Village Regulation of Property and the Social Basis for the Transformation of Qing Manchuria

Abstract

Generally speaking, Chinese scholars of eighteenth and nineteenth century Manchuria have understood the region's settlement, and subsequent socio-economic integration into the Qing empire, as the outgrowth of demographic processes at work in China, and have characterized colonization as the extension of "advanced" forms of Han social organization and agricultural production methods from one of China's economic cores (the north China plain) to one of its frontiers.1 In the West, Ho Ping-ti's and Dwight Perkins's now classic accounts of the development of Chinese agriculture and economy in the late imperial period succinctly captured both dynamics. On the one hand, their Malthusian-Ricardian explanations of developments in the economy delineated the forces at work driving Han peasants onto the empire's frontiers, as well as marginal lands within its cores. As population grew and diminishing returns to labor set in within long-settled zones, peasants emigrated to open [End Page 124] new land. On the other hand, the same growth in population drove peasants within the cores to raise the carrying capacity of their land through labor-intensifying methods, and it was these labor-intensive systems of agriculture which they took to the frontiers. Population pressure led simultaneously, therefore, to the extension of arable land and higher yields. Ho and Perkins argued that these were the necessary conditions for China's sustained population growth over the course of the Ming and Qing dynasties (Ho 1959, 136-195; Perkins 1969, 23-26, 52). While the demographic account describes accurately the push to migrate to northeast China, and even accounts in a general sense for the extension of Han farming and social organization there, it does not explain how Han peasants established the social and political conditions necessary for them to secure possession of most of the northeast's farmland by the end of the dynasty. In stark contrast to regions of the Qing empire where the central state and regional officials promoted colonization by guaranteeing secure property rights to settlers, granting exemptions from the land tax, and even providing seed, draft animals, and tools, successive Qing emperors were committed to preventing Han migration to and colonization of their homeland in Manchuria.2 With the abrogation in 1668 of the Shunzhi emperor's brief policy of recruiting commoners to settle in southern Manchuria, the full weight of Manchuria's regional government was shifted to preventing and uncovering illegal Han immigration and settlement, and preventing Han commoner peasants from taking possession of Qing lands (Sudō 1944, 197-209, 225-235, 388-400; Diao 1993, 122-133; Yi 1993, 198-206). Because the demographic paradigm cannot explain how Han peasants defied the state to take possession of Qing lands in the northeast, it provides only a partial account of the colonization and transformation of that region. A full account of Han colonization of the northeast must therefore consider how Han commoners successfully defied the Qing state to capture de facto possession and control of much of Manchuria's cultivated land, even as they were denied de jure rights to it. Whereas immigration was a pre-condition for the devolution of Qing lands into the hands of commoners, their securing possession of these lands required the appearance of village institutions and norms for configuring and maintaining effective self-regulation and self-organization. Immigrants and Immigration In the eighteenth century, droves of empty-handed young men left north China's Shandong and Zhili provinces for the northeast, where they hoped to [End Page 125] find work as wage laborers, establish themselves as members of rural communities, accrue some cash, and acquire land (see full description, RZSL 1964, 1544 [juan 111]). Official records suggest that the population of Han or commoner peasantry grew quickly between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The total registered population reached 360,000 in 1741, and 1.76 million by 1820 (Isett 1998, 450, table A...