Economic development

In the 1640s and ’50s the Manchu abolished all late Ming surtaxes and granted tax exemptions to areas ravaged by war. Tax remissions were limited, however, by the urgent need for revenue to carry on the conquest of China. It was not until the 1680s, after the consolidation of military victory, that the Qing began to permit tax remissions on a large scale. The permanent freezing of the ding (corvée quotas) in 1712 and the subsequent merger of the ding and land tax into a single tax that was collected in silver were part of a long-term simplification of the tax system. The commutation of levies from payment in kind to payment in money and the shift from registering males to registering land paralleled the increasing commercialization of the economy.

A healthy tax base required that land be brought under cultivation. Because more than one-fourth of the total cultivated land had slipped off the tax rolls in the early 17th century, the restoration of agriculture was an important goal. The new dynasty began to resettle refugees on abandoned land with offers of tax exemptions for several years and grants of oxen, tools, seeds, or even cash in some areas. In the late 17th century the resettlement of the Chengdu Basin in western China and of Hunan, Hubei, and the far southwest proceeded on this basis.

Land reclamation went hand in hand with the construction and reconstruction of water-control projects. This was an activity so characteristic of a new dynasty that one can speak of “hydraulic cycles” moving in tandem with political consolidations in China. These water-control projects varied in scale with terrain and ecology. In central and southern China, irrigation systems were the foundation for rice cultivation and were largely the product of private investment and management. In northern China, control of the heavily silted Huang He (Yellow River), which frequently inundated the eastern portion of the North China Plain, required large-scale state management and coordination with the related water level of the Grand Canal, the major north-south waterway supplying Beijing.

The preferred crops—rice in central and southern China, wheat in northern China—retained their primacy in Qing agriculture. In the course of the dynasty, the cultivation of wheat and other northern staple grains continued to creep southward; rice was transplanted to the best lands on the frontiers, and the cropping cycle gradually intensified. Both on the frontiers and within China proper, new lands were opened for settlement using the New World crops that had been introduced into China in the late 16th century. Corn (maize) and the Irish potato permitted Chinese to cultivate the marginal hilly lands. The sweet potato provided insurance against famine, while peanuts (groundnuts) were a new source of oil in the farmers’ diet. Tobacco, another 16th-century import, competed with rice and sugarcane for the best lands in southern China and became an important cash crop.

Once the economy had been restored, the Qing state attempted to keep it running smoothly. For the most part, the state did not actively intervene in what was becoming an extremely complex market economy. The major exception was its successful effort to offset regional food shortages in years of crop failure. Every province was supposed to purchase or retain reserves in the “ever-normal” granaries located in each county, so named because they were intended to stabilize the supply, and hence the price, of grain. Even relatively uncommercialized hinterlands were thus armored against famine. The ability of the government to respond effectively to food scarcity depended on its information gathering. During the 18th century, data on local grain prices became a regular feature of county, prefectural, and provincial reports.

The Qing government played a relatively minor role in the commercial economy. There were state monopolies in salt, precious metals, pearls, and ginseng, but the long-run trend was to reduce the number of monopolies. The state barely began to tap the growing revenue potential of trade, just as it failed to tap the expanding agricultural base. Its rare interventions in trade were motivated by a desire to dampen economic fluctuations in employment. Its major goal was stability, not growth.

And yet the early Qing was a period of economic growth and development. With the imposition of the Qing peace, the economy resumed a commercial expansion that had begun in the 16th century. This expansion in turn stimulated specialization in crops sent to market, which included raw materials to be used in the textile industry as well as consumption goods such as tea, sugar, and tobacco. Profit enticed merchants, landlords, and farmers to buy or rent land to produce cash crops. A new kind of managerial landlord, who used hired labor to grow market crops, emerged in the 18th century.

The tenant’s position improved vis-à-vis the landlord’s, a wage-labor force arose in agriculture, and land was increasingly used as a marketable commodity. Systems that guaranteed tenants permanent cultivation rights spread in the 18th century through the wet-rice cultivation zone and in some dryland cultivation systems. Multiple layers of rights to the land generally benefited the tenant and improved incentives to maintain the fertility of the soil and to raise output. There was a general shift from servile to contractual labor in agriculture that was part of a long trend toward eliminating fixed status and increasing mobility of labor and land.

Equally important processes of commercialization gained momentum with the recovery of the domestic economy. The 16th-century boom created new layers of rural markets that linked villages more firmly to a market network. Although the majority of economic transactions continued to take place within local and intermediate markets, interregional and national trade in grain, tea, cotton, and silk expanded significantly. In the 18th century, Shanghai became a thriving entrepôt for the coastal trade that extended from Manchuria to southern China.

The most-dramatic economic innovations of the 18th century resulted from the needs of long-distance traders for credit and new mechanisms that would ease the transfer of funds. Native banks, as they were called by foreigners in the 19th century, accepted deposits, made loans, issued private notes, and transferred funds from one region to another. Promissory notes issued by native banks on behalf of merchants facilitated the purchase of large quantities of goods, and money drafts and transfer accounts also helped ease the flow of funds. By the early 19th century, paper notes may have constituted one-third or more of the total volume of money in circulation. The demands of large-scale, long-distance trade had, without government participation, inspired merchants to transform a metallic monetary system into one in which paper notes supplemented copper coins and silver.

Customary law evolved outside the formal legal system to expedite economic transactions and enable strangers to do business with one another. Business partnerships in mining, commerce, and commercial agriculture could be formalized and protected through written contract. Reliance on written contracts for purchasing and mortgaging land, purchasing commodities and people, and hiring wage laborers became commonplace.

The early Qing economy was intimately tied to foreign trade, which consisted of junks trading with ports in Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Philippines and of the expanding trade conducted by Europeans. After 1684, when the ban on maritime trade was lifted, Western traders flocked to Guangzhou (Canton), and foreign commerce was finally confined to this port in 1759. The “Canton system” of trade that prevailed from that year until 1842 specified that Europeans had to trade through the cohong (gonghang), a guild of Chinese firms that had monopoly rights to the trade in tea and silk.

From 1719 to 1833 the tonnage of foreign ships trading at Guangzhou increased more than 13-fold. The major export was tea; by 1833, tea exports were more than 28 times the export levels of 1719. Silk and porcelain were also exported in increasing quantities through the early 18th century. Although only a small fraction of total output was exported, the effect of foreign trade on the Chinese economy was direct and perceptible. Its repercussions were not limited to the merchants and producers involved in specific export commodities but also had a general impact on domestic markets through the monetary system.

The Chinese economy had long been based on a metallic currency system in which copper cash was used for daily purchases and silver for large business transactions and taxes. The exchange ratio between silver and copper cash was responsive to fluctuations in the supply of the metals, and changes in the exchange ratio affected all citizens. The economic expansion of the 18th century brought rising demand for silver and copper. Although domestic production of copper increased, silver was primarily obtained from abroad. After 1684 the net balance of trade was consistently in China’s favor, and silver flowed into the Chinese economy. Perhaps 10 million Spanish silver dollars per year came into China during the early Qing, and in the 18th century Spanish silver dollars became a common unit of account in the southeast and south.