Left to right: Immanuel Wallerstein, Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 and Tang Zhen 唐甄
World-systems theory, like most revisions of Marxism away from its Manichaean, messianic materialist cosmology, is an improvement on the original but still bears some slight flaws. It is to be lauded, however, for the way it has opened up the study of history to the material interconnectedness of the world for a much longer time than ‘globalisation’ has been underway (this latter phenomenon coming to mean only a popularised, ersatz-democratic version of what has been happening arguably since the 1200’s). Some of the readings for my Late Imperial China course have been incredibly interesting and enlightening, if thought about through a Wallersteinian lens. One of the articles we were to read for the class, ‘The Kangxi Depression and Early Qing Local Markets’ by Kishimoto Mio, offered a very intriguing picture of the Qing economy, the ways in which it tied itself into a global, proto-colonialist economy, and some tantalising strands of radical-conservative resistance to official policy, particularly from the independent Confucian scholar Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 and the neo-Confucian scholars Tang Zhen 唐甄 and Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 which, if properly implemented, may have had some profound impacts on the direction of economic history as a whole.
Dr Kishimoto’s description of the Qing economy reads as a familiar one. Qing villages were not self-sufficient for their own needs; many peasant households required a monetary income to provide themselves with basic services and to pay taxes. Though the transition in China between a traditional, ‘feudal’ economy and a capitalist one was much rockier than that in Europe, it is very easy to see the parallels. The enclosures movement which set off the Song Dynasty resulted in a massive jump in inequality; though mercantile families prospered, there was a marked rise in the incidence of social banditry (such as that of Song Jiang of Water Margin fame). This movement was somewhat reversed in the Yuan Dynasty, but came back in the Ming Dynasty, along with factional politics and widespread corruption in a system which had become dysfunctionally dependent upon eunuch-officials. The Qing Dynasty’s governance reforms and their creation of a Manchu-Han dyarchy lessened political corruption, but economically they remained a ‘commercialised peasant economy’ thanks to the abortive Song enclosures movement.
During the recession under the Kangxi Emperor, a number of different officials began prescribing economic remedies, including: the importation of more silver (ultimately dug up from Potosí in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru); the redistribution of existing currency and the stimulation of consumption by the wealthy; and the partial replacement of silver as the dominant form of currency, either by copper or by paper money. Tang Zhen, Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi all belonged to the last group. Even though Tang Zhen’s and Huang Zongxi’s idealist neo-Confucianism (derived from their teachers, both of whom belonged to the Wang Yangming 王陽明 school) was philosophically directly at odds with the more conservative Gu Yanwu’s textual-criticism approach, they found broad agreement on the issue of economic and political reform. All three thinkers were critics of the dependence of China on foreign (Spanish Peruvian) silver, and of the pro-silver Qing policies which were wreaking havoc on the welfare of upstream Chinese peasantry. All three wanted to support local, inland markets in a scale-free economy by repealing the silver standard and thus stalling the flow of wealth outwards toward the port cities… but they stopped just short of the proto-Keynesian projects of Wei Shixiao 魏世傚. All three were likewise critics of political concentration of power, just as they were critics of the concentration of wealth (Gu Yanwu, in his youth, was also a radical anti-Qing agitator and organiser of the peasantry – and throughout his life he never served in an official post under the Qing). In this they were contemporaries of Cavalier localism and critiques of enclosures and of parliamentary power (which would soon become dictatorship) in England, and were early anticipators of distributism.
On the other hand, those who supported the importation of silver and the resumption of trade with Taiwan and the Philippines (and thus with Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Japan) were established Qing officials or governors of downstream and coastal provinces which stood to gain by relaxation of the Qing bans on foreign trade. They vehemently criticised and ostracised the anti-silverists, though for a long time the Qing government did not listen to either party. Ultimately, the Kangxi Emperor acquiesced and reëstablished foreign trade and mining on a limited level; the silver which would have been imported and the gold and other goods which emerged from China would go on to spur political competition and strengthen the economies of the colonial powers, to fund further projects in the Americas and in Asia – such as the East India Company, established in 1707. I’m sure I needn’t go into detail about which trade goods would replace silver as the basis of ‘free trade’ between China and the European powers; suffice it to say that wealth was not only sucked out of China’s interior, it was literally smoked away. But given that much of Europe’s wealth was by now coming from the New World (and the exchange of New World silver for goods from early Qing China through the Spanish Philippines), it leaves one to wonder what would have become of the world economy if the Qing leadership had listened to Tang Zhen, Huang Zongxi or Gu Yanwu.
There are also some intriguing parallels between these anti-silver Confucian thinkers and the New Left; as well between the Qing administrators who opposed them and the ‘reformist’ party. The New Left wishes to retain some state ownership, yes, but they are also generally in favour of using state ownership to protect local, interior economies and are likewise sceptical of the uses of foreign trade. As the example of the politically-erstwhile Bo Xilai demonstrated, they may tolerate heavy-handed policy at the local level, but are suspicious of concentrations of power at higher levels (and thus are the most effective voices of political reform). The New Right, on the other hand, are generally uncritically supportive of free trade policy and attack anything that smacks of populism or redistribution of capital, but will support political centralisation when it suits them. And of course the PRC, just like the Qing government before it, ultimately decided in favour of the New Right’s course of economic ‘reform’ (though at the notable expense of political reform). We shall see where this course takes China; I do not believe that many Chinese people, particularly those living in the Chinese interior, will much enjoy where the government ends up taking them.
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