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 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 2011-04-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization. Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.
Download or read book The Rise of Fiscal States written by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading economic historians present a groundbreaking series of country case studies exploring the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia.
Download or read book Interpreting China s Grand Strategy written by Michael D. Swaine and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2000-03-22 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's continuing rapid economic growth and expanding involvement in global affairs pose major implications for the power structure of the international system. To more accurately and fully assess the significance of China's emergence for the United States and the global community, it is necessary to gain a more complete understanding of Chinese security thought and behavior. This study addresses such questions as: What are China's most fundamental national security objectives? How has the Chinese state employed force and diplomacy in the pursuit of these objectives over the centuries? What security strategy does China pursue today and how will it evolve in the future? The study asserts that Chinese history, the behavior of earlier rising powers, and the basic structure and logic of international power relations all suggest that, although a strong China will likely become more assertive globally, this possibility is unlikely to emerge before 2015-2020 at the earliest. To handle this situation, the study argues that the United States should adopt a policy of realistic engagement with China that combines efforts to pursue cooperation whenever possible; to prevent, if necessary, the acquisition by China of capabilities that would threaten America's core national security interests; and to remain prepared to cope with the consequences of a more assertive China.
Download or read book The Troubled Empire written by Timothy Brook and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of America and the World Volume 4 1945 to the Present written by David C. Engerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.
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 Making Of An Economic Superpower The Unlocking China s Secret Of Rapid Industrialization written by Yi Wen and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.
Download or read book Staging Personhood written by Guojun Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After toppling the Ming dynasty, the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. Yet China’s new rulers tolerated the use of traditional Chinese attire in performances, making theater one of the only areas of life where Han garments could still be seen and where Manchu rule could be contested. Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming–Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China. He reveals not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming but also the ways costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition. In case studies of theatrical texts and performances, Wang considers clothing and costumes as indices of changing ethnic and gender identities. He contends that theatrical costuming provided a productive way to reconnect bodies, clothes, and identities disrupted by political turmoil. Through careful attention to a variety of canonical and lesser-known plays, visual and performance records, and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a pathbreaking perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China.
Download or read book Dragons Tigers and Dogs written by Robert J. Antony and published by Cornell East Asia Series. This book was released on 2002 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dozen papers from the Workshop on Qing Management and the Bonds of Civil Community, 1600-1014, held in Cumberland Falls, Kentucky in October 1998 examine the strategies and institutions the Qing government used to solve practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire. Most of the contributing historians are American. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Download or read book China s Long Term Economic Development written by Hongjun Zhao and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the evolution of Chinese governmental governance and its long-lasting impact on Chinese economic development, firstly by examining the formation of Chinese style governance, the core contents of this governance and its vitality compared to other governance patterns in Chinese history. Secondly, this book discusses the effectiveness of this governance in supporting economic development before the Song dynasty and its failure in serving economic development during the past three to five centuries. Ultimately, Hongjun Zhao predicts the direction Chinese governance will take in the next 20 years.
Download or read book Development Centre Studies Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run written by Maddison Angus and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 1998-09-25 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study provides a major reassessment of the scale and scope of China’s resurgence over the past half century, employing quantitative measurement techniques which are standard practice in OECD countries, but which have not hitherto been available for China.
Download or read book Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State written by Justin M. Jacobs and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz, and Tajiks, is also the last significant “colony” of the former Qing empire to remain under continuous Chinese rule throughout the twentieth century. By foregrounding the responses of Chinese and other imperial elites to the growing threat of national determination across Eurasia, Justin Jacobs argues for a reconceptualization of the modern Chinese state as a “national empire.” He shows how strategies for administering this region in the late Qing, Republican, and Communist eras were molded by, and shaped in response to, the rival platforms of ethnic difference characterized by Soviet and other geopolitical competitors across Inner and East Asia. This riveting narrative tracks Xinjiang political history through the Bolshevik revolution, the warlord years, Chinese civil war, and the large-scale Han immigration in the People’s Republic of China, as well as the efforts of the exiled Xinjiang government in Taiwan after 1949 to claim the loyalty of Xinjiang refugees.
Download or read book Law and the Party in Xi Jinping s China written by Rogier J. E. H. Creemers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an in-depth study of the ideological and organisational features of China's legal system, as it is embedded in the Party-state.
Download or read book China written by Ross Garnaut and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine papers by various authors discussing aspects of economic reform in China over a 20 year period.
