Dear Bruce R. McFarling,
You ask such good questions that I fear that, whilst there are lots of
statistics, some of them are quite bizarre or opaque as to what they might
actually mean. For instance, when the Mongol Yuan regime introduced
capitation tax, hitherto collected by them exclusively in North China,
to South China as well, to alleviate embarassing cashflow problems, the
population reported by the census of 1290 fell by 30 million from the
previous combined totals for North and South China, about 100 million,
without considering probable natural increase to a minimum of 115 million.
Central Place Theory," which you rightly emphasize, is the basis for G.
William Skinner's introduction of the construct of "Macroregions" into
the study of Chinese market hierarchies. See his three major theoretical
articles in George William Skinner (Ed.), The City in Late Traditional
China, Stanford, 1977. This applies best to the Qing period (1644-1912),
when population and commercial patterns were assuming the form in which
the Europeans found them. Before that, there are Very Serious Problems.
Specifically, discontinuities due to disease and warfare.
The West Yangzi Macroregion was decimated during 1644-1646 by an insane
peasant rebel run amok, according to dubious accounts. Since the death toll
he boasted of exceeded the maximum population possible, and most of his
troops apparently disobeyed his orders to murder everyone they could catch,
it is likely that there were more refugees than dead. The depopulation and
economic ruin of Sichuan is, however, a fact.
When we go back to what in common parlance is called Mediaeval times,
that is, Five Dynasties (907-960), Northern Song (960-1126), Southern
Song (1127-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), and Ming (1368-1644), we find at
the outset a division of China into ten states. From 923, the Khitan,
or Liao Empire, occupied parts of North China below the Great Wall, and
by the late tenth century, the Northwest China Macroregion (Shaanxi and
Gansu) was mostly occupied by the Xixia or Western Xia, a nomad empire
ruled by Tanguts (speaking Tibetan or a language related thereto). From
this time until 1126, the political entity called China was faced with
two formidable hostile powers, each copying the latest Chinese technology
(or innovating their own), employing Chinese administrators and engineers,
and *governed more efficiently and effectively than China itself*. That
this is *counterintuitive* is sufficient to warn us about how little we
may actually know about the significance of the much-vaunted meritocratic
Chinese bureaucracy, recruited by civil service examination, which comes
into flower at just this time; there is a book by John W. Chafee, The
Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China, SUNY, 19861994, which covers
this. To illustrate the political situation, the capital of the Liao
was the present Beijing, which means Northern Capital, but was then
called by the Liao Nanjing, Southern Capital. Between the two hostile
great powers, the Song empire, from 1004, was paying, annually, five
hundred thousand rolls of silk and three hundred thousand ounces of
silver in tribute. The nomads were superior in cavalry, of course;
this followed from the extermination of the knightly aristocracy in
the Chinese social revolution of the ninth and tenth centuries, whose
symbolic events are the revolt led by the salt smuggler Huang Chao in the
870s and the deposition of the Tang by the peasant-born Zhu Wen in 907.
The grave atmosphere of the time let to a seriousness in policy debate
unmatched anywhere else in the world for centuries. Energetic but incoherent
economic measures were taken, such that an ironmaster, presumably working
on government orders, was raided in 1055 on suspicion of plotting rebellion
by the local authorities, as he had several thousand employees; with 500
of these, he then actually did rebel. This raises a question about Song
industry, which is that the iron and coal deposits were located in rural
areas, so did not correspond with commercial centers. Anyway, we now come
to the big push.
Wang Anshi, the Prime Minister from 1068 to 1085, introduced the New
Policies, intended to make the Song regime a permanent warfare state. To
fight the major powers, he raised an army of 1.25 million men by conscription,
building state factories for the mass production of armour and weapons. To
boost agricultural production, including silk, he established a rural credit
administration intended to help small landowning peasants, but which of
course did not neglect the owners of large estates, who opposed the scheme
anyway, in particular the measures for state intervention in the grain
economy for famine relief. Most ingenious was the Tea and Horse Administration,
which gave a monopoly on tea for trade with the nomads on the frontier to
the Southwest tea producers, with screams of pain from Southeast tea growers.
The scheme not only got cavalry horses for the army; it even made a profit
of three million strings-of-cash a year, thought a lot of money for the
time.
The state obtained the iron and steel for the weapons factories by letting
contracts to private ironmasters, who seem to have been let alone.
After repeal, in 1085, the New Policies were reinstated in 1102 but were
blamed for the military disasters of 1126 and thereafter, notably the loss
of the whole of North China. It is not possible to estimate how much iron
was produced before that point any more accurately than "somewhere between
35,000 tons and 125,000." As for population, from a country with an elite
focused on the capital, Kaifeng, at the time of its fall having a population
of a million and a half, and one of the three cities on Earth with street
lights (the other two were Cairo and Cordoba), the Southern Song empire
decentralized into regions whose elites intermarried only within the
region, exhibited local separatisms, and had in common the grand
metaphysical synthesis of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), conducive to withdrawal
from national politics to pursue discipline and cultivation of Mind.
Wang Anshi came to figure in Cold War politics when, in the 1950s, Lin
Yutang published a biography of Su Tongbo (aka Su Shi, d. 1107), poet,
painter, Conservative statesman (and flagrant foot-fetishist in the arts).
Yutang's hero opposed the "socialistic" Reformers. This is merely one, and
not the worst, of the screwball distortions of the Mediaeval paleaontology
of capitalism to exhibit "blowback" onto contemporary affairs, whilst
compounding the existing ideological confusion about the past, the latter
already possessing sufficient ideological confusion about itself to more
than suffice. The Reformers had made the honest mistake of positing that
Civilized (Advanced) government should be more competent than Barbarian
government; also, that Civilized (Advanced) armies, raised in levee en
masse and lavishly equipped by the state, should outfight or at least
overwhelm Barbarian armies, howbeit the state officials, soldiers, and
generals on both sides were Chinese. Under the Committee of Public Saftety,
in 1793-1794, Lazare Carnot, "Organizer of Victory," had made analogous
assumptions, substituting Republican for Civilized, Old Regime for Barbarian,
and European for Chinese; he was proven correct. The Reforemers were not;
their warfare state was disgracefully beaten in 1125-1126 by a newer and
tougher nomad state, that of the Jurched, or Jin.
From this time onward, it was taboo for the Song rump state to intervene
in the economy. It became quite clear that the Yangzi valley estate ("manor,"
in Selvin's usage) owners would no longer pay taxes for support of the
bloated Song military establishment which, now permanently on the defensive,
was deployed mainly for chasing bandits, from whom it became increasingly
indistinguishable: soldiers were former bandits, vice versa.
The Southern Song state funded itself on commercial taxes (including the
salt monopoly), with foreign trade and consumer goods industries looming
more and more important. Hangzhou, the Temporary Camp, *Xingzai*, Marco
Polo's Quinsay, had a population of 1.25 million at its peak, circa 1250-
1275 (Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China, 1250-1275). Hangzhou was a
factory town, featuring "Shipbuilding, silk production, and porcelain-
and-paper making" (R. Huang, China: A Macrohistory). The urban working
class (rural proletariat aside) sufficed for the genesis of the Chinese
restaurant.
Foreign trade centred on the Lower Yangzi, Central Coast, and Southeast
China macroregions, with the great port of Chuanzhou, in Fujian, and the
longstandingly polyglot Guangzhou, in modern Guangdong, as huge and growing
trading ports whose trade expansion continued under the Mongol Yuan. Over
half the imports were what Chinese called "drugs," which to Europeans would
subsume such categories as condiments, "health food," medicines, and real
or placebo psychoactive substances. The repute of powdered rhinoceros horn,
kingfisher feathers, tiger bone, and *gu* juice (for sex witchcraft) is
excessive. The tiger, withal, is being at this time hunted to extinction,
and bear bile is being extracted on an industrial basis on the Burmese
frontier in circumstances redolent of US poultry factories.
It is important to stress that both North and South China were technically
progressive, though they economically diverged. The iron and coal mines of
the Northern Song remained, but on the other side of a political frontier.
Mathematics and science flourished in the North, literature and publishing
in the South. The most certain thing about the size and density of the
population of the Beijing region is its annihilation after 1331. In that
year, "nine tenths died" in what is now Hebei province, surrounding Beijing,
then called Khanbalit or Dadu. As the holocaust of Bubonic Plague persisted
into 1332, two Mongol emperors and a crown prince died. In 1941, an
ethnographic survey conducted by social scientists attached to the Japanese
railway administration in North China could not find a single village whose
foundation antedated the accession of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, in
1368, or more likely, that of the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, in 1402.
The principal difficulty in determining what happened to the Chinese
population is census accuracy. As mentioned above, when the Mongols united
China in 1279, North China had been collecting capitation tax; whilst South
China had been collecting acreage tax. At first, Khubilai thought to
demonstrate to the former Southern Song subjects that the Mongol state,
by eliminating the cost of an army which could not and would not defend
the country would *save money*, notwithstanding the fallen regime's
ostensible commitment to Confucian frugality. As suggested in a previous
post, the persistence of returns to a largely-negative state, rarely doing
much for the underlying population, but eschewing costing too much in
revenues, either for fear of provoking social upheaval, is a theme of
Confucianism from its inception, with this gradually assuming the proportions
of orthodox state doctrine.
Khubilai's salutary intent withered before his conquistadorial itch, in
the worst maritime-imperialist idiocies prior to the Spanish Armada. As any
eighth or ninth-century Arab or ninth-century Viking knew, before you invade
a place you know nothing about, you raid it, and refrain from going ashore
in strength before you know that whatever is in there is not waiting for
you. The Arab conquest of Spain in 711, for example, was preceded by large-
scale raids in 710. Khubilai invaded Japan twice, Vietnam twice, and Java,
with 6,000 ships, in 1293. In 1290, a census was taken reflecting his
high taxes. The Yangzi valley landlords, having evaded taxes to the Southern
Song, were not going to pay anything to the Mongols, either. In 1293, a
troubleshooting agency was set up to check on tax delinquencies in the
Yangzi valley. (This is in a collection entitled China Under Mongol Rule.)
The following year, Khubilia died, and in 1295, his successor, for reasons
yet to be explained, abolished the agency because "violations are few." That
had not been true for hundreds of years.
Morris Rossabi, in Khuibilai Khan, claims that the Mongol census of 1290,
which showed a population of 70 million, was accurate, whilst the Ming census
of 1395, which counted 65 million Chinese, must have been crooked, as all
Ming censuses were crooked. The raw count never exceeded 70 million through
the whole Ming dynasty, though the real population may have tripled. There
is good reason to suppose, however, that there was an honest count in 1395:
fear. Zhu Yuanzhang had just completed the fourth wave of massive blood
purges in 1393, or it was still going on, so one would hope nobody would
be so foolish as to fake census returns in this period. Once the pressure
of the terror was removed, of course, all bets were off.
Comparison of populations of selected cities in the last years of Southern
Song with the first Ming counts shows a decline of two-fifths, attributable
to Bubonic Plague, and not out of line with what happened in Europe. But the
Chinese cities were larger to begin with; they surely grew during the Yuan
if commerce increased, as it certainly did. Not merely maritime commerce
from the Lower Yangzi, Central Coast, and Southeast Coast ports, but across
Central Asia via the Mongol Silk Pipeline to Caffa on the Black Sea. Also,
via Korea, across the Sea of Japan. The most pitiful aspect of Khubilai's
foreign policy is that, a mere few years after his disastrous invasions,
Chinese were settling down to do business as immigrants to Japan, Vietnam,
and the site of modern Singapore (which is not all that far from Majapahit,
on Java, where Zheng He found Chinese settled in the early fifteenth
century). The idea of naturalized immigrants in Japan is bizarre, of course,
but then, Traditional Japanese culture, like all Traditional cultures, has
changed beyond recognition several times over the centuries and millennia,
like the European. Unless you believe in Essences.
The Bubonic Plague made a mess of Japan as it did many other places.
Frankly, I would love to curl up with a good book on the Hojo Period as
good as William Wayne Farris' Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan
and The Heavenly Warriors for prehistory through the Heian Period; and
Conrad Totman's Early Modern Japan. The Hojo collapsed in 1333, possibly
or Elsewise, months or a year after the killer Plague in Northeast China.
Political chaos continued till 1338, with Go-Daigo's efforts at imperial
restoration partly coinciding with, then in contradiction to, Ashikaga
Takauji's designs on a restored Bakufu. Civil war continued between the
rival branches of the Imperial House and adherents for another fifty
years; and nothing was ever very calm or orderly for long during the
Ashikaga (Rokuhara) period.
Japan was peripheral to the Chinese core economy, and collapsed with it.
There was no basis for Sino-Japanese trade after that.
Imaginarily,
Daniel A. Foss