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Abstract
Contentious Peasants, Paternalist State and
Arrested Capitalism in China's Long Eighteenth Century
Ho-fung Hung
Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins
University
hofung@jhu.edu
Now it is widely recognized that "the fall
of the East" preceded "the rise of the West." But when and how exactly did the
East, China in particular, fall? Abu-Lughod's and Mark Elvin's contention that
China turned stagnant after its fifteenth-century retreat from the maritime
world is recently challenged by Frank and others. It is shown that China's
post-medieval economic slowdown was only temporary, and was soon followed by a
resuscitation of commerce in sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Europe's
global hegemony was never a reality before China's economic advance reversed
again in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Notwithstanding the
pertinence of this revisionist historiography, it fails to give any satisfactory
explanation of why the expanding market economy in China did not give rise to
capitalism as it did in Europe.
In this paper, I argue that the mid-eighteenth-century "great
divergence" between China and Europe cannot be sufficiently explained by their
different geopolitical constellations (a la Bin Wong) or different ecological
constraints (à la Pomeranz). The particular state ideology and specific pattern
of social unrest in eighteenth-century China have to be taken into account too.
In the long eighteenth-century of China (c. 1683-1839), the
Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty adopted an extreme form of Confucian
paternalism to enhance their legitimacy over the Han majority. The Qing
government, though encouraging commercial growth for the sake of the empire-wide
circulation of essential foodstuffs, was always suspicious of the wealthy Han
elite and occasionally raged against them in the name of the poor, whose
livelihoods were threatened by the merchants' accumulation of wealth. Meanwhile,
sweeping commercialization and demographic expansion generated a large
dislocated population prone to be recruited by heterodox religious sects with
radical egalitarian visions. In contrast to Europe where peasant revolts faded
out after the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century China witnessed recurrent
large-scale millenarian uprisings against the state and the rich.
Subsequently, capital accumulation in China was curbed from
above (by the paternalist state) and from below (through millenarian revolts).
After China was incorporated into the capitalist world-system, the legacies of
the eighteenth-century state and popular ideologies enabled China to continue
resisting the logic of capital accumulation, and hence to become an epicenter of
anti-systemic movements.
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