The purpose of this course is to summarize new directions in Chinese history and social science produced by the creation and analysis of big historical datasets based on newly opened Chinese archival holdings, and to organize this knowledge in a framework that encourages learning about China in comparative perspective. Our course demonstrates how a new scholarship of discovery is redefining what is singular about modern China and modern Chinese history. Current understandings of human history and social theory are based largely on Western experience or on non-Western experience seen through a Western lens. This course offers alternative perspectives derived from Chinese experience over the last three centuries. We present specific case studies of this new scholarship of discovery divided into two stand-alone parts, which means that students can take any part without prior or subsequent attendance of the other part. Part 1 (this course) focuses on comparative inequality and opportunity and addresses two related questions ‘Who rises to the top?’ and ‘Who gets what?’. Part 2 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-china-history-part-2) turns to an arguably even more important question ‘Who are we?’ as seen through the framework of comparative population behavior - mortality, marriage, and reproduction – and their interaction with economic conditions and human values. We do so because mortality and reproduction are fundamental and universal, because they differ historically just as radically between China and the West as patterns of inequality and opportunity, and because these differences demonstrate the mutability of human behavior and values. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/dzUPRyJ4ETk
3.2: Population Categories and Wealth Entitlements in China
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Del curso dictado por The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 1
36 calificaciones
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
36 calificaciones
De la lección
Module 3: Social Mobility and Wealth Distribution in Late Imperial and Contemporary China
Conoce a los instructores
James Z. LeeDean and Chair Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences
So in the West, the persistence and the growth of the have a lot population in
terms of their tremendous [INAUDIBLE] of wealth is because of the supremacy of
property rights over social policy and political rights.
But in China, the first contrast is the persistence of imperial rights over
private ownership. So, whereas in the West, we have this
tremendous imbalance of wealth, partly because private ownership rights takes
precedence over the political needs of the many.
In China, you have the persistence of political rights over profit, over
private ownership whether it's in the faraway past all the way up to the
present. So if you look at the earliest Chinese
texts, for example, the Book of Poetry, it talks about how everywhere under
Heaven is the King's land, each of those who live on the land as the king's
subject. And then, 2500 years later, you still
have important to so-called radical thinkers, arguing essentially exactly the
same line. All treasures under Heaven are the
emperor's personal property. All the people under Heaven are the
emperor's people. And the responsibility of the emperor is
not so much the accumulation and protection of property under a small
number of have a lots, rather it's the distribution of imperial largesse over
society as a whole. So this this very important strength in
Chinese political economy starts actually starts earlier than Confucius, but he is
one of the first to articulate this and in great detail.
And he wrote, the head of a state or a noble family worries not about
underpopulation, but about uneven distribution, not about poverty, but
about instability. For where there is even distribution,
there is no such thing as poverty, where there is harmony, there is no such thing
as underpopulation, and where there's stability, there is no such thing as
regime change. So in other words, legitimacy, for
Confucius, dependent on equal distribution.
what Mencius later on developed as a sense not so much of human rights, in
terms of political rights. But rather of human entitlements where
the population as a whole is always entitled because of their, because of
their humanhood. To be supported by the state in terms of
a guaranteed livelihood, guaranteed clothing, guaranteed work and so on.
And as a result, almost every Chinese dynasty from the very earliest under the
Qin, to the very last under the Qing, and even after the last dynasty with both the
Republic and then especially with the current People's Republic of China.
The state has worked very hard in redistributing a large portion of wealth,
especially land, to the population as whole population these are distribution
policies. known with different names, whether
there's jikou shoutian under the Qin-Han, zhantian under the Western Jin, tuntian
or more specifically juntian under the Northern Dynasties, to the later
distribution of land under the Eight Banner system in the last dynasty, the
Qing Dynasty. And then of course, you have land
reforming collectivization by the most recent Chinese regime.
But this idea of land distribution as opposed to land accumulation, of even
distribution rather than uneven accumulation, is an idea which runs very
deep in Chinese political economy and in Chinese policy.
However, until recently, we didn't have the data to study the distribution of
wealth for China as we do in England, in Wales, and the United States.
And it's still not possible to show you the equivalent tables of how much wealth
does the top 1% of the population have as was the bottom 90% or the bottom 80%.
But we do have, we're beginning to have, a much better example of the importance
of this equal land distribution, from studies by, a few young scholars, such as
Sui, Tang at the University of Iowa, who has accumulated a very good case study
from one county out of the 2,000 some odd counties of China.
in this case also in Northeast China, a county south of the provincial city
capital Harbin called Shuangcheng Harbin is of course the provincial capital of
Heilongjiang. and what we'll do now is we'll look first
at strong study for an understanding of equal land distribution of Late Imperial
China, and then, we'll look at the results of a very recent survey of
household wealth in contemporary China. And show how the patterns of property
distribution of who gets what are remarkably similar both in the late
imperial and in the, and in the contemporary, in contemporary China.
And that they are different from the unequal distributions of the have a lots
and the have nots of England and Wales and the contemporary United States.
So, Shuangcheng is one of the first empirical studies of property
distribution in Chinese history. It covers more than 100 village
communities, and it documents the important existence and persistence of
two patterns. First, the categorization of population
into a few sort of a political economic categories.
In this case, [INAUDIBLE] and the existence and persistence of within
category equality, and between category, inequality.
And this allows us both to assess the, a degree of inequality in land distribution
in China historically, and to assess the common assumption the regime change, the
Chinese revolution in 1949, is leading to increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Maybe true, maybe untrue, we'll do that in the next week.
Now, with Shuangcheng, Shuangcheng was a collection of state farms in
Heilongjiang, Northeast China. So, in that sense, like the United States
it's a frontier county, which is established by sort of state colonies.
our data comes not from the immediate first wave of migrants, which was in 1850
to 1830, but from annual population registers which began in the 1870s and
the quadrennial land registers which also begin around the same time.
Now the Qing state moved the population to Shuangcheng, because of a because of a
very well-known fiscal crisis, that the state faced in the early 19th and
throughout the 19th century. Which was that the state, as the
population was growing, as the population of the dependent population on the state
was growing, the state did not have a growth in income from taxation to match
the growth of dependent populations. What the state did have was it had wealth
in terms of unsettled land in northeast China.
And the state therefore decided to move some of this dependent population from
the state capital in Beijing from Rehe which was near Beijing where the state
had it's Summer Palace. and to move to support these metropolitan
bannermen the state also created a group of what we'd called rural bannerman,
[FOREIGN]. Where they relocated from elsewhere in
Northeast China either directly south of Shuangcheng in Jilin or you go further
south in Liaoning province. And it gave, it created two categories of
bannermen, one which are metropolitan bannermen from the capitals, the other
rural bannermen from northeastern provinces.
And for metropolitan bannermen, it gave them 64 hectares of land per household,
for rural bannermen it gave them half, 34 hectares of land per household.
This is at a time that most Chinese households had less than one hectare.
So in other words, one one population receives 60 times the per capita
distribution of land in China, the other receive 30 times.
So, by any definition, relatively well off.
What you see here is the location of Shuangcheng, the red dot, the location of
the origins of the Metropolitan bannermen who came from Beijing and Rehe, and the
origins of the rural bannermen who came nearby Shuangcheng but also further south
of Liaoning. they settled in a 120 Banner Villages in
Shuangcheng, which are shown on this map which are located like many sort of many
property development sort of schemes. Well, so locate it in a kind of
Descartian sort of a set of vertical and horizontal lines.
these 120 villages persist today as the most important so-called administrative
villages of Shuangcheng County being in charge of some approximately 5, 600
natural villages in the county overall. Now, we have two sets of data that make
up this big social science data set that illuminates our the big data discoveries
in Week 3. the first are government population
registers they are comprised annually. There are all together 260 coded and
linked registers, that make up this data set for Shuangcheng and they provide 1.3
million observations of 100,000 linked individual histories.
So in other words, we can find your entry in 1866, in 1867, in 1868, perhaps you
got married in 1869, perhaps you had children in 1871, perhaps you died in
1910. And we link all these observations
together so that we can create life histories, and so, we can study any year
between 1866 and 1912 and study to what extent the patterns we find in that year
are a product of the patterns before of the linked data that we have beginning in
1866. So what you have here is an example of
what these registers look like they as you see, they record the banner
affiliation, the place of origin, the ethnicity, the village, the surname, the
occupation, the age, household headship, other household members, any vital
events. they're quite detailed, and although
they're written in hand, they're in a very clear penmanship that's actually
much easier to read. The many ah, [COUGH] Chinese, the much
Chinese handwriting even today. These data are kept annually and they're
kept because, when the state first tried to settle populations in Northeast China,
what it discovered was, was that many people volunteered to move to the
Northeast so they could get these large land endowments.
Once they got them, they would sell the land, and they would move back to
Beijing. So as a result, to make sure that the
population, settlement population was actually still remaining in Shuangcheng
the state decided to do it, registers every year to ascertain whether people
were really there and to also compile land registers.
To make sure that not only were the people still there in Shuangcheng, but
the land that had been assigned them was still farmed by them.
So in addition to the 100,000 individuals, which you can trace over
time, we also have almost 20,000 physical plots, and 23 coded land registers from
1870, '76, '87, '89. 1906, we have partial registers in
between and we can link most of these plots to the land owner in the household
register and it's this data set which allows us to understand, examine the
distribution of wealth in Shuangcheng. Now, this is only a micro study, but it
is a very telling micro-study and it is the first such micro-study for Chinese
history and therefore extremely important.
what you see here is the Sample Page of the Land Register and you can see again
you have village, name of land owner, land type, land size location and so on.
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