China in the Time of the Qing Dynasty, 1644-1911
This is a piece to complement my video talk: ´A Look at China at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century`.
In many ways the Qing simply continued with the best of Ming traditions. Qing emperors took on a god-like persona. They were the Son of Heaven, the link between heaven and earth. They accepted Confucian principles as the basis on which Chinese society was founded and on how their own rule should be founded too, including an acceptance of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. However, Manchu became an official language, marriage between Manchu’s and Chinese was forbidden, and Manchu women were prohibited from adopting the Chinese tradition of foot-binding, something they should have been eternally grateful for!
The Qing were hands-on rulers too. Ministers would be summoned for consultations and the memorials, the official communications from senior officials, were read every day and responses given where necessary. They also presided over the Grand Council which advised the emperor and made sure his orders were carried out. They were, however, obliged to rely heavily on Han bannermen and the Banner system. This was feudal in nature, the means by which the army was organised under a feudal lord and his banner, but economic, social and political roles quickly developed too. It helped the regime to embed itself into the fabric of Chinese life.
China was divided into eighteen provinces, each with its own administration. Each had a governor and two or three provinces would be placed under a governor-general. Each province would have provincial appointments which were balanced so that if a Manchu was appointed governor-general of a group of provinces, the provincial governors would usually be Han, and vice versa. Below the governor would be a provincial treasurer, a provincial judge and an official responsible for education. Each province was divided into circuits, prefectures and districts. The district magistrate, described as ‘officials close to the people’ were the most junior official in the administrative structure. In total, there were between 1,200 and 1,300 of them. This meant that each district magistrate was responsible for the well-being of something like 250,000 people, not so ‘close to the people’, but then China was already a huge country with a huge population.
Something like half of the officials were appointed having successfully completed an examination based on the Confucian classics. The other half bought their positions. These usually took up more junior positions. In total there were about 20,000 civilian officials, half serving as court officials, half in the provinces, and there were a further 7,000 military officials. Checks were put in place to prevent corruption.
China didn’t have a hereditary aristocracy like that which had developed in Europe. There was a small hereditary class within the Manchu clan and a titled nobility made up from leading civil and military officials. However, the prominent social elite was the gentry, a group made up of those who had successfully passed the examinations for a state post or else purchased an educational title. In theory, this offered the prospect of social mobility, but in practice it was mostly the sons of wealthy people who could afford the lengthy period of study that would lead to examination success. But it was worth the sacrifice of families to finance a son through his studies for not only did it secure wealth, but also power and influence, and perhaps most importantly, security. In the first half of the nineteenth century they numbered about 1,100,000, and if their families are included, about 5,500,000. This was kept at a little over 1% of the population by means of the quotas that were set for examination success.
They enjoyed, economic, social and political privileges. They were exempted from the labour serving tax. They would act as a link between state officials and the people, and were also prominent in education and the general dissemination of Confucianism. With no local government in China, they took on what would otherwise be its responsibility, things like irrigation projects, road repairs, the construction of bridges, as well as basic public welfare. However, there were specific restrictions placed on their activities. They were not allowed to engage in any form of military activity without express permission. Neither were they allowed to organise the baojia, the system begun during the Song dynasty which gave local communities the responsibility for local order (including providing trained and armed militiamen) and organising civil projects where necessary, nor could they collect taxes or infringe on the judicial authority of the government in any way. They nevertheless were a dominant force in their local communities.
If the Manchu’s adopted the ways of the Ming, the ways of the Chinese, this is most clearly seen in their approach to foreign affairs in which they continued in the elitist, racist way that “others” were inferior. As J.A.G. Roberts puts it, ‘China was the Middle Kingdom and the neighbouring states of Asia were perceived as occupying an inferior position on her periphery.’[1] This, of course, meant continuing with the tributary system, the acknowledgement of China’s supremacy by her neighbours and the payment of tributes, for example yearly in the case of Korea or over longer periods, every ten years in the case of Burma (now Myanmar) or Laos, all in return for China’s benevolence, for example trading rights, and protection.
China entered another period of sustained prosperity and vigorous growth between 1500 and 1800, particularly when the Manchu-Qing dynasty first took control. The territory under Chinese control more than doubled between the Qing seizing control in 1644 and the early eighteenth century. Mongol land to the north, and land to the west in central Asia, Turkestan and Tibet. Conquest was followed by controlled population movement on a massive scale. For example, the population of the Sichuan province in the south-west had fallen to around half a million people in 1681 but reached 207 million by 1812 as a result of government-directed migration. This migration into the central and western provinces led to more land being cultivated and so, more crops being produced, including new crops like corn and peanuts. Improved planting material, improved irrigation, and double-cropping also contributed to bigger crop yields. Consequently, food supplies increased and China’s population again increased (five-fold between 1400 and 1800). China continued to benefit from being the dominant power in south-east Asia. China in 1800 was at least as urbanised as Western Europe, and its merchants had shown considerable commercial nouse.
What is more, the Chinese peasant, unhindered by the shackles of feudalism, was free to buy and sell land, and to sell the produce of his land. The peasantry, though throughout relying on their own labour or, for the wealthy peasants, that of the water buffalo, had nevertheless shown a capacity to adapt and be innovative. Indeed, China marketed its harvests over a distance much greater than was the case in Europe. Living standards in the most advanced regions of China, for example the Yangtse Delta, were on a par with Western Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with similar figures of calorie-intake and life expectancy.
Neither did China particularly lag behind Europe with regard to technology. China had been using textile machines for some time, had developed its own steam engine and was more advanced in some fields, for example irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing and medicine. So that in the eighteenth century, the Chinese economy was the largest in the world, followed by India with Europe some way behind, leading Adam Smith to remark that ‘China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.[2] Yet China did not industrialise in the nineteenth century and as a result, Europe, which of course had industrialised, overtook China in technology and so, economic and military power, and China found itself the victim of aggressive European imperialism.
China was certainly wealthy enough to industrialise and had the technological know-how. China also had a merchant class with the wherewithal to invest in an industrialising economy. China, too, had a large population and so a large domestic market which benefited from very good transportation. So, why did China not industrialise and, not for the first time, lose an opportunity to establish itself as a world power?
The answer first of all lies in agriculture. Indeed, of greater significance than any other factor, agriculture needed to develop if industry was to. Agriculture is critical to industrialisation in a number of ways. Man farmed before he made things, certainly on an industrial scale, and so agriculture developed first. This meant that it needed to become more efficient, efficient enough to export products, in order to pay for industrialisation (which is a very expensive undertaking). Also, agriculture had to become more efficient in order to feed a growing portion of the population who, in the process of industrialising, would no longer be involved in producing food. There was also the matter of raw materials which agriculture provided industry with. Things such as cotton or silk. And also, with the majority of the population engaged in agriculture, this was the key market for manufactured goods before a country was in a position to export manufactured products to other countries. But the farmer in the countryside needed to be able to afford what the manufacturer made in the city. So, an agricultural revolution is nearly always an essential prerequisite for industrialisation.
At some point between 1750 and 1775 Chinese agriculture reached a tipping point and it no longer kept up with the needs of population growth. As China`s population grew, so too did the pressure for land and China did not have enough good farmland. What held China back was that its heartland, lying between the Yellow and Yangtse rivers, though it’s most fertile region, struggled to cope with a growing population. The land, overused, was losing its fertility, and land elsewhere was nothing like as fertile.
Farming was also overwhelmingly undertaken on a small scale. Primogeniture was not a feature of Chinese culture and so family farms were divided between all the sons, and not just the first born, making them smaller and unable to produce surpluses. Though even a thing like measurements varied in different parts of China, it is thought that something like a million elite landowners each owned somewhere between 17 to 25 acres of land, in the north owner-farmers held plots between 3 to 5 acres, in the south between 2 and barely 3 acres. By comparison most British farms today fall somewhere between 50 and 250 acres. Tenancy was much more widespread in the south but taking China as a whole something like 30% of farms were tenancies and 20% both owned land and worked rented land. As in Britain, prior to the industrial revolution, many families supplemented their income with what we in Britain referred to as ‘cottage industries’, perhaps spinning or weaving cotton, as in the lower Yangtse valley, China’s main cotton producing area.
At the time, China did not have access to large supplies of key natural resources either, notably coal and metals, though there were iron works employing two or three thousand men and their output in the seventeenth century compare favourably with that of Britain. There was also a thriving ceramic industry with considerable amounts exported. But the most pressing shortfall was wood for fuel and building. Supplies were being exhausted. Where population levels were most dense, forested areas fell to between two and six per cent of the total land area, way below that of Europe. Also, China’s coal supplies lie in the north-west, and its size, in this instance and at this stage in its history with under-developed transport systems, proved an insurmountable handicap. Western Europe’s coal supplies, in contrast, were much more easily made available, and this was a critical factor in explaining the European industrial revolutions.
What is more, with a growing population, the price of labour fell and so any incentive to invest in labour-saving technology was lost. The domestic system of production, that led to the factory in Britain first, and then the rest of Western Europe, and which was just as well developed in China, remained adequate for China’s needs.
Of course, none of the shortfalls could be made good by an overseas empire, as was the case for the European powers, for China had shunned any opportunity it may have had to build one. These different approaches were founded in culture. Whereas Europe craved change and domination too, China craved stability and harmony. This was the other factor that led Britain first, and much of the rest of Western Europe in its wake, to leap ahead of China: colonies, particularly America. Cotton, shipped from America, replaced wool, as Britain didn’t have anything like enough land to clothe its growing population from the backs of sheep (or the cheap labour supply provided by slaves), nor could it continue to provide the timber it needed. And a critically important by-product of European colonialism that would come to play a part in Chinese history in the nineteenth century, was that the rivalry for colonies honed Europe’s military capacity to a level that China could not compete with.
The Chinese state failed to play its role. It didn’t have to take on the leading role itself, but it did need to give the incentive for others to do so, and it had no interest in doing so. The entrepreneur was not encouraged. And so the Chinese peasant, if he was lucky, still walked behind the water buffalo.
[1] J.A.G. Roberts, p. 17
[2] Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, p. 27; quoted in Martin Jaques, p.93