Chapter Nine
In 1948, an American farmer, William Hinton, went to live and work in a village called Long Bow, or, in Chinese, Zuangzuangcun, in the Shanxi province of China, about four hundred miles southwest of Beijing. It was a momentous time. After more than two thousand years, the oldest system of land ownership in the world was about to end. The Communist Party called it “feudal” referring to the privileges enjoyed by the owners of the soil, and the obligations heaped on the peasants who worked it. But the term was inaccurate. To most Western eyes, what China enjoyed was something like private property. But its roots were more ancient, and it had evolved in a way that created lords and peasants rather than capitalist landowners.
To the Communists, locked in a civil war with the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek, the difference was immaterial. Article One of the Draft Land Law published on December 27, 1947, had spelled out the party’s intention in plain language: “The agrarian system of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation is abolished. The agrarian system of ‘land to the tiller’ is to be realized.” In case any doubts remained, Article Two rubbed the message in: “Land ownership rights of all landlords are abolished.”
The word used for this dramatic upheaval was fanshen, meaning “turn over,” and Hinton chose it as the title of his account of what happened. Setting the scene for his American readers, he tried to convey the immensity of the Asian landscape, stretching for almost five thousand miles from the China Sea to the Urals, and from the frozen wastes above the Arctic Circle southward through the short-grass steppes and across the vastness of the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts into the atmosphere-piercing ranges of Tibet and Nepal. Frost still gripped the plains after the longest day of summer had passed, and the continental earth still pumped its warmth into the naked skies when winter returned. “This ancient lag, this ever-recurring cosmic overlap of heat and cold, cold and heat, brings a violence to the climate of all North China that is incalculable in its effect,” Hinton wrote. “From February to June cold winds blow from Mongolia outward toward the sea, gripping all the land from the Yangstze to the Amur [Rivers] in drought. Then, after weeks of hot and pregnant calm, the skies reverse themselves. Fierce torrential rains sweep in from the Pacific, flash floods carve up the earthen hills of [Shanxi] and [Shaanxi] [provinces in central China], swell the rivers with mud-clogged water, and inundate the flat plains bordering the sea.”
Repeatedly flooded and enriched with silt, the fertile flatlands close to China’s rivers, and especially those around the deltas of the Yellow, the Yangtze, and the Pearl Rivers, became the birthplace of the first Chinese dynasties in the first millennium BC. Two earlier civilizations, Egypt in the third millennium BC, and Babylon a thousand years later, had also grown up in similar riverside conditions. The concentration of people made possible by the ground’s fertility, and the need to organize communal projects such as irrigation channels and tall, protective dykes, encouraged the growth of formal government. But while the Egyptian pharaohs and the Babylonian kingdom belong to history, China has survived conquest, rebellion, and more than 150 years of humiliation by the technologically superior powers of the West.
Two competing needs, to maintain harmony within its enormous population and to keep control of it, have guided the policies of China’s different governments. In dull times, the two needs are in equilibrium, but when they are in conflict, the times grow interesting. Even today, with the second largest manufacturing and trading economy in history, China’s politics and administration are still shaped by the same goals. And central to the values of the Communist Party, as it was to those of its predecessor, the Qing Dynasty, is the belief that ownership of the earth is the key to achieving harmony without losing control.
The Qing Dynasty had collapsed in 1911 because of its inability to keep those imperatives in balance. A generation of intermittent civil war followed, exacerbated by Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and northern China, and ended in the victory of Mao Zhedong’s Red Army over Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949. The abolition of private property rights lay at the heart of the new regime. In Mao’s words, Chinese history was to be understood in terms of ownership of the earth.
“Under the bondage of feudalism [peasants] had no freedom of person,” he wrote in 1938. “The landlord had the right to beat, abuse or even kill them at will, and they had no political rights whatsoever. The extreme poverty and backwardness of the peasants, resulting from ruthless landlord exploitation and oppression, is the basic reason why Chinese society remained at the same stage of socio-economic development for several thousand years.” It followed, therefore, that the creation of a new society depended upon the creation of a new way of owning the earth. When the idealistic Hinton arrived in Long Bow, it was to discover that this historic change was already taking place. The oppressed condition of peasants in the village seemed in itself enough to justify the revolution.
After three thousand years of civilization, most peasants still lived in homes built of yellow mud and adobe, hardly better than the hovels of seventeenth-century Russian serfs—earthern-floored, heated by an open-fire stove, and consisting of little more than a single space, divided by partitions or curtains into three sections for sleeping, eating, and a public area where the ancestral shrine was kept. In the first house Hinton visited, he found a garlic-chewing peasant, Wang Wenping, living in a single room with no door and no glass in the windows, only torn paper. Despite a revolution in agriculture and crop production that had taken place in China a thousand years before, Wang himself still relied on an iron hoe to cultivate a plot of land less than three acres in area, growing wheat, millet, and maize. He and other villagers lived so close to the breadline that their habitual greeting was not “How are you?” but “Have you eaten?” Yet Wang was not the poorest in the village. About a third of the families had no land and survived for most of the year on a diet of millet porridge, pickled turnip, and whatever edible herbs they could find growing wild on the hillside. “To live without land,” Hinton concluded, “was to live in a state of constant disaster.”
The exceptions were a few peasants rich enough to employ others to help them work their tiny farms, and a ruling elite of landlords who did no work, leaving it entirely to hired labor. Even the wealthiest man in the village, Sheng Ching-ho, owned only twenty-three acres, but the surplus food and wealth his land produced paid for a home fifteen sections wide and made of expensive gray brick. More importantly, the prestige attached to the possession of so many fields also made him the village headman, tax collector, and local judge, earning enough cash from these activities to become chief banker, lending money to poorer peasants at rates of interest up to 50 percent per month.
Since the only worthwhile security the Long Bow peasants could offer were their crops and their labor, failure to repay loans locked many poorer families into long periods of dependency on moneylenders and led some to sell their children into virtual slavery to pay their debts. Their servile condition was enforced by physical beatings and flogging. There was no capital available for investment to improve the land, to expand the local inn, or to increase production of iron from the nearest foundry. In the absence of banks or any more secure repository, Sheng buried his surplus of silver dollars in the earth beneath his courtyard.
The state of Long Bow in 1948, however, illustrated a historical mystery. In the eighteenth century, the well-informed Adam Smith could confidently declare, “China has long been one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world.” Even allowing for distortions in converting traditional measures such as the shi (roughly two bushels) and the mu (about one sixth of an acre) to their English equivalents, it has been estimated that in 1800 a well-farmed wheat field in northern China might yield close to thirty bushels an acre compared to the twenty-five bushels expected from a good English field. The energy yields from China’s rice paddy fields, although worked only by hand, were greater than those from English wheat fields that had been fertilized, deep-plowed, and harvested according to the best scientific practice. More than a century after the land revolution in England, the growth in productivity that it triggered had still not enabled its farmers to catch up with the yields achieved by Chinese peasants.
Yet, in the twentieth century, long after the West had escaped the threat of famine, the chronic poverty of China’s peasants brought them so close to starvation that the British historian R. H. Tawney compared them to “a man standing permanently up to the neck in water so that even a ripple is enough to drown him.” The gap that opened up between China and the West in those two hundred years is often referred to by historians as the “great divergence.” In the West, it has been blamed variously on China’s failings, in technology, in economics, in politics, even in individual psychology. However, the Communist Party still adheres to Mao’s explanation that it was caused by the feudal exploitation of peasants by brutal landlords coupled with foreign domination in the nineteenth century.
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In 1758, an urgent report was sent from the northwestern province of Gansu to the Qianlong emperor in Beijing. Starving peasants had rioted, assaulted state guards, and broken into the imperial granaries to steal grain. This was more than crime, it came close to rebellion, and the provincial governor advocated harsh punishment. The empeoror’s severity toward his enemies was legendary. In a campaign twenty years earlier against the powerful Dzungar nomads in central Asia who controlled the Silk Route connecting China and Europe, Qianlong had not only defeated a potent threat but, in an act of genocide, virtually exterminated the Dzunghars by slaughtering close to one million of them. In nine other military campaigns against Tibetans, Taiwanese, and descendants of the Golden Horde, the Qianlong emperor had never been less than ruthless when confronted by opposition.
Yet, presented with evidence of the peasants’ assault on imperial property, he responded by warning Gansu’s governor not to “punish the people as thieves. If crowds consist of truly famine-stricken people who plunder for food, and if they do not have weapons, and their numbers are small, governors should be lenient according to the situation.” Then he ordered the extensive imperial bureaucracy into action. Messengers were dispatched to the neighboring province of Shanxi, requiring its government-controlled granaries to send wheat to Gansu, while the southern province of Sichuan was commanded to send surplus cereals to resupply Shanxi, and Sichuan’s neighbors were told to reduce their own consumption so that they too could help if called upon.
This was how imperial rule was supposed to work. The emperor cared for the people as though they were his children, and they obeyed him as though he were their father. Mutual obligation was in effect a cosmic law, connecting heaven and earth, greatest and lowest, and its purpose was the promotion of social harmony. The most compelling description of this unifying principle had been given by the sixth century BC ethical master K’ong, better known in the West as Confucius, the Latin name given him by the Jesuits. It was not by chance that in Confucian texts the character representing “harmony” was made up of two parts, “grain” and “mouth”—without an adequate supply of food, harmony was impossible. Indeed the very mandate from heaven, the moral authority that gave an emperor sovereignty over his subjects, depended on his ability to preserve harmony. As generations of Confucian scholars pointed out, hunger was so destructive of harmony that its existence suggested the emperor had lost the trust of heaven. When the failure of the monsoon devastated food supplies in 1744, Qianlong himself had not only prayed for rain but publicly fasted in order to regain “the grace of Heaven” and restore the harmony that had been lost.
The need for maintaining harmony was inculcated among the mighty army of scholar-bureaucrats who administered China’s vast landmass and its millions of inhabitants. Their ethos was based squarely on The Analects of Confucius. At each stage of their careers, they had to demonstrate their mastery of Confucian teaching in order to pass the demanding examinations required of every office-holder. The lowest county administrators, numbering more than one hundred thousand in the sixteenth century, needed only to memorize the major texts for their sheng-yuan degree, but increasingly sophisticated interpretation was required through the next eight higher levels ending with the palace exam, the jinshi, that guaranteed the highest offices in the imperial service to successful candidates. This topmost elite of mandarins rarely numbered more than four thousand.
Confucian principles placed the use of land at the heart of society’s structure. Although the highest social class was reserved for scholars (who were also government officials), they almost invariably came from landowning families, and immediately below them came food-producing farmers, leaving craftsmen and merchants to fill the two lowest ranks. During most of the Ming Dynasty, the last native Chinese rulers who held power from 1368 to 1644, the structure of society and government was provided by that inherited hierarchy.
In the 1480s, however, a wave of inflation caused by uncontrolled printing of paper money began to undermine the existing order. The incomes of old-established families dependent on fixed rentals were progressively reduced, and at the same time the despised merchant class began to benefit from a rapidly increasing trade as European vessels found new routes to the east. Silver originally mined in Bolivia and shipped to Cadiz was exchanged by Portuguese and later Dutch shippers for Chinese silk and porcelain. In modern Indonesia and along the coasts of the China Sea, the massive purchases of spices by the newcomers kick-started a general trade within the Far East that enriched the merchants of Canton and Shanghai still further. In the last century of the Ming dynasty, up to 1644, almost seventy-five hundred tons of silver flowed into China, not only from Europe but from the rising trade economy of Japan.
The surge of precious metal completed the destruction of the old order, with inflation tripling once more in the second half of the sixteenth century. The standby form of cash, strings of copper coins, was valued in terms of the silver tael, roughly equivalent in weight and value to a silver dollar. Taxes, once assessed in shih, the weight of cereals, now had to be paid in silver. No class had better access to this new currency than merchants, who upset the higher echelons of society with a restless ambition at odds with the unflappable calm of the mandarin class. “People pursue what is profitable to them,” complained the sixteenth-century scholar Zhang Han, “and with profit in mind they will go up against disaster [i.e., take risks]. They gallop in pursuit of it day and night, never satisfied with what they have, though it wears down their spirits and exhausts them physically.”
In a social upheaval as dramatic as the private property revolution in England, Chinese merchants, flush with silver, began to buy land, once the preserve of the aristocracy. It was an investment, but the return was not measured in cash. British officials examining property documents in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, formerly part of Guangzhou Province, concluded from records going back to the sixteenth century that “Land according to Chinese tenure is held as freehold.” In other words, China had the potential to be a private property economy. There was a crucial difference from Anglo-Saxon property, however.
Although owned outright, the land was not an exclusive, individualized possession, as recognized by English common law, but a family asset that existed to sustain the household. Since the owner also faced a direct legal obligation to pay the land tax that provided two thirds of the imperial revenues, it might seem surprising that anyone should have wanted to invest in land. Yet, during the sixteenth century, under the Ming Dynasty, government officials and city merchants in China began to behave like their English counterparts and put their savings into owning the earth.
What motivated them was the Confucian ethos that placed family loyalties at the center of private and public conduct. No more effective means of meeting family obligations existed than owning land, the basic source of sustenance where children, cousins, and distant kindred could all work and feed themselves. When the land passed to the next generation, the same values required it to be divided equally among the male children. Should it have to be sold, the new owners were supposed to come from within the wider clan or the immediate community, whose members were expected to provide shelter and employment for the family. Although not directly stated as legal requirements, these moral obligations had the force of civil law, and were interpreted as such by the Confucian-trained officials who adjudicated in cases of dispute. In other words, ownership of land came burdened with duties. It was the reverse of the English belief that attached rights to property.
Nevertheless, in Confucian terms, land proved to be a sound investment for its wave of new owners. Nationally, the inferior status of merchants merged into the superior class of landowners, and within each clan the prestige of the owner soared, and his dependents did well. In about 1600, a landless laborer employed on a clan farm in the rich Yangtze delta earned almost 20 percent more than his equivalent in England, and up to twice as much as farm workers in Mediterranean parts of Europe. A peasant family in the same fertile area, owning an average-sized farm of fifteen mu(roughly 2.5 acres) could make as much as the tenant farmers of a hundred acres in Essex. Adding in the earnings made by their wives from cotton spinning and silk weaving, the rural population along the rivers and coasts of China made a better living in 1600 than any other in the world, with the possible exception of the newly liberated peasants in the Ganges valley of Mogul-ruled India. Food production in coastal regions increased, and with it came a rapid growth in the population, from about fifty million in 1500 to one hundred million by the mid-seventeenth century.
The exploding population growth placed enormous strain on both the framework of government and the supply of land. In the country’s vulnerable northern and eastern provinces, there was a marked incidence of famine, undermining the Ming Dynasty’s mandate of heaven. At the same time, existing landowners found their dominance of China’s bureaucracy challenged by the children of rich merchants who began to study for and pass in large numbers the exams that qualified them to hold official positions. To the anguish of conservatives, social mobility began to overwhelm the old order, and writers like the sixteenth-century essayist Kuei Yu-kuang lamented the vulgarization of society that occurred when the traditional “distinctions between scholars, peasants, and merchants became blurred.”
The merchants’ sudden interest in government appears to have been sparked by the sort of motive that impelled the subjects of King Henry VIII to seek representation in the House of Commons—as new landowners they needed political power to safeguard their interests. In China, such power was represented by the gigantic bureaucratic system that raised taxes and enforced the laws and the emperor’s instructions.
Worse still for traditional Confucianists, even their foundation belief that mastery of the ancient texts was the ultimate source of knowledge came under challenge. The most influential exponent of Confucian studies in the sixteenth century, Wang Yangming, argued that book-learning was not enough: true wisdom emerged from the experience of individual action. The new teaching viewed merit as individual, almost democratic, not a matter of hierarchy. “There is the sage in everyone,” wrote Wang. “Only one who has not enough self-confidence buries his own chance.” Self-confidence was not a quality lacking in the upstart gentry.
To protect their own interests, the old Ming aristocracy tried to restrict the number of passes in official exams to a fixed quota and refined to a fiendish level the requirements of the “eight-legged essay” that was mandatory for higher-grade mandarins. But resistance cracked in the late sixteenth century when provincial governors on the northern frontier, desperate for cereals to feed their troops, began offering degrees for sale in return for food. Thousands of wealthy merchants-turned-landowners, especially from further south around the Yangtze delta, took advantage of the opportunity and shipped rice and wheat north in exchange for a sheng-yuan qualification and the chance to put a clever child in charge of local administration. Once a family had a foot on the ladder, it became easier to progress further. In the southern province of Fukien, just 3 percent of the top provincial officials came from the merchant class at the start of the sixteenth century, but almost a quarter by the end.
As in England, increasing control of the bureaucracy allowed the upstart gentry to frustrate the government’s desire to impose new taxes. In wealthy Anhui Province, close to the Yangtze delta, for example, the once-powerful bureaucrat Yao Wen-jan, a descendant of merchants, was notorious for spending his retirement in the mid-seventeenth century “interfering in matters of local administration” and blocking imperial attempts to conduct a new land survey of the province in order to increase the taxes and labor services payable by its merchant landowners. During the long Ming Dynasty, when the population had grown by as much as a quarter, and the area of cultivated land by almost one third, the revenue from the land tax remained what it had been in 1385.
In their attempt to maintain control over an increasingly turbulent empire, the Ming emperors were forced to find alternative levers of power. In the sixteenth century, the palace eunuchs who ran the imperial household were given a wider role. Armed with sweeping executive powers, including that of capital punishment, eunuchs were sent into the countryside to supervise provincial officials, raise new taxes, and organize imperial projects such as silk and salt production. In effect, a parallel government had come into existence.
Despite the obvious differences in culture and scale, the financial battle that developed between the Ming Dynasty and its landowners shared one fundamental consequence with the confrontation between king and property owners in England. Step by step, a dispute over taxation drove the children of China’s new gentry to challenge the emperor as the ultimate sovereign power. Provincial hostility developed into civil war during the 1620s and 1630s, with a number of provinces asserting their complete independence from the Ming government in Beijing. Amid the turmoil, the province of Jianxi in the Yangtze delta, later the site of the first area of Communist rule, offered a glimpse of how things might have developed.
It was there that Wang Yangming’s interpretation of Confucianism had taken deepest root. The T’ai-chou school that embodied his optimistic, self-assertive teaching attracted not just middle-class landowners and merchants, but craftsmen such as potters, brick burners, and stone-masons, as well as thousands of peasants. When they went to war, they fought both for independence and for a recognizably democratic agenda. The banners of the poorest of them were torn cotton pants, their weapons, sharpened hoes, and they called themselves the “Levelling Kings.” Their proclamations demanded the “levelling [of] the distinction between masters and serfs, titled and mean, rich and poor.” Two years before Richard Overton fired his arrow into the bowels of the House of Lords, a band of Levelling Kings broke into the home of an important official and ordered “the master to kneel, [saying] ‘We are all of us equally men. What right had you to call us serfs.’ ”
Predictably, the delta landowners were as outraged by this presumptuous assertion as Cromwell and Ireton were at Putney. But at the end of the Ming Dynasty something like the language of rights was in the air, and the landowners themselves were seeking political power to protect their property. Instead of political reform, however, the civil war paved the way for a foreign coup d’état that reimposed the old system more vigorously than before.
Denuded of resources and unable to pay or feed his troops—desertion reduced some units to just 10 percent of their original strength—the last Ming emperor lost control of the army. In 1644 invaders from Manchuria seized control of an almost undefended Beijing. The mutiny that might have changed everything was not defeated, merely frozen.
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The regime installed by the Manchu invaders was unmistakably foreign, a fact underlined by an early imperial edict requiring all native Han Chinese men to shave their scalps and grow a pigtail, and by the maintenance of a purely Manchu military force of eight regiments of “bannermen.” Manchu control, however, had to be balanced by Han Chinese harmony, and for that reason the new Qing Dynasty, as it was known, retained not just the culture and structure of the Ming government, but even the people who operated it. Thus in the mid-eighteenth century, most of the Qianlong emperor’s senior Chinese mandarins in Beijing, as well as the leading officials in the rich Yangtze delta provinces such as Anhui, belonged to the families of the sixteenth-century upstart merchants.
To restrict the power of these increasingly aristocratic, provincial officials, the Qing Dynasty also re-created their predecessors’ parallel administration. In its new form, the imperial staff was made up of Manchus rather than eunuchs, but they performed the same supervisory function and were armed with the same summary powers. Once established, however, the dynasty produced in succession three rulers of outstanding talent and energy, the Kangxi, Yongzhen, and Qianlong emperors, whose reigns lasted from 1661 to 1796. Their military and administrative genius extended the empire’s boundaries to Taiwan, Tibet, Xingjiang, and Mongolia, creating the frontiers of modern China. The last of these mighty emperors was possibly the greatest in China’s long history.
The artists who painted the Qianlong emperor found it easy to depict the variety of his interests. Sometimes he appeared as a warrior in armor, once as an incarnation of the Buddha, often as a scholar with a tasseled hat, and, most frequently, in the golden robes of an emperor. Over time their portraits showed his stern face becoming creased by age, and his Manchu mustache growing gray, but none of them succeeded in capturing the blazing energy that drove the engine of the empire with unremitting intensity for more than sixty years.
Most of the imperial city in Beijing is his work, a 180-acre-sized Chinese box of palaces within palaces, audience halls opening into pavilions that sit within parade-ground courtyards. But so too are the forty-two thousand poems he wrote, the mountainous encylopedias, dictionaries, and records of the language he commissioned, and the legendary art collection he amassed of almost twenty thousand paintings and seventy thousand pieces of porcelain and jade. Year after year, he toured his enormous country, making more than 150 progresses to the semitropical south, the prairie east, and mountainous north, accompanied by courtiers, concubines, administrators, and astronomers, drawing maps, examining accounts, measuring the position of stars in the sky. No detail escaped him.
It was a characteristic inherited from his grandfather, the Kangxi emperor who personally supervised every aspect of the empire’s organization, once even sending an urgent message during a brief absence from Beijing to tell his son that “it should be about the season for the arrival of the songbirds in the capital, please let me know if you have seen them.” His terrified son sent for some birders, and with their help was able to reply that he had been fortunate enough to see two songbirds, but, as he confessed, the command had caused him to “break out in a sweat all over his body.”
In 1793, soon after the Qianlong emperor’s eighty-third birthday, a delegation arrived in the magnificence of the imperial palace from an inconsequential island “cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea,” as the emperor’s advisors put it. Its leader, Lord George Macartney, presented the emperor with gifts from King George III, intricately engineered astronomical instruments including a planetarium that mimicked the workings of the solar system. Brusquely, the emperor dismissed as unimportant both the delegation and the gifts. “I have but one aim in view,” Qianlong wrote to the British king, “namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfill the duties of the state . . . I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
To many modern historians, this failure to realize the significance of manufacturing marks the crucial element that would cripple China’s standing as a world power. Less than half a century later, Britain, numerically one of the smallest of Europe’s powers with a population of eighteen million, attacked China in what became known as the First Opium War. The superiority of British technology was made brutally apparent in 1841 when its steam-driven, iron-hulled ship, the Nemesis, powered upstream against wind and current past the imperial navy’s wooden sailing junks and bombarded to rubble the forts protecting Canton, today’s Guangzhou. Yet industrial incompetence does not by itself explain the mighty empire’s failure to mount any worthwhile defense against this new power.
To Macartney, the British envoy, China’s weakness went much deeper, and was obvious even under the Qianlong emperor’s rule. The system of government was so divided it could only be made to work by a ruler of exceptional talent. “The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war [a battleship carrying one hundred cannon],” he reported, “which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbors merely by her bulk and appearance, but whenever an insufficient man happens to have the command upon deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship.”
The threat of mutiny that Macartney identified came from the Han Chinese scholar-bureaucrats and landlords who ran the provincial administration. Their jealousy of the Manchu officials who formed the parallel government provided a central theme in Cao Xuequin’s classic bestselling novel of the Qianlong era, A Dream of Red Mansions. Raised as a Manchu, Cao’s own grandfather had been directly appointed by the Kangxi emperor to the imperial post of commissioner of textiles in the southern city of Nanjing, located on the Yangtze delta in Jiangxi Province, next door to Anhui. Since the commissioner was in charge of the imperial silk factories and supervised cotton production in the region, the Cao family had become exceptionally wealthy by the early 1700s. But they were also expected to report directly to Beijing on the administration of the provincial aristocracy.
The novel is about the fortunes of just such a family, and it begins with their downfall, losers in a power struggle with local magnates. A messenger from Beijing counsels them, too late, to consult an imaginary advice book for imperial officials, known as The Mandarin’s Life-Preserver, which “lists all the richest, most influential people in the area. There is one for every province. They list those families which are so powerful that if you were ever to run up against one of them unknowingly, not only your job, but perhaps even your life might be in danger. That’s why they’re called ‘life-preservers.’ ”
Cao knew what he was writing about because that was the fate that befell his own family when confronted by four of Jiangxi’s grandee families. Although it gave rise to one of the world’s most enchanting, fantastical novels, the fall of the Cao family has a wider significance as an illustration of the challenge faced by imperial officials: how could control be reconciled with the preservation of harmony? Officials came and went, but landowners were there for generations. In the absence of the emperor’s active support, the most powerful imperial officials frequently preferred to preserve harmony by turning a blind eye to the power of the provincial administrators. Some actively connived at the evasion of imperial supervision, but the majority were content simply to enforce existing levels of taxation, ignoring any new sources of income or wealth.
The difficulty that even the most energetic emperor faced in maintaining control was inadvertently revealed by the Qianlong emperor himself. At the height of his power in 1774, he boasted that during his reign imperial revenues had more than doubled, from thirty-four million silver taels to seventy-eight million. This may sound impressive, but was equivalent to just twenty-six million pounds raised from a population of 275 million. In that year, however, Britain’s government raised seven million pounds in property and personal taxes from a population of 6.8 million. Either each British taxpayer was paying ten times as much as his Chinese equivalent in land tax and duties on expenditure, or the great bulk of Chinese taxes and levies never reached Beijing.
This was the weak link in the chain of government that Macartney had referred to. Much of Chinese territory was owned by the emperor and his officials, and more was administered by cities and their guilds, but the largest single block was owned by Cao’s nemesis, the provincial landlords. Unlike the political cohesion that developed in other private property societies as magnates sought influence at the center, Chinese property owners only needed control of provincial government to protect their clan-based interests.
In the cold, cereal-growing north, property rights were usually vested in the most senior male in the extended family, while the junior and more distantly related members of the clan who worked the soil paid in duties and service. In the more productive south, where cotton and rice could be grown, land tended to be rented for profit, but was administered by a ruling elite from within the clan, and farms were largely tenanted by kin rather than strangers. Where disputes could not be settled internally, the codified rules of behavior that governed family obligations were arbitrated by local government officials, and a prudent landowner ensured that such people belonged to his immediate family.
This kinship-based network of villages and rural communities provided the base of the pyramid of government. Their produce served the estimated forty-five thousand market towns where taxes were levied and rents were paid. The market towns were in turn answerable to the county towns, home to the lowest level of provincial administrators, whose edicts were enforced by landowners backed by a local militia. Above them stood the provincial capitals where imperial and regional government competed ceaselessly for control of tax assessment, land registration, and the collection of revenues.
There could be little doubt about the winners in this competition. The opulence of the few surviving mansions built by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century grandees in provincial cities such as Nanjing testifies to their wealth. Its foundation was laid during the century of agricultural improvement that followed the influx of money-minded merchant landowners. Farmers learned to increase yields by enriching the soil not just with manure but organic fertilizers made from crushed soybeans or oilseed. And in the eighteenth century, Qianlong’s officials in the waterlogged Jianghan plain between the Yangtze and Han Rivers reported with admiration how the peasants adjusted their planting to flood conditions, experimenting with early or late-growing rice crops to avoid seasonal flooding, and, when catastrophe threatened, either put in sorghum that resisted immersion before the waters rose, or, the moment they began to recede, “quickly replanted buckwheat, beans, and vegetables. [In this way they] could still look forward to a harvest and avoid a famine.”
The innovative methods of Chinese farmers led to an extraordinary growth of about 40 percent in cereal yields in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the increase of food came a second great explosion in the population, which tripled from one hundred million in 1650 to three hundred million by 1800. The pressure on land led to massive increase in the area taken under cultivation. Qianlong’s boasted increase in tax revenues is evidence of his relative success in registering this new land for taxation. But between 1753 and 1910, it is estimated that the area of cultivated land in China grew by a further 30 percent, yet annual revenues barely rose during the period, and in 1890 still amounted to less than one hundred million taels, about 2 percent of GNP.
In the 1890s, when British colonial authorities in Hong Kong attempted to make a record of Han Chinese landholdings in Kowloon, formerly part of Guangdong Province, they found that much of the new land brought into cultivation since the sixteenth century had never been registered for taxation. Instead, when villagers began farming wasteland, they had put their new property under the protection of the head of the dominant clan or family group in the area. “The greater part of the land claimed by clans was never registered,” British officials reported, “and, as a rule, it appears that no land tax was ever paid on this land to the Government.” The farmers did pay an annual levy on their unregistered property, but, as the officials put it, to local “taxlords” rather than to the government. With just twenty thousand imperial administrators to supervise an army of provincial officials that had grown to more than 1.25 million in the nineteenth century, there was little risk of detection by Beijing.
Unable to exercise control over revenues from the land, the Qing Dynasty never possessed the resources to develop the major industrial projects of the nineteenth century—steel foundries and, above all, railway construction—or to finance the steam-driven navies, electric communications, and rifled artillery that Britain, the United States, and Japan, after the Meijis revolution of 1868, could boast. The frailty of the Qing government was underlined by the Taiping rebellion that broke out in 1853 and cost the lives of perhaps twenty-five million people before it was at last put down with foreign help in 1864.
Britain’s success in opening up China to international trade, including the importation of opium, following the Opium War in 1842, encouraged other technologically advanced nations to impose their own will on the antiquated behemoth. The United States, France, Russia, Japan, and eventually Germany all carved out trading privileges by force and extracted financial indemnities from the Chinese government for its opposition. By the start of the twentieth century, these charges amounted to 40 percent of the government’s vestigial revenues. “It is not China that is falling to pieces,” declared one British official, “it is the [international] powers that are pulling her to pieces.”
In effect, the Qing Dynasty had hijacked the land revolution, extinguishing any possibility that individual landowners might have created rural capital in their property. Yet even at its height, it could never exert enough dominance to establish its own rights over the land. And as the nineteenth-century emperors lost power to those who owned the earth, they were increasingly deprived of the income that a government needed to equip itself for the modern industrial age.
With little large-scale employment available in factories or cities, the mass of China’s growing population—above four hundred million by the early twentieth century—was condemned to remain in the countryside. The pressure of numbers remorselessly depressed wages—a laborer’s earnings that in 1600 would have supported four people barely fed two in 1750, and scarcely met his own needs in 1910—and created intense competition for land. Increasingly, landlords made their money from the bribes, rents, loans, duties, taxes, and labor dues they extracted from the people, often their own relatives, who tilled the soil. Their unrelenting efforts to squeeze more funds from peasants gave rise to a bitter rural saying, “A peasant always hangs himself in his landlord’s doorway.”
As the population grew and property was divided among sons, the average size of a farm shrank from just under three acres to less than one acre. In southern Guangdong, one tract of land that had supported a single wealthy family in the sixteenth century was split between more than seven hundred households by the end of the nineteenth century. For the landlords, the chief value of the land had come to lie in the number of people it would support rather than the return on the crops it produced. Profit-making farmers had become survivalist peasants.
Fundamentally, Mao’s diagnosis of China’s history was correct: the pattern of land ownership, exacerbated by foreign intervention, had condemned the Chinese to misery. But the form of communal ownership invented by the Cultural Revolution would prove just as effective in producing the same result.