WHERE URBAN MIGRANTS MET RURAL SETTLERS: STATE CATEGORIES, SOCIAL BOUNDARIES, AND WEALTH STRATIFICATION IN NORTHEAST CHINA, 1815 – 1913 by Shuang Chen A dissertation submitted by partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Professor James Z. Lee, Chair Professor Barbara A. Anderson Professor Myron P. Gutmann Assistant Professor Pär K. Cassel Professor Cameron D. Campbell, University of California, Los Angeles © Shuang Chen 2009 For my parents, Tong Niannian, and Thomas ii Preface My graduate education at the University of Michigan has been a journey from traditional history to quantitative history to social history. Six and a half years ago, in January 2003, I arrived at the University of Michigan with a background in political and institutional history. Interested in learning social and quantitative history, I entered the field of historical demography and enrolled in classes in social scientific and demographic methods. I soon discovered, however, that in the post-modern era after the linguistic turn, most historians were no longer satisfied with numerical descriptions of social behavior. Instead, they sought the stories behind their quantitative results to elucidate the mentality and agency of historical actors. Accordingly my graduate education also became a journey to develop solutions to integrate quantitative and qualitative methods and produce a more holistic understanding and history of human experience. Fortunately, the well-preserved archival sources in Shuangcheng enabled me to integrate quantitative and qualitative analyses and produce a textured history of land distribution. Shuangcheng was established through the relocation of a state bannermen population in the early nineteenth century. Upon their arrival, the state allocated land to official immigrants and tried to preserve its equal distribution within and unequal distribution between state-designated population categories. At the same time, in the century from 1815 to 1913, local practices also interacted with state policies to bring forth changes in both policy and local society. Although the distribution of landed wealth is iii considered an important topic in Chinese history and history in general, due to the lack of individual plot data, especially longitudinal and intergenerational wealth data, few studies anywhere have explored individual and household-level land distribution for entire communities or higher levels of administrative aggregation, especially over time. In my dissertation, I can do so and describe not only the pattern of distribution per se, but also the state policies and local practices that produced and maintained this pattern. I commenced my project by analyzing the socio-demographic data generated from the Qing banner population registers for Shuangcheng. The Qing banner population registers in Shuangcheng were compiled annually between 1866 and 1912 as part of the local government archives. My professors, James Lee and Cameron Campbell, had already located and acquired the microfilm version of these voluminous registers from the Genealogy Society of Utah and recruited me to this project. In the summer of 2003, under their direction, I went through these microfilms and compiled, in longitudinal order, the lists of registers which need be entered first. In the winter of 2004, they began to code these data with the data coders in the Lee-Campbell research group: Sun Huicheng and Jiyang. In a fall 2004 research seminar with Professor Myron Gutmann, relying on their initial data transcriptions of 231,392 observations of 19,240 individuals, I wrote my first research paper on mortality in the Shuangcheng banner population. In 2005, I further developed these research results into my first conference presentation to the IUSSP Conference on Vulnerable Populations where I identified distinctive mortality patterns between the two categories of immigrant populations: metropolitan and rural bannermen. And this presentation in turn became my first English language publication, albeit in a French journal (Chen, Campbell, and Lee 2006). iv At the same time, beginning in the summer of 2004 with support from the Department of History, the International Institute, and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, I started to collect qualitative sources on Shuangcheng and encountered a sea of alternate materials. I first visited the First Historical Archives in Beijing, where I found court memorials archived in the collection of the Grand Council or Junjichu lufu zouzhe, which thoroughly documented the early history of the Shuangcheng state farm from the initial policy discussion to relocation and settlement from the central government’s perspective. Then, in the Liaoning Provincial Archives in Shenyang, the large collection of Shuangchengpu Zongguan Yamen Dang'an, or Shuangcheng banner government archives, provided me with rich information of the later development of Shuangcheng society. With 1,555 volumes of documents dating from 1850 to 1924, this archival collection not only included communications between local and provincial government on policy implementation, fiscal reports, taxation files, and routine administrative paperwork, but also contained voluminous legal cases with rich information on local practices of land transaction, land rental, marriage, commercial activities, and etc. In the summer of 2005, this time with support from the Center for Chinese Studies, I visited in addition to the First Historical Archives and Liaoning Provincial Archives, the Shuangcheng City Archives with my advisor, James Lee, and located not only the Shuangchengpu Xieling Yamen Dang’an (30,064 items), which is from the same government archive as the Shuangchengpu Zongguan Yamen Dang’an, but also the archives of the civilian local government (9,623 documents between 1882 and 1912). Since then, I worked intensively on these archival sources to explore the history of Shuangcheng. v These central and local government archival documents, with their rich information on historical context, provided important alternate insight into the population and land data. Beginning in May 2006, I initiated the data transcription, cleaning, and processing of the land data from four registers—compiled in 1870, 1876, 1887, and 1889—of the Bordered Yellow banner and linked them to the banner population registers most by machine and the remainder by hand. In the summer of 2006, I was therefore able to make a preliminary analysis of land distribution among the metropolitan bannermen in the Bordered Yellow banner. The results revealed a surprisingly equal land distribution which I described in 2007 and 2008 panel presentations at the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association. To investigate why the pattern of land distribution was so equal, I began to examine the institution that organized the land and population registers. I especially paid attention to official communications on policy implementation and legal cases regarding land disputes. Through close reading of the legal cases, I identified local practices that were not documented by the official paperwork and discovered that in Shuangcheng the unit of state land allocation was the household. Although the actual residential arrangements of household members varied, the government allocated land to all registered household units equally. Excited by these discoveries, I continued to explore social and economic organization in Shuangcheng. While the quantitative data generated the large picture, the qualitative materials fleshed out the mentality of the policy makers and local actors that directed their behaviors. Quantitative and qualitative methods and data, in other words, complemented each other to provide me with a holistic view of state land allocation and local practices of land accumulation and transfer. vi Archival researches, moreover, also facilitated data transcription and linking. Until 2007, I had thought that the population data available for longitudinal analysis began in 1870, since an 1870 reform in Shuangcheng administration had renamed all banner villages, making it difficult to link populations before 1870. In the spring of 2007, based on archival studies and with the help of Sun Huicheng, I was able to link the Shuangcheng banner villages before and after 1870. This advancement enabled the extension of the longitudinal population dataset back to 1866. During this mutual process of archival study and data analysis, the collective efforts of data acquisition and entry by James Lee, Cameron Campbell, Sun Huicheng, and Jiyang in the Lee-Campbell research group and the Asia Library of the University of Michigan made much of my research possible. In 2006, Michael Meng at the Asia Library generously purchased the microfilms of Shuangchengpu Zongguan Yamen Dang’an, which James and I hand carried back to the United States in separate trips. Beginning in September 2006, Sun Huicheng entered the remaining land registers. In August 2007, the major work of data entry was completed, generating a total population dataset of 1,346,829 observations of 108,100 individuals and a total land dataset of 19,609 records of 13,155 land owners, most of which I linked to the banner population registers by machine and the remainder, with Sun Huicheng’s help, by hand. In the summer of 2007, with support from professors James Lee and Cameron Campbell’s research grants, I visited Shuangcheng City Archives