The cambridge history of china volume 11 late ching, 1800 1911, part 2

THE CAMBRIDGE
H I S T O R Y OF
CHINA
Volume II
Late Ch'ing, 1800-1911, Part 2
edited by
JOHN K. F A I R B A N K
and
K W A N G - C H I N G LIU

CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

CAMBRIDGE
LONDON

ã

NEW

YORK

MELBOURNE

ã NEW
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ROCHELLE

SYDNEY

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Tai Lieu Chat Luong


CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Cambridge University Press 1980
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1980
Reprinted 1999, 2005, 2006
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:
The Cambridge History of China.
Vol. 11 edited by J. K. Fairbank and K. C. Liu.
Bibliography: p.

Includes index.
CONTENTS : v. 10. Late Ch'ing, 1800-1911. pt. 1.
v. 11. Late Ch'ing, 1800-1911. pt. 2.
1. China History. I. Twitchett, Denis Crispin.
II. Fairbank, John King, 1907- III. Liu, Kwang-Ching, 1921DS735.C3145 95i'°3 76-29851
ISBN O 521 22O29 7 (V. Il)
ISBN-13 978-0-521-22029-3 hardback
ISBN-IO 0-521-22029-7 hardback

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GENERAL EDITORS' PREFACE

In the English-speaking world, the Cambridge histories have since the
beginning of the century set the pattern for multi-volume works of history,
with chapters written by experts of a particular topic, and unified by the
guiding hand of volume editors of senior standing. The Cambridge Modern
History, planned by Lord Acton, appeared in sixteen volumes between
1902 and 1912. It was followed by The Cambridge Ancient History, The
Cambridge Medieval History, The Cambridge History of English Literature, and

Cambridge Histories of India, of Poland, and of the British Empire. The
original Modern History has now been replaced by The New Cambridge

Modern History in twelve volumes, and The Cambridge Economic History of

Europe is now being completed. Other Cambridge Histories recently
undertaken include a history of Islam, of Arabic literature, of the Bible
treated as a central document of and influence on Western civilization,
and of Iran and China.
In the case of China, Western historians face a special problem. The
history of Chinese civilization is more extensive and complex than that
of any single Western nation, and only slightly less ramified than the
history of European civilization as a whole. The Chinese historical record
is immensely detailed and extensive, and Chinese historical scholarship has
been highly developed and sophisticated for many centuries. Yet until
recent decades the study of China in the West, despite the important
pioneer work of European sinologists, had hardly progressed beyond the
translation of some few classical historical texts, and the outline history
of the major dynasties and their institutions.
Recently Western scholars have drawn more fully upon the rich traditions of historical scholarship in China and also in Japan, and greatly
advanced both our detailed knowledge of past events and institutions,
and also our critical understanding of traditional historiography. In
addition, the present generation of Western historians of China can also
draw upon the new outlooks and techniques of modern Western historical scholarship, and upon recent developments in the social sciences,
while continuing to build upon the solid foundations of rapidly proCambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008


vi

G E N E R A L EDITORS* PREFACE

gressing European, Japanese and Chinese sinological studies. Recent
historical events, too, have given prominence to new problems, while

throwing into question many older conceptions. Under these multiple
impacts the Western revolution in Chinese studies is steadily gathering
momentum.
When The Cambridge History of China was first planned in 1966, the aim
was to provide a substantial account of the history of China as a bench
mark for the Western history-reading public: an account of the current
state of knowledge in six volumes. Since then the out-pouring of current
research, the application of new methods, and the extension of scholarship
into new fields, have further stimulated Chinese historical studies.
This growth is indicated by the fact that the History has now become a
planned sixteen volumes, including the earliest pre-dynastic period, but
which still leave out such topics as the history of art and of literature,
many aspects of economics and technology, and all the riches of local
history.
The striking advances in our knowledge of China's past over the last
decade will continue and accelerate. Western historians of this great and
complex subject are justified in their efforts by the needs of their own
peoples for greater and deeper understanding of China. Chinese history
belongs to the world, not only as a right and necessity, but also as a
subject of compelling interest.
JOHN K. FAIRBANK
DENIS TWITCHETT

June 1976

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CONTENTS

General editors' preface

page v

Ust of maps

xi

List of tables

xiv

Preface to volume 11
1 Economic trends in the late Ch'ing empire, 1870-1911
by ALBERT FEUERWERKER, Professor of History, University
of Michigan
Agriculture
Handicraft industry
Modern industry
Domestic and foreign commerce
Government and the economy
2 Late Ch'ing foreign relations, 1866-1905
by IMMANUEL C. Y. H S U , Professor of History, University
of California, Santa Barbara

The changing context
Foreign, relations, 1866-75
Acceleration of imperialism in frontier areas and
tributary states
Japanese aggression in Korea

The threatened 'partition of China'
The Boxer Uprising
The effects of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the
Russo-Japanese War
3 Changing Chinese views of Western relations, 1840-95
by Y E N - P ' I N G
and E R H - M I N
Hong Kong

xv
1

2
15
28
40
58
70

70
71
84
101
109
115
130
142

Professor of History, University of Tennessee
W A N G , Senior Lecturer, Chinese University of

HAO,

Introduction: traditional views of foreign relations
Initial response and inertia, 1840-60
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142
145


VU1

CONTENTS

The impact of Western power and wealth, 1860-95
page 156
The ambivalence of foreign policy views, 1860-95
172
Continuity and change in Chinese views of Western relations 199
4 The military challenge: the north-west and the coast
by KWANG-CHING LIU, Professor of History, University of
California, Davis and RICHARD J. SMITH, Associate Professor of
History, Rice University
Ch'ing armies of the post-Taiping era
The Muslim revolts and their international implications
Ch'ing victories in Shensi and Kansu
The reconquest of Sinkiang
Li Hung-chang and coastal defence
The Sino-French War and its aftermath
The disaster of the Sino-Japanese War

5 Intellectual change and the reform movement, 1890-8
by H A O CHANG, Professor of History, Ohio State University
Background - aspects of the Western impact
K'ang Yu-wei and the emerging intellectual ferment
The reform movement
Reform in Hunan
The debacle of 1898
Legacies of the reform era
6 Japan and the Chinese Revolution o f i 9 i i
by MARIUS JANSEN, Professor of History, Princeton University
The opening of China as a warning to Japan
Meiji Japan in Chinese thinking
Chinese students in Japan
Nationalism and its repercussions
Influence through translation
Japan and the Chinese revolutionaries
7 Political and institutional reform, 1901-11
by CHUZO ICHIKO, Professor of History, Center for Modern
Chinese Studies, Tqyo Bunko, Tokyo
The reform edict of the Kuang-hsu Emperor
Reforms in education
Reforms in the military system
Preparations for constitutionalism
Financial reorganization and centralization
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202

202
211

225
235
243
251
269
274
274
283
291
300
318
329
339
340
343
348
353
361
363
375

375
376
383
388
403


CONTENTS

Other reform programmes
Characteristics of the late-Ch'ing reforms

IX

page 408
411

8 Government, merchants and industry t o i 9 i i

416

by W E L L I N G T O N K . K . C H A N , Associate Professor of History,

Occidental College
Merchants and modern enterprise: a reassessment
Official sponsorship of modern industry
Campaigns for private enterprise
Peking and the provinces: the conflict over leadership
The emergence of entrepreneurial officials
9 The republican revolutionary movement
by M I C H A E L G A S S T E R , Professor of History, Rutgers University
Early coalitions: the revolutionary m o v e m e n t before 1905
T h e revolutionary alliance, 1905—8
T h e fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, 1908-12
T h e emerging coalition
T h e birth of the republic

416
421

437
447
454
463
465
484
506
507
515

10 Currents of social change
by M A R I A N N E B A S T I D - B R U G U I E R E , Maitre de recherche au Centre
national de la recherche scientifique, Paris
T h e privileged classes
T h e c o m m o n people
T h e g r o w t h of a sub-proletariat
Dynamics of social change

535

Bibliographical essays

603

Bibliography

627

Glossary-index

683

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536
571
586
5 89


MAPS

i
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
io
11

Ch'ing empire - physical features
Major crop areas
Trade routes
Railway building
Central Asia
French Indo-China

Imperialism
Peking
International relations of Manchuria and Korea
Muslim Rebellion
Ch'ing reconquest of Sinkiang

12

Taiwan

page xu
4
42

55
89
98
114
120

216

236
259

13 Sino-Japanese War
14 Revolution of 191.1

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271

523


MAP I. Ch'ing empire
- physical features
0
0

libo miles

" - " Trade Route
Grand Canal
Great Wall
Pass
Region of wind-borne foess

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TABLES

i
z
3
4
5
6
7

8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

Estimated gross national product
page z
Changes in rural population and area of farm land
5
Changes in the size of farms
$
Chou and hsien reporting of harvests
7
Trends in crop acreages
8
Estimated production of major crops
11
Cotton yarn and cloth imports
20

Capital, looms and workers in handicraft workshops
23
Estimated yarn and cloth consumption
2$
Number and capitalization of foreign-owned industries
29
Foreign and Sino-foreign manufacturing and mining
30-1
Nature of Chinese-owned manufacturing and mining
35
Location of Chinese-owned manufacturing and mining
36
Initial capitalization of Chinese-owned manufacturing and
mining
37
Number and initial capitalization of treaty-port and inland
Chinese-owned manufacturing firms
38
China's foreign trade
46-7
Distribution of principal imports
49
Distribution of principal exports
49
Foreign trade and principal trading partners, 1871-1911
JI
Foreign trade and principal trading partners, 1899-1905
52
Estimated revenue and expenditure of the central government
63

Military and indemnity loans
67

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j

,

j


PREFACE TO VOLUME 11

While generating is required in all thinking about history, it becomes a
special problem in the case of China's history. 'China' is in fact one of the
largest generalities used in modern speech. The term represents the largest
body of people in one of the biggest land areas over the longest recorded
time - a four-dimensional non-pareil. Just to think about 'China' or 'the
Chinese' is to rise to a level of generality (measured in persons or years or
acres) that in other fields of history would seem almost infeasibly high.
Europe since the Minoan age is a smaller entity. To say, with our greater
knowledge of Europe and comparative ignorance of China, that European
history is more complex would be presumptuous. Until modern times the
Chinese record was more extensive. Perhaps China's greater sense of unity
produced more homogeneity than in Europe, or perhaps this is partly an
illusion created by the traditional Chinese historians' primary concern for
social order, the state and its ruling class.
In any case, China's historical record with its already high level of
generality is now being studied in search of syntheses and unifying concepts to give peoples of today some image of China's past. This is urgently

needed, but the difficulties are great: the public need for a generalized
picture often coincides with a popular seeking for predetermined conclusions, in order to allocate blame and identify villains, or to acknowledge
guilt and regret it, or to justify doctrines and reaffirm them, as the case
may be.
This means that what the historian of China contributes to his history
must be scrutinized with even greater care than usual, especially in a history
of China written by outside observers. For example, modern Chinese
history in the West has been in large part a history of foreign relations
with China, the aspect of modern China most easily studied by foreigners.
Of course the multiplicity of foreign influences on China since 1840 (or
since 1514) is plain to see. It has even become customary to date modern
times from the Opium War, a foreign invasion. But all such impacts from
abroad formed only a small part of the Chinese people's day-to-day environment, in which the surrounding landscape and inherited ways remained
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XVI

PREFACE TO VOLUME II

dominant and changed only slowly. Is it not likely that foreign influences
will in time bulk less large in the landscape of nineteenth-century China ?
Not because they will shrink in size or significance but simply because they
will be overshadowed by the accumulated new knowledge about China's
indigenous experience.
Volume 10 of this series begins not with the foreign commercial invasion
and Opium War but with the view from Peking - the institutional structure
of the Ch'ing empire in China and Inner Asia early in the nineteenth
century. This is followed by Peking's growing domestic problems of
administrative control and social order in the first half of the century.

Similar signs of internal malaise as well as signs of rejuvenation appear in
the accounts of the Taiping and the Nien rebellions and of the tortured
success of the Ch'ing restoration. China's economy, and even her military
institutions, shows the inner dynamics of an ancient yet far from stagnant
society. In the face of unprecedented strains, millions of men and women
knew how to survive. It is evident that by the end of the dynasty the
eighteenth-century triumph of Ch'ing arms and governance in the Manchus'
Inner Asian empire had actually set the stage for the expansion of the Han
Chinese from China proper into the spacious borderlands of Manchuria,
Mongolia, Sinkiang and eastern Tibet - a great secular migration consequent upon China's phenomenal population growth that began even
before the eighteenth century.
The rise of the Canton trade - a two-way street - is only the best-known
part of this great Han expansion in numbers, migration, trade and even
investment. Part of this Chinese expansion had indeed already taken place
overseas, parallel with the expansion of Europe. It occurred beyond the
Ch'ing frontiers in that realm of maritime China which forms a minor
tradition roughly half as old as the great tradition of the continental,
agrarian-bureaucratic empire that dominated the official histories. Seafaring enterprise in the form of the junk trade from Amoy and Canton to
South-East Asia (Nanyang, 'the southern seas') long antedated the arrival
of the European colonial powers in that region. One has only to think of
the Southern Sung navy taken over by the Mongols, of their expedition to
Java in 1292, and of the early Ming expeditions across the Indian Ocean in
the period 1405-33. Granted that the emperor's leadership of maritime
China was foreclosed by the resurgence of Mongol power in the 1440s
which pre-empted Ming attention, and by the eventual succession of the
Ch'ing as another Inner Asian, anti-seafaring dynasty, the fact remains that
in the South-East Asian colonies of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch,
British and French the European rulers increasingly relied upon Chinese
merchants and middlemen to handle retail trade and perform the tasks of

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PREFACE TO VOLUME II

XVU

licensed monopolists and petty tax collectors. These overseas Chinese
(Hua-ch'iao, 'Chinese sojourners') became a special middle class in the
European colonies, just as they became indispensable also to the rulers of
Siam, where one of them indeed founded the Chakri dynasty that still
reigns at Bangkok. Though unappreciated and sometimes denounced by
Peking, the seafarers and entrepreneurs of maritime China thus participated
in the commercial revolution of early modern times and the colonialism to
which it gave rise in South-East Asia.
When this accelerating growth of international trade at length forced
its way into China through the Tiger's Mouth (Hu-men, Bocca Tigris)
below Canton, merchants of Canton, Swatow and Amoy both in legal
trade and in the opium trade were among the prime movers in the subsequent growth of international contact. Despite the plethora of foreign
commercial records and the present paucity of Chinese, we know that the
foreign trade of China was a distinctly Sino-foreign enterprise - in fact,
once the treaty ports were opened, the foreign firms' compradors handled
most of the trade both into China from the ports and out of China through
the ports. Hong Kong, Shanghai and the other places of trade became
Chinese cities no matter what the foreign residents may have thought about
their sovereignty, their treaty rights or the fire-power of their gunboats. It
is almost equally true to say that Chinese participated in the foreigners'
opening of China as to say that foreigners participated in China's commercial opening of herself. In the rapid growth of the East India Company's
great staple trade in tea at Canton c. 1784-1834, the tea, after all, came from
China. Taken together with the Chinese farmers or traders in far-off

Sinkiang or Manchuria, the seafarers and entrepreneurs of maritime China
bespeak the vitality of the Chinese people, especially since they received
scant help from their own government.
If foreign trade was a two-sided process in which both Chinese and
foreigners actively participated, there is also another consideration with
which to appraise the foreign influence in late Ch'ing history: during the
nineteenth century, foreign contact bulked larger and larger in the experience of almost every people. The great migration from Europe to the New
World had long preceded the more modest movement of Chinese overseas
in foreign vessels after mid-century. For the British public the Opium War
was of less strategic relevance than the First Afghan War, the Boxer
Uprising was only a spectacular incident during the long grind of the
Boer War. For most peoples industrialization came from abroad; the centre
of gravity in many aspects of change was seen to lie outside the country.
International science and technology, like international trade and politics,
increasingly contributed to the global life of a world society. In this perCambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008


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P R E F A C E TO VOLUME I I

spective it seems only natural that outside influences should have played an
unprecedentedly larger role in late Ch'ing history.
China's entrance into world society has now laid the basis for historical
interpretations that are themselves an ultimate form of foreign influence.
These interpretations align the Chinese experience with that of other
peoples. This is done first with 'imperialism' and secondly with 'modernization'. These approaches are by way of analogy, seeking to find in China
phenomena found universally elsewhere.
Both imperialism and modernization are terms of almost meta-historical
scope that require precise definition and concrete illustration if they are to

be of use to historians. In a general way imperialism implies foreign
initiatives while modernization suggests domestic processes. In its
economic aspect, imperialism in the case of China stopped short of colonialism. No plantation economy was developed by foreigners solely for an
export market. Even the classic Marxist agent of disaster, the import of
factory-made cotton textiles, did not destroy China's handicraft production
of cloth; it was sustained into the second quarter of the twentieth century
by the supply of cheaper machine-made cotton yarn that could be used by
otherwise unemployed members of farming families whose weaving could
not have fed them by itself but could nevertheless add a tiny bit to their
mea"gre family incomes. The fact that in the 1930s perhaps 70 per cent of
China's cotton cloth still came from handlooms indicates how strongly
Chinese families felt compelled to make use of their unemployed labour
power. Handweaving indexed their poverty. In thwarting the domination
of factory-made cloth, it also suggests how China's people on the whole
escaped becoming a mass market for foreign goods (with the exception of
cigarettes and kerosene for illumination) simply by being too poor. This
example may suggest how much more we need to know about the internal
aspects of China's relations with the outside imperialists in the late Ch'ing.
The psychological impact of imperialism, though slow to accumulate,
was less uncertain. As time goes on, imperialism as a theme in modern
China's history may become more substantial in the realm of thought and
psychology, conducive to the rise of nationalism, while it may stand up
less well in the quantified field of economics. Chinese ideas of foreign
exploitation are already more broadly and easily documented than such
exploitation itself. The aggressive assertion of foreign privilege is the
major fact in the record, and on this level the missionary vied with the
merchant. The imperialism of warfare and gunboat diplomacy, treaty
rights and the foreign presence, became very plain to all at the time and is
clearly remembered in the national heritage today.
A more recent outsiders' view, the concept of modernization, as applied

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P R E F A C E TO VOLUME I I

XIX

to China suffers from being a catch-all for the concepts of the social
sciences developed mainly in the modern West. The effort of the social
sciences to be objectively value-free may sometimes be contaminated by
their being a culture-bound product of the West. If so, this should be a
temporary problem that will be obviated by the growth of a world culture.
More serious is the high level of generality inherent in the term modernization. We take it to be a prehension into unity of the ideas of progressive
development exemplified in all the social sciences including history.
Modern times see widespread growth which brings complexity, change
and development in the analytic realms of the economy, the polity, the
society and the culture. But the modernization process in each of these
realms is defined in the terms of the discipline concerned. To posit a single
principle at work in every realm across the board is a further act of faith.
This may be a logical satisfaction and yet difficult to apply to the confused
data of history. Do we really gain in understanding by promoting the
adjective 'modern' to the status of an abstract entity, 'modernization' ? The
term may become a useful basket, like 'life', in which to carry a load of
things largely unknown, messages undeciphered, mysteries unresolved.
Like any term, once reified as a thing in itself, it may become a substitute
for thought.
As the corpus of modern historical research and writing on China grows
and develops, we should expect less demand for the over-arching generalizations that give preliminary structure to a new field of learning. The
concrete experience and conscious concerns of the late Ch'ing era should
receive major attention, as they do in many parts of this volume. While

literature and the arts remain regrettably beyond our scope here, the
history of philosophical and political thought gives us major insights into
what happened and how. In brief, the late Ch'ing response to the West now
begins to seem like only a minor motif; the major process was China's continued response to the Chinese past in the light of new conditions including
the West. Stimulus, in short, is where you find it, and stimulus without
response is no stimulus at all.
For example, the deterioration of the Grand Canal transport system to
feed Peking roused an effort in the 1820s to revive the sea transport of
government rice around Shantung, an institutional arrangement within
the tradition of the statecraft (ching-shih) school of practical administrators.
Only in the 1870s were steamships adopted to meet the problem. Again,
the doctrinal basis for the self-strengthening movement, to defend China
by borrowing Western technology, may be viewed as an application of
traditional statecraft in a new context. Only in the 1890s, after many
disasters, were ideas of evolutionary progress and social Darwinism

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PREFACE TO VOLUME II

smuggled into Confucianism as a necessary platform for the reform movement. And in the end, the principal struggle of the reformers was not
against imperialism directly but against those Chinese traditions that had
made imperialism possible. Late Ch'ing reformers and revolutionaries both
accepted the ancient Confucian adage, 'If you can keep your own house in
order, who will dare to insult you ?' China's strength must come from
within. For scholars trained in the classics, the chief source of inspiration
for China's future was still her past. For today's historians of the late

Ch'ing, this puts a premium on understanding China's great tradition as
well as the nineteenth century. There is no substitute for our knowing what
the generations before Sun Yat-sen actually had in mind.
Mary Clabaugh Wright (1917-70) left her mark on the history of late
imperial China through her students and friends and in two books dealing
respectively with the 1860s and the 1900s - the initial and final periods of
the present volume. The last stand of Chinese conservatism: the T'ung-chih

Restoration, 1862-1874, which developed from her Harvard dissertation of
1952, analysed the problems and policies of the Ch'ing regime comprehensively as few have done before or since. China in revolution: thefirstphase,
1900-1913, edited from a conference she organized and presided over in
1965, is the first all-embracing study of the subject that embodies the
results of modern scholarship from half-a-dozen countries. From 1945 to
1959 Mary Wright built up the Chinese library of the Hoover Institution
on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford and then from 1959 until her
untimely death was Professor of History at Yale University. Since this
volume of the Cambridge History of China is so indebted to her pioneering
work, we dedicate it to her.
JKF
October 1977

KCL

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CHAPTER 1

ECONOMIC TRENDS IN THE LATE
CH'ING EMPIRE, 1870-1911

There was little of the Chinese economy prior to the twentieth century that
was not included within the agricultural sector or quite intimately connected with it.' The bulk of the following essay ought properly to be
devoted to an analysis of the structure and development of Chinese agriculture in the nineteenth century and its implications for the rest of the
economy. I have, however, while discussing agriculture first, given
roughly equal attention to handicrafts, modern industry, trade and commerce, and the fiscal system. If these divisions are so obviously the customary ones, I can only plead my own limitations and the possible extenuation that - with honourable and increasing exceptions - the studies of
China's modern economic history upon which I have had to rely for this
survey are themselves conventionally descriptive works.
The treatment of material in all of the following sections is unavoidably
selective. I have in each case focused on what was new or changing in the
last five decades of the Manchu dynasty against a background which, until
1911 and long afterwards, remained a basically unaltered mix of the factors
of production operating within a largely constant social context. This is
not to imply that nothing of importance changed in the last century of
imperial China. On the contrary, ideological and political storms uprooted
the Confucian empire. Fundamental economic change and modern
economic growth, however, did not come of their own momentum out of
the late-Ch'ing economic system. They were pre-eminently the by-products
of a new and possibly still tenuous political integration which itself was
achieved only after decades of political strife, foreign invasion and civil
war.
One must begin by reluctantly accepting that precise quantitative
information of a global kind - as opposed to a fair amount of suggestive
local and partial data - is not available and probably cannot be satisfactorily derived for pre-republican China. Nowhere is this more apparent
1

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Committee on the Chinese Economy
of the Social Science Research Council, and of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University
of Michigan in the preparation of this essay.

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2

ECONOMIC TRENDS, 1 8 7 0 - 1 9 1 1

than in the case of so fundamental a measure as national income. Table 1
reproduces, with modifications, the only attempt, of which I am aware, to
estimate China's gross national product in the nineteenth century. The
individual components were often arbitrarily arrived at, but it is doubtful
whether substantial amounts of more reliable information can be assembled.
These estimates roughly indicate the relative sizes in the 1880s of the several
sectors of the economy.
TABLE 1

Estimated gross national product of China in the 1880s
Amount (1,000 taels)

Sector

2,229,941

Agriculture
Nonagriculture
mining
manufacturing*
construction
transportation
trade

finance
residential housing
government services
professional, gentry and other
services
net income from abroad

66.79

1,108,816

33.21

47,800
128,000
30,000
30,000
220,000
74,645
164,000
164,000

1.43
3-77
0.90
0.90
6.59
2.24
4.91
4.91

241,313
11,258

7-23
0.34

Total

3.338,757

100.00

* almost entirely handicraft.
Source: Chung-li Chang, The income of the Chinese gentry (1962), 296. The principal shortcomings of
this estimate, apart from the admittedly critical data question, are Chang's probable
overstatement of the share of gentry services, and the much more serious reliance on
1887 official data for the area of cultivated land. As I suggest in the next section, these
data and thus the share of agriculture should be adjusted upward by at least one-third.
This I have done and, leaving Chang's other components unchanged, I have accordingly
recalculated the percentages.
AGRICULTURE

While there were changes in detail and alterations in the size or quality of
certain components, the technology and organization of Chinese agriculture differed little in 1911 from what it had been in 1870. (Even into the
1930s it remained largely unchanged.) The principal changes were: a slow
but perceptible population increase unaccompanied by an equivalent
extension of cultivated land; a resulting decrease - particularly in North
China - in the size of the average farm; changes in the pattern of crops
grown, partly in response to the increasingly adverse man-land ratio and

partly in response to new external market opportunities; the absolute and

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AGRICULTURE

3

relative decline of cotton spinning as a peasant handicraft and a partial
restructuring of the sources of rural non-agricultural income in response
to this decline; some differentiation of land-holding patterns in the immediate hinterlands of the growing treaty ports from those of the bulk of
the rural interior of China; and a completion of the process already long
under way by which the distinction between various legal forms of land
tenure was dissipated.
No useful demographic data for the last half of the nineteenth century
are of course available. The official estimates for the 1840s put China's
population at a little more than 400 million persons; these, it has been
argued, while not accurate in detail are relatively good data.2 The Taiping
Rebellion and the other great mid-century uprisings not only resulted in
substantial population losses, especially in central China, but also produced
a breakdown of the refurbished pao-chia system which had collected the
reasonably reliable population data for the period 1776-1850. 'The century
between 1851 and 1949, despite the availability of various figures, is
practically a demographer's vacuum.'3
There are, nevertheless, sufficient qualitative indications from which to
assert, if not to measure, a slowly increasing population from the 1870s
until the end of the dynasty. Migrations of population from provinces to
the west and north which had not been so severely afflicted gradually
repopulated the Yangtze valley provinces that the civil wars had ravaged.

The last four decades of the Manchu dynasty were internally relatively
peaceful and, compared to mid-century, prosperous. While the wars with
France in 1884-5 and with Japan in 1894-5 were politically and diplomatically of great significance, they had no major demographic effect. The
great famine of 1877-8 in North-West China and lesser but still serious
famines in 1892-4 and 1900 unquestionably resulted in temporary population losses. Such crises, caused by drought and floods, had been endemic
in the past and were experienced again in the twentieth century, for
example in 1920-1, 1928, 1931 and 193 5. They are inherent components of
the demographic pattern characteristic of many 'underdeveloped' countries
which combines a high but widely fluctuating death-rate and a high but
relatively stable birth-rate to produce slow but substantial population
increments.
But, how large an increment ? C. M. Chiao and J. L. Buck have estimated
from birth- and death-rates observed in 4,216 farm families from four
provinces in 1924-5 that the rural population of China might possibly have
grown at an average rate of 1.4 per cent per annum between the 1860s and
2

Ping-ti Ho, Studies on tbe population of China, t)SS-i9J3, 47-64.

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J

Ibid. 97.


ECONOMIC TRENDS, 1 8 7 0 - I 9 I I

MAP. 2 Major crop areas
the 1920s.4 Such a rate of increase, if uninterrupted, would have resulted in

a doubling of the population during these seven decades, and on the face
of it appears too high as an actual long-term average although it might
have been valid in some areas for shorter periods. In 1934, the National
Agricultural Research Bureau of the Ministry of Industry produced, from
retrospective and thus tenuous data assembled by its crop reporters, an
estimate of changes in the rural population and the area of farm land
between 1873 and 1933 which I reproduce in table 2. A population increase
of 17 per cent for the forty years 1873-1913, or an annual average of slightly
less than 0.5 per cent, is suggested. Assuming a total population of
between 350 and 400 million in 187 3, by 1913 this total would have increased
to between 410 and 468 million. Bearing in mind that the mid-century
population was somewhat more than 400 million, that the Taiping and
other civil wars resulted in severe population losses, and that the population of China in 1953, after many years of war and civil war, was enumerated at 5 83 million in the closest thing to a real census that China has ever
4

C. M. Chiao and J. L. Buck, 'The composition and growth of rural population groups in
China', Chinese Economic Journal, 2.2 (March 1928) 219-55.

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AGRICULTURE
TABLE 2

Index numbers of changes in China's rural
population and area of farm land,

= I0°)

1873

1893
1913
1933

Population

Farm land

100

100

108

101
101
101

"7
'3«

Source: Department of Agricultural Economics,
National Agricultural Research Bureau,
Ministry of Industries, Crop reporting in China,
'934. 48-53-

experienced, these estimates for 1873 and 1913 are at least not unreasonable.
The National Agricultural Research Bureau's respondents, as table 2
indicates, reported that the farm area in their several localities showed no
increase comparable to the slow but continuing population growth which

occurred. The resultant worsening of the man-land ratio is reflected in the
historical data on average farm size shown in table 3, collected by J. L.
Buck'sfieldinvestigators for his monumental land utilization study. Buck's
respondents overwhelmingly attributed the reported decreases in average
TABLE 3

Changes in the si%e of farms, 1870—1930

Regions, areas and locations
China
wheat region
rice region
Wheat Region Areas
spring wheat (Kansu, Tsinghai)
winter wheat-millet (Honan, Shansi,
Shensi)
winter wheat-kaoliang (Anhwei, Honan,
Hopei*, Kiangsu, Shantung)
Rice region areas
Yangtze rice-wheat (Anhwei, Chekiang,
Honan, Hupei, Kiangsi, Kiangsu)
rice-tea (Hunan, Kiangsi)
Szechwan rice (Shensi, Szechwan)
double-crop rice (Fukien)
south-western rice (Kweichow)

Number of
locations
reporting

Average crop area per farm
(hectares)

iSfo

1S/0
'•37
'•75
0.67

'•35
1-77
0.81

ifro
1.06
1.32
o-77

0.92
1.10
0.72

8

0.48
1.14

0.51
1.28

0.66
0.97

0.71
0.81

'9

2.19

2.18

'•53

1.26

15

°-77

0.99

0.84

0.79

6

0.42

0.82
0.58

0.42

2
1
2

—

0.52

0.76
0.64
0.55
0.48

0.74
0.55
°-53
0.36

55
29
26
2

0.76
0.54

* Hopei province was, of course, called Chihli in the late Ch'ing period.
Source: John Lossing Buck, Land utilisation in China. Statistics, 288.

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'9)»


6

ECONOMIC TRENDS, 1 8 7 O - I 9 I I

farm size to increases in the population of their areas. In North China
(Buck's winter wheat-kaoliang areas) the decline in average farm size was
more striking than in central China (the rice-wheat and rice-tea areas). The
difference is attributable to the much greater demographic losses from the
Taiping Rebellion in the provinces south of the Yangtze River and the
consequent temporary fall in the man-land ratio in Central and South
China. As population migrated to these then relatively less-crowded
provinces from more crowded areas, the man-land ratio rose and average
farm size after 1900 slowly declined.
While it is certain that rural living standards between 1870 and 1911 did
not improve, there is no conclusive evidence that population growth and
declining average farm size were accompanied by a drastic secular fall in
the peasant standard of living. The semi-annual official reports from the
provinces to Peking on the quality of the summer and autumn harvests do
indicate a definite downward trend in the course of the nineteenth century.
It is reasonable to expect that some deterioration occurred during the
catastrophic rebellions of the 1850s and 1860s as table 4 suggests. A continued decline after 1870, however, is not convincingly confirmed by the

numerous reports of local crop conditions which appear annually in the
Reports and returns on trade by the Imperial Maritime Customs. My suspicion
is that the higher proportion of poorer harvests reported in the last decades
of the dynasty in part reflects the efforts of the provinces to resist Peking's
importunate demands for increased tax remittances, which are described
below in the discussion of government and the economy. The depopulation attributable to the rebellions, moreover, could be called a Malthusian
safety valve which temporarily reduced the inexorable pressure of population on land.
Conditions of individual farmers and of spatially separate localities of
course differed widely, with the difference between survival and misery
often depending upon uncertain weather, the rapacity of the local officials
and the presence or absence of civil war and banditry in the locality. Overall, however, total crop production between 1870 and 1911 probably
increased adequately to support the larger population. This increment was
not due to any major changes in farm technology or organization. No
important new crops or seed varieties (like corn and early-ripening rice
earlier in the dynasty) were introduced in the second half of the nineteenth
century. The middle decades of civil war, moreover, had seen a substantial
destruction of capital stock which was only gradually replaced. Irrigation,
water storage and control, and grain storage facilities were not extended or
improved beyond their eighteenth-century levels. The increase in crop
production was apparently die result mainly of a shift by farmers to crops
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AGRICULTURE

f

which yielded a larger amount of food or income per unit of land and at
the same time required more labour for their cultivation. Crop shifts of this
kind in the early twentieth century, as the man-land ratio continued to

TABLE 4

Percentage of chou and hsien in nine provinces reporting above normal,
normal and below normal harvests, 1821-1910
Number of reports*
1821
182;
1830
1835

1840
1845
1850
1855
i860
1865
1870
1875
1880
1885

1890
1895

1900
1905
1910

,114
.'92

.321
.229
,3O4
,306

,019
979
752

i ,087
>*55

1 .308
l .309
1 .246
1 .3°9
1 . 2 43
i ,190
] ,198
1 ,126

Above
normal
42.99
46.47
39.64
20.17
25.07
29.24
22.27

14.09
20.21
5-79
4.86
6.19
7-79
6.26
5-27
3-94
4.28
4.00
4.61

Normal

54-3°

51.67
61.54
65.58
67.02
63.93
72.32
65.67
59.04
53.81
45.01
53.66
52-94
49-51

45-37
45-29
42.85
43-*4
37-74

Below
normal
2.69
1.84
1.51
14.23

7.89
6.81
J-39
20.22
24-73
40.38
50.11
40.13
39.26
44-22
49-35
50.76
52.85
52-7J
57-63

* For eight of the nine provinces both summer and autumn reports are included; the number of
tbou and hsien reporting is thus about half the number of annual reports
Source: Calculated from data in Li Wen-chih, comp. Cbung-kuo cbin-tai nung-yeb sbib t^u-Hao
ti-i-cbi, 1840-1911 (Source materials on the history of agriculture in modern China, 1st
collection, 1840-1911), 761-9, which are based on reports submitted in response to the
following edict: 'An edict to the Hu-pu. Hereafter, in reporting the harvest results of
the several provinces, use the following categories; eight Jen [i.e., 80 per cent of a
theoretical maximum] is to be taken as a rich harvest, six to seven ftn as a normal harvest,
and Eve fen or less as a poor harvest.' Ta-Cb'ing Kao-tmng sbun-buang-ti sbih-lu (Veritable
records of the Ch'ien-lung Emperor of the Ch'ing dynasty), 339. 4ia-b, 14 June 1749
(vol. 22, p. 5151 of Taipei reprint, 1964).

worsen, are shown in the data on trends in crop acreage between 1904-9
and 1924-9 collected by J. L. Buck's investigators and summarized in
table 5. These indicate a progressive substitution of corn, sweet potatoes
and sesame for barley, kaoliang and millet as food crops, and also an
increase in such cash crops as cotton to supply the expanding mills of
Shanghai and Tientsin. For the period 1870-1911, unfortunately, not even
such imperfect although suggestive data are available; but if changes of
this kind could occur amidst the political instability and civil war of the

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8

ECONOMIC TRENDS, 1 8 7 O - I 9 I I

early Republic, they are not implausible in the relative stability of the lateCh'ing decades. Some partial clues are provided by an examination of
trends in the exportation of agricultural products between 1870 and 1911.

TABLE 5

Trends in crop acreages between 1904-9 and 19}0-}
Number of
localities
reporting

Estimated percentage of total crop area*
1904-9

1914-19

1924-9

1930-5

Crops whose acreage increased
or was unchanged

broad beans
corn
cotton
opium
peanuts
rapeseed
rice
sesame
soy-beans
sweet potatoes
wheat

7

9

9

9

8

22

11

16
18

17
20
20

*9

11

14
14

13

18

14

3

11

9

8

11

11

5

21

27

17

15
40

37

7

7

4
8

41
8

28
40

10
10

9
8

18
29

IO

11

12

26

27

17

13
27

*4

23

to
26

7

20
2
20

16

17

17

5

6

9

Crops whose acreage decreased

barley
indigo
kaoliang
millet
sugar cane

10
12

14
15

22

2J
18

10

7

6

19

* in the reporting localities
Source: Buck, Land utilization,217.

In value terms, tea was China's most important single export until 1887
when it was overtaken by silk. The proportion of tea to total exports fell
steadily from 54 per cent in 1871 to 18 per cent in 1898 and 11 per cent in
1906. While the decline in the absolute quantity of tea exported was far less
precipitous, it does suggest that tea acreage did not increase during the
four decades under consideration. The exportation of raw and manufactured silk as measured by both quantities and values increased throughout the four decades. This suggests the likelihood that additional land was
devoted to growing mulberry and oak trees. In North China and Manchuria the leaves of oak trees fed the worms from whose silk 'pongee', an
increasingly important export fabric, was woven.
From 1888 to 1919, with the single exception of 1899, China exported
more raw cotton than it imported. This completely reversed the import
surplus shown between 1870 and 1887 (except 1874). At first glance it
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AGRICULTURE

9

might appear that the growing exportation of raw cotton is a strong
indication that the total cotton crop increased significantly in the last two
decades of the Ch'ing. But matters were not in fact so simple. The increase
in cotton exports was accompanied by a steady rise in raw cotton prices
and by a simultaneous growing inflow of relatively inexpensive machinespun yarn from India and Japan. The conjunction of these three trends
suggests that cotton production did not expand or did not expand sufficiently to meet both domestic and export demand, that the resulting higher
domestic prices of cotton and yarn induced weavers to purchase the
cheaper imported commodity, and that in turn a reduced domestic demand
diminished the inducement to increase raw cotton production.
One crop which definitely expanded in acreage during the last decades of
the nineteenth century was opium. In value terms opium was China's
largest single import until the mid-i88os. Opium and cotton goods

together made up about two-thirds of China's imports in the 1870s and
early 1880s; by 1898 the share of the two had fallen to about 50 per cent.
This decline was entirely due to a decrease in the quantity (although not
the value, which continued to rise) of opium imported, while cotton goods
imports increased rapidly. The principal reason for the fall in the quantity
of opium imports was the steady spread of domestic opium cultivation.
Unfortunately no data are available with which to measure even roughly
the area of land newly planted with poppy to replace the imported article.
The significant price rises per unit at the very end of the Ch'ing and in the
first years of the Republic were caused by market speculation in reduced
quantity of the drug as the first step towards its de jure if not de facto
suppression. The legal import trade was abolished at the end of 1917, while
efforts to suppress domestic cultivation subsequently varied in success
with the morals and financial needs of the local warlords in whose territories the poppy was grown.
Again, judging from data on the quantity and value of exports between
1879 and 1915, it appears possible that there was a substantial increase in
crop acreage of soy-beans, rapeseed, sesame and peanuts. Before the 1890s
the trade in these commodities was negligible. From the turn of the century,
the value of bean products and vegetable oils exported shot quickly
upward, the oils going largely to Europe where they were used chiefly in
soap manufacture, and the beans and bean cake as well as oil to Japan. The
chief producing and exporting area was Manchuria; the flow of population
from North China to Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese War was
possibly related to an important expansion of soy-bean cultivation. Moreover, efforts to suppress the opium crop in North China led farmers to
increase their planting of beans, sesame and peanuts as a substitute cash

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