Rise and Demise of the Qing Empire
Imperial Hegemony, Popular Resistances and Arrested Capitalism in China’s Long Eighteenth Century
Ho-fung Hung
Johns Hopkins University
The Enigma of China-Europe Divergence
Now, it is widely recognized that the “rise of the West” and the “fall of the East” were two complementary,
mutually constitutive processes. But when and how the East, China in particular, fell behind Europe is a topic of constant
debate. Abu-Lughod’s (1989) and Mark Elvin’s (1973) contention that China turned stagnant after its fifteenth-century
retreat from the maritime world is recently challenged by Frank and others. It is shown that China’s post-medieval
economic slowdown was only temporary, and was soon followed by a resurgence of commerce in sixteenth through
eighteenth centuries as a result of the massive influx of American silver (Frank 1998; Atwell 1998).
Qing China was reputed as the “sink of silver” that absorbed most of the bullion originating in the Americas, and
was the largest market formation in the eighteenth-century global economy. As pointed out by Chase-Dunn and Hall
(1997: 189-192), in most of the early modern period, Europe at large was a peripheral zone in the Afroeurasian prestigegood networks, and Europe’s “long-distance trade with China was one of unequal exchange in which the Chinese were
gaining greater returns” (1997: 191). Commercial prosperity and political stability in China were admired by many
contemporaneous philosophers and court-advisers in Europe, such as Quesnay and Voltaire, who wrote emphatically and
convinced the absolute monarchs that China was the model to follow regarding the development of laissez-faire economy
and absolutist rule. Europe’s global hegemony was never a reality before the latter half of the eighteenth century when
China’s market economy (as an economic system based on generalized commodity exchange, or the formula of C-M-C)
continued its quantitative expansion without any qualitative transformation into capitalism (as an economic system based
on the ceaseless accumulation of capital, or the formula of M-C-M’), while the capitalist development in Europe entered a
new phase of industrial expansion (see Arrighi’s [1994: 1-26] and Braudel’s [1977; 1992] delineation of the distinction
between market and capitalism)
Hence, the central question was why the early modern market economy in Europe led to the rise of capitalism,
whereas a more advanced market formation in China did not give rise to capitalism. Currently, the geopolitical and
ecological arguments were the most popular explanations of China-Europe divergence. The geopolitical explanation
asserts that it was the fragmented political system in Europe that led to incessant interstate competition for mobile capital
1
and stimulated the private and ceaseless accumulation of capital there (Wong 1997; cf. Arrighi and Hung 2002). The
ecological explanation inferred that the European conquest of the New World created a vast new frontier for Europe and
enabled the latter to surpass the ecological constraints that put a ceiling over productivity growth in both China and
Europe (Pomeranz 2000).
Notwithstanding the insights that these two perspectives offer, their explanations are far from sufficient. Both
perspectives try to explain the dynamic emergence or non-emergence of capitalism in terms of unchanging political
economic structures. The arguments are ahistorical and deterministic. Bin Wong sees the non-emergence of capitalism in
China had almost been predestined by the end of the Warring States Period in 221 B.C.E. (Wong 1997: 73-104).
Pomeranz sees the great divergence between Europe and China was predestined at the point of the European conquest of
America. The complex socio-political processes and unfolding of events that linked up the macro-geopolitical or
ecological settings concerned and the outcome of transition or non-transition to capitalism are missing. A more historical
and nuanced account of the China-Europe divergence is not possible unless historical actors are brought into the analysis.
To Wallerstein (1974; 1989), the transition to capitalism in Europe was as much the emergence of new actors – the section
of aristocratic elites that shifted to capital accumulating activities as a new strategy of class reproduction – as the
emergence of a new system. This theme in the classical world-system formulation is recently developed by Lachman
(2000), who contends that the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe was a consequence of a chain of piecemeal
calculations and actions of the feudal elites who were in constant conflict with one another and part of whom, given the
particular socio-political milieus they were embedded, unintentionally converted themselves into full-scale capital
accumulators.
Another flaw of the geopolitical and ecological perspectives is that they fail to delineate the specificity of China’s
social and political formations positively. The specificity of China is defined as a collection of lacks – the lack of
interstate competition, the lack of an outlet of ecological pressure (cf. the lack of Protestant ethics as to Weber). This
approach is not wrong per se, but it leads us to neglect half of the equation. It is equally important to look for political,
social, or ideological formations that China possessed and Europe lacked, formations that prevented the logic of capital
accumulation from being predominant in China, or in a Polanyian formulation, formations that protected the Chinese
society from the unchecked emergence of a self-regulatory market (Polanyi 1944; cf. Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 18990).
2
In this paper, I will explicate the complex socio-political processes that led to the non-transition to capitalism in
China by focusing on the class reproduction process of the gentry elites. I argue that in early modern China as in early
modern Europe, the expansion of generalized commodity exchange opened a new window of opportunity for the
preexisting elites to reproduce themselves by participating in trade and accumulating monetary wealth. However, the
particular habitus – structured structures and structuring structures that constrained and enabled actors’ actions as defined
by Bourdieu (1990: 52-65) – in which the Chinese gentry embedded constricted their self-transformation into full-fledged
capital accumulator.
Great Transformation, Chinese Style
Commercial Expansion and Ecological Pressure
China’s long eighteenth-century, beginning in 1683 (when the empire recovered from a deflationary depression)
and ending in 1820 (when the empire began to enter another round of deflationary depression), is generally known as the
Shengshi (Age of Prosperity) or the High Qing period in China (see Figure 2 below). This period covered the late Kangxi
reign (1662-1722), the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), the Qianlong reign (1736-1795), and part of the Jiaqing reign
(1796-1820). The century-long economic boom was attributed by many to the massive influx of American silver and the
huge demand for Chinese products in the world market, as the imported silver stimulated commercial growth by vastly
increasing the monetary supply in the economy (e.g. Quan 1987, 1996a; Frank 1998: 108-11, 160-1; Naquin and Rawski
1987: 104; Rowe 1998: 177; Chao 1993; Atwell 1977, 1982, 1998).
Though American silver began to flow into China in the late sixteenth century, the inflow was soon hampered by
the turbulent dynastic transition in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Ming dynasty collapsed and the Manchus
conquered China. Internal peace had been restored under the unified rule of the Qing government by 1650. But the early
Qing ban on sea trade that cut off the Ming loyalists in Taiwan from mainland supply disrupted the flow of silver into
China and dragged the nascent Qing empire into a prolonged period of deflationary depression. The depression ended in
1683 after the Taiwan regime surrendered and the ban on foreign trade was lifted (Kishimoto-Nakayama 1984).
Besides the commercial expansion, the long eighteenth century was also characterized by a mounting ecological
pressure. Thanks to the political and social stability after the late seventeenth century and the popularization of New
World Crops such as sweet potato and maize that turned originally unproductive lands into productive ones, population of
China tripled between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century. The total acreage of cultivable land, however,
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only doubled during the same period (Wang 1973: 7; Naquin and Rawski 1987: 24-6; Ho 1959). The diminishing of landman ratio, together with the depletion of natural resources caused by rapid commercial expansion, led to a looming
ecological crisis in the empire (Elvin 1998, Marks 1996).
Fig. 1. Index of population, cultivated land and average cultivated land
per head, 1380-1930 (1380=100)
population
800
cultivated land
land-man ratio
700
600
Index
500
400
300
200
100
1930
1880
1830
1780
1730
1680
1630
1580
1480
1430
1380
1530
0
Year
Source: official data adjusted with reference to Perkins (1969: 16); compiled by
Liu and Hwang (1979: 81-2)
The dual increase in monetary supply and population pressure triggered a century-long inflation known as the
“Chinese price revolution” of the eighteenth century (Quan 1996b). Thorough the century, the price level of China had
increased by 3-4 times (Wang 1980; Guo 1996; Quan 1996b & c).
Figure 2. Rice price s in the Yangz i De lta, 1650-1900 (tae ls pe r shi)
4.5
Price
25 years moving average
4
3.5
3
Price
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
Year
Source: modified from Wang (1992: 40-47)
4
1890
1875
1860
1845
1830
1815
1800
1785
1770
1755
1740
1725
1710
1695
1680
1665
1650
0
The inflationary pressure was not distributed evenly over space, as it hit the economically advanced regions most.
Price level was the highest in the Lower Yangzi Delta, lowest in the Southwest, and intermediate in the Mid-Yangzi
region (Quan 1996d). The inflation and inter-regional price difference touched off extensive regional specialization and
economic growth driven by Smithian dynamics (see Wong 1997: Part I; Pomeranz 2000). While the Lower Yangzi region
(southern Jiangsu province and northern Zhejiang province) and the southern-southeastern coast (the Fujian and
Guangdong provinces) witnessed sweeping urbanization and proto-industrialization, and increasingly concentrated on
producing high value-added products such as silk and cotton textiles, areas with lower inflationary pressure such as the
Upper Yangzi region (the Sichuan province) and the empire’s Southwest (the Guangxi and Yunnan province) were
transformed into peripheral zones that supported the development of the economically advanced regions by exporting
foodstuffs and other raw materials like timber, silk cocoon and raw cotton to the latter. An empire-wide market with a
core-periphery division of labor was in shape (Hung 2001: 491-7). Price movements in different regions of the empire
were more or less in phase (Rowe 1998; Xu 1999; Wu 1983; Naquin and Rawski 1987: 214-6; Li 1999; Fan 1992; Marks
1996, 1998; Fan 1998: ch. 2; Quan 1996d).
Class Formations and the Making of an Imperial-Hegemonic State
The eighteenth-century expansion of commerce and population brought forth profound social transformations.
The predominantly serf-based manorial order gave way to a peasant economy in the countryside. Though the transition
had already begun in the Ming dynasty (Elvin 1973: 235-67), a substantial portion of the agrarian economy was still
dominated by large estates in early Qing, especially in North China. The final demise of serfdom did not come until the
eighteenth century when population explosion overloaded the manorial order and commercialization of social relations
enabled full-fledged development of contractual relations (Huang 1985: 85-96; see also Buoye 2000).
As most estates were fixed in size, estate owners were increasingly incapable of maintaining a rapidly expanding
serf population that grew alongside with the rest of the population. To get rid of the increasing burden of feeding their
serfs, many estate owners partitioned their estates into small slots and rented them out, or came to rely on hired-laborers to
work on their land. Serfdom henceforth gave way to contractual relations between landlords and tenants, and between
managerial landlords and hired laborers. Commercialization of land ownership also triggered the polarization of the
peasantry into labor-employing rich peasants and labor-selling poor peasants. The aristocrat-serf stratification based on
hereditary status was replaced by a landlord-tenant-hired laborers stratification based on alienable ownership of land and
labor. This transition was reflected in the revised Qing legal code and changing legal practices in the late eighteenth
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century when landlords, tenants and agrarian laborers began to be treated as equal commoners (Huang 1985: 97-105). We
shall also see later that when the shortage of cultivable land intensified after the mid-eighteenth century, a substantial
portion of the peasantry was demoted to the rank of landless and jobless vagrants, or what can be categorized as the
subaltern class.
Whereas serfdom was in decline, the somewhat meritocratic gentry elites remained to be a dominant sociopolitical force. In Qing China as in previous dynasties, the class reproduction of the gentry elites were carried out through
the accumulation of degrees in the imperial examination, bureaucratic-officials titles, and land. Given the sweeping
commercialization in the eighteenth century, accumulation of monetary wealth through mercantile activities became a
legitimate and desirable means of class reproduction as well (Brook 1990; Rowe 1990). Accordingly, the gentry elites
were differentiated into gentry-officials, gentry-landlord, and gentry-merchants. There were also gentry degree holders
who did not serve in the bureaucracy but acted as local magnates in their home areas, exercising informal yet hegemonic
influences in local affairs and facilitating the formal governance of the state (Jing 1982: 163-4). Attainment and
maintenance of gentry status were invariably lineage-based and intergenerational. Many powerful lineages dispersed their
risks by simultaneously pursuing different strategies of class reproduction. Needless to say, the specific choice of
combination of strategies varied in time and space.
Synchronic with the rise of absolutist states in northwestern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century, the Qing regime during the same period fostered centralization and rationalization of its governance. By the turn
of the eighteenth century, the Manchu monarch had leveled the powers of local warlords and noblemen (Wakeman 1985).
Then, through the successive empire-wide land surveys and a “rationalizing fiscal reform” in the 1720s and 1730s, the
Manchu rulers successfully stamped out bureaucratic corruption and tax evasion of local elites (Zelin 1984). New
institutions and techniques of government, such as the Grand Council (which allowed the emperor and his closest advisors
to handle the most urgent matters and surpassed the bureaucracy) and the secret palace memorial system (which enhanced
the emperor’s access to information on local affairs as well as control of local officials) were invented (Bartlett 1991). The
centralization process was in tandem with the military mobilization and territorial expansion of the empire which was to
exterminate the threat to the empire’s security posed by the nomadic states in Central Asia. Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet
were incorporated and became part of China for the first time.
Contrary to what the traditional “oriental despotism” thesis suggests, the Qing state was very active in facilitating
commercial growth. Pro-commercial stance of the Chinese state gestated in the late Ming period when a growing
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commercial economy began to be recognized as an unalterable reality. Since the late sixteenth century, hostility toward
silver, internal commerce, foreign trade and merchants in traditional Confucianist thoughts had lost ground to the school
of thought emphasizing the “natural law” of the market economy and proposed that the market economy would flourish
under appropriate facilitation but not control by the government. This pragmatic attitude toward commerce continued to
grow in the Qing bureaucracy and had become a mainstream position by the eighteenth century (Rowe 2001; Xiao 1987:
331-339; Zheng 1994: 133-150; Lin 1991: 9, 13-7; Chao 1993: 40; Chen 1991b; von Glahn 1996: 215-6). The Qing
government also promoted commerce through various means such as developing the empire’s commercial transport
infrastructure and stimulating new production and marketing sectors by offering incentive packages for entrepreneurs in
target areas (Rowe 1998: 184-5).
The idea of paternalist and benevolent rule was another major component of the Manchu governance. Relieving
the burden of the poor was claimed to be the first priority of the imperial government. At times of regional famines, the
central government never hesitated to grant tax breaks to the affected areas. When local conflicts between lower classes
and local elites broke out, the emperor often sided with the former and blamed the latter (as we shall see in detail later).
Above all, the Qing government instituted an extremely conservative fiscal regime in the name of enhancing the
livelihoods of the peasants. In 1713, the Kangxi emperor promised that the government would never increase its subjects’
burden by permanently fixing the per capita tax quotas, despite the fact that the Qing government was still suffering from
fiscal stringency at that time. This promise was closely kept by his successors (Guo 1996: 13-14). The paternalist ideology
was to enhance the imperial hegemony of the Manchus, who were despised by many Han Chinese as inferior nomadic
invaders subjugating China by naked violence. It was also to prevent the recurrence of massive social unrest in late Ming
caused by unchecked privileges of the elites and heavy tax burdens.
The organic articulation of the pro-commercial and paternalist dispositions of the Qing state was best illustrated
by the official granary system. Though the Qing government relied primarily on the free circulating of grains in the grain
market to feed the expanding population, the government instituted a large-scale granary system as a regulatory apparatus
to protect its subject from the vicissitudes of the grain market. Under this system, hundreds of thousands of local
government-run ever-normal granaries were established all over the empire. Local governments were to purchase grains
from the market to stock the granaries when grain price was low, and sold the grains back to the market at submarket price
when there was an unusual hike in rice price. If the stock in local granaries was not sufficient in lowering local rice price,
granary storages in other areas would be mobilized under the coordination of higher-level officials (Will and Wong 1991;
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Will 1990; Rowe 2001: 155-185). What we can see was a market economy contained by the strong, regulative hand of the
imperial state. At times when the routine regulatory apparatuses were insufficient in protecting people’s livelihoods, the
government would also resort to extraordinary means to check the free operation of the market. It is what we shall soon
turn to.
Popular Resistances and Gentry’s Strategies of Class Reproduction
The Changing Political Economy and Pattern of Social Unrest
The contours of the processes of commercialization, population growth and state centralization in China’s long
eighteenth century were not totally congruent. While the empire’s commerce and population grew uninterruptedly from
the late seventeenth up to the early nineteenth century, the aggressive expansion of state power lasted only between the
1680s and 1760s, and began to level off thereafter.
The centralization of the Qing regime between the 1680s and the 1750s was largely driven by the fiscal and
logistic necessity arising from the Qing’s prolonged military campaign in Central Asia. This effort ended up in the success
of the Qianlong campaign of 1755-60 that incorporated today’s Xinjiang area. After the campaign, the constant urge of
military mobilization was gone, and the conservative notion of “sustaining the prosperity and preserving the peace”
(ciying baotai) became the central goal of the regime.
Also, with the tax quota frozen at the 1713 level, the real income of the government dropped when inflation
picked up. When government spending on payroll and public projects shrank in real terms, underpaid officials began to
resort to bribery to maintain their luxurious ways of live, and local governments at the brink of bankruptcy were urged to
appropriate unsanctioned surtaxes to pay for their bills (Guo 1996: 14-15; Kuhn and Mann 1978: 119-30; Zelin 1984).
Local tax bullies reemerged and the competition for resources between the central and local government intensified. It is
noted that in the 1770s onward, government’s capacity in regulating the grain market via the granary system decreased
precipitously and the officials gradually adopted a hand-off policy toward the market (Will 1990: 289-301; Wong 1991:
75-92). The falling state power vis-à-vis the society was aggravated by the ever expanding size of the population and
increasing complexity of the Chinese society
Accordingly, we can partition the long eighteenth century into the epoch of 1683-1760 and that of 1761-1820.
While the first epoch was characterized by the simultaneous growth of state power, commerce and population, the second
was characterized by the falling capacity of the central government amid the incessant growth of commerce and
8
population. Figure 3 below roughly shows the general trend of unrest level in eighteenth-century China. Two peaks of
unrest are clearly seen at the 1740s and the 1790s, corresponding to the two epochs. The compositions of unrest in the two
peaks are different. The one in 1740s was mainly made up of localized conflicts including actions directed at the state
(such as protests asking for government food relief) and class conflicts (such as food riots). Most events in the peak of the
1790s were large-scale armed uprisings, usually organized by heterodox religious sects.
50
Figure 3. Mentions of Unrest Events, 1645-1795
45
40
Localized Conf lict s
Armed Uprising
Armed Uprising (XGZ)
35
Mentions
30
25
20
15
10
5
1792
1785
1778
1771
1764
1757
1750
1743
1736
1729
1722
1715
1708
1701
1694
1687
1680
1673
1666
1659
1652
1645
0
Year
Source: KYQ and XGZ
In the first epoch, with the presence of a hegemonic and paternalist state and with the expanding agrarian frontiers
capable of absorbing the dislocated and landless population, many of the unrest were well contained and remained to be
localized and brief. In the second epoch, however, the frontier zones had been filled up and could no longer serve as the
“safety valve” of the empire, and the state capacity had dropped to the point where the recalcitrant and ever-expanding
subaltern class could survive government suppression and launched large-scale, sustained uprisings.
Below, we shall see how the class reproduction strategy of the gentry elite was shaped by the different dynamics
of unrest and different state responses to it in the two epochs.
The 1740s: Food Riots and the Double Pressures on the Gentry-Merchants
The 1740s was a decade of empire-wide food shortage. Hikes of rice price were widely reported in different parts
of the empire (Quan 1996e; Rowe 2001: 179-83). It is debatable whether the price hike was caused by population growth
– the 1740s was the decade when the rate of population expansion was the highest (45% over the decade) (Lin 1989: 299)
– or by the rapid increase in silver supply of the empire (Quan 1996a). But the pike was unmistakable.
A natural response of the gentry-merchants to a local food crisis was to stockpile their grains and to sell it to the
market bit by bit to maximize their profits, or to ship the rice to other regions with even higher prices. On the other hand,
9
the poor, who had neither financial nor institutional means to cope with a sudden rise in the cost of living, often answered
the profit-maximizing activities of the merchants by storming grain storehouses, forcing the merchants to sell their goods
at lower prices, or stopping them from exporting their rice through setting up barricades or looting commercial rice boats.
Events of food riots were documented in virtually all regions of the empire, from Hubei to Guangdong, from Jiangsu to
Guizhou (CSUE; Wong 1982). These food crises and food riots were not specific to China, but were widely documented
in other early modern societies (Tilly 1975; Rudé 1964: Ch. 1, 2, 7; Thompson 1991: Ch. 4; Walthall 1986; Vlastos 1986;
Ikegami and Tilly 1994; White 1995). What was particular about the food crises in China was how the Qing government
handled them.
From the vantage point of the imperial state, the most ideal way of alleviating a food crisis was to mobilize the
granary system and transported the stocks from rice-abundant area to localities in crises. But in the 1740s, particularly in
the years 1743 and 1748, the granary system was overloaded with too many crises all over the empire. The government
then resorted to squeezing the gentry-merchants. The Qianlong emperor repeatedly reminded the bureaucracy that local
food crises were always exalted and sometimes caused by “wicked merchants” (jianshang), or those “rich but not
benevolent” (weifu buren) people, who deliberately stockpiled grains and pushed up rice price. Hence, one of the best
ways to cope with a food crisis was to urge local merchants to sell their stocks at prices lower than the market price. But it
had to be done in the way that would not stir up popular contentions against the rich (QSL-QL juan 193: 13-4, 273: 26-8;
see also Rowe 2001: 180-81). While at some places local officials carried out the emperor’s will well and solved local
food crisis smoothly (see Rowe 2001: 167-83), in many other places local food crises deteriorated into escalating unrest.
A case in point was the food riots of Suzhou – the largest and wealthiest city in the Lower Yangzi Delta – in
1748. The scale of the disorder was perhaps the largest the city witnessed in the eighteenth century. In 1747, in response
to the escalating rice price and imminent social unrest, the provincial governor of Jiangsu pressed the gentry-merchants in
Suzhou to sell their rice at low prices. For fear of government punishment, the gentry sold out most of their stocks in a
panic. In the next year, after another bad harvest in the adjacent areas, rice price upshot even more steeply. Most private
stocks in the city had already gone because of the panic sell-off in the previous year. Large-scale riots in the city and
several other locations in the vicinity followed suit. Besides the seizure of food, the rioters also requested the comeback of
a trusted and respected ex-local official who was believed to be more capable of managing the crisis. Rice wholesalers
were looted and local government offices stormed. The resolves of the local government to restore law and order by
physical force only messed up the situation further. The arrest of a popular figure identified as the ringleader unleashed
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other rounds of protests and riots demanding the release of the arrested. The angry citizens were pacified only after the
central government gave in to the protesters’ demands and let the beloved ex-official go back to the area and handle the
situation (QSL-QL juan 314: 25-6, 314: 31-3, 316: 4-8).
Another case was the salt riot in the mid-Yangzi commercial city of Hankou in 1740. To alleviate an occasional
pike of salt price in Hubei province, the provincial governor encouraged the salt merchants in Hankou, the richest city in
the province, to export its salt to the regions with the highest prices. When the salt price in Hankou soared subsequently, a
riot in the city broke out. Major salt houses were encircled and smashed by thousands of angry citizens. The merchants
were held hostage and they were forced to sell their salt locally. Despite the scale of disorder, no suppression or arrest was
reported after the incident. The rioters were only seen by Qianlong as “stupid people” (yumin) who “did not have the
patience to wait for the handling of the situation by officials” (bu jingting banli). The local officials were told to patiently
explain to the angry citizens to make them “content with their lots” (gean benfen). Also, local officials should urge the
merchants to sell their salt fairly, so that both the merchants and the people could get a fair deal (liangde qiping). After a
lengthy investigation of the event in the central government, the provincial governor of Hubei, who encouraged the
Hankou merchants to sell their salt to other regions in the first place, was demoted as he was identified as the person
responsible for causing the price hike and the riots (QSL-QL juan 117:7, 117: 20-21, 118: 6-7, 120: 28, 122: 16-7, 123: 57).
The cases of Suzhou in 1748 and Hankou in 1740 – the two wealthiest cities in the empire – were emblematic of
the pattern of unrest and government’s response to it in the first half of the eighteenth century. In these two cases and
many other similar cases, the poor attacking the rich were not punished severely, while the rich and the officials in charge
were to be blamed. Time and again, the emperor compared both the “wicked merchants” (jianshang) who “turned a blind
eye to their neighbors’ sufferings” (moshi xiangmin kunku) and the “contentious people” (diaomin) who “have the
intention to rob” (cun rangduo zi xin) to disobedient children who needed education and discipline by their parents – i.e.
the imperial state (QSL-QL juan 185: 6-9, 193: 13-4, 273: 26-9, 291: 17-9). Viewed in this light, it is well probable that in
the emperor’s eyes, the “wicked merchants” were elder brothers who tormented the younger ones, and the practice of the
government to press them to sell their commodities cheap was like parents disciplining a bullying son.
Besides violent direct actions directed at the merchants, organized protests calling for government’s food relief
were another type of popular responses to food crises. This type of action was usually initiated by local gentry and was
most frequently found in the Lower Yangzi Delta, where the hegemony of the local gentry was the strongest. The typical
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scenario was that certain members of the local gentry class wrote and distributed polemical posters and pamphlets to call
the commoners for action. The repertoires of protests included market strikes (bashi, shutdown of local markets by
peddlers and merchants), rallying in front of or even storming local government offices, composing and circulating
popular songs ridiculing local officials, etc. (e.g. QSL-QL juan 173: 6-7, 287: 17).
For example, in 1742, when the Gaoyou, Baoying and Huian prefectures of Jiangsu were hit by a flood and the
government was accused of being slow at delivering food relief, local gentries in the prefecture cities called for market
strikes and organized protests in which local people protested by holding statues of local gods (which were often used to
symbolize alternative, popular justice challenging the legitimacy of local officials Wu 2000) in front of local government
offices. One of the organizers was found to come from an extremely prestigious lineage in the region and to be a close
relative of one of the grant secretariats in the central government (QSL-QL juan 173: 6-7). This incident caught serious
attention of the emperor, who sent a special agent to the area to pacify the local populace and investigate the event. The
gentry instigators were persecuted rigorously, the local official in charge of moral education was demoted, and the grand
secretariat involved was purged (QSL-QL juan 173: 6-7, 185: 6-8, 185: 9).
The suppressions of gentry-led mobilization were invariably more brutal than the suppression of the riots of the
poor, for any alliance between the gentry and the popular classes was perceived to be grave threats to the imperial rule.
The gentry-leaders were often executed upon arrest. The Qianlong emperor was puzzled why the local elites, who were
surely not to be affected by food crises, would be so enthusiastic in organizing such protest actions (QSL-QL juan 173: 67, 316: 19-20). But if we take into account the ferocity of food riots and pressure that local officials put on the gentry
during a food crisis, the gentry’s initiative in organizing protest actions was not puzzling at all. Directing the anger of the
poor to the state was the best thing the gentry could do (if they were capable of doing so) to protect themselves from the
violence form below and to preempt the government’s pressure on them. However, given the relentless response of the
government, the risk of organizing local protests was enormous on the part of the gentry-leaders. Hence, this kind of
protest was not as frequently seen as food riots.
The food crises, food riots, and the government management of them in the 1740s showed that though the
imperial government was prone to rely on the market and merchants to enhance the wealth of the empire and the
livelihoods of its subjects in ordinary times, the gentry-merchants were squeezed from above (through the paternalist
discipline of the imperial state) and from below (through popular contentions) whenever the livelihoods of ordinary
people were disrupted by the vicissitudes of the market. Gentry-merchants hardly had the chance to transgress the
12
constraints put on them by the paternalist state and the “moral economy of the crowd” (cf. Thompson 1991). Their profitmaximizing activities were well contained.
The 1790s: Millenarian Uprisings and Militarization of the Gentry Elites
As a result of the commercialization process and population expansion, a substantial portion of the peasantry
experienced downward mobility thorough the eighteenth century. For the per capita acreage of cultivable land was
decreasing, poor peasants working on small plots of land were increasingly exposed to the risk of bankruptcy at times of
bad harvests that would force them to sell their land in the market for food. In the early eighteenth century, the enlarging
population of landless peasants was effectively absorbed by the agrarian frontiers such as Sichuan and Taiwan
(Entenmann 1982; Shepherd 1993). However, by the mid-eighteenth century, most fertile lands in the frontiers had been
filled up. The landless migrants were left with the choices of settling in the infertile highland or participating in the nonagrarian sectors by becoming peddlers, miners, or boatmen on commercial ships (Kuhn and Mann 1978; Kuhn 1970: 39;
Leong 1997).
This marginal population was extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature (if they were cultivators in the
ecologically fragile area) and market (if they worked in the commercial sector). They were excluded from the safety net of
the lineage-based social organizations, and were beyond the reach of the imperial public order grounded on the baojia
system. This uprooted population was far more susceptible to the calling of heterodox religious sects – in which they
could found social support and spiritual comfort – than the appeals of the Confucianist orthodoxy. The growing
population of this subaltern class and the falling capacity of the state in maintaining social order led to the exponential
growth of sectarian activities toward the end of the eighteenth century.
Most heterodox religious sects in early modern China were dominated by the tradition of the White Lotus
religion, the origins of which could be traced as far back as to circa 1100 C. E.. It represented a merging of the religious
traditions of Taoism, Buddhism and Manichaeanism. The core of the religion was the idea about the cycling of kalpas
(jie), a classical Sanskrit term meaning immensely long periods of time between successive transformations of the world.
The followers of the religion worshipped the Eternal Venerable Mother (wusheng naomu), the supreme deity controlling
the cycle of kalpas. Each kalpa was governed by a particular Buddha, and the present kalpa was governed by the historical
Shakyamuni Buddha. When the current kapla ended, the material world would be destroyed by horrific famines and
diseases. Then the Venerable Mother would send the Maitreya Buddha (lile fo) to earth and initiate a new kalpa.
Followers of the religion were told to practice vegetarianism and led an ascetic way of life so that they could attain
13
salvation and would be brought back to the womb of the Venerable Mother during the catastrophic kalpic transition
(Harrell and Perry 1982: 290-1; Yu 1987a; Ownby 1999; Overmyer 1976, 1981, 1985).
The White Lotus religion spread rapidly in China among the lower classes in the early modern period.
Independent and competing sects worshipping the Venerable Mother ramified (Gaustad 2000). Many of these sects were
entrepreneurial and their leaders used sectarian activities for personal gains. They attracted people by demonstrating their
magical power of exorcising illnesses, and told the followers that their chance of salvation during the kalpic transition
increased with their contribution to the sects. Many sectarian leaders got rich by exploiting their followers’ faith (Qin and
Zhang 1999: 296).
There were also sects which lived on organized banditry or showed a rebellious character. Notably, the White
Lotus religion was appropriated by many rebels as an ideology to call for action. In those cases, the content of the religion
mutated with a utopian twist. It came to prophesize that during the imminent kalpic transition, the Maitreya Buddha would
be reincarnated and his followers should aid his work of cleaning the world of corruption to earn their salvation. The new
kalpa would be the dawn of an egalitarian world in which there would be no distinction between men and women, rich
and poor, old and young (Harrell and Perry 1982: 290-1; Yu 1987a). There was some sort of wealth redistribution within
the sects, as wealthy members were expected to contribute more, and their donations were used to help poorer members
(Entenmann 1982: 192). The guru-disciple hierarchy within the sects overturned other Confucianist social hierarchy such
as that between men and women. Women (particularly widows) were frequently found among the prominent leaders in
sectarian uprisings (Yu 1987b; Liu 1988: 788-93).
The first major outbreak of large scale uprising with a White Lotus outlook was in the mid-fourteenth century,
when heterodox sects in the South declared in the midst of plagues and famines that the Maitreya Buddha had come and
people in search of salvation should take up their arms and overthrow the Mongols. The Red Turban Army to which Zhu
Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, belonged was one of the rebel groups inspired by the White Lotus religion.
After the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368, White Lotus sects were persecuted inexorably, for the new emperor
was well aware of the rebellious potential of the religion. But towards the mid-seventeenth century when the imperial
government was weakening, White Lotus sects revived and fueled a number of major rebellions contributing to the final
collapse of the Ming.
The White Lotus religion was suppressed once again after the consolidation of the Qing dynasty. But the Qing
government was never able to root out sectarian activities, which turned into underground operation. Over the eighteenth
14
century, White Lotus sects proliferated with the growth of the subaltern class (Harrell and Perry 297-301). Countless
semi-secret vegetarian halls were established as gathering places of the believers. In 1746, a White Lotus sect know as
Dacheng in Sichuan was found to be preparing for an armed uprising (KYQ 640-47). The rebellion aborted as the rebels’
plan to storm the major cities in the regions was unveiled before it materialized. The followers of the sects were found to
be mostly migrants from other provinces (QSL-QL: 242: 30, 245: 10, 249: 31-2, 251.6, 265: 11-2, 265: 37-8, 267: 31).
The leader of the aborted rebellion was a woman who preached that the Maitreya Buddha was coming to rule the world
very soon, and the faithful should join the rebellion and they would be assigned official posts in the millenarian kingdom
of the future (QSL-QL 271: 18-9, 271: 21-2). According to the confessions of the arrested members, the followers of the
sect spread all over the empire, and were active in Yunnan, Guizhou, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Shanxi and even
Zhili. An empire-wide witch-hunting of co-conspirators and crackdown of Buddhist vegetarian halls ensued.
Notwithstanding the assiduous crackdown of heterodox sects after 1746, religious uprisings erupted one after the
other in the latter half of the eighteenth century (KYQ: 648-734). In 1748, amid the empire-wide food crisis, an armed
rebellion organized by another White Lotus sect broke out in the Jianning prefecture of Fujian at the empire’s southeast
coast. The leaders of the rebellion claimed that the Maitreya Buddha would arrive in the prefecture capital soon, and his
follower should conquer the city to prepare for his coming (QSL-QL 309: 38-44). The call for action was echoed by
thousands of hungry Hakka migrants residing in the highland areas (QSL-QL 317: 29-30). When the rebel army marched
with the banners of “urging the rich to aid the poor” (quanfu jipin) and “exercising justice according to the Heavenly
Will” (titian xingdao), participants of the uprisings felt free to loot grain storages and property of the rich along the way
(QSL-QL juan 309: 4-5, 309: 8-9, 309: 38-44, 312: 12-3).
Other major uprisings with the tint of White Lotus religion included the uprising of the Clear Water sect in
Shandong in 1774 (KYQ 746-771; Naquin 1981) and the uprising of the Fujian migrants in Taiwan in 1787 (Ownby 1996:
55-81, Appendix; KYQ: 772-818). Though the Qing government was able to suppress these rebellions without many
difficulties, the outbreaks showed a general trend of increasing scale and duration. The Dacheng rebellion in 1746 never
materialized, the Fujian uprising in 1748 lasted a few weeks, the Shandong uprising in 1774 lasted a few months, and the
Taiwan uprising in 1787 lasted nearly a year. This trend can be seen as a reflection of the falling capacity of the state in
maintaining social order as well as the growing size and despair of the subaltern class. Of course, the largest and most
disruptive uprising of all was the White Lotus rebellion of 1796-1805.
15
From 1792 on, rumors about the imminent end of the kalpa and arrival of the Maitreya Buddha were spreading in
the White Lotus sects active in western Hubei. It was anticipated that on the 10th day of the 3rd month of 1796, “a black
whirlwind would rise and blow all day and all night, killing countless people, and leaving mountains of bones and oceans
of blood.” The sect leaders told their followers to save themselves by participating in a general uprising to overthrow the
Manchus (Naquin 1981: 155; KYQ: 863).
The rumors triggered a spiral of sect activism and government suppression in the mountainous border areas of the
Shaanxi, Sichuan and Hubei provinces. These areas were densely populated by poor migrants from central China who
failed to find any decent piece of land in the overcrowded Sichuan lowland. These migrants hardly made ends meet by
relying on the infertile lands in the highland, and many of them chose to become outlaws living on banditry or were
recruited by religious sects (Kuhn 1970: 39; Goldstone 1991: 394-99). In the few years leading up to 1796, intensification
of government arrest further radicalized the sect members, who believed that they would be arrested anyway. They were
found looting lowland villages for food, which was then stocked for the preparation of the uprising (QZQ: 1-164; KYQ:
861-8). According to confessions of the arrested members, they were attracted by the call for action because the sect
leaders promised that participants of the uprisings would be rewarded with small plots of land or official titles in the
forthcoming Maitreya kingdom (QZQ: 10; KYQ: 862-3).
When the general uprising broke out in spring 1796, it was immediately joined by a substantial number of nonsect members who were identified by the Qing authority as “perverse and lawless people” (wulai bufazi tu) including
shack people (pengmin), salt smugglers, pirate coin makers and bandits (KYQ: 825). The rebellion persisted for nearly 10
years and cost the Qing regime more financial resources to put it down than any other military campaign in the eighteenth
century. Other than the large population of the starving migrants in the ecologically fragile Shaanxi-Sichuan-Hubei
border, the other reason for the sustainability of the rebellion was the guerilla tactics employed by the rebels. Participants
of the uprising were organized into small and highly mobile bands supported and informed by the surrounding populace.
Their practice of hit and run made the relatively immobile banner armies – the elite force of the Qing military
establishment – stationed in walled cities impotent (Kuhn 1970: 40).
When the imperial government realized that the war against the rebels was in a deadlock and the bannermen were
unreliable in suppressing the revolt, it changed its strategy and began to encourage the local gentry in the unrest area to
organize local militias under the nominal supervision of local officials. It was to stamp out any possible foothold that the
rebels could find in the vast rural space separating walled cities (Kuhn 1970: 41-50). Though this strategy turned out to be
16
effective and accounted for the final dissolution of the rebellion, it opened the Pandora Box of political and military
decentralization of the empire.
After crushing the powers of semi-autonomous warlords in the 1670s and 1680s, the Manchu state was ever eager
to monopolize the means of violence. Militarization of local elite was a taboo in the dynasty. Though scattered local
militias existed under the tacit approval of the government for the sake of suppressing smaller-scale rebellions, especially
in the frontier areas where the imperial presence was relatively weak, they were never formally recognized nor
encouraged by the state (such as the Miao rebellions in the 1730s and 1740s e.g. QSL-QL juan 3: 27, 57: 21; Naquin
1981: 150).
In the aftermath of the White Lotus Rebellion, the capacity of the state continued to decline. Declining state
capacity and the deflationary depression caused by the opium trade and massive silver outflow led to the ramification of
rural disorder. Banditry, sectarian activities, rent and tax resistances mushroomed in both economically advanced and
backward regions (e.g. Perry 1980: 48-95; Bernhardt 1992: 43-83). The rescinding constraint from the state and enlarging
threat from below enabled as well as urged the local gentry to shore up their policing and military functions. Local
military networks spanning from provincial elites to gentry and ruffians at the county level emerged all over the empire
(Kuhn 1970: 41-50; McCord 1990; Perry 2002: 31-39; Wakeman 1966). Local militias were usually financed by the
private wealth of gentry leaders as well as special taxes extracted from agricultural production and mercantile activities in
the communities concerned. Financial resources of militias at lower geographical level were funneled to higher level
military organizations (such as provincial armies that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century) (Kuhn 1970: 87-92). Local
government officials who were anxious to extract unsanctioned surtaxes to cope with the deteriorating fiscal condition of
the state, as well as landlords who found increasingly difficult in collecting rents given the peasants hardships, allied with
the local militias and relied on them for tax and rent collection. Local officials, landlords and gentry gradually converged
into a strata of local despots who were later characterized by the twentieth-century revolutionaries as “local bullies and
evil gentry” (tuhao leshen). Their coercive and extractive activities led to a general decline in agricultural productivity and
further increase in social unrest (Wakeman 1975: 21-23; Polanchek 1975: 220-2; 226-8 246; Perry 1980: 86-7; Bernhardt
1992: 80).
The result was a vicious circle of escalating social unrest and elite militarization over the nineteenth century.
While it is noted that “religious rebellions crowded the records of every decade after the middle of the eighteenth century”
(Yang 1961: 219) right to the collapse of the Qing empire, the pace of elite militarization redoubled after the Taiping
17
Rebellion of 1851-1864, when the first professional provincial army virtually autonomous from the command of Beijing
was established in Hunan for the suppression of the rebels. This vicious circle threw China in disarray and made it
incapable of coping with the challenge of imperialist powers, hence paving the way for the final disintegration of the Qing
empire and the protracted civil war that followed.
Conclusion
In early modern northwestern Europe, a section of the aristocracy transformed themselves into capitalists and
became the locomotives of Europe’s “transition to capitalism.” This elite transformation was facilitated by the particular
habitus in which the aristocratic elites were embedded. The continuous decline in seigniorial income after the fifteenthcentury crisis of feudalism, in conjunction with the escalating interstate competition for mobile capital after the collapse
of the medieval system of rule, induced a section of the aristocracy to engage in commercial activities and exchanged its
financial power for the protection from the absolutist states (Wallerstein 1974, 1989; Arrighi 1994). At the same time, the
“new periphery” of the Americas served as an ever expanding outlet for Europe’s subaltern class displaced by the boom
and burst of the commercializing economy. Resources imported from the New World prevented the living standards of the
poor from falling too much during the era of primitive accumulation, hence contributing to the relative stability and lack
of large-scale peasant revolts in northwestern Europe as compared to other world-empires in turmoil towards the end of
the eighteenth century (for the disappearance of large-scale revolt in eighteenth-century Europe, see Rudé 1964: 20 and
Bercé 1987: 183-96; for the contribution of New World Resources to Europe’s stability, see Pomeranz 2000: 82-4; 282-4;
for North America as a destination of mass migration at times of economic distress in Europe, see Bailyn 1986).
Aided by the state from above and shielded from large-scale revolt from below, the embourgeoisement of the
aristocracy went unfettered in the core zones of Europe. By contrast, the particular habitus of the gentry elites in
eighteenth-century China led them to embark on different paths of class reproduction. In most of the eighteenth century,
the paternalist Manchu state was harsh on the gentry-merchants. The imperial authority was anxious to keep the
mercantile elites at bay and at times joined the rioting mass to check their profit-maximizing activities. Given the state’s
paternalist regulation of the market and the availability of other means of class reproduction (such as participating in the
imperial examination and performing bureaucratic services), it was unwise for the gentry lineages to throw too much
resource into the accumulation of capital. The full-scale embourgeoisement of the gentry class was forestalled, and the
transition from a market economy to capitalism in China was therefore arrested.
18
Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, the capacity of the paternalist state declined and the lid put on the
expansion of local elites’ power was lifted. Meanwhile, the population expansion and tightening land-man ratio in
eighteenth-century China, together with the lack of any ecological frontier comparable to the size of the Americas, created
a large and formidable subaltern class that gave rise to a general breakdown of social order and successive large-scale
millenarian uprisings in particular. Freed from the political constraints from above and threatened by the subaltern class
from below, the gentry elites took on a peculiar path of class survival and reproduction through militarization, which
caused further increase in popular resentment and revolts.
Capitalist enterprises did emerge in mid-nineteenth-century China as a response to the “challenge from the West.”
But the nascent capitalist transition was countervailed by the transition of China’s socio-political system into a sort of
feudal order characterized by crumbling central authority and expansion of local military-predatory networks. The
militarization of local elite continued well into the twentieth century when many local despots developed or were
integrated into warlord regimes under the sponsorship of imperialist powers. These military-predatory elites were exactly
the “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” class which fettered the growth of China’s “national bourgeois” according to Mao
Zedong’s famous analysis of China’s social formation in the early twentieth century.
The post-imperial chaos of China was ended not by any “bourgeois revolution” but by a Communist-led agrarian
revolution. Students of China’s Communism notice that the Chinese revolution was grounded on the rich tradition of
peasant war in late imperial China, and the socialist state that the revolution sought to construct turned out to be not so far
away from the Qing state in terms of its paternalism and authoritarianism. Viewed in this light, the paternalist and utopian
religious ideologies originating in eighteenth-century China not only arrested China’s transition to capitalism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also turned China into an epicenter of anti-systemic movements in the twentieth
century. But it is another story.
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