Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
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Researchers have indeed painted a flourishing economic landscape. The bustling eighteenth-century commerce had roots before the Ch'ing conquest: an expanded money supply, in both the silver and copper components of China's bimetallic currency, nourished an expanding domestic trade that overflowed the boundaries of China's major economic regions. Monetary expansion benefited from imports of precious metals and from their increased domestic production. Silver and copper streamed into China in exchange for her silk, tea, porcelains, and other products desired by the outer world. Exchange grew more efficient, farmers could specialize in cash crops, and handicraft industries grew rapidly. The government took advantage of all this liquidity to carry out major tax reforms.4 This expansive scene, already visible in the late sixteenth century, was redrawn on an even grander scale as the nation recovered from the turmoil of the Ming collapse and Manchu conquest. The mild but persistent rise in prices that accompanied the influx of silver was generally good for economic growth: farmers could sell their grain more profitably and could pay their taxes more easily. Investors flourished in the long period of eighteenth-century inflation.5 Such is our picture of a vigorous, bustling age. To understand the background of the i 768 crisis, however, it will be important to explore its effects on social attitudes, a subject we still know very little about. The place to begin is the region of the lower Yangtze, where the soulstealing crisis began.
The Society of the Lower Yangtze
The area known as Kiangnan ("south of the river") in east-central China formed the prosperous core of what we now call the lower Yangtze macroregion. On the provincial map, this core included southern Kiangsu, a corner of eastern Anhwei, and northern Che- kiang.6 It is in this setting, the most highly developed of China's economic regions, that the eighteenth-century commercial expansion is most often described. For three-quarters of a millennium it had been China's most prosperous regional economy. There most conspicuously were found the cash-cropping and the specialized markets so characteristic of China's late imperial economy. So specialized were these local economies, in fact, that grain production was much too low to sustain the population. As a result, a vast interregional grain entrepot sprang up in Kiangnan cities and market towns. By the eighteenth century rice imports sufficient to feed between three and four million people a year were flowing from the upper- and midYangtze provinces to the market towns around Soochow, Sungchiang, and T'ai-ts'ang.7 This rice made its way to grain-deficit areas all around east China. According to an early eighteenth-century observer,
Fukien rice has long been insufficient to supply the demands of Fukien. Even in years of abundant harvest much has been imported from Kiangsu and Chekiang. What is more, Kiangsu and Chekiang rice has long been insufficient to supply Kiangsu and Chekiang, so that even in abundant years they have looked to Hunan and Hupei. For several decades, rice from Hunan-Hupei has collected at the market town of Feng-ch'iao in Soochow Prefecture [just west of Soochow city]. By way of Shanghai and Hsu-p'u, this Feng-ch'iao rice makes its way to Fukien. Therefore, even though a year's harvest may be blighted, there will be no inflation of rice prices.,,
In manufacturing, the basis of Kiangnan's wealth was textiles. Cotton products of the lower Yangtze reached a national market. Silk was the leading export product and clad the increasingly luxurious bureaucratic, scholarly, and commercial elites. These huge industries were built on the handicraft labor of millions of peasant families. So tightly was the peasant household bound to the marketing network in Kiangnan's highly commercialized society that no "isolated" or "cellular" local economies were conceivable (to cite an old misconception about village China). In its extreme form, this integration of village with market town meant a kind of slavery to handicraft work. For a swelling population to survive in this densely populated region on ever-smaller parcels of farmland, every family member was mobilized to produce for some niche of the market. As early as the fifteenth century, we find an account of such lives in the cotton industry:
Cotton-cloth production is not limited to the villages, but also is done in the cities. At dawn the country women carry yarn they have spun into the city, where they exchange it for raw cotton; the next morning they come in with another load, without any respite. A [peasant] weaver can produce about a roll (p'i) of cloth a day, and some work all through the night without going to bed. After payments of taxes and interest, a farming family's resources are exhausted before the end of the year, and they rely for living expenses entirely on the cotton industry.9
Not only in highly commercialized Kiangnan but in less developed areas as well, intimate connections between village and market town formed the texture of late imperial society.1' The suffusion of the late imperial economy by monetized silver and copper made possible-and in fact required-a constant flow of people to and from urban centers. Virtually every peasant household traded in a local market, and through it was linked to regional and even national markets. What this meant for China's premodern industry was that extensive, highly rationalized production could proceed without large-scale urbanization. Although large factories and urbanized work forces did exist in some regional metropolises such as Nanking, the more general pattern was of an intricate putting-out system, based on handicraft labor by the wives and children of land-poor farmers, who could participate in large production systems while still living in villages.
The Emancipation of ' Labor
The growth of commerce since the sixteenth century had been accompanied by a freer market in labor. Land tenancy tended toward long-term, contractual relations between landlord and tenant. In some areas, permanent tenancy rights (under a kind of dual-ownership system, in which surface and subsurface rights were held by different persons) had emerged by the eighteenth century. The hereditary status system of the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), in which millions of people were enrolled in special registers and compelled to work for the state in specialized occupations, was formally abolished soon after the Ch'ing conquest. Most important, the obligatory labor-service of all commoners (the corvee) was swept away in the tax reforms that began in the sixteenth century, by which land and labor taxes were merged and assessed on the basis of land. Instead, the state hired laborers to do its work. Indeed, by the eighteenth century, labor-for-cash was the obvious and necessary basis of a commercializing economy."
The spirit of formal equality-already so forcefully impelled by economics-was symbolized by the Ch'ing government's emancipation of small groups of servile people in the 172os and the enunciation of a general policy of commoner equality. I emphasize this last phrase because eighteenth-century China remained a steeply hierarchical society, with towering heights separating the governing elite from the rest of the population. But though the numbers freed were very small, the symbolic achievement must have seemed worth the effort. By sweeping away "mean" (chien) status among the commoners, the emancipation decrees apparently were meant to create a subject population uncluttered by specially disadvantaged groups. The proximate reasons for the decrees of the i 72os are still obscure. Nevertheless, the more general reason must have been related to the Manchus' distrust of the Han landlord elite (whose dependents these servile groups were) as well as a desire to express a kind of conqueror's "benevolence" in which the Manchu regime stood above a relatively undifferentiated mass of commoners-a scornful gesture at some long-standing Han social distinctions. Formal commoner equality was right in line with the despotic and rationalizing style of Injen, the third Ch'ing emperor and Hungli's father. The language of the emancipation decrees implied that lacking specific historicallegal reasons for servile status (such as penal servitude or a contract of indenture), all commoners were of equal standing before the mighty Ch'ing state. Writing about the despised Tanka (boat people) of Kwangtung, Injen pronounced that "they were originally ordinary subjects (hang-min, lit. "good [i.e., not polluted] commoners"), and there is no reason (li) to despise them."12 Concludes a recent study: "Best of all," freedmen could now "take advantage of the expanded labor market a
nd change employers if they wished."13
A free-wheeling labor market, the decline of personal dependency and servile status: these have great appeal to a twentieth-century Westerner, who associates them with Freedom and Progress. Yet their effect on the mentality of an eighteenth-century Chinese may have been somewhat different. No doubt they were appreciated by families struggling to survive on small parcels of land, who urgently needed to sell their excess labor power to fend off starvation. Landless men could hope to survive in a free market for hired farm labor. A few able and lucky outcasts might now rise from pariah status into the examination system (barred to "mean" groups) and thence into elite status. (A decree of 1771 dealt with such upstarts by ruling that only in the fourth generation after formal emancipation might a man legally sit for the examinations.)'' With respect to servile groups, however, it may be wondered whether much "freeing up" actually occurred. Even half 'a century later, the serflike tenants in I4ui-chou were having trouble asserting their imperially mandated freedom.15 And one historian points out that provisions for cash redemption of servile status were in fact meaningless, for they were well beyond the resources of tenant farmers, and in any case "redemption" would leave them without it livelihood."'
Surely the underlying fact about "free labor" in the eighteenthcentury economy is that it was sold in a buyer's market. In an increasingly crowded region like Kiangnan, "freedom" for the wage laborer meant the liberty to harness one's family to the kind of regime I have just described in the Kiangnan cotton industry. It meant the option to leave an oppressive landlord and take one's chances elsewhere. Liberty could also be found, presumably, in the labor gangs hired to work on government dredging projects, or on the docks of the maritime trading ports. But how many people could not find buyers for their labor in the growing economy of the age-and what happened to them?
Popular Consciousness of the Prosperous Age
Here indeed was a bustling economy. Its effects on social consciousness, however, are virtually unexplored. Take, for instance, social communication. The dense commercial networks so prominent in the eighteenth-century landscape put nearly everybody in a regular relationship to a market. Knowledge of regional and national events flowed with goods and people along the trade routes between villages and market towns, between local markets and regional entrepots. The "back-alley news" (hsiao-tao hsiao-hsi) that Chinese of our day find so essential to supplement the government-controlled press was already well developed in late imperial times-and there is plenty of evidence that China's "back alleys" were, even then, linked to regional and national networks of information. News of opportunities elsewhere, as well as of dangers flowing from elsewhere, were the daily fare of the Chinese villager (to say nothing of the city dweller).
Hardest to estimate is what the Prosperous Age really meant to ordinary people. Attitudes about where liLfe was leading, whether toward better conditions or worse, whether toward greater security or less, may have been rather different from what we would expect in a growing economy. From the standpoint of an eighteenth-century Chinese commoner, commercial growth may have meant, not the prospect of riches or security, but a scant margin of survival in a competitive and crowded society. Commerce and manufacturing enabled hard-pressed rural families to hang on, but only through maximum employment of everyone's labor. This scramble for existence in an uncertain environment may have been a more vivid reality in most people's lives than the commercial dynamism that so impresses us in hindsight.
Two large questions bear upon this late eighteenth-century consciousness: first, whether China's economic growth, however impressive in absolute terms, was able to offset the great increase of her population; and second, how the unevenness of that growth from region to region may have affected how people viewed the security of their lives.
Population, Prices, and Money
A steep rise in rice prices in 1748 set off alarm bells throughout the national bureaucracy. The effect on public order was immediate and disturbing: riots in Soochow and other lower Yangtze cities, which had become dependent upon rice imports from provinces upstream. But officials all around the empire were aware of the inflation in rice prices and its connection to population pressure. Ch'en Hung-mou, governor of Shensi Province, wrote that the inflation resulted from a long-term shift in the ratio between population and land. "It is certainly a result of population pressure . . . In all the provinces, the fertile land has already been brought under cultivation. Although there are still large areas of mountainous or marshy wasteland, the soil is so poor that it must be left fallow for two years after one year's cultivation." 17 An experienced official, Wang Hui-tsu, commented on what these conditions meant for his home county of Hsiao-shan (adjacent to Hangchow, and a scene of soulstealing panic twenty years later): "When the rice price was up to 16o copper cash for one peck, all the grass roots and tree bark were eaten. In places where there was powdery sand, people unearthed it to eat and called it `Buddha's Sand,' though some died of it.""
This was no short-term problem; rice prices continued to rise during the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet their effect on local society was apparently buffered by a rise in the money supply. Beginning in the 176os, the opening of silver mines in Annam by Chinese entrepreneurs, as well as a quickening influx of Mexican silver coins in payment for Chinese goods, swelled the supply of silver. One authority estimates that China's silver supply rose by some 274 million Mexican dollars in the period 1752-18oo.'9 But it was after the 176os that the silver influx was most profuse, as can be seen in the record of silver imports:LO
The decreasing availability of silver in the early Ch'ien-lung period may have made it harder to sustain living standards in the face of population growth. The marked increase beginning in the 176os and gathering force in the 1780s probably made it possible, for a time, to realize prosperity despite intense crowding. Yet the benefits of silver trickled only slowly into local society. For the lower Yangtze, the turnabout seems to have occurred around 1780. For that crucial region, at least, qualitative evidence suggests that the celebrated eighteenth-century "prosperity" cannot have begun much earlier than that date. Our Hsiao-shan informant, Wang Hui-tsu, goes on to say, "For more than a decade before 1792, rice prices stayed high. [Yet] when one peck cost 200 copper cash, people thought it was cheap. In 1792, when one peck cost 330-340 copper cash, people still enjoyed life." How could this be explained? Wang believed that it was because the inflation after about 1780 was not confined to population-sensitive rice prices, but extended to all commodities: when rice prices had been high in the past, other commodities were not affected, "while today 117941, everything including fish, shrimp, and fruit, is expensive. Therefore, even small peddlers and rural laborers can make ends meet."21 One explanation for this turnaround is an increase in the supply of money in general. With more money in everyone's hands, sellers could charge more for goods of all kinds.22 Though the evidence is still sparse, Wang's account adds convincing local substance to inferences from silver-supply data.
More research will be needed before we can understand fully how men's awareness of their social surroundings was shaped by eighteenth-century economic change, particularly population growth and the availability of money. We must get the periodization right: what temporal shifts made people aware of changes in their life chances? If Wang Hui-tsu's sense of the timing turns out to be right, then what we are seeing after 178o is but a brief felicity. The real prosperity of the Prosperous Age extended from the 178os until the mid-i8ios (when a worldwide shortage of silver decreased foreign capacity to buy Chinese goods-at about the same time that opium imports created a catastrophic outflow of silver, causing the nationwide distress that we have always associated with the beginning of the modern period).23 If so, then the soulstealing crisis occurred just before the increased money supply had begun to relieve the burden of population pressure in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century. Rice prices in the lower Yangtze were still weighing heavily on commoners' lives in an ove
rcrowded society. In 1768, the outer world had only just begun to pay the bill for China's population boom.
Uneven Development
If the highly developed Hangchow region saw some hard times before the 178os, what of the outlying mountainous areas? One did not have to travel far from the commercialized cores to find abject poverty, unemployment, and disorder. Two adjacent jurisdictions illustrate the contrasts that lay just outside the Soochow-Hangchow core of the lower Yangtze, some forty miles from Te-ch'ing, the origin of the soulstealing panic. Kuang-te, an independent department in Anhwei, lies about thirty miles from the western shore of Lake T'ai.24 The neighboring district to the east, An-chi in Chekiang, which was connected by water to the (,rand Canal, had a flourishing silk industry that had pushed mulberry cultivation even into its hilly districts. Yet economic development had passed Kuang-te by-save for the influx of population that was common to counties of the Yangtze highlands. In 1739 Magistrate Li asked that the Throne remit the grain-tribute tax so that he could use it to fill the local relief granaries: "There is little arable land, and because very little water is retained in [irrigation] ponds, the soil is unproductive. The cultivators have almost no carts and draft animals with which to engage in commerce. The people also lack handicraft skills with which to eke out a living. To survive, they simply hope for a good harvest. But with long internal peace, the population has increased, and an abundant harvest barely furnishes one year's subsistence. "21 Transport routes were inadequate to permit timely purchase of grain from other areas, and the people would be in great difficulty if officials bought grain locally to stock the relief granaries. Just that summer, people were panicked by the threat of floods, and grain was being hoarded. No jurisdiction in the Kiangnan area had such difficulty feeding its people, Magistrate Li concluded. Elsewhere we learn that Kuang-te had ("despite repeated prohibitions") unusually high levels of female infanticide.21'