The Rise and Fall of Imperial China (Princeton Studies in Contemporary China) by Yuhua Wang

Author:Yuhua Wang [Wang, Yuhua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691215167
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-10-10T22:00:00+00:00

7.2.4  Government Intrusion

The elites had to deal with sporadic government policies designed to penetrate local society. These policies were usually introduced at the beginning of each dynasty when the emperors were still ambitious, and when the imperial government controlled more resources (e.g., land) after violence and migration as a result of dynastic change. In the early Ming era, for example, the founding emperor divided the populace into hereditary occupational registrations, including commoner, military, and artisan, and created a labor service system in which all adult males could be called on to perform government service.26 In the early Qing era, to tackle local government deficits, the third Qing emperor—Yongzheng (1722–1735)—ordered the “return of the meltage fee to the public coffers” (火耗归公).27 Officials in each province were authorized to collect a fixed percentage surcharge on all regular land and head taxes remitted to the central government. This surcharge was retained in the province of origin to provide officials with substantially increased salaries (养廉).28

These policies increased the costs to elites and introduced considerable uncertainty to their intra-family relations. For example, the Ming registration system was hereditary, and the government forbade households from dividing their registration. For a military household, this meant that, regardless of whether its descendants lived as a single household or maintained a number of separate domestic and economic units, they had to collectively ensure there was always a soldier at his post.29 Formally, state officials accepted monetary payments as a substitute for military service and used the income to hire mercenaries. Informally, military-registered households hired mercenaries themselves to fulfill their obligations.30 But as the number of descendants swelled over generations, it became harder for the household to collectively decide who should pay for the mercenary, and even more difficult to determine who it should be.

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