Rise in the Standard of Living of Jiangnan Peasants
Since labour productivity and the standard of living are inseparably linked, the rise in farm labour productivity in Jiangnan implies an increase in the peasants' standard of living.
Earlier studies, like those examining labour productivity, have claimed that the standard of living of Jiangnan peasants continued to drop to a ‘minimum subsistence level' throughout the period under study.46 However, as I argued in relation to the previous studies of labour productivity, this conventional wisdom is undocumented and does not withstand further scrutiny. The concern here then is to determine whether the standard of living of peasants in Jiangnan did improve during the relevant two centuries.First, wage changes for farm workers indicate that standards of living improved among Jiangnan peasants. There was a steady increase in the wages of farm workers. It is no wonder that complaints could be heard repeatedly from employers about farm labour becoming more and more expensive during the two centuries. The increase is related to the ‘Chinese price revolution' which was the result of a large-scale and continuous influx of silver. However, the movement of prices was generally favourable to Jiangnan peasants during most of the period.47 Consequently, as Wei Jinyu has documented, real wages in farming rose sharply in cash, and moderately in kind, between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The increase in the real wage meant that it took four or five farm workers to support an adult in the late Ming, but by the mid-Qing only one or two hired labourers were needed to maintain the same standard of living (WeiJinyu 1983).
E. A. Wrigley has developed a method to gauge the development of labour productivity in agriculture (Wrigley 1987) which I think is very helpful. From this perspective, Wei's results suggest that the number of mouths fed by every one hundred people working on the land would increase remarkably.
It can be concluded, therefore, that farm labour productivity did increase in Jiangnan during the two centuries under study. In addition, this period also saw a decline of real rental rates (Fang Xing 1992), though no evidence suggests that the tax burden became heavier in this period. On the contrary, it seems to have become lighter.48 There is little doubt, therefore, that real incomes of peasants did improve considerably in Jiangnan at this time.Second, the quality of the peasants' diet also improved in Jiangnan during the period. Fang Xing suggested that ordinary Jiangnan peasants ate more fish, meat, and tofu, drank more tea and wine, and consumed more sugar than ever before (Fang Xing 1996, 1999: 2175—92). Farm labourers were clearly better fed in the mid-nineteenth century than in the seventeenth century, whether in terms of the quantity or quality of meat, fish, and wine, all of which they consumed in substantial quantities (James Lee and Wang Feng 1999: 29—31).
Third, the improved standard of living can also be seen in the increase in consumption, not only of ‘ordinary goods' like cotton cloth, but also of ‘luxury goods' such as silk, wine, tobacco, and opium. Bao Shichen, an early nineteenthcentury Jiangnan scholar, provides us with a description of the consumption of wine, tobacco, and opium in Suzhou Prefecture. This description indicates that the consumption of these items increased remarkably in the early nineteenth century (Bao Shichen 2001: 56—9). According to John Barrow, a contemporary western observer in China at the turn of the nineteenth century, most of the people in northern Zhejiang (a part of Jiangnan) wore silk (Barrow 1806: 572). But such accounts are rare in the literature before the late eighteenth century.
The Jiangnan peasants' choice of food also supports the argument that living standards rose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During these two centuries, an increasing number of Jiangnan peasants lived on rice that was imported from the middle and upper Yangzi.
Rather than planting sweet potatoes in their fields and then consuming them as food, they preferred to purchase the expensive rice from far away. Sweet potatoes were much cheaper than rice, but there was a major social barrier to its consumption: eating them was usually considered to be a symbol of abysmal poverty. This barrier could have been overcome if the standard of living in Jiangnan really fell, as was the case in Fujian during the same period. The increasing consumption of imported rice, rather than sweet potatoes, is thus inconsistent with any thesis that the standard of living had plummeted following a long decline of more than two centuries.Fourth, the pattern of migration during the period under study also suggests improved living conditions in Jiangnan. In the Qing times, there were large-scale migrations from highly populated east China to rich and less populated regions like northeast China, Taiwan, and southeast Asia. However, there is little evidence to suggest that such emigration took place from Jiangnan, even though it had been the most crowded region in China and enjoyed a central position in the development of water transportation. On the contrary, Jiangnan witnessed continuous in-migration. Most immigrants rushed into prosperous cities and towns located in east Jiangnan to work in industry. It is perhaps surprising that the majority of these immigrant workers did not come from neighbouring villages, but from peripheral areas of Jiangnan, or even from outside Jiangnan. Why did the local rural labour force not prefer to work outside their villages? One main reason seems to be economic: they could have a better income when they worked in the villages.4’
Finally, I will examine the standard of living in Jiangnan in the mid-nineteenth century from a broader perspective. As Jacque Gernet, Ping-ti Ho, and others have
suggested, the Chinese peasant lived quite well in late Imperial times when compared with their counterparts in the major countries of early modern western Europe or in TokugawaJapan.50 Being residents of the most prosperous area of China at that time, peasants in Jiangnan enjoyed the highest standard of living of their counterparts in the rest of the country. These peasants were well fed and clothed whether by late Imperial Chinese standards or by early modern European standards. It would be wrong to argue that they must have lived at ‘minimum subsistence level'.
As was the case for farm labour productivity, the conventional wisdom that the standard of living declined in late Imperial China is principally based on an old and misleading Malthusian conception. Neither does the conventional wisdom on the standard of living square with what we know from Jiangnan history. Therefore, a new perspective is called for, even in the relatively well-trodden field of the pre-industrial Jiangnan rural economy.