The Center and the Local

The Ming state used household registration to organize millions of people (including Chinese, immigrants, and subjugated peoples), extract resources, and regulate society. On threat of execution, households were to provide accurate and timely information on a standardized form about family members (number, age, gender), land, animal livestock, and changes in holdings.

Heads of local administrative communities (li jia, which putatively contained 110 households) collected the information into books and presented them to the offices of the local magistrate, who vetted their accuracy and produced comprehensive registers, a summary of the total number of households, adults, and total amount of land and other property for each administrative community under his jurisdiction.^[1432] The original administrative

community books and the magistrate’s comprehensive registers were passed up the administrative ladder, from prefect to provincial governor until they arrived at the Ministry of Households in the capital. The original books of households and property were then bound in yellow paper; these were the famous Yellow Books or Yellow Registers (huang ce). Reflecting their importance, Yellow Books (presumably a small sampling) were placed near the altar when the emperor conducted the yearly sacrifices to Heaven on the day of the winter solstice. As one scholar puts it, “the Yellow Books stood for the emperor’s control of all under Heaven.”^[1433]

The court used the Yellow Books (and their sixteenth-century replacements, the gui hu ce) to assess taxes and services.^[1434] The Ming state derived most of its revenue from land taxes, which were assessed on the basis of each household’s holding and in light of the land’s relative degree of productivity. Early in the dynasty, the tax rate was set at about 3 percent of the harvest and was generally paid in grain (although periodically the state allowed payment in copper coins or silver).

Several previous dynasties had made commerce an important source of imperial revenue, and the Ming taxed urban shops on the basis of the width of their shop fronts and collected custom fees on goods passing through transit stations. However, agrarian taxes formed the mainstay of the dynasty’s income, most of which was collected and consumed at the local level. The rest was delivered to the capital, where it was used to cover the imperial family’s expenditures (estimated to be between 20 percent and 25 percent of all imperial revenue), annual subsidies to the northern border garrisons, salaries of capital officials, and other various expenditures.^[1435] Nearly four million piculs of tax grain were transported each year along the Grand Canal, a linked network of rivers and canals that stretched more than 1,700 kilometers from the affluent port city of Hangzhou to the Ming capital in Beijing.^[1436]

Building on fifteenth-century precedents of commuting some taxes and service obligations to payments in copper coins, during the sixteenth century, many (but far from all) taxes were commuted to payments in silver. Between 1540 and 1600, annual silver imports into China nearly quadrupled from 40,000 to more than 150,000 kilograms.^[1437] Heijdra estimates that government income in silver grew rapidly in the seventeenth century, quadrupling between 1618 and 1642.^[1438] Silver was used as a commodity measured by weight, rather than as a currency coined by the state; silver imports from the New World and Japan were one of many threads connecting the Ming and global economies. Silver, copper coins (almost always in short supply), grain, and to a far lesser extent cotton and silk textiles were all used both as mediums of exchange in the general economy and as tax payments.

Early Ming law stipulated that each household was to be registered in a category of labor service and that such status was hereditary. The most common categories were farmer, military, and merchant, but artisanal, saltern, even melon and insignia- carrying households were all to serve the state in designated ways.

Each household was not only to pay taxes but also to provide items or services required by the state.^[1439] As was true in the case of taxes, the household service system varied by time and place. Scholars sometime highlight Hongwu's insistence that households were not to change profession, shirk service obligations, or otherwise deviate from official procedure, leading to two somewhat contradictory conclusions. One is that the Ming dynasty was hobbled at the outset by the founder's vision, which allowed for no change or reform; the other is that the variation that did occur was evidence of dynastic decline. A more realistic and fruitful perspective is that the state responded, albeit not always effectively, immediately, or openly, to changes in population, socioeconomic conditions, political need, and military exigencies. Local officials often initiated reform, frequently without seeking approval from above, in response to pressing questions.^[1440] Other officials facing similar challenges often adopted successful local experiments that in time might gain official recognition from the court, which periodically promulgated such new practices as dynastic policy. Contemporary officials were fully aware of such adaptations but generally preferred to describe them in terms of historical precedents from the early Ming or antiquity. Given how often Hongwu and Yongle had shifted policies and given the Chinese political tradition's extraordinary richness, it was usually possible to offer a satisfactory precedent to justify a given policy—just as it required little effort to summon counter-precedents as criticisms.

Many socioeconomic developments that sparked changes in the Ming's tax regime also transformed labor service obligations. First, and perhaps most important, was the commutation of service obligations into payments, usually of silver, which were generally then apportioned across an administrative community instead of being assessed on a single household.

Commutation into silver in turn was linked to three other important trends. First was the growing but far from universal use of silver, not minted as coins but measured in weight, in the economy. By the mid-sixteenth century, as demand for silver far outstripped domestic supplies, the Chinese economy in effect drove the world economy. Silver from the New World and Japan was delivered to China, where it commanded higher values than elsewhere, in exchange for manufactured goods.^[1441] Second, the hereditary households' obligations grew less relevant for individual family members. As long as the household unit met its responsibilities to the state, individuals within the household were free to engage in other occupations, sometimes at great physical distances. Most men from hereditary military households did not serve as soldiers, but instead farmed, traded, or studied.^[1442] A few even became leading court ministers. One can describe this process as evidence of the state's declining power, efficiency, and ambition, but it makes more sense to see it as change that offered challenges and opportunities to individuals, families, and officials. With the commutation of services into payments, the increased circulation of silver in the economy, and greater choice in livelihood, officials were better able to use the silver payments to purchase the services and materials they needed. Put in slightly different terms, by no later than the mid-fifteenth century, a fluid labor market had emerged.

One place these trends intersected in an area of great concern to the dynasty and society was the military labor market.^[1443] In addition to the hereditary military households noted earlier, military labor took several other forms, most important being local militias and mercenaries. In the wake of the 1449 Tumu debacle when Mongol forces captured the reigning emperor, Zhengtong, the dynasty attempted to revitalize its military, from the border garrisons to local militias.

Initially, local government had raised men for militia duty through the administrative community, which was charged with supplying a certain number of men, who would report for a few weeks of drill and service as needed. During the latter half of the fifteenth century, the state commuted this service obligation to payments in silver, which the county magistrate would use to hire men. Additionally, beginning from the mid-fifteenth century, military commanders along the northern borders hired mercenaries in increasing numbers. By no later than the mid-sixteenth century, mercenaries comprised an important part of the military, supplanting but not fully replacing hereditary households, which supplied less and less military muscle but were never abolished. The state paid most mercenaries' wages, which seemed to have averaged about 18 taels of silver per year for a typical soldier, but could range much higher depending on market forces.

Sensitive to regional variation and changing socioeconomic conditions, the Ming dynasty surveyed the empire's resources and extracted taxes and services. As was true in all empires, dynastic will was often contested, and people from landed gentry to impoverished farmers attempted simultaneously to avoid state extractions and exploit state opportunities. To paraphrase James Scott and Michael Szonyi, they worked to perfect both the art of not being governed and the art of being governed, although the latter predominated.^[1444] Depending on circumstances, they might try to circumvent registration and its attendant tax, labor, and legal responsibilities. In other cases, registration could be advantageous, as families used special tax and corvee waivers granted by the state to expand landholdings. Wealthy families often hid their assets by underreporting the extent and fertility of their lands, bribing local government clerks, or by registering their lands in the names of weaker subordinate households.^[1445] Strategically exploiting weak imperial infrastructure and jurisdictional interstices, individuals, families, and communities avoided state extraction through internal migration, new occupations, or alliances with local elites, clerks, or more senior government authorities.

In response to shifting demographic patterns and socioeconomic conditions, the Ming state sought to impose control (in the form of accurate household registration and taxation) and to establish more rigorous governance (in the form of county governmental offices and resident military garrisons), which sometimes sparked sharp and sustained resistance. Consider, for instance, the fertile Jingxiang-Xiangyang region, an area roughly 200 square miles (in today's Hubei Province), which the Ming state had attempted to close to internal migration early in the dynasty. During the fifteenth century hundreds of thousands of people relocated to the region to avoid taxes, corvee labor, and other state exactions. Following a succession of large-scale imperial campaigns of suppression, negotiations, and registration drives, the Ming state eventually established several new counties to assert administrative control and founded academies to foster dynastic loyalty and more broadly Confucian values.^[1446] Although often sim- plistically attributed to government corruption or the venality of palace eunuchs, a surge in military clashes between the Ming state and local communities in several other regions during the early sixteenth century owed much to the court's desire to reassert imperial control.^[1447]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

The Center and the Local

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