Download or read book The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation written by Taisu Zhang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This survey of the fiscal history of China's last imperial dynasty explains why its ability to tax was unusually weak. It argues that the answer lies in the internal ideological worldviews of the political elite, rather than in external political or economic constraints.
Download or read book The Ideological Foundations of the Qing Fiscal State Introduction written by Taisu Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th Centuries -- relative to Western Europe and Japan -- and the subsequent collapse of the imperial system altogether had much to do with the Qing state's extraordinarily limited fiscal and administrative capacities. Contrary to the still surprisingly prevalent notion of "oriental despotism," the Qing was, in fact, an extremely low tax regime. The central element of state revenue, the agricultural tax, remained stagnant in total volume from the mid-18th Century to the end of the 19th, despite a near tripling of China's population and economy. Ultra-low levels of extraction from the rural economy helped mire the late-Qing state in a perpetual state of fiscal crisis and administrative weakness, stunting its industrial development and eventually destroying its political cohesion.Despite the crucial role that fiscal institutions played in the Qing's economic and political decline, their origins and foundations remain poorly understood. Most importantly, preexisting explanations struggle to explain the stagnation of agricultural taxes in the 19th Century, when the Qing state was under constant and severe pressure to expand its revenue base -- pressure that become almost unbearable after mid-century. Using this as an impetus, this book provides a new account of Qing fiscal legislation and policymaking that focuses on the interplay between political ideology and state institutions. It argues that the stubborn refusal to raise agricultural taxes was less a pragmatic response to the state's material circumstances than an ideological choice. Qing lawmakers locked agricultural tax quotas at very low levels not because they had to or could afford to, but because their ideological biases produced interpretations of real world events that emphasized -- overemphasized, for the most part -- the sociopolitical dangers associated with tax hikes.However, this was not a simple story in which "Confucianism" straightforwardly undermined Chinese politics and institutions. From the earliest decades of the dynasty, Qing elites operated under a fiscal mindset that, while vaguely “Confucian” in some sense, exhibited fundamental differences from what we observe in earlier dynasties. Whereas elites in previous dynasties often debated fiscal policy in highly moralistic terms -- whether, given the circumstances, government fiscal policy was inherently just or ethical -- the Qing state was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the perceived sociopolitical consequences of tax hikes. The dominant political belief among early Qing elites was simply that increasing agricultural taxes would trigger severe social unrest among the rural population, and must therefore be avoided out of basic political self-preservation.Qing fiscal policymaking was therefore unusually pragmatic and “realist,” but it was heavily ideological nonetheless. The idea that raising taxes would trigger social collapse and rebellion gained popularity in the early Qing largely because its “factual” explanation for Ming collapse, which placed much of the blame on a series of tax hikes in the early 17th Century, echoed and reinforced a longstanding moral skepticism towards government taxation passed down through the Confucian canon over two millennia. In their attempt to learn from the trauma of Ming collapse, early Qing elites committed to a new political “common sense” in which keeping tax burdens below the late Ming “red line” was considered a necessary condition for sociopolitical stability. This remained the dominant political wisdom throughout the dynasty, even though, by at least the mid-18th Century, its basic empirical assumptions about agricultural productivity and local living standards had become wildly inaccurate. In other words, the nominally “empirical” foundations of Qing political “realism” were themselves the product of ideological bias.A number of factors contributed to the longevity of these dubious empirics: First, the cognitive biases that facilitated their initial dissemination in the early Qing continued to influence elite thinking in later periods. Throughout the dynasty, they interpreted -- misinterpreted, most of the time -- almost any sign of local unrest as evidence that tax were already too high. More interestingly, the belief in ultra-low taxation was institutionally and intellectually self-perpetuating: political elites commonly believed that the very act of surveying would generate social speculation of potential tax hikes, and was therefore politically dangerous in the same way that actual tax hikes were dangerous. As a result, the state's last systematic attempt to measure agricultural production and land usage occurred in 1689, and the imperial court banned land surveys from 1730 onwards. This was an unprecedented move: every major Chinese dynasty before the Qing had conducted land surveys with some regularity, and were able to convert that knowledge into much higher levels of fiscal extraction. The Qing state, in contrast, knew disturbingly little about its economy for the final 223 years of its existence. Without clear information to the contrary, however, the conventional assumption that tax increases would push rural income below subsistence levels, and therefore trigger severe unrest, was politically impossible to refute. By stunting the state's capacity to collect information, anti-taxation arguments created an institutional and intellectual environment in which competing ideas were unlikely to emerge, and even less likely to persuade. As a result, policymakers remained committed for nearly two centuries to fiscal practices that they believed were necessary for political survival -- but were, in fact, a major cause of the dynasty's decline and fall.
Download or read book The Imperial Mode of China written by George Hong Jiang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilising Marxian, Weberian, and institutionalist approaches, this book proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the nature of Chinese economic history: the ‘imperial mode’ of China. The book aims to innovatively apply a cohesive historical materialist framework to the economic evolution of China, while at the same time offering micro-analysis of China’s institutions throughout its history. Taking a long-run perspective, from ancient China up until the present, the book aims to show how Chinese economic history can be viewed as a dynamic evolutionary process consisting of various stages. The first part of the book lays out the imperial mode as a mode of production based on China’s agricultural economy, with a structure consisting of a central authority, the bureaucratic system, and the peasantry. The second part then chronologically examines the different dynasties through this analytical lens and suggests ways in which China’s resistance to institutional changes in the early modern period has had long-lasting consequences for its economic development. The book goes on to show how the imperial mode is able to facilitate the agricultural economy, but did not foster the modern commercial and industrial economy. It integrates modern China into the long wave of economic history, showing how this imperial mode still exerts influence on China’s current path of development, as well as introducing a new way of understanding communist China from a historical perspective. This book will have interdisciplinary appeal for researchers and students of economic history, economic development, the history of China, economic sociology, and social history more broadly.
Download or read book The Long Game written by Rush Doshi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-11 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.
Download or read book The Making of the Chinese Civil Code written by Hao Jiang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first attempt in the English language to study and evaluate the new Chinese Civil Code.
Download or read book Before and Beyond Divergence written by Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? The authors combine economic theory and historical evidence to argue that political processes drove the economic divergence between the two world regions, with continued consequences today that become clear in this innovative account.
Download or read book Freedoms Delayed written by Timur Kuran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to diverse indices of political performance, the Middle East is the world's least free region. Some believe that it is Islam that hinders liberalization. Others retort that Islam cannot be a factor because the region is no longer governed under Islamic law. This book by Timur Kuran, author of the influential Long Divergence, explores the lasting political effects of the Middle East's lengthy exposure to Islamic law. It identifies several channels through which Islamic institutions, both defunct and still active, have limited the expansion of basic freedoms under political regimes of all stripes: secular dictatorships, electoral democracies, monarchies legitimated through Islam, and theocracies. Kuran suggests that Islam's rich history carries within it the seeds of liberalization on many fronts; and that the Middle East has already established certain prerequisites for a liberal order. But there is no quick fix for the region's prevailing record of human freedoms.
Download or read book Culture and Order in World Politics written by Andrew Phillips and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In pre-publication, book had the subtitle Diversity and its discontents.
Download or read book China s Grand Strategy written by Andrew Scobell and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To explore what extended competition between the United States and China might entail out to 2050, the authors of this report identified and characterized China’s grand strategy, analyzed its component national strategies (diplomacy, economics, science and technology, and military affairs), and assessed how successful China might be at implementing these over the next three decades.
Download or read book Confucianism written by Daniel K. Gardner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume shows the influence of the Sage's teachings over the course of Chinese history--on state ideology, the civil service examination system, imperial government, the family, and social relations--and the fate of Confucianism in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China developed alongside a modernizing West and Japan. Some Chinese intellectuals attempted to reform the Confucian tradition to address new needs; others argued for jettisoning it altogether in favor of Western ideas and technology; still others condemned it angrily, arguing that Confucius and his legacy were responsible for China's feudal, ''backward'' conditions in the twentieth century and launching campaigns to eradicate its influences. Yet Chinese continue to turn to the teachings of Confucianism for guidance in their daily lives.
Download or read book State Sponsored Inequality written by Shuang Chen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the social economic processes of inequality in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rural China. Drawing on uniquely rich source materials, Shuang Chen provides a comprehensive view of the creation of a social hierarchy wherein the state classified immigrants to the Chinese county of Shuangcheng into distinct categories, each associated with different land entitlements. The resulting patterns of wealth stratification and social hierarchy were then simultaneously challenged and reinforced by local people. The tensions built into the unequal land entitlements shaped the identities of immigrant groups, and this social hierarchy persisted even after the institution of unequal state entitlements was removed. State-Sponsored Inequality offers an in-depth understanding of the key factors that contribute to social stratification in agrarian societies. Moreover, it sheds light on the many parallels between the stratification system in nineteenth-century Shuangcheng and structural inequality in contemporary China.
Download or read book The Art of Not Being Governed written by James C. Scott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
Download or read book Global History with Chinese Characteristics written by Manuel Perez-Garcia and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.
Download or read book The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c 1200 1815 written by Richard Bonney and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1999-09-02 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume an international team of scholars builds up a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal history of Europe over six centuries. It forms a fundamental starting-point for an understanding of the distinctiveness of the emerging European states, and highlights the issue of fiscal power as an essential prerequisite for the development of the modern state. The study underlines the importance of technical developments by the state, its capacity to innovate, and, however imperfect the techniques, the greater detail and sophistication of accounting practice towards the end of the period. New taxes had been developed, new wealth had been tapped, new mechanisms of enforcement had been established. In general, these developments were made in western Europe; the lack of progress in some fiscal systems, especially those in eastern Europe, is an issue of historical importance in its own right and lends particular significance to the chapters on Poland and Russia. By the eighteenth century `mountains of debt' and high debt-revenue ratios had become the norm in western Europe, yet in the east only Russia was able to adapt to the western model by 1815. The capacity of governments to borrow, and the interaction of the constraints on borrowing and the power to tax had become the real test of the fiscal powers of the `modern state' by 1800-15.
Download or read book Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States written by Andrew Monson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the new fiscal history, this book represents the first global survey of taxation in the premodern world. What emerges is a rich variety of institutions, including experiments with sophisticated instruments such as sovereign debt and fiduciary money, challenging the notion of a typical premodern stage of fiscal development. The studies also reveal patterns and correlations across widely dispersed societies that shed light on the basic factors driving the intensification, abatement, and innovation of fiscal regimes. Twenty scholars have contributed perspectives from a wide range of fields besides history, including anthropology, economics, political science and sociology. The volume's coverage extends beyond Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East to East Asia and the Americas, thereby transcending the Eurocentric approach of most scholarship on fiscal history.
Download or read book State Peasant and Merchant in Qing Manchuria 1644 1862 written by Christopher Mills Isett and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study seeks to lay bare the relationship between the sociopolitical structures that shaped peasant lives in Manchuria (northeast China) during the Qing dynasty and the development of that region’s economy. The book is written in three parts. It begins with an analysis of the ideological, political, and economic interests of the Qing ruling house in defending its homeland in the northeast against occupation by non-Manchus, and examines how these interests informed state policy and the reconfiguration of the region’s social landscape in the first decades of the dynasty. The book then addresses how this agrarian configuration unraveled under challenge from settler peasant communities and gives an account of the resulting property and labor regimes. The study ends with an account of how that social formation configured peasant economic behavior and in so doing established the limits of economic change and trade growth.
Download or read book Empire to Nation written by Joseph Esherick and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a hit and run that injures his son, John Spector is shocked when the driver comes forward to confess the accident was planned and that John made the arrangements. Upset by the suggestion, he embarks on a quest that will take him through the bizarre underbelly of the city in search of the truth. Even when faced with demons bent on stopping him, haunted by dreams of a man he's never met or sidelined by concerns for his mental health, John remains unshakable. Only after his path leads to the philanthropist Charles Dapper does his determination waver, for this is when he must make an extraordinary self sacrifice to realize his goal or risk losing everything.
