Qing State Research Articles

Integration and Disintegration in North China's Grain Markets, 1738–1911

An analysis of grain prices from Zhili (Hebei) province in North China for the period from 1738 to 1911 demonstrates that while the province's local grain markets gradually fragmented, the provincial market as a whole simultaneously grew more closely integrated with external markets, first with Fengtian (Manchuria) and later with the Lower Yangzi region. The Qing state's food policies, the deterioration of transport routes, and the condition of rural markets provide a context for understanding these seemingly paradoxical trends.

Integration and Disintegration in North China's Grain Markets, 1738–1911

An analysis of grain prices from Zhili (Hebei) province in North China for the period from 1738 to 1911 demonstrates that while the province's local grain markets gradually fragmented, the provincial market as a whole simultaneously grew more closely integrated with external markets, first with Fengtian (Manchuria) and later with the Lower Yangzi region. The Qing state's food policies, the deterioration of transport routes, and the condition of rural markets provide a context for understanding these seemingly paradoxical trends.

Local Militia and State Power in Nationalist China

Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the organization of local community defense forces, or militia, was a common Chinese response to periods of civil war, popular rebellion, or social disorder. As such, it is hardly surprising to find an increasing level of militia mobilization leading up to and peaking in the (1927-1937) of Nationalist Party (Guomindang) rule. Precisely because the organization of militia was a recurring theme in modem Chinese history, the proliferation of militia in the Nationalist period raises certain questions about the significance of this phenomenon to our understanding of state-society relations in this period. In his groundbreaking study of local militarization in the mid-nineteenth century, Philip Kuhn (1970) showed how the organization of militia in the face of widespread rebellions marked a devolution of power from the weakened Qing state to local elites. Given such historical precedents, one might hypothesize that the widespread mobilization of militia during the Nanjing decade indicated a basic weakness in the Nationalist government's relationship to local elites and a clue to its ultimate failure to achieve broader state-building objectives.

Headship succession and household division in three Chinese banner serf populations, 1789–1909

In late imperial China, as many as 10 per cent of all peasants were unfree. The most common form of unfree labour was state populations organized under the Eight Banners, an elite military organization. This article discusses household succession and household division in three such banner populations organized under the imperial household agency (neiwufu).The banner household, called hu in Han Chinese or boigon in Manchu Chinese, was defined by common residence and common consumption. Household members lived together, ate together, and farmed together. They did so, however, on state land as hereditary state peasants, albeit elite peasants. Provided with ample land, their principal functions were to provide the state with agricultural goods, as well as with labour and military service.The Qing state organized the banner household according to two contradictory principles. On the one hand, by encouraging late household division many banner households evolved into large joint households. On the other hand, by enforcing a system of primogenitary household headship and by granting household heads considerable power over the persons and property of all household members, banner households also resembled stem households. This combination of exclusionary headship and inclusionary membership was a source of tension and potential conflict within banner households. The purpose of this article is to compare Daoyi to two other banner populations, Dami and Gaizhou, in order to ascertain if household behaviour in Daoyi was common elsewhere in northeast China. This is of particular interest since our previous reconstruction of social organization in Daoyi, Fate and fortune in rural China: social organization and population behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (1997), revealed a society dominated by multiple-family households sharply stratified by generation, seniority within generation, and gender.Specifically, we compare headship succession and household formation rules among these three populations between 1789 and 1909. The article is divided into three sections. In Section I, we describe the three populations and the household registration system that provides most of our information on them. In Section II, we analyze household structure and the patterns of household transition. Finally, in Section III, we contrast two different rules of headship succession among these populations and discuss the consequent patterns of household division.

Corruption in Eighteenth-Century China

Eighteenth-century chinese commentators were eloquent on the subject of official corruption, characterizing it as one of the greatest scourges on the Qing state and society. Xu Wenbi (n.d.), in an administrative handbook based on his experiences as magistrate of Yongchuan county in Sichuan province from 1764 to 1768, bemoaned the devastating effects of corruption on the Chinese populace, writing: “Wherever corruption manifests itself, there are a hundred stratagems to suck out the lifeblood of the people. How can one imagine that the wealth of the region would not be exhausted in the space of a few years?” (Xu n.d., 1:26a). Yin Huiyi (1691–1748), who served as Henan governor from 1737 to 1739, stated that avoiding corruption should be the primary goal of any provincial official. “An official who has been appointed to a post should, first and foremost, remain pure,” he wrote, adding, “No matter whether his rank is lofty or humble, in the end, incorruptibility should be his most precious jewel” (Yin 1940, 4–5). Using similarly strong language, the renowned official, essayist, and historian Qian Daxin (1728–1804) pronounced that “when a single individual is corrupt, an entire dynasty may erupt into chaos” (Qian n.d., 2:10a–11a, 1:124–25).

Ritual Imitation and Political Identity in North China: The Late Imperial Legacy and the Chinese National State Revisited

Ritual Imitation and Political Identity in North China: The Late Imperial Legacy and the Chinese National State Revisited! by Kenneth Pomeranz In the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely assumed that the main contribution of the Republican era to the development of the Chinese nation-state was negative : these years were seen as the decline into chaos that dissolved "Confucian" and "imperial" political formations, paving the way for the importation of radically new "modem" and "national" ones. The issues that seemed central to the models of "modernization" popular at the time seemed to have little relevance for Republican China, in which effective national institutions and nationalist consciousness were largely noticeable by their absence. The state-making literature of the 1970s-with its emphasis on the often unwelcome growth of bureaucracy, taxation, conscription, and policing, rather than a shared enterprise of nation-building-seemed to have much more to say to China specialists. Beginning with Philip Kuhn's seminal articles on taxation and local government in Republican China, numerous scholars found substantial continuities between the efforts of various Republican regimes and the more successful consolidation that occurred after 1949. And in the process, ways· in which the Qing state laid the foundations for post -1949 China surfaced, tooespecially in the last decade or two of the dynasty, but in some cases extending much further back-continuities with important implications for both the feasibility of consolidation and for the particular characteristics of the Chinese national state.2 In the last fifteen years or so, scholarly interest has returned to considering how ideas like "nationhood," "citizenship," and "modernity" have become part of the standard mental equipment of people all over the world. Though the new literature no longer sees this as the inevitable and unambiguously welcome process that modernization theory celebrated, these concepts are once again being treated as the antitheses of older pre-Enlightenment (or pre-Hegelian, or preFrench Revolution) ways of being, and their acceptance as a central part of the formation of a modem state and society. While the latter point is almostcertainly true, the sharp opposition between "imperial" and "national" political cultures in much of this literature seems quite questionable, especially in the Chinese case; so does the emphasis in much of this Jiterature on the "nation' as Twentieth-Century China, 23.1 (November 1997): 1-30 2 Twentieth-Century China a wholly imported, essentially Hegelian concept. At the very least, such analyses need to be balanced by the project that Bryna Goodman describes in her recent study of native place organizations in Shanghai: "By tracing the role of older cultural elements in the imagining of the nation, this study ... contributes to this developing discussion by providing a counterweight to excessive emphasis on the contribution of new historical elements."3 One way or the other, the process of re-thinking the relationship of China's late imperial past to the formation of its modem national state( s) in light of these new turns in the broader literature is beginning: focusing now less on areas such as taxation than on areas such as religion, ritual, and nationalism.4 The present essay takes up Goodman's project, but for a largely rural and relatively "backward" area. It begins by laying out some of the directions and implications of recent scholarship for two related parts of this inquiry: 1) how did the principles by which local elites legitimated themselves facilitate or obstruct the acceptance of national authorities as legitimate? and 2) how did the imperial legacy help or hinder the process by which ordinary people came to think of themselves as part of the gigantic abstraction "China"? It then complicates these questions with an investigation of evidence from one part of North China, suggesting that what may seem like small differences in local social structure could profoundly influence the extent to which the imperium did or did not leave a legacy conducive to twentieth-century nationalism. The area in question is not very well documented, and the arguments in this section must be regarded as exploratory rather than empirically well-supported. They represent both my best guess about the region and-perhaps more importantly-a set of suggestions for how we might...

I Thought I Would Have Some Happy Days: Women Eloping In Eighteenth-Century China

I THOUGHT I WOULD HAVE SOME HAPPY DAYS: WOMEN ELOPING IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHINA* Paola Paderni The family, and gender relationships in particular, are important recurring themes in the literature of the Qing period. Actively supported by the state, Neo-Confucianism was fundamentally based on the Three Bonds: sovereign-subject, father-son, and husband-wife, which, along with the older brother-younger brother and friend-friend relationships, formed the Five Relationships . Of these five, the father-son and husband-wife bonds were the main axes of the family system. These unequal relationships based on gender and age were essential to Qing society, providing the cultural basis for the sovereign-subject bond from which the state derived its power. In the eighteenth-century, Chinese society was becoming increasingly mobile . Social boundaries were more blurred and less dependent on personal dependency bonds. These hierarchical principles were therefore necessary in order to legitimate differences and inequalities found in society, as well as in the family. The husband-wife relationship served this general function better than the others because it was seen as biologically determined, and hence both natural and inevitable. It could not be questioned through an act of rebellion, as in the case of the sovereign-subject bond, nor did it make allowance for role changes, as in the case of the father-son bond.1 The importance attributed to this bond explains why contemporary literature on the family placed so much stress on keeping women under control. Women were, after all, presented as the major source of family conflicts, embodying the destructive force of the libido. The authors of "household instructions" (jiaxun) insisted on the importance of keeping women confined to their quarters, sep- *This research was funded by the Italian Ministero dell 'Universita e della Ricerca Scientifica. The author would like to express her thanks to the staff of Beijing's First Historical Archive for precious help in finding the sources. She wishes to thank also Robert Antony, Giovanna Fiume, Giulio Machetti, Paolo Macry and the two anonymous readers of Late Imperial China for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Translation from Italian by Gabriele Poole. 1GaIeS 1989:801-02 Late Imperial China Vol. 16, No. 1 (June 1995): 1-32 1 2 Paola Paderni arated from servants and strangers. Sexual anxiety underlay these precepts, which were justified as necessary for the preservation of family morals.2 Throughout the centuries the Confucian model has pervaded the entire Chinese culture, and, as anthropologist Barbara Ward has argued, family themes in particular have played a central role in the formation of a unitary Chinese identity.3 The Qing Code (Da Qing liili), like the codes of former dynasties , reinforced and codified social hierarchies by differentiating penalties according to the wrongdoer's position within the family and, more generally, his or her social status. What the Qing state considered as a crime was any act that appeared to question its authority or the existing social order. The Qing legal code dedicated an entire section to marriage. Ideologically, marriage served the state and society by guaranteeing patrilineal descent, creating alliances between families, and differentiating social roles according to gender.4 Marriage in China, as in fact in all patriarchal societies, entailed an agreement between two families; what mattered was not the individual's future but the advantages the families could derive from the marriage, whether it be wealth, prestige, or simply support. Any act that went counter to this principle was considered to be dangerously deviant behavior. To run away from one's husband or father was a crime, because it challenged the family, the institution on which the state based its power. Such deviant behavior is the subject of this essay. If human behavior is more than a simple application of the rules and norms established by the system, our task is to investigate how, in everyday practices, given values were adapted, modified, and circumvented through strategies that were influenced by extraneous factors. Our aim is to shed light on a world that was clearly variegated, impassioned, violent, and "quite deviant from the harmonious Confucian family model."5 These deviations did not necessarily constitute a deliberate challenge to established norms...

Chinese History in Economic Perspective. Edited by Thomas G. Rawski and Lillian M. Li. Studies on China No. 13. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xvii, 362 pp.

Secular trends of rice prices in the Yangzi delta, 1638-1935 grain prices in Zhili Province, 1736-1911 the Qing state and the Gansu grain market, 1739-1864 grain markets and food supplies in eighteenth-century Hunan infanticide and family planning in later Imperial China land concentration and income distribution in Republican China farming, sericulture and peasant rationality in Wuxi county in the early twentieth century women's work in the Ningbo area, 1900-1936 native-place hierarchy and labor market segmentation local interest story.

Safely Supping with the Devil: The Qing State and Its Merchant Suppliers of Copper

SAFELY SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL: THE QING STATE AND ITS MERCHANT SUPPLIERS OF COPPER* Helen Dunstan Introduction Among the many merits of William T. Rowe's outstanding study of late Qing Hankow is that it has highlighted the concept of "privatization" as a key theme in late imperial Chinese economic history. Rowe represents privatization of the economy as a secular trend established by the seventeenth century if not before.1 "Privatization" in this context can, it seems, mean any or all of the following: the passage of specific state-run enterprises or sub-sectors into private hands; the overtaking of state enterprise by private enterprise in certain fields; the transfer of regulatory functions from government to guilds; and, in the salt and brokerage sectors, the opening to a broader public of opportunities previously controlled by limited, and highly powerful, elite groups portrayed by Rowe as extensions of the state bureaucracy, or "quasi-officials."2 A closely related concept that features in Rowe's study is "liberalization" , also represented as a long-term trend. Tendencies towards liberalization and even economic liberalism (or at least "non-interventionism") in Qing policies towards the grain trade have meanwhile been noticed by Kishimoto Mio and the present author. Kishimoto and Dunstan, however, have identified these tendencies specifically in the early Qianlong period, and do not see them as having undergone continuing development thereafter. They see at most an episode, and not a trend.3 "This paper owes a great deal to the encouragement and detailed criticism of the late Jennifer Cushman, who gave both with the warm-hearted generosity for which her memory is cherished. I have received useful comments also from Mark Elvin, Sue Naquin, Denis Twitchett, Hans Ulrich Vogel, and Late Imperial China's editors and readers. The unpublished archival material used in this article was collected in 1984 when I participated in an exchange program between the Australian National University and Beijing University. I thank both institutions, as well as the staff of the First Historical Archives in Beijing. 1RoWe 1984:200, 341. 2Rowe 1984:111, 120 and refs. there cited, 123, 177, 191-93, etc. 3Rowe 1984:180, 192-93, etc.; Kishimoto 1987:27-32; Dunstan 1988:Sects. 33, 36-37, 41-42. Late imperial China Vol. 13, No. 2 (December 1992): 42-81© by the Society for Qing Studies 42 Safely Supping with the Devil: The Qing State43 The purpose of the present case study is partly to show how, in the highly regulated and restricted mid-Qing Sino-Japanese trade, some degree of "privatization " (in approximately the first sense identified above) and "liberalization " took place in 1736-37. This too was, however, but an episode: in 1744 the trade was notably "de-privatized" (in, approximately, both the first and the last senses of "privatization" noted above). The story is a long and complex one, shedding considerable light on how the Sino-Manchu state conducted its business relationships, and on the influence of the Imperial Household Department on public policy decision-making. Although, for several reasons, it cannot serve as a test of the general privatization thesis, it does suggest a little caution. The reasons why privatization and liberalization were not sustained in certain areas could be as revealing as the evidence for the posited general trend. The Chinese side of the eighteenth-century Sino-Japanese trade was at all times ultimately dominated by the Sino-Manchu state. The state was the chief buyer of copper, the main return cargo brought from Nagasaki; the copper was required for the central government mints till 1737, and for provincial mints thereafter. Down to 1737, the state alternated between two principles for organizing the acquisition and delivery of Japanese copper. Under "bureaucratic management," officials were formally responsible for buying and delivering the copper, but it was merchants who procured the copper through the controlled trade at Nagasaki. Such merchants will hereafter be referred to as "supply merchants." "Bureaucratic management" prevailed down to 1700, and from 1716 till 1737. During the years of "merchant management" (1700-1715), by contrast, formal responsibility for purchase and delivery was made over to a handful of contractors, most of whom were merchant consortia (the most notable exception being...

The real question about China: Why was the Song economic achievement not repeated?

The pertinent question about China’s economic performance from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries is less why she did not have a European–style industrial revolution than why even her own Song dynasty achievement was not repeated. Supposed explanations which appear in the literature are discussed: no scientific revolution; technological regression; population pressure; Confucian values; and the institutions within the Ming–Qing state. It is suggested that while the substitutes for direct economic policy and independent law were sufficient to permit the economy to expand, they restricted the market enough to prevent a return to previous levels of activity.

The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China

Note of place-names Part I. Background: 1. The issues 2. The sources and the villages 3. The ecological setting Part II. Economic Involution and Social Change: 4. Managerial farming and family farming in the 1930's 5. The small-peasant and estate economies of the early Qing 6. Commercialization and social stratification in the Qing 7. Accelerated commercialization in the twentieth century 8. Managerial farming and family farming: draft-animal use 9. Managerial farming and family farming: labor use 10. The underdevelopment of managerial farming 11. The persistence of small-peasant family farming 12. The commercialization of production relations Part III. The Village and the State: 13. Villages under the Qing state 14. Changes in the village community 15. Village and state in the twentieth century 16. Conclusion Appendixes Character list Index.

Qing History: The State of the Field in 1983

Vol. 6, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1985 QING HISTORY: THE STATE OF THE FIELD IN 1983 Luo Ming $^ i$ and Li Hongbin |.^m Translator's Note: In deference to the scholar to whom this volume is dedicated, I wish to highlight two themes in this review of Qing studies in the People's Republic on which Joseph Fletcher's work has direct bearing . Imperial succession in the Manchu line has always excited strong debate among Chinese historians, and does so again among those reviewed here. In their biography of Abahai, Sun Wenliang and Li Zhiting reject the suggestion that he could have usurped power on Nurhaci 's death. In the many articles on Yongzheng, Xu Zengzhong pronounces him to be a usurper and Xue Ruilu offers evidence of his having murdered his brothers, whereas Yan Xueren argues that Yongzheng was Kangxi's chosen successor. Fletcher felt that the Chinese concern over usurpation by Manchu princes failed to recognize the difference between Manchu and Chinese traditions ofsuccession . The principle of Manchu succession, which Fletcher called bloody tanistry, required that brothers contest for supremacy to ensure that the strongest would become leader. The Manchu aristocracy recognized that, by fighting their way to rulership, Abahai and Yongzheng were demonstrating that they held the charisma or "luck" ofpower which gives to him who has it the right to rule. Fulin stays within blood lines, but it can pass laterally as well as from father to eldest son. In traditional Chinese statecraft, vertical succession between emperors transferred the mandate ofHeaven, whereas traditional Manchu statecraft trusted that fraternal conflict would produce a more vigorous ruler. The legitimacy of Chinese dominion over wide tracts ofInner Asia has been another large concern in Chinese historiography. Articles in this review picture that dominion as a progressive step along a developmental road: beneficial to national security, peace, and prosperity ; productive of improved relations among different nationalities; 67 68Luo Ming and Li Hongbin and essential for raising the cultural level of non-Han civilizations. Ma Ruheng asserts that the mid-seventeenth-century Zunghar leader Khotokhotsin was a loyal tributary vassal to the Qing state; Li Fengzhen links the Qing suppression of Lobdzan Dandzin in 1 723 to the development of productive forces in Tibet; Gu Xiaorong sees the installation of the Qing Imperial Resident in Lhasa in 1727 as helping to promote a common unity among different nationalities; and Zhang Yuxin argues that the Qing conquest ofXinjiang in the 1 750s accelerated socioeconomic development in that region. But adequate historical judgments on events in Inner Asia in the Qing cannot be made solely from the point of view of Han political, cultural, and economic systems, as Fletcher's work shows. Qing dominion was, after all, the product ofManchu rather than Han strategy and experience . To control the entire region was always an option in steppe society, which was constantly shifting between small, dispersed bands and despotic control under a single khan. The Qing succeeded through a unique combination of diplomacy and force that only the Manchus, with their knowledge of both steppe society and the bureaucratic state, could sustain. Identifying this outcome as either progressive or necessary threatens to submerge nomadic culture into Chinese history, even ifthat, ironically, is exactly what the Manchus succeeded in doing. 1983 was a productive year for historical research on the Qing in the period before the Opium War, a continuation of recent trends. Over ten specialized monographs and collections of primary sources were published , and some 160 essays concerning Qing history appeared in journals , essay collections, and other publications. Their range of issues and content is evidence that Qing historical research has broken free of the long-term stasis (of the Cultural Revolution period) and is maintaining steady improvement both in breadth and depth. The Sprouts of Capitalism The Question of the Sprouts of Capitalism in Agriculture in the MingQing Period ^ 3% tf *t *$ & 3* $ & * & % % UM by Li Wenzhi £ .$? $ê , Wei Jinyu 4i& and Jm8 Junjian ^i M, ?%_ (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe) is one of Qing History: The State ofthe Field in 198369 the more systematic works in recent years on the question of the sprouts of capitalism in agriculture. The four essays in this book...