Similar to other
developing countries, the most fundamental problem
China faces in its path toward industrialization
is urbanization. Yet China is unique because of
its size. China has more than 200 cities with a
population of more than a million. While this is
more than any other country, China today is still
a country with a predominantly rural population.
The largest city is non-coastal Chongqing
(15.3 million, with 30 million in its metropolitan
area) on the bank on the Yangtze River upstream in
Sichuan province in the southwest interior; next
is
coastal Shanghai (13.1
million, with 20 million in the metropolitan area)
at the mouth of the Yangtze; and next is Beijing
(12.2 million, with 15 million in metropolitan
area), the nation's capital.
Only 515
million (40%) of the 1.3 billion Chinese
population were urbanized as of the end of 2003,
compared with an average 70% for developed
countries. Britain was 37% urbanized in 1850, the
United States 41% in 1910 and Japan 38% in 1950.
During the past two and a half decades, China has
industrialized to a far greater extent than it has
urbanized. By developed-country standards, China's
current industrialization level should have
generated 60% urbanization instead of 40%. That is
an urbanization gap of 280 million people, larger
than the population of the US. Its level of
economic development has also outpaced its
urbanization, which should be 50% rather than 40%.
China's historical
conditions Yet Chinese historical
conditions raise doubt on whether Western norms of
urbanization have any relevance for China.
Some six decades ago, China emerged from a
century of semi-colonial feudal economy dominated
by foreign interests into the beginning of a
sovereign modern socialist society based on
agrarian revolutionary ideology, which continues
to inform Chinese politics today. The path of
escape from semi-colonialism was through
anti-imperialism by political revolution against a
decrepit dynasty. The political struggle for
national revival was complex and protracted,
spanning almost a century of violence that
included a post-revolution civil war that has yet
to end after the establishment of the People's
Republic.
After political revolution
succeeded on the mainland in 1949, the path from a
feudal economy has been through modernization, and
the path toward building a modern socialist
society is through continuing socio-economic
revolution, not neo-liberal revisionism. These
three paths intertwine inseparably in Chinese
politics. None of them should be confused with the
insipid infiltration of Westernization that has
manifested itself in the form of cultural
imperialism disguised as universal modernity
during the past two centuries and as global
neo-liberalism in the past two decades.
Today, some 800 million of China's
population of 1.3 billion still live in rural
areas. While China has begun to industrialize at a
fast pace, industrial workers are still a minority
constituent in the Chinese political structure.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed
85 years ago on July 1, 1921, in Shanghai by a
group of young intellectuals influenced by new
exposure to Marxist ideology, the Party Congress
was attended by only 58 delegates. They elected
Chen Duxiu as the party's first chairman, who
viewed the urban industrial worker as the natural
ideological base for socialist revolution. The
rural peasantry was considered too conservative
and provincial to be a fertile revolutionary base
on which to bring China into socialism in the
modern world through revolutionary communism. The
CCP at its very beginning constituted itself as a
minority party of industrial workers and had to
pay a high price for that ideological mistake.
Still, according to Harvard political
scientist/historian Benjamin Schwartz (Chinese
Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1958), by 1927 the
communist-organized "All China Federation of Trade
Unions" grew to a membership of 2.8 million
concentrated in a few coastal cities while the
rural peasant associations represented by Mao
Zedong had only about 2 million members, too
widely scattered all over the countryside to be
taken seriously as a potent revolutionary force.
While this achievement in organizing industrial
workers made the CCP one of the larger communist
parties in the world at the time, it camouflaged
its irrelevance in Chinese political reality.
Yet this was when the Kuomintang (KMT)
right wing, representing the interests of the
budding national bourgeoisie and established
landlords, newly under the nationalistic influence
of rising fascism, and focusing on urban centers
as seats of political power, became alarmed at the
spread of communist influence among China's new
factory workers. This fear was not based on any
long-range vision of national revival needs, but
on shortsighted desire to keep wages low to ensure
easy profit for a new class of national
capitalists and their foreign partners and
creditors. Within the KMT, the fascist right wing
broke with the socialist left wing, and with the
assassination in 1925 of Liao Zhongkai, Sun
Yat-sen's top aide and heir apparent, seized
control of the coalition government to suspend
cooperation with the CCP by abruptly disarming the
Shanghai workers militia and liquidating with mass
terror all communist organizations in urban areas.
Mao Zedong escaped the anti-communist
White Terror in Shanghai and went to the rural
interior where, with the help of peasant general
Zhu De, he founded a guerrilla army in rural
Jinggangshan on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi
provinces to continue resistance. Under the
leadership of Mao, a vast region with more than 60
million inhabitants soon turned enthusiastically
to support a communist administration. The basis
for this popular support was not abstract Marxist
ideology but a practical program of socialist land
reform that brought long-denied social justice to
the suffering peasants.
In the spring of
1934, Chiang Kai-shek led an army of 550,000 newly
trained and equipped by Nazi Germany to undertake
an anti-communist "Bandit Extermination Campaign"
(Qiao-fei) that encircled the
100,000-member, ill-equipped Red Army and
threatened it with complete annihilation. In
response, the out-numbered Red Army embarked on a
historic and heroic Long March of 7,000 circuitous
miles (11,270 kilometers) finally to reach its
home base in Yenan in northern Shaanxi province in
October 1935 with only 20,000 survivors.
At the bleakest point of the Long March,
an enlarged meeting of the CCP Politburo was held
in January 1935 at Junyi at Guizhou to consider
desperate options to break out of the KMT
encirclement to avoid destruction. In the
emergency meeting, Mao proposed a shift in
strategy to rely not on the urban industrial
workers but the peasantry for support of the
revolution. On this populist platform, Mao was
elected as the new leader of the CCP. This
strategy, being responsive to Chinese political
reality, eventually led to total communist victory
over the whole nation. Henceforth, the CCP has
been a majority party of the Chinese peasantry.
The term "proletariat class" has since been
interpreted in Chinese political lexicon as
"property-less" class, which in Chinese culture
has traditionally meant farmers without their own
land, not just industrial workers.
While
the factors behind the defeat of the Kuomintang by
the CCP have since been controversially debated
among conservative Western historians, to most
Chinese observers the key factor behind the
failure of KMT was clearly its self-inflicted
inability to cultivate and keep the support of the
Chinese peasantry. It is the unavoidable fate that
awaits any political party in China should it make
the same mistake, be it imperial, monarchist,
fascist, capitalist or communist. In Chinese
political culture, support from the peasantry is
known commonly as the Mandate of Heaven
(Tian-ming). Chinese communism has strong
and distinctive historical and indigenous roots
that 19th-century Marxism and 20th-century
Leninism re-energized.
At the top of the
list of obvious reasons why the KMT fell was
pervasive official corruption, which was related
to inflation. Prices rose throughout KMT rule at
more than 30% a year but the salary of government
officials, already suffering from traditional
institutional defect of below-market pay for the
bureaucracy, were not indexed, so bureaucrats
could not survive financially without corrupt
sources of extra income. Yet the real and fatal
corruption was the super-greed at the highest
levels of government, which set unsavory standards
for the entire public sector. Perpetrators could
feel safe from persecution as long as they did not
steal more than their superiors. It was an open
secret that after the Nationalist Treasury ran dry
from official corruption and war, the three top
political families, the Chiangs, the Songs and the
Kungs, related through marriages, were the
exclusive beneficiaries of massive US financial
aid to China from 1942-49.
Hyperinflation
in the last days of KMT rule, which was caused in
no small way by high-level corruption in
large-scale monetary fraud, robbed the KMT of all
popular support. On August 19, 1948, with US aid,
a new gold-backed yuan was issued at an exchange
rate of 4 yuan to a US dollar. By mid-May 1949,
the yuan fell to 23.3 million to a dollar. Less
than five months later, on October 1, 1949, when
the People's Republic was proclaimed by the CCP,
the KMT had already fled to Taiwan. The fact that
the KMT fell from power with the free fall of its
currency explains why China is hypersensitive
about the danger of hyperinflation associated with
a free-floating and freely convertible yuan.
Another reason for the demise of the KMT
was that, chiefly because of its elitist outlook,
the party suffered from a preference for a small
number of top cadres from the time of its
founding. The shortage of committed cadres was
further exacerbated by the war with Japan, in
which more than 100,000 young officers became
casualties, two-thirds of the new graduates of the
Central Military Academy, plus 19,000 of the
24,000 young civilian cadres trained for
mass-mobilization and development tasks.
Even before the war, the KMT had put low
priority on social reform and, in particular, the
redistribution of land. The KMT relied on the
conservative absentee-landlord class living in
luxury in cities for support in its halfhearted
resistance against Japanese aggression. After the
war, US anti-communist influence prevented the KMT
from introducing critically needed social reform.
KMT policies, hijacked by the national bourgeoisie
and conservative landlords, neglected the interior
countryside and its peasant population in favor of
coastal cities artificially buoyant with foreign
capital, giving a false impression of a growing
economy while the nation was actually falling into
socio-economic chaos.
Finally, the KMT, as
a political amalgam of diverse special-interest
groups and privileged social classes, exclusive of
the peasant masses, the only class that really
counts in Chinese politics, became paralyzed by
internecine factional conflicts that prevented the
natural emergence of any politics of
self-preservation.
Today, the
71-million-member Chinese Communist Party, to
various degrees of seriousness, is faced with
several shortcomings similar if not identical to
those that brought down the KMT, such as a cadre
corps demoralized by a social milieu that
celebrates money ahead of revolutionary ideology,
as symbolized by the inclusion of capitalists into
the membership of a supposedly proletariat
revolutionary party; rampant official corruption
that has become structural; and, until recently,
deliberate policy neglect of the rural peasantry.
While none of these have so far reached crisis
proportions, the experience of the KMT shows that
such problems can accelerate surprisingly quickly
if left unattended under a rug of false
prosperity.
US propaganda tries to create
a false impression that communism is popularly
opposed in China by a majority of freedom-starved
people who are congenitally antagonistic toward
big government. This propaganda describes a China
that exists only in the wishful Western mind. The
historical fact is that in China, the masses
always look to a strong central government to
protect them from abuse of power at the local
level.
Notwithstanding US propaganda,
communism has not been arbitrarily imposed on the
vast nation by force by a dictatorial minority but
has been welcomed by the peasant masses who
constitute more than 80% of the population because
communism provides practical solutions to their
real problems. Communism is opposed in China only
by a minority bourgeoisie and a foreign-influenced
comprador class.
At long last, the newest
generation of Chinese leadership is finally taking
measures to reverse the two-decade-long policy
neglect of the welfare of the peasant masses.
History has shown such neglect to be politically
cancerous without fail.
The land reform
movement of 1950-53 The slogan "Land to
every tiller" (geng ze yu qi tien) came
from KMT leader Dr Sun Yat-sun as a key
revolutionary slogan of the Nationalist revolution
of 1911. It was adopted by the CCP in the Chinese
Soviet period in the early 1930s in southern
China, where the party started to institute a
program of equal distribution of land among the
peasantry. This populist policy cemented the
backbone of popular support for the CCP.
After the 1937 War Against Japanese
Aggression ended in 1946, the CCP began to
rearrange the pattern of farmland ownership in the
areas it controlled immediately after the Japanese
surrender, distributing all lands dispossessed
from big landlords to destitute landless peasants,
tenant farmers and rural workers. This land-reform
program won the overwhelming support of the
land-hungry peasants and was fundamental in the
CCP's final victory in the pursuing civil war
against the KMT.
With the establishment of
the People's Republic in 1949, the CCP immediately
set about a nationwide, all-embracing
redistribution of agricultural land with three
aims: equality; permanent elimination of
counter-revolutionary opposition; and mobilization
for mass movement for national reconstruction.
The Land Reform Law decreed in 1949 by the
provisional Central Government Administrative
Council provided the legislative foundation by
which the rural population was classified into
five categories: landlords, rich peasants, middle
peasants, poor peasants, and tenants and rural
workers. The classification criteria differed from
region to region in response to socio-economic
traditions and geographical variations. There was
considerable on-the-spot circumstantial adjustment
and creative interpretation in sorting out the
categories, as rigid class distinction of social
groups existed more in the Chinese cultural
consciousness than in reality. However, the
categorization, imperfect and unwittingly
inequitable as it was in many cases, served the
revolutionary purpose of identifying potential
reactionary forces of political resistance.
Deng Zihui, the senior cadre in charge of
the land-reform movement, and who later became
minister of agriculture, wrote on December 28,
1950, in the People's Daily: "Land reform is the
most fundamental struggle against the feudal
system ... to regard it as a technical affair,
namely the redistribution of land, would be a
grave political mistake; for the feudal system can
be removed only by the complete extermination of
the landlord class through a number of military,
intellectual and economic confrontations."
The land reform of 1950 redistributed
almost 50 million hectares, about 40% of
cultivated land of the nation at the time. It
solved the inequality problem in society but it
did not solve the technical production problems of
China's antiquated and inefficient agriculture in
the economy, which had reached its operative
optimum when the population it supported was not
more than 100 million. It soon became clear that
land reform needed to be accompanied by social
reform to initiate agriculture collectivization
toward "socialist transformation".
Social
reform began with a movement of marriage reform to
secure the emancipation of women, to prohibit
marriages arranged by parents to liberate the
young generation for modern life and to break down
the residual feudal family clan system. The new
Civil Laws proclaimed by the KMT government after
the 1911 bourgeois revolution had forbidden
polygamy, but had continued to allow the feudal
custom of second wives and concubines to remain.
This feudal practice was terminated by the new
Marriage Law of the People's Republic.
To
solve the agricultural production problem,
collectivization was necessary to assembly larger
tracts of farmland needed for mechanization and to
pool financial resources to buy farm machinery and
build support facilities and related
infrastructure. This practical necessity was in
line with the aim of the transformation of the
"national, bourgeois democratic revolution" of Sun
Yat-sen to the "socialist revolution led by the
dictatorship of the proletariat", the
property-less class.
On October 1, 1953,
four years after the founding of the People's
Republic and with initial success of the land and
marriage reform programs behind it, the CCP
proclaimed a new "General Line of Socialist
Transformation" after discussing it democratically
in two National Work Conferences on economic and
organization issues three months earlier.
By the summer of 1953, it became clear
that land reform alone could neither guarantee
adequate food supply to the nation, particularly
the heavily populated cities, nor to provide
sufficient savings and investment for national
industrialization, not even farm mechanization.
Peasants understandably but thoughtlessly
preferred to sell their produce to
inflation-causing speculators in the open market
at momentary higher prices rather than to
price-stabilizing government farm administration,
not realizing that volatile speculative high
prices would cause a general collapse of farm
prices in the long run because it drains wealth
from the farming sector into the financial sector
through the manipulation of market prices. Tax
evasion was rampant through unreported
transactions in the private markets.
Collectivization was not just a theoretical aim,
it was a practical necessity.
Land
reform in Chinese history Land reform has
been a fundamental socio-political movement
throughout Chinese history.
The 4th and
3rd centuries BC were a period of rapid economic
development and technical innovation in China when
the central and southwestern plains came under
continuous cultivation through extensive land
clearing encouraged by various political regimes.
A proficient husbandry developed allowing the use
of manure as fertilizer, differentiating of soil
types for different crops, incorporating plough
and sowing dates into the calendar, use of
drainage to drying out marshy regions and
detoxifying salty terrain and using irrigation to
bring new arid land into cultivation.
These collective undertakings were all
deliberate policies of agricultural development
promoted by rulers of petty kingdoms to enhance
the wealth and power of the state competitively.
State control of agriculture, the indispensable
source of food supply, has been the foundation of
Chinese civilization, not markets. Socialistic
statism is a founding principle of Chinese
political culture, just as Jeffersonian
representative democracy is for US political
culture.
Market fundamentalism, which even
in the United States has been a creature of the
state, is the very antithesis of four millennia of
recorded socio-economic history in Chinese
civilization. Even so, statism in agriculture is
operative in all modern nations in the world
today. US insistence that China adopt a market
economy is nothing but cultural imperialism, and
the US assertion that market fundamentalism is the
most efficient economic arrangement is merely a
sign of conceptual narrow-mindedness that comes
from self-deception and ignorance of history, if
not disingenuous self-service. Market
fundamentalism can perform efficiently only if the
state sets rules to allow it to do so. Without
state regulation, market fundamentalism
degenerates into failed markets quickly through
the natural concentration of market power.
Karl Polanyi's Origins of Our Time: The
Great Transformation (1945) points out that
the modern world's market economy was of very
recent origin and emerged fully formed only as
recently as the 19th century, in conjunction with
capitalistic industrialization, which is also a
development of state policy. The current
globalization of markets following the fall of the
Soviet bloc is also of recent post-Cold War
origin, in conjunction with the advent of the
information age and finance capitalism, all
creatures of the state.
Prior to the
coming of capitalistic industrialization, the
market played only a minor part in the economic
life of societies. Even where marketplaces could
be seen to be operating, they were peripheral to
the main economic organization and activity of
society. Polanyi argued that in modern market
economies, the needs of the market determined
social behavior, whereas in pre-industrial and
primitive economies, the needs of society
determined economic behavior. Polanyi reintroduced
social concepts of reciprocity and redistribution
in human relationships.
Reciprocity
implies that people produce the goods and services
they are best at producing, and share them with
others with joy rather than for financial profit.
This is reciprocated by others who are good at
producing other goods and services. There is an
unspoken agreement that all would produce that
which they could do best and mutually share and
share alike, not just sold to the highest bidder.
All find their fulfillment in separate productive
livelihoods. The motivation to produce and share
is not personal profit, but personal fulfillment,
and avoidance of social contempt, ostracism, and
loss of social prestige and standing. This was the
historical experience in China until the arrival
of Western imperialism to proselytize
mercantilism, a controlled form of trade imposed
by a foreign state of superior power in the name
of the free market.
Shang Yang (died 338
BC) of the Kingdom of Qin in the Warring States
Period (408-221 BC) built the state's legal system
based on the Book of Law, introduced a
legalist government in the midst of Confucian
culture and propelled the Qin state to prosperity
that enabled it to unite all of China, ushering in
the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). He introduced a new,
standardized system of land allocation, reformed
taxation, encouraged the cultivation of new
frontiers, and favored agriculture over commerce,
all implemented with state action. Shang Yang
burned books by Confucians in an effort to curb
the conservative philosophy's pervasive and
undesirable influence against change.
Shang Yang was credited by Han Fei-zi with
putting forth two precepts: Ding Fa (fixing
legal standards) and Yi Min (all people as
one). Han Fei was a prince of the state of Han who
joined the state of Qin, but eventually he became
a victim of deductive conflict of loyalty and was
granted the princely privilege of committing
suicide in 233 BC by Qin prime minister Li Si
(died 208 BC), as Socrates was by an Athenian
court for similar thought crimes. In reaction to a
Qin edict to deport immigrants, Li Si wrote
Advice Against Driving Away Guest Immigrants
(Jian Zhu Ke Shu) by arguing that the
expulsion of immigrants only enriches and
strengthens foreign countries. Members of the US
Congress could benefit from reading Li Si's
treatise at this time of anti-immigrant hysteria.
In Chinese history, merchants have never
been celebrated as important figures of society,
reflecting the social and cultural disdain
accorded to the market and its participants. In
contrast to the United States, in Chinese cultural
awareness there is no equivalent to the likes of J
P Morgan, John D Rockefeller or Andrew W Mellon,
robber barons of the market. To call a person a
merchant is an insult in China even today.
Hydraulic engineers who successfully controlled
flood and improved irrigation, not rich merchants
who gained wealth from trade, were national heroes
and their names were recorded in official
historiography, such as Xi Zi in the Wei Kingdom
and Li Ping and his son Cheng Guo in the Qin
Kingdom.
The primitive state of
agriculture and transportation of the
Chun-Qiu/Jian-Guo (Spring-Autumn/Warring States)
period (770-226 BC) could not support large
population centers of high density. The
3rd-century text by Han Fei referred to a large
increase in population in the country that
continued during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220),
which provided the earliest official census in
Chinese history, recording 57,617,400 taxable
individuals in the year AD 2. This population
increase was directly related to improvements in
farming.
Sui and Tang dynasties land
reform In the 8th century, the height of
the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), China's population
centroid shifted from the Wei Valley and the
central plains, where it had remained relatively
fixed since Neolithic times, toward the plains of
the lower Yangtze basin because of the adoption of
wet-rice cultivation in the south. The population
south of the Yangtze River tripled from 3 million
taxable individuals to 10 million between the
years 600 and 742 during the Sui Dynasty (581-618)
and the first part of the Tang Dynasty, about
one-fifth of the total 50-million population.
The 900km-long Grand Canal was built by
the first Sui Dynasty emperor linking Luoyang and
Huai-an near the seacoast in what is now Jiangsu
province and connecting Huai-an with the Yangtze
River in the south. An annual volume of 5 million
bushels (about 176,000 cubic meters) of rice was
transported by barge to the north to overcome
recurring food shortages previously suffered by
the arid north. Luxury goods were also part of the
freight traffic. Song Dynasty conservative
historian Sima Guang described in his famous work
Integrated Political History (Zi Zhi
Tong Jian, 1066) that fresh abalone, a
delicacy in Chinese haute cuisine, were
captured alive from the Yellow Sea and sent up to
Changan from Jiangdu via the Grand Canal. Five
barrels of seawater had to be stored on board
transport barges to keep just 500 abalone alive
for the month-and-a-half journey.
Exploiting the prosperity created by 19
years of sagacious rule of the first emperor, the
second ruling Flaming Emperor (Yangdi) of
the Sui Dynasty that preceded Tang embarked on an
ambitious program of spectacular construction and
expeditionary military campaigns. The legendary
excesses of the Flaming Emperor would be
identified by future Confucian historians as a
direct cause for his abrupt loss of the Mandate of
Heaven (Tianming) after only a relatively
brief reign of 12 years.
For example, the
reconstruction and expansion of Luoyang and its
ancient palace had required 2 million conscript
workers. Another million workers had been
mobilized to construct a 900km-long Grand Canal.
The original aim had been to make it possible,
upon completion of the canal, to ship grain from
the south to the arid north. But the Flaming
Emperor soon used the canal for himself and his
court to travel from Luoyang, his new capital
330km to the east of ancient Changan, to the then
most prosperous commercial city in the land,
Jiangdu, 100km east of modern-day Nanjing. Newly
designed imperial dragon barges for this purpose
had been on order from the southern provinces at
great expense.
Along the canal route, more
than 40 luxurious palaces were built as resting
places on route at points of scenic beauty. Known
as departure palaces (ligong), they were
built according to the latest design trend, of
grand proportions and fine material, and decorated
by celebrated painters and master sculptors of
wood and stone. Concurrent with these major
projects, construction of the famous West Villa
(Xiyuan) was ordered by the Flaming Emperor on the
western outskirts of Luoyang. West Villa occupied
a site measuring 100 square kilometers. Within
this large site, 5 square kilometers were devoted
to a series of man-made lakes of artful shapes.
Artificial mountains were formed by the excavated
earth. These miniature mountains were studded with
delightfully sited pavilions high above the
monotonous, flat landscape of the plains of
central China where Luoyang is situated.
A
private canal connected the string of man-made
lakes of West Villa to the city of Luoyang via the
Luo River from which Luoyang had received its name
and much of its charm since the beginning of
civilization. Along the private canal, between
West Villa and Luoyang Palace in the imperial
capital, 16 royal palaces were built, known as the
Sixteen Estates (Shiliu Yuan). Each estate
housed 300 court beauties in a network of
exquisite pavilions, luxuriously furnished, as a
mortal's make-believe paradise.
Imperial
outings were frequently organized by the Flaming
Emperor of the Sui Dynasty on the private canal
around West Villa, with the imperial entourage
numbering several thousands, often in the evening
to enjoy the full moon, especially in autumn. The
peripheral-ranked aristocrats rode along both
banks of the canal on horseback and in open
carriages, lit by hundreds of lanterns. Waving
enthusiastically, they provided a moving stage of
choreographed excitement for the royal inner
circle, whose members enjoyed the spectacles on
shore from well-lit imperial barges of dragon
motif. The royals themselves, in turn, formed the
centerpiece of a real-life opera, with music and
incense filling the air, and with laughter, shouts
of poetic riddle games and expressions of
sycophantic flattery mingling joyously.
Occasionally, firework displays were
presented, viewed by an audience of up to 18,000
invited guests. The sounds and lights were visible
from several kilometers away, to the delight of
the local populace.
To project an image of
absolute imperial power, the Flaming Emperor of
the Sui Dynasty took on the role of a vigorous
patron of the performing arts. He ordered the
construction of grand facilities for circus
performances, staged with hundreds of exotic
animals from all parts of the immense empire.
Theaters with orchestras of 300 musicians were
built, presenting operas using male singers
dressed in women's costumes, a practice that would
survive to the present time in traditional Chinese
opera and Japanese Kabuki theater.
Street
festivals were periodically organized, with
performers numbering more than 30,000 parading a
route 2km long, with the audience seated on
viewing stands lining both sides of the parade
route. To meet rising popular demand for public
entertainment, the court established a school for
musicians, training 30,000 professionals to
support frequent, court-sponsored ceremonial
events and festivals in Luoyang, new imperial
capital of the soon-to-fall Sui Dynasty.
With completion of the Grand Canal, the
Flaming Emperor, before his precipitous downfall,
embarked frequently by barge from Luoyang to enjoy
his tours of Jiangdong, a resort region in the
Yangtze Delta 1,000km southeast.
The main
imperial dragon barge used by the Flaming Emperor
consisted of four attached sections totaling 600
meters in length, with a height of nearly 14
meters above water. The front section consisted of
the main imperial room, the inner imperial room,
and the east and west rooms. The middle two
sections housed 120 imperial cabins, all
elaborately decorated with gold and jade. The back
section housed imperial household servants and
support facilities. The empress (huanghou)
traveled on her own phoenix barge, smaller than
the Flaming Emperor's imperial dragon barge, but
just as elegantly decorated, though appropriately
subdued.
The imperial dragon barge,
surrounded by nine floating scenery barges in
three sections, formed the lead of a fleet of
several thousand other court barges, housing
members of the hougong (rear palace), the
sovereign's personal household, composed of
imperial concubines (huangfei) and palace
eunuchs (huanguan). Still other barges
followed, housing the princes, the princesses,
ministers, Buddhist monks (seng), Buddhist
nuns (nigu), Taoist priests
(daoshi), Taoist priestesses
(nuguan) and distinguished foreign guests
and envoys, including exhibition barges showcasing
tribunal gifts from foreign lands.
On
upstream return trips, the whole imperial flotilla
was towed by a force of 80,000 men dressed in
special tow-gang uniforms, in formations that were
distributed with military precision and
engineering balance along both banks of the Grand
Canal.
Adding to the imperial flotilla
were several thousands more military barges for
the Imperial Guards. The whole imperial fleet
routinely numbered more than 10,000 barges,
stretching over several kilometers, disrupting
commercial barge traffic, the accommodation of
which the costly Grand Canal construction program
was originally intended for morally and justified
by economically.
Cavalry formations in
ceremonial armor galloped along both banks of the
Grand Canal, with imperial flags and regimental
standards fluttering in the wind for as far ahead
as the eye could see. It was a most impressive
sight, reinforced by heart-pounding military drums
and exhilarating imperial bugles announcing in
advance the pending arrival of imperial presence.
Food and wine were provided to the
imperial flotilla by local administrative units
within 100km on either side of the Grand Canal,
each vying for imperial attention by providing the
best of local cuisine and specialty produce to
both the moving fleet and the 40 departure palaces
(li gong) en route.
Such regal
pleasure, described admiringly in detail in Song
Dynasty neo-Confucian conservative historian Sima
Guang's famous work, Integrated Political
History, was meant to symbolize the absolute
power of the state, personified in the emperor. To
Sima Guang, such glory justifies the bloody
treachery of high politics as worthy of princely
pursuit, self-restraint as ordained by Confucian
ethics notwithstanding, not to mention the heavy
burden of the peasant masses.
Two other
major construction projects also contributed to
the dubious fame of the Flaming Emperor of the Sui
Dynasty. The first was a network of highways with
a standard width of 15 meters to accommodate
unobstructed two-way chariot traffic. Its main
arterial was a 4,000km route running from Zhuojun,
modern-day Beijing, to the garrison town of Yulin
in the west, where the construction of a new
section of the Great Wall extension had taken
place. The highway ended at Yutian, modern-day
Hetian (Khotan), in the Tarim Basin in the far
west.
The second project involved a system
of grain-storing garrisons. The garrisons, each
with enclosure walls running 100km in total
length, and boasting 3,000 grain silos guarded by
1,000 troops, were designed to facilitate rapid
deployment of troops in war and to provide food
reserve for the populace in peace. The exorbitant
cost of all these projects fell mostly on the
peasants and the resultant discontent contributed
to the abrupt fall of the Sui Dynasty.
Land reform in the Tang Dynasty aimed at
correcting the wasteful ways of the second Sui
emperor to provide each family with enough land to
support itself and to establish an empire-wide
agricultural system that would ensure the
regularity of tax revenue and social stability.
The provision of the means of livelihood for every
family, the equivalent of full employment in the
modern market economy, was guaranteed by the
government through equal distribution of public
land. Unlike the modern market economy where
structural unemployment is maintained by central
bank monetary policy to combat inflation, the
traditional Chinese economy considered full
employment an undeniable responsibility of the
state.
In the Tang era, land was
distributed equally as annuities to be held only
for the lifetime of the recipient. Taxes were
levied not according to property size but to
population count. For every able-bodied
individual, the state imposed a tax called
zu payable in cereal. There was also a
system of corvee called yung and a tax paid
in cloth named tiao. The founding emperor
of the Tang Dynasty adopted the populist policies
that had begun by the first emperor of the
preceding Sui Dynasty.
The Sui ruler upon
gaining power opened state land reserves to the
landless, distributed 5,000 buffaloes from
government lots free to impoverished farmers to
restore production, forbade the military to draft
men under the age of 21, reduced the annual tax
burden on farmers by as much as 80%, shared with
the common people revenues from state monopolies
on wine and salt, exempted the elderly - those
over 50 - from taxes, and reduced the state's take
from farm harvests by one-third. A central
bureaucracy was established and staffed with
literati selected on merit through public
examinations. Within a few years of these populist
policies, the Sui economy recovered totally from
three centuries of war and destruction and grew
with unprecedented prosperity, with state grain
reserves sufficient for feeding the nation for the
next 60 years. Yet all this was frittered away by
the second Sui emperor's extravagance within two
decades.
Cottage industries were always
part of the Chinese agricultural economy. Taxes on
high-population-density regions with small farm
plots were higher than those on larger farms with
low population density. There was no financial
incentive for the average farmer to acquire more
land than he could cultivate as he would not be
able to find tenant farmers, since every
able-bodied farmer could claim his own land. The
land pattern required regular meticulous census
and regulation on personal mobility.
In
Tang China, the emperor held sovereign title to
all land in the empire, and granted land with the
population on it to meritorious aristocrats and
approved clergies, and also directly to
individuals of the general public who had to
cultivate it themselves. Aristocrats were entitled
to collect revenue from the farmers living on
their lands. Aristocrats in turn had to pay a
commission on their revenue to the imperial house
unless specifically exempt.
In areas of
historically high population density, or even in
fringe areas that through the influx of immigrants
experienced sharply increased population over
relatively short periods, a continuous
redistribution of public land has become
operationally impracticable. Furthermore, the
Equal Field System (Juntian Zhi) was tied
to the Tax Laws of Rent, Corvee and Cloth (Zu
Yong Tiao Fa) of the second year the Reign of
Martial Virtue (Wu'de), proclaimed in AD
619. It was principally a poll tax with no direct
relationship to land, except the implicit equality
in universal land allotment to able-bodied males.
Under the Tax Laws, taxes were regularly
required of the population in three forms: rent,
paid in the form of grain (zu), labor or
corvee (yong) in kind, and cloth
(tiao). Cloth was frequently used as a form
of common currency during the Tang era. Each
able-bodied male aged 21-60 was required to pay an
annual rent of 2 piculs (121 kilograms) of grain,
64 meters each of damask, brocade and silk, or 274
meters of cotton cloth, plus 20 days of labor. If
labor was not provided or not required, an
additional meter of each type of cloth was taxed
for each day of grace. Labor worked in excess of
the normal 20 days earned credit against other
taxes, five days earning an exemption from cloth
payments and 10 days earning exemptions from
payments in both grain and cloth. A maximum credit
of 50 days of labor was permitted, after which
direct cash compensation had to be paid by the
government to the laborer.
A special tax
called Miscellaneous Labor (Zayao) was
levied under exceptional circumstances, such as
defense construction or major public projects.
Generally, a sovereign who decreed Miscellaneous
Labor too frequently would run the risk of being
labeled immoral by Confucians at his own peril.
Such a label would expose the sovereign to the
danger of having the Mandate of Heaven
(Tian-ming) taken from him forcibly by
ambitious aristocrats poised to exploit the
dissatisfaction of the people.
Taxes were
collected from the family as a unit and not from
individuals, but the rate was applied to the
number of able-bodied males in the household,
excluding servants and slaves. Imperial family
members (huangshi) and aristocrats
(guizu) were exempted from taxes on their
private estates and on the income from their
fengwu (fief), as were families of
meritorious ministers (gongchen). Commoners
(sheren) beyond the age of 80 and in poor
health were granted one male helper at state
expense; beyond age 90, two helpers; and beyond
100, three helpers. There were, unfortunately, not
too many of those in Tang society, given the low
average life expectancy in the 7th century.
Peasant families within a fengwu
paid two-thirds of their taxes to their local
lords, with one-third of the payments reserved for
the emperor, the Son of Heaven, whose agents did
all the collecting. Labor or corvee could be
substituted by grain or cloth, and sometimes by
coins, which were in constant short supply.
Hereditary fiefs were called shifeng (solid
grants) and non-hereditary grants were called
sifeng (consumable grants).
Despite
increasingly uneven shifting of geographical
distribution of the population, the poll tax
remained geared to the ideal, though increasingly
fictitious, system of equal land allotment. As a
result, many families over time fell into dire
circumstances, unable to pay their taxes because
they had not received their allotment of land at
locations of their preference. As the population
became more mobile because of structural changes
in the economy as well as new socio-political
developments, the resultant disorder in tax
collection eventually reached the point where
reform became critically necessary. It was in this
agitating climate for tax reform that political
pressure was created in mid-7th century Tang China
for a ruler who had little connection to
traditional, vested feudal interests. That ruler
was Wu Ze-tian, a 53-year-old woman of merchant
roots, known as Heaven Empress (Tainhou).
She was the only female emperor in Chinese
history.
In AD 780, 162 years after the
founding of Tang Dynasty, about midway through its
289-year history, the Duo Tax System (Liang
Shui Fa) was introduced that levied taxes
twice a year, in the sixth and 11th lunar months.
It was a land tax, proportional to acreage held by
each landowner.
Henceforth, with
replacement of the traditional poll tax by a land
tax, the imperial government lost interest in
limiting the size of landholdings. Fiscal
incentive for official opposition to formation of
large estates evaporated. In fact, large estates
were now preferred by the central imperial
authority because such estates would allow more
efficient collection of taxes.
The growth
of a system of big non-aristocratic landlords was
ensured when tax became based on land rather than
on population, and state revenue was not
threatened by the concentration of large
landholdings within any one family, provided the
family did not enjoy tax exemption.
Moreover, a land tax placed an indirect
tax on previously non-taxpaying servants and
slaves, because of the direct relationship between
land productivity and manpower needs. It also
provided financial incentives for the efficient
use of land. Under this tax regime, the landowning
merchant class prospered and grew as a political
force in Tang society, even if it continued to
suffer traditional social stigma.
As
government appetite for additional revenue
increased, state monopoly of production and sale
of important commodities, beginning with salt, and
later to include wine, iron and bronze, were
reinstituted. Tea drinking became popular in the
Tang era and eventually tea also became a
state-monopolized commodity. The British had the
same idea, which led them to impose a salt
monopoly on British India in 1929, against which
Mahatma Gandhi organized a satyagraha, a
campaign of civil disobedience expressed in the
form of non-violent, passive resistance to unjust
laws.
Similarly in France, the high tax on
salt emerged as one of the underlying causes of
the French Revolution. The salt works at
Arc-et-Senans and the custom barrieres ringing
Paris at which tolls on salt and other commodities
were collected became symbols of oppression. The
architect of the salt-works and customs
barrieres, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
(1735-1806), was imprisoned after the revolution
for his role in the design of the oppressive
facilities. Salt had been used as currency in
ancient societies and men had been known to have
sold their family members into slavery for it.
Sung Dynasty socialism The 11th
century was a watershed of political and social
reform in China. The reform movement of the Sung
Dynasty (960-1279), though inseparable from
ideology and philosophy of its time, was motivated
by historical contingencies that presented
themselves as clear and present danger to the
state.
The successes of northern barbarian
invasions from the Liao and Xia tribes caused
thinking men in Sung society to question and seek
remedies to the deficiencies in the established
national culture that had resulted in an
ineffective defense system. They critically
examined the institutions in society and the
organization of the state within the
socio-economic and political context of the time.
While the Chinese state had always drifted
toward centralism, the responsibility of national
policy always resided in a State Council with
decentralized representation. In the Sung Dynasty,
the State Council consisted of five to nine
members chaired by the emperor. Councilors were
responsible for presenting the varied views of
different constituents of society. On every policy
issue, the council heard the opinion of every
councilor representing diverse interests, with the
emperor only ratifying the majority council
decision or casting a tie-breaking vote. The
emperor's authority was moral rather than
political. This State Council system continues
today, chaired by the premier, reporting to the
politburo chaired by the president of the republic
and chairman of the Communist Party.
The
emergence of a market economy during the Sung era
resulted in a widening disparity of income and
wealth beginning around the 11th century. A new
class of rentiers came into existence and
grew larger to overwhelm the ancient aristocracy
whose privileged station came from past martial
feats. The rentiers lived handsomely off
the rent from their land. The wealth and leisure
associated with unearned income gave rise to new
generations of men who were learned of the
classics and who delighted in philosophical
musing, wrote essays on political theory and
became active in the appreciation and making of
the arts, but who were economic parasites whose
estates increasingly escaped taxes, while the tax
burden fell increasingly heavy on small farmers,
tenant farmers and landless laborers. Sung culture
flourished among the elite while Sung society slid
into decline.
By the mid-11th century, a
new meritocracy was changing the socio-political
balance within the Sung ruling class away from the
traditional hold of the ancient aristocracy. Prior
to the Sung Dynasty, from the Han to Tang
dynasties, the aristocrats formed a close clique
that jealously guarded their genealogies. They
could often preserve their social privileges to
survive the rise and fall of dynasties as long as
they were willing to shift political loyalty to
the new regime. But the ancient aristocrats were
frugal compared with the free-spending luxurious
lifestyle of the new rentiers who began to
siphon off larger and larger shares of the
national wealth for their own conspicuous
consumption. Still, the new meritocracy inevitably
produced reform-minded thinkers among the elite
whose sense of moral propriety trumped the selfish
interests of their own class. And the apprehension
of external threats to the state created a
receptive climate for the social reform movements.
The gradual collapse of the system of
allocating land only for life began in the 8th
century at the height of the Tang Dynasty, with
the transfer of taxes on to cultivated land rather
than on individuals of working age. This meant
that land-use rights could be sold by a farmer's
estate or be forfeited from failed farmers or
those who defaulted on their monetary debts,
producing a new group of landless peasants amid an
economy of rising land prices. Land leaseholds
became a commodity that could be traded in the
market and investors could buy land to be farmed
by landless tenant farmers for profit and to
speculate on a rising land market. By the Sung
era, this land market had created an economy of
severe disparity.
The increase in rice
production also brought profound changes in the
economy through the growth of commerce in surplus
agricultural produce and arts and craft products.
The profit became concentrated in the hands of
large landowners rather the dispersed throughout
the farming population. The surplus farm labor
energized the arts and crafts with apprentices.
The production of porcelain reached perfection in
the 12th century and spilled over from imperial
kilns that produced exclusively for the imperial
household to quality commercial kilns that
produced for the aristocrats and a wealthy urban
bourgeoisie. Big commercial conglomerates were
formed from dealing in surplus grain and
consolidating small crafts cottage industries into
large factories in specialized factory towns, such
as Jingdezhen for porcelain.
The mercenary
army also siphoned off surplus labor from small
farms as large estates and monastery compounds
encroached on them. Absentee-landlord families
lived in luxury in the imperial capital or
provincial capitals and towns, enjoying the wealth
produced in their rural estates by tenant farmers
and wage earners while the landlords escaped
taxes. This led to a new kind of urbanization
where cities became good places to spend money
rather than to earn it, except for the service
sector, which had to follow where the money was
being spent. Busy trading towns multiplied in all
parts of the empire. Foreign trade with imports of
exotic goods such as incense, rare gems, ivory,
coral, rhino horns, ebony, sandalwood, etc
produced a deficit for the Sung treasury that had
to be paid in copper, sliver or gold coins. Sung
copper coins were so abundant in Japan that they
were accepted as local currency.
The
principal wealth of the economy came increasingly
from craft manufacturing and commerce, with
agriculture as a supporting base. Printed books
also became a major trade. With trade came a
monetary economy with the rise of credit. The
supply of metal coins could not keep up with the
expansion of commerce, and the world's first paper
money was issue by the Sung authorities in 1024
and quickly spread throughout the entire economy.
Bills of exchange, known as "flying money"
(fei-qian), were received by merchants at
points of sale some distance from home, which they
could exchange back into coins after a safe
journey back home.
Intellectual flowering
in art and science, philosophy and ethics,
literature and poetry, history and archeology,
astronomy and cosmology, came from this new
material prosperity out of which a naturalist
philosophy emerged to fuse into unity nature and
humanity. It was a philosophy of optimism based on
a belief in universal reason, in the promise of
education, in the possibility to improving society
and politics through the primacy of mind, while
discounting practical knowledge and physical
power. Some historians identify this purist
philosophy of anti-materialism as the cause of the
decline of the Sung Dynasty, and as the reason
China fell behind the West in science and
technology after the 17th century.
The
Sung Dynasty was a bifurcated society, with
culture and philosophy flourishing at the wealthy
top and misery and resentment simmering at the
bottom. But the unhappy situation at the bottom
was not well acknowledged by history, as little
written record of it survived compared with the
voluminous record of high culture and art. The
agricultural economy simply could not sustain
indefinitely an economy in which 20% of the
populations were unproductive officials and
literati, with 5% of population owning 90% of the
land and wealth and living in luxury while the
rest of the population drifted toward mere
subsistence.
As the Sung Dynasty came
under imminent external threat from the northern
barbarians, the state began to look to reform as a
survival strategy. The most celebrated reformer
was neo-Confucian Wang Anshi (1201-86), who has
since been credited by historians with
reintroducing state socialism beyond historical
natural socialism into Chinese society.
Henry Wallace, as US secretary of
agriculture during the administration of president
Franklin D Roosevelt, adopted Wang's idea of
subsidized farm credit and price guarantee and
applied them to New Deal programs during the Great
Depression of the 1930s. Wallace, a liberal
Republican turned Democrat, later became
Roosevelt's third-term vice president but was
replaced by Harry Truman in FDR's fourth term as a
result of conservative opposition domestic and
foreign, including British prime minister Winston
Churchill, who complained of Wallace's being soft
on communism. Had Wallace been still vice
president when FDR died in office in his fourth
term, he would have been president instead of
Truman, no atomic bombs would have been dropped on
Japan, and the Cold War might have been avoided.
Wang's Green Sprout Money Law and Market
Law were pioneer programs of state farm credit and
price subsidy that constituted Chinese state
socialism. which grew out of an ideology of
egalitarianism and social justice beyond the
utilitarian social hierarchy of Confucianism.
Antagonistic to despotism and believing in the
need for a regulatory regime to protect social
justice for the weak and powerless, Wang saw heavy
tax and corvee burdens concentrated on farmers as
the structural weaknesses of the state's fiscal
difficulties. He believed that equalizing the tax
burden on all socio-economic classes according to
their ability to carry would strengthen the state
financially. Regulation against usury and
loan-sharking and trade monopolies would also
strengthen the economy, which in turn would
increase tax revenue.
Between 1069 and
1076, Wang initiated major economic reforms in the
interest of small farmers, artisans and tradesmen,
including reduced interest rates, commutation of
labor services to the state, price-stabilizing
measures, and land taxes. He also set up state
financial planning, reduced the professional army,
built up a cavalry militia, and carried out a wide
range of educational reforms to equalize
opportunities for the rural poor.
By
giving low-interest government loans to farmers to
reduce their debt burden, Wang reduced the number
of destitute families who would otherwise become a
threat to society and a burden for the state. He
reasoned that farmers would continue to pay their
taxes and to make improvements in productivity if
they were not constantly in fear of losing
everything to their creditors. An updating of the
tax registers to increase revenue prevented
corrupt officials from pocketing unregistered
taxes they collected. Population was rising but
not all were duly recorded on the registers to be
officially liable for taxes. The Treasury profited
from a new census that allowed collection of taxes
from all to prevent corrupt officials from only
passing on the amount stipulated in the
out-of-date registers while keeping the surplus
collection from non-registered farmers for
themselves. Taxes in kind were translated into
money taxes. This encouraged trade because farmers
needed to sell some of what they produced to get
cash to pay their dues. Trade was also taxed, so
government revenue benefited twice over.
Wang's reforms were opposed by
conservative neo-Confucian Sima Guang (1019-86),
who represented the interests of big landowners
and their entourage of sponsored conservative
historians, literati and social philosophers. Wang
Anshi and Sima Guang, personal friends, were
supported by opposing factions within the
bureaucracy that competed for the emperor's
attention. Factional politics were conducted by
means of writing memoranda to the throne,
presenting arguments for and against particular
ideas, policies and people. The officials in
charge of presenting a summary of all key
memoranda were accordingly very powerful in policy
formation. This method of conducting politics is
ironically indispensably valuable to historians
because many of the memoranda survive to
posterity, preserving a written record of the
policy debates.
Opposed by the big
landowners, Wang's reforms were rescinded after
Sung Emperor Shenzhong's death in 1076. Sung
society thereafter embarked on a gradual decline
with its anti-materialist optimism. Another
problem that beset the Sung economy was the uneven
development between the northern and southern
regions, with the center of economic activities
shifting from the Yellow River (Huang He) valley,
the cradle of Chinese civilization, toward the
Yangtze River Valley and the coastal regions.
Still, the three great inventions of Chinese
civilization, printing, the compass and gunpowder,
were invented during the Sung Dynasty.
Mongol rule During the time of
Genghis Khan's rule (1210-27), the Mongols had no
administrative institutions for ruling an empire.
Unlike the Khitans and the Jurchens earlier, the
Mongols did not benefit from adopting Chinese
administrative art and institutions before they
started their territorial conquest, although
Genghis Khan benefited from Chinese artillery
science in his military exploits.
It was
only in the reign of Ogodei (1229-41) that the
occupation of China was completed and Chinese
wealth and culture were exploited to solidify
Mongol rule by Kublai Khan as the first emperor of
the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1363). The conquest of
southern China and the expeditions against Japan,
Burma, Vietnam and Java were organized by the
Mongols with troops and resources raised in China
and with Chinese fleets.
Yelu Zhuzai
(1190-1244), a descendant of the Khitan Liao
Dynasty (907-1125) and a minister of the Jurchen
Jin Dynasty that fell to Genghis Khan,
demonstrated to Ogodei the benefits of an annual
fiscal system and estimated that tax revenue could
yield annually 500,000 ounces of silver, 80,000
rolls of silk and more than 20,000 tons of cereals
in North China alone. In 1229, an empire-wide
postal relay system by pony express that had been
established six centuries earlier during the Tang
Dynasty (618-907) was restored, a system of
property taxes revived and public granaries
rebuilt. An unfrocked Zen Buddhist monk, Liu
Ping-zhong (1216-74), advised Kublai Khan at
Karakorum in 1249 with the famous Han Dynasty
adage: "One can conquer the world on horseback;
one cannot govern it on horseback."
The
Mongol rulers adopted many of the institutions of
Sung state socialism, which produced the
prosperity that Marco Polo (1254-1324) wrote about
glowingly. Unfortunately for the Mongol imperial
house, the socialist reforms of Wang Anshi adopted
by the first Yuan emperor were reversed by the
conservative neoclassical Confucian ministers, and
the Yuan Dynasty fell after only 89 years of rule
as a result. By contrast, the Sung Dynasty,
benefiting from the residual effects of the reform
measures of Wang Anshi, lasted 320 years.
Ming Dynasty land reform The
effort on land reform by the early rulers of the
Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), which liberated China
from Mongol rule, was in many ways comparable to
that of the People's Republic in the 1950s.
In two decades, Ming reform achieved
impressive targets in irrigation, land
restoration, reforestation and flood control. In
1395 alone, 40,987 reservoirs were repaired or
built. Large areas were restored for cultivation
and resettled by a massive transfer of population.
In 1371, some 233,000 hectares were reclaimed for
cultivation and in the next three years, a
whopping additional 2.4 million hectares were
restored, 2 million in 1374 alone. Taxes in the
form of grain tripled to 1 million tons in 1393,
compared with a third of a ton under Mongol
occupation.
The most impressive
achievement was in reforestation. More than 50
million trees were planted in the Nanking (now
Nanjing) region with a view of constructing a
high-seas fleet that carried Muslim sailor Cheng
He (1371-1433) in his famous ocean expeditions. In
1392, each household in Anhui province was obliged
to plant 200 mulberry trees to support the silk
industry and 200 persimmon trees. This obligation
was extended to the whole empire two years later.
In 1396, more than 84 million fruit trees were
planted.
But the prosperity soon led to
fiscal abuse. By the end of the reign of Emperor
Wan-li in 1619, more than half of state revenue
was devoted to supporting the imperial court and
its aristocratic entourage. The rising state
deficit led to a sharp rise in taxation on the
peasantry. By 1627, a series of bad harvests due
to drought caused a serious famine, and peasant
revolts were setting the stage for recurring
Jurchen attacks from Manchuria, which ended the
Ming Dynasty in 1644 and ushered in the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911).
Agricultural
policies of the Qing Dynasty An early Qing
policy of low taxes on peasants cemented popular
support among the majority Han Chinese for the new
minority Manchu dynasty and disarmed residual Ming
resistance fanned by early Qing atrocities and
wholesale appropriation of peasant land after
1644.
Beginning with the reign of Kang-xi
(1661-1722), an agricultural policy favoring small
farmers was instituted. Adequate salaries for
officials reduced corruption in government.
Chinese agriculture reached a high point of
pre-industrial development in the 18th century.
Along with traditional crops such as wheat,
barley, millet and rice, new crops such as sorghum
(gao-liang), maize (corn), sweet potato and
ground nut allowed year-around harvests and
bridged the winter gap as well as making drier
soils productive. Vegetables and fruits became a
regular part of the national diet, and the rearing
of pigs and poultry as well as advances in fish
farming increased the protein intake in the
population. Commercial crops such as cotton, tea
and sugarcane expanded rapidly.
Jacques
Gernet noted in A History of Chinese
Civilization that the Chinese peasant of the
founding Yung-zheng reign (1723-36) and the early
Qian-lung reign (1736-96) of the Qing Dynasty were
much better off and more content than their
counterparts in the France of Louis XV, even
better educated because of the proliferation of
public and private schools that many farmers could
afford for their children. Some great Chinese
literati of the 18th century came from humble farm
origins. This was because Qing agricultural policy
favored small farmers, who were moderately taxed.
A 1711 ordinance forbade any increases in tax
quota even as the population rose.
It was
only in the final two decades of Emperor
Qian-lung's reign in the mid-1770s that the burden
of an extravagant court and its unproductive
aristocratic entourage reimposed high taxes on the
peasants and rekindled peasant rebellions. But
while the Chinese peasants gradually fell into
aggregate poverty, the finally collapse of the
Qing economy was caused by the advance of Western
imperialism through the illegal smuggling of opium
into China, paid for by an outflow of silver. What
is yet to be fully recognized by economic
historians is the adverse effect on the Chinese
economy from the massive outward drain of silver
from the illegal opium trade Britain and the
United States imposed on China as a result of the
inability of the Qing state to regulate illicit
trade in opium and, more important, free trade in
silver. The collapse of the Qing economy in the
19th century was largely a monetary event.
Silver had been used widely as currency in
China since the 15th and 16th centuries with
imports from the Americas as a result of a Chinese
trade surplus. Around 1564, Mexican silver coins
began circulating widely in Chinese coastal trade
towns such as Guangzhou and Fuzhou as payment for
Chinese exports. The 19th-century reversal of
China's trade to deficit was due to Western opium
smuggling between 1820 and 1825. This trade was
denominated in silver until China ran out of that
metal, after which the illicit trade was
denominated in porcelain that steadily fell in
price.
The outflow of silver from China
coincided with the collapse of silver prices in
the international market as Western economies
adopted the gold standard. Silver was leaving
China in huge quantities while the price of silver
was falling in the international market. Yet while
the price of silver fell in the international
market, its price rose in the Chinese domestic
market, accelerating and exacerbating real trade
inflation in the Chinese economy through domestic
price deflation.
This monetary collapse
inflicted great financial damage on China's
poorest peasants. While peasant income was
denominated in copper coins, their tax obligation
to the state was denominated in silver coins,
because the state's trade deficit was denominated
in silver. The scarcity of silver created by the
massive outflow pushed the domestic silver price
sky-high in terms of copper coins. International
bi-metalism greatly disadvantaged the Chinese
silver-based export economy and domestic
bi-metalism greatly disadvantaged the copper-based
finances of the Chinese peasantry.
China
suffered from a protracted economic recession all
through the 19th and 20th centuries as it came
into commercial contact with the Western
economies. This two-century-long recession was the
result of the structural monetary disadvantage
dual bi-metalism imposed on the Chinese
silver-based monetary system and fatally wounded
the Chinese economy. The bankrupt economy reduced
China to a failing state unable to defend itself
from aggressive Western powers until the founding
of the People's Republic.
Next:Land reform in the People's Republic
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New
York-based private investment group. His website
is www.HenryCKLiu.com.
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