look at structural problems and collective action problems within the bureaucracy: For example, the delegation of significant fiscal authority to the provinces after 1850 opens up the moderately tempting possibility of collective action problems, regional competition, and “races to the bottom.”20 Provinces might have worried about the socioeconomic 20

See, e.g., Dai Yifeng (戴一峰), Wanqing Zhongyang yu Difang Caizheng Guanxi: Yi Jindai Haiguan wei Zhongxin (晚清中央与地方财政关系:以近代海关为中心) [Central-Local Fiscal Relations in Late Qing China: With a Focus on Maritime Customs], 4; Zhongguo Jingjishi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History]; Chen Feng (陈锋), Qingdai Zhongyang Caizheng yu Difang Caizheng de Tiaozheng (清代中央财政与地方财政的

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consequences of being the “first mover” in increasing taxes, or may have wanted to gain economic advantages over competing provinces by keeping taxes low. Alternatively, high-risk laws and policies may have had a difficult time getting passed or even proposed due to the tragedy of the commons, in which the proponents received most of the blame in case of failure, but relatively little of the reward in case of success. The primary challenge that these political will/incentive misalignment accounts must grapple with – beyond finding support in archival sources – is, once again, explaining the differential treatment of agricultural versus nonagricultural taxation in the Qing: Why was there a lack of “political will” to raise agricultural taxes when there was, for much of the dynasty, enough “political will” to experiment with and ultimately raise non-agricultural taxes? More specifically, was there some identifiable political or economic self-interest of individual policymakers that made them less willing to raise agricultural taxes? Some might point to greater sociopolitical or administrative costs that agricultural tax hikes entailed, but that would revert back to the supply-side explanations discussed above. If the answer is instead that elites believed that agricultural tax hikes were riskier even when, in reality, they were not necessarily so, then that immediately puts us on a very different path – one that leads to ideological, rather than rationalist, analysis.

b. explaining nonagricultural taxation This section applies the rationalist theories summarized and discussed above to the evolution of Qing nonagricultural taxation. It argues, as stated above, that nearly all segments of its 268 years history can be adequately explained through some combination of these rationalist explanations, and usually through a straightforward combination of demand-side and supply-side factors – political will theories can add considerable depth to the narrative, but are often not essential. The bottom line is that, along most institutional dimensions, the Qing state took a fundamentally pragmatic and flexible approach to nonagricultural taxation, one that does not appear to qualitatively differ from how many other early modern states made fiscal policy. The history of Qing nonagricultural taxation can be separated into four major phases: (1) slow and steady growth from the early dynasty to the mideighteenth century, (2) a period of near-stagnation from the later eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, (3) an interlude of tentative institutional reform in the early nineteenth century, and (4) explosive expansion and institutional change from 1850 until the dynasty’s final years. In terms of total nominal volume, as laid out in Chapter 1, it grew at a similar pace as economic 调整) [Fiscal Adjustment of Central and Local Governments in the Qing Dynasty], 5; Lishi Yanjiu (历史研究) [Historical Research] (1997).

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recovery and demographic growth in the first phase, stagnated in the second phase, gained moderate new heights in the third, and skyrocketed in the fourth, becoming the state’s main source of revenue by the 1880s. Fluctuations in demand-side conditions drove a significant portion of governmental behavior in all four phases, whereas supply-side constraints became more influential in the final two phases – especially in phase four, when they likely prevented the state from reaching full fiscal sustainability through nonagricultural tax hikes alone.

I. The Early Qing Nonagricultural taxes began from a very low base in the early Qing due to the economic devastation caused by Ming collapse and the ensuing Manchu invasion. Interregional commercial activity, in particular, was severely damaged by the military campaigning that took place in the Yangtze regions and South China during the first few years of the dynasty, and would take decades to recover. In 1652, formal government income from the two major categories of nonagricultural taxation, the salt tax and tariffs, including both foreign trade tariffs and domestic commerce tariffs, amounted to only 3.1 million taels, whereas “miscellaneous taxes” had yet to be collected with any regularity. In comparison, agricultural taxes, which at this point only consisted of the “land and head tax” and the grain tribute, contributed about 10 times that amount.21 Despite this enormous initial disparity, nonagricultural taxes grew at a much faster pace than agricultural taxes throughout phase one, which ended in the mid-eighteenth century.22 By the 1680s, they had increased by about 30 percent, whereas agricultural taxes had only grown by around 15 percent. From the 1680s to the 1720s, agricultural taxes experienced essentially no growth, whereas nonagricultural taxes grew by almost 50 percent to nearly double their 1652 levels. Most of this growth came from the salt tax, which grew from 2.1 million taels in 1652 to over 4.4 million in 1725. Tariff income grew at a much slower pace: from 1 million to 1.35 million over the same period, which nonetheless outpaced the agricultural tax. Agricultural taxes experienced a one-time bump of around 13 percent in the later 1720s due to Yongzheng’s meltage fee reforms, but the fiscal rationalization efforts that he championed had ground to a halt by the 1730s, and fell apart almost immediately after his death in 1735. In the meantime, nonagricultural taxes continued to grow rapidly, to well over 12 million taels by the 1750s: Salt taxes and tariffs contributed 11 million taels in 1753, whereas miscellaneous taxes had likely grown from negligible levels in the 1650s to a few million taels annually in the mid-eighteenth century. All this amounted to about a quarter of the state’s total

21

See discussion in Chapter 1, Section B.

22

Id.

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revenue – still relatively insignificant compared to the agricultural tax, but increasingly important in absolute terms. For the most part, this growth tracked the rapid economic and demographic recovery the Qing experienced throughout this period. Specific population estimates for the 1650s vary enormously, ranging from over 100 million to less than half that. Nonetheless most scholars seem to believe that the population likely tripled, and may have quadrupled, between the early dynasty and the mideighteenth century.23 The economy, both its agricultural and nonagricultural sectors, nominally grew at a comparable pace, although real growth was moderately lower. From 1690 to 1750, a period for which we have more reliable estimates, both the population and nominal economic production roughly doubled.24 Taking these statistical trends into account, the tax rate directly imposed on the protoindustrial and service sectors (including commercial shipping and selling activities) probably remained largely stable during most of phase one, and may even have increased somewhat toward the end of it in response to military campaigning in Xinjiang and Tibet – even as the tax rate directly imposed on the agricultural sector fell sharply over the same period. The growth of nonagricultural taxes during phase one requires no complicated explanation: The state simply extracted more from salt production, commerce, mineral extraction, alcohol production, and other economic subsectors as they naturally recovered under predominantly peaceful domestic conditions. The state’s frequent military campaigning in the northwest created ample fiscal demand for this expansion, especially after 1725.25 On the supply side, because the increase in extraction was largely spread out over the course of a full century, no dramatic investment in administrative infrastructure was necessary at any given point, and the state never seemed in any real danger of exhausting its administrative capacity to collect taxes. Escalation in local surcharge collection may well have existed, as it certainly did in agricultural tax collection by the early eighteenth century, but because nonagricultural taxes, in terms of monetary value, were a mere fraction of the agricultural tax even in the 1750s, they never became a politically significant issue at the higher echelons of the state apparatus. As we will see in later chapters, nearly all the political conflict in this era was centered on the agricultural tax – naturally so, given its continued fiscal prominence. II. Mid-Qing Stagnation Phase two, which runs from the 1760s to the early 1800s, saw both agricultural and nonagricultural taxes stagnate in total volume, but in different ways. 23

24

Kent Deng, China’s Population Expansion and Its Causes during the Qing Period, 1644–1911, (Econ. Hist. Working Paper Series No. 219, London School of Economics, 2015), http://eprints .lse.ac.uk/64492/. 25 Broadbery, Guan, & Li (2018). See, e.g., Perdue (2005).

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As discussed in Chapter 5, whatever momentum Yongzheng had built for agricultural tax reform had petered out by the early 1740s, and for the next century there would be no significant attempt at institutional reform or expansion: Quotas for silver and grain collection remained essentially unchanged. The total volume of nonagricultural taxes experienced no significant change from the 1750s to around 1810, but this masks some significant shifts in its composition: The salt tax fell from a peak of some 7 million taels annually in the 1750s to around 5.7 million taels in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but this was offset by continued growth in tariff income and miscellaneous taxes.26 In other words, although both agricultural and nonagricultural taxation stagnated in total volume during this period, there were still symptoms of institutional change in the latter, but essentially none in the former. To a large extent, Qing fiscal behavior in phase two can be successfully explained by demand side factors: Qing campaigning in the Xinjiang and Tibet had begun to wind down by the later 1750s, which significantly reduced the government’s annual spending needs. The government’s domestic administrative capacity likely declined throughout this period due to rapid population growth, which was not counterbalanced by any significant investment in administrative resources, but, by and large, this did not become a serious problem, nor a politically salient one, until the later 1790s. In response, grain extraction, which had consistently hit 7–8 million shi a year during the peak of military campaigning, fell back to the 4–5 million shi range for much of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.27 The moderate decline in salt tax income during this period likely followed the same institutional logic: The state had less immediate need to wring every last cent it could out of the salt trade, and therefore took a more relaxed attitude toward its administration and taxation – although there is no indication that it was politically averse to drawing in larger amounts of revenue from salt production or any form of interregional commerce. If we look carefully enough at the decline in officially reported salt tax revenue, we can also discern some faint signs of supply-side constraints at work: As many contemporaries commentators noted, salt tax arrears had become a salient political issue at court by the late 1780s and early 1790s, and could amount to over a million taels a year during this period. Most contemporary observers, including several provincial salt tax administrators, blamed this on collusion between licensed salt merchants and local officials.28 Like its Ming predecessor, the Qing collected salt taxes by selling licenses to 26 28

27 See discussion in Chapter 1, Section B. Id. See, e.g., Zengxiu Hedong Yanfa Beilan (增修河东盐法备览) [Revised Account of the Salt Laws of Hedong] ch. 2 (Zhang Yuanding [张元鼎] ed., 1882); Wang Qingyun, Shiqu Yuji, at ch. 5. For detailed discussion, see Ni Yuping (倪玉平), Boyi yu Junheng: Qingdai Lianghuai Yanzheng Gaige (博弈与均衡: 清代两淮盐政改革) [Struggles and Balance: Huai River Basin Salt Administration Reform in the Qing Dynasty], 33–53 (2006).

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local merchant families, who could then enjoy monopolistic or semimonopolistic operating rights within a certain region. This drove up consumer salt prices significantly, which unsurprisingly induced the widespread emergence of illegal salt production in large parts of central and southwestern China. This, in turn, incentivized collusion between salt merchants, both licensed and unlicensed, and local officials: Government agents were able to collect significant rents and surcharges from salt producers in return for administrative protection. To offset the financial impact of these surcharges, licensed salt merchants regularly insisted on underpaying their formal tax quotas, and corrupt local officials were often in no position to resist. Over time, this led to serious arrears in salt tax collection, and a corresponding decline in official government revenue.29 The Sng/Moriguchi and Rubin/Ma supply-side models, which predict rising informal surcharges paired with declining formal tax collection as a result of economic and demographic expansion, seem to provide a solid explanation for such administrative decay. The relative lack of politically salient demand-side fiscal pressures until the 1790s meant, of course, that there were no serious attempts at court to explore expansionary policies for most of phase two. III. Reform Efforts in the Early Nineteenth Century By the early nineteenth century – the beginning of phase three – demand-side pressures had once again begun to mount, which quickly shifted nonagricultural taxation back into expansion mode. By the end of Qianlong’s reign, the erosion of the state’s administrative capacity had become painfully obvious. Desperate for additional resources, local governmental entities began to propose various tweaks to the tax system in the hopes of shoring up their increasingly desperate finances. To make matters much worse, the White Lotus Rebellion added another major source of fiscal demand: Although the rebellion, unlike its mid-nineteenth century successors, never truly threatened the fundamental vitality of the dynasty, it nonetheless forced the Imperial Court to sink some 200 million taels into military expenditures from 1796 to 1804.30 Whatever fiscal reprieve the Qing state had enjoyed in the later eighteenth century had all but vanished by 1805. Most of the Imperial Court’s response to these demand-side pressures came in the form of cost-cutting: It streamlined its bureaucratic functions, cut

29

30

See sources cited at Qing Shilu Jinji Ziliao Jiyao (清实录经济资料辑要) [A Selection of Economic-Related Materials in the Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty], 733–738 (Nankai University History Department ed. 1959). On the White Lotus Rebellion and its impact on state finances, see Yingcong Dai, The White Lotus War, 3–31 (2019); Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates, ch. 1 (2014).

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spending whenever possible, and outsourced a significant amount of local administrative tasks to communal and kinship-based organizations.31 On the revenue side, it chose, as in the past, to increase nonagricultural taxation while keeping agricultural taxation effectively untouched. Problems with salt tax collection, as noted above, had gained a certain measure of political salience by the 1790s. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, initial local experiments at institutional reform were short-lived: Their proponents attempted to merge the salt tax into the local land tax quota, thereby running afoul of the deepest institutional commitment of mid-Qing fiscal conservatism, which was that the agricultural economy could not be taxed any more heavily than it already was. By the early 1830s, however, a new wave of salt tax reform experiments were once again moving forward at the regional level, and these proved to be more institutionally durable. The most prominent of these reforms were Tao Shu’s “salt ticket” reforms in the Northern Huai River (“Huaibei”) region.32 In 1830, Tao, newly appointed to the governorship of Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Anhui, won the Imperial Court’s approval to implement a series of privatization and marketization reforms in the regional salt industry. The reforms, which were rolled out over several years, essentially replaced the old licensing regime with a new “ticketing” (“piao”) system that would allow easier entry into the salt market by private producers. Whereas the old regime issued a limited number of effectively monopolistic production and shipping licenses to specific merchants, the new system would allow any private party to produce and ship salt as long as it purchased a ticket of appropriate value from local government agents, which authorized the selling of salt along preregistered shipping routes. These government agents were located in transportation hubs in the Huaibei river system, with the expectation that nearly all regional shipping activities would have to pass through some subset of these hubs. To some extent, this network of tax collection nodes along major shipping routes provided a basic administrative blueprint for the lijin tax reforms that would follow in later decades. By opening up the salt market to private producers, Tao Shu’s reforms greatly expanded the economic base for fiscal extraction, thereby increasing government revenue without any substantial rate increase. Huaibei salt tax income increased from less than 500,000 taels in 1832 to more than double that by 1840 – in other words, revenue growth from a single medium-sized regional market increased the gross national salt tax income by almost 10 percent.33 At the same time, the reforms did serious systemic damage to preexisting avenues of collusion between major salt merchants and local officials, which may actually have led to a sizeable one-time reduction in informal local surcharges. Large-scale influx of newly legalized salt into the local market also 31

32

For an overview of the emerging literature on the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition, see, e.g., Rowe (2011). 33 The best academic account of these reforms is Ni (2006). Id., at 76.

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lowered salt prices across the board for private consumers, and won widespread acclaim from the general population. The primary losers of the reform were the major merchant families who had previously monopolized the legalized salt market and their colluders within the local bureaucracy. These parties were powerful enough to significantly slow the pace of reform, but not to reverse it. Within a few years, with overwhelming evidence of lower prices and higher government revenues rolling in, the new reforms became firmly entrenched in the Huaibei region, and were soon recognized by senior officials across the country as a successful model for future salt tax reform.34 Given this apparent success, it is somewhat puzzling why other major saltproducing regions did not quickly follow suit: Prior to Tao Shu’s death in 1839, he had made extensive preparations for expanding the reform to the Southern Huai River (“Huainan”) region, but this institutional momentum vanished overnight upon his death.35 It was not until 1849 that the Huainan region finally adopted a version of the ticketing system, and not until the 1850s, when the Taiping Rebellion forced the Qing government to throw all institutional caution to the wind, that other parts of the country began to fall in line.36 What, then, explains this excruciatingly slow pace of adoption? Part of the answer is that there were some collective action problems at work among the different salt-producing macroregions. Substantially lower salt prices in any major macroregion would have spillover effects on salt production and pricing in other parts of the country, given its increasingly interconnected regional markets. Huaibei was only a middling regional market that produced relatively limited spillovers, which made it suitable as an initial testing ground, but Huainan was a much larger one that could generate national shockwaves.37 From this perspective, creating a the ticketing system in Huainan would likely be the point of no return: Once it happened, other macroregions would have no choice but to eventually follow suit, lest their salt markets be flooded with cheaper salt from Huainan. It was therefore unsurprising that risk-averse policymakers were somewhat hesitant to extend the reforms to Huainan or any other major regional salt market. A number of political memorials from the 1840s spoke to these concerns, which clearly weighed heavily on the minds of many political elites.38 That said, risk aversion only makes sense when there actually are significant and salient risks involved. The political memorials mentioned above identified several of these: First, they worried that local governments simply would not have the administrative capacity to effectively collect ticketing fees, leading to widespread tax evasion, and therefore lower government revenue. Second, they expressed concern about potential collusion between private merchants and 34 37

38

35 36 Id., at 73–78. Id., at 78–91. Id., at 91–115. Qing Xuanzong Shilu (清宣宗实录) [Veritable Records of the Xuanzong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty], ch. 405, Daoguang 24th Year 5th Month Yiyou. Id.

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corrupt officials, which might become harder to root out as the salt market in question became larger. Specifically, they cited the significantly larger size of the Huainan salt market as reason to be much more concerned about these problems than Tao Shu was in Huaibei. The applicability of the Sng/Moriguchi and Rubin/Ma models to these concerns is fairly obvious. Just as importantly, the pervasive collusion between traditional salt monopolies and local officials that had motivated Tao Shu’s Huaibei experiment in the first place was itself the product of principal-agent control problems: Merchantofficial collusion deepened as the salt industry grew over the eighteenth century – simultaneously eroding official salt tax collection and increasing illegal surcharges – until it became a major political issue in the 1790s. In other words, the supply-side problems discussed above influenced every phase of the early nineteenth century salt tax reforms, from the political conditions that motivated them ex ante to the administrative difficulties that constrained them ex post. Despite these administrative difficulties, the fiscal pressures faced by the Qing state in phase three were nonetheless large enough to produce rather significant growth in salt tax revenue between the 1810s and 1840s: from 5.8 million taels in 1812 to 7.5 million in 1841.39 While the other sources of nonagricultural taxation were not quite as robust, they did not stagnate either: Tariff income declined slightly during the Opium War years (1839–1842), but soon recovered as foreign trade expanded in the aftermath of the Treaty of Nanjing. Miscellaneous taxes likely continued their slow but steady trek upwards. All in all, nonagricultural taxes experienced substantial if not gamechanging growth and institutional development during the first half of the nineteenth century, consistent with the background narrative of worsening but not yet regime-threatening fiscal shortages, paired with deeply entrenched supply-side institutional constraints that slowed the pace of reform.

IV. Late Qing Crisis and Adaptation Of course, slow reform was no longer an option by the start of phase four: With the rise of the Taiping Rebellion in 1850–1851, the Qing state plunged into the worst fiscal crisis it had ever encountered, and all institutional gloves were off. The unprecedented escalation of demand-side pressures quickly overrode any hesitation over supply-side constraints, resulting in unprecedented growth in nonagricultural taxation: As outlined in Chapter 1, the creation of the lijin commercial tax gave the government a brand new source of formal revenue that would yield over 10 million taels annually within a few years of its creation in 1853–1854, and some 13.5 million by the late 1860s.40 The tax proved controversial and difficult enough to administerthat its growth ceased after 1870 – more on this shortly – and its total volume plateaued at around 39

See discussion in Chapter 1, Section B.

40

See discussion in Chapter 1, Section C.

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14 million taels until the end of the century. That said, the other major nonagricultural components of the tax system continued to grow during the 1870s and 1880s: The salt tax had fallen back to about 5 million taels a year during the turmoil of the 1850s, but returned to around 7 million in the 1870s, and, with the addition of a new “salt lijin” of some 5 million taels annually, to over 13 million in the mid-1890s. Miscellaneous taxes, including an increasing assortment of intraregional commercial taxes – as opposed to the more interregional lijin tax – leapt from around 1.5 million taels prior to 1850 to nearly 10 million annually in the 1890s. In terms of absolute volume, all of this paled in comparison to the explosive growth of tariff income, which, driven by rapid growth in foreign trade, went from around 5 million taels in the 1840s to around 8.5 million by the early 1860s, to 11.7 million in 1872, to 15–20 million during the 1880s, and then to 20–25 million during the 1890s. In total, formal nonagricultural taxation rose from some 13–14 million annually in the 1840s to 35–40 million in the 1870s, 45–50 million taels in the 1880s, and around 55 million during the early 1890s. Meanwhile, agricultural taxes, as discussed in the previous chapter, continued to stagnate: Moderate expansion in some of its subcomponents was more than offset by reduction in others, with the result that the state’s formal direct tax income from the agricultural sector was likely lower in 1890 than it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the end of the century, agricultural taxes only contributed around 40 percent of formal government revenue, sharply down from over two thirds in the 1840s, even though the Chinese economy remained just as agrarian as it had ever been – if not actually more so. The real question posed by this brief statistical sketch of nonagricultural taxation is not why it grew so quickly – that is readily and obviously explained by the sharp rise of demand-side pressures – but rather why it did not grow even more quickly. After all, despite all this fairly dramatic growth, the Qing state still fell considerably short of true fiscal sustainability during this period, and was forced to both further emaciate its administrative infrastructure and assume significant levels of foreign debt to make ends meet. The primary culprit was, of course, the stagnation of the agricultural tax, but assuming there was simply no political possibility of raising it, what prevented the state from raising nonagricultural taxes even more aggressively than it actually did? According to recent estimates, even in the 1890s, formal nonagricultural taxation still only amounted to 2–3 percent of nominal nonagricultural GDP.41 This number rises to about 5–6 percent if we add estimates of informal surcharges, which grew just as rapidly, if not more so, during the later nineteenth century, but even this higher figure would still put the Qing state toward the lower end of what its major contemporary competitors were extracting from their economies – 41

See discussion in Chapter 1, Section C for these baseline estimates.

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similar to the Ottoman state, slightly lower than the Russians and Americans, and significantly lower than France, Japan, England. It was only “high” when compared to the almost unthinkably low late Qing agricultural tax rate, which at this point hovered at around 1–2 percent even after informal surcharges are taken into consideration. The nonagricultural economy almost certainly could have sustained more aggressive extraction, a point that is further reinforced by the rapid increase in nonagricultural tax rates in the early twentieth century. Given that there was ample fiscal demand for doing so, what held the Qing state back? Here again, supply-side models can do most of the heavy-lifting. These models identify two primary challenges to expanding fiscal extraction in large countries: potential shortages in administrative capacity and potentially exorbitant levels of local corruption. The larger the state, the harder it is to muster adequate administrative capacity for effective tax collection, or to effectively clamp down on informal surcharges. These difficulties tend to reinforce political opposition against fiscal expansion, rooted in fear of over-extraction and subsequent socioeconomic instability. All of these dynamics are easily visible in the history of late Qing commercial taxation: The state faced tremendous obstacles when trying to ramp up its tax collection capacities, local corruption skyrocketed, and both factors played obviously significant roles in drumming up opposition to the new taxes – which did indeed seem to slow, if not completely halt, their growth. The best place to start is probably the creation and expansion of the lijin collection apparatus from the mid-1850s to the later 1860s. As a significant amount of literature has illustrated, this was a massive undertaking.42 New tax offices had to be created in hundreds of transportation and storage hubs in major economic provinces, primarily those in the Lower Yangtze and South China, each of which had to hire dozens of formal employees. Statistics from 1902 show that total employment nationwide in these offices was between 25,000 and 26,000, which represented a very significant expansion of the local bureaucracy: Given that the average county government employed only four or five dozen people in this era, staffing and funding the new lijin offices may have produced as much administrative overhead as staffing 400 or more county-level governments in a country that, prior to 1850, only had around 1,600 county governments in total.43 Given that the total volume of lijin collection in 1902 was not significantly higher than what it was in the late 1870, we can probably assume most of the administrative infrastructure was already in place by that earlier date. In other words, the creation and administration of the lijin tax alone may well have forced the Qing state to expand its local bureaucracy by some 20 percent or more over two decades – truly lightning fast speed for a 42

43

See, e.g., Luo (1936); Mann (1987); Zheng Beijun (郑备军), Zhongguo Jindai Lijin Zhidu Yanjiu (中国近代厘金制度研究) [Studies of Lijin System in Modern China] (2010). Luo (1936), at 82.

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government that, prior to 1850, had experienced very little bureaucratic expansion, if any at all, for well over a century. Moreover, it was one thing to create and staff lijin collection offices, and another to adequately embed them within local commercial networks so they could actually begin to generate revenue. Almost immediately upon their creation, these new offices began to encounter tax resistance and evasion activities by merchants, ranging from large, interregional operations to small, rural outfits. To combat them, the office had to quickly acclimate themselves to local power networks, economic institutions and norms, transportation routes, open markets and black markets, and a myriad of other highly diverse regional conditions. Beyond that, they had to build sociopolitical connections, establish patrols, tap into networks of information sharing, and, ultimately, muster the coercive power necessary to extract payments.44 All of this would have been difficult even for a premodern state at the peak of its administrative and fiscal powers, but the Qing state in the 1850s and 1860s was, even by its own low standards, operating at a severely suboptimal level.45 A significant portion of the richest regions were fiscally offline due to the Taiping Rebellion, and those that still paid their taxes were usually doing so at a reduced ratio. Meanwhile, as discussed in Chapter 6, political elites continued to display considerable aversion toward agricultural tax hikes, severely hampering their ability to increase revenue through the preexisting tax collection infrastructure, which focused largely on assessing and collecting the land tax and grain tribute. All in all, the state, which was already experiencing serious administrative decay and fiscal constraints in the early nineteenth century, now had to pay for massive military campaigns, maintain at least some of its regular administrative functions, and attempt to construct and activate a new tax-collection system all at the same time – and all on a significantly reduced revenue stream. That the Qing state was able to actually pull this off speaks volumes about its considerable logistical and financial competence even at this late stage. That said, it also meant that, inevitably, many corners had to be cut in the construction of the new commercial tax collection apparatus. Rather than developing independent informational and coercive capacities, which would have required serious administrative investment, the new tax offices generally relied on the know-how and sociopolitical connections of local collaborators: gentry members, powerful local lineages, major merchant families, guilds, and so on. To give these people and entities an incentive to cooperate, tax officials had to allow them to take a share of the collected revenue – effectively creating an informal and highly fragmented kind of commercial tax farming. Previous 44 45

Mann (1987), at 103–110. On local administration during the mid-nineteenth century, see, e.g., Li Shizhong (李世众), Wan Qing Shishen yu Difang Zhengzhi (晚清士绅与地方政治) [Late Qing Gentry and Local Politics], ch. 2, 3 (2006).

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estimates suggest that the number of locals informally making money through “patronage and squeeze” in the lijin system was, in 1902, some two to three times the size of the formal lijin bureaucracy.46 There was, of course, considerable regional variation in how these new tax offices were set up, but in virtually no part of the country were their operations fully formalized.47 In many regions, local gentry members and merchants simply staffed the tax offices directly: Prominent local families were allocated positions in the offices based on their socioeconomic status without any real top-down vetting or selection process. Some provinces, most notably Hunan, attempted to maintain an institutional balance between these local gentry appointees and formal bureaucratic appointees who were assigned to their posts by the provincial treasurer following an official review process. Functionally, the former controlled the vast majority of the offices’ everyday operations, but the latter nonetheless gave provincial and central authorities some limited amount of direct oversight. Other provinces insisted on staffing the tax offices entirely with bureaucratic appointees, but in such cases they still had to informally rely on the cooperation of local elites to function. Most contemporary commentators eventually realized that, between these two models, the former was considerably more cost-efficient, simply because it spent less money on formal bureaucratic appointees who were less well-connected within local commercial networks, and therefore less effective at tax collection.48 The benefit of relying on this system of informal tax farming was that the new system could begin to generate revenue very quickly, and at relatively low administrative cost. The downside was limited growth capacity and, of course, serious corruption: First, the system’s reliance on local sociopolitical networks meant the state did not enjoy an entirely free hand in setting and enforcing tax rates and quotas. Instead, these decisions often had to be made in consultation with local entities, which not only slowed the process considerably, but also imposed some innate checks against the state’s fiscal capacity.49 The state could, realistically speaking, only tax as much as its local collaborators were willing to help it collect, but these collaborators were usually embedded deeply enough in local networks that they were at least somewhat vulnerable to socioeconomic pressures exerted by major merchant families and organizations. The state’s fiscal relationship with local commercial networks was therefore one of negotiation and mutual compromise, rather than one-sided coercion and administration – an institutional reality that was formally reflected, in 46 48

49

47 Mann (1987), at 105. Luo (1936), at 21–31, 68–91, 110–113, 348–393. Mann (1987) at 110–111; Lin Liyue (林丽月), Lijin yu Qingmo Hunan Sheng de Caizheng (厘 金与清末湖南省的财政) [Lijin and the Finance of Hunan Province in Late Qing China], 7 Guoli Taiwan Shifan Daxue Lishi Xuebao (国立台湾师范大学历史学报) [National Taiwan Normal University Journal of Historical Studies] 196 (1979). Mann (1987), at 110–112.

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Hunan and elsewhere, in the division of tax office staff positions between local gentry members and official bureaucratic appointees. Second, the reliance on informal networks meant that the system enjoyed weaker administrative economies of scale than a fully formalized fiscal apparatus could conceivably have generated. Instead of being able to simply replicate a standardized administrative structure, the state had to negotiate and construct each network of local collaborators based on their specific socioeconomic conditions. Finally, the potential for corruption – in the form of informal surcharge collection – in such a system was simply massive. In fact, some tolerance for corruption was effectively necessary for the system to function at all, given that its local collaborators would otherwise have no incentive to assist the state in collecting taxes. As discussed in the Chapter 1, the total volume of informal surcharges swiftly came to rival, and even exceed, that of formal lijin revenue. Lower end estimates of total lijin extraction, including both formal taxes and informal surcharges, amount to some 30 million taels annually for the early 1890s – more than double the formally reported revenue of 13–14 million taels.50 Higher end estimates rise into the 40–50 million tael range. Scholars have given similar estimates of the ratio between informal surcharges and formal taxes in the salt tax and miscellaneous tax categories: The formal salt tax came in at 12–13 million taels annually in the 1890s, but informal surcharges likely brought the real volume of extraction to nearly 30 million taels.51 Miscellaneous tax collection, too, often carried informal surcharges that more or less equaled formal taxes in total volume. It is worth noting the expansion of these fiscal categories often relied on the very same administrative infrastructure that was used to assess and collect the lijin – most of their growth came from new taxes imposed on commercial shipping and storage, which meant that the lijin tax offices were well positioned to collect them – and therefore suffered from the same institutional problems of informal tax farming and ensuing corruption. The one fiscal category that proved somewhat more resistant to informal surcharges was tariffs: Formal tariff income came in at around 25 million taels, whereas recent estimates of total tax collection, including informal surcharges, only amount to some 30 million taels.52 This 1:5 ratio between informal surcharges and formally reported revenue is dramatically lower than the roughly 1:1 ratio estimated for nearly all other fiscal categories, including the lijin, the salt tax, miscellaneous taxes, and the agricultural tax. But why? The most likely explanation is that new tariff income came almost entirely from a handful of urbanized treaty ports on the coastline or along the Yangtze River, which meant the Qing state faced considerably less daunting informational hurdles and principal-agent control problems in its assessment and collection

50

Shi & Xu (2008), at 261.

51

Id., at 259.

52

Id., at 259–260.

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than in, say, the highly localized and regionally diverse collection of lijin revenue or salt taxes.53 As argued above, state control was significantly stronger in major urban centers than in smaller towns or rural regions. It was therefore able to maintain much tighter control over tariff officers than over lijin collectors or agricultural tax assessors, with the result that informal surcharges were far less rampant in the former category than in the latter two. For precisely this reason, the lijin was consistently more controversial in late Qing fiscal politics than tariff collection from foreign trade, even though the latter was, by the 1890s, a significantly larger source of formal revenue. The Imperial Court faced numerous calls to reduce or even eliminate the lijin in the post-Taiping recovery phase. Some of the pressure came from reformist literati like Zheng Guangying or Ma Jianzhong who argued, under the rhetorical banner of “emphasizing commerce” (“zhongshang”), that state policy should pivot away from agriculture toward commerce as the primary source of domestic economic growth, and should therefore tax commercial activities as lightly as possible in order to foster their growth and expansion.54 More often, however, the system engendered enormous opposition within the imperial bureaucracy simply because of its rampant corruption: Calls to abolish it became a recurring feature of Qing politics immediately after the Taiping Rebellion had been put down in 1864, and almost always cited local corruption and excess surcharges as one of the main reasons. As one Ministry of Finances memorial argued in 1880: [Because the lijin] has no fixed quota and no regular auditing procedure, local officials responsible for its collection often embezzle the revenue they collect. Given that lijin offices are widely dispersed in counties and towns, some hundreds or even thousands of li away from the provincial government, if provincial governors fail to diligently exercise their oversight authority and allow local agents to report whatever they want, then the evils of this system are obvious and widely known to all.55

Given its escalating fiscal needs after 1864, the Imperial Court could not afford to seriously entertain the possibility of abolishment or even any significant reduction, but it did feel enough pressure that, from the ascension of the Guangxu Emperor in 1875 onward, it issued edicts ordering local anticorruption investigations on a nearly biyearly basis.56 In sharp contrast, the growth of

53 54

55

56

See Liushiwu Nian Lai Zhongguo Guoji Maoyi Tongji, at 122–123. See, e.g., Ma Jianzhong (马建忠), Shikezhai Jiyan (适可斋记言) [The Record of Words at Room Shike], 1, 31 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju Press 1960); Zheng Guanying (郑观应), Shangwu (商务), in Shengshi Weiyan (盛世危言) [Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age], ch. 5 (1894). For modern academic discussion, see Peng Lifeng (彭立峰), Wan Qing Caizheng Sixiang Shi (晚清财政思想史) [A Study on the Fiscal Thought in the Late Period of Qing Dynasty], 90–91 (2010). Donghua Xulu (东华续录) [Sequel to the Donghua Records], ch. 33 (Wang Xianqian ed., 1884), available at https://ctext.org/library.pl?if=gb&file=18193. Zheng (2010), at 91–99.

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tariff income was never a terribly contentious issue during this period, with the sharpest controversies centering around the distribution of tariff collection powers between Qing officials and foreign administrators based in the major treaty ports, but not on the existence and rapid expansion of tariffs themselves.57 As a result, foreign tariffs were actually the only major fiscal subcategory that experienced consistent growth into the late nineteenth century: By the early 1890s, lijin revenue growth had all but stalled, as had growth in the salt tax. Miscellaneous taxes remained volatile, but no longer experienced the consistently rapid growth of the 1860s and 1870s. Only tariff income maintained a significant upward trajectory, from around 16 million taels a year in the mid1880s to some 23 million in the early 1890s, to 26–27 million later in the decade.58 This is completely consistent with the basic predictions of the supplyside models discussed before: The weaker the principal-agent problems between central authorities and their local agents, the lesser the threat of rampant local corruption, and the greater the state’s ability to effectively raise taxes. From this perspective, nonagricultural taxation could not grow any faster in the late Qing simply because the state lacked the administrative capacity needed for faster growth. It is worth pointing out here these administrative constraints stemmed not merely from the size and complexity of Chinese society, but also, to a considerable extent, from the Qing state’s refusal to raise agricultural taxes. As noted above, many of the initial difficulties in creating a new commercial tax apparatus stemmed directly from a crippling shortage of both money and bureaucratic manpower, which forced the government to rely very heavily on local sociopolitical networks for tax assessment and collection. Its administrative constraints in 1880 were therefore closely linked to its resource constraints in the 1850s, which were themselves largely the product of more than a century of complete stagnation in agricultural tax collection. Had the government been able to draw even moderately more direct revenue from agriculture, it may well have been able to construct a significantly more administratively robust system, with less reliance on informal tax farming. This was, in fact, the institutional path taken by some other large early modern states: The Russian state, for example, spent much of the later nineteenth century shifting from a fiscal regime that relied primarily on direct agricultural taxation to one that relied on indirect taxes. Rather than immediately abandoning direct agricultural tax hikes once the transition was underway, the government pursued them throughout this period, more than doubling 57

58

See, e.g., Chen Yong (陈勇), Wan Qing Haiguan Yangshui de Fencheng Zhidu Tanxi (晚清海关 洋税的分成制度探析) [An Exploration of Revenue Distribution Institutions for Late Qing Maritime Customs], 2012(2) Jindai Shi Yanjiu (近代史研究) [Studies on Early Modern History] 76. See discussion in Chapter 1, Section C.

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the agricultural tax in nominal terms from 1855 to 1895.59 This helped fund the creation and expansion of the indirect taxation apparatus, which finally took over in the 1880s as the primary source of government revenue. Only in the early twentieth century, after rapid growth in indirect taxes had already reduced direct agricultural taxes to insignificance, did the government allow them to truly stagnate, and eventually even decline.60 Contrast that with the Qing transition to commercial taxes that occurred at around the same time: Agricultural taxes, which were already grossly inadequate in the face of escalating spending, actually shrunk in nominal volume even as the new commercial tax system struggled to administratively establish itself. Small wonder, then, that by the 1880s and 1890s, the Russians were able to raise far greater sums, relative to the size of their economy, through indirect taxation than did the Qing state. Beyond these administrative constraints, “political will” problems – that is, the financial self-interest of political elites in avoiding taxation themselves – may also have contributed to the inadequacy of commercial tax growth in the late Qing. Qing fiscal stagnation from the late seventeenth century to the midnineteenth went hand in hand with stagnation in the total size of the official bureaucracy, especially in the number of examination degrees available. With rapid population growth, it soon became unprecedently difficult to acquire an examination degree of juren-level (the minimum degree needed to become an official with formal bureaucratic rank) or higher, even for descendants of senior officials. Many elite families were forced to find other occupations for their sons who could not acquire government positions, and this phenomenon became steadily more widespread over time. The most common outlet was, in fact, business and commerce, which promised relatively high economic returns and relatively comfortable, urban, and cosmopolitan lifestyles. By at least the later eighteenth century, many, perhaps most, socially and politically prominent lineages had begun to invest heavily in commerce, and especially in relatively high-profit interregional commercial activities.61 Anhui, Shanxi, Sichuan, and Hubei, among other provinces, all experienced a considerable boom in elite commercial investment during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although few major political lineages specialized in commerce, many became 59

60 61

Plaggenborg (1995), at 55; Kotsonis (2014), at 313–314 (documenting growth in direct agricultural taxes in the later nineteenth century). Kotsonis (2014), at 314. Political elite investment in commerce is a heavily studied theme. See, e.g., Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937 (2000); Sun Lijuan (2005); Yun Yan, Chen Zhiwu, & Lin Zhan, Guanshen de Hebao: Qingdai Jingying Jiating Zichan Jiegou Yanjiu (官绅的荷包: 清 代精英家庭资产结构研究) [The Gentry’s Purse: Family Wealth Structures of Qing Elites] (2019). On the collaboration of merchants and political elites in local governance, see, e.g., William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (1992).

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substantial stockholders in merchant or proto-industrial joint ventures. Although it is impossible to measure this quantitatively, it seems reasonably likely that the later Qing political elite – defined at any given time as the collection of formally ranked officials and their extended households – invested rather more heavily in commerce than did their early Qing predecessors or the Ming political elite. As discussed in some detail in Chapter 5, these socioeconomic developments helped generate a gradual rehabilitation of “commercial activity” in elite political ideology: Whereas early Qing elites, from the emperor down, tended to speak of commercial activity in somewhat derogatory terms – as an issue of “minor” and “peripheral” importance – beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of influential policymakers and intellectuals began to rethink the importance of commerce to socioeconomic welfare. They argued that commerce was at least as important – if not more so – than agriculture to the country’s economic prospects, and that the state might generate higher levels of growth and industrialization if it invested in commercial activities than in agrarian ones. By the 1880s and 1890s, these ideas had become centerpieces in the Qing state’s legislative and policymaking agenda, which, in hindsight, coexisted rather uneasily with its aggressive taxation of nonagricultural production.62 This meant that political elites had more to lose from any significant increase in commercial taxation, which may well have made them reluctant to support such increases. There can be no doubt that, collectively, wealthy Qing urbanites were unhappy about the lijin taxes: Their well-documented and relentless attempts to circumvent it speak clearly to this. Whether this unhappiness had any real impact on decision-making in the higher levels of the bureaucracy is much harder to demonstrate, if possible at all. Certainly no self-respecting provincial or central level policymaker would openly acknowledge that he opposed commercial taxes because his own family or their socioeconomic acquaintances did not want to pay them. That said, it seems perfectly possible, even likely, that such considerations at least colored, perhaps subconsciously, the attitudes of at least some officials. For example, Wang Mingluan, a prominent official who held posts in multiple ministries over a 40 year bureaucratic career, came from one of the major merchant lineages in Anhui, and it seems plausible that his sustained hostility toward the lijin tax stemmed at least

62

These intellectual developments are discussed in detail in Chapter 6. On the turn toward procommercial attitudes in the later Qing, see Li Dajia (李达嘉), Cong Yishang dao Zhongshang: Sixiang yu Zhengce de Kaocha (从抑商到重商 思想与政策的考察) [From Restraint to Encouragement of Commerce: An Investigation into Ideas and Policies], 82 Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan Jindai Shi Yanjiusuo Jikan (中央研究院近代史研究所集刊) [Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica] 1 (2013).

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partially from that family background.63 Outside of the official bureaucracy, the connections between policy proposals and personal backgrounds were sometimes easier to trace: Some of the major intellectual opponents of the lijin, most notably Xue Fucheng and Zheng Guanying, were either business entrepreneurs themselves or counted major businessmen among their direct family members, and it seems rather likely their personal backgrounds colored both their generally pro-business and pro-commerce policy positions and their specific opposition to commercial tax hikes.64 Nonetheless, these personal financial interests, to the extent they truly mattered, were ultimately only able to slow, rather than stop, the sharp rise of commercial taxation. For high level policymakers, whatever personal incentives they might have had to combat commercial tax hikes were likely more than counterbalanced by their strong interest in maintaining the state’s capacity to rule and govern: In the end, their personal and familial fortunes were closely aligned with those of the Qing state, and the more prominent the official, the closer that alignment. Incentive misalignment and the resulting lack of political will may well have played some role in slowing the growth of nonagricultural taxation in the late nineteenth century, but it was, in all likelihood, a supporting role to the more powerful administrative supply-side constraints discussed above. All in all, there is no obvious need to look beyond rationalist explanations to understand the trajectory of Qing nonagricultural taxation. In all four phases identified above, some combination of demand-side and supply-side factors suffices to explain the general direction and pace of institutional change, which, for most of the dynasty, was tilted toward expansion. Demand side pressures were relatively strong during phase one, eased off during phase two, reemerged in phase three, and ramped up dramatically in phase four. Supply-side constraints existed, to some extent, in all four phases, but were much more salient and powerful in phases three and four due to accumulative economic and demographic growth, which sharply escalated the principal-agent control problems that much of the supply-side literature focuses on. As a result, the expansion of nonagricultural taxation was steady in phase one, slowed down in phase two, picked up again in phase three, and accelerated aggressively in phase four – but not enough to meet the state’s even faster-growing spending needs. The Qing state’s approach to nonagricultural taxation was, for lack of a better word, largely “rational,” both in the sense that it responded flexibly to demand-

63

64

See, e.g., Wang’s opinions in his 1879 memorial Hubu Zunyi Lijin Jibi Qingshang bing Hejian Shu (户部遵议厘金积弊请饬并核减疏) [Memorial to the Ministry of Finance on the Longstanding Problems with Lijin Collection], in 5 Hunan Liwu Huizuan (湖南厘务汇纂) [Collected Materials on the Lijin System in Hunan Province], 4–7 (Dan Xiangliang ed., 1889). See Peng (2010) for a summary of Xue and Zheng’s positions.

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side pressures, and in the sense that it worked around informational limitations and resource constraints in a rationally predictable manner.

c. the “irrationality” of agricultural taxation In sharp contrast, the Qing state’s approach to agricultural taxation was distinctly “irrational,” at least in the sense that it failed, or rather refused, to respond to demand-side pressures for nearly the entire dynasty. This does not mean it lacked political coherence, or that it is impossible to understand its internal logic, which the rest of the book aims to uncover. Nonetheless, if the hallmark of a “rational” fiscal policy is its ability to raise additional revenue within supply-side boundaries when the state faces increasing spending needs, then Qing agricultural tax policy was stubbornly “irrational.” More specifically, this section will argue that none of the “rationalist” explanations laid out in Section A are able to fully explain the extreme stagnation of Qing agricultural taxes: Several of them may have contributed, perhaps significantly, to the stagnation, but there is always some significant part of the story – in some cases the escalation of fiscal demand in the nineteenth century, in other cases the sharp differences between agricultural and nonagricultural tax policy – that they are unable to explain. I. The Limitations of Demand-Side Theories The limitations of “Tilly thesis”-type demand-side explanations are rather obvious: Most importantly, after 1850, the Qing state faced geopolitical and internal military challenges that were probably on par with, if not substantially more serious than, any faced by the early modern western European states. The Taiping threatened the very survival of the Qing state, and in the European imperial powers, it faced opponents that were vastly more technologically advanced and financially powerful. In Japan, it faced a neighbor with clear expansionist ambitions, who was ramping up fiscal capacity and industrial capacity very rapidly, and would soon pose a near-existential threat to the dynasty. Despite these enormous pressures, agricultural taxes experienced effectively no growth until after 1900.65 One might attempt to argue that the sharp increase in nonagricultural taxation was a sufficient response to escalating demand-side pressures, and therefore there was no significant demand-side pressure on agricultural taxes, but as argued in the previous section, this was almost certainly not the case – in fact, the lack of funding from agricultural taxes may well have been a major reason why nonagricultural tax hikes could not grow quickly enough to adequately fund the state’s military and industrial spending. It was, in the 65

See Chapter 1, Section C for detailed discussion.

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end, almost certainly impossible to deal with the kind of fiscal pressures faced by the late Qing state while taxing some 70–80 percent of the economy at less than 1 percent. Governmental capacity, especially capacity to offer famine relief in the wake of major natural disasters, suffered enormously in the absence of significant agricultural tax increases, but not until the complete fiscal meltdown of the early twentieth century were they even tentatively experimented with. It would not be much of an exaggeration to describe this as fiscal suicide. In fact, the Qing was actually a global outlier in attempting to transition from direct agricultural taxation to indirect commercial taxation while keeping agricultural taxes essentially flat in total volume: Apart from the Russian example discussed above, Japan and England both substantially increased agricultural taxes in the early stages of the transition, in part to fund the administrative investment that it demanded, and did not ease off until well after agricultural taxes became almost completely insignificant, both fiscally and politically.66 The contrast is no less stark when we compare the late Qing transition to the Song dynasty transition flagged above: The Song state still relied heavily on in-kind direct agricultural taxation in the early eleventh century, but did so at a relatively high level of extraction – per capita-wise, probably 8–10 times the late Qing rate. In fact, the state ran significant annual budgetary surpluses in the early eleventh century, which funded the investment in administrative infrastructure and reform that was necessary for the institutional shift to consumption-based excise and commercial taxation.67 The agricultural tax continued to increase during the early phases of the transition, and again in the twelfth century, when the state’s military spending needs again outpaced what indirect taxation could reliably provide. In contrast, Qing agricultural taxation stagnated before, during, and after the institutional transition to indirect taxation, seemingly oblivious to its infrastructural needs. In fact, the historical trajectory of the agricultural tax, as opposed to other components of the fiscal system, was only remotely related to military spending in the early-to-mid Qing, and almost not at all by the nineteenth century.

66

67

On English fiscal centralization, see He (2013), ch. 2; Julian Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economy: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800, 277–305 (2017); B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, 386–388 (1962). The land tax spiked by around 40 percent in the immediate aftermath of the 1688 transition, receded temporarily after 1696, stayed steady for another three decades, and then steadily climbed in absolute volume by around 60 percent over the course of the mid to late eighteenth century, before skyrocketing by some 150 percent during the Napoleonic Wars. For Japan land tax statistics, see He (2013), 106; Nakamura (1966), at 434. From the Meiji state’s consolidation of power in 1872 – 1875, the total volume of land tax collected more than tripled, from around 20 million yen to nearly 70 million – far outpacing any other form of government income. The state was then forced to reduce the land tax in the face of widespread rural rioting to around 60 million, where it stayed for the next two decades, until it began to steadily increase again, eventually more than doubling in real terms by the 1910s. HKTDTFTJ, 396–408; Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014); Liu (2015).

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During the eighteenth century campaigns into Central Asia, only the grain tribute – some 15 percent of the agricultural tax in peacetime – experienced any notable hikes, and generally only in the ballpark of around 3 million shi of grain each year.68 In the early nineteenth century, too, severe shortages of local administrative resources incentivized the state to expand nonagricultural tax collection, most significantly from the salt trade, but left the agricultural tax almost completely untouched. Clearly, something other than demand-side considerations was driving political and institutional decision-making in the latter domain.

II. The Limitations of Supply-Side Theories What about supply-side “rationalist” explanations? The “Huang Zongxi thesis,“ the primary supply-side explanation offered in the preexisting literature, explains some general features of the Qing tax regime – the serious principal-agent problems that it faced in nearly all localities – and specifically applies with significant force and persuasiveness to nonagricultural tax policy. When it comes to agricultural tax policy, however, the thesis may not apply nearly as well even on its own theoretical terms. As argued in Section A, there are two constraints on local informal surcharge collection: First, there is topdown monitoring by the central government; second, there is bottom-up resistance by local communities. The “Huang Zongxi thesis” focuses primarily on the former, which weakens with population growth and economic expansion, but the latter, which strengthens with population growth, is arguably just as important once local officials’ coercive power falls below a certain threshold. In particular, the latter is likely a stronger factor in rural settings than in urban ones due to the rural countryside’s greater geographic, economic, and social distance from the center of power. All this casts some doubt on whether the thesis can apply nearly as powerfully to agricultural taxation than to nonagricultural taxation. In fact, there is compelling empirical evidence to suggest that it did not. As discussed in the previous chapter, informal surcharges likely boosted the “real” agricultural tax rate throughout the mid to late Qing to about double the formal quota – without much observable increase in the informal-to-formal ratio despite rapid population growth. Following the dynasty’s fall in 1912, formal agricultural taxes experienced a decade and a half of rapid growth, nearly quintupling by 1927, despite no obvious growth in the state’s administrative capacity. The “Huang Zongxi thesis” would presumably predict escalating levels of local rent-seeking under such circumstances, leading to even more rapid increases in informal surcharges. Existing sources do not, however, bear this out: Government and academic surveys of local surcharges in the 68

HKTDTFTJ, 542–555; Chen (2000); Shen (2002).

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1930s found they had largely kept pace with the formal quota, keeping the ratio between the two at roughly 1:1.69 This suggests something other than topdown control had kept local surcharges in check. The “Huang Zongxi thesis” also has considerable difficulty explaining the Qing state’s differential treatment of nonagricultural and agricultural taxation. If corruption and rent seeking by local agents were the central government’s primary concern, then they would have had very little reason to prefer raising commercial and proto-industrial taxes over raising agricultural taxes: The ratio of informal surcharge to formal quota was broadly similar in all these categories, at around 1:1. In fact, the lijin tax likely had a significantly higher informalto-formal collection ratio than did the agricultural tax – as high as 2:1, according to some estimates70 – which makes sense given that, as discussed above, the “Huang Zongxi thesis” applied more easily to tax collection in urban commercial centers than taxation in the rural countryside. Despite all this, the Qing state was ultimately willing to increase nonagricultural taxes, but resistant to the idea of agricultural tax hikes. Concerns about local corruption cannot explain this difference in political attitude and, if anything, would have predicted the opposite. The counter-argument, of course, is that early modern states did not care about local corruption per se, but rather about the possibility that too much corruption might lead to social unrest. Their bottom line was sociopolitical stability, and limiting principal-agent problems was only a means to that end. Correspondingly, one could argue that commerce and proto-industrial production generated higher profit margins and living standards than agriculture, and therefore the danger of overexploitation and subsequent revolt was lower in nonagricultural communities than in agricultural ones.71 Available macroeconomic data do not, however, support this contention: By the late nineteenth century, nonagricultural sectors accounted for roughly 20–25 percent of GDP, and also, according to recent estimates, around 20 percent of the population in the Yangtze macroregions, North China, and South China.72 Nonagricultural production may have yielded greater profits than agriculture for top-tier earners, and lower profits for the masses – that is, there might have been greater capitalist or proto-capitalist exploitation in nonagricultural sectors – but higher levels of inequality would have made social unrest more likely, rather than less. 69

70 71

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Zhongguo Caizheng Jianshi (中国财政简史) [A Brief Fiscal History of China], 231 (Zhongguo Caizheng Jinrong Academy Caizheng Jiaoyanshi ed., 1980); Guomin Zhengfu Caizheng Jinrong Shuishou Dang’an Shiliao 1927–1937 (国民政府财政金融税收档案史 料: 1927–1937) [Archival Sources on the Finances, Currency, and Tax Receipts of the National Government, 1927–1937], 1119–1120 (Caizheng Bu Caizheng Kexue Yanjiusuo & Zhongguo Dier Lishi Danganguan eds., 1997). Shi & Xu (2008), at 261. As discussed in Chapter 6, this was exactly the rationale many late Qing officials, most notably Zeng Guofan, gave to support the creation of the lijin. Broadbery, Guan, & Li (2018).

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That said, it is still possible that Qing elites were less concerned about urban unrest than rural unrest not because the likelihood of revolt was lower in nonagricultural communities, but rather because, even if they revolted, the consequences would have been less severe due to their smaller population share. This seems very shortsighted, given that the 1912 Revolution was, in large part, an urban movement, but it becomes somewhat more defensible if we discard the benefit of hindsight: The Ming, after all, had fallen to massive peasant uprisings, and the major sources of Qing instability during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been the White Lotus, Taiping, and Nian rebellions. Some of these were much more serious than others, but they were all predominantly peasant rebellions. By 1900, in fact, Qing political elites had yet to encounter, whether in real life or history books, a serious nonrural rebellion that was not also some kind of military coup attempt from within the ruling class.73 This begs the more general question of whether raising agricultural taxes really would have triggered serious rural unrest. As discussed at length in Chapters 3–5, large swaths of the Qing political elite certainly thought it would, and there is no question that any tax increase would be, at least in the short term, socially unpopular, but the real question here is whether a more objective assessment of China’s socioeconomic and political circumstances, particularly in the later nineteenth century, really supports their beliefs. Later chapters focus on unraveling the subjective elite thought process, whereas this chapter focuses on more objective, political, economy-based explanations for low taxation, which theoretically operated independently of subjective worldviews. One of the major destabilizing factors in Qing politics throughout the dynasty was, of course, the Manchu ethnicity of its ruling family, which engendered much opposition and tension at both the beginning and the end of the dynasty.74 One could potentially argue that inbuilt ethnic tensions put the Qing court on a tighter sociopolitical leash relative to both its Ming predecessors and its Republican and Communist successors: If those regimes could extract, say, 5–10 percent of agricultural production without destabilizing their rule, then all other things being equal, the Manchu court could only extract a somewhat lower percentage. This may or may not have been true, but it tells us very little about whether the Qing government undertaxed or not, just as it tells us very little about whether the Ming or Republican governments over- or undertaxed. Those assessments always have to be made on the basis of data internal to the dynasty or regime, rather than from any sort of generalized 73

74

By military coup from within the ruling class, I speak, of course, of the War of the Three Feudatories in the late seventeenth century. E.g., Mark Elliot, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (2001); Pamela Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (2002).

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comparative analysis. The following paragraphs argue that this kind of internal assessment tends to undermine any suggestion that the Qing could not have significantly raised agricultural taxes while avoiding serious unrest at the same time. There is a separate issue of whether the “Manchu-ness” of Qing politics biased its ruling class against tax hikes, perhaps by inspiring unusual levels of fear and anxiety toward the Han population, but that is a question of political ideology rather than political economy, and is best reserved for later chapters.75 The Qing did, as noted above, experience several major rural uprisings during the “long nineteenth century,” but few scholars now believe they were caused, in any significant way, by high taxes or tax increases. Quite the opposite, it seems much more likely that one of their major causes was the lack of government fiscal capacity to provide adequate famine relief.76 The typical Qing reaction to a major local famine was to either reduce or waive taxes for that region until the famine had passed, but very often this was insufficient – in fact, given how low Qing tax rates were in the first place, it barely mattered in many cases. What was necessary, especially when the famine was provincial in scale, was the large-scale provision of food and money. Increasingly, the Qing state found itself unable to do this due to inadequate revenue intake. As discussed in Chapter 1, early nineteenth century famine relief operated at only a fraction of the capacity of mid-eighteenth century programs, and late nineteenth century famine relief plunged to yet more abysmal levels.77 If there truly was a fiscal dimension to the major nineteenth century rebellions, it was that taxes were too low in non famine-stricken regions to provide minimally sufficient relief to famine-stricken ones. Take, for example, the Taiping and Nian Rebellions.78 The Taiping garnered much of its initial social support directly from the Guangxi and Guangdong countryside, where a major drought had ravaged the local economy in 1849, lead to casualties that likely reached into the 100,000s, and driving several million into below-subsistence living standards. State famine relief was, as had become customary by now, anemic, consisting of tax waivers and a relief fund of barely 1 million taels. As smallholder households scrambled to make ends meet, the Taiping movement’s offer of wealth and land redistribution between rich and poor seemed attractive indeed, and its ranks soon swelled with 75 76

77

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See Chapter 5, Section E, for detailed discussion. On the causes of the White Lotus Sect rebellion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Daniel McMahon, Rethinking the Decline of China’s Qing Dynasty: Imperial Activism and Borderland Management at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (2015). On the Taiping and Nian rebellions, see below. Will & Wong (1997); Lillian M. Li, Introduction: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State, 41 J. Asian Stud. 687 (1982). Kuhn (1978) (describing the minimal state presence in Guangxi prior to the Taiping rebellion, and highlighting the importance of famine to the spread of both the Taiping and Nian rebellions); James T. K. Wu, Impact of the Taiping Rebellion Upon the Manchu Fiscal System, 19 Pac. Hist. Rev. 265 (1950).

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desperate local farmers and peasants. At the same time, the government’s tight fiscal circumstances had eroded the war-readiness of its standing armies and militias. These were by no means the only reasons for the Taiping’s initial success – anti-Manchu social sentiment, religious fervor, and shrewd military tactics all played major roles – but it would be truly difficult to imagine the rebellion achieving what it eventually did without some “support” from severely weakened state finances and capacity. A similar narrative can be told for the Nian Rebellions, which swept across parts of North China – albeit in much smaller numbers compared to the Taiping – during the 1850s as the state’s attention was focused primarily on the Taiping: Their armies recruited almost exclusively from regions affected by the major Yellow River floods in 1851 and 1855. The state was unable to provide even the usual level of relief due to the Taiping campaigns and negotiations surrounding the repayment of the Opium War indemnities, thereby driving several tens of thousands of homeless men into the ranks of the rebel army. As discussed in some detail in later chapters, the peasant rebellions that led to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty were also triggered, in large part, by inadequate governmental relief during severe famines. One could ask, of course, whether over-taxation had substantially contributed to the deterioration of rural living standards in the build-up to the famine. This, too, is extremely unlikely. Even counting informal surcharges, the “real” agricultural tax burden for most Qing macroregions was consistently under 2 percent in the decades that preceded these rebellions. It had been as high as 4–5 percent during the earlier eighteenth century, and likely somewhat higher in the seventeenth century, across both the Ming and early Qing regimes.79 On the other hand, pre-tax rural per-capita income around 1850 was only mildly lower, in real terms, than what it was in the later eighteenth century – and had recovered somewhat from the 1830s recession.80 The picture that recent economic historiography paints of later Qing China is, generally speaking, one of market-driven growth that largely kept pace with population growth, without any significant deterioration in living standards.81 The generation population’s ability to sustain taxation might nonetheless have declined if inequality had sharply increased while tax burdens shifted disproportionately to smallholders, but this was almost certainly not the case: Not only did tax burdens remain proportional to landownership throughout the dynasty, but there was also no discernable trend of wealth agglomeration in the later Qing – quite the opposite, smallholders remained the dominant force

79 81

80 Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014). Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018). Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2015), at 52 (“Massive population growth with stable long-run living standards is the defining feature of the Ming–Qing economy. Output kept pace with population: Despite fluctuations and regional variation, we see no downward trend in per capita consumption.”); Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018); Wong (1997).

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in the rural economy through the mid-twentieth century.82 It is therefore quite difficult to see the case for over-taxation at any point in the mid to late Qing – or, for that matter, for any substantive deterioration in living standards, save for periods of serious political crisis or natural disaster. Ultimately, it is no coincidence that both Ming and Qing rural unrest became more serious as state taxation rates decreased. The Qing economy performed quite well by the standards of preindustrial agrarian economies, but, like its preindustrial peers, by no means well enough to keep rural incomes above subsistence level during a major natural disaster. Robust state-driven relief measures were generally needed, but by the nineteenth century, the Qing state no longer had the fiscal capacity to provide them. If higher levels of agricultural taxation were economically sustainable, perhaps even desirable from a welfarist perspective, could it nonetheless be true that they were socially unacceptable – and would have triggered serious unrest anyway, economic conditions notwithstanding? For example, perhaps the loss aversion of rural communities was strong enough that, even though the share of their produce that went into government coffers steadily declined after 1730, they still would have rebelled against any increase in the tax quota. One could imagine that their rising disposable income could have been matched by rising material consumption and calorie intake, which would have made any subsequent tax hike, even if was only back to original rates, feel like a decline in living standards. By this line of reasoning, tax reductions are a one-way street: Once given out, they cannot be taken back without serious political opposition. The problem with this argument is that loss aversion is never the sole psychological determinant of social disobedience, especially armed disobedience: Social unrest is at least as costly for those who engage in it as it is for government authorities – usually much more so. Actual rebellion against an established state apparatus, in particular, involved a high risk of death, social ostracization, and prolonged economic uncertainty, and was usually a last resort in times of severe economic crisis. In comparison, a mild decline in living standards – even if it triggered psychological loss-aversion – seems rather less significant. A brief survey of the history of Qing rural rebellions suggests that agrarian communities were indeed deterred by the costs of rebellion: Not all rebellions were triggered by severe famines or some collapse in the sociopolitical order, but those that were not tended to be limited in scale, and fairly infrequent: The Qing experienced a few ethnic identity or religion driven rebellions during the eighteenth century, most notably the anti-Manchu campaigns of the Heaven and Earth Society and the White Lotus Sects, but these were comparatively minor and concentrated in frontier regions where government control was 82

Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985); Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangtze Delta, 1350–1988 (1990); Zhang (2017).

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weakest. Even in its fiscally weakened state, the Qing state dealt with them fairly effectively.83 Serious rebellion in core Chinese macroregions was a much rarer affair, generally set off by severe and widespread famines. A somewhat more empirically grounded way to approach the question of “would an agricultural tax increase trigger rebellion” is to look at what actually happened after the post-1900 agricultural tax increases. As noted above, the Qing government finally decided, largely out of desperation, to raise agricultural taxes after the Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Uprising, which, combined, allowed foreign powers to impose war indemnities of some 700 million taels. Facing its second severe fiscal crisis in a half-century, the Qing state gradually added 4–5 million taels to its formal agricultural tax revenue from 1901 to 1903 – which merely restored revenue levels to what they had been before 1894, before military and political turmoil temporarily damaged the state’s tax collection capacity – and then another 15 million or so between 1903 and 1911, bringing the total increase to around 40 percent from the 1894 pre-Sino-Japanese War baseline.84 Although this pales in comparison to the skyrocketing of nonagricultural taxes, it nonetheless qualifies as a major tax hike – in fact, the single largest agricultural tax hike in Qing history. How did rural communities respond? There was certainly some grumbling and some open resistance, as would almost inevitably follow any major tax hike in any preindustrial society, but there is scant evidence of unmanageable levels of social unrest.85 The frequency of rural tax protests likely increased in this period, and some protests did indeed become violent, but violent tax protests were a common feature of virtually any period of Qing history, usually as a way to acquire tax waivers in years of bad harvests, or to protest against perceived inequalities in quota distribution. Existing sources do not allow for reliable comparisons of the frequency of rural tax protests between the mid and late Qing, but even those who believe there was a substantial uptick after 1900 concede that protests were probably more frequent and severe during the 1840s – when there was no agricultural tax increase whatsoever – and that 83 84

85

See McMahon (2015) on the Qing response to the White Lotus Rebellion. 68 Qingchao Xu Wenxian Tongkao (清朝续文献通考) [Sequel to the Comprehensive Examination of Literature in the Qing Dynasty], 8245–8249 (Liu Jinzao ed., 1912); Wang Yejian (王业键), Qingdai Tianfu Chulun (清代田赋刍论: 1750–1911) [Land Taxation in Qing China], 97–98 (Gaofeng trans., 2008). The former source shows an increase in formal agricultural tax collection, from around 30 million taels in 1901 to around 35 million by 1903. The latter shows an increase from 35 million in 1903 to a formal budget quota of nearly 50 million taels in 1911). More generally, see discussion in Chapter 1, Section C. The largest tax revolt occurred at Laiyang, Shandong Province in 1910, which was put down in a few months without large-scale military mobilization. Scholars who have studied this revolt and others like it conclude they had “no direct influence on the 1911 Revolution.” See Prazniak (1980); Edward Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–1913 (1975). On local resistance to late Qing fiscal extraction, see also Elizabeth Perry, Tax Revolts in Late Qing China: The Small Swords of Shanghai and Liu Depei of Shandong, 6 Late Imperial China 83 (1985).

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these rural tax protests were, in all likelihood, too scattered and limited to have been a major cause of the 1911 Revolution, which was elite-driven and predominantly based in urban centers.86 As discussed below, the very same elites that overthrew the Qing state chose not only to retain the higher rural tax burden, but actually to further increase them over the following decade. Clearly, they did not believe agricultural taxes hikes were politically unsustainable. Even if there was a substantial post-1900 uptick in peasant tax protests, it likely had much more to do with the deterioration of Qing military prestige and local administrative capacity after successive defeats to the European powers and Japan than with the economic onerousness and unsustainability, perceived or real, of the tax hike itself. The repayment of war indemnities and foreign debt in this period so utterly dominated government spending that very little was left for almost anything else, including famine relief, or any other form of social welfare. This, coupled with the shattering of what military reputation the state had accumulated in the post-Taiping era, likely eroded the ability of magistrates to handle local dissatisfaction – or might have tempted some particularly disgruntled communities to prey upon perceived state weakness. In other words, it is quite possible the likelihood of social escalation had increased, but not the actual level of unhappiness. In any case, the early twentieth century Qing government, even in its severely weakened state, was generally able to deal with these incidents of local unrest. Even the most serious armed uprisings were swiftly put down with only a few thousand troops, and added very little to the state’s military expenditures.87 What is perhaps equally telling, arguably more so, is what happened after the dynasty’s collapse: Not only did the succeeding warlord states decide to retain the late-Qing tax increases, but they added to it steadily. By the mid1920s, state extraction from agriculture in many regions had likely increased to around 165 percent of the 1912 level, despite near-constant civil warfare between various military factions.88 Upon largely unifying the country in 1927, the Nanjing Republican government further doubled formal agricultural tax quotas to around five times their 1902 levels.89 Informal surcharges continued to be assessed and collected at roughly 100 percent of the formal quota 86

87 88

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Prazniak (1980); Rhoads (1975). See also the essays collected in China: How the Empire Fell (Joseph W. Esherick & C. X. George Wei eds., 2013), none of which identify tax revolt as a major factor. Prazniak (1980). Liu Xiaocheng (刘孝诚), Zhongguo Caizheng Tongshi: Zhonghua Minguo Juan (中国 财政通史: 中华民国卷) [The Financial History of China: Republic of China], 74 (2006); Jia Shiyi (贾士毅), 7 Minguo Xu Caizheng Shi (民国续财政史) [The Sequel to the Fiscal History of the Republic of China], 22–26 (1934); Wu Zhaoshen (吴兆莘), 2 Zhongguo Shuizhi Shi (中国税制史) [A History of Taxation in China], 138 (1937). 3 Zhongguo Jindai Nongye Shi Ziliao (中国近代农业史资料) [Source Materials on Modern Chinese Agricultural History], 12 (Zhang Youyi ed., 1957).

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throughout this period.90 Despite these dramatic increases, the social response was fairly mild, even though the Republican state’s well-documented problems in local administration provided relatively little deterrence against local resistance.91 All in all, the first four decades of the twentieth century experienced a long series of tax hikes, none of which triggered unmanageable local unrest. This early twentieth century history also provides very strong reasons to believe that the Qing state possessed the basic administrative capacity to implement a significant tax hike throughout most of its 268 year history, except, perhaps, during the Taiping Rebellion years and its immediate aftermath. One could argue about the relative administrative capacities of the Qing state vis-à-vis the various Republican states, but there can be very little doubt that the Qing state’s administrative capacities were stronger between 1870 and 1901 than they were after 1901, or that they were likely stronger still prior to 1850. Indeed, the period after 1870 did see the Qing state make significant repairs to its agricultural tax system, including a wholesale revamping of the grain tribute and a partial revival of land surveying. As noted in Chapter 1, the severe fiscal pressures after 1901 essentially drove local administrative spending – and therefore administrative capacity – off a cliff. In fact, the history of Qing local administration during the nineteenth century was broadly one of near-continuous decay and decline, with ever-greater shares of local governance being conducted through communal self-rule. In other words, it seems extremely unlikely that the early or late nineteenth century Qing state was administratively or politically incapable of pulling off the kind of tax increase that its much-weakened 1900–1911 successor largely succeeded in implementing.92 Even a “mere” 33 percent increase of around 12 million taels a year in the 1880s and 1890s93 – roughly what the government managed between 1903 and 1908 – would have provided enormous fiscal and economic benefits: It would have allowed the central state to almost double its investment in infrastructure, including industrial development, transportation, and famine relief. Famine relief, in particular, could have been restored to pre-1800 levels

90

91

92

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Zhongguo Caizheng Jianshi (1980), at 231; Guomin Zhengfu Caizheng Jinrong Shuishou Dang’an Ziliao (国民政府财政税收档案资料) [Archival Material On the Fiscal Income of the Republican Government], 1119–1120 (1997). See, e.g., Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900– 1942 (1988); Huaiyin Li, Village Governance in North China: 1875–1936 (2005). One might argue, of course, that the local impact of the post-1901 tax hike was partially absorbed by rapid inflation in the early twentieth century, which doubled grain prices from their 1880 levels. This was undoubtedly true, but rapid inflation at a comparable pace was also a feature of the 1885–1900 Qing economy, which suggests that, at the very least, implementing a tax hike in 1890 would have been no more burdensome to local agricultural communities than it was in 1908. Estimates of the formal agricultural tax in the late nineteenth century are made in Chapter 1, Section C.

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with an additional 5–7 million taels per year, while state-sponsored industrial projects could easily have achieved double – or even triple, if economies of scale are taken into account – the production capacity they actually reached.94 It is impossible to estimate whether this would have allowed China to keep pace with, say, Japanese infrastructure investment during the same period, but then again, there is also no reason to believe that a 33 percent increase was the upper limit of what the Qing state could have realistically managed in the late nineteenth century. By this point, we have gone well beyond specifically critiquing the “Huang Zongxi thesis” and have provided, instead, a general argument against any supply-side “rationalist” theory of agricultural tax stagnation: The Qing state was politically and administratively capable, even in 1907–1908, of implementing significant agricultural tax hikes. Successor regimes, none of which were obviously stronger than the late Qing in terms of administrative capacity, inherited this expansionist fiscal posture, leading to even sharper tax hikes. In addition, the late Qing state was able to push through a series of major nonagricultural tax increases during the post-Taiping era, most of which created systemic corruption risks and principal-agent problems at least as severe as any potential agricultural tax hike.95 These fiscal “successes” – successes in the sense that they boosted state revenue without triggering unmanageable levels of social unrest and unsustainable levels of corruption – strongly suggest that the government was politically and administratively capable of implementing large agricultural tax increases at almost any point in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when state capacity was almost certainly stronger than what it was in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. III. The Limitations of “Political Will” Theories Finally, we must consider the utility, if any, of “political will”-type explanations. Consider first the idea that policymakers resisted agricultural tax hikes because they had to pay them too. There are, however, a number of difficulties with this thesis: First and foremost, although high-level political elites did indeed pay some agricultural taxes, they were also unusually well-positioned to evade them. In the early Qing, those who possessed formal examination degrees – which most officials did, either through actual academic performance or purchase – were simply exempt from the “head tax,” which comprised some 15–20 percent of the formal agricultural tax.96 This exemption became 94 95

96

These assessments are based on the statistics laid out in Chapter 1, Section C. On the high incidence of local corruption in lijin collection, see, e.g., Luo (1936), at 119–223; Mann (1988), at 112–120. See Zhang Zhongli (张仲礼), Zhongguo Shenshi: Guanyu Qi zai Zhongguo Shijiu Shiji Shehui zhong Zuoyong de Yanjiu (中国绅士: 关于其在中国十九世纪社会中作用的研究)

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meaningless after the Yongzheng tanding rumu reforms eliminated the “head tax” in favor of a unified “land tax.” Nonetheless, political elites, defined here simply as those who held some formal government position, continued to enjoy a number of informal institutional advantages: Most importantly, due to their closer sociopolitical connections with local tax administrators, who tended to come from the extended families of county-level political elites, they and their close relatives were much more successful than commoner families at avoiding informal surcharges. A large number of local records and private writings attest to this, noting that families with strong political connections were regularly able to bend tax collection procedures to their own financial interests, leading to serious fiscal inequality between them and commoner families.97 For similar reasons, a significant number of political elite families enjoyed success in evading even formal agricultural taxes: The Yongzheng corruption investigations, for example, attempted to crack down on both elite tax evasion and the collection of informal surcharges. After that campaign, which was continued by Qianlong after 1735, had run its course by the 1740s, the general presumption among most contemporary observers was that elite tax evasion rapidly swelled back to precrackdown levels, and had indeed surpassed them during by late eighteenth century.98 All things considered, most officials probably paid extremely low agricultural taxes, whether formal or informal, even when compared to the already very low taxes that commoner households paid. Assuming that these institutional conditions would continue to exist after a hypothetical agricultural tax hike – and there really is no reason to assume otherwise, unless the tax hike was accompanied by another major anti-tax evasion crackdown – then government officials would have been largely shielded from the hike’s fiscal impact. The macroeconomic consequences of official tax evasion were minimal, as formally titled officials comprised such a tiny portion of the overall population – far less than 1 percent of the population99 – that their tax contribution was generally negligible. Nonetheless, its mere existence casts significant doubt over any potential suggestion that high[The Chinese Gentry: Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society], 36–44 (Li Rongchang trans., 1991); Zhang Peiguo (张佩国), Qingdai Shenquan de Erchong Zhipei (清代绅权的二重支配) [Dual Dominance of Gentry Power in the Qing Dynasty], 4 Kaifang Shidai (开放时代) [Open Times], 121 (2019). 97 Zhang (2019). 98 See, e.g., Zhu Chengru (朱诚如), Jiaqing Chao Zhengdun Qianliang Kuikong Lunshu (嘉庆朝 整顿钱粮亏空论述) [Studies on the Investigations of Fiscal Deficit in Jiaqing Era], in Guankui Ji (管窥集) [Collected Papers of Zhu Chengru], 104 (Zhu Chengru ed., 2002). 99 For estimates of the size of the Qing bureaucracy, see Li Tie (李铁), Zhongguo Wenguan Zhidu (中国文官制度) [The Chinese System of Civil Servants], 171 (1989). Examination degrees were given to less than 0.01 percent of the population. If we include people who purchased degrees, the number increases sharply, but nonetheless does not exceed 0.15 percent of the population. See Xu Daling (许大龄), Qingdai Juanna Zhidu (清代捐纳制度) [The Contribution System of the Qing Period] (1950) on the expansion of purchased degrees in the nineteenth century.

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level political elites had a strong personal economic incentive to oppose agricultural tax increases. In addition, any such suggestion would likely have a very difficult time explaining why the Qing state was able to dramatically raise nonagricultural taxes after 1850. Political elites likely had stronger economic incentive to oppose commercial tax increases, particularly the interregional commercial taxes levied under the lijin system, than any similarly-scaled agricultural tax hike. As discussed above, commerce had become increasingly vital to the economic self-interest of Qing political elites by the later nineteenth century. Given their ability to evade formal and informal agricultural taxation, one has to wonder why – and whether – they cared more about suppressing agricultural taxes than commercial taxes, if indeed economic self-interest was the primary consideration. In particular, the relatively hefty burden the lijin tax imposed on interregional trade fell predominantly on large commercial families and firms, which often had close personal and business relationships with provincial or central-level policymakers. This was largely a matter of necessity, given that these large firms dominated interregional commerce, and therefore must have borne the brunt of the burden. Given the vociferous opposition to the lijin system that flared up quite regularly in late Qing politics,100 it seems likely that many political elites had personal reasons to oppose the new commercial taxes. There is, at the moment, no plausible way to measure the relative economic interest that political elites had in commerce, as compared to agriculture, and this chapter certainly does not attempt to do that. Even so, the burden of proof would fall on potential proponents of an “economic self-interest thesis” to explain why the Qing court was able to push through commercial taxes, but not agricultural taxes. The point here is simply that, especially when we consider the informal loopholes elites regularly abused in agricultural taxation, this seems like a tall task indeed. What if we replace “economic self-interest” with “political self-interest” along the lines discussed in Section A? Here, too, there are many problems: First, to state the obvious, the Qing state was undemocratic, and there was no formal notion of political representation. Ascension into the highest ranks of the bureaucracy was, in theory and to some extent in practice, made on the basis of examinations and, once on the job, performance evaluations based largely on statistical assessments performed in a top-down manner.101 It was certainly no popularity contest. The few major powerbrokers in national politics who entered public service without a top examination degree generally purchased their posts. In addition, there were strict rules that prevented officials from taking posts within their home provinces, precisely to eliminate the kind 100 101

Mann (1986), at 94–103 (describing the political debate over the lijin as “polarizing”). On promotion criteria, see Ch’u (1962), at 14–35. Serious social unrest under a magistrate’s jurisdiction was a major negative consideration for promotion, but this was hardly the same as social popularity.

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of local lobbying described above. Given these institutional conditions, any purported link between local short-term popularity and government behavior is hard to establish. Why would an autocratic bureaucracy behave like a representative government? One possible answer might be that government officials generally left behind large lineages or kinship networks in their hometowns, which could have been vulnerable to retaliation from other local lineages or social groups if the official supported a tax hike.102 But how, in that case, did these local groups come to the conclusion that it was worth alienating a high-level official over what ultimately would have been a very minor loss of income – especially when, given the lack of institutional transparency in Qing political deliberations, they generally had no clear information on who was responsible for which policies or laws, and therefore no clear sense of whether it was worth it to threaten or lobby the official? Moreover, it is not even clear how severe – or sustainable – local unhappiness with tax hikes would have been. Local communities were, as demonstrated by their willingness to tolerate substantial amounts of informal surcharge, perfectly cognizant of the need to keep local governments basically functional. As discussed in greater detail in later chapters, in the absence of a state infrastructure spending, they were willing to spend considerable amounts of their own money on granaries, dams, irrigation systems, roads, and other public goods. An argument along the lines of “tax hikes will pay off in the form of better famine relief and infrastructure investment over the long run” would not necessarily have been socially unacceptable, or even unpopular over the medium to long run. In addition, if the “political constituency” at play was major local landlords – which, frankly, seems much more plausible than local smallholders – then any such theory would run into the same empirical difficulties as the “economic selfinterest” thesis discussed above: Agricultural tax evasion was not limited to the families and relatives of active officials, but was instead epidemic among major landlords, most of whom possessed considerable sociopolitical ties with local tax collectors. In fact, more than one contemporary observer believed tax evasion by local landlords was the primary reason for the tax arrears that persistently drove mid-Qing state income a few million taels below the formal quota.103 Moreover, a large number of these landlords had become heavily involved in commercial activities as early as the late seventeenth century, investing large sums into salt production, textiles, tea, porcelain, and so on. Recent studies of Lower Yangtze proto-industrialists and commercial firms, for example, suggest that many of them were financed by large landlords, many of whom had moved into urban centers and simply collected rent from the

102

Wang (2019).

103

See discussion at Chen (2008), at 255–280.

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countryside.104 It is manifestly unclear why these landlords would have cared more about agricultural tax increases than commercial or proto-industrial ones – and yet their reservations about commercial tax hikes, which the imperial court was perfectly aware of, went completely unheeded in the later nineteenth century. What, then, are we left with? As noted above, the delegation of fiscal authority to the provinces after 1850 raises the possibility of regional competition and “races to the bottom.” The difficulty lies, however, in identifying the specific political economy of such a race, particularly when an agricultural tax hike probably would not have created any noticeable deterioration in rural living standards or serious social unrest. Moreover, these theories apply much more readily to nonagricultural taxes than agricultural ones: While mass rural migration did occur, mostly during the early dynasty and the Taiping decade, it was an extremely risky endeavor that required major socioeconomic incentives – something that a 1–2 percent loss of disposable income would likely not qualify as.105 Merchants and proto-industrial producers, on the other hand, possessed fairly strong socioeconomic capacities for interregional movement.106 It would be difficult, therefore, for a regional competition theory to explain why commercial taxes spiked but agricultural taxes. Fundamentally, any argument that “the political self-interest” of Qing policymakers prevented them from raising taxes is necessarily incomplete unless it also considers the substantial incentives officials had to raise taxes: stronger administrative capacity, strong control over local society, higher salaries, more staff, and, later in the dynasty, more money to pay for military expenditures, less reliance on foreign debt, and so on. How, exactly, did Qing elites weigh these benefits against the political costs of taxation? In the end, this is a question about political worldviews and subjective mindsets: It does not seem possible to construct some “objective” theoretical model of Qing political economy that demonstrates why, “objectively,” policymakers should have cared more about the short-term social backlash against tax hikes than the many long- (and short-)

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106

On commercial investment by large landholding lineages, see Zelin (2005), for examples. On absentee landlordism and its impact on commerce and agriculture, see Bernhardt (1992), at ch. 1; Lynda S. Bell, From Comprador to County Magnate: Bourgeois Practice in the Wuxi County Silk Industry, in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance 114, 114–140 (Joseph W. Esherick & Mary Backus Rankin eds., 1990). On rural migration, see James Z. Lee & R. Bin Wong, Population Movements in Qing China and Their Linguistic Legacy, 3 J. Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series, 50 (1991). On merchant interregional mobility, see, e.g., Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (2006), which documents extensive merchant movement across South China and Southeast Asia; and Pang Limin (庞利民), Jin Shang yu Hui Shang (晋商与徽商) [Shanxi Merchants and Anhui Merchants] (2017), which lays out regional and long distance merchant networks centered in Shanxi and Anhui, but reaching across central and North China, and into the major urban centers of the Lower Yangtze.

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term benefits they could have generated. These “just so” accounts of how one set of interests happened to rationally outweigh some other set of interests are almost by nature unsatisfying. To do better, one must begin by piecing together the subjective political worldview of Qing elites from primary sources. As the term “subjective worldview” indicates, I believe the story was an ideological one, something that defies simple materialist modeling. This chapter has argued that the Qing state could not successfully cope with later nineteenth century fiscal pressures without raising agricultural taxes, that the social cost of doing so would likely have been manageable, and that a pure political economy-oriented theory of institutional gridlock would probably run into serious difficulties. While it cannot claim to have exhausted “materialist” theories for under-taxation, it has attempted to demonstrate that preexisting accounts and the most obvious alternatives are unlikely to succeed. The subsequent chapters argue that the solution is to look beyond rationalist theories, toward political culture, ideology, and intellectual history. The key to solving the puzzle lies in the subjective beliefs of political elites, rather than their “objective” material circumstances. A final word of caution: As emphasized at the beginning of the chapter, I do not argue that the preexisting “rationalist“ theories discussed here are wrong – rather, the claim is merely that they cannot explain the unique stagnation of the agricultural tax, especially after 1850. Quite the opposite, they are highly helpful in understanding many of the basic structural characteristics of the Qing tax regime, especially its approach to nonagricultural taxation, and indeed in understanding the fiscal politics of large, relatively peaceful empires in general. There is little doubt that geopolitical circumstances influenced Qing fiscal policy throughout the dynasty, that fiscal crises were one of the primary drivers of state action, or that principal-agent problems between central and local officials weighed against imposing very high formal tax quotas. Nonetheless, to understand what differentiated the agricultural tax from other kinds of taxation, or what differentiated the Qing from other early modern states, including other Chinese dynasties, we need to look to other, “softer,” political forces.

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3 Pre-Qing Fiscal Regimes

This chapter1 begins the book’s turn from rationalist analysis to ideological analysis, surveying the fiscal ideologies, institutions, and practices of imperial China prior to the Qing. It first provides a very quick overview of Chinese fiscal history from Confucius’ time to the fourteenth century, and then a much more detailed overview of Ming institutions and fiscal thought, with a specific focus on late Ming reforms and fiscal expansion. The core argument is that, contrary to the somewhat common image of the Chinese state as a consistently Confucian and fiscally conservative entity, all major dynasties prior to the Qing, including its immediate predecessor, underwent substantial fiscal expansion after mid-dynasty, in response to economic and demographic growth and escalating military pressure. The Confucian ideology of fiscal restraint did seem to impose some constraint on governmental behavior, particularly in the early Ming, but it was often outflanked by more pragmatic concerns – not to mention by ideological arguments in favor of fiscal expansion firmly situated within the Confucian intellectual canon. Section A covers fiscal history up to the Yuan Dynasty, reaching all the way back to Confucius himself in intellectual terms, and to the Han in institutional ones. Section B discusses the rise of fiscal conservatism in the early Ming. Section C lays out the wave of local and national-level fiscal reforms that occurred during the mid to later Ming, up to Zhang Juzheng’s famous “Single Whip” laws. Section D hones in on late Ming fiscal discourse in the aftermath of Zhang’s reforms, demonstrating that, even at this late stage, many Ming political elites continued to keep an open mind toward fiscal expansion, and that moral condemnation of taxation had limited political impact. It was 1

Segments of this chapter appeared in Taisu Zhang, Fiscal Institutions in Imperial China, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Asian History, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/ 9780190277727.013.134 (2020).

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not until state rule clearly began to crumble in the late 1630s that there was a truly decisive shift toward fiscal conservatism, which then set the stage for the major paradigm shift that occurred in the wake of the Ming-Qing transition.

a. from confucius to the mongols Although it is both tempting and somewhat true to say, as many scholars have,2 that there was a deep “Confucian” tradition of ethical condemnation of taxation, it was really not until the Ming that there was anything resembling an intellectual, much less a political, consensus against expansionary fiscal policy – and even then, the political realm tolerated, indeed encouraged, dissent from this basic moral position under many circumstances. When placed against this political background, an unqualified claim that “Confucian political ethics condemned taxation” seems far too simplistic. The origins of this claim are traceable to Confucius’ avowed moral discomfort with state taxation, later echoed and substantially strengthened by Mencius, which may have colored scholarly perceptions of political discourse and practice in later dynasties. The truth is, however, that fiscal institutions and thought from the Western Han onward often diverged from this “orthodox” Confucian position in deeply impactful ways. The gist of Confucius’ thinking on governmental fiscal extraction was, as many scholars have noted, that it was innately morally questionable, and should only be conducted with extreme restraint. His most famous statement on these issues, echoed and elaborated upon in countless treatises and political documents in later history, is that “the gentleman understands virtue (yi), whereas the commoner only understands material gain (li).”3 “Actions in pursuit of material gain,” he believed, tended to cause “disdain” (yuan). The root of social disorder and suffering was, therefore, “the calculated pursuit of material gain at cost to virtue.” This led to the conclusion that the just and benevolent ruler should always act in accordance to virtue, and should refrain from the pursuit of material gain unless it was otherwise justified by the principles of virtue. Confucius himself, as noted by his students, “rarely discussed material gain.”4 While this political philosophy does not rule out governmental taxation per se, it certainly implies that, in the absence of clear ethical justifications, the pursuit of fiscal income should be treated with a large dose of moral skepticism. At other times, Confucius spoke glowingly of states that taxed their population lightly: The just ruler is one who “carefully cultivates his own virtue yet demands little from others.”5 The material welfare of the commoner population took, in his mind, both practical and ethical precedence over the material 2 4

See discussion in Introduction, “Ideological Analysis in Decline.” 5 Analects 9.1. Analects 15.15.

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interests of the ruler: “If the population is prosperous, how can the ruler fail to achieve personal prosperity? But if the population is poor, then how can the ruler achieve personal prosperity?”6 He was also a prominent supporter of a flat 10 percent tax rate on farmers, which, by the standards of the feudal era he lived in, would have constituted a dramatic reduction in state extraction.7 A century later, Mencius – the “second sage” of the Confucian canon – reworked these strong but nonetheless somewhat flexible positions into something more fundamentalist and unyielding: Whereas Confucius “rarely” discussed material gain, Mencius considered any political discussion of material gain to be innately immoral. As he famously stated to the Duke of Liang: “Why should a ruler discuss material gain? The only discussion should be of benevolence (ren) and virtue.”8 In another essay, he elaborated: “If rulers and subjects, fathers and sons, elder and younger brothers all treat each other with benevolence and virtue, and completely discard any consideration of material gain, there is no possibility of political failure. Why, then, should we ever discuss material gain?”9 In terms of actual fiscal policy, Mencius was a strict minimalist: Rulers should extract as little as possible from their people, to the point where any material consumption by the ruler beyond what was ritually and morally necessary was automatically considered a moral failing. Like Confucius, Mencius supported a 10 percent tax rate, which he traced back to the mythical ancient rulers Yao and Shun, as the proper balance between the ritualistic needs of the ruler and the economic interests of his subjects.10 One might imagine that the broad and substantial consensus between these two founding figures of Confucianism would have locked government behavior into a low-taxation, low-interference mode once the ideology became politically dominant in the Western Han Dynasty,11 but Chinese fiscal policy and thought proved highly flexible and varied in virtually every major dynasty prior to the Qing. For much of the Western and Eastern Han, there was fierce debate among political elites over the proper role of the state in economic management, with a substantial portion of aristocrats and officials favoring a more interventionist and therefore higher taxation approach. Prominent proponents of this position include, for example, Sang Hongyang in the Western Han, and Zhong Changtong in the Eastern Han.12 Many other scholars and officials, such as Sima Qian, Ban Gu, Wang Chong, and Xun Yue, favored a more 6 7 8 11

12

Analects 12.9. Id. “Che” refers here to the traditional 10 percent tax rate applied in the Western Zhou dynasty. 9 10 Mencius 1.1. Mencius 12.24. Mencius 12.30. Dong Zhongshu was, indeed, a fierce opponent of “speaking of profit.” See Dong Zhongshu (董 仲舒), Duzhi Pian (度制篇), in Chunqiu Fanlu (春秋繁露) [Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals], https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-fan-lu/du-zhi/zhs. On Sang Hongyang’s basic fiscal positions, see Huan Kuan (桓宽), Discourses on Salt and Iron: A Debate on State Control of Commerce and Industry in Ancient China, at ch. 1 (Esson McDowell Gale trans., 1931). Zhong Chantong’s (仲长统) primary work on fiscal policy is Chang Yan (昌言), especially the Sun Yi (损益) chapter.

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flexible approach that recognized both the need to “cultivate the strength of the people” through low taxes in times of material paucity, and to raise taxes to fund major military and infrastructure programs in times of relatively prosperity.13 Reflecting this variety of positions, Han fiscal policy oscillated, sometimes wildly, between periods of fiscal restraint and periods of highly aggressive taxation.14 This pattern continued well beyond the Eastern Han’s collapse in 220 AD: The military and political instability that characterized much of the Six Dynasties (220–589) period that followed put heavy pressure on fiscal institutions, leading to irregular but often heavy taxation. Tang Dynasty (618–907) fiscal institutions were, for the most part, more stable than their Han or Six Dynasty predecessors, but nonetheless experienced major change around 780, when Yang Yan pushed through the famous “Two Taxes Law” that set a major precedent for fiscal reform in the Song and Ming.15 Shortly after the dynasty’s founding, the imperial court implemented a tripartite fiscal system that charged a grain tax (zu) based on landholding, a flat household tax (diao) collected in textiles, and a corvée labor tax (yong) assessed to all male laborers. Annual tax quotas were established on the basis of periodic demographic and land surveys, leading to an overall tax rate of roughly 10 percent – close enough to the Confucian ideal to win near universal praise from both contemporaries and later historical commentators. By middynasty, however, a series of rebellions and the demographic and economic upheaval that they brought had rendered this system administratively infeasible: The government no longer had reliable knowledge about local population figures, which made collection of the corvée labor tax enormously difficult. In addition, a large number of miscellaneous taxes had emerged over the dynasty’s first 160 years, making tax collection a highly complicated affair that the weakened bureaucracy could no longer effectively manage. In response, Yang Yan and his colleagues implemented a series of reforms that condensed government fiscal revenue into two components – a household tax (hushui) assessed largely on the basis of household wealth, and a land tax (dishui) – thus weakening the connection between demographics and tax.16 The 13

14

15

16

On Sima Qian’s fiscal thought, see Sima Qian (司马迁), Ping Huai Shu (平淮书), in Shi Ji (史记) [Records of the Grand Historian], ch. 30. On Ban Gu, see Ban Gu (班固), Shihuo Zhi (食货 志), in Han Shu (汉书) [Book of Han], ch. 24. Wang Chong’s fiscal thinking were mainly expressed in the form of a critique on funerary rituals and spending, see Wang Chong (王充), Bozang Pian (薄葬篇), in Lun Heng (论衡) [The Balance Inquiries], ch. 67. On Xun Yue (荀悦), see the Zhengti (政体) and Shishi (时事) essays in his Shen Jian (申鉴) [Extended Reflections]. Sadao Nishijima, The Economic and Social History of Former Han, in 1 The Cambridge History of China, 545–607 (Denis Twitchett & Michael Loewe eds., 1986). For a good summary of this history, see Denis C. Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty (2nd ed., 1970); Michael T. Dalby, Court Politics in Late Tang Times, in 3 The Cambridge History of China, 561–681 (Denis Twitchett ed., 1979). See Yang Yan Zhuan (杨炎传), Jiu Tang Shu (旧唐书) [Old Book of the Tang], ch. 118.

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new, streamlined system collected taxes only twice a year, in the spring and fall, and forbade the collection of local fees and surcharges at any other time – hence the name “Two Taxes Law.” In addition, the government began collecting some taxes in coin, rather than in kind. Combined with some continuous effort to update the land registry, this gave the Tang state a simpler and therefore more stable fiscal foundation for the remainder of its existence. Yang Yan was known, both contemporarily and in later dynasties, as a proponent of larger, more fiscally active government: Contrary to the traditional fiscal maxim of “spending only as much as one can collect” (liang ru wei chu) – which assumed a fixed tax rate that could not be adjusted based on yearly spending needs – he advocated “adjusting tax collection based on spending” (liang chu zhi ru), which would give the state much more budgetary flexibility on a year to year basis, and could potentially lead to a much more expansive taxation scheme.17 Unsurprisingly, this made him many enemies among more conservative Confucian literati, who saw him as a facilitator of fiscal irresponsibility and his policies as a sign of moral decay.18 They did not, however, enjoy much political success in opposing them: Despite Yang’s demotion and death barely a year after the establishment of the “Two Taxes Law,” the basic institutional structure he created survived until the end of the dynasty, and would provide an institutional blueprint for several successor regimes, including, eventually, the Song (960–1279).19 The Song Dynasty was, of course, a notoriously high taxation regime – probably the most aggressive in imperial Chinese history: The state took full advantage of a rapidly expanding economy to bolster its own fiscal muscle. By 1071, shortly after the initiation of Wang Anshi’s highly controversial fiscal and economic reforms, government revenue reached some 62 million strings of cash per year, which represented a tripling of mid-Tang taxation levels and a doubling of the per-capita tax rate.20 The enormous amounts of money thrown into border defense and war indemnities – the Song lived under a constant threat of invasion from the north and northwest, and frequently had to buy peace through the payment of huge indemnities – meant that the Song state rarely ran a budget surplus, but at least it did enjoy a much larger budget than its predecessors. Unlike its Tang predecessor or its Ming and Qing successors, the Song fiscal state made a fairly rapid transition from direct agricultural taxation to indirect commercial taxation relatively early on in its history. Beginning in the early eleventh century, the share of total government revenue that came directly from agriculture steadily declined, from over two-thirds at the start of the century to 17 19

20

18 Id. Id. Wu Shuguo (吳樹國), Tang Song zhiji Tianshui Zhidu Bianqian Yanjiu (唐宋之際田稅制 度變遷研究) [Research on the Transition of Land Taxation during the Tang-Song Period] (2007). See Liu (2015).

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about half in the 1020s, and then to about a third in 1077.21 Agricultural taxes still grew in absolute nominal volume, and quite rapidly in some decades: For example, they increased by some 3.5 million strings of cash between 997 and 1021, by another 3–4 million strings between 1021 and 1064, and then by at least some 7 million shi of grain, or around 5 million strings of cash, between 1077 and 1085.22 Nonetheless, indirect taxes like excise and commercial taxes grew at a considerably faster pace, and contributed the lion’s share of government revenue by the late eleventh century. The Wang Anshi reforms represented, in many ways, the high point of imperial Chinese fiscal state-building.23 Almost completely ignoring conventional misgivings about aggressive taxation and state economic intervention, Wang implemented a sweeping set of reforms between 1069 and 1074 – the issuance of government bonds, “seeding loans” issued to farmers that carried an annual 20 percent interest rate, state manipulation of grain prices through fiscal, rather than regulatory means, nationwide resurveying of cultivated land, and so on – that dramatically expanded the state’s fiscal intake and managerial powers. The dizzying speed at which these reforms were implemented nationwide created, however, enormous principal-agent problems that facilitated massive amounts of local corruption and mismanagement. When a major famine struck Northern China in 1074, Wang’s many political enemies, led by Sima Guang, immediately heaped blame on his reforms, particularly the “seeding loans,” for aggravating rural poverty and destabilizing the countryside. This led to his demotion and temporary political exile, from which he never fully recovered. By 1085, the reforms had been formally abolished, and a more conservative fiscal regime put in its place. This did not, however, mark the end of Song fiscal expansion. A number of Wang’s reforms were revived at later points in the dynasty, particularly after it 21 22

23

Id., at 53. See HKTDTFTJ, at 396–398. The figures for 997 and 1021, which represent total agricultural taxation, are drawn from the same kinds of sources, using the same kinds of measurements, and can therefore be compared to each other – ditto for the 1077 and 1085 figures, which represent formal central government revenue. Direct comparison between the figures for 1021 and 1077, however, would be like comparing apples to oranges. We do know that the total volume of the grain tribute from the Yellow, Bian, Guangji, and Guangji river systems grew by around 20 percent from 981 to 1065 (HKTDTFTJ, 403), which is likely somewhat representative of general agricultural taxation trends nationwide. A recent estimate by Li Huarui largely confirms this, showing a roughly 20 percent increase in agricultural taxation between 1021 and 1064. See Li Huarui (李华瑞), Song, Ming Shuiyuan yu Caizheng Gongyang Renyuan Guimo zhi Bijiao (宋、明税源与财政供养人员规模比较) [Comparative Research on Scales of Fiscal Dependents between Song and Ming Dynasties], 2016(1) Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History] 5. See James T. C. Liu, Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih (1021–1086) and His New Policies (1959); Paul Smith, Shen-tsung’s Reign and the New Policies of Wang An-shih, 1067–1085, in 5 The Cambridge History of China, 347–483 (Denis Twitchett & Paul Jakov Smith eds., 2009).

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moved south in the aftermath of the military disasters of 1127. Escalating military spending to ward off Jurchen and later Mongol invaders forced the Song government to dramatically expand its fiscal apparatus yet again, reaching a high of some 120 million strings of cash per year in the early thirteenth century – nearly double the nominal fiscal intake of the late eleventh century, and nearly seven times the mid-Tang level.24 Although the bulk of this expansion came in the form of indirect excise and commercial taxation, some scholars have argued that the “direct” agricultural tax also underwent a significant increase from 1077 levels, and funded a significant share of local government expenditures.25 This fiscal expansion came as the dynasty’s total territory and arable acreage shrunk by around a third due to invasions from the North, meaning that per-acre tax burdens had, in some places, grown by a factor of over 5.26 Song fiscal policy was nothing if not aggressive. One might expect Confucian scholars to express dismay and condemnation at these highly expansionist policies, but later Song intellectuals were, as a group, rather tolerant of the government’s fiscal position. Zhu Xi, for example, argued that the primary issue with fiscal extraction was not its total volume, but rather its equity: whether it extracted from different regions, and different economic classes, in a fair and balanced manner. In terms of the government’s economic role, Zhu Xi was, in fact, a supporter of moderately “big” government, advocating both the creation of elaborate famine relief institutions and a sufficiently robust fiscal apparatus to support it. He went so far as to criticize conventional Confucian understandings of “virtue” and “material gain” as unnecessarily rigid and simplistic: “Material gain is an awkward and dirty thing, but if we completely refuse it, then we would be asking people to avoid material gain and embrace material damage, which is also wrong.”27 At other points, he argues that “material gain is born from virtue: If we conduct ourselves in a virtuous manner, material gain will naturally follow.”28 The 24

25

26 27

28

Bao Weimin (包伟民), Zailun Nan Song Guojia Caizheng de Jige Wenti: Da Liu Guanglin Jun (再论南宋国家财政的几个问题——答刘光临君) [A Re-Discussion of a Few Issues on the Financial System of Southern Song China: A Response to Dr. Guanglin William Liu], 46 Taida Lishi Xuebao (台大历史学报) [Historical Inquiry, National Taiwan University] 177, 183 (2010). In addition, Richard von Glahn gives fairly detailed summaries of preexisting academic estimates of Song taxation, see Richard von Glahn, The Economic History of China 230–235, 255–265 (2016). For estimates of indirect versus direct taxation, see Guanglin Liu (2005). Liu argues that the direct agricultural tax experienced virtually no growth from the late eleventh century onward, but this conclusion is strongly disputed by Bao (2010), who argues that the land tax grew robustly after 1127 – following a couple decades of stagnation and even moderate decline between the late eleventh century and the early twelfth – and likely reached new heights by the early thirteenth century. Bao (2010), at 190–201. See Zhu Xi (朱熹), Zhuzi Yu¨lei (朱子语类) [A Collection of Conversations of Master Zhu], ch. 36 (Li Jingde ed., Zhonghua Shuju 1986). Id., ch. 38.

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reason why Confucius “rarely spoke of material gain” is simply that “as long as we act accordingly to reason, material virtue will naturally emerge from within.” Therefore, “when statesmen balance material gain and virtue in a mutually complementary fashion, they will be able to manage the world as if it were sitting in their palms.”29 These positions seemed to represent a moderate softening of literati attitudes toward “material gain” over the course of the Song: the fiscal debates in the eleventh century between Wang Anshi and his political enemies largely proceeded under a common understanding that to “speak of accumulating material gain” (yan li) was morally questionable. Sima Guang regularly attacked Wang’s policies as “accumulating material gain,” an accusation that clearly carried significant political gravitas for both sides, whereas Wang took great pains to distinguish “the proper managing of government finances” (li cai) from yan li, and to argue that his policies amounted only to the former, and not the latter.30 By the Southern Song, however, Zhu Xi and other Neo-Confucian luminaries were openly questioning whether the traditional shunning of yan li was in fact a proper application of Confucian political ethics. They did, of course, encounter substantial opposition in doing so – Ye Shi, for example, seemed to support Wang Anshi’s distinguishing of li cai from yan li, even as he argued that Wang’s actual policies had crossed the line into yan li31 – but the mere existence of serious debate over this issue already suggests a general softening of attitudes. The severe political and military challenges faced by the Song from the twelfth century onward seemed to nudge its elites toward greater tolerance for fiscal expansion. The Mongol conquest in the later thirteenth century brought a number of institutional changes to the fiscal state, but no substantial reduction in extraction levels.32 Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) economic policy was marked by significant regional variation – regions south of the Yangtze continued to utilize Song institutions, whereas Northern provinces adopted a mixture of Kitan, Jurchen, and Mongol institutions that involved heavy corvée labor taxes – aggressive experimentation with monetary policy, and the widespread use of tax farming. The government’s total fiscal income fell due to a severe decline in both population and economic output relative to Song levels, but per capita taxation was, if anything, even higher. The growth of tax farming, in particular, 29 30

31

32

Id. Su Shi (苏轼), Sima Wengong Xingzhuang (司马温公行状) [A Brief Biography of Sima Guang], in 2 Sushi Wenji (苏轼文集) [Collected Works of Su Shi], 482 (Kong Fanli ed., 1986); Wenguo Wenzheng Sima Gong Wenji (温国文正司马公文集) [Collected Works of Sima Guang], ch. 39 (Shangwu Press 1929). Ye Shi’s (叶适) most important essays on this subject are Caiji (财计) and Cai Zonglun (财总论), in Shui Xin Bie Ji (水心别集) [Selected Works of Ye Shuixin], ch. 2, 4 (Shangwu Press 1936). For a general account, see Elizabeth Endicott-West, The Yuan Government and Society, in 6 The Cambridge History of China, 587–615 (Herbert Franke & Denis Twitchett eds., 1994).

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led to rapid growth in informal tax surcharges at the local level, which meant that the real taxation burden imposed on the agricultural sector was even higher than in the late Song. Many officials and scholars expressed concern over this largely illegal escalation of fiscal extraction, but at the same time, tax farming brought substantial benefits to the imperial court: It allowed for steady rates of tax collection at substantially reduced administrative cost, and therefore provided a much needed boost to the government’s balance sheet. Much of this was poured into military spending, but some of it also went into the imperial family’s direct expenditures, leading to public displays of extravagance that far exceeded what the Han population had been used to under the Song. By the early fourteenth century, these highly visible symptoms of fiscal expansion had apparently triggered widespread intellectual backlash: Much more so than in the Song, Han Chinese intellectuals living in the Yuan were largely unified in their condemnation of governmental tax practices and institutions. Nearly all writings on fiscal policy that survive from this period – such as those by Wang Yun, Ma Duanlin, and Zhang Gui – emphasize the need to reduce government spending and taxation. Zhang, who served as a senior advisor to five consecutive emperors, is perhaps the most authoritative voice on this: “Governmental funds are all collected from the general population. . . . [Extravagant spending by the imperial family] damages both the military and the general population . . . and creates great pressure on local governments. Such extreme extravagance often extends across several years, generating contempt among the population.”33 Nonetheless, many of these critiques focused on a few particular aspects of the fiscal state, rather than general assaults on taxation per se: Zhang was clearly troubled by the imperial family’s extravagance. At the same time, he was largely supportive of government extraction insofar as it went into military or infrastructure spending. Wang Yun was a fierce critic of tax farming and heavy labor taxes reintroduced in northern China, but also advocated aggressive construction of state granaries as a famine relief measure, which he acknowledged would require a fairly high level of taxation.34 Ma Duanlin approached both contemporary fiscal institutions and historical ones with a fairly measured combination of criticism and approval: He praised Yang Yan’s expansionist reforms, for example, and positively assessed some of Wang Anshi’s measures while criticizing others.35 Among contemporary fiscal practices, he – consistent with his admiration of Yang Yan – advocated an expansion of land-based taxation and gradual elimination of the labor tax. Nonetheless, he believed 33 34

35

Zhang Gui Liezhuan (张珪列传), Yuan Shi (元史) [History of the Yuan], ch. 175. Wang Yun (王恽), Bian Min Sanshiwu Shi: Yi Xu Min (便民三十五事:议恤民) [On Showing Solicitude for the People], in Qiujian Xiansheng Daquan Wenji (秋涧先生大全文集) [Collected Works of Qiujian], ch. 9 (Shangwu Press 1936). Ma Duanlin (马端临), Wenxian Tongkao (文献通考) [Comprehensive Examination of Literature], ch. 1, 3, 15 (Zhonghua Shuju Press 2006).

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contemporary fiscal extraction had become undisciplined, and supported an overall tightening of tax quotas and collection mechanisms. All in all, the pre-Ming history of Chinese taxation does not yield the impression that some sort of Confucian anti-taxation mentality dominated state policy. Quite the opposite, all major dynasties experienced significant fiscal expansion around mid-dynasty, and while there were indeed many complaints that such expansion was innately unethical, there were always an equally influential group of more pragmatically minded officials and scholars available to make a strong counterargument. From the mid-Tang transition onward, state taxation entered into a six century-long process of expansion – often highly aggressive expansion – accompanied by a substantial loosening of literati attitudes toward “pursuing material gain.” Rapid per capita income growth in the Northern Song helped the population digest some of this expansion, but even so, per capita tax burdens likely experienced substantial growth from the tenth century to the fourteenth.36 While moral aversion to fiscal extraction clearly played some substantial role in the political and institutional history of most major dynasties, its influence was uneven and regularly diluted, both in policymaking and in elite intellectual discourse. This should hardly be surprising to political and institutional historians: The political circumvention and erosion of mainstream moral commandments in political life is a common theme across the entire span of known human history. In this particular context, the Confucian “moral commandment” against taxation, to the extent it truly existed, was always somewhat ambiguous in content, and therefore vulnerable to pragmatic or ethical manipulation: Even a strict fundamentalist who stuck to the text of Confucius’ sayings would have a hard time arguing that he left no ethical room for fiscal expansion – at most, he was uncomfortable with it, and seemed to believe there was a high threshold for moral justification. Mencius may have been somewhat more absolutist in his condemnation of “material gain,” but the existence of ambiguity in Confucius’ position was, as noted above, more than enough material for later, less taxation-averse thinkers like Wang Anshi or Zhu Xi to work with. Moreover, many statesmen, such as Yang Yan, simply did not seem to be very troubled by Confucius’ professed disdain for yan li, and rarely discussed it in their writings. Public displays of material extravagance could, as seen in the later Yuan, become a source of considerable ethical discomfort for many Confucian scholars, but when it came to the proper level of fiscal extraction, or the proper economic role of the state, imperial Chinese elites held diverse and often highly flexible positions. Insofar as ethical concerns were voiced, they did indeed tend to come in the form of yan li accusations, but at no point between 36

Robert M. Hartwell estimates that the state extracted a relatively consistent share, around 10 percent, of total economic production throughout the Southern Song, although per capita tax burdens likely increased due to declining per capita income. See Hartwell (1988), at 78–79; see also Liu (2005).

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Confucius’ lifetime and the Yuan-Ming dynastic transition were these concerns so politically dominant that fiscal expansion became unacceptable for an extended period of time. Quite the opposite, fiscal policy in most eras was pragmatic, flexible, and at least somewhat tolerant of tax hikes.

b. the early ming Following its creation in 1368, the Ming fiscal state made some early efforts to reverse the fiscal and monetary excesses of the Song and Yuan.37 The early Ming court experimented with paper currency for a short period and then moved to a silver and coin-based currency, under which taxes were largely collected in kind. Indirect commercial taxes and excise, which had once formed the bulk of the Song fiscal state, fell very sharply during the military and economic turmoil of Yuan-Ming transition, and, despite some periods of fairly rapid growth, especially in the late Ming, never managed to supply more than a small, if growing, fraction of state income at any point during the dynasty – perhaps 10 percent in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which grew to around 20 percent by the early seventeenth century.38 Throughout its 276-year existence, the Ming state relied on agricultural production as its primary source of revenue. For much of the dynasty, the rural population paid the bulk of its tax in grain, although the labor tax imposed on some northern provinces continued to be fairly substantial. In the process of overthrowing Mongol rule, the Ming state had accumulated large amounts of land that formerly belonged either to Mongol aristocrats or other military factions. These were now converted into state property that was rented out to smallholders, charging a “tax” (effectively a rent) of some 20–40 percent.39 For privately owned land, the tax rate was substantially lower, often no more than 5 percent even in the relatively heavily taxed Lower Yangtze, roughly half of what it was in the Yuan.40 Combined, they yielded a largely stable annual intake of some 30 million shi of grain – equivalent to some 9 million taels of silver under contemporary conversion

37 38

39

40

Huang (1998). See summary at Chen (2006a), at 73–97. The 20 percent estimate for the late Ming is derived from the share of the military campaign taxes imposed after 1618: The campaign taxes were assessed as a direct percentage add-on to preexisting tax quotas, which meant the share of the campaign taxes distributed to nonagricultural taxation was more or less the share that nonagricultural taxation contributed to total government revenue. See, e.g., Sun Chengze (孙承泽), Shan Shu (山书) [Book in the Mountains], ch. 13 (Zhejiang Guji Press 1989). See Wu Dange (伍丹戈), Mingdai Tudi Zhidu he Fuyi Zhidu de Fazhan (明代土地制度和 赋役制度的发展) [The Development of the Land and Corvee System in the Ming Dynasty], 14–16 (1982). Id.

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rates – which accounted for well over 90 percent of the government’s total revenue.41 The exact reasons for this nationwide tax reduction are hard to pinpoint, given the paucity of political sources from this era, but there are some obvious candidates: The extraordinarily high tax rates imposed in the Song and Yuan had, as noted above, generated an intellectual backlash among Han literati by the early fourteenth century, which continued to be highly influential – arguably more so, now that the government was once again Han-dominated – in the early Ming. A number of prominent early Ming officials and intellectuals were fierce critics of Song and Ming fiscal practices, and argued for a return to limited government and in-kind taxation. Fang Xiaoru, the teacher and later primary advisor to the Jianwen emperor, took some particularly extreme conservative positions on this, advocating a return to Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC–256 BC) agrarian policies, which he believed best exemplified the principles of “benevolence” (ren) and “virtue” (yi) due to their egalitarianism and fiscal restraint.42 While this specific proposal was somewhat unusual even among fiscal conservatives, Fang’s expressed desire for socioeconomic equality and lower taxes was fairly conventional for his time. Influential officials in the 1390s, most notably Wang Shuying, argued that the primary problems with post-Tang fiscal institutions were that smallholders were burdened with a heavier tax burden than large landlords on a per capita basis – the exact opposite of what virtuous governance demanded – and that overall government spending, particularly military spending, had grown to unsustainable heights since the early Song.43 The Yuan practice of collecting taxes in cash also came under attack, most notably from Wang Yi, for its disparate impact on rich and poor.44 Given the general socioeconomic conditions of the early Ming, it is not terribly surprising that contemporary officials and scholars largely favored some degree of fiscal conservatism. The population had plummeted due to the decades of war that marked both the rise and fall of the Mongol occupation and, by 1368, was barely half of what it was in the later Song.45 Both the agricultural and manufacturing sectors were in shambles. Like their predecessors in the early Han and Tang, early Ming policymakers believed in economic 41

42

43 44 45

The exact number grew from around 26 million shi in the mid-Hongwu reign to over 32 million shi later. It later stabilized at around 28 million shi in subsequent reigns. HKTDTFTJ, at 255–269. Fang Xiaoru (方孝孺), Xunzhi Zhai Ji (逊志斋集) [Selected Works of Xunzhi Zhai], ch. 1, 4, 11 (Ningbo Press 1996). Wang Shuying (王叔英) memorial, HMJSWB, ch. 12. Wang Yi (王禕), Quan Huo Yi (泉货议) [On Currency], HMJSWB, ch. 4. Early Ming population estimates, see Wu Songdi (吴松弟), 3 Zhongguo Renkou Shi (中国人 口史) [A History of China’s Population], 387–391 (2000). For a lower estimate, see Cao Shuji (曹树基), 4 Zhongguo Renkou Shi (中国人口史) [A History of China’s Population], 464–465 (2000).

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recovery through fiscal restraint: “Give the people rest” (yu min xiuxi) and “grow economic surplus through rest and nourishment” (xiuyang sheng xi) were mainstream political slogans in all three eras.46 With the expulsion of the Mongols, the need to maintain large standing armies had receded – a luxury the Song state never enjoyed throughout its history – thereby creating the geopolitical space necessary to push through large scale tax reductions. The Ming’s first emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, was another major political force in favor of fiscal restraint. As historians never tire of pointing out, Zhu was born into an impoverished peasant family – one of only two dynastic founders in Chinese history, the other being the founding emperor of the Han, who could claim this distinction – and experienced first-hand the suffering that landlord and governmental extraction could inflict on the peasantry. While it is obviously problematic and dangerous to indulge in some sort of warped “great man” history in which the dynastic founder’s personal background determines the dynasty’s political tendencies, in Zhu’s case many of his primary political instincts were almost certainly inseparable from his early life experience.47 He was, for example, an outspoken skeptic of commerce and commercial institutions, instead insisting that agriculture was the only reliable source of wealth production. He was also a committed opponent of landlord accumulation, and sought to reverse it through state-controlled land redistribution. In terms of fiscal policy, he was, unsurprisingly, a strong supporter of lower taxes and limited government, which dovetailed nicely with both his pro-peasant inclinations and his deep distrust of the bureaucracy, which he constantly suspected of corruption and abuse. It is hard to say how much ideological common ground Zhu shared with even his more fiscally conservative advisors. He lacked the scholarly background to interact with them at a truly intellectual level, but the two sides did share a general political intuition in favor of “benevolence” (ren) and “easing” (kuan) – in the political language of the day, these terms were associated with shrinking the scale of government and reducing fiscal extraction.48 Whereas scholar-officials such as Fang Xiaoru strived to be philosophically systemic and historically grounded in their condemnation of taxation, Zhu’s political instincts sometimes seemed to draw more heavily from class consciousness than from elaborate moral principles. He was never fully comfortable with the

46

47

48

Ming Taizu Shilu (明太祖实录) [Veritiable Records of the Taizu Emperor of the Ming], ch. 39. See, e.g., John D. Langlois, Jr., The Hung-wu Reign, 1368–1398, in 7 The Cambridge History of China, 107–181 (Frederick T. Mote & Denis Twitchett eds., 1988). For an argument on why Zhu’s actions were more attuned with the Confucian mainstream than often thought, see also John Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (1983). See, e.g., various edicts and petitions reported in Ming Taizu Shilu, ch. 29, 39, 130, 174.

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bureaucracy around him, and repeatedly clashed with it. Nonetheless, there was enough common ground on fiscal policy for the two sides to work together. The regime of fiscal restraint that Zhu and his advisors created remained intact for roughly a century: From the 1360s to the 1450s, there were no major changes made to either tax collection institutions or to the overall tax quota itself. By the mid-fifteenth century, however, the Ming fiscal state was already coming under substantial duress: Mongol invasions during the 1440s forced the imperial court to splurge on military spending, whereas the often dramatic political turmoil of the 1440s and 1450s – bloody dynastic successions that bordered on coups, political cleansing of opposing factions, and so on – sharply escalated its administrative costs. Political weakness at the center bred local corruption, which in turn led to widespread embezzlement and underreporting of tax revenue, continuously eroding the state’s fiscal position well into the late Ming.49 In response, beginning in the later 1450s, records of substantial regional tax hikes begin to emerge in official records. For the next 180 years, Ming fiscal institutions would undergo a somewhat milder and more drawn out version of the rapid change and expansion that Tang and Song institutions experienced after mid-dynasty. Unsurprisingly, this was the subject of much debate and animosity among the political elite, from which distinct patterns of rhetorical tactics, argumentation, and normative reasoning would emerge.

c. fiscal reforms in the mid-to-late ming The earliest attempts at systemic fiscal expansion in the mid-Ming came at the provincial and regional level, rather than at the center. This may have had something to do with the political resilience of the early Ming consensus discussed above, but if so, the consensus was clearly weakening, for the center did very little to curb provincial fiscal experimentation, and even encouraged it from time to time. Despite the bottom-up nature of these experiments, they nonetheless generated a substantial increase in tax revenue over several decades, and fed directly into the top-down reforms championed by Zhang Juzheng in the later sixteenth century.

49

It should be emphasized that a deterioration in the state’s formal administrative capacity did not immediately translate into a deterioration of order and governance at the local level. As argued in, for example, Michael Szonyi, The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (2017), local interactions between the Ming state and its population went well beyond the realm of formal coercion, and, as they later did in the Qing as well, involved significant amounts of local self-governance and mutual cooperation. This gave the state a considerable buffer in local governance – when formal administrative capacity decreased as a result of deteriorating state finances, it could shift some of the burden onto less formal forms of self-governance and state-society collaboration. Nonetheless, the latter was not a perfect substitute for the former, especially in regards to interregional state activity such as military campaigning and large-scale famine relief.

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The initial wave of action came in the Lower Yangtze, which at the time was already the single most important source of state revenue. Beginning around 1457, a series of Lower Yangtze governors began to add “waste surcharges” (hao) to formal grain tax quotas, nominally to compensate local governments for the administrative cost of tax collection.50 These measures effectively amounted to, depending on the specific county and the type of land, a 50–120 percent increase in the actual volume of grain collected from the countryside. The formal grain quota was then shipped off to Beijing, while the “surcharges” would be reallocated regionally to pad provincial and local government budgets.51 Over the next six decades, Lower Yangtze governors would experiment with a variety of measures and surcharge rates, some aiming to equalize the tax burden borne by state-owned and privately-owned land (guan min yi ze), others simply attempting to increase tax revenue amidst rising administrative expenses. Often, the two objectives went hand in hand, as some regional tax regulations would sharply increase the tax rate imposed on private land, sometimes by as much as 500 percent, while moderately reducing tax collection from state-owned land.52 On balance, this still led to a substantial increase in agricultural taxes. By the mid-sixteenth century, these measures had spread beyond the Lower Yangtze to South China and elsewhere.53 For the most part, surcharges were imposed in a piecemeal fashion, moving from town to town and county to county. This led to significant fiscal discrepancies between different regions and serious administrative confusion. At the same time, the creation of official surcharges gave local officials an administrative opening to (often illegally) charge informal surcharges and fees of their own. By the 1480s and 1490s, this had created such a swollen fiscal regime in some localities that higher level officials began implementing countermeasures to simplify and limit local tax collection. This came, for the most part, in the form of silver conversion (zhe yin): Apart from the formal grain quota imposed by the central government, provincial and regional surcharges began to be collected in silver, which was easier to audit and assess.54 Although this provided an opportunity for provincial authorities to crack down on local abuse, it also allowed them to further increase the volume of these surcharges by imposing a higher silver exchange rate than contemporary grain market prices. Conversion of grain taxes to silver soon became a widespread phenomenon, bringing along a general increase in provincial and local government revenue

50

51 52

53

Li Bing Liezhuan (李秉列传) [Biography of Li Bing], Ming Shi (明史) [Official History of the Ming], ch. 177. Cui Gong Liezhuan (崔恭列传) [Biography of Cui Gong], Ming Shi, ch. 159. See, e.g., Zhu Jian, Gujin Zhiping Lue, at ch. 1; Jiading Xianzhi (嘉定县志) [Annals of Jiading County], ch. 7 (1605), cited in Chen (2006a), at 50 (unable to pull original source). For a general summary of this history, see Chen (2006a), at 49–51. 54 Chen (2006a), at 51. Id.

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across the country. In North China, where relatively heavy corvée labor taxes created their own local complications and abuses, provincial governors moved to collect all taxes that would be used to pay military defense costs in silver, and then implemented a conversion rate of one tael of silver for each shi of grain, roughly double contemporary market prices.55 By the early sixteenth century, such practices were common across the country, supplying some 12–15 percent of the central government’s annual income, and probably a much larger share of provincial tax collection.56 Similar changes to portions of the annual grain tribute took place over the course of the sixteenth century.57 Given that fiscal expansion was predominantly a provincial and regional affair, it is very difficult to estimate just how large the expansion actually was, but even if it only formalized the grain surcharges discussed above, that would still imply a near doubling of agricultural taxes in some regions. The central government did not actively pursue any comparable fiscal expansion until the sixteenth century, but it was clearly happy to allow provincial experimentation. Unlike the Qing Court, which, as we will see in later chapters, legally banned the collection of local surcharges and enforced it with periodic zeal, the Ming Court was often openly tolerant, at least if the surcharges came with provincial authorization. There are very few records of Lower Yangtze governors being sanctioned or even rebuked for charging “waste surcharges” – the major exception may have been Li Bing, whose sacking in 1468 may have been indirectly related to his aggressive implementation of surcharges58 – and, for the most part, they made no effort to hide them from the center.59 By the later sixteenth century, in response to deepening fiscal crisis at the center brought about by excessive spending and widespread corruption, the central government took significant steps to both administratively normalize provincial surcharges and to seize a larger portion of them for itself. This was predominantly achieved through the famous “Single Whip Laws” (yitiao bian fa) that were the hallmark fiscal achievement of the later Ming. Although the Single Whip Laws are most commonly associated with Zhang Juzheng’s nationwide implementation in 1582, their creation dates back at least a half-century before that. The first use of the term “single whip” in central level deliberations came in 1530, when the senior officials Fu Hanchen and Gui E 55 56

57 58 59

Li Min Liezhuan (李敏列传) [Biography of Li Min], in Ming Shi, ch. 185. An estimate of some 814,000 taels a year of converted silver income given to the central government is found in Wang Ao (王鳌), Zhenze Changyu (震泽长语) [Writings in Zhenze], ch. 1, which would amount to around 12 percent of the central government’s fiscal income. A higher silver income figure and percentage is reported in Han Wen’s (韩文) memorials collected in HMJSWB, ch. 85. Shi Huo Er & San (食货二 & 三) [Commerce, Parts Two and Three], Ming Shi, ch. 78, 79. Li Bing Liezhuan (李秉列传) [Biography of Li Bing], Ming Shi, ch. 177. Local surcharges were openly discussed between local officials and central censors. See, e.g., Wang Ao (王鳌), Wuzhong Fushui Shu yu Li Sikong (吴中赋税书与巡抚李司空), in HMJSWB, ch. 120 (criticizing the central government’s tolerance of local surcharges).

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used it to describe a set of national reforms designed to simplify and standardize tax collection.60 These reforms would abolish some of the traditional subcounty level fiscal assessment and collection units, such as the li and jia, and would instead concentrate all tax collection at the county level. At the same time, local surcharges and fees would be formalized and consolidated whenever possible. Essentially, this was an attempt to resurvey and simplify local tax burdens and even them out based on current landownership and usage patterns. Despite approval by the Jiajing emperor and some fledging attempts at implementation, the central government failed to muster the administrative resources to see these reforms through. It was, once again, the provinces that were the more effective facilitators of institutional experimentation and change. From the 1530s onward, perhaps partially in response the central government’s failed attempt at simplification and reassessment, various provinces began to push through their own measures. In 1537, for example, the regional governor of Yingtian, in Southern Jiangsu, created a “single collection method” (zhengyi fa) that, similar to Yang Yan’s “Two Taxes Law,” merged both corvée labor taxes and a number of local surcharges and fees into the official grain tax, and began collecting it in silver.61 Implementation of these changes required, of course, a fairly thorough understanding of the region’s actual tax burden and land distribution, and was therefore preceded by both a land survey and an accounting of local fees and surcharges. This was one of the earliest prototypes for the Single Whip Laws, and substantially boosted the region’s fiscal health, partially because formalized local surcharges were somewhat more streamlined and therefore easier to assess, and partially because silver was, by this time, simply a more efficient medium of tax collection than grain, textiles, or actual labor service. Furthermore, the conversion of grain taxes into silver offered regional authorities an additional opportunity to increase tax quotas by massaging conversion rates. From the 1530s to the 1560s, variations of these institutional reforms emerged across the Lower Yangtze and South China, and eventually spread to North China.62 By the 1560s, its chief proponents, such as Pang Shangpeng and Hai Rui, had developed a more institutionally mature version in Zhejiang and Jiangsu that they formally named the “Single Whip Laws”: Not only did this version include the formalization, simplification, and silver conversion 60

61

62

For a detailed chronology of the Single Whip Law’s conception and implementation, see Liang Fangzhong, Yitiaobian Fa Nianbiao (一条鞭法年表) [Chronology of the Single Whip Law] (1952). See Ding Liang (丁亮), Zouxiang Yitiaobian Fa de Nuli: Zhengyifa yu Mingdai Nan Zhili de Junyaoyi Gaige (走向一条鞭法的努力:征一法与明代南直隶的均徭役改革) [Efforts toward the Single Whip Laws: From the Unified Taxation to Reform of the Common Service System in Southern Zhili during the Ming Dynasty], 2019(10) Gugong Bowu Yuan Yuankan (故宫博物 院院刊) [Palace Museum Journal] 69. Id.

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measures discussed above, but it also incorporated the reorganization of local tax collection units previously proposed by Gui E and Fu Hanchen at the national level.63 Over the course of the 1570s, this bundle of reforms was implemented under central authorization in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong, until they were made national policy by Zhang Juzheng in 1582.64 By the time of Zhang’s national push, the reforms had become refined into a fixed set of procedures: a land and tax survey of all affected regions, a comprehensive merging of all grain taxes, local surcharges and fees, corvée labor taxes into a single grain-based “land and head” (diding) tax quota, conversion of the grain quota into silver, and collection of this new silver quota at the county level.65 Upon full implementation, only a fraction of agricultural taxes would, in theory, continue to be collected in grain, as an annual “grain tribute” to the capital. These procedures could then be repeated whenever the state felt that its fiscal regime no longer accurately reflected landownership and production patterns at the ground level. To some extent, this may have facilitated greater economic equality: The land surveys discovered substantial amounts of previously unregistered land – which were disproportionally owned by large landlords – while also updating government records of preexisting land titles. Given that the overall direction of late Ming landownership was apparently toward greater concentration and landlordism, the updating of preexisting land titles and tax quotas tended to work strongly in favor of smallholder and tenant interests. Contemporary politicians, as discussed below, placed an enormous amount of emphasis on this egalitarian impact, citing it as one of the primary justifications for the new tax regime.66 At the same time, the Single Whip Laws increased the government’s total fiscal intake, while also cracking down on local corruption. The merging of local fees and surcharges into a formal tax quota assessed and collected at the county level or above sharply reduced the ability of sub-county authorities to tamper with the collection process, and therefore managed to simultaneously

63

64 65

66

For commentary by contemporaries or near-contemporaries, see, e.g., Gu Yanwu, Tianxia Junguo Libing Shu, ch. 84; and the essays in HMJSWB, ch. 357, 358. For a general narrative, see Chen (2006a), at 57–58. Shi Huo Er, Ming Shi, ch. 78. There is, needless to say, a massive amount of academic literature on Zhang Juzheng’s reforms. For a good summary, see Feng Ming (冯明), Jin Sanshi Nian Lai Guonei Zhang Juzheng Yanjiu Zongshu (近三十年来国内张居正研究综述) [A Review of Mainland Chinese Studies on Zhang Juzheng in the Recent Thirty Years], 33 Changjiang Daxue Xuebao (长江大学学报) [Journal of Yangtze University] 104 (2010). For an authoritative narrative, see Fan Shuzhi (樊树志), Yitiaobian Fa de Youlai yu Fazhan (一条鞭法的由来与发展) [The Origin and Development of the Single Whip Laws], 1982(1) Mingshi Yanjiu Luncong (明史研究论丛) [Essays on Ming History] 124. See, e.g., Zhang Dong (张栋), Yin Shi Chen Yan Shu (因事陈言疏), HMJSWB, ch. 438. See further discussion in infra Section D.

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reduce illegal surcharges and increase the revenue that actually flowed into official coffers. Similarly, the simplification of tax quotas and its conversion to silver led to a substantial fall in administrative costs, which further strengthened the government’s financial position. These measures also gave the central government some degree of control over local surcharges that had previously fell beyond its administrative reach, therefore allowing it to extract a larger cut of total collected revenue.67 More importantly, the new fiscal regime offered the central government several levers with which to periodically update its overall fiscal intake: By regularizing land surveys and reassessment of grain to silver conversion rates, it gave fiscal policymakers a set of tools to expand – or, in theory, reduce – overall fiscal extraction without having to go through the decades-long local experimentation and wholesale institutional change that characterized the Single Whip Laws. In the immediate aftermath of Zhang’s nationwide push, total state revenue experienced fairly rapid growth. Zhang died a few months after the push began, and his enemies repeatedly attempted to reverse his legislative accomplishments in subsequent years, making regional implementation was a slow and uneven process that was not completed until the early Qing. Even so, by as early as 1587, the conversion to silver had already boosted total revenue substantially: The National Granary, which had been nearly empty in the 1570s, now held enough grain “to supply five to six years” of usual expenses,68 suggesting that the government had been running surpluses of at least several million taels a year since 1582, as compared to running regular deficits in the 1560s and 1570s. Its total revenue, as measured in silver, increased to about 25 million taels a year by the early seventeenth century, before any of the major military campaign taxes had kicked in.69 In nominal silver terms, this was more or less triple what it had been in the early sixteenth century, and more than enough to bring an end to the multiple decades of fiscal crisis that had plagued the Jiajing era. This period of fiscal sustainability lasted only three decades. From the 1610s onward, massive military campaigns against Japanese and Manchu forces, coupled with a series of droughts and famines caused by what ecologists now describe as the “little ice age” of the early seventeenth century,70 threw the 67

68

69

70

For contemporary discussion of these institutional consequences by local political elites, see, e.g., Li Cheng (历乘), ch. 7 (Liu Chi (刘敕) ed., Zhongguo Shudian Press 1959). Zhang Juzheng (张居正), Da Hecao Zongdu Wang Jingsuo (答河槽总督王敬所) [A Reply to the Viceroy of Rivers Wang Jingsuo], in 2 Zhang Juzheng Ji (张居正集) [Collected Works of Zhang Juzheng], 398 (Zhang Shunhui ed., 1994). Wang Tingyuan (王廷元), Sanxiang Jiapai Kaoshi (“三饷加派”考实) [Research on the “Imposition of the Three Military Campaign Taxes”], 1983(1) Anhui Shida Xuebao (安徽 师大学报) [Journal of Anhui Normal University] 64, 66 (1983). See Guo Songyi (郭松义), Mingmo Sanxiang Jiapai (明末三饷加派) [The Imposition of Three Military Levies in the Late Ming], 1983(2) Mingshi Yanjiu Luncong (明史研究论丛) [Essays on Ming History] 285.

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imperial court back into fiscal crisis, and forced it to once again seek additional revenue sources. Perhaps emboldened by the success of the Single Whip Laws, the Ming state responded in a much more aggressive and direct fashion than before: After some experimentation and deliberation in the early 1610s, it imposed a nationwide military campaign tax – the infamous Liao Xiang – on all sectors of the economy in 1618, which grew to 9 million taels a year within a decade. There were no accompanying institutional changes this time: The new tax was implemented as a straightforward increase of preexisting tax quotas, spread largely evenly per capita across the country – although certain regions in the poorer northwest, predominantly clustered in Shaanxi, received some exemptions. Some 80 percent of these formal surcharges were imposed directly on agricultural production, reflecting the land tax’s continued position of dominance in the overall fiscal infrastructure.71 From 1636 onward, massive peasant rebellions in these drought and famineridden Shaanxi regions forced the imperial court to expand its military spending yet again and impose another round of national tax hikes, this time under the names of “military training taxes” (Lian Xiang) and “anti-rebellion campaign taxes” (Jiao Xiang). Combined with the Liao Xiang, these tax hikes, collectively known as the “Three Military Campaign Taxes” (San Xiang), added over 16 million taels a year in revenue until the dynasty’s end in 1644, an increase of 65 percent from early seventeenth century levels.72 The final total – around 42 million taels a year – became, as we saw in Chapter 1, more or less the institutional starting point from which the Qing state would begin its own fiscal history. The fiscal history of the mid to late Ming was, therefore, one of accelerating expansion. This gave it something in common with both the Tang and the Song, although the total volume of revenue extraction, even by the end of the dynasty, remained substantially lower than the Song peak. Unsurprisingly, these expansionary measures, particularly the nationwide tax hikes implemented after 1580, met with fierce but ultimately unsuccessful opposition from fiscal conservatives in the bureaucracy. Despite wave after wave of palace memorials and treatises condemning the expansions as unethical and irresponsible, the proponents of fiscal reform were able to win the political argument and push through their legislative agenda. That they were able to do so, indeed as early as the 1450s, speaks to the serious political limitations of traditional anti-taxation arguments based on deontological morality.

d. late ming political discourse As noted in Section A, early Ming fiscal thought took a decisively conservative turn in response to the perceived excesses of Song and Yuan taxation. Moral 71

Shan Shu, ch. 13.

72

See Wang (1983); Shi Huo Er, Ming Shi, ch. 78.

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purists such as Fang Xiaoru insisted upon the need to return state activity to the “virtue” and “benevolence”-based paradigm of the supposedly utopian past. These intellectual and political trends continued to exert some influence on state behavior until the dynasty’s final years, and would become the conservative standard critique of virtually every major fiscal reform documented above.73 As Li Mengyang, a Board of Finance official serving in the early sixteenth century, wrote to the Hongzhi Emperor in response to the regional fiscal initiatives of the later fifteenth century: “As Dong Zhongshu once said, the proper role of the statesman is to diligently seek benevolence and virtue, whereas the role of the commoner is to seek material profit, and worry that it is insufficient. . . . In this day and age, the educated elite emphasize material profit and overlook virtue, devoting their time to lesser pursuits. . . . Your subject considers this malicious (jian).”74 Li did not ground his fiscal policy position entirely on the moral impropriety of “pursuing profit” – in other memorials, he also laid out the negative socioeconomic consequences of fiscal expansion in some detail – but between the two kinds of arguments, one deontological and one consequentialist, he clearly considered the former more significant. His consequentialist arguments, while serious, lacked the urgency and extreme alarm that Qing statesmen would later bring into this arena. “The damage done to the people,” he argued, was that “taxation is heavy and the people are therefore poor.” Left unchecked, this would lead to a shortage of grain and money for both the imperial state and its subjects, and might drive some of the latter into banditry, but these were “gradual” dangers, whereas the moral failing was immediate and decisive.75 73

74 75

Apart from the essays and memorials discussed in greater detail below, see, e.g., He Liangjun (何 良俊), Song Dasitu Sun Donggu Kaoman Beishang Xu (送大司徒孙东谷考满北上序), HMJSWB, ch. 204; Qian Wei (钱薇), Jun Liang Yi (均粮议), HMJSWB, ch. 215; Guo Zizhang (郭子章), Ti Yanben Xiangben Maben Shu (题盐本饷本马本疏), HMJSWB, ch. 419; Li Zhi (李 植), Qing Ba Liaozuo Kaicai Shu (请罢辽左开采疏), HMJSWB, ch. 425; for conventional examples of “speaking of profit” being employed as a per se indictment of fundamental moral failure. Li Mengyang (李梦阳), Ni Chuzhi Yanfa Shiyi Zhuang (拟处置盐法事宜状), HMJSWB, ch. 138. Li Mengyang, Ying Zhao Shangshu Shu (应诏上书疏), HMJSWB, ch. 138. Mid and late Ming fiscal conservatives often seemed to reason from the basic assumption that fiscal expansion was inherently undesirable – something that did not need to be further explained – and rarely laid out its negative sociopolitical consequences in very clear terms. Li Mengyang’s memorial is one example, but there are many others See, e.g., the series of essays criticizing the Single Whip reforms by Ge Shouli (葛守礼), in HMJSWB, ch. 278, which list a number of negative consequences of the reforms, but do not bother to explain why those problems necessarily outweighed the reforms’ positive impact, or why those consequences necessarily posed a threat to the regime’s political stability. The structure of the argument seemed to be that, because the reforms changed “the old laws of our ancestors” (zuzong jiufa) and led to some expansion of revenue extraction, they were presumptively wrong. See also Chai Sheng (柴升), Ti wei Chenyan Shibi yi Mi Koudao Shi (题为陈言救时弊以弭寇盗事), HMJSWB, ch. 107, which seems to assume as self-evident the idea that any significant expansion of fiscal extraction would damage the core political ethic of renhe (“harmony of people”). When it came to laying out the consequences of

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The structure of Li’s memorial – some discussion of material consequences, following by a concluding argument that emphasized instead the innate moral value of fiscal restraint – eventually became a sort of standard political template for fiscal conservatives, who employed it throughout the later Ming. In an early seventeenth century memorial condemning the expansion of silver mining that accompanied the Single Whip Laws, Guo Zhengyu raised a number of harrowing scenarios that fiscal reform, particularly the transition from in-kind tax collection into silver-based collection, could generate: poverty, political dissent, and eventual dynastic collapse in the model of the Qin and Eastern Han.76 The causal effect that he envisioned was not, however, a straightforward link between higher taxes and popular revolt. Instead, he argued that the economic suffering caused by higher taxes would trigger widespread discontent among the political elite, whose more morally conscious members would disapprove of “speaking of profit.” If the imperial court then ignored their political and ethical counsel – or, even worse, attempted to punish them for voicing dissent – it would lose the support of officials and scholars across the country, which would then destroy the court’s political legitimacy in the eyes of commoners and place it in grave danger of total collapse. In other words, “punish me and allies for political dissent, and you will lose your moral, and therefore political, legitimacy.” By this point in the memorial, the immediate socioeconomic consequences of tax reform had clearly been pushed into the background, giving way to a concluding argument grounded in theories of virtue and filial piety: Both the Ming’s founding emperor and the recently deceased Jiajing Emperor, Guo argued, were scrupulously resistant to fiscal expansion, and their descendants therefore have a moral obligation to protect this legacy of benevolence. Among the wave of memorials condemning the Single Whip reforms following Zhang’s death in 1582, Guo’s memorial stood out for its unusually cogent display of political reasoning. Guo was well aware that a simple consequentialist warning of “higher taxes could trigger political chaos” – supported by a few historical examples, most more than a millennium old – would be insufficiently persuasive in the political environment of the early seventeenth century, and openly acknowledged this: “Your Majesty may think that the realm is currently at peace . . . and therefore that [current institutions] do not cause trouble, but historically, unrest and collapse often begin with dissatisfaction among commoners.”77

76

losing renhe, Chai’s was intentionally vague: He considered the major danger to be “disorder” (luan), rather than “collapse” (wang), and framed his concerns as “speaking out of an abundance of caution” (wanyi), rather than concrete predictions. The contrast with the early Qing writings discussed in Chapter 4, which confidently predicted total social collapse as a proximate outcome of fiscal expansion, is clear and compelling. 77 Guo Zhengyu (郭正域), Fa Zu Ting Shui Fu (法祖停税赋), HMJSWB, ch. 454. Id.

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In the end, Guo returned to traditional political ethics to make his case: “Why should Your Majesty not follow the example set by the founding emperor,” who, according to Guo, expressly disavowed any private pursuit of wealth by the state and its agents “as equivalent to theft and robbery?”78 Along similar lines, he also employed the conventional “speaking of profit” accusation to question the basic moral character of those who had advocated fiscal expansion to the Jiajing Emperor, the current emperor’s grandfather: “They could only attempt to curry favor through speaking of profit, and completely disregarded the fundamental interests of the dynasty. Thankfully, the Shizong Emperor rejected their proposals in his sage-like wisdom.”79 The implication was clear: Your grandfather knew better than to tolerate such moral failure, and so should you. These arguments, and others like them that circulated among the late Ming political officialdom,80 suggest a political environment in which elites shared no clear consensus on the socioeconomic consequences of tax hikes, and were therefore wary of relying on them too heavily in policy arguments. Unlike early Qing political discourse, in which drawing a direct connection from tax hikes to peasant rebellion to dynastic collapse was standard practice,81 relatively few Ming elites seemed to emphasize this connection, even when decrying fiscal expansion in the strongest possible moral terms. They may have worried that, not only would such an argument fail to persuade many of their peers, but it might also render themselves vulnerable to accusations of fear-mongering and incitement. Instead, the safer and probably more effective mode of argumentation was to underscore the inherent ethical weakness of taxation, which was at least guaranteed to put fiscal reformists on the back foot and force them to play defense on intellectual turf that had traditionally been favorable to conservatives. For the most part, fiscal reformists rose to the challenge. Responses to the consequentialist critiques raised by conservatives were readily available: simplification of tax collection methods, the maintenance of state granaries as a safeguard against famine, the need for military campaigns into Korea, and so on. All of these were enormously powerful arguments in Ming political discourse. Many fiscal reformers were able to turn the conservative arguments on 78 80

81

79 Id. Id. See, e.g., Xing Tong (邢侗), Dong Shi Ce (东事策), HMJSWB, ch. 468. Writing during the Korean campaigns of 1592–1598, which began the cycle of military campaign-driven fiscal expansion of the post-Zhang Juzheng era, Xing argued that, even though predictions about socioeconomic consequences were necessarily vague and imprecise, there were nonetheless signs of unrest that should give the Imperial Court pause. Like Guo, Xing worried about the negative sociopolitical impact of tax hikes, but did not, in the end, issue truly concrete predictions on what that impact would be, instead ending his argument with platitudes about “speaking for profit” and vague observations about rural poverty – which, in anticipation of criticism, he preemptively described as “the unoriginal views of an old man.” See Chapters 4 and 5 for detailed discussion.

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their head and argue that sustaining the government’s fiscal health was at least as important a guarantor of sociopolitical stability as reducing taxation, and very likely more so. This argument, as presented by Qiu Jun, Hai Rui, and others, emphasized the role that state granaries and famine relief played in warding off social unrest and rebellion, as well as the positive role that general infrastructure investment could play in alleviating poverty.82 Others, such as Gui E and Zhang Juzheng, argued that socioeconomic inequality was a far greater threat to stability than higher taxes per se – this echoed Confucius’ famous saying that “the wise ruler does not fear poverty, but instead fears inequality,” which strengthened the argument’s political force among conservative audiences – and therefore that, insofar as tax reform could help equalize the tax burdens imposed on rich and poor, it could positively contribute to social stability even if it also led to a higher level of overall extraction.83 Within later Ming political discourse, the conventional “model,” so to speak, of sociopolitical stability was a pluralist one in which tax burdens were but one of many perceived input variables, and not necessarily the dominant one. On the “virtue” versus “material gain” side of the argument, the reformers had a more difficult time, and were forced to write in a more defensive and tentative tone. As Hai Rui, a famed economic reformer of the late Jiajing era, wrote to a fellow official: For the Sage (shengren), there is no more urgent political need than to maintain a strong military and a wealthy state. It is often said that the Sage speaks of virtue but not of material gain. . . . Has there ever truly been this kind of simpleton Sage, this kind of suicidal Sage? Many officials believe that they can speak for heavenly morality, and for the Way of the King. They deem our reforms, whether large or small, ‘unethical to speak of,’ but never take any real action of their own, and instead choose to languish day in and day out in procrastination. To them, there is but one thing that demands immediate action, and that is the verbal condemnation of their political foes. This kind of uselessness is, ultimately, the reason why everyone despises these obtuse Confucian scholars.84

Hai Rui’s frustration with fiscal conservatives and their moral orthodoxy seemed to boil over in this particular instance, but in general, he and other reformers had plenty of political success against them. Most importantly, he 82

83

84

See, e.g., Qiu Jun (丘濬), Xu Min zhi Huan (恤民之患), in Daxue Yanyi Bu (大学衍义补) [Supplement to the “Abundant Meaning of the Great Learning”], ch. 3.7; Hai Rui (海 瑞), Shengcai you Dadao (生财有大道), in Hai Rui Ji (海瑞集) [Selected Works of Hai Rui], ch. 6.1. Zhang Juzheng took an unusual subtle – arguably inconsistent – position on taxes: On the one hand, he was a firm believer that the best way to balance a budget was to reduce expenditures. See his famous memorial Chen Liu Shi Shu (陈六事书), HMJSWB, ch. 324. On the other hand, he strongly defended the need to rebalancing the tax burden between rich and poor, even if it led to higher total taxes. See, e.g., Zhang Juzheng, Da Yingtian Xunfu Song Yangshan (答应天巡抚 宋阳山), HMJSWB, ch. 327. On Gui E’s fiscal positions, see discussion above on the origins of the Single Whip Laws. Hai Rui, Fu Ouyang Bai’an Zhangke (复欧阳栢庵掌科), HMJSWB, ch. 309.

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had many allies in high positions who shared his disdain for the traditional “virtue” versus “material gain” dichotomy. Gao Gong, one of the chief political advisors to the Jiajing and Longqing emperors, complained that “valorizing ‘not speaking of material gain’ is exactly the kind of attitude that makes it impossible to govern the country.”85 Several years later, Zhang Juzheng, too, complained that his reform initiative faced heavy opposition from fiscal conservatives wielding a morally purist “never speak of material gain” argument.86 Gao, Zhang, and Hai all belonged to a long tradition of Ming statesmen, reaching back as early as the prominent mid-fifteenth century scholar and politician Qiu Jun, who argued that “speaking of material profit,” while sometimes problematic, could be morally acceptable if done correctly. Qiu argued, for example, that while “profit” was indeed less innately morally valuable than “virtue,” if pursued properly for nonselfish purposes, it could nonetheless “agree with the principles of virtue.”87 Therefore, the state, to the extent that it was pursuing the general material wellbeing of the country and not merely its own financial surplus, had a positive role to play in regulating and supervising economic activity. Taken to its logical extreme, this line of reasoning produced arguments like those championed by the famous scholar and critic Li Zhi, who, as part of his general assault on Song NeoConfucianism, argued that the traditional elite condemnation of “pursuing profit” was both hypocritical and unrealistic, and that the pursuit of private material wealth was perfectly justifiable.88 One finds traces of Zhu Xi’s account of virtue and material wealth in many of these writings, and some of them cite him prominently.89 This was, in all likelihood, no less a political tactic as an intellectual one: By this point in time, Zhu’s interpretation of the Confucian canon had gained formal governmental recognition as the “proper” one,90 and it was politically difficult even for the most ardent and orthodox fiscal conservative to dismiss his sympathy for state taxation as merely incorrect or immoral.

85

86

87

88

89 90

Gao Gong (高拱), Yan Li zhi Chen (言利之臣), in Zhongguo Jingji Sixiang Shi Ziliao Xuanji: Mingqing Bufen (中国经济思想史资料选辑: 明清部分) [Selected Materials on the History of Chinese Economic Thought: Ming and Qing Dynasty] [hereinafter JJSXSZL], 168 (Li Puguo ed., 1990). Zhang Juzheng, Da Fujian Xunfu Geng Chutong (答福建巡抚耿楚侗), HMJSWB, ch. 328. Similar complaints about the purist moralizing of fiscal conservatives are found in Yuan Shizhen, Yan Fa Yi (Ba) (盐法议八), HMJSWB, ch. 476. Qiu Jun, Zonglun Licai zhi Dao (总论理财之道) [On the Way of Finance], in Danxue Yanyi Bu, ch. 4.1. Li Zhi (李贽), Fen Shu (焚书) [Burning Books], ch. 1, in Li Zhi Wenji (李贽文集) [Writings of Li Zhi], 15, 16, 38 (Shehui Kexue Wenxian Press 2000). See, e.g., Qiu Jun, supra note 82. On this history, see Hilde De Weerdt, Canon Formation and Examination Culture: The Construction of “Guwen” and “Daoxue” Canons, 29 J. Song-Yuan Stud. 91 (1999).

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The image of late Ming fiscal debate that emerges from these sources is one in which moral concerns and arguments carried great political weight, but were also not so one-sided that reform and expansion, even highly aggressive expansion, became practically impossible. There were substantial intellectual resources within the formal, state-sanctioned Confucian canon that reformers could marshal to push back against “pursuing material profit is inherently unethical” sorts of arguments. To be sure, they knew they faced a somewhat uphill battle on this front – the exasperated tone that their writings often took suggests as much – but they did not necessarily have to win the ethical argument all or even most of the time to prevail politically: All they needed to do was neutralize the ethical concerns enough so that the pragmatic benefits of tax reform could carry the day. Adding to the reformers’ political advantage was the fact that conservatives actually agreed with them on a number of core policy issues: Both sides recognized the need to distribute the tax quota equitably among rich and poor households, and, partially in pursuit of this objective, both sides likely saw a need for regular and systemic land surveys.91 As a practical matter, this made it somewhat difficult for fiscal conservatives to combat policy initiatives like the Single Whip Laws: They all contained at least some elements – those that called for surveying and redistribution – that many conservatives were perhaps loathe to oppose. Even after Zhang Juzheng’s death in 1582, his opponents were unable to roll back most of his trademark legislative achievements: They may have complained about the increase in overall extraction levels, but lacked both the will and the ability to dismantle the fiscal machinery that Zhang and other reformers had constructed over the previous half-century. The Military Campaign Taxes imposed from 1618 onward were of a different character altogether: They did not pretend to reform the basic institutional structure of tax collection, but were instead a direct surcharge added proportionately to preexisting tax quotas. Fiscal conservatives therefore had a more straightforward path of attack, but what is striking even in this context is the ambivalence of their consequentialist reasoning. Conservative writings from the 1610s to 1620s took a line broadly similar to the Guo Zhengyu memorial discussed above: They worried about the negative socioeconomic consequences of tax hikes, including potential unrest and banditry, but tended to identify them as future, rather than immediate, threats.92 Most often, the tone of their writings belied longer-term worry, rather than fear of immediate collapse: “If the Imperial Court insists on these tactics, how can its fiscal situation be sustainable,” wondered one senior official as the 1618 Campaign Tax was being debated in court, “in the future, the sources of disorder will be the 91

92

Zhang Juzheng, for example, spoke of land surveying as one of the main areas of possible consensus between him and his political opponents. See, e.g., Zhang Juzheng (张居正), Da Shandong Xunfu He Laishan (答山东巡抚何来山), in JJSXSZL, at 154–155. E.g., Wang Xijue (王锡爵), Yu Gu Chongan Xunfu (与顾冲庵巡抚), HMJSWB, ch. 395.

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poverty of the people, rather than frontier problems.”93 Another expressed concern that “the population is already in a state of high anxiety over these tax increases, with rumors flying left and right. . . . Further increases would doubtlessly drive many to abandon their lands and turn to banditry. . . . Moreover, taxes raised for the Northeastern campaigns may not be retracted once those campaigns are over.”94 In fact, the political debates leading up to the 1618 tax hike seemed to focus more on the difficulty in shipping military rations to Manchuria and distributing them effectively than on the tax hike per se.95 The deepening crisis of the 1620s and early 1630s eventually changed the tone of conservative opposition: Fiscal conservatives became ever more alarmed by the scope and duration of the military campaign taxes, and began to predict sociopolitical disaster with greater urgency and alarm. Nonetheless, even at this late stage, despite rapid growth in both numbers and political influence, they were still unable to coalesce around a clear consequentialist argument.96 Some warned that overtaxed peasants would abandon their land, but continued to characterize this as a future threat hidden under a facade of current economic prosperity.97 Other memorials laid out in considerable detail the local corruption and abuses that the campaign taxes had enabled in the Lower Yangtze, but glossed over the socioeconomic reaction this was generating, simply claiming that the local population “was suffering, but did not dare speak up against corrupt officials.”98 The authors seemed to assume that fiscal corruption was, by its very nature, such a serious moral failing that no consequentialist argument was necessary to establish its political urgency – and in any case, they did not seem to have a clear sense of what the consequences might be. If so, then they had badly misjudged the political atmosphere in Beijing: Given the sheer size of military bills the Imperial Court had to foot during this period, these moral condemnations and relatively vague warnings of future disaster lacked the political immediacy needed to dent the Court’s commitment to fiscal expansion, and the campaign taxes continued to snowball rapidly. It was not until the late 1630s and 1640s that large numbers of officials began to draw direct connections between fiscal expansion and the festering peasant rebellions in the northwest. Official memorials from this era began to 93 95

96 97

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94 Id. Xing Tong, Dong Shi Ce, HMJSWB, ch. 468. See, e.g., Xiong Tingbi (熊廷弼), Da Li Mengbai Duxiang (答李孟白督饷), HMJSWB, ch. 481; Zuo Guangdou (左光斗), Tiwei Jijiu Liaodong Jihan Shi Shu (题为急救辽东饥寒事疏), HMJSWB, ch. 495. To some extent, Xing Tong’s Dong Shi Ce also seems to reflect this: He speaks of the logistical problems of military campaigning in very concrete terms, but openly acknowledges that his fears about the socioeconomic consequences of raising taxes are less grounded. HMJSWB, ch. 495–504 contain multiple examples of these arguments. See, e.g., Yao Ximeng (姚希孟), Dai Dangshi Tiaozou Difang Libi (代当事条奏地方利弊), HMJSWB, ch. 501 (“其名不贫而实贫。形不病而神病者。吴为甚。及今不为节养。将来必成 溃决”). See, e.g., Huang Tinghu (黄廷鹄), Yifa Yuan Shu (役法原疏), HMJSWB, ch. 503.

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explicitly warn of impending dynastic collapse caused by excessive taxation, citing the peasant rebellions as a direct consequence of fiscal overreach, and predicting they would quickly snowball to fatal levels if such overreach continued.99 By 1640, the chorus of doomsayers had reached a critical mass, and the imperial court eventually caved into their concerns, formally rolling back the Jiao Xiang.100 The timing of these rollbacks was, to put it mildly, less than opportune: The peasant rebels, who had gone into hiding following a series of crippling defeats in 1638, had just launched another major offensive out of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Henan, while the Manchu armies in the northeast had finished recuperating from a successful campaign in the Korean Penisula, and were once again bearing down on the Ming.101 Nevertheless, political opposition to fiscal expansion had finally hit an irreversible breaking point, and the rollback was implemented despite once again mounting military costs. The Chongzhen Emperor was forced to make up for the shortage with increasingly large “donations” from the treasury and from wealthy Beijing residents, but this inevitably fell short of original spending levels, and the Ming’s military position soon began to collapse as a result. Especially in the northwest, severe delays in wage payment and food supply began to generate large numbers of defectors. Many joined the rebel peasant armies, tilting the balance of power ever more dramatically in their favor. Within a year and a half of the fiscal rollback, they had reversed the string of humiliating defeats suffered during the 1630s and began to sack major cities, beginning with Luoyang in 1641, moving onto Xiangyang and Jingzhou in 1642, and finally breaking the Ming government’s final stronghold in Shaanxi in 1643. By this point, with Manchu armies pounding at the empire’s Northeastern gate and the state’s fiscal and military capacities in freefall, the dynasty’s days were numbered. In 1644, Li Zicheng’s armies sacked Beijing and the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself. In the aftermath of Ming collapse, Manchu forces entered from the northeast with the aid of Chinese defectors, defeated and

99

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See, e.g., Sun Chengze (孙承泽), Chunming Meng Yu Lu (春明梦余录) [Additional Records of Dreams at the Gate of Spring Brightness], ch. 36; Shi Huo Er, Ming Shi, ch. 78 (listing a number of conservative criticisms); Roger Des Forges, Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming, 197–198 (2003). Guo Songyi (郭松义), Qingdai de “Huang Zongxi Dinglü” Xiaoying (清代的“黄宗羲定律”效 应) [The Effects of the Huang Zongxi Thesis in the Qing Dynasty], in 1 Qing Shi Jing Jian (清 史镜鉴) [Reflection on Qing History], 65–71 (Guojia Qing Shi Biancuan Weiyuan Hui ed., 2008) (“剿饷早于崇祯十三年 1640 明廷已下诏停征了”). For this history, see William Atwell, The T’ai-ch’ang, T’ien-ch’i, and Ch’ung-chen Reigns, 1620–1644, in 7 The Cambridge History of China, 585–640, 634–637 (Frederick T. Mote & Denis Twitchett eds., 1988); Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, ch. 10 (2010); John Dardess, The Late Ming Rebellion: Peasants and Problems of Interpretation, 3 J. Interdisciplinary Hist. 103 (1972).

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scattered Li’s army through a series of battles, and began the arduous process of consolidating a new regime. All in all, political opposition to late Ming taxation was marked by more than a century of relative mundanity, from the Hongzhi era to the early 1630s, followed by swift escalation in the late 1630s in the face of deepening crisis. During the former phase, the arguments employed by fiscal conservatives were not noticeably different than those employed by generations of Confucian moralists from the Song to the early Ming. They condemned the immorality of tax hikes and worried about its long term sociopolitical consequences in somewhat uncertain terms, but saw little political benefit, or even intellectual merit, to predicting more dire and immediate consequences. This kind of deontological argumentation could be politically determinative in the right environment, as it was for a couple of decades in the early Ming, but the immediacy of the later Ming state’s fiscal needs tended to overwhelm it. In response, fiscal conservatives began – slowly – to place more emphasis on consequentialist arguments, and as the scale of early seventeenth century tax hikes began to escalate, so too did their warnings of eventual socioeconomic disaster. Even so, it was not until the last decade of the dynasty that the political mainstream came to grips with the immediacy and severity of its decay and, at the same time, began to openly associate fiscal expansion with the possibility of short-term dynastic collapse. The Ming elite retained a fairly high level of confidence in the dynasty’s longterm survival right up until its final years.102 Until the later 1630s, few elites seemed willing or even able to contemplate the possibility of total collapse: The first major famine struck the northwest in 1632, and the first wave of serious peasant rebellions did not emerge until the mid-1630s, and were initially defeated with relative ease. The 1610s and 1620s were marred by serious conflict in Beijing between eunuch administrators and literati officials, but this had been a common theme of Ming politics since the dynasty’s early years. Periodic defeats to Manchu invaders during this period were unnerving, and yet Manchu campaigning quieted down after Nurhachi’s death in 1626, not to rekindle until the later 1630s. Until then, few officials could have foreseen the chaos that would soon sweep over the empire. More importantly, the specific catalyst of eventual Ming collapse – massive, arguably unprecedented famine, followed by massive, arguably unprecedented 102

The late Ming was, in fact, a period of considerable intellectual energy, innovation, and even optimism. See Fan Lizhou (范立舟), Wanming Renwen Jingshen Fenxi (晚明人文精神分析) [An Analysis of Humanitarian Spirit in Late Ming China], 2006(9) Zhexue Yanjiu (哲学研究) [Philosophical Research] 56; Li Shangying (李尚英), Ming Mo Donglin Dang (明末东 林党) [The Donglin Faction in Late Ming] (1983). For a general account of literati psychology during the Ming-Qing transition, see John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (2002); Zhao Yuan (赵 园), Ming Qing zhi Ji Shidaifu Yanjiu (明清之际士大夫研究) [A Study of LiteratiOfficials during the Ming-Qing Transition] (2014).

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peasant rebellion103 – was something political elites were poorly equipped to understand and deal with. This may be surprising to modern observers, given that post-1949 Chinese historiography, shaped to no small extent by Marxist theory, has portrayed peasant rebellion as the driver of dynastic collapse throughout Chinese history, but one must recognize that Ming elites operated under a very different historical and political mindset. Until the late 1630s, peasant rebellions against Han Chinese rule of comparable scale and severity had not been seen for at least 8, or perhaps 14, centuries: One has to go back to the late Tang or, more appropriately, to the Qin or Han to find examples of comparable rebellions against an ethnically Chinese dynasty, and none of those were nearly as successful as the Ming rebellions eventually proved to be.104 Popular uprisings led by religious sects and local gentry did, of course, overthrow Mongol rule just three centuries ago, but given the unusual ethnic dynamics involved and the relatively short duration of Mongol rule, few Ming elites saw the Yuan as a cautionary tale for their own fiscal policies. Rather, the mainstream interpretation of the Yuan-Ming transition seemed to be, simply, that the Ming had successfully overthrown the tyrannical rule of barbaric foreign invaders.105 The most recent Han Chinese dynasty, the Song, was not brought down by peasant uprisings, but was instead killed off by foreign conquest, which, to the extent that it weighed on elite political thinking, would (quite reasonably, one might add) have driven elites to focus more on the Manchu threat than on the prospect of catastrophic peasant rebellion. It is therefore unsurprising that political elites were somewhat slow to recognize the nature and severity of “the peasant problem”: The major recognizable historical precedents were many centuries in the past. Moreover, none of them had actually managed to overthrow the imperial government like Li Zicheng’s armies were eventually able to do. In such an intellectual environment, if an official wanted to argue that high taxation would lead to fatal levels of domestic social unrest, he would have to do so without the assistance of 103

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Brook (2010); Dardess (1972). See also Helen Dunstan, The Late Ming Epidemics: A Preliminary Survey, 3; Ch’ing Shi Wen-ti, 1 (1975); James Bunyan Parsons, The Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty (1970); Des Forges (2003). The Huang Chao and Wang Xianzhi rebellions in the late Tang were much less serious than the peasant rebellions that drove Qin, Eastern Han, and Ming collapse, and tend to occupy a lesser role in canonical accounts of dynastic collapse. Of all these major peasant rebellions, the Ming rebellions were by far the most successful, in that they were the only ones not eventually put down by the dynasty they rebelled against, and in fact managed to both sack the dynasty’s capital and remove its emperor from power. See, e.g., Qiu Jun (邱浚), Nei Xia Wai Yi zhi Xian (内夏外夷之限), HMJSWB, ch. 73; Zhang Fujing (张孚敬), Zou Da Anmin Chiwu Shu (奏答安民饬武疏), HMJSWB, ch. 178 (describing the Yuan-Ming transition as “中国强则夷狄衰而盗贼息矣”); Yang Rong (杨荣), Ping Hu Song (平胡颂), HMJSWB, ch. 17 (praising Zhu Yuanzhang for “受天明、平胡元乱、为生民主、悉 复中国古先圣王之政”); Song Lian (宋濂), Jin Yuan Shi Biao (进元史表), HMJSWB, ch. 1 (attributing the Yuan’s initial success to Kublai Khan’s willingness to Sinicize his regime, and attributing the dynasty’s eventual collapse to his descendants’ failure to follow his example).

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psychologically compelling historical precedents or readily applicable “historical lessons” that could easily capture the political imagination of his peers. This sapped consequentialist political reasoning of much of its power: Without those precedents, it was hard to persuade others, or even oneself, the consequences of fiscal expansion were so severe that the state must immediately sacrifice enormous short-term fiscal capacity for long-term stability. In fact, to the extent the Manchu invaders in the northeast were considered a greater existential threat than the peasant armies in the west, a true historically-minded consequentialist would likely have concluded that maintaining the imperial state’s fiscal and military capacities in the face of potential foreign conquest was far more important than keeping tax burdens low. Nonetheless, one can identify sprouts of historical reasoning and interpretation in these later Ming writings, even those that were produced before the late 1630s, that would later become part of the intellectual foundation of Qing fiscal ideology. Most importantly, fiscal conservatives, and even some of their reformist opponents, seemed to share a consensus that large-scale peasant rebellions, when they did emerge, were generally a reaction against fiscal overreach. Unlike their Qing successors, Ming elites did not have any clear sense of where the fiscal “red line” for large-scale peasant rebellion was, and until the very last years of the dynasty, few were willing to openly argue that the Ming fiscal state had already stepped over it.106 That said, they did tend to agree that the major episodes of peasant rebellion in Chinese history, such as the Chen Sheng and Wu Guang rebellion in the Qin, the Yellow Turbans in the Eastern Han, and the Huang Chao and Wang Xianzhi rebellions in the Tang, or even some of the peasant rebellions in the late Yuan, were all examples of high taxation – not always agricultural taxation – leading to social revolt.107 How, then, did these historical interpretations become mainstream in the first place? After all, they were hardly the only ones available: As many major historical accounts had long argued, the Qin rebellions were arguably as much as a reaction to harsh legal procedures and punitive regulations as they were to high taxes per se.108 The Han and Tang rebellions, on the other hand, were both directly triggered by ineffective state responses to famine or plague, which potentially lent themselves to “historical lessons” of the opposite nature – that 106

107

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See, e.g., Guo Zhengyu, Fa Zu Ting Shui Fu, HMJSWB, ch. 454; Xing Tong, Dong Shi Ce, HMJSWB, ch. 468. See, e.g., Guo Zhengyu, Fa Zu Ting Shui Fu, HMJSWB, ch. 454; Chai Sheng, Ti wei Chenyan Shibi yi Mi Koudao Shi, HMJSWB, ch. 107; Zhang Mao (章懋), Yichu Yanfa Shiyi Zouzhuang (议处盐法事宜奏状), HMJSWB, ch. 95 (discussing the connection between salt tax collection and the Huang Chao Rebellion and the Zhang Shicheng Rebellion); Zhao Jin (赵锦), Jichu Jizhong Liuyi Difang yi Gu Genben Shi (计处极重流移地方以固根本事), HMJSWB, ch. 340 (arguing for tax rate reductions as a way to grow the economy, increase total state revenue, and preemptively prevent peasant rebellions). The most famous and influential example is probably Jia Yi (贾谊), Guo Qin Lun (过秦论) (Criticizing the Qin), in Xin Shu (新书) [The New Book], ch. 1.

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the state could have avoided them if it had more fiscal and administrative capacity, not less. Early Song elites, for example, were far more concerned with the political damage done by military fiefdoms and political decentralization than with Huang Chao’s rebellion, and were therefore far more interested in strengthening the central administration than in weakening it.109 Despite the existence of these alternatives within the historiographical canon, by at least the later Ming, the “high taxes led to rebellion” narrative was clearly the most salient historical account found in elite writings, and its influence only grew as the dynasty’s sociopolitical crisis deepened. There was, of course, a natural synergy between the moral condemnation of taxation and the interpretation of historical rebellions as caused by high taxes. If one believed the former, then it was very easy, almost unavoidably so, to develop a sort of “I told you so” mentality when it came to the latter: Given how deeply immoral taxation was, of course it had to be a cause, and perhaps the cause, of these major historical rebellions. Of course the most severe examples of social upheaval were caused by the most grievous of political sins: How else could the heavenly mandate manifest itself in human history? As an immense amount of cognitive and behavioral research has demonstrated, human beings almost always tend to interpret factual information in ways that conform to their preexisting biases and deeply held beliefs. Not only is it psychologically uncomfortable to challenge one’s core beliefs, but very often it is not even cognitively possible: They are so embedded in the way we view the world that the very act of conscious thought is usually a reaffirmation of them. Ming fiscal conservatives were likely no exception in this regard. Their moral mistrust of fiscal expansion drove them to find historical examples of such expansion leading to widespread human suffering and political disaster, and the intellectual salience of these major peasant rebellions made them easy targets. As the political clout of fiscal conservatism swelled in response to the dramatic growth of military campaign taxes in the 1630s, so too did the influence of its historiography. As discussed above, the immense temporal distance of this historiography severely dampened its immediate impact on Late Ming political deliberations: Even after 1638, there is little evidence that these historical examples wielded much influence over policymaking, which by this point was almost entirely shortsighted and therefore unresponsive to broader systemic critiques. Nonetheless, it laid some of the intellectual groundwork for how elites would interpret and reap political lessons from Ming collapse a couple of years later. The tendency to blame peasant rebellion on high taxes was one of the most important intellectual continuities between Ming and Qing political thought, but it gained a whole new dimension of salience and influence after the Manchu 109

See, e.g., Zhang Dezong (张德宗), Bei Song de Xiangbing Zhidu (北宋的厢兵制度) [The Auxiliary Army in Northern Song Dynasty], 1982(4) Shixue Yuekan (史学月刊) [History Monthly] 31.

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conquest: Instead of interpreting and debating millennium-old, almost mythological episodes of peasant rebellion, early Qing elites had to grapple with deep and fresh sociopolitical wounds that would continue to fester for decades afterward. Ming collapse would fundamentally change how the establishment thought about fiscal policy – indeed how it thought about politics and society in general – but as with any major discontinuity or “revolution” of this sort, there were significant threads of intellectual continuity that bridged the chasm.

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4 The Early Qing Paradigm Shift

This chapter examines the “founding moment” of Qing fiscal ideology, tracing its evolution in response to the sociopolitical catastrophes of the Ming-Qing transition. The primary argument is that there was an immediate and powerful souring of elite attitudes toward state taxation after the dynastic transition, and this set Qing fiscal institutions onto a rigid low-tax, low-interference trajectory that sharply diverged from the common practice of earlier dynasties. It examines the impact of the Ming-Qing transition by surveying early Qing political discourse, institution building, and private scholarship, moving from the initial reduction of late Ming tax quotas immediately after the Manchu conquest, to their return in the 1670s, to the fiscal crises and debates of the late Kangxi (1661–1722) era. By the end of these developments, elite political and intellectual opinion had hardened against fiscal expansionism in an arguably unprecedented fashion. As discussed in the Introduction, one of the primary difficulties with conventional scholarly accounts of “Confucian fiscal conservatism holding back Qing taxation” is that they struggle to explain why the Qing was so much more fiscally conservative than its predecessor dynasties – despite the fact that they were all heavily under the influence of Confucian political ideology. This chapter begins to solve this puzzle by laying out the major paradigm shift in political thinking that occurred after the Ming collapse, which explains how and why early Qing fiscal policymaking profoundly differed from the later Ming. Chapters 5 and 6 then examine how this paradigm shift became institutionally and politically entrenched from the early eighteenth century onward. Somewhat ironically, the more institutionally entrenched Qing fiscal conservatism became, the less deontologically “Confucian” it appeared. Normative concerns over “speaking of profit” were quickly replaced with realist and pragmatic arguments over socioeconomic consequence, an intellectual 158

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transformation that dramatically accelerated after the Ming collapse, and had become mainstream as early as the late seventeenth century. Section A examines the institutional shifts that immediately followed the Ming-Qing transition, which ushered in a political presumption against raising agricultural taxes beyond what they were in the latter decades of the Ming. Section B turns to the intellectual paradigm shift that occurred among Chinese elites at roughly the same time, covering both the general turn toward empiricism and pragmatism in early Qing political thought and the specific way this pragmatism fed into fiscal conservatism. Section C discusses some of the cognitive and political theory that can help modern social scientists make sense of this paradigm shift – specifically how it fed off of certain cognitive biases produced by preexisting Confucian political norms, while simultaneously transforming those norms. Section D lays out how the Qing state moved toward fiscal “quotaism” in the Kangxi era, and how intellectual skepticism toward land surveying began to emerge among its governing elites. Both of these developments would play a major role in politically and institutionally entrenching fiscal conservatism in the mid-Qing.

a. the ming-qing transition It would be almost impossible to overstate the trauma the Ming collapse inflicted on the Chinese population, both literati and commoners alike.1 The population dropped by around 40 million over the course of the 1640s, and heavy fighting between Qing forces, peasant armies, and Ming loyalists dragged on in the southern provinces for more than a decade after the Chongzhen Emperor’s death in 1644. Beyond the sheer scale of material suffering, there was the additional humiliation of foreign conquest, embodied in forced changes to hairstyle, dress, and more importantly, sociopolitical status. But the psychological shock of the Ming-Qing transition went well beyond that: The Manchu conquest only succeeded in the aftermath of thorough and nearly unprecedented domestic collapse. For perhaps the first time in recorded Chinese history, a peasant rebellion had directly destroyed an ethnically Chinese dynasty – defeated its major armies, sacked its capital, forced its emperor to commit suicide, and would very likely have established a new dynasty but for Manchu intervention – and this weighed extremely heavily on the minds of educated Chinese as they struggled to adapt to new circumstances. The Ming had, in their minds, failed spectacularly in terms of both external defense and internal management, arguably more so than any major dynasty that preceded it, and this could not help but demand deep skepticism toward its intellectual and political 1

For general accounts of how the Chinese literati coped with the dynastic transition, see, e.g., Zhao Yuan (2014); Lynn Struve, Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm (1998). See also, Jonathan Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain (2008).

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conventions. The fact that, as recently as the late 1630s, the specter of dynastic collapse remained fairly distant in the minds of most political elites only aggravated the cognitive impact of actual collapse. For decades afterward, political writings, both public and private, exhibited a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that made them almost painful to read.2 The dynastic transition therefore created a watershed moment – a full-blown paradigm shift – in Chinese political thinking. It created an era of often overwhelming intellectual vulnerability in which core components of the old system were subject to intense scrutiny and doubt, and many were rejected in favor of new ideological commitments. As the new dynasty assembled itself in Beijing after 1644, its rulers and elites inevitably began to scour late Ming history for cautionary tales of what kinds of policies and institutions to avoid: for “never again” lessons to learn and internalize. This process was conducted against a background need to consolidate, as quickly as possible, the Manchu conquest and to pacify the Han Chinese population it subsumed. It therefore demanded rapid, decisive action, rather than measured, slow reconsideration. As a result, many of the “lessons” early Qing elites drew from the Ming collapse initially resembled knee-jerk, heat-ofthe-moment reactions. Although many of them would later gain sophistication and depth through decades of intellectual reexamination, delineation, and entrenchment, at this early stage, when the psychological trauma was still fresh and piercing, these reactions were arguably more the product of passion than of measured reason, more “fast” thinking than “slow.”3 The immediate demands of sociopolitical consolidation forced the Qing Court to carry over much of the Ming bureaucracy and legal system unchanged: The institutional setup of the new government largely resembled the old one, as did its legal codes and regulations. Nonetheless, within a few years of its establishment, the new regime had made at least two fundamental institutional changes to the old political system, both directly in response to perceived causes of the Ming collapse: First, it decimated the political status of palace eunuchs, who had played a major role in imperial politics and policymaking throughout the Ming, and at times could rise to positions of enormous power. Especially during the late Ming, peaking with the unprecedented prominence of the eunuch Wei Zhongxian during the Tianqi reign (1620–1627), the conflict between eunuchs and literati officials frequently boiled over into bloody factional fighting. Small wonder, then, that early Qing literati quickly 2

3

On the psychological impact, see Zhao Yuan (2014); He Guanbiao (何冠彪), Ming Mo Qing Chu Xueshu Sixiang Yanjiu (明末清初學術思想研究) [Studies on the academic thought in the late ming and early qing], ch. 1 (1991); Li Xuan (李瑄), Ming Yimin Qunti Xintai yu Wenxue Sixiang Yanjiu (明遗民群体心态与文学思想研究) [A study of the mentality and literary thought of the Ming loyalists] (2009). This terminology is, of course, taken from Daniel Kahneman, Thinking: Fast and Slow (2011).

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concluded that the eunuch political power had been a major cause of Ming decline and fall4 – and the Manchu court responded accordingly. Beginning in 1645, the regent prince Dorgon, ruling through the child emperor Shunzhi, issued a series of edicts that sought to prohibit eunuch participation in policymaking.5 Although eunuchs briefly regained some of their political statures after Dorgon’s death in 1650, by the early 1660s the tide had once again turned against them, this time for good. By the eighteenth century, with the issuance of formal regulations on eunuch conduct, eunuchs had almost completely disappeared from the political sphere, never to return. The other major institutional change came in fiscal policy. Early Qing literati targeted fiscal excess as perhaps the major cause of Ming collapse, something that played an even larger role than eunuch abuses of power. As a basic chronological matter, eunuch political influence had dramatically receded following Wei Zhongxian’s death in 1627, whereas fiscal expansion accelerated throughout the 1620s and 1630s, with no substantial pullback until 1638. For many political and intellectual elites writing in the later 1640s and 1650s, this apparently made the latter an even more attractive proximate explanation for the dynasty’s final collapse than the former. During the first several years of Qing rule, a wave of memorials from officials, especially Han Chinese officials, implored the Imperial Court to reduce tax rates from late Ming levels, arguing that a decisive and permanent recommitment to fiscal restraint was the single most important lesson it could draw from Ming failure – without which the new dynasty would, in all likelihood, quickly follow in the tragic footsteps of the old. As one of the very first memorials the regent Dorgon received in 1644, penned by a senior provincial official named Song Quan who was one of the most experienced Ming officials to submit immediately to Qing rule, argued: The first thing that must be done is to eliminate all the tax hikes [imposed in the Late Ming], so that people’s livelihoods may be revived. Why did bandits rise up [in the Late Ming]? It was because the people were impoverished. Recently, the enormous scale of military needs forced the Ming to impose additional taxes. State agents . . . then added their private surcharges to formal surcharges. Combined, they sucked dry the marrow of 4

5

Huang Zongxi, in particular, was an especially ardent critic of the Ming eunuch system. See, e.g., Zhu Yilu (朱义禄), Lun Huang Zongxi dui Huanguan Zhidu de Pipan (论黄宗羲对宦官制度的批 判) [On Huang Zongxi’s Critique of the Eunuch institution], (2009)4 Zhonggong Ningbo Shiwei Dangxiao Xuebao (中共宁波市委党校学报) [Journal of the Party School of CPC Ningbo Municipal Committee] 90. See Norman A. Kutcher, Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule (2018) for a general survey of literati efforts to contain eunuch power in the early Qing, which managed to eliminate formal eunuch control over most areas of policymaking, but did not prevent many eunuchs from flourishing on a personal level, especially in roles that managed the imperial household’s everyday life. See Tang Yinian (唐益年), Qingdai Yanjin Taijian Ganzheng (清代严禁太监干政) [Qing Dynasty Strictly Prohibits Eunuchs from Interfering in Politics], in 1 Qing Shi Jing Jian (清史镜鉴) [Reflection on Qing History] 147 (Guojia Qing Shi Biancuan Weiyuan Hui ed., 2008).

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the people. The greater the impoverishment of the people, the larger the scale of bandit rebellions. If the Sage Emperor now wishes to save the people from these dire circumstances, he must tax lightly, so as to lay the foundation for peace and stability over ten thousand generations.6

Specifically, the memorial proposed to reduce tax quotas by up to 70 percent, back to what they were in the early Wanli era, before the Single Whip Laws of 1581 had taken effect. Similar proposals appeared repeatedly, with virtually no opposing views being voiced, in memorials submitted to the Court in 1644 and 1645: Officials up and down the system recommended cutting the size of the bureaucracy to save costs, eliminating local surcharges through anti-corruption sweeps, and, most frequently by far, eliminating late Ming military campaign taxes, all in the name of solidifying Qing rule.7 The consensus was clear: The best, and perhaps the only, way the new dynasty could swiftly win over the Han population – apart from basic political truisms such as respecting Confucian rituals and properly recruiting talent – was by reducing the fiscal burden imposed upon it. Lest the new rulers underestimate the urgency of these demands, multiple memorials submitted by former Ming officials who had now joined the new regime highlighted the example of Late Ming collapse as a cautionary tale: It is often said that the people are like water: they can support a ship, but can also sink it. The survival of the country depends completely on social sentiment. There is no need for ancient tales here, as there is a clear example in recent developments: in the Late Ming, despite droughts and famines, the state continued to increase military spending year after year, and the taxes it imposed to support these campaigns increased day by day and month by month. Once the people could no longer maintain a basic livelihood, their anguish and anger boiled over. They began to believe the sweet promises made by the bandit Li Zicheng, and rushed to join his cause. The bandit army was therefore able to sweep through Shaanxi, Henan, Shanxi, and Shandong, sacking well-defended cities within a day due to the collaboration of the local population. This, then, is what happens when the people’s loyalty disintegrates.8

Waves of memorials like these shaped the basic tone of early Qing political discourse: The new dynasty must avoid the mistakes of the old to solidify its rule, and the greatest mistake of the old dynasty was its fiscal expansionism.9 Clearly moved by these arguments, Fan Wencheng, a northeastern Han literati

6

7

8 9

Song Quan memorial, in 1 Huang Qing Zou Yi (皇清奏議) [Memorials of the Imperial Qing Court] [hereinafter HQZY], 93–100 (Wenhai Press 1967). E.g., Qing Shizu Shilu (清世祖实录) [Veritable Records of the Shizu Emperor of the Qing], ch. 6, Shunzhi 1st Year 7th Month Jiawu (Luo Yangxing, the governor of Tianjin, requesting the repeal of late Ming surcharges). Yang Zhen memorial, in 1 HQZY, 161–171. For similar arguments on the causes of Ming collapse or the need to reduce agricultural tax quotas to consolidate rule, see, e.g., the memorials collected in 1 HQZY, 109, 123, 173, 179, 213, 239, 307, 333.

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who had joined the Manchu court in 1618 and was now its senior civil affairs official, proposed locking in Qing tax quotas according to “Wanli era (1572–1620) precedents.” “The Ming,” Fan wrote, echoing his new colleagues, “fell because it taxed the common people too harshly, which provoked them into banditry. How can we once again tread the path that led to its destruction?”10 Eager to secure the loyalty of his freshly conquered Han subjects, Dorgon quickly agreed to these basic fiscal principles, and formally abolished the Ming military campaign taxes in one of his very first decrees: Of all the problematic policies implemented by the previous dynasty, the one that provoked the people the most was the (1618) Liao Xiang, which directly threw the people into poverty and forced them to rise up as bandits. This was followed up by the Jiao Xiang, . . . and then by the Lian Xiang. These three campaign taxes . . . greatly burdened the average person, cutting off his fat and scraping away his marrow. . . . From this year onwards, any extra surcharge beyond the standard tax quota, such as the military campaign taxes . . . are all completely abolished.11

To ensure that the fiscal benevolence of the new dynasty was well publicized to its freshly conquered masses, Dorgon ordered all local governments, from the provinces down to the counties, to “aggressively inform the population of these measures through public notices.” If any bureaucrats took advantage of the institutional transition to “secretly impose surcharges,” they would be “executed without mercy.”12 Effectively, the decree would remove a cool 15 million taels from the state’s annual income – around a third of the total. Another decree issued a few months later confirmed that all land tax quotas would be assessed in accordance with Wanli tax records.13 For all the determination this decree tried to project, the Manchu ruling elite had yet to be fully persuaded that there was absolutely no political space for tax increases beyond this reduced threshold. They were, after all, still mired in prolonged combat with remnant Ming forces in the Lower Yangtze, and would not be able to seize those economically critical regions until a year later. Large portions of South China remained in the hands of Ming loyalists until the early 1660s. The sheer amount of military spending this demanded, coupled with the often high administrative costs of regime change, was a constant counterforce to tax reduction efforts throughout the Shunzhi era. Within four years of Dorgon’s decree, escalating levels of administrative spending – which must have come as a rude shock to the Manchu court – had given him a change of heart, and he tried to sneak the Liao Xiang, which the decree had condemned in such striking terms, back into the fiscal quota under a different title.14 This met 10

11 13

Zhao Lian (昭梿), Xiao Ting Za Lu (啸亭杂录) [Miscellaneous Writings of Xiao Ting], ch. 2 (1821) (discussing Fan Wencheng’s “deep benevolence”). 12 Qing Shizu Shilu, ch. 6, Shunzhi 1st Year 7th Month Renyin. Id. 14 Qing Shi Gao, ch. 4. See Chen Feng (2008), at 110–114.

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with immediate condemnation by a number of Han officials, and prompted another round of doomsaying memorials that begged the Qing Court to avoid repeating the late Ming’s fiscal mistakes, to which the Qing court once again responded by affirming the importance of following “Wanli era precedents.”15 Fan Wencheng’s reasons for proposing this new fiscal baseline were, it turned out, significantly more complex than initially met the eye.16 He was, of course, eager to project a political image of heeding “the lessons of Ming collapse” – given that the commonly recognized symptoms and causes of Ming domestic collapse tended to emerge en masse only after the largely peaceful Wanli era, the notion of following “Wanli precedents” was indeed politically welcome to the Han bureaucracy – but he also had less high-minded administrative reasons for choosing this language over something more specific: First, following a decade of military turmoil, the Wanli era was simply the last Ming era for which full fiscal records existed. Second, and perhaps more importantly, given that the era spanned a full 48 years, it supplied a plethora of institutional precedents that gave the skilled fiscal administrator ample wiggle room to operate in. In particular, significant parts of the Liao Xiang, which were initially implemented around 1618, could be covertly legitimated and revived under these precedents. Governmental documents therefore took great care to characterize the reinstatement of these Liao Xiang components as merely “following the precedent set in the 48th year of the Wanli era,” while providing assurances that “all surcharges imposed in the Tianqi (1620–1627) and Chongzhen (1627–1644) eras would be completely abolished.”17 In other words, although Dorgon could not hide the fact that he was indeed walking back a portion of his earlier abolition of the Liao Xiang, he did at least reaffirm his commitment to the broader principle of following Wanli precedents. Despite triggering some anxiety within the Han bureaucracy nonetheless, this was enough to ward off full blown resistance. For the most part, the Qing Court honored its commitment to Wanli precedents as it formalized and reorganized its fiscal apparatus during the 1650s and early 1660s. A decade of regional land surveys culminated in the 1657 Fu Yi Quan Shu (Complete Book of Taxation), which broadly followed the 1620 template, but with a number of local adjustments to account for recent

15

16

17

Id., at 110–111. See, e.g., discussion of Wanli precedents in Wang Zhizuo (王志佐) memorial, FNHA 02-01-02-2052-008, Shunzhi 6th Year 7th Month 15th Day; Zhu Yanqing (朱延庆) memorial, FNHA 02-01-02-2099-002, Shunzhi 6th Year 7th Month 15th Day (the memorial was submitted twice under two authors, suggesting coauthorship); Bahana (巴哈纳) memorial, FNHA 02-01-02-2099-015, Shunzhi 6th Year 10th Month 14th Day; Che Ke (车克) memorial, FNHA 02-01-02-2104-004, Shunzhi 9th Year 6th Month 16th Day. Fan Wencheng (范文程) biography, Qing Shi Gao (清史稿) [Draft History of the Qing], ch. 232. Qing Shizu Shilu, ch. 30, Shunzhi 4th Year 2nd Month Kuiwei; ch. 33, Shunzhi 4th Year 7th Month Jiazi.

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changes in population and land use patterns. As the Shunzhi emperor, who was now ruling directly, explained in an official decree: The realm was prosperous in the Wanli era, but military campaigning during the Tianqi and Chongzhen era led to the imposition of surcharge taxes. . . . Once the people could no longer afford this burden, the country’s lifespan came to an end. We must heed this warning. . . . The Quan Shu tax system follows Wanli era precedents, and all Tianqi and Chongzhen additions have been completely abolished. [The specific distribution of land and head taxes] was determined through modifying the original quota, which were drawn from Wanli era records, . . . through careful verification of demographic changes and land reclamation.18

The “verification” process Shunzhi referred to included two waves of land and demographic surveys, national in aspiration but regionally uneven in practice, initiated by the Imperial Court in 1645 and 1655, which did at least manage to update tax quotas for some parts of North China, the Lower Yangtze, and the war-torn northwest.19 These changes were, for the most part, distributional: The total “land and head“ tax quota that the Quan Shu arrived at – around 22 million taels of silver and 7 million shi of grain – was largely similar to 1620 post-Liao Xiang tax levels, but was allocated in a somewhat more equitable fashion. Less war-torn regions now shouldered a moderately larger share of the total quota, and larger landlords were to assume some of the tax burden formerly imposed on smallholders. One of the most important characteristics of the 1657 fiscal regime was that it was, by design, fluid and supposed to be updated periodically. The Shunzhi decree clearly stated “if there is further progress in land reclamation that warrants an update to the quota, provincial governors and censors should compile them into a formal report that can be inspected and verified.”20 Presumably, provincial and regional land surveys would keep tax quotas up to date, allowing them some measure of growth as the agrarian economy recovered. Within a few years of the Quan Shu’s issuance, however, senior officials began voicing doubts about whether there truly was any room for further expansion of the tax quota. Barely a year after the new quotas were set, the censor Wei Yijie submitted a memorial arguing that the ability of civilians to finance military campaigns had already reached its zenith, and any further expansion of tax quotas would lead to disaster: “This, [the over-burdening of the people], is the greatest danger the country currently faces. Officials, literati, merchants, and farmers are all already overburdened by military campaigns, yet the campaigns themselves are underfinanced.”21 Wei’s proposed solution

18 19 20 21

Qing Shizu Shilu, ch. 112, Shunzhi 14th Year 10th Month Bingzi. Zhang Yan (2002), at 72. Qing Shizu Shilu, ch. 112, Shunzhi 14th Year 10th Month Bingzi. Wei Yijie (魏裔介) memorial, 2 HQZY, 1115–1122.

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was to have the military fund itself through land reclamation projects, a long term measure that would take years to have any effect. Other officials, such as the Board of Works official Yao Yanqi, focused more on short-term fixes, such as shifting funds from the government’s administrative functions and the imperial family’s living allowance to the military, but agreed that tax increases must be strictly avoided, lest an already overburdened civilian population rise up in rebellion: “If birds are starved, they will resort to raiding, and if beasts are starved, they will assault humans. This is why certain things must not be done.”22 The clear consensus that emerges from these documents was that the Quan Shu quota had already maxed out the economy’s fiscal capacity, and to go any further would be to court the same kind of collapse that the Ming had just experienced. This position was stated especially clearly in a 1659 memorial by the Board of Revenue official Liu Hongru. Positioning himself directly against Shunzhi’s 1657 decree, Liu argued that the Imperial Court should publicly and formally commit itself to a fixed quota – in absolute volume, not tax rate – for perpetuity: “The overall amount of wealth the country can provide is finite, yet the fiscal needs of the government potentially unlimited. . . . Allowing the tax quota to creep upward whenever the current budget becomes exhausted – this is no way to secure long-term political and social stability.”23 Gesturing toward the Court’s previous manipulation of “Wanli era precedents,” Liu acknowledged it had needed to maintain a certain level of fiscal flexibility while it was still consolidating its rule over newly conquered territories, but now that that process had largely been completed, it was time to “fix the total volume of fiscal extraction . . . as a permanent rule that cannot be changed.” Failing to do this would quickly throw the country back into a vicious pattern of escalating military spending, never-ending tax hikes, and foreseeable destabilization. If the Imperial Court wished to expand its revenue intake, it should look to land reclamation by the military, rather than to additional taxes.24 These voices reached a crescendo a few years later in 1661, following Shunzhi’s death early in the year and the ascension of the Kangxi Emperor. Beyond the regime change itself, another reason for the escalation was the temporary reinstatement of portions of the Lian Xiang to support a final assault on Ming loyalist positions in Yunnan.25 This would have added some 5 million taels to the government’s total fiscal intake that year, and even though actual

22 23 24

25

Yao Yanqi (姚延启) memorial, 2 HQZY, 1123–1130. Liu Hongru (刘鸿儒) memorial, 2 HQZY, 1145–1156. Id. See also, Li Dingyu (李鼎玉) memorial, 2 HQZY, 1239–1247 (asking that the Court make a concerted effort to punish any local official who collected informal surcharges beyond what the fixed formal quota allowed). See Asha (阿思哈) memorial, FNHA 02-01-02-2125-013, Shunzhi 18th Year 11th Month 28th Day; Yang Maoxun (杨茂勋) memorial, FNHA 02-01-02-2225-004, Shunzhi 18th Year 11th Month 16th Day.

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collection levels were likely far lower, the backlash among Han Chinese bureaucrats was nonetheless significant. Upon Kangxi’s ascension, the Imperial Court – the new emperor was only eight at this point, and four regents ruled collectively in his stead – immediately received a series of memorials condemning the state’s fiscal excess and calling for a sharp reduction to military spending. Wei Yijie once again took up the mantle of fiscal conservatism: “Taxation to fund the military has now impoverished the country to the extreme, and already exceeds the fiscal capacity of the country.”26 Others warned that additional layers of administrative and fiscal complexity would create an opening for local corruption, and would eventually snowball local fiscal extraction, formal and informal, into unmanageable levels.27 While explicit discussion of “learning from the Ming Collapse” was now somewhat rarer than in 1644 – it still appeared frequently enough, especially in memorials on fiscal affairs28 – the dynastic transition clearly still weighed heavily on the minds of many officials: They were quick to speak of imminent socioeconomic collapse, and with a far greater tone of urgency and inevitability than what we saw in Late Ming memorials.29 Responding to their concerns, the Imperial Court backed off from making the new military campaign surcharges permanent, and one finds little trace of them in later fiscal records. Although many of these early Qing debates were framed in general terms as, essentially, political referendums against what officials considered to be late Ming fiscal excesses, a deeper look into these debates clearly indicates they were focused primarily on the land tax and grain tribute. Nonagricultural taxation, which at this early stage was almost entirely derived from salt production and tariff income, was largely an afterthought that rarely drew large amounts of political attention. Part of this was almost certainly due to its relatively insignificant volume: The economic havoc wreaked by the Ming-Qing transition had driven salt production and all kinds of commerce, both domestic and international, sharply below their late Ming levels. As a result, nonagricultural taxes

26 27 28

29

Wei Yijie (魏裔介) memorial, 3 HQZY, 1539–1543. Lu Chongjun (卢崇峻) memorial, 3 HQZY, 1569–1573. E.g., Ji Zhenyi (季振宜) memorial, 3 HQZY, 1445–1453 (“The example of Ming Collapse is not far from us.”); Lin Tingda (蔺挺达) memorial, 3 HQZY, 1599–1604 (emphasizing the need to understand “the difficult circumstances of agricultural production” by looking to “the reasons for the previous dynasty’s rise and decline”); Xu Xu (徐旭) Memorial, 3 HQZY, 1667–1670 (framing tax policy in the northwest within the general context of late Ming impoverishment and collapse). E.g., Yang Nai (杨鼐) memorial, 3 HQZY, 1527–1535; Zhao Tingchen Memorial (赵廷臣) 3 HQZY, 1563–1567 (arguing for the need to immediately curb public and private spending and promote frugality); Xu Xu (徐旭) Memorial, 3 HQZY, 1683–1690 (warning that the population was already extremely impoverished, and could not withstand any additional economic extraction, even to merchants).

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contributed less than a tenth of the revenue that agricultural taxes did in the 1650s.30 Insofar as government memorials spoke about nonagricultural taxation, they were usually in favor of expanding revenue extraction from commerce. As one 1657 memorial by the censor Yi Pi stated: The creation of domestic commercial tax collection stations can both supply revenue for the state and ensure the proper flow of goods between merchants and commoners. . . . Extracting marginal value from merchants to pay for the spending needs of the state and its military shows, within its operations, the state’s intent to emphasize and protect the core foundations (“ben”) of the economy while regulating and controlling its peripheral components (“mo”).31 By “the core foundations of the economy,” Yi referred, following traditional intellectual conventions, to agriculture, whereas by “peripheral components” he referred to commerce. The contrast could not be starker: Agricultural taxation was routinely spoken of by early Qing officials with a mixture of fear, anxiety, and condemnation, whereas commercial taxation was considered, even in the immediate aftermath of Ming collapse, something the state was not only allowed to actively pursue, but should actually be encouraged to. Clearly, the “lessons of Ming collapse,” with all their intellectual and political trauma, had extended only to the former, and not the latter. All of this makes a great deal of sense if we look at the basic chronology of Ming decline and collapse: Late Ming tax hikes, especially the three military campaign surcharges, were not limited to agricultural taxes, but were instead applied more or less evenly, in terms of rate increases, to all fiscal categories. Despite the significant increase in agricultural and nonagricultural taxation alike, starving peasants from the northwest were the overwhelmingly dominant source of sociopolitical unrest in the late Ming, whereas merchants and other nonagricultural producers generally acquiesced to the tax hikes, if perhaps grudgingly. This may well have emboldened early Qing policymakers to immediately endorse an expansionist fiscal posture against the latter while nervously tiptoeing around the former, even though the Qing conquest may very well have disrupted commerce and nonagricultural production more severely than it had damaged agriculture.

b. the new intellectual paradigm The early Qing political turn toward fiscal conservatism did not, of course, develop in an intellectual vacuum. Rather, it was part of a general shift across the Chinese intelligentsia toward small-state political ideology that emerged in response to the Ming collapse. The most prominent intellectuals of the day 30 31

See discussion in Chapter 1, Section B. Yi Pi (伊辟) memorial, Shunzhi 13th Year 11th Month 28th Day, in 1983(1) Lishi Dang’an (历 史档案) [Historical Archives] 30.

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wrote lengthy treatises explaining in painstaking detail why societal welfare was best served by reducing the government’s regulatory and administrative reach – why, essentially, the state was a necessary evil that should, as both a moral and pragmatic matter, be as limited as possible. The contrast with the relatively positive attitudes toward state intervention and control voiced by mid to late Ming literati is stark, and was almost certainly a product of the intellectual and political whiplash that scholars and officials alike experienced during this era. I. Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and Wang Fuzhi The famed “early Qing trio”32 of Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and Wang Fuzhi all contributed significantly to the formation of this new intellectual paradigm. Gu, in particular, was so shaken by the Ming-Qing transition that, at some point in the later 1640s, he burned nearly everything he had written before the Ming collapse and vowed to start anew under a completely different mindset. Self-consciously, at least, he wished to sever any intellectual continuity with the Late Ming, so as to fully internalize the lessons of its collapse. This demanded a reorientation of intellectual energy away from the metaphysical and abstractly ethical, and toward empirically understanding “the origins of political order and chaos, and the foundations of economic livelihood,” which were, in his mind, what “the Six Classics were truly concerned with.”33 What, then, were the “origins of political order and chaos” according to Gu? While his political writings cover an enormous amount of ground, exploring many facets of state administration and economic production, the theme he returned to over and over again was fiscal extraction. Eschewing a narrow focus on Ming collapse for a broader narrative of intellectual and political decline since the later Tang, Gu argued that the shift of tax collection in kind to 32

33

There is some debate over whether this famous “trio” truly deserved the title. See Chen Juyuan (陈居渊), Qing Chu San Da Ru“Zhengming” (清初三大儒“正名”) [“Rectifying Names” for the Three Great Scholars of the Early Qing], Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Xuebao (中国社会科学报) [Chinese Social Science Today], Jan. 6, 2014. Whereas Gu and Huang, especially the latter, were extremely well-connected and prominent scholars during their lifetimes, Wang was, in his later years, a recluse, and may not have had quite as much direct influence over his contemporary scholars – although he certainly was prominent enough to draw the repeated attention of both Wu Sangui and the Qing Court during his later years. Nonetheless, the reason the three scholars are conventionally lumped together in this fashion – sometimes with Yan Yuan added in as a fourth wheel – is not necessarily because of their contemporary influence, but because their writings seemed to exemplify the best and most prominent strands of thought among the early Qing literati. See, e.g., Wang Xuequn & Wu Caiwa (汪学群 & 武才娃), Qingdai Sixiang Shilun (清代思想史论) [Studies on the Intellectual History of the Qing Dynasty] 112, 128 (2007). Gu Yanwu (顾炎武), Yu Huang Taichong Shu (与黄太冲书) [Letters with Huang Taichong], in Gu Tinglin Shiwen Ji (顾亭林诗文集) [Poems and Writings of Gu Tinglin], ch. 3 (Zhonghua Shuju Press 2008).

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tax collection in cash or silver, which made fiscal expansion dramatically easier from an administrative perspective, was a critical long term cause – perhaps the long term cause – of the Chinese state’s decline from the Tang to the Ming, culminating with the Ming’s total social, economic, and political collapse.34 This was not, of course, a linear process, but Gu found reasons to believe that fiscal overreach, largely in the form of over collection via silver or cash conversion, was a primary culprit of not merely Ming collapse, but also of Song and Tang decline.35 “To rely on the silver to enrich the state,” he argued, “is like attempting to curb hunger with alcohol. From the transition between Tang and Song onward, officials have come to rely on these machinations – and yet, over time, by deceiving themselves in this fashion, they did enough damage to fundamentally destroy the bonds of trust between the state and its subjects.”36 While most officials considered the Qing state’s adoption of Wanli-era quotas and institutions as a sign of fiscal restraint, and therefore as a positive development, Gu was less enthusiastic about this institutional continuity. His thesis of long-term decay cast Wanli-era institutions, especially Zhang Juzheng’s Single Whip project, in a far less favorable light than how most government officials saw them, and Gu was clearly unimpressed by any sort of “but things got far worse after Wanli” argument.37 He argued, therefore, for a return to a pre-silver, and even pre-cash tax collection system – something not seen in full since the early Tang – and for a strict cap on grain collection: an average rate of around 0.12 shi per mu, adjusted up or down according to the quality of the land.38 Given early Qing land productivity rates,39 this would yield an average tax rate of around 4–5 percent, considerably lower than even early Tang rates, and around half the rate the government nominally claimed to collect at this time. For all his hostility toward fiscal overreach, Gu was perhaps the least antistatist member of the famed early Qing scholarly trio of Huang, Wang, and himself. Both Huang Zongxi and Wang Fuzhi advocated positions that, if implemented, would essentially remove the state from any substantial role in economic management or oversight. Huang famously argued that the interests of the ruler were normatively subordinate to the interests of the people, and therefore that the general population’s economic interests should take strict 34 35

36 39

Gu Yanwu, Qian Liang Lun (钱粮论) [On Money and Grain], HCJSWB, ch. 29. Gu Yanwu, Ri Zhi Lu (日知录) [Records of Everyday Learning], ch. 12 (“崇祯末年之事， 可为永鉴也”); Gu Yanwu, Du Song Shi Chen Gou Zhuan (读宋史陈遘传) [Reading the Chen Gou Biography in the Song History], in HCJSWB, ch. 26. 37 38 Gu, Qian Liang Lun, HCJSWB, ch. 29. Id. Gu, Ri Zhi Lu, at ch. 10. For a relatively recent estimate of land productivity, see Guo Songyi (郭松义), Ming Qing Shiqi de Liangshi Shengchan yu Nongmin Shenghuo Shuiping (明清时期的粮食生产与农民的生活水 平) [Food Production and Peasants’ Living Standards in the Ming and Qing Dynasties], 2001(1) Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Yuan Lishi Yanjiusuo Xuekan (中国社会科学院历史研究所集 刊) [Collected Works of the Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences] 373.

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precedence over those of the state.40 Like Gu, Huang was a fierce critic of both Ming fiscal expansionism in general and the conversion from grain to silver in particular: He also believed that the latter fed the former, which eventually led to an institutional paradigm in which “taxes could only accumulate, but never pare down.”41 Even more ardently than Gu, Huang advocated the rejection of contemporary fiscal and economic institutions in favor of ancient ones. In particular, he supported a partial return to the jingtian (“well and field”) system, under which state-owned land – which, by his estimate, accounted for some 30 percent of total arable land in the late Ming – would be largely evenly distributed to smallholders.42 The state would then tax the newly distributed land at a 10 percent rate, collected only in grain, while taxing land that was already privately owned at either a 5 or 3 percent rate.43 Whereas conventional political thought considered the shiyi shui (a “tithe tax” of around 10 percent) of the ancient Zhou dynasty to be an example of benevolent government, and therefore worth aspiring to,44 Huang argued that applying a 10 percent tax rate to the contemporary agrarian economy would actually lead to disastrous overexploitation. Although a 10 percent rate might have worked when the land was more plentiful and evenly distributed, it would be backbreaking for most households under contemporary conditions of gross inequality and widespread impoverishment – in fact, “even a 3.3 percent tax rate in today’s world might lead to a higher fiscal burden than what the shiyi shui truly imposed on the ancient economy.”45 The state’s proper course of action under these circumstances was, in essence, to surrender all of its property to smallholders, and then tax them as little as possible, so that their wealth and income could eventually recover to a sustainable level. A failure to do this would mire the country in its current state of ruin, in which people “view their ruler as a hated adversary, and call him a despot.”46 Huang even went as far as to toy with real anarchy: “The greatest menace to the interests of the country is, in fact, the ruler himself. If there were no ruler, then each person could freely pursue his own self-interest and enjoy his own wealth.”47 A just ruler should therefore govern as nonintrusively as possible – and, most importantly, extract as little wealth as possible from his subjects. Then, and only then, would he win their true affection and loyalty. More forcefully than either Gu or Wang, Huang philosophically rejected the traditional idea that “speaking of profit” or pursuing material gain was morally 40

41 43 44

45 47

Huang Zongxi (黄宗羲), Yuan Chen (原臣), in Ming Yi Daifang Lu (明夷待访录) [Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince], ch. 2. 42 Huang Zongxi, Tian Zhi, in Ming Yi Daifang Lu, ch. 8 (“有积累莫返之害”). Id. Id. For example, a reduction down to the traditional 10 percent rate was one of the core fiscal beliefs of the influential North China “Yan and Li School.” See Li Gong (李塨), Ping Shu Ding (平书 订) [Collected Writings on Stability], ch. 7–11 (1708). 46 Huang, Tian Zhi. Huang Zongxi, Yuan Jun (原君), in Ming Yi Daifang Lu, ch. 1. Id.

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questionable. Quite the opposite, his reasons for opposing state taxation were, echoing arguments developed by the late Ming scholar Li Zhi, fundamentally grounded in the moral legitimacy of private wealth maximization: “At the beginning of human history, human beings were all selfish, and pursued their own material interests (si li).”48 Although a number of ancient sages were able “to disregard their own material interests, and instead attempt to benefit all of society,” it would be wholly unrealistic to expect that most later rulers could follow in their footsteps.49 Instead, the great majority of rulers and officials tended to pursue their own self-interest just like commoners, and for this reason their power and authority had to be carefully checked – so that “each person could freely pursue his own self-interest.”50 Modern scholars will find significant overlap between these ideas and those espoused in much of contemporary political science and economics. Indeed, a number of contemporary Chinese scholars, such as Qin Hui, have lauded Huang as the progenitor of political economy theory in China:51 He was, for example, among the first to systemically argue that the self-interest of local officials will inevitably fuel the creation of new fiscal surcharges as long as the central government fails to impose an absolute upper bound on taxation. In fact, Huang’s similarities with modern political economy theories go beyond this basic empirical “thesis.” The pursuit of self-interest and material is not a moral problem for him – it is merely an inescapable fact of human behavior – and insofar as it leads to the abuse of political power, the proper response is to create institutional checks, rather than to condemn the pursuit of self-interest per se. This was a point of significant disagreement between Huang and Wang Fuzhi, who insisted there was a moral difference between “virtue” (yi) and “material gain” (li), in that the former was indeed normatively superior to the latter, and was something rulers and officials must aspire to, both collectively and individually.52 Even so, Wang was not entirely dismissive of the need to supply some material gain to those in positions of power, lest the temptation to discard virtue become too greater. Rather, he argued that the pursuit of virtue would inevitably lead to ample material gain over the long term: “In fact, when has virtue failed to generate material gain? Yet those who rule still do not understand how to create material gain through virtue.”53 In contrast, if rulers were narrowly focused on their own short-term material interests, “then they

48 51

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49 50 Id. Id. Id. Qin Hui (秦晖), Bingshuishi Gaige yu Huang Zongxi Dinglü (并税式改革与“黄宗羲定律”) [Tax Reform and “Huang Zongxi Thesis”], 2002(3) Nongcun Hezuo Jingji Jingying Guanli (农 村合作经济经营管理) [Rural cooperative economic management] 6. Wang Fuzhi (王夫之), Ai Di (哀帝), in Du Tongjian Lun, (读通鉴论) [Reading The Tongjian History], ch. 14. Xiang Bin et al. (项斌等), Zhongguo Gudai Caizheng Sixiang Shigao (中国古代财政思想 史稿) [Draft History of Ancient Chinese Financial Thought], 610–611 (1993).

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would suffer far greater losses over the long run.”54 From this angle, Wang was hardly an ethical purist in the traditional mode, but was instead a pragmatist who simply chose to emphasize long-term interests over short-term ones. Even compared to Gu and Huang, Wang was unusually eager to attribute all manners of historical political catastrophes and contemporary socioeconomic ills to the evils of over-taxation. In a series of historical essays stylized as reading responses to Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian, he methodically analyzed nearly every episode of major social unrest or economic crisis from the Qin Dynasty to the Tang-Song transition, ultimately attributing the majority of them to some form of over-extraction of farmers, either by the state or by private parties such as merchants and large landlords. As he concluded in his essay on the Xuanzong Emperor of the Tang, “of all the things that lead to great suffering among the people and to great damage to the state, none is more severe than the emperor hoarding wealth. . . . If a dynasty, which possesses all within the four oceans, fears poverty, then it will inevitably collapse due to the impoverishment of its people.”55 More than anything else, this was the unifying message Wang attempted to hammer home in his sweeping historical analysis – that the primary cause of dynastic decline and fall, including but not limited to the Ming, was over-extraction of private wealth.56 This would almost certainly have counted as revisionist history in the later Ming, when, as argued in Chapter 3, most fiscally conservative officials made the connection between fiscal expansion and social unrest only rather tentatively. Following the MingQing transition, however, Wang’s account was effectively mainstream. Wang’s unusually consistent historical thesis fed into a set of unusually strong policy recommendations for contemporary officials: He agreed with Huang and Gu on the virtues of reducing tax rates below 5 percent, or even 3, and that the conventional 10 percent “ideal” rate was, in fact, “unbenevolent.”57 But beyond that, he also advocated in exceptionally clear terms for the creation of a permanently fixed tax quota – in absolute volume, rather than tax rate – that would be unresponsive to increases in arable land or total output. Tracing this institutional framework, accurately or not, back to the ancient Shang and Zhou dynasties, Wang attributed their longevity to their commitment to a fixed tax quota. This maximized the production and reclamation incentives of rural households, which led to prosperity and political stability: “If, at the founding of a dynasty . . . the land tax is permanently fixed, no longer will there be any worry that the population is impoverished, or that arable land lies uncultivated. Without any danger of local corruption and without the need to adjust tax quotas, what worries will the state still have?”58 If Huang was the 54 56

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55 Id. Wang Fuzhi, Xuan Zong (玄宗), in Du Tongjian Lun, ch. 22. Specifically on the Ming decline and fall, see, e.g., Wang Fuzhi, Chuanshan Si Wen Lu (Wai Pian) (船山思问录 (外篇)) [Chuanshan’s Reflections], Sec. 209 (criticizing the Single Whip Laws). For a selection of Wang’s historical essays on fiscal policy, see JJSXSZL, 298–326. 58 Wang Fuzhi, Tang Gaozu (唐高祖), in Du Tongjian Lun, ch. 20. JJSXSZL, 328.

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political economist of the trio, then Wang was the lassiez faire classical economist – yet both positions led, ultimately, to the conclusion that the state should tax lightly, and should be extremely wary of expanding tax quotas. All in all, despite the significant philosophical and methodological differences between Gu, Huang, and Wang – Gu and Wang were, at least early in their careers, followers of the Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism (“Song Xue”) developed by Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao, and Zhu Xi, whereas Huang started off as a practitioner of Wang Yangming-style “idealism” – they shared at least two major points of agreement when it came to interpreting and responding to Ming collapse. First, they all believed that scholars needed to adopt a more pragmatic, empirical, and politically informed worldview in light of the political and intellectual failures of the late Ming literati, who, in Gu’s words, were “hollow people speaking of empty ideas.”59 Second, they agreed that a more empirical analysis of state policy led to the inexorable conclusion that state taxation had gotten wildly out of hand, and must be quantitatively reduced and institutionally constrained before sociopolitical order could be reestablished.

II. Other Major Figures The majority of their contemporaries likely concurred on both points: There was, as many historians have noted, a widespread rejection in the early Qing of the moral and philosophical self-cultivation that had occupied such a prominent position in Ming scholarship,60 in favor of a more grounded style of scholarship that focused less on normative questions than on empirical ones: philology, economics, politics, and the natural sciences. As the influential scholar Tang Zhen argued, “when the people are materially well-off, they no longer think of rebelling; only then are legal institutions and moral education possible. Those who seek order know, then, how to proceed. Those who only cultivate their own virtue create no general benefit to society. They can be scholars, but not rulers or officials.”61 Around the same time, a large organization of scholars – the “Yan and Li School,” named after the famed Hebei literati Yan Yuan and Li Gong – gathered in North China under the common belief that “empty and useless scholarship” had poisoned the late Ming political and intellectual atmosphere, and that a new, more realist direction was needed to revitalize the “true” Confucian tradition of jingji, a term commonly translated as “economics,” but that in fact covers the study of human social and material 59

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Gu Yanwu, Yu Youren Lun Xue Shu (与友人论学录) [Discussions with Friends], in HCJSWB, ch. 1. E.g., Elman (1984); Wang & Wu (2007), at 112–170; Zhang Jinfan (张晋藩), Qing Chu Jingshi Zhiyong de Sixiang yu Shixue de Xuefeng (清初经世致用的思想与实学的学风) [Practical Thoughts and Realist Styles in the Early Qing], (2007)3, Anhui Shifan Daxue Xuebao (安 徽师范大学学报) [Journal of Anhui Normal University], 292–297. Tang Zhen (唐甄), Xing Gong (性功), HCJSWB, ch. 1.

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welfare.62 In the Lower Yangtze, a large component of “realist” (“shixue”) scholars coalesced around Gu and a few other prominent scholars, such as Zhu Yizun and Mao Qiling, and eventually produced a sizeable intellectual lineage that included Pan Lei and other prominent Kangxi Era officials.63 The second consensus – that the tax regime needed to be shrunk and institutionally constrained – was perhaps even more widespread. To be sure, there was significant disagreement over many of the institutional details – for example, Gu and Huang were strongly hostile to Single Whip-type collection in silver, a position shared by influential scholars like Yan Yuan, Li Gong, and Ren Yuanxiang,64 but many others were not65 – but the general belief that the late Ming state had fiscally overextended was, as far as existing writings will show, nearly universal. Scholars as different in philosophical orientation as Tang Zhen, who was openly skeptical of the sociopolitical legitimacy of the imperial state, and Lu Shiyi, who firmly believed in traditional Confucian moral hierarchies between ruler and subject, could nonetheless agree that fiscal withdrawal and restraint was one of the most pressing political needs of the day. Writing in the mid-Kangxi era, Tang ruthlessly criticized the Qing state for its failure to adequately reduce taxation levels: “It has been 50 years since the Qing was established, and yet those in power have done nothing to increase the wealth of the people.”66 How should they do that, one might ask? Tang’s answer was straightforward: “There is nothing more damaging to society than the greed of those in power.”67 Echoing Huang Zongxi, Tang argued that “greed” originated in heavy taxation, and was then amplified through local corruption – which meant, to tackle the latter, one must first curb the former.68 Lu, a far more traditionalist scholar who was already prominent at the time of Ming collapse, was somewhat more temperate in his critique of Qing policies, but, in the end, was just as insistent on the need to reduce taxation: “The current fiscal regime is indeed simpler than Han or Tang systems . . . but it nonetheless fails to capture the wisdom of the ancient past.”69 Fiscal 62

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Yan Yuan (颜元), Xi Zhai Ji Yu (习斋记余) [Notes from the House of Studies], ch. 3. See also, Zhao Zongzheng (赵宗正), Yan Li Xupai zhong de Shixue Sixiang (颜李学派的实学思想) [The Realist Thought in the Yan Li School], in Studies on the History of Chinese and Korean Realism: Papers of the Fifth International Symposium on East Asian Realism (1998). See Wu Chao (吴超), Jiangnan “Boxue Hongru” yu Qing Chu Shixue Xuefeng (江南“博学 鸿儒”与清初实学学风) [Jiangnan “erudite scholars” and Realist school in the early Qing], 10–36 (2017). See the several essays by Ren Yuanxiang (任源祥), collected in HCJSWB, ch. 29. See also, Xiang Bin et al. (1993), at 629. See, e.g., the three memorials by Yao Wenran (姚文然) in HCJSWB, ch. 29; and Yuan Yixiang (袁一相), Yitiao Bian Yi (一条鞭议), in HCJSWB, ch. 29. Given the strong institutional inertia toward silver-based collection in the early Qing, one can safely conclude that these positions were typical of high level officials. 67 68 JJSXSZL, 375. Id., 372. Id., 371–374. Lu Shiyi (陆世仪), Lun Fu Yi (论赋役), HCJSWB, ch. 29.

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institutions, Lu argued, should incentivize both population growth and land reclamation, which not only meant that they needed to be very low – “nothing leads to more land reclamation than low land taxes, . . . and nothing leads to more population growth than low head taxes” – but also that they needed to be stable in absolute volume. Ideally, they should “neither grow nor decline,” to maximize institutional predictability.70 While one might imagine that a pragmatic or empirical turn in political thought would have produced a more flexible approach toward fiscal policy, it actually had the opposite effect in the post-traumatic world of the early Qing. Whereas, as discussed in Chapter 3, the accusation of “speaking of profit” was often employed in Song and Ming politics as an indictment of personal virtue and morality – forcing fiscal reformers from Wang Anshi to Gao Gong and Hai Rui to somewhat wearily defend themselves on ethical and even philosophical grounds – few major scholars in the early Qing continued to cling onto deontological critiques of “speaking of profit.” Gu Yanwu likely spoke for a large swath of scholars when he stated that “ancient rulers did not shun speaking of profit per se, and to the extent that they refused to raise profit, it was only because doing so would damage the wellbeing of the people.”71 Both Huang and Wang, who, as noted above, belonged to different and often adversarial schools of thought, took somewhat similar positions: Even Wang, who expressed somewhat stronger moral reservations against “pursuing profit,” recognized it was foolish and ultimately self-defeating to categorically refuse to “speak of profit.”72 In this fashion, the morally purist position we often found among fiscal conservatives in the later Ming had, with the rise of early Qing empiricism and pragmatism, given way to a predominantly consequentialist mindset in which the complaint against fiscal extraction was no longer that it was by nature morally suspect, but rather that it had grown to levels that were fundamentally destabilizing, and would lead to political ruin if allowed to continue. On this latter point, the memorials examined in Section A that bemoaned how over-taxation had “impoverished the country to the extreme” were broadly on the same page as private scholars like Gu, Huang, or Tang Zhen, who warned in sharper language that continuation of Ming fiscal policies would lead to the same political outcome: mass uprisings and dynastic collapse. Almost everyone seemed to agree deep cuts were necessary, even as they disagreed over how deep: Government officials, as discussed above, largely coalesced around “Wanli era precedents” as an acceptable compromise, whereas private scholars were free to explore and advocate for more extreme positions. The contrast between the overwhelming uniformity of these early Qing positions and the relatively feeble warnings of potential social disruption

70 72

71 Id. Gu Yanwu, Yan Li zhi Chen (言利之臣), Ri Zhi Lu, ch. 12. Xiang Bin et al. (1993), at 610–611.

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employed in late Ming politics – as argued in Chapter 3, fiscal conservatives were wary of making such arguments, and did so tentatively, as late as the 1630s – is highly suggestive. III. Deontological Framing, Historiography, and the Rise of Pragmatic Fiscal Conservatism The Ming-Qing transition and the enormous intellectual trauma it produced had, therefore, accomplished something that traditional moral anxiety over “speaking of profit” had consistently failed to do over some two millennia of existence: It had generated, essentially within a single generation, a sweeping consensus in favor of fiscal conservatism. Under more neutral circumstances, the philosophical turn from deontological ethics to pragmatism might have produced more diversity in opinions, in that people might have suspended judgment over the direction of the fiscal policy until they had a clearer sense of the relevant socioeconomic facts. Under the all-consuming shadow of Ming collapse, however, only one specific brand of empirical pragmatism seemed either politically or intellectually credible: the kind that drew a direct causal link between fiscal over-expansion and sociopolitical collapse, and therefore demanded swift and decisive action in the opposite direction. If there were dissenters from this mainstream position, they seemed to keep their opinions private, perhaps out of fear of being socially or politically ostracized, or perhaps because they themselves wondered whether it was appropriate to voice their dissent under such circumstances. Once this kind of one-sided fiscal “pragmatism” had gone mainstream, it quickly became much more politically constraining than deontological moral anxiety had been in the Ming or Song: As long as there was some room for philosophical debate over what, exactly, the avoidance of “speaking of profit” demanded of state action – and there was always some room – Song and Ming governments had at least some leeway to pursue expansionist reforms. In contrast, the early Qing consensus no longer presented the political choice as between a possibly more ethical course of action and a possibly less ethical one, but rather as between life or death. In fact, many officials and scholars did not even present the choice as between long-term collapse and short-term fiscal gain, but as between impending collapse and fiscal gain.73 In this kind of environment, it would have taken an exceptionally brave or foolish ruler to overrule his chorus of doom-saying advisors. The transition between deontological fiscal conservatism and pragmatic or consequentialist fiscal conservatism was not, however, a process in which the latter simply replaced the former. Rather, there was a subtle yet powerful 73

See, e.g., the memorials discussed in Section A, supra, and also Tang Zhen’s essay in JJSXSZL, 375.

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generative relationship between the two, in that the former produced the intellectual and cognitive conditions for the latter to emerge and eventually take over. As noted in Chapter 3, late Ming fiscal conservatives had a strong tendency to blame essentially every major historical episode of peasant rebellion on fiscal over-extraction, even though there were plenty of other possible explanations available. In all likelihood, they did so because their deep-rooted normative dislike of taxation encouraged, consciously and subconsciously, an interpretation of history that assigned negative sociopolitical outcomes to fiscal expansion. At the time, there were no truly compelling historical cases – none that were both severe and recent enough74 to trigger a sufficiently strong political reaction – that would have allowed them to definitively state that raising taxes would lead to political collapse, but for obvious reasons, this was no longer true after the Ming collapse. To modern historians, the assertion that the Ming collapsed due to overtaxation is highly controversial, to say the least. It made frequent appearances in Mainland Chinese historiography during the early to mid-twentieth century,75 especially among those scholars who favored Marxist historical narratives of “feudal” regimes oppressing their subjects, but has more recently been subject to fierce debate.76 It is not hard to understand why upon a quick scan of some basic facts: The regions of the country – Shaanxi, specifically – where the 74

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Save, of course, for the Ming overthrown of Mongol rule – but that was commonly interpreted, as argued in Chapter 3, as the overthrow of foreign tyranny, and therefore not a terribly appropriate comparison frame for Han-dominated governance. E.g., Zhongguo Shi Gangyao (中国史纲要) [Outline of Chinese History] (Jian Bozhan ed., 1961); Wang Liuquan, The Rise of Land Tax and the Fall of Dynasties in Chinese History, 9 Pacific Affairs 201–220 (1936). The primary debate has been between Ray Huang, whose attack on the “Ming collapse can be blamed on high taxes” thesis has been one of the most influential arguments in the field in the later half of the twentieth century, and his many detractors in China. See Huang (1974); Li Longqian (李龙潜), Ye Ping Huang Renyu zhu Shiliu Shiji Mingdai Zhongguo zhi Caizheng yu Shuishou (也评黄仁宇著《十六世纪明代中国之财政与税收) [Another Review of Ray Huang’s Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth Century Ming China], https://project .ncnu.edu.tw/jms/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/Pp20.pdf; Wan Ming (万明), 16 Shiji Mingdai Caizheng Shi de Chongxin Jiantao (16世纪明代财政史的重新检讨) [A Reexamination of 16th Century Ming Fiscal History], 2014(10) Shixue Yuekan (史学月刊) [Monthly Journal of History] 116. Nonetheless, there are many who continue to have a more positive view of Huang’s general thesis, if not necessarily the empirical details. See, e.g., Xia Weizhong (夏维 中), Jingshan de Wanfeng: Da Ming Diguo de Shuaiwang (景山的晚风: 大明帝国的衰亡) [The Evening Breeze of Jingshan: The Decline of the Great Ming Empire] (1998); Lai Jiancheng (赖建诚), Bianzhen Liangxiang: Mingdai Zhonghouqi de Bianfang Jingfei yu Guojia Caizheng Weiji, 1531–1602 (边寨粮饷: 明代中后期的边防经费与国家财政危 机) [border defense funding and the state’s financial crisis in the middle and late Ming dynasty, 1531–1602] (2010). In Western academic circles, Des Forges (2003) largely accepts the traditional literati view that tax increases helped push Henan into revolt, but notes that it did so extremely late in the process, around 1640, id. at 197–198, and does not emphasize its importance relative to other factors such as natural disasters, the lack of famine relief, and general economic decline.

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peasant rebellions originated were traditionally some of the least heavily taxed,77 and once famine began to strike in the early 1600s, were granted tax reductions and waivers on a fairly regular basis. Moreover, of the three Military Campaign Taxes that became the poster-child for Late Ming fiscal excess in the early Qing, only the first actually preceded the emergence of massive peasant rebellions in the northwest, whereas the latter two were more properly described as reactions to it. The first Campaign Tax, the Liao Xiang, was especially onerous for large parts of Zhejiang, Zhenjiang, Songjiang, Henan, Shandong, and Zhili, but substantially less so for Shaanxi, which, in per capita terms, was again one of the most lightly taxed regions.78 In fact, it is arguably just as plausible to believe that under-taxation was responsible for Ming collapse. The peasant rebellions in the northwest were directly caused by a combination of two factors: severe natural disasters that were likely part of the “Little Ice Age” sweeping across the northern hemisphere in the early seventeenth century, and a sharp decline in state subsidies to the region due to fiscal shortfalls.79 Military campaigning in the northeast had, by the 1620s, put such a severe drain on government finances that it no longer had the resources to offer any effective famine relief – or pay the garrisons that maintained social order in the region. Facing starvation, peasants and army deserters rebelled, and, recruiting from similarly famine-struck regions, snowballed over the next decade into the massive army that would eventually sack Beijing in 1644.80 Compared to the empirically elusive connection between tax increases and northwestern peasant rebellions, there was a much more direct and obvious one between fiscal undercapacity and those rebellions. It is also completely possible, as some scholars seem to believe, that the fiscal system was not necessarily a major cause of sociopolitical breakdown, either through over-taxation or through under-taxation, and that the primary culprits of dynastic collapse lay elsewhere.81 More subtle positions are also readily available: Perhaps the Ming government should have taxed more heavily in 77

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Fang Xing (方兴), Cong “Su Song Zhongfu” dao “Sanxiang Jun Tan” (从“苏松重赋”到”三 饷”均摊) [From Heavy Taxing of the Susong Region to Equal Distribution of the “Three Campaign Taxes”], 2010(1) Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History] 141, Table 3. 79 Id., at Table 4. Atwell (1988); Huang (1974); Xia (1998). Atwell (1988), at 615–616, 621–623, 631–637. This account notes, in particular, that tax collection was extremely uneven for the final round of campaign surcharges implemented in 1638, and it may not have yielded much increased revenue at all, especially from faminestruck regions. E.g., Zhang Zhaoyu (张兆裕), Tianyi Liuxing: Ming Wang Yuanyin de Linglei Jiedu (天意流行: 明亡原因的另类解读) [Heaven’s Will Spread: An Alternative Interpretation of the Causes of Ming’s Collapse], 2014(2) Mingshi Yanjiu Luncong (明史研究论丛) [Essays in Ming history] 178. Brook (2010) assigns very little weight to tax hikes in his account of Ming collapse, instead emphasizing the overwhelming nature of natural disasters and epidemics. He notes that tax hikes were so poorly enforced that, by 1644, “80 percent of counties had stopped forwarding any taxes at all.” Id., at 252.

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the southern parts of the empire, which were not heavily affected by the economic downturn and never seemed in any serious danger of rebelling, but should have taxed more lightly in famine-stricken North China.82 This potentially could have given it the best of all worlds: more robust military funding, tax relief to economically troubled regions, and the ability to offer those regions significant famine relief. The problem with late Ming fiscal policy was therefore not one of over-taxation per se, but rather misallocation of fiscal burdens. The point here is not to argue that tax increases had no bearing on Ming collapse, but merely to show, at the very least, how ambiguous and debatable the mainstream early Qing account was. It did not obviously make any more sense of the facts than the counter-narrative of fiscal undercapacity, and arguably made less. Under neutral political circumstances, scholars who studied the era would probably have splintered across a number of positions: Some might still buy into the “tax increases caused collapse” narrative, whereas many others would strongly disagree on a variety of grounds, ranging from arguing the opposite to downplaying the significance of fiscal policy altogether. This is, in fact, precisely how modern historiography on the Ming collapse has played out over the past several decades. We cannot, therefore, explain the rapid and near-uniform coalescing of early Qing elites around the “tax increases caused Ming collapse” narrative simply as a natural reaction to the overwhelming weight of the facts. Objectively, the basic facts were ambiguously inconclusive at best and openly contrary at worst to such an interpretation. Instead, the sweeping rise of the early Qing consensus was almost certainly the product of some sort of intellectual prior or bias – ideological, cultural, political, cognitive, or all of the above – that shepherded scholars and officials en masse toward a less than ironclad empirical position. The challenge, then, is to identify a source of bias that could plausibly have had this effect. The unusual scale and speed of the effect were very likely produced, or at least dramatically amplified, by the severe intellectual and sociopolitical trauma of the Ming-Qing transition – which affected not merely the “losers” but even a large segment of the “winners” of dynastic change – but that trauma itself cannot explain the content of the bias. This is where the generative effect of traditional political ethics comes into play. The idealistic condemnation of “speaking of profit,” while often politically ineffective in the Song and Ming, was nonetheless so common and so intractably ingrained in the intellectual environment of ruling elites that it lurked in the background of nearly every major argument over fiscal policy. The fact that even the most ardent and effective proponents of fiscal expansion or state economic activism in the second millennium, including Wang Anshi, Qiu Jun, Gao Gong, Zhang Juzheng, and Hai Rui, nonetheless exhibited a substantial amount of normative defensiveness when pressed on the propriety

82

The analysis in Fang Xing (2010) would seem to support this thesis.

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of “profit seeking” behavior speaks to how deeply influential the basic ideal was, even among those who found it deeply politically inconvenient.83 In fact, many of these fiscal reformers, especially Zhang Juzheng, openly accepted the notion that fiscal expansion was a sort of high-risk, high-reward “necessary evil”: Not only did it increase the state’s burden to govern responsibly, the idea being that the state could only justifiably extract more from the people if it tried doubly hard to use the money well, but it also increased the odds of corruption and abuse of power.84 A government that taxed more heavily possessed greater resources to do good, but also faced a greater risk of political degeneration if it mishandled the additional resources. Like their fiscally conservative opponents, these reformers generally lacked a definitive notion of what political degeneration would substantively look like, but a sense of unease clearly lurked in the corners of their political and intellectual calculus: There was, in their minds, something normatively uncomfortable about raising taxes, which generated at least some fear that they would lead to undesirable consequences. For fiscal conservatives, on the other hand, this sense of unease, which bridged the normative and consequential dimensions, did not so much lurk in the corners as consciously drive their political agenda, even if it was a losing agenda much of the time.85 All in all, for a large swath (likely a majority) of the late Ming political elite, spanning both sides of the fiscal debate, the underlying moral anxiety over taxation spilled over into a sense of empirical foreboding about the possible political cost of fiscal expansion. To some extent, almost everyone was somewhat anxious something might go wrong once taxes increased, ranging from local corruption or uneven allocation of the new taxes to economic decline and possible rebellion somewhere down the road. To be sure, they differed sharply on the normative weight and political manageability of those anticipated problems, and even the most entrenched opponents of expansion had a somewhat difficult time explaining just how severe the problems would realistically be, but they nonetheless shared an underlying assumption that raising taxes could cause serious political damage if improperly managed. In other words, they were intellectually and cognitively conditioned to associate certain kinds of social, economic, and political problems – specifically, economic deterioration and ensuing peasant rebellion – with “mismanaged” fiscal expansion. As a result, once things clearly began to go south in the later 1630s, fiscal conservatives quickly gained the upper hand in court politics: As noted in Chapter 3, by 1640, the imperial court had already begun to dismantle some of the military campaign taxes even in the face of sharply escalating military expenditures.86 Political support for fiscal expansion caved quite rapidly in the 83 84

85

See discussion in Chapter 3, Section D. Zhang Juzheng, Chen Liu Shi Shu; Zhang Juzheng, Da Yingtian Xunfu Song Yangshan Lun Junliang Zumin. 86 See discussion in Chapter 3, Section D. Guo Songyi (2008).

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face of serious socioeconomic turmoil, even if, to the modern historian’s eye, the connection between expansion and turmoil was shaky and controversial at best. The wobbly and tentative nature of fiscal expansion was hardly a unique symptom of Ming politics: Both Yang Yan’s Liangshui reforms in the Tang and Wang Anshi’s Xinzheng reforms in the Song were quickly rolled back once their primary advocates fell out of power, only to be revived a number of years later.87 If the late Ming peasant rebellions had eventually been successfully put down – which, if we briefly indulge our inner counterfactual historian, would have been plausible enough had the Ming government not been simultaneously waging a ruinously expensive campaign against the Manchus – the military campaign taxes likely could have been reintroduced later as well. The Ming collapsed, however, before that potential cycle could complete itself. In the aftermath of these developments, early Qing literati swiftly and naturally coalesced around the interpretation of Ming collapse – that it was a result of over-taxation, rather than under-taxation – that most readily agreed with the underlying deontological and consequentialist anxieties they inherited from the Late Ming. The specific way this cognitive process played out varied from school to school and person to person, but overall, a significant volume of writing from the Ming-Qing transition bears clear marks of its influence. It is worth remembering here that late Ming and early Qing elites were trying to make sense of Ming decline and collapse under almost unfathomable political and psychological pressures, created first by the looming specter of dynastic collapse, and then by the need to reconstruct their shattered political worldview while dealing with, and in many cases helping construct, a new, foreign regime.88 The collective need to quickly produce and agree on a politically usable interpretation of the Ming collapse was truly immense, if only to help people cope with the intellectual and political trauma, and almost certainly made it more attractive for scholars and officials, consciously or subconsciously, to reach for cognitive shortcuts. The influence of their deontological biases was probably exceptionally powerful under these circumstances, far more so than it would have been in less challenging times. In Wang Fuzhi’s case, his partial embracement of the traditional “virtue versus profit” ethical dichotomy, coupled with his heavily historiographic mode of political argumentation, left a clear textual trail from deontological ethical commitments to historical interpretation and political pragmatism. Wang’s position on the “virtue-profit” dichotomy was relatively close to what Zhu Xi had advocated a couple of centuries ago – unsurprisingly so, given that Wang was a major “Song Learning” advocate. He accepted as inevitable that the general population would pursue private material profit, even as he found this morally uninspiring and unworthy of praise or normative defense. The proper 87 88

See discussion in Chapter 3, Section B. For more descriptive accounts of these pressures, see, e.g., He Guanbiao (1991); Li Xuan (2009); Zhao Yuan (2014).

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understanding of “virtue,” in light of this position, was not that it precluded any discussion of material profit or any action related to gaining profit, but rather that it required rulers to pursue profit only for the long-term benefit of the general public.89 This notion of virtue included both a deontological component and a consequentialist one: The former looked to the subjective intention of the ruler – whether he was pursuing public welfare or private gain – whereas the latter looked to the efficacy of his actions – whether he had correctly identified the long-term material interests of the public, and was acting prudently in pursuit of them. In Wang’s mind, the two were inextricably linked: Subjective virtue would inevitably produce positive socioeconomic outcomes over the long run, which he described as “the pursuit of profit through virtue,” whereas the lack of subjective virtue would inevitably produce long-term socioeconomic decline.90 This assumption of causal inevitability fed into a fairly confusing mode of historical analysis in which Wang’s assessment of subjective intent tended to openly interfere with his evaluation of socioeconomic consequences, and vice versa. On the one hand, he refused to recognize fiscal reforms that were issued with the express intent of pursuing public welfare, even those that brought no observable financial gain to the state itself, as subjectively benevolent or virtuous (“ren yi”) if they led to observable socioeconomic instability. Thus, the dismantling of the state’s salt and iron monopoly in the later Han Dynasty could not be characterized as subjectively benevolent or virtuous, even though it intentionally “returned” a segment of the economy from state control to private management, because it ultimately led to rising socioeconomic inequality and unrest.91 On the other hand, when it came to identifying the socioeconomic consequences of subjectively selfish or short-sighted fiscal reforms – institutional reforms that, Wang believed, subjectively disregarded long-term social welfare to narrowly pursue administrative efficiency or to reinforce the state’s short-term finances – he was often willing to make large leaps of logic to connect them with negative consequences, even when the factual evidence was flimsy at best. For example, he repeatedly claimed that the Song Dynasty’s aggressive fiscal expansion, which he accused of being subjectively “unbenevolent to the extreme,” was responsible for its ultimate demise, both economically and militarily: [Under these fiscal conditions], how could the people not have been impoverished, unhappy, and evil? How could the country not have been weak? How could bandits not have risen up, and foreign barbarians not have invaded? For this very reason, dynasties since the Song, even at their most prosperous, have never reached even a tenth 89

90

Xiang Bin et al. (1993), at 610–611; Wang Zeying (王泽应), “Wang Fuzhi Yi Li Sixiang de Tedian he Yiyi” (王夫之义利思想的特点和意义) [The Characteristics and Significance of Wang Fuzhi’s Thought on Virtue-Profit], 2009(8) Zhexue Yanjiu (哲学研究) [Philosophical Researches] 54. 91 JJSXSZL, 350. Wang Fuzhi, Xian Di (献帝), in Du Tongjian Lun, ch. 9.18.

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of the Han and Tang’s wealth. Once you violate the core principles of statecraft, all under heaven will become impoverished.92

Even if we disregard the unnecessary rhetorical flourish at the end of this passage, Wang was clearly playing fast and loose with his historical narrative. The Song was, by almost any measure, far wealthier than previous dynasties, both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis.93 It was, as he alluded to, militarily vulnerable and frequently invaded, but to attribute any of that to fiscal policy is a serious stretch, even by the sometimes ambiguous standards of classic Chinese historiography. If anything, the causal relation ran in the other direction, in that the Song needed a larger pot of revenue to finance its higher defense expenditures. In fact, Wang seemed to acknowledge himself in his account of Song economic sophistication: “Economic consumption had grown ever more expansive and diverse, driving merchants to chase after profit several thousands of li away.”94 The tension between this description and the broader claim of Song “poverty” was almost certainly the product of Wang’s overarching normative agenda. That said, giving a fully accurate account of Song’s decline and fall was clearly not the priority here. Rather, Wang’s aim, as it often was even when he wrote about the Han and Tang,95 was to build toward a grand narrative of political decline culminating in the Ming collapse. The merging of fiscal overreach, peasant rebellion, and foreign invasion under the same causal framework was very tenuous in the context of Song history, but it was, for obvious reasons, more attractive in the late Ming context. One has to suspect, therefore, that Wang was really writing about Ming decline through his Song narrative. He certainly left suggestive language to this effect: “From the Song to the Yuan, and then to the Hongwu and Yongle emperors of the Ming . . . and then from the Xuande Emperor onwards . . . the harm done by these fiscal policies has yet to cease even today.”96 Why was Wang so insistent on embedding his account of Ming decline and fall within a longer narrative that reached back more than six centuries? Part of the answer was probably his intellectual familiarity with Song NeoConfucianism, and therefore with Song politics and institutions, but it also had much to do with the fact that he was consciously attempting to bridge the gap between deontological ethics and historical analysis – to supply an ethical theory of “the core principles of statecraft.” As he explained in the conclusion to his Du Tongjian Lun: “There are two kinds of bad history: those that have a frail connection to the Way (‘Dao’), but do not really embed themselves within it; and those that seem to agree with the Laws (‘Fa’), but do not truly permit

92 93 95

Wang Fuzhi, Wudai Xia (五代下), in Du Tongjian Lun, ch. 30.5. 94 Von Glahn (2016), at 240–252. JJSXSZL, 324. 96 E.g., Du Tongjian Lun, ch. 9.18, 27.3. JJSXSZL, 325.

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their subject-matter to be judged accordingly.”97 Good history, following this line of logic, sought to produce an evaluation of events and people that directly derived from the fundamental principles of good governance, and applied them consistently and rigorously. As Wang was well aware of, however, this kind of evaluation is far easier to conduct when speaking of history in a more abstract and generalized fashion, rather than engaging with minute specifics – in fact, he explicitly argued that historians had a moral obligation to avoid getting caught up in “fine, convoluted, and overly clever interpretations of details.”98 In other words, the mutual interference between his deontological commitments and historical consequentialism was by conscious design, which suggests that his critique of Song and Ming fiscal policy, while consequential in form, likely had deep deontological undertones. Few early Qing scholars were as philosophically candid as Wang was about the normative commitments they carried into their historical or empirical analysis, but many of their writings display similar traces of normative framing. Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi were less insistent on the normative inferiority of “pursuing profit” than Wang was – Huang was, if anything, openly hostile to the idea – but both acknowledged that the traditional condemnation of “speaking of profit” did at least correctly capture the negative impact that unchecked and selfishly-motivated fiscal extraction had on socioeconomic stability.99 To them, the formal philosophical weakness of traditional political ethics did not overshadow the practical political wisdom it conveyed. Gu, in particular, took great pains to salvage the political viability of “not speaking of profit” from its philosophical demise.100 He argued that, although ancient sages did indeed “speak of profit,” proving that it could not be as deontologically impermissible per se as Ming scholars claimed, they did so only when it would further the public interest and always refrained from overexploiting the population. Later rulers, officials, and scholars, less virtuous than their predecessors, needed to abide by stricter normative maxims, lest the temptation to overexploit become overwhelming.101 “Speaking of profit” could be properly condemned as a matter of politics,102 even if it was ethically permissible in an absolute sense. Similarly, a substantial number of early Qing officials and scholars continued to employ the term “speaking of profit” as a verbal weapon against expansionist fiscal policies, even as they placed lesser weight on the term’s deontological sting, and greater weight on its implication of potential social

97 99 100 102

98 Wang Fuzhi, Xulun San (叙论三), in Du Tongjian Lun, ch. 31.3. Id. See Huang, Yuan Jun; Gu Yanwu, Ri Zhi Lu, ch. 12.5, 12.7. 101 Gu Yanwu, Ri Zhi Lu, ch. 12.7. Id. Gu also seemed to believe that, to some extent, the political appearance of “not speaking of profit“ was just as important, if not more so, than actually avoiding it. See Gu Yanwu, Tian Gong Lun (田功论) [On Success in Agriculture], HCJSWB, ch. 33 (“天子收不言利之利, 而天下 之大富积此矣”).

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unrest and economic collapse. As Lin Lu, a historian writing in the later Shunzhi era, argued when reflecting on Song and Ming fiscal policy: The reason why sages disdained speaking of profit is that, from ancient times, whenever immoral men have done damage to the country, then have done so through using material profit as an incentive. In the beginning, they seduce rulers by proposing policies that are supposed to profit the state and bring convenience to the people. When rulers receive such proposals in times of tight governmental finances, they are often pleased, and eagerly implement them. In the short term, state coffers are filled, which further persuades rulers that the proposals are effective, but little do they know that disaster of such extreme magnitude ultimately awaits.103

The parallels with Wang Fuzhi’s historiography in this passage are obvious, although Lin is less insistent on the inherent moral inferiority of “speaking of profit,” choosing instead to present its problems as strictly consequentialist, and indeed contingent upon the ruler’s lack of political will. A broadly similar but substantially more detailed thesis was presented by the influential scholar and official Chu Fangqing in the essay he submitted in the final round of the 1667 National Examination. Writing directly to the Kangxi Emperor, Chu argued: There is but one political strategy that can bring about lasting social stability, which all under heaven now dismiss as obtuse, and yet your subject nonetheless considers a guarantee of success: your majesty should never speak of material wealth and profit. There is, of course, a difficulty here: although refusing to speak of wealth and profit expresses great sympathy for the people, how can a ruler who does so continue to finance the state? Your subject is fully aware of this philosophical problem, but I am not here to make a ridiculous proposal to deceive your majesty. The reason we have now reached the present impasse, where the country’s land taxes have hit their upper limit and can no longer be increased . . . despite maximal efforts to ward off corruption and enforce administrative responsibility, is that we have allowed those who speak of wealth and profit to dictate policy . . . Now that we know what consequences their policies will generate . . . the best course of action is, of course, to head in the opposite direction.104

There are a number of interesting things about this passage, starting with the fact that it was written for a National Examination, which was as formalistic and intellectually restrictive a forum as any. Candidates treaded especially cautiously in the final round, when they were already assured of the prized jinshi degree, and were writing to compete for more prestigious placements within the bureaucracy. Claims made under such circumstances, especially claims about other scholars and officials, were almost always worded with the utmost care, lest a single poorly expressed passage sabotage one’s political career before it had even begun. Therefore, when Chu wrote that “all under heaven now 103

104

Lin Lu (林潞), Jia Sidao Gongtian Lun (贾似道公田论) [On Jia Sidao’s Public Lands Reforms], HCJSWB, ch. 32. Chu Fangqing (储方庆), Dian Shi Ce (殿试策), HCJSWB, ch. 7.

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dismisses as obtuse” the traditional deontological condemnation of “speaking of profit,” he likely did so under the assumption that this was an acceptable presentation of conventional wisdom. Despite rhetorically positioning himself as a contrarian, Chu was actually no such thing: Both the substance of his fiscal conservatism and the logic through which it was argued were quite conventional for the times. More importantly, the fact that he continued to employ the derogative phrase “speaking of profit” under these conditions of intense political and intellectual scrutiny suggests an underlying belief that the phrase remained politically useful even when stripped of its traditional deontological content – that utilizing it as a rhetorical weapon was more than acceptable to most other officials. In fact, several of the more famous National Examination essays that survive from this early period, including those written by at least two zhuangyuan (the top performer in the final round), employed a similar tactic: They seemed to accept that the traditional disdain toward administrative, military, and fiscal excess must now be justified on firmly consequential grounds, but argued that the historical lessons of recent dynasties nonetheless demonstrates the continued viability of such disdain as pragmatic political wisdom, if no longer as a pure moral commandment.105 The “pragmatic turn” in early Qing political thought had clearly made quite an impression on political elites, but instead of bringing them out of the shadow of traditional political morality, it only seemed to reinforce that morality: Old ethical positions and biases now influenced the way these scholar-officials understood the social, economic, and political consequences of fiscal expansion. The new pragmatism therefore preserved the substantive positions of traditional fiscal conservatism. In fact, it did more than merely preserve: As discussed above, even during the institutionally unsettled years of the Shunzhi and early Kangxi eras, the new “pragmatic” consensus had considerably greater political success reigning in fiscal behavior than the old deontological critique had ever managed in the late Ming, and it would only grow stronger as the new dynasty consolidated and stabilized its rule.

c. theoretical exposition and alternative explanations I. Theoretical Exposition On a theoretical level, the political and intellectual history developed here is broadly aligned with mainstream understandings of human cognition and psychology. Cognitive scientists generally agree that confirmation bias is a near-universal phenomenon, especially in the political arena: When given new information on some matter of high political salience, most individuals, under 105

See Ma Shijun (馬世俊), “Dian Shi Dui Ce Huang Qing Wen Ying (殿試對策皇清文穎), HCJSWB, ch. 7; Miu Tong (繆彤), Dian Shi Dui Ce Huang Qing Wen Ying (殿試對策皇清文 穎), HCJSWB, ch. 7.

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most circumstances, tend to interpret it in such a way that reinforces, rather than challenges, their preexisting normative beliefs and sociopolitical allegiances.106 Therefore, when presented with the same neutrally worded body of information about, say, gun violence or climate change, people on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum tend to interpret it as supporting their view. Similarly, people tend to disregard evidence that is clearly contradictory to their prior beliefs, and to over-emphasize evidence that supports them. Recent scholarship has debated whether this phenomenon is purely a result of psychological bias and in-built human irrationality, or whether it is a semi-rational response to social pressure to conform and fall in line, but few doubt it is, as a general rule, extraordinarily difficult to change people’s minds through empirical evidence, especially on salient political issues.107 Persuasion tends to happen through major, seismic shocks to the political ecosystem – major social, economic, or political crises that fundamentally reorient political allegiances and beliefs – rather than through measured, “rational” discourse and proof.108 One could question, of course, whether political elites facing massive realworld consequences to their decisions are quite as susceptible as the average educated survey respondent to confirmation bias: Perhaps the weight of their decisions would force them to think more slowly, more deliberately, and therefore more objectively? While this may be true to some extent, any hope that elite policymakers or decisionmakers can be anything close to fully objective is almost certainly over-optimistic. The very large literature on American judicial decision-making, for example, overwhelmingly suggests that highly professionalized judges, when making rulings of enormous sociopolitical

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This is a massive academic literature. See, e.g., Leon Festinger, A theory of cognitive dissonance (1957); Charles Taber & Milton Lodge, Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs, 3 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 50 (2006); Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, & Yphtach Lelkes, Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization, 76 Pub. Opinion Q. 405 (2012); David K. Sherman & Geoffery L. Cohen, The Psychology of Self-Defense: SelfAffirmation Theory, 38 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 183 (2006); Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith, & Donald Braman, Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus, 14(2) J. Risk Res. 147 (2001); Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, The Selective Exposure Self- and Affect-Management (SESAM) Model: Applications in the Realms of Race, Politics, and Health, 42 Communication Res. 959 (2015) (summarizing literature). See Dan M. Kahan & Donald Braman, Cultural Cognition and Public Policy, 24 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 149 (2006). See, e.g., Frank R. Baumgartner & Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993); The Dynamics of Evolution: The Punctuated Equilibrium Debate in the Natural and Social Sciences (Albert Somit & Steven A. Peterson eds., 1992); F. R. Baumgartner et al., Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective, 53 Am. J. Poli. Sci. 603 (2009). In legal theory, perhaps the best example of this thesis is Bruce Ackerman’s theory of constitutional moments. See Ackerman (1991); Walter Dean Burnham, Constitutional Moments and Punctuated Equilibria: A Political Scientist Confronts Bruce Ackerman’s We the People, 108 Yale L. J. 2237 (1999).

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consequence, nonetheless display strong ideological bias when interpreting both law and facts – although they are not exclusively ideological, and balance ideology with many other personal and professional considerations.109 There is very little reason to believe that executive officials and lawmakers, who are usually not afforded the measured and relatively slow pace of work that judges benefit from, can be any more objective or nonideological. From this perspective, it is almost entirely unsurprising that early Qing elites tended to interpret Ming collapse as the outcome of misguided fiscal expansion: As noted above, while late Ming political elites differed sharply in their attitudes toward specific fiscal policies and institutions, there was broad agreement that there was at least something normatively problematic and politically risky about fiscal expansion. Even the strongest supporters of fiscal reform and expansion displayed some discomfort and defensiveness when confronted with the “speaking of profit is innately unvirtuous” line of argument. The way they got around it was not by categorically denying that there is no normative problem or political risk with raising taxes, but rather that those problems and risks were manageable through good governance, and could be counterbalanced by the sociopolitical benefits of building a stronger, better financed state apparatus. That is, when facing down moral condemnation from fiscal conservatives, they seemed more comfortable with a “yes, but . . .” kind of argument than with a direct “no.” When things began to fall apart in the late 1630s, they, too, were intellectually conditioned to blame it on fiscal expansion, the main difference being that, while fiscal conservatives were probably more likely to blame fiscal expansion per se, reformers were probably inclined to blame local mishandling of initially well-intentioned fiscal policies that allowed them to snowball out of control.110 Even the latter position, however, would lead to the conclusion that Ming taxation had reached politically unsustainable levels by the end of the dynasty. Given that the cognitive framing under discussion here – “Confucian” moral anxiety over taxation – was, by the late Ming, over 2000 years old, one has to wonder whether this kind of confirmation bias existed in earlier segments of Chinese fiscal history. It likely did, but not nearly as powerfully: We can potentially observe its existence in, for example, the seesawing between fiscal expansion and conservatism in the Song, in which conservatives routinely gained political strength following any kind of serious rural unrest, or in the 109

110

See, e.g., Lee Epstein & Jack Knight, Reconsidering Judicial Preferences, 16 Annual Rev. Pol. Sci. 11 (2013), for a summary of this literature. They observe: “We envision three primary types of motivations that should be incorporated in a more realistic framework of judicial decision making. The first would be ideological motivations (following from the attitudinal model), and the second would be the personal (self-interested) motivations that political scientists have long neglected but that we have identified here. The third type would be . . . legal motivations . . . .” This is the kind of mindset that fed directly into the “Huang Zongxi thesis” discussed above and in Chapter 2.

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multiple decades of fiscal stability in the early Ming. None of these episodes, however, seem comparable in either strength or longevity to the Qing turn toward fiscal conservatism, for the simple reason that Ming collapse was arguably a unique event in recorded Chinese history: a true peasant rebellion directly overthrowing a major Han-dominated dynasty. Other forms of dynastic takeover, be it foreign conquest,111 the overthrow of foreign rulers,112 or rebellion by local lords or generals,113 did not lend themselves to a narrative of fiscal policy failure nearly as easily as peasant rebellion, and while several other dynasties experienced major peasant rebellions in their later years, only the Ming directly fell to one. Therefore, while confirmation bias in favor of fiscal conservatism may well have existed in various forms and durations throughout imperial Chinese history, the sheer force of confirmation the Ming collapse provided was probably unprecedented, which makes it an excellent candidate to explain the unprecedentedly conservative nature of Qing agricultural taxation. This is not to say that all the Ming-Qing transition did was confirm preexisting cognitive biases. Nothing could be further from the truth. As major shocks tend to do, the Ming-Qing transition fundamentally realigned a number of core elite intellectual and political allegiances: It dramatically raised the intellectual profile of political pragmatism and consequentialism, while severely damaging elite interest in deontological moral theory. It also turned what had previously been a fiercely contested debate between fiscal reformers and conservatives into something resembling a general consensus in favor of conservatism. The claim here is simply that, as modern cognitive theory would predict, the direction of the realignment was not random, but broadly consistent with some of the deeper normative and consequentialist anxieties that both reformers and conservatives shared prior to the shock. We could question, of course, why Ming collapse did not further challenge the intellectual validity of those anxieties themselves, but that was unlikely under the specific conditions of late Ming politics: Although both reformers and conservatives held, with varying levels of conviction and depth, some anxiety over fiscal expansion, the reformers had pushed it through anyway out of other considerations. In other words, the primary political posture of the Ming that directly preceded its decline and fall was one of expansionism, which made it the natural target of post-collapse backlash. If the Ming had somehow adhered to a policy of strict fiscal conservatism prior to its collapse – as argued above, this likely would have made the peasant rebellions worse, as it would have further depleted the state’s already low capacity to offer famine 111

112 113

For a mainstream literati narrative of Song collapse, see, e.g., the series of political and moral failings listed in Song Shi (宋史) [The History of the Song], ch. 45. On Ming narratives of Yuan collapse, see discussion at Chapter 3, Section D. See, e.g., Xin Tang Shu (新唐书) [The New Book of the Tang], ch. 10; Hou Han Shu (后汉 书) [Book of the later han], ch. 8.

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relief – then the shock of dynastic collapse may well have compelled political elites to question their anxieties over taxation; but when, as in real history, the collapse was preceded by a century-long process of fiscal expansion, then it was far, far easier for both sides to just blame the tax hikes. Somewhat ironically, the intellectual reaction to Qing collapse three centuries later did involve a significant backlash against its fiscal conservatism and a decisive turn toward more aggressive taxation, which we will explore in some detail later in the book.114 As many scholars have argued, confirmation bias is especially powerful when people not only have cognitive priors on a certain issue, but also some personal motivation or incentive to reinforce it.115 The two kinds of mental processes are not always so easily disentangled, of course: A person’s understanding of their material incentives is often contaminated by their normative commitments and biases, and vice versa. In other words, I am more likely to want things I morally approve of than things I do not; on the other hand, my normative worldview is often self-serving, in that it tends to glorify my personal interests.116 In the early Qing context, most Han political elites probably had a substantial incentive to advocate for limited government, and therefore lower taxes, simply because it would limit the extent of potentially hostile Manchu intervention into local society. Especially in the earliest years of the new dynasty, when mutual mistrust between Manchu and Han political elites was at its highest, this would likely have incentivized Han elites to favor less, rather than more, buildup of state capacity. There is, perhaps inevitably, little empirical evidence of these incentives – expressing them in public or in print would have been politically, and perhaps biologically, suicidal in that kind of environment – but it seems at least theoretically plausible. This kind of theoretical conjecture is qualitatively different from the “Han hostility toward Manchu rule made the Qing state afraid of taxing too heavily” thesis briefly discussed in the Introduction (and is discussed again in the following subsection), and should not be conflated with it. The former is a theory of how self-interest subconsciously shaped empirical worldviews – a personal and, for lack of a better word, selfish cognitive process, and therefore unlikely to leave a significant written record – whereas the latter is an argument 114

115 116

See Chapter 6 and Conclusion for more detailed discussion. As noted in Chapter 1, fiscal extraction ramped up dramatically in the two decades following the Qing collapse, effectively tripling the agricultural tax quota. E.g., Kahan & Braman (2006); Taber & Lodge (2006). See, e.g., Mark Suchman, On Beyond Interest: Rational, Normative and Cognitive Perspectives in the Social Scientific Study of Law, 1997 Wis. L. Rev. 475–501(1997); John L. Campbell, Ideas, Politics, and Public Policy, 28 Ann. Rev. Soc. 21–38 (2002). This dynamic manifests, in particular, in the tendency of individuals to want to think like their social acquaintances, which produces large amounts of “group think” in political orientation. See, e.g., Geoffrey L. Cohen, Party over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs, 85 J. Pers. & Soc. Psychol. 808 (2003).

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about perceived political legitimacy and popular support,117 and can therefore be openly presented as a public-minded argument about the state’s political position, unless there was some kind of political rule or norm against it. In the absence of such rules and norms, the lack of a clear written record is a much bigger problem for the latter than the former. Confirmation bias is often a central force behind the sociopolitical entrenchment of deontological morality. Purely deontological ideas, especially those related to state, rather than individual, behavior, are rarely so clear and powerful they are able to seriously constrain political behavior through sheer moral force alone. At the level of high politics, perhaps due to the wide variety of constituencies and opinions that most large polities inevitably contain, there is usually at least some ambiguity and room for real debate within a polity’s normative commitments: “war is evil,”118 “the rule of law is good,”119 “taxation is inherently problematic,” and so on. To a large extent, if we take the entire polity, or even just the entire ruling elite, as the unit of analysis, such commitments represent general inclinations rather than clear consensuses on concrete issues. Are all wars evil? No major polity in human history has ever agreed on that absolute position.120 Instead, there is always some normative debate on how to draw the line. What, specifically, are the institutions necessary for the rule of law? Even the most advanced liberal democracies would have a hard time producing a politically compelling answer that relies only on the deontological normative value of institution A versus institution B.121 Similarly, when Chinese fiscal conservatism was defended largely on deontological grounds, reformers almost always had a number of normative 117

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120 121

On the conceptual boundaries of perceived legitimacy, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, 36–37 (1978). For a summary of academic debates over this issue, see, e.g., Seth Lazar, War, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta ed., 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/arch ives/spr2020/entries/war. On the twentieth century’s changes in the global political and legal posture toward war, see, e.g., Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (2017), and the ensuing debate. For general academic debates, see, e.g., Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law, 1–6 (2004); Robert Stein, Rule of Law: What Does It Mean?, 18 Minn. J. Int’l L. 293 (2009); Simon Chesterman, An International Rule of Law, 56 Am. J. Comp. L. 331 (2008). For debates over the value and meaning of the “rule of law“ specifically in the Chinese context, see, e.g., Randall Peerenboom, China’s Long March towards the Rule of Law (2000); Xin Chunyin (信春鹰), Houxiandai Faxue (后现代法学) [Postmodern Jurisprudence], 2000(5) Zhongguo Shehui Kexue (中国社会科学) [Social Sciences in China] 59; Albert H. Y. Chen, Toward a Legal Enlightenment: Discussions in Contemporary China on the Rule of Law, 17 UCLA Pacific Basin L. J. 125 (1999); Benjamin L. Liebman, Legal Reform: China’s Law-Stability Paradox, 143 Daedalus 96 (2014); Taisu Zhang & Tom Ginsburg, China’s Turn Towards Law, 59 Va. J. Int’l L. 306 (2019). On this subject, see, e.g., Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations (2005). See, e.g., Tamanaha (2004), for detailed discussion on the philosophical foundations of the rule of law.

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tools at their disposal to blunt the ethical critique, even though they themselves shared at least some of the normative anxiety over taxation: We can use the extra income to pursue necessary social goods; taxation per se is not the problem, taxation for selfish or irresponsible reasons is; and so on. At the purely normative level, there is almost always some wiggle room, some slippery slope available in large-scale politics, if not necessarily in serious philosophy. At a baser level of analysis, political actors are, as many of us can attest personally, often not the most ethical creatures – in fact, it may well be true that, in many societies, voluntary entrance into politics self-selects for a certain level of normative ambivalence – and do respond terribly strongly to a deontological commandment. Instead, normative positions tend to become politically influential, and eventually restrictive, by developing a robust utilitarian or consequentialist dimension that synergizes with more mundane human desires for safety, physical or psychological wellbeing, economic welfare, and so on:122 War is evil not merely because it is innately wrong, but also because it leads to widespread human suffering of a very concrete kind, which helps us draw the normative line at wars that lead to particularly severe levels of suffering. The rule of law is good not merely because of its innate fairness, but because it prevents irresponsible governance, which helps produce a more robust political consensus on what specific institutions it demands. Taxation is perhaps innately morally problematic, but more pressingly, raising taxes will probably set off massive peasant rebellions that fundamentally destabilize the regime. The merging of normative concerns with more utilitarian ones significantly strengthens their political appeal, both to elites and to the general public, even if it may cause some dilution of the deontological commitment. Normative purity often makes for bad politics, whereas a successful synergizing of normative inclination and perceived self-interest can be much more productive. Confirmation bias enters this picture at the intersection of normative and utilitarian beliefs: It suggests that, over time, the two are likely to develop symbiotically, rather than independently. Our normative positions will likely influence the way we understand utilitarian consequences, whereas, as much as we might not want to admit it, our consequential perception of self-interest tends to affect our normative leanings.123 How strong the synergy is depends, to a large extent, on whether there are strong enough external shocks to fuse them together, whether there is a salient and serious enough event that powerfully confirms our biases in either direction. Again returning to the Chinese 122

123

On the two dimensions – normative and explanatory – of ideological worldviews, see, e.g., Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 171–207 (2004); Paul Hirst, On Law and Ideology, 1–21 (1979); Geuss (1981); Baker (1990); Armitage (2000), for theoretical discussion and historical contextualization. See sources cited at supra note 115.

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fiscal context: Prior to the Ming-Qing transition – that is, prior to the occurrence of a truly powerful confirmation event – fiscal conservatives clearly believed raising taxes would trigger social unrest, but they were unable to put forth a clear and convincing account of when, and how severely, that unrest would materialize. Reformers shared some of this consequentialist anxiety, but generally believed it could be contained and preempted through good governance. Following the Ming collapse, however, the anxiety boiled over for both groups of elites, leading to the strong consensus we observe in the early Qing. This process of mutual confirmation can, in some cases, produce a truly coherent political ideology, a coherent worldview that guides both our normative thinking and our perception of real-world cause and effect, as opposed to a less systemic set of ideas, norms, or mere sympathies. Successful ideologies attract people by positing themselves as not merely normatively good, but just as importantly, empirically true, which assures their followers that not only are they doing the morally right thing, but also they are eventually guaranteed of success, normatively and in more worldly ways. The combination of the two is often a far more powerful call to action – at the social and political level, if not always at the individual level – than a simple normative exhortation or mere self-interested appeal. From this perspective, it was arguably not until the early Qing that the Confucian moral bias against taxation really matured into something that could be safely called a real fiscal ideology: Unlike their late Ming counterparts, Qing fiscal conservatives, a label that likely applied to the great majority of Han Chinese political and intellectual elites, were certain of not only the righteousness of their position, but also its prudent necessity. But, one might ask, doesn’t the hardening of a normative belief into a fullblown ideology increase its empirical falsifiability, and therefore render it more vulnerable? It does indeed. Once a normative idea becomes attached to concrete predictions or claims about real-world cause and effect, it risks being devalued if those causal claims are ever disproven in the public perception.124 This is often a somewhat remote risk due to the ongoing influence of confirmation bias: The empirical components of an ideology, once they obtain the status of supposed “common sense,” can be incredibly resistant against efforts to disprove them. Even so, there is nonetheless some possibility of empirical falsification, whereas a purely normative idea is, by definition, logically impervious to empirical assault, and usually politically impervious as well. The eventual fate of Chinese fiscal austerity in the early twentieth entury is, as discussed later, an excellent example of these dynamics at work: Once it was empirically demonstrated, in the final years of the Qing dynasty, that it was possible to implement 124

Apart from the narrative developed in this book, one of the clearest examples of this dynamic in modern economic and political history is the paradigm shift in fiscal thinking that occurred after the Great Depression. See Barry Eichengreen & Peter Temin, The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 9 Contempor. Eur. Hist., 183 (2000); Anne Mayhew, Ideology and the Great Depression: Monetary History Rewritten, 17 J. Econ. Issues 353 (1983).

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nationwide land tax increases without setting off truly destabilizing levels of social protest, elites quickly abandoned the two millennia-old normative ideal of fiscal restraint, turning instead to aggressive state building and administrative expansion. This soon became one of the foundational commitments of the Republican Era and the early People’s Republic, transcending the usually vicious political divisions that otherwise marred the twentieth century.125 That said, the risk of empirical falsification is often the price a normative ideal must pay to become truly politically operational. Without it, normative ideals may exert some influence over politics, but are all too easily counterbalanced by other normative concerns or basic material self-interest. They become far more powerful when people believe them to be aligned or symbiotic with self-interest, but this requires a perceived causal connection, which is by nature falsifiable, between the two. Ideological influence therefore tends to be a highrisk, high-reward matter: Highbrow ethical commitments gain political force by, essentially, getting their hands dirty in the realm of empirical predictions, but, in doing so, render themselves vulnerable to empirical critique. This implies that there is often an inverse relationship between an ideal’s political longevity and its level of influence. From this perspective, the relative political longevity of Qing fiscal conservatism, which, at least in its application to agricultural taxation, spanned virtually the entire dynasty, is truly remarkable. True, this was a relatively short period of time compared to the two millennia-long histories of the deontological ideal itself, but it was very long when compared to the political lifespan of most other Chinese fiscal policies. Looking at the longue durée fiscal history outlined in Chapter 3, rarely did a fiscal policy survive untouched for more than a couple of decades. In comparison, the Qing commitment to a low agricultural tax regime for over two centuries was almost unbelievably durable. The psychological shock of the Ming collapse goes a long way toward explaining the formation of a fiscally conservative consensus in the early Qing, but by itself, it does not provide a fully adequate explanation for the longevity of that consensus. The remainder of this book tackles the longevity issue, beginning with Section D below, which identifies a number of developments in the later Kangxi era that laid the groundwork for full blown fiscal stagnation in the eighteenth century. II. Alternative Explanations? Before we move on to those developments, we should address a few potential alternative explanations for the political and intellectual history laid out in the previous sections. These have been briefly alluded to over the course of the 125

On statism in modern Chinese economic policymaking, see Zheng Zhenqing, An Interactive Evolution between Capitalism and Statism in Modern China, 47 Chinese Stud. Hist. 21 (2013).

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narrative, but for the sake of argumentative clarity, they deserve a more concentrated and formal response here. There are at least two compelling versions one must consider: First, perhaps the early Qing turn to fiscal conservatism was a rational response to the political needs of a new, ethnically foreign conquest dynasty that had yet to fully solidify its rule. Second, given the severe economic and demographic contraction the Chinese economy suffered during the MingQing transition, fiscal conservatism may simply have been a prudent and wellinformed response to real economic hardship at the local level. To some extent, both of these alternative explanations are obviously correct within the narrow confines of the Shunzhi era, and perhaps the early Kangxi era as well. Indeed, as noted above, the Qing’s need for political consolidation and the population’s need for economic relief weighed heavily on the subjective mindset that political elites brought into fiscal debates, and almost certainly played some role in nudging them toward conservatism. In particular, there can be no doubt that the sociopolitical tensions created by ethnic conquest played some role in shaping fiscal policy in the dynasty’s earliest years: The pacification of the Han population was clearly a major reason why Dorgon was so eager to abolish the Ming campaign taxes. By the late seventeenth century, however, ethnic tensions between Manchu and Han were no longer an explicitly influential force in the context of fiscal policymaking: They simply did not appear much, if at all, in mid-Kangxi era debates over fiscal policy, and had almost completely vanished by the eighteenth century. One might hypothesize that public mention of ethnic tensions was politically taboo for Han officials, and therefore that they would have avoided such language even if it weighed heavily on their minds, but this was plainly untrue, even in the early Qing: Quite the opposite, they featured prominently in a number of other political debates, ranging from bureaucratic promotion126 to institutional design,127 that were at least as politically sensitive as fiscal policy, if not more so. Much more plausibly, for most officials, Han or Manchu, ethnic tensions simply did not consciously register as a major reason to oppose fiscal expansion. If it played a role, it probably did so indirectly, as part of the subconscious background against which more salient ideological and political forces fought for influence. Furthermore, the rise of fiscal conservatism in the early Qing happened altogether too quickly and sweepingly to simply be a “rational” response to contemporary economic circumstances: Were that the case, the rise would likely have been somewhat slower and more uneven, with more contentiousness among political elites before they settled on the new consensus. Instead, Dorgon 126 127

E.g., Ma Shijun, Dianshi Duice Huang Qing Wen Ying. E.g., Wei Yijie, Qing Zhao Dui Chen Shu (请召对臣疏), HCJSWB, ch. 9. HCJSWB contains a significant number of memorials, scattered throughout the dynasty, that explicitly discuss Manchu-Han relations or tensions. While it was certainly a delicate issue that required careful wording, at no point did the issue become politically taboo.

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began to receive large numbers of petitions for tax reductions immediately after the 1644 conquest, well before the new regime had any time or administrative capacity to “rationally” scope out the Chinese economy. The intellectual consensus, too, formed within the next few decades without any visibly significant opposition, and without real access to reliable information on the speed and scope of the economic and demographic recovery. If we take early Qing political and intellectual writings on their own terms, then it seems very clear they were driven by the shock of Ming collapse and the ideologically inflected “lessons” elites drew from them, rather than by any level-headed information collection and assessment process conducted by either the Qing state or by local elites – in fact, virtually none of the sources discussed above cite anything of the sort. Most importantly, if ethnic tensions and objective economic suffering were the primary driving forces behind the rise of fiscal conservatism, then we would expect it to gradually weaken as the new dynasty solidified its political control for good after the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), and as the economy swung into a prolonged period of rapid growth after 1680 that lasted for multiple decades.128 Instead, the complete opposite happened: As Chapter 5 will argue, the rigidity of Qing tax policies and political dominance of fiscal conservatism actually increased over time, even as living standards objectively improved, and the political salience of ethnic tension waned. In fact, as discussed in the next section, two of its central institutional pillars – the rise of “quotaism” in agricultural taxation and the discontinuation of land surveying – did not become politically and intellectually entrenched until well after the 1680s. Waning ethnic tensions and decreasing levels of objective economic hardship are very awkward explanations for these developments: They may very well have continued to lurk in the background of fiscal debates, but, on their own, they cannot logically explain the sustained rise and institutional entrenchment of fiscal conservatism from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, and then again to the nineteenth century. We should recognize, instead, that ideological paradigm shifts follow their own internal logic. They do, of course, respond to changes in external political or economic conditions, but do so on their own cognitive and intellectual terms: they tend, as noted above, to interpret new developments as reinforcements of preexisting ideological biases and commitments, rather than as reasons to discard them. Only by acknowledging the ideological nature of Qing fiscal conservatism – that, as a result of Ming collapse Qing political elites had a fundamentally different political and intellectual worldview than their late Ming predecessors – can we properly understand its trajectory over the course of the dynasty. New external developments and information were processed and responded to through that worldview, rather than over or around it in

128

On the speed of the post-1680 recovery, see, e.g., Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018), at 995.

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some rationalist fashion, and therein lied the source of fiscal conservatism’s extraordinary influence and longevity.

d. fixed tax quotas and the land survey problem Several external factors further strengthened the political case for fiscal conservatism in the late seventeenth century. Most importantly, once the Three Feudatories rebellion had been put down in the early 1680s, the dynasty entered into its first prolonged period of political and military stability, which significantly eased the fiscal pressures faced by the Imperial Court. Political stability allowed the Court to substantially boost its administrative reach and capacity, thereby increasing the reliability of tax collection. This meant that a consistently higher share of the nominal tax quota began to be actually collected year on year, which further weakened any possible political case for increasing the quota itself. At around the same time, the Chinese economy and population began to experience robust recovery from its post-Ming nadir – the size of the economy would regain its late Ming peak shortly before 1700, and the population would also do so a few decades later129 – which immediately suggested to the Imperial Court that the relative fiscal restraint of the Shunzhi and early Kangxi eras had finally succeeded in producing a sustainable recovery, and should therefore not be tampered with.130 Buoyed by these developments, scholars and bureaucrats alike began to float an even more conservative set of fiscal norms. Although these would not become institutionally entrenched for another couple decades, they had gained enough political clout by the end of the Kangxi era in 1722 that the Yongzheng Emperor (1722–1735), who engineered the last systemic attempt to boost Chinese agricultural taxation until the early twentieth century, had to circumvent them through political loopholes, rather than confront them head-on. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Qianlong Emperor, facing fierce pressure from his advisors, had formally enshrined these norms into legal regulations and state policy, thus creating the highly restrictive institutional and political framework Qing elites were forced to operate under for essentially the rest of the dynasty.

129 130

See Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018), at Figure 2, 6. See generally, He Ping (何平), Qingdai Fushui Zhengce Yanjiu: 1644–1840 (清代赋税政策 研究) [Studies on Qing Tax Policies], 14–26 (1998). The bias toward maintaining the fiscal status quo is most clearly seen in two parallel developments: First, the Imperial Court made a strong push toward regularizing the tax waivers granted to regions struck by natural disasters, which had been haphazard at best from the mid to late seventeenth century. See Chen Feng (2008), at 182–202 for a detailed discussion. Second, the Court sought to institutionalize tax collection practices, see id. at 255–264, but with the caveat that provinces with openly entrenched practices of lax collection, such as Sichuan, were generally allowed to continue them. The unique case of Sichuan is discussed more carefully in Chapters 5 and 6.

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This framework coalesced around two primary norms: First, the state should set a fixed absolute volume of agricultural taxation – what some historians have called “quota-ism”131 – and rarely, if ever, go beyond it. Formal increases of this volume quota should be allowed only, and perhaps not even, under the most extreme of political circumstances. Specifically, economic and demographic growth should not trigger any quota increase, and the state should be content with extracting a smaller share of economic production. In other words, the fiscal ideal should be volume stability, rather than rate stability. As noted above, the most commonly cited ideal of fiscal benevolence in classical Chinese politics was the shiyi shui, which called for rate stability at 10 percent of agricultural production, and would therefore have allowed for increases in the absolute volume of taxation as the economy expanded. Qing quotaism was a clear departure from this traditional ideal, but not necessarily an unprecedented one: For example, up until the mid-fifteenth century, Ming taxation also seemed to follow a form of soft quotaism.132 What was unprecedented was, first, the institutional dominance and formality of Qing quotaism, which allowed for nearly no political and intellectual dissent, and second, its extraordinary longevity, which extended all the way from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. Whereas the longevity issue is taken up in the next two chapters, the political and intellectual origins of agricultural tax quotaism are more properly found in the early Qing, and are therefore discussed here. Second, the state should cease the traditional practice of land surveying, and instead allow peasants to reclaim and invest in lands without reporting the increase in acreage and yield to the state. Given that land surveying was, functionally speaking, the primary (perhaps only) means through which a centralized bureaucracy ruling over a very large landmass could systemically measure the size of the agrarian economy, abandoning the practice meant the state would, in effect, voluntarily blind itself vis-à-vis the economic livelihoods of most of its subjects. The obvious and enormous costs of such an unusual measure meant that those who advocated it needed an ever stronger political argument, which came in the form of fiscal conservatism: Because land surveying was generally a necessary precondition for any major redistribution or increase of agricultural tax quotas, abandoning it effectively removed the possibility of future fiscal expansion. It would allow, in the terminology of new institutional economics, the Qing state to make a “credible commitment”

131

132

This term, which goes back to Huang’s (1974) influential but controversial critique of Ming fiscal policy, has been adapted into Qing fiscal history by Kaske (2018), R. Bin Wong, Taxation and Good Governance, in The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500–1914 (B. Yun-Casalilla & Patrick K. O’Brien eds., 2012); and He Ping (1997). See discussion at Chapter 3, Section B.

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against agricultural tax hikes, a position increasingly large numbers of political elites rallied around even as the Imperial Court consolidated its rule.133 I. “Quotaism” Compared to the Qing abandonment of land surveying, its commitment to quotaism has attracted a larger amount of attention in modern historiography due to its direct and obvious numerical manifestation – as discussed in Chapter 1, the absolute volume of Qing agricultural taxes indeed remained unchanged for nearly two centuries despite the major economic and demographic expansion, a unique statistical pattern that stands in sharp contrast with fiscal policy in every other major Chinese dynasty. In terms of institutional significance, however, the latter norm was likely more important, and was the true engine behind the unusual ideological longevity of Qing fiscal conservatism. In fact, the former was largely a symptom of the latter: As discussed in detail in later chapters, the lack of land surveying made it nearly impossible to propose any increase to the tax quota, as there was no politically authoritative source of information that could demonstrate the rural economy’s improved capacity to sustain fiscal extraction. Despite this eventual synergy, the two norms were intellectually and politically distinct when first proposed in the later seventeenth century. This was because, whereas the norm of “quota-ism” had some precedent in Chinese political history, the rejection of land surveying was largely unprecedented and would indeed have seemed anathema to the great majority of policymakers, even the conservatives, in the Ming or Song. It therefore had to be justified and substantiated on unique intellectual and political grounds – grounds that could not have existed without the trauma inflicted by Ming collapse, and took considerably longer to become mainstream than did “quota-ism.” As discussed above, “quota-ism” gained support from many political and intellectual elites almost immediately after the Ming-Qing transition.134 Lobbying by officials during the later Shunzhi era in favor of a fixed tax quota yielded clear results after the Kangxi Emperor’s ascension in 1661: For the entirety of Kangxi’s 61-year reign, formal land tax quotas remained almost unchanged. In southwestern frontier regions formerly controlled by the Three Feudatories, they were actually reduced as a gesture of benevolence, and then locked in to prevent future increases.135 Lobbying to reduce the comparatively 133

134 135

Douglass C. North & Barry R. Weingast, Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England, 49 J. Econ. Hist. 803 (1989). See, for example, above discussion of Liu Hongru and Wang Fuzhi. One of the most influential memorials to this effect was submitted by the censor Shi Wencheng (石文晟) in 1695, 4 HQZY, 2115–2127.

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heavy taxes imposed on the Lower Yangtze also become a common theme in memorials, a trend that had origins back in the late Ming, and would continue until the late nineteenth century.136 This new institutional reality dovetailed with an ever growing collection of private literati writings, to which Wang Fuzhi, Lu Longqi, and Chu Fangqing were all prominent contributors,137 that advocated fixed labor and silver quotas as the most direct and effective solution to the over-taxation and poverty passed down from the late Ming to the new dynasty. Nonetheless, at this relatively early stage, proposing a tax hike was not yet the automatic political death sentence it later became. In 1677, for example, Jin Fu, newly promoted to the position of rivers and canals minister, openly petitioned Kangxi to resurvey the countryside and raise taxes, arguing that, if the Court were simply to keep a standard 10 percent tax rate, it could more than double its fiscal income.138 By this point, many, if not most, Han literati had already turned against the old 10 percent tax rate as politically unsustainable, and there is no evidence that Jin’s proposal produced any positive reception whatsoever. Nonetheless, the proposal was merely ignored, rather than formally rebuked or punished. Jin’s background as a Han Bannerman from Manchuria likely had something to do with this unconventional position – and almost certainly helped shield him from sociopolitical backlash. As we will see in the next chapter, fiscal reformers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not nearly as fortunate, and had to tread much more lightly. By the late Kangxi era, a number of steps were taken to enshrine “quotaism” as a formal legal and political commitment. The most famous step in this direction is, of course, Kangxi’s 1712 edict declaring that “the head tax quota is now fixed for all eternity, and no new births from this year onwards shall contribute to any increase in it.”139 Commonly known as the “shengshi zi ding, yong bu jiafu” (“because the prosperous age produces population growth, the state will forever refrain from increasing the head tax”) principle, this 136

137

138

139

E.g., Mu Tianyan (慕天顔) memorial & Tang Binshu (湯斌疏) memorial, in Jiangnan Tongzhi (江南通志) [General History of Jiangnan], ch. 68 (1736). On late Ming petitions to reduce Lower Yangtze tax quotas, see Fang Xing (2010). On later Qing attempts to do so, see Chapter 6, Section B. For a general analysis, see Fan Jinmin (范金民), Jiangnan Zhongfu Yuanyin de Tantao (江南重赋原因的探讨) [Discussion on the Reason of Jiangnan’s High Tax], 14; Zhongguo Nongshi (中国农史) [Agricultural History of China], 46 (1995). See the essays by Lu Longqi (陆陇其) and Chu Fangqing on labor tax quotas, which were still used in parts of North China in the Early Qing, at HCJSWB ch. 33. Jin Fu (靳辅), Shengcai Yuxiang Diyi Shu (生财裕饷第一疏), HCJSWB, ch. 26. For further discussion of Jin Fu’s political position and its response, see, Guo Chengkang & Zheng Baofeng (郭成康和郑宝凤), Lun Qingdai “Bu Jia Fu” ji Qi dui Shehui Jingji de Yingxiang (论清代”不加 赋”及其对社会经济的影响) [On the “No Additional Taxes” Policy of the Qing Dynasty and Its Impact on Social Economy], 1995(2) Shehui Kexue Jikan (社会科学辑刊) [Collected Works in the Social Sciences] 100. Dong Hua Lu (东华录), Kangxi 51st Year 2nd Month Yihai.

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declaration swiftly became one of the most commonly-used catchphrases – arguably the most commonly used catchphrase – of Qing fiscal conservatives, and seemed to embody all that was benevolent and wise about Kangxi’s rule. As historians generally recognize, however, the edict was actually much narrower in scope than modern audiences sometimes give it credit for: It explicitly froze only the head tax, but not the much more important land tax – in fact, nowhere does the actual language of the edict mention the land tax at all.140 While freezing the head tax was by no means an insignificant commitment, head taxes, which came to around 3.35 million taels per year at this point, only accounted for about 12 percent of total agricultural taxes.141 That said, the rationales given by the edict for the freeze do strongly suggest that the Imperial Court had, by this time, internalized a broader political reluctance to raise any kind of agricultural tax, whether land or head: “The country has long been at peace, and the population is growing day by day. We cannot raise head taxes according to current population figures, however, because although the population has increased, the amount of land available has not.”142 We will encounter this kind of Malthusian worldview many times in later chapters, but this is one of the earliest instances of the imperial court formally acknowledging it. Some officials, as noted above, advocated similar viewpoints at least as early as the late Shunzhi era, and presumably their persistent rhetoric had eventually made an impression on the Emperor and his closest advisors.143 Taken to its logical conclusion, the statement would imply that the economy’s taxable surplus – the amount of surplus produced beyond the population’s basic subsistence needs – was actually shrinking, and therefore the government should not only refrain from increasing taxes, but should probably work actively to reduce them. It would presumably have applied with at least equal force to both head and land taxes, if not actually with greater force to the latter, given its far greater volume. It was within this general political context of deepening fiscal conservatism that the Kangxi Court began to move forward with the true hallmark fiscal reform project of the early eighteenth century: fully merging the head tax into the land tax – known more broadly as “spreading the population into the land” (“tan ding ru di”) program.144 Unlike the freeze on the head tax, which was a quick fix that could be implemented through almost entirely top-down mechanisms, the “spreading” of the head tax into land necessarily involved detailed coordination, accounting, and execution at all levels of the state, and took

140 142 143 144

141 He Ping (1997); Guo & Zheng (1995). He Ping (1997), at 63; HKTDTFTJ, 542–573. Dong Hua Lu, Kangxi 51st Year 2nd Month Yihai. E.g., Liu Hongru memorial, 2 HQZY, 1145–1156. The most detailed layout of this program is still Guo Songyi (郭松义), Lun Tan Ding Ru Di (论 摊丁入地) [On Tan Ding Ru Di], 1982(3) Qing Shi Luncong (清史论丛) [Collected Works on Qing History] 28. See also Da Qing Huidian Shili (大清会典事例) [Examples of the Qing Official Statutes], ch. 157 (1886) (on ding yin tanzheng [丁银摊征]).

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several decades to complete. It was, more or less, a direct continuation of Zhang Juzheng’s Single Whip Law, which had only been partially implemented in the late Ming before progress stagnated in the Chongzhen era. Early Qing fiscal reliance on Wanli-era head tax quotas that had survived Zhang’s reform push, especially in North China, led to further regression of this limited progress, and by the time the project of producing a unified, land-based agricultural tax collected in silver was revived in the late Kangxi era, the Qing court faced a tangled mess of potential logistical and political obstacles that were not necessarily much simpler than what Zhang faced in 1581.145 Not only were land records severely out of date by this point – the last (failed) attempt at national land surveying happened over 25 years ago146 – but the merger directly contradicted the economic interests of many large landowners whose households had high land-to-population ratios. On the latter point, in particular, the Qing merger plan could potentially have gone much further than even the Single Whip Law in rebalancing quota distribution between larger and small landholders: Whereas the Single Whip Law still assessed land and head taxes through separate surveys, and only sought to unify their collection procedures, the Qing merger essentially would do away with head taxes altogether, and assess household tax quotas only based on landholding.147 Small wonder, then, that the initiation of the merger program, beginning with Guangdong in 1716, caused considerable anxiety among local literati and landlords. Wary of these potential problems, the Imperial Court rolled out the merger very slowly, moving from Guangdong to Sichuan in 1721, then to North China in the early Yongzheng era, and to most other provinces by 1728. Shanxi and Guizhou did not complete the reform until the mideighteenth century.148 More importantly, the Court sought to dampen opposition to tax reform by strengthening its political commitment to a low and effectively unchanging land tax quota. As a number of scholars have documented, the Court signaled throughout the 1710s and 1720s that, unlike the Single Whip Law, the landhead tax merger was designed not to boost government revenues, but to further entrench the fiscal conservatism that Kangxi had ostensibly committed himself to in his 1712 head tax freeze. The message communicated to both government officials and local gentry seemed to be that, given the relatively fixed amount of arable land in the country, a land-centric assessment system would inevitably be better fortified against potential tax hikes than one that incorporated

145 148

146 147 Guo (1982). Zhang (2002), at 72–73. Guo (1982). Da Qing Huidian Shili, ch. 157. But see Liu Zhiwei (刘志伟), Guangdong Tan Ding Ru Di Xinlun (广东摊丁入地新论) [A New Discussion on the Tan Ding Ru Di in Guangdong], 1 Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese economic history] 21 (1989), which argues that the exact timing of the Guangdong implementation came later than conventionally assumed.

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demographic elements.149 Looking back in 1731 at the previous two decades of institutional change, the senior official and prominent scholar Zhu Shi commented that “once the former emperor (i.e., Kangxi) had, in his great benevolence, . . . banned future increases of the head tax and set a permanent quota, how could the Court harshly demand more of the land tax, which already had its own fixed quota?”150 The Court went to great lengths to communicate its aversion to agricultural tax hikes during the final decade of the Kangxi era. In one 1712 episode, Nian Gengyao, then governor of Sichuan, petitioned the central government to strengthen local tax collection efforts, citing abysmally low collection ratios as the driving rationale: Whereas the formal annual quota for the province amounted to some 1.6 million taels, actual collection amounted to less than 15 percent of that, barely reaching 200,000 taels in most years.151 The mere fact that a provincial governor felt he needed central approval to strengthen the collection of preexisting tax quotas in his own jurisdiction is itself a strong indication of taxation’s special, arguably unique, political status. Nian requested authorization to punish local officials who could not boost the collection ratio to 20 percent within five years, and to reward those who could reach 40 or 50 percent within promotions. One would have thought this was a reasonable enough request – after all, it would leave the formal quota unchanged, and would only attempt to collect a fraction of it – but it met with immediate opposition. In one memorial, the censor Duan Xi accused Nian of ignoring both the province’s historical baggage and its present circumstances: “Since the late Ming, Sichuan has been ravaged by numerous uprisings and military campaigns, and was impoverished to the extreme. Over the past several decades, there has indeed been some recovery, but it remains a sparsely populated region.”152 Jia then reminded Kangxi of his recent commitment to fiscal restraint: “Just this Spring, your majesty decreed that . . . in order to conserve private wealth, the head tax shall remain unchanged. Given that Sichuan remains an impoverished frontier region that requires rest and nourishment, why should there be any rush to increase land taxes there?”153 This memorial, and others like it, eventually persuaded Kangxi to reject Nian’s petition,154 and as a result, tax collection figures from Sichuan remained in the low 200,000 tael range through the 1730s. The Imperial Court’s commitment to stable tax 149

150

151 153 154

This certainly seemed to be the understanding of many contemporary officials. See, e.g., Dong Zhisui (董之燧) memorial, in Jiangnan Tongzhi, ch. 68, which argues that a land-centric system would be far more stable and equitable than one that independently assessed head-taxes. Zhu Shi (朱轼) memorial, in 25 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe (宫中档雍正 朝奏折) [Yongzheng Reign Memorials from the Palace Archives], 243–244 (1979). 152 This episode is narrated in Duan Xi (段曦) Memorial, 4 HQZY, 2263–2270. Id. Id., at 2267–2268. Qing Shengzu Shilu (清圣祖实录) [The Verified Record of Qing Shengzu], ch. 256, Kangxi 52nd Year 10th Month Bingzi.

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quotas therefore extended not merely to formal quotas, but even to customary undercollection. It seems safe to say, then, that by at least the late Kangxi era, the Qing tax regime had already turned decisively toward a particularly rigid form of “quota-ism,” at least in agricultural taxation. Nonagricultural taxation, as discussed in Chapter 2, operated under a very different kind of institutional and political logic. It grew slowly but steadily throughout the Kangxi era, from slightly less than 5 million taels a year in the 1680s to some 7 million a year in the 1720s. In addition, central policymakers continued to express strong support for expanding commercial taxation. Some expressly argued, in fact, that commercial taxes should not be subject to the kind of quotaism they believed should be imposed on agricultural taxation: “The state’s extraction from the people must follow fixed rules and quotas, which is why, outside of the agricultural tax, it collects tariffs. The purpose is to extract from merchants, so as to supplement the state’s proper income (zheng gong) . . . .”155 Such claims, in this instance made by the censor Li Zanyuan in 1672, put forth a traditionalist view of taxation in which agricultural taxes occupied the center of sociopolitical gravity – but precisely because of their sociopolitical centrality, they had to be regulated in a more institutionally rigid fashion than more peripheral taxes like tariffs.156 Nonagricultural taxes, in contrast, could be wielded much more flexibly, with significantly less political risk. These arguments substantively echoed the Shunzhi era arguments on “emphasizing core foundations while restraining peripheral components” (zhong ben yi mo) discussed in Section A, and would therefore seem to represent a consistent strand of political logic that shaped the state’s differential treatment of agricultural versus nonagricultural taxation throughout the early Qing.

II. The Land Survey Problem Compared to their swift and relatively straightforward embrace of permanent tax quotas, political elites took much longer to intellectually reject land surveying, and even longer to institutionally reject it. The relative resilience of land surveying stemmed from the traditional belief that it benefitted, rather than harmed, smallholder economic interests: They were, so the argument went, the only effective way to ensure that large landholders, conventionally regarded as economic predators constantly siphoning land away from smallholders, paid their fair share of taxes. This remained the mainstream opinion 155

156

See Deng Yibing (邓亦兵), Qingdai Qianqi Yishang Wenti Xintan (清代前期抑商问题新探) [A New Exploration on the Problem of Restraining Business in the Early Qing Dynasty], 2004(1) Shoudu Shifan Daxue Xuebao (首都师范大学学报) [Journal of Capital Normal University] 1 (citing a Li Zanyuan (李赞元) memorial held in China’s National Library). For a similar argument, see, e.g., Ning Yunpeng (宁云鹏), Yuan Xu (原序), in Hushu Guan Zhi (浒墅关志) [Records of Hushu Pass], ch. 18 (Ling Shouqi [凌寿祺] ed., 1827).

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among political elites as late as the early seventeenth century. It was, for example, Zhang Juzheng’s justification for the nationwide surveying efforts that accompanied the rolling out of his Single Whip Law: Even if the reforms expanded the size of the overall taxation pie, they would actually lessen the fiscal burden of smallholders by slicing the pie in a fairer, more accurate, way.157 Late Ming literati largely agreed with this argument, and even the most ardent fiscal conservatives seemed to concede the sociopolitical benefits of land surveying,158 focusing their fire instead on the military campaign taxes that were simply assessed as a ratio of preexisting tax quotas, and therefore implemented without any additional land surveying. Following Ming collapse, scholarly writing began to focus more on the negative aspects of land surveying: Not only was it an unusually heavy administrative burden, but it also tended to create high levels of social anxiety by signaling an impending tax hike. In other words, it “disturbed the population” (raomin), a serious accusation in the highly risk-averse political atmosphere of the early Qing. Several prominent early Qing scholars, including Huang Zongxi and Lu Shiyi, argued that it created strong incentives for households to conceal their landholding figures, and when concealment was no longer viable, to resist tax hikes in increasingly desperate and eventually militant ways.159 For these critics, Zhang Juzheng’s surveying efforts were not benevolent attempts to protect smallholder interests, but instead socially disruptive measures that ushered in dynastic decline. As Lu Longqi stated: “In no other era were Ming land quotas as rigorously compiled and implemented as in the Wanli era, and yet if we trace the origins of Ming decline and collapse, we must inevitably start with the Wanli era.”160 Others observed that “when [Zhang Juzheng] governed the country and ordered national land surveying, educated men wrote that he ‘surveyed all the land in mountains and river systems, leaving only the ocean and the sky.’ . . . Zhang genuinely had the best interests of the country and its people at heart, but even he failed to survey properly, and instead left a legacy of mockery and derision.”161 Lu Shiyi spoke for many when he concluded that “from ancient times to the present, no one has known how to [conduct land surveying properly]. Small wonder, then, that the entire country becomes frightened and disturbed whenever it hears that a land survey is forthcoming.”162 157

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E.g., Zhang, Chen Liu Shi Shu, HMJSWB, ch. 324; Zhang, Da Yingtian Xunfu Song Yangshan Lun Junliang Zumin, HMJSWB, ch. 327. See Zhang, Da Fujian Xunfu Geng Chutong tan Wang Ba zhi Bian, HMJSWB, ch. 328 (noting he had encountered relatively little resistance on the land surveying program). Huang’s thinking on this matter is expressed especially clearly toward the end of Tian Zhi (田 制), in Ming Yi Daifang Lu, ch. 8. Lu Longqi, Lingshou Zhi Lun (灵寿志论), HCJSWB, ch. 31. Cai Fangbing (蔡方炳), Changzhou Qing Tian Jishi (长洲清田纪事), HCJSWB, ch. 31. Lu Shiyi, Lun Fu Yi, HCJSWB, ch. 29, makes a similar statement. Lu Shiyi, Lun Qingzhang Tiamu (论清丈田亩), HCJSWB, ch. 31.

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At court, too, voices against land surveying began to emerge. For example, a 1659 memorial by Wei Yijie asking the Imperial Court to ban all surveying of reclaimed land in Shandong argued that, “given the extreme poverty among the population, how can they tolerate further land surveying? . . . Even if we send in truly enlightened officials to conduct the surveying, they will be unable to avoid disturbing the people under these circumstances.”163 This growing chorus of criticism shared at least two major intellectual themes with the general turn toward fiscal conservatism documented elsewhere in this chapter. First, it was almost entirely utilitarian in nature, rather than deontological: Conventional critiques were entirely about social consequences; potential mishandling by corrupt county officials,164 or perhaps kneejerk negative reactions, justified or not, by local populations. Few, if any, thought there was anything innately immoral about land surveying. Second, the impact of the Ming decline and collapse was unmistakable: It was clearly the major political and perhaps psychological catalyst that soured the attitudes of early Qing elites. Nonetheless, this was a slow and gradual process – unsurprisingly so, given how deep elite support for land surveying had been just a few decades ago. Even at the individual level, many early Qing critics of the institution seemed torn between their admiration for its equitable ideals and their condemnation of its actual administrative implementation. Lu Shiyi, who harshly criticized the Ming and Song governments for mishandling land surveying, nonetheless believed there was a “correct” way of surveying – which relied more on positively incentivizing local populations to report their own survey data than on coercive state action – that those earlier regimes had simply failed to understand. He expressed no particular confidence that the Qing state possessed either the political wisdom or the proper personnel to follow this “correct” method, but he did believe, at least, in its existence.165 Others were altogether more positive, encouraging the Qing court to survey land more extensively so that tax quotas could be further reduced from Wanli levels, citing population and arable acreage declines across much of North China due to the dynastic transition.166 It was not until the mid-Kangxi era that land survey critics decisively gained the upper hand at Court. Land surveys were ordered by the Imperial Court at least three times during the Shunzhi era (in 1645, 1653, and 1658) and twice in the early Kangxi era (in 1663 and 1676).167 None of these amounted to a systemic nationwide survey, but were instead piecemeal efforts to plug obvious

163 164

165 166 167

Wei Yijie memorial, 2 HQZY, 1191–1195. Apart from the writings cited above, see Zhang Mao (张懋), Qing Cheng Fushui Ding’e Fangce Shu (请成赋税定额方册疏), HCJSWB, ch. 31, for an example of how such arguments played out at Court. Lu Shiyi, Lun Fu Yi, HCJSWB, ch. 29. Lu Hong (卢紘), Xintai Zhangtian Yi (新泰丈田议), HCJSWB, ch. 31. Zhang (2002), at 72–73.

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holes in the Wanli era records the Court now relied on to assess tax quotas. More expansive proposals to survey land and reassess the national tax quota, such as the one proposed by Jin Fu in 1677, were ignored. Nonetheless, these survey projects became the target of serious political criticism in the 1680s. The senior official Yang Yongjian, by this point one of the most prominent Han officials at court, petitioned Kangxi in 1681 to “stop all land surveying activity across the country, so as to relieve the hardships suffered by the population.”168 Yang cited corruption and abuse by local officials as the main reason to halt land surveying, but also pointed to economic tensions inflicted by recent military campaigning as a reason to “allow the people to rest” (yu min xiuxi). Over the next decade, similar opinions gradually gained the upper hand at Court: Jin Fu was demoted in 1688, and when the Court again tried to survey reclaimed land in 1689–1690, the project met with so much resistance it never got off the ground.169 In this general environment, local officials were often hesitatant to pursue their own surveying projects, but some surveying did occur in irregular patches.170 By the early eighteenth century, central policymakers, including the emperor himself, began to formally endorse the position that the government faced a binary choice between surveying and taxation: It should refrain from surveying any segment of the economy or population that it also wished to tax, lest the surveys generate widespread social anxiety over impending tax hikes. Kangxi’s 1712 edict on fixing the head tax is perhaps the clearest example of this. Apart from the Malthusian arguments surplus discussed above, Kangxi supplied one other major rationale for the new policy: “I wish to know the real size of the population, and will therefore forego all head tax increases from this day forward.”171 In other words, holding open the possibility of increasing the head tax would make it politically and socially impossible to conduct systemic land surveys, and vice versa. Although this particular statement applied only to

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Yang Yongjian (杨雍建), Qing Ting Zhangliang yi Su Minkun Shu (请停丈量以苏民困疏), HCJSWB, ch. 31. Zhang (2002), at 74. On early Qing local survey projects, see, e.g., Liang Yong (梁永), Qingdai Sichuan de Tudi Qingzhang yu Yimin Shehui de Fazhan (清代四川的土地清丈与移民社会的发展) [Land Clearance in Qing Dynasty Sichuan and the Development of Immigrant Society], 2008(3) Tianfu Xinlun (天府新论) (New Horizons from Tianfu) 69; Wang Qingyuan (汪庆元), Qingdai Shunzhi Chao Tudi Qingzhang zai Huizhou de Tuixing (清代顺治朝土地清丈在徽州 的推行) [The Implementation of Land Clearance in Huizhou during the Shunzhi Dynasty of the Qing Dynasty], 2007(3) Zhongguo Shi Yanjiu (中国史研究) [Journal of Chinese Historical Studies] 145; Yang Guoan (杨国安), Qingdai Kangxi Nianjian Lianghu Diqu Tudi Qingzhang yu Diji Biancuan (清代康熙年间两湖地区土地清丈与地籍编纂) [Land Surveying in Hunan and Hubei during the Kangxi Era], 2011(4) Zhongguo Shi Yanjiu (中 国史研究) [Journal of Chinese Historical Studies] 159. Dong Hua Lu, Kang Xi 51st Year 2nd Month Yihai.

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the head tax, it almost certainly reflected mainstream political opinions toward the land tax as well. In fact, the same kind of argument appeared the very next year in an imperial edict rebutting a proposal by the censor Pan Zongge to survey reclaimed land in Hunan.172 The fact that opposition to land surveying steadily gained force among the Han literati during the relative stability and prosperity of the mid-to-late Kangxi era further emphasizes an argument made in Section C: these political and intellectual trends cannot simply be interpreted as some sort of rational response to the political and economic challenges faced by the Qing state. Those challenges almost certainly played some role in shaping the initial swing toward fiscal conservatism after the 1644 conquest, but the fact that fiscal conservatism became more powerful as the challenges receded over time clearly points to other, less “rationalistic” forces at work. Land surveys may well have been objectively costly and logistically challenging during the later Kangxi era, but surely they were less so at that point in time, when the economic recovery from Ming Collapse was effectively complete, per capita incomes arguably at an all-time high,173 and state-society relations highly stable, than in previous decades or the late Ming – and yet widespread opposition to land surveying continued to strengthen even as the economy’s capacity to sustain tax increases clearly increased. The fact that the edicts, memorials, and essays cited above fail to cite any major contemporary episode of land surveying-induced social unrest, but make much of late Ming controversies is, from this perspective, very telling: This was a fundamentally ideological phenomenon, grounded in political and intellectual reactions to recent history. Despite Kangxi’s apparent endorsement of the anti-surveying position by 1712, it would take another three decades for the Qing Court to formally ban the practice, which reflected its somewhat contested political nature even in the early eighteenth century. In between, the short-lived – relative, at least, to his father and son – but institutionally ambitious Yongzheng Emperor would attempt to roll back at least some of the fiscal conservatism that had come to dominate court politics during his father’s reign, and would introduce the last wave of systemic land tax increases in Qing history until the twentieth century. Modern historians have hailed his efforts, justifiably so, as a serious fiscal modernization project, and perhaps the Qing state’s last, best chance to avoid the political and administrative stagnation and decline that marked its middle and later history,174 but what is much more revealing about elite fiscal ideology

172

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Zhang Yan (張研), Shiba Shiji de Zhongguo Shehui (十八世紀的中國社會) [Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century], 34 (2003). In at least one recent quantitative estimate, Chinese per capita income in 1700 was higher than at any other point in the Second Millennium. Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018), at 995. E.g., Zelin (1984).

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in the “high” Qing is not so much Yongzheng’s initial successes, but the large and politically decisive backlash his policies generated following his death in 1735. From then on, fiscal conservatism was no longer just an elite mindset, but an institutionally entrenched commitment of the Qing state. This made it nearly impossible for later reformers to even propose increasing the land tax, and almost none would do so until the late nineteenth century. These developments are taken up in the next chapter.

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5 Mid-Qing Entrenchment

This chapter examines the intellectual and institutional entrenchment of fiscal conservatism from the Yongzheng reign to the Daoguang reign (1722–1850). This stretch of mid-dynasty consolidation began with a burst of reformist energy, fueled by Yongzheng’s desire for higher tax revenues, but quickly turned toward full blown and deeply entrenched conservatism under Qianlong, of which a 1740 legal ban on provincial land surveying was the most important institutional component. The increasingly dire financial straits the imperial court found itself mired in toward the end of Qianlong’s reign forced it, upon the Jiaqing Emperor’s ascension to the throne in 1796, to choose between systemic fiscal expansion or openly conceding a number of core administrative functions to local self-governance. By this point, the former, to the extent that it could increase agricultural tax quotas, was almost completely anathema to political elites, and while nonagricultural taxation continued to experience some reform and growth, it was far too limited in total volume in this era to adequately fund any significant administrative expansion. As a result, the Jiaqing Court embarked on one of the most thorough “decentralizing” projects in late imperial Chinese history. This supplied another couple of decades of sociopolitical cohesion at the cost of further fiscal weakening, which degenerated into full-blown crisis once the Taiping Rebellion flared up in 1850. If we focus solely on the institutional dimensions of this narrative, then there was at least one major juncture – during the Yongzheng reign (1722–1735) – in which there was some real hope of rationalizing the tax regime, and another one – during the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820) – in which the state had to actively choose between fiscal expansion and administrative withdrawal. Both resulted in further entrenchment of the state’s commitment to fiscal conservatism. In between, there were six decades of intellectual entrenchment, including the rise to prominence of the “Malthusian” economic worldview that we first encountered at the end of Chapter 4, that arguably made the Jiaqing turn toward 211

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administrative decentralization all but inevitable. Even the YongzhengQianlong transition, which contained significant amounts of political drama, seemed to many contemporaries to be a natural reversion to Kangxi-era conservatism following a decade of misguided institutional experimentation. In that sense, although the political and institutional history of mid-Qing fiscal development contained some genuinely contingent and sometimes disruptive elements, its intellectual and ideological history was, in general terms, substantially continuous with the early Qing. While it may be an exaggeration to say that this intellectual and ideological continuity somehow “determined” how political contests would shake out during the two institutional junctures identified above, it clearly exerted some significant influence over them – influence that only grew steadily stronger over time. Section A covers Yongzheng’s signature fiscal reforms, most importantly his attempt to expand the agricultural tax base by introducing “meltage surcharges” to the land tax quota. This is well-trod academic territory, so the narrative will move quickly. Section B focuses on the Qianlong era return of fiscal conservatism, and how it came to be institutionally and politically entrenched, most notably through the legal ban on land surveying. Section C traces the rise of a “Malthusian” economic worldview among political elites, from the Qianlong Emperor down, which further deepened their fiscal conservatism. Section D examines the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition, and quickly surveys political practice and discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century. Section E looks back at the historical narratives developed in this chapter and the Chapter 4, and identifies intellectual continuities and differences between early and mid-Qing fiscal policy discourse.

a. yongzheng era fiscal reforms The Yongzheng Emperor has undergone a sort of historiographic rehabilitation over the past several decades: Once portrayed as a harsh, abusive ruler in classical Chinese historiography1 – he was, for reasons that will become apparent below, fairly unpopular with mainstream Confucian literati, who then set the tone for later historical interpretation – he is now routinely lauded as perhaps the most enterprising and hardworking Qing emperor, and certainly one of the most institutionally influential.2 In particular, historians now tend to see him as the strongest advocate of fiscal rationality in Qing history, the ruler who came closest to setting the dynasty on a path toward financial

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E.g., Xiao Yi Shan (萧一山), Qingdai Tongshi, (清代通史) [General History of Qing 880–890] (1986). E.g., Dai Yi (戴逸) et al., 18 Shiji de Zhongguo yu Shijie: Zhengzhi Juan (十八世纪的中国 与世界: 政治卷) [China and the World in the 18th Century: Politics] (1999); Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (2001).

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sustainability.3 Owing largely to Madeleine Zelin’s magisterial study,4 his “meltage fee” (huohao) reforms remain one of the most scrutinized episodes of Qing institutional history, drawing an arguably outsized amount of academic attention relative to its actual historical impact. This section largely accepts this now-conventional narrative and summarizes it in broad strokes. It does, however, recast some features of the narrative in light of their continuities and discontinuities with Kangxi era fiscal conservatism. In particular, it emphasizes the residue influence that such conservatism exerted on Yongzheng’s political rhetoric and tactics, even as he was effectively attempting to overturn both of the institutional and ideological commitments – to “quotaism” and against land surveying – identified at the end of Chapter 4. Yongzheng was fully aware that his reforms challenged over half a century of ideological entrenchment and institutional precedent, which forced him into some highly uncomfortable political maneuvers that would later contribute to the reforms’ eventual demise in the later eighteenth century. This is not to say the reforms were doomed from the very start by the political and ideological climate in which they were formulated. They did, however, consciously operate in the shadow of deeply embedded ideological opposition, and required a herculean effort to get off the ground. Yongzheng ascended the throne in late 1722, having inherited both a major fiscal initiative, the merger of the head tax into the land tax,5 and an even larger fiscal deficit from his father. By the end of Kangxi’s reign, annual tax collection had declined to dangerous levels in many places with the tacit approval of the fiscally conservative imperial court.6 This led to major budget deficits across the country, which then placed ever greater stress on the national treasury. The treasury’s reserves had fallen to barely 8 million taels by 1722, less than 20 percent of the government’s annual budget, and almost certainly insufficient to cover a major famine or military campaign.7 At the same time, both the economy and the population were growing very rapidly, sharply increasing the administrative demands placed on the state apparatus. In fact, most local governments were already unable to cover basic operational costs with the formal budget allocated to them by central authorities. Instead, they had to resort to a number of informal surcharges to make ends meet. This was risky business under the Qing legal system, which, since a 1644 edict by Dorgon, had formally outlawed the collection of any informal

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E.g., Zelin (1984); Liu Fengyun (刘凤云), Yongzheng Chao Qingli Difang Qianliang Kuikong Yanjiu (雍正朝清理地方钱粮亏空研究: 兼论官僚政治中的利益关系) [The Investigation of Local Government Deficits in the Yongzheng Emperors Reign – With a Discussion of Interest Relationships in Bureaucratic Politics], 2013(2) Lishi Yanjiu (历史研究) [Historical Research] 44. 5 6 7 Zelin (1984). Zhuang Jifa (1985), at 61–100. Zelin (1984), at 1–24. Id.

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tax surcharge under penalty of death.8 Nonetheless, as Kangxi was forced to recognize toward the end of his reign, it was simply impossible, by the early eighteenth century, to maintain any semblance of a functional county government if the magistrate relied only on formal fiscal income. In 1722, shortly before his death, Kangxi took the position that, while surcharges should remain nominally outlawed, minor transgressions could be tolerated if the local fiscal need was both real and serious.9 Essentially, he chose to look away for the time being, but refused to lend local officials any formal authority to collect surcharges – if they insisted on collecting, they would have to do so with their own sociopolitical capital, and at their own risk. Chief among the assortment of surcharges charged by local bureaucrats was the “meltage fee” (huohao or haoxian), which had become a near-nationwide phenomenon by the early 1720s.10 As discussed in Chapter 1, it was a “customary surcharge” (lougui) that local officials imposed at the time of tax collection as a share of the formal quota, under the theory that, when local communities paid their taxes in smaller units of silver, some of that silver would inevitably be lost in the melting process to consolidate them into standard weight taels, and that an additional “meltage fee” was therefore necessary to satisfy the formal quota. In reality, this was just a general excuse for officials to collect an additional 15–80 percent of the quota, with enormous regional variance. For the most part, local communities tolerated the practice, partially because they, too, benefitted from having a functional town or county government, and partially because, in all likelihood, the surcharges were usually economically bearable. Corruption was, of course, an ever-present concern given the lack of formal institutional authorization and transparency, but there is little evidence that the surcharges were a significant source of social unrest despite their penetration into nearly all regions of the country. From the very first month of his reign, Yongzheng began sending signals to provincial authorities that he would be amenable to formalizing these informal surcharges, which effectively reversed the position that Kangxi had taken just a few months ago.11 Eager to please the new emperor, senior officials from North China, the Lower Yangtze, and the Middle Yangtze all submitted memorials with detailed plans to formalize meltage fees within their respective

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11

Qing Shizu Shilu, ch. 6, Shunzhi 1st Year 7th Month Jiawu, Renyin. Qing Shizu Shilu (清圣祖实录) [The Verified Records of Qing Shengzu], ch. 299, Kangxi 61st Year 9th Month Wuzi. See, e.g., Abe Takeo, Kosen Teikai no Kenkyu (耗羨提解の研究) [A Study on Haoxian], 16 Toyoshi Kenkyu (東洋史研究) [The Journal of Oriental Researches] 454 (1958); Chen Feng (陈锋), Lun Haoxiao Gui Gong (论耗羡归公) [On the Haoxian Guigong Policy], 2009(3) Qinghua Daxue Xuebao (清华大学学报) [Journal of tsinghua university] 17. Qing Shizong Shilu (清世宗实录) [The Verified Records of Qing Shizong], ch. 2, 61st Year of Kangxi 12th Month Xinyou.

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jurisdictions.12 These received immediate praise and approval from Yongzheng, and by 1724, most provinces had begun drafting proposals of this sort. The most common form of the new meltage fee surcharge was, following preexisting customary practice, simply as a direct percentage added to the formal quota. In much of North China, for example, this initially amounted to an 11–12 percentage add-on, later raised to 16–18 percent in Shandong and Henan,13 whereas in the Lower Yangtze the addition was often less than 10 percent, under the theory that formal land tax quotas there were already more burdensome than in North China, and could not withstand as high an increase. At the same time, the old informal surcharges would be systemically eliminated, so as to avoid accusations of raising taxes. Once collected at the provincial level, these new surcharges would then be almost exclusively redistributed as annual bonuses for salaried officials. Given that only 10–15 percent of the state’s total annual budget was devoted to paying official salaries, a 20 percent meltage fee surcharge would effectively triple the formal income of many officials, and more than double it for the rest. The new bonuses were given the aspirational title of “payments to cultivate incorruptibility” (yanglian yin), expressing the central government’s hope, however over-optimistic, that higher salaries would reduce the incentive for local corruption. Almost immediately, the new surcharges came under heavy criticism from fiscal conservatives. As Zelin has documented in great detail, this criticism came in two varieties: First, opponents questioned the wisdom of centralizing surcharge collection and bonus redistribution at the provincial level, rather than allowing local bureaucrats to directly redistribute at the county or town level.14 The latter would presumably allow for more flexibility and lower information costs in both assessment and collection. Second, a number of memorials questioned whether the reforms, by normalizing and legitimizing previously illegal surcharges, would effectively raise taxes over the medium to long run:15 Although the Imperial Court’s position was that it was merely formalizing preexisting surcharges, what was to prevent corrupt local officials from adding new informal surcharges to the now higher formal tax quota? Once they had done that, wouldn’t the “real” tax burden imposed on peasants be even higher, and wouldn’t this amount to exactly the kind of dangerous tax hike the dynasty had tried so hard to avoid thus far? 12

13

14 15

Zhong Shichen (钟世臣) Memorial, 1 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 414 (1977); Shi Wenzhuo (石文焯) Memorial, 2 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 253 (1977); Gao Chengling (高成龄) Memorial, 2 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 673. Feng Yuankui (冯元魁), Lun Qingchao Yanglian Yin Zhidu (论清朝的养廉银制度) [A Study on Yanglian Yin in the Qing Dynasty], 1991(2) Fudan Daxue Xuebao (复旦大学学报) [Journal of Fudan University] 64. Zelin (1984), at 97–105. Id.; Ding Shijie (丁世杰) Memorial, 5 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 27 (1978).

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Yongzheng and his supporters responded to both of these concerns in a series of memorials and edicts written from 1724 to 1726, and the differences in how they responded to each concern speak volumes about the circumstances at court: what was deemed politically acceptable to argue, and what was not. On concerns over provincial-level collection and redistribution, they simply argued for its institutional superiority over direct local redistribution: It would lessen the incentive of local bureaucrats to over-collect the new surcharge, and would allow for greater transparency and systemic coordination between localities.16 None of these arguments were invulnerable to counterarguments, but they were nonetheless a strong enough signal of the imperial court’s political resolve that dissenting voices quickly quieted down. When it came to accusations of increasing taxes, however, Yongzheng and his allies chose to accept, rather than refute, the basic premise of the criticism: They readily agreed that tax hikes must be avoided, at least for now, but insisted that the surcharge reforms would actually reduce the real tax burden, rather than increase it.17 This argument relied on two premises: First, the total amount of meltage fee surcharge authorized by the imperial court was significantly lower than what its preliminary surveys of customary local practice had revealed. These surveys, commissioned by provincial authorities in the reform’s preparation process, suggested that customary meltage fees likely amounted, in aggregate, to 50 percent or more of the formal land tax quota.18 The formalized surcharges were only a fraction of this in most provinces, and were strictly forbidden from exceeding preexisting customary surcharge levels in any region. Therefore, if the central government succeeded even in reducing informal surcharges by half – the stated goal was, in any case, to eliminate them entirely19 – then it could realistically claim to have lowered the real tax burden in most localities. This led to the second premise: that the central government actually possessed the administrative capacity to root out informal surcharge collection. While many contemporaries feared this was impossible, Yongzheng was more optimistic: He seemed to genuinely believe that raising the legal income of salaried officials would render them unwilling to take the sociopolitical risks involved with collecting informal surcharges.20 The problem with this position was that, if Yongzheng was serious about laying an institutional foundation for true fiscal sustainability – and there is every indication that he was – then there was no way he, or his successors, could have avoided confronting fiscal quotaism, or at least the highly rigid 16 17

18 19 20

E.g., Iduri (伊都立) Memorial, 4 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 839 (1978). E.g., Dong Hua Lu, ch. 25; Gao Chengling (高成龄) Memorial, 2 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 673; Gao Chengling (高成龄) Memorial, 3 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe, 822 (1978). Abe (1958); Zelin (1984), at 48, 73. Qing Shizong Shilu, ch. 49, Yongzheng 4th Year 10th Month Renshen. Qing Shizong Shilu, ch. 91, Yongzheng 8th Year 2nd Month Bingchen.

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Kangxi version, head-on. For his institutional framework of formalization and rationalization to be remotely sustainable, the Qing state needed to be able to reassess and potentially increase meltage fee surcharges whenever the basic administrative cost of local governance outstripped formal fiscal income. If economic and demographic growth could force local officials into collecting surcharges once, they could easily do so again if rigid quotaism continued to be the norm. This was, however, precisely what the meltage surcharge reform’s opponents feared: This kind of formal surcharge would simply become a new vehicle for tax increases. This was, substantively, an irreconcilable point of conflict between mainstream fiscal conservatism and any realistic form of fiscal sustainability. That Yongzheng and his allies chose to circumvent – and to some extent, acquiesce on – this fundamental argument, especially when they were perfectly willing to directly confront the criticisms of provincial control, is very telling. It strongly suggests that, in their judgment, it was politically feasible to engage, and win, arguments over collection and reallocation procedures, but infeasible to win an argument against quotaism. Any acknowledgment that the government needed to be able to raise taxes to keep up with socioeconomic expansion would have been a political death sentence for the new reforms, and the only way out was to insist that informal surcharges could be reduced to the point where formalization truly amounted to a tax cut. The danger was, of course, that this would effectively hang a sword of Damocles over the new surcharge: If its opponents could ever demonstrate that informal surcharges continued to be collected at significant levels after the formalization process, they could hoist the reformers with their own rhetorical petard. It would be all too easy for them to say, at the earliest possible juncture: “You promised that there would be no real increase in tax burdens and that informal surcharges would be eliminated after formalization. Well, this has not happened, and the reforms have effectively been a tax hike.” In fact, accusations of this sort began to emerge as early as the later 1720s, leading to large scale efforts, especially in the Lower Yangtze, to further clamp down on informal surcharges.21 Once Qianlong ascended to the throne in 1735, they became the cornerstone upon which conservatives consolidated their political position. Yongzheng’s unwillingness to confront fiscal conservatives head-on over their core beliefs also reared its head in his general hesitation toward land surveys. While he did manage to conduct some relatively rigorous audits of local governmental finances in the Lower Yangtze he and his core political allies never openly proposed a systemic survey of the regional, let alone national, agrarian economy, instead attempting (largely unsuccessfully) to update preexisting land registries through government registration of land sale

21

Zhuang Jifa (1985), 141–147.

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contracts.22 Given the enormous informational benefits of land surveying to Yongzheng’s fiscal reform agenda and his expressly favorable attitude toward it,23 we can only assume his hesitation to survey on a large scale was due to wariness of the likely political opposition – the piecemeal surveying that was conducted had already generated quite a bit of it.24 Instead, the new surcharges were, by and large, simply assessed based on internal auditing and reporting of preexisting lougui figures, which likely had some deeply perverse effects on how local officials manipulated and reported them. All in all, both of the major institutional trends of the later Kangxi era – toward quotaism and against land surveying – continued to be highly influential during Yongzheng’s reign. In the meantime, the reform did lead to a significant expansion of the government’s fiscal capacity. Coupled with a fairly determined effort to reduce tax collection arrears, the new surcharges were able to boost national treasury reserves to over 50 million taels by the end of Yongzheng’s reign, an increase of over 500 percent from what he inherited from Kangxi. This happened despite a significant escalation of military campaigning in the northwest shortly after Yongzheng’s ascension to the throne. Annual land tax income grew by around 15 percent following the surcharge reforms, an addition of some 3.5 million taels, and the gradual expansion of “second tier” tax items like the salt tax also contributed a few million taels a year. Most historians are also willing to credit Yongzheng with a substantial reduction in local corruption over the same time span, believing that the doubling of official salaries facilitated by this expansion of fiscal capacity did indeed have a positive effect on bureaucratic behavior.25 Despite these successes, it became increasingly clear during the latter half of Yongzheng’s regime that his reforms were deeply unpopular with a large portion of political elites, Han and Manchu alike. Part of this was straightforward self-interest: His auditing program closed a large number of tax loopholes that local gentry, especially those in the Lower Yangtze, had traditionally taken advantage of.26 At the same time, accusations of tax hikes continued to plague

22

23

24

25

26

Zelin (1984), 247–252. The only major regional land survey conducted during Yongzheng’s reign was of Sichuan, which had a number of unique circumstances. See infra note 618 for discussion. See, e.g., Yongzheng’s response – describing land surveying as a “benevolent policy” – to a Yu Zhaosheng (俞兆晟) Memorial, Gong Zhong Dang (宫中档) Archives [hereinafter GZD] 402011130, Yongzheng 3rd Year 8th Month 28th Day, which discussed the difficulties with local surveying. E.g., Zhu Gang (朱纲) Memorial, GZD 402011164, Yongzheng 5th Year 4th Month 28th Day (discussing problems with land surveying in Hunan); Hiyande (宪德) Memorial, GZD 402013096, Yongzheng 7th Year 11th Month 16th Day (accusing multiple officials of corruption and abuse during land surveying). E.g., Zelin (1984), at 201–204; Chen Feng (2008), at 240–241; Zhuang Jifa (1985), at 146–147; Chen (2006b), at 42–44. Zhuang Jifa (1985), at 151–184.

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the reform agenda.27 These accusations were made especially potent by the eventual reemergence of informal surcharges in response to a combination of political and socioeconomic factors: lapses in Yongzheng’s anti-corruption campaign, increasingly rapid population growth, and the corresponding growth of local administrative burdens.28 The synergy between personal economic grievances and ideological self-righteousness produced an unusually powerful political cocktail that drove large numbers of officials and scholars into open or thinly veiled opposition to the new fiscal regime. By and large, this was not enough to seriously threaten Yongzheng’s reform agenda, but the meltage surcharge’s political viability quickly became dependent on his personal authority, and was called into question upon his sudden death in 1735. It is impossible to surmise what Qing fiscal history would likely have looked like had Yongzheng lived for another decade or two, as both his father and his son managed to do. The strength of his personal authority would likely have grown over time, further reducing the likelihood that fiscal conservatives could have successfully stalled his pro-reform tendencies. With Yongzheng at the helm, there is at least a possibility that the Qing tax regime could have obtained true institutional rationality – that is, regular updating of tax quotas based on thorough land surveying and internal assessment of administrative needs – over the following decades. For the first time in Qing history, there seemed to be a genuine possibility that the tax regime could have broken free of the ideological straightjacket it had worn since the Ming collapse. That said, this would have been a tall order even under the most ideal circumstances. Yongzheng enjoyed the loyalty of several devoted lieutenants, most notably Tian Wenjing, who spearheaded his auditing of local government finances in the Lower Yangtze, but, by and large, he made few inroads in reversing the mainstream fiscal conservatism among rank-and-file officials. Without their genuine support, fiscal rationalization would always be a high-wire balancing act, and any significant socioeconomic turmoil – famines, regional rebellions, and the like – would have posed a serious threat to its political viability. The situation would almost certainly have remained deeply unsettled for quite some time, possibly for decades. The only reason there was any possibility of reform at all was Yongzheng’s unusually strong consolidation of power and even stronger political will, but even he was unwilling to openly challenge the core tenets of fiscal conservatism.

27

28

See, e.g., the series of memorials by Xu Ding (徐鼎), collected in Shizong Xian Huangdi Zhupi Yuzhi (世宗宪皇帝朱批谕旨) [Red-marked Comments and Edicts of the Yongzheng Emperor], ch. 96 (1738), https://ctext.org/library.pl?if=en&res=6403, on continued local tax corruption in Hubei and Jiangxi following the meltage fee reforms. Zhuang Jifa (1985), at 141–147. These problems became increasingly serious by the early Qianlong reign, to the point where Qianlong himself was forced to acknowledge them. E.g., Qing gaozong Shilu (清高宗实录) [The Verified Records of Qing gaozong], ch. 143, Qianlong 6th Year 5th Month Xinmao.

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In the end, whatever uncertainly there may have existed was made moot by Yongzheng’s 1735 death. At this point, fiscal reformers still faced a steeply uphill battle – one whose momentum had, if anything, stagnated since the mixed results yielded by the auditing campaign in the Lower Yangtze. The emperor’s death almost immediately vaporized whatever momentum that remained, and forced reformers to play defense in the new regime, which would quickly revert back into Kangxi-era conservatism, and then institutionally strengthen it to unprecedented levels.

b. the qianlong reversion I. Debating the Meltage Fee Reforms Most large-scale fiscal reforms in Chinese history suffer some sort of political backlash once their primary advocate at Court loses his grip on power, either due to death or power struggles: The reforms championed in the Tang, Song, and Ming by Yang Yan, Wang Anshi, and Zhang Juzheng all had their share of detractors, who would attempt to roll back at least some portion of the reforms upon their respective political demises. Their record was highly uneven: They had only limited success in reversing Zhang Juzheng’s reforms, but had more immediate and systemic success against Wang Anshi. Regardless, in no case did the general momentum toward fiscal reform simply stop because of these temporary setbacks: The institutionalization of the Two Taxes Law continued after Yang Yan’s death due to the support of the Dezong Emperor, whereas Song and Ming fiscal expansion would soon escalate to new heights just a few decades after Wang and Zhang’s respective deaths. In comparison, the backlash against the Yongzheng reforms was both less and more powerful: The immediate pushback following the 1735 regime change was relatively moderate, but the mid to long term institutional damage it produced was arguably much more severe. In fact, unlike in any of these previous episodes, the post-Yongzheng backlash essentially stopped Qing fiscal reform in its tracks: Fiscal policy in general would remain stagnant for the next 115 years, and agricultural taxation for other several decades beyond that. Whereas the Tang, Song, and Ming reforms all ushered in long-term reorientation toward fiscal activism, the Yongzheng reforms were more of a blip of intense activity, preceded and followed by much longer periods of conservatism. Upon Qianlong’s ascension to the throne, he immediately faced, as was customary for such occasions, a small flood of memorials from senior officials giving all sorts of political advice, ranging from vague moralizing to more concrete policy proposals.29 A substantial number of the latter specifically 29

Zelin (1984), at 266–278.

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targeted the meltage surcharge, asking that it be reviewed and potentially curbed. Partially because it seemed politically dangerous to ask the new emperor to completely reverse his father’s signature political accomplishment, and partially because the new surcharges were now a critically important component of official salaries, virtually no one argued for the surcharge’s direct repeal. Instead, they returned to the time-tested accusation of tax hikes – by this point, the claim that local informal surcharges had returned en masse, and that real tax burdens had likely rise across much of the country since the 1720s, went largely unchallenged in high level political debates – to press for stricter supervision of local collection procedures, paired with either an outright reduction of surcharge quotas or at least a permanent freeze.30 These petitions displayed a significant amount of intellectual continuity with the early Qing paradigm shift documented in Chapter 4: Several petitions made the familiar argument that the agricultural production capacities of the country were limited in absolute volume, and therefore that the government was engaged in a zero-sum fiscal game with the population.31 This implied, furthermore, any increase in the population morally and pragmatically behooved the government to reduce, rather than increase, the formal tax quota. One may recall that we previously encountered this Malthusian argument in Kangxi’s 1712 edict on freezing the head tax – and will encounter it many more times before this chapter is finished. In addition, the petitions also echoed some versions of the “Huang Zongxi thesis,” expressing strong skepticism that the government would actually be able to keep local corruption in check, especially under conditions of rapid population growth. It is worth noting here that these “Huang Zongxi thesis” concerns were couched firmly within the more general belief that tax hikes, whether real or nominal, must be avoided because of the already serious economic strains faced by the population. The core argument made in these memorials was essentially that, due to the impossibility of eliminating informal surcharges, there was no way to implement further meltage fee formalization without increasing the real tax burden imposed on the general population. Local corruption was indeed a concern, but it was a concern because the state could not afford to extract more from its subjects. The fairly absolutist nature of the latter claim meant, moreover, there was no need to precisely measure the volume of new informal surcharges: so long as they continued to exist, then there was a significant danger meltage fee formalization would increase the real tax burden, and that was reason enough to freeze it. To some extent, these memorials can be read as

30 31

Id., at 267. E.g., Xu Wangyu (許王猷) Memorial, GZD 402005599, Yongzheng 13th Year, 11th Month, 20th Day; Xue Yun (薛馧) Memorial, GZD 402005627, Yongzheng 13th Year, 11th Month, 19th Day; Lu Maizu (鹿邁祖) Memorial, GZD 402005634, Yongzheng 13th Year, 11th Month, 13th Day.

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calling Yongzheng out – subtly and delicately, of course – on his aforementioned “promise” that meltage fee formalization would not increase the real tax burden. Because that promise had already been broken, the state’s fiscal posture had to change accordingly. Both the Grand Secretariat and Qianlong responded sympathetically to some of the proposals. They acknowledged the general desirability of a tax deduction, but expressed reservations over its financial feasibility.32 A few of the regions that had expressed strong opposition to Yongzheng’s fiscal reforms, mostly from the Lower Yangtze, were granted moderate reductions in the meltage surcharges, but there was no effort to make this a national policy. As a compromise, the imperial court formally declared that the surcharges would be capped at present levels: While they could potentially be reduced based on demonstrations of local hardship, they could no longer be increased.33 This effectively eliminated any possibility of fiscal rationalization and, more than a little ironically, defeated the fundamental purpose of establishing the meltage surcharges in the first place, which was to give the imperial court the kind of fiscal flexibility it had given up under Kangxi era quotaism. Instead, the surcharges themselves were now subject to essentially the same institutional logic as the system it was designed to combat. For the remainder of the Qianlong era, they were assessed at roughly 3.5 million taels a year – or about 12 percent of the formal land tax quota – with no substantial variation even during major military campaigns.34 These compromises only seemed to embolden conservatives, who quickly escalated their requests. Over the next seven years, the Court received a number of proposals to abolish the meltage surcharge altogether, and by 1742, Qianlong felt compelled to respond in a formal manner. Following a round of solicited debate at court, he issued an edict declaring that the surcharges “were now established practice, upon which the state and the people have reached a long-lasting equilibrium.”35 Any major change to the system would only invite administrative unrest and escalate local corruption. He acknowledged that the surcharge system had accumulated significant problems over the past two decades, but argued that the prudent thing to do was, in fact, to be conservative, and maintain the institutional status quo. By claiming the mantle of institutional conservatism as his own, however, Qianlong also foreclosed any possibility of expanding the surcharge system, which he acknowledged openly: “In order to establish clear institutional precedents that the general population can safely rely on, surcharges may be reduced slightly from time to time, but can never be increased.”36

32 34 35

33 Zelin (1984), at 268–269. Zelin (1984) For a statistical sketch, see Chapter 1, Section B. Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 178, Qianlong 7th Year 11th Month Yichou.

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Id.

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II. The Land Survey Ban and Its Aftermath In fact, “make no change” was more or less the mantra the Qianlong agricultural taxation apparatus operated on throughout the mid-eighteenth century. Beyond locking in surcharge levels, the most critical step it took in this direction was to formally ban provincial and local land surveys. Although Yongzheng had, with some exceptions,37 refrained from large scale land surveying campaigns, Court officials nonetheless found something to criticize in his general approach toward land reclamation and registration: Throughout his reign, the emperor had encouraged local officials to play a more active role in land reclamation projects, which, apart from speeding the pace of reclamation, also made it easier for the state to register reclaimed land, which provided a small but nonetheless welcome boost to local tax revenues.38 This was naturally controversial among fiscal conservatives, many of whom believed the state should simply allow reclaimed land to go unregistered and untaxed. Upon Yongzheng’s death, a number of these officials, led by Qianlong’s personal tutor Zhu Shi, immediately seized upon the land reclamation issue to push a more general offensive against land surveying.39 Pulling together the various arguments against surveying we encountered at the end of Chapter 1, they argued that any central authorization of the practice, even if it was narrowly limited to newly reclaimed land, would give revenue-hungry local officials an opening to significantly exaggerate local landholding figures – which would inevitably force some farmers to abandon their land, and potentially set off local rebellions. The only solution, in their opinion, was to “not only cease the practice of land surveying, but also drop the requirement that newly reclaimed land be registered with the local government.”40 Qianlong soon responded in a positive but measured manner. In an edict banning the exaggerated reporting of land reclamation figures, he agreed that local surveying practices contained serious abuses of power, and often 37

38

39

40

The largest scale land surveying project that happened under Yongzheng was a 1728 survey of Sichuan, which at the time was experiencing a massive influx of migrants, and was therefore in particularly pressing need of a land survey to settle local tax payment disputes (Liang Yong [2008]). The total land quota assigned to the province nearly tripled after the survey, but the presurvey quota was so low – barely 15 percent of its late Ming level, or around 225,000 taels – that the fiscal and economic impact was still minimal. As Liang Yong points out, even after the increase, Qing tax rates were still only about a quarter of late Ming tax rates: By 1728, arable land and agricultural output had both doubled since the late sixteenth century, but the tax quota had been cut in half to about 650,000 taels, and would remain there until the nineteenth century. Qing shizong Shilu, ch. 6, Yongzheng 1st year, 4th Month, Yihai; ch. 61, Yongzheng 5th Year 9th Month Jimao. Zhu Shi (朱轼) Memorial, 25 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe 242–245; Yunlu (允禄) et al., 26 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe 303–304, Yongzheng (specific date unknown) (discussing Zhu Shi’s request for a freeze on land surveying). Zhu Shi Memorial, 25 Gong zhong Dang Yongzheng Chao Zouzhe 243–244.

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“amounted to tax hikes in the name of land reclamation, which do no favors to the political standing of local governments while damaging the economic interests of the people.”41 That said, the edict did not go so far as to ban land surveying altogether, which seemed to signal a willingness to hear additional opinions on the issue. Several months later, the Fujian provincial governor Lu Zhuo wrote to the court seeking authorization for a small scale land survey he wished to conduct in Jianyang County, which had been embroiled in a tax quota misreporting scandal since 1729.42 In 1686, in an attempt to conceal long standing tax collection arrears, the Jianyang County magistrate, Li Liucheng, decided to unilaterally reduce – without authorization from higher authorities – the local tax quota. He did so by changing the reported tax status of some 4600 hectares (695 qing) of previously cultivated land to uncultivated, which reduced the local tax quota by around 15 percent. Needless to say, this was a serious violation of state regulations, but the decay in the Qing state’s information collection capacity was already such that the offense remained undetected until 1729. In fact, even after the discovery, the imperial court was deeply torn on how to respond. Punishing the officials who had overlooked or perpetrated the misreporting was a relatively simple matter, but how to deal with the shrunken tax quota was far more complicated. Some officials, such as Hao Yulin, the regional governor of Fujian and Zhejiang, favored leaving the falsified tax quota in place, lest the local population respond negatively to a perceived tax hike.43 Lu Zhuo, on the other hand, thought there was some possibility of recovering the 4600 hectares of lost quota revenue, and proposed to do this through a local land survey. By the spring of 1736, Zhu Shi’s petition and the emperor’s sympathetic response had already become common knowledge among senior officials, which forced Lu to take a wary, almost fearful tone in his memorial. Acknowledging the imperial court’s “benevolent desire” to avoid tax hikes and “overburdening the people,” Lu promised that his survey project would produce no increase in the overall tax quota – at best, it would restore the quota to what it was before 1686. Lu went on to argue that, even if the quota were to remain unchanged at the present level, a land survey would still produce considerable sociopolitical value: Local land records had become severely 41 42 43

Qing gaozong Shilu, ch. 4, Yongzheng 13th Year 10th Month Yihai. Lu Zhuo (卢焯) memorial, FNHA 04-01-22-0001-047, Qianlong 1st Year 5th Month 9th Day. Hao’s memorial is summarized and discussed in some detail in He Ping (何平), Cong Qianlong Jianyang Tianfu An Lun Qingdai de Fushui Guanli (从乾隆建阳田赋案论清代的赋税管理) [Discussing Tax Administration in the Qing Dynasty from the Qianlong Jianyang Land Tax Case], 2004(2) Qingshi Yanjiu (清史研究) [The qing history journal] 71. Hao was one of the officials who pushed very aggressively for a return to Kangxi era fiscal conservatism in the early Qianlong era, advocating, for example, a reduction of Taiwan’s land tax quota, which had recently increased as a result of Yongzheng’s tanding rumu policies. See Hao Yulin (郝玉麟) memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0003-003, Qianlong 1st Year 7th Month 13th Day.

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outdated due to under-registration of land transactions, which meant some administrative units were being overtaxed relative to their landholdings, while others were undertaxed. Surveying done strictly for redistribution purposes would allow the court to maintain a fixed tax quota, while improving the fairness and equity of its allocation. This was, of course, the exact same argument that late Ming officials had once employed to justify the national land surveying conducted as part of the Single Whip reforms – which, as discussed in Chapter 4, had enjoyed some support among political elites as late as the Shunzhi and early Kangxi eras. In a clear display of how far this argument’s political standing had fallen since then, it was soundly refuted both by Qianlong and his most senior advisors. Zhang Tingyu, by this point the single most prominent Han official in the country, likely spoke for many when he condemned Lu’s proposal as politically misguided in a memorial to the emperor: “If mishandled ever so slightly, land surveying can easily lead to local unrest.”44 Channeling these sentiments, Qianlong responded to Lu’s petition in an unusually direct and harsh manner: Reading through your memorial, I find nothing but empty arguments. If land surveying truly does not burden the people, but instead benefits them, then presumably they would welcome the practice. I have, however, never known this to be true. If land surveying will not lead to tax hikes, then why would local governments wish to spend their funding on it? If the argument is instead that surveying will lead to greater fairness in quota distribution, then why do the people fear land surveying as they fear fire or water hazards? In the end, this proposal of yours was clearly designed to raise taxes, but has now been shrouded in fanciful arguments to avoid criticism.45

In fact, Qianlong refused not only to allow a land survey, but also to take any action toward recovering the lost tax quota. Instead, Jianyang was allowed to keep its artificially deflated quota for good. Three months after Lu Zhuo’s initial memorial, another memorial on land surveying came in from the Hubei governor Zhong Bao, who requested that a survey be authorized in Mianyang County. Zhong’s initial petition gave the traditional optimistic take on land surveying: If conducted properly, it would simply redistribute existing tax quotas in a more equitable fashion, without leading to any quota increase.46 Although the higher level responses to this petition are not recorded, they were most probably negative, for in a different memorial submitted just a couple of weeks later, Zhong swung to the opposite position: he recommended that another surveying project in Luzhou be

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Zhang Tingyu (张廷玉) Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0003-026, Qianlong 1st Year 10th Month 28th Day. Qianlong’s red-ink commentary on Lu Zhuo’s memorial, FNHA 04-01-22-0001-047. Zhong Bao (钟保) Memorial, FNHA 02-01-04-12921-001, Qianlong 1st Year 9th Month 20th Day.

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suspended, due to the chance that it might “burden the people” with additional fees and bribes. In all likelihood, the seasoned politician had detected some hostility to his original stance, and had adjusted very quickly.47 This, then, was the new mainstream position on land surveying among Qing political elites: It was politically dangerous for all the same reasons that tax hikes were politically dangerous. Policymakers seemed to believe, probably correctly, that local populations would interpret any attempt at land surveying as the precursor of an attempted tax hike, and would therefore respond just as negatively.48 If the government needed to avoid the sociopolitical consequences of tax hikes – and by this point in Qing history, there was no longer any disagreement that it could not afford to do otherwise – then it needed to avoid land surveying as well. Strained as this logic might seem to modern audiences, it was, in fact, a natural offshoot of the “land surveying disturbs the people” (qingzhang rao min) argument that had been gaining political momentum since the early Qing. In 1740, the new consensus was enshrined in the Qing Code as a formal substatute: “It is forever forbidden for provinces to conduct land surveys, or to either restrict or coerce the self-reporting of reclaimed land.”49 From this point onward, only the central government would have the authority to order land surveys, and it was quite clear from the court’s political posture that it would not do so.50 The court would soon have another opportunity to further clarify this position. In 1742, a debate flared up between two censors, Bao Zuoyong and Zou Yigui, over whether the Imperial Court should authorize a local survey of reclaimed land in Guizhou. Zou, the proponent of the survey, argued that, since a few reclamation and surveying projects had added about 4000 mu of taxable land to official records in the early Kangxi era, a number of ambiguities and inaccuracies in the records had led to much dispute and even litigation among local landowners. A new survey was needed, therefore, to “cease litigation.” Zou took special care to emphasize that – unlike, for example, Lu Zhuo’s initial land survey proposal from 1735 – his proposal would keep the provincial tax

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Zhong Bao memorial, FNHA 02-01-04-12863-008, Qianlong 1st Year 10th Month 9th Day. The problem with this logic, needless to say, is it almost certainly overestimated the likely local response to an actual tax hike. Da Qing Lu¨li (大清律例) [The Great Qing Code], Hulü Tianzhai (户律 田宅) [Laws on Household Matters, Land, and Residences], Sec. 93.03 (1768). Memorials from this period speak clearly of the Imperial Court’s position as one that would eliminate land surveying as an administrative option for good, rather than one that merely prohibits local governments from doing so on their own. See, e.g., Necin (讷亲) Memorial, FNHA 02-01-04-13018-009, Qianlong 3rd Year 12th Month 8th Day (discussing the court’s order to “ban the practice of land surveying forever”); Zhang Tingyu memorial, FNHA 02-0104-12827-015, Qianlong 1st Year 9th Month 16th Day.

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quota completely unchanged, and was solely intended to enhance the accuracy of government records.51 Even so, his proposal came under immediate attack from Bao. Even if the state’s intention was not to raise taxes, Bao argued, “the ignorant local population would like be confused, and would fail to understand.”52 Instead, they would descend into panic immediately upon receiving news of the land survey, and would react as if they had been subject to a formal tax hike. These arguments swiftly won the support of Xu Ben, then the minister of revenue, and other senior officials, and the Board of Revenue formally rejected Zou’s proposal a few months later.53 This official precedent further clarified the Imperial Court’s position: The ban did not merely extend to land surveys conducted for the purpose of increasing taxes, but to all land surveys, even if they committed a priori to keep the tax quota unchanged. Just as importantly, this back-and-forth expressed with unusual clarity a belief that had been lurking in the background of Qing fiscal policymaking ever since Kangxi’s 1712 edict on freezing the head tax: that local populations would inevitably take a major land survey as the harbinger of a tax hike, which meant that, if tax hikes were completely off the table due to the potentially unmanageable social backlash they could trigger, then land surveys needed to be taken off the table for the very same reason. Looking back, we can see earlier versions of this argument in Kangxi’s 1712 statement that he was freezing the head tax because he wished “to know the real size of the population,” and again in Qianlong’s 1736 statement that local populations “fear land surveying as they fear fire or water hazards” precisely because it was almost always conducted for the purpose of raising taxes. Combined, the 1740 substatute and the string of policy precedents surrounding it effectively spelled the end of serious, large scale, state-driven information gathering on the agrarian economy for the next century and a half. The state still conducted, from time to time, internal audits to root out corruption, identify oversized informal surcharges – which became more of a problem in the mid-nineteenth century tax crises – and close major tax arrears.54 But it was not until the late nineteenth century that it once again attempted to systemically collect data on agricultural production and landholding – and even then only in a piecemeal fashion.55 In the meantime, only occasional and piecemeal efforts were made to update land registries, usually based on voluntary self-reporting, 51

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Bao Zuoyong (包祚永) Memorial, FNHA 03-0334-011, Qianlong 7th Year 2nd Month 23rd Day (summarizing arguments made in Zou Yigui’s [邹一桂] memorial). Bao Zuoyong memorial, FNHA 03-0334-011. Xu Ben (徐本) memorial, FNHA 02-01-04-13617-007, Qianlong 8th Year 6th Month 29th Day. See Chen Feng (2008), at 275–280; Liu Fengyun (刘凤云), Jiaqing Chao Qingli Qianliang Kuikong Zhong de Jianan Jueze (嘉庆朝清理钱粮亏空中的艰难抉择) [Difficult Choices in Clearing the Money and Grain Deficit in the Jiaqing Reign], 2013(5) Zhongzhou Xuekan (中州学刊) [Academic Journal of Zhongzhou] 128. See Chapter 6, Section C for detailed discussion.

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which did occur from time to time when households wished to formally register a land transaction, or gain an official land title for some other reason.56 In very rare cases, the Imperial Court would order a localized survey in response to serious local disputes about landownership – essentially, when the disputes had gotten so bad that the local population openly requested a survey – but these were both unusual and very limited in scope.57 As a result, the government’s formal assessment of total tilled land in the country barely budged between the early eighteenth century and the late nineteenth, and actually shrunk substantially in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,58 even though, as several scholars have demonstrated, the real amount experienced steady growth, and had likely increased by 25–35 percent, and perhaps by as much as 50 percent, over the same period.59 What may have made it easier for Qing political elites to accept this informational self-mutilation was the common belief that, by this point, the official 900 million mu figure reached in the Yongzheng era already covered nearly all taxable farmland in the country. Further surveying would likely add very little to the total amount, and was therefore not worth the effort or money – and certainly not worth the severe social disruption officials believed it would cause. As noted in Chapter 4, “Wanli Era Precedents” carried enormous weight in early Qing fiscal politics – the Qing Court committed, very early in its rule, to not exceeding the tax quotas set in the late Wanli era of the Ming (circa 1608),

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See, e.g., Sulin (书麟) memorial, FNHA 03-0843-006, Qianlong 51st Year 12th Month 29th Day (describing a wave of “voluntary” land reclamation recording in Fuyang, Anhui Province). E.g., Suhede (舒赫德) memorial FNHA 02-01-04-15862-005, Qianlong 31st Year 9th Month 18th Day (describing a series of disputes over state-sponsored shoreline reclamation in Guangdong, and suggesting land surveying as a solution). See HKTDTFTJ, 16. The 1887 figure of around 911,000,000 mu, drawn from the Guangxu Huidian (光绪会典), ch. 17, and issued after some attempts at provincial land surveying in the 1880s is only slightly higher than the Yongzheng figure of 890,000,000. In between, the official estimate dropped to 800,000,000 in the mid-nineteenth century due to accumulated local reports of floods or draughts leading to loss of cultivated land – naturally, local communities were far more eager to volunteer this kind of information than any increase in arable land. After the Taiping Rebellion, the central government, desperate for additional revenue, made a push to recover the old land tax quota. This was done without any national-level land surveying, although some provincial surveying was done, especially in Taiwan, which gained formal province status in 1885. See Liu Kexiang (刘克祥), Shijiu Shiji Wushi zhi Jiushi Niandai Qing Zhengfu de Jianfu he Qingfu Yundong (十九世纪五十至九十年代清政府的减赋和清赋运动) [The Qing Government’s Campaign to Reduce and Clear Taxes in the 1850s and 1890s], in 7 Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Yuan Jingji Yanjiu Suo Jikan (中国社会科学院经济研究所集刊) [Collected Works of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences], 294 (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ed., 1984). For further discussion, see Chapter 6. Lijuan Miao et al., China’s Land-Use Changes during the Past 300 Years: A Historical Perspective, 13 Int. j. environ, res. public health 847 (2016); Xiaobin Jin et al., Farmland Dataset Reconstruction and Farmland Change Analysis in China during 1661–1985, 25 J. Geographical Sci. 1058 (2015).

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before the Lianxiang and Jiaoxiang had been implemented – and continued to be influential even in the eighteenth century. Following Zhang Juzheng’s land surveying program, government estimates of total arable land in the Wanli era stabilized at around 900 million to 1 billion mu, and it was probably not a coincidence, as some scholars have noted, that Qing land surveying efforts, piecemeal as they always were, quickly lost momentum as official figures approached this threshold.60 From 1740 onward, a belief that the Qing economy had hit its maximum agricultural production capacity – that both the state and its population had more or less “exhausted” arable farmland – became extremely prevalent among the political elite, from Qianlong himself down. The full Malthusian implications of this belief are taken up in the next section. For now, the point is merely that it probably synergized, politically and psychologically, with the deeply entrenched fear of “disturbing the people” in very powerful ways. Lest anyone wonder whether Ming precedents still weighed on the minds of political elites in the Qianlong era, it is worth remembering that one of the most important and politically visible events of the early Qianlong reign was the formal publication of the Ming History in the summer of 1739. This effectively constituted the Qing political elite’s collective and formal verdict on the Ming: its successes, failures, and, of course, the reasons for its collapse. Its writing and compilation had been an extremely torturous process, taking nearly a century and destroying many political careers in the process – as compared to, for example, the mere 331 days it took to complete the Yuan History in the early Ming – and one has to wonder whether the unusually traumatic experience of the Ming-Qing transition made it difficult for early Qing scholars to officially close the book on Ming history. At the very least, this extremely long process speaks to how seriously the project was taken by officials and scholars alike.61 Being the collective work of many dozens of scholars over nine decades, the final product included a number of narratives on Ming decline and collapse, which vary in weight and significance. Nonetheless, fiscal overreach clearly emerges from this somewhat tangled narrative as one of the most important perceived causes. The two clearest statements on the causes of Ming collapse in the History come, first, in the concluding remarks to the biography of the Wanli emperor, and then in the foreword to Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong’s biographies. The former is the more ambiguous of the two, stating simply that “the collapse of the Ming truly was caused by the Shenzong (Wanli) Emperor.”62 The passage does not elaborate much on this statement, simply 60

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Zhou Jian (2020), at 376–377. On official land statistics from the Wanli era and the early Qing, see HKTDTFTJ, 14–16. On the compilation of the Ming Shi, see, e.g., Thomas A. Wilson, Confucian Sectarianism and the Compilation of the Ming History, 15 Late Imperial China 53 (1994). Shenzong Benji (Er) (神宗本纪 (二)) [Biography of the Shenzong Emperor, Part Two], Ming Shi, ch. 21.

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criticizing the actions of “evil parties” without explaining what, precisely, those actions were. The latter, however, gives a much clearer conclusion. It first criticizes the Chongzhen Emperor for being impatient and harsh toward his advisors and military commanders, with the effectiveness of driving away virtuous and capable men who might otherwise have been able to aid him. Then, in a sharp turn, the essay takes a more sympathetic tone, and seems to acknowledge that there probably was not much that Chongzhen could have done anyway, given the extreme difficulty of the external circumstances he faced: If we consider that natural disasters had already spread across the country, widespread famine and starvation had gripped the population, the administration was overly complicated and taxes were too heavy, leading to external enemies and internal rebellions . . . this was truly an illness that had already reached the inner organs, and was impossible to cure. What else could one expect except collapse? Therefore, the Ming did collapse because of bandit rebellions, but bandit rebellions were not the true fundamental cause of its collapse. What sorrow! The Zhuanglie (Chongzhen) Emperor was not an emperor who deserved to be blamed for dynastic collapse, but instead had dynastic collapse imposed on him as a matter of fate.63

In other words, while the peasant rebellions were the direct cause of Ming collapse, the Ming History compilers believed their spread was fundamentally due to three other external factors: natural disasters, “administrative complications,” which was their way of describing the internal bureaucratic decay of the Wanli and Tianqi eras, and tax increases. Combined, these factors led to large scale famine, which, coupled with the Manchu threat in the northeast, secured the eventual success of the rebellions. Chongzhen himself, as the History repeatedly emphasized, was a diligent, if flawed, ruler, but his failure to resuscitate the dynasty was effectively overdetermined – and over-taxation was one of the most important reasons why. In fact, if natural disasters were considered an uncontrollable external factor, then the History was accusing the late Ming of, essentially, only two fatal mistakes: internal bureaucratic decay and high taxes. This, then, was as close as the Qing political elite ever came to issuing a collective statement on the causes of the Ming collapse. Even after a century of consolidation and seven decades of stable rule, the idea that the Ming had stepped over a fiscal “red line” after the Wanli era – and that the Qing must never repeat this mistake – continued to loom in the background of intellectual and political discourse. While the early Qing reaction to this idea was simply a conventional reduction and stabilization of the tax quota, by the early Qianlong reign, the Imperial Court’s position had further hardened into a formal ban on land surveying, which would have far deeper consequences for intellectual and political development in the decades to come. 63

Liuzei Liezhuan (流贼列传) [Biographies of Roving Bandits], Ming Shi, ch. 309.

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The Qianlong Court’s decisive return to fiscal conservatism is all the more striking when compared and contrasted against its continuation of Yongzheng’s expansionary approach toward other components of the fiscal apparatus. From the early Yongzheng era to the mid-Qianlong era, annual revenue from nonagricultural taxation increased from around 7 million taels to some 12–13 million, largely in response to increased military campaigning in the northwest.64 The pace of nonagricultural fiscal expansion slowed once those campaigns began to wind down in the 1770s and 1780s, but it was never truly subjected to the kind of ideological crackdown that agricultural taxation immediately underwent after Yongzheng’s death in 1735. As discussed in Chapter 4, this internal institutional divergence makes good sense if we believe that Qing fiscal conservatism was substantively motivated by the perceived negative example of Ming collapse, which warned against overtaxing peasants, but not merchants or craftsmen. In fact, it makes even more sense when we begin to consider the intellectual and political impact of mid-Qing “Malthusian” fiscal thought, which cautioned against taxing agricultural production, but not commerce or manufacturing. To this we now turn.

c. “malthusian” entrenchment This section discusses the institutional and political entrenchment of fiscal conservatism over Qianlong’s 62-year reign, focusing, in particular, on the perception of overpopulation that came to dominate political and intellectual discourse. The term “Malthusian” in the section title is put in quotation marks to emphasize the somewhat “artificial” nature of this discourse: There was, as the previous chapters have repeatedly emphasized, and as most scholars would now agree, no real Malthusian crisis in the Chinese economy, but an enormous swath of the political and intellectual discussion was conducted under the assumption that there was – with powerful institutional consequences. I. “The Population Is Growing Day by Day” The idea that the Qing economy faced an overpopulation problem had gained the Imperial Court’s formal recognition since the last years of the Kangxi era, but truly exploded in prominence and intensity under Qianlong. As noted in Chapter 4, it began to make appearances in imperial edicts around 1712, when Kangxi ordered a permanent freeze of the head tax. During the Yongzheng reign, it appeared periodically in the court’s formal proclamations, but sparingly so. After Qianlong ascended the throne, however, it quickly became one of the most prominent political principles that drove legislation and policymaking, and would remain so for the next century. 64

See discussion Chapter 2, Section B.

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A crude but nonetheless effective way to trace this change is to track the frequency of some core phrases in official court historical records – most importantly in the Shilu. This is by no means a comprehensive, or even systemic way to assess the state of political discourse at court, but when it shows dramatic changes in the frequency of use like it does here, it constitutes reasonably suggestive evidence of general trends. From Kangxi to Yongzheng, and then to Qianlong, Court edicts had a relatively formulaic way of discussing overpopulation: They would usually employ the phrase “shengchi ri fan” (“the population is growing day by day”),65 or some variation of it. This was, as noted before, exactly the phrasing that appeared in Kangxi’s 1712 edict on the head tax. The term “shengchi” (“population”) appears in the Kangxi Shilu 10 times, almost all in edicts. Of these, only six were actually employed to express concern over overpopulation, all of which appeared after 1712. Four of these worried that population growth had driven grain prices sharply higher, and ordered local officials to take corresponding measures to protect regional food supply chains.66 The other two, including the 1712 head tax edict and another in 1716 on frontier settlement, expressed concern over a perceived “Malthusian crisis”: “Although the population has increased, the amount of land available has not.”67 Notably, the 1716 edict explicitly endorsed the idea that arable land in core macroregions had already been exhausted: “Some suggest land reclamation as a solution, but they do not know that there is no more free land in the interior regions.”68 Yongzheng, having adopted a significantly more expansionist fiscal position than his father, seemed to resist the idea that Malthusian decline was inevitable. The phrase “shengchi” appears some 16 times in the Yongzheng Shilu, but only three of these were in a context where the court expressed concern over overpopulation.69 The first, an edict issued in the first year of Yongzheng’s reign, seemed to echo Kangxi in stating that “the country has long been at peace, and the population has grown day by day. The land can barely provide enough food.”70 Unlike Kangxi, however, Yongzheng saw land reclamation in core provinces as a potential solution, and encouraged it across the country, coupled with a promise that reclaimed land would not be taxed for at least six years, and sometimes 10. Although this promise was presented as an incentive, 65

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The first exact appearance of the phrase 生齿日繁 comes in Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 242, Kangxi 49th Year 7th Month Kuiwei, although variations had been used in the previous year. Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 236, Kangxi 48th Year 1st Month Xinsi; Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 240, Kangxi 48th Year 11th Month Gengyin; Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 250 Kangxi 51st Year 4th Month Yihai; Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 272, Kangxi 56th Year 4th Month Dingyou. Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 249, Kangxi 51st Year 2nd Month Renwu; Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 268, Kangxi 55th Year (run) 3rd Month Renwu. Qing Shengzu Shilu, ch. 268, Kangxi 55th Year (run) 3rd Month Renwu. Qing Shizong Shilu, ch. 6, Yongzheng 1st Year 4th Month Yihai; ch. 54, Yongzheng 5th Year 3rd Month Gengyin; ch. 56, Yongzheng 5th Year 4th Month Wuzi. Qing Shizong Shilu, ch. 6, Yongzheng 1st Year 4th Month Yihai.

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it was, in fact, a more fiscally aggressive position than either Kangxi or Qianlong took, both of whom, as previously discussed, effectively gave up on taxing reclaimed land under the theory that it was both socially disruptive and fiscally insignificant. By 1727, following a series of bruising fights at court over his meltage fee reforms, Yongzheng seemed to take a slightly more conciliatory approach toward the Malthusian political mainstream. In an edict encouraging frugality addressed to the general public, he acknowledged that “the population has grown day by day, but in core provinces, the landmass cannot expand.”71 Nonetheless, the edict encouraged the planting of vegetables and fruit on barren land that could not be used for grain production. Two months later, when hosting the national jinshi examinations, Yongzheng issued the following essay question: “The population has increased, but the amount of land available has not. . . . If the state wishes to ensure that all arable land in the country is tilled . . . how should it encourage the people to do so?”72 Clearly, the emperor had yet to completely give up on ways to expand the arable landmass. In fact, as noted above, Yongzheng continued to support land reclamation projects throughout the latter half of his reign, even if he may no longer have hoped that they could make a significant difference for either gross production or state finances. Under Qianlong, overpopulation was mentioned in imperial edicts much more frequently, quickly becoming one of the most prominent themes of his reign. The term “shengchi” appears almost 200 times in the Qianlong Shilu – in around 10 percent of its chapters – and was clearly one of the most frequently employed phrases in political discourse.73 The majority of its mentions are in contexts where overpopulation, either of the general population or specifically of Manchu and Han bannermen, was an explicit concern. Of these, one of the earliest and most important was a 1735 edict, issued within a month of Yongzheng’s death, that served as a sort of summary statement on the economic legacies left behind by his father and grandfather: [Under Kangxi‘s reign] the country had long been at peace. The population had grown day by day . . . but arable land had not expanded. This was why the people’s consumption could not become plentiful, and why their land was so difficult to manage. . . . [Under Yongzheng’s reign] the emperor invested in the irrigation and repair of all arable

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Qing Shizong Shilu, ch. 54, 5th Year, 3rd Month, Gengyin. Qing Shizong Shilu, ch. 56, 5th Year, 4th Month, Wuzi. These are too numerous to list one by one. Many of the more notable examples are discussed in further detail below. For a rough idea of how frequently the term was used, search for it in any of the many online versions of the Qing Gaozong Shilu (清高宗实录) [The Verified Records of the Gaozong Emperor of the Qing]. One of the more stable versions is the one provided by the Zhonghua Diancang (中华典藏) [Chinese Classical Collections] website, www .zhonghuadiancang.com/lishizhuanji/daqinggaozongchunhuangdishilu/.

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land, North and South, and made sure that barren land had been properly reclaimed and sown.74

This seemed to constitute an acknowledgement that, under Yongzheng’s stewardship, the great majority of arable land in the country had been reclaimed – which would imply that there was no longer major economic value to further reclamation. Unlike Yongzheng’s edict in the first year of his reign, Qianlong’s 1735 edict did not call for further reclamation projects, but instead promised to steady the country’s economy and finances by promoting frugality within the imperial household and among the officialdom. In other words, the pie could no longer grow significantly, so the best, and perhaps only, way to enhance the general population’s economic welfare was to reduce the slice consumed by the government. Imperial edicts throughout the Qianlong era repeatedly endorsed the idea of a zero-sum fiscal game between the state and its population – several dozen times in the Shilu alone – and regularly employed it as an argument for fiscal constraint.75 Coupled with the even more frequently stated concerns about overpopulation, this locked fiscal policy discussions among political elites into a firmly Malthusian paradigm, in which they genuinely appeared to believe that the “taxable surplus” in the economy – the portion of total production beyond the population’s basic subsistence needs – was rapidly shrinking due to demographic expansion, and had reached, or was very close to reaching, the point where any additional fiscal extraction could have caused the economy to fall below subsistence. From this perspective, the state faced ever growing pressures to maintain fiscal discipline, avoid tax increases, and, whenever possible, offer tax breaks to the population. Qianlong himself seemed ever more committed to a Malthusian view of the economy as his reign went on: In the early years of his reign, when the institutional inertia of Yongzheng’s policies had yet to completely disappear, his edicts still occasionally made a gesture or two towards land reclamation as a way to alleviate demographic pressures. When they did so, however, they generally expressed a not-so-thinly veiled resignation that reclamation could produce no more than marginal benefits. A 1740 edict, for example, begins with the familiar statement “the population now grows day by day, but arable land has not expanded,” and then moves on to suggest that “in mountainous regions, on mountain summits and valley corners, I hear there is still some land left to be reclaimed. . . . As a source of taxation, this is of minimal value, . . . but it nonetheless can supplement the local food supply. . . . [Local governments] should allow their populations to reclaim such land without registering it as

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Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 3, Yongzheng 13th Year, 9th Month, Renxu E.g., Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 189, Qianlong 8th Year 4th Month Jihai; ch. 242, Qianlong 10th Year 6th Month Dingwei; ch. 320, Qianlong 13th Year (run) 7th Month Dingmao; ch. 900, Qianlong 37th Year 1st Month Xinhai; ch. 1370, Qianlong 56th Year 1st Month Jiashen.

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taxable property.”76 Likewise, a 1746 edict encouraged local populations to reclaim whatever “scattered bits of uncultivated land” they could find, and again promised that it would go unregistered and untaxed.77 To a large extent, Qianlong’s willingness to allow reclaimed land to go untaxed synergized with both the Imperial Court’s deeply rooted fear of “disturbing the people” through land surveying, and with his belief that there simply was not much uncultivated land left in the country. To try to survey and tax reclaimed land would therefore be to pay significant sociopolitical costs for minimal fiscal gain, and was therefore just not worth it. By the 1750s and 1760s, Qianlong seemed to have given up on the idea of land reclamation altogether. When his edicts referenced the overpopulation problem, they largely operated under the assumption that the state would have to look elsewhere for pressure valves – to, for example, migration to Xinjiang, as a 1759 edict suggested,78 or to market integration as a means of moving food from richer regions to poorer ones, an idea he endorsed in a 1768 exchange with the governor of Guangdong and Guangxi.79 Later in his reign, Qianlong no longer spoke of the exhaustion of land as the principal constraint on state fiscal extraction, but rather the exhaustion of wealth in general: “The state has long been at peace,” declared a lengthy edict issued to commemorate Qianlong’s 80th birthday in 1791, “the population grows day by day, the economy can only produce a limited amount of resources, and yet the material needs of the population increase steadily.”80 Interestingly, this particular edict was actually devoted to rebuking a memorial submitted by the Board of Rites official Yin Zhuangtu, which accused Heshen and other senior officials of inciting local unrest through corruption and over-extraction. Qianlong took great offense at Yin’s accusations, charging him with slander, but when it came to the accusation of over-extraction, the edict took a more defensive tone: “If it were true, as Yin Zhuangtu claims, that the population was already on the verge of economic collapse due to government extraction, then why have nearly all regions been peaceful for over a century?” Having said that, however, Qianlong felt compelled, immediately afterward, to make the statement cited in the previous paragraph, which effectively amounted to an acknowledgement that government over-extraction was a major potential concern under Malthusian economic conditions, but had yet to become as severe as Yin claimed. The edict then argued that the Imperial Court had already taken measures to curb overspending and over-taxation: “Our dynasty has always diligently practiced frugality, so as to benefit the people.” In other words, Qianlong’s position was not that Yin had incorrectly 76 77 78 79 80

Qing Gaozong Shilu, Qing Gaozong Shilu, Qing Gaozong Shilu, Qing Gaozong Shilu, Qing Gaozong Shilu,

ch. 123, 5th Year 7th Month Jiawu. ch. 262, 11th Year 4th Month Xinchou. ch. 599, 22nd Year 10th Month Dingyou. ch. 819, 33rd Year 9th Month Jiayin. ch. 1370, 56th Year 1st Month Jiashen.

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identified a nonexistent problem, but rather that the court already understood the problem, and had managed to stay ahead of it through fiscal restraint. This back-and-forth indicates that something close to a consensus existed among late-eighteenth century Qing political elites, from the emperor down, over the existence of a Malthusian crisis. The only disagreement seemed to be over how severe it was, and whether the state was doing enough to address it. In fact, Malthusian overpopulation was an extremely common theme in literati writings during the Qianlong and Jiaqing reigns, developing along similar lines as it did in imperial edicts from Kangxi to Yongzheng, and then to Qianlong – in other words, the political elite’s Malthusian pessimism seemed to grow in intensity over time. For example, in the late Kangxi reign, the Guangxi provincial governor Li Ba still wrote of population growth – “recently, the population has become large” – as something that could be addressed through aggressive land reclamation, and urged the Imperial Court to provide stronger incentives to do so by providing tax breaks.81 By the early Qianlong reign, however, Chen Hongmou, arguably the most famous regional bureaucrat of the Qianlong era, took a more urgent tone in describing the economic situation in Hunan as one that had already reached the point where “the population was growing day by day, and their livelihoods were become impoverished day by day.” Chen was a firm believer in land reclamation, but seemed fairly pessimistic that it could truly solve the problem: “Even if all waterfronts and mountain sides are converted into arable land, I fear it would still be insufficient to feed the rapidly growing population.”82 Nonetheless, he saw no other way out. Many other essays from this period, such as a petition by the Fujianese scholar Guo Qiyuan to provincial authorities, echoed Chen’s observation: “The population grows larger every day, but the land does not expand with it. The changing balance between the population and the land is the reason why people are increasingly impoverished.”83 Twenty years later, Gao Jin, then governor of Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi, gave an even darker portrayal of overpopulation in Anhui: “The population grows day by day, but local grain production can no longer feed it.”84 Believing all local arable land to be exhausted, he proposed converting local cotton farms to grain production. Around 1793, the famed scholar Hong Liangji produced two of the most influential writings on Qing population growth. In a pair of essays titled Zhiping (“good governance”) and Shengji (“livelihoods”), he argued that the country now faced a critical overpopulation problem: “The country has been at 81 82

83

84

Li Ba (李绂) Memorial, HCJSWB, ch. 33. See Chen Hongmou (陈宏谋), Peiyuan Tang Shouzha Jieyao (培远堂手札节要) [Digests of Handwritten Notes of Peiyuan Tang], ch. 2 (1778). Guo Qiyuan (郭起元), Lun Minsheng Wuben Jieyong Shu (论闽省务本节用书), HCJSWB, ch. 36. Gao Jin (高晋) memorial, HCJSWB, ch. 37.

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peace for over a century, which truly is quite long but its population is now 5 times what it was 30 years ago, 10 times what it was 60 years ago, and actually 20 times what it was a century ago.”85 He acknowledged that arable land had also grown in volume since the early Qing, but insisted it had grown at a much lower rate: “Some would say that, two or three generations ago, there was still much uncultivated land left . . . but even so, arable land has only doubled, or in some places tripled or quintupled, . . . but the population has grown by ten times or twenty times.”86 In any case, he believed that arable land had been exhausted and, looking forward, the country faced a situation in which “the population becomes 10 times larger, but the arable landmass remains the same, while there are ten times as many merchants in the economy, but the total volume of goods remains the same.” This was obviously a recipe for socioeconomic collapse, but what could the government do about it? Hong suggested several measures: large-scale migration to frontier regions, boosting productivity in core regions, reducing wealth and landholding disparity, and, of course, “reducing taxes wherever they become too heavy,” which they inevitably would under Malthusian conditions.87 These essays powerfully expressed the demographic anxiety that gripped multiple generations of Qing elites from the later eighteenth century to, as we will see in the next chapter, the late nineteenth. Hong has sometimes been called “China’s Malthus,”88 a rather ironic title given that his essays actually preceded Malthus’ Principle of Population by several years,89 but as should be quite apparent by now, he merely gave more definite expression to an elite intellectual and political consensus that had already been building since the early eighteenth century. By the end of Qianlong’s reign, when Hong wrote his famous essays, it had acquired near-dogmatic status, both at court and within the broader community of scholars and officials.

II. Creating a Durable Myth The reasons behind the ascendancy of this Malthusian consensus are multiple and complex. Like all prevailing myths, it had some foundation in reality: 85

86 88

89

Hong Liangji (洪亮吉), Juanshi Ge Jia Ji (卷施阁甲集) [The First Collection of Writings from Juanshige], ch. 1, Sec. 6, 7 (both essays are in this chapter) (Zhonghua Shuju Press 1994). 87 Id. Id. Examples abound. See, e.g., Fu Xueliang (傅学良), Hong Liangji de Renkou Sixiang Shuping (洪 亮吉的人口思想述评) [A Review of Hong Liangji’s Thought on Population], 2005(5) Donghua Daxue Xuebao (东华大学学报) [Journal of Donghua University (Social Science)] 24; Chen Yinghong (陈英鸿), Hong Liangji yu Maersasi Renkou Lun zhi Bijiao (洪亮吉与马尔萨斯 人口论之比较) [A Comparison of Hong Liangji and Malthusian Theory of Population], 1991(2) Anqing Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao (安庆师范学院学报) [Journal of Anqing Normal University] 22. A short survey of Hong and other mid-Qing “Malthusian” thinkers can be found in Zanasi (2020), at 113–137. Fu Xueliang (2005).

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Demographic pressures did indeed escalate over the course of the eighteenth century – the population-to-land ratio in 1800 was, according to most modern estimates, over 75 percent higher than it was in 1700 – and so the basic impression of increasing land scarcity was undoubtedly correct. Even so, however, the other parts of the consensus are much more difficult to reconcile with scholarly estimates: Land reclamation continued to be a significant economic force throughout the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, which meant that the total arable landmass was hardly stagnant.90 More importantly, land productivity significantly increased during this period, preventing per capita production from falling too severely: Between 1740 and 1800, it declined only by around 15 percent even according to the more pessimistic modern estimates, whereas other estimates suggest it essentially flatlined.91 Even if we accept the former estimate, living standards were further protected by the importing of new food crops that provided higher calories per unit of production. In other words, there was indeed Malthusian decline, but it was much, much gentler than what Qing political elites seemed to believe, stopping well short of threatening subsistence. As a recent survey of the academic literature observes: “Massive population growth with stable long-run living standards is the defining feature of the Ming–Qing economy. Output kept pace with population: despite fluctuations and regional variation, we see no downward trend in per capita consumption.”92 The question, then, is why Qing political elites though otherwise – zealously so, in fact. In nearly all the examples cited above, the conclusion of rising impoverishment was not a direct empirical observation, but was instead a deduction based on two assumptions: rapid population growth and stagnant economic production. The first was largely accurate, and the government was able to produce formal census figures to back it up. Following the freezing and eventual functional elimination of the head tax, Qing elites no longer thought of demographic surveying as something that was sociopolitically risky, and, by the mid-eighteenth century, managed to update official population statistics with some regularity and accuracy. Table 5.193 summarizes the official population figures produced through this process. Note that the seventeenth and eighteenth century figures only report tax-liable male laborers, and were therefore the product of severe underreporting due to a combination of local efforts at tax evasion and a lack of central 90

91 92

93

See, e.g., Lijun Mao et al. (2016); Xiaobin Jin et al. (2015); Vaclav Smil, China’s Agricultural Land, 158 China Q. 414 (1999). Broadberry, Guan, & Li (2018), at 995; Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 50–54. Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014), at 54. See also, Richard Von Glahn, Economic Depression and the Silver Question in Nineteenth-Century China, in Global History and New Polycentric Approaches, 81–118 (Manuel Perez Garcia and Lucio De Sousa eds., 2018) (“[T]he evidence does not suggest that China had reached the point of a Malthusian demographic crisis [prior to the Taiping Rebellion]”). Data draw from Chen (2006b), at 45.

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table 5.1. Official population statistics Year

Reported Population

Source

1685 1721 1753 1766 1812

2,0341,738 25,616,200/27,355,462 183,678,259 208,095,796 333,700,560

Donghua Lu: Kangxi Donghua Lu: Kangxi/Qing Tongdian Donghua Xulu: Qianlong Donghua Xulu: Qianlong Qing Renzong Shilu

political will to raise the head tax.94 These reporting problems swiftly receded after the head tax’s Yongzheng era merger into the land tax. Moreover, from the early Qianlong era onward, the government began collecting more comprehensive demographic data, covering all members of the household, resulting in a mirage of unbelievably explosive population growth from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth. Most Qing policymakers probably knew that comparing the two sets of figures was therefore like comparing apples to oranges, but some may have taken them, or at least found it convenient to use them, at face value. Qianlong, for example, issued at least a few remarks to this effect, stating late in his reign that “the population is now fifteen times what it was during the Kangxi reign.”95 In any case, given that the more comprehensive Qianlong era figures continued to report rapid ongoing population growth, these figures gave very few political elites a reason to dissent from the conventional wisdom that, since the early-eighteenth century, the population had indeed grown enormously – perhaps not by as much as 15 times, but enormously nonetheless – and was continuing to expand at a brisk pace: In contrast, land surveying was, as discussed above, effectively eliminated as an administrative tool from 1740 onward due to concerns over “disturbing the people.” From that point, Qing elites no longer had access to any remotely accurate macroeconomic statistics: The sheer scale of these statistics placed them far beyond the reach of private estimation capacities, while the state simply refused to update its figures. This is not to simplistically argue that Qing elites somehow blindly believed in the accuracy of official statistics, and therefore believed the economy had ceased to grow simply because the statistics no longer changed. As the Hong Liangji example shows, Qing scholars were perfectly willing, in their private writings, to make claims that went quite a bit beyond what official demographic statistics could show – official statistics, if taken at face value, showed 94

95

See Jiang Tao (姜涛), Qingdao Renkou Tongji Zhidu yu 1741–1851 Nianjian de Zhongguo Renkou (清代人口统计制度与1741–1851年间的中国人口) [The Qing Dynasty Demographic System and the Population of China during 1741–1851], 1990(5) Jindai Shi Yanjiu (近代史 研究) [modern chinese history studies] 26, for detailed discussion. Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 1441, Qianlong 58th Year 11th Month Wuwu.

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population growth of around 1400 percent from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, whereas Hong believed the real number to be around 1900 percent – and there is no reason to believe their intellectual deference to official land statistics was any greater. The argument is instead one that combines intellectual inertia, ideological bias, and the natural informational monopolies that governments, modern and premodern alike, enjoy in large societies. As noted above, even before the formal freeze of land surveying, political elites, including both the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors, had already shown considerable skepticism that there was much land left to reclaim in core economic regions. In fact, it seems perfectly possible that this belief in land exhaustion may have been one of the auxiliary reasons for the 1740 ban: The most visible complaints about “disturbing the people” spoke to the perceived costs of land surveying, but perhaps such complaints could potentially have been overcome if the perceived benefits of doing so were large enough. However, the growing consensus that arable land was close to being maxed out effectively eliminated this possibility, at least as a matter of politics. There was, therefore, a deep political synergy between the rejection of land surveying and the belief in land exhaustion, far more complex than simple unidirectional causality. The two mutually reinforced in powerful ways, and to take on one meant to also take on the other: One could not plausibly argue in favor of land surveying without also arguing that there was more land to be reclaimed and surveyed, or vice versa. Despite this political entanglement, it is nonetheless logically correct to speak of the land survey ban as a major reason for the political entrenchment of the Malthusian consensus in the Qianlong reign – for the very simple reason that updated land reclamation and production figures96 almost certainly could have proven the consensus wrong, or at least greatly exaggerated. At the very least, it could have revealed just how much potentially arable land there still was in the country, which, just on its own, could have changed the entire political posture of the court, perhaps even back to where it was in the early Yongzheng era. To roughly understand how much intellectual and political difference updated statistics could have made, consider the following estimates. Modern scholars generally believe that a considerable number of tenant households in the early to mid nineteenth century had to submit about half their annual production to landlords.97 They could survive under such an arrangement,

96

97

Note that land surveying was never just a matter of measuring arable land mass: To equitably distribute the tax burden, the state also needed to measure the quality of land – “excellent, medium, and poor,” for example – which meant it also needed to measure, if somewhat more crudely, land productivity. This meant that serious surveying could probably have captured at least some of the large productivity gains that occurred in the later eighteenth century. E.g., Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368–1968, at 312 (1969).

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but just barely. This implies, taking tax burdens and other coerced expenses into account, that the basic “subsistence line” for lower-income household members was slightly less than half the per capita production around 1850, perhaps around 45 percent of it. If we accept the more pessimistic modern estimates, which show a “weak Malthusian” decline in food production of roughly 20 percent from 1750 to 1850, then the per capita “subsistence line” would amount to just over one-third of production in 1750.98 Still using these estimates, which show a roughly 25 increase in total food production from 1750 to 1800, coupled with a 50 percent population increase, the total “taxable surplus” from agriculture – that is, total food production minus the gross “subsistence line” – would actually have increased by around 14 percent over the same period, quite enough to sustain the kind of rational tax increase that Yongzheng envisioned. In fact, under these estimates, even if the agricultural tax quota had increased by 50 percent over this period, keeping up with demographic instead of economic growth, that still would have left the general population with a roughly 12 percent gross increase in its post-subsistence disposable income, and would barely have made any dent in per capita income. If we employ more optimistic modern estimates, which argue for no significant decrease in per capita consumption during the mid-Qing,99 then the increase in “taxable surplus” would have largely kept pace with population growth, growing some 50 percent during Qianlong’s reign. If, however, we accept, as most Qing political elites seemed to do, the “strong” Malthusian assumption that the population was growing while total production remained effectively unchanged, then the “taxable surplus” would have declined severely from 1740 to 1800, creating a strong political case for tax reductions – or, barring that, at least for rejecting any tax increases. In particular, if you believed, as many Qing elites did, that the population was already “deeply impoverished” in the Kangxi era, then you probably believed, as Hong Liangji explicitly argues, it was sitting on the brink of mass starvation at best in 1800. Surely there could be no viable argument for further fiscal expansion under such conditions. The point here is not to somehow “prove” that, had the Qing state made a serious effort to survey its agrarian economy, it would have avoided the deepening fiscal conservatism of the Qianlong reign, and continued on the path toward fiscal rationalism that Yongzheng had tried, however incompletely, to set it on. A counterfactual of such magnitude is impossible to argue for, even for the most theoretically oriented historians. Instead, the goal is simply to show how even a relatively moderate change in empirical perception – of the three statistical scenarios laid out in the previous two paragraphs, the first and third both recognize Malthusian decline, and the difference in magnitude is merely around 20 percent – could potentially have produced qualitatively different 98

Boardberry, Guan, & Li (2018), at 995.

99

Brandt, Ma, & Rawski, at 50–54.

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political assessments and institutional postures. A simple recognition that arable land still had room to grow, even by as little as 20 percent, and that land productivity was still trending upward could, assuming elites responded rationally to this information, have produced fundamental changes in their assessment of the state’s fiscal position. For this reason alone, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the land survey ban was one of the most important forces that helped entrench fiscal conservatism during the Qianlong era. One could ask, of course, why private estimates did not rise up to challenge the increasingly faulty official statistics: As a general matter, why didn’t local officials draw upon their own experience and knowledge to refute the assumption of Malthusian stagnation? While it is always difficult to provide a thorough explanation for why something did not happen, there are some obvious and fairly powerful answers available in this context. First and foremost, macro-level economic estimates were well beyond the capacity of private information collection.100 This is not only true of the Qing, but also of nearly every large country in the early modern era, and frankly in the modern era as well. The ground-level information collection that was needed for such estimates required enormous amounts of labor, financing, and administrative coordination, none of which private actors were able to provide at the national level, or even at the provincial level. In fact, the government itself had enough difficulty marshalling these resources even before 1740, and private actors faced far higher hurdles due to their lack of coercive authority. High quality local level estimates may have been possible in some cases, but needless to say, the intellectual and political gap between a local estimate that may have shown some economic growth and an argument for abandoning Malthusian assumptions at the national policymaking level were simply colossal. All these logistical problems were further aggravated by the fact that, for the most part, local communities were by no means eager to share their economic information with the state.101 This book tries very hard to argue that they likely 100

101

Within the Qing context, it seems more than likely that serious private efforts to gather macrolevel economic data, had they been remotely financially plausible, would likely have met with strong hostility from the state under the same kind of “disturbing the people” rationale that had doomed local government land surveying. In fact, the tendency of local communities to underreport their landholdings has been one of the primary obstacles for modern attempts to accurately reconstruct arable land acreage. See Cao Xue, Jin Xiaobin & Zhou Yinkang (曹雪, 金晓斌, 周寅康), Qingdai Gengdi Shuju Huifu Chongjian Fangfa yu Shizheng Yanjiu (清代耕地数据恢复重建方法与实证研究) [Research on Cropland Data Recovery and Reconstruction in the Qing Dynasty: Method and Case Study], 68; Dili Xuebao (地理学报) [Acta Geographica Sinica], 245 (2013); Shi Zhihong (史志宏), Qingdai Qianqi de Gengdimianji ji Chanliang Guji (清代前期的耕地面积及粮食产量估计) [Estimates of Arable Land and Grain Production in the Early Qing Dynasty], 1989(2) Zhongguo Jingjishi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History] 47; Zhang Youyi (章有义), Jindai Zhongguo Renkou he Gengdi de Zaiguji (近代 中国人口和耕地的再估计) [Re-estimation of Population and Arable Land in Modern China], 1991(1) Zhongguo Jingjishi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese

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would have tolerated state-driven land surveying, and even actual tax hikes, but that hardly means they were enthusiastic about doing so. Political elites were undoubtedly correct that land surveying would have aroused local suspicions and even anxiety about an ensuing tax hike. The argument here is rather that they underestimated the political feasibility of the tax hike itself. That said, even if local communities could have sustained higher taxes, there can be no doubt they still would have preferred lower taxes. What this implies, however, is that private efforts to collect local economic information for political use would very likely have encountered significant social resistance – that successful economic surveying probably would have required the coercive authority of the state, which the state itself was adamantly against supplying. Moreover, even if some private party managed to produce reliable largerscale estimates, it would have faced a steep uphill climb to gain enough recognition and agreement to play an even marginally significant role in high level political debates. Mere objective accuracy does not, on its own, convey political stature and authority, no matter how much scholars might hope it does. Instead, those qualities usually need to be manufactured through institutions and procedures that are themselves perceived as authoritative: certification by a board of respected experts, for example, or confirmation by a neutral and professional governmental agency that enjoyed wide sociopolitical trust. Qing information politics were no exception to this. The mid-Qing intellectual landscape was, as scholars have long observed, deeply fractured along both philosophical and pragmatic lines,102 but if there was a major policy issue in the later eighteenth century upon which most elites seemed to agree, it was fiscal conservatism. In other words, any private estimate purporting to refute the mainstream belief in severe Malthusian overpopulation would almost certainly have encountered enormous skepticism and hostility. It is one thing to persuade

102

Economic History] 20; Jiang Taixin (江太新), Guanyu Qingdai Qianqi Gengdi Mianji zhi Wojian (关于清代前期耕地面积之我见) [My Opinion on the Area of Cultivated Land in the Early Qing Dynasty], 1995(1) Zhongguo Jingjishi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History] 47. E.g., Liang Qichao (梁啟超), Zhongguo Jin Sanbainian Xueshushi (中國近三百年學術 史) [A History of Chinese Scholarship in the Last Three Centuries] (Renmin Press ed. 2008); Huang Aiping (黃愛平); “Hanxue Shicheng Ji” yu “Hanxue Shangdui”: Jianlun Qingdai Zhongye de Hansong Zhi Zheng (《漢學師承記》與《漢學商兌》─兼論清代中葉的漢宋之 爭) [‘Hanxue Shicheng Ji’ and ‘Hanxue Shangdui’: A Discussion of the Han-Song Controversy in the Mid-Qing Dynasty], 1996(14) Zhongguo Wenhua Yanjiu (中國文化研 究) [Chinese Cultural Studies] 44; Bao Hongchang (暴鴻昌), Qingdai Hanxue yu Songxue Guanxi Bianxi (清代漢學與宋學關係辨析) [An Analysis of the Relationship between Han Studies and Song Studies in the Qing Dynasty], 1997(2) Shixue Jikan (史學集刊) [Collected Papers on History Studies] 64; Zhang Xun (張循), Qingdai Han-Song Xue Guanxi Yanjiuzhong Ruogan Wenti de Fansi (清代 漢、宋學關係研究中若干問題的反思) [A Reflection on Some Issues in the Study of the Relationship between Han and Song Studies in the Qing Dynasty], 2007(4) Sichuan Daxue Xuebao, Shehui Kexueban (四川大學學報, 哲學社 會科學版 [Journal of Sichuan University, Philosophy and Social Science] 43.

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political elites of an empirical argument under neutral circumstances, which already would have been very difficult in this context for reasons explained in the previous paragraph, but quite another to attempt such a feat when most elites were already committed to the opposite position. Official government economic statistics showing room for fiscal expansion may have carried enough perceived stature to overcome such skepticism, but private claims based on anecdotal local experiences almost certainly did not. To make things even worse, the risks of attacking conventional fiscal wisdom were not merely social or reputational, but in many cases overtly political: By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the hostility against tax hikes in the Imperial Court that anyone who proposed anything resembling it was often subject to formal demotion, and not just the kind of harshly worded rebuke that, say, Lu Zhuo received in 1736. Using private statistics to argue against the Malthusian consensus carried, in such an environment, real and serious risks for one’s political career and livelihood. Coupled with the logistical, intellectual, and social difficulties of making such an argument in the first place, it is small wonder that, as far as existing sources can show, virtually no one did until the final years of the dynasty. At a more general level, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7, early modern and modern states alike tend to possess natural monopolies over the production of much politically authoritative information, both by virtue of their resource advantages, and because of the legitimating power the state holds over that information. Later generations of scholars sometimes overlook these monopolies, both because they sometimes have access to local information the contemporary elites would have had a hard time procuring – this is true, for example, of Qing local land data – but also because they themselves are no longer subject to the historical state’s legitimating authority. To begin to understand how significant such authority can be, simply consider how difficult it is, in the modern societies we now live in, to socially and politically dislodge government-issued information that nearly all informed experts agree is inaccurate: For example, few scholars believe that current official Chinese GDP figures are accurate, and yet they nonetheless are cited and relied upon far, far more frequently than any competing estimate.103 But more on this later.

III. Institutional Consequences Returning to the later eighteenth century, the institutional consequences of Malthusian entrenchment are abundantly clear wherever one looks in the mid-Qing fiscal landscape. Like its Song and Ming predecessors, the Qing state

103

On problems with Chinese GDP figures, see, e.g., Jeremy L. Wallace, Juking the Stats? Authoritarian Information Problems in China, 46 British J. Pol. Sci. 11 (2016).

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regularly granted tax waivers to natural disaster-stricken regions.104 Under Kangxi, this practice expanded to include periodic tax waivers granted even to regions that had not experienced a serious natural disaster. Most notably, in 1710, Kangxi set a precedent for granting national tax waivers, which not only waived a large portion of the current year’s quota, but also forgave arrears accumulated over the previous years. This was, of course, a dramatic measure that could only be employed rather sparingly, and Kangxi only made use of it this one time, whereas Yongzheng never did. Qianlong, however, granted national tax waivers a total of four times during his reign, in 1745, 1770, 1778, and 1790, and then again in the first year of the Jiaqing reign (1796), when he was still the de facto ruler.105 He did this even though the state’s fiscal reserves were no more abundant in the latter half of his reign than they were in the late Kangxi years – which suggests that the driving rationale for the waivers was not fiscal abundancy, but rather an increasingly dire perceived need to reduce the population’s tax burden. Needless to say, in this kind of environment, no further effort was made to expand the silver portion of the agricultural tax quota in any way, including both the land and head tax and the new meltage surcharges added on by Yongzheng. The grain tribute fluctuated in response to military spending, occasionally rising to peak Shunzhi and Kangxi levels during major campaigns, but then falling back to about half that in regular years.106 In the meantime, the population and the economy, as discussed above, grew rapidly, as did the administrative demands they placed on the state. As a result, by around 1800, the state’s fiscal and administrative capacity had again fallen behind the basic local governance functions it needed to supply, perhaps even more severely than in the late Kangxi era, which meant that local officials once again had to resort to informal taxation just to round up enough resources to run county yamen day-to-day. The magnitude of these surcharges was, as discussed in Chapter 1, broadly comparable to what they had been in the early eighteenth century, roughly reaching 100 percent of formal quotas, with large regional variations. The Qing tax state had, in this sense, come full circle over the course of the eighteenth century, ending in a similar position to how it began. In between, however, it had experimented with and then decisively rejected a somewhat tentative reformist agenda, which meant that fiscal conservatism was, in a political and intellectual sense, much more deeply entrenched in 1800 than it had been in 1712. In fact, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the political stigma against agricultural tax hikes had become so strong officials seemed to simply assume that any policy proposal for such a move would be 104

105

See Chen Feng (陈锋), Qingdai ‘Kangqian Shensghi’ Shiqi de Tianfu Juanmian (清代“康乾盛 世”时期的田赋蠲免) [Land Tax Waivers during the “Kang-Qian period” of the Qing Dynasty], 2008(4) Zhongguoshi Yanjiu (中国史研究) [J. Chinese Hist. Stud.] 131. 106 Id. See discussion in Chapter 1, Section B.

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automatically rejected, sometimes with the Imperial Court’s formal censure. In other words, “not raising agricultural taxes” had gone from a political preference to something approaching an institutional norm. As a result, officials who proposed any substantial reform to agricultural fiscal institutions were placed under enormous political and psychological pressure to demonstrate that their proposals would not increase the tax burden of the affected population, however mildly. One particularly powerful demonstration of these political dynamics is the salt tax-land tax merger experiments that were conducted in Central China from 1791 to 1806.107 As discussed in Chapter 2, criticism of the traditional salt production and taxation system had ramped up over the course of the Qianlong reign due to its increasingly apparent inefficiencies: especially in the Hedong macroregion, which covered large parts of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan, the domination of local markets by state-sanctioned merchants, who openly colluded with local officials, had become so severe that they were able to charge monopoly prices that were high enough to shift most of the tax burden they incurred back onto private consumers.108 This naturally triggered an economic backlash in the form of widespread illegal private salt production, leading to serious tensions and occasional conflict with their state-sanctioned counterparts, while also generating a sharp increase in salt tax arrears. It was against this background of systemic dysfunction that, in 1791, the Shanxi provincial officials Feng Guangxiong and Jiang Zhaokui proposed eliminating the grant system in Hedong altogether. Under their proposal, which quickly won support from Agui and other senior officials in Beijing, the state would allow any private merchant who had the resources to produce, ship, and sell salt, without collecting any fees from them. The lost revenue would be recouped through an addition to the local land tax, equal to the previous salt tax quota, and distributed equally per capita. This would effectively shift the salt tax from producers to consumers, which greatly simplified the collection process, while also providing a major boost to market competition. Feng immediately recognized that the weak link in this proposal was the increase it would impose on the local land tax. The size of the increase was small – only about 9 percent of the land tax quota – but it was an increase nonetheless, and threatened to summarily torpedo the proposal’s political prospects. As Feng notes in his memorial, previous proposals of this sort had all been rejected for two reasons: (1) There were some concerns over whether private salt production could meet the consumption needs of the local economy, but more importantly, (2) court officials had automatically rejected any

107

108

For a general narrative of this episode, see Zengxiu Hedong Yanfa Beilan (1882); Wang Qingyun (1983); Ni Yuping (2006), at 40–46. See discussion in Chapter 1, Section B.

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measure that “came close to increasing taxes” (“jin yu jiafu”).109 Feng readily accepted this basic political bottom line, but argued that there would, in fact, be no additional financial burden imposed on the local consumer population: Their moderate increase in land tax payments would be more than offset by reductions to salt prices. The core of his memorial consisted of a series of calculations, based on local price surveying, demonstrating that the current tax system was directly responsible for relatively recent price increases that, in gross volume, had already exceeded the region’s entire salt tax quota. Armed with these calculations, Feng argued that his proposal would result in a sharp increase in local salt production, which would then generate gross price reductions equal to or greater than the increase in land taxes. Effectively, the proposal’s political viability hinged on the latter prediction, which Feng fully recognized: “[This measure] would benefit the people, rather than burden them, and it would reduce prices, rather than increase taxes – this is the reason why it should be implemented.”110 Angered by evidence showing large-scale collusion and corruption between local bureaucrats and salt merchants, Qianlong overruled a significant amount of opposition at court to allow Feng’s proposal to move forward. Within a few months, Feng’s predictions had largely been proven right: Local salt production jumped, prices fell rapidly, and there was no sign of significant local unhappiness with the new policies.111 Despite these apparent successes, many at court continued to express discomfort at the possibility that at least some lowerincome households would be paying more in taxes than they were saving in salt expenditures, or were gaining through shipping and selling salt.112 In addition, although the merging of the salt and land taxes allowed the salt tax to be collected at significantly less administrative cost, it added layers of administrative complexity that gave rise to new forms of fiscal corruption. Over the next decade, as local complaints about both inequity and corruption began to accumulate, opposition to the regional experiment gradually reached a breaking point.113 Somewhat ironically, the final straw came in the form of complaints, beginning in 1802, that rapidly increasing Hedong salt production had spilled over into other macroregions, especially into North Jiangsu and Anhui, and had begun to threaten the financial viability of state-backed salt merchants in those regions.114 In other words, the merger had become too successful at boosting 109

110 112

113

114

Feng Guangxiong (冯光熊) Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0030-039, Qianlong 56th Year 8th Month 23rd Day. 111 Id. See Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 1403, Qianlong 57th Year (run) 4th Month Jichou. See, e.g., the memorials on this topic collected in Hedong Yanfa Beilan (河东盐法备览) [Collected Documents on Salt Policy in Hedong], ch. 11 (Jiang Zhaokui (蒋兆奎) ed., Zhonggui Shehui Press 2012); Zengxiu Hedong Yanfa Beilan (1882), ch. 5. Qing Renzong Shilu (清仁宗实录) [The Verified Records of Qing Renzong], ch. 93, Jiaqing 7th Year 1st Month Xinmao. E.g., Ma Huiyu (马慧裕) Memorial, in Zengxiu Hedong Yanfa Beilan, ch. 5.

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production and lowering prices. At the same time, the deregulated nature of the Hedong salt market meant that Mongolian salt was now being shipped into the region in large amounts, creating unwanted competition for local production. By 1806, the Imperial Court decided that the experiment had gone on long enough, and restored the old state-controlled system. When the Qing state again took up the salt tax problem in the 1830s, it steered clear of the land tax entirely, instead of imposing a sort of open-market production and shipping license that would later become one of the precedents for the lijin reforms. For our present purposes, the most notable thing about this relatively short-lived regional experiment was that, to get it off the ground, its proponents felt compelled to demonstrate its financial neutrality for local households – and that political support for the measure began to unravel as soon as complaints were made that some poorer households had incurred an increase in their overall expenditures. Institutional tinkering with the land tax was still allowed in the late Qianlong era, but political norms now seemed to demand that it be done under the condition that the state imposed no additional financial burden on any significant segment of the agricultural population. In other words, within the boundaries of state control, rural household fixed expenditures could only go down, and never up. With this fullblown institutionalization of fiscal “quotaism,” whatever hope for fiscal rationalization there had once existed in the Yongzheng era had completely evaporated. Looking back at the political rise of Malthusian fiscal thought in the eighteenth century, it is easy to understand how it continued to sustain, and even strengthen, the institutional divergence between agricultural and nonagricultural taxation discussed in previous sections and chapters: Qing Malthusian thought, like its Western European counterparts, focused on the increasing scarcity of arable land and, by extension, food production. It was therefore a fundamentally agricultural theory of socioeconomic decline, and had relatively little to say about commerce or manufacturing. These ideas fit very naturally within the political worldview of Qing literati, who were already accustomed to combining rigid conservatism on agricultural taxation with flexible expansionism on non-agricultural taxation. In fact, it seems more than likely that Malthusian ideas were able to rapidly gain intellectual and political prominence in the Kangxi and Yongzheng eras precisely because they dovetailed so neatly with the ideological priors of political and intellectual elites. In any case, the rise of Malthusianism and its entrenchment through the 1740 land survey ban almost certainly had the additional effect of deepening the divergence between agricultural and non-agricultural taxation: The former continued to be subject to institutional lockdown, whereas the latter showed strong signs of reformist energy even during the political miasma of the early nineteenth century.

d. into the nineteenth century The first half of the nineteenth century is often spoken of as a time of institutional stagnation and decay. A recent literature has arisen to combat this

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perspective, arguing, often very persuasively, that the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition created a burst of political and institutional energy that put Qing governance on a more sustainable trajectory. Some of these developments are discussed in greater detail below. Nonetheless, within the narrower confines of fiscal history, the general impression of institutional stagnation is hard to avoid: The fiscal system, especially its agricultural components, remained institutionally untouched throughout the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns, including the total quotas. Tax collection continued to be a serious problem, and arrears accumulated in many parts of the country, as did reports of corruption and the full-scale return of informal surcharges. Unlike Yongzheng, however, the Jiaqing Emperor refused to take any drastic state action against either problem.115 Shortly after Qianlong’s death in 1799, Jiaqing received a number of memorials urging a systemic auditing of local government finances, largely in the Yongzheng model, followed by severe punishment against those who could not quickly make up for past arrears. Ignoring these proposals, the new emperor instead chose a much more moderate path, ordering local governments to make up for past arrears “in a slow and measured manner” by tapping into both their formal meltage fee income and their “informal surcharges” (lougui).116 This was coupled with a conventional reminder that “eliminating informal surcharges would be a benevolent policy,” but no substantive threat was issued against either those who continued to collect informal surcharges, or against those who failed to swiftly reduce arrears.117 Instead, the message was, essentially, “just do what you can.” Compared with his apparent patience on recovering arrears, the more important principle that Jiaqing emphasized was simply that, no matter what, “the people must not be exploited.”118 Small wonder, then, that the more notable fiscal episodes of the Jiaqing and Daoguang eras almost always ended in some sort of conservative entrenchment. Most notably, the automatic rejection of any proposal that would raise any portion of the agricultural tax became effectively normalized – institutionalized, even – during the Jiaqing era: a long chain of edicts, as early as 1799, when Jiaqing became the de facto ruler upon Qianlong’s death, and extending into the 1810s, emphasized that “[the Emperor], out of benevolence and love for his people, wishes to let the people rest, and will not allow any discussion of

115

116

117 118

See discussion, at Liu Fengyun (2013); Zhu Chengru & Zhang Li (朱诚如 & 张力), Jiaqingchao Zhengdun Qianliang Kuikong Lunshu (嘉庆朝整顿钱粮亏空述论) [On Rectifying the Deficit of Money and Grain in Jiaqing Dynasty], in 2 Ming Qing Luncong (明清论丛) [A Collection of Essays on the Ming and Qing Dynasties], 117 (Zhu Chengru & Wang Tianyou eds., 2001). Qing Renzong Shilu, ch. 41, Jiaqing 4th Year 3rd Month Wuzi; ch. 46, Jiaqing 4th Year 6th Month Jihai. Qing Renzong Shilu, ch. 41, Jiaqing 4th Year 3rd Month Wuzi. Qing Renzong Shilu, ch. 57, Jiaqing 5th Year 1st Month Renxu.

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increasing taxes.”119 While this proclamation might seem somewhat redundant, given the many fiscally conservative precedents set in the Qianlong era, there were, in fact, still a few loopholes left to be plugged: Although the silver portion of the agricultural tax – that is, the land and head tax, plus meltage fees – had indeed already been set to a fixed volume, the grain tribute, still allowed for some year-on-year adjustments. In particular, the cost of collecting and shipping grain had increased steadily since the early eighteenth century due to infrastructural decay along the Grand Canal and other major waterways. This led, in the late Qianlong era, to the formal authorization of shipment fees in parts of Henan, which added 6–7 percent to the region’s formal grain quota.120 Early Jiaqing officials could therefore reasonably believe that moderate adjustments to the grain tribute were not yet fully off limits. Acting on this belief, Jiang Zhaokui, by this point the official overseer of the entire grain tribute system, proposed in 1799 to boost official revenue enough to cover escalating administrative and shipping costs, largely along the same institutional lines that Yongzheng’s meltage fee reforms had once employed: His proposal would formalize a portion of the informal surcharges that local bureaucrats conventionally added onto the grain tribute – equal to, depending on the specific proposal, 10–20 percent of the formal quota – while attempting to reduce, or at least freeze, the remainder.121 The Imperial Court’s rebuke came quickly. Jiaqing summarily rejected Jiang’s argument that formalizing informal surcharges did not amount to a tax increase. Echoing early Qianlong era criticisms of Yongzheng’s meltage fee reforms, the Emperor accused Jiang’s proposal of “simply giving corrupt local officials another excuse to extract more. Nominally, it would only formalize a 10 percent increase to the formal quota, but I fear that informal surcharges cannot be eliminated, and therefore that the real increase will be far greater.” The proposal was therefore “no different from a formal tax hike (jiafu), and must definitely be rejected.”122 Within a few months of this episode, Jiang was formally investigated, removed from his post and forced into a disgraced retirement.123 Despite this obvious warning, grain tribute administrators now faced such a dire situation on the ground that they continued to propose ways to boost formal revenue, at least enough to pay for necessary infrastructure repairs. Nonetheless, Jiaqing and his senior advisors refused to budge. An 1804 edict

119 120

121

122 123

FNHA, Shang Yu Dang (上谕档), Jiaqing 17th Year 8th Month 12th Day. See Bi Ruan (毕沅) Memorial, FNHA 04-01-05-0067-018, Qianlong 51st Year 3rd Month 15th Day. E.g., Jiang Zhaokui (蒋兆奎) Memorial, FNHA 03-1743-011, Jiaqing 4th Year 8th Month 15th Day. FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Jiaqing 4th Year 8th Month 28th Day. FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Jiaqing 4th Year 11th Month 23rd Day.

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reiterated the Imperial Court’s position that “increasing taxes sicken the people, and must never be allowed.”124 By 1806, Jiaqing felt compelled to clarify that even temporary increases to grain collection, which had occurred periodically throughout the eighteenth century, were now off limits, however minor the amount: “In the past, the Court had allowed some increases under the assumption that they were temporary, but even that was already a move of desperation. . . . I see that these increases, once authorized, are now collected every year. . . . How is this different from a formal tax increase, and how can it not sicken the people?”125 To drive his disapproval home, Jiaqing referred the responsible officials to their respective superiors for censure and demotion. A few years later, in a more softly toned edict, he did acknowledge the need for infrastructure repairs and called on relevant officials to propose funding strategies, but nonetheless insisted that “tax increases are evil policies that sicken the people, and cannot be considered. . . . Apart from those evil policies, you may suggest any measure that might help the state meet its fiscal needs.”126 Lest anyone wonder whether these positions merely reflected Jiaqing’s own inclinations, they continued to be politically dogmatic well after his death in 1820. His successor, the Daoguang Emperor, actually seemed to harbor some reformist aspirations upon his ascension to the throne: When two senior officials, Sun Yuting and Cheng Ling, proposed a 25 percent increase to the grain tribute a few months after Jiaqing’s death127 – clearly, they were hoping that the new emperor would be more fiscally flexible than his father, and wished to take immediate advantage of the regime transition – Daoguang initially gave them his blessing. Within a few months, however, overwhelming opposition by other officials up and down the bureaucratic hierarchy, citing both the sociopolitical dangers of over-taxation and institutional precedents like Jiaqing’s rebuke of Jiang Zhaokui,128 had forced the Emperor to reverse his position.129 Sun, by that point one of the most powerful officials in the country, had to be reassigned after this episode, and retired a few years later. A similar episode occurred early in 1822, when the court received a proposal from Tu Zhishen, a Zhili provincial official, to merge the remnants of the

124 125 126 127

128

129

FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Jiaqing 9th Year 5th Month 21st Day. FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Jiaqing 11th Year 12th Month 24th Day. FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Jiaqing 13th Year 12th Month 10th Day. Sun Yuting & Cheng Ling (孙玉庭, 成龄) Memorial, FNHA 03-1765-078, Jiaqing 25th Year 11th Month 24th Day. See, e.g., Hu Jiayu (胡家玉) Memorial, Huangchao Jingshi Wen Xu Bian (皇朝经世文续编) [Sequel to the Collected Works on Statecraft of the Dynasty] [hereinafter HCJSWXB_SK], ch. 36 (Sheng Kang [盛康] ed., 1892); Wang Jiaxiang (王家相) Memorial, FNHA 03-3103-006, Daoguang 1st Year 6th Month 15th Day, cited in Yan Aihong (晏爱红), Qingdai Zhongqi Guanyu Caoliang Jiafu de Sanci Zhengce Bianlun (清代中期关于漕粮加赋的 三次政策辩论) [Three Policy Debates on the Increase of the Grain Tribute in the Mid-Qing Dynasty], 2010(5) Shilin (史林) [Historical Review] 100. There is a detailed discussion of this episode in Yan (2010).

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corvée labor tax in Zhili – due to its proximity to the capital, Zhili was one of the very few places in the country where residents still owed the state a small share of their labor – into its formal land tax.130 A wave of memorials condemning the proposal as equivalent to a tax hike immediately followed, and the emperor quickly rejected it.131 One memorial by the Board of Rites official Yuan Xian – the grandson of the famed poet and essayist Yuan Mei – staked out a particularly forceful position: “The history of tax hikes since ancient times is a cautionary tale. In times of peace, there is no legitimate reason to increase taxes. In times of unrest, increasing taxes will only drive the people into banditry and rebellion.”132 The example of the Ming collapse was not explicitly cited, but it was fairly obvious what Yuan had in mind here. Following this episode, the Daoguang Court formally stated its intention to continue censuring and demoting officials who proposed any sort of tax hike,133 which quickly put an end to any hope of significant fiscal reform under the new regime. Clearly, conservative “quotaism” was not merely some personal belief of Jiaqing’s, but rather a deeply entrenched commitment shared by the great majority of political elites. Caught in between the Scylla of infrastructural decay and escalating shipping costs and the Charybdis of its own entrenched quotaism, the Qing state’s eventual solution to the grain tribute problem was to shift grain shipment from inland canals and riverways to the sea. Beginning in around 1825, the court received and approved a number of proposals, most notably from Yinghe, Qishan, and Tao Shu, to begin shipping grain via the Shanghai to Tianjin sea route.134 This was not altogether without historical precedent, as the route had been heavily used in the Yuan and early Ming, but nearly all grain tribute

130 131 132 133

134

Tu Zhishen (屠之申) Memorial, FNHA 03-2844-004, Daoguang 2nd Year 1st Month 6th Day. FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 2nd Year (run) 3rd Month 7th Day. Yuan Xian (袁铣) Memorial, FNHA 03-3048-030, Daoguang 2nd Year 3rd Month 5th Day. FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 2nd Year (run) 3rd Month 25th Day. For other statements of Daoguang era fiscal conservatism, see, e.g., the memorials collected at 1 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi (道咸同光四朝奏议) [Memorials from the Daoguang, Xianfeng, Tongzhi, and Guangxu Reigns], 11, 23, 48, 51, 173, 204, 207, 363, 375, 413, 429 (Taiwan Shangwu Press ed., 1970); 2 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi 574, 644, 660, 691, 692, 696, 701, 751, 756, 819, 852, 890, 897, 937 (Taiwan Shangwu Press ed., 1970). In many ways, the Daoguang reign was both the high point of Qing fiscal conservatism – quotaism at its most politically crippling and institutionally entrenched – and its final hurrah before the fiscal crises of 1850s would force the system to change, albeit slowly and at an uneven pace. Memorials that trumpet the standard fiscally conservative positions are therefore particularly abundant in this era. These proposals and many others related to the sea shipping reforms are collected in HCJSWB, ch. 48. See also, Ni Yuping (倪玉平), Qingdai Caoliang Haiyun yu Shehui Bianqian (清 代漕粮海运与社会变迁) [Grain Tribute Sea-Shipping and Social Change in the Qing Dynasty], (2005); William T. Rowe, Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century, 119–121 (2018) (focusing specifically on Bao Shichen’s role in the sea shipping reforms).

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shipping had been done via inland waterways since the early fifteenth century. As such, the shift required an enormous amount of logistical planning, and could only be implemented in phases, stretching well into the late nineteenth century. Qing contemporaries were therefore somewhat justified in their effusive praise for the Imperial Court’s logistical audacity – the soon-to-be prominent scholar Wei Yuan, who was heavily involved during the planning phase, claimed, for example, that “this is something that has never been seen in the past”135 – but when placed within the broader context of mid-Qing fiscal entrenchment, it feels much more like a concession to conservative quotaism than an active attempt at fiscal reform. The court’s position was essentially that, because fiscal expansion was completely off the table, the only way forward, however logistically difficult it may be, was to try to cut shipping costs. Aside from the grain tribute, the salt tax was, as discussed in Chapter 2, the other major fiscal institution that political elites continued to debate and modify with in the early nineteenth century. For the most part, it did so by replacing the old system of state-backed production and shipping with an open-market licensing system that allowed any private firm to produce and ship salt so long as it purchased a ticket (piao) from the government, which was assessed and issued at major transportation chokepoints.136 These pro-market reforms, implemented most successfully in the Huaibei region under Tao Shu’s governorship during the 1830s, provided an institutional blueprint for taxing private commercial activity that later came in handy during the lijin reforms of the later nineteenth century. The fundamentally different political reception to Tao Shu’s salt ticketing reforms and to Feng Guangxiong’s salt and land tax merger highlight, once again, the unique position of agricultural taxation within the Qing tax regime: Tao Shu’s experiments were largely uncontroversial, even popular, among senior officials at court, whereas Feng’s project generated large amounts of political backlash throughout its short lifespan. Ironically, the former actually led to a significant increase in salt tax revenue, whereas the latter was designed to be revenue neutral, and produced mainly administrative benefits, rather than fiscal ones – and yet the latter drew far greater opposition from fiscal conservatives than did the former. The difference likely stemmed from the fact that the latter nominally “raised” the land tax, even though this was more than offset by a reduction in salt prices, whereas the former did not. The Imperial Court’s position was clear: Salt taxes could be allowed to increase, but agricultural taxes could not. Even so, the court was unable to fully contain the institutional ripple effects of Feng Guangxiong’s fiscal experiment. It turned out that the experiment’s economic success – higher salt production, lower prices, and significant

135 136

Wei Yuan (魏源), Haiyun Quan’an Xu (海运全案序), HCJSWB, ch. 48. See Ni Yuping (2006) for a general survey of these reforms.

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administrative cost savings before it was shut down in 1806 – had caught the eye of other provincial officials, some of whom wished to transplant it into their own jurisdictions. It was the very rare nominal tax hike that had actually been visibly popular with its target population, and local officials facing similar fiscal crunches did not fail to take note. As a result, in 1812 and 1813, the Imperial Court received a pair of proposals from Sichuan and Shaanxi officials, requesting authorization for their own salt and land tax merger programs.137 The Board of Revenue quickly rejected both proposals, citing the termination of Feng’s earlier experiment.138 Despite this formal setback, local authorities decided to informally implement the merger programs anyway, collecting the salt tax as an informal surcharge to the land tax with much support and cooperation from their respective populations, who welcomed the price reductions and extra business opportunities provided by the merger.139 Interestingly, a few minor cracks emerged in the government’s land surveying ban during this era, although little came of them in the end. In 1818 and 1819, largely as a punitive measure against severe tax arrears, the court authorized land surveys and fiscal audits in two mountainous counties, Nanxiong and Renhua, in northern Guangdong. The surveys were conducted without notable local resistance, revealing that cultivated land in those counties had actually increased by a good 25 percent since the late Kangxi era.140 Rather than seeing this success as a reason to expand land surveying, however, the provincial government, with the Imperial Court’s full blessing, quickly decided that further surveying would be too risky, and instead began to employ the Nanxiong and Renhua surveys as a threat against other counties with large tax arrears: Essentially, “pay up or we might do a land survey on your territory as well.”141 When those counties eventually did pay up through donations by local gentry families, provincial authorities happily dropped the threat. It seems fairly likely that successful land surveys in northern Guangdong, with its mountainous terrain and relatively low population density, were not considered appropriate institutional precedents that could be applied to more economically

137

138

139

140

141

Dong Jiaozeng (董教增) Memorial, FNHA 03-1734-003, Jiaqing 18th Year 1st Month 8th Day; Qinggui (庆桂) Memorial, FNHA 03-1781-033, Jiaqing 17th Year 12th Month 9th Day. Sichuan Yan Fa Zhi (四川盐法志) [A Record of Salt Taxation in Sichuan], ch. 22 (Ding Baozhen (丁宝桢) ed. 1883). See Huang Kaikai (黄凯凯), Qingdai Sichuan Zhuanshang Yin’an Zhidu xia de Yanke Gui Ding (清代四川专商引岸制度下的盐课归丁) [A Study on Yanke Gui Ding under the Salt Certificate System of the Qing Dynasty in Sichuan Province], 2016(8) Shixue Yuekan (史学 月刊) [Monthly J. Hist.] 51. Jiang Youxian (蒋攸铦) Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0048-002, Jiaqing 22nd Year 10th Month 1st Day; Ruan Yuan (阮元) Memorial, FNHA, 04-01-23-0173-024, Jiaqing 23rd Year 3rd Month 3rd Day; Tojin (托津) Memorial, FNHA 02-01-04-19884-007, Jiaqing 24th Year 12th Day 13th Day. This position is stated especially clearly in Ruan Yuan (阮元) Memorial, FNHA 03-1740-013, Jiaqing 24th Year 12th Month 24th Day.

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developed parts of the region, but one nonetheless has to wonder what the government could have discovered had it mustered the political courage to keep surveying. For the most part, however, land surveying continued to be as politically frowned upon in the early nineteenth century as it had been in the later eighteenth.142 The general picture that emerges from this runthrough of major events is one of growing fiscal pressures crashing into a largely unyielding ideological wall.143 As many early nineteenth century officials observed, the administrative needs created by population growth had far exceeded the state’s formal fiscal capacity to provide it, and while moderate growth in nonagricultural taxation and the continued collection of informal surcharges helped plug some of the gap, they were ultimately insufficient. The former was simply too limited in total volume at this time to make any fundamental difference – Tao’s ticketing reforms, for example, produced only half a million taels of extra annual revenue – whereas the latter, for reasons discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, seemed to face informal institutional constraints of its own. As the Sichuan and Shaanxi informal salt tax reforms demonstrate, in the absence of legal sanction and administrative support from the center, successful local expansions of informal tax surcharges generally had to rely on cooperation from their target populations. Such cooperation could exist if the population would, as in the salt tax merger, financially benefit from the surcharge, or if the surcharges paid for some essential public good that only the government could supply, but these conditions were satisfied only rarely. The equilibrium produced by these sociopolitical dynamics seemed to be, as noted in Chapter 1, the imposition of informal agricultural tax surcharges roughly equal to, but not significantly higher than, the formal quota: Informal surcharge collection in the early nineteenth century did not appear to be qualitatively much more extensive than what it had been in 1725, or what it later became in the early twentieth century. With formal agricultural tax quotas almost completely stagnant and informal surcharges unable to grow nearly as fast as administrative needs

142

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See, e.g., political exchanges regarding rejected land survey proposals in memorial by unknown author, FNHA 03-2497-034, Jiaqing 8th Year; Fang Weidian (方维甸) Memorial, FNHA 0401-04-0023-001, Jiaqing 12th Year 10th Month 28th Day; record of Jiaqing’s edict in response to Fang Weidian’s Memorial, FNHA 03-1870-107, Jiaqing 12th Year 11th Month 19th Day. The only exception the state made in terms of banning local surcharges was to occasionally allow, in years of high military spending, the imposition of some formal surcharges in Sichuan. Sichuan, however, had always been an extreme outlier in fiscal policy due to having the lowest tax rates by far of any province, a legacy of socioeconomic devastation during the late Ming peasant rebellions – its tax rate was, by official estimates, barely a tenth of high tax provinces like Zhejiang, and this was almost certainly an underestimates. As a result, even the Imperial Court recognized there was room to increase taxes in Sichuan, so long as such increases were not regularized and fully institutionalized. These exceptional fiscal politics – unseen anywhere else in the country – are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6.

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demanded, local and regional officials faced constant difficulties in making ends meet. As a result, they continued to search for new sources of funding despite obvious hostility from the central government: The grain tribute, the salt tax, and so on. One might wonder, of course, whether these occasional proposals from local officials indicated some sort of erosion or fracturing of the political elite’s collective commitment to agricultural fiscal conservatism, but that seems extraordinarily unlikely: First, local officials innately faced a shorter political time-horizon than did central authorities, and were much more likely to emphasize short-term solutions over long-term commitments. They were, after all, the scapegoats who would have been reprimanded and punished if local administrative and fiscal capacity decayed beyond some major breaking point. Put the very same people into central policymaking positions, and their perspective likely would have changed significantly. More importantly, the emergence of a few local proposals hoping to exploit preexisting fiscal loopholes is hardly a sign of serious erosion. Quite the opposite, the fact that central authorities moved so decisively to shut down any attempt to tinker with agricultural taxation suggests the consensus was, if anything, probably strengthening. After all, the general elite perception of Malthusian overpopulation only seemed to deepen in the early to midnineteenth century, a subject discussed in further detail in Chapter 6. When scholars speak of Hong Liangji as the “father” of Chinese demographic studies, they generally point to the many similar commentaries on overpopulation that emerged in the wake of his Zhiping and Shengji essays, including works by such influential scholars as Long Qirui,144 Tang Chenglie,145 Gong Zizhen,146 and Wang Shiduo.147 How, then, did the early nineteenth century Qing state solve the problem of governing a rapidly growing population within this increasingly rigid fiscal straightjacket? One possible answer, favored by older accounts of the period, is that it did not: In many aspects, such as the maintenance of local granaries, or of military readiness, the early nineteenth century was a period of political stagnation and decay, especially during the “Daoguang depression” of 1815–1835, during which the Qing economy experienced its first sustained period of deflationary pressures.148

144 145 146 147

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Long Qirui (龙启瑞), Lun Licai (论理财), HCJSWB, ch. 29. Tang Chenglie (汤成烈), Zhi Fu Pian (治赋篇), HCJSWB, ch. 34. Discussed in detail in Chapter 6, Section A. E.g., Wang Shiduo (汪士铎), Wang Huiweng Yi Bing Riji (汪悔翁乙丙日记) [Wang Huiweng’s Diary in Yi Bing], (1853). See von Glahn (2018) for detailed discussion. See also, Suzuki Chu¯sei (鈴木中正), Shincho¯ chu¯ki shi kenkyu¯ (清朝中期史研究) [A Study of Mid-Qing History] (1952); Daniel McMahon, Dynastic Decline, Heshen, and the Ideology of the Xianyu Reforms, 38 Tsinghua J. Chinese Stud. 231 (2008).

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The other possible answer, favored by a more recent strand of literature, is that the state learned to do more with less: It streamlined government institutions so they could maintain as much of their functionality as possible even under conditions of increasingly severe fiscal scarcity, and when that was no longer possible, to fostering social alternatives to formal governance. Much of this activity came in the political aftermath of the White Lotus Rebellions, a major religious sect uprising in the mountainous intersection of Hubei, Shaanxi, and Sichuan that lasted from 1796 and 1804, and at its peak involved battles between hundreds of thousands of rebels and Qing soldiers. While the rebellion never came close to becoming the kind of existential threat that the Taiping later posed,149 it was nonetheless cause for much anxiety among political elites, not to mention a serious drain on fiscal and administrative resources – by some estimates, the total amount of money the Qing state spent on fighting the rebels exceeded 200 million taels over an 8-year span, which amounted to about half of its total formal income. The fiscal drain was made significantly worse by the Imperial Court’s immediate knee-jerk response to the onset of the rebellion in 1796, which was to partially blame it on regional overtaxation, and therefore to grant generous tax waivers to affected provinces – on top of the national waiver granted that very same year.150 By the end of the rebellion, state finances had sunk into full-blown crisis mode, forcing a response from the state. Of the two most general options available – systemically increasing the state’s income or reducing its cost – there was no political appetite in high politics for the former, which meant that the latter had to be pursued with some rigor. In response, the court engineered a sweeping and deliberate administrative “withdrawal,” which scholars now increasingly praise for its orderly and well-planned execution.151 This involved a concerted anti-corruption effort soon after Qianlong’s death in 1799, which sought to reduce embezzlement while boosting administrative performance, but more importantly, a fairly large-scale transfer of local governance and administrative duties from the state to local society. As a recent manuscript argues, “one of the most striking aspects of the political adjustment . . . consisted in the establishment of new relations [between the state and] the elites of the empire,” which resulted in local social elites assuming a much larger role “in local public affairs in terms of their monetary contribution and the assumption of managerial roles.”152 These

149

150 151

152

Yingcong Dai, White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China, Introduction (2019). Qing Renzong Shilu, ch. 6, 1st Year, 6th Month, Gengyin. Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire, 190 (2014). Seunghyun Han, After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early NineteenthCentury Suzhou, 14 (2016).

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roles included famine relief, tax collection, dispute resolution, and the provision of public goods, ranging from irrigation to places of collective worship. One of more interesting contrasts one can draw between Qing governance and its Ming or Song predecessors was how they approached the thorny social issue of lineages. While much modern scholarship portrays China as lineagedominated throughout most of its imperial history, most dynasties actually had a somewhat uneasy relationship with local lineages, both because they posed a threat to the state’s administrative control and because commoner lineages wished to copy ritualistic privileges of extended ancestor worship the officialdom wished to keep for itself – in other words, they desired sociopolitical badges of privilege that the political elite were resistant to sharing. As a result, the Song and Ming states allowed commoners to collectively worship multiple generations of ancestors only grudgingly, repeatedly attempting (but ultimately failing) to prohibit them from engaging in large-scale lineage self-organization. The Qing, however, usually took the opposite posture: Although Qianlong still seemed somewhat unsure of the political merits of lineage self-governance, by the nineteenth century the state had decisively endorsed it, leading to rapid growth in the production of lineage registries and self-governance charters.153 Correspondingly, a significant wave of literati writings produced in this period, by such famed scholars as Qian Daxin, Cheng Yaotian, Zhang Huiyan, Hong Liangji, Gong Zizhen, He Changling, and Wei Yuan, advocated lineage selfgovernance as both morally beneficial and politically necessary.154 The next chapter will have more to say about this school of thought and its political footprint in the late nineteenth century, but it truly came of age during the late Qianlong and Jiaqing eras.

e. continuity and change Admittedly, even if Qing elites had possessed no ideological bias whatsoever in favor of fiscal conservatism, the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries still would have been a difficult time to attempt significant fiscal reform. There was at least a shade of truth to the perception of Malthusian decline, however exaggerated the perception was made by the combination of ideological bias and the lack of countervailing information. That shade alone, under neutral circumstances, would likely have been enough to give some political elites pause about fiscal reform and expansion. Moreover, as Peter Perdue has pointed out, the political argument in favor of fiscal and administrative reform was particularly weak between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, between Qianlong’s Western frontier campaigns and the Opium War, simply because, 153 154

See discussion in Zhang (2017), at 207–208. Luo Jianqiu (罗检秋), Shehui Bianqian yu Qingdai Hanxuejia de Zongzu Guannian (社会变迁 与清代汉学家的宗族观念) [Social Change and the Kinship Ideology of Qing Dynasty Sinologists], 37 Hebei Xuekan (河北学刊) [Hebei Academic Journal] 41 (2017).

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even taking the White Lotus Rebellion into account, it was a period of relative peace and stability, with comparatively lower military spending pressures.155 That said, the Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang reigns were undeniably periods of active political and ideological reinforcement, rather than passive institutional continuity or mere prudent restraint. It cannot be emphasized enough that the Qianlong Court inherited a reformist fiscal posture from Yongzheng, and turned it into full-blown conservative entrenchment within a mere five years, even though external socioeconomic circumstances were not substantially different in 1740 than they were a decade ago. The scale and pace of this change rivaled the Kangxi-Yongzheng transition from conservatism into reformism, and clearly suggests strong ideological forces at work. Even the Jiaqing and Daoguang eras were, as discussed above, periods where political elites had to actively reaffirm and strengthen the state’s commitment to “quotaism” against enterprising local officials who sought to loosen the outer limits of that commitment. If the informal salt and land tax mergers in Sichuan were any indication, some of those outer limits could easily have been loosened without provoking any significant social unhappiness – which suggests that the central government’s refusal to consider them was less than fully pragmatic, and therefore ideologically contestable. Without rehashing the arguments already made in Chapter 2, it is worth pointing out that, even in this period of relative peace and stability, the major rationalist explanations proposed in the existent literature are nonetheless incapable of explaining many key characteristics of Qing fiscal policy: Malthusian pressures on the agrarian economy were not nearly severe enough to constitute a satisfactory political explanation by themselves. On the other hand, the lack of immediate political demand to increase revenues was only true in relative terms: In absolute terms, the state lost a significant chunk of its administrative capacity from 1740 to 1800 due to its fiscal conservatism, which resulted in Jiaqing “retreating” the state from large swathes of local governance – orderly and planned, certainly, but retreat nonetheless.156 Moreover, even with the withdrawal, a number of local officials were so pressed for resources that they were willing to brave censure and demotion from the court to proposal fairly small expansions to local fiscal quotas, hardly the sign of a fiscal regime that faced no significant pressure to expand. Finally, there is relatively little evidence of any “Huang Zongxi thesis”-like dynamic at work in the mid-Qing, despite rapid demographic and economic expansion: The ratio of informal to formal taxation did not seem to experience rapid growth from the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth.157 The additional informal surcharges that we do observe being imposed on local 155 156

157

See Perdue (2005), at 547–557. There has been, in recent years, a growing literature on these developments in the early Jiaqing reign. For a summary, see Rowe (2011). See Chapter 1, Section B.

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populations, notably the Sichuan salt and land tax merger, were probably done with their consent and cooperation, which is something most versions of the thesis fail to account for. In terms of the major ideological forces that shaped mid-Qing fiscal politics and institutions, there were strong elements of continuity with the early Qing, but also significant, if gradual and incremental, change. The main intellectual and political development emphasized in this chapter – the land survey ban and the ensuing rise of Malthusian fiscal politics – had origins in the Kangxi reign, but sharply escalated under Qianlong. Hostility toward land surveying, too, was something that first emerged in the aftermath of the Ming-Qing transition, but underwent a qualitative change in the eighteenth century from somewhat contested intellectual position to legally reinforced political norm. As a result of these developments, fiscal “quotaism” in the early nineteenth century was qualitatively stronger than what it had been under Kangxi: much more institutionally entrenched, much more politically dogmatic, and intellectually buttressed by new kinds of mainstream beliefs and arguments. The Ming-Qing transition itself continued to exert some influence over political discourse even in the nineteenth century, but its significance clearly declined over time. As noted above, the publication of the Ming History in 1739 was a significant milestone, both politically and intellectually, and as late as the early Daoguang era, Court officials were still citing the negative example of late Ming tax hikes as a major reason to avoid them.158 The frequency of such arguments was, however, far lower than what it had been in the later seventeenth century, and was certainly no longer one of the primary driving forces behind Qing politics. That said, the formal enshrinement of the “tax hikes killed the Ming” thesis into official state history helped it remain a useful and sometimes powerful rhetorical weapon nearly two centuries after the dynastic transition – no mean feat by any standard. The state’s differential treatment of agricultural and nonagricultural taxation was, as discussed in Chapter 2, largely continuous throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, fueled and strengthened by both the elite reaction to Ming collapse and the later emergence of fiscal Malthusianism. Both strands of thought reinforced the notion that the Qing’s political and economic stability predominantly depended on the pacification of the agricultural population, as opposed to the commercial or manufacturing sectors. The underlying rationale may have changed somewhat from the 1650s to the 1800s, but the political and institutional ramifications remained remarkably consistent, and would not be seriously challenged until the final decade of the dynasty. One theme that did disappear almost completely by the mid-Qing was any mention of ethnic tensions as a reason for fiscal restraint – not that this had ever 158

FNHA, Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 6th Year 12th Month 16th Day.

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been a visibly influential argument even in the early Qing. As noted in the Introduction and again in Chapter 4, given the enormous amount of writing on the “New Qing History” that has been produced in recent years,159 it might seem very tempting to believe that Qing taxation was more restrained than Ming or Song taxation because of political tensions created by the Manchu conquest: Crudely put, a conquest dynasty ruled by an ethnic minority suffered from an innate political legitimacy deficit, and therefore had to tread much more lightly in domestic administration, and especially in fiscal extraction. However theoretically attractive this idea may be, it finds little support either in macro level historical trends or in primary sources: First and foremost, ethnic tensions were simply not mentioned much, if at all, as a reason for fiscal restraint after the dynasty’s first couple of decades. Whereas men like Dorgon and Fan Wencheng did seem to believe that tax reductions were an effective, or even necessary, means to win over the Han population,160 by the later Kangxi reign this had largely disappeared as a stated reason, whether in edicts, memorials, or private writings, for tax waivers, reductions, fixed quotas, or banning land surveys – and by the Qianlong reign it was essentially nowhere to be found. Instead, the reasons were almost always the ones identified in this chapter and the preceding one: fear of unrest and rebellion, perceived impoverishment, perceived Malthusian crisis, “disturbing the people,” and so on. Lest one suspect that this deafening silence on ethnic tensions was due to some sort of political taboo against mentioning Manchu-Han sociopolitical tensions, such tensions continued to be openly discussed in edicts and memorials on other issues throughout the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns: The allocation of local bureaucratic positions between Manchu and Han applicants, for example, was a periodic source of political strain throughout the Qing, and officials often explicitly discussed ethnic tensions in that context.161 Much more plausibly, ethnic tensions were not cited in written fiscal policy memorials because they no longer played a significant role in fiscal policymaking. Moreover, as argued in Chapter 4, whatever one thinks of the continued existence of ethnic dynamics in fiscal policymaking, one would at least have to admit they were almost certainly much weaker in the mid Qing than they were in the dynasty’s early years.162 Like the political and intellectual trauma of 159

160 161

162

For a summary of the “New Qing History” movement, see, e.g., Waley-Cohen (2004); Mario Cams, Recent Additions to the New Qing History Debate, 47 Contemporary Chinese Thought 1 (2016). See discussion at Chapter 4, Section A. See, e.g., Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 8, Yongzheng 13th Year 12th Month Xinwei; Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 177, Qianlong 7th Year 10th Month Renzi; Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 1375, Qianlong 56th Year 3rd Month Jiawu. Scholars have argued, for example, that the political assertiveness and outspokenness of Han Chinese officials increased significantly after the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition. E.g., Matthew W. Mosca, The Literati Rewriting of China in the Qianlong-Jiaqing Transition, 32 Late Imperial China 89 (2011).

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Ming collapse, political anxiety over Manchu-Han tensions almost certainly softened and receded over time. New Qing historians persuasively argue that such tensions still existed in the later Qing, but even they acknowledge that they were, as a general matter, less severe, and that at least some “Sinicization” occurred among Manchu bannermen. These trends fit very uneasily, however, within the broader narrative of Qing fiscal institutions, which is, once again, a narrative of deepening conservatism from Shunzhi to Daoguang. What further differentiates a Ming collapse-driven account of fiscal conservatism from a Manchu conquest-driven account, even beyond the former’s far stronger documentary basis, is the former’s much stronger political and intellectual synergy with the Qianlong land survey ban. If the initial rationale for Qing fiscal conservatism was that there was a fiscal “red line” beyond which the state would risk rural economic collapse and widespread revolt, then it is easy to see, first, how such a rationale could generate political support for a land survey ban and, second, how a land survey ban could, in turn, politically reinforce the idea of a fiscal red line – and indeed convert it into a set of empirical beliefs about Malthusian decline. If, however, the initial rationale was that a foreign conquest dynasty needed to appear especially benevolent to its subjects for the sake of political consolidation, then it is far more difficult to see how this idea could lead to a land survey ban a full century after the conquest – and over six decades after the last round of serious domestic unrest – or, for that matter, how the land survey ban could solidify the idea into beliefs about Malthusian decline. There is a coherent internal logic in the former account that simply does not exist in the latter. All things considered, the shape and substance of fiscal politics had experienced fairly substantial change from the early to the mid-Qing, even as they existed alongside strong strands of continuity. When we turn our attention to somewhat more abstract intellectual dimensions, however, continuity arguably becomes the stronger theme. Most notably, the intellectual pragmatism and empiricism that emerged in the ruins of the Ming collapse continued to be highly influential in the mid-Qing, and only seemed to strengthen its political position over time. It would be folly, of course, to try to summarize the enormous complexity of the mid-Qing intellectual world here, which splintered across numerous factions and schools, many of which were highly antagonistic towards one another, but the main strands of thought – whether the “Song learning” (Song Xue) paradigm that largely controlled entrance into the officialdom or the “Han learning” (Han Xue) paradigm that came to dominate private scholarship163 – all seemed to harbor a healthy respect of empiricism, 163

There is a very large literature on the Songxue-Hanxue division and its interaction with state policy. Apart from sources cited at supra note 102, see also, Luo Jianqiu, Qian Jia Liangchao de Wenzhi Bianhua ji Qi Xueshu Xiaoying (乾嘉两朝的文治变化及其学术效应) [Changes in Governance and Its Academic Effects in the Qianlong and Jiaqing Eras], 2015(1) Qingshi Yanjiu (清史研究) [Studies in qing history] 14.

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even as they brought very different methodologies and perspectives to that capacious concept. “Pragmatism” was indeed the subject of pointed intellectual debates, but at the same time, its hold over elite politics only seemed to deepen over time. As many scholars have observed, going into the late eighteenth century, a sort of state-society distinction had emerged within the Qing literati. Song NeoConfucianism continued to be the orthodox school of thought in the all-important imperial examinations, effectively handing Song leaning an institutional monopoly within the higher echelons of the bureaucracy. Whereas contemporary Han learning proponents often sought to portray Song learning as full of empty moralizing and needlessly concerned with metaphysical normativity, the most prominent Song learning scholars in the mid-Qing bureaucracy – Zhu Gui, Chen Hongmou, and so on – were all deeply committed to pragmatic and “useful” policymaking that prioritized the population’s material wellbeing over abstract normative commitments. As William Rowe has capably argued, Chen and the brand of Song learning he exemplified were deeply committed to balancing NeoConfucianism’s traditional metaphysical and normative inclinations with a thorough empirical understanding of socioeconomic realities – what Rowe calls “the juxtaposition of pragmatism and moralism.”164 In other words, they were NeoConfucian scholars more in the image of Gu Yanwu, who was, despite his lasting impact on Han learning, initially a Song learning adherent, than in the image of some idealized moralist – perhaps the kind that we saw Hai Rui lash out against in Chapter 3 – who cared for nothing but normative purity. In the fiscal context, this commitment to pragmatism is seen most clearly in the open political acceptance of “speaking of profit” in the Qianlong Court. Whereas labeling a proposal as “speaking of profit“ was once an almost uniformly hostile accusation in late Ming and even early Qing politics, it had become, by the mid-eighteenth century, a far more nuanced phrase in elite political discourse. Qianlong himself addressed the profit-virtue (yi-li) distinction more than once in his edicts, generally to state a consensus position among his senior advisors. For example, in response to a memorial submitted by the censor Chen Gaoxiang criticizing other officials of “speaking of profit,” Qianlong, after consulting with his senior advisors, issued an edict that explicitly rejected Chen’s absolutist position: Sages have never avoided speaking the word “profit,” even though wise men treat it with some caution. . . . “Profit” and “virtue” are not fundamentally incompatible. Pursuing profit for the sake of benefiting the outside world is both fair and just, and in that context profit and virtue are one. Pursuing profit for self-interest, on the other hand, is greedy and narrow-minded, and in that sense profit is but a menace.165

164

165

William T. Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China, 3 (2001). Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 70, 3rd Year 6th Month Yiwei.

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In 1786, Qianlong returned to this issue in a lengthy discussion with several officials, recorded as a formal lecture, on the relationship between profit-seeking and benevolence (“ren”). In it, he once again made the argument, with the agreement of others present, that the proper pursuit of profit was no less benevolent than nominally purer forms of benevolence.166 While memorials and edicts in this period continued to casually employ “speaking of profit” as a rhetorical weapon against fiscal proposals that seemed unduly expansionist,167 in many other contexts it was used more as a neutral description,168 suggesting that the traditional moral stigma attached to the term had significantly receded. When memorials and edicts truly wished to substantively address a fiscal position, as we have seen throughout this chapter and the last, they almost always spelled out the expected socioeconomic consequences – overtaxing an impoverished population, inciting local unrest, causing regional economic imbalances, and so on – and then relied upon those as the primary rationales to either accept or reject a proposal. Even under the sway of “Song learning,” Qing fiscal politics remained overwhelmingly realistic and consequentialist in intellectual orientation, from their turbulent seventeenth century beginnings to their early nineteenth century stagnation. Fiscal conservatism deepened even as political pragmatism became more entrenched. These chapters have argued, in fact, that fiscal conservatism deepened because political pragmatism became more entrenched. Despite the often antagonistic relationship between Han and Song learning, they nonetheless tended to agree on the need for greater intellectual empiricism. Han learning was, if anything, more insistent on this point, although the specific brand of “empiricism” it championed was, reflecting the predominantly private nature of the school, largely unsuited to politics.169 There were, as many have argued, a number of sociopolitical forces behind Han learning’s rise to intellectual preeminence in the mid-Qing: Rapid demographic expansion coupled with a full stagnation in the number of examination degrees meant that the vast majority of highly educated Chinese had virtually no realistic chance of entering the bureaucracy through traditional high-prestige avenues.170 These trends raised the

166 167

168

169

170

Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 1248, 51st Year 2nd Month Gengchen. Apart from the Chen Gaoxiang exampled cited above, see also, for example, Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 144, 6th Year 6th Month Bingwu; Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 920, 37th Year, 11th Month, Kuimao. E.g., Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 136, 6th Year 2nd Month Yisi; Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 576, 23rd Year 12th Month Jiayin. Han learning did, of course, gain a large measure of government recognition during the compilation and editing of the Siku Quanshu (四库全书), to the point where the editorial board of the collection was almost completely dominated by Han learning scholars, but center of gravity for the school nonetheless remained in private scholarly networks. See, e.g., Benjamin A. Elman, Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction via Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China, 50 J. Asian Stud. 1 (1991). Some high-status families had the resources to purchase offices for their members, but even these lower-prestige positions were limited in number, and hardly available to the great majority of highly educated Chinese.

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social profile of private scholarship, while also producing a substantial measure of antagonism towards state intellectual orthodoxy within that scholarship. Such antagonism manifested itself in two ways in mainstream Han learning: First, many scholars criticized traditional notions of “reason” and “ritual” as being overly rigid and inhumane, arguing instead for a more flexible set of sociopolitical ethics that afforded materialistic needs and desires greater respect and moral legitimacy.171 Second, and more prominently, Han learning scholars attacked Song learning – or rather, an idealized version of it – as being insufficiently grounded in careful empirical scholarship. By this they often meant careful philological analysis of classical texts (kaozheng or kaoju), rather than the kind of real-world pragmatism championed by government officials like Chen Hongmou, but as Benjamin Elman, among others, has argued, there was actually some intellectual synergy between this textual empiricism and more general kinds of scientific and sociological empiricism.172 Dai Zhen was, of course, the Han learning scholar par excellence of the midQing – and also a powerful example of both sorts of antagonisms: He was one of the strongest advocates of philological textualism, but also someone with wide interests in mathematics and the natural sciences. His particular brand of empiricism was therefore a capacious one that could easily synergize with the kind of “realist learning” (shixue) that Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, Wang Fuzhi, and Yan Yuan had once advocated in the early Qing. This was not necessarily true of some other Han learning scholars such as Hui Dong, but even their narrower kind of empirical textualism at least shared with early Qing pragmatism – and also with “Song learning” – a common dislike of purely deontological or metaphysical moralizing. Dai was also a fierce opponent of what he considered to be the rigid normativity of Song Neo-Confucian scholars like Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao, and Zhu Xi, which denied the normative value of human material desires, and would instead completely subjugate human behavior to “reason” (li). This, he famously argued, amounted to “killing through reason” (yi li sha ren).173 Instead, scholars should recognize the positive moral value of satisfying certain material desires, and should create a system of ethics that worked through these desires, rather than against them. Qianlong’s open

171

172 173

See Lawrence Zhang, Legacy of Success: Office Purchase and State-Elite Relations in Qing China, 73 Harv. J. Asiatic Stud. 259 (2013). See, e.g., Zhang Yunyi (张允熠), Cong Songxue,Hanxue Dao Daixue : Zhongguo Zhuliuwenhua Jindai Zhuanxing de Shenceng Xueshu Beijing Tanxi (从宋学、汉学到戴学: 中国主流文化近代转型的深层学术背景探析) [From Song Studies, Han Studies to Dai Studies: An Exploration of the Deep Academic Background of the Modern Transformation of Chinese Mainstream Culture], 2007(8) Zhexue Yanjiu (哲学研究) [Philosophical Studies] 32. Elman (1984), at 79–85. Dai Zhen (戴震), Mengzi Ziyi Shuzheng: Li (孟子字义疏证: 礼) [The Meaning of Mencius: li], 9 (Zhonghua Shuju Press 2009). The most influential modern commentary is probably Hu Shi (胡适), Dai Dongyuan de Zhexue (戴东原的哲学) [The Philosohy of Dai Dongyuan] (Yuelu Shushe Press 2010).

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tolerance of “speaking of profit” would likely have seemed quite appropriate to Dai and many others like him in the Han learning camp. Despite the often explicit hostility between Han and Song learning in the mid-Qing, the two sides actually shared a good deal of common ground, at least in their shared skepticism of deontological normativity and the advocacy of normatively neutral “empiricism.”174 To a large extent, this laid the foundation for the reemergence of shixue as an intellectual rallying call in the late Qing.175 In terms of basic methodological and normative orientations, the continuities between the early and mid-Qing were quite robust, with clear intellectual consequences for how fiscal and economic issues were debated both within and beyond the imperial bureaucracy. The relationship between mid-Qing fiscal conservatism and its early Qing prototype was, in the final analysis, one of entrenchment, both institutional and intellectual. The specific arguments employed to support and justify conservatism were often different, but they were nonetheless derived from underlying political and intellectual trends that can easily be traced back to the early dynasty in some form or shape. Most importantly, early Qing fears of over-taxation and social unrest were able to institutionally self-perpetuate by first producing a political consensus against land surveying, and then legally enshrining it, which eliminated any real possibility of fiscal reformers raising a persuasive empirical case against either the mainstream perception of Malthusian crisis or the increasingly inflexible fiscal quotaism it continuously reinforced. In a political and intellectual environment that increasingly valorized empiricism, this actually guaranteed the continued dominance of fiscal conservatism. More than a little ironically, Qing pragmatism and empiricism had managed to produce a fiscal paradigm that was far less flexible than its Ming, Song, or Tang predecessors. All that said, it is nonetheless true that conservative entrenchment was made at least somewhat easier by the largely peaceful sociopolitical conditions of the midQing. Although the continued vitality of fiscal conservatism did require a considerable amount of active reinforcement, even political aggression, one could also plausibly argue that external conditions made it relatively easy and painless for the mid-Qing state to settle into a fiscally restrained “small government” paradigm. The combination of rigid quotaism and population growth led to heightened fiscal pressures by the late eighteenth century, but not to the sort of full-blown fiscal crisis that plagued the late Qing. For a time, the state could maintain a decent amount of administrative functionality and a relatively high level of social order through internal reorganization and orderly retreat, without raising agricultural taxes. As it moved into the mid-nineteenth century, however, all of these external conditions were about to change.

174

175

See Feng Tianyu & Huang Changyi (冯天瑜, 黄长义), Wan Qing Jingshi Shixue (晚清经世 史学) [The Practical historical studies in the late qing], 64–123 (2002). Id.

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6 Late Qing Reforms

Across almost all institutional dimensions, fiscal and otherwise, the period after 1850 was the most turbulent in Qing history: Severe military and political duress during the Taiping Rebellion ushered in an era of frenzied governmental activity that fundamentally changed the organizational structure and functionality of the Qing state, leaving a deep institutional legacy that lasted far beyond the dynasty’s demise in 1912. The Qing fiscal state, in particular, underwent its most dramatic and sustained phase of expansion and reform in this period: In nominal terms, the total volume of taxation almost doubled between 1850 and 1895, and then tripled between 1895 and 1911, paying for – just barely – skyrocketing state expenditures in war indemnities, foreign debt, military reform and upkeep, infrastructural investment, and industrialization initiatives. This rapid expansion of raw fiscal volume was accompanied by a number of structural changes: New categories of commercial taxes and surcharges were added to the state’s arsenal, and previously insignificant sources of income quickly evolved into major pillars of the new fiscal regime. Meanwhile, the balance of authority between central and local authorities fundamentally shifted in favor of the latter, leading to deep changes in collection, shipping, and accounting procedures. By the 1880s and 1890s, it was no longer possible to characterize the Qing state as “fiscally conservative” in any general sense. There was, however, one bastion of fiscal restraint in this era of rapid expansion and change: Not only did the total volume of agricultural taxation experience no substantial increase in the later nineteenth century, it likely shrank for large segments of it. Even after 1901, with the Qing state facing full-blown fiscal collapse due to astronomical war indemnities sustained during the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901, political elites continued to harbor considerable reluctance to touch agricultural taxes, raising them at a far slower and visibly tentative pace compared to other categories of taxation. Meanwhile, the rural economy, severely damaged in 267

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some regions during the Taiping Rebellion, had largely recovered by the 1870s in terms of cultivated acreage, total population, gross production, and real percapita production. In fact, real per-capita GDP had, by one estimate, increased to about 9 percent higher than what it was before the Taiping, staying there for the next five decades.1 As previously argued, there is simply no good rationalist explanation for the special treatment afforded to agricultural taxation – and so we must look to ideology. Section A begins by examining some of the major intellectual trends of the midnineteenth century, most notably the turn toward “realist learning” (shixue) that would fundamentally reshape elite political attitudes in the late Qing. It argues that, although shixue scholars positioned themselves against mainstream “Han Learning” ideas along a number of intellectual and sociopolitical dimensions, they nonetheless tended to embrace old-fashioned quota-based conservatism when it came to the specific issue of taxing agriculture. Much of this was due to the persistent influence of the Malthusian empirical paradigm they inherited from earlier generations, but a general perception of rural impoverishment – which carried with it the need for fiscal restraint – was prevalent even among those scholars who rejected the idea that the agrarian economy had no room to grow. Sections B surveys major fiscal reforms and their underlying politics during and after the Taiping Rebellion. The government’s frantic attempts at boosting revenue led to a dramatic expansion of commercial taxes and tariffs, but the agricultural tax was only moderately affected. The onset of large scale military campaigning forced the state to tolerate some regional attempts at boosting surcharge collection, but such attempts were nonetheless highly controversial and usually relatively short-lived, and whatever positive impact they had on state finances was more than offset by cuts made in other regions: One of the Qing Court’s most decisive actions during the later phases of the rebellion was to actually permanently reduce the agricultural tax quota imposed on the Lower Yangtze. The political elite’s anxiety over agricultural taxation may well have increased during this period, with many of them believing that overextraction was a major cause of the rebellion. Officials also drew a clear line, during and after the rebellion, between agricultural and nonagricultural taxes, arguing that the latter could be increased while the former could not because of differences in profit margins and the potential for economic growth – yet another example of Malthusian thinking at work. The dominance of Malthusian empirics was, however, put under increasingly severe strain by the piecemeal return of provincial land surveying from the 1860s through the 1880s. As slow and incomplete as they were, the surveys nonetheless managed to uncover a substantial increase in total tilled acreage from early nineteenth century officials estimates, thereby posing a direct challenge to the empirical belief that agricultural production no longer

1

Ma & de Jong (2019), at Appendix Table 4.

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had any room for growth. Although this did not immediately produce any notable tax hike, it likely contributed to significant changes in intellectual and political attitudes that would eventually lead to more flexible fiscal policymaking after 1900. Section C turns to the final decade of the dynasty, during which the state’s rigid quotaism on agricultural taxation finally began to loosen. Several sociopolitical forces converged to produce this change: First and foremost, the state’s fiscal situation had deteriorated so severely after the Boxer Movement that it was now forced to put all options on the table. Second, many political elites had finally begun to move past the empirical perception of an overtaxed rural economy mired in Malthusian crisis, partially due to the influx of Western ideas about agricultural production, and perhaps partially due to the aforementioned return of large-scale land surveying. Third, a large influx of silver into the economy in the late nineteenth century may have given some elites hope that tax quotas could be raised without necessarily imposing a heavier burden on the rural population. That said, relative to the almost reckless abandon with which the Qing state raised other kinds of taxes, agricultural tax hikes were handled with great hesitation and care even at this very late stage: They were kept comparatively modest in volume, and preceded by a nationwide accounting and surveying program that gave the state informational cover for its unprecedented fiscal moves. Once the genie had been let out of the bottle, however, it could no longer be put back in: Recognizing now that agricultural tax hikes had not produced – and would likely not produce – unmanageable levels of social unrest, political elites indulged heavily in them during the Republican era, even when the state’s administrative capacity was arguably weaker than in the late Qing. By the 1930s, a new, “modern,” “statist” fiscal paradigm had fully set in, bringing with it a near-tripling of the agricultural tax. Section D distills and summarizes the unique political logic that underlay agricultural taxation in the late Qing, which moved at a very different pace from the broader institutional and intellectual trends of the era. This is not to say, of course, that the political logic of agricultural taxation was completely immune from external pressures, but rather that those pressures had to be filtered through that logic before significant institutional change could occur. The section then concludes by returning to the analytical themes explored in Chapter 2, laying out the significant advantages of the ideology-infused institutional narrative developed here over preexisting alternatives, including both purely rationalist explanations for Qing fiscal behavior and explanations that overemphasize the Confucian moral aversion to taxation.

a. mid-nineteenth century intellectual trends An enormous amount of scholarship produced over the past century has emphasized the transformative intellectual and political significance of the

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mid-nineteenth century in modern Chinese history. The combination of the post-Opium War “Western impact” with the most serious domestic crisis in Qing history,2 the Taiping Rebellion, forced a number of fundamental changes in the sociopolitical worldview of Qing elites that generations of scholars have documented in minute detail. Their fiscal worldview, however, evolved at a relatively slow and gradual pace. The most significant developments in midnineteenth century fiscal thought display considerable amounts of continuity with eighteenth century conventions, and it was not until the late nineteenth century that more radical ideas came into vogue. When it came to agricultural taxation, elite ideas moved at an even slower pace, with significant departures from the mid-Qing orthodoxy coming only in the final decades of the dynasty – although some of these departures can certainly be traced back to ideas first voiced in the early or mid-nineteenth century. None of this is surprising, given the relatively static empirical views about the agrarian economy that most scholars and officials continued to hold in the absence of authoritative information to the contrary. I. The Rise of Shixue The most important intellectual development in early and mid-nineteenth century China was likely the reemergence of “realist learning” (shixue) as a dominant, arguably the dominant, intellectual paradigm, and certainly the primary source of reformist energy in the otherwise politically stagnant Daoguang era. As noted in the previous chapters, the shixue tradition in the Qing reaches back to the earliest years of the dynasty, to Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and the Yan and Li School of North China. Although this tradition was eventually overtaken in private academic influence by the more philologically oriented “Han Learning,” the two paradigms shared, as discussed in Chapter 5, a healthy skepticism of “empty moralizing” and a preference for “empirical” scholarship – even though they favored very different kinds of “empiricism.” The spirit of political and socioeconomic “realism” championed by Gu and Huang lived on in the mid-Qing most directly through “Song Learning” scholar-officials like Chen Hongmou, who, despite being in the academic minority, often wielded considerably greater political power than their “Han Learning” contemporaries, and maintained control over the allimportant examination system.3 In that sense, shixue never truly fell out of the Qing political mainstream. 2

3

With, of course, the exception of the 1911 Revolution itself – but then again, in terms of economic and demographic damage, or the scale of military conflict, the Revolution did not come close to the Taiping. See Chapter 5, Section E. See also Zeng Guangguang (曾光光), Tongcheng Pai yu Qingdai Xueshu Liubian (桐城派与清代学术流变) [The Tongcheng School and Academic Development in the Qing Dynasty] (2016).

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By the mid-nineteenth century, shixue had regained much of its former preeminence in the private academic sphere as well.4 Beginning in the Jiaqing era, scholars were captured by an ever-deepening perception of political and socioeconomic decay: worsening official corruption, the steady erosion of state capacity, and mass impoverishment caused by over-population – in other words, serious Malthusian crisis – were common complaints among scholars and officials during this era. These were, to be fair, common complaints among scholars and officials during most eras in the Qing, but they were unusually compelling against the social and political realities of the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns: State capacity was indeed at its lowest point since the dynasty’s founding,5 corruption remained rampant even after some attempts at combating it in the early Jiaqing reign, and there was indeed, as many scholars have documented, a “Daoguang depression” that brought with it economic stagnation and monetary deflation.6 Recent scholarship does argue that contemporary perceptions of Malthusian crisis were greatly exaggerated,7 and that living standards largely stagnated, rather than significantly declined,8 but such perceptions were extraordinarily difficult to overturn for reasons discussed in Chapter 5. Over time, the general belief that state and society alike were mired in deep decay pushed scholars away from the kind of “pure” philological scholarship practiced by mid-Qing Han Learning scholarship, and toward “useful” scholarship that could help the country regain its material prosperity and spiritual vitality. The first half of the nineteenth century saw several major schools of thought rise up against the intellectual dominance of Han Learning. Song Learning gained considerable influence beyond official ranks through the rise of what Zeng Guofan would later call the “Tongcheng School,” a group of essayists, predominantly active in the Middle and Lower Yangtze, who advocated a return to the literary and intellectual style of Tang and Song dynasty scholarship. The school traced its origins to eighteenth century scholars such as Dai Shiming, Fang Bao, and Liu Dakui, but truly gained national prominence in the early nineteenth century under the leadership of the Tongcheng (Anhui Province) native Yao Nai, who argued for the merging of Han Learning textual empiricism with the sociopolitical pragmatism and literary style of Song Learning.9 Other major Tongcheng scholars such as Fang Dongshu and Tang Jian were openly critical of the “emptiness” and “uselessness” of Han Learning

4 5 8 9

For a general survey of the rise of shixue in the late Qing, see Feng & Huang (2002). 6 7 See discussion at Chapter 5, Section D. Von Glahn (2018). Id. Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014). Zeng (2016). Yao’s more explicit statements on these issues come in Yao Nai (姚鼐), Shu’an Wenchao Xu (述庵文钞序) [Preface to Collected Works of Shu’an], in Xibao Xuan Quanji: Wenji (惜抱轩全集: 文集) [Collected Works of Yao Nai], ch. 4 (Shanghai Guji Press 1992).

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philology, calling for a more robust and muscular advocacy of jingshi (“ordering the world”) ideals and sociopolitically “useful” (jiyong) scholarship.10 By the later nineteenth century, the school had become both politically and intellectually prominent through the efforts of major scholar-officials like Zeng, Guo Songtao, Zhang Yuzhao, and Xue Fucheng.11 Another major challenge to Han Learning came from the emergence of “New Text Classical Learning” (Jinwen Jingxue), a strand of scholarship that had been largely defunct since the fifth or sixth century, but was recovered and repurposed in the later Qing as a banner for social and political reform.12 Strictly speaking, the school is more easily defined by the collection of ancient writings it included in its literary canon than by any specific set of normative or empirical ideas: It emphasized the importance of the Gong Yang and Gu Liang commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals, and then of Han dynasty interpretations written by Dong Zhongshu and others, neither of which drew nearly as much attention from mainstream Han or Song Learning. Substantively, late Qing “Jinwen” scholarship overlapped heavily with both Han and Song Learning scholarship: It shared Han Learning’s methodological textualism and skepticism toward deontological orthodoxy, but shared with Song Learning a strong emphasis on sociopolitical pragmatism. In the final years of the dynasty, it came to be associated with especially radical calls for sociopolitical reform and change under the leadership of Kang Youwei and others.13 In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, it was a burgeoning intellectual movement with a somewhat nebulous set of substantive commitments, defined primarily by its textual canon, its aggressive advocacy of

10

11

12

13

See Fang Dongshu (方东树), Hanxue Shangdui (汉学商兑) [An Assessment of Han Learning] (1831); Tang Jian (唐鉴), Guochao Xue’an Xiaoshi (国朝学案小识) [Introduction into Qing Period Philosophy], at Introduction (Shandong Youyi Shushe Press 1990). See, e.g., Zeng Qiyun (曾琦云), Zeng Guofan Sixiang Yuanliu Xintan (曾国藩思想源流新探) [A New Inquiry into the Intellectual Origins of Zeng Guofan’s Thought], 2009(1) Xiangtan Daxue Xuebao (湘潭大学学报) [J. Xiangtan Univ.] 135; Gao Ruiquan (高瑞泉), Jindai Jiazhiguan Biange yu Wan Qing Zhishi Fenzi (近代价值观变革与晚清知识分子) [Modern Changes in Values and Late Qing Intellectuals], 2004(1) Huadong Shifan Daxue Xuebao (华东师范大学学报) [J. East China Normal Univ.] 18. See, e.g., Liang (2008); Huang Kaiguo (黄开国), Qingdai Jinwen Jingxue de Xingqi (清代 今文经学的兴起) [The Rise of the New Text Confucianism in the Qing Dynasty] (2008); Yang Nianqun (杨念群), Qingchao Lixue, Zhuzi Xue, Jinwen Jingxue Fuxing de Yiyi: Jianji yu Wanqing Zhengzhi Taishi de Hudong Guanxi (清朝理学、诸子学、今文经学复兴的意义—— 兼及与晚清政治态势的互动关系) [The Significance of the Revival of Neo-Confucianism, PreQin Philosophies, and New Text Confucianism in the Qing Dynasty: And Their Interactions with the Political Situations in the Late Qing Period], 2019(1) Zhongbei Daxue Xuebao (中北 大学学报) [J. North Univ. China] 1. See Kang Youwei (康有为), Xinxue Weijing Kao (新学伪经考) [A Study of the Forges Classics of the Xin Period] (1891).

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“useful” scholarship, and its relative openness to macro-level institutional reforms. Even within Han Learning affiliates, cracks were emerging. As early as the late Qianlong and early Jiaqing era, prominent Han Learning scholars such as Zhang Xuecheng were arguing for “using scholarship to order the world” (xueye jiang yi jingshi), and were openly critical of the purely philological interests of most of their Han Learning colleagues.14 Hong Liangji, who we encountered in Chapter 5, was actually a Han Learning historian by training, but eventually turned toward socioeconomic research and analysis as his primary intellectual pursuit. Several major Han Learning scholars of the early nineteenth century, including Jiao Xun and Ruan Yuan, followed in Zhang Xuecheng’s footsteps to argue for a merger of Song Learning political ideals with Han Learning empiricism – which, substantively, brought them very close to what Yao Nai was arguing for at around the same time.15 By the Daoguang era, a new consensus in favor of sociopolitically useful shixue was emerging across traditional intellectual divisions. The men who are often spoken of as the leaders of the new paradigm came from a variety of backgrounds: Yao Ying, for example, was one of the major Tongcheng School scholars of his era, whereas Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan were closely affiliated with the “New Text” school.16 Tao Shu and He Changling, the political linchpins of the new movement, were critical of both Han and Song Learning, but also never embraced the “New Text” canon.17 The new movement therefore transcended traditional intellectual boundaries, bringing together scholars of diverse backgrounds under the common methodological banner of jingshi jiyong. It should be noted that many of these major shixue figures were socially and politically interconnected through Tao Shu and He Changling’s extensive patronage networks, frequently collaborating on political and intellectual projects. The rise of shixue reoriented a significant amount of scholarly attention to real world problems like economic production, social organization, foreign relations, and, of course, fiscal policy. Shixue scholars and officials prized hard-nosed realism, knowledge of the world, including the world beyond Chinese boundaries, and a relatively larger appetite for sociopolitical reform. This attitude further turned them against the traditional condemnation of “speaking of profit,” and some of them, such as Bao Shichen and Wei, openly

14

15

16

Zhang Xuecheng (章学诚), Tian Yu (天喻) [The Metaphor of Heaven], in Wenshi Tongyi: Nei Pian (文史通义: 内篇) [On Literature and History], ch. 3 (Shanghai Guji Press 2008). Jiao Xun (焦循), Yu Sun Yuanru Guancha Lun Kaoju Zhuzuo Shu (与孙渊如观察论考据著作 书) [Discussion with Sun Yuanru on Evidential Scholarship], in Diaogu Ji (雕菰集) [Selected Works of Jiao Xun], ch. 13 (1937); Ruan Yuan (阮元), Ni Guoshi Rulin Zhuan Xu (拟国史儒 林传序) [Drafted Preface to Biographies of the Confucian Scholars], in 1 Yanjing Shi Ji (研经室 集) [Selected Works of Ruan Yuan], ch. 2 (1993). 17 Feng & Huang (2002), at 86–123. Id.

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embraced “speaking of profit” as a badge of honor, rather than shame.18 Research and writing about geography, agriculture, shipping, salt production, taxation, bureaucratic management, and many other “realist” topics experienced explosive growth in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, producing not only a significant amount of original scholarship, but also many major compilations of earlier writings, most notably the Huangchao Jingshi Wenbian [“Jingshi” Writings of the Imperial Dynasty], a massive collection of official and private writings from the early-to-mid Qing, compiled by He Changling and Wei Yuan, that continues to draw significant academic attention to this day. II. Shixue and Fiscal Conservatism When it came to substantive ideas about fiscal policy, however, change came slowly under the shixue banner. To some extent, jingshi shixue seemed to care more about changing the attitudes and intellectual focuses of scholars than about actually changing their substantive opinions. As a result, it drew more scholarly attention to fiscal policy, but did not immediately engineer any significant change to the content of fiscal thinking. Only a few of the major jingshi advocates in the Jiaqing and Daoguang imperial bureaucracy, such as Tao, He, Yao, Lin, Tang Peng, and so on, left a legacy of significant fiscal reform. This is not to say that they were fiscally inactive – quite the opposite, several of them had reputations as skilled fiscal managers19 – but rather that they were, by and large, more interested in helping the institutional status quo function optimally than in making significant change to it. Tao Shu, who spearheaded both the salt license (piao) reforms and the grain tribute sea shipping reforms discussed in Chapter 5, may have been an exception, but even he seemed to prefer more moderate measures whenever feasible. As previously discussed, the salt license system he pioneered in the Huaibei region was a sort of compromise between the Daoguang Court’s general fiscal conservatism and the growing need to revamp the salt tax system: It replaced the old state-backed monopolies with a more commercialized system that allowed private investors to enter the salt market with relative ease, but no longer attempted, as Feng Guangxiong and Jiang Zhaokui once did, to replace the salt tax with a direct addition to the land tax. Instead, licensing stations were created at shipping chokepoints to issue licenses to private producers and collected corresponding fees. The government would have to assume extra administrative burdens and risks under this arrangement, but could avoid the charge of increasing taxes on the rural populace. In keeping with the general 18

19

On Bao, see Rowe (2018). Wei Yuan’s clearest statements on this topic are found in Wei Yuan (魏源), 1 Mo Gu (默觚) [The Scrolls of Wei Yuan], ch. 8 (学篇八) (1878). Tang Peng, for example, served in the Ministry of Revenue for a number of years. Tao Shu was, of course, the most prominent fiscal manager of the group.

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political trends of the Daoguang era, virtually none of its major shixue officials advocated any notable change to agricultural taxes, or authored any serious critique of mainstream political thinking on that subject. The unprecedented fiscal crisis of the 1850s changed everything, of course, but as discussed in the next section, even then, most officials were highly reluctant to go against the mantra that agricultural taxes could not be raised. Outside of the formal bureaucracy, challenges to parts of mainstream fiscal thinking emerged here and there, but were generally overshadowed by its vast intellectual and institutional inertia during this period. Most importantly, the perception of Malthusian crisis remained enormously influential throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In fact, all of the main political and institutional forces that had sustained this perception during the Qianlong and Jiaqing eras continued to do so during the mid-nineteenth century: the population continued to grow rapidly until 1850 – nearly doubling, in fact, between 1750 and 1850 – while land surveying continued to be politically frowned upon until the 1870s.20 A couple of treatises published by influential scholars during the 1850s suggest that overpopulation’s grip over elite political thought was as strong as ever. The first was Tang Chenglie’s Zhi Fu Pian [On Fiscal Policymaking], written in 1852, which was one of the most systemic and thorough critiques of the agricultural tax system as it stood prior to the major reforms ushered in by the Taiping Rebellion.21 The other two were Wang Shiduo’s pair of essay collections – Yimao Suibi [Causal Writings of the Yimao Year] and Bingchen Beiyi Lu [Memorandums from the Bingchen Year] – which were written in 1855 and 1856 during the peak of the Taiping onslaught, but focused largely on the Qing economy and population as it had stood prior to the Rebellion.22 Tang, who had established himself as a major scholar of fiscal affairs during the Daoguang reign, made two proposals: First, to reduce the real tax burden by clamping down on local surcharges; and, second, to replace tax collection in silver with collection in coin. Both proposals were premised on his firm belief that overpopulation had led to severe impoverishment of the population, which had reduced the taxable agricultural surplus to what Tang believed was the lowest level in Chinese history: “The population has never been larger than it is today, and the impoverishment of the people has never been as severe as it is now.” Despite these conditions, the state continued to tolerate the local collection of surcharges, which, when considered against the background of “unprecedented” impoverishment, meant that “the fiscal burden imposed on the people has never, in history, been as heavy as it is now”23 – a rather 20 21 22

23

See Deng (2004). Tang Chenglie (汤成烈), Zhi Fu Pian (治赋篇) [On Fiscal Policymaking], HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 34. Wang Shiduo (汪士铎), Wang Huiweng Yi Bing Riji (汪悔翁乙丙日记) [Diary of Wang Shiduo] (1946). Tang Chenglie, Zhi Fu Pian.

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disorienting statement to modern scholars who are aware that agricultural tax burdens were substantially lower in the early nineteenth century than at any other point in Second Millennium Chinese history. The rest of his treatise reads like a “greatest hits” collection of Qing fiscal conservatism, covering most of the major intellectual themes we saw in Chapters 4 and 5: it blamed Ming collapse on excessive taxation, called for the abolishment of tax collection in silver, and criticized Yongzheng’s meltage fee reforms for formalizing local surcharges, rather than attempting to eliminate them. The logical centerpiece of the entire argument, however, was the assumption of Malthusian crisis, which laid an indispensable empirical foundation for the rest of the treatise. For Wang Shiduo, who is often spoken of in the same breath as Hong Liangji as “China’s Malthus(es),” mid-nineteenth century overpopulation had reached such an critical level that state taxation was no longer the real problem.24 He argued that, while many peasants did join the Taiping because they could no longer to afford paying taxes and rents, this did not mean that reducing taxation could have kept them loyal. Given how impoverished the population had become prior to the Taiping Rebellion, no matter how little the state taxed, it would still be beyond the ability of many, perhaps most, peasants to pay up. Instead, the only real solution was to reduce the population through all possible means: Offering no economic relief to regions struck by natural disasters or epidemics, making heavier use of capital punishment, birth control, even infanticide.25 As horrifying as many of these measures must have seemed to his peers, Wang insisted that, without them, there was little hope of restoring economic sustainability and sociopolitical stability. There were many unorthodox elements in Wang’s analysis, which explains the somewhat cold response it received from his contemporaries, even though Wang was a fairly well known scholar at this point and would soon become one of Hu Linyi’s personal advisors. Unsurprisingly, his list of macabre proposals to reduce the population gained little traction with others. Moreover, his account of overpopulation was unusually extreme even by contemporary standards: as discussed in the following section, many political elites insisted that reducing taxes was both a necessary and effective step toward regaining the allegiance of Taiping-conquered regions, and would have considered Wang’s pessimism on this front excessive. Nonetheless, the belief that overpopulation had driven the economy into a Malthusian crisis was completely mainstream during the Daoguang and Xianfeng reigns, echoed by many inside the bureaucracy, including Tao Shu himself, and beyond it.26

24 26

25 Wang (1975). Id. See, e.g., Wang Qingyun (王庆云) Memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 10; Chen Zhao (陈肇) Memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 31; Wang Jiaxiang (王家相) Memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 36; Yao Wentian (姚文田) Memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 36; Tao Shu (陶澍) Memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 36.

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Midcentury shixue scholars offered a variety of solutions to this perceived Malthusian crisis, several of which would have considerable impact on fiscal policymaking in the post-Taiping recovery. Gong Zizhen, for example, proposed that the state should attempt to equalize landholding in core economic regions, so that the most impoverished would still be able to maintain a basic livelihood off the land.27 This would be accomplished not through direct redistribution by the state – Gong seemed to recognize that such redistribution was well beyond the state’s administrative capacity – but by encouraging the formation of large lineages in the countryside, which could provide a basic livelihood for their least well-off members by accumulating significant amounts of lineage-controlled property and using it for charitable purposes. As noted in Chapter 5, following the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition, the Qing became perhaps the first major Chinese dynasty to consciously delegate significant chunks of sub-county administration to local lineages, and Gong’s proposal fell squarely within this tradition of encouraging lineage self-governance and economic selfhelp. He did recognize, however, that such local redistributionary efforts could only slow, and not fundamentally solve, the socioeconomic problems created by overpopulation, and proposed interregional migration as a longer-term solution: While there was very little the state could do to boost production in its core economic regions, the Northwestern frontier still offered a large surplus of land. Gong therefore argued that the state should encourage migration from core economic regions, especially from the severely overpopulated southeast, to the northwestern frontier through all possible means: advocacy and exhortation, supplying financial incentives, and, in some cases, even the use of coercive force.28 Under Gong’s influence, Wei Yuan also became enamored with the idea of inter-regional migration.29 His basic approach to fiscal management was quite radical by the standards of the Daoguang era: He broke from the conventional Malthusian view, which assumed that significant economic growth was no longer possible, and therefore focused on reducing expenditures, by arguing that such reductions – “tightening outputs” (jieliu) – must be paired with progrowth policies – “expanding inputs” (kaiyuan) – that could increase state revenue over the long run. He therefore rejected the idea of an fully exhausted economy and, in the aftermath of the First Opium War, was one of the earliest scholars to advocate “learning from foreigners” in order to strengthen domestic industry. When it came to agriculture, however, his views were much more moderate. He seemed to tacitly accept the assumption that there was little room for 27

28 29

See Gong Zizhen (龚自珍), Gong Zizhen Quanji (龚自珍全集) [Collected Works of Gong Zizhen], 50, 78 (Shanghai Guji Press 1999). Id., at 106–107, 115. Wei Yuan, 2 Wei Yuan Ji (魏源集) [Collected Writings of Wei Yuan], 485–487 (Zhonghua Shuju Press 2009).

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agrarian growth in core regions, and instead placed his hopes on migration to the frontiers, including but not limited to the northwest. In particular, he argued that the state should proactively relocate bannermen to frontier regions and charge them with major land reclamation projects. This would be doubly beneficial, both shoring up border defenses and tapping into a major new source of agricultural production. Until such policies began to generate substantial fiscal returns, however, Wei advocated fiscal moderation: Unlike some of the more aggressively anti-statist scholars we encountered in previous chapters, he appreciated the positive value of government spending, and opposed reducing it so much that the state’s ability to supply basic public goods like famine relief would be severely impaired.30 Nonetheless, he argued that current levels of military spending were already excessive, and should be streamlined to reduce extraction from already overburdened core regions. Employing bannermen to reclaim frontier land would actually aid this agenda as well: Over time, land reclamation would allow frontier garrisons to economically support themselves, thereby sharply reducing the state’s military expenditures. The idea of relieving overpopulation through frontier land reclamation was a very popular one among major shixue scholars. As previously noted, Hong Liangji was also a major supporter. Within the bureaucracy, Tang Peng, otherwise a committed fiscal conservative who sometimes opposed the very idea of “speaking of profit” – not because of any deontological normative disapproval, but because he believed that fiscal expansion would inevitably produce a vicious cycle of economic recession, falling revenues, and larger budgetary shortfalls – enthusiastically embraced frontier land reclamation as a fundamental solution to Malthusian impoverishment.31 The politics of frontier settlement made it a relatively safe focal point for reformist energy: The Qing state had long encouraged migration from core regions to the northwest, and held little aversion to ramping up its efforts in this direction. The northeastern frontier was more politically sensitive: Largely due to ethnic tensions between Manchu and Han populations, the Qing had formally banned Han migration to Manchuria since 1668, although the enforcement of this ban was uneven at best. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, these concerns had become largely obsolete even among Manchu elites. In 1860, the Imperial Court began to open Manchuria to Han settlement in phases, beginning with the southernmost parts of the region, until all constraints were formally

30

31

Id., at 469–471. For a comparison of Gong and Wei’s thinking on migration to the Northwest, see Wang Penghui (王鹏辉), Gong Zizhen he Weiyuan de Yudixue Yanjiu (龚自珍和魏源的舆地 学研究) [The Geographical Research of Gong Zizhen and Weiyuan], 2014(3) Lishi Yanjiu (历 史研究) [Hist. Res.] 73. Tang Peng (汤鹏), Yi Pin (医贫) [Curing Poverty], 1 Zhongguo Jindai Jingji Sixiang Ziliao Xuanji (中国近代经济思想史资料选辑) [Selected Materials on Modern Chinese Economic Thinking] [hereinafter JDJJSXSZL], 60–66 (Zhao Jing & Yi Menghong eds., 1982).

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removed in 1904.32 This led to a large wave of Han migration into the northeast over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with largely positive economic outcomes for both migrants and the state.

III. Bao Shichen’s Challenge A more radical vision for rural economic revival came from Bao Shichen, whose views have drawn a considerable amount of academic attention in recent decades after being largely ignored in the earlier twentieth century.33 Bao was, in fact, a widely respected figure in early-to-mid nineteenth century shixue circles, and many of his views on the agrarian economy were decades ahead of his time. Most notably, whereas men like Wei and Gong had largely accepted the conventional wisdom that there was little room for agricultural growth in core economic regions, Bao, writing in the early Jiaqing reign, categorically rejected the idea that agricultural production capacity was anywhere close to being exhausted, even in core economic regions.34 His argument came in two prongs: First, he estimated that the total arable landmass within core economic regions (neidi) amounted to some 4.1 billion mu, over four times the formal official figure. This was, in fact, a wildly inaccurate estimate – China’s tilled landmass has never exceeded 2 billion mu even in the modern era35 – but Bao was at least correct that aggressive land reclamation, which was happening anyway outside of state recordkeeping, could have substantially increased total production. Second, he argued that land productivity still had room for significant increases: He criticized political and intellectual elites for failing to understand and promote agricultural “best practices” across the country, leading to suboptimal productivity in most regions.36 Moreover, he argued that fiscal overextraction had severely dampened the willingness of rural populations to invest in agriculture, and was a central reason why, in his estimates, agricultural productivity was performing so poorly. The solution, then, was clear: The state 32

33

34 35

36

Bai Hongzhong (白宏钟), Yimin yu Dongbei Jindai Shehui Wenming de Jiangou (移民与东北近 代社会文明的建构) [Immigrants and the Construction of Modern Society in Northeast China], 7 Zhongguo Shehui Lishi Pinglun (中国社会历史评论) [Chinese Soc. Hist. Rev.] 383 (2006). See also Shuang Chen, State-Sponsored Inequality: The Banner System and Social Stratification in Northeast China (2017). Apart from Rowe (2018), see also Zhang Yan (张岩), Bao Shichen Jingshi Sixiang Yanjiu (包世臣经世思想研究) [Studies on Bao Shichen’s Thoughts on Statecraft] (2016); Li Guoqi (李国祁), Bao Shichen yu Wei Yuan Jingshi Sixiang Bijiao Fenxi (包世臣与魏源经世思想 比较分析) [A Comparative Analysis of the Jingshi Thought of Bao Shih-Chen and Wei Yuan], 33 Taiwan Shida Lishi Xuebao (台湾师大历史学报) [Bull. Hist. Res.] 137 (2005). See Bao, Qi Min Si Shu (1997), at ch. 1(xia), 2; Bao, Zhongqu Yi Shao (1993), at ch. 7(xia). See, e.g., Arable Land (hectares)-China, The World Bank, Data https://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA?locations=CN (last visited Aug. 16, 2021). Bao, Qi Min Si Shu (1997), at ch. 1 (shang).

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should encourage land reclamation and the dissemination of agricultural best practices, but must do so while reducing agricultural taxation. Although Bao did, in fact, accept several core empirical elements of the mainstream Malthusian narrative, he interpreted their causes and implications quite differently: He readily agreed that rapid population growth had led to over-taxation, but insisted this was not because the rural economy had reached its upper bound, but because over-taxation had disincentivized agricultural production.37 In his predictions on the potential for further production growth, both in arable acreage and in land productivity, he was a true visionary. Like most visionaries who were well ahead of their times, however, his ideas generated only a lukewarm reception. They certainly had some supporters – the Tongcheng School scholar Wu Dexuan, for example, penned an essay that echoed Bao’s arguments virtually step by step38 – but for the most part, academic debate and fiscal policymaking continued to operate upon a general assumption of deepening Malthusian crisis. Bao was, in any case, as least as strong a supporter of fiscal restraint as any mainstream fiscal conservative, which may have lessened the immediate political novelty and impact of his ideas. History has, at least, been relatively kind to them. The underwhelming reception to Bao’s agrarian vision further reinforces how much of a difference regular land surveying could have potentially made in Qing political discourse: The starting point of Bao’s analysis was the set of estimates he made of potentially arable landmass in core economic regions and of land productivity under optimal conditions.39 Both of these were likely drawn from Bao’s observations of local land reclamation and production, which he then projected onto the national level through a series of fairly simplistic mathematical calculations.40 As a matter of pure logic, Bao’s general argument that the rural economy had much room to grow did not necessarily depend on the plausibility of these estimates, but their empirical persuasiveness to his contemporaries probably did, and it is clear from other writings produced in the early nineteenth century that the estimates did not gain traction with others. One has to wonder why Bao considered it necessary to give these estimates at all, but then again, given the general intellectual commitment to fact-based empiricism among mid-Qing elites, he likely felt – probably correctly – there was no chance of persuading other scholars of his broader thesis without refuting their Malthusian assumptions on their own terms, which meant arguing, in numerical terms, for the existence of significant amounts of potentially reclaimable land at the national level. The problem was that, like everyone else, he had no way of producing accurate numerical estimates in the absence of state-driven data collection.

37 39 40

38 Id. Wu Dexuan (吴德旋) essay, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 31. Bao, Zhongqu Yi Shao (1993), at ch. 7(xia). See Rowe (2018), at 75–80, for analysis of how Bao arrived at these estimates.

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Forced into this uncomfortable intellectual corner, Bao produced a set of estimates of arable landmass that were clearly speculative and presented with virtually no corroborating evidence. Even to modern scholars who sympathize with his rejection of the Malthusian mainstream, the figures seem “wildly wrong,” if nonetheless refreshing.41 To elites with access to official land figures – a description that, at any given time, applied to most of the imperial bureaucracy, and many people outside of it – they likely seemed completely outlandish, and almost certainly damaged Bao’s credibility. That said, if the Qing state had kept its land records up to date, reflecting the steady growth of the empire’s tilled acreage throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is not at all difficult to imagine how the reception could have been very different: After all, if Bao, whose baseline position on fiscal restraint was, after all, not very different from the average official, could be persuaded of the potential for significant agricultural growth through some exposure to local production, why couldn’t other shixue scholars? The most plausible answer is, once again, that the sociopolitical risks of agreeing with his position were extremely high when official statistics lent them no support, and therefore that the cognitive threshold of persuasion was made artificially high by the institutional rejection of land surveying. All in all, when it came to agricultural taxes, the advent of shixue produced, prior to the 1850s, only a few strands of divergence from the Malthusian mainstream, and nothing that was powerful enough to dislodge its political and institutional dominance. Nonetheless, those few strands of novel thinking did lay something of an intellectual foundation – or, at least, sowed the seeds – for the more significant pushback against the institutional status quo that occurred during the Taiping Rebellion and its aftermath. This was not only true of agricultural taxation, but also of how elites understood the proper structure of the economy. As modern day sinology is fond of pointing out, there was a time when the conventional view of the late imperial Chinese economy portrayed it as dominated by “Confucian” antipathy toward commerce.42 More recent scholarship has refuted that view by unpacking the deep and mutually beneficial relationship that the late imperial state often enjoyed with the merchant community, but at the level of elite political discourse, there were still many advocates of “restraining commerce” (yi shang) even in the nineteenth century.43 Men like Xie Jieshu and Xu Zi,

41 42

43

Rowe (2018), at 80. See, e.g., Timothy Brook, Weber, Mencius, and the History of Chinese Capitalism, 19 Asian Persp. 79 (1995). Often, the first target of their criticism is Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Talcott Parsons trans., Charles Scribner’s Sons 1958); Weber (1964). For modern academic writings on this topic, see, e.g., Li Ta-chia (李达嘉), Cong Yi Shang dao Zhong Shang: Sixiang yu Zhengce de Kaocha (从抑商到重商: 思想与政策的考察) [From Restraint to Encouragement of Commerce: An Investigation into Ideas and Policies], 82

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writing in the Daoguang era, expressed open animosity to the relative affluence of the merchant class: “There are three groups of people in today’s world who are impoverished, and only one that is rich. The emperor is impoverished, his officials are impoverished, and the people are impoverished, but only merchants are rich.”44 The implication was twofold: first, that the state should attempt to redistribute wealth from the commercial sector to the agricultural; and, second, that if there was any room for fiscal expansion, it must be imposed against merchants, rather than farmers. As we will see in the following section, such ideas supplied part of the political consensus behind the creation of the lijin during the Taiping Rebellion. In contrast, many shixue scholars, ranging from Bao and Wei to major political figures like Lin Zexu, took a significantly more positive view toward commerce, considering it one of the core components of a functional economy.45 They were certainly not the first Qing elites to have held such views – Chen Hongmou, as William Rowe has argued, was a major believer in the economic value of liutong (“circulation of goods”), as were many of his contemporaries46 – but political appreciation of commerce’s positive economic contributions nonetheless seemed to grow with the rise of shixue, and would later become a major focal point for reform during the Yangwu Movement.

b. fiscal crisis and institutional response The Taiping Rebellion and the ensuing fiscal crisis it produced forced the Qing state to fundamentally revamp its fiscal institutions within a very short timeframe. For the most part, political elites threw caution to the wind as they scrambled to meet yawning deficits and sustain skyrocketing military expenditures. As outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, with the sole exception of the agricultural tax, every other major category of taxation underwent dramatic expansion during the rebellion and its aftermath. In particular, the creation of the lijin commercial tax and a sharp increase in tariff income were the primary lifelines that allowed the state to survive its initial fiscal plunge in the early-tomid-1850s. From that point until the end of the dynasty, the trajectory of these nonagricultural fiscal categories was one of near-continuous growth: Looking only at formal quotas, they grew by 400 percent between 1850 and the 1890s, and then almost tripled from the 1890s to the end of the dynasty.47

44

45 46

47

Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan Jindai Shi Yanjiusuo Jikan (中央研究院近代史研究所集刊) [Bull. Inst. Mod. Hist. Academia Sinica] 1 (2013). Xie Jieshu (谢阶树), Li Cai (理财) [On Finance], 1 JDJJSXSZL, 161–162. See also Xu Zi (徐鼒), Wu Ben Lun (务本论) [On the Essence of Statecraft], 1 JDJJSXSZL, 181–193. See Li (2013). Rowe (2018). See also Zanasi (2020), at 54–107, on mainstream Qing intellectual attitudes toward markets. See discussion in Chapter 1, Section C.

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Agricultural taxes were by no means spared the institutional shocks created by the rebellion, but by any measure, quantitative or qualitative, it experienced a far milder set of institutional shocks than did commercial taxes, tariffs, or salt taxes. The total volume of agricultural tax extraction most likely decreased between 1850 and the 1890s, even though it underwent significant expansion in a few regions.48 Even in these extremely trying times, most political elites, including some of the most active fiscal reformists within the bureaucracy, continued to operate under a general assumption that there was no significant room, if any, for increasing the real fiscal burden imposed on rural populations. Nonetheless, a number of institutional red lines that had been established over the course of the Qianlong to Daoguang reigns were successfully breached within a decade or so of the rebellion. First, Yongzheng-style surcharge formalization made a major comeback during the rebellion years in the form of grain tribute reform in several Central China provinces. Similar reforms had failed to gain any real political traction at Court during the early nineteenth century, but became a semiregularized part of the Qing state’s fiscal toolkit during the Rebellion, in part due to the provinces’ apparent success in formalizing some portions of local surcharges while substantially reducing the rest. Some provinces actually seemed to deliver on Yongzheng’s unkept promise of boosting the state’s formal income while reducing the real tax burden.49 Second, one province, Sichuan, actually imposed a direct and semi-permanent tax hike on its population during the rebellion,50 although Sichuan’s unique fiscal status prevented this from setting any sort of general institutional precedent. Third, the political and institutional rejection of land surveying finally weakened from the 1860s to the 1880s, leading to, for the first time in over a century, a significant increase in official tilled acreage statistics. With it came a noticeable change in elite assumptions about the maximum production capacity of the rural economy: away from Hong Liangji or Wang Shiduo’s Malthusian pessimism, and toward Bao Shichen’s vision of untapped agrarian potential. The immediate fiscal impact of these changes was relatively limited: The political revival of surcharge formalization overturned one specific institutional manifestation of mainstream fiscal conservatism, but posed no direct challenge to its core beliefs about agricultural taxation. The tax hikes in Sichuan were more than quantitively offset by significant tax reductions given out to the Lower Yangtze in the 1860s, and seemed to be perceived by many political elites as a much needed regional rebalancing measure, rather than a straight-up tax hike.51 The gradual return of land surveying, too, failed to produce any immediate political movement to raise agricultural taxes. That said, it did seem to at least to weaken some of the core empirical beliefs that had politically sustained fiscal conservatism for most of the dynasty, and would set the 48

Id.

49

Id.

50

Id.

51

Id.

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intellectual stage for much more drastic changes to the agricultural tax after 1901.

I. Grain Tribute Surcharge Formalization Despite the Imperial Court’s fairly ruthless rejection of surcharge formalization proposals in the Jiaqing and Daoguang eras, they were nonetheless one of the first tools provincial authorities turned to in the mid-1850s as a way to partially plug fiscal deficits. The institutional advantages of surcharge formalization in the grain tribute context, as opposed to the land and head tax context, were still substantial: Until the early nineteenth century, there had been significantly less political stigma attached to periodically increasing the grain tribute than to adjusting the land and head tax.52 Moreover, the fact that the grain tribute was collected and shipped through a more concentrated bureaucratic apparatus than the land and head tax meant that, to some extent, informal surcharges were easier to track down and audit, and therefore easier to formalize. Finally, the fact that it involved often complicated conversion exercises between grain and silver gave regional managers some relatively convenient institutional levers to manipulate collection practices and quotas. As noted in Chapter 1, surcharge formalization began in Hunan in 1855 under Luo Bingzhang’s governorship. Placed under enormous pressure by state authorities to “donate” additional funds to support their military campaigning against the Taiping, a couple of local gentry from Xiangtan County, led by one Zhou Huannan, proposed imposing new surcharges equal to 130 percent of the county’s formal grain tribute quota, of which 100 percent would go into military expenditures, and 30 percent into local administrative costs. Luo quickly approved the proposal, which soon went into effect across the province. This seemed to open up a dam of pent-up reformist activity among provincial governors: Within three years, similar measures had been implemented in Hubei, Anhui, and Jiangxi, which boosted the formal grain tribute income in those provinces by 50–70 percent, and total tax revenue about some 10–15 percent.53 At the same time, they made serious efforts to reduce and regulate preexisting informal surcharges through local audits and subsequent punitive measures. In Hubei’s case, the provincial governor Hu Linyi claimed that the swapping out of informal surcharges for formal ones actually reduced the real grain tribute tax paid by the local population by more than 50 percent, from around 13000 cash per shi of formal quota to around

52

See Chapter 5, Section D.

53

Yan Aihong (2009).

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5000 shi54 – a claim that modern scholarship has found at least somewhat plausible.55 Functionally, these measures came straight out of the Yongzheng meltage fee reform playbook, in which the reduction of informal surcharges gave the government political cover to add formal ones. That playbook had, of course, been politically marginalized and often outright rejected for more than a century prior to Luo’s reforms in Hunan, as we saw in Chapter 5, but the fiscal desperation created by the Taiping forced a fundamental loosening of political restrictions against fiscal experimentation. In the heat of the moment, other considerations had to give way to crude fiscal-military necessity: Not only did Luo’s measures meet with explicit approval from the Xianfeng Emperor, but no serious challenges were mounted to any of these grain tribute surcharges until several years after the rebellion had been put down. Nonetheless, mainstream fiscal conservatism did eventually rear its head once the state had regained some semblance of normalcy: In 1870, the censor Hu Jiayu submitted two memorials that sought the formal repeal of any formal surcharge created in Jiangxi during the rebellion, and condemned the provincial governor Liu Kunyi for allowing the surcharges to persist after the rebellion had ended.56 His arguments were fairly conventional: An apparently unfounded accusation that Liu’s efforts at eliminating informal surcharges had been unable to quantitatively make up for the formal surcharges he had imposed; some warnings about the potentially severe sociopolitical damage that might occur if the Jiangxi surcharges were allowed to continue; and a few gestures toward the institutional precedents against agricultural tax increases set throughout the dynasty, most recently during the Jiaqing-Daoguang transition, when Sun Yuting had attempted to conduct grain tribute surcharge formalization in the Lower Yangtze. As we saw in Chapter 5, a very similar set of arguments had sunk Sun’s reforms and, in all likelihood, ended his political career, as they had other reformist measures throughout the late Qianlong and Jiaqing eras. Liu pushed back by launching a series of fairly ad hominem attacks on Hu’s credibility, pointing out that Hu’s family had failed to fully pay their own tax

54

55

56

Hu Linyi (胡林翼) memorial on Grain Tribute policy and management, Xianfeng 8th Year 6th Month 16th Day, in 1 Hu Linyi Ji (胡林翼集) [Collected Works of Hu Linyi], 499 (Yuelu Shushe Press 1999). See also Hu Linyi Memorials, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 37. See Hong Jun (洪钧), Weiju Xia de Liyi Tiaozheng: Lun Hu Linyi Zhengdun Hubei Caozheng (危局下的利益调整:论胡林翼整顿湖北漕政) [Adjustment of Interests under Critical Situations: On Hu Linyi’s Reform of the Grain Tribute System of Hubei], 2012(6), Jianghai Xuekan (江海 学刊) [Jianghai Acad. J.], 155; Zhou Jian (周健), Gaizhe yu Haiyun: Hu Linyi Gaige yu Shijiu Shiji Houbanqi de Hubei Caowu (改折与海运: 胡林翼改革与19世纪后半期的湖北漕务) [Hu Linyi’s Reform and the Grain Tribute System of Hubei in the Late Nineteenth Century], 2018(1) Qingshi Yanjiu (清史研究) [The Qing Hist. J.] 63. Hu Jiayu memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 36. This seems to be the same memorial as Hu Jiayu (胡 家玉) memorial, FNHA 03-4860-044, Tongzhi 12th Year 4th Month 25th Day, cited in Yan (2010).

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quota for over two decades, and then by insisting that, due to rigorous reduction of informal surcharges, his reform measures had not, in fact, led to any increase in the real tax burden imposed on the local population.57 In a sign of how times had changed, the Imperial Court sided decisively with Liu, later stating that, with over a decade’s worth of successful implementation under their belt, the grain tribute reforms in Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui had demonstrated their practical feasibility – including, perhaps most importantly, that they could be implemented without triggering serious social unrest – and therefore that the court would actually risk more local socioeconomic disruption by repealing them.58 In the years after, Liu would go on to greater heights in his long bureaucratic career, eventually becoming one of the most prominent regional governors in the country, while Hu’s career went into a steep downturn, ending with a corruption charge by the later 1870s.59 Although this episode demonstrated that the grip of mainstream fiscal conservatism had weakened substantially in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion, it also paradoxically encapsulated its enduring strength. Provincial reformers took great pains, even during their peak of fiscal desperation in the 1850s, to offset formal surcharges with reductions in informal ones, which meant that they were really shifting financial resources away from local governments into central and provincial coffers, rather than expanding the total size of the fiscal pie. This was, to put it lightly, a dangerous move to take during a major rebellion, when it was arguably more important than ever to maintain the administrative and fiscal capacities of local governments, but – with one notable exception, which will be discussed shortly – virtually no provincial authority attempted to straightforwardly inflate the pie without some offsetting anti-informal surcharge campaign. In that sense, the old political stigma against increasing agricultural taxation remained alive and well throughout the rebellion and the so-called Tongzhi Restoration. Indeed, both sides of the Hu Jiayu-Liu Kunyi quarrel seemed to focus much of their political energy around the question of whether Liu had done enough to fiscally offset his imposition of formal surcharges. Several of the reformist governors confidently proclaimed, in fact, that their measures had actually reduced the real fiscal burden imposed on the local population.60 The only real political shift, from this perspective, was that the state was willing to suspend, perhaps temporarily, its traditional suspicion that surcharge formalization reforms would, over the long term, raise real tax burdens. This was

57

58

59 60

Liu Kunyi (刘坤一) Memorial, FNHA 03-4870-061, Tongzhi 12th Year 5th Month 28th Day; Qing Muzong Shilu (清穆宗实录) [Veritable Records of Qing Muzong], ch. 358, Tongzhi 12th Year 10th Month Jiawu. Qing Dezong Shilu (清德宗实录) [Veritable Records of Qing Dezong], ch. 70, Guangxu 4th Year 3rd Month Yihai. For modern scholarly analysis of this episode, see Yan Aihong (2010). See, e.g., Hu Linyi Memorial, 1 Hu Linyi Ji, 499; Liu Kunyi Memorial, FNHA 03-4870-061.

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undoubtedly a substantial change of direction comparing to the ever more conservative fiscal politics of the early nineteenth century, but it was not a fundamental one. The basic posture of the Qing Court on agricultural taxation remained one of stagnation by necessity – that, in other words, the rural population could not afford to pay more than it already did and, therefore, that the state should not force them to do so. In fact, the Taiping Rebellion was not necessarily a net political loss on the agricultural taxation front for fiscal conservatives at all. Although the rebellion did force the government to loosen some fiscal constraints, it also gave rise to a number of sociopolitical narratives that further entrenched political opposition to agricultural tax hikes. Shortly after the Rebellion began in 1851, a considerable number of officials began to push the argument that it was caused – and made worse – by overly aggressive agricultural taxation. Some placed the blame squarely at the feet of local surcharges: “In recent years,” stated a memorial by the censor Chen Qingyong, “county and townships have charged meltage surcharges to the land tax, and various conversion surcharges and excesses to the grain tribute. Even clean officials believe these surcharges to be within their rights, whereas corrupt officials pursue them especially enthusiastically.”61 The people have “fallen ill,” and “no longer sympathize with the state.” As a result, “the atmosphere of banditry and rebellion has persisted, and emergencies are frequently reported.”62 Chen was so infuriated by the Imperial Court’s tacit acquiescence on this issue he took the extraordinary step of asking the young Xianfeng Emperor to issue an edict of self-condemnation (zui ji zhao), so as to appease aggrieved taxpayers and take responsibility for the rebellion63 – which the beleaguered emperor actually did.64 Others shared this basic diagnosis, arguing that the state must address its fiscal crisis through the reduction of expenditures, rather than through imposing new taxes: “[Your subject] sees the difficult times we live in, and believes that there are only two ways to generate profit – either by increasing revenues, or by reducing expenditures – but when revenues have already reached a point where they can no longer be increased, then we must focus on reducing expenditures.”65 The Malthusian undertones of this claim are unmistakable. Calls for tax reductions and holidays also emerged, pitched as a way to pacify 61

62 64

65

Chen Qingyong (陈庆镛) Memorial, 3 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi, 1039–1045 (1970). 63 Id. Id. Xianfeng issued several of these self-condemnation edicts. The earliest was the edict reported in Qing Wenzong Shilu (清文宗实录) [Veritable Records of Qing Wenzong], ch. 57, Xianfeng 2nd Year 3rd Month Jimao, followed a year later by the edict reported in ch. 90, Xianfeng 3rd Year 4th Month Xinsi. Wang Zhenji (汪振基) Memorial, 3 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi 1060–1062. See Wesin (倭仁) memorial, 3 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi, 983–984; Xu Jiyu (徐继畬) Memorial, 3 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi, 1018–1023 for other arguments in favor of reducing expenditures.

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supposedly overburdened rural populations and ensure their loyalty to the state.66 It was, of course, completely unsurprising that a bureaucracy that had been gripped by fears of Malthusian decay for more than a century would pin much of the blame for a major peasant rebellion on overtaxation. Given the knee-jerk nature of these assessments, which were submitted almost immediately after the rebellion expanded beyond Guangxi, it seems eminently reasonable to suspect confirmation biases at work – not so different from the confirmation biases that had once fueled the early Qing verdict on Ming collapse, only strengthened by a century and a half of institutional and intellectual entrenchment. Like its early Qing predecessor, the claim that high agricultural taxes were at least partially responsible for the rise and spread of the Taiping Rebellion went largely unchallenged in later nineteenth century political discourse: Officials writing in the later 1870s continued to speak of it as a sort of political common sense, a negative example that the court should always keep in mind when considering fiscal reform.67 The Rebellion therefore proved to be a double-edged sword when it came to its impact on fiscal politics: On the one hand, it strengthened the hand of provincial reformers, but at the same time, it only seemed to cognitively reinforce traditional anxieties about overtaxation and ensuing peasant rebellion. The political behavior of Luo Bingzhang, Hu Linyi, Liu Kunyi, and others who simultaneously pursued formal fiscal expansion and informal fiscal reductions makes a great deal of sense in this kind of environment: They knew that financial desperation gave them somewhat more leeway to push against traditional institutional boundaries, but were also painfully aware that this leeway was significantly constrained by entrenched hostility against agricultural tax hikes, which the Rebellion had only further agitated. They were just as eager to avoid the political taint of raising taxes as their early nineteenth century predecessors, and were therefore always very careful to present surcharge formalization reforms as reductions to real agricultural tax burdens.

II. Regional Agricultural Tax Cuts and Hikes In fact, it was perfectly possible during this era for senior officials to be both reformist and substantively conservative at the same time on agricultural taxation. Some of the most ardent champions of grain tribute reform were also the strongest advocates of regional tax reductions. The clearest example of this came during the early 1860s, when the Imperial Court came under major pressure to reduce agricultural taxes in the Lower Yangtze. Ever since the Taiping had seized control over significant portions of the region in the early 66 67

Cai Shouqi (蔡寿祺) memorial, 3 Dao Xian Tong Guang Sichao Zouyi, 1056–1059. See Wen Ming (文明) Memorial, FNHA 03-6526-051, Guangxu 2nd Year 4th Month 15th Day.

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1850s, the Qing state’s ability to extract tax revenue from it had, of course, plummeted to a fraction of the full normal quota.68 Almost a decade later, as its armies and militias began their final counteroffensive against the rebellion in 1863, the court received a series of petitions from senior officials to permanently lower the formal quota, so as to aid the region’s post-rebellion recovery. More than any other macroregion, the Lower Yangtze had suffered enormous damage during the rebellion, up to nearly two-thirds of its formally registered population. While its recovery would, in time, prove to be rapid and thorough, it would be several decades before it came close to regaining its former economic and demographic vitality.69 Some measure of economic relief from the government was therefore all but certain. The only real issue was the specific institutional form that relief would take. The Qing state could, for example, simply have suspended, in part or in full, tax payments from the region for a number of years, which likely would have been the easiest path forward from an administrative perspective. Senior officials in the region – Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Guo Songtao, Zuo Zongtang, and others – pushed, however, for a more lasting solution, arguing that the region deserved a permanent reduction of its agricultural tax quota, especially of its grain tribute quota.70 This would not have necessarily made much real financial difference to the region, but it did send a very different political signal: Much of the argument was naturally rooted in the need to gain the trust and loyalty of the local population through a stronger display of imperial benevolence. Other parts of their argument, however, did not depend on the particular circumstances of the rebellion and its aftermath, but instead relied on the observation that the Lower Yangtze had always borne an 68

69

70

See Qing Wenzong Shilu, ch. 97, Xianfeng 3rd Year 6th Month Jichou for high level political reactions to this. On the speed of the demographic recovery in the Lower Yangtze, see Li Nan & Lin Chu (李楠, 林矗), Taiping Tianguo Zhanzheng dui Jindai Renkou Yingxiang de Zai Guji: Jiyu Lishi Ziran Shiyan de Shizheng Fenxi (太平天国战争对近代人口影响的再估计——基于历史自然实验的实 证分析) [A Re-Estimation of the Effect of the Taiping Rebellion on Population Loss in Modern China: An Empirical Analysis Based on a Historical Natural Experiment], 14 Jingjixue Jikan (经济学季刊) [China Econ. Q.] 1325 (2015). On economic recovery, see Li Nan & Lin Chu (李 楠, 林矗), Jindai Taiping Tianguo Zhanzheng dui Jingji Fazhan de Changqi Yingxiang (近代太 平天国战争对经济发展的长期影响) [The Long-Term Effect of the Taiping Rebellion on Economic Development], 2014(2) Jingji Ziliao Yicong (经济资料译丛) [J. Trans. Foreign Lit. Econ.] 62. These estimates suggest that population density did not fully recover until the 1920s, but economic production had recovered at a much faster rate – in fact, the lower population density actually spurred urbanization and proto-industrial development in the region. See memorials collected in Jiangsu Sheng Jianfu Quan’an (江苏省减赋全案) [Collected Materials on Tax Reduction in Jiangsu Province] (Liu Xungao ed., 1866), ch. 3, 4. Guo Songtao’s memorial is reprinted in Chapter 4. Zeng and Li’s joint memorial can be found at FNHA 03-4862-080, Tongzhi 2nd Year 5th Month 11th Day. Zuo’s Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0086004, Tongzhi 2nd Year 12th Month 2nd Day. Li’s separate memorial, along with related memorials by Pan Zuyin (潘祖荫) and Ding Shouchang (丁寿昌), HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 37.

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unusually heavy agricultural tax quota, had long been overtaxed as a result, and was therefore overdue for a tax cut. Feng Guifen, who, despite being a lower-ranked official working under Li Hongzhang’s patronage, was one of the major intellectual forces behind these proposals and the ghostwriter for Li’s memorial to the Court, had in fact been arguing that the Lower Yangtze was overtaxed since at least the early 1850s, even before the Taiping’s sacking of Nanjing in 1853. Afforded this opportunity to make a real political impact, he laid out, through Li’s memorial, a sweeping fiscal history of the region that reached all the way back to the early Ming, when, in his view, the seeds of overtaxation had already been sown.71 By the early nineteenth century, he argued, the state’s fiscal path dependency, coupled with its continued inability to eliminate informal local surcharges, had imposed such a heavy fiscal burden on the region’s agricultural economy that serious arrears were all but inevitable. The rebellion and its aftermath, which would have forced the Imperial Court to reduce its fiscal reliance on the Lower Yangtze anyway, therefore offered it a chance to permanently rectify these long-standing structural injustices. The state quickly agreed. Actual implementation had to be phased out over several years as it reestablished basic control over the region after 1864, but by the later 1860s, the formal reduction to grain tribute quotas in Jiangsu and Zhejiang alone had reached 800,000 shi of grain, equal to some 20 percent of the country’s total nominal grain tribute quota.72 At the same time, provincial authorities made a genuine effort to reduce informal surcharges, generating another 864,000 shi and some 3.5 million strings cash worth of real tax reductions.73 At no point in the later nineteenth century did central or provincial authorities make any serious attempt to roll back these tax cuts. Quite the opposite, provincial governors and local officials continued to press for tax reductions even in the later 1870s, well after the region was on its way to recovery.74 The only part of the country where the Qing state allowed any sort of formal semi-permanent agricultural tax hike was Sichuan, but Sichuan had been an extreme outlier in terms of agricultural tax quotas since the very beginning of the dynasty, and had therefore long operated under a very different kind of fiscal politics than other macroregions. As noted in Chapter 5,75 the early Qing state had set Sichuan’s land tax quotas at unusually low levels in recognition of the socioeconomic devastation the province had suffered in the late Ming at Zhang Xianzhong’s hands. Yongzheng era land surveying led to some moderate adjustments and increases, but still set per capita agricultural tax rates at only a quarter of what they were in the late Ming. Once these quotas were 71

72 74

Feng Guifen (冯桂芬), Xianzhi Tang Gao (显志堂稿) [Essays of Xianzhi Tang], ch. 9 (1876), reprinted in 1 JDJJSXSZL, 338–344. 73 See statistical estimates collected in Ni Yuping (2017), at 198–205. Id. 75 Id., at 200. See Chapter 5, Section B.II.

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locked in during the full swing to fiscal conservatism under Qianlong and Jiaqing, Sichuan enjoyed what government officials widely recognized as “the lightest tax burdens in the entire country,” paying only a very small fraction, relative even to the already artificially low government estimates of its economy, of what other provinces paid.76 In most years, the province had to rely on large fiscal subsidies from other provinces to make basic administrative ends meet.77 As a result, even in the early nineteenth century heyday of Qing fiscal conservatism, the Imperial Court had been willing to give local officials some legal leeway during military campaigns to impose formal surcharges. The Court recognized that formal tax quotas were so low in Sichuan that occasional overcollection would not “be of any concern to the local population.”78 During both the White Lotus Rebellion and the Opium Wars, Sichuan officials were periodically allowed to charge surcharges equal to 100 percent, or even 200 percent in some localities, of the formal quota. Nonetheless, given the bureaucracy’s general fiscal conservatism at the time, most senior officials were firmly against making these surcharges permanent, and no serious proposal of the sort was ever entertained at Court.79 Once the Taiping Rebellion began, Sichuan naturally became one of the places where the government went looking for additional revenue. In 1853–1854, the central government greenlit a series of proposals to collect a year’s worth of advance taxes from parts of Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. Whereas such measures were only implemented, somewhat sheepishly, in a temporary and somewhat piecemeal fashion in Shanxi and Shaanxi,80 they fit into a broader and more sustained effort to raise revenue from Sichuan. With the court’s blessing, Sichuan provincial officials soon began to collect several different kinds of “donations” – voluntary in name only – as direct percentagebased surcharges to the land tax, and would do so almost annually for the rest of the 1850s and 1860s.81 The precise amount of surcharge varied from region to region depending on its wealth and productivity, but in gross, this added 76

77

78

79 80

81

See, e.g., relevant statements made in Luo Bingzhang (骆秉章) Memorial, FNHA 03-4897-097, Tongzhi 2nd Year 4th Month 1st Day; Wen Ming Memorial, FNHA 03-6526-051, Guangxu 2nd Year 4th Month 15th Day; Yurui (裕瑞) Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0964-016, Xianfeng 3rd Year 12th Month 18th Day; Jia Zhen (贾桢) Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0965-054, Xianfeng 4th Year 12th Month 27th Day; FNHA Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 19th Year 5th Month 28th Day (“川省田賦之輕甲於天下，每田一畝徵地丁銀不及二分，較他省少至十數倍 及數十倍不等”). See FNHA Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 19th Year 5th Month 28th Day; Luo Bingzhang Memorial, FNHA 03-4897-097. FNHA Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 19th Year 5th Month 28th Day. See also, Yurui Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0964-016. FNHA Shang Yu Dang, Daoguang 19th Year 5th Month 28th Day. Qing Wenzong Shilu, ch. 96, Xianfeng 3rd Year 6th Month Wuyin; ch. 118, Xianfeng 4th Year 1st Month Kuichou. This was first proposed in Yurui Memorial, FNHA 04-01-35-0964-016.

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around 2 million taels to government coffers in most years,82 which brought officials estimates of Sichuan per capita tax rates close to those in Hunan, but still far lower than in those in, for example, Hubei, Henan, or the Lower Yangtze. Given the continued prominence of agricultural fiscal conservatism at Court throughout the later nineteenth century, it was perhaps inevitable that political scandal would flare up from time to time around this attempt to wring more revenue from the most lightly taxed province – by far – in the country during the worst fiscal crisis in the dyansty’s history. In 1862, immediately following the ascension of the Tongzhi Emperor, Luo Bingzhang, who had now assumed the governorship of Sichuan, asked the Imperial Court to censure a provincial official named Xiang Kui for failing to properly administer the surcharges, leading to local protests.83 The Court issued the censure and suspended surcharges for one year. Ironically, Luo quickly came to recognize that there was simply no way to meet the province’s military and administrative obligations without the surcharges, and asked to reinstate them the very next year, to which the court also readily agreed.84 The surcharges would again be the subject of some debate in the 1860s and 1870s: An 1876 memorial submitted by the censor Wen Ming, for example, made an especially impassioned argument that the court must learn from the rise of the Taiping Rebellion, which he squarely blamed on overtaxation, and at least limit, if not eliminate outright, the continued collection of wartime surcharges.85 Given, however, that the popular response to the surcharges had actually been fairly manageable, the occasional local protest notwithstanding, the court, which continued to be in dire need of revenue, decided that they could continue. While a couple of other provinces, especially Yunnan and Guizhou, eventually imposed their own agricultural tax surcharges during the rebellion years, and others joined the fray in the 1870s and 1880s as spending on military and administrative modernization ramped up across the country, none came close to matching the scale or institutional longevity of the Sichuan surcharges.86 Recent academic estimates suggest that, prior to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the provinces added a total of some 5 million taels worth of agricultural surcharges, formal and informal,87 of which more than half came from Sichuan alone. In most other parts of the country, the new surcharges were barely enough, if at all, to make up for weaker collection of traditional tax

82 83

84 85 87

See Ni (2017), at 147–148; Shi & Xu (2008), at 94–95. FNHA Shang Yu Dang, Tongzhi 1st Year 6th Month 11th Day; FNHA Shang Yu Dang, 1st Year 12th Month 22nd Day; Qing Muzong Shilu, ch. 7, Tongzhi 1st Year 6th Month Renxu. Luo Bingzhang Memorial, FNHA 03-4897-097. 86 Wen Ming Memorial, FNHA 03-6526-051. Chen (2006b), at 217–219. Xu (2009), estimates the total amount of new surcharges imposed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, prior to the first Sino-Japanese War, was around 10 million taels a year, of which half likely came from agricultural sources.

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quotas, and there is scant evidence that per capita agricultural tax burdens were increasing.88 All in all, total government tax income from agriculture, even if informal surcharges are taken into account, likely experienced no significant growth from 1850 to the end of the century, and may actually have declined.89 From this perspective, Sichuan was really the exception that proved the rule: For the time being, the institutional status quo on agricultural taxation may have bent somewhat in the face of the mid-century fiscal crisis, but it did not break. III. The Lijin Debates and Malthusian Conservatism In sharp contrast, the very same events broke the traditional status quo on nonagricultural taxes almost immediately, forcing through unprecedented growth in lijin commercial taxation, salt taxes, and tariff income over the course of the later nineteenth century. This institutional history has already been covered in considerable detail in Chapter 2, and will not be repeated here. What should be emphasized here is that contemporary policymakers were fully cognisant of the sharp institutional divergence between agricultural and nonagricultural taxation, and defended it in strong and explicit terms. Many of these defenses perfectly showcased the powerful strands of ideological continuity that, at least on fiscal policy, connected mid-Qing political elites to their late Qing successors. To a very large extent, lijin reformers relied on the traditional ideological differentiation between agricultural and nonagricultural taxation to ward off opposition to the new commercial tax. As argued throughout previous chapters, Qing political elites, collectively and individually, had always taken very different approaches to the two fiscal categories, but nowhere were these differences crystalized quite as powerfully as during the lijin debates. Proponents of the tax attempted to draw a very clear line between it and any potential increase to agricultural tax quotas, arguing the reasons for opposing the latter – which they expressly endorsed – did not apply to the former. Hu Linyi and Guo Songtao, two of the tax’s most prominent champions, both stated that, whereas peasants could only “acquire very limited profit,” merchants enjoyed far greater returns to their investments.90 It was therefore

88 90

89 See Chapter 1, Section C. Id. See Hu Linyi memorial quoted in He Lie (何烈), Lijin Zhidu Xintan (厘金制度新探) [A New Inquiry into the Lijin System], 224–225 (1972); Guo Songtao Memorial, in Huangchao Zhengdian Leizuan (皇朝政典类纂) [Classified Materials on Government Regulations of the Qing Dynasty], ch. 98 (Xi Yufu & Shen Shixu eds., Wenhai Press 1982); Guo Songtao (郭嵩焘), 1 Guo Songtao Riji (郭嵩焘日记) [Diary of Guo Songtao], 83 (1981); Guo Songtao (郭嵩焘), Guo Songtao Zougao (郭嵩焘奏稿) [Collected Memorials of Guo Songtao], 127 (1983).

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completely appropriate to tax commerce, while leaving agriculture alone. Zeng Guofan himself, as reported by his staff, seemed to agree: [In the overall structure of the economy], the peasants are the roots, whereas the merchants are merely the branches. . . . The state’s fiscal policies should never attempt to harm farmers, because any such attempt will destroy the roots. It is, however, quite alright for fiscal policies to harm merchants, because they will survive regardless. . . . This is because the profits of agriculture are meager and limited in absolute quantity, whereas the profits of commerce are enormous and unlimited.91

The Malthusian undertones in these views are unmistakable, most notably when Zeng’s staff employ the same “limited in absolute quantity” language that we saw so much of in Chapter 5. Opponents of the new tax were, of course, all too happy to concur with these views, even as they insisted that it might end up imposing additional costs on the rural economy after all, at least in the form of trickle-down costs that merchants might attempt to pass onto their peasant suppliers.92 Lijin proponents eventually disarmed these arguments by pointing to the agrarian benefits of the new tax: It would reduce some of the inequalities between farmers and merchants, and would encourage capital investment in agriculture simply by reducing the economic returns of investing in commerce.93 This latter argument would eventually prove to be quite prescient: As noted in Chapter 1, there did seem to be an economic shift back to agriculture in the decades after the creation of the lijin tax, but while modern scholars may, with the benefit of hindsight, consider this to be an obstacle to industrialization, both sides of the lijin debates in the 1850s and 1860s would have considered that outcome desirable. If the tax managed to drive capital investment away from industry and commerce back into the “roots” of the economy, then it was doing exactly what it was designed to. In any case, those debates were conducted entirely upon the classic Malthusian premise that the agricultural economy was so fragile it could not sustain any additional economic burden. None of this is to claim, of course, that the ideological compatibility between the lijin tax and mainstream fiscal conservatism was somehow the primary reason for its political passage – that distinction obviously belonged to the massive demand-side fiscal pressures the state faced. That said, it may very well have been a necessary condition, without which swift passage might have been very difficult under the political conditions of the day. All of this speaks very strongly to the continued political and intellectual vitality of Malthusian fiscal conservatism even after 1850s. It also highlights, once again, some of the core characteristics of that conservatism: By the mid-Qing and afterward, it was more pragmatic than deontological; it was built upon specific empirical 91 92

See memo from unnamed Zeng Guofan staffer, quoted in He (1972), at 225. 93 See Mann (1987), at 97. He (1972), at 29 (discussing Lei Yixian’s Memorial).

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assumptions about the size and growth potential of the rural economy; and, perhaps most importantly, it only applied to agricultural taxation, and not to other fiscal categories. All of these characteristics continued to be the subject of broad consensus among political elites even in the aftermath of the Taiping. Small wonder, then, that agricultural taxes largely continued to stagnate even as nonagricultural taxation skyrocketed. IV. The Return of Provincial Land Surveying As durable and resilient as agricultural fiscal conservatism was in the later nineteenth century, cracks did begin to emerge in its ideological and political foundations. These cracks did not lead to any fundamental institutional change until after 1901, but they did lay some of the intellectual groundwork for those more radical changes. Perhaps most importantly, provincial level land surveying began to make a comeback in the 1850s, beginning with the surcharge formalization programs in Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei discussed above. In Hubei, for example, Hu Linyi ordered county governments to coordinate with local gentry in verifying and updating local land registries, which would then supply the informational foundation for the allocation of formalized surcharges.94 These surveying efforts did not seem to yield any significant changes to local quotas, but they nonetheless posed a direct challenge to the land surveying ban that the Imperial Court had, for the most part, rigorously enforced since the 1740s. Given the severity of the fiscal crisis it faced, the Xianfeng Court had no desire to revisit this particular fight with its provincial agents, and Hu’s surveying efforts went largely unchallenged. The provincial demand for new land surveying further escalated in the 1860s. The Taiping and Nian (1851–1868) rebellions and the socioeconomic destruction they inflicted had made local land registries all but unusable across most of the Lower Yangtze, and also in parts of North and South China. In response, local or provincial officials ranging from Feng Guifen to Liu Ruqiu began to push fairly aggressively for new surveying once the state had regained control over these regions. Liu, in particular, argued that local land registries in Zhejiang had become unusable even before the rebellion simply due to natural socioeconomic change since the early Qianlong era, and therefore that the region was long overdue for a survey.95 Nonetheless, even under these circumstances, there was still some resistance within the bureaucracy and, as Feng Guifen observed, fiscal reformists in Jiangsu had to frame their surveying plans within the context of grain tribute quota reduction for them to win enough support: “Land surveying is usually conducted for the purpose of increasing 94 95

See Hu Linyi memorial, HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 36; Hong (2012), at 157. See the collection of Liu Ruqiu’s (刘汝璆) Memorials, in Huang Chao Jingshi Wen Xu Bian (皇朝经世文续编) [Sequel to the Collected Statecraft Writings of the Qing Dynasty] [hereinafter HCJSWXB_GSJ], ch. 33 (Ge Shijun [葛士浚] ed., 1888).

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taxes. Once [its opponents] understood that we wished to lower taxes instead, they ceased their opposition.”96 Once an initial wave of provincial land surveying had been conducted in the Lower Yangtze and a fuller institutional precedent set, the floodgates opened.97 Over the next decade and a half, surveys would be conducted in all the Lower Yangtze provinces, then in Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou, and finally in several North China provinces affected by the Nian Rebellion. By the 1880s, provinces that had not experienced substantial occupation by rebel forces, including Shanxi, Zhili, and Guangdong, had also joined the fray, in the hope of recovering some of the lost revenue they had suffered in the early and midnineteenth century as a result of lax tax collection, itself a partial result of outdated land registries. Finally, in the interests of reinforcing its control, the state began to make a concerted effort to survey land use and settlement patterns in frontier regions, conducting surveys in Xinjiang, Taiwan, and the northeast. These surveys immediately generated a moderate increase in official estimates of total tilled acreage – from around 800 million mu in the midnineteenth century to around 911 million mu in 1887, slightly higher than the Yongzheng era estimate of 890 million mu98 – but their longer-term intellectual and political impact went far beyond that. As contemporaries fully recognized, the surveys were slow, piecemeal, and, in many localities, simply inaccurate due to a toxic combination of administrative weakness and social reluctance.99 Even with all these sociopolitical and logistical handicaps, they had managed to boost official tilled acreage estimates by a fairly substantial amount. This was a clear telltale sign that there was quite a bit more unregistered but cultivated land out there in the rural economy. Given the significant role the land survey ban played in entrenching midQing conservatism, the loosening of that ban almost certainly played a similarly substantive role in weakening its political dominance. The surveys would not, in the short term, lead to any serious attempts to raise agricultural taxes, but they did produce information that seemed to directly challenge the Malthusian assumptions that underlay the state’s reluctance to raise agricultural taxes as 96

97 98

99

Feng Guifen, Jiangsu Jian Fu Ji (江苏减赋记) [Tax Reduction in Jiangsu Province], HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 37. See Liu Kexiang (1984) for a detailed treatment of this history. HKTDTFTJ, 16; Qinding Daqing Huidian (Guangxu Chao) (钦定大清会典 (光绪朝)) [Rules and Statutes of the Guangxu Reign of the Great Qing Dynasty], ch. 17 (1900). HCJSWXB_GSJ, ch. 35 collects an assortment of Feng Guifen’s essays on this topic, as does HCJSWXB_SK, ch. 37. See generally Liu Kexiang (1984). See also complaints by Zuo Zongtang, cited in Qin Hancai (秦翰才), Zuo Wenxiang Gong Zai Xibei (左文襄公在西 北) [Zuo Zongtang in Northwest China], 181–182 (1984); and contemporary complaints against Li Hongzhang’s administration of the surveys cited in Yuan Shuyi (苑书义), Li Hongzhang Zhuan (李鸿章传) [Biography of Li Hongzhang] 100 (1991).

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recently as the lijin debates. They seemed to give credence to, for example, Bao Shichen’s previously dismissed claims that the rural economy had not even begun to approach its largest possible size, and there were signs that the intellectual tide was turning as early as the mid-1860s. Feng Guifen, for one, argued that large-scale land reclamation, aided by the importing of Western agricultural technology, could supply one major pathway to sustained economic recovery and growth.100 Such ideas gradually gained influence among late Qing literati just as land surveying gradually grained political momentum: By the final years of the dynasty, Liang Qichao could argue that a sustained governmental commitment to land surveying could uncover so much untapped production capacity that, under optimal economic conditions, the agricultural tax quota could be raised to a whopping 250 million tales from the traditional 28 million tael level, indeed without any increase in nominal per capita tax rates.101 Liang’s specific numerical views may well have been somewhat extreme, but his more general belief that the rural economy had yet to reach exhaust its production capacity – and therefore that Malthusian fiscal pessimism was fundamentally incorrect – was quite common across the late Qing intellectual spectrum: ranging from mainstream Yangwu reformers like Zhang Zhidong, to pro-commerce advocates like Xue Fucheng, to Liang’s fellow Weixin reformer Tan Sitong.102 These beliefs were further bolstered by the increasingly widespread belief among these reformers that, arable acreage aside, land productivity also had much room to grow from its current levels. An early version of this argument made by Lin Zexu in the 1840s suggested that something as simple as partially replacing grain production in Beijing suburbs with rice production could increase land productivity by a substantial margin, and reduce the Imperial Court’s increasingly tenuous reliance on the grain tribute.103 This suggestion failed to generate much enthusiasm among Lin’s contemporaries, but made a comeback in Feng Guifen’s writings two decades later, which reworked Lin’s ideas into a more ambitious proposal for state investment in irrigation

100

101

102

103

Feng Guifen, Ken Huang Yi (垦荒议) [On Reclamation], in Xiaobin Lu Kangyi (校邠庐抗议) [Protests from the Xiaobin Studio], at Appendix, ch. 7 (1883). Liang Qichao (梁启超), 8 Yinbing Shi Heji: Wenji (饮冰室合集: 文集) [Collected Essays from the Ice-drinker’s Studio], 2–5 (Zhonghua Shuju Press 1989). Xue Fucheng (薛福成), Yongyan Quanji Shizhong: Yongyan Haiwai Wenbian (庸庵全 集十种: 庸庵海外文编) [Collected Works of Xue Fucheng], ch. 3 (1898), reprinted in 2 JDJJSXSZL, 60–63; Zhang Zhidong (张之洞), Quan Xue Pian (Wai Pian) (劝学篇: 外篇) [Exhortation to Learning], ch. 9 (1898); Tan Sitong (谭嗣同), Renxue (仁学) [A Study of Benevolence] (Zhonghua Shuju Press 1958). Lin Zexu (林则徐), Jifu Shuili Yi (畿辅水利议) [On Irrigation around the Capital Region], ch. 1 (1876).

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infrastructure across North China.104 This, Feng argued, could provide the material means for rice production even in colder and more arid environments. More importantly, as information about Western economies and industrial technologies began to circulate in some elite circles, Feng and others began to promote the idea that the mechanization of agricultural production could eventually provide a major boost to land and labor productivity. Feng himself was only able to muster a somewhat half-hearted endorsement of the idea, arguing that mechanization boosted labor productivity, if not necessarily land productivity, and was therefore useful as a temporary recovery measure in the Lower Yangtze and other rebellion-afflicted regions that suffered, for the time being, from depopulation. Once a full demographic recovery was made and land once again a scarce resource, Feng anticipated that mechanization would no longer yield any obvious benefits over traditional methods of production, and could then be discarded.105 Reformist officials writing a few decades later, however, would take a stronger, more optimistic position on the issue: Xue Fucheng, for example, argued in the early 1890s that the experience of Western societies demonstrated the vast economic potential of mechanized and commercialized agriculture. Europe, as Xue argued, “fed many times China’s population with substantially less territory,” which could only mean that modernized production methods and commercialization could produce sharp increases in both land productivity, and not merely in labor productivity.106 A couple of years later, Zhang Zhidong would make a somewhat similar argument in his famed Quan Xue Pian (An Exhortation to Learning): “If we fail to properly study agriculture . . . then despite our vast territory and huge population, we can never avoid the criticism that our land is already filled to the brink and our population already too large. But what is the most important thing to teach about agriculture? It is, in fact, chemistry.”107 Proper application of chemical fertilizer would, in Zhang’s mind, allow China to support up to three times its current population – a surprisingly accurate prediction, perhaps by coincidence, in light of later economic and demographic developments in the twentieth century. Combined with the increasingly widespread belief that China had far more arable land than previous realized, the idea that agricultural land productivity could be doubled, or even tripled, from its current levels led an ever-growing number of political and intellectual elites to question the Malthusian empirical assumptions that had guided fiscal policymaking since the eighteenth century.

104

105

106

Feng Guifen, Xing Shuili Yi (兴水利议) [On Irrigation], in Xiaobin Lu Kangyi, Part One, ch. 13. Feng Guifen, Chou Guoyong Yi (筹国用议) [On State Revenue], in Xiaobin Lu Kangyi, Part Two, ch. 1; Cai Xixue Yi (采西学议) [On Western Learning], in Xiaobin Lu Kangyi, Part Two, ch. 17. 107 Xue Fucheng (1898), at ch. 3. Zhang Zhidong (1898), at ch. 9.

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Not that this was a smooth and uncontested transition. Far from it. In the 1850s and 1860s, many prominent reformers continued to affirm the old Malthusian view of an exhausted rural economy, as demonstrated by the positions that Hu Linyi, Guo Songtao, and Zeng Guofan took on differentiating between agricultural and commercial taxation. Hardcore conservatives who ardently resisted most kinds of economic modernization and fiscal reform clung to that view well into the 1880s and 1890s, and continued to be somewhat influential both at court and among the broader literati community. Officials like Ding Lijun and Sheng Yu expressly rejected Xue and Zhang’s characterization of European economies as “supporting larger populations with less land” than China, and instead argued that China was uniquely burdened by an extremely large population living on very limited arable land.108 These unique circumstances, along with the fiscal and administrative conservatism the Qing state had long adhered to, were “the foundations of the country,” and could not be altered without courting economic and political disaster, especially in the aftermath of several decades of severe unrest.109 The existence of these considerable countercurrents forced the intellectual transformation that was gaining momentum among men like Feng Guifen, Xue Fucheng, Zhang Zhidong, or the Wuxu reformers to remain institutionally dormant for some decades after the return of land surveying: Gross agricultural tax revenue experienced no substantial growth until the early twentieth century. Even so, the old dogma was clearly weakening as new information about both the domestic rural economy and foreign ones trickled in, setting the stage for more fundamental change after 1901.

c. endgame The final straw that broke the Qing state’s commitment to a permanent agricultural tax quota came in the form of its series of military humiliations at the hands of the Japanese and Western imperial powers, first during the First SinoJapanese War (1894–1895), and then during the Boxer Uprising (1899–1901). The defeats were sociopolitically catastrophic for numerous reasons that go far beyond fiscal policy, but for the narrow purposes of this book, the primary consequence was the massive war indemnities they imposed. The Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) imposed some 200 million taels of indemnity, to be paid over 7 years; whereas the Boxer Protocol (1901) imposed a whopping 450 million taels of repayments, spread out over 39 years. The former was actually 108

109

See Ding Lijun essay collected in 1 Yangwu Yundong (洋务运动) [Self-strengthening Movement], 264 (Zhongguo Shixue Hui ed., 1961). See also Sheng Yu (盛昱), Yiyuan Wenlue: Shu Tielu Shulue Hou (意园文略) [Collected Works of Yiyuan], ch. 2 (1910); Fang Junyi (方浚颐), Erzhi Xuan Wencun (二知轩文存) [Collected Works of Erzhi Xuan], ch. 1 (1879). Ding Lijun essay, in 1 Yangwu Yundong 264.

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repaid ahead of schedule in 1898 with the aid of massive borrowing from various European countries, but the latter fundamentally changed the structure of the Qing fiscal state: With a 4 percent annual interest, it demanded yearly payments of some 25 million taels – around 30 percent of the government formal annual tax revenue prior to 1894 – over the next four decades.110 For a government that, even before 1894, already had to cut administrative functionality and take on considerable foreign debt just to make ends meet from year to year, this was a back-breaking shock that forced it once into full-blown crisis mode. The 1901 crisis led directly to the first large-scale increases to formal agricultural tax quotas since the 1720s – something that the previous fiscal crisis in the 1850s, as discussed above, had not managed to do. As documented in Chapters 1 and 2,111 between 1901 and 1903, formal annual agricultural tax revenue increased by 5 million taels, or around 15 percent, thereby recovering the annual revenue loss the state had temporarily suffered after 1895 as a result of domestic unrest and foreign invasion. It then increased by another 12 million taels or so between 1903 and 1908, and by around 3 million between 1908 and 1911. In all of these phases, growth in agricultural taxation was far outpaced by continued growth in nonagricultural taxation, whether in terms of absolute volume or as a share of preexisting quotas, but even so, the rigid “quotaism” that, with very few exceptions, had dominated agricultural fiscal policy since the late Kangxi reign was finally crumbling. I. Changing Attitudes Why did the 1901 crisis succeed in dismantling agricultural tax quotaism, whereas the 1850 crisis had not? One might argue that, this time around, the Qing state could not have met its indemnity repayment obligations without some contribution from agricultural taxation. It seems, however, somewhat unlikely that it absolutely could not have generated that 5 million tael annual revenue increase between 1901 and 1903, or perhaps even the 12 million tael annual increase from 1903 to 1908, from nonagricultural sources – not when items like the salt tax or the lijin were deemed capable, just a few years later, of supplying an additional 25–30 million taels of annual revenue if squeezed more aggressively. Quantitatively speaking, the severity of the post-1901 fiscal crisis was not obviously greater than the fiscal crisis the Qing state had weathered five decades ago. From 1850 to 1860, the state was forced to raise new revenues equal to around one third of its pre-1850 formal income, which was only

110 111

See Chen (2006b), at 270–271. See discussion in Chapter 1, Section C and Chapter 2, Section C.

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slightly lower than the percentage it had to immediately raise after 1901.112 The demand-side pressures created by the two crises were, from this perspective, roughly comparable in scale and depth. At the same time, the supply-side institutional conditions for increasing nonagricultural taxation were, if anything, more favorable in 1901 than in 1850. The rapid growth in commercial taxation, tariffs, and salt taxes throughout the later nineteenth century provided the basic administrative infrastructure for the state to raise new taxes: Instead of having to build a new tax category and a corresponding collection apparatus largely from scratch, it could now simply expand upon preexisting fiscal institutions.113 Moreover, elite opposition to tapping these new sources of revenue had largely worn itself out over the course of the previous four decades, which meant the Imperial Court likely faced fewer and weaker political obstacles against nonagricultural fiscal expansion in 1901 than it had in 1850. The point here is simply that, although there were very, very strong incentives for the Qing state to increase the agricultural tax after 1901, they were not necessarily that much stronger – and perhaps not at all – than its incentives to do so in the 1850s: The escalation in demand-side pressure was not qualitatively larger, whereas change in supply-side conditions actually may have made it easier for the 1901 state to meet that fiscal demand without resorting to agricultural tax hikes. What had fundamentally changed between 1850 and 1901 was the political and intellectual attitudes of political elites. Whereas, as discussed above, Malthusian conservatism was still politically and intellectually dominant in 1850, major competitors had begun to emerge by the 1890s. Aided by the partial resumption of provincial land surveying, the idea that the agricultural economy had, contrary to traditional beliefs, significant room for growth gained a considerable following among elites during the final two decades of the century. With the short-lived political ascension of the Wuxu reform movement (1898) and the more durable rise of second-generation Yangwu reformers like Zhang Zhidong, such beliefs gradually became influential even in the highest echelons of government. The gradual discarding of Malthusian economic assumptions did not immediately lead to any widespread advocacy for raising the agricultural tax. Quite the opposite, most of its earliest proponents – men like Bao Shichen or Feng Guifen – actually pushed for further reductions to it, arguing that, although agricultural production had room to grow, it could only do so if the government supplied strong enough economic incentives, in the shape of lower taxes, to the rural population for land reclamation and technological upgrading.114 112

113 114

The post-1901 figure is simply derived from dividing the new indemnity payments the Qing state had to make by its pre-1899 formal annual revenue. The 1850 figures are derived from the data collected in Chapter 1, Section C, Table 1.2. On the construction of this apparatus, see Chapter 2, Section B. On Bao, see discussion surrounding supra notes 790–793. On Feng, see Feng (1876), at ch. 9.

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Feng, in particular, was fairly enamored of the idea that lineage self-governance could be an effective, and perhaps even superior, alternative to local bureaucratic administration, and was therefore generally supportive of smallgovernment approaches to economic development and sociopolitical governance.115 Second-generation Yangwu politicians, too, generally refrained from recommending agricultural tax hikes, and instead focused most of their fiscal reform proposals on the commercial and industrial sectors. Zhang Zhidong, for example, wrote extensively about imposing new tariffs and consumption taxes in major trading ports, adding a stamp duty, and so on, but proposed no significant changes to agricultural taxes.116 The Wuxu reformers and their political allies tended to be much more aggressive toward agricultural taxation, both before and after their short-lived political ascendancy in 1898. Liang Qichao, as noted above, was one of most vocal advocates for significantly increasing the land tax quota.117 Given that the government was, in his mind, only taxing a fraction of the country’s tilled landmass, a simple national land survey could uncover enough unregistered – and therefore untaxed – land and agricultural production to increase agricultural tax revenue several times over. Liang’s views found robust support among several of his fellow Wuxu reformers, most notably in Huang Zunxian’s writings, who was even more explicit than Liang in his support for higher taxes. Drawing on his years of diplomatic experience in Japan, England, and the United States, Huang pointed out that Qing taxes, far from being too high, were dramatically lower than in other major economies. In particular, he shared Liang’s view that a thorough land survey of the countryside could generate major revenue gains without any increase to the tax rate. This extra revenue, Huang proposed, should be directly injected into the state’s flailing industrialization efforts. In fact, if the Qing could only muster the political will to tax as heavily as the European powers or Japan, it could “increase its revenue by five or six times, which would be more than enough to acquire all the tools of wealth and power, be it iron, modern weapons, steamboats, or railroads.”118 He placed the blame for the Qing’s political and economic weakness squarely on the shoulders of under-taxation: “In fact, it is precisely because tax revenue is insufficient that both foreign and domestic policy is

115

116

117 118

Feng Guifen, Fu Zongfa Yi (复宗法议) [On Restoring the Lineage System], in Xiaobin Lu Kangyi, Part II, ch. 16. For a good summary of Zhang’s fiscal thinking, see, e.g., Zhongguo Fushui Sixiang Shi (中 国赋税思想史) [A History of Chinese Thoughts on Taxation], 605–606 (Wang Chengbai & Sun Wenxue eds., 1995). The best scholarly assessment of Zhang’s career and general political thought remains Li Xizhu (李细珠), Zhang Zhidong yu Qingmo Xinzheng Yanjiu (张之洞与清末新政研究) [A Study on Zhang Zhidong and New Policies of the Late Qing Dynasty] (2003). See discussion surrounding supra note 858. Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪), Riben Guozhi (日本国志) [Treaties on Japan], ch. 16 (1887).

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always perfunctory, weak, and purely reactionary. Isn’t this clearly because the state extracts too little from its economy?”119 The Wuxu reformers were hardly the only advocates of fiscal and administrative expansion in the late Qing. Following the imposition of new war indemnities in 1901 that the Qing state clearly could not afford under preexisting tax quotas, the foreign community in China – which had more than a passing interest in making sure the Qing state did pay off its treaty obligations – exerted considerable pressure on it to reconsider its traditional conservatism toward agricultural taxation. Notably, some of the Imperial Court’s most prominent foreign advisors made explicit recommendations to this effect: Robert Hart, the famed British diplomat who served as the second Inspector General of the Qing’s Imperial Maritime Custom Service from 1863 to 1911, famously argued in 1901 that the Imperial Court was actually substantially under-taxing agriculture: “[By my estimates], even if taxed at only a 1 percent rate, [agricultural taxes] should yield revenue of 250 million taels a year,120 and if we only extract a third of that, we should still be able to collect 80 million taels. However, based on the records of the Ministry of Finance, actual revenue from this source is only 25 million taels. Where is the rest? This seems like an area where reform is due.”121 Recognizing that richer countries like England or Japan may not be the most persuasive reference frame, Hart then shored up his argument by contrasting Chinese agricultural tax quotas with Indian ones: “India has only half the arable land that China has, and yet its agricultural tax revenue amounts to some 100 million taels a year. China should consider taxing at a similar rate.”122 Hart’s views were apparently widely shared within the European diplomatic community: George Jameison, then British Consul-General in Shanghai, arrived at some very similar estimates in a manuscript on Chinese state finances he published in 1897, arguing that China had at least the agricultural production capacity to sustain agricultural taxes of some 100 million taels per year.123 While the political influence of the Wuxu reformers quickly dissipated after the Empress Dowager Cixi terminated their short-lived reform movement, the intellectual and political clout of foreigner advisors and diplomats only grew after 1901, often dramatically. Nonetheless, the willingness of Chinese policymakers to respond to these suggestions almost certainly depended on changes in their own fiscal mindset – away from the rigid Malthusianism that was still 119 120

121 123

Id. Robert Hart Memorial, collected in Zhongguo Haiguan yu Yihe Tuan Yundong (中国海 关与义和团运动) [Chinese Maritime Customs and the Boxer Rebellion], 49 (Zhongguo Jindai Shi Ziliao Congkan Bianji Weiyuan Hui eds., 1983). Note that this is the exact same estimate that Li Qichao arrived at, which suggests the possible existence of intellectual interaction between the two. 122 Id. Id. George Jamieson, Zhongguo Duzhi Kao (中国度支考) [Examination of Fiscal Revenues and Expenditures of China], 10–11 (Young John Allen trans., 1897).

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mainstream as recently as the 1850s, and toward a more flexible view of the rural economy and its ability to sustain higher taxes. This change in economic and fiscal thinking dovetailed with the rapid rise of “statist,” for lack of a better word, political ideology in the late Qing. As noted above and in Chapter 5, since the earliest decades of the Qing dynasty, many intellectual elites had openly advocated for a de minimis approach to local governance: Even if the state had a positive role to play in socioeconomic life, for the most part, it should try to govern with a light touch, and leave the rest to local lineages and other social organizations. Men like Huang Zongxi and Wang Fuzhi, as we saw in Chapter 4, essentially considered government a sort of necessary evil that should be minimized whenever possible. Such views became even more politically mainstream following the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition, when administrative decentralization effectively became the formal policy of the Imperial Court. Writings that extolled the functional and moral virtues of lineage self-governance quickly proliferated in the early nineteenth century, and continued to be highly influential in the 1850s and 1860s through the advocacy of men like Feng Guifen. By the final two decades of the dynasty, however, a sort of intellectual counteroffensive had emerged among officials and scholars who began to argue that the Qing’s lassiez-faire approach to local administration was, in fact, one of its most fundamental problems, and one of the primary culprits for its relative economic and military weakness. As scholars have noted, many late Qing elites, particularly those that trended toward the radical reformist end of the political spectrum, came to embrace some version of “statism” as a core component of their ideological worldview.124 A number of the Wuxu reformers, most notably Liang, championed ideals of statism that saw a necessary connection between state-building – administratively, militarily, and politically – and China’s continued survival and rejuvenation in the modern age. Especially after the movement’s swift political defeat in 1898, Liang turned decisively toward a view of the state as necessarily coercive, administratively and politically unified, and ultimately indispensable to any hope that China had of economic and military development. Drawing on the writings of the Swiss jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschl, Liang argued that what China needed was in fact a “despotic” state, one that was “capable of unifying the people and compelling sacrifice.”125 China’s fundamental problem, from this perspective, was that its population lacked any semblance of a “state consciousness” (guojia sixiang), and instead conceived of power and allegiance purely in private, kinship-based terms. This prevented the country from developing the capacity to mobilize and deploy 124

125

See, e.g., Peter Zarrow, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of The Chinese State 1885–1924, at ch. 2–4 (2012); Wang Hui, Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity, in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, 231, 242–245 (Wen-Hsin Yeh ed., 2000) (discussing late Qing statism). Zarrow (2012), at 114.

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resources at a national scale, which is what Liang thought was necessary for its survival in a world of modern international competition. The intellectual synergy between these more general beliefs and the specific fiscal positions he took is fairly obvious. Other progressive reformers such as Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, and Yan Fu took somewhat more liberal attitudes toward economic reform, placing much of their hope for economic modernization in private, as opposed to public, activity, but they nonetheless believed the state had a major role to play in the process. Kang, for example, was more than happy to echo the mainstream Yangwu belief in state subsidized industrialization, calling for state sponsorship of large-scale transportation infrastructure, post offices, mechanized factories, and mining, while proposing several kinds of new commercial taxes, sovereign debt instruments, and paper currency.126 He did push back against the traditional Yangwu preference for direct state control of major industry, arguing that economic production and commerce was best left to private ownership and management,127 but his vision of an infrastructurally and financially active state nonetheless implied a systemic expansion, rather than retreat, of government spending. Tan, too, was a fan of both private and public spending – so long as the latter focused on technological upgrading and infrastructural investment, rather than direct control of economic production – and aggressively argued against any attempt to curb state expenditures.128 Compared with Tan’s often radical idealism, Yan Fu took a more utilitarian approach to state power, but tended to arrive at similar prescriptions for state spending and investment.129 Liang, Kang, Tan, and Yan were not without their fundamental differences in political theory and ideological orientation, but they nonetheless shared a common belief that state power, particularly economic power, ought to be expanded. In fact, such beliefs extended well beyond the Wuxu reformers and their intellectual allies, drawing strong support from more conventional statesmen in the Yangwu tradition. Although men like Zhang Zhidong were far less open than Liang, Tan, or Yan to wholescale political reform – particularly democratic reform – in the image of European governments, they nonetheless believed, both before and after 1898, that a strong state was necessary for the empire’s political and economic survival.130 To be sure, they firmly rejected the kind of ideologically driven “statism” that captured Liang’s imagination, but it 126

127

128 129

130

Kang Youwei (康有为), Shang Qing Di Di Liu Shu (上清帝第六书) [The Sixth Memorial to the Qing Emperor], in 2 Wuxu Bianfa (戊戌变法) [Hundred Days’ Reform], 200–201 (Zhongguo Shixue Hui ed., 2000). Kang Youwei (康有为), Gongche Shangshu (公车上书) [Scholars’ Petition to the Throne], in 2 Wuxu Bianfa, 141–142. Tan (1899). Yan Fu (严复), Ni Shang Huangdi Shu (拟上皇帝书) [Drafted Memorial to the Throne], in 1 Yan Fu Ji (严复集) [Selected Works of Yan Fu] 61 (Wang Shi ed., 1986). See discussion in Zarrow (2012), at 123.

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would not be a misnomer to described their basic political position as a more measured and pragmatic kind of functional “statism.” In any case, their support helped keep the Imperial Court on an administratively and fiscally expansionist trajectory after 1898, despite the emergence of a significant conservative backlash following the Wuxu Reform’s political collapse. By the final years of the dynasty, more radical versions of statism had arguably entered the political and intellectual mainstream, as calls for political “Westernization” grew in strength, and constitutional reform formally entered the Imperial Court’s agenda. One of the most explicit examples of this emerged during the famous “ritual and law debates” that broke out in 1907 and 1910 over the court’s attempts to issue a new criminal code.131 As many scholars have documented, the core issue in the debates was whether the new code should, as the Great Qing Code did before it, continue to give traditional Confucian kinship hierarchies certain kinds of of explicit legal recognition and protection. The new code’s drafters, led by Shen Jiaben, favored Western-style individual rights and obligations, enforceable even within the family, whereas their more cautious opponents – of which Zhang Zhidong was one – insisted on weakening those rights and obligations in relationships between senior and junior family members, which would have allowed the former to wield their traditional social authority over the latter without additional legal intervention. In a widely discussed speech delivered in the later stages of the debate, Yang Du, then a newly minted mid-level official recruited specifically for his expertise in Japanese and Western legal reform, argued that China’s central political problem was, in fact, that “lineage loyalty is strong, but statism is weak,” and that “we have too many filial sons and loving fathers . . . but not enough loyal subjects.”132 The only way out, he insisted, was to “recognize statism as our central political principle, and convert all the filial sons and loving fathers . . . 131

132

There is a considerable academic literature on these debates. See, e.g., Chai Rong (柴荣), Qingmo Li Fa zhi Zheng Beihou de Falü Sixiang Jiazhi (清末礼法之争背后的法律思想价值) [Legal Thoughts behind the Ritual and Law Debate in Late Qing China], 2007(2) Guangdong Shehui Kexue (广东社会科学) [Soc. Sci. Guangdong] 152; Gao Hancheng (高汉成), Shixi Qingmo Xiulü zhong Li Fa zhi Zheng de Liliang Duibi (试析清末修律中礼法之争的力量对比) [A Comparison of the Powers behind the Ritual and Law Debate in Late Qing China], 2003(3) Dongfang Luntan (东方论坛) [Eastern F.] 93; Wang Rui & Guo Dasong (王锐, 郭大松), Qingmo Li Fa zhi Zheng Tanxi (清末礼法之争探析) [An Inquiry into the Ritual and Law Debate in Late Qing China], 2003(2) Shandong Shifan Daxue Xuebao (山东师范大学学报) [J. Shandong Normal Univ.] 96; Ai Yongming (艾永明), Lun Qingmo Xiulü zhong de Li Fa zhi Zheng (论清末修律中的礼法之争) [On the Ritual and Law Debate in Late Qing China], 1984(4) Suzhou Daxue Xuebao (苏州大学学报) [J. Soochow Univ.] 36; Li Guilian (李贵 连), Qingmo Xiuding Falü zhong de Li Fa zhi Zheng (清末修订法律中的礼法之争) [The Ritual and Law Debate in Late Qing China], 1982(1) Falu¨ Pinglun (法律评论) [L. Rev.] 31. Yang du (杨度), Guanyu Xiugai Xinglv de Yanjiang (关于修改刑律的演讲) [Speech on the Modification of Criminal Law], in Yangdu Ji (杨度集) [Selected Works of Yang Du], 528–529 (Liu Qingbo ed., 1986).

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across the country into loyal subjects.”133 In other words, the social dominance of lineages – something that had enjoyed widespread intellectual and political endorsement since at least the late eighteenth century – had now become a major obstacle to the country’s political and economic rejuvenation, and needed to be overturned by all political and legal means possible. It would be a major mistake to take Yang Du’s shockingly explicit statements as evidence of some widespread and fundamental rejection of lineages among political elites. Even relatively radical reformers like Liang still believed that lineages could play a positive – even indispensable role – in maintaining social order and coherence under a modern, “statist” political regime,134 and there is scant evidence, if any, that the socioeconomic primacy of lineages was ever seriously threatened during the early twentieth century.135 In fact, given Yang Du’s penchant for political flair and drama and his well-known ideological swings later in life,136 it is not clear how deeply and sincerely he believed in these statements himself. Nonetheless, the mere fact that they could be made in high level political debates without drawing anything more serious than the outrage of conservatives – Yang was not punished by the court, and was actually promoted afterward137 – shows that a state-centric view of sociopolitical ordering had become fully mainstream by this point, so much so that even highly radical statements of statism could be made at relatively minimal personal risk. The “ritual and law debates” ended soon after with the passage, with minor revisions and amendments, of Shen Jiaben’s original draft.138 Needless to say, endorsement of some version of statism by these Late Qing elites did not necessarily imply any clear willingness to specifically raise agricultural taxes. Zhang Zhidong never openly endorsed the idea, even though he likely agreed to some fairly significant agricultural tax hikes within his own political jurisdiction after 1903. Even the Wuxu reformers seemed somewhat hesitant on this issue: Although Liang and Huang Zunxian were strongly supportive, neither Kang nor Tan explicitly argued for anything of the sort. Nonetheless, when coupled with the clear intellectual and political decline of Malthusian economic empirics, the rise of statism did at least create a general political environment in which proposing agricultural tax hikes was no longer politically dangerous, and could even generate a significantly positive response in some circles. In the aftermath of the Boxer Wars, with demand-side fiscal pressures again skyrocketing due to the new war indemnities, that proved sufficient to finally crack open the door to true institutional change.

133

134

135 136

137

Id. See also Yang Du (杨度), Lun Guojia Zhuyi yu Jiazu Zhuyi de Qubie (论国家主义与家族主 义的区别) [On the Difference between Statism and Familism], in Yang Du Ji, 533 (1986). See, e.g., discussion in Liang Qichao Wenxuan (梁启超文选) [Selected Works of Liang Qichao], 110–112 (Xia Xiaohong ed., 1992). See Zhang (2017), at 185–196. On Yang Du’s political career, see Hou Yijie (侯宜杰), Yang Du Er Ti (杨度二题) [Two Points on Yang Du], 1986(6) Jindai Shi Yanjiu (近代史研究) [Mod. Chinese Hist. Stud.] 236. 138 See Gao (2003). Id.

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II. Institutional Implementation Given the extraordinary longevity and depth of agricultural fiscal conservatism, its political demise could not happen overnight even under these conditions, and instead took place in several phases over the next decade. From 1901 to 1903, agricultural tax revenue merely recovered the losses it had incurred domestic and geopolitical unrest that had dominated Chinese politics between 1895 and 1901.139 Once that recovery had taken place, the Qing state then began to fundamentally reorganize its fiscal apparatus in the image of European and Japanese models. The core substantive change, which gradually took place across the country from 1902 to 1908, was the full rejection of revenue “quotaism” in favor of formal budgets.140 Under the new model, the state would estimate how much it needed to spend each year, produce an official budget, and then adjust revenue quotas based on the budget. In other words, revenues were now expected to catch up to estimated expenditures (liang chu wei ru). This amounted to a full reversal of the traditional quotaism mode, in which expenditures had to be allocated within a fixed set of revenue constraints (liang ru wei chu). The Qing state had, of course, been heading in this direction ever since nonagricultural taxation ramped up in the 1850s, but the new budgeting model only began to fully incorporate all components of the fiscal apparatus, non-agricultural and agricultural alike, after 1903. Given the ever-increasing levels of political, administrative, and fiscal decentralization in the late Qing, these changes naturally began at the provincial level, with Hubei being the first mover under Zhang Zhidong’s governorship.141 In late 1902, Zhang ordered a number of provincial offices to produce a budget for the upcoming year. The most pressing order of business was to estimate how much additional revenue had to be raised to pay off Hubei’s share of the Boxer Protocol indemnities. Following his example, the governors of several other provinces, including Fujian, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Jilin, began to roll out similar budgeting mechanisms over the next five years. As part of this process, major provincial increases to the agricultural tax quota began to be implemented across the country, shouldering a substantial portion of indemnity payment: In dynasty’s final decade, local records indicate that the Hubei provincial government imposed agricultural tax surcharges equal to some 30 percent of the pre-1894 land tax and grain tribute quotas.142 In parts of 139 140

141 142

See Chapter 1, Section C, Table 2. The best recent academic monograph on these events is Liu Zenghe (刘增合), “Cai” yu “Zheng”: Qingji Caizheng Gaizhi Yanjiu (“财”与”政”: 清季财政改制研究) [Finance and Politics: A study on Financial Reform in the Last Years of the Qing] (2013). See also Shen Xuefeng (2006), at 54–55 (discussing the reluctance of late Qing elites to admit the shift from liang ru wei chu to liang chu wei ru); Zhou Zhichu (2002), at 116–138. See Liu (2013), at 201–209. Lu Hongsheng (陆红生), Tudi Fushui (土地赋税) [Land Taxation], in Hubei Tudi Zhi (湖北土 地志) [Hubei Land Gazetteer], 100, 103 (Peng Jinhui et al. eds., 1999); Chen Jun (陈钧),

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Zhili, agricultural tax extraction, which had remained largely stable between the 1850s and 1899, more than doubled from 1901 to 1911.143 The central government entered the fray around 1908. Its first move was to marshal what remained of its administrative capacity and conduct a sweeping national audit of provincial and local government finances. As many scholars have documented, this audit was a resounding success, perhaps surprisingly so, given the considerable deterioration of the Imperial Court’s control over its local agents since 1850 and the massive damage done to its prestige in 1895 and 1901.144 It produced highly detailed records of local revenue and expenditures, which, assembled and published in a series of provincial Caizheng Shuoming Shu (“Fiscal Manuals”), now constitute perhaps the main source of late Qing fiscal information for modern scholarship, including, as discussed in Chapter 1, Wang Yeh-chien’s highly influential calculations of 1908 agricultural tax burdens. Their primary contribution to contemporary fiscal policymaking seemed to be the “discovery” of large provincial agricultural tax surcharges imposed in the aftermath of the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Boxer Protocol, especially the latter. Rather than punishing the provincial authorities responsible for these surcharges – which would almost certainly have been the Imperial Court’s preferred course of action six or seven decades ago – central authorities simply formalized a portion of these surcharges, especially those stemming from the grain tribute, into the national accounting books. This produced a formal estimate of the 1908 agricultural tax that had increased to some 33 million taels and 7.2 million shi of grain, from a 1903 baseline of around 35 million taels total. At the roughly 2 taels to each shi of grain conversion rates the government employed during its final decades,145 this amounted to an increase of around 12 million taels, or nearly 35 percent, easily the single largest formal agricultural tax hike in Qing history. The political trepidation that, even at this very late stage, surrounded this tax hike is easily seen in events that followed. After 1908, with the new audit results in hand, the Imperial Court began to adopt for itself the formal budgeting procedures that had been implemented at the provincial level since 1902–1903.146 This produced, in 1911, a level of formal extraction and spending that dramatically exceeded even 1908 levels. The total budget amounted to over 200 million taels, up from around 123 million in 1908, and more than double the roughly 90 million taels of formal annual revenue prior to 1894.147

143

144 145 146

Hubei Nongye Kaifa Shi (湖北农业开发史) [A History of the Agricultural Development in the Hubei Province], 210 (1992). Feng Dehua & Li Ling (冯德华, 李凌), Hebei Sheng Dingxian zhi Tianfu (河北省定县田赋) [Land Tax in Ding County of Hebei Province], 4 Zhengzhi Jingji Xuebao (政治经济学报) [Bull. Pol. Econ.] 481, 487 (1936). For detailed discussion, see Liu (2013), at 80–198. For discussion of this rate, see Chapter 2, Note 82. 147 For detailed discussion, see Liu (2013), at 209–230. See Chapter 1, Section C.

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Nearly all of the 80 million tael increase from1908 levels came from nonagricultural sources: The lijin, salt tax, and miscellaneous commercial taxes more than doubled, while tariff income increased around 30 percent from an already very high base. Agricultural taxes also increased, but only by around 5 percent. Clearly, central policymakers remained more comfortable with increasing nonagricultural taxation than agricultural taxation – it was one thing to formalize fait accompli provincial increases, quite another to order large increases from the top down. In all likelihood, some conservative officials at court still expected political disaster to strike at any moment due to agricultural tax hikes. Political disaster did strike in 1911, but as discussed above and in the work of many other scholars, it had very little to do with the agricultural tax increase: There was a smattering of tax revolts across the country, but they were, without exception, moderate in scale and easily put down. Quite to the contrary, the fact that even the perilously weak late Qing government had managed to raise agricultural taxes without setting off unmanageable levels of sociopolitical unrest only seemed to embolden fiscal reforms in the Republican Era. Neither the Yuan Shikai-led Beiyang regime (1913–1916) nor any of the major warlord factions that occupied various parts of the country after Yuan’s death in 1916 made any effort to reduce agricultural tax burdens. Instead, as noted in Chapter 2, agricultural tax quotas increased consistently, even temporarily regaining their status as the main source of government revenue due to the civil war’s disruption of interregional commerce.148 If these increases could perhaps be explained away as the necessary consequence of military campaigning, what happened shortly after reunification in 1927 under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government speaks more clearly to the political mindset of Republican elites: They continued to ramp up agricultural tax extraction, hitting 5 times the 1902 nationwide quota almost immediately after reunification, which represented a doubling of pre-1927 rates.149 After the Communist takeover in 1949, agricultural taxation once again increased sharply, and would stay at a very high level until 2006, when, having been rendered fiscally insignificant due to China’s rapid industrialized growth after 1978, it was finally abolished completely.150 Clearly, whatever lessons political elites had learned from Qing collapse, “avoiding agricultural tax hikes” was not one of them.

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Zhongguo Fushui Shi (中国赋税史) [A History of Taxation in China], 314 (Sun Yigang & Dong Qingzheng eds., 1987). 1911 agricultural tax quotas nominally increased 1902 quotas by around 50 percent, while the increase between 1912 and 1926 came to around 65 percent. See discussion above and in Chapter 2, Section C. If 1927–1929 rates were about 5 times the 1902 quota, then they were around double the pre-1927 agricultural tax quota. Chao Kuo-chün, Current Agrarian Reform Policies in Communist China, 277 The Ann. of the Am. Acad. of Pol. and Soc. Sci. 113 (1951).

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In fact, the well-documented rise of statism in various political incarnations throughout the Republican era strongly suggests that elites had learned the very opposite lesson: that weak state capacity, beginning with weak fiscal capacity, had been one of the Qing’s fundamental failings, and that they must aggressively bolster such capacity to have any hope of lifting the country out of its present economic and political miasma.151 On the specific issue of fiscal policy, men across the political spectrum, ranging from Sun Yat-sen himself to more conservative fiscal technocrats like Zhou Xuexi, Xiong Xiling, and Liang Shiyi all favored some version of fiscal expansionism, either through the growth of traditional fiscal categories, the creation of new categories, or, more commonly, some combination of the two.152 Xiong, who served as the first Minister of Finance under the Beiyang regime, likely spoke for a significant slice of mainstream thinking when, in 1913, he proposed an ambitious multi-prong fiscal reform agenda that would gradually increase agricultural and salt tax extraction, revamp tariff collection, replace the lijin with a combination of new sales and consumption taxes, and create a number of new taxes, including income taxes, estate taxes, corporate taxes, investment taxes, and so on.153 Actual implementation of this agenda was piecemeal at best due to the political turmoil that would soon sweep over the country during and after Yuan Shikai’s brief ascension to emperorship in 1915–1916, but they provided a basic blueprint for reform that would remain influential for the next several decades.154 The increase in agricultural tax extraction may actually have been the most successful and long-lasting of Xiong’s reform measures: The share of state revenue that came from agriculture steadily increased from around 23 percent in 1912 to over 50 percent by the end of the decade, providing a measure of fiscal stability in otherwise deeply turbulent times.155 From there, the Chinese state, whether in its Beiyang, Nationalist, or Communist versions, never looked back. Once a major fiscal tax hike had been 151

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On state building and statist ideology in Republican China, see, e.g., Julia C. Strauss, Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1912–1940 (1998); Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State (1988); Huaiyin Li, Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936 (2005); Zhenqing Zheng, An Interactive Evolution Between Capitalism and Statism in Modern China: Political Economic Practices from the Guomindang to the Chinese Communist Party, 47 Chinese Stud. Hist. 21 (2013); William C. Kirby, Engineering China: The Origins of the Chinese Developmental State, in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, 137 (Wen-hsin Yeh ed., 2000); William C. Kirby, The Nationalist Regime and the Chinese Party-State, in Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia, 211 (Merle Goldman & Andrew Gordon eds., 2000). Zou Jinwen (邹进文), Minguo Caizheng Sixiang Shi Yanjiu (民国财政思想史研究) [A Study on the Fiscal Thoughts in Republic of China], 95–142 (2008). Jia Dehuai (贾德怀), 1 Minguo Caizheng Jianshi (民国财政简史) [A Brief History of Finance in Republic of China], 38–40 (1941). 155 Liu (2006), at 26–51. Zhongguo Fushui Shi (1986), at 314.

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formally recognized in 1907, but did not bring about the dreaded consequences of rural economic collapse and mass rebellion, the ideological spell of Malthusian pessimism seemed to break for good. Without it, the rigid conservatism that had dominated Qing agricultural taxation since 1735 completely disintegrated, replaced with an expansionist mindset that saw agricultural taxation as a fiscal safety net, to be strengthened whenever possible. By this point, the ideological and political forces that had been set in motion by Ming collapse some 270 years ago had finally come full circle. Early Qing backlash against the perceived failings of late Ming policymaking led to the ascension of agricultural fiscal conservatism, whereas the early twentiethcentury backlash against the perceived failings of Qing institutions led to the ultimate demise of that ideology and the rapid growth of state income across all dimensions, including the long sacrosanct agricultural tax. In both episodes, fundamental regime change and the collective trauma it inflicted on ruling elites generated paradigmatic changes in their political thinking: in the former case toward a small-state ideology that favored administrative decentralization and local communal self-governance, in the latter toward various versions of statism and an economic system wrapped ever more tightly around government policy and institutions. As many have argued, Chinese politics remain under a distinctly statist paradigm even today.156 In between, there were over two centuries of institutional and intellectual entrenchment, during which elites came to embrace – in many cases voluntarily, in other cases because of overwhelming sociopolitical pressure from their peers or superiors – very specific beliefs about overpopulation, economic stagnation, and the hypothetical consequences of agricultural tax hikes. Economic and political reality exerted increasing pressure on these beliefs as time passed, but they possessed, throughout the dynasty, an extraordinary ability to intellectually self-repair and institutionally self-perpetuate, and it was not until the occurrence of not one, but two major fiscal crises in the final decades of the dynasty that they finally collapsed. What was truly remarkable about Qing fiscal conservatism, in the end, was its durability and resilience, its ability to set the terms of political debate and governmental behavior for so long, across so many dramatic shifts in the political and economic landscape. Purely rationalist political behavior would likely have embraced agricultural tax hikes long before the early twentieth century: probably no later than the 1850s, and quite possibly as early as the Jiaqing reign. In fact, rationalist political behavior may not have even allowed the conservative retrenchment that happened after Yongzheng’s death in 1735. In contrast, ideological forces were capable of holding the political line for much longer, likely to the long-term detriment of China’s industrial 156

See, e.g., Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations, 21–45 (2010); Zheng (2013); Kirby (2000a); Kirby (2000b).

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development, but not without some considerable benefits to short-term household incomes across the rural economy.

d. a final summary The ideological, political, and institutional history developed in these chapters is richly laden with possibilities for theoretical interpretation. Those familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for example, will likely see in this history the rough contours of two Kuhnian paradigm shifts:157 one at the beginning of the dynasty, and one at the end. Once a seismic, “revolutionary” event had produced a new intellectual paradigm, it would take another revolutionary event of comparable scale and power to dislodge that paradigm from its position of dominance. Until then, the paradigm would reproduce itself by restructuring the terms of intellectual falsification and verification, so that any new information that might emerge would almost always be processed and interpreted in ways that cohered to the paradigm, rather than contradicted it. Political ideas have, of course, a very different structure and internal logic than scientific ones, but the possible analogies and comparisons are highly compelling. Similarly, political scientists and legal scholars who emphasize the difference between “constitutional politics” and “normal politics” might be tempted to interpret the early and late Qing paradigm shifts as examples of “constitutional politics”158 – understood here in a functional sense, without the underlying legal framework of an actual written constitution – at work, producing new fundamental institutional and political commitments among the ruling elite. Then there are the numerous ways that Qing fiscal history deepens and expands our understanding of how ideologies gain and lose political influence. These theoretical angles will be explored in some detail in Chapter 7. Before that kind of more expansive theorizing can take place, however, we should spend a couple paragraphs distilling the internal logic of Qing fiscal ideology into a more theoretically usable form and summarizing its interaction with external sociopolitical and economic forces. After four full chapters of often complicated ideological history, most readers would likely benefit from a condensed wrap-up segment before jumping into further theoretical discussion. In addition, some may desire a quick refresher on why this new kind of ideological history is needed in the first place – why it does a better job of explaining certain features of the Qing fiscal state than both the more

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Kuhn (1962). See, e.g., Bruce Ackerman, Constitutional Politics/Constitutional Law, 99 Yale L. J. 453 (1999); Michel Rosenfeld, Just Interpretations: Law Between Ethics and Politics, ch. 8 (1998); William Partlett & Zim Nwokora, The Foundations of Democratic Dualism: Why Constitutional Politics and Ordinary Politics Are Different, 26 Constellations 177 (1999).

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conventional rationalist accounts we saw in Chapter 2 and the older moralistic arguments about Confucian tax-aversion. This section provides both. As argued in Chapters 3 and 4, the fiscal paradigm shift that occurred during the Ming-Qing transition had two primary dimensions: First and foremost, the transition set off a massive wave of skepticism toward both taxation in particular, which was widely understood to have been a major cause of Ming collapse, and governmental administration in general. Second, it reoriented the intellectual center of fiscal conservatism away from traditional deontological arguments about “speaking of profit,” and decisively toward empirical pragmatism. Under the new paradigm, the strongest argument against raising agricultural taxes was no longer “raising agricultural taxes is morally wrong in a deontological sense,” but rather “if we raise agricultural taxes, we risk suffering the same fate as the Ming.” To be sure, the former remained somewhat visible in elite political discourse, and indeed was likely responsible for creating many of the cognitive biases that produced the latter in the first place, but it was not until the latter’s ascension that fiscal conservatism truly became a dominant political force. The political potency of conservative moral aspirations depended, in the end, on their ability to credibly tie themselves to the political elite’s base desire for self-preservation. To do so, their proponents needed a concrete narrative of what could go wrong if taxes were raised, which they found in the ideologically inflected narratives of Ming collapse that quickly seized control of elite political discourse after 1644. The idea that the rural population could not sustain taxation beyond a specific ceiling – generally understood to be the level of taxation imposed in the late Wanli realm – both politically empowered fiscal conservatism to unprecedented levels and, at the same time, rendered it vulnerable to certain avenues of attack. Self-preservationist empirical beliefs, by their very nature, are largely impervious to normative counterarguments, but can lose stature rapidly if their empirical foundations are ever proven wrong. Most importantly, any politically credible evidence of significant economic growth beyond late Ming levels could significantly erode their influence. This is why, as argued in Chapter 5, the institutional crackdown on land surveying may well have contributed even more to the political longevity of those beliefs than the Ming collapse-induced elite intellectual trauma that gave rise to them in the first place: By depriving political elites of politically certifiable evidence to the contrary, the land survey crackdown effectively locked in Malthusian assumptions about overpopulation and economic decline into mainstream political and intellectual discourse for nearly 150 years. Insofar as the crackdown was itself driven by elite anxiety over “disrupting the people” and fear of sociopolitical backlash against even the preparatory steps leading up to a potential agricultural tax hike, it was an extraordinarily successful example – likely without equal in late imperial Chinese history – of ideological selfperpetuation and institutional reproduction.

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Note that the operative phrase in the previous paragraph was “politically credible evidence”: for empirical information to become politically influential, it must gain credibility in the eyes of mainstream political elites. In other words, raw “information” needed to become certified “evidence.” The process through which this happens in politics is not so qualitatively different from the gatekeeper role that, for example, evidence law plays in modern legal proceedings. In the Qing fiscal context, piecemeal local information that may have appeared to contradict mainstream Malthusian empirics could not, on their own, overturn elite faith in those empirics. Rather, they needed to acquire sufficient scale and weight, but this was virtually impossible in the absence of official land surveying, which, at the time, was probably the only means of acquiring relatively accurate macro-level information about the economy, and certainly the only means that carried enough intellectual and political authority to affect fiscal policymaking – but more on this in Chapter 7. The events laid out in this chapter follow naturally from this long-term ideological narrative: going into the mid-nineteenth century, Qing fiscal conservatism operated on a supposedly pragmatic and empirically grounded internal logic that made it highly resistant to most kinds of demand-side fiscal pressures. In fact, the fiscal crisis that followed the rise of the Taiping Rebellion in 1850 actually seemed to strengthen the case against agricultural tax hikes in many political circles: Raising agricultural taxes in moments of deep political crisis seemed even more suicidal than usual if one believed that, due to Malthusian overpopulation, the rural population was already overtaxed and on the verge of full-sale economic collapse. As a result, even during the peak of the crisis, central and provincial authorities kept agricultural tax quotas stable, with only a few significant exceptions in either direction. What finally did bring down fiscal conservatism were a series of institutional and intellectual changes that challenged the ideology on its own terms: The gradual return of land surveying after 1860 bolstered a growing chorus of elite voices who pushed back against the conventional Malthusian perception of a thoroughly exhausted rural economy. By the time the second major fiscal crisis came around in 1901, anti-Malthusian voices had become strong enough that, finally, the state’s commitment to agricultural fiscal quotaism began to crack. Given that the political and institutional entrenchment of Malthusian empirics had long been the political linchpin of fiscal conservatism, it was perhaps inevitable that the demise of that ideology necessarily followed the loosening of those institutional shackles. There was, in some sense, a certain historical symmetry in how Qing fiscal conservatism became fully entrenched in the later eighteenth century through the prohibition of land surveying, but was then gradually undone in the later nineteenth century by its reintroduction. As the old Chinese saying goes: “The only person who can untie a knot is he who knotted it in the first place.”159

159

解铃还需系铃人.

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At this point, the empiricism and pragmatism of fiscal conservatism had actually become a liability: Given that deontological moralizing about the inherent evilness of taxation no longer played any significant role in fiscal discourse, conservatives had nothing to fall back on once their empirical beliefs were successfully challenged. There was very little room for moral or religious fundamentalism in late Qing politics, and nearly all major positions were advanced or refuted on the basis of consequentialist sociopolitical calculations. As a result, once agricultural tax hikes were somewhat tentatively implemented after 1901 and did not incite serious unrest and rebellion, thereby clearly demonstrating that conventional doomsaying about their sociopolitical consequences was substantively wrong, fiscal conservatism essentially collapsed overnight, clearing the way for far more aggressive agricultural taxation in the Republican era. Qing fiscal conservatism was not, in the end, immune to the state’s external circumstances, but for those circumstances to produce fundamental political and institutional change, they had to be filtered and processed through the internal logic of fiscal conservatism – seen through its own empirical lenses. Once the filtering was complete and force applied to the proper pressure points, things changed very quickly. This narrative has a number of major advantages over preexisting accounts of late imperial fiscal behavior. As discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 2, those accounts struggle to explain at least three major characteristics of Qing fiscal policy: (1) why agricultural tax quotas were locked in place for so long, even in the face of severe demand-side pressures; (2) why the Qing state treated agricultural taxation and nonagricultural taxation so differently; and (3) why Qing fiscal policy was so much more conservative, at least on agricultural taxation, than its Ming predecessor. Rationalist explanations are unable to adequately answer the first and second questions, while traditional ideological claims about Confucianism’s ethical aversion to taxation fail to answer the third. The narrative developed here, in contrast, easily answers all three. Agricultural tax quotas were stagnant because, following Ming collapse, political elites were collectively extremely anxious about the perceived consequences of agricultural tax hikes – an anxiety that only deepened with the ascension of Malthusian beliefs about economic stagnation and overpopulation. Why did this anxiety not apply to nonagricultural taxation? Because elites did not understand nonagricultural taxation to be a major cause of Ming collapse, which was, after all, a product of peasant rebellions, not urban uprisings. Consequently, they never developed an empirical worldview that perceived nonagricultural tax hikes as a major threat to regime stability. Qing fiscal conservatism was always fundamentally about agricultural taxation, indeed exclusively so, and the intellectual and political history laid out in Chapter 4 clearly explains how this came to be in the early dynasty. Straightforward intellectual and institutional path dependency explains the rest. In fact, the ability of the Qing state to steadily increase some segments of nonagricultural taxation throughout the later seventeenth, eighteenth, and

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early nineteenth centuries – all without doing significantly visible economic or social damage – likely supplied some of the requisite political will and confidence behind the much more dramatic later nineteenth century commercial tax hikes. Why was Qing fiscal policy so different from its Ming – or, for that matter, Tang and Song, predecessors? As argued in Chapters 3 and 4, the intellectual and political trauma inflicted by Ming collapse on the literati was likely an unprecedented event in Chinese history. Peasant rebellions had played some role in the collapse and rise of other dynasties before the Ming-Qing transition, but never in such a prominent and direct fashion. When late Ming fiscal conservatives attempted to predict the sociopolitical consequences of tax hikes, they could only do so in a relatively vague and imprecise manner, which likely dulled their political impact. Instead, Ming fiscal conservatism relied much more heavily on deontological arguments about the immorality of taxation. While those arguments were often influential in their own right, they could also be effectively countered by deontological arguments in the opposite direction, which meant that, when demand-side pressures escalated, the later Ming state, like most other early modern governments placed in similar situations, tended to favor aggressive fiscal expansion. It was only after the Ming-Qing transition that political elites could decisively point to a major historical example – indeed one seared into the minds of nearly all early Qing intellectuals – of tax hikes leading to total sociopolitical collapse. In fact, this narrative of Ming collapse was, as Chapter 4 argues in some detail, highly debatable from an objective, academic perspective. Nonetheless, given the normative and cognitive priors of early Qing elites, coupled with the immense sociopolitical pressure early Qing elites felt to produce a politically usable “lesson” from the catastrophe, it is very difficult to see how they could have come to a different conclusion. Confucian political ethics had normatively conditioned them to worry about the sociopolitical consequences tax hikes – not even late Ming fiscal reformers like Zhang Juzheng were immune from this – so when sweeping, disastrous sociopolitical unrest finally did chronologically follow a series of major tax hikes, their intellectual tendency to blame the former on the latter was, to a large extent, cognitively overdetermined. The difference between Ming and Qing fiscal policy therefore came down to the successful marriage of traditional normative anxiety with deeply held empirical beliefs about the consequences of agricultural tax hikes in the early Qing, as opposed to the predominantly deontological nature of late Ming fiscal conservatism. It should surprise no one that “we think tax hikes are morally problematic and now we know for sure that they will kill us” was a far more politically powerful argument than “we think tax hikes are morally problematic” alone. The nature of Qing fiscal conservatism was fundamentally different from its Ming predecessor, which is something that traditional arguments about Confucian morality did not identify.

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Beyond these macro-level analytical advantages, the ideological narrative developed here also does a better job of explaining a number of more specific episodes in Qing fiscal history: As argued in Chapter 4, it allows us to understand the speed and uniformity with which early Qing elites coalesced around the new paradigm of fiscal conservatism, something that would seem rather unlikely if elite behavior was purely rationalistic. It also explains why fiscal conservatism actually deepened even as the economy recovered and living standards rose into mid-dynasty – and also as ethnic tensions between the Han Chinese and Manchu populations eased off into a relatively stable pattern of sociopolitical coexistence. In the late Qing, it explains why rigid agricultural fiscal quotaism only collapsed after 1901, and not after 1850, something that is especially difficult for rationalist models, whether demand-side or supply-side, to explain. Nevertheless, this book should not be seen as a full-blown refutation of preexisting explanations, but rather as an attempt to fill in their gaps. It seeks to complement more than it seeks to reject. Rationalist models remain admirably effective in explaining the basic trajectory of Qing nonagricultural tax policy. Even within the realm of agricultural taxation, their influence can still be felt acutely at many points in our narrative, and has been appropriately incorporated throughout. Traditional ideological arguments do not go deeply enough into the idiosyncrasies of Qing fiscal thought, but they nonetheless correctly identify the Confucian moral anxiety that underlay early Qing elites’ intellectual and political eagerness to blame Ming collapse on overtaxation. What this book has added to these preexisting accounts is a more detailed, comprehensive, and theoretically robust argument about the political influence of ideology – a large, missing piece of the puzzle, perhaps, but still only one piece.

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7 Theoretical Implications

The historical narrative developed in the previous chapters offers an enormous range of theoretical implications, ranging from models of individual human political behavior to theories of ideological change, to debates over the nature of constitutionalism. This chapter seeks to untangle – or, at least, begin to untangle – some of these implications. It would likely be impossible to fully address any of those theoretical questions without doubling the length of an already very long manuscript, but the chapter attempts to concisely identify how the empirical material presented here speaks to some of their core issues. Given length limitations, it offers relatively few conclusive answers, and instead lays out a range of interpretative possibilities, some more compelling than others. Section A briefly discusses whether, and to what extent, rationalist models of political decision-making can coexist with ideological or cultural ones. Insofar as mainstream theories of rational political choice allow for the possibility of exogenous preferences and incomplete information, they are not necessarily opposed to the idea that ideology and culture can influence political decisionmaking. If we loosen the assumption of complete rationality and begin to incorporate behavioralist and cognitive biases into the model – as is increasingly popular in the positivist social sciences – then there is even more room for ideological or cultural factors to operate, not merely on the objectives of political action, but also the means. None of these claims are theoretically novel, but they do beg the question of how models based on ideology and culture differ from other kinds of nonrationalist models. The core difference lies in their much stronger ability to explain societal differences, but this ability comes with a number of caveats and potential pitfalls, which urge methodological caution when employing ideological or cultural analysis: They are perhaps best employed, at the moment, as a fallback option when other, more universalist models fall short. 319

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This short section aims primarily to further clarify conceptual and methodological positions already developed in the previous chapters. Section B asks how political ideologies become politically influential. The primary ideology discussed in this book – Qing fiscal conservatism – rose and fell in a distinctly nonlinear fashion, and this seems to be broadly true of many of the most influential political ideologies in modern Chinese history. Indeed, one would expect major, cataclysmic sociopolitical events to have some profound impact on both the intellectual trajectory of ideological beliefs and their political fortunes, and there was no shortage of such events in modern China. Whether this implies, on the other hand, that political ideologies tend to gain influence in lurches, rather than linearly, is a much more difficult question. Nonetheless, if we consider the complex synergies between normative and empirical beliefs that likely have to fall into place before an ideology can truly gain a large political following, then it seems at least possible that some variation of a Kuhnian paradigm-shift theory also applies generally to the politics of ideological change: Ideologies, especially modern ideologies, need to be empirically “vindicated,” at least as a matter of popular perception, before they can become sociopolitically powerful, and this seems far more likely to happen under conditions of significant upheaval than in times of relative stability. Section C turns to the more specific question of how legal institutions interact with political ideology. There are vibrant literatures, stretching back decades, on how ideologies influence legal institutions: The mid-twentieth century tensions between legal formalists and realists, for example, often centered around this very issue. What has often been missing in these debates is an account of how the arrow of influence runs in the opposite direction – how law and legal institutions impact the sociopolitical status of an ideology. The deconstruction of an ideology into its normative and empirical components that this book has argued for offers one useful way to think about this question: While much attention, scholarly and political, has been paid to how law impedes or furthers normative agendas, much less attention has been paid to how law entrenches empirical perceptions by regulating the collection, processing, and dissemination of information. This latter mechanism – let us call it the “informational function” of law – was not only the primary means of institutional entrenchment that Qing fiscal conservatism benefitted from, but is also arguably the most important way legal institutions influence political ideology in modern societies. Finally, Section D turns to the question of constitutionalism. The political commitment to permanent agricultural tax quotas was one of the most durable features of the Qing state. Under some recent theories of constitutionalism, especially those that take a fundamentally functionalist approach, this may well be described as a central “constitutional commitment” of the Qing state – a label that would have considerable implications for both conventional narratives of Chinese legal development and global narratives on the modern rise of

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constitutionalism. As tempting as that possibility is, this section pushes back against these functionalist conceptions of constitutionalism, and argues for a more normatively grounded concept that would exclude Qing fiscal conservatism: If the idea of “constitutionalism” is to have any real meaning at all, it must include elements of normativity. These conceptual gymnastics lead to a number of interesting conclusions, one of which is that a government’s ability to make “credible commitments” against arbitrary expropriation does not necessarily depend – and in the Chinese context, has rarely depended – on whether it is constrained in a constitutional sense.

a. ideology, culture, and rationalist models of political behavior As noted at the beginning of Chapter 2, rationalist models of political behavior are usually “nonideological” and “noncultural.” That is, they make little to no active use of ideological or cultural factors themselves, and instead seek to explain political decision-making through universalist assumptions about human objectives – that political actors seek to maximize their own utility, usually consisting of some combination of wealth, power, and status, and that their utility-based preferences are both complete and transitive – paired with the additional assumption that those actors pursue their objectives in a rational manner, logically weighing costs against benefits based on the available information.1 Rationalist models, in other words, tend to combine universal, rationally structured ends with universal, rationally identified means. Certainly, the rationalist models examined in Chapter 2 are of this variety. Insofar as the costs and benefits of any specific decision can be quantified, these assumptions allow for the possibility of formal mathematical modeling and econometric analysis. That said, many rationalist models are not necessarily “anti-ideological” or “anti-cultural,” in that, although they themselves make no use of ideological or cultural analysis, they do not actively reject the possibility that human political behavior can be ideological or cultural. This is most obviously seen in how these models understand the composition of individual utility: At the foundational level, they assume that utility functions are completely subjective to each person,2 who may internalize any ideological or cultural influence into her 1

2

For the survey of how scholars in various fields conceptualize “rational choice,” see Robert Sugden, Rational Choice: A Survey of Contributions from Economics and Philosophy, 101 Econ. J. 751 (1991). See also Richard A. Posner, Rational Choice, Behavioral Economics, and the Law, 50 Stan. L. Rev. 1551 (1998); James M. Buchanan, Public Choice: The Origins and Development of a Research Program (2003). Neoclassic versions of this assumption take utility functions as fundamentally exogenous to any economic model. See, e.g., Gary S. Becker & Kevin M. Murphy, A Theory of Rational Addiction, 96 J. Pol. Econ. 675 (1988); George J. Stigler & Gary S. Becker, De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, 67 Am. Econ. Rev. 76 (1977). See criticism and attempted modification at, for example: David Krackhardt, Endogenous Preferences: A Structural Approach, in Debating

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preferences without running afoul of the model’s core principles, so long as they are done so in a logically coherent – that is, complete and transitive – manner. Rationalist models themselves rarely incorporate such factors voluntarily,3 and certainly not in the specific academic literature surveyed in Chapter 2, but they are not theoretically averse to doing so. Any ideological or cultural factors thus incorporated would simply introduce a number of exogenous preferences to the model, a “black box” that the model takes for granted, and does not peer into.4 Rationalist models are therefore often compatible with ideological or cultural influences on the objectives of political action. But what about the means? Here the theoretical space is much narrower, and the assumption of rationality more oppressive. Nonetheless, there are at least some possibilities for coexistence. Perhaps most importantly, when multiple equilibria exist for some particular decision, ideological and cultural factors can help identify the “focal point” around which rational actors will coalesce, under the expectation that other actors will behave accordingly.5 This is especially true when information is incomplete: Take, for example, the classic scenario in which two strangers need to meet up in a city at a specific time, but due to a breakdown in communication, they do not know the location of the meeting. Under these conditions, the rational thing to do would be to wait for the other party at the most salient landmark in the city. What those are, however, is culturally determined: Tiananmen Square in Beijing, for example, or Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Social or political trust is another concept utilized in many rationalist models that has been closely associated with cultural analysis: For example, scholars have argued that some groups of people are socially closer than others, with

3

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Rationality: Non-rational Aspects of Organizational Decision Making, 239–247 (Jennifer Halpern & Robert N. Stern eds., 1998); R.A. Pollak, Habit Formation and Dynamic Demand Functions, 78 J. Pol. Econ. 745 (1970). Even legal theory, which sits at the intersection of numerous social sciences, and is therefore a particularly ideal forum for economic analysis to join forces with cultural analysis, has seen strong resistance against the latter from practitioners of the former. See literature reviews at, e.g., Lauren B. Edelman, Rivers of Law Contested Terrain: A Law and Society Approach to Economic Rationality, 38 L. & Soc’y Rev. 181 (2004); Jack Knight & Lee Epstein, Building the Bridge from Both Sides of the River: Law and Society and Rational Choice, 38 L. & Soc’y Rev. 207 (2004); Amitai Etzioni, Social Norms: Internalization, Persuasion and History, 34 L. & Soc’y Rev. 157, 158 (2000); Robert C. Ellickson, Law and Economics Discovers Social Norms, 27 J. Legal Stud. 537, 542 (1998). Ellickson, in particular, provides an exceptionally clear explanation for why economic analysis has generally been reluctant to incorporate cultural analysis. See Taisu Zhang, Cultural Paradigms in Property Institutions, 41 Yale J. Int’l L. 347 (2016); a famous example of this is the way ideological preferences have been incorporated into rational choice models of adjudication. See Epstein & Knight (2013) for summary and critique. See Richard H. McAdams, A Focal Point Theory of Expressive Law, 86 Va. L. Rev. 1649 (2000); Robert Sugden, A Theory of Focal Points, 105 Economic J. 533 (1995); Alvin E. Roth, Towards a Focal Point Theory of Bargaining, in Game Theoretic Models of Bargaining, 259 (Alvin E. Roth eds., 1985).

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stronger levels of in-group trust, because they are so culturally inclined.6 In many cases, this has been conceptualized as a collectivism versus individualism distinction, in which some cultures are more inclined toward the former, and some toward the latter.7 For culture to be a truly independent factor in such models, it must be conceptually and functionally distinct from mere conditions of physical or informational proximity: That is, trusting someone due to cultural beliefs must be distinguishable from trusting someone simply because there is a lot of information available about that person. If the former kind of trust is to also be “rational,” however, then the role of culture begins to look very much like the focal point mechanism described in the previous paragraph: Assume, for example, that my rational strategy is to cooperate with someone if she cooperates with me, but cheat if she cheats – but also that I have no information if she will cooperate or cheat. In such cases, sharing a common culture that behooves one to trust other members of the same cultural group may well constitute a rational focal point that facilitates cooperation from both sides. These openings for ideological influence on political means are quite limited, and if we wish to expand them, then some loosening of the assumption of rationality is necessary. This has been, most prominently, the primary objective of behavioral economics, and a major agenda of psychological and cognitive research.8 Their arguments should be very familiar to most social scientists by this point: that many human decisions, including political decisions, are, in fact, substantially irrational, subject to numerous cognitive biases. Some of these biases, such as loss aversion, seek to undermine the rationality of ends by showing that human preferences are not transitive.9 Others, such as various kinds of anchoring bias, availability bias, or confirmation bias, argue for

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This has also been presented as an individualism versus collectivism distinction, in which some cultures are inclined toward the former, and some toward the latter. See, e.g., Alberto Alesina & Paola Giuliano, Culture and Institutions, 53 J. Econ. Lit. 898 (2015) (summarizing the relevant literature); Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, & Luigi Zingales, Cultural Biases in Economic Exchange, 124 Q. J. Econ. 1095 (2009); Ernst Fehr, On the Economics and Biology of Trust, 7 J. European Econ. Assoc. 235 (2009); Guido Tabellini, Institutions and Culture, 6 J. European Econ. Assoc. 255 (2008); Avner Greif, Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection of Collectivist and Individualist Societies, 102 J. Pol. Econ. 912 (1994); Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993). Alesina and Giuliano (2015); Greif (1994). For methodological surveys done from the economics side, see Richard H. Thaler, Behavioral Economics: Past, Present, and Future, 106 Am. Econ. Rev. 1577 (2016); John Conlisk, Why Bounded Rationality?, 34 J. Econ. Lit. 669 (1996). For a summary from the psychological side, see Martin G. Haselton, Daniel Nettle & Damian R. Murray, Evolution of Cognitive Bias, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 968 (David M. Buss ed., 2015). Nathan Novemsky & Daniel Kahneman, The Boundaries of Loss Aversion, 42 J. Marketing Res. 119 (2005).

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systemic error in information processing, which may lead to suboptimal decision-making, and therefore challenge the supposed rationality of means.10 These are, of course, welcome developments for those of us who favor ideological and cultural analysis – it is certainly easier to introduce ideological and cultural factors into a behavioralist model than purely rationalist ones – but behavioralist models do not necessarily employ such analysis themselves. In fact, most kinds of behavioralist models are just as silent on ideology and culture as rationalist ones, in that they tend to believe the existence of cognitive bias is a universal human phenomenon, and not dependent on cultural or ideological context. This has led some observers to comment on the difference between “psychological” and “sociological” revisions to economic rationalism: The former focuses on innate, universal features of behavior and thought, whereas the latter gives more weight to factors that are society and contextspecific, which would presumably include culture and ideology.11 In particular, the latter pays attention to the substantive content of cultural or ideological beliefs and values, and not merely on their signaling role for, say, in-group or out-group identity and solidarity. Dig a little deeper, however, and it becomes readily apparent that many kinds of cognitive biases, to the extent they exist, can easily be culturally or ideologically dependent – not necessarily in terms of the cognitive mechanism that interests psychologists and behavioral economists, but at least in terms of the substantive behavioral outcome they produce. The use of confirmation bias as an explanatory factor, of course, always begs the further question of “confirmation of what,” just as any use of anchoring biases begs the question of “anchoring of what.”12 The cognitive priors that are being confirmed or “anchored” are often highly culturally or ideologically specific, as they were in the Qing fiscal context, and continue to be in modern politics across the globe: Conservatives tend to interpret evidence in conformity with conservative principles, liberals with liberal ones, and so on. Furthermore, due to the increasing segregation of news and social media on a partisan basis, the first and most salient pieces of information one encounters on any major political issue are increasingly likely to bear ideological and political influences.13 As a result, while the cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased interpretation of evidence may well be universal, the substantive interpretations they produce are nonetheless robustly cultural and ideological. The theoretical leap from rationalist models of political behavior to ideological and cultural ones is, therefore, smaller than one might think – not 10 11

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Summarized in Conlisk (1996). See Robert C. Ellickson, Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors: A Critique of Classical Law and Economics, 65 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 23 (1989). See discussion in Chapter 4, Section C. Joshua Aaron Tucker et al., Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature (2018), https://ssrn.com/abstract=3144139.

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necessarily any larger than the more conventional leap from rationalist economics to behavioral economics. Rationalist models already are capable, on their own terms, of coexisting with ideological and cultural influences on political objectives, and insofar as an increasing community of scholars are now willing to loosen the assumption of rationality enough to recognize the existence of confirmation or anchoring bias, they have also effectively opened the door to powerful ideological and cultural influences on calculations of political means. In fact, some very well-known studies in economic history, particularly those on the early modern Middle East, have already begun to go beyond the individualism/collectivism dichotomy to seriously consider the influence of more specific, more substantive religious and cultural beliefs on economic and institutional behavior.14 That said, there often seems to be more resistance toward ideological and cultural analysis among social scientists, particularly economists, than toward cognitive analysis of the more universalist kind.15 Why is this the case? One reason is probably the increasingly strong movement toward quantification in many social sciences: Whereas there are widely accepted and well developed methods for quantifying cognitive bias, quantifying cultural or ideological influence remains, to this day, a much more difficult problem.16 Much of this simply stems from the greater ability of researchers to control and modify cognitive triggers in experiments, as compared to enormous difficulty, if not outright impossibility, of manipulating culture and ideology in an experiment setting: To demonstrate the cognitive impact of anchoring effects, for example, the researcher only needs to manipulate the initial piece of information experiment participants receive. To demonstrate the impact of exogenously held cultural or ideological beliefs, however, they must rely on cruder survey methods or natural experiments that have well-known limitations. In surveys, for example, the ideological leanings of participants are externally determined and cannot be manipulated within the survey, which can make it very difficult to determine the precise causal mechanisms behind an empirical finding: For example, when a participant agrees with conservative political positions, is he doing so because he has genuinely internalized the position, or simply out of

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E.g., Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (2010). Such sentiments are expressed particularly well in Ellickson (1989). More recent discussions of this phenomenon can be found in Justin D. Levinson & Kaiping Peng, Valuing Cultural Differences in Behavioral Economics, 4 ICFAI J. Behavioral Fin. 32 (2007); and Cass R. Sunstein, What’s Available: Social Influences and Behavioral Economics, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1295 (2003). See also, Floris Heukelom, Behavioral Economics: A History, 1 (2014) (“In addition, it suggests that economics and psychology are stable, universal entities.”). See methodological discussion in Richard V. Adkisson, Quantifying Culture: Problems and Promises, 48 J. Econ. Issues 89 (2004). See also David Throsby, Economics and Culture, 7–8 (2001).

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group-based loyalty?17 The former represents an ideological belief, whereas the latter only represents some sort of political tribalism, and may actually be a rational choice. Natural experiments offer a way around these problems, but are available only on a relatively rare and unpredictable basis. Alternatively, many social scientists seem to draw their hostility toward ideological and cultural analysis from a healthy skepticism of the way that such analysis has often been conducted in the past. To a considerable extent, the current hostility and skepticism that one often observes is part of a larger backlash that began several decades ago against the way that some scholars, spread across disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and history, applied the concept of “culture.”18 Across much of this expansive literature, culture was a sort of all-encompassing term that underlay every facet of human behavior and thought. As Clifford Geertz, perhaps cultural anthropology’s most influential spokesman, put it, culture is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”19 Cultural symbols, concepts, influences, and beliefs therefore permeated all aspects of human life, constituting the basic logic of social and political behavior.20 Regardless of the substantive merits of positions like Geertz’s, they undeniably popularized several methodological pitfalls: Most importantly, culture thus defined is a remarkably amorphous concept, which makes empirical arguments about cultural influence and causation extraordinarily difficult to evaluate and falsify.21 The eagerness of cultural theorists to find cultural influence everywhere and in everything came, as many critics have pointed out, to put enormous stress on the concept’s intellectual boundaries. What made

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This is the central question raised in Kahan & Braman (2006). See, e.g., Gerard Roland, Economics and Culture, in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (R. A. Scott and S. M. Kosslyn ed., 2015), https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781118900772.etrds0091 (summarizing mainstream economic attitudes toward culture); J. Mark Ramseyer & Minoru Nakazato, The Rational Litigant: Settlement Amounts and Verdict Rates in Japan, 18 J. Leg. Stud. 263 (1989). Clifford J. Geertz, The Interpretations of Culture: Selected Essays, 89 (1973). Id. Other major works that make this kind of constructivist argument include, for example, Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise (1966); Mary Douglass, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966). A more recent summary is provided in Frank Dobbin, Cultural Models of Organization: The Social Construction of Rational Organizing Principles, in The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, 117 (Diana Crane ed., 1994). The gradual but decisive decline of structuralist thought in cultural anthropology, following its mid-twentieth century heyday under Claude Lévi-Strauss’s influence, cemented the idea of behavior as culturally constructed in nonmaterially deterministic ways. See Vincent Descombes, Philosophy and Anthropology after Structuralism, 14 Paragraph 217 (1991). But see Danilyn Rutherford, How Structuralism Matters, 6 Hau: J. Ethnographic Theory 61 (2016) for a discussion of structuralism’s enduring relevance. Roland (2015).

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culturally constructed behavior different from other kinds of behavior, or was all human behavior inherently cultural as a matter of assumption? In particular, is there any clear, empirically useful way to distinguish between behavior that is fundamentally cultural in nature and behavior that is more plausibly seen as the equilibrium outcome of rational choice? Some might argue it is improper to ask for falsifiability from frameworks of cultural analysis that are fundamentally interpretive, rather than positivist, in nature.22 Insofar as one can understand the exercise of interpretative understanding as being qualitatively distinct from the positivist explanation of the external world, this is at least a partially fair critique, but only to the extent that cultural theorists are in fact engaged in pure interpretation, instead of external – and therefore positivist – explanation cloaked in interpretive terminology. Geertz, at least, was clearly interested in providing systemic explanations for external social behavior,23 as were many other sociologists and anthropologists who had major influence on cultural studies in its formative years. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, famously and somewhat controversially regarded sociology as a form of science.24 This is not to deny that their theories have interpretive elements and applications, but only to point out that, to the extent their work engages in external explanation, it is not unreasonable to ask for clear, empirically useful definitions and the theoretical possibility of verification and falsifiability. Purely interpretive analysis, on the other hand, is a qualitatively different project, in both objective and method, from the kind of explanatory research this book is interested in: It would likely reject the very question of “can cultural differences explain institutional or economic outcomes” as conceptually incoherent. Interdisciplinary and intermethodological dialogue can bridge many intellectual chasms, but not one that large.25 Within the world of positivist explanation, rationalists would likely insist that any behavior that can be explained through rational models should not be 22

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For summary and discussion of critiques of positivism in cultural anthropology, see, e.g., Paul B. Roscoe, The Perils of “Positivism” in Cultural Anthropology, 97 Am. Anthropologist 492 (1995). Geertz (1973). See Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Richard Nice trans., 2004). There have, of course, been many attempts to merge or bridge positivism and interpretivism. See, e.g., Chris Clarke, Paths between Positivism and Interpretivism: An Appraisal of Hay’s Via Media, 29 Politics 28 (2009); Wendy D. Roth & Jal D. Mehta, The Rashomon Effect: Combining Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches in the Analysis of Contested Events, 31 Sociological Methods & Research 131 (2002); Ann Chih Lin, Bridging Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches to Qualitative Methods, 26 Policy Stud. J. 162 (1998); Allen S. Lee, Integrating Positivist and Interpretive Approaches to Organizational Research, 2 Organizational Res. 323 (1991). For the most part, these approaches either seem to argue for doing both positivist and interpretive analysis, without explaining the synergy of doing so, or for a better positivist understanding of causal mechanisms through empathetic interpretive analysis – in which case the interpretive analysis is largely reduced to a form of positivist epistemology.

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explained through cultural theory. As one-sided as this burden of proof is, it is, at least, usable in empirical research and, furthermore, offers a clear enough conceptual boundary between the two categories. For the most part, cultural theorists have not countered with any such boundary of their own – except, perhaps, to say that rationality itself is culturally constructed, and therefore the distinction is unnecessary, if not outright nonsensical.26 This obviously clashed in fundamental ways with the common belief that some dimensions of human behavior are innate and universal, including the desire for survival, subsistence, wealth, and status, and therefore did not seem to require any cultural explanation. To say that everything is a cultural construct is no less intellectually overbearing – arguably much more so, given the far less definite meaning of “culture” – than to say that every human decision is fully rational, but the latter claim does, at least, have the advantage of being clearly conceptualized and potentially falsifiable. In contrast, the conceptual ambiguities in the former claim eventually built up to the point where many claims of cultural construction and influence were no longer falsifiable in any real sense. If culture was simply a sort of all-encompassing epistemic “field” or “habitus,” to employ some of Pierre Bourdieu’s most infamously elusive terms, that was almost infinitely variable and conceptually malleable,27 then of course there was no logical way to disprove the influence of culture on any specific sociopolitical phenomenon. The problem was that this also rendered the concept effectively useless as an explanatory tool, impossible to either falsify or defend. Geertz’s brand of cultural theory, in particular, has often been criticized for lacking a specifically testable theory of causation, so much so that, within its intellectual boundaries, “culture seems to take on the qualities of a transcendental actor,”28 and eventually begins to “explain” itself in a fundamentally circular manner. Insofar as many of the social sciences desired, wisely or not, theoretical precision and empirical falsifiability similar to the natural sciences, it was perhaps inevitable that they eventually distanced themselves from this kind of cultural analysis. In particular, these intellectual dynamics have likely exerted considerable influence on the various historiographical debates that this book positions itself within. As a general matter, economic history has gone from a field that, in the first half of the twentieth century, regularly entertained grand theories of how cultural differences explained different paths of economic development, to one that, in recent decades, has swung decisively toward rationalist models of 26 27

28

See Dobbin (1994). See Orville Lee III, Observations on Anthropological Thinking About the Culture Concept: Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu, 33 Berkeley J. Sociology 115 (1988). Jeffrey Alexander & Phillip Smith, The Strong Program in Cultural Theory: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics, in Handbook of Sociological Theory, 135, 144 (Turner J.H. eds., 2001).

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economic behavior. The literature on Sino-Western economic divergence is an especially good example of this: Over the past several decades, it has largely abandoned cultural analysis in favor of noncultural economic models.29 Whereas many used to believe that late imperial China’s relative economic underperformance was a product of its Confucian political and social culture, such beliefs rarely, if ever, appear in articles and books produced since the 1990s, giving way to more “economic” explanations based on resource endowment, demographics, geography, or “hard” institutional constraints like separation of powers or property rights. While the forces behind this intellectual transformation were numerous and varied, one important complaint against traditional cultural explanations was that they were often too vague to be useful: Generalized claims that, for example, Confucian culture discouraged the aggressive accumulation of wealth either led to the circulation of some extreme behavioral caricatures that were easily proven false – “Chinese elites were hostile to the accumulation of wealth”30 – or failed to produce behavioral hypotheses specific enough to allow for serious empirical verification. Empirical research clearly demonstrated, in fact, that Chinese farmers, merchants, scholars, and officials did attempt to accumulate wealth,31 which meant that any such claim of cultural influence and causation had to rely on fairly subtle conceptual and empirical differences between “aggressive” and “nonaggressive” accumulation. This proved to be well beyond the level of behavioral specificity that traditional cultural theories were able to provide, which partially drove their eventual replacement by more theoretically precise and empirically testable models of economic and institutional change. Around the same time, a similar and closely related transformation took place in the study of late imperial Chinese fiscal history: Since the 1990s, most scholars have become disinterested in the use of culture or ideology as a significant explanatory factor for Qing fiscal behavior. They focused instead on developing the litany of rationalist explanations discussed in Chapter 2, which were, to be fair, more behaviorally specific and well-grounded in social scientific theory than older claims about Confucianism’s supposed moral aversion to taxation. 29

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Much of this literature is summarized in Zhang (2017), at 1–9. This transition is obvious when comparing, for example, Weber (1954); Weber (1964); Polanyi (1944); with Wong (1997); Frank (1998); Pomeranz (2000); Rosenthal & Wong (2011); and many others recent books and articles on Chinese economic history. The classic version of this argument is found in Weber (1964). The argument was later repackaged in John K. Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (1982). It has, of course, been subject to withering criticism, as early as Yu Ying-Shi (余英时), Cong Jiazhi Xitong Kan Zhongguo Wenhua de Xiandai Yiyi (从价值系统看中国文化的现代意义) [Examining the Modern Relevance of Chinese Culture from Value Systems] (1984). E.g., Bell (1992), at 207, 226–229, 232–239. See also, Pomeranz (2000); Rosenthal & Wong (2011); Zhang (2017) for similar viewpoints.

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This book has argued, at the methodological level, for rehabilitation of ideological analysis in historical explanation, but it does so with full awareness of the intellectual pitfalls that have traditionally plagued such analysis. First, it distances itself from the urge to find cultural or ideological influence in every facet of human behavior, and instead seeks to recognize as much self-interested rationality as the evidence suggests – which is, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, quite a lot. Even leaving aside the enormous and arguably insurmountable empirical problems with the former position, it is incredibly difficult to clearly define and delineate even as a theoretical matter: While it may be just as empirically indefensible to say all human behavior is rational, the relatively simple and straightforward way that “rationality” as a concept can be laid out means, at least, one can straightforwardly imagine what universally rational human behavior looks like. In contrast, the intellectual presentation of any cultural system must, by definition, be built up internally on its own terms, and then communicated to outsiders in intellectually comprehensible terms. It is easy to say something is a cultural construct, but much harder to precisely and coherently lay out the actual substance of that construction from scratch. It seems unwise, therefore, to strenuously resist the possibility of rationalist explanation when it plausibly presents itself. What this really means, at the empirical level, is that the burden of proof for cultural and ideological theories of behavior should probably be somewhat higher than the corresponding burden for rationalist ones, given the former’s somewhat greater likelihood of theoretical ambiguity. This is not to say one must completely exhaust any and all possible rationalist explanations before turning to cultural or ideological ones, but it does mean that those who argue for cultural or ideological models face a somewhat greater burden to explain why rationalist models will not suffice than vice versa. This is, as all burden shifting exercises are, an extremely tricky balance to maintain, but it is probably appropriate to seek cultural or ideological explanations only when there are clear and powerful deficits in the most obviously relevant rationalist models. This requires that cultural and ideological theorists also maintain a reasonable level of fluency in basic economic or political economic theory – perhaps not enough to construct an elaborate rationalist model themselves, but at least enough to evaluate the applicability of basic rationalist models to the sociopolitical or economic phenomenon at hand. More importantly, the inherent difficulty of delineating a cultural or ideological explanation places a heavy theoretical burden on those who would use them to be as clear and specific as possible – to lay out the internal logic of a cultural or ideological system as lucidly as possible, so that it is readily comprehensible to outsiders. This is a difficult task, given the obvious hurdles in linguistic, conceptual, and even logical translation, but it is an essential one if real scholarly discourse is to be pursued. It means that those who have studied and observed cultural or ideological behavior from the inside cannot simply demand intellectual deference from outsiders, but must strive to translate it into

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something intelligible and testable without the benefit of an internal point of view. Different scholars may, of course, have different ways of doing this, but as a general matter, there is probably much merit to giving the idea of “culture” some internal structure: pointing to core beliefs and values, explaining their systemic interaction with other beliefs and values, perhaps constructing a basic hierarchy of concepts and ideas internal to the culture in question, explaining the behavioral impact of symbols and rituals in more explicit terms, and so on.32 In other words, the project of internal-external translation would likely benefit immensely from attempts to rigorously present the internal logic of a cultural or ideological system, and not merely a hazier and less structured “internal perspective.” Insofar as these are our intellectual objectives, ideological explanations may well be significantly easier to execute, both theoretically and empirically, than cultural ones. This section has, up to now, spoke of ideology and culture in the same breath – and there are indeed many obvious and powerful similarities behind the two concepts – but there are also major differences between them. Both speak to the significant role that unexamined, unjustified, or internalized beliefs, values, and attitudes play in constructing human behavior, but culture is a much more expansive concept, encompassing a wide spectrum of social, normative, religious, and political attitudes, beliefs, and values, some conceptual firmer and more compact, others rather shapeless. Even if we limit ourselves to a social phenomenon that does not have obvious rationalist explanations, the range of mechanisms through which cultural influences operate is still very large and very diverse, which perhaps explains, to some extent, the conceptual ambiguities that characterized much of cultural theory during the 1970s and 1980s.33 Identifying and crystalizing the internal logic of a cultural system is therefore an enormously difficult and hazardous task, one that requires scholars to tread an exceptionally fine line between overimplication and lack of conceptual clarity. Ideologies, on the other hand, tend to come with a built-in set of concepts and logical moves that their adherents have strived to explain and clarify. Count Destutt de Tracy, the French enlightenment philosopher commonly recognized as the original creator of the term “ideology,” used it to describe a “rationalist method of breaking complex systems of ideas into their basic

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This does not amount to a full-blown return to the kind of structuralism championed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962), given that it would not entail a commitment to any universalist theory of cultural formation, but it would attempt to find stronger internal structures in any specific culture. It would be fairly sympathetic, for example, to the “strong program” of cultural interpretation advocated by Alexander and Smith (2001), or the more institutionalist approach seen in Judith Blau, The Shape of Culture (1989). Discussed in Alexander & Smith (2001).

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components.”34 Today, however, the term refers not to “a science of ideas, but the ideas themselves, and moreover ideas of a particular kind. Ideologies are ideas whose purpose is not epistemic, but political.”35 If that seems too vague, others have defined it as a “systematic model of how society functions,” a “worldview which is perceived as contestable by those who do not share it,”36 or a “comprehensive belief system composed of patterned ideas and claims to truth.”37 Michael Freeden, likely the foremost scholar of political ideology in the late twentieth century, gives the following definition: “An ideology is a wide-ranging structural arrangement that attributes decontested meanings to a range of mutually defining political concepts.”38 In all of these definitions, there is a common perception that ideologies are systemic, structural, and, to a large extent, internally coherent.39 Unlike a cultural system, which is often a bottom-up social phenomenon organically formed in a decentralized fashion, ideologies are typically intellectual and political phenomena that have a relatively concentrated set of “founders” and major influencers, who then produce a more tightly organized set of concepts and arguments that constitute the ideology’s core tenets.40 In fact, for a set of ideas to make the leap into a full-blown “ideology,” some sort of internal conceptual structure and hierarchy is likely necessary, which is, in turn, usually – perhaps always – obtained through the exercise of intellectual or political authority by a somewhat limited set of actors. Whereas scholars who study cultural systems regularly have to intellectually construct and structure them in terms that their actual members do not necessarily employ themselves, scholars who study major ideologies can often simply repeat the self-expression of ideologues, and still be well on their way to a 34

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The genealogy of the term is traced in Manfred B. Steger, Ideology, in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (G. Ritzer ed., 2012), https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9780470670590.wbeog282. Christine Sypnowich, Law and Ideology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta ed., 2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/law-ideology/. Geuss (1981), at 10; Baker (1990), at 17–18; Armitage (2000), at 4. Manfred B. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary 4, 50 (2008). Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, 54 (2003). See also Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, 19–25, 76 (1996) for a more detailed summary of relevant conceptual debates. In addition, Tommie Shelby defines ideological beliefs as beliefs that, among other characteristics, “form, or are derived from, a prima facie coherent system of thought, which can be descriptive and/or normative.” Tommie R. Shelby, Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory, 34 Philosophical Forum 153 (2003). On the structural nature of ideology, see, e.g., William Sewell, Ideologies and Social Revolutions, 57 J. Modern Hist. 57, 59–61 (1985). While more recent conceptions of ideology in jurisprudence and political theory seem to coalesce around the idea that ideologies are systemic, earlier theoretical work has sometimes sought to reject that notion. See, e.g., John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (1984), which argues for an idea of ideology that is grounded in social life, rather than political belief systems. Id., at 83. See Freeden (1996), at 123–127. See also, David J. Manning, Ideology and Political Reality, in The Structure of Modern Ideology, 54 (Noel O’Sullivan ed., 1989).

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coherent explanation for outsiders. In particular, ideologies that manage to gain a large political following effectively must have found a way to express themselves clearly and concisely, or else they would not be able to gain that following in the first place. To some extent, this may be true of cultures as well – the most sociopolitically successful cultural systems are probably those with clearly expressed core beliefs, values, symbols, and rituals – but not as powerfully, given their often more decentralized origins and structure. From this perspective, we may want to think of “ideology” as a somewhat more structured, intellectually rigorous, and a conceptually crystalized subset of “culture.” The point of this section is not to argue against rationalist or cognitive models of political behavior, but only to discuss how ideological and cultural analyses differs from both, yet is not necessarily incompatible with either. From there, it has provided some basic ideas on how best to theoretically present and empirical substantiate ideological and cultural explanations. Needless to say, these are enormous questions that have generated endless amounts of academic debate, and others will undoubtedly have different perspectives on them. Nonetheless, given the kind of historical argument – both explicitly ideological and explicitly causal – this book has made, some explanation of its basic methodological posture is warranted. At the very least, it should help the reader better understand some of the analytical moves made in previous chapters: for example, why the book devoted an entire chapter to rationalist explanations and their limitations before jumping into its ideological narrative, why it places so much emphasis on the “internal logic” of Qing fiscal conservatism, and why it limits itself to a very elite set of intellectual and political actors.

b. paradigm shifts and the politics of ideological change One of the most striking things about the ideological history developed in this book is how “lumpy” and “paradigmatic” it was. The political fortunes and, to a large extent, the substantive content of Qing fiscal conservatism were made over the course of a few decades after the dynasty’s founding, while another few decades of turmoil right before its end produced its demise. In between, there were nearly two centuries of intellectual, institutional, and political entrenchment – a long period of continuity sandwiched between two turbulent paradigm shifts. Now, most historians would resist the urge to theoretically generalize from one narrative, however significant that narrative may be, but given the social scientific bent this book has adopted throughout, it cannot help but devote a couple of pages to the issue of generalizability: Are there any broader theoretical reasons to believe that political ideologies tend to evolve through paradigm shifts, instead of in a more linear, continuous fashion?

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Some conceptual clarifications are necessary up front: There are two different senses – intellectual and political – in which an ideology evolves, and the discussion here focuses only on the latter. Ideologies have intellectual trajectories, in which their substantive content evolves over time, and then they have political ones, in which their political influence rises and ebbs. There are some obvious mechanisms of synchronization between the two: A significant change in the intellectual content of an ideology may well produce a major change to its political stature, while a sudden change in political stature may well prompt an ideological movement’s leaders to rethink their substantive positions. Nonetheless, there is no obvious reason why they are necessarily synchronized, and modern history contains many examples of asynchronous evolution.41 Within the confines of Chinese history, the intellectual content of twentieth century “New Confucianism” continued to experience significant revisions well after the ideology’s political stature had crumbled.42 Even Qing fiscal conservatism, for all its historical “lumpiness,” experienced at least some periods of disconnect between its intellectual and political dimensions: The intellectual challenge to Malthusianism, if we trace it back to Bao Shichen and his early nineteenth century contemporaries, preceded the idea’s political demise by almost a century, and even men like Feng Guifen, writing in the 1850s and 1860s, were a couple of decades ahead of their time in political terms. Given the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of such disconnects, this section focuses only on the political dimension. It argues that it is, in fact, theoretically likely that the political fortunes of almost any ideology, regardless of its intellectual trajectory, will evolve in a “lumpy,” paradigm-shift driven fashion, rather than in a relatively linear and continuous one. This logically derives from the proposition, first made in Chapter 4, that ideologies require a certain level of perceived “empirical verification” to become politically influential. Qing fiscal conservatism only became politically dominant after elites began to empirically associate clear and severe consequences – namely, widespread peasant uprisings leading to dynastic collapse – with agricultural tax hikes. Until then, the normative exhortations of Ming fiscal conservatives had been largely incapable of preventing systemic tax hikes once demand-side pressures escalated in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Appealing to elites’ desire for political self-preservation proved to be significantly more politically effective than appealing to their moral values and 41

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One particularly powerful account of how “human rights” quickly became a mainstream political movement in the later twentieth century after centuries of intellectual discourse can be found in Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2012). A summary of these developments, focusing on Liang Shuming, Xiong Shili, and Mou Zongsan, can be found in Chung-ying Cheng, Confucianism: Twentieth Century, in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, 160 (Antonio Cua ed., 2003). On the more recent and politically active Mainland Chinese variant, see, e.g., the collection of essays in Xin Shiji Dalu Xin Rujia Yanjiu (新世纪大陆新儒家研究) [ Research on New Confucianism in the New Century on the Mainland] (Cui Gang ed., 2012).

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normative anxieties, but it also required a persuasive – perceived to be persuasive, at least – empirical account of how tax hikes endangered their political livelihoods. There are good reasons to believe this kind of “empirical verification” dynamic may well be a common feature of major political ideologies, indeed of belief systems in general.43 One would actually be hard-pressed to think of any influential political ideology in modern or early modern history that did not heavily rely on the issuance and purported “verification” of empirical predictions to garner political support. Marxism and communism, for example, draw an enormous amount of their intellectual and political appeal from their predictions about the inexorable trajectory of human political development. For Marx, not only was communism normatively superior to capitalism, but it would inevitably replace it with advancements in human productive power.44 One might even argue that his theory of history was developed more fully than his normative condemnation of capitalism. As one scholar notes: On reading Marx’s works at all periods of his life, there appears to be the strongest possible distaste toward bourgeois capitalist society, and an undoubted endorsement of future communist society. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he say that communism would be a just form of society.45

More politically weaponized versions of Marxism, most prominently its twentieth century communist varieties, were no less insistent on the historical inevitability of their eventual victory and ascendance, and therefore deeply politically reliant on their empirical narratives. In the Chinese communist context, for example, the political legitimacy of early generation party leaders, including Mao himself, were closely connected to their ability to persuade others “that they were carrying out the laws of history in accordance with the dialectical process,”46 which is something many observers considered a common feature of Marxist regimes. In the post-Mao era, the party, insofar as it can still be called communist, has actually relied even more strongly on

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The generalized idea that ideologies provide a necessary epistemological link between the external world and the internal normativity of individuals is most strongly associated with Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 79–87, 153–164 (1936). See also, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) (“when seemingly ontological conditions are challenged from the collective viewpoint of a dissident reality, they become visible as epistemological.”) See, e.g., G. A. Cohen et al., Historical Inevitability and Human Agency in Marxism [and Discussion], 407 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 65 (1986). See Jonathan Wolff & David Leopold, Karl Marx, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta ed., 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/. William Dorrill, Transfer of Legitimacy in the Chinese Communist Party: Origins of the Maoist Myth, 36 China Q. 45 (1968).

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materialist and empirical, as opposed to normative, arguments for political legitimacy, most obviously on performance-based metrics like economic growth.47 The same is likely true, although perhaps to a lesser extent, of Western liberalism. Although many versions of modern liberalism, such as the Rawlsian version, are deontologically self-contained as a normative system –48 that is, they are intellectually capable of making arguments about the normative value of things like liberty, democracy, or the rule of law by strict recourse to what they consider normative first principles – much of classical liberal philosophy, most obviously its utilitarian wing, was concerned with how liberal ideals could be realized through political and institutional means.49 In other words, they were deeply concerned with the feasibility issue, and therefore operated in both normative and empirical dimensions. Moreover, the sociopolitical appeal of liberalism has, in the twentieth century, relied very significantly on empirical claims that liberal states produce more stability, happiness, economic growth, cultural vibrancy, and so on, than illiberal ones.50 In that sense, Adam Smith and the liberal economics he pioneered – even its more recent, more maligned neoliberal form – were at least as critical to the political dominance of modern liberalism as normative theorists like Rawls, and perhaps much more so. During and after the Cold War, liberal critiques of communism were just as likely to be empirical in nature as normative: For example, many argued that a desire for liberty and private property was inherent in human nature, regardless of its normativity.51 The ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union was waged to an enormous extent through demonstrations of technological, economic, and military supremacy, arguably more intense than it was waged at the normative

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See Heike Holbig & Bruce Gilley, Reclaiming Legitimacy in China, 38 Politics & Policy 395 (2010); Hongxing Yang & Dingxin Zhao, Performance Legitimacy, State Autonomy and China’s Economic Miracle, 24 J. Contemporary China 64 (2015). See, e.g., Leif Wenar, John Rawls, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta ed., 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/rawls/. See Freeden (1996), at 144–177, 276–310. See, e.g., Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992); Daniel R. Fusfeld, Economics and the Cold War: An Inquiry into the Relationship between Ideology and Theory, 32 J. Econ. Issues 505 (1998). For historical tracing, see, e.g., S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (2003); John Williamson, A Short History of the Washington Consensus, 15 Law & Bus. Rev. Ams. 7 (2009). For a recent reiteration, see Peter Berkowitz, Liberal Democracy versus Communism, Hoover Institution, www.hoover.org/research/liberal-democracy-vs-com munism. E.g., Norman A. Graebner, The Cold War: An American View, 15 Int’l J. 95 (1960). See also Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (Mark Solovey, Hamilton Cravens eds., 2012).

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level.52 More recently, arguments between liberals and conservatives in the United States have been just as likely to be about materialistic performance indicators – economic growth, personal incomes, life expectancy – as they are about matters of normative principle.53 One might suspect that the heavy reliance of these ideologies on empirical argumentation is a modern phenomenon: that, perhaps, in the increasingly secular and materialistic social cultures of the modern world, where people increasingly refuse to justify normative values through metaphysical theories of the divine, political ideologies are probably placed under greater pressure than they were in the premodern world to justify themselves in terms of material welfare.54 This would, presumably, create enormous pressure on ideologues to empirically demonstrate the material superiority of their beliefs against their main competitors. From this perspective, the distinctive shift of Qing Confucianism in general, and fiscal thinking in particular, toward real-world pragmatism may be seen as a relatively “modern” development that would justify the choice of some prominent historians to date the beginning of “modern Chinese history” to the Ming-Qing transition.55 As intuitive as this idea is, there is some evidence that major premodern ideologies – insofar as we can think of religions as a special kind of ideology – were just as reliant on empirical claims: After all, what is a theology of the afterlife but an “empirical” claim about existence after death?56 From a modern, secular point of view, it is an unprovable claim incapable of demonstrating its own plausibility, but the operative phrase employed throughout this section is “perceived” plausibility, rather than objective plausibility. Many premodern religions made concerted efforts to “empirically” demonstrate the plausibility of their metaphysical narratives: The Catholic church, for example, developed an elaborate set of procedures and institutions to “prove” the occurrence of miracles,57 while similar demonstrations of supposedly supernatural phenomena were also commonplace in many Asian religions, especially Buddhist and Daoist sects.58 By “proving” their access to the supernatural, the 52

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See Audra J. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2012). Readthroughs of the opinion sections of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times make this obvious. Nonetheless, for a more academic treatment, see, e.g., Randolph T. Stevenson, The Economy and Policy Mood: A Fundamental Dynamic of Democratic Politics?, 45 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 620 (2001). See, e.g., Ninian Smart, Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization, ch. 7 (1981). See, e.g., Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (1991). See Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (2016); Lynne R. Baker, Death and the Afterlife, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion 366–391 (William Wainwright eds., 2004). See Paolo Parigi, The Rationalization of Miracles (2012). See David Fiordalis, Buddhist Miracles, Oxford Bibliographies (2014), www .oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195393521/obo-9780195393521-0116

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priesthood also laid claim to greater plausibility for their metaphysical statements about the afterlife. The central theoretical insight here is that mass conversion to a set of ideas and values likely requires not just normative appeal, but also some assurance to potential converts that they can reap significant personal benefits, as defined a priori by their subjective perceptions of self-interest, or at least not suffer substantial harm. Even the most normatively attractive intellectual movements will struggle to gain followers until they have demonstrated the plausibility of their goals – but this requires empirical, rather than normative, persuasion. More often, some promise of material gain is also thrown into the package. Hence, Marxist movements promise the proletariat that victory is inevitable, while liberal ideologies argue that nonliberal systems are doomed to fail in the modern world, and that liberalism or neoliberalism produces the highest standard of living. In terms of their basic cognitive function, such claims are not so different from religious promises of salvation or eternal bliss in the afterlife – and punishment for nonbelievers. Successful belief systems must appeal to both the higher ideals of their believers and to their baser instincts and desires. These arguments go back to a point raised in the previous section: This book is not terribly sympathetic to claims that all human preferences, values, and beliefs are culturally or ideologically “constructed.” There seem to be large swaths of behavior, mainly related to the basic pursuit of material interests and sociopolitical status, that are, more or less, innate to human nature, and differ only marginally across societies and cultures. Such behavior may well be potentially “constructible,” in the sense that a strong effort at cultural or ideological indoctrination could change them, but at least it seems that, across documented human history, it has been extremely difficult and costly to do so. For example, while it was once somewhat commonly believed that the aggressive, largely rational pursuit of material wealth is a modern, predominantly “Western” phenomenon, more recent historical research has found large amounts of self-interested rationality in the economic behavior of commoners throughout human history, and in nearly every major society: Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and so on.59 If we assume there are indeed innately self-interested facets of human behavior that are very difficult to change, then it would only be sensible to expect that most highly successful belief systems will find a way to subjectively cater to them. From there, it is but a small logical step to argue these belief systems must be capable of making certain empirical claims – “these ideas will further your material

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.xml; Franciscus Verellen, “Evidential Miracles in Support of Taoism”: The Inversion of a Buddhist Apologetic Tradition in Late Tang China, 78 T’oung Pao 217 (1992). This literature is discussed in Taisu Zhang, Moral Economies in Early Modern Land Markets: History and Theory, 80 L. & Contemporary Prob. 107 (2017). See also, Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (1979).

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self-interests more successfully than their main competitors” – with reasonably high levels of perceived plausibility. But what does this have to do with the paradigm shift model of ideological politics proposed at the beginning of this section? If most ideologies require a certain amount of perceived empirical verification to gain sociopolitical influence, then it seems rather likely they will not do so in a linear fashion. As a large amount of cognitive research, some of it discussed earlier in Chapter 4, demonstrates, under conditions of relative sociopolitical stability, most people tend to interpret new empirical evidence in ways that maximize their compatibility with both their preexisting beliefs and, just as importantly, those of the in-group that they belong to.60 What this means, for our present purposes, is that a new ideology will have great difficulty siphoning away sociopolitical support from preexisting ones as long as their empirical worldviews are even semi-capable of making sense of current events – which, with the aid of individual cognitive biases and group-based social pressures to ideologically conform, will almost always be the case under stable conditions. Under such conditions, mainstream ideologies will likely benefit from positive feedback loops in individual cognition and social network effects that further enhance their sociopolitical dominance, making large-scale ideological reorientation very unlikely. Only in times of major turmoil and upheaval, when preexisting ideological lenses suddenly seem fundamentally out of touch, are entire groups of people really willing to fundamentally reorient their core beliefs. In other words, in the absence of major external shocks, incorrect empirical beliefs will likely not be socially perceived as such, thereby rendering a society’s ideological composition heavily path-dependent.61 Furthermore, some ideologies may not even gain a concrete empirical dimension until the emergence of some cataclysmic event that seems intuitively hospitable to their core beliefs. As discussed in Chapter 4, making concrete empirical predictions is a very high-risk, high-reward activity: On the one hand, 60

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See discussion in Chapter 4, Section C. On pressures to ideologically conform within social groups, see Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (1982); Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (1986); Timur Kuran, Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1996); Cass R. Sunstein, Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes, 110 Yale L. J. 71 (2000); Geoffrey L. Cohen, Party over Policy: The Dominating Influence of Group Influence on Political Beliefs, 85 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 808 (2003); Kahan & Braman (2006). For the application of this literature to private law, see Taisu Zhang, Beyond Information Costs: Preference Formation and the Architecture of Property Law, 12 J. Legal Analysis 1 (2020). Note that the term “path-dependent” here is employed in a cognitive and behavioralist sense, rather than in the rationalist sense most commonly seen in the political science literature on path dependency. See, e.g., Paul Pierson, Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics, 94 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 251 (2000). The core mechanism discussed here is one of confirmation bias, rather than rational personal incentives leading to large-scale institutional stagnation.

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it does open up the possibility of mass conversion, but on the other, it also makes the ideology vulnerable to empirical falsification. This is less of a problem when an ideology has already become dominant, as the widespread existence of confirmation bias will make sociopolitically successful empirical falsification very difficult, but when an ideology is still in its political infancy or childhood, the danger of empirical falsification or rejection is very real. In fact, precisely because of the existence of confirmation bias, any new ideology attempting to unseat a dominant one will likely face a steep uphill battle on the empirical verification front. As a result, proponents of nondominant ideologies will often be highly cautious, sometimes excessively so, in making empirical predictions – until some major upheaval comes along and fundamentally disrupts the target population’s empirical worldviews, opening up new possibilities for empirical persuasion and indoctrination. In very broad strokes, this encapsulates the intellectual and political history of late Ming fiscal conservatism. Given length limitations, there is not room to discuss other cases of major ideological change in any detail here, but for the sake of theoretical illustration, consider the political trajectory of Chinese communism in the twentieth century: Like a sizeable number of other Chinese political ideologies, it came into existence in the decade after Qing collapse, which created a temporary void of intellectual and ideological authority that many competitors rushed to fill.62 Following its acrimonious split with the Nationalist Government after 1927, the movement was constantly on the brink of death for almost a decade before the Japanese invasion in 1937 forced the Nationalists to cease their military campaigning against the last remaining Communist stronghold in Shaanxi and seek a united front against the Japanese foe. From there, the Communist Party gradually accumulated both military and political capital, while the Nationalist Government suffered the lion’s share of casualties against the Japanese offensive. As scholars have noted, the contest for hearts and minds between the Communists and Nationalists was not simply between their respective political ideologies – which actually had much in common in terms of government organization, but differed in their approach toward economic development – but, perhaps even more importantly, a race to be seen as the most viable successor to Sun Yat-sen’s anti-imperialism pledge from the early Republic.63 How the general population perceived each party’s anti-imperialism credentials was at least as important to their sociopolitical fortunes as how they perceived their socioeconomic message. In any case, the grounds of this ideological contest were often more empirical than normative: Which party could more 62

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See Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (1971); Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (1996). Joseph W. Esherick, Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution, 21 Modern China 45 (1995).

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effectively fight off foreign imperialism? Which party could produce better economic outcomes for the general population? After Qing collapse, the politics of ideological reconstitution in the Republican era continued to be significantly consequentialist and pragmatic – which, as in the Qing, hardly prevented them from being fundamentally ideological at the same time.64 From this perspective, the Great Depression’s penetration into the Chinese economy in the 1930s and the Japanese military invasion combined to produce the kind of turbulent, paradigm-shifting moment that we have already encountered twice in previous chapters. Fairly or not, they did significant damage both to the Nationalist Government’s economic reputation and its anti-imperialism credentials, and gave the Communists, once they were able to move out of Shaanxi after 1937, a wide opening to rally support from elites and commoners alike.65 By 1945, the Communist Party had not only gained a strong foothold in rural North China, but had also won over millions of educated citizens in major urban centers, giving it both the military capacity and the deep social support necessary for eventual victory in the ensuing civil war. Chinese communism’s post-Mao decline – insofar as the regime under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin was much less ideologically Communist than the regime under Mao Zedong – was no less “lumpy” and “paradigmatic” than its rise during the Republican era. Although there undeniably were, as many have argued, important intellectual and political continuities between the late Mao years and the early post-Mao era, it is also obviously true that qualitative ideological and political change happened in a hurry after Mao’s death in 1976. Given the unparalleled importance of Mao’s personal cult to the Communist Party’s sociopolitical legitimacy, his death almost immediately ignited the deep tensions that had accumulated both within and beyond the Party structure during the Cultural Revolution.66 The ensuing rise of Deng and the decisive pivot toward economic and political “opening up,” which may well be the most intensively studied era in the history of the People’s Republic, needs no summary here, but a few points ought to be highlighted: First, the political groundwork for Deng’s reforms was laid, to a large extent, by political and intellectual disenchantment with Mao’s

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For a basic summary of Republican era intellectual trends and their political foundations, see Zheng Dahua (郑大华), Minguo Sixiang Shi Lun (民国思想史论) [Intellectual history of the republic of china] (2016). Esherick (1995); Parks Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (1991). See also, Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–45: The Struggle for Survival (2013). There is an enormous amount of writing on this period. See, e.g., Gordon White, Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China (1993); Tang Tsou, The Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Reforms: A Historical Perspective (1986); The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (Roderick Macfarqhuar ed., 1997).

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revolutionary agenda during the Cultural Revolution years.67 This was at least as much an empirical disenchantment as a normative one: A younger, educated generation of urban residents who had once zealously embraced Mao’s vision of a radical struggle gradually despaired of the vision’s sociopolitical feasibility and economic viability during years of political disorder, economic stagnation, and, in many cases, personal suffering and trauma. A tumultuous decade that was bookended at both ends by major, paradigm-shifting events – the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and Mao’s death in 1976 – therefore became the catalyst for sweeping ideological and political reorientation in the 1980s. Second, the high popularity of liberal ideas among Chinese intellectual and political elites in the 1980s and 1990s was as much a product of the West’s material allure as it was a product of its normative attractiveness.68 There was, to be sure, a normative backlash against the oppressive nature of Maoist politics, but this coexisted with, and was supported by, elite admiration of western and Japanese wealth and prosperity. In that sense, the intellectual atmosphere in the 1980s felt somewhat like a redux of the 1910s and 1920s, right down to the lack of a truly dominant, authoritative mainstream ideology. The prestige of Western law – most notably its American variant – among Chinese elites depended, in particular, on the perceived connection between western legal institutions and economic development.69 Chinese intellectuals were arguably even more ardent consumers of the “Washington consensus,” which predicted a causal relationship between certain kinds of legal and political institutions and general socioeconomic prosperity, than American ones. Freedom, democracy, and the rule of law were noble ideals, to be sure, but just as importantly, people thought that they could make them rich.70 67

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See The Politics of China (1997), at ch. 4; Elizabeth J. Perry & Christine Wong, Introduction, in The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, 1 (Elizabeth J. Perry & Christine Wong eds., 2020). For surveys of intellectual trends in the 1980s and 1990s, see, e.g., Xu Jilin (许纪霖), Zhongguo Zhishi Fenzi Shilun (中国知识分子十论) [Ten Essays on Chinese Intellectuals] (2003); Zhang Bingnan & Shao Hanming (张秉楠, 邵汉明), Zhongguo Xin Shiqi Xueshu Sichao: Wenhua juan (中国新时期学术思潮:文化卷) [Academic thought in China’s New Era: Culture Volume] (1996); Li Zehou (李泽厚), Zhongguo Xiandai Sixiang Shilun (中国现代思想史论) [Modern Chinese Intellectual History] (1996). See also, Zhu Liyuan (朱立元), Zenyang Kandai Bashi Niandai de “Xixue Re” (怎样看 待八十年代的”西学热”) [How to View the “Western Learning Fever” in the 1980s], 1996(1) Wenshizhe (文史哲) [Journal of Literature, History and philosophy] 256. See discussion in Taisu Zhang, The Development of Comparative Law in China, in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, 228 (Matthias Reimann and Reinhardt Zimmerman eds., Oxford Univ. Press 2nd ed., 2019). Some might argue that the post-Mao Chinese obsession with material wealth is itself a sociocultural construct, driven by government policies and slogans like “to get rich is glorious” (zhifu guangrong), but this is a strenuous interpretation: The swing toward materialism occurred so fast and so broadly that it was almost certainly a product of pent-up social demand – heavily repressed during the Mao years – finally being released, rather than a product of government preference engineering from scratch.

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China’s authoritarian turn over the past decade actually accentuates the importance of these empirical underpinnings: China’s robust economic growth after the 2008 Financial Crisis seemed to persuade many intellectuals that a more centralized and authoritarian system was no less capable, if not more so, of producing economic growth and social stability than a liberal free-market regime.71 Once this happened, a distinct anti-liberal shift occurred among highly educated Chinese, producing robust support for the party-state’s renewed push toward technocratic authoritarianism. It seems at least plausible, and perhaps even likely, that the Chinese population has evaluated political ideologies more on the basis of socioeconomic performance than on the basis of normative attraction for at least the past two or three decades. Communist revolutionary ideals have, as a result, remained politically marginalized even under the recent authoritarian turn, despite the occasional breathless comparison between Xi Jinping and Mao among China watchers in the West.72 China remains a pseudo-capitalist society in which an enormous amount of wealth is securely owned by private parties. Economic policy is, to be sure, more statist nowadays than in the early 1990s, but it is not communist in any substantive sense. The point here is simply that both the rise and decline of Chinese Communism in the twentieth century were, first, nonlinear developments in which relatively short bursts of serious upheaval produced fundamental changes in trajectory and, second, ideological processes in which empirical argumentation and perceived verification played a critical role. Other major Chinese political ideologies – given that they were either displaced by communism after 1949, or sought to replace it in the post-Mao vacuum – also experienced these concentrated paradigm shifts, which, when combined with the Qing ideological narrative developed in previous chapters, now seems to be a central feature of Chinese political and intellectual history since at least the seventeenth century, and very possibly earlier. There is no especially compelling reason to think that this kind of ideological “lumpiness” was somehow a uniquely Chinese or uniquely modern phenomenon. Insofar as the need for empirical verification was driving much of the lumpiness, it seems likely this is a somewhat global phenomenon, at least in the 71

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This is most clearly seen in the proposal of a new “Beijing Consensus” on alternative models of economic development. For discussion and critique, see Yasheng Huang, Rethinking the Beijing Consensus, 2011(11) Asia Policy 1; Scott Kennedy, The Myth of the Beijing Consensus, 19 J. Contemporary China 461 (2010). On Beijing’s crackdowns on Marxist and even Maoist radicals, see, e.g., Yuan Yang, Inside China’s Crackdown on Young Marxists, Financial Times, Feb. 13, 2019, www.ft.com/content/ fd087484-2f23-11e9-8744-e7016697f225; China Shuts Down Maoist Website Utopia, Guardian, April 3, 2012, www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/06/china-maoist-websiteutopia. On Xi-Mao comparisons, see, e.g., Doug Bandow, Xi Jinping Wants to Become the New Mao, Cato Institute (May 20, 2020), www.cato.org/commentary/xi-jinping-wants-becomenew-mao.

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modern world, and likely across much of the premodern world as well. Large scale changes in empirical perception, perhaps even more so than large scale changes in normative values, tend to clump around periods of significant sociopolitical or economic upheaval. This suggests that the politics of ideological change are, to a considerable extent, exogenous to the ideology itself – unless its core followers somehow manage to instigate major upheaval themselves. Few ideologies become politically influential simply because of the inexorable attractiveness of their normative vision or the inherent intellectual superiority of their empirical worldview. It may be tempting to believe that history always “bends toward” truth, and therefore that new ideologies will install empirical worldviews that more accurately describe how human societies function than their predecessors, but this misunderstands how ideologies work. Dominant ideologies are able to significantly reshape polities and societies in their own image – class conflict, for example, will probably become more severe if everyone believes in its existence, whereas human economic behavior will likely become somewhat more economically rational if everyone believes it is – and therefore tend to reproduce sociopolitical conditions that seem to verify their empirical predictions.73 A major difference between intellectual paradigms in the natural sciences and the ideological paradigms discussed here is that the former is, in the end, strongly constrained by the laws of the natural world,74 which exist exogenously from any scientific paradigm, whereas the latter, insofar as they make empirical claims about human behavior, are, to some extent, able to reconstruct human behavior in ways that strengthen their own empirical plausibility. Now, assuming that some aspects of human behavior are largely innate and universal, the capacity of an ideology to empirically reproduce itself is not limitless – not to mention ideologies vary dramatically in the extent of their sociopolitical dominance. Nonetheless, one may reasonably suspect it is substantially harder to dislodge a dominant ideological paradigm than a dominant scientific one. This begs the question of how ideologies reproduce themselves. The previous paragraph identifies one possible mechanism – altering social behavior in ways that conform to the ideology’s predictions – but there are many others. Separately, there are the institutional, political, or social vessels through which these mechanisms take effect: laws, education, the production of art and literature, and so on. The following section hones in on the interaction between

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See, e.g., Mark Van Vugt, Self-Interest as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, 24 Behavioral & Brain Sci. 429 (2001); Costas Azariadis, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, 25 J. Econ. Theory 380 (1981); Teppo Felin & Nicolai J. Foss, Social Reality, the Boundaries of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and Economics, 20 Org. Sci. 654 (2009). For recent discussion of how this affects the behavior of legal professionals, see Shyamkrishna Balganesh & Taisu Zhang, Legal Internalism in Histories of Copyright, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 1066 (2021). Even Kuhn (1962) acknowledges that paradigms eventually change because they fail to explain natural phenomenon.

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one such vessel – law – and one specific mechanism of ideological entrenchment: manipulating the collection and dissemination of information needed to falsify an ideology’s empirical predictions.

c. law and ideological entrenchment The focus on law in this section does not imply that legal institutions are somehow the most important vessel of ideological entrenchment and reproduction. Mass education, for example, can easily be far more effective at direct indoctrination than legal regulation, as can various forms of propaganda. Nonetheless, to the extent that, in large state apparatuses with significant principal-agent problems there are almost always some legal undertones or preconditions to the operation of these other vessels, the law is, at least, an integral part of any major process of ideological entrenchment. Legal theory’s interest in ideology has, for the most part, focused on the question of how ideology influences law, and to what extent law is ideological: the mid-twentieth century tensions between legal formalists and realists, for example, often centered around this very issue.75 Critical legal scholars, in particular, persistently argued that legal institutions are heavily ideological in ways that reinforce preexisting social hierarchies. In jurisprudence, however, both Dworkinian natural law theories and legal positivism resist the portrayal of law as innately ideological: Given that both attempt to identify some “essential nature” of law, they rejected any portrayal of law as “inevitably shaped by ideas emanating from power relations outside of the law.” One recently influential example of these intellectual instincts is originalism, which seeks to present itself as a neutrally formalist theory of constitutional interpretation, even if the substantive outcomes it reaches tend to be overwhelmingly conservative. At the same time, however, a large literature on law and judicial behavior continues to insist, through quantitative means, that adjudication at all levels tends to be heavily ideological. What has usually been missing in these debates is a careful account of how the arrow of influence runs in the opposite direction – how law and legal institutions impact the sociopolitical status of an ideology. At first glance, this might seem intellectually folded into the question of whether the law is ideological, but this is not true. There is no guarantee that laws made under some ideological influence will actually enhance that ideology’s sociopolitical status, and no guarantee that it will not have the opposite effect. Instead, to understand how law influences ideology, we must independently identify the avenues and dynamics through which legal institutions can shape human thought and behavior.

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Much of this literature is summarized in Sypnowich, Law and Ideology (2019).

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Given the limited space available, this section can do little more than provide a simple typology of these avenues and dynamics. It does place special emphasis on the sociopolitical importance of law’s “informational function” – that is, the ability of legal institutions in virtually any kind of political regime to regulate the formation and communication of public information – but even that function is only sketched out in basic terms. Nonetheless, the hope is that readers will leave with a somewhat clearer mental roadmap of the theoretical possibilities, and where to look for them in real legal systems. Potential legal influences on an ideology’s sociopolitical status can be categorized along two major axes. The first categorizes legal actions based on their targeted objects – ideologies as sociopolitical identities and affiliations, or as collections of values and beliefs – whereas the second categorizes them based on the legal function – coercive, incentivizing, expressive, or informational – employed. The interaction between the two axes identifies a number of specific legal instruments that can be used to solidify or undermine an ideology’s stature, with varying levels of sociopolitical salience and behavioral effectiveness. The first axis is divided into two major categories: legal actions that target, directly or indirectly, an ideology as a holistic identity, and those that target, directly or indirectly, its substantive values and beliefs. The former include, for example, laws that simply seek to ban – or promote – conservatism in the same way that race laws might target a racial category: “being a member of the conservative party” or “self-identifying as a conservative” is directly banned or promoted via legal regulation.76 One could argue, of course, that simply banning or promoting “conservatism” as an identity category is meaningless without further delineation of the criteria by which a determination of conservatism is made – membership in a specific sociopolitical group, for example, participation in certain rituals and use of certain symbols, or possession of certain substantive beliefs and values – and therefore that what are really being banned or promoted are those criteria, rather than the category itself. That said, as a legal matter, the identity category is rarely reducible to the substantive values and beliefs that intellectually constitute the underlying ideology. Instead, states almost always make heavy use of party or group membership and other nonintellectual signals when attempting to identify supporters of an ideology.77 The latter category includes legal actions that more specifically target the substantive values and beliefs of an ideology: For example, a law banning the teaching of libertarian ideas in public schools, or a legal regulation declaring 76

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McCarthyism is probably the example that will speak most directly to American readers, Nelson W. Polsby, Towards an Explanation of McCarthyism, 8 Pol. Stud. 250 (1960), whereas for Chinese readers the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, Ning Wang, Victims and Perpetrators: Campaign Culture in the Chinese Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, 45 TwentiethCentury China 188 (2020), would be a reasonable example. E.g., Polsby (1960); Wang (2020).

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that the only correct answers to a national history examination for high schoolers are those that conform to Marxist historiography. Such legal actions are conceptually distinct from those in the previous category for a number of reasons: First, there is rarely any one-to-one correlation between a set of substantive ideas and a specific ideological label. For example, people who believe in Marxist theories of history may well reject Marxism’s normative agenda, and would therefore not be “Marxists” in any conventional sense. Alternatively, some people who are sociopolitically identified as “Marxist” may not necessarily believe in Marxist theories of history, or even know about it. Second, even if there is, as a matter of social fact, a one-to-one correlation between an ideological label and a set of ideas – for example, if all Marxists believed in a single theory of history, and if anyone who believes in that theory is universally recognized as a Marxist – a law that targets the label could still be conceptually distinct from a law that targets the substantive idea as long as the correlation could be conceivably broken in the future, which it always is. Given that this book has consistently emphasized the difference between normative ideas and empirical ideas, it only makes sense to further break down this latter category of “laws that target ideas” into normative and empirical subcategories: a law that bans “speaking of profit” as morally inappropriate, for example, as opposed to a law that mandates the teaching of Malthusian economics in public universities. Some might wonder whether these subcategories are really different enough from each other in a legal sense to merit separate identification here, but those differences will hopefully become clearer as we move onto the second axis. The second axis separates legal actions based on their functional posture: Some laws mandate certain kinds of behavior – or ideas, if you live under a regime that recognizes thought crimes – and are backed up by the state’s coercive enforcement capacity. For example, the state can throw you into jail for trespassing on private property, or for failing to disclose income on a tax return. Other laws provide positive incentives for desirable behavior: You get a tax break for charitable donations, for example, or, in many countries, for having children.78 Democratic states may create legal incentives for their citizens to vote, most importantly by ensuring the openness and fairness of elections. The third category of actions employs what some legal scholars have called the law’s “expressive function,”79 wherein the law expresses a preference for certain kinds of behavior, but does not necessarily apply either coercive force or material incentives to back it up. Instead, the point is simply to express approval or disapproval toward certain kinds of behavior or beliefs. Speed limits are one possible example, depending on the extent of actual enforcement, 78

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E.g., Peter McDonald, An Assessment of Policies That Support Having Children from the Perspectives of Equity, Efficiency and Efficacy, 4 Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 213 (2006). E.g., Cass R. Sunstein, On the Expressive Function of Law, 144 U. Pa. L. Rev. 2021 (1996).

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as are underenforced legal bans against flag burning or the display of Nazi symbols.80 It is also possible to legally express certain preferences to the general population by coercing or incentivizing the actions of a subgroup: For example, states can express a general preference for communism by requiring all government officials to receive training in Communist doctrine upon taking office. Beyond these three functional categories – all of which obviously have the potential to impact an ideology’s sociopolitical status – there is yet another category of legal actions that simply take no explicit position on the general population’s behavior or beliefs. They do not seek to either coerce or incentivize private activity. In fact, they do not purport to regulate private activity at all, and therefore express no position toward it. Instead, they only seek to regulate the internal workings of the state: its internal allocations of power and resources, the procedures that govern the use of those powers and resources, and the administrative structures through which they are staffed and implemented. Some of these rules, commonly lumped together under the “administrative law” label,81 are closely related to the legal system’s utilization of its coercive, incentivizing, or expressive functions, and could therefore be seen as extensions of them, but then there are some rules and institutions that appear to exist on a separate plane altogether, and seem wholly unconcerned with changing or guiding private activity. This is where the law’s “informational function” resides, and despite its nominal neutrality toward private behaviors and beliefs, it can easily match or surpass any of the other three functions in terms of ideological influence, as we saw in the century-long institutional entrenchment of Qing fiscal conservatism through the cessation of government land surveying. Administrative or bureaucratic states, both modern and premodern, routinely perform numerous data collection services that produce sociopolitically authoritative information: how large is an economy, how populous is a country, who owns what property, and so on.82 To a large extent, this information constitutes the empirical foundation of political discourse: The vast majority of political arguments rely on specific statements of fact, which, more often than not, make use of government-supplied information. In fact, as previously discussed in Chapter 5, the state often possesses an effective natural monopoly 80

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E.g., Erik Bleich, The Rise of Hate Speech and Hate Crime Laws in Liberal Democracies, 37 J. Ethnic & Migration Stud. 917 (2011); Joachim J. Savelsberg & Ryan D. King, Institutionalizing Collective Memories of Hate: Law and Law Enforcement in Germany and the United States, 111 Am. J. Sociology 579 (2005). See Jody Freeman, Private Parties, Public Functions and the New Administrative Law, 52 Admin. L. Rev. 813 (2000) for an attempt to redefine the label. See, e.g., Fred H. Cate, Government Data Mining: The Need for a Legal Framework, 43 Harv. C.R.-C. L. L. Rev. 435 (2008); Emmanuela Gakidou & Margaret Hogan, Data Collection in Developing Countries, in Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, 587 (Kimberly KempfLeonard ed., 2005); Jo Goodey, Racist violence in Europe: Challenges for Official Data Collection, 30 Ethnic & Racial Stud. 570 (2007).

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over certain kinds of information – no other entity is logistically capable of collecting information on such a large scale – and this is no less true of modern states as it was of the Qing bureaucracy. The legal infrastructure that empowers and regulates these informational services possesses, therefore, an often politically low-key but nonetheless critically important capacity to ideologically shape an enormous swathe of political discourse by manipulating its informational building blocks: It could, as in the case of Qing fiscal conservatism, simply ban the collection of potentially contradictory information, or it might introduce political bias into the calculation and dissemination of core statistics, perhaps by legally mandating partisan control over supervisory committees. Whereas the other three legal functions can effectively target both the ideology as a sociopolitical identity and its substantive intellectual components, the informational function has a much narrower reach. Laws can coerce action against, for example, all libertarians (“anyone who is identified as a libertarian will go to jail”) or simply against libertarian ideas (“schools are not allowed to teach that free markets are efficient”), they can incentivize action against both categories (“anyone who leaves the libertarian party receives a one-time tax break,” or “schools that stop teaching the ideas of Milton Friedman receive extra funding”), or they may simply express a position against them without actually employing either coercive force or substantive incentives. In contrast, the law’s informational function, given its nominal indifference toward individual behavior and beliefs, can only effectively target an ideology’s empirical statements. Informational data points exert no influence on an ideology’s sociopolitical stature except by making them appear more or less intellectually attractive. Moreover, they do not speak directly to normative beliefs, except through changing the empirical beliefs that underlie them. Despite this much more limited range of influence, the informational function is by no means less effective than the other three. At a very basic level, people who believe in the economic superiority of a political institution are almost certainly more likely to support it ideologically – and as we saw in previous chapters, believing that tax increases will lead to political collapse as an empirical matter can be a significantly stronger source of political motivation than merely believing that they are normatively wrong. Table 7.1 lays out the interactions between the two axes, along with examples for each interaction: There is reason to believe, in fact, that the informational function can sometimes be more effective than other forms of ideological indoctrination because it is less likely to be perceived as ideologically biased. Many modern societies, even authoritarian ones, would respond with skepticism if their governments were seen as engaging in ideological indoctrination – even if the governmental activity in question were legally allowed, it would probably have little social effect – but such skepticism only activates when the activity is widely

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table 7.1. Categories of interaction between law and ideology Targets Functions

Legal actions that target ideological identity

Legal actions that target substantive beliefs or values Normative

Empirical

Coercive

“All libertarians will go to jail”

“All schools must teach classes that criticize liberty as a normative ideal”

Incentivizing

“Those who leave the Libertarian Party will receive a tax rebate” “Believing in libertarianism is illegal (but no penalty is enforced)” N/A

“Scholars that criticize liberty as a normative ideal will receive government funding for their research” “Publications that celebrate liberty are nominally banned (but no penalty is enforced)” N/A

“Teaching of Milton Friedman’s theory of efficient markets in universities is banned” “Scholars who criticize Friedman’s theory of efficient markets receive government research funding”

Expressive

Informational

“Teaching of the theory of efficient markets is nominally banned (but no penalty is enforced)” “Manipulate GDP data in such a way that would seem to discredit the idea of market efficiency”

perceived as ideological.83 Whereas it is relatively easy to identify political and legal activities involving the punishing, rewarding, or expression of beliefs or identities as ideological, it is often much more difficult to do the same for informational manipulation. Not only does “information” naturally carry a veil of neutrality and objectivity, particularly when it is expressed in numerical form, but the government’s “natural monopoly” over enormous swaths of socioeconomic information – ranging from military intelligence, to most forms of macroeconomic information, to law enforcement statistics, property title

83

Even in the contemporary Middle East, there is some evidence that state involvement with religious indoctrination leads to social backlash and declining levels of religiosity. See, e.g., Jean-Philippe Platteau, Islam Instrumentalized: Religion and Politics in Historical Perspective (2017). See also, Ammar Maleki & Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Iranians’ Attitudes towards Religion: A 2020 Survey Report, The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN, https://gamaan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GAMAAN-Iran-ReligionSurvey-2020-English.pdf (2020).

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records, public company listings, and public health information – tends to increase the general population’s willingness to uncritically defer to it. If we focus on liberal societies, it becomes even more obvious that the informational function is often subject to significantly weaker legal constraints than the other three functions. Most notably, because it tends to operate without the use of legal coercion on private parties, it manages to avoid many of the constitutional and statutory constraints that the other functions are subject to, such as the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution.84 It is true, of course, that most modern legal systems impose some legal controls on their informational apparatuses to safeguard their accuracy and objectivity, but these tend to be procedural rather than substantive in nature, and are sometimes ineffective. The United States, for example, imposes explicit transparency and expert peer review requirements on its federal statistical agencies.85 As a substantial body of scholarship has argued, however, these requirements do not always have the intended effect, and are often subject to the discretion of the very agencies they are supposed to constrain.86 It is worth noting that informational manipulation need not occur through active falsification, but can just as easily operate through various forms of inaction. When the state effectively dominates the production of a certain kind of information, it can often entrench and reinforce related mainstream empirical beliefs simply by refusing to collect or publish certain kinds of new information. The entrenchment of “Malthusian” economics in Qing fiscal history is an excellent example of this, but there are prominent modern examples as well. Alternatively, a simple refusal to expand the definition of a statistic – for example, refusing to recognize certain offenses as hate crime or rape87 – can present an entirely different empirical picture, supporting fundamentally different ideological interpretations. Governmental inaction is likely subject to even less social scrutiny and legal constraint than active fabrication, but can be just as effective in terms of ideological indoctrination. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, during which the latter parts of this book were written, has likely enhanced the sociopolitical salience of these informational dynamics. By the admission of some of its own senior officials, the Trump administration actively considered reducing public testing for the virus 84 85

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See, e.g., Cate (2008). See, e.g., Maureen Mahon, Proceed with Caution: The Implications of the OMB Peer Review Guidelines on Precautionary Legislation, 84 Wash. Univ. L. Rev. 461 (2006); Stuart Shapiro & David Guston, Procedural Control of the Bureaucracy, Peer Review, and Epistemic Drift, 17 J. Pub. Admin. Res. & Theory, 535 (2007). Shapiro & Guston (2007); Jack McDevitt et al., Improving the Quality and Accuracy of Bias Crime Statistics Nationally, in Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader, 77 (Barbara Perry eds., 2003). See, e.g., the Obama Administration’s expansion of the definition of rape, which sharply increase official statistics on the crime. Charlie Sasvage, U. S. to Expand its Definition of Rape in Statistics, N. Y. Times, Jan. 6, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/politics/federal-crimestatistics-to-expand-rape-definition.html.

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so that official statistics would appear less dire, thereby aiding Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.88 This, along with the numerous examples of outright false statements about the pandemic made by Trump and many of his advisors, once again highlighted the strong possibility – indeed likelihood – that government-issued information can easily be subject to political or ideological manipulation. The more disturbing thing is that, even in the Internet age, there was no viable alternative. People knew with certainty that the federal government had explicitly considered manipulating testing data for political purposes, and yet the vast majority of media reports nonetheless regurgitated government-issued statistics without annotation, thereby allowing most forms of mainstream sociopolitical commentary to proceed from that potentially manipulating informational basis.89 This was more than a little ironic in an era where social “disinformation” has been one of the primary concerns of the American political and intellectual establishment ever since Trump’s rise to power in 2016.90 Modern authoritarian regimes are, of course, probably even more prone to informational manipulation than their liberal democratic peers – many of them, including China, Russia, and Turkey, likely engaged in information suppression or manipulation during the COVID-19 pandemic, often more systemically than the Trump administration91 – but their egregious behavior only further showcases the enormous difficulty of challenging state-issued information. For example, the intellectual community has known with near certainty for many years that the Chinese government manipulates its GDP data, at least sometimes for political purposes.92 Nonetheless, mainstream media, even in the western world, continues to report state-issued GDP figures as if they are 88

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E.g., Edward Luce, Inside Trump’s Coronavirus Meltdown, Financial Times, May 14, 2020, www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed; Yasmeen Abutaleb, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey & Philip Rucker, The Inside Story of How Trump’s Denial, Mismanagement and Magical Thinking Led to the Pandemic’s Dark Winter, Washington Post, Dec. 19, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/trump-covid-pan demic-dark-winter/. The New York Times’ COVID-19 Data Tracker Continues to Use Government Data from the Spring of 2020: Coronavirus in the U. S., N. Y. Times, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/ coronavirus-us-cases.html (last accessed Aug. 8, 2021). E.g., Deen Freelon & Chris Wells, Disinformation as Political Communication, 37 Pol. Communication 145 (2020). See, e.g., Liz Cookman, What Is the Real Extent of Turkey’s COVID-19 Crisis?, Al Jazeera, Apr. 14, 2021, www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/14/what-is-the-real-extent-of-turkeys-covidcrisis; Roy Green, How Reliable Are China’s COVID Numbers?, Global News, Sep. 25, 2020, https://globalnews.ca/news/7358278/china-covid-19-data-reliability/; Anton Troianovski, Russia’s Hidden COVID Toll Is an Open Secret, N. Y. Times, May 22, 2021, www.nytimes .com/2021/04/10/world/europe/covid-russia-death.html. E.g., Changjiang Lyu et al., GDP Management to Meet or Beat Growth Targets, 66 J. Accounting & Econ. 318 (2018); Wei Chen et al., A Forensic Analysis of China’s National Accounts, Brookings, www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/a-forensic-examination-of-chinasnational-accounts/ (2019).

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authoritative, likely because there simply is no intellectually viable alternative.93 Some private attempts to calculate more accurate Chinese GDP figures have periodically been made,94 but have never managed to gain enough sociopolitical traction, inside or outside of China. It is true state-issued information has become somewhat less authoritative due to the cultural dominance of social media and the ensuing rise of “alternative facts,” especially among right-wing political movements. Unfortunately, this has only worsened the quality of public discourse, given that right-wing “alternative facts” are even more politically and ideologically charged than state-issued information. Fighting fire with nuclear waste never helps. While the rise of social media has diluted the elite establishment’s control over the circulation of information or “disinformation,” it has not fundamentally diluted the government’s functional monopoly over the production of many kinds of macro-level information, including a wide range of economic and public health statistics. No reliably accurate private alternative exists for these statistics, which means that, for now, the only feasible way to improve the informational quality of public discourse is to reduce governmental manipulation, instead of promoting significantly more problematic private “facts.” Until this happens, the law’s informational function will likely remain as robust and ideologically influential as we saw in previous chapters.

d. “constitutionalism”? For a number of years, some scholars have been actively searching for functional equivalents to “constitutionalism” in Chinese legal history.95 Some of this comes in the form of an intellectual backlash against allegedly “Eurocentric” or even “orientalist” narratives of western legal exceptionalism, in which “constitutionalism,” the “rule of law,” and all the positive sociopolitical and economic outcomes they generate were historically unique to the western world, and therefore explain its modern dominance.96 These narratives 93

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See, e.g., Jonathan Cheng, China Is the Only Major Economy to Report Economic Growth for 2020, Wall St. J., Jan. 18, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-the-only-major-economy-toreport-economic-growth-for-2020-11610936187. E.g., Lyu et al. (2018); Chen et al. (2019). E.g., Jaeyoon Song, The Zhou Li and Constitutionalism: A Southern Son Political Theory, 36 J. Chinese Phil. 424 (2009); Pierre-Étienne Will, Epilogue: Virtual Constitutionalism in the Late Ming Dynasty, in Building Constitutionalism in China, 265 (Stéphanie Balme & Michael Dowdle eds., 2009); Stéphanie Balme & Michael W. Dowdle, Introduction: Exploring for Constitutionalism in 21st Century China, in Building Constitutionalism in China, 1 (Stéphanie Balme & Michael Dowdle eds., 2009); Su Li, The Constitution of Ancient China (2018); Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future (2013). For discussion and critique, see, e.g., Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (2013).

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were highly prevalent in the mid-to-late twentieth century among legal scholars, and continue to enjoy significant influence in a number of academic fields, notably institutional economics, where they have been employed by prominent scholars to explain what separates “rich countries of the world . . . from the poor.”97 The economic mechanism that, according to these theories, links constitutionalism and modern economic development is that the former powerfully facilitates the issuance of “credible commitments” by states to make “credible commitments” against the arbitrary expropriation of property, which is a necessary condition for the latter.98 The counternarrative that some Chinese specialists have been attempting to develop for some time – parallel to thematically similar arguments pursued by Islamic Law specialists and others99 – attempts, correspondingly, to demonstrate that imperial China did have robust legal institutions and, in particular, possessed high-level institutions that played a “constitutional” role in regulating politics. In light of these attempts, it makes sense, as a coda to this collection of theoretical vignettes, to briefly consider whether the fiscal conservatism traced throughout this book can be intelligibly considered a “constitutional” commitment of the Qing state, given the extraordinarily strong and durable constraints it imposed on policymaking and state capacity for some two centuries. This question may well be of considerable academic interest on its own, but more importantly, answering it allows us to hone in on a number of conceptual mistakes often seen in the strands of academic literature identified in the previous paragraph. Recognizing those mistakes helps produce a clearer idea of what “constitutionalism” entails, and how it may or may not facilitate modern economic growth. Much of this debate turns on which concept of “constitutionalism” one employs. Conventionally, constitutionalism is the idea “that government can and should be legally limited in its powers, and that its authority or legitimacy depends on its observing these limitations.”100 Under a strict interpretation of this definition, Chinese politics were almost certainly not “constitutional” at any point in the imperial era – and likely not today – given that there was no body of law in any major dynasty that purported to limit the emperor’s authority. Some possibilities begin to appear when we loosen the “legal” requirement to include some highly durable norms, such as the various

97 98

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Acemoglu & Robinson (2003), at 1. E.g., Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, A Theory of Political Transitions, 91 Am. Econ. Rev. 938 (2001); North & Weingast (1989). Summarized in Christie S. Warren, Constitutions and Islamic Law, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013 .96. Wil Waluchow, Constitutionalism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta ed., 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constitutionalism/.

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Confucian rituals and intra-family codes of conduct that regulated behavior within imperial families: These norms exercised some measure of control over the emperor’s conduct, both public and private, and often interfered with his selection of heirs.101 The problem is that these norms left the vast majority of state functions untouched, which meant that, at least in theory, the emperor’s power was still largely unchecked even if we bought into the idea of “constitutional” rituals. A separate wave of books and articles attempted to further expand the conceptual boundaries of “constitutionalism” by arguing that, so long as a government possessed a core set of institutions and norms that shaped its major functions and operations, it was being “constituted” in a substantive way and could lay claim to having a functionally significant “constitution.” China’s historical “constitutional” features included its written language, its centralized bureaucracy, the institution of the emperor, and so on, all of which emerged from the functional needs of governing a large, easily unified population and territory. This argument, commonly associated with Zhu Suli, likely the most prominent legal scholar teaching in Mainland China today, has drawn both large amounts of interest and large amounts of criticism since its introduction in the mid-2010s.102 Most obviously, it would effectively make the label of “constitutionalism” nearly universally applicable to all sophisticated polities, given that nearly all political regimes are “constituted” by at least some underlying institutions and functions, and therefore render it meaningless. The question of how we should identify a polity’s core functions and corresponding institutional framework is well worth pursuing for its own sake, and Zhu is entirely correct to point this out, but it need not be pursued under the conceptual framework of “constitutionalism.” Instead, that label is best reserved for institutionally entrenched norms that substantively constrain the state. The “norm” requirement is necessary so that a “constitution” can speak from a position of authority: The ruler’s powers must be subject to the “constitution’s” authority, so that a violation of the “constitution” politically delegitimizes the state.103 Otherwise, there would be no difference between a “constitution” and any significant external constraint on the state’s functionality: natural resources, geopolitics, economic capacity, demographics, and so on. Zhu’s idea of “constituting” the state points precisely to such external constraints as the foundational elements of 101

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E.g., Chaihark Hahm, Ritual and Constitutionalism: Disputing the Ruler’s Legitimacy in a Confucian Polity, 57 Am. J. Comp. L. 135 (2009); Qianfan Zhang, A Constitution Without Constitutionalism? The Paths of Constitutional Development in China, 8 Int’l J. Con. L. 950 (2010) (discussing and criticizing this approach). Su Li (2018). See also, Taisu Zhang, Beyond Methodological Eurocentricism: Comparing the Chinese and European Legal Traditions, 56 Am. J. Legal Hist. 195 (2016) (discussing Zhu’s theory); Yuri Pines, Book Review: The Constitution of Ancient China, 3 J. Chinese Hist. 430 (2019) (criticizing Zhu’s treatment of historical sources). See Waluchow (2018).

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“constitutionalism,” but that kind of conceptualization would effectively remove any limiting principle from the term. Furthermore, if “constitutions” must be normative, then they must also be at least somewhat “constraining” as a matter of logic. This is where the fiscal ideas and practices this book focuses on offer some intriguing possibilities. There can be no doubt that the ideology of fiscal conservatism constrained Qing politics and administration in very significant ways, to the extent where it fundamentally “constituted” the state’s basic functionality. Moreover, the maxim of “never raise agricultural taxes” comes across as something that could plausibly be called a “norm.” Would it be conceptually possible, then, to cite this as an example of imperial Chinese constitutionalism? While this is a tempting possibility, Qing fiscal conservatism did not, upon closer inspection, constrain the state in a truly normative sense, and therefore cannot be employed as an example of constitutionalism. The dominant rationale among Qing elites for fiscal restraint was, as argued in previous chapters, more consequentialist than deontological: “we cannot raise agricultural taxes because doing so will threaten our rule,” instead of “we cannot raise taxes because it is morally or legally forbidden.” Qing fiscal restraint primarily derived, therefore, from perceived self-interest and subjective pragmatism, rather than any kind of normative principle. The old Confucian moral skepticism of “speaking of profit” did still exist – and continued to be intellectually significant in the early Qing, at least as a source of cognitive framing – but its political influence clearly deteriorated over the course of the dynasty, to the point where the Qianlong Emperor himself expressly rejected it in 1738.104 In fact, this deterioration happened alongside the full institutional and political entrenchment of fiscal conservatism in the mid-eighteenth century, which makes it exceedingly difficult to see the latter as a product of the former. Some scholars and officials did, of course, continue to argue against tax increases from a moral standpoint even in the nineteenth century, but they were almost certainly outside of the political mainstream on this issue. Moreover, there was no legal authority against raising agricultural taxes: Kangxi’s 1712 edict promising to “never raise the head tax” did not, as argued in Chapter 4, extend to the land tax, while the ban on land surveying, functionally significant as it undoubtedly was, never amounted to a direct ban against raising taxes. Ultimately, the stagnation of the agricultural tax was not a predominantly normative commitment of the Qing state – either in a moral or legal sense – no matter how deeply entrenched it was politically or ideologically. Even without the “constitutional” moniker, Qing fiscal conservatism was politically powerful enough to cripple the state’s local administrative capacity

104

Qing Gaozong Shilu, ch. 70, Qianlong 3rd Year 6th Month Yiwei.

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by the mid-nineteenth century. As politically and economically damaging as this eventually proved to be, it also produced a legal environment in which private property rights, whether over land or other kinds of business assets, were in very little danger of being arbitrarily expropriated by the state.105 There were at least two different reasons for this: First and foremost, the state was simply not administratively powerful enough to engage in large-scale expropriation. Second, specifically in the context of rural land, a state that was so reluctant to raise agricultural taxes almost certainly could not have mustered the political will to seize significant amounts of privately owned land. The Qing state was, of course, often willing, even eager, to raise nonagricultural taxes, which meant that other forms of economic capital could not rely on the latter rationale, but even so, the former rationale offered it ample protection in most circumstances. As a significant amount of scholarship has now demonstrated, Qing property rights were, by the standards of an early modern economy, reasonably secure in both horizontal and vertical senses – that is, against both encroachment by other private parties, and expropriation by the state.106 While the former was largely a product of robust customary regimes backed by closely knit lineages and other forms of communal self-governance, the latter derived from the state’s administrative and fiscal minimalism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was not until after 1949 that state expropriation of private assets truly became a politically and economically significant phenomenon.107 In that sense, the Qing state was quite capable of making “credible commitments” in the New Institutional Economics sense, despite not being significantly “constitutional.” Clearly, then, constitutionalism is not a universally necessary condition for the issuance of credible commitments. There are many other ways to adequately constrain state power – ideological, economic, geopolitical – so that credible commitments become institutionally possible. The fallback position might be that constitutionalism is nonetheless a necessary condition for the issuance of credible commitments while maintaining a high level of state capacity, but even this qualified statement seems somewhat dubious in the context of modern Chinese history. As many have pointed out, private economic investment flourished in the 1980s and 1990s as if the state had made a credible commitment to not

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See the literature summarized in Zhang (forthcoming 2023), https://ssrn.com/abstract= 3547494. Id. See Jonas Alsen, An Introduction to Chinese Property Law, 20 Md. J. Int’l L. & Trade 1 (1996).

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expropriate private assets, but scholars have long struggled to identify the source of this credible commitment.108 Government policy certainly encouraged entrepreneurship and private investment, but there were no real constitutional guarantees to speak of. Language protecting private entrepreneurship property was introduced into the Chinese Constitution in several phases from 1988 to 2004,109 but few commentators would argue that the Constitution, or, for that matter, any other legal document or normative principle, actually constrained the collective decision-making of the party leadership in any substantive fashion.110 China was not a “constitutional” regime at any point during the Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin eras, while state capacity remained reasonably robust as a result of vigorous state building campaigns during the 1950s and 1960s. Nonetheless, many private parties seemed to genuinely believe that the state had made a credible commitment to not arbitrarily expropriate their assets – genuinely enough, at least, to set off a massive wave of private investment and entrepreneurship. Two obvious possibilities are that, first, private parties mistakenly believed there was a credible commitment when there in fact was none; and, second, that there was actually no widespread social perception of a credible commitment, but private parties were nonetheless willing to invest their economic assets. In other words, truly secure property rights were not, in fact, necessary for China’s post-Mao “economic miracle.”111 Either could be correct, but there is yet a third possibility: The consensus among political elites in favor of economic “opening up” during the Deng era was strong enough – and adequately supported by political and institutional investments, but not constitutional ones – that private parties could comfortably rely on it.112 The population’s comfort level may well have been further enhanced by its own eagerness to move on from the economic stagnation and political turmoil of the late Mao era, which may have made it much more willing to trust the government’s political messaging. In other words, a robust political consensus among policymakers can, when communicated clearly to a politically receptive public, constitute an effective “credible commitment” even in administratively powerful regimes that lack constitutional norms. Regardless of how much state capacity a regime might 108

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Most attempts at answering this question have focused on nonlegal protections, such as “de facto federalism.” See, e.g., Yingyi Qian & Barry R. Weingast, Federalism as a Commitment to Reserving Market Incentives, 11 J. Econ. Perspectives 83 (1997). See Lin Haiyin (林海吟), Woguo Xianfa dui Siyou Caichan Baohu de Bianhua yu Zhengzhi Zhengdangxing (我国宪法对私有财产保护的变化与政治正当性) [Changes in Chinese Constitutional Protection of Private Property and Their Political Legitimacy], Zhongguo Fayuan Wang (中国法院网) [China court] (2009), www.chinacourt.org/article/detail/ 2009/01/id/340122.shtml. This literature is discussed and critiqued in some detail in Zhang & Ginsburg (2019). See, e.g., Frank K. Upham, The Great Property Fallacy: Theory, Reality, and Growth in Developing Countries (2018). E.g., Qian & Weingast (1997).

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possess, constitutionalism is but one possible path of several toward the economic provision of secure property rights. In fact, China may well have evolved from a country with very low state capacity and functionally secure property rights in the nineteenth century, to one with very high state capacity and functionally secure property rights in the post-Mao era – and yet in neither era did it possess a truly constitutional regime.

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Conclusion

The Qing tax state was a hybrid entity on multiple levels. Most obviously, it collected revenue in both silver and grain, which led to significant bureaucratic complications and enhanced the likelihood of local corruption. More institutionally significant, over the long run, was its combination of different fiscal categories – some targeting agriculture, others targeting proto-industry and commerce – into a unified revenue structure. Dig more deeply, and we discover that the hybridity was not merely one of fiscal categories, but also one of different political logics: Nonagricultural taxation operated under a predominantly rationalist model, responding to the escalation of demand-side pressures in the nineteenth century with considerable amounts of political and institutional agility. Agricultural taxation, in comparison, was locked into a fundamentally conservative and deeply ideological paradigm of fiscal quotaism for the great majority of the dynasty’s 268-year lifespan. Furthermore, the ideological conservatism that dominated agricultural taxation was, itself, a hybrid product of two different intellectual forces: a traditional and deontologically normative skepticism of taxation that had been part of Confucian political ethics for more than two millennia, and a Qing-specific, “empirically grounded” consequentialism that both cognitively originated from that normative skepticism, and politically weaponized it to an unprecedented degree. Finally, over the course of the dynasty, this Qing-specific consequentialism also developed and merged at least two different empirical narratives: an early dynasty narrative on the causes of Ming collapse, and a mid-to-late dynasty narrative of Malthusian economic decline. To speak of “the Qing tax regime” is to synthesize all of these hybridities into a single analytical unit, while hopefully not losing track of the multi-layered complexity within it. The combination of these layers produced, ultimately, a system of taxation that, until 1850, may have been functionally stable on its own terms – even though some cracks had certainly begun to emerge in the early nineteenth 360

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century – but was nonetheless far more limited than most of its major contemporaries. After 1850, although the nonagricultural components of the system displayed considerable institutional initiative and reformist energy in the face of an unprecedented fiscal crisis, its steadfast refusal to significantly raise agricultural tax quotas prevented it from fully rising to the occasion, leaving a number of critical state functions, including famine relief and military-industrial investment, severely underfunded. Although these ideological obstacles to revenue expansion finally melted away after 1901 in the wake of another major fiscal crisis, it was too late to save the dynasty from political collapse in 1911, bringing with it the end of “imperial China” altogether. Successor regimes would learn from the Qing’s fiscal missteps and develop far more robust revenue streams from both agricultural and nonagricultural sources, thereby laying the fiscal foundations for socioeconomic “statism.” Whereas Chapter 7 focused on the possible theoretical takeaways from this narrative, the Conclusion returns to the historiographical themes laid out in the book’s Introduction. Specifically, it addresses three major questions: First, what are the possible connections between the Qing’s relative fiscal weakness and the “Great Divergence”? Second, within the context of Qing history, how should we understand the connection between fiscal capacity and the broader concept of state capacity? Third, how does the ideological narrative developed here fit into the broader narrative of Confucianism’s decline and fall in the later Qing? A full answer to any of these questions would require its own book, but one can sketch out some possibilities within a few pages, some of which I hope to develop in future work. This would, at least, further clarify how this book situates itself historiographically, and maybe even give interested readers something to look forward to.

fiscal capacity and economic divergence Although the idea that low fiscal and administrative capacity had at least some connection to China’s relative economic underperformance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has gained a respectable academic following over the past couple of decades, the specific mechanisms of that connection are not always spelled out in clear terms. The core intuition behind it is generally that some baseline level of state, and therefore fiscal, capacity is necessary for industrialization and modern economic growth, and that China fell below this baseline until well into the twentieth century.1 While this statement comes across as fairly sensible, its finer points of economic logic are actually somewhat elusive. This book – which focuses on explaining low fiscal capacity itself, rather than its economic consequences – certainly makes no attempt to explore them in full, but the broader historical significance of its conclusions does 1

E.g., Brandt, Ma, & Rawski, at 79 (2014).

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partially depend on the intellectual possibility of doing so in the future. Some forward-looking discussion as we reach the end of the book is therefore desirable, especially when its Introduction motivated the entire thesis by flagging its connection to “Great Divergence”-type questions. The question of global economic divergence and the “rise of the West” is one of the oldest and largest in the social sciences. In China’s case, the question has two related but ultimately distinct subcomponents: why China fell behind the west in terms of industrial development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,2 and why it took so long for it to industrialize – not until the later twentieth century, really – even after the economic gap had become painfully obvious after the two Opium Wars.3 Explanations that contribute to the former do not necessarily contribute to the latter. In fact, even the comparison sets are somewhat different: for the former question, the most relevant comparisons are, as the “Great Divergence” literature appropriately focuses on, with western European economies, whereas for the latter, the Sino-Japanese comparison becomes enormously significant, given Japan’s relative success at “catching up.” The latter issue also relates to a somewhat separate political economy literature on “late industrialization,” which specifically highlights the importance of state spending and investment to the economics of “catching up.”4 The closest that preexisting research has come to providing a general theory that can potentially explain, through the lens of fiscal undercapacity, both why China “fell behind” and why it “caught up” so slowly is the capital/labor price model that several prominent scholars have recently endorsed.5 This model argues that the primary economic precondition for both the initial invention of industrial technology and its widespread adoption was relatively high labor prices paired with relatively lower capital prices. Its primary insight is that industrial technologies, for the most part, conserve labor while requiring heavier capital investments. Therefore, they are more in demand in economies where labor is relatively scarce and capital is relatively plentiful. In fact, if the costeffectiveness of capital investment is lower than the cost-effectiveness of labor

2

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This is what the lion’s share of the academic literature has focused on. See, e.g., Pomeranz (2000); Wong (1997); Frank (1998); Ma (2008); Brenner & Isett (2002); Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009); Acemoglu & Robinson (2010); Huang (1985); Myers (1973); Li Bozhong (1998). Books and articles that have discussed this part of the problem include Brandt, Ma, & Rawski (2014); He (2013); Rosenthal & Wong (2011); Huang (1985); Huang (1990). See, e.g., Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic backwardness in historical perspective: a book of essays (1962); Alice Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (1989); Mehran Kamrava, Politics and Society in the Developing World, ch. 2 (2d ed. 1995); David Waldner, State Building and Late Development (1999). See, e.g., Allen (2009); Robert C. Allen et al., Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925 – in Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India, 64 Econ. Hist. Rev. 8 (2011); Rosenthal & Wong (2011).

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investment, then there would be no economic incentive to pursue labor-saving technology at all. Following this logic, a number of scholars have argued that China’s comparative underdevelopment can be attributed to its lower labor costs and higher capital costs relative to its European and perhaps Japanese competitors. One could add an additional wrinkle to this argument by incorporating economies of scale into the cost-effectiveness of both labor and capital: Returns to labor investment, as many have argued, likely diminished with scale in pre-industrial production,6 whereas returns to capital investment likely increased substantially in some sectors once a certain scale of production was reached.7 Some industrial technologies, including those in textile production and transportation, may have become profitable only when employed at large scales. When these economies of scale are added to the model, they further strengthen the basic intuition that industrialization was far more likely in economies with relatively plentiful capital and relatively scarce labor, than in economies with the opposite combination. The viability of these arguments depends on identifying reasonable measures or proxies for the cost-effectiveness of labor and capital across all economies in the comparative set – a highly difficult task that has only seen partial progress over the past few decades. Labor costs and productivity are relatively easy to measure: There are studies and statistical compilations going back many decades on wages and productivity in multiple sectors of the Chinese, western European, and Japanese economies, and a number of recent articles have made rigorous use of them to demonstrate that, prior to European industrialization, the wages necessary to generate a single unit of production in most Chinese protoindustrial sectors was indeed substantially lower than in their European counterparts.8 The obvious shortcoming in this literature has, as many have pointed out, their one-sided focus on labor, without paying equal attention to the cost-effectiveness of capital.9 After all, what really matters in this model is the cost-effectiveness of labor relative to capital, and cheaper wages in China mean very little if capital was also cheaper. Measuring capital costeffectiveness, however, has proven to be a more elusive target due to the larger variety in capital investments and the greater difficulty in identifying both their costs and their economic returns. 6

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This argument is most prominently made by proponents of “involution”: greater labor intensity leading to lower labor productivity. E.g., Huang (1990); Huang (1985); Myers (1980). See, e.g., Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Investment in Fixed and Working Capital during Early Industrialization: Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing Firms, 44 J. Econ. Hist. 545 (1984); and Jonathan Temple & Hans-Joachim Voth, Human Capital, Equipment Investment, and Industrialization, 42 European Econ. Rev. 1343 (1998), for some evidence that the capital intensity of firm production – and the returns to that capital – increased with firm size. E.g., Allen (2009); Allen et al. (2011). E.g., Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr, & Cormac Ó Gráda, Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution, 6 Annual Rev. Econ. 363 (2014).

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In response, some scholars have turned to various socioeconomic proxies that they believe can capture the capital side of the equation. For example, some have proposed to use urbanization rates as a reasonable approximation of the relative cost-effectiveness of labor versus capital, under the rationale that urbanization inherently leads to higher labor costs and lower capital costs: The removal of people from agriculture means that it costs more to clothe and feed them, while the economies of scale available in urban settings enhances the low-cost concentration of capital.10 Needless to say, this is an imperfect proxy: For example, the higher population density in urban centers could have also provided significant economies of scale on the labor side, which may or may not offset the higher costs of subsistence. Nonetheless, these potential complications have not deterred claims that China’s relatively lower urbanization rates – which some have attributed to its relative peace and stability – were a major reason for its slower pace of industrialization. At the very least, it seems indisputable that capital accumulation was cheaper and easier in cities than in the countryside. Whatever the merits of these claims, there is another, considerably less wellexplored dimension of the economics of capital accumulation: legal and political institutions. One of the distinctive features of early modern economies was that a very significant share of capital accumulation was not done through what modern economists and legal scholars would consider “free contracting,” but was instead conducted through institutional devices laden with mandatory rules, institutional and economic duress, and outright coercion. Institutional differences across countries could therefore lead to substantially higher or lower costs of capital accumulation, which must be incorporated into any serious capital/labor price model of industrialization. One such institutional device was collateralized lending, which, as I have argued in a previous book, exerted enormous influence on the concentration of landownership in both China and England: The laws and customs governing collateralized lending differed dramatically between the two countries, offering substantially stronger default and foreclosure protections to Chinese borrowers than to English ones.11 As a result, English creditors were often able to permanently seize collateralized land upon loan default at “prices” – essentially the amount of the original loan – substantially lower than what the land would have sold for on the open market. Chinese creditors, in contrast, not only had to make up the difference between the original loan and the land’s full value if they wish to permanently acquire it, but usually did not have the option of permanent acquisition at all due to mandatory customary rules that effectively eliminated the possibility of default when the land was being collateralized. These rules also had significant spillover effects on the market for permanent land sales: The extremely favorable institutional conditions for collateralized

10

Rosenthal & Wong (2011).

11

Zhang (2017).

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borrowing that Chinese landowners enjoyed significantly depressed their willingness to offer land up for permanent sale, whereas the harsh borrowing rules imposed upon English borrowers often drove them into the permanent sales market when they needed large amounts of cash. As a result, it was significantly costlier to permanently acquire land in China than in England, which, in turn, directly led to much greater land inequality, and therefore concentration of landed capital, in the latter. England became a country of large estates and sociopolitically dominant landlords by the late seventeenth century, whereas China’s rural economy remained smallholder-heavy well into the twentieth century. Insofar as land was arguably the most important source of capital in preindustrial societies, the cost of capital accumulation was substantially higher in China than in England due to systemic differences in collateralized lending institutions. Fiscal institutions are another piece of the puzzle: Government taxation was, after all, a form of capital accumulation, indeed one that played a significant role in the industrialization process of many countries, including the People’s Republic of China. A highly efficient tax apparatus can often accumulate capital at a lower cost – which essentially amounts to the administrative and political cost of setting and enforcing tax quotas – and higher speed than private parties can manage through market transactions. Many scholars doubt the cost-effectiveness of governmental capital accumulation because they fear that the state will spend its resources in a more wasteful manner, generating lower returns,12 but such concerns need not deny that the state enjoys major institutional advantages on the accumulation side. Moreover, in circumstances where large-scale capital accumulation is needed over a relatively short period of time – as is often true of countries attempting to “catch up” in the industrialization process, such as Japan and China in the later nineteenth century – there is a plausible case to be made that state accumulation, especially when properly invested in private entrepreneurship through professionalized financial institutions, can be as cost-effective as private accumulation, if not even more so, given their ability to quickly override transaction and information costs that may render private transactions inefficient. Whereas such an assumption may have seemed dubious to earlier generations of neoclassical economists, China’s rapid post-Mao economic growth on the back of heavy state investment has substantially boosted its credibility.13 12

13

The dominant debate over this issue focuses on the cost-effectiveness of fiscal policy. See Richard Hemming, Michael Kell, & Selma Mahfouz, The Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Stimulating Economic Activity: A Review of the Literature, IMF Working Paper No. 02/208 (2002), https:// ssrn.com/abstract=880868. Such voices grew louder after 2008. See, at Nicholas R. Lardy & Arvind Subramanian, Sustaining China’s Economic Growth After the Global Financial Crisis (2011). See also, Su Dinh Thanh & Nguyen Phuc Canh, Dynamics between Government Spending and Economic Growth in China: An Analysis of Productivity Growth, 17 J. Chinese Econ. & Bus. Stud. 189 (2019); Justin Yifu Lin & Zhiqiang Liu, Fiscal Decentralization and Economic

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From this perspective, higher levels of governmental military-industrial investment may well have been able to significantly accelerate China’s industrialization push after the 1850s, perhaps even enough to keep pace with Japan. The transition from direct agricultural taxation to indirect nonagricultural taxation did allow the state to accumulate capital at lower administrative and political cost, but the state’s ability to extract agricultural taxes remained artificially depressed by ideological politics throughout its final six decades of existence – which meant that, given preexisting levels of administrative investment in agricultural taxation, it was generating substantially lower fiscal returns than it realistically could have.14 As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, even a moderate increase to agricultural tax quotas in the later nineteenth century could have more than doubled the state’s investment in industrial development, which potentially could have generated large macroeconomic returns. This argument necessarily assumes that state-driven investment could have done at least as good a job at stimulating industrialization than market-oriented private investment, perhaps due to the existence of market inefficiencies such as high transaction or information costs. While the claim is not self-evident, requiring both additional economic modeling and empirical verification, many economic historians familiar with the era would likely be instinctively sympathetic, not least because of the existence of the Japanese comparison set: The pace of Chinese industrialization during this era was undeniably slower than Japan’s, and the Japanese state undeniably had far more fiscal resources at its disposal, which it invested very aggressively in industry.15 It seems only natural to suspect that the two were somehow interconnected. The application of this argument, that higher levels of state-driven capital accumulation could have sped up industrialization, to the pre-1840 period poses a different set of questions and challenges. Whereas China’s primary economic challenge post-1840 was effectively one of technological transplanting and “catching up,” the primary issue before 1840 – or rather, before the

14

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Growth in China, 49 Econ. Dev. & Cultural Change 1 (2000); Tao Zhang & Heng-fu Zou, Fiscal Decentralization, Public Spending, and Economic Growth in China, 67 J. Pub. Econ. 221 (1998). This is demonstrated most powerfully by the state’s successful implementation of agricultural tax hikes after 1901, and again after 1912, without any noteworthy investment in administrative infrastructure. E.g., He (2013); Kozo Yamamura, Success Ill-Gotten? The Role of Meiji Militarism in Japan’s Technological Progress, 37 J. Econ. Hist. 113–135 (1977); Fukaya Tokujiro (深谷 徳次郎), Meiji Seifu Zaisei Kiban no Kakuritsu (明治政府財政基盤の確立) [ Establishment of the financial base of the Meiji government] (1995); Fujimura Toru (藤村通), Meiji Zaisei Kakuritsu Katei no Kenkyu (明治財政確立過程の研究) [A Study of the Meiji Fiscal Establishment Process] (1968); Harada Mikio (原田三喜雄), Nihon no Kindaika to Keizai Seisaku: Meiji Kogyoka Seisaku Kenkyu (日本の近代化と経済政 策—明治工業化政策研究) [Japan’s Modernization and Economic Policy: A Study of Meiji Industrialization Policy] (1972).

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west’s military and economic superiority became truly politically salient – was one of innovation and organic industrialization. It is perhaps easier to accept that a concentrated burst of government spending could have accelerated the pace of transplanted industrialization over the course of a few decades than to believe that stronger governmental intervention could have sped up the pace of domestic innovation and technological development over the course of multiple centuries. The latter would seem to require a stronger theory of market failure and efficient state-driven resource allocation than the former. One might argue that the state was uniquely well positioned to invest in public goods like education or infrastructure, which were in turn necessary for technological innovation.16 Alternatively, state-driven capital accumulation may well have accelerated the pace of urbanization: Cities and towns are much more likely to emerge in seats of political power, and often snowball in size as the government’s economic footprint expands.17 Beijing is a prime example of this. If urbanization is, as some have suggested, positively correlated to the overall ease of capital accumulation in the economy and the cost-effectiveness of capital, then insofar as more robust taxation could have stimulated urbanization, it also could have had significantly positive spillover effects for capital accumulation, well beyond whatever amount the state was able to directly extract and spend. Needless to say, these are all hypotheses rather than fully formed arguments, but the points here are merely that, first, the cost-effectiveness of capital likely was dependent on legal and political institutions in pre-industrial economies, whether in China or elsewhere, and, second, any attempt to study these institutional conditions should include an account of taxation. This opens up a number of potential economic connections between Chinese fiscal institutions and Sino-Western and Sino-Japanese economic divergence. Certainly, taxation is only one of several institutional conditions that deserve academic attention – land-selling and collateralization instruments, as noted above, are another, as are forms of firm organization, such as the business corporation – but given that the functionality of nearly every other economic institution depended, to some extent, on the supply or lack thereof of state administrative and legal capacity, it is likely an indispensable one. Interestingly, if weak fiscal capacity was indeed a major reason for China’s relative economic underperformance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it may also offer a very productive angle from which to understand its rapid economic rise in the twentieth century. As noted in Chapter 6, following the Qing’s collapse, there was a significant elite backlash against the dynasty’s 16

17

E.g., James L. Butkiewicz & Halit Yanikkaya, Institutions and the Impact of Government Spending on Growth, 14 J. Applied Econ. 319 (2011). This is a contentious issue, especially in the Chinese context. See, e.g., Li Tian, Biqing Ge & Yongfu Li, Impacts of State-Led and Bottom-Up Urbanization on Land Use Change in the PeriUrban Areas of Shanghai: Planned Growth or Uncontrolled Sprawl?, 60 Cities 476 (2017).

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perceived material weakness, which then gave rise to a new, heavily statist paradigm of governance and economic management that only accelerated after 1949. One might argue, therefore, that the dramatic increase in state fiscal capacity during the early People’s Republic, which led to capital accumulation on a massive scale,18 laid the foundations for record-breaking economic growth once the economy returned to market-driven development in the 1980s and 1990s. In this view, pre-1949 China had most of the necessary ingredients for modern economic growth – relatively secure private property, robust markets, ample natural resources, a vibrant culture of entrepreneurship in large parts of the country, and so on – and only lacked requisite levels of capital accumulation. Once state-driven accumulation had “solved” the capital problem, albeit at massive short-term costs, and once the other ingredients were again in place after 1978, the economy took off at unprecedented speed.19 This, too, is only a hypothesis at the moment, but an undeniably gripping one that deserves further study and consideration. These hypotheses move quite a bit beyond the boundaries of traditional “Great Divergence” debates, which focus primarily on England’s relative rise – and China’s relative initial decline – prior to the nineteenth century. By bringing in the clearly related but ultimately distinct question of why Asian economies like China and Japan caught up at different speeds, it again highlights the importance of going beyond traditional East-West comparisons to look at intra-Asian and East-East comparisons. Only by doing so can we gain a fuller understanding of the institutional, economic, and political possibilities at play in these enormous questions of global divergence and reconvergence. In a world whose economic and political center of gravity has increasingly moved away from the northern Atlantic countries, the “rise of the west” should no longer be the sole focus of modern comparative and global history, even if it still is the natural and perhaps indispensable starting point.

fiscal capacity and state capacity Although this book has focused on the Qing state’s fiscal capacity, it has inevitably brought up, at various points, the broader concept of “state 18

19

This came at enormous cost to the agricultural economy, given that much of the accumulated capital came from rural sources. See Dwight H. Perkins, China’s Modern Economy in Historical Perspective, 115–166 (1975); Gregory C. Chow, Capital Formation and Economic Growth in China, 108 Q. J. Econ. 809 (1993); Wang Hui, Cheng Xiaorui, Qu Chengle (王辉, 程晓蕊, 曲承乐), Jiedu Woguo Gongyehua Moshi (解读我国工业化模式) [Explaining the Model of Chinese Industrialization], 2014(1) Gaige yu Kaifang (改革与开 放) [Reform and Openning] 27. Influential accounts of China’s post-1978 “economic miracle” include, for example, Justin Yifu Lin, Fang Cai & Zhou Li, The China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform (1996); Chenggang Xu, The Fundamental Institutions of China’s Reforms and Development, 49 J. Econ. Lit. 1076 (2011).

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Fiscal Capacity and State Capacity

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capacity,” of which fiscal capacity is only a subcomponent – arguably the single most important subcomponent, but a subcomponent nonetheless. While the state’s ability to govern depends very heavily on its ability to tax, the relationship between fiscal capacity and general state capacity is not necessarily a completely linear one, and there are many ways the state can strengthen its governance without raising taxes. This section aims to untangle some of the conceptual and functional interconnections between the two concepts, and lay out some thoughts on how to evaluate the fluctuations in Qing state capacity. A state’s fiscal capacity is most directly tied to its military capacity. While there are some ways to accumulate military resources without government spending – local militias, and so on – the vast majority of military operations have, since very early in human history, been directly paid for by the government itself.20 How cost-effective the state’s military spending depends, of course, on how it efficiently organizes and coordinates its military activities, whether it has a draft, and a number of other institutional features, but holding those features constant, the state’s military capacity directly depends on how many economic resources it can utilize. The correlation between state capacity and fiscal capacity weakens somewhat when we turn to domestic governance. Some parts of the above paragraph still apply: Holding constant the state’s logistical organization and administrative efficiency, how much it can accomplish directly through its salaried employees – what we might call “formal state capacity” – grows and recedes largely in lockstep with its fiscal capacity. That said, an enormous amount of domestic governance can be effectively handled by nonstate actors and without state funding, as long as the state acquiesces and, in some cases, provides a basic amount of coordination and perhaps institutional motivation. The more complicated question is whether, and to what extent, this kind of state-authorized societal self-governance, or “informal state capacity,” should count toward aggregate measures of “state capacity.”21 The clearest example in Qing history of local self-governance rising up to fill the administrative void left by a retreating state was, of course, the QianlongJiaqing transition that we discussed in Chapter 5: After 1800, the Qing state consciously encouraged local communities to assume larger administrative responsibilities, so that it could maintain a responsible level of governance over a growing population while keeping the size of the formal state apparatus 20

21

The classic statement on the relationship between state building and military spending is, of course, Tilly (1990). See also, Carolyn Webber & Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (1986). On imperial Chinese expenditures and their connection to military investment, see, e.g., Shen Xuefeng (2006). In the Chinese context, this question is explicitly raised in He Wenkai (和文凯), Caizheng Zhidu, Guojia Quanli Zhengdangxing yu Guojia Nengli: Qingdai Guojia Nengli de Zai Kaocha (财政 制度, 国家权力正当性与国家能力 清代国家能力在考察) [Fiscal System, State Legitimation, and State Capacity: A Reevaluation of the State Capacity in Qing China], 2021(1) Zhongguo Jingji Shi Yanjiu (中国经济史研究) [Researches in Chinese Economic History] 18.

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stable. Such measures won broad support among nineteenth century scholars and officials, many of whom were quite enamored, philosophically and practically, with the idea of lineage self-governance. The end result, however, was rather mixed: While local communities were able to pick up much of the slack in areas like basic agricultural infrastructure, day-to-day conduct regulation, dispute resolution, and even some degree of self-defense, other state functions suffered. Most notably, famine relief and other forms of crisis management deteriorated significantly over the course of the nineteenth century. There was, as recent scholarship has pointed out, a temporary rebound in some areas during the post-Taiping recovery,22 but nowhere to eighteenth century levels. During the massive famine that swept through North China in 1876, for example, private parties across the country did manage to muster some 1 million taels of famine relief, but this was only a relatively minor sideshow compared to the roughly 5 million taels the state committed, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, was nonetheless deeply inadequate given the almost unprecedented – in Qing history – scale of the famine, and significantly weaker than eighteenth century famine relief measures. This shows that local self-governance was, at best, a partial substitute for formal state administration in Qing. As in other large, land-based countries, there were certain capital-intensive or interregional projects – large-scale famine relief, industrial investment, regulation of interregional commerce, and so on – that only the state could provide, and no amount of informal state capacity could adequately compensate for the late eighteenth and nineteenth century decline in formal state capacity. Although the Qing state does deserve a considerable amount of credit for tapping into informal state capacity as a bulwark against administrative decay, it would be an exaggeration to say that aggregate state capacity experienced no significant decline during this period. We should, however, acknowledge that the rise of informal state capacity did allow aggregate state capacity to decline at a slower and gentler pace than did fiscal capacity, and that the Qing remained reasonably well-governed in absolute terms despite this decline.23 From the government’s point of view, the decline in state capacity did not merely manifest in the deterioration of public goods like famine relief or industrial investment, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the loss of control over local affairs. In fact, as early as the Kangxi-Yongzheng transition in 1722, the decline of state capacity in the face of rapid demographic expansion had already become a politically salient issue among the ruling elite, bringing along 22

23

He (2021); Li Wenhai (李文海), Wanqing Yizhen de Xingqi yu Fazhan (晚清义赈的兴起与发展) [The Rise and Development of Yizhen in the late Qing Dynasty], 1993(3) Qingshi Yanjiu (清史 研究) [The Qing History Journal] 27; Jin Huanyu (靳环宇), Wanqing Yizhen Zuzhi Yanjiu (晚清义赈组织研究) [A Study of Yizhen Organizations in the Late Qing Dynasty] (2008). He (2021).

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Confucianism

371

a slew of anxieties over local corruption and socioeconomic instability.24 Yongzheng’s fiscal reforms managed to bring a few decades of administrative and financial reprieve, but concerns that the government was in danger of losing control over both local officials and local society never left elite political discourse, and became especially prominent in the nineteenth century. From the general population’s perspective, which is the perspective that many modern commentators have chosen to adopt, effective self-governance may well have provided a reasonable substitute for most, although not all, formal government functions. From the Imperial Court’s perspective, however, moving from the latter to the former represented a clear deterioration of its authority and power, and was therefore a course of action that should only have been pursued under circumstances of considerable sociopolitical duress. The great irony was, of course, that this duress was largely produced by the court’s own ideological shackles.

confucianism It is only fitting to end a book about Qing political ideology with some general thoughts on the trajectory of Qing Confucianism. After all, despite the qualitative differences between Qing fiscal ideology and the deontological hostility toward “speaking of profit” that guided earlier generations of fiscal conservatives, the former was, as noted in the Introduction, nonetheless deeply intertwined with the latter, cognitively, linguistically, and politically. The “pragmatic turn” in Qing political thought may seem profoundly unorthodox when compared to traditional Song-Ming Confucian ethical discourse, but it still took place in a world where political arguments were conducted with constant reference to Confucian classical texts, and even the most committed pragmatists – Chen Hongmou, Bao Shichen, Feng Guifen, and others – would still consider themselves part of the Confucian intellectual tradition. The ideological foundations of Qing taxation were still deeply Confucian, although in highly idiosyncratic ways. To some extent, the narrative of Qing fiscal ideology that we have told in this book parallels the broader trajectory of political Confucianism over the course of the dynasty. The turn toward pragmatism went far beyond fiscal thought and policymaking, covering nearly all facets of governance and political conduct. Fiscal pragmatism and empiricism were, as we discussed in previous chapters, double-edged swords: On the one hand, they politically weaponized fiscal conservatism like never before, gaining enormous influence by appealing not only to the political elite’s sense of right and wrong, but also to its most fundamental political self-interests. On the other hand, they also rendered fiscal conservatism vulnerable to empirical falsification, which, once it finally happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thoroughly destroyed the ideology’s intellectual and political standing, relegating it to 24

Chapter 5, Section A.

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near-complete insignificance in the Republican and Communist eras. High reward, high risk. One could, in fact, potentially tell a similar story about Qing Confucianism in general: Following the Ming-Qing transition, a paradigmatic shift toward pragmatism and empiricism offered the Confucian literati an intellectual and political lifeline in times of deep despair. Not only did it help them come to terms with the trauma of Ming collapse by identifying parties, ideas, and policies to blame, but it also offered a clear path forward, indeed a call to scholarly and sociopolitical action: The country could be “reorganized” (jing shi) and the people could be “saved” (ji min) if Confucian scholars could simply muster the courage and wisdom to engage with the world around them on a more pragmatic basis.25 Managing economic production, coordinating commerce, enforcing laws, enhancing social harmony, and regulating state power – for Qing scholars and officials, these were the callings of a new age, giving them a renewed and more concrete sense of purpose, while also shoring up their political cohesion and willingness to serve the new regime. At the same time, the embrace of pragmatism came with significant costs: It encouraged scholars to measure a regime’s success by its ability to generate material welfare for its population, rather than by moral standards of political conduct. More so than previous Confucian intellectual paradigms, it seemed to place a very high value on fu qiang, or “wealth and power.”26 Taken to logical extremes, it may even have encouraged elites to evaluate the fundamental worth of an ideological worldview – their own, in particular – by its material successes and failures. This was all well and good as long as the Qing appeared to be materially successful, which it clearly did through the late eighteenth century, but once the economic and military superiority of western nations, and even of Japan, became painfully obvious in the later nineteenth century, elite confidence, not merely in the Qing state but in Confucianism itself, began to rapidly erode, and eventually collapsed in the twentieth century in spectacular fashion.27 From this perspective, the very same material pragmatism that had once reinvigorated the Confucian elite 25 26

27

See Chapter 4, Section B. See also, Rowe (2001). See, e.g., Orville Schell & John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century (2013); Xu Jinlin (许纪霖), Cong Xunqiu Fuqiang dao Wenming Zijue: Qingmo Minchu Qiangguo Meng de Lishi Shanbian (从寻求富强到文明自觉——清末民 初强国梦的历史嬗变) [From Seeking Prosperity and Power to Civilizational Consciousness: The Historical Transition of the Powerful Nation Dream in the Late Qing], 2010(4) Fudan Xuebao (复旦学报) [Fudan Academic Journal (Social Science)] 1. On the decline of Confucianism, see, e.g., Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (1968) (arguing the fundamental incompatibility between Confucianism and modernity); Benjamin A. Elman, Confucianism and Modernization: A Reconsideration, in Conference Volume for the International Conference on Confucianism and Modernization, 1 (1987); Tu Wei-ming, Bingyi Yu & Zhaolu Lu, Confucianism and Modernity – Insights from an Interview with Tu Wei-ming, 7 China Rev. Int’l 377 (2000). See also the modern intellectual history traced in Kam Louie, Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary China (1980). On the legal dimensions of the Confucian collapse, see Zhang (2019).

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may also have been a major reason for its final disintegration: By allowing the fundamental ideological legitimacy of Confucianism to be evaluated in materially consequentialist terms, rather than deontological ones, it opened the door for its eventual delegitimization in a materially inhospitable world. If this broader narrative is true – a topic for future research, rather than the present volume – then it offers a very different take on the old Confucian maxim of “not speaking of profit”: The gentleman avoids speaking of profit not merely because he is primarily concerned with his personal virtue, but also because he does not wish to normatively expose himself to profit-based criticism. By not speaking of profit, he forces others to evaluate him on the basis of his virtue, rather than his material successes and failures, over which he wields less control. There are powerful lessons somewhere in here for modern politicians, entrepreneurs, religious leaders, and intellectuals alike, but they may be very uncomfortable ones to learn and acknowledge.

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Abbreviations of Sources

Source Huangchao Jingshi Wenbian (皇朝经世文编) Huangming Jingshi Wenbian (皇明经世文编) Zhongguo Lidai Hukou, Tiandi, Tianfu Tongji (中国历 代户口、田地、田赋统计) Chinese First National Historical Archives (中国第一历史档案馆) Zhongguo Jingji Sixiang Shi Ziliao Xuanji: Mingqing Bufen (中国经济思想史资料选辑: 明清部分) Huang Qing Zou Yi (皇清奏議) Gong Zhong Dang (宫中档) Huangchao Jingshi Wen Xu Bian (皇朝经世文续编), Sheng Kang ver. Zhongguo Jindai Jingji Sixiang Ziliao Xuanji (中国近代 经济思想史资料选辑) Huang Chao Jingshi Wen Xu Bian (皇朝经世文续编), Ge Shijun ver.

Abbreviation HCJSWB HMJSWB HKTDTFTJ FNHA JJSXSZL HQZY GZD HCJSWXB_SK JDJJSXSZL HCJSWXB_GSJ

375

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Index

Anhui, 39, 52, 60, 95, 105–106, 123, 143, 205, 228, 236, 247, 271, 284, 286 Bao Shichen, 14, 51, 273, 279, 283, 297, 301, 334, 371 Bao Zuoyong, 226 behavioral economics, 323, 325 Beiyang Fleet, 71 Beiyang regime, 310–311 Boxer Movement, 67, 71, 74, 269 Buddhism, 337 capital/labor price model, 362, 364 capitalism, 19, 30, 45, 335 Catholic church, 337 Chen Hongmou, 236, 265, 270, 282, 371 Chen Sheng and Wu Guang rebellion, 155 Cheng Yaotian, 258 Chongzhen Emperor, 152, 159, 230 Chu Fangqing, 186, 201 cognitive theory, 187, 191, 323 commercial taxes, 6, 8, 10–11, 40, 46, 48, 52, 56, 63, 69, 78, 81, 87, 98, 105–106, 121, 123, 130, 135, 205, 267–268, 283, 305, 310 communism, 335–336, 340–341, 343, 348 confirmation bias, 187, 189, 191–194, 323–324, 340 Confucianism, 13, 15, 17, 20, 25–26, 31, 125, 127–129, 131, 134, 137, 148–149, 153, 158, 162, 174–175, 189, 194, 212, 229, 263, 265, 269, 273, 281, 306, 314, 317, 329, 353, 355–356, 360, 371–372

constitutionalism, 319–320, 353–355, 357, 359 contract, 5, 53 credible commitments, 199, 321, 354, 357 cultural constructs, 77, 328, 330 Dai Zhen, 265 Daoguang Emperor, 34, 55, 59, 96, 211, 249, 251–252, 256, 259–260, 262, 270–271, 273–277, 282–285, 291 Daoism, 337 Deng Xiaoping, 341, 358 deontology, 16, 21, 26, 34, 144–145, 153, 176–177, 182–185, 187, 190, 192, 195, 207, 265, 272, 278, 294, 314, 316–317, 356, 371, 373 Ding Lijun, 299 Dorgon, 42, 161, 163–164, 196, 213, 261 empirical assumptions, 19, 25–26, 29, 295, 298 empirical falsifiability, 194, 328 empirical predictions, 1, 195, 335, 339, 344–345 England, 4–5, 8, 14, 33, 57, 80, 87–88, 99, 109, 200, 302–303, 364, 368 ethnic tensions, 27, 34, 112, 196–197, 260–261, 278, 318 eunuchs, 153, 160 falsifiability, 327 famine relief, 5, 15, 22, 54, 58, 73, 81, 109, 113, 117–118, 122, 131, 133, 138, 148, 178–179, 191, 258, 278, 361, 370 Fan Wencheng, 162, 164, 261

417

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418 Fang Dongshu, 271 Fang Xiaoru, 136–137, 145 Feng Guangxiong, 246–247, 253, 274 Feng Guifen, 290, 295, 297, 299, 301, 304, 334, 371 first mover problem, 90, 308 fiscal quotaism, 159, 197, 199, 205, 213, 216, 218, 222, 248, 252–253, 259–260, 266, 269, 300, 308, 315, 318, 360 fiscal state, 4, 31, 37, 58, 62, 129–130, 132, 135, 138, 155, 267, 300, 313 focal point theory, 35, 278, 282, 322–323 foreign trade tariffs, 6, 91 France, 4, 57, 99 Fu Hanchen, 140, 142 Fu Yi Quan Shu, 164 Fujian, 142, 149, 206, 224, 308 functionalism, 27, 320 Gao Gong, 149, 176, 180 Gold Standard, 194 Gong Zizhen, 256, 258, 273, 277–278 grain tribute, 35, 37, 39, 42–43, 49–51, 57, 60, 65, 67, 91, 100, 110, 118, 130, 140, 142, 167, 245, 250, 252–253, 256, 274, 283–285, 287–288, 290, 295, 297, 308 granary system, 5 Great Depression, 194, 341 Great Divergence, 2–3, 33, 52, 361–362, 368 Gu Yanwu, 16, 39, 142, 169, 174, 176, 185, 263, 265, 270 Guangxu Emperor, 63, 65, 103, 228, 252, 286, 288, 291, 296 Gui E, 140, 142, 148 Guo Songtao, 272, 293, 299 Guo Zhengyu, 146, 150, 155 Hai Rui, 141, 148, 176, 180, 263 Han Dynasty, 127, 183 Han learning, 262, 264–265, 268, 270–272 Hao Yulin, 224 He Changling, 16, 258, 273 head tax, 44–45, 201, 204, 208, 213, 221, 227, 231, 238–239, 356 Hong Liangji, 18, 236, 239, 241, 256, 258, 273, 276, 278, 283 Hu Jiayu, 251, 285–286 Hu Linyi, 52, 276, 284–286, 288, 293, 295, 299 Huaibei region, 95–96, 253, 274 Huainan region, 96 Huang Chao and Wang Xianzhi rebellions, 154–155

Index Huang Zongxi, 83–85, 110, 119, 152, 161, 169–171, 175, 185, 189, 206, 221, 259, 265, 270, 304 Huang Zongxi thesis, 83–85, 110, 119, 189, 221, 259 Huang Zunxian, 302, 307 Hubei, 39, 52, 60, 105, 208, 219, 225, 257, 284, 286, 292, 295, 308 Hunan, 39, 52, 59–60, 101–102, 107, 209, 218, 236, 284–285, 292, 295 individualism/collectivism, 325 informal surcharges, 4, 7, 11, 46–47, 51, 53–55, 57, 61, 64, 67–68, 72, 83, 94, 98–99, 102, 110, 114, 120, 139, 166, 213, 215–216, 219, 221, 227, 249–250, 255, 259, 284–285, 290, 293 informational function of law, 320, 346, 348–349, 353 intellectual history, 27–28, 124, 187, 195, 343, 372 interpretive analysis, 327 intra-Asian comparison, 33, 368 Japan, 2–4, 28, 33, 36, 57, 59, 74, 80–81, 83, 86, 88, 99, 108–109, 117, 302–303, 326, 341, 362, 365–366, 368, 372 Jiang Zemin, 341, 358 Jiang Zhaokui, 246–247, 250–251, 274 Jiaqing Emperor, 47, 54–55, 95, 120, 211, 227, 236, 245, 247, 249–250, 252, 254, 258–259, 261–262, 271, 273–275, 277, 279, 284–285, 291, 304, 312, 369 Jilin, 308, 342 Jin Fu, 201, 208 juanna, 40 Jurchen, 131–132 Kang Youwei, 272, 305 Kangxi Emperor, 34, 44–45, 56, 158, 166, 175, 186–187, 195, 198, 200–204, 207, 209, 212–214, 217–218, 220–221, 224–226, 231–233, 236, 239, 241, 245, 248, 254, 259, 261, 300, 356, 370 kaozheng, 265 Korea, 147, 362 land and head tax, 37, 39, 43, 49, 51, 67–68, 91, 142, 165, 203, 245, 250, 284 land surveys, 23–24, 30, 35, 44, 46, 118, 141, 150, 159, 197, 199, 203, 205–206, 208–209, 211, 213, 218–219, 223–226, 228–230, 235,

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419

Index 239–240, 242–243, 248, 254, 260, 262, 266, 268, 275, 280–281, 283, 290, 295–296, 299, 301, 314–315, 348, 356 land tax, 26, 45–46, 67, 95, 100, 109, 120, 131, 144, 163, 167, 173, 195, 200, 202–203, 209, 212–213, 215–216, 218, 222, 224, 228, 239, 246, 248, 252–253, 259, 274, 287, 290–291, 302, 308, 356 land taxes, 8, 176, 186, 202, 204, 247 Li Bing, 139–140 Li Hongzhang, 272, 290, 296 Li Mengyang, 145 Li Zicheng, 152, 154, 162, 229 Liang Qichao, 243, 297, 302, 307 Liang Shiyi, 311 liberalism, 336, 338 lijia system, 41 lijin tax, 62, 95, 98–99, 102, 106, 111, 121, 293–294 Liu Hongru, 166, 200, 202 Liu Kunyi, 61, 285–286, 288 Long Qirui, 256 lougui, 46, 214, 218, 247 Lower Yangtze, 32, 47, 65, 69, 99, 122–123, 135, 139–141, 151, 163, 165, 175, 201, 214–215, 217, 219, 222, 268, 271, 283, 285, 288, 290, 292, 295, 298 Lu Longqi, 201, 206 Lu Zhuo, 224–226, 244 Luo Bingzhang, 61, 284, 288, 291–292 Ma Duanlin, 133 Malthusianism, 18, 24, 26, 30, 35, 48, 56, 202, 208, 211, 221, 229, 231–232, 234–235, 237, 240–241, 243–244, 248, 256, 258–259, 261–262, 266, 268, 271, 275–277, 280–281, 283, 287, 293–294, 296, 298–299, 301, 307, 312, 314–316, 347, 351, 360 Manchu, 27, 34, 38, 43, 91, 112, 114–115, 143, 152–154, 156, 158–159, 161, 163, 191, 196, 218, 230, 233, 261, 278, 318 Mao Zedong, 341 Marxism, 13, 18–19, 27–28, 30, 154, 178, 335, 338, 343, 347 meltage fee (huohao), 46, 49, 70, 91, 213–216, 219, 221, 233, 249–250, 276, 285 Mencius, 126–127, 134, 265, 281 military campaign tax (Ming), 144, 150, 179 military spending, 10, 42, 48, 54, 60, 79, 81, 109, 131, 133, 136, 138, 144, 162–163, 166–167, 245, 255, 259, 278, 369

Ming collapse, 18, 21, 26, 28, 34, 42, 91, 152–153, 156, 158–160, 162, 164, 168–169, 174–175, 177–180, 182, 184, 189–190, 194–195, 197, 200, 206, 219, 229–230, 252, 260, 262, 276, 288, 312, 314, 316, 318, 360, 372 Ming Dynasty, 4, 21, 39, 114, 135–136, 138, 141, 143–144, 152–153, 156, 161–162, 167, 169, 179, 182, 206, 353 Ming History (Ming Shi), 229–230, 260 Ming-Qing transition, 7, 16, 21, 34, 42, 44, 126, 153, 158–159, 167, 169, 173, 177, 180, 182, 190, 194, 196, 200, 229, 260, 314, 317, 337, 372 miscellaneous taxes, 40, 64 Mongol, 26, 131–132, 135–136, 138, 154, 178 Nationalist Government, 340–341 Nian Rebellion, 5, 63, 103, 112–113, 142, 204, 296 Opium War, 33, 50, 59, 65, 69, 72–73, 97, 114, 258, 270, 277 Ottoman Empire, 4, 57 paradigm shifts, 14, 29, 126, 158, 160, 194, 197, 221, 313–314, 333, 339, 343 peasant rebellions, 21, 26, 112, 114, 144, 151, 153, 155–156, 179, 182, 190, 193, 230, 255, 316 People’s Republic of China, 6, 23, 35, 88, 195, 341, 365, 368 property, 5, 14, 40, 135, 171, 235, 277, 329, 336, 347, 350, 354, 357–358, 368 Qian Daxin, 258 Qianlong Emperor, 32, 47, 50, 54, 94, 120, 198, 211, 217, 219–220, 222–223, 225, 227–231, 233–235, 237, 239–241, 245–250, 257–259, 261, 263, 265, 273, 275, 277, 283, 285, 291, 295, 304, 356, 369 Qing Code, 226, 306 Qing pragmatism, 265–266 Qiu Jun, 148–149, 154, 180 rationalist theories, 9–10, 12, 15, 17, 25, 32, 34, 76, 78, 85, 88–90, 107–108, 110, 119, 124–125, 198, 259, 268–269, 312–313, 318–319, 321–322, 324, 328–329, 331, 333, 339, 360 realist learning (shixue), 265, 268

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420 Republican China, 2, 5, 12, 35, 72, 112, 116–118, 195, 252, 269, 310, 316, 341, 372 rule of law, 192–193, 336, 342, 353 Russia, 4, 8, 10, 33, 79, 87–88, 104, 109 salt tax, 40, 44, 63, 91, 93, 95, 97–98, 102, 104, 155, 218, 246, 248, 253–255, 274, 300, 310–311 Shaanxi, 144, 152, 162, 178, 246, 254–255, 257, 291, 308, 340–341 Shanxi, 40, 105, 123, 162, 203, 246, 291, 296, 308 shengchi ri fan, 232 shengshi zi ding, yong bu jia fu, 44 Sheng Yu, 299 Shunzhi Emperor, 43, 161–163, 165–166, 168, 186–187, 196, 198, 200, 202, 205, 207–208, 214, 225, 245, 262 Sichuan, 32, 61, 67, 105, 152, 198, 203–204, 208, 218, 223, 243, 254–255, 257, 259, 283, 290–292 Single Whip Laws, 125, 140–141, 143, 146, 148, 150, 162, 170, 173, 175, 203, 206, 225 Sino-Japanese War, 2, 68, 70, 72–73, 81, 116, 267, 292, 299 Song Dynasty, 4, 15, 17, 23, 26, 31, 34, 58, 87–88, 109, 128–132, 134–135, 138, 144, 149, 153–154, 156, 170, 174, 176–177, 180, 182, 184, 186, 189, 200, 207, 220, 244, 258, 261, 263, 265–266 Song learning, 182, 262, 264–265, 270–273 South America, 59 speaking of profit (yan li), 127, 145–147, 158, 171, 176–177, 180, 185, 187, 189, 263–264, 266, 273, 278, 314, 347, 356, 371, 373 state capacity, 2, 7, 15, 36, 53, 119, 191, 271, 311, 354, 357, 361, 369–370 statism, 195, 304–306, 311–312, 361 Sun Yat-sen, 311, 340 Sun Yuting, 251, 285 Taiping, 5, 7, 9, 12, 35, 38, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63–65, 68, 70, 73, 79–80, 96–97, 100, 103, 108, 112–113, 117–118, 123, 211, 228, 238, 257, 267, 270, 275–276, 281–282, 284–286, 288, 290–292, 295, 315, 370 tan ding ru di, 202 Tan Sitong, 297, 305, 339

Index Tang Chenglie, 256, 275 Tang Dynasty, 58, 128 Tang Jian, 271 Tang-Song transition, 173 Tao Shu, 95, 97, 252–253, 273, 276 tax state, 31, 245, 360 Tibet, 48, 50, 79, 92–93 Tilly thesis, 79, 108 Tongcheng School, 270–271, 273, 280 Tongzhi Emperor, 61, 201, 204, 252, 285–286, 289, 291–292 Treaty of Shimonoseki, 299, 309 Two Taxes Law, 128–129, 141, 220 United States, 4, 23, 57, 302, 336, 348, 351, 353 Wang Anshi, 129–130, 132–134, 176, 180, 182, 220 Wang Fuzhi, 169–170, 172–173, 182–183, 185–186, 201, 265, 304 Wang Mingluan, 106 Wang Shiduo, 256, 275–276, 283 Wang Yun, 133 Wanli era precedents, 164–166, 176 war indemnities, 10, 38, 63, 68, 70, 73, 116–117, 129, 267, 299, 303, 307 Weberian theory, 13, 15, 29, 85 Wei Yijie, 165, 167, 196, 207 Wei Yuan, 16, 253, 258, 273, 277, 279 Wei Zhongxian, 160 White Lotus Rebellion, 50, 94, 116, 259, 291 Wuxu reformers, 299, 302–305, 307 Xianfeng Emperor, 55, 61, 252, 276, 285, 287, 289, 291, 295 Xinjiang, 48, 50, 79, 92–93, 235, 296 Xiong Xiling, 311 Xue Fucheng, 107, 272, 297–299 Yan Fu, 305 Yang Du, 306 Yang Yan, 128–129, 133–134, 141, 182, 220 yanglian yin, 47, 215 Yangwu Movement, 63, 71–73, 282, 297, 299, 301, 305 Yao Nai, 271, 273 Yellow Turbans, 155 Yin Zhuangtu, 235 Yongzheng Emperor, 32, 34, 45–47, 49–50, 52, 54–56, 60, 69, 91, 93, 120, 198, 203, 209, 211–212, 214, 216–217, 219–220,

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421

Index 222–224, 228, 231–233, 236, 239–241, 245, 248–250, 259, 261, 276, 283, 285, 290, 296, 312, 370 Yuan Dynasty, 5, 26, 34, 58, 125, 133–136, 144, 154, 184, 252, 277 Yuan Shikai, 310–311 Yuan Xian, 252 Zeng Guofan, 52, 111, 271, 289, 294, 299 Zhang Gui, 133 Zhang Huiyan, 258 Zhang Juzheng, 39, 125, 138, 140, 142–143, 147–148, 150, 170, 180, 203, 206, 220, 229, 317

Zhang Tingyu, 39, 225–226 Zhang Zhidong, 297–299, 301, 305–306, 308 Zhejiang, 39, 51, 53, 135, 141, 179, 224, 255, 290 Zheng Guanying, 103, 107 Zhu Gui, 236 Zhu Shi, 204, 223–224 Zhu Xi, 131, 134, 149, 174, 182, 265 Zhu Yuanzhang, 137, 154 Zou Yigui, 226 Zuo Zongtang, 289, 296

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995955.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995955.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press