Week 3: Traditional China

Traditional China

• Economic Systems
• State – Society Relationships
The Maturation of the Market Economy
Maturation of a Market Economy in Ming China
• The Hongwu Emperor envisioned an economy of self-sufficient farmers.
• However, after 1500 there was commercial development across China.
• This was based on growing agricultural productivity and the growth of a
monetarized economy.
• Rural industrial developed.
• Cash crops such as cotton and silk grew and were the base.
Maturation of a Market Economy in Ming China

• Interregional trade led to regional specialization:

“The central Yangzi valley provinces of Hunan and Hubei shipped
surplus rice downriver to Jiangnan, while ocean- going ships carried rice
from the Pearl River Delta to Fujian.”
Maturation of a Market Economy in Ming China

• Private silk production became much more important than state

production.
• The division of labor became more complex as producers
increasingly specialized in different parts of the production process.
• This generated what economic historians call “Smithian Growth”.
Constructing Domestic Order
Social and Political Order in Europe and China
• Europe: Nobles, Clergy, Commercial Elites
• Late imperial China: no estates; notions of class did not matter to the
construction of political order.
The units of social order were families, lineages, and villages.
• Horizontal cliques vs. vertical bureaucratic ties
Local Communities
• In England, local authorities sustained a tradition of independence.

• Political community in feudal Europe was rooted in local settings.

• The state-making process centralized the extraction and control over

resources without having a major impact on (local) political
community.
Tocqueville
• Tocqueville on Chinese central administrative control.
• The equilibrium political position: agrarian empire.
• A Neo-Confucian agenda: ways for local elites promote social tranquility and
popular welfare.
• Local social order and nongovernmental actors.
“China appears to me to present the most perfect instance of that species of well-
being which a highly centralized administration may furnish to its subjects.
Travelers assure us that the Chinese have tranquility without happiness, industry
without improvement, stability without strength, and public order without public
morality. The condition of society there is always tolerable, never excellent. I
imagine that when China is opened to European observation, it will be found to
contain the most perfect model of a centralized administration that exists in the
universe. (Tocqueville 1960, 1:94)”
Public sphere
• Nineteenth-century changes in state-society relations:
 Local elites assumed ever-larger responsibilities.

• “Public sphere" (Habermas, 1989): a realm of public opinion and political

activity that emerged in postfeudal European societies.
Public sphere in China
• A Chinese variant of the public sphere: The roles of the gentry in late Ming
and early Qing society.

• Also, new urban centers in the nineteenth century.

• Often omitted are less urban and less economically developed regions.
Granaries
• The eighteenth-century state's system for subsistence management included monthly
price reports for grains in every prefecture of the empire as well as weather and
harvest reports.

• Compared to eighteenth century practices, granaries in some places did become

more of an elite responsibility, since officials by themselves became increasingly
unable or unwilling to sustain granaries by themselves.
Local Schools
• Strategies of moral control resembled those of material control.
• Community schools (shexue)
• Charity schools (yixue)
• Role of community leaders
• Lower Yangzi vs. Border regions
• Village lecture system (Xiangyue): elites without formal bureaucratic positions
who recognized their Confucian responsibilities to preach correct behavior.

• Baojia system: registering households created an institutional nexus between

family and state to regulate the people's virtue (Dutton 1992).
Jiangnan model of elite rule
• Elites had played a salient role in local affairs since the late Ming.
• Late 19th century, more local elites became part of the local government.
• In the case of managing granaries:
• No clear divisions of responsibilities; no delegation of authority,
resources and responsibilities; routine surveillance and extraordinary
investigations from the central government.
Transition into Modernity
• Modernization: disappearance of rural granaries, demise of Confucian education
• Late twentieth-century conditions no longer fit the conventional narrative of
modernization.
• Rural subsistence management reemerged after 1949 as a basic political challenge.
 Central government officials faced difficulties moving grain surpluses.
• Differences with Europe:
 The role of kinship in state formation
 The lineage as the basis for state efforts
• The relationship among Chinese elites, local governments, and central state: classic work by
Philip Kuhn (1975).