It is embarrassing for a historian of China to be caught writing tortoise history. Not hare history, in which change is conspicuous and rapid, nor even longue durée history, in which the important change is secular, but tortoise history, in which no change of importance seems to happen and the myth of an “unchanging China” seems to find its vindication. But then, appearances can be deceptive.
This essay investigates a tradition of writing about what we call market forces that can be traced to the early ninth century, had developed significantly by the mid-thirteenth, and thereafter seems not to have greatly changed, although particular provocations might stimulate elaborations and refinements. The challenge undertaken is that of assessing the elaborations and refinements without holding Chinese authors to Western expectations of linear progress or imposing Western benchmarks in the manner recently critiqued by David Mervart.Footnote 1 The research presented here began as a quest for links between a moment in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, when a scholar-official called Dong Wei 董煟 (d. 1217) argued that during food shortages the profit motive should be allowed to do its work, and an episode in the mid-eighteenth century when ultra-radical opinion within the bureaucracy favored a near-dismantling of the Chinese state's traditional price-stabilizing institutions in deference to the perceived superior efficacity of the profit motive. Robert Hymes established the interest of Dong's ideas in an important essay published in 1993, while I noted the moments of mid-eighteenth-century radicalism in my State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China, published in 2006.Footnote 2 A recent invitation to write the chapter on political economy from Song to Qing for the Cambridge Economic History of China forced me to revisit my inadequate acknowledgements of Dong's precedence in that book and my earlier one, Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age (1996).Footnote 3 How would my mid-Qing findings look if scrutinized in a multi-century perspective?
One answer was readily to hand: Dong the innovator was also Dong the influencer. The high likelihood that Dong's famine-relief manual, our single source for his economic thought, helped inform eighteenth-century approaches to the perennial “Confucian” project of assuring popular subsistence has been noted by William Rowe, who pointed out the work's inclusion in a late seventeenth-century collection of writings on “famine governance.”Footnote 4 However, further acquaintance with Song texts, including the relevant sections of Dong's Jiuhuang huomin shu 救荒活民書 (Treatise on quelling famine and keeping the folk alive), rapidly dispels the notion that Dong was the first to articulate that central tenet of premodern Chinese market-conscious discourse, the doctrine that high prices draw supplies onto dearth-stricken markets. Although supplemented, edited, reorganized, and/or annotated versions or imitations of Dong's book span the Yuan and Ming dynasties, reproductions of otherwise authored key Song passages in post-Song works, not to mention applications of the tenet by later authors who do not cite Dong, suggest a broader tradition that was formed, transmitted, and occasionally elaborated by several minds, among which that of Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086) played a covert but particularly influential role.Footnote 5
Discernment of a multi-century textual tradition—one of several constituting the main corpus of premodern Chinese political economy—transforms one's interpretative agenda. It is not only that, as I illustrate elsewhere, we risk mistaking the significance of a tradition's later moments if we are unaware of what has gone before, whether the foundational texts of that tradition date from the Song, the Tang, or the centuries straddling the Qin unification.Footnote 6 Rather, in investigating these particular textual traditions, one expects reward not from a quest for evidence of cumulative change but from close reading to determine subtle variations in the way in which authors used inherited conceptual and linguistic resources. The existence and longevity of the traditions are important for the macrohistory of Chinese political culture but not nearly as interesting as the nuances of what happened within them. In the case of those traditions whose key inherited resources were derived from the Confucian scriptures, the relationship between texts and the contemporary realities that they were often written to address was inherently problematic, although there are many cases of skilled authors successfully using ancient resources to comment meaningfully on issues of their own day. By contrast, not only was the tradition addressed here grounded in the perceived regularities of the operations of a market—the market in interregionally traded bulk supplies of grain—but the early development of that market was also one of the key changes of the Tang–Song transition, the very period in which the tradition emerged.Footnote 7 We cannot hope to understand this tradition without close reading of its texts, but the key conceptual resources with which we observe its authors working are rudiments of economic theory.
Rowe has already drawn attention to what he rightly calls “a continuing discourse on famine administration, and political economy more generally, that persisted from at least the twelfth century through the Qing era.”Footnote 8 He sees this, however, as an “alternative economic discourse,” the dichotomy being with Confucian moralistic “orthodoxy” and its insistence on “righteousness,” as opposed to “profit,” as a worthy stimulus to action.Footnote 9 The discourse as described by Rowe was unitary, and he appears to frame it in a progress-oriented view of Chinese history when he suggests that it “acquired ever greater acceptance as China entered the early modern period.”Footnote 10 Careful reading of various texts, including one analyzed by Rowe, discloses to me something different: a complex skein combining orthodox doctrine, conventional wisdom, and avant-garde opinion, and not necessarily aligned with any broader linear progression.
In reaching this more nuanced understanding of the discourse, I use cross-cultural comparison (in this case, with ancien régime France), valuable above all for informing the historical imagination, that is, educating the historian's sense of possibility. True, cross-cultural comparison can also serve to temper uncritical endorsement of cultural exceptionalism while helping the historian pinpoint what was distinctive about a given culture's case. Observation of the commonalities between two large, commercialized agrarian polities in governmental responses to the perceived and real problems caused by greed and dearth leads me to postulate a Chinese mainstream tradition that, while “market-sensitive” (Rowe's phrase), was also consistent with the moralistic bias of Confucian governance.Footnote 11 Inherent in the distinctive Chinese set of institutions for relieving famine, however, were grounds for controversy that eventually sparked a genuinely radical intellectual departure the significance of which we would miss without careful differentiation between the arguments of the radicals and those previously advanced in the same cause. The potential of this departure was aborted, but it pointed towards a qualitatively different paradigm shift from that attempted by the physiocrats in Enlightenment-era France.
This article is offered as a contribution to the historiography of premodern Chinese economic thought, a topic often best pursued by studying the policy deliberations that reveal how Confucian-trained scholar-officials understood the effects of governmental action or restraint. The forms of state engagement with the business world after the breakdown of the Tang-dynasty system of controlled urban marketplaces were limited and did not include suites of central-government policies to regulate commerce. The grain trade, however, was a special case, because “the people” were “the basis of the state,” as ancient wisdom had it, and popular subsistence was at stake throughout each grain crop's life-cycle, from the seed grain's germination to the release to consumers of the marketed surplus. The state not only resisted behavior that impeded the free flowing of the grain trade, but also entered that trade in a way that mimicked the standard mercantile practice of buying cheap but selling dear—except that the state's sales were supposed to benefit consumers by undercutting the peak prices of lean seasons. It also held grain off the market, just like those objects of state intervention, speculative hoarders—save that the state's intent was rescue of the famine-stricken through handouts of grain. In the very mimicking, not to mention the assumption that the state should use its power to compete with private commerce in the physical supply of actual grain, lay ample grounds for conflicts of interpretation.
The article has three main parts. In the first, I revisit some mid-eighteenth-century texts on which I have written previously in order to propose a consistent interpretative framework both for this material and for the foundational texts of the tradition. It is this preliminary discussion that is critically informed by cross-cultural comparison. In part two, I delve into the tradition's early history, re-examining Dong Wei's argument against government attempts to control grain prices—the nub of the vision of a “self-regulating process” that Hymes discerns in Dong's references to the grain trade—in the light of earlier economic fables and a roughly contemporaneous, more abstract discussion that supplies an answer to the naive question, “What was the Chinese for laissez-faire?”Footnote 12 In considering Dong's argument, I draw out the implications of an aspect that Hymes does not particularly emphasize, showing that the scaffolding for the mental model of the operations of the grain trade that I have reconstructed from snippets of eighteenth-century discourse was already in place by the early thirteenth century, equipped with its “vertical” (temporal) and “horizontal” (spatial) planes. I coin the term “horizontalism” to refer to a family of arguments that assert the influence of market conditions, particularly price differentials, on commercial flows of grain between geographic units, be these administrative jurisdictions such as prefectures or physiographic regions such as the Middle-Yangzi lowlands and the Yangzi delta. I end the section by invoking a mid-eighteenth century exemplar of price-focused horizontalist writing to demonstrate the sophistication that could be achieved not because of cumulative progress in what we would call a discipline but because of one observant scholar's exasperation at the mismatch between a newly mandated bureaucratic control process and the way he thought merchants responded to incentives.
There is no mystery when a tradition exhibits continuity. It is change that is remarkable and demands comment. That distinctive Chinese tradition of practice, direct state provisioning of the hungry with actual grain in a commercialized and monetized economy, invited challenges that had the potential to transform conceptualization. Part three surveys the arguments made down the centuries for departing from the commonsense approach of giving famine victims grain, focusing not on what we might assume the authors to have thought but on the cases that they made explicitly. It is in the arguments for replacing grain with money that we see momentary qualitative change in the mid-eighteenth century, in the wake of an extraordinary initiative to raise the state's capacity to dispense grain to famine victims. With hindsight, we can credit the most extreme of the mid-eighteenth-century radicals with having neared a paradigm shift, but bureaucratic commonsense prevailed, perhaps with good reason. The radicals adumbrated a refined version of horizontalism by recognizing the role of what we call effective demand in influencing commercial grain flows between geographic units, but their arguments were not well developed, and it is not clear that the avant-garde economics of the 1740s represent an advance over some thoughtful remarks that Dong Wei based on direct observation of village society half a millennium earlier. The lesson is not the precocity of Song economic thought, still less confirmation of stasis as the dominant mode of intellectual endeavor in imperial China. Rather, my conclusion points to the importance of recognizing non-linear journeys if we are to understand the dynamics of free-market thought under the dominance of premodern Chinese bureaucratic government and to appreciate particular elaborations and refinements for what they actually were.
Time-Honored Modes of Supply Management
The premodern Chinese state's characteristic mode of direct participation in the grain trade found institutional form in the famous ever-normal (that is, price-normalizing, or at least price-stabilizing) granaries, key tools of the benevolent paternalism with whose image dynasties—some more than others—sought to convince the Confucian-educated elite of their fitness to rule. Dong Wei's handbook provides as good an exposition as any of the standard, Confucianized understanding of the state's transactions. The purpose of the state's post-harvest buying is price-support for growers; that of its springtime release of stocks is price-relief for consumers; the state both buys and sells on terms more generous to the intended beneficiaries than those the market offers them.Footnote 13 However orthodox, this was the sanitized version. The earliest recorded blueprint for the ever-normal institution, attributed to the proto-Legalist statesman Li Kui 李悝, was remembered as the means by which one of the ancient warring states grew “rich and powerful.”Footnote 14 The interests of the ruler darkly pervade the earliest substantive exposition of the theory of state intervention trading; this comes from a presumably Western Han chapter of the quasi-Legalist Guanzi ([Writings in the name of] Master Guan). The Guanzi initiated another component of orthodox ever-normal doctrine, the idea that the state's socially responsible grain transactions undermined the selfish schemes of hoarders; in the Guanzi, however, the merchants who exploit subsistence needs are represented primarily as rivals to be brought under control in the state's ascent to economic power. The most notorious episode in premodern Chinese history of alleged (and probably actual) state profiteering, the experiment with wholesaling various commodities undertaken during the late eleventh-century ascendancy of the fiscal innovator Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), sprang from a proposal that borrowed Guanzi terminology to advocate the ever-normal principle's broader application.Footnote 15 This checkered pedigree of ever-normal operations foreshadows controversy at the eighteenth-century acme of the institution's history.
While price-support for growers suited the interests of a landed ruling elite, it was the very survival of the vulnerable masses that was at issue in the rich literature spawned by the state's self-legitimizing commitment to disaster relief. Nonetheless, ever-normal transactions presupposed the existence of a grain market, which also had its functions, if only in providing for the subsistence of the great urban populations that characterized post-Tang China. How could statesmen ensure that state interventions designed to adjust market conditions did not obstruct those workings of the profit motive that were beneficial to consumers? It is because this problem was recognized and debated that China's subsistence-policy literature offers unique insights into the conceptual resources available to post-Tang statemen for thinking about the market.
When viewed in light of the full Chinese system of generally interventionist practice, the conventional admonitions against certain forms of interference with the free flow of commerce appear not as challenges to an orthodox, supposedly “Confucian” objection to all things driven by the quest for profit, but rather as integral parts of a mainstream policy tradition that is best illuminated through comparison with the regulatory system applied to grain merchants in ancien régime France. The grain trade in whose context local representatives of the post-Tang state bought and warehoused bulk supplies of grain was peopled by a range of profit-seekers who were conventionally viewed with suspicion similar to that accorded French grain-traders.Footnote 16 There were merchants who bought with the interregional market in mind, particularly in southern China, where the abundance of navigable waterways spelled lower transport costs than in most of the north. There were others, known pejoratively as tunhu 囤戶 (hoarders), who bought grain for speculative purposes and did not necessarily transport it further than the local town. These two species were neither mutually exclusive nor the only groups who warehoused grain. In times of dearth, local landlords and the urban brokers who received supplies imported from grain-rich rural areas might also withhold grain from hungry markets. Dynastic governments in China had their repertoire of interventionist approaches for defending consumers—and, to a lesser extent, producers—from forms of profit-seeking that were thought injurious; ancien régime France was home to a web of interventionist practices that were known collectively as la police des grains. The French practices were underpinned by a pragmatic, limited respect for commercial freedom even before they were radically challenged in the mid-eighteenth century by new, liberal doctrines; as I will now illustrate, a similar respect existed in the Chinese case.Footnote 17
In China, indignation against the profiteer who removed locally grown grain in order to sell it on markets where it would fetch higher prices was not infrequently supported by official prohibitions of grain exports from a jurisdiction—bans that were sometimes sanctioned by superior authority or even written rules, such as an eighteenth-century one providing for such action when, with bad harvests undermining food availability, “wicked fellows in pursuit of profit privily transport grain from [the jurisdiction's] borders to the detriment of popular subsistence.”Footnote 18 The instinct to close particular avenues for the export of grain, however, had often to reckon with imperial endorsement of the ideal of free circulation (liutong 流通, that is, unimpeded flowing), in the name of which merchants were to be encouraged to meet the needs of markets whose high prices reflected scarcity. The defense of free circulation lay partly in reminding local officials to refrain, and to encourage the subject population to refrain, from acts of what I elsewhere call “supply protectionism,” or in Chinese parlance edi 遏糴, an ancient phrase that originally meant “blocking purchases of grain [by emissaries of other states].” It comes as no surprise, given the phrase's antiquity and moralistic connotations, that opposition to edi was a principle asserted frequently by central governments of the post-Tang age of bulk commercial grain shipments, however commonly the admonitions to refrain were honored in the breach. In the French police tradition also, whatever happened in practice, the precept was that liutong be upheld.Footnote 19
Defense of free circulation lay equally in action to draw grain out of hoards and put it on the market. In China, at least in the significant realm of appearances, modalities for counteracting hoarding varied with perceived class status: suasion was more likely to be used with landlords, coercion with merchants. Deterrence for landlords might take the form of appeals to their economic rationality, such as advice to sell before peak prices tumble—expostulations likely to prove unavailing if economic rationality pointed landlord minds to the external market. Suasion sometimes masked coercion, particularly in the Southern Song (1127–1279), when weak commitment to the ever-normal system often deprived local officials of ready access to emergency reserves of grain.Footnote 20 For merchants, deterrence might take the form of threats of crippling beatings. Sensible, experienced officials, however, probably refrained from inflicting potentially fatal beatings on purveyors of necessities of life. While a senior territorial official might threaten summary beating to death for perpetrators of especially heinous forms of hoarding, greater administrative effort was usually invested in supervising forced sales of grain, often at a price below the current market rate, but not necessarily so low as to erode the merchant's capital. If, indeed, the stockpiles of grain destined for export to another jurisdiction could be represented as the hoards of antisocial profiteers, such methods constituted censure-free supply protectionism.Footnote 21
It is in the subtler techniques for assuring merchant cooperation in the circulation of grain surpluses that we find a suggestive contrast between second-millennium China and ancien régime France. On the one hand, the ever-normal method, deeply rooted in China's traditions of statecraft and implemented openly as a legitimate governmental operation, made a tentative, furtive, innovatory appearance in eighteenth-century France, where experiments with selling grain through merchant surrogates to veil government involvement grew in sophistication and sensitivity to the ways of the market as the liberal doctrines gained ground.Footnote 22 Chinese, Manchu, and French officials were in the same conceptual universe when they—Emida 鄂彌達 and Wang Mo 王謩 in 1738, the secretary of Feydeau de Brou in 1757—advocated coaxing market prices down through the stepped small reductions achieved by the gradual release of stocks at prices only slightly below the current market rate. In China, however, recognition that large reductions were more likely to encourage than to counteract profiteering had been expressed already in 1195. Emida and Wang wrote with informed assurance to an emperor who presided over an ever-normal system that had been institutionalized with unprecedented vigor and thoroughness after neglect and desuetude in the immediately preceding centuries. The ever-normal system of their day was embedded in the Qing state's implicit masterplan for dynastic security because the primary de facto function of its growing stockpiles lay in supplying the state with the strategic capacity to issue peasant grain-producers with short-term, often free survival rations in subsistence crises. No such background of solidly established practice supported De Brou's secretary, who reneged on his initial insights, urging speed upon a merchant who understood the workings of the market far better than he did.Footnote 23
The staple of the French police des grains, on the other hand, lay in local regulatory systems whose purpose was to shepherd grain supplies in the first place to the open market, and often also to the specific market that authorities deemed proper for them.Footnote 24 References to control techniques such as those used in France are scarce in Chinese sources compared with the vast documentation on direct state participation in the grain trade. Where we find mention of practices such as the use of information and certification to constrain merchant action, we are challenged to determine, case by case, how far these reflect experimentation and how far habits of thought with much in common with the ancien régime fixation on control. A parallel with the story of de Brou's secretary experimenting with a technique in which there was a deep reservoir of Chinese experience is provided by the story of the Kangxi emperor in 1709 ordering the collection and intra-bureaucratic transmission of detailed data about bulk purchases of grain as a way of keeping the supplies flowing down the River Yangzi and not disappearing into hoards.Footnote 25 In the French tradition, the police routinely deployed such information. The registration of grain merchants and key features of their business was a condition of their participation in the trade. Grain cargoes travelled with documentation that was issued when a merchant reported a bulk purchase and had to be submitted on arrival at a market designated in advance. In China, bulk-purchase data were available in the records of the state-licensed brokers who arranged wholesale grain transactions. Kangxi's innovation lay in ordering officialdom to extract and use the information.Footnote 26
Ancien régime France and post-Tang China were alike in being large agrarian polities in which government authorities saw the unimpeded circulation and prompt marketing of grain surpluses as requiring protection from self-interested behavior. It is surprising neither that a similar repertoire of interventionist techniques evolved in both polities, nor that radical differences in the history of political structures and political thought in the two countries were reflected in a radical difference in the dominant techniques. The value of the French example, as I illustrate further below, is that it helps us understand how much non-interventionism could be logically accommodated within a mainstream tradition that was interventionist in defense of free circulation as well as being informed by conventional morality. This insight will put us in a better position for identifying ideas that pointed towards a genuine alternative—a potential paradigm shift.
I conclude this section by comparing two eighteenth-century Chinese examples of official orders that grain in transit be accompanied by a certificate specifying the intended place of sale. Both illustrate that it was no operational challenge for the world's oldest bureaucracy to issue cargo-accompanying documents as part of the solution to specific problems. Both show authorities ordering such certification in order to hold merchants to serving dearth-afflicted areas, whether the concern was with the merchant caught without a permit in territory protected by a provincial export ban or with the imagined abuser of a tax concession that was intended to attract cargos to hungry markets. Neither example is new to the English-language literature, but Rowe's account of the episode that I discuss first emphasizes the point of departure of a key text—commitment to free circulation within the protected territory—rather than the detailed control procedures that the author represented as an integral and necessary part of his free-circulation policy.Footnote 27 What comparison of the two cases shows is that while the imposition of a documentary regimen that permitted the same intensity of control as under the police des grains made sense in the context of provincial particularism, derision greeted the use of similar means to encourage mercantile relief of famine over a broad region. The argument of the derider transports us to a world of amoral forces but not, I shall argue, to any position that was incompatible with the mainstream tradition.
In the spring of 1748, Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 (1696–1771) saw no need to explain the use of permits when he announced to the people of drought-stricken Shaanxi that while “wicked brokers and local ruffians” were prohibited from amassing stocks and taking them outside the province, it was permitted for “gentry, merchants, scholars, and ordinary folk” to apply to their local authorities for permits under which they could buy grain in parts of the province that still had surplus and travel home to sell their cargo at the market price.Footnote 28 In the autumn, Chen instituted supplementary “small certificates” that tightened the controls: people caught with permitless cargoes that they were willing to sell inside Shaanxi were to be issued with official documents setting out their name, the quantity of grain, and the Shaanxi county in which the grain was to be sold. The authorities of that county were to be notified, and the matter would be closed only when those authorities had informed the issuing authorities that the certificate had been surrendered to them. The involvement of brokers at both ends of the grain's journey added extra assurance, because brokers could be made accountable through bonds of guarantee. It was the bond provided by the broker who had arranged for the certificate to be issued that would impose the deeper liability:
After the notification is received at the place at which the grain is to be sold, if much time passes and the grain boat fails to arrive but privily betakes itself elsewhere, the authorities who issued the certificate are to be notified, on which they shall punish the broker who supplied the bond.Footnote 29
As this procedure applied specifically to merchants who had failed to acquire permits authorizing trade that would supply one's own home Shaanxi county, there was some basis for suspicion that “privily betak[ing] itself elsewhere” might mean stealthily proceeding down an export route.
Very different in its implications was a similar system of controls instituted ten years earlier by the Jiangsu authorities and Board of Revenue. Here, the purpose was to prevent merchant abuse of special remissions of the transit taxes upon grain and beans that were en route to places visited by natural disaster. To guard against the risk that beneficiaries would “have the dishonesty to take their grain to other provinces or sell it before reaching the disaster-stricken area,” they were required to specify their destination county and, or arrival at that county, to obtain an official stamp on a certificate that had been issued at the internal customs station whose impost they had been spared. They must then, on pain of a fine of double the remitted tax, return to that station so that its authorities could inspect the stamped certificate.Footnote 30
In the discussion of this system that I published in 1996, I did not probe the assumptions underlying the policy of seeking to attract grain cargoes through temporary transit-tax remissions and the associated control procedure. An edict of 1738 explaining the adoption of this policy in preference to the more radical proposal of exempting staple foodstuffs permanently from internal transit taxes intones:
Rich merchants and great traders pursue profit as if they were [downward diving] ducks. If not the slightest distinction is made between places where the harvest has been poor and those where it has been abundant, how is the state to wield the power of stimulation (guwu zhi quan 鼓舞之權) and have the merchants leap to ply their trade in places that lack grain?Footnote 31
The Board of Revenue later defended its controls by warning that without them, “there would be no check whatever on wicked merchants having the dishonesty to take their grain elsewhere.”Footnote 32
Reflected here are two related views that branch out from the axiom that profit is what matters to the merchant and re-converge in the position that the state has a role to play in assuring commercial flows of grain to places visited by shortage. The edict represents the merchant's headlong rush for profit as blinding him to all other considerations, whereas to the Board the potential for profit-mindedness to debase the moral character of merchants is likely to manifest itself in actual fraud. The profit motive makes for unreliability. Fang Bao 方苞 (1668–1749), one of China's more famous eighteenth-century classicists, turned these doctrines upside down. To Fang it was obvious that “pursuing high prices and forsaking low ones” was an operational principle that grain merchants “grasp[ed] without needing to be taught it.” Post-disaster prices reflected “the severity of the disaster,” and in gravitating to the highest prices, merchants naturally gravitated to the areas of greatest need.Footnote 33 In the model Fang expounded it was precisely because of the profit motive that reliable predictions could be made about merchant behavior. Morality was irrelevant. Merchants reliably sought profit.
Given that, according to Hymes, Dong Wei had reached a very similar position in the early thirteenth century, the stage is now set for a close, albeit incomplete, examination of the history of premodern Chinese belief in the profit motive in the context of subsistence policy.Footnote 34 Such belief may appear at variance with Confucian moral “orthodoxy” because of the widespread assumption that, for the Confucian-educated gentlemen who usually governed China, li 利 (profit) was a dirty word. Pierre-Étienne Will has emphasized that Dong Wei himself represented the profit motive as stimulating forms of economic conduct “each one more loathsome than the other.”Footnote 35 However, the word li had broad semantic range and generally positive connotation.Footnote 36 Individual arguments to the effect that pursuit of profit was functional for society at large should be assessed for what they do say rather than downplayed because they are not fully Smithian. I turn now to what was probably the most venerable and well accepted of these arguments.
From Economic Fables to Elementary Horizontalism
Easily missed in Dong Wei's famine-relief manual is the anecdote that immediately follows the passage on which discernment of the vision of a “self-regulating” process in Dong's thought most crucially depends. Dong had copied this story from another source, and as he omitted some revealing detail, it is preferable to recount the version that appears in a mid-twelfth-century miscellany. The story, which may be apocryphal, tells how the famous Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052) addressed a subsistence crisis in Hangzhou, where he was the prefect. With rising grain prices causing concern, Fan baffled everyone by raising the market price of 120 coins per peck by 60 coins. He then had notices posted “along the rivers” announcing the size of the price rise. The result was merchants “vying” to bring their grain to Hangzhou. Once the imports had flooded in, Fan restored the price of 120 coins per peck.Footnote 37
The story probably dates from the mid to late eleventh century: its recording is credited to Fan Zhen 范鎮 (1008–1088; no relation of Zhongyan).Footnote 38 The ruse was successful, at least for Hangzhou consumers, but was the interference necessary? Fan was not the earliest Chinese official whose trust in the allure of elevated market prices provided subject matter for a Song anecdotalist. The didactic general history Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 (Comprehensive mirror aiding governance) by Sima Guang includes the story of Lu Tan 盧坦, who as surveillance commissioner in what is now southeastern Anhui rejected a request to depress the price of grain by fiat in the drought year of 808. Noting that a low price would deter importation, he let the price rise naturally, and “the merchants converged like spokes into a wheel's hub.”Footnote 39 By tracing the story to Sima's likely source, a biography of Lu Tan by Li Ao 李翱 (774–836), we discover that Lu took other famine-relief measures, including borrowing military rations grain and “releasing a large amount [of it] onto the market so as to stabilize the price.” In that fuller account of Lu's actions, it was because of his whole bundle of responses to the crisis that “although the drought was severe, people forgot about disaster.”Footnote 40 By contrast, in Sima's simplified version as told in several historical editions of Zizhi tongjian, not to mention the reproduction in a thirteenth-century encyclopedia, the words “and the folk relied [on it] for [their] survival” are added immediately after the statement that merchants converged on the disaster-stricken zone.Footnote 41 The resulting impression is that Sima's lesson for the emperor and other governing-class readers was that merchant responsiveness to profit sufficed to tide local populations over subsistence crises.
Whatever historiographical distortion Sima thus wrought (assuming that the added words were his), Lu Tan's attractively moral-pointing story, along with those of Fan Zhongyan and one Bao Zheng 包拯 (999–1062), was now available for retelling. When all three were reproduced by Wu Zeng in a chapter on “beginnings” published in 1157, Wu's point was that Lu's restraint was the origin of the “strategy” (ce 策) implemented by Fan and Bao.Footnote 42 Wu credited Bao only with “likewise refrain[ing] from limiting the price of rice”; if this abstinence from action was a “strategy” for Wu, Dong Wei could hardly be faulted for using the word “method” (fa 法) for the practice of prohibiting “forcing down the price” (yi jia 抑價).Footnote 43 A further simplified version of Sima's Lu Tan story appears in the supplement (1208 or later) appended to Dong's book, while the sixteenth-century author Lin Xiyuan 林希元 chose the Fan Zhongyan story to complement his exposition of the ill-effects of imposing artificially low prices. In a list of “don'ts” in his Huangzheng congyan 荒政叢言 (Collected words on famine governance), a work that purportedly began as a memorial submitted to the throne in 1529, Lin recommended Fan's trick as an adjunct to leaving grain prices alone.Footnote 44
A tamer but more revealing ruse story is found paired with the Lu Tan story in an undistinguished famine-relief treatise dubiously attributed to Ouyang Yuan 歐陽元 (1315 jinshi; died 1357) of the Yuan dynasty, and also, for example, among the disconnected and generally unacknowledged text-clippings that comprise the “market prices” section of a sixteenth-century handbook for county administrators. This story shows the official Zhao Bian 趙抃 (1008–1084), more than two decades after Fan's death, stopping deaths by starvation in Yuezhou 越州 (present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang province) by posting wayside notices authorizing those with grain stocks to “sell them at an increased price.” As the wayside notices posted by his counterparts in other stricken prefectures forbade the raising of rice prices, “the rice merchants of [those other] prefectures betook themselves to Yue like spokes into a wheel's hub.”Footnote 45 The presumed timelessness of the two ruse-based models for the discerning territorial official is illustrated by their repetition two centuries later in Chen Hongmou's Congzheng yigui 從政遺規 (Inherited guidelines for official service; 1742), where we find the Zhao Bian story quoted (along with many other vignettes from the careers of worthy Song officials) from a late-Ming collection of such heirlooms and the Fan Zhongyan one reproduced as part of an early seventeenth-century discussion of famine relief.Footnote 46 It may have been hard for the well-read territorial official not to be familiar with these stories.
The Zhao Bian story's revealing character has nothing to do with either its veracity or its representativeness of Song famine-relief doctrine. Its history, easily traced through the attribution concluding its transcription in the fourteenth-century Wenxian tongkao 文獻通考 (Comprehensive scrutiny of basic and supplementary sources), renders it as suspect as the Lu Tan story.Footnote 47Wenxian tongkao credits the story to a twelfth-century didactic anthology, Sanchao mingchen yanxing lu 三朝名臣言行錄 (A record of the words and deeds of renowned officials of three emperors’ reigns), compiled by Zhu Xi; but the attribution supplied by Zhu Xi points to none other than Sima Guang as the story's primary transmitter.Footnote 48 The story appears in Sima's Sushui jiwen 速水記聞 (The man from the River Su's record of things heard), a miscellany of materials that, according to a twelfth-century historian, were gathered for a planned extension to Zizhi tongjian. This suggests that Sima saw the story, which he attributed to one Zhang Ji 張濟, as an object lesson to supplement the other teachings of recent history.Footnote 49
The real Zhao Bian was no more inclined than the real Lu Tan or any other serious premodern Chinese famine-relief practitioner to put full faith in the “self-regulating process” of price mechanisms, or, to quote the exaggeration that Ouyang Shoudao 歐陽守道 (b. 1209) claimed to be current in the marketplaces of his day, the experience that “With prices, no sooner has one heard that they are cheap than they are dear, and no sooner has one heard that they are dear than they are cheap.”Footnote 50 The man from the River Su (Sima Guang) had failed to note that, with “more than half” the people of the lower Yangzi region dying, Zhao Bian had “exhausted the techniques by means of which one relieves famine.” While the account of his diligence that Zhu Xi juxtaposed with the Zhao Bian ruse story comes from a stele carrying Zhao's epitaph, a more substantial account was available in the collected writings of Zeng Gong 曾鞏 (1019–1083), and this shows Zhao's work to have been the epitome of a planned operation.Footnote 51 Let us, furthermore, return to Dong Wei and put the views that Hymes and Rowe have emphasized into perspective. Dong listed five core famine-relief “methods,” of which only two—prohibition of “forcing down the price” and of supply protectionism—were militantly free-circulation-focused. They were to be balanced by the two “methods” that he put in pride of place, that is, “the ever-normal [institution] for relief sales” and “the philanthropic granaries for relief aid [gratis].”Footnote 52 Letting the market have its way with prices was the right way to address the commercial aspect of famine-relief policy—and only part of the right way at that. It was not famine-relief policy itself.
Two aspects of the story told thus far deserve comment precisely because, although significant, they are not surprising. The first is timing—the fact that narratives set south of the Yangzi and propagating a non-interventionist approach to market grain prices began to emerge in the late Tang and early Song, were taken up by Song didacts, and were complemented in the southern Song by more abstract statements such as the following from Dong's contemporary Ni Si 倪思 (d. 1220):
If one wants the merchants to converge like spokes into a wheel's hub, the best thing is to guard against their being held up at inspection points and market-places and to let rice prices take their course (ting mijia zhi ziran 聽米價之自然) …. Merchants are pursuers of profit. If only the price of rice is somewhat elevated, they all assemble. The best thing therefore is to let matters take their course (ting qi ziran 聽其自然). Once rice has assembled, prices can be expected to stabilize spontaneously (zi ping 自平).Footnote 53
All these developments are obviously consistent with well-known economic changes that began in the late Tang and included the triumph of a burgeoning commercial class over the previous tradition of systematic state-imposed restrictions.Footnote 54
The second noteworthy aspect is the perceived compatibility of opposition to “forcing down the price” with interventionist approaches to subsistence crises. The record of la police des grains in France suggests that, in China also, warnings against direct interference with grain's market price need not necessarily have seemed inconsistent with regulatory practices whose basic purpose, after all, was to ensure that grain reached markets. Arguments that in China had started with Lu Tan appear in Steven Kaplan's account of la police des grains as translations from the eighteenth-century French. The French controller-general who wrote in 1725 that the availability of some grain at an elevated price was preferable to a total supply failure caused by misguided price fixation used more words to make his point than survive in Li Ao's ninth-century biography of Lu, but the arguments are identical.Footnote 55 The French versions, as Kaplan quotes them, make sense in their own context; there is no need to speculate about possible Chinese influence in order to explain them. While the primary emphasis of Chinese interventionism in subsistence matters was on direct provisioning, there was still less reason to perceive incompatibility between restraint from heavy-handed meddling with the market price and government efforts to nudge that price down through competition with would-be profit maximizers. Increase in supply was the purpose of the first approach and the instrument of the second: both went in the same direction. While the persistence in Ming and Qing famine relief manuals, general administrative manuals, and other texts of what had become stock arguments against direct price controls is perhaps testimony to their being often honored in the disregard, it constitutes evidence that these arguments were part of a mainstream tradition, not a challenge to Confucian values.Footnote 56 One would be hard pressed to name a more celebrated Confucian didact than Sima Guang.
What is interesting about Dong Wei's substantive argument that “forcing down the price” jeopardizes the supply of grain to the markets of jurisdictions in which it occurs is that he addresses both the horizontal (spatial) and the vertical (temporal) planes of the implicit model that surfaces with varying degrees of clarity in post-Tang references to the workings of the grain market. The horizontal plane is that of the flow of commerce between geographic units each of which has its own supply conditions (relative to the market-dependent population) at any given time. In this implicit model, the price level obtaining in any given geographic unit reflects its supply conditions, and the key question for the subsistence of market-dependent consumers in Unit A, where shortage has elevated prices, is whether Unit A is able to attract commercial grain imports. Its ability to do so is understood, in this simple version of the model, as dependent on how its price level compares with those of Units B, C, D, and so forth. The vertical plane, by contrast, is that of the flow of stored grain onto local markets, be the grain held in bins and granaries in the area in which it was grown or in warehouses in the cities into which it has been imported. Absent state coercion or popular collective action, the landlord, dealer, or grain broker controls the timing of his sales; the key question for local consumers is how he times his sales in response to local price signals. Lurking behind that question is another: is his intent to reap the profits offered by the local market proof against the lure of sales to exporters? In other words, what might snatch grain from the realm of vertical distribution to which local consumers thought it belonged and launch it onto the navigable waterways that vitalized the realm of horizontal distribution?Footnote 57
The Zhao Bian story comes into its own as an eleventh-century example of horizontalist awareness: it is the jurisdiction in which grain prices are allowed to respond naturally to famine conditions that competes successfully with the neighboring jurisdictions for commercial grain supplies. Dong Wei offered no advance beyond the horizontalist anecdotal tradition in arguing that forcing down the price would deter importation, but he ventured into verticalist territory in warning that the resulting aggravated scarcity would make local grain-holders even more afraid to release their stocks for sale—presumably, for fear of the grain's violent seizure once it left those well defended homesteads with which, in 1178, Yuan Cai 袁采 had advised elite contemporaries to repel the dangers of rural residence.Footnote 58 If, on the contrary, price signals were left to do their work, the fear of local grain-holders would be lest they “miss the time” (that is, the opportunity to sell before imports made prices tumble), and they would “vie to be the first to open their granaries.”Footnote 59 We find similar linkage of the horizontalist and verticalist perspectives in a sixteenth-century famine-relief treatise by Tu Long 屠隆 (fl. 1577), who recommended supplementing free fluctuation of grain prices with active measures to boost grain supply in order to make grain prices “go down on their own without being lowered and stabilize on their own without being stabilized.” We find it also in a work by Zhou Kongjiao 周孔教 (fl. 1580), who warned that the inevitable response of local wealthy households to price controls—“barring the door to purchasing of grain” (bidi 閉糴), to translate literally—would only be provisional: when “merchants from afar” arrived, underhand deals would siphon the food that local people needed into the long-distance trade.Footnote 60
The simple horizontalist model, cast as it was solely in terms of relative price levels, was capable of some elaboration, as Fang Bao's argument against the Board of Revenue's control procedures in 1738 reveals. Fang portrayed interjurisdictional price differentials conspiring to deliver optimal distribution of available supplies in regions afflicted by natural disaster. The highest prices guided merchants to the worst-stricken areas; their grain imports reduced those prices to lower levels than the merchants could obtain elsewhere, at which point the flow of grain shipments changed course, with merchants “vy[ing] to betake themselves elsewhere.” To ting qi zibian 聽其自便 (literally, “let them suit themselves”) would expedite the circulation process.Footnote 61Ting qi zibian in the imperative may sound like laissez-faire, but Fang was not endowing this phrase, which was not uncommon in administrative parlance, with any particular normative significance. It is the phrase that Ni Si had used half a millennium earlier, ting qi ziran (literally, “let [the matter under discussion] be so of itself,” that is, “let [it] take its natural course”) that was evocative of ancient Daoist texts and thus had resonance as a counsel of superior wisdom. There may be heuristic value in using ting qi ziran as an epithet. My proposal is that, rather than endorsing Hymes's observation that “the laissez-faire position in its pure form seems [to have been] unavailable” at the dawn of the thirteenth century, or Will's sensible remark that in eighteenth-century Chinese famines “complete laissez-faire was out of the question,” we explore the scope and meaning of the “ting qi ziran approach” in Chinese economic statecraft.Footnote 62 Fang Bao's argument is deeply imbued with the ting qi ziran spirit of elementary horizontalism.
From Humble Copper Coins to Advanced Horizontalism
Fang's reasoning did not convince the Board of Revenue, and although it was better received at court, only limited concessions resulted. It may, however, have helped condition the emperor for receptivity to other arguments for a more ting qi ziran approach to popular-subsistence policy than the extremes of interventionism that punctuated the “long 1740s.”Footnote 63 As I have shown elsewhere, a generally unsuccessful attempt to enhance preparedness for famine by vastly increasing the stockpiles in the ever-normal granaries was accompanied by a stream of critical memorials that, between them, established an antithesis between the supposedly inflationary intrusions of officials buying grain for granary restocking and the purportedly innocuous activity of merchants whose responsiveness to price signals extended to restraint from buying when cost prices jeopardized their profit margins. On one side was the image of the rigid, quota-driven, deadline-dominated bureaucratic buyer whose appearance provoked a string of negative market reactions, all of which conspired to raise the local market price of grain; on the other was that of the expert in commercial calculation whose vessels merged into the flow of grain boats gliding up and down the navigable waterways of the greater Yangzi valley relieving seller markets of overabundant surpluses and congregating at those needy markets where good profits could be made. It was the Manchu official Anning 安寧 who, in 1744, affirmed the unnaturalness of the market impact of official buying and enunciated the principle that “the free flowing of grain should be allowed to follow its natural course” (migu zhi liutong dang shun qi ziran 米穀之流通當順其自然).Footnote 64
While the ever-normal system survived these criticisms, albeit with lower storage targets than those set in 1738–39 and 1744, the long 1740s saw flickers of a challenge to the time-honored assumption that state stockpiling served vulnerable consumers better than self-interested storage. Not only did flexing of state muscles against private hoarders provoke defenses both of the profiteering speculator and of the urban warehouse-keeping broker whose gradual, price-sensitive release of stocks resembled best-practice ever-normal operations; one official even suggested that worst-practice ever-normal operations were both prevalent and reminiscent of market-manipulative profiteering. Another conjured up a momentary vision of a network of commercially operated anti-famine stockpiles strategically situated “at major crossing points on overland and water routes and at important population centers.”Footnote 65 When first mooted in the late 1730s, the most radical proposal of all—to try to reverse what historians today see as a secular inflationary trend by selling the ever-normal granaries’ entire present stocks—received short shrift. In 1748, a somewhat less extreme proposal—to sell all the Yangzi-valley ever-normal granary reserves in excess of the old, supposedly four-figure storage targets—was made in the memorial that may have prompted the emperor to order across-the-board target cuts that, he hinted, should perhaps be radical.Footnote 66
Although those proposals that advocated large reductions in state stockpiling specifically in regions with good water transport generally rested on the claimed efficacy of private commerce, it was a radical author indeed who hinted that one need not bother to replace the lost capacity to save disaster victims’ lives through direct doles of grain. Common practice offered an alternative: give relief in a mixture of grain and silver or, if necessary, silver alone.Footnote 67 As the use of silver in relief distributions was conventionally regarded as an unfortunate expedient, radical advocates of stockpile reduction found it advisable to formulate positive arguments for substituting silver. As I showed in State or Merchant?, in 1743 two authors, Li Qingzhi 李清植 and Wu Wei 吳煒, articulated in horizontalist language the notion that to boost the purchasing power of poor consumers was indirectly to boost grain supply on local markets.Footnote 68
Li Qingzhi, who initiated this argument, was advocating not target-cutting but a measure to enable provincial administrations to accumulate silver reserves for famine-relief distributions in monetary form. It is significant that he found it necessary to defend monetary distributions against the commonsense position, asserted by the emperor as recently as 1737, that “If, because of famine, one gives relief in grain, the folk will be without a famished look.”Footnote 69 To quote Li's argument in full:
Master Guan has it that “Tang cast coin with the metal of Mount Zhuang and applied redemption in those cases in which people lacking gruel had sold their children; Yu cast coin with the metal of Mount Li to relieve people's hardships.” The Zhouli has it that “If there is famine in the capital, coin is made in the markets.” Now how could Tang, Yu, and the Duke of Zhou, with all their sageliness, have failed to realize that when the folk are hungry, they must have grain before they can eat? The point is that, with shortage of grain being an inevitable feature of a famine year, when it comes to food for famine victims, even the likes of yams and miscellaneous produce [of the soil] can all preserve life; the thing to fear is to be empty-handed and therefore sit awaiting death. If given relief in the form of silver, [the famine victims] will naturally each be able to contrive means of survival. Besides, if the famine victims have money, merchants are bound to come plying their trade, and it will naturally be possible to avoid a breaking-off of food supplies.Footnote 70
Another official wrote shortly afterwards that Li's idea of a formally adopted policy of providing relief in monetary form had taken him a little while to accept, which suggests that aspects of the above rationale also seemed new and challenging.Footnote 71 However, as Rowe claims that already in the thirteenth century Dong Wei “argues … that relief in cash is preferable to that in kind because it stimulates rather than stifles market exchange,” an examination of the history of positive justifications for this practice must precede assessment of the significance of any novel contribution that Li may have made.Footnote 72
A Song official whom Wu Wei quoted to confer a pedigree on advocacy of distributing relief in monetary form was Zeng Gong 曾鞏 (1019–1083).Footnote 73 But the reason for which Zeng once advocated the allocation of 500,000 strings of base-metal coin and 1,000,000 shi of grain for direct distribution to disaster victims was simple: there had been an earthquake and a flood, and it was commonsense that people needed money to meet their housing needs and grain to meet their food needs. He proposed the measure as an “extraordinary” response to an “extraordinary” calamity.Footnote 74 Indeed, unambiguous evidence of the distribution of money to rural disaster victims being envisaged at central-government level is uncommon for Song times: there are records of money being included in resource allocations for famine relief, but in most cases probably for governmental purchases of relief grain. Other relatively clear examples of intent that direct monetary doles be issued to the general disaster-stricken population date from 1029, 1073, 1074, and 1075—the last three during Wang Anshi's ascendancy.Footnote 75 There are also a few passages referring to various dates during the period 1183–1215 that appear somewhat likely to signify that coin as well as grain was distributed to the general population.Footnote 76 In 1185 an official temporarily assigned to a drought-stricken area of what is now southern Shaanxi outlined arrangements for securing grain for in-kind relief in two jurisdictions, while noting that in a third, where “from now on, the prices of things will be very stable, besides which there are no people wandering about,” the authorities were preparing both money and rice for direct distribution.Footnote 77 Perhaps enough officials on the ground made similar decisions elsewhere in Southern Song China for Dong Wei to be saying nothing outrageous some fifteen years later when he put a pragmatic argument for distributing relief partly in monetary form when “the famine is not total, rice is circulating, and the prices of things are not surging upwards.”Footnote 78
What, precisely, was Dong's argument? In his main discussion of the form in which the free relief emanating from the state-controlled “philanthropic granaries” should be distributed, Dong represented the high cost of overland porterage in areas not served by navigable waterways, together with the risk of pilfering en route, as the prime considerations making monetary relief the option of choice when such characteristics of a mild subsistence crisis prevailed. He also noted that the danger of peculation during monetary distributions made issuing relief in a mixture of grain and money a prudent compromise. Elsewhere, however, he commented as follows on one of the cases of direct distribution of coin being ordered under Wang Anshi and his master, the emperor Shenzong:
If in a year of calamity and famine the lean folk obtain coin, in that case they will be able to purchase various other things to fill their hungry innards. When [the emperor] Shenzong “commanded [the fiscal commission and stabilization fund supervisorate of Jingdong East circuit] to issue stabilization-fund coin (changping qian 常平錢) and department-granary grain (shengcang mi 省倉米) and distribute it according to [household] rating,” he was probably anticipating that the grain would not suffice and so supplemented it with coin, which truly showed flexibility in famine relief planning. This notwithstanding, it was none other than Shenzong who fulfilled those words of Lu Zhi 陸贄 [754–805]: “What the court loses is financial resources, and what it gains is human hearts.”Footnote 79
Whether or not the receipt of cash doles in the not merely severe, but increasingly catastrophic, famine of 1075 won peasant hearts to the extent that Dong imagined, he had broached that part of the justification for issuing relief in monetary form that stressed not the saving in cost, risk and trouble for officialdom, but the presumed benefit for disaster victims.Footnote 80
Warming to the theme in his main discussion and in a supplement appended to his manual, Dong noted that receipt of coin could enable the rural poor not only to redeem the necessities that they had pawned (farm tools, grain reserved predominantly for sowing) but also to make their relief allowances go farther. Provided with the means to buy the cheaper, coarser cereals, the poor could boil them with wild food plants or other vegetables and so feed their families for longer than if given rice to the same value. Their tools redeemed, they could go about their normal work, which would serve to “bind their hearts”—thereby averting their alienation from the social order had helplessness impelled them into vagrancy. So persuaded was Dong of these advantages that he reported having once proposed a resource-recycling wheeze that inverted the conventional grain-centered literalism of the “commonplace Confucian scholar.” Distributing coin in the cities and grain in the countryside was sanctioned by Song tradition and presumably made sense to the old-fashioned. It is easy to find Song cases of monetary doles being made to urban and suburban residents, including short-term visitors who were fleeing famine.Footnote 81 Dong's idea was that the grain in the philanthropic granaries be sold at a reduced price to “folk on both sides of the city walls,” and that the monetary proceeds be distributed monthly in the countryside, thereby spreading relief effectively to the “mountain deeps and valley boundlessnesses.” It was a daring notion that was not, to Dong's regret, put to the test of practice, which may be why he also included a simpler version whereby “ever-normal rice” would be sold in urban areas and “philanthropic granary money” distributed in villages.Footnote 82
To the extent that peasant recipients spent their monetary doles on food, the effect of broadening the affordability of rice and coarser foodstuffs by boosting peasant buying-power should have been to increase the volume of food traded, but it is hard to discern in the above arguments a claim that “relief in cash … stimulates … market exchange,” still less an insinuation that food relief “stifles market exchange.”Footnote 83 Dong was not opposed to food relief; to the contrary, more than once he recommended that officials faced with incipient famine put money held in the ever-normal and philanthropic granaries into buying grain to feed the people. There was, admittedly, a distinction between his recommendations for the two types of granary. “Ever-normal rice” was for selling to “bring market prices into equilibrium and silently dissipate the tendency to withhold grain from sale”; the proper use of proceeds of past sales was thus in any case post-harvest intervention buying. An official who realized that there was too little “ever-normal rice” to manage a coming famine should draw on the “ever-normal money” to procure more grain where it was available. One option that Dong suggested was to lend the money to private parties to buy supplies elsewhere and sell them locally. Funds thus lent were capital, not “relief in cash.”Footnote 84 It was only in his discussion of the free relief issued from the philanthropic granaries that Dong added the words “or distribute the money to [the eligible famine victims]” after his statement that officials faced with understocked philanthropic granaries should spend the “philanthropic granary money” that had “recently” been accumulating to “make broad purchases” of beans, wheat, and other kinds of cereal to issue as food relief.Footnote 85 In time of famine, moreover, the emperor should issue money from the privy purse to serve as “funds for buying grain” (diben 糴本), while the forms of support that prefects should request from the throne in major famines included “loans” of funds from the same source for the same purpose.Footnote 86 Dong also reproduced a proposal by Zhao Xiong 趙雄 (d. 1193) that addressed the problem of overland transport, but on a broader geographical scale than Dong's own remarks envisaged. Given the lack of navigable waterways into the region for which Zhao was advocating, the court should send paper money instead of rice, but on arrival the funds should be divided among the drought-affected prefectures, whose prefects should each contrive to buy whatever kind of grain or pulse he could in places where there had been harvests.Footnote 87
Zhou Zhiyuan's research suggests that by the mid-Ming, the practice of issuing relief in coin or unminted silver was sufficiently accepted for authors to make no bones about expounding procedures for the allocation and distribution of monetary doles. Already in the 1520s, Lin Xiyuan endorsed the case that Dong had made for issuing relief in monetary form before noting that “In recent times, there are many officials administering famine relief who apply [Dong's position] and distribute relief exclusively in silver [and/or] coin.”Footnote 88 None of the Ming sources that Zhou cites, however, evidences any change in the nature of the grounds put forward for considering relief in monetary form beneficial to recipients. To the limited extent that the three authors proposed such grounds, they only offered variations on Dong's views. Lin Xiyuan thought relief in monetary form appropriate for those disaster victims classified as “poor, but less so” (compared with the “extremely poor”): these were people he imagined as having some capacity for self-help and able to parlay cash doles into active means of livelihood.Footnote 89 Zhong Huamin 鍾化民 and the anonymous author of an account of Zhong's actions in 1594 as imperially appointed director of relief in Henan expressed in different terms Dong's principle that relief in monetary form was appropriate where the need was less than urgent. It made sense to hand out silver in village-by-village distributions because the key distinction was between the desperate people on the brink of starvation who were fed gruel at emergency assistance stations and the folk whose remnant dignity disinclined them from being batched into groups of 200, possibly with vagrants, and directed to attend the feeding station named in the recipient-identity document worn visibly upon the arm.Footnote 90 Finally, Zhou Kongjiao elevated Dong's concern with distance into a principle—that “the folk of distant places” should be given relief in silver. In a brief discussion that echoes Dong's wording, Kong intimated that relief in monetary form would benefit recipients in upstream, non-rice-growing areas “more than 100 li” (notionally, about 58 kilometers) from the administrative capitals where the grain reserves were concentrated. Recipients would benefit simply because this was the only form of relief that they were likely to receive at all.Footnote 91
One cannot demand much theoretical sophistication of short famine-relief treatises structured as series of paragraphs on discrete topics. In 1738, under the Qing, Li Jin 李錦, a junior central-government literary official, had the full expository opportunities afforded by a very different genre—the policy-proposal memorial—but contributed nothing more, in advocating that relief be distributed 60 percent in grain and 40 percent in silver, than the obvious point that monetary doles would enable famine victims to meet needs other than that for staple foodstuffs. In responding with a recommendation that provincial chief administrators be granted the discretion to authorize mixed silver-grain distributions when county-level grain reserves did not suffice, the grand secretaries and senior officials of the Board of Revenue retreated even from that modest departure from grain-centeredness. The silver components of mixed distributions benefited famine victims as stop-gaps, they suggested, preventing the delays that would have eventuated had it been necessary to await the arrival of supplementary grain supplies from other jurisdictions. The emperor approved their recommendation.Footnote 92
Such was the institutional context in which the investigating censor Sun Hao 孫灝 joined Li Qingzhi and Wu Wei in supplying the elements of a conceptual breakthrough in which a policy of supplementing what Amartya Sen calls the “exchange entitlements” of vulnerable people could be understood as positively worthy of replacing direct help with “food availability.”Footnote 93 In 1743, as I have shown elsewhere, Sun sounded a fresh note when he concluded a list of five advantages of the use of silver in famine-relief distribution as follows: “Though there may be a famine year, there will certainly not be exhaustion of all grain supplies. There is such a thing as having grain and fearing the want of silver, but if only one has silver, how will one fear the want of grain?”Footnote 94 The statement was cavalier, and Sun did not elaborate on it. However, we can probably unlock the meaning by remembering the degree to which contemporary discussions of popular-subsistence policy were permeated by expressions of opinion about, on the one hand, the immobilization of commoditized supplies of grain in hoards and warehouses, and, on the other, the flowing of commercial grain stocks in accordance with the profit motive's promptings. Against that background, it is understandable that, in the temporary absence of truly catastrophic famines, the commonsense perception that famine-relief policy must address “food availability decline” (Sen's term) should show rudimentary signs of yielding to concern with a quite different question: what made the difference between one household's successful staking of a claim to some share in the food supplies that did exist, and another household's inability to take out a subsistence ration. By Sen's standards, “silver”—that is, “money”—is an incomplete, simplistic answer but a good first start, granted a monetized economy.Footnote 95
Sun was advocating the use of silver in relief distributions to support a claim that the state could tolerate 30–40 percent shortfalls from the relatively low, pre-1738 grain-storage targets, provided that the equivalent amount in silver was stored instead. He mentioned Li Qingzhi's argument as the point of departure for his own reflections but did not repeat Li's claim that merchants would gravitate towards disaster-stricken populations whose individual members could afford to purchase grain.Footnote 96 Wu Wei, however, borrowed this notion in a cause more radical than Sun's. It was Wu who, in the late 1730s, had proposed the nostrum of liquidating the realm's entire stock of ever-normal grain. In 1743, he returned to this idea, advocating that cut-price sales be held in every rural town to spread the benefit as broadly as practicable. With the capacity to issue emergency relief from local grain reserves destroyed, one would issue famine victims with silver “for a month or two,” with the result that “Not only will one avoid their tiring themselves out along the waysides; one will also be providing them with means of seeking livelihood.” Nor was that all:
With this in place, officials will not harass [those from whom they seek to acquire grain], while subaltern functionaries will not misappropriate [grain from the reserves]; the people will not be fatigued, while the requisites for making a living will be theirs in full. Once the folk have money, it will be possible to sell them rice, on which merchants from near and far will all come one after the other. There has never been a case of rice prices failing to stabilize in such a situation.Footnote 97
Between them, Li and Wu had inadvertently suggested a significant refinement of the conventional implicit theory of the horizontal distribution of commoditized grain surpluses. It is not enough to say that grain will gravitate to wherever the price level suggests the largest profit margin. One must factor in the size of the actual market, that is, the number of people who have funds enough to pay prices that make it worth the merchant's while to bring them grain.
The breakthrough was potential, not actual. Li Qingzhi and his followers had limited demonstrable influence. Their proposals were dismissed in 1743, and their glib advocacy of monetizing famine relief proved unable to overwhelm bureaucratic habituation to maintaining grain reserves whose necessity seemed confirmed whenever they were drawn on to prevent mass hunger. The advanced horizontalism adumbrated in 1743 at most prepared the ground for a handful of very radical proposals penned during the period 1748–1752, but the influence of those proposals was short-lived.Footnote 98 The partial use of silver in relief distributions remained an accepted expedient, and there were officials who dutifully considered how best to set the grain-to-silver commutation rate in order to avoid disadvantaging recipients of silver doles at currently prevailing price levels. However, the practical difficulties that could arise when silver predominated in the limited resources available for relief operations probably deterred thoughtful territorial administrators from complacency about letting ever-normal grain reserves become excessively depleted.Footnote 99 The arguments for distributing relief in monetary form that Lillian Li cites from the turn of the eighteenth century suggest no conceptual advance. It seems likely that the eventual attrition of the ever-normal system, and the concomitant normalization of the practice of distributing relief in monetary form, were products of the complex process of dynastic decline that recent scholarship confirms as traceable to the second half of the eighteenth century, not of any further sophistication of economic theory.Footnote 100
More important are the limitations of the casual and disconnected claims of Li Qingzhi, Wu Wei, and Sun Hao. They advocated an approach to famine relief that Sen's theories would have validated, but without articulating the idea that, other things being equal, the financial empowerment of a community's consumers will give it an advantage in the competition to attract commoditized grain surpluses.Footnote 101 All three recognized the agency of famine victims in their claims that relief in monetary form could empower the recipients to solve their own subsistence problems. Sun was the most explicit, envisaging that silver doles would serve as micro-capital to finance micro-businesses—to turn famine victims into peddlers, in other words. But Sun's remarks, while elegant, were brief. They did not address effective demand for the services of petty craftsmen-vendors during mass starvation.Footnote 102 However innovative Wu's model for the exercise of state responsibilities following annihilation of the in-kind subsistence guarantee, his rephrasing of Li's claim that grain would flow to communities enriched with monetary doles lacks the critical reflection that might have generated a convincing version.
It is legitimate to wonder how far Wu's model represents an improvement over that implicit in Zhong Huamin's late-Ming “Illustrated report on famine relieved” as supplemented by a biographical introduction by Zhong's early-Qing editor Yu Sen 俞森 (fl. 1690). In the legend that we recapture from these texts, Zhong Huamin saved the lives of 47,456,781 Henanese famine victims, of whom 22,960,912 received gruel. The remaining 24,495,869 received silver in the wake of Zhong's heroic implementation of the “method” of eschewing price controls: he let the price of grain soar to a peak of 5 taels per shi, only to watch it plummet to 0.8 tael/shi as the long-distance merchants responded both to the price incentive and to the steps that Zhong had taken to protect their cargoes. By adopting Yim Shu-yuen's sensible assumption that what the provincial government's figures actually recorded was instances of individuals claiming allocations on specific days, that is “person-days” of relief, we obtain a more realistic picture of some 400,000 individuals being fed gruel daily, and over 12,000,000 individuals receiving a monthly dole of silver on two days one month apart. The ratio of silver-recipients to grain-recipients was determined by the resources available. With the granary system requiring fundamental reconstruction, the 1594 relief effort had been fueled by grants and donations, and much more silver than grain had been provided by government and private sources. Despite Zhong's complacent rhetoric, the historian has no idea how many lives relief distributions in the form of silver actually saved: in today's jargon, a monetary dole is but an “input,” not an “outcome,” and, in any case, Timothy Brook has cleverly suggested that perhaps this famine did not threaten lives on quite the scale that has been uncritically assumed.Footnote 103
Wu Wei's proposal of selling the entire stock of ever-normal grain would have re-imposed the situation faced by Henan's officialdom in 1594, except that the low capacity to issue food relief would have been generalized throughout the realm. The experiment would have been tried against the background of stronger fiscal institutions and more competent government, but without robust grounds for believing that the combination of free trade and monetary relief doles of unspecified magnitude would enable the state to discharge the responsibilities that Confucian humanitarianism mandated.
Conclusion
What does the near-non-event of the momentary progression in 1743 from elementary to advanced horizontalism tell us about traditions of premodern Chinese economic thought and what Mark Elvin once called “the pattern of the Chinese past”?Footnote 104 First, the idea of a single countercultural market-conscious “discourse” is too simple: important elements of free-circulation doctrine were mainstream, but glimpses of a radical alternative vision are found in documents from the long 1740s. In this ultra-ting qi ziran vision, which generally assumed a southern Chinese commercial system lubricated by navigable waterways, the state largely yielded the management of the grain surplus to the private sector, whose practices and institutions already served consumer interests more reliably than did the ever-normal system and had the potential to replace its functions. In the radical vision, the state used its resources not for ambiguous competitive transactions whose supposed justification was as checks on commercial greed, but for monetary doles that not only broadened consumer choice but more fundamentally fed commerce, gratified profit-hunger, and unleashed the potential of high prices to put grain within the reach of people previously too poor to pay them.
By the 1740s, the freedom of grain cargoes to gravitate towards the highest prices was a long-established, imperially promulgated ideal that might be violated in practice either because of a persuasive argument that a particular population needed protection or because of bumbling by bureaucrats imbued with the longer-established notion that preoccupation with profit made a man untrustworthy. The claim that monetary relief broadened consumer choice was also long-established, although its expression had taken a variety of forms: the financially empowered consumer, or producer-as-consumer, could redeem pledges, choose what to buy, or use his dole as travel funds or micro-capital. While the claim was old, however, the practice that it was intended to justify affronted literalist commonsense and was officially considered a regrettable expedient even as it became commonplace. The notion that boosting peasant “exchange entitlements” might serve to attract trade was, by contrast, avant garde. While it would be rash to assert that no one before Li Qingzhi had ever entertained it, his cavalier suggestion that it clinched the case for embracing the monetary-relief approach was too outlandish for the body delegated to assess it. In its formal response, that body did not address Li's argument, merely reasserting that including an admixture of silver in relief allowances was permitted as a “temporary expedient” and that Li's proposal was inconsistent with existing policy. The Board of Revenue, dismissing Sun's memorial, further described food relief as based in the natural order (literally, “a constant [principle] of the order of things,” li zhi chang 理之常) while rejecting any notion that permitting the partial use of silver implied acceptance that “silver is more convenient than grain and to be relied on as fail-safe.”Footnote 105
We can recognize the rudimentary ideas of Li, Sun, and Wu as an “advance” without endorsing them, but does “advance” mean “progress”? If the concept of linear progress is applicable, there should be a case that Li, Sun, and Wu had advanced farther in a specified direction than had Song, Yuan, and Ming authors on famine relief. It is hard to avoid arbitrariness in specifying a direction from outside, but what if, heuristically, we seek evidence of progress towards a reconceptualization of popular-subsistence policy as a matter of preventing and correcting severe (starvation-inducing) constraints on access to available food supplies, as opposed to counteracting food availability decline—in other words, a simple, applied version of Sen's thesis? Li and Wu contributed one aspect: the leap to advanced horizontalism. From the broader perspective proposed, however, their casual remarks compare unfavorably with an early thirteenth-century passage in which Dong Wei not only shows keen awareness of the competition for local grain supplies between local people and outside interests, but also momentarily makes the local resident with money in his hand the center of attention, as an embattled subject, not an object of system-level planning. Purportedly drawing on his own observations, Dong depicts the unequal struggle between ordinary residents and the brokers trying to secure supplies for famine-stricken counties elsewhere: while both are willing to pay increased prices to the wealthy local stockpile-owners, it is only the latter who are able to use stealth to circumvent the price controls imposed by well-meaning officials. While Dong's account of the form taken by the competition is part of his section on eschewing price controls, he is implicitly addressing issues of power in the marketplace and its uneven distribution.Footnote 106
If we cannot confidently identify the trajectory of the understanding of market forces discussed in this article as one of linear progress, it may be prudent to refrain from associating the mid-eighteenth-century developments with a Chinese “early modernity.”Footnote 107 True, the conditions in which cherished assumptions about the value of state stockpiling came into question were created partly by the eighteenth-century inflationary trend, and some have posited a relationship between that trend and the international bullion flows that helped to shape the modern world.Footnote 108 The historical fact of Li's assertion that merchants are attracted to markets in which consumers can pay elevated prices makes sense in the context of a flourishing commercial system that population growth may have made busier and more competitive in the eighteenth century than it had been in the thirteenth, but that does not confer an early-modern character on the age in which Li lived.
What alternative characterization of this trajectory is possible? Both Fang Bao's elaboration of the elementary horizontalist model and Li Qingzhi's leap towards advanced horizontalism arose in reaction to interventionist excesses. It is worth invoking Kishimoto Mio's image of the dakō shitsutsu 蛇行しつつ public policy of the high Qing period, perpetually meandering between extremes of interventionism and relaxation, with the operational principles of territorial governance and the conscious intent of the imperial presider conspiring to guide policy back towards a golden mean. My previous translation of dakō shitsutsu as “zigzagging” devalues the metaphor implicit in the Chinese characters: the image is of serpentine motion—the winding course described by the snake.Footnote 109 We need neither disparage the textual tradition discussed in these pages for failing to run forward like the hare nor seek to rescue it from orientalist perceptions of stagnation by claiming that, like Aesop's tortoise, it reached the finishing line at its own pace. Instead, we observe with curiosity the non-linear motions of the snake.
It would be premature, on the basis of two mid-eighteenth-century examples, to credit our snake with having spent a thousand years zigzagging. Let us notice instead the distinctiveness of where it went on one of its perambulations. No Enlightenment-era French snake is likely to have nosed its way towards the foothills of Sen's “entitlement approach” to understanding famine.Footnote 110 There was nothing in the perceived problems with the “police” approach to subsistence policy to suggest such a direction. In eighteenth-century France even the stabilizing sale was at an embryonic stage; the question whether systematic state stockpiling was increasing market grain prices did not arise, and even if it had, after mid-century radical opinion was calling for the abandonment of practices whose aim was to keep grain cheap for consumers. A good return for growers was the new priority.Footnote 111 It was China in which the capacity to halt famines by distributing life-saving resources was a touchstone of good government, and the more successfully the state stored grain, the greater the degree of choice its agents had as to the form in which relief was issued. The ever-normal system reflected in Dong Wei's handbook was quite poorly administered, and the philanthropic granaries, although state-supported, did not necessarily have large grain stockpiles either.Footnote 112 In those circumstances, arguing that distributing coin was actually quite beneficial was perhaps pushing on an open door. In the mid-1740s, by contrast, the availability of very large stockpiles created real choice, and the perceived causal link between rising grain reserves and rising market prices pushed a minority of officials to suggest that insistence that one must have ample grain to distribute was the wrong choice. However, the strength of the reliance that the territorial bureaucracy vested in the ever-normal system made it desirable to put more arrows in one's argumentative quiver than had been the case in Dong Wei's day. It was in that context that Li Qingzhi and Sun Hao adumbrated innovative arguments for distributing relief in monetary form.
The Chinese snake, in other words, tried out an interesting new direction in response to a China-specific issue: the perceived impact of unusually committed and methodical implementation of the distinctively Chinese approach to popular-subsistence policy. It is no criticism of that canny reptile if, having climbed to the top of a rock from which a whole new vista was theoretically discernible, it slithered back down and went the other way. Its reasons for so doing were grounded in that same commonsense perception of the order of things that Sen is remarkable for having challenged in 1981.Footnote 113 What the Chinese snake did not do was pursue a European path but fall short of the destination.
