Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700 - Couverture rigide

Von Glahn, Richard

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520204085 ISBN 13 : 9780520204089

Editeur : University of California Press, 1996

Synopsis

The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity’s diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn’s study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.

Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Richard von Glahn is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the coeditor of The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (2003) and The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (1987).

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"A classic. All subsequent work in areas related to Chinese monetary history will simply have to follow in von Glahn's footsteps."—Dennis O. Flynn, author of Born with a "Silver Spoon"

"An important study of a little-researched and maddeningly complex topic. It reflects a rare combination of strengths in monetary theory, more general social and economic history, and an impressive command of hard-to-find materials in both Chinese and Japanese."—Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Making of a Hinterland

"A fascinating story of the origins and development of the Wutong cult and the demonic in Chinese religion. From the Shang Dynasty down to late imperial times, Von Glahn lays before us an engaging wealth of knowledge and never-before presented data."—Steve Bokenkamp, Indiana University, and author of Early Daoist Scriptures

"No other writer has explored the place of the sinister in Chinese religion in such a thoughtful and nuanced way. An excellent, gracefully written study covering major themes of the Song through Ming periods."—Patricia Ebrey, author of The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

"A classic. All subsequent work in areas related to Chinese monetary history will simply have to follow in von Glahn's footsteps."—Dennis O. Flynn, author of Born with a "Silver Spoon"

"An important study of a little-researched and maddeningly complex topic. It reflects a rare combination of strengths in monetary theory, more general social and economic history, and an impressive command of hard-to-find materials in both Chinese and Japanese."—Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Making of a Hinterland

"A fascinating story of the origins and development of the Wutong cult and the demonic in Chinese religion. From the Shang Dynasty down to late imperial times, Von Glahn lays before us an engaging wealth of knowledge and never-before presented data."—Steve Bokenkamp, Indiana University, and author of Early Daoist Scriptures

"No other writer has explored the place of the sinister in Chinese religion in such a thoughtful and nuanced way. An excellent, gracefully written study covering major themes of the Song through Ming periods."—Patricia Ebrey, author of The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700

By Richard von Glahn

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Richard von Glahn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520204085


Introduction

Bronze coin constituted the fundamental form of money in China throughout the imperial period. Fiscal as well as monetary policy under successive dynastic regimes was premised on a bronze coin economy. In China, as elsewhere, the authority to issue money remained a closely-guarded sovereign privilege. The state exercised greater direct control over money than over virtually any other facet of the economy, particularly since Chinese political economy deemed monetary policy the single most important tool of economic management at the ruler's disposal. Yet despite the enormous prestige and power imputed to sovereign control over money, from the Song (960-1279) dynasty onward China's rulers found it increasingly difficult to sustain a monetary system based on bronze coin. The Song and its successors, the Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) empires, tried to supplement (or, at times, replace altogether) costly bronze coin with a purely nominal form of money, state-issued paper certificates. But paper currency became defunct early in the Ming period, and the state itself reluctantly condoned the use of uncoined silver both as a means of exchange and as an instrument of tax payments.

The transition from the coin economy of the early imperial era to the silver economy of the late imperial period marked a crucial watershed in the evolution of Chinese society, economy, and culture. The purpose of this book is to study this transition, from its origins in the Song period to its essential completion in the Qing (1644-1911) dynasty, in order to advance our understanding of the market economy in premodern China.

The Market Economy and Paradigms of China's Modernization

Since the 1950s, the emergence of a market economy has occupied the center stage in the historiography of late Ming-early Qing China (ca. 1500-1800). Chinese socioeconomic historians first drew attention to the dynamic commercial growth of this period, espying in it signs of "the sprouts of capitalism" growing between the cracks of China's "feudal"

society. The "sprouts of capitalism" literature equated commercialization with capitalism, and portrayed the penetration of rural society by money and markets as a harbinger of the imminent demise of "feudal relations of production," a course of events derailed by the irruption of Western imperialism into the Chinese ecumene in the nineteenth century.1 The "sprouts of capitalism" paradigm made a deep impression on Western scholarship on China. Although historians in the West remain unpersuaded by its Marxist framework of analysis, they have assimilated the substantive findings of the "sprouts of capitalism" scholarship, shorn of its conceptual dogma, into their own model of an "early modern" stage of Chinese history. The economic changes of post-sixteenth-century China were recast in the mold of a market-driven model of development. Monetization of public finance as well as private exchange, dissolution of servile social relations and the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agricultural and handicraft production, rural market integration, "privatization" of commerce and the growing autonomy of merchant and artisan guilds, the stimulus of foreign trade, and the sanction accorded to the pursuit of wealth in both public and private morality all evinced a pattern of socioeconomic change deemed comparable to early modern Europe.2 Thus, despite sharp contrasts in their basic assumptions about the nature of Chinese society, both the "sprouts of capitalism" and "early modern" paradigms are predicated on reified conceptions of modernity informed by the historical experience of Western Europe.3

The "early modern" paradigm of late Ming-early Qing society and economy also has infused the study of cultural change. Few studies of intellectuals, the arts, literature, and popular culture in this period fail to include a prefatory invocation of the social consequences of the growth of the market economy and their impact on elite and popular mentality. Recent studies of the cultural history of late imperial China commonly rest on the implicit assumption that the market economy was a liberating force that expanded cultural horizons and opened up new vistas of intellectual creativity and artistic freedom.4 According to this view, the complexity of a market society unmoored from its rigid hierarchies of status, gender, and social order overwhelmed the apparatus of state control, creating new opportunities to stake out domains of individual or corporate autonomy.

Such portraits of a "restless, fragmented, and fiercely competitive" market society,5 in which "a modernist response to questions of indi-

vidual human existence seemed to be brewing"6 have grown increasingly elaborate as studies of the social, intellectual, and cultural history of late Ming-early Qing China have proliferated. But the centerpiece of this tableau, the market itself, has virtually faded from view. This neglect is unfortunate, because the question of whether the market actually functioned in the ways in which this model supposes remains very much an unproven hypothesis. Indeed, one major recent study of the rural economy in the late imperial era challenges the fundamental premise that commercial development in this period engendered prosperity and real economic growth.7 Unfortunately, the actual workings of the late Ming-early Qing economy have not attracted nearly as much scholarly scrutiny in recent years as has the study of its symbolic representations.

Foreign Silver and the Global Monetary Order

Current scholarship defines "early modern" China above all in terms of an unprecedented monetization of economic life—that is to say, the transformation of an economy based largely on production for household use, exchange through custom and barter, and in-kind payments of rents and taxes into one characterized by production for the market and widespread use of money as a medium of exchange and tax payments. The crucial impetus to this transformation, it is argued, was provided by the importation of massive quantities of foreign silver from Japan and the Spanish dominions in the New World beginning in the mid-sixteenth century.8 The coincidence of the huge influx of silver with the expansion of China's domestic economy during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries has led to the conclusion that foreign silver fueled China's indigenous market economy. Commenting on the impact of foreign trade on domestic economic growth in the Qing, Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski assert that "it was the steady annual inflows of New World silver in enormous amounts that financed this commercial development and economic growth."9 The vast increase in the supply of silver also has been credited with making possible the rationalization of the fiscal system and the monetization of taxes, drawing virtually every household into the money economy.10 But the real economic impact of silver on China's domestic economy remains unexplored. The presumption that massive imports of silver were a boon to the economy finds little

support in economic theory, and the experience of Spain in the sixteenth century certainly offers empirical evidence to the contrary.

The dramatic influx of foreign silver into China usually is explained as a consequence of the asymmetry of commercial exchange between China and Europe before the nineteenth century. Given the European appetite for Chinese goods, in contrast to Chinese indifference to European products, the balance of trade tipped decisively in China's favor.11 Thus foreign traders were forced to pay for their purchases of Chinese commodities with bullion—a particularly galling concession in the age of mercantilism, when possession of precious metals was equated with national wealth and power. Yet by the same token, according to some scholars, growing integration into the global economy and dependence on foreign sources of silver also rendered China's economic prosperity vulnerable to interruptions in trade flows or reversals in the balance of trade.

The issue of silver imports has taken on heightened significance in recent studies postulating that China, like Europe, plunged into a serious economic and political crisis in the mid-seventeenth century stemming from an abrupt diminution in the flow of bullion into its overheated economy. This idea was first adumbrated in the work of Pierre Chaunu, who emphasized that China's commercial ties to the European colonial trade networks drew the Middle Kingdom into a monolithic world-economy, "itself dominated by the powerful pulsations of the Atlantic zone."12 Chaunu's pathbreaking study was marred, however, by his treatment of China as a passive and inert participant within this global economy. Observing that China and Europe simultaneously suffered economic contractions in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, Chaunu concluded that China's prosperity hinged on the Atlantic economy's cycles of growth and decline.13 More recently, historians of China have assigned China a more active role at the center of an East Asian "world-economy," but they nonetheless presume that China was beholden to uninterrupted infusions of foreign silver to maintain its economic prosperity. Indeed, the vicissitudes of bullion flows are now invoked as the crucial factor in a "seventeenth-century crisis" that culminated in the fall of the Ming dynasty.14

Proponents of the "crisis thesis" contend that the influx of foreign silver in late Ming China resulted from the constant deficits in balance of payments incurred by Japan and the European states. These massive imports—estimated by some scholars to amount to a minimum of 250,000-265,000 kgs. of silver per year in the first third of the seven-

teenth century15 —accelerated commercial development and the rise of the market economy. But it has been suggested that this flood of silver engendered negative consequences as well: "over-rapid urban growth, unbridled business speculation, and severe price inflation."16 Most importantly, once primed with foreign silver, the Chinese economy became enmeshed in a global economy centered on Seville and lubricated by a constant stream of American bullion. According to these scholars, the severe depression of the Atlantic economy in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, compounded by disruptions of the flow of silver from Japan and the Philippines starting in the late 1630s, was a proximate, if not the principal, cause of the collapse of the Ming in the 1640s. Economic distress ramified into popular unrest, and the financially strapped Ming state lacked the resources needed to restore social order.17

The "crisis thesis" thus conveys a more complex, and far darker, picture of the impact of silver imports and China's integration into the global economy than does the "early modern" paradigm. But the "crisis thesis" has not gone unchallenged. Brian Moloughney and Xia Weizhong contend (rightly, in my view) that the decline in silver imports in the final years of the Ming was far less severe than Atwell suggests (see chapter 4).18 Jack Goldstone has delineated a number of logical inconsistencies in the "crisis thesis" model, but Goldstone also rejects monetarist explanations entirely; instead, he claims that the fall of the Ming resulted from a fiscal crisis, not a monetary one (see chapter 7).19 But neither Moloughney and Xia nor Goldstone offer an alternative theoretical model to explain why China attracted such a large portion of the world's silver supply or how silver functioned in the Chinese economy.

A critical evaluation of the "crisis thesis" must begin with a reconsideration of its theoretical premises. The idea that bullion flows resulted from trade imbalances has been challenged by K. N. Chaudhuri in his monumental study of Indian Ocean trade. Chaudhuri instead utilized the specie-flow theory of David Ricardo to explain the drain of European bullion into India (and thence to China) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ricardo departed from the classical theory of international trade, which explained bullion movements as adjustments to large differences in absolute price levels between two trading countries, by emphasizing the effects of changes in bullion stock on spending behavior. A sharp increase in the stock of precious metals—in essence, an expansion of the money supply—induced spending, raising the demand for goods and thus crying up prices. The disequilibrium in relative prices triggered a flow of specie from areas where the cost of producing precious

metals was low and the price level was high toward areas where costs of production were high and prices low. The flow would continue until an equilibrium in production costs and price levels was reached. In Chaudhuri's view, it was exactly a disequilibrium of this sort that drove the massive export of precious metals from Europe to Asia in the early modern period.20

The Ricardian specie-flow mechanism, by recognizing that monetary metals were commodities governed by the same economic laws as other commodities, offers an important insight into the nature of money in a hard-money world. Dennis Flynn has expanded on Chaudhuri's use of Ricardo by stressing the specific role of silver as the chief commodity in the global trade of this era. Contrary to the usual depiction of European traders reluctantly surrendering precious metals in order to obtain the Chinese goods they desired, Flynn argues that Europeans brought silver to China because they profited immensely from this trade. (Indeed, European traders first intruded into the East Asian trading sphere by acting as middlemen in the exchange of Japanese silver for Chinese silk.) The discovery of vast silver lodes in Japan and the New World in the sixteenth century in effect lowered the costs of producing silver and enabled traders to reap enormous arbitrage profits by delivering silver from the new sources of supply to areas where silver commanded a high price—China above all. In other words, rather than exchanging commodities for money, Chinese merchants traded commodities they possessed in abundance (silk, porcelain) for a commodity they lacked (silver). Thus Flynn portrays the movement of silver as the primary cause—rather than the effect—of East-West trade. Turning Chaunu on his head, Flynn goes so far as to suggest that the formation of a global trading system largely stemmed from China's Jovian demand for silver.21 An appreciation of the commodity nature of monetary metals resolves many of the logical contradictions of the balance-of-trade approach to bullion flows, and is more consistent with the available empirical data (see chapters 4 and 7).

Discussion of the role of silver in the Ming-Qing economy has, in one way or another, reflected the debate over the "price revolution" of early modern Europe. The "price revolution" thesis advanced by Earl Hamilton explains the secular rise in prices across Europe from 1500 to 1650 as essentially a monetary event resulting from the import of bullion from the Americas. The causes behind the price revolution have provoked heated debate (see chapter 7); but its effects have been subjected to

equally contentious dispute. On the one hand, the price revolution has been credited with enabling the capital formation that made possible the take-off of the European economy.22 On the other hand, the close of the price revolution around 1650 is said to have inaugurated a long-term phase of economic decline typically designated as "the crisis of the seventeenth century."23 Scholarship on seventeenth-century China likewise has bifurcated into the "early modern" approach, emphasizing the economic stimulus of silver imports, and the "crisis thesis," which underscores the dire consequences of China's dependency on the world economy. But such global explanations of the role of silver imports in the economy of late imperial China have paid scant attention to questions of monetary demand, indigenous monetary media, and the infrastructure of markets and exchange within China itself.24 A satisfactory understanding of the impact of silver imports must proceed from an investigation of the place of silver in China's domestic monetary system.

Evolution of China's Monetary System

The integration of China's monetary system into the wider international economy did not begin with the rise of the European trading empires. Money ranks as the most fluid of all commodities, and the currents of international monetary flows easily breached political boundaries. Although the money issued by China's rulers was intended to serve exclusively as domestic currency, it often functioned as the international currency of the East Asian trading world (and beyond). In the Song and Yuan periods, China's bronze coin and paper currency circulated widely throughout eastern and central Asia, and in the Indian Ocean as well, as the common medium of international trade; Chinese coin even assumed the role of a domestic currency in Japan and in numerous Southeast Asian polities. The importation of foreign silver beginning in the sixteenth century altered, but did not radically transform, a monetary system that was already part of an international monetary order.

The history of money in imperial China stands in marked contrast to the monetary regimes of Europe and western Asia, which primarily utilized precious metals—gold and silver—as currency. The predominance of bronze coin set apart the Chinese monetary system as a singular phenomenon in world history, though not an entirely unique one; from time to time base currencies manufactured from copper-silver alloys

prevailed in early modern Europe, and in parts of India as well. Among the many exceptional features of Chinese monetary history, two in particular stand out: the virtually complete absence of gold and silver coinage, and the appearance of paper money many centuries before paper currencies were issued by European states. These peculiarities of Chinese money—the former usually considered a sign of backwardness, and the latter evidence of precocity—are readily intelligible in terms of the basic principles of Chinese monetary theory, as the following chapters will show.

But the key reconfiguration of China's monetary system—the shift from bronze coin to a silver standard—already was underway long before the influx of foreign silver in the late Ming. From the thirteenth century onward, paper currency and subsequently uncoined silver supplemented, and to a large extent supplanted, bronze coin as the monetary standard. The monetary system of Ming-Qing China conventionally is described as a type of "parallel bimetallism" in which uncoined silver and bronze coin were relatively discrete forms of money: high-value silver served as the principal instrument of exchange in wholesale commerce and long-distance trade, while bronze coin constituted the primary currency of petty retail marketing.25 While this division of silver and coin into separate spheres of circulation generally held true, there were important exceptions. The secular movements of coin/silver exchange ratios demonstrate the existence of a complex, organic system involving frequent interchange between the two monetary media. Workers paid lump-sum wages in silver needed to convert their pay into coin; conversely, merchants regularly consolidated sales receipts in coins by exchanging them for silver. In the eighteenth century, the appreciation of coin induced many people to settle even large-scale transactions like sales of land and other real property in coin.26

Despite its advantages over base bronze specie in large-scale transactions, uncoined silver only exacerbated the problem of a lack of a single monetary standard. Imperial China's currency system generally has been dismissed as primitive and inadequate for the needs of a market economy; a typical pronouncement states unequivocally that "China's money was chaotic and constituted a major obstacle to commercial development."27 Complexity should not be confused with chaos, however. While Qing China may have lacked any monetary standard whatsoever, as Kuroda Akinobu recently has suggested, the erosion of a unified monetary standard itself was a result of market expansion.28

The manifold currencies of late imperial China reflected the increasing diversity of market demand for monetary media as the range of money-use broadened.

Curiously, despite the frequent citation of monetary phenomena as key causal factors in socioeconomic change, the monetary history of imperial China remains largely terra incognita. The pioneering studies, now more than forty years old, of Kato Shigeru, Miyazaki Ichisada, and, above all, Peng Xinwei still provide an indispensable foundation for research, but the economic theories that underlay their work are largely obsolete.29 The only monograph in a Western language devoted to the monetary history of pre-Opium War China is Herbert Franke's 1949 study of the Yuan monetary system.30

Recently, a group of Japanese scholars centered around the Chugokushi kenkyukai in Kyoto has brought the transition from a coin economy to a silver economy into the foreground of analysis of state-society relations in late imperial China. These scholars stress that the bronze coin monetary system was an artifact of the autocratic state that emerged in the Song period. In their view, the monetization of the Song economy owed more to what they call "fiscal trade" (tax remittances, state monopolies, and military procurement) than private commerce. This "fiscal trade" accounted for the bulk of long-distance exchange. Through its fiscal and monetary policies, the Song state integrated fragmented local markets into an enduring, empire-wide commercial network. The use of money in private commerce thus derived from its primary function as a means of state payments, rather than the other way around, and the value of coin was sustained by the demand for it created by the state. The strength of the state's monetary authority in Song times also can be inferred from the general absence of counterfeiting and the Song state's relative success in creating a viable paper currency system.

The Song marked the apogee of a strong, unified monetary system. According to this school of thought, the role of money as a means of state payment remained paramount throughout most of the Ming period, too. Thus, in their view, the Ming state's gradual adoption of a silver standard in tax payments (begun in the early fifteenth century, and significantly advanced by the end of the sixteenth) prompted a shift from a coin to a silver economy in private exchange as well. By the seventeenth century, "market trade" had eclipsed "fiscal trade." But the silver economy failed to produce a unified standard of value, with

the result that a wide variety of monetary regimes prevailed in different regions of the country.

The spread of commerce into the countryside in the eighteenth century, which brought most villages within the ambit of the market economy, engendered another change in the monetary system. Since coin proved far more suitable to the needs of petty exchange, commercialization in the early Qing period evoked greater demand for coin and a shift in exchange values to the advantage of coin against silver. Thus the coin economy of the eighteenth century represented an inversion of that of the Song period: whereas bronze coin originally functioned as an instrument of economic control wielded by the autocratic state, by the end of the imperial era the use of coin proliferated in concert with the growth of rural private trade.31

This provocative thesis challenges the assumption that the use of money is a product of private commerce, and instead delineates a state theory of money reminiscent of the German school of historical economics.32 I am by no means convinced by the Chugokushi kenkyukai's claim that the state played the determining role in setting the monetary standard down to the end of the Ming dynasty. In my view, the silver standard originated in private commerce, not from the monetization of state payments. I would also contend that the transition from the coin economy to a silver economy took place much earlier, over the course of the fourteenth century, even though coin remained an indispensable component of the monetary system throughout the late Ming and Qing periods. But I emphatically agree with the Chugokushi kenkyukai's insistence on the need to analyze the specific functions of each type of money. Their approach also places appropriate emphasis on differences in the demand structure for different forms of money and reminds us of the enormous variety of circulating media. Adoption of the silver tael as the money of account by the Ming and Qing states produced a homogeneous accounting system suited for the purpose of tabulating and transferring revenues. Yet we must remember that the official "Kuping" tael was not a real circulating money but, rather, an abstraction. As a means of payment, silver assumed a bewildering variety of physical forms whose complexity was masked by the false uniformity of the official monetary unit.

By calling into question tacit assumptions about money and the market economy, the Chugokushi kenkyukai group challenges the essentially unilinear model of economic development underlying the "early modern" paradigm of socioeconomic change. Although the "early modern"

scholarship hails the rise of the silver economy from the sixteenth century onward as a progressive advance toward a rational and modern economic system, the fact that the use of bronze coin surged in the eighteenth century, reappropriating many of the functions usurped by silver, largely has been overlooked.33 This apparent regression cannot be understood by simply invoking one-dimensional explanations like the relative supplies of metals; instead, it requires a thorough reassessment of how the monetary system functioned. Nor was such a "regression" unique to China; parallel phenomena can be seen in other parts of Asia. In the Indian subcontinent, the monetization of the rural economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also created demand for base currencies like cowries and badam (an inedible nut) in addition to bronze coin.34 Tokugawa Japan's reversion from bronze coin to a rice standard as the basis of its fiscal system has long perplexed scholars; it is now clear that rice, a supposedly primitive "commodity money," supplanted coin as the medium of exchange in private trade, too, during the late sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries, precisely when national unification was spurring economic growth.35

In China, the state lost effective control over the monetary system during the transition from the Song to the Ming dynasties. Adoption of the silver tael as the money of account and principal means of state payments did not lead to the creation of a unified monetary standard. On the contrary, the monetary system of the Ming-Qing era became progressively refracted into manifold regional currencies: the types and qualities of coin and silver varied significantly from province to province, and often from locality to locality. The preferred medium of exchange also shifted periodically between coin and silver. While the market, not the state, dictated the choice of the medium of exchange, the money market of late imperial China did not conform to the modernization narrative underlying the "early modern" paradigm. Indeed, the relative autarky of regional monetary systems and the apparent regression of Chinese currency (from paper money to silver to coin) belies conventional assumptions about unilinear economic development. The type of money that prevailed in a given market reflected its particular needs, resources, and patterns of trade. The weakness of the state's monetary authority and the lack of sophisticated credit institutions precluded the formation of a strong national monetary system. Yet it would be premature to conclude that the complexity of China's monetary system constituted an impediment to economic growth. Bronze coin, though an archaic anachronism to modern eyes, offered a number of advantages

over silver bullion in the periodic marketing system that spread over China during the Qing period.

This study does not seek to evaluate the place of money in the Chinese economy as a whole, nor does it advance an economic analysis of the premodern Chinese economy per se. Instead, it examines what money meant to the Chinese themselves, how it was incorporated into economic thought and fiscal policy (which, for all intents and purposes, were virtually identical in imperial China), and how the state and market interacted through a medium vital to both. As the Chugokushi kenkyukai's work has demonstrated, analysis of China's monetary system entails more than perusal of numismatic inventories or sinological excavation of the documentary record; it also requires the application of economic analysis. Unfortunately, the surviving documentary evidence rarely gives scope to the kind of mathematical investigation on which economic analysis ordinarily depends. While numerical data of many sorts exist, the records are almost always defective or incomplete and thus unamenable to the techniques of quantitative analysis. In the absence of useful quantitative data, the extensive body of government records and private writings concerning money and monetary policy must be mined for testimony on the actual workings of the monetary system. In this domain monetary theory offers useful tools of analysis. Careful attention to the functions of money can yield valuable insight into the operation of the money economy. Of course, the historian also must be sensitive to the analytical categories of Chinese political economists and statesmen (as well as other learned witnesses), especially since classical Chinese monetary analysis itself provides an illuminating perspective from which we can survey the behavior of money (and its owners).

By intention, this study will raise as many questions as it answers. A clearer understanding of money and its effects will provide insight into the nature of the market economy emerging in the late imperial period, and also aid us in tracing its cycles of growth and decline; but this study is only a first step toward a reevaluation of the late imperial economy. Apart from seeking to expand our knowledge of the market economy and the economic changes mediated by money, it also aspires to serve as a point of departure for a reassessment of the culture of late imperial China. The cultural repercussions of the rise of a market economy have attracted considerable attention and stimulated vigorous debate. The

current controversy over the question of a Chinese "public sphere" stems from the problem, still very much an issue in contemporary China, of the relationship between a market economy and political culture.36 Just as the rise of a market economy in late Ming-early Qing China did not lead to the development of capitalism, neither did it presage the birth of a bourgeois culture. Yet the market did have a profound influence on culture in the late imperial period. Money and the notions of value it inspired readily translated into a metaphorical and symbolic language that became an important constituent of social and political discourse.37

But we are only beginning to decipher this language. We should be wary of the presumption that the market economy nurtured a positivist faith in individual worth and the potential for social betterment, or any simulacrum of a Weberian capitalist ethic. In the realm of culture, as in the harsh environment of the economy, the uses of money created—and reflected—personal anxiety, social tensions, and political conflict.38 Whatever its social meaning, though, few would disagree with the statement that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, money—in its physical and tangible forms, and also as a rhetorical medium and arbiter of social values—thoroughly permeated the social life of most Chinese. To understand the social meaning of money, we must first elucidate the internal dynamics of the money economy.

Continues...

Excerpted from Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700by Richard von Glahn Copyright © 1996 by Richard von Glahn. Excerpted by permission.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520204085
• ISBN 13: 9780520204089
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 338
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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