by Chris Harman
The rebellion was similar in many ways to those that had brought down the Ch’in Dynasty in 206 BC and helped break apart the Han Empire after AD 184. There were to be other rebellions in the course of Chinese history, often following a similar pattern. A dynasty established itself and embarked upon ambitious plans of palace building, and canal and road construction; it attempted to ward off threats from pastoralists along its northern and western borders with expensive fortifications and foreign wars; it extended its power, but pushed the mass of the rural population to such levels of poverty that rebellions erupted which broke the imperial power apart; then some rebel leader or imperial general established a new dynasty which started the whole cycle again.
The rural poor never gained the benefits of victory. Scattered across the length and breadth of the countryside, tied to their individual plots of land, illiterate, knowing little of the outside world, they could rebel against acts of oppression by the existing state, but they could not collectively counterpose to it a new state in which they ruled as a class. Instead, they looked to create a state in the image of the existing one, but under a ‘good’ rather than a ‘bad’ emperor. It meant that even in victory they set up new rulers who treated them much as the old ones did.
This process even became incorporated into the ruling ideology, with the notion of the legitimacy of a dynasty depending on ‘the mandate of heaven’, which periodically would pass from one dynasty to another.
Yet the recurrent pattern does not mean Chinese society was ‘changeless’, as many Western writers used to claim. As dynasties came and went there were cumulative changes, involving the gradual introduction of new techniques into productive activities and, with them, important changes in the relationships between different groups in society.
Leading the world
China continued to undergo a great economic transformation. The owners of large landed estates, worked by either tenant farmers or wage labourers, sought to increase their incomes by investment in new farming implements and milling machinery, and by methods which enabled them to obtain more than one crop a year from their land. 11 There was continued migration from the north to the rice-growing areas of the Yangtze Valley and the south. There was a sharp rise in agricultural productivity, and a corresponding growth in the surplus that the rich could use to buy various luxuries.
Trade networks began to connect farmers to local markets, and local markets to provincial cities, which grew in size and importance. More boats than the world had ever seen plied the 50,000-mile network of rivers and canals, carrying not just luxuries for the rich but also bulk products. Money played an increasing part in the transactions of all sections of society and banknotes began to be used as well as coins. The number of traders grew, and some became very rich. The cities grew until the Sung Dynasty’s capital, K’ai-feng, enclosing an area 12 times the size of medieval Paris, probably had a million inhabitants, 12 and the city of Hang-chou, in the Yangtze Valley, anything between one and a half million and five million. 13
Industries grew as well. In K’ai-feng, ‘arsenals served the country as a whole … at a time when military technology was developing rapidly’; a textile industry grew up, based on resettled workers from ‘Szechwan and the Yangtze delta’; and the iron and steel industries became ‘highly organised enterprises dependent on more sophisticated techniques, great investments in equipment and large numbers of workers’, under the control of both the government and ‘private iron masters’. Workshops ‘produced articles of luxury for the imperial family, high officials and wealthy businessmen’, but also ‘building materials, chemicals, books and clothing’. 14
There was considerable technological innovation. Pit coal was substituted for charcoal in metallurgy, water-driven machinery was used for working bellows, and explosives were employed in the mines. The quantity of iron produced in 1078 exceeded 114,000 tons – it only reached 68,000 tons in England in 1788. 15 There was an unprecedented expansion of ceramics and porcelain-making – a technique not discovered in Europe for another 700 years. Gunpowder was in use by 1044 – 240 years before the first European mention of it. By 1132 it propelled rockets from bamboo tubes and by 1280 projectiles from bronze and iron mortars. 16 New naval technologies – ‘anchors, rudders, capstans, canvas sails and rigid matting sails … watertight compartments, mariners’ compasses’ – enabled Chinese ships to reach the Arabian Gulf and even the east coast of Africa. 17 Some could carry 1,000 people, and Chinese map-making was far ahead of not only that of Europe, but also that of the Arab Middle East.
Finally, advances in book production permitted the creation of a literature aimed at a sizeable middle-class audience for the first time in history. Printing from engraved blocks was already taking place in the ninth century. There appeared works on the occult, almanacs, Buddhist texts, lexicons, popular encyclopaedias, manuals of elementary education and historical books, as well as classic works, the complete Buddhist writings, printed promissory notes and practical manuals on medicine and pharmacy. 18 By the eleventh century moveable type existed, based on the fitting together of individual characters, although it was not used for large-scale printing until the fifteenth century – probably because the large number of Chinese characters did not make it any quicker or more economical than block printing. In any case, China possessed printed books half a millennium before Europe, and the written word ceased to be the prerogative of a literate elite or of those who dwelt in the great monasteries. Schools, both state-run and private, multiplied, especially in the new economic heart of the country, the lower Yangtze region. As one Chinese writer who lived in this region at the time wrote, ‘Every peasant, artisan and merchant teaches his son how to read books. Even herdsmen and wives who bring food to their husbands at work in the fields can recite the poems of the men of ancient times’. 19
The growth of trade and industry was matched by a growth in the prosperity, size and influence of the merchant class, so that some historians even refer to it as a ‘bourgeoisie’. Twitchett writes that by the late Sung period there was ‘a wealthy, self conscious urban middle class with a strong sense of its own identity and its own special culture’. 20 What is more, there was an important shift in the attitude of the state towards the merchants. Previous dynasties had seen the merchants ‘as a potentially disruptive element’ and kept them ‘under constant supervision’. 21 Curfews had prevented anyone going on the streets of the cities after nightfall, markets had been confined to walled city areas under tight state supervision, and merchants’ families had been barred from positions in the state bureaucracy. Now many of these restrictions fell into disuse. By the early eleventh century one high official could complain of the lack of ‘control over the merchants. They enjoy a luxurious way of life, living on dainty foods of delicious rice and meat, owning handsome houses and many carts, adorning their wives and children with pearls and jade, and dressing their slaves in white silk. In the morning they think about how to make a fortune, and in the evening they devise means of fleecing the poor’. 22
The new urban rich began to use their economic power to exert influence over the imperial bureaucracy:
The examination system now became a route by which increasing numbers of men from outside the circle of great families could enter the higher levels of the imperial government … The new bureaucrats were increasingly drawn from the families who had benefited most from the commercial revolution … the rich merchants and the wealthy landowners. 23
Only a few hundred men would pass the national examinations, 24 but they were the apex of a huge system. By the thirteenth century there were some 200,000 students in government schools and thousands more in private and Buddhist schools, all of whom dreamed of getting to the top. A good number came from merchant families.
Lost centuries
The merchants were still far from running the state, even if they were an increasingly important pressure group. Most large-scale production was still under state control, even when profitable activitie
s – such as operating state-owned ships – were contracted out to merchants. The state itself was run by bureaucrats trained as scholarly officials, whose ideal was the country gentleman. 25 This was also the ideal for the merchant’s son who obtained an official position. The result was that, just as the Sung Empire was reaching its peak, new signs of crisis began to appear.
What historians usually call ‘neo-Confucianism’ was the dominant ideology within the state. It stressed the need for rulers and administrators to follow an orderly routine, based upon mutual respect, which attempted to avoid both the violent actions of aristocratic warrior classes and the ruthless profit-making of merchants. It set the tone of the studies to be undertaken by anyone who aspired to a post in the state bureaucracy and it suited a conservative social layer whose ideal was a life of scholarly leisure rather than the hurly-burly of ruthless competition and military turmoil.
It also accorded with the approach of the early Sung emperors. They blamed the collapse of the previous T’ang Dynasty on expensive policies of military expansionism, so they cut the size of the army and relied on bribery to buy peace from border states. This approach was expressed through semi-religious notions about the harmony of nature and society. But it contained a rational, pragmatic core. It was a way out of the long years of crisis that had gone before.
Many Western writers have concluded that the dominance of neo-Confucianism blocked the path of capitalist advance in China. They have seen its hostility to ‘the spirit of capitalism’ as keeping Chinese society stagnant for millennia. Others have emphasised the ‘totalitarianism’ which supposedly stopped Chinese economic development. 26 But, as we have seen, in the Sung era Chinese society was far from stagnant. Non-Confucian ideas (Buddhist, Taoist and Nestorian) not only existed but were found in print. And officials who in theory stood for Confucian pieties in practice behaved very differently. Patricia Ebrey, for instance, has shown how a widely distributed Sung advice manual for the gentleman class, Yüan Ts’ai’s Precepts for Social Life contradicted many neo-Confucian tenets. The writer ‘assumed one’s goal in business was profit’, and expressed ‘business-like attitudes’, so that ‘those fully committed to … neo-Confucianism would have to abstain from most of the activities [he] … describes’. 27
There was a gap between the prevalent neo-Confucian ideology and the activities of the merchant class. But it was a gap that class could tolerate so long as the economy was growing and it was becoming richer and more influential – just as the first European capitalists hundreds of years later were prepared to work with monarchic states and accept their official ideologies so long as these did not impede the making of money.
The peculiarity of China which weakened the ability of the merchants and wealthier tradesmen to transform themselves into a fullblown capitalist class was material, not ideological. They were more dependent on the officials of the state machine than was the case in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. For the state officials were indispensable to running a major means of production – the massive canal networks and irrigation works. 28 This gave the Chinese merchants little choice but to work with the state machine, 29 even though that state was absorbing an enormous proportion of the surplus and diverting it from productive use – spending it on the luxury consumption of the court and the top officials, and on bribing the border peoples.
This was a period of great prosperity for the gentry-officials and the rich merchants alike. 30 It was also a period of grinding poverty for the peasants. In the eleventh century Su Hsün wrote:
The rich families own big chunks of land … Their fields are tilled by hired vagrants who are driven by whips and looked upon as slaves. Of the produce of the land, half goes to the master and half to the tiller. For every landowner there are ten tillers … The owner can clearly accumulate his half and become rich and powerful, while the tillers must daily consume their half and fall into poverty and starvation. 31
The ‘Confucian’ ethics of the gentry-officials certainly did not extend to those who toiled for them. Yüan Ts’ai’s Precepts for Social Life refers to peasants and artisans as ‘lesser people’, speaks of ‘perversity on the part of servants, their tendency to commit suicide’, suggests how they should be beaten, and advises treating them as domesticated animals. 32
The historian John Haeger writes, ‘By the end of the southern Sung, much of the countryside had been impoverished by the same forces which had sparked the agricultural and commercial revolution in the first place’. 33
But before any symptoms of internal crisis could mature – and any clash of interests between the merchants and the officials come to the fore – an external crisis tore the state apart. In 1127 an invasion from the north cut China in half, leaving the Sung in control only of the south. In 1271 the whole country fell to a second invasion.
The first invasion did not fundamentally alter conditions in the north. The conquerors, the Jürchen, were a people already organised in a state patterned on Chinese lines and ran their half of China, the Chin Empire, with Chinese-speaking officials. Effectively there were two Chinese empires for almost 150 years.
The second invasion was much more serious. It was by Mongol armies which had spread out from their central Asian homeland in the previous century to rampage west to central Europe and south into Arabia and India, as well as east into China and Korea. Mongol society was dominated by military aristocrats who owned vast nomadic herds. They were superb horsemen and had the wealth to acquire up-to-date armour and armaments. The result was a military combination that few armies could withstand. 34 But they had little administrative structure of their own. For this they depended upon the services of peoples they had conquered.
In China the Mongol rulers called themselves the Yüan Dynasty and relied upon sections of the old officialdom to run the empire. But, not trusting them, they kept key positions in their own hands and contracted out the profitable business of collecting taxes to Muslim merchants from central Asia, backed up by military detachments. This broke apart the social arrangements that had resulted from – and further encouraged – a level of technological and economic advance such as the world had never known.
The economic problems that had been slowly growing in the Sung years, especially the impoverishment of the countryside, now came to the fore. Prices began to rise from the 1270s onwards. The poverty of the northern peasantry was made worse by the further spread of big estates.
Chinese society continued to be advanced enough to amaze foreigners. It was the Mongol court in Beijing that so impressed the Italian traveller Marco Polo in 1275. The vast stretch of the Mongol presence from one end of Eurasia to the other also played an important part in spreading knowledge of Chinese technical advances to the less advanced societies of the west. But China itself had lost its economic dynamism, and the poverty of the peasantry caused repeated revolt, often led by religious sects or secret societies – the ‘White Lotus’, the ‘White Cloud’, the ‘Red Turbans’. Finally, the son of an itinerant agricultural worker who was a Red Turban leader, Chu Yüan-chang, took the Mongol capital Beijing and proclaimed himself emperor in 1368.
There was a steady recovery from the devastation of the last Mongol years under the new empire, known as the Ming. But there was no recovery of the economic dynamism. The early Ming emperors consciously discouraged industry and foreign trade in an effort to concentrate resources in agriculture, so that they were less developed in the early sixteenth century than they had been in the twelfth. In the meantime, other parts of Eurasia had learned the techniques the Chinese had pioneered, and had begun to build flourishing urban civilisations of their own – and armies and navies to go with them.
Chapter 3
Byzantium: the living fossil
The collapse of the Roman Empire in western Europe was not the end of the empire as such. Emperors who described themselves as Romans still reigned in the city of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) 1,000 years after the Goths sacked Rome. The empire today is
usually called Byzantium, but the emperors and their subjects regarded themselves as Romans, although their language was Greek. Through much of that 1,000 years the splendour of Constantinople – with its luxurious royal palaces, its libraries and public baths, its scholars acquainted with the writings of Greek and Roman antiquity, its 300 churches and its magnificent St Sophia cathedral – stood out as the one redoubt of culture against the poverty, illiteracy, superstition and endless wars that characterised the Christian lands of the rest of Europe.
Even in the twelfth century, when western Europe was reviving, Constantinople’s population was greater than that of London, Paris and Rome combined. The city fascinated the elites of the neighbouring Muslim empires, although ‘Baghdad, Cairo and Cordova [Cordoba] were each larger and more populous than Constantinople’. 35
Yet Byzantine civilisation added very little to humanity’s ability to make a livelihood or to its knowledge in those 1,000 years. In every sphere it relied on advances already known to the old Roman Empire – and already known to the Greeks of the fifth century BC.
St Sophia cathedral, 36 completed in the mid-sixth century, was the most magnificent building in Europe at the time. But it also marked the end of any advance by Byzantine architects. 37 The innovative techniques employed were not used again, and later architects did not know how to keep it in full repair. Byzantine literature was characterised by a deliberate rejection of originality, with ‘a striving to emulate the style of classical models and to serve scrupulously a set of pedantic rules … No literary value was attached to originality of content, freedom of invention, or freedom in the choice of subject matter’. 38 The obsession with imitating the past meant the language of official society was the ‘classic’ Greek of 1,000 years before, not the very different version employed in the life of the city: ‘When making a formal speech, the orator would shrink from referring to any object in everyday use by its familiar name’. 39 Byzantine art was characterised by ‘a process of continuous limitation’ until it became nothing more than propaganda, either for the imperial power or for the church. 40