Telling Chinese History 9/19/08 2:25 PM Page 27

1.Wakeman, Telling Chinese History 9/19/08 2:25 PM Page 27 chapter 1 China and the Seventeenth-Century World Crisis Imperial rescript to the Board of Revenue and other yamen: We are reminded that for a number of years now there has been no surcease from military hostilities. Hundreds of millions have been spent on urgently needed supplies. Added to that, there have been floods and droughts, and the little people have found it difficult to eat. The local officials cannot soothe and pacify them, and as a result, they become vagabonds who cut off Our roads. The entire world within Our territorial boundaries is part of Our own personal Mandate. Unable to endure the sight and sound of such misery, We find no solace in sleeping and eating. The time to rescue and protect them cannot be postponed. The Board of Revenue and other yamen have charge of certain tax revenues. Let them all clearly ascertain the actual amount of silver taels in their treasuries, and then quickly come forward and let Us see. Special rescript. Twenty-third day of the second month of Shunzhi eleven (1654). The fall of the Ming house (1368–1644) and the rise of the Qing regime (1644–1911) was one of the most colorful and abrupt dynastic succes- sions in all of Chinese history. Yet in spite of the Manchus’ sudden occu- pation of Beijing in 1644, only six weeks after the Ming emperor com- mitted suicide just outside the vermilion walls of the Forbidden City, the transition from Ming to Qing was no sudden coup d’état. Whether from our own detached perspective in the present or from the closer vantage points of Ming subjects and Qing conquerors at the time, the change must appear part of a much longer process: the economic decline of seventeenth- Originally published in Late Imperial China 7, no. 1 (June 1986): 1–26. 27 Copyrighted Material 1.Wakeman, Telling Chinese History 9/19/08 2:25 PM Page 28 28 China in the Context of World History century commerce, the social disintegration of the Ming order, and the political consolidation of Qing rule. Late Ming China’s connection with a global monetary system is by now quite clear to historians. Because of a constant deficit in the balance of payments in favor of Chinese goods and industries, silver flowed to China’s Weltwirtschaft from all over the world. “Long before Europeans knew the world in its totality, the globe was already divided up into more or less centralized and more or less coherent zones, that is, into several world economies that coexisted.”1 Within the East Asian economic zone during the early 1600s, China probably imported an average of 33,000 to 48,000 kilograms of silver from Japan per year, and from outside that zone even more specie flowed into “the tomb of European moneys.” China during the seventeenth century, through trade with the Spanish Philippines, became the major recipient of American silver, receiving in a good year between two and three million pesos (57,500–86,250 kilograms).2 Some historians have argued that this flow of bullion into China from European dominions in the Americas was only a secondary surplus trade.3 We would maintain, however, that East Asia formed its own world economy, “eine Welt für sich,” with core and peripheries, though without the overseas settlements and colonies of the corresponding European world economy.4 China, at the center of this system, drew as much as 20 percent of all silver mined in Spanish America directly across the Pacific via galleon to Manila and thence to Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang in ex- change for silks and porcelains. Other American bullion found its way indirectly through the Central Asian trade at Bokhara. As much as half of the precious metal mined in the New World may have thus ended up in China. When this quantity is combined with the silver exported from Japan, the total amount of specie annually reaching China in the first third of the seventeenth century was at least 250,000 to265,000 kilograms and probably considerably more. Although at a considerable remove, the Chinese economy stood ready to be badly affected by the severe depression that struck the worldwide trading system centered on Seville between 1620 and 1660. Before the European trade depression of the 1620s, the numbers of Chinese ships calling at Manila amounted to as many as forty-one per year. By 1629 this number had fallen to six vessels, and, as trade relations with Cen- tral Asia attenuated at the same time, the supply of silver reaching China from the New World dwindled. During the 1630s, silver began to flow again in great quantities. The Manila galleon continued to bring supplies from New Spain, the Macaonese carried Japanese silver to Canton, and Copyrighted Material 1.Wakeman, Telling Chinese History 9/19/08 2:25 PM Page 29 China and the Seventeenth-Century World 29 yet more specie came from Goa to Macao through the Straits of Malacca.5 But then, in the late 1630s and early 1640s, this flow was again and even more drastically interrupted, just at a time when the highly commer- cialized regional economy of the lower Yangzi had come to depend more and more upon expanding amounts of money to counter inflation.6 After 1634 Philip IV took measures to restrict the shipment of exports from Acapulco; in the winter of 1639–40, many of the Chinese merchants in Manila were massacred by the Spanish and natives; in 1640 the Japa- nese cut off all trade with Macao; and in 1641 Malacca fell to the Dutch, who severed the connection between Goa and Macao. Chinese silver imports plummeted.7 One of the secular effects upon the bimetallic copper and silver cur- rency system of China may have been a steadily worsening copper inflation during the late Ming—an inflation that drove up the price of grain in heavily populated areas like theYangzi River delta, causing great hard- ship to the urban population there. The immediate impact of the drastic curtailment of silver shipments between 1635 and 1640 was even worse on residents of that area, which depended so much upon sericulture for its livelihood. As the international trade in silk waned, causing yet a fur- ther decline in silver imports, silk-growing areas like Huzhou in north- ern Zhejiang grew economically depressed.8 At the same time, after two centuries of dramatic population growth (between 1400 and 1600, China’s population may have increased from 65 million to more than 150 million), climate and disease took their toll. Unusually severe weather struck China between 1626 and 1640, around the beginning of the Maunder Minimum (otherwise known as “the little ice age of Louis XIV,” 1647–1715), when the earth’s climate fell to the lowest temperatures since a.d. 1000. Extreme droughts were followed by major floods, which were exacerbated by the decline of “controlled hydraulic works” (zhudi) during the previous century.9 Frequent famines, accompanied by plagues of locusts and smallpox, produced starvation and mass death during the same period. The result was an extraordinary depopulation during the late Ming; one scholar has even suggested that between 1585 and 1645, the population of China may have dropped by as much as 40 percent.10 There was in any case an unusual demographic dip in China during the years coinciding with the global economic depression: “At approximately the same times China and India probably advanced and regressed in the same rhythm as the West, as though all humanity were in the grip of a primordial cosmic destiny that would make the rest of man’s history seem, in comparison, of secondary importance.”11 Copyrighted Material 1.Wakeman, Telling Chinese History 9/19/08 2:25 PM Page 30 30 China in the Context of World History This common demographic decline has led historians to believe that China participated in the same general seventeenth-century crisis that gripped the Mediterranean world. From the perspective of many of those actually suffering from the in- flationary trends of the late Ming, their economic difficulties were mainly to be attributed to the growing monetization of the economy. Con- temporary gentry commonly bemoaned commercialization and exalted the simpler life of a century or two earlier, when people were more self- sufficient and much less caught up in marketing relationships.12 One early seventeenth-century gazetteer, for instance, contrasted the moral and economic tranquility of the Hongzhi reign (1488–1505), when arable fields were plentiful, houses were abundant, mountains forested, villages peace- ful, and bandits absent, with the turmoil and social disruption of the Jia- jing period (1522–66), when property frequently changed hands, prices fluctuated, rich and poor grew socially apart, and market conditions grew complicated. By 1600, the gazetteer stated, the situation was even worse: “One out of a hundred is wealthy, but nine out of ten are impoverished. The impoverished are unable to oppose the wealthy so that, contrary to what should be, the few control the many. Silver and copper cash seem to dominate even Heaven and Earth.”13 Modern historians have commonly attributed the economic difficulties of the late Ming to a systemic breakdown affecting the entire social order.14 The early Ming pattern of a self-sustaining administration, with taxes in kind supplied by tax collectors among the people, military costs covered by self-sufficient hereditary garrisons, and labor services provided by corvee or permanently registered hereditary occupational groups, had depended upon the central government’s ability to maintain efficient reg- istration and allocation procedures.15 The monetization of the economy; the move of the primary capital to Beijing, away from the major grain- producing regions in the lower Yangzi River delta; and the lack of ra- tional procedures at the center of the bureaucracy to perpetuate the ide- ally self-sustaining population units all led to a breakdown.

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