The Origin
Today’s history class brought up the so-called problem of the “sprouting of capitalism” in China during the middle and late Ming period.
After reading Huang Yinyu’s China’s Great History, I was already thinking about questions of this sort, and when I later had the privilege of studying Huang Yinyu’s Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century, I found that some of my own views were supported. So I wanted to write these preliminary thoughts down.
Let me begin with the question of the “sprouting of capitalism”: in my view, there was fundamentally no “sprouting of capitalism” in China during the Ming and Qing periods.
First, the word “capitalism” is a foreign import; China never truly formed capitalism, and the situation in China at that time was completely different from the circumstances in which Western capitalism took shape, so it is hard to say with any certainty whether China then had any tendency to develop toward capitalism. Second, a variety of factors in traditional Chinese culture and in China’s objective environment determined that it would be extremely difficult for capitalism to arise independently in China. To call the new phenomena of the late Ming and early Qing “sprouts” seems to imply that they were later “suppressed” by someone or other, whereas in fact neither China nor the West ever actively tried to “crush” China’s “capitalism”; rather, objectively speaking, capitalism simply lacked the soil and space in which to survive (as will be discussed below). If it was congenitally deficient and doomed not to develop, why call it a “sprout” at all?
The Meaning of Capitalism (for Reference)
When preparing to write, the first thing that confused me was how to understand the word “capitalism.” The question seems simple enough, but the concept of “capitalism” we usually encounter is mostly presented as the “opposite of socialism,” which inevitably causes interference in our understanding. Moreover, the word “socialism” is also often presented as the “opposite of capitalism,” so it is difficult to arrive at an exact definition. In fact, the term “capitalism” was itself ambiguous from the moment it appeared. It is said that Marx never used this label, instead using expressions such as “the age of the capitalist” and “the mode of production of the capitalist” [子]; and economists such as Gide, Conwas, Marshall, Seligman, and Cassel long refused to use it in the early twentieth century, only coming to embrace it widely after the Second World War as the opposite of socialism in political debate [丑].
The definition in the Modern Chinese Dictionary reads: “a social system in which the capitalist owns the means of production and uses them to exploit wage labor and extract surplus value.” This explanation is extremely inefficient, because in explaining one concept it introduces a whole pile of new concepts: “capitalist,” “means of production,” “exploit,” “wage labor,” “extract,” and “surplus value.”
Here I will still cite Huang Yinyu’s definition as a reference; how one ultimately understands it will vary from person to person: “Capitalism is a kind of economic organization and system, in which the production and distribution of goods are directed by private capital. As a rule, a country that adopts such a system takes the expansion of national capital as one of its immediate major tasks, so private capital also occupies a special weight in its political life. [寅]” What must be noted here is that capitalism is first understood as “a kind of economic organization and system,” and only then extended into the political sphere; this is not exactly the same as the usual understanding we get from the Modern Chinese Dictionary and the like.
A detailed discussion of definitions would be too complicated. Huang Yinyu only dared to reach this conclusion in Chapter Four, after more than a third of the entire book, so I will simply follow his view here. Readers who have thoughts on this topic are advised to consult Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century.
I. Agriculture and Morality
The formation of capitalism must first have a solid agricultural foundation. If even subsistence is not secured, then industry and commerce can hardly be spoken of at all. So although this is not the key issue, I should first compare the agricultural foundations of China and the West.
Today China feeds one-fifth of the world’s population with 7% of the world’s arable land and still has grain surpluses; its agricultural efficiency, if not calculated per capita, is very high indeed. In ancient China, its share of the world’s population was much higher still, and one can imagine that China’s agricultural productivity at the time was unsurpassed.
In considering the reasons for the strength of Chinese agriculture, agrarianism was of course one factor, but one must mainly attend to the role of objective conditions: in dietary habits, rice in southern China, whether measured per mu or per plant, has a caloric value far higher than Western grains. Northern wheat, in processing terms, relies mainly on steaming and boiling, and compared with Western bread baking and roasting, with milk and butter added on top, it is obviously far less labor-intensive and far cheaper. Geographically, most of China has a monsoon climate, humid and rainy, with dense river networks, all of which is ideal for cultivation.
But agricultural strength does not mean the ability to generate surplus labor. On the contrary, the strong productive power of Chinese agriculture also means enormous instability. It is precisely the monsoon, the rain, and the many rivers that bring frequent disasters; sharp drops in grain output lead to famine, and when and where famine will occur is unpredictable. Sustained declines in production require war to reduce the population, and because the population base is so large, once grain production returns to stability, the population deficit can be rapidly made up. In this way, the production and demand of Chinese agriculture are always in an unstable equilibrium [卯], forcing the attention of the whole society, from top to bottom, to revolve around agriculture for a long time and to build an entire political and moral system on that basis.
Although the West was far inferior to China in agricultural productive capacity, it never worried about this. In the first place, the peoples of Western Europe originated as Germanic barbarians and had only traditions of nomadism and war, with no habit of agriculture. After they invaded the Western Roman Empire, they naturally did not value agriculture; those who usually engaged in farming were the conquered local populations and the defeated Germanic tribes. Since they began as nomadic peoples invading agricultural peoples, even when Western Europe later formed a feudal hierarchical society, peasants still could not possibly be valued.
Let us look at the important process of the original accumulation of capital in England—the enclosure movement and bloody legislation. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, England’s economy underwent major transformation. The woolen textile industry became a “national industry,” and the price of wool, as a raw material, soared. For the old nobility who controlled land, engaging in agriculture took at least a year to complete a production cycle, with slow speed, long cycles, and little income from monetary rents. Meanwhile, lower and middling landed nobles saw the advantages of sheep raising—fewer hired workers, shorter cycles, higher profits—so they drove away the peasants, fenced off the land, and hired only a small number of shepherds. Such sheep raising quickly spread throughout most of England; this was the English “enclosure movement,” which began at the end of the fifteenth century and lasted more than three hundred years.
The peasants violently driven off the land in the enclosure movement lost their means of livelihood—what Utopia calls “sheep eat men.” In response to the large number of “free men,” by the 1530s the Tudor dynasty had begun issuing harsh laws punishing vagrants: an ordinance of 1530 stipulated that, except for the elderly and those who had lost their labor power, who would be granted “begging licenses” by the state, all other vagrants were to be arrested, whipped until they wrote oaths of voluntary labor, and sent back to their place of origin; in 1536 it was further stipulated that those arrested for a second violation should have half an ear cut off, and those arrested a third time would be executed; in 1547 this went further still: anyone who “refused to work” would, once denounced, be sentenced to become the denouncer’s slave… It was precisely this series of “bloody legislation” that forced vagrants to accept the meager wages of handicraft workshops and become wage laborers.
According to records, during the reign of Henry VIII (1509~1547), about seventy-two thousand vagrants were hanged; during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558~1603), three or four hundred people were sent to the gallows every year, and these laws remained in effect until the eighteenth century. [辰]
In China, where one emphasizes “the state takes the people as its foundation” and “food is the heaven of the people,” such things are unimaginable.
Social development always moves from barbarism toward civilization. The feudal system of ancient China, although from today’s standpoint a system of exploitation, backwardness, and ignorance, was much more civilized than Western Europe, which was born of barbarian peoples. It was precisely the blank starting point of morality that gave Western Europe the chance to reconstruct an entirely new social system; whereas for China to form a new capitalist system, it would either have to accept an already formed system from outside, or undergo a great moral retrogression—such as the “collapse of rites and music” in the Spring and Autumn period—and the latter is obviously hard to realize.
II. Commerce and the Legal System
In the formation of capitalism, commerce is the most important link. The huge wealth brought by trade is not only “original accumulation” but also continuously supports and drives the further development of capitalism.
In China, the term “merchant” had already appeared by the Zhou dynasty, but its emergence was due to the fact that the merchants of the Shang people, having been defeated by the Zhou and having lost their land, had no choice but to engage in the exchange of goods; so from the very beginning merchants were looked down upon. At the same time, due to objective factors, Chinese merchants also had very few opportunities to obtain enormous profits, making it difficult for them to form a new and powerful class.
In a certain sense, the formation of Western European capitalism actually also owed something to China: up until the Opium War, for several thousand years before that, Western trade with the East had always run a huge deficit—Europeans needed India’s spices, China’s silk, tea, porcelain, and other luxuries, but for a long time they had nothing that would interest Easterners, so they could only exchange gold and silver. Thus in exchanges between East and West, the West was the place of consumption and China the place of production. We know that the closer buying and selling are to the place of production, the more room there is for choice and the smaller the profit; once goods are sold to a distant place of consumption, monopoly is easier to form and prices can be driven up, so the only people who had the chance to reap huge profits were European merchants. On the Chinese side, by contrast, one only had to focus on production; merchants were dispensable.
It was precisely the enormous profits brought by East-West trade that drove the arrival of Europe’s Age of Discovery. At the same time, the massive influx of gold and silver into the West caused a regression in China’s monetary system—China itself had very little gold and silver in reserve, and from ancient times had formed a monetary system completely different from that of the West: base-metal currency (copper). Unlike precious-metal currency, the value of the currency itself was lower than its value in use, making it closer to the symbolic, credit-based currency of modern times. But the massive inflow of gold and silver beginning in the Ming dynasty directly lowered the status of copper coins and indirectly accelerated the disappearance of paper money (jiaozi), which became the main circulating currency, causing a regression in the system.
To say “regression in the system” is somewhat vague. One obvious effect of silver replacing copper cash was that it “hindered circulation.” Although at face value silver is obviously easier to carry, this also means it is easier to hoard—no one, no matter how wealthy, would bury a billion copper cash in a cellar, and even less would they bury so much paper money, but many people might well bury thousands upon thousands of taels of silver underground. In fact, a memorial from 1580 does reveal the existence of this problem [巳]. In addition, one must not overlook the gold and silver that continuously turned into jewelry, vessels, and handicrafts and thus dropped out of circulation. Although the long-term relative stability of silver’s value eased inflation, it was precisely the stability of its value and quality that made the rich feel even more at ease in letting it sleep underground rather than using it for business investment.
Furthermore, the development of commerce requires the support of law. One of the major points of capitalism is “loan-based operation”; whether one is speaking of lending or trade, without the restraint of law they will all fall into chaos and disorder.
“Trustworthiness” is one of the “five constants,” and traditional Chinese culture places the greatest emphasis on sincerity and good faith. By comparison, European culture is a secondary culture formed after the ancient Greek and Roman culture was stolen by the barbarians; it bears the characteristics of nomadic tribes and was originally not moralizing, much less concerned with trustworthiness. Moreover, the original Roman Empire also lacked cultural cohesion and had always relied on force and punishment to maintain stability.
Yet precisely because trustworthiness is regarded by Chinese people as ordinary and taken for granted, for a long time China’s credit system was mostly maintained only by “morality.” And precisely because credit was difficult for medieval Europeans to observe consciously, Europeans chose instead to maintain credit through harsh “laws”!
The exemplary late-Ming bureaucrat Hai Rui once said: “In doubtful lawsuits, better to wrong the elder brother than the younger; better to wrong the uncle or elder uncle than the nephew; better to wrong the poor than the rich; better to wrong the foolish and upright than the cunning and unruly. When the matter is a dispute over property, better to wrong the common people than the local gentry, in order to remedy abuses. When the matter is a dispute over speech and demeanor, better to wrong the local gentry than the common people, in order to preserve decorum. [午]” Compared with the European court described in The Merchant of Venice, the difference is obvious: in China, not only is credit maintained by morality, but the entire social order also seems to depend on morality for its preservation, whereas in the West the guarantee that the whole society will not collapse usually requires, and only requires, the maintenance of harsh law.
Although the role of morality in place of law shows that Chinese people possess strong self-discipline and self-reflection, and although it increases the cohesion of the whole society, it becomes a congenital deficiency for China when it comes to forming capitalism.
III. The Impact of Isolation
Many people attribute China’s failure to produce capitalism to the Qing dynasty’s “closed-door policy,” but I do not think so.
Of course, if we speak of the motive for closure, it may have been the behavior of the ruling class at the time to protect its own position, as well as a manifestation of the Chinese people’s blind arrogance; but from a technical perspective, I believe that the closure at that time was not without its reasons.
Just imagine: if China had implemented an open policy at that time, what would have happened? Would it have risen like Japan?
When considering this question, we are usually accustomed to making Japan the comparison, but in fact Japan’s situation was not at all like China’s. At least in terms of character, China is a continental civilization, whereas Japan was originally a maritime civilization. By the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, the various domains already had organizations such as “kuramoto” (financial managers), “shokunaka” (various commercial groups), “toiya” (wholesalers), and “kaiseng” (regular shipping routes with insurance functions), and so on; the government lacked a tradition of centralization, while commercial organizations and capital were already in the process of growing. The Meiji Restoration looks on the surface like a reform ahead of its time, but in reality it was the placing of a new high-level structure atop a lower-level structure that had already attained a certain scale. If we do not examine this special circumstance, we may think that because Japan could do this, all other countries should be able to do so as well. [未]
Why not look at India? It too was an ancient civilization and a continental civilization:
Modern India cannot be called closed. The West’s opening of new sea routes was precisely in order to find a way to trade directly with India; afterward, Western countries could trade along India’s entire coastline. What did this openness bring? When examining why Britain was able to conquer all of India so quickly, one important factor that cannot be ignored is the rise of a powerful merchant class, whose economic interests were closely connected with those of Western companies. These companies were able to conduct business in India with comparatively little restriction (in China they were almost completely excluded). In trading centers such as Bengal, wealthy indigenous merchants controlled the local economy and became increasingly restless. For example, one of them, a man named Clive Seth, bought over the loyalty of generals who ought to have followed the orders of the Nawab of Bengal (the provincial governor): in the Battle of Plassey (1757), these generals avoided fighting the British. In this major engagement, the British lost only 65 men; as one Indian historian put it, Plassey was “a deal, not a battle.” [申]
Moreover, full openness further strengthened the West’s advantages in trade: they could compare prices from shop to shop, purchasing needed goods at the lowest price and reaping enormous profits, whereas local merchants, though supported and made wealthy, gained only a negligible share by comparison. At the beginning, few Western goods were sold into the East; later, as Britain established itself on Indian soil, textiles and the like produced by the West with overwhelming technological advantages flooded into the Indian market. Because the Industrial Revolution shortened labor time by hundreds or thousands of times, Western goods could combine enormous profits with low prices compared with local handicrafts, and no national industry could compete with them. This further strangled the development of national commerce and industry; Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement first of all called on the people to boycott British goods.
It can be seen that openness is not necessarily a good thing. While we see that openness brought unprecedented prosperity to the Tang dynasty and made New China full of vitality, we should not overlook the differences in historical context. In the Tang dynasty, those who mainly interacted with China were major powers on roughly equal footing with China, such as Sasanian Persia and the Abbasid Empire in West Asia, and the Gupta dynasty in South Asia; China and these countries each had their own strengths, and the exchange of culture and trade was a win-win. When somewhat more backward countries such as Japan and Korea interacted with China, it was often Japan and Korea that actively came to China to learn. But in the Qing dynasty, the power gap between East and West was far too great. As I have mentioned many times before, such interactions usually amounted only to a “single win” for the West. To put it more vividly: the “openness” of the prosperous Han, Tang, and New China meant that foreigners could come in while Chinese people could also go out (and accompanying the “people” were goods, technology, and culture); but in the Ming and Qing periods, only the West could pour into China, while China could not reach the West. Whether in commerce, technology, or culture, the West held absolute initiative. If the gates were thrown wide open at that time, then the entire society, from material life to spirit, would inevitably have come under Western control in an all-round way.
So, in my view, it is “backwardness” that leads to “closure,” not “closure” that leads to “backwardness.”
It is said that if a frog is thrown directly into boiling water, it can jump away at once; but if it is put into water and heated gradually, it will first quite comfortably enjoy the warmth, and by the time it realizes the danger, it will already have no strength left to leap. China, this “frog at the bottom of the well,” was the same: had an adequately open policy been implemented at that time, China very likely would have been numbed by the slow penetration of the West’s powerful economic and cultural forces, and in the end would have been divided and crushed; whereas the policy of closing the country and barring the door enabled China, before the invasion of the great powers, to maintain unity in politics, economics, and culture, and thereby to generate the solidarity and fighting spirit needed to resist foreign enemies. Leaving Japan aside, compared with South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, a closed China was able, under the West’s overwhelming superiority, to tenaciously preserve sovereign independence, national unity, and cultural continuity; this was unquestionably precious, and one cannot say that this had no connection whatsoever with the Qing dynasty’s policy of closing the country and barring the door.
Conclusion
The main point this article aims to explain is: ancient China never spontaneously developed a tendency toward capitalism; that is, China did not possess the conditions to nurture capitalism from within. Even if we explain that the Ming and Qing periods produced new phenomena such as “externalized division of labor,” at most we can say that there was “change,” not “reform”; this is essentially different from the “complete set”[戍] of changes in Western Europe that were “once they occur, irreversible”[酉].
Many people laboriously search for the sprouts of capitalism in China, nothing more than to find a little psychological comfort: that Chinese people originally also had the chance to spontaneously form capitalism, had the chance to take off before Europe rose and not be overtaken. This again gives rise to an illusion: that China failed to seize the opportunity because the court was incompetent, because of some foolish emperor, because of some castrated dog of a eunuch, or even by shifting the blame onto foreign peoples and foreign countries. All of this is wishful thinking that does not accord with historical fact.
In fact, even if we concede that ancient China did not have capitalist sprouts, there is no need whatsoever to feel discouraged, because the formation of European capitalism, aside from terrain and population factors, first depended on the barbarian tradition inherited from Germanic tribes; second, it benefited from the attraction of the wealth of the rich East in East-West trade; and third, it had to rely on bloody plunder and enslavement to be realized. One might say that it was precisely because China was excessively strong and precocious that it came to a halt, and precisely because Western Europe was initially backward and ignorant that it produced a sudden breakthrough. “When things flourish to the extreme, they must decline”; Chinese people already discerned this law thousands of years ago, so why should we today be so dejected?
Backwardsness more easily breeds reform; the successful reforms of socialism also all originated in weak countries. Of course, within this there have been successes and failures, but that the backward side has a greater chance of producing a leap is certain. It does not matter if one is overtaken; one day socialist China will still return to the crest of the wave. But ruling the world is not our pursuit, because even if one day you regain the lead, there will inevitably come another day when other rivals overtake you: our patriotic fervor should not be fixated on contests over who is stronger or weaker; what we should take pride in should not be how prosperous and powerful ancient China once was or how powerful China is going to be; rather, it should be that Chinese civilization has a five-thousand-year-long lineage, flowing without interruption, and that China’s traditional culture is peaceful and modest, loyal and filial, sincere and earnest, broad in spirit… These traits, whether in the era when China led or after it was overtaken by the West, have always remained. What present-day Chinese people should most do is carry these fine traditions forward; compared with vying for strength and victory, doing so is what truly leaves the most precious wealth for future generations and for the civilization of the earth!
Postscript
After finishing this article, I showed it to classmates and was pointed out to have a number of problems. For example, regarding the impact of silver on commerce, my view lacked persuasiveness and evidence. Later, when I looked into the materials, I found that because the manufacture of copper coins was technically complex, while more than half of silver flowed in from outside and did not need to be mined or minted, in fact the cost of producing copper coins was relatively higher than the value of the silver itself! This was also one major reason why silver was able to rapidly replace copper coins. Of course, although this does not prove my view, it does not refute it either. Because, in the global circulation of silver at that time, China’s position was completely passive; that is, both the inflow and outflow of silver were entirely beyond the country’s control. On the question of whether the massive inflow of silver was more beneficial than harmful, there seem to be differing views even among experts. For the time being, let us set this question aside; it does not affect my overall argument.
There are still many disputes regarding the third section, after all, emotionally, we have long grown accustomed to wringing our hands in grief over “closing the country and barring the door.” My purpose is by no means to cheer for closing the country and barring the door; however, we must admit that the course of history often has its own intrinsic rationality and will never be controlled by one person or a handful of people. Comparing Peter and Kangxi of the same era, you may say: Peter changed Russia’s destiny while Kangxi could not; the power of an individual can influence the history of an entire country. But imagine this: even if Kangxi had studied in Western Europe, or even if Peter had been invited to China to serve as emperor, what could either of them have done in a China where bureaucracy was deeply rooted, natural disasters and man-made calamities came one after another, and internal and external troubles were ceaseless? Even if culture and institutions might change, one is powerless before geographic conditions: Peter opened a passage to the Baltic and the Black Sea, turning Russia from an inland country into a maritime country, while China could never alter the character of its continental state…
I believe that history is still created by the masses. Although the power of individuals is sometimes crucial, what it often accomplishes is the role of a “catalyst,” that is, it may speed up or slow down the arrival of certain historical moments, but it cannot transcend objective conditions or determine the broad direction of history. After experiencing the brilliance of the prosperous Tang, China was destined to move toward a low point; decline would come sooner or later, and anyone’s efforts could only accelerate or delay this process. It is still the same old saying—when things flourish to the extreme, they must decline. Whether it is Sumer, ancient Egypt, Macedon, ancient Rome, China, Europe, or the United States, no one can remain in a state of supreme flourishing forever. As Chinese people, what we should lament and what we should strive for is not domination or hegemony, for that is only a passing cloud; what we should focus on is technological progress and cultural inheritance.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that when many people savor history, they often unconsciously fall under the influence of “Eurocentrism.” With this interference, even though the modes of development among different peoples vary tremendously, one still always tries to force them into Europe’s already established pattern. This kind of limitation of the age was difficult to avoid even for erudite figures such as Marx and Toynbee in their own time. And in Chinese historiography today, it is even more constrained by certain traditional dogmas. The most obvious example is the “five-stage theory of social development”: the two-thousand-year Chinese bureaucratic system, which has abolished feudalism since the Han dynasty, is called “feudal society,” while the Xia, Shang, and Zhou, which truly implemented the feudal system, are labeled “slave society”—yet in fact, even at the height of China’s “slave society,” the scale of slave use could hardly be compared with that of Western countries such as Rome. Such a small confusion in the definition of terms makes China’s historical development route “sound” much closer to the West, but the fact is not necessarily so. I think that while the development of history certainly has its own intrinsic laws, it cannot be summed up by a few simple words. Removing the shackles of dogmatism and understanding China’s historical process, we find that China neither could nor needed to follow the path of Western capitalism; in fact, China also did not go through the necessary stages of Western capitalism such as “sprouting,” expansion, monopoly, and so forth. As Marx put it, China leaped over the “Caucasian gorge” of capitalism at the cost of Western aggression—that is, it obtained all of capitalism’s fruits without undergoing all the sufferings of developing the capitalist system[亥]. —I think that a great transformation of China’s social system must necessarily come through external force and influence, and cannot spontaneously produce some “capitalist sprouts”: just as the formation of Western capitalism likewise could only arise against the background of East-West exchange and trade.
Endnotes
[子] Huang Renyu, Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century, p. 3; Broadening the Historical Horizon, p. 95
[丑] Huang Renyu, Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century, p. 3
[寅] Huang Renyu, Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century, p. 191
[卯] From the Western Han to the early Qing, China’s population always fluctuated below 60 million; the peak periods above 50 million (the late Western Han, late Eastern Han, early Sui, the prosperous Tang, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing) were mostly accompanied by peaks in economic development, and were often on the eve of major historical upheavals. — See He Xin, “Population Laws and Social Order and Disorder in Chinese History”
[辰] Shandong Education Press, A Concise History of the World, pp. 296–297
[巳] Huang Renyu, Fiscal and Taxation in Sixteenth-Century Ming China, p. 95 — Zhou Xuanwei, Continuation of Jinglin Chronicles 2, 5
[午] Huang Renyu, Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century, p. 24
[未] Huang Renyu, Broadening the Historical Horizon, p. 129
[申] [U.S.] Stavrianos, A Global History: The World Since 1500, p. 439
[酉] Huang Renyu, Capitalism and the Twenty-First Century, p. 22
[戍] Huang Renyu, Broadening the Historical Horizon, p. 129: “(Needham said) … the Renaissance, the Reformation, the formation of capitalism, and the development of modern science and technology are a kind of ‘package’ of events; once one appears, all appear, and the four developments occur successively and are mutually connected.”
[亥] Marx’s original words refer to Russia. Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 19, p. 129, cited in Yi Junqing, ed., The Road of Philosophy (First Series), p. 77,
Leave a Reply