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The State and the Economy in Late Imperial China

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The State and the Economy in Late Imperial China 297 THE STATE AND THE ECONOMY IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA ALBERT FEUERWERKER The question, theoretical and empirical, of the relation of the state to the economy in preindustrial societies has of course not been ignored. Marx, for example, made this one of his central concerns in those sections of the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie that discuss precapitalist economic formations. And nearly all research on China's economic and social history has, explicitly or implicitly, taken account of the imperial government as a positive, or a negative, or a neutral factor in the develop- ment of the specific historical problem under study. What 1 propose to do in this brief paper is to consider a number of the ways in which the state in the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties (i.e., from the eleventh through the nine- teenth centuries, which we may call "late imperial China "l ) did in fact interact with the economy; to discuss these policies and measures in the context of the potential means by which a premodern state may influence a premodern economy; and at times to compare the Chinese historical expe- rience with that of early modern Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. I am concerned with such questions as the extent to which Chinese adminis- trators in the late imperial period deliberately intervened in the economy, how they" did so, and with what results. What impact did their unwitting intervention (e.g., through the collection of taxes) have? Can the remarkable premodern economic growth that China experienced be attributed to the character or intensity of state intervention? How did the Chinese experience in these regards differ from that of early modern Europe, and to what degree does state intervention account for the more rapid growth of the European economy after 1750? So broad an essay as this one can, I fear, only demonstrate my own historical ignorance. But it may nevertheless be useful in identifying some particularly salient problems that merit further investi- gation. Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. 298 This large subject cannot be covered systematically in so brief a space. Before proceeding with my partial effort, let me indicate the broader range of distinctions that a more thorough presentation might require, and thus locate this paper more precisely. In the case of the "state," for example, we ought to distinguish at least between the court or dynasty on the one hand and the imperial bureaucracy on the other, as well as between central and local government. In considering the policies or actions of the state that can affect the economy, it is useful to distinguish those that require direct fiscal expenditures by the state (and thus control of some part of the output of the economy) from those that do not entail a direct expenditure of economic resources (although they call for other kinds of "expenditures," say of political power or prestige). The various measures undertaken by the gov- ernment may primarily affect either the supply side of the economy (i.e., the structure and size of the production and distribution of commodities and services), or the demand side (i.e., the structure and size of the consumption of commodities and services). Their consequences may be measured, in other words, by changes in the values of a large variety of different indicators: for example, size of total output; size of output per capita; composition of output; relative importance of the sectors of the economy; levels of technol- ogy; price and wage levels; the ratio of consumption, savings, and invest- ment; and the level of imports and exports. Unfortunately, reliable and systematic statistical data for such measure- ments are rare in any premodern society, China included. We have certainly not yet compiled and analyzed all of the quantifiable information that can be derived from the public and private documents of premodern China. But even with the best of outcomes, I expect that for many critical measurements we shall always have to rely in some degree on indirect or partial evidence. Limited Direct Government Influence on the Economy State policies or actions with respect to the economy that required direct expenditures were limited by the amounts of money, goods and labor that the government controlled through direct and indirect taxation, corv~e services, and other government income. Is it possible even to guess what proportion of national income in the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties was controlled by the state and thus provided a potential means for influencing the economy directly? While there are abundant data about tax quotas and even some reporting of actual tax collections and receipts, the money value of corv~e services prior to their gradual incorporation into the land tax in the late Ming and early Qing is probably impossible to estimate with any certainty. And estimates of national income (itself a concept with a variety of 299 meanings in practice) can only be very rough. We shall need to begin with what I believe are a number of reasonable assumptions: (1) nonagricultural employment in China from the ninth century through the eighteenth was about 20 percent of total employment; (2) the value added per capita by nonagricultural labor (even in premodern handicraft industry) was greater than in farming, so that perhaps only 70 percent of national income originat- ed in the agricultural sector; (3) 80 percent of cultivated acreage was planted in grain so that, assuming a constant return per acre, grain output was typically about 60 percent of national income (0.8 • 0.7 = 0.56); and (4) the output of grain per capita remained relatively constant at 500 600 catties (250-300 kg) of unhusked grain (paddy, gu). 1 have combined these assump- tions with estimates of population size, normal grain prices, and typical annual government revenue to conjure into existence Table I. I am very unsure of the Song figures especially: was it really the case, as they seem to imply, that the government in the Northern Song period had potentially greater ability to affect the economy directly than its successors? In a broad sense, such a conclusion would fit Robert M. Hartwell's hypothesis, based on a close study of the financial bureaucracy, that the notable economic expansion in the Northern Song was in part the result of policies adopted by experienced, technically competent fiscal officials with a national rather than a local outlook. 2 These measures (for example, the encouragement of foreign trade, and an increased supply of money) tended to expand markets and to reduce the risk level of commerce. What this guess about the overall tax revenue as a proportion of national income does suggest, if we use five to seven percent as a typical figure, is that in this respect pre-twentieth century China was comparable to preindustrial Europe. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, public expenditure in most European states was still only 4-6 percent of national income. (In the twentieth century, of course, this proportion grew significantly to 20 percent and more.) This comparison is somewhat misleading in that the public sector in Song, Ming, and Qing China was continuously able to levy general direct taxation, i.e., the land tax, while even at the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, direct taxes were still occasional imposts that were overshadowed in importance by indirect charges (customs duties, tolls, excises, etc.). When general direct taxation reappeared in Europe in the early modern period, it was the occasion for the convening of representative assemblies of property owners to give their consent to these levies. The dimensions of public income in Europe thus caught up with those bf imperial China during the process of state-building in an age of absolute monarchy, in which both military costs and those of administration were shifted from the semi-public "feudal" TABLE I Estimates of Population, Grain Output and Prices, National Income, and Government Revenue in the Northern Song, Ming, and Qing Dynasties Year (1) (2) (3) = (4) (5) - (6) = (7) (8) = Population Paddy (gu) (1) x (2)/t30 "Normal" grain (3) X (4) (5)/0.6 Government (7)/(6) (millions) output Total grain price per Total value National revenue Revenue as per capita output (million picul of grain output income (million percent of (catties =fin)* piculs = dan)* (taels = liang)* (million taels) (million taels) taels) national income Northern Song (ca. 1080) 90 550 381 0,6 229 381 50 (?) 13 Ming (ca. 1550) 150 550 635 0.6-0.8 381 508 635-847 50 (?) 6-8 Qing (ca. 1750) 270 550 1,142 0.5-0,9 57 ! - ! ,028 952- 1,713 74 4 8 Qing (ca. 1880s) 400 550 1,692 - 3,339 250 7.5 Qing (ca. 1908) 430 550 1,819 1.0-2.0 1,819-3,638 3,032 6,063 292 5 10 Sources (1) The population estimates are guesses, of course, based on data in Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368 1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Ho, "An Estimate of the Total Population of Sung-Chin China," in F. Aubin, ed., Etudes Song, ser. 1, no. 1 (1970), 33 53; and Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968 (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). (2) Perkins, Agricultural Development, 13 36, presents the argument for assuming this level of constant per capita consumption/output. (4) Quan Hansheng Zhongguofingi shi luncong (Collected essays on Chinese economic history) (Hong Kong: Xinya yanjiusuo, 1972), 2 vols., 1.74 75; Ray Huang, Taxation and Government Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 159-60, 169-70; Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908 (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1973), Table 26.
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