How Plausible is a Nineteenth-Century Decline in Living Stand­ards?

As I have noted repeatedly above, the standard of living I am sketching for eighteenth-century China would not only compare well to Europe's, but would exceed in many ways what investigators found in early twentieth-century China.

on a negative view of nineteenth-century trends. Finally, the older view of a catastrophic nineteenth century generally had in the background a picture of eighteenth-century China already beset by inexorably mounting ‘overpopulation’ and/or an inability to innovate (whether due to politics or culture) which, of course, is very different from the story I have been telling here. Thus, though it goes beyond the eighteenth century, a brief account is in order of how the relatively prosperous China I described fell upon harder times, and where we should and should not expect to see that reflected in the standard of living.

Eighteenth-century China did indeed show serious signs of ecological strain, though simple overpopulation will not explain them. I have emphasized in my recent book that these strains were by no means unique. Europe, though far more sparsely populated, also faced serious pressures, which were already creating serious problems in some areas, and might have created far more had not vastly increased flows of resources from overseas and underground (especially coal mines) been brought into play. For present purposes, what matters is that though serious, these problems did not amount to a ‘Malthusian’ crisis, in which areas were no longer able to sustain the standards of living previously achieved. In the Yangzi Delta, where locally produced supplies of food, fuel, fibre, and building materials were inadequate, a set of quite effective strategies for dealing with the problem were in place: (1) preventive checks which stopped further population growth;⁴⁵ (2) various labour-intensive techniques to economize on the use of land and fuel; (3) enormous amounts of extra-regional trade, which brought in about one-sixth of the region's rice, huge quantities of timber, all of its sugar, huge amounts of raw cotton, and soybeans which, though they were largely used for beancake fertilizer, would have been enough to feed 3—4,000,000 people per year.⁴⁶ This made the beancake trade alone larger than all of Europe's long-distance grain trade put together.⁴⁷

By the late eighteenth century, however, one crucial part of this triad—long-distance trade—was becoming less effective. Many peripheral regions—unlike the Yangzi Delta—were experiencing very rapid population growth, and might well have had less surplus of land-intensive commodities to ‘vent in any case. But at least equally important, these regions were diversifying their economies. The middle Yangzi, for instance—the Delta's principal ‘rice bowl'—was increasingly growing its own cotton and making its own cloth rather than putting all of the additional labour that its increased population represented into double-cropping grain and trading for cloth (Li Bozhong 1998: 108).

declined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century for a variety of reasons: over-cutting and land clearance for farms along the Han River, the growth of local demand (both due to population increase and to the development of timber-using industries such as paper-making and charcoal iron making, particularly in Sichuan), and problems with transportation (both along the Yangzi and on smaller rivers).⁵⁰ Only the Manchurian frontier trade continued to grow apace.

This pattern of development had a number of consequences that matter to our story. The simplest and most benign is that the regional distribution of population growth tended to depress China-wide consumption averages. The Yangzi Delta, for instance, with the country's highest living standards, had probably about 18% of China's population in 1750, 9% in 1850, and 6% in 1950; thus, even if it maintained fairly high levels of consumption, these would do less and less to raise ‘national’ averages. Throughout the empire, the pattern was that less prosperous macro-regions had the fastest population growth (with the exception of Manchuria), and that within each macro-region, the fastest growth tended to be in the peripheries.⁵¹

In the case of some goods, where consumption had been heavily concentrated in a few regions, the effects could be dramatic.

For kinds of consumption that were not as geographically concentrated, the changing regional distribution of population and proto-industry explains less, but it is nonetheless crucial to our overall story. First, since shifting demographic weights would produce an apparent decline in standard of living even if the standard of living within each region was completely unchanged, they help reconcile the decline hypothesis with the relative paucity of sources noting a decline in living standards in particular areas prior to the great mid-nineteenth-century catastrophes. In the places from which the most texts are preserved, there probably was little or no decline to observe. Second, while many factors contributed to this pattern of development—state subsidies to migration, gender norms which favoured a ‘man ploughs, woman weaves’ division of labour where possible (rather than having all family members in the fields), high transport costs as settlement moved further away from principal rivers, and simple Smithian dynamics (which made an increasingly complex division of labour within interior regions profitable as their population grew)—none of them require us to find unusual ‘blockages’ or pathologies in eighteenth-century China to explain at least this part of its nineteenth-century problems.

But this decline in inter-regional trade had other dimensions, which depressed living standards in other ways. In some cases, shortages of particular commodities were probably serious enough to have a significant inhibiting effect on further development. Li Bozhong, for instance, has argued that soaring wood prices (especially for construction timber, and also for fuel) had a serious inhibiting effect on proto-industrial expansion in the Yangzi Delta (Li Bozhong 1994^: 86-9, 94, 2000: 337-42).

Robert Marks and others also have shown the effects of timber shortage on ship-building in Guangdong and Fujian (Marks 1997: 168).

In areas where growing population combined with stagnant or declining trade, there was increasing pressure on the ability of the land to feed the local population. In areas with relatively warm climates and lots of water, such as southern paddy-rice country, there were still various ways to approach this problem through labour-intensification that raised per-acre yields; this was also true where it was possible to import rising quantities of off-farm fertilizer. But in huge areas where none of this applied, it seems very unlikely that per-acre yields could have kept up with population, and there was often not much land left to clear. In those cases, it seems likely that food crops retook some land that had been allocated to cash crops in the eighteenth century, shrinking the total amount of the crop available. I have argued elsewhere that this was probably true for cotton in north China (one of the country's two principal growing areas) between 1750 and 1900 (Pomeranz 2000a: 139, 334-8). Even if the acreage under cotton, tobacco, indigo, etc., did not actually shrink, it seems very likely that it declined in per capita terms. (Cotton yields per acre, for instance, do not seem to have changed at all until twentieth-century hybrids, irrigation methods, and chemicals came along.) Lillian Li has shown that the grain markets of north China were less integrated across space in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth century (Li 2000: 678, 682, 688-9, 696). Perhaps this was due to transport problems; perhaps it was because, as areas increasingly concentrated on food production, there was less trade; or perhaps it was because, as the whole region had less of a margin above subsistence than before, local harvest shocks of a given size produced larger price spikes.

Attempting to reconstruct budgets for a ‘typical’ north China farm family in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pan Ming-te comes up with a much smaller surplus above subsistence in the twentieth century—even though he did not factor in disasters of any sort.⁵³ There is some indirect evidence of improving nutritional and living levels (based on anthropometric, nuptuality, and fertility data) for southern Manchuria and for Beijing, but we have yet to see much evidence to support an optimistic scenario for many other parts of the country (Campbell and Lee, Chapter 16, this volume).

could be supported for most places during this period, it would say nothing about the century before that.

Equally important for our purposes, increased regional self-reliance often led to the over-exploitation of local resources as people attempted to replace land-intensive imports—and thus to ecological crises that became subsistence crises. An early and historically important example is the deforestation of the steep hillsides of western Zhejiang and Anhui, just west of the Yangzi Delta, from the late eighteenth century on. (Other, gentler, hills nearby had been cleared beginning in the fifteenth century, but this had far less environmental impact.) While this was once seen as a Malthusian story—in which it was presumed that people cleared these hillsides in order to plant them with newly available corn that they could eat—this story no longer fits the available evidence. (This evidence shows, for instance, no food supply shortage in the region, the strong commercial orientation of the groups who cleared the hillsides, and their lack of interest in terracing the hillsides, which would have allowed them to farm them for much longer.) It seems likely, instead, that this deforestation was driven by the desire for the lumber itself to supply a still buoyant Yangzi Delta market, which was having trouble with some of its traditional sources of imports; the corn-planting was a temporary measure, which helped feed the loggers cheaply and with minimal investment of labour.⁵⁴

The results of deforesting these steep slopes were catastrophic for the Delta counties downstream. The 1830s and 1840s brought the worst flooding the Delta had seen in at least two centuries—flooding which contemporaries understood quite clearly was linked to hillside clearance. From 1840 onwards, incidents of resistance to both rents and taxes (which were conventionally supposed to be decreased in years of disaster) likewise became more frequent than at any other point in the Qing dynasty (Bernhardt 1992: 55—83). Gentry in the region also began making the unprecedented claim that the region needed to be permanently relieved of some of its special grain tribute responsibilities (Polachek 1975: 226—7). Since the Yangzi Delta was by far the most heavily taxed part of the country, and these were years of mounting challenges for the state—due to problems with the Yellow River further north (Dodgen 1991: 53—9), the Opium War, and increased social unrest (some of which fed into the massive rebellions that began in 1851)—this was a particularly inopportune time for these problems to occur and may well have had very long-lasting political and economic consequence. As we shall see shortly, after the great rebellions, the state was both weakened and reoriented in ways that greatly exacerbated ecological strains, and were not easily repaired.

Ecologically though, this particular episode of over-exploitation was not one of the worst—in part because once the great rebellions were over, the lower Yangzi was plugged in to new sources of land-intensive imports (from Southeast Asia to the Pacific Northwest), which made a return to such measures unnecessary. After the war, large portions of these hills were successfully reforested—and enough of them stayed that way that the region never again faced comparable flooding. Neither the property rights regime in the area nor the effectiveness with which it could be enforced (often cited as contributing factors in the deforestation, and with good

reason) had improved, but access to imports had. Other regions, which had a harder time reversing the trend towards regional self-sufficiency, were not so lucky; the roughly contemporaneous over-cutting of trees in Shaanxi's Bashan range, for instance, was never repaired (Vermeer 1991: 311—15, 325—9).

The situation was often worst of all in those relatively poor regions which during the high-Qing had received some sort of central government support that helped underwrite continued stable subsistence in increasingly fragile ecologies. A particularly severe case was the inland portion of the north China plain—particularly the area near the Yellow River and the northern sections of the Grand Canal. Here a combination of slowly mounting ecological problems, the state's fiscal difficulties, and a shift in the state's priorities under pressure from abroad (to military modernization, indemnities for lost wars, attempts to jump-start mechanized industry in coastal areas, and public services for areas that might be threatened with foreign takeovers if they were too disease-ridden or disorderly) led to the abandonment, first of the Grand Canal, and subsequently of much of the central government role in flood control. The results were a massive increase in flooding, loss of access to badly needed supplies of wood and stone (for dike construction), far greater problems with banditry and other forms of disorder, and—in a vicious cycle—further withdrawal of both public and private resources. Though it is not possible to calculate precisely how much these problems may have lowered the region's standard of living, I estimated in an earlier work that by the 1920s and 1930s the annual costs of these interlinked ecological and political problems were equal to at least 10% of the region's agricultural output, and possibly over 20% (Pomeranz 1993: 218—20, 287—93).

Probably very few other areas suffered this badly, but many had lesser problems of a similar sort. Funds that had once subsidized well-digging in various poor and semi-arid regions dried up at roughly the same time that larger populations were pushing down the water table, growing local industries destroyed hillside forests, and so on.⁵⁵ And increased economic and ecological stress often meant a decline in public safety, further pushing the downward spiral. Last but by no means least, the state's efforts to promote subsistence security became far less effective in the nineteenth century. The state-supervised (though not always state-run) granary system was already on the decline by the end of the eighteenth century, and was essentially irrelevant after 1850 (Will and Wong 1991: 75—98). It appears that this system had been best developed and had had its greatest effects in areas that were not well positioned to rely on trade to cushion harvest shocks (Shiue 1998: ch. 2). Thus, its decline once again hit hardest at those places that were relatively autarkic (and perhaps getting more so, especially as transportation infrastructure decayed).

Meanwhile, forces beyond anybody's control may have been creating more crises to deal with. The nineteenth and early twentieth century was a bad time for China meteorologically. This was both a matter of background conditions (a prolonged cool period in the first half of the nineteenth century, which would have been particularly damaging for areas that were trying to squeeze in an extra crop to deal with growing pressures on the land), and in terms of sudden shocks, such as the

unusually severe El Ninos that produced horrific north China droughts in 1876—9 (1877 was the driest in the previous 200 years) and 1897—9, and the unusually severe La Ninas that produced massive floods in other years.⁵⁶ That weather became much less significant in the North Atlantic as its margin above subsistence grew after 1800 (and weather fluctuations were generally more benign than in monsoon areas, anyway), does not mean it should drop out of our narratives for other areas.

Overall, then, there seem to be a good many reasons to think that both the standard of living in ‘average’ years, and security against fluctuations in exceptional years, declined in much of China (though not everywhere) between the late eighteenth and early twentieth century. This serves to buttress our estimates of a relatively high standard of living in eighteenth-century China. The political and ecological dynamics of this decline, and their interconnections, also serve to remind us that there is no reason for regional trends to be the same across China, but also that no part of China was fully immune from changes in the others—even, or perhaps especially, as inter-regional trade declined and fragile political mechanisms for maintaining the conditions for relative prosperity became correspondingly more important. That large systemic problems caused Chinese living standards to stagnate—at best—while the West's rose with unprecedented speed in the nineteenth century need not imply that we should already find pernicious effects of these problems a century earlier, causing China to fall steadily and inexorably behind. There are a number of new issues to consider—particularly with respect to the numbers and living standards of ‘middling’ Chinese whose fortunes might (or might not) parallel those of the Europeans emphasized by Hoffman et al. (Chapter 6, this volume)—but in the meantime, a picture of general comparability still seems warranted.