China Traditional at Its Peak: Achievements and Problems
John K. Fairbank This selection from John K. Fairbanks' magistral survey, The Great Chinese Revolution, assesses the traditional system under the Qing (Ch'ing) dynasty as it had developed by the early nineteenth century. It describes a China that still impressed contemporary European observers. The commercialization and domestic trade that had begun to grow under the Song (Sung) and Ming had reached far higher levels. In 1800, and perhaps as late as 1850, China was still, all in all, probably more prosperous than Europe; average welfare levels were probably higher. But China by then was rapidly falling behind technologically as Europe forged ahead with its industrial revolution. The system had begun to run out of steam, with no new technology boosting production to support a still growing population that had more than doubled since the seventeenth century. In other respects too, the traditional system proved incapable of adjusting adequately to the mounting population pressures. The imperial administration, always a thin layer, was stretched beyond its ability to deal with both local and national problems. Official and private corruption became a growing problem, and there were the beginnings of widespread dissatisfaction, demoralization, and even revolt. Fairbank here adroitly summarizes recent scholarship on this period and gives us a vivid picture of the Great Tradition as it approached its steep decline after about 1850.
WHEN WE LOOK at China in 1800 the first thing that strikes the eye is a remarkable paradox: the institutional structure of the society, especially the government, was showing little capacity for change, but the people and therefore the economy were undergoing rapid and tremendous growth. Until recently this paradox remained largely unnoticed. It may well be called a contradiction between substructure and superstructure. China's modern history began with the Opium War of 1840 both in the thinking of the Western powers that invaded China in the nineteenth century and also in the thinking of the Marxist revolutionaries who have represented the latest phase of that invasion. Early foreign observers noticed that the structure of government from Ming to Ch'ing had hardly altered, the tribute system for handling foreign relations remained active at least in the ritual forms of the Ch'ing court, and the government had not noticeably expanded or developed in comparison with what the Jesuits had reported three hundred years earlier. The result was a European impression of an "unchanging" China. Recent research has made it plain that this was a very superficial judgment that applied only and mainly to institutional structures like the bureaucratic state and perhaps the family system. The facts of Chinese life were far otherwise. As of 1800 the Chinese people had just completed a doubling in numbers that was even more massive than the contemporary growth of population in Europe and America. With numbers came trade. Aside from some petty exactions by imperial customs collectors, the vast Chinese empire was a free-trade area, more populous than all of Europe. Production of crops for comparative advantage was far advanced: the Lower Yangtze provinces specialized in rice production while the provinces just to the north produced cotton for exchange. Craftsmen in many centers produced specialties recognized all over the country:
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chinaware at Ching-te-chen, iron cooking pans in Canton, silk brocade from Hangchow and Soochow. Enormous fleets of Chinese sailing vessels (junks) plied the highway of the Yangtze River and its tributaries, while thousands of others sailed up and down the China coast, taking southern fruit, sugar, and artifacts to Manchuria and bringing back soybeans and furs. One early British observer was amazed to calculate that in the 1840s more tonnage passed through the port of Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze than through the port of London, which was already the hub of Western commerce. Exuberant growth and lethargic institutions bear upon one of the great conundrums of modern Chinese history--China's failure in spite of her high level of technology and resources to achieve a breakthrough into an industrial revolution comparable to that in contemporary Europe. This great contrast between China and the Atlantic community in the nineteenth century has given rise to various explanatory theories. One of the most widespread has been the "we was robbed" notion, that China's growth into capitalism was impeded by Western imperialism and its jealous and baleful repression of Chinese enterprise. This theory except among true believers has been exploded, not least because it assumes the primacy of China's foreign trade in her productive processes. To be sure the imperialism of the unequal treaty system after 1842 held China back in that a protective tariff was prevented by treaty while foreigners lorded it over Chinese in the sanctuary of the treaty ports. Amassing the numerous details of imperialist iniquity creates a quite adequate basis for patriotic humiliation and anger. But this by no means settles the economic problem. The non-emergence of capitalism in the Chinese economy goes back much further than the Opium War and the era of imperialism. The basic fact was that China could not increase her productivity per person and so break out of what has been called the "high-level equilibrium trap," the situation where a high level of pre-steamengine technology remained in balance with a circular-flow of production and consumption that inhibited investment in industrial development. One part of this trap was the enormous muscle supply that made machinery unnecessary. Another reason was that there was little creation of credit or accumulation of capital available for investment. The dynasty and ruling class lived by tax gathering more than by trade. In effect the China that entered modern times a century and a half ago had achieved a high degree of homeostasis, the capacity to persist in a steady state. Like a human body whose selfrighting mechanisms maintain levels of temperature, blood pressure, respiration, heartbeat, blood sugar, and the like within small ranges of normal variation, China's body politic and social had institutionalized a whole series of practices that would tend to keep it going along established lines: salt distribution seasoned the cereal diet, night soil fertilized the vegetables, pigs were raised on human offal, dikes prevented floods, government granaries ensured against famine. The mutual-responsibility system automatically policed the neighborhood, performance of family obligations gave security to its members, the doctrine of the Three Bonds tied the individual into the family and the family into the state, while the examinations inoculated the new talent with orthodoxy. The "law of avoidance" (that no official could serve in his native province) kept down nepotism. Rebels founded new dynasties only to perpetuate the system. This old China was an artful structure, full of local variety within its overall plan, decentralized in material ways but unified by a ruling class with a sense of form and a self-image created by history. Let us begin by getting a picture of life in the village. The "average" peasant in the 1800s, if we
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guess from the data of later times, probably had a family of five, including two unmarried children and a parent. A big house with several courtyards, sheltering the nuclear families of two or three sons, was only for the affluent. A peasant dwelling had a beaten earth floor and thatched roof in the North, stone and tile in the rainy South. Northerners might all sleep on a wide mat-covered brick bed with flues within it for warming in winter. Universally windows were covered with paper, not glass. The latrine was next to or above the pig pen. Water came in buckets on a shoulder pole from a village well. Clothes were washed without soap by beating in well water or beside a stream, canal, or pond. This "average" farmer probably was part owner-cultivator and part tenant. In any case he and his family worked three or four small strips of land at some distance from one another, carrying hoes or sickles back and forth, producing mainly for their own subsistence. Near cites and trade routes they might add cash crops. Their life was lived mainly in the village among neighbors from day to day, punctuated by regular trips to the market town, say, one hour's walk away, where seasonal festivals, itinerant storytellers, or a theater troupe would enliven the year. Not having been peasants, we are hard put to imagine their inner consciousness. We know the rational-superstitious balance was different and the horizon of concerns vastly more limited, but while the peasant's basic human feelings would no doubt be intelligible to us, there were other attitudes, social drives, and values that would be hard for us to grasp or accept. Supposing "human nature is the same everywhere," still its social manifestations may differ enormously. Village neighbors, being fixed and lacking automobiles, played larger roles than city or suburban neighbors do with us. Communal activities included not only wedding and funeral ceremonies and the attendant feasts but also mutual arrangements for crop watching against thievery, and defense against bandits. In fact Chinese villagers formed associations, made contracts, and organized collective activities in many lines without reference to officialdom. These arrangements were normally among households and by being collectively accepted formed a legal structure. Thus families who claimed a common ancestor formed a lineage, and a lineage often held property to maintain graves and rites of ancestor veneration, or to keep up instruction in a school available for lineage offspring. Farm households might also join in irrigation projects and agree contractually on the allocation of water rights. They might agree to support religious worship in a temple or enter into a business enterprise to mine coal or sell sugar. A lot went on among the people beneath the notice of the state. Another thing we know is that villages as units had a lively sense of self-interest, and violent feuds with neighboring villages often resulted, sometimes over water rights, boundaries, or other tangible issues, sometimes from more abstract causes of sectarian faith or accidents of personality or history. Sporadic warfare might result, one community, sect, or confederation against another. Such struggles focused on purely local issues far beneath the provincial, to say nothing of the national level. In short, violent strife, in regions so far studied, seems to have been built into the agrarian social system. The resulting slaughter of enemy villagers might be accompanied by pillage, rape, barbarous torture, and wholesale destruction. The bucolic life was often far from peaceful. Like any human structure, Chinese society existed in tension, and by the nineteenth century the
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equilibrium of its parts had grown precarious. First, the balance between land and people was upset by increase of numbers. The mechanism of population growth in eighteenth-century China, when numbers more than doubled, is still largely unknown. Long-continued domestic peace had helped. So did quickerripening rice strains from Southeast Asia and new crops of maize (corn), peanuts, and sweet potatoes from America. The faster-ripening rice permitted more double-cropping. The American crops could grow in sandy margins where rice could not. Moreover, migrants from the eastern provinces opened up new land in the Northwest and Southwest, terracing hilly regions not formerly cultivated. The population as it grew produced more night soil to be used as fertilizer for the fields. Possibly diseases were better controlled, as by variolation to prevent smallpox. Other factors may still be discovered. Behind the enormous further increase to about 430 million by 1850 lay the fact of a broad base of perhaps 150 million to start with about 1700, so that a very modest rate of growth was quite enough to crowd the landscape. Long-term motives included the Chinese love of children and investment in them as old-age insurance. It was a sacred duty to beget sons to carry on the family line and the pious reverence for its ancestors at the household shrine and in the clan temple. The well-to-do invested in secondary wives and progeny instead of the motorized equipment of today's household. More people meant more hands in the family economy. Thus conscience and calculation both led to more births. It was an uninhibited procreation like the spawning of fish in the sea, since marital sexuality was the last refuge of privacy and still (unlike today) the least-regulated activity in community life. This growth of numbers was naturally accompanied by growth in the commercial economy. All sorts of economic indicators showed this: more junks plying along the coast; more banks set up by wealthy Ningpo families in the new port of Shanghai; more business for the remittance bankers of central Shansi, who almost monopolized the transfer of official funds; more exports of Fukien teas and Chekiang or Kiangsu silks by way of Canton; and more imports of opium to meet a craving for the drug that was in itself a symptom of demoralization. Increase of trade, however, did not break out of the pattern of government licensing of commercial monopolies and the limited aim of collecting tax quotas without encouraging investment for growth. Let us cite examples. If one tries to name one commodity almost universally needed by the American people today it would, I suppose, be gasoline. In the old China it was salt, a dietary necessity for eaters of cereals and vegetables who seldom saw meat. To pursue the analogy (for what it is worth), the American oil barons of Dallas today would find their eighteenth-century counterparts in the salt merchants of Yangchow, whose opulent lifestyle was the envy of the age. Since the Yangchow merchants differed in being under the government, not independent of it, their history may be instructive. To begin with, the government salt monopoly had come down from ancient times. In the early 1800s salt was produced variously by evaporation of sea water on the coast, by boiling brine lifted from hundreds of deep salt wells in Szechwan (some went a thousand feet down, with bamboo tubing), or from certain inland salt mines or lakes. Salt production was handled by
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monopoly merchants, whose hereditary rights supported wealthy families. These rights or kang allowed the monopolists to sell the product to distribution merchants, who managed the actual business of transporting salt under license. A shipment so licensed and registered could be delivered only to the point specified, where government depots handled the complex local distribution to the populace. Salt intendants in each province, in a complex, self-sustaining bureaucratic network, collected license fees and sales taxes at the main points of production and distribution. The Board of Revenue at Peking got about a sixth of its total receipts from this monopoly. As late as the 1890s, when the land tax and Maritime Customs duties were estimated at 32 million taels each, the salt revenue was estimated at 13 million. The salt monopoly was a great device for accumulating merchant capital and at the same time for corruption between merchants and officials. One index to the vitality of the system is the reform urged by the scholar-official Wei Yuan in the producing region of North Kiangsu. In the 1832-33 reform the large monopoly rights of the kang merchants were supplemented by smaller shipments sold by a ticket system (p'iao), so that smaller purchasers with less capital could function in the trade. Even so, by the time official salt reached its consumption market, its price had been raised by the successive commission, transport, and handling charges, including the official peculation normal to such operations. This made a considerable incentive for smuggling. Perhaps half the total salt was illegally produced and distributed by smuggling gangs on more difficult, roundabout routes, but the cost of preventing this smuggling would have eaten up any gain in receipts. On the other hand, the smugglers could never take the government's basic profits away from it. So officials and smugglers coexisted. In their heyday the salt merchants, organized in their own guild and with their own temple, were the leading social class in places like Yangchow or Hankow. As the most wealthy merchant stratum, they increasingly supported philanthropies and were called upon for contributions to flood control, defense, and other public enterprises. The reform represented by the ticket system in the early nineteenth century of course opened the door for private enterprisers on a smaller scale than the big hereditary monopolists. Bureaucratic control was reduced during the Taiping war, after which came what Rowe calls the "privatization" of the salt trade, part of a general trend. Suppose your family firm (hang) had belonged to the Ningpo tea guild in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Your best supply of teas would come from the Bohea Hills on the upper waters of the Min River upstream from the port of Foochow. Tea of course was produced in many parts of South China. A family farm might have its own tea bushes. But the combination of soil and climate in the Bohea Hills, plus the traditional skill of nimble-fingered young women in picking, sorting, roasting ("firing") and otherwise processing black and green teas (differently processed), allowed export to fastidious customers all over China as well as to the European East India companies at Canton. Batches ("chops") from local producers would be purchased by traveling buyers ("guest merchants," k'o-shang), who arranged for export from the region. In season, the long lines of tea bearers would have poles attached to their burdens so that, when they stopped to rest, the tea packages would never touch the ground. This was the scene explored in disguise by the pioneer botanist Robert Fortune, who in the 1850s collected tea plants for British India, where government quality control eventually let Indian tea eclipse Chinese tea on the world market.
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Suppose your Ningpo tea firm had established its base of operations in the rapidly growing port of Shanghai. Ningpo was a much older emporium, a port for tributary trade with Japan in medieval times. Like Canton, Foochow, Shanghai, and Tientsin, Ningpo was situated several miles up a river so that its port could not easily be raided by pirates. As the trade expanded, the Ningpo tea guild, like Ningpo bankers, became prominent in Shanghai's domestic trade. If you were shipping a tea cargo five hundred miles up the Yangtze to a trade center like Hankow, you would probably get a berth on one of the Lower Yangtze types of trading junks. Arriving in Hankow after many days, you would find a very busy port on the peninsula formed by the Yangtze and its tributary the Han River coming in from the northwest. Opposite across the Yangtze on the south would be the provincial walled capital of Wu-ch'ang, part of what is now called Wuhan. In Hankow you would deal with agents or brokers to sell and distribute your tea. The export of teas through Canton grew to twenty million pounds a year in the last days of the East India Company monopoly. Yet one could hardly conclude that the foreign export trade was more than one area of growth. Supposing a pound of tea supplied an affluent person for a year, the Chinese domestic market certainly had many more than twenty million affluent customers for the Bohea product. One secret of China's domestic trade after the eighteenth century was water transport. Water routes north from Canton, for example, went over one or the other of two passes, with short portages to reach the river systems of Kiangsi and Hunan. Even in the arid North the Han River route went several hundred miles toward Sian, while in East China the Grand Canal became an artery of private commerce as well as official foodstuffs. China's muscle-power resources, used with the greater efficiency of water transport, could obviate the comparatively high cost of moving goods long distances by land. Study of Hankow, the most commercial part of the three Wuhan cities, illustrates commercial development, since Hankow was a focal point of exchange on trade routes coming from all parts of China: (1) The route by the Hsiang River in Hunan brought spices and other tropical products that reached China through Canton, as well as some of the woolens that the British East India Company was obliged to unload on the Hong merchants, who found little use for them in the local heat. In return down this route, Canton received rice from Central China. (2) The Upper Yangtze route above Hankow used different vessels, and so the rice from Szechwan for the Lower Yangtze was often transshipped at Hankow if not Ichang. The timber production in Szechwan eventually gave way in the late nineteenth century to Szechwan opium destined for Shanghai. (3) Up t he Han River to the Northwest went brick tea for the overland trade to Russia. The lower reaches of the Han were a cotton-growing area. (4) Hankow's major trade, of course, was down the Yangtze shipping Hupei and Hunan rice to help feed the Lower Yangtze cities and contribute to the rice shipments that went up the Grand Canal to Peking. From the Lower Yangtze came the salt shipments collected at Yangchow from the coastal producing area north of Shanghai. Rice and salt were both essential to the Chinese diet. The extensive exchanges through Hankow argue for the thesis that by the middle of the eighteenth century if not before China had a genuine national market, in which supply from any sector might meet demands from anywhere else. Of course this applied only to certain commodities. The cellular self-sufficiency of local areas still characterized most of the
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economy. Like the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe or the onset of a commercial revolution in China, the date when a national market emerged depends on what weight you give to what evidence. The rise of China's national market can be measured by the growth of specialized merchant groups, such as wholesalers, retailers, itinerant peddlers, all overlain by a stratum of brokers and commission agents, who offered their services to principals at a distance in the interregional trade. One symptom of the rise of commerce had been the proliferation in the eighteenth century of native-place associations, generally known as guilds, which were set up primarily to facilitate merchants' activities. Most guilds represented counties or prefectures (groups of counties) rather than whole provinces. Other guilds were devoted to certain trades, and sometimes the two were combined, as in for example the Ningpo teamen's guild. The guild provided the facilities of a hostel, a meeting place, an acknowledged membership, and a capacity to represent group interests, as in organizing a boycott or registering complaints. Another guild function was arbitration of commercial disputes, and trade guilds also of course provided warehouse facilities. They were entirely unofficial agencies, though the officials might acknowledge their existence. A guild hall would be a series of buildings surrounded by a co mpound wall, not unlike a yamen. The formal entrance would lead through the major halls for meetings and observances, while smaller quarters along the sides provided work and living space. The cultural functions of guilds included religious veneration of the patron deity or historic figure reverenced by the guild. The Hui-chou Guild at Hankow had as its patron Chu Hsi while the Shao-hsing Guild had Wang Yangming. Thus the merchants honored these of idols the scholar-class. The facilities might include not only dormitories for people passing through but also schools for education in preparation for examinations, and possibly an opera stage. Guilds took on the regulation of commerce in place of the local government. In certain matters the entire guild might act as a unit, for instance in setting regulations or in guild boycotts. In fact guilds did about everything except industrial production. Both Rotary and Kiwanis, if they had functioned in the old China's commercial centers, would have been considerably impressed. Guilds were financed by entrance fees. They would also make investments in real estate, and money might be raised by a bond issue. Rent from shops and other properties might be considerable. The Shensi-Shansi Guild at Hankow had a fine temple and hostelry and rebuilt a section of the city, from which it collected valuable rents. After the Taiping Rebellion the entire complex was rebuilt. Guilds served the community in a variety of ways. Philanthropic activities were important-- providing food for the poor, taking care of public thoroughfares, building bridges and improving the water supply, assisting in firefighting, including the construction of fire lanes where buildings would be removed (the firemen would use water-pumping equipment). In time of need they contributed to local defense. All of this represented Confucian "publicmindedness." Thus the guild organization moved toward providing municipal services as a responsibility. They were still another symptom of the strength of the private merchant community.
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Between organization by place and organization by trade, the guild system presented an extremely complicated and internally differentiated structure. During the nineteenth century the creation of trade guilds was the major area of growth in the system. As time went on the combination of native-place guilds with others from the same general area produced larger structures. The spurt in growth of guilds, for example at Hankow, in the late nineteenth century was a new phase in a domestic development long under way. Naturally the whole guild structure sought official recognition and patronage. In fact the cultivation of official connections was essential for their welfare. Many merchants acquired gentry status by purchase of degrees if not by examination. Inevitably the major guild organizations in a city might band together in a larger organization by a system of linkages or confederations. Guild alliances proved most useful in affecting economic policy, if necessary by boycotts. All this verged upon a kind of municipal government, especially in a time of common need as in the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). From this background it is easy to see that the Chinese chambers of commerce that were put together in the 1900s as innovations were little more than a further stage in the kind of merchant-gentry municipal organization that had already grown up. Thus we can conclude that, while the Western impact gradually mounted to become unsettling in the 1890s, before that time there had been a natural domestic growth of private commercial-social organization. This trend included the increasing dependence of the state on revenues from commerce together with less-stringent regulation of it. This latter relaxation of regulation was part of the provincial officials' effort to raise greater revenues from an expanding local trade. In the nineteenth century the organization of trade was getting beyond the family firm, and true partnerships suggestive of joint stock companies were being set up. Their trading operations had to pay great attention to the multiform Chinese currency system, in which each locality and each trade might have its own unit of account, the differential ounce of silver (tael), that required a lot of bookkeeping. Economists, to be sure, revel in aggregate data, but such are unavailable for 1800. While we can cite evidence of tendencies toward a national market, we lack overall statistics to position it on a scale between medieval and modern. Not unnaturally the British and American merchants at the new treaty ports (which entered into their heyday after the Taiping Rebellion had been quelled in 1864) attributed the growth of trade to their own influence as an arm of the world market. This view was no more wrong than the usual foreigner's preoccupation with his own small picture of China. In fact, however, the rise of treaty-port trade in the late nineteenth century was in large part a revival of the vigorous communal life already present in pre-Rebellion China. For example, the brick-tea trade to Russia in the modern centuries was only a continuation of the tea-for-horses exchange with the Mongols set as early as the Sung period. In short, tea had been a principal export to the barbarians long before the arrival of the East India companies by sea. As a commodity produced in some regions but consumed in all, tea had at one time lent itself to government monopoly. The natural instinct of Chinese officials in late imperial times was to get it under some sort of license control by setting up monopoly merchants who could collect an official tax. Chinese licensed monopolists were of course anathema to the foreign traders of the new free-trade era and were the subject of much consular correspondence
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with local officials. The actual regulation of the trade, in which tea samples might greatly vary from the consignments received and quality control was therefore a principal task, was undertaken by the tea guilds themselves. One of their functions was to maintain standards in the trade and ensure its regularity in opposition to the get-rich-quick operations of Western entrepreneurs. The failure of the Chinese government to step in and ensure nationwide quality standards for the tea trade led by the twentieth century to Japan and India taking the world market away from China. But in retrospect this failure looks like a result of the decentralization of China's economic life, in other words the domination of trade by the private merchants organized in their guilds. In any case the maturity of merchant organization under guilds did not produce entrepreneurs intent on investment in industrial production. Quite the contrary, it was probably a disincentive to European-type capitalism. One essential for industrial investments is the availability of credit, but here again China's undoubted development had its limitations. The credit structure that facilitated China's domestic commerce began at the lowest level with the pawnbroker and usurer, sometimes the same person, who provided small sums to people in need. At the top level before the arrival of foreigners, the transfer of credit as well as of official funds interregionally was handled by the remittance banks that centered among families in the Fen River Valley in Central Shansi. By establishing nationwide branches, often tied in by bonds of kinship, a Shansi bank in one region could receive funds and issue an order on a branch bank in another region, where the funds in question would be made available at a slight discount for the transfer charge. In between these top and bottom levels were several categories of large and small money shops or "native banks," as the foreigners called them (ch'ien-chuang). The small ones might serve merely their local residential communities, but the large ones were usually connected with chains of native banks extending along trade routes or between major cities. Such chains could, of course, be most easily set up by the natives of one place, such as Ningpo or Shaohsing in northern Chekiang, whose banking connections stretched up the Yangtze from Shanghai and along the coast. These intercity banking networks expanded with the growth of trade. In the open competition among them, many banks might issue their own bank notes in the absence of legal tender of the realm authorized by Peking. In other words, the native banks created credit by issuing their bank notes to merchants and even officials. They knew, of course, that a certain portion of specie must be held in reserve, but the amount of the bank notes they issued to a customer might be far greater than his deposit with them. The bank notes' value was stated usually in terms of silver or copper cash and they were payable to bearer. Of course this system led to the evil of speculation on credit and possible bankruptcy of the creditor as well as the speculator. But, in this era of premodern conveniences, city residents were not numbered and ticketed by a watchful government, and a defaulting banker might simply close shop and disappear in the crowd. Efforts to police the banking system and punish defaulting speculators were regularly made by government officials in the light of their duty to respond to citizens' complaints. One major device for regulation was the requirement of guarantors in the traditional Chinese manner, men of substance who stood surety for a given banker as they did also for merchants. At the same time the bankers' guilds in common self-defense tried, through their members, to curb fraud. Along with this the banking guilds took on the supervision of credit, including the setting of the local rate for different kinds of units of accounts or taels. Thus the effort was made to regulate the anarchy of the credit market.
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In this way Chinese commerce by the early decades of the nineteenth century was being facilitated "through such innovative services as bills of exchange, deposit banking, book transfers of funds between depositors, overdraft credit and ... negotiable and transferable credit instruments." Banking was another of those "old Chinese customs" that was undergoing rapid development before the treaty ports were opened. However, this growth of production and consumption seems not to have appreciably changed the productivity per person, the increase of which is a key to the development process. The withdrawal of capital from current consumption and its allocation to purposes that would improve productivity might have begun with the infrastructure, like the building of telecommunications, roads, and eventually railroads, or it might have been put more directly into heavy industry, which requires a large initial investment. This is the kind of investment that the developers of Meiji Japan were able to achieve, but it was not achieved by the late Ch'ing Government or even the provincial leaders, much as some of them tried. One can only conclude that China was too stuck in her old ways, which were marked by growth in volume of people, product, and exchange, but not in the efficiency which constitutes productivity per worker, which in turn amasses capital for investment in the modern mechanized type of economy. The growth of population and of commerce began by simply producing more of the same. There is much evidence of the increased activity of the private sector in economic life and of the development of a credit system which would later be susceptible to a centralized use for investment. But meanwhile more people meant more muscles to use instead of machines--cheap labor power--which was probably a disincentive to radical innovation. To the availability of cheap muscle power was added the widespread incidence of monopolies, corruption, and ostentatious consumption as alternatives to productive investment. If we compare China with Europe in the early 1800s, strong contrasts at once emerge. The eighteenth century, to be sure, had seen rapid population growth accompanied by an increase of trade in both areas. But, while Europe in the 1790s was in the throes of the French Revolution and its militantly innovative aftermath, the Chinese empire was chiefly beset by the White Lotus Rebellion of 1795-1804, a purely traditional peasant-based rising that foreshadowed dynastic decline but nothing new. Contemporary Europe had also accumulated the ingredients of the Industrial Revolution, when machines greatly increased the productivity of capital and labor. Some have tried to find a process at work in China comparable to Europe's "protoindustrialization." But evidence does not support this search for China's equivalence. The "putting-out system" for cottage production of commercial goods for a merchant, for example, was far from a new development in early modern China, and at all events it would not necessarily lead to a higher stage of economic organization, namely capitalism. On the contrary, China remained stuck in its labor-intensive circular-flow economy at a high level of premodern, muscle-powered technology. In the course of time commercialization might conceivably have led on into industrialization, but it had not yet begun to do so. However, recognition of the growth of commerce and of the private sector in China, before the foreign incursion under the unequal treaties of the 1840s and '50s, is a significant finding. It puts the Western "opening" of China in a new light. It cuts the foreign invader down to size, reduces the importance of the long-assumed "Western impact," and gives late imperial China its due as a society not static but in motion. The primary fact was that economic growth was principally if not wholly in the private sector, leaving the government behind and more
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superficial than ever. As we have always suspected, China's center of gravity lay within, among the Chinese people, and that is where the ingredients of revolution accumulated. .. . Economic growth naturally had its social and political effects. These were evident in the increase in unemployed literati, peasant migration, official corruption, military weakness, and social cleavages among the people. Out of all this came a generation of rebellion. One contribution to the Ch'ing Government's downfall was its failure in the early nineteenth century to keep up with the growth of population and commerce by a commensurate growth of government structure and personnel. For example, the government did not raise the provincial quotas of successful degree holders who could emerge from the examination system. Originally these quotas had been set to maintain some kind of geographical balance, so that the great preponderance of the degree holders would not be from the Lower Yangtze provinces-- not unlike arranging membership in the U.S. Congress so that all areas would be included. But, as the number of talented men capable of achieving degree status increased, the rigidity of the quotas closed the door to many of them in their effort to join the government ranks. One result was an increasing effort to attach such talent to the government in the form of advisors (mu-yu), deputies (wei-yuan), and expectant officials (hou-pu, "waiting to be appointed"). But this only increased the competition for preferment without increasing the efficiency of administration. The institutional structure of government failed to expand until later in the century. One effect of this limitation of upward mobility was that a myriad of young literati seeking office became frustrated hangers-on of the government offices or yamen, where staffs were swollen and job competition induced all sorts of bribery and corruption. Personal favoritism began to skew the procedures of administration and deny the Confucian ideal of devotion to principle. Personal cliques and patronage networks began to upset the impartiality of the examinations, taxation, and justice. Squeeze took over. Since provincial officials were normally tax farmers, expected to produce established quotas of revenue and keep the surplus for their own expenses and profit, whenever the officials' morale was low, they would gouge the people unmercifully. This official rapacity, inflicting hardship upon the common people, began to rouse rebellion. Growth of trade did not mean peasant livelihood improved. On the contrary, numbers of the destitute and unemployed from crowded areas migrated to marginal lands in the mountainous West and Southwest, where government was thinly spread. The famous but little-studied White Lotus Rebellion is one example of this trend. China's population explosion had led farmers to move into marginal areas as well as into the new frontier of cultivation in Manchuria. In the mountainous regions where Hupei, Shensi, and Szechwan meet, settlers from Central China had newly established themselves, extending the scope of Chinese rice cultivation in a comparatively unproductive peripheral region. The White Lotus Rebellion that arose in this area had certain classical features: it was inspired by a secret Buddhist folk religion that believed in the Eternal Mother. However, the various leaders (some of them women) who headed the armies and decentralized assemblies by which followers were organized were unable to agree on a Buddhist savior or Maitreya incarnate or on a pretender to lead a revival of the Ming dynasty. The White Lotus sectarians thus remained disunified as well as decentralized, forming a tenuous network of communities. They built defensive stockades
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around their mountain villages and defied the Ch'ing tax collectors. One of their slogans was the well-known "the officials force the people to rebel." The rising was of course nativist and anti-Manchu. However, the White Lotus does not seem to have been a rising among oppressed peasants on account of heavy tax collections. County magistrates and their underlings were comparatively few and weak in resources. To some undetermined extent the White Lotus seems to have arisen to take the place of an inadequate government, which had not yet developed in this frontier region its usual functions of public works, ever-normal granaries, and examinations for the ambitious. By 1800 the Manchu banner forces, partly because so many commanders profited from the funding of their military complex, were unable to suppress these rebels. The rebellion was ended only after the new Chia-ch'ing Emperor found incorrupt Manchu commanders. They also used Chinese militia, who now excelled the vaunted Manchu bannermen as a military force. To discerning scholars versed in the lore of the dynastic cycle, the fortunes of the Ch'ing dynasty seemed to be turning downward. The hard crust of corruption in the best-documented imperial institutions has been abundantly described. Take for example the massive Grand Canal transport network, which took Lower Yangtze rice north to feed Peking. Khubilai Khan in the late thirteenth century had extended the Grand Canal on a northern course to his newly built capital at Peking; and the Ming and Ch'ing had used it ever since as a great artery of north-south trade, safer from storms and pirates than the sea route around the Shantung peninsula. A large administration under two governors-general handled the grain transport and managed the thousands of grain boats that every year tried to get through the canal locks (a Chinese invention) in Shantung en route northward. Grain boats 30 feet long with crews of 10 men were annually poled and hauled some 1,100 miles, traversing a high point 140 feet above sea level in order to supply 400,000 tons of rice to the Peking granaries. They carried private cargo too. One of the problems of canal traffic was that it had to cross the Yellow River. Over the centuries the director-general of the Yellow River Conservancy had built up a bureaucracy comparable to that of the two directors-general of grain transport. Dikes along the river were mended by engineers so competent that they could use comparatively vast imperial allocations of funds to build dikes that would look good enough but last only a few years. The point was that the officialdom made great profits from the imperial expenditures. Meanwhile, the Grand Canal transport was handled by a large bureaucracy plus thousands of bargemen. Ancestors of these bargemen had been assigned to their functions some generations before and had often by a sort of subinfeudation arranged for the actual work to be done by nonhereditary gangs of boatmen. From all this paraphernalia of officials, boatmen, and their barges the imperial officials derived considerable profit, which they would not lightly forgo. As breakdown and silting of the canal impaired its efficiency in the early nineteenth century, the old idea arose that transport of rice by sea around the Shantung promontory would be cheaper and more efficacious. In a crisis in 1826 such transport was actually arranged by hiring merchant vessels, but the vested interests of the Grand Canal system were so strong that this improvement was promptly given up. Inefficiency won out. The population explosion did a great deal more than weaken the government. In economic life the superabundance of human muscles made labor-saving devices uneconomical. Why dam a stream for waterpower, as the Europeans were doing, when labor was dirt cheap and could
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continue to be used instead for textile spinning and weaving? Indeed, why use mules and a cart when porters were so available? Porters needed only paths to follow, not roads laboriously graded at odds with the contour of rice terraces. The stern oar (yu-lo) to move a sampan used manpower very efficiently, as did the Chinese barrow balanced over its centered wheel. On land or water, mechanical transport by steampower would face stiff human competition. Even animal power was at a disadvantage. The human hoe still outdid the traction plow, and consequently China remained less prepared to make the shift that came so naturally to Western farmers, from animal traction to automotive traction. As a result, seeders, cultivators, reapers, binders, and the whole Caterpillar family remained unfeasible, as they are even today. Production was locked into a muscle-power technology. Socially, the flood of people was even more deleterious because life was reduced more and more to a grim struggle for survival. Generosity and philanthropy became luxuries that family members could ill afford. As the primary units for survival, families had to watch every rice grain. Some evaded taxes by enlisting as clients of more powerful landowners, and became peons supplying girls, workmen, and guards for their patrons. The self-sufficient ownerfarmer had a harder time, needing protection against the officials' yamen runners, the big house's bullies and enforcers, and the bandits who emerged from the unemployed and destitute. Not only local order but also personal morality declined as people proliferated. Natural calamities of flood, drought, famine, and pestilence became more severe because greater numbers were affected. People lost confidence in the future as well as in the work ethic. Virtue brought uncertain rewards. Those who lived by their wits survived better. Sycophancy, cheating, prostitution of boys and womenfolk, smuggling, violence, all had their uses in the struggle. Confucian conduct often became a public sham. After 1800 popular demoralization evidenced in opium smoking set in first amid the minor officials, yamen underlings, and troops of the establishment, but as poppy production spread within China, peasant producers took up the habit too. These evils that flowed so largely from numbers changed the quality of Chinese life. Inevitably it became more brutish and uncertain. Honest officials who died poor became illustrious paragons because their example was so rare. A society that in Sung and even Ming had accepted the individual often on his merits now became suspicious of all seemingly worthy motives, fearful of strangers, and ungenerous. The struggle for survival meant that all ideals were risky, like daily life itself. Such fluctuations in welfare and morale had occurred before, but now in the late Ch'ing comparison with the West revealed more basic and systemic weaknesses.
From: The Great Chinese Revolution John K. Fairbank Harper Perennial, 1987
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