"By 1100, China had many of the features associated with industrial
society."- Rand McNally Historical Atlas.
"Commercial taxes bring in millions. Why tax the people?"-Gaozong, 1127-62
"Perhaps [fifteenth-century] China did not really want to expand."-Immanuel
Wallerstein, 1976.
In the year 200 the pits of military dictatorship were reached in China and
the Roman Empire. The power behind the crumbling throne of the Han Dynasty was
Cao Cao, possibly the greatest military genius in Chinese history, whose
martial exploits were all at the expense of other Chinese, including the mass
of the people. Cao Cao's rise to power commenced with the suppression of the
revolutionary peasant war of the Yellow Turbans (184-194). Roman Emperor at
the same time was Septimius Severus, whose philosophy of government was
basically similar to that of the Chinese warlord: "Reward the army; despise
all others." Severus waged considerable war against other Roman armies, those
of Pescennius Niger (193-4) and Clodius Albinus (195-6). Though he did make
a spectacular raid into the Parthian Empire, then on its last legs, in which
he captured the capital, Ctesiphon-on-Tigris, enslaving 100,000. It is probable
that he knew little and cared less about the contribution of the Silk Route
from China to the wealth of Mesopotamia and Syria. As far as is recorded, he
was exclusively preoccupied with glory, loot, plunder, conquest for its own
sake, and perhaps a touch of emulation of Alexander The Great (like Trajan
before him). Contemporaries cared even less. It was held against Severus that
he had beseiged the city of Hatra twice, and expensively failed on both
occasions. Hatra was not to fall into Roman hands until the reign of Severus
Alexander (222-35), last ruler of the Severan house.
Septimius Severus should have been as aware as anyone could have been where
the wealth of Syria, exemplified by the mercantile classes of city-states like
Palmyra, was coming from. Born in Leptis Magna in Roman Africa, Severus had
seved in Syria, where one third of the Roman army was stationed, and was
married to a Syrian princess. What's more, he'd had firsthand experience
of the political muscle of the mercantile and industrial communities of
Syria when the various cities chose up sides in the civil war between him
and Pescennius Niger. Antioch, for example, supported his enemy, for which
reason he made an example of it. On the other hand, favoured Syrian mercantile
elements proudly perpetuated his memory in adopting the *praenomen* Septimius,
as in Septimius Oedenathus, the Palmyrene senator whose imperial claim was
"inherited" by his widow, Zanab (Zenobia), in the name of his son, Vabalathus
(270-2).
It was under Severus that Eastern, specifically Syrian, religions, including
Christianity, whose first and foremost bastion in the Near East was Antioch,
first became fashionable in the Latin West, notably Africa. Roman Africa was
precisely the beneficiary of Severus' loot and his family fortune by marriage,
especially his hometown of Leptis Magna. But Carthage also prospered, and
Carthage, a city the size of Antioch but a place whose wealth was that of
rentiers and landlords, was the Los Angeles of the Roman Empire. By 200, it
was producing the leading literary figures, playwrights, poets, novelists,
and even jurisconsults of the Latin world. One of the greatest of these
literary figures was the Christian writer, Tertullian. He was the probable
author of one of the greatest pieces of propaganda ever written, The Passion
of Sts Perpetua and Felicitas, about the trials and executions of seven
Christians in 202. (The pamphlet pulls out every stop of class, race, and
erotic symbolism a Christian writer could get away with.) More respectably,
at this time, the women of the Severan house, Julia Domna and Julia Maesa,
subsidized the cult of the sun god of Emesa, Syria, whose priest was the
teenage emperor "Elagabalus."
As we know the subsequent histories, we are here on overconfidently familiar
ground, ie, what *really* motivated historical agents in the fourth century.
That is, mass-salvation religions. By the mid-third century, Africa rivalled
only Egypt in mass conversion to Christianity, reflecting both the sophisti-
cation of the intellectuals and the depth of misery of the enserfed peasantry.
At the other end of the Eurasian landmass, Cao Cao found it advisable,
before the year 200, to make provision for his Buddhist soldiers to attend
services and perform ablutions.
Cao Cao controlled the North China plain, which gave him, in turn, control
of the Silk Route into Inner Asia as far as the Stone Pillar, the oasis of
Kucha. From Northwest China he drew the horse-nomad cavalry, especially the
mailed archers, who made him invincible on the plains; the Chinese had just
invented the stirrup, in the second century. Mahayana Buddhism had come to
China from Inner Asia. Almost the last accomplishment of the expiring Han
Dynasty had been the decisive defeat of the Northern Xiongnu, in alliance
with the Southern Xiongnu. Losers, in the North China plain, were sent West,
in the direction of Europe. Whether the Northern Xiongnu became the Huns of
Europe is still controversial. (The Ruan-ruan, or Juan-juan, were expelled
from North China in 551, then appeared in the Balkans as the Avars a few
decades later.)
Cao Cao and Septimius Severus alike imposed harsh, brutal social discipline.
Legal codes were revised in both empires. Jurisprudential studies flourished.
We know that the Silk Route had great importance, even riveting importance,
to the empires at either end, but we do not know how this importance was
subjectively apprehended by those who made policy, even when the identity of
those who made policy was utterly clear. Commerce, also, was one thing,
production another. The Chinese empire had asserted claims to state interven-
tion in the economy as early as the Discourses on Salt and Iron, a debate
on state monopolies said to have taken place around 110 BC. Nothing comparable
existed in the West until the Late Empire, when Diocletian had tried and
failed to regulate prices (303), then Constantine imposed the *chrysargyron*,
a tax on the commercial and service personnel of the cities of the East (where
those of the West were collapsing into depopulation from epidemic disease). In
certain cases of strategic need and dire labour shortage, such as the guilds
of *naviculari* charged with the provisioning of the capitals, Rome and
Constantinople, hereditary service obligations were imposed. And in 374,
Valentinian I reduced to *coloni* the former free peasants of the Western
Empire; but this was under conditions of a taxpayer strike, already far
advanced. We shall find examples of such strikes, where states guarantee
exploitation, but fail to collect taxes toward their very survival as states
from the very classes constituting the intended beneficiaries of these
guarantees, on numerous occasions.
Let's consider the possible roles of the precapitalist state as guarantor
of exploitation and as accumulator or facilitator of accumulation.
1. The state guarantees exploitation concomitant with its definitional
monopoly of the means of violence in a given territory. (All definitions of
the State, left, right, Weberian, agree on this criterion of stateness.) It
in principle refrains from regulation, control, and regimentation of
accumulative activities, which are the sole and exclusive province of owners
of the means of production as private property. This is the ideological norm
under *capitalism*, and is perhaps the definining social characteristic of
the capitalist class qua class; ie, its bifurcation into entrepreneurial
and or even versus politico-military specialists. Be it noted that it remains
the same class, with labour divided and career-lines bifurcated; nothing
prevents, much encourages, marriages and even sibling relations across the
public-sector/private-sector line. Recall the brothers Rockefeller.
In precapitalist societies (social formations, or whatever the sociogibber-
ish or Marxogibberish term of your choice, this is rare. The reason is, as
stated in previous posts to this list, and by others of you who would not like
to think of yourselves as agreeing with me, that the "social relations of
production" take the predominant form of market-unmediated forced labour.
The exploiter is also a wielder of the means of violence, having served in
the military in a position of command, elsewise as a magistrate of state.
Typically, life and property are wagered in political struggles ranging
rival cliques of soldiers and magistrates against each other for supreme
power (with or without some nominally sacrosanct figurehead's figleaf-
provision function). Cases are nevertheless known of classes or class
fractions which made sincere efforts to live in peace and quiet, eschewing
politics, and enjoying, if possible increasing, their fortunes.
a. In the late stages of the Roman Republic, Cicero castigated slaveowning
landlords of this type as "fishponders," ie, whiling away their cultivated and
leisurely existence in beholding the beauty of captive fish. (Chinese landlords
also loved their fishponds.) Cicero's point was, however, that the winner in
the struggle for power would thus acquire a de facto licence to kill them all,
with confiscation of property. In a proscription by Antony, in 43 BC, every
provision was made to allow Cicero to escape, but as a man of theory, he
dithered, procrastinated, and got confused, leaving the triumvirs no choice
but to behead him.
Under the principate, the senate was a literal millionaire's club, with
a fortune worth one million sesterces required for entry; the usual was much
greater. Combined impotent gossipmongering of the senators, with or without
Stoical philosophical tinge, with paranoia not unmixed with greed on the part
of the emperors ensured executions and confiscations at irregular intervals.
Some emperors, notably Domitian (not the Antichrist for nothing) were worse
than others, of course; these were not merely not deified but hit with
*damnatio memoriae*, tantamount to getting expunged from the Great Soviet
Encyclopedia without hope of Rehabilitation. Septimius Severus was charged
with actually culling the Senate regularly for no political reason at all;
and this may have some truth to it, apart from those actually "guilty" of
supporting rival generals.
b. In Early Medieval China of the Six (Southern) Dynasties, as mentioned
in a post I sent last week, the Great Families held titles to great offices
of state, but refused to perform any duties attendant thereto. Their leisured
and highly cultivated existence emphasized, apart from metaphysical specula-
tion, "pure conversation," (one is reminded of Sidonius Apollinaris and his
friends in Burgundian-occupied Gaul indulging in versification and polite
repartee whilst contemplating bemusedly the butterfat-smeared tribal warriors
wandering around upholding Law and Order) as well as "self-so," the admiration
for the high degree of intrapschic well-grooming one's own Self has attained.
The flaw in the ointment, pardon the expression, was the social resentments
of the officer class. Great Families regarded "a mere military man" unfit to
marry their daughters. When military coups occurred, under slogans issued by
warlords to reform the state, there would transpire a wave of executions of
refined aristocrats on trumped-up charges; but nothing so drastic as to amount
to changing the system would occur. In between times, the officer class
guaranteed exploitation (by for example suppressing the Daoist pirate rebel
Sun En and his psychedelically drugged "demon soldiers" in 399).
The warrior-aristocrats of Northwest China, who survived as the ruling class
under the Tang, were the more typical case. These were lance-knights who wore
plate armour (not adopted in Europe till centuries later). It must be carefully
stressed, due to vestigial Eurocentrism, that these were soldiers in a regular
army, not feudal warriors.
*** Feudalism is a hierarchical polity wherein each member of the hierarchy
accumulates the means of violence on the spot and in person. Power wielded
at any given level of the hierarchy is a function of complex mixtures of
loyalties and coercive abilities partly expressions of these loyalties. It
is entirely possible that the units of a feudal polity are themselves
*states*. Eg, in ancient Mesopotamia, circa 1750 BC, "Twenty kings follow
the Man of Babylon; fifteen kings follow the Man of Isin; fifteen kings
follow the Man of Yamhad...." To stretch the definition a bit, the entire
Earth comprises a single feudal polity, the units whereof are "sovereign
states," each one of these swearing vassalage to the single Superpower, and
some vassals notably more Turbulent than others.
2. The state simultaneously guarantees exploitation *and* promotes
accumulation based on resources it owns outright or grants on conditions
to direct producers. The Tang state in China (618-907) made an effort, at
least partly successful for a century, to grant peasants allotments for life,
in return for which they owed military service. This system collapsed, due
to contradiction between the state's obligation to protect the peasants'
holdings from absorbtion in Great Estates and its obligation to guarantee
the owners of Great Estates the sanctity of their private property. As the
capacity of the state to make its economic-regulatory prerogatives stick
disintegrated under growing complexity of the economy (beyond knowledge or
capacity of officials to regulate it) and curtailment of land revenues from
the period of military coups and civil wars, 755-763, onward, the state was
compelled to shift its revenue collection base to commercial taxes and the
proceeds of expropriating the Buddhist Church.
The foregoing represents the closest one finds in empirically observable
social reality to so-called Oriental Despotism. The latter is a Utopia which
cannot exist.
3. The state guarantees exploitation, but cannot extract a share of the
surplus from the private exploiters. This is the situation of taxation strike,
already mentioned. It results or eventuates from the possession in the hands
of the state of means of violence sufficient to stifle the direct producers
but inadequate to intimidate the private owners, usually landlords, commanding
private retainers, thugs, bullyboys, and whatever else slapdash ad hoc means
of violence which would make sufficient trouble for the magistrate on duty, in
terms of personnel reports, that the taxes owed are not paid. Or, the state is
hard-up for really nasty means of repression. The fiscal crisis may derive from
demographic factors (depopulation) or curtailment of the professional military
for social-political reasons. The crisis may be circumvented by ingenuity in
finding alternative sources of revenue, or it may not be surmounted at all.
a. The Western Roman Empire: Pre-Roman Gaul was the abode of Fierce and
Warlike Tribes. According to A. Momigliano, Ancient Wisdom, 1971, this was
due to slave-raiding conducted since the late eighth century BC from the
Greek colony of Massilia. Analogies with the effects of European slave-trading
upon the societies of Africa were exact, by implication. The Greeks of Massilia
shunned contact with the Celts of the interior, and only ventured inland when
their services were retained by Rome as intelligence agents, according to
Momigliano. The expansion of urban life and landed estates producing for the
urban market then failed to survive the epidemics of smallpox and measles of
the late second and third centuries. Gaul became a "demographic sink," a
region of decimated population separated by a political frontier from peoples
less exposed to epidemic diseases due to hot-dry or cold climates; or else,
by the very thinness of human habitation inhibiting contagion. With the decline
of population and the consequent paucity of legally free and personally mobile
tough tribals ready and willing to volunteer for the legions or auxiliaries,
excepting the Albanian-speakers in Illyria, there remained only the Germans,
across the frontier, ready and willing to fill the vacancies. With the huge
tracts of *agres vacantes*, it became economic for landowners to buy up huge
tracts of land for derisory sums, or to receive holdings in commendation in
return for protection from taxation and conscription. Those protected were
lost to the state finances. So were the landlords themselves. The latter could
readily discern the utter incapacity of the state to protect property against
*bagaudae* in Gaul and Spain, *circumcelliones* in Roman Africa (complicated
by religious schism with a strong class component). The labour-short holdings,
in any case unprofitable unless of truly immense extent and fully protected
against the direct producers, were actually rendered more profitable by going
shares with Goths, Vandals, Burgundi, or Suevi. Back to Fierce and Warlike
Tribes, the Wild West, and Where We Came In.
b. The Tang dynasty (618-907) was reduced to hapless puppet status by the
great peasant war associated with the name of Huang Zhao, not the last salt-
smuggler to lead the Broad Masses to victory over the empire. From 865 to 880,
his armies pillaged the great cities, from Chang'an [=Eternally Secure] and
Loyang in the north to Guangzhou [Canton] in the south; foreign merchant
communities in the latter city were exterminated. According to one atrocity
story, when loyalist troops drove Huang Zhao's forces out of Chang'an, the
rebel swore a "bloodbath," then re-liberated the officially liberated city,
or vestiges of it, from its current liberators, leaving not much re-liberated
thereafter. The capture and execution of Huang Zhao helped not at all, as
warlord troops were undistinguishable in manners from rebels. Units of official
troops had been recruited from surrendered rebels, analogous to the *chieu hoi*
["open arms"] program in the Vietnam War, US phase. One of these units was
commanded by a peasant-born general, Zhu Wen. In 907, the latter snuffed the
Tang, proclaiming the Later Liang. Only four peasant-born men turned this trick
of whom the last was Mao Zedong; Zhu Wen was the second. (Ommitting, for this
count, Li Zicheng, who eliminated the Ming in 1644 only to lose to an alliance
between the imperial commander on the Manchu front and the Manchu.)
The revolution which exterminated the knightly class in China has no
European parallel. As with the entire issue of the relative paucity of
victory in peasant war by the peasants outside China and Vietnam, this is
one of the great unasked questions of history. In the Jacqueries, the English
Peasant War, the German Peasant War, the peasants were slaughtered by their
armoured Betters like rabbits. Even the Hussites, who fought the flower of
German chivalry with the Chalice in one hand and the Blade in the other found,
after fighting from 1419 to 1433, that there were just too damned many Germans.
In China, the knightly class was broken. Its mores were stigmatized as of
foreign origin (the Sui, 581-618, were half-Mongol; the Tang, 618-907, were
half-Turkish); sexually depraved (Empress Wu actually ruled as Son of Heaven
in her own name, 690-705. Deposed by reason of alleged senile dementia, she
died of officially characterized natural causes a few months later. Her
daughter-in-law, Empress Wei, inherited most of her power but none of her
brains; was killed in a coup in 710 in which the grandiose Xuanzong seized
power. He was accused of being led to his doom by the beautiful Lady Yang,
who was strangled, July 16, 756); otherwise-indecent (women rode horses as
enthusiastically as men, playing polo, which had been imported from Persia);
and prey to superstition, both foreign (Buddhism) and domestic (Daoism, where
the Tang claimed descent from Laozi, who was either imaginary or a pseudonym).
The tenth century, which saw the final crushing of the aristocracy, was by
no accident the precise time of the origins of Chinese footbinding. The new
ruling class was to be resolutely civilian; its males typically landlords,
merchants, and deskbound officials; its women confined, in the most literal
sense thanks to crippling, to monotonous women's work, above all, textile-
making by labour-intensive methods. The crippling was also mental. In Ancient
and Early Medieval China, female writers had been, if not numerous, at least
not unknown. This now changed; and the occasional woman would rebel against
fatherly attempts to teach her poetry composition by insisting that suchlike
literary activities were unwomanly. (See Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner
Quarters, 1993.) Marriage customs changed, with dowry replacing bridewealth.
The reconsolidated political regime, the Song (960-1279), having come to power
after a long succession of army revolts (similar to those of the Byzantine
Empire, except the boots were yellow, not purple), disdained militarism and
abhorred the cavalry, especially. This was poitical and ideological animus:
The cavalry was the hallmark of the former ruling class. As it happened, the
Song state was faced with rival Great Powers which, furthermore, cut it off
from access to horse-grazing areas and horse-exporting tribes. The radical
prime minister Wang Anshi remedied this, to some extent, with the creation of
a Tea and Horse Administration, trading one for the other at remote borders.
But mainly, the Song relied upon conscript infantry against the horsy Liao
Empire (Khitans) and Western Xia or Xixia (Tanguts), likewise mounted. The
Song lost nearly every war fought, paying both enemy Great Powers a half
million rolls of silk annually plus tons of silver bullion in tribute. The
army declined in efficacy as it quadrupled in size. Conscripts were replaced
by mercenaries, recruited from, and deserting to, bandits. The Song became
more preoccupied with internal security the less capable it became of defending
the country, turning as a last resort to gunpowder and firearms.
The interventionist program of Wang Anshi, the New Policies, were discred-
ited by the defeat and captivity of emperor Huizong in 1126 at the hands of
new invaders, the Jin dynasty of Ruzhen (Jurchen) Tatars from present-day
Manchuria. The new border was in exactly the same place as the one separating
the Eastern Jin of South China from the Former Qin of North China before the
Battle of the Fei River, 383: The wet-rice areas of the Huai and Yangzi valleys
are in effect seas of mud, which impedes cavalry. In other ways, too, history
repeated itself. From 1127 onward, without the resources of North China, the
regime was helpless to collect land taxes from the vast serf-cultivated estates
of the Yangzi valley; concealment of unregistered serfs and tenants was
standard practice. The Song henceforth financed the state from commercial
taxes, as did the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) which succeeded them. To
protect the trade routes, the Song created a navy which dominated the Indian
Ocean. The Mongol Yuan went beyond this, attempting huge seaborne invasions
of Java, Japan, and elsewhere: without exception, expensive disasters.
In the last gasp of the Southern Song, the Yangzi Valley landlords went on
tax strike. Khubilai Khan was already ruler of North China, conquered by the
Mongols in 1234; and he had already proclaimed the new regime, the Yuan
(Origin). In 1259, the Mongols conquered the southwestern kingdom of Da Li,
in present-day Yunnan, outflanking the Southern Song; then they constructed
a navy, using Chinese and Korean engineers, to crack the Yangzi defenses. (The
decisive battle was fought at the Siege of Xiangyang, 1269-1271, which the
Mongols won by means of two immense cannon, cast by Arab engineers; the gun-
powder, of course, had been a Chinese invention.) Now, in 1263, land reform
for defense of the country was proposed by Jia Sidao [Chia Ssu-tao], 1213-
1275. The reforms
"met bitter opposition in the central government and in the Council of
State, in which representatives of the big landowners sat. Chia Ssu-tao's
plan was to limit properties to 500 *mu* (about 27 hectares) and to buy
with state funds a third of the surplus, in order to establish 'public
lands' (*guantian*, *kuan-t'ien*), the income from which would be allocated
to military expenditure. The reforms were partially applied from 1263 until
the death of Chia Ssu-tao. By the end of the dynasty [1279] 20 percent of
the lower Yangtze area was to have been converted into 'public lands'. The
Mongols took possession of these estates and either handed them over to
princes of the khan's family or kept the income from them to pay for the
maintenance of their garrisons." (Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civ-
ilization, Second Ed, 1996, pp 315-6)
Surely the ferocious Mongols could squeeze money out of this class. They
could not. Khubilai Khan almost tried. By 1390 he was broke. Scandals involving
foreign and Tibetan ministers were undermining political stability. Military
disaster abroad had ruined the Mongol myth of invincibility, not to mention
costing several fortunes over. A census had reported possibly thirty million
Chinese too few. In 1293, accordingly, the Agricultural Office of the central
government, in what is now Beijing, cloned itself into a special field office,
to investigate fraudulent nonregistration of tenant-serfs and nonpayment of
arrears in taxes. (The cloning of a field office was a typical Mongol Yuan
device for emergency trouble-shooting.)
In 1294, Khubilai Khan died; this has ever since been attributed to the
combined effects of alcoholism and obesity. (Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, 1988)
In 1295, his successor, emperor Temur (1294-1308), ordered the Agricultural
Office field unit disbanded as a waste of the taxpayers' money, since 'viola-
tions of the law are few.' Nobody has hitherto questioned the official story
that Khubilai died of natural causes. Until tonight. [Note: In the version of
the story I sent out as an article, I suppressed that Paranoid supposition.]
In the anti-foreign and anti-rich peasant war which broke out in 1351, with
Bubonic Plague raging, the Yellow River changing its course yet again and
flooding large parts of Shandong province, and the Mongol state falling apart
along with the purchasing power of its paper currency (backed by anticipated
sales of state-monopoly salt to consumers either starving or dead), the Yangzi
landlords quite naturally refused to pay and even threatened to fight before
they did so. (John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians, 1973) The rebels'
depredations aroused further hatred of the Mongols for failure to protect
private property; the regime was accused of "lax" and "permissive" government.
The emperor-pope of the rebels, one Hu Lin'er, had prior to the outbreak
of revolt in 1351 sought to propagate a variant of the White Lotus syncretism,
which mingled Central Asian Manichaeanism, the cult of the Buddhist Saviour
Maitreya, and that of the Daoist Great Mother of the West (*xiwangmu*). Hu
Lin'er's self-style was *xiaomingwang*, Lesser Prince of Radiance. His Song
dynasty ruled part of North China from 1355 to 1359, while his peasant-born
nominal subordinate Zhu Yuanzhang, set adrift in 1344 when his family all died
of the Plague and since 1351 a deputy guerrilla commander, subsequently an
autonomous warlord, was building his power base in the Yangzi valley. With
Hu Lin'er beaten by Mongol mercenaries, and Zhu Yuanzhang's capture of Nanjing,
in 1360, the man who wielded real power could not dispense with Hu Lin'er (by
drowning, in 1367) due to the holy man's popularity with the troops. Even then,
the ideological father of the Revolution's memory was perpetuated in the name
chosen for the dynastic regime, *Ming*, Radiance. A foe of Moral Wickedness,
Zhu Yuanzhang found it in commerce, trade, and the great cities, all now
considerably diminished; whilst Moral Virtue was agricultural. As emperor
Hongwu (Glorious Victory), 1368-98, he launched a reign of political terror
possibly unsurpassed in relation to population in Chinese history; and the
Yangzi valley was made to yield land tax. While private foreign trade, as
opposed to trade disguised as political tribute, was illegal from 1370 to
1568 (as crooked governments deal with illegality). In state-conducted
industry, such as manufacture of the coinage and salt-manufacture for the
state monopoly, the Ming from the outset practiced principled Luddism. In
each case, the most labour-intensive, lowest-productivity technique was used.
(See Ray Huang, Taxation and Finance in Sixteenth Century China, 1973, for
all the details you can handle.) Even so, the Ming navy, the world's only
ocean-going force at the time, might have dominated the Indian Ocean had not
Yongle, 1402-1424, not lost a War In Vietnam for reasons familiar to US
readers (1407-1427).
It took 74 years, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, for the leaders
of the then-USSR to become convinced (1) that they could not produce up to
international standards; and (2) that failure to produce up to international
standards was a terrible failing. It was in 1511 that the Portuguese commander
Albuquerque arrived in Malacca to say, in effect, "we're the international
standards," which might have meant something to Serious People in the Northern
Song dynasty (960-1126). But not to the Ming, only now starting to re-wallow in
commercial-urban delights, if of a decidedly labour-intensive sort. Nor to the
reactionary moralists, who opposed what would develop into the Ming Decadence
from the first signs of moneymaking frenzy. International standards would be
by definition Chinese, and anyway, as of 1500, the country had as high a per
capita income as anywhere.
Nobody ever wanted capitalism. A Medieval European religious fanatic, raving
on a streetcorner, say, St Paul's Cross, London, that mere moneygrubbers would
become the highest form of life, would have been canonized, or burnt for
heresy, but never ignored as propounding something impossible if intolerable.
Horror of money was the other side of Medieval European urban commerce and
industry. The bourgeoisie might be thought of as the cathedrals' way of getting
themselves built. There was nothing in Chinese culture fusing the Original Sin
of Concupiscience with the Mortal Sin of Avarice in the figure of the Whore of
Babylon. Capitalism, or precapitalist/protocapitalist development leading
toward capitalism, was simply never part of the buisness of pre-capitalist
states. In 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang had led a victorious social revolution dedicated
to the establishment of a coercive dictatorship for the purpose of the
extirpation of Moral Evil. (See John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy,
1983.) After many years of intensive study of the Mind of the Evildoer, as
recorded in hundreds of pages of what are considered Paranoid ravings, which
however were required texts in the schools at the time, he despaired of any
fundamental solution: "No sooner do I have the bodies of one bunch of evildoers
cleared away, than they bring in another bunch for execution! That's one thing
about evildoers, they never learn!"
Daniel A. Foss