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State-Sponsored Inequality
The Banner System and Social Stratification in Northeast China
By Shuang Chen STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0163-5
CHAPTER 1
Social Formation Under State Domination in Modern China
An Introduction
Eleven days after the Chinese New Year, in 1824, a procession of fifty-three wagons left Beijing, the capital of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), and headed northward to a remote settlement in Manchuria called Shuangcheng (map 1.1). Riding in the wagons were sixty men, fifty-four women, and seventy-two children — a total of fifty-three households. These travelers had begun this journey because the government had told them that they were returning to their ancestral homeland, where fertile land, clean and spacious houses, and assistance in farming the land awaited them. Fifteen days later, they went through the Shanhaiguan Pass — the easternmost pass on the Great Wall — and entered Manchuria. Escorted by local officials, they traveled farther north, taking another sixteen days to cross the border into Jilin. After another ten days, they finally arrived at their destination. These fifty-three households were the first Beijing pioneers to settle in Shuangcheng, but others soon followed.
These settlers from Beijing would become the state-designated elites in Shuangcheng. They were descendants of the warriors who had helped the Manchu rulers of the Qing conquer China proper in 1644. As early followers of the emperor, those warriors had been organized under a system called the Eight Banners, and were referred to as bannermen. Because of this distinguished status, they and their descendants were to serve the state as soldiers and receive stipends from the state in perpetuity. But in the early nineteenth century, amid a fiscal crisis surrounding the support of the banner population, the state decided to relocate the bannermen living in Beijing back to Manchuria, substituting state land for the state stipends. Over a period of two decades, a total of 698 such banner households arrived in Shuangcheng. To help them settle in their new homes, the state, between 1815 and 1820, also relocated three thousand households of bannermen from elsewhere in Manchuria (map 1.1) to Shuangcheng. The government's settlement of the banner immigrants triggered private migration into the area as well. By the 1860s, a total of 5,300 registered households had settled in Shuangcheng, establishing a rural society divided into two segments: the haves — that is, the jingqi, or "metropolitan bannermen," from Beijing and Rehe and the tunding, or "rural bannermen," from other parts of Manchuria, who were supported by the state with land grants — and the have-nots, that is, the fuding, or "floating bannermen," and minren, or civilian commoners, who had moved into the area without the state's permission and thus did not receive land allocations. Among the haves, the metropolitan bannermen received land grants that were twice as large as those of the rural bannermen. These asymmetrical entitlements continued until 1906, by which time Shuangcheng had become a county with more than sixty thousand households, containing 440,000 people (SCXZ 1990, 829). This legacy of social segmentation persisted in Shuangcheng far beyond the fall of the Qing in 1911.
This book explores the social and economic processes of inequality under a state-dominated system by providing a holistic, comprehensive view of the formation of the social hierarchy in Shuangcheng in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The state created a social hierarchy from the top down by classifying people into distinct categories, each associated with differentiated entitlements to land. Under this system, the state directly intervened in wealth distribution and the determination of people's social status in order to fulfill its administrative goal: to maintain the elite status of the metropolitan bannermen. Eventually, the state-designated social hierarchy played out on the ground at the intersection of state policies and local practices.
As a well-documented case, the Shuangcheng story offers a historical perspective on the phenomenon of states using resource allocation to create structural inequality. Scholars who study social stratification pay increasing attention to the persistence of structural inequality in modern societies (Baron and Bielby 1980; Blau 1994; Diprete et al. 1997; Tilly 1998). In his thesis of "durable inequality," Charles Tilly (1998, 1–40) points out that inequalities measured by acquired individual attributes that range along a scale from low to high — such as income level or education level — are open, fluid, and easy to change. However, when ascriptive characteristics, such as gender and skin color, become the basis of social differentiation and access to resources, the inequalities arising along these categorical boundaries interact with acquired individual attributes to become "durable" (ibid.). This is because boundaries between categories based on ascriptive characteristics are hard to change. In his study of the rising inequality in post-socialist China, Wang Feng (2008) reveals that the major sources of social inequality are the various categories created by the socialist state, based on household category, ownership type, industrial sector, and geographical location. The durability of structural inequality in a society raises two questions: Among the various ascriptive characteristics of an individual, how do certain ones become the basis of social differentiation? And, how are the boundaries corresponding to these characteristics created and maintained? The study of the Shuangcheng case shines a historical light on the role of one important actor — the state — in creating such boundaries, and on the social construction of these boundaries in an agrarian society.
This book focuses on structural inequality created by the state because such inequality is not only the foundation of the social hierarchy in nineteenth-century Shuangcheng but also a feature of the Chinese society after the foundation of the People's Republic of China ([PRC]; 1949–present). Among the many categories created by the socialist state, those created by the hukou household registration system most resemble the population categories in Shuangcheng. With its goal of industrialization, the PRC, established the hukou system and divided the population of the entire country into the "rural household" category or the "urban household" category (Wang 2005). This system has created nationwide inequality between the two household categories, with the urban households enjoying better entitlements to state employment and the associated benefits, such as housing and education. Numerous studies have highlighted the profound impact of the hukou system on social inequality in China and its connection with the socialist revolution (Solinger 1999; Wu and Treiman 2004; Wang 2005; Whyte 2010; Brown 2012). Yet people rarely recognize that the state-sponsored inequality in post-1949 China was not a socialist extension but a statecraft that had existed in history. The Eight Banners registration system in Qing-dynasty Shuangcheng has many parallels with the hukou system in the PRC. Placing this phenomenon in the broader perspective of state-building and its social consequences renders an in-depth understanding of state-sponsored inequality in the past and present.
In a broad sense, both the state-dominated system in Shuangcheng and the hukou system in post-1949 China are state-initiated projects of social engineering, in which the state implemented policies to proactively design or plan the social order. The efforts to penetrate and control society go hand in hand with the emergence of the state. From time to time, these efforts culminate in projects of social engineering. In the twentieth century, government social-engineering projects garnered considerable attention because they were often carried out in an entire country and impacted the society on a massive scale. James Scott (1998) examines some of these large-scale social-engineering projects, such as Soviet collectivization and the Tanzanian forced villagization. He points out that the ways these projects were carried out are closely associated with the political system and ideology of the respective state; all the large-scale projects he studies were carried out by an authoritarian state with a "high-modernist ideology": "a strong version of self-confidence based on the development of science and technology and the expansion of production" (ibid., 4). Yet little attention has been given to social-engineering projects undertaken in the past. Although the Shuangcheng settlement and the hukou system were independent projects carried out under different ideologies, both grew out of a state belief in using resource allocation to create a social hierarchy among the population, and both were backed up by a political system that enabled the state to implement such policies. These parallels connect socialist China to its imperial past. By reconstructing the story of social formation under state domination in nineteenth-century Shuangcheng, this book offers a unique perspective on how historians and social scientists typically conceive modern phenomena.
In addition to the implications for the social stratification system in contemporary China, the Shuangcheng case also offers a special setting for the examination of some key issues in nineteenth-century China. The state-dominated system in Shuangcheng was special in two respects. First, the Eight Banners institutionally distinguished Shuangcheng from many other local societies of the period. Although the Qing institutionalized the bannermen and created the Shuangcheng society from top down, it had only limited reach into local civilian society. For most of the Qing dynasty, the state did not establish formal government institutions below the county level. Only in the early twentieth century, the last decade of Qing dynasty, did the state begin to build government offices at the district level. State landownership and the level of state control in Shuangcheng were only seen in the Eight Banner farms in Manchuria, the manor lands in the areas surrounding Beijing, and Xinjiang (Wang, Liu, and Guo 1991; Diao 1993; Diao and Yi 1994; Guo 1997; Qiu 2014). Second, the ability of the state to carry out the Shuangcheng settlement and to design the immigrant society counters our general understanding of Qing history in this period. The received wisdom about nineteenth-century China portrays it as an age marked by the devolution of political power, a vicious cycle brought about by endless internal rebellions and foreign intrusions. At the societal level, the numbers of local elites greatly expanded, and they became more and more important in organizing local society. Thus, the Shuangcheng society seems on the surface to be very different from other local societies. However, as this book reveals, Shuangcheng was still part of the China of the nineteenth century and experienced all the social and political changes of this period. Most importantly, banner officials in Shuangcheng adopted a style of local governance similar to that of the civilian system elsewhere in China. Therefore, despite the institutional difference, the ways in which the Shuangcheng immigrants responded to state policies, organized themselves, and carried out daily activities can serve as references to social behaviors of the time. The basic social dynamics — economic and demographic differentiation, social mobility, and social reproduction at the local level — are informative in understanding rural communities in nineteenth-century China.
By showing how the interaction of state policies, local politics, and customary practices gave rise to disparities in socioeconomic status among the Shuangcheng immigrants, the book illustrates in vivid detail the transformation of banner society in Manchuria in the late Qing. As the institutional foundation for Manchu's rule of China, the development of the Eight Banners has been key to understanding the history of the Qing. The political, socioeconomic, and cultural status of bannermen are important indicators of the vigor of this institution. Traditional views on the Eight Banners in the late Qing emphasize its decline, when it could no longer provide stipends to bannermen, and when the banner people lost their linguistic and military traditions. However, studies that have been done in the last thirty years shed new light on the ramifications of the fiscal and cultural crises of the Eight Banners. As their institutional support gradually dissolved, the banner people became embedded in the broader social fabric of Chinese society (Crossley 1990; Ding et al. 2004; Enatsu 2004; Qiu 2014). During this process, some bannermen were able to maintain their socioeconomic status and even became local elites (Enatsu 2004). At the same time, the banner people developed and preserved a distinct ethnic identity (Crossley 1990). While existing studies focus on either a select group of individuals or on a single aspect of the life of bannermen, the Shuangcheng story provides a holistic view of the banner people living in 120 villages in the last hundred years of the Qing dynasty. It confirms findings in the existing scholarship that "banner people" was not a simple, unitary category but a diverse group who interacted with and adapted to the larger society. It reveals that the Eight Banners significantly impacted the society of Manchuria, not only in terms of the identity of bannermen but also in terms of the social hierarchy in the region.
Moreover, the Shuangcheng story illuminates in particular the questions of to what extent and how the state was able to reach into and transform local society. Over the course of the development of the modern state, scholars have provided abundant documentation and theories about the complexity of state-society interactions and their perplexing consequences. Scott (1998, 2–3) highlights the inherent tension between state-building and local customs. Since myriad local customs are illegible to outsiders, state measures to govern a society, or make a society "legible," are ways to simplify that society. As such, the interactions between state policies and local society have consequences going both ways: on one hand, local people had the capacity to modify and subvert the state-imposed policies; on the other hand, despite resistance to the state's simplifications, state policies did shape social institutions and transform the society (ibid., 47–51). At the same time, the boundary between the state and society in everyday life is often blurred. As Joel Migdal (2001, 11–16) synthesizes in his "state-in-society approach," although the state has an image as "a coherent, controlling organization," in practice, both the state and society have multiple representatives, with different interests. These representatives formed "shifting coalitions and contended with one another over rules for everyday behavior" (Ibid., 11). This is also true in China. Because of the absence of a formal government structure below the county level, the state in the late imperial period relied on many agents to carry out its rule in local society (Hsiao 1960; Ch'ü 1962; Huang 1985, 219–48; Reed 2000; Zheng 2009). Some local elites helped to promote state policies and disseminate state ideologies to reinforce their own power and socioeconomic status (Wong, Huters, and Yu 1997; Faure 2007). Therefore, scholars studying local society in the late imperial period identify the influence of state ideology and policies everywhere. Whereas existing scholarship on state-society relations looks at how the state penetrates local society, the Shuangcheng case illuminates the boundary between the state and society by asking the question the other way: in a society created by the state, to what extent are local people able to exercise their agency, and how is this agency practiced?
Finally, by counting wealth as an indispensable variable in the process of social formation, and by using a non-Western case to illuminate the levers of wealth distribution in a noncapitalist setting, the book also contributes to comparative studies of wealth inequality. By revealing extremely unequal distributions of wealth, recent studies on global wealth distribution have sparked growing popular interest in this field (Lindert 2000; Davies et al. 2011; Piketty 2014). Yet, most of the studies on wealth distribution that have been done so far focus on Western countries, where the patterns of wealth distribution were shaped by the interplay of the development of capitalism and state fiscal policies. Because of the scarcity of systematic data preserved from the early periods, our understanding of wealth distribution in preindustrial societies remains limited. The book offers one of the first empirical studies on the distribution of landed wealth in an entire county to show how wealth inequality in early modern China was produced and maintained in an agrarian society under a state-dominated system.
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Excerpted from State-Sponsored Inequality by Shuang Chen. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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