Municipal Reform and Urban Social Conflict in Late Ming Jiangnan

Abstract

Hilistorians seeking the stirrings of urban social and political consciousness in China usually have turned to the convulsive century between 1550 and 1650, when the rapid pace of commercial growth and urbanization began to generate new economic tensions fraught with political implications. This period witnessed an unprecedented series of urban protests in the commercial and industrial centers of China, in Jiangnan in particular. Some scholars have viewed these protests as evidence of a nascent urban consciousness which united “bourgeois” intellectuals and urban workers against the panoply of feudal obligations imposed by the Ming state (Fu Yiling 1957:109–21; Tanaka 1984:189–91; Yuan 1979:296, 310). Others have stressed the accelerating trend toward absolutism in the late Ming and the emergence of a cross-class alliance opposed to the arbitrary exercise of state power (Miyazaki 1957:351–56). Common to both of these interpretations is a blurring of class lines and a polarization between state and society—or, more precisely, between the state and urban communities—which fostered urban political solidarity.