The Ideological Foundations of the Qing Fiscal State (Introduction)

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.