Challenging the Mandate of Heaven

Social Protest and State Power in China

Elizabeth J. Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780765604446
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317475125
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social science theories of contentious politics have been based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from the European and American experience, and classic texts in the field make no mention of either the Chinese Communist revolution or the Cultural Revolution -- surely two of the most momentous social movements of the twentieth century. Moreover, China's record of popular upheaval stretches back well beyond this century, indeed all the way back to the third century B.C. This book, by bringing together studies of protest that span the imperial, Republican, and Communist eras, introduces Chinese patterns and provides a forum to consider ways in which contentious politics in China might serve to reinforce, refine or reshape theories derived from Western cases.

1

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Predators and Protectors: Strategies of Peasant Survival

In the late imperial period, peasants in North China lived in a highly unstable natural environment. The resultant insecurity cast a dark shadow upon economic, social, and political life in the area. With productive opportunities severely constrained, peasants turned to alternative means of promoting and safeguarding their survival. Many households pursued the familiar strategies of controlling family size, borrowing from others, or moving elsewhere in an effort to obtain or conserve scarce resources. Such solutions, common to peasants the world over, assumed a particular form in North China that was conducive to the emergence of a diverse array of more aggressive strategies. These violent adaptations to a hostile environment can, for the most part, be subsumed within two broad categories. The first category includes offensive attempts to seize the resources of others: the predatory strategy. The second is composed of efforts to guard against such attacks: the protective strategy.

Although the motivation for these strategies was personal survival, their effect was to provide peasants with valuable experience in cooperation, mobility, and high-risk behavior. It is often assumed that sideline pursuits work primarily to sap rebellious potential.¹ Missing from this view is the point that adaptive strategies are more than simply income boosters. Far from an inevitable fetter upon revolt, involvement in short-term migration, banditry, militia, and the like can actually organize peasants for more dramatic steps.

It is important to remember that these adaptations to the local environment evolved and persisted over generations. Although conditioned by the physical and social backdrop, these were by no means automatic, “knee-jerk” responses to set stimuli. Peasants learned to cope with their predicament in a cumulative history of trial-and-error experience, passing on these traditions to their progeny through oral history, folklore, and direct instruction.

Like all human beings, peasants are not entirely autonomous individuals. Their range of activity is dependent upon and limited by social circumstances and cultural traditions. Conflict over scarce resources is not comprehensible on an individual basis alone. Both the pattern of resource distribution and the struggle for a readjustment of this pattern necessarily involve wider social units. Much of the following discussion of peasant survival strategies will therefore be concerned with identifying the levels of social organization at which particular strategies were employed. Collective action implies organization, but this may be variously based upon kinship, settlement, class, friendship, occupation, or a number of other ties. Only after having clarified the underlying structures of action can we proceed to the central issue: the relationship of these strategies to peasant rebellion.

Theories of group conflict stress the importance of “mobilization”—the process whereby the discontented muster resources for the pursuit of common goals.² Collective survival strategies constitute important means of peasant mobilization, thereby facilitating the possibility of rural rebellion. The Nian and Red Spears provide examples of how, at two specific times in history, ongoing predation and protection were transformed into outright challenges to the Mandate of Heaven. Under the pressures of severe natural disaster and political crisis, regular survival strategies could generate anti-state activity. Such dramatic, rebellious expressions should not, however, blind us to the pragmatic and continuous character of these local patterns of survival.

An ecological perspective on peasant revolt does not deny its political nature. In the first place, national policies played a role in creating many of the problems with which Chinese peasants had to cope. Lack of proper dike maintenance by the central government was largely responsible for the devastating flooding of the region. Administrative irrationalities made possible the practice of smuggling. Lax security contributed to the growth of banditry and the need for private forms of defense. Periodic tax increases and marauding government soldiers furthered the protective response. In the second place, rebellion by definition involves opposition to government authority and is therefore a political act. Nevertheless, such opposition is often peripheral to an explanation of how and why traditions of rural violence evolve and persist. For the peasants themselves, armed revolt is often an extension of familiar strategies for making a living, turning into an anti-state position only reluctantly and under outside pressure.

Standard Household Strategies

Peasant households sought to cope with the problem of scarcity by controlling family size and composition, borrowing from others, diversifying their sources of income, and the like. Periodically family members or entire households would also move outside the local area in search of additional resources. These “sedentary” and “mobile” solutions were standard patterns that may at first appear quite unrelated to more aggressive survival strategies. In fact, they did have an important bearing on the likelihood and style of collective violence. Typically adopted at the level of the household—the primary production-consumption unit of any peasant economy—these mundane responses are common to many peasant societies. The form and consequences of these solutions to resource scarcity differ, however, and it is these differences that help to define the nature of peasant action in specific locales.

Sedentary Solutions

One of the most prevalent and tragic solutions to peasant poverty is the killing of infants. In China, where males were the favored offspring for both cultural and economic reasons, infanticide was primarily directed against girl babies. Whereas boys might be expected eventually to contribute to family income, girls were seen as liabilities who had to be reared and then married off at considerable expense. Widespread female infanticide resulted in a glaring imbalance in the sex ratio, with males outnumbering females by a sizable margin.³

For the mid-nineteenth century, figures from Xuzhou Prefecture in Jiangsu suggest an average of 129 men for every 100 women.⁴ The disparity continued into the twentieth century. Table 1.1 gives figures from a field investigation conducted in sixteen northern Anhui villages in 1932. These statistics show males outnumbering females among the younger residents, with the ratio reversing itself among the elderly. Although in peasant societies female life expectancy is often lower than that of males because of higher mortality during the childbearing years, here we see no indication of that trend. Rather, the proportion of women increases steadily over the life cycle. It thus seems likely that the imbalance in the sex ratio was due to female infanticide. Figures from eighteen northern Anhui counties in 1934 range from a low of 108 to a high of 150 males per 100 females. The mean for the area as a whole was 123 men for every 100 women.⁵ This sex ratio imbalance was not extraordinarily high by historic Chinese standards, yet the figures suggest that as many as 20 percent of males in the region may have gone unmarried. Although individual peasant families were pursuing a rational policy in rearing sons who were expected to augment household income, the social impact of this policy was a serious surplus of single young males. The dryland wheat farming practiced in this area was an extensive form of agriculture unresponsive to increased increments of human labor. Few family plots were large enough to absorb the labor of many sons. Some of these unmarried men were able to sell their services to more affluent families as hired workers or servants, but unemployment was a chronic problem. The existence of a huge contingent of single men had major consequences for the pattern of intergroup conflict. “Bare sticks,” as unmarried males were popularly termed, provided a principal source of recruits for both predatory and protective movements. Smugglers, bandits, crop watchers, and militiamen alike were drawn in large part from their ranks. Thus the practice of female infanticide, though motivated by a family’s need to restrict resource consumption, also helped contribute to particular forms of resource competition.

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Table 1.1

Percentage of Males and Females in Northern Anhui Villages, 1932

Age Group	% Male	% Female
Under 7 years	55	45
7–14 years	54	46
15–54 years	53	47
55+ years	49	51
Average	53	47

Source: Yang Jihua, 1933.

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Despite efforts to control family size, many households continued to suffer economic difficulties. A flood, famine, wedding, or funeral could push peasants below the margin of survival, forcing them to borrow grain or money to weather the crisis. If an investigation conducted in four northern Jiangsu villages in 1943 is representative, nearly one-half of all households were in debt. About 80 percent of the debts had been incurred to provide food for immediate subsistence needs. Most of the other borrowing was a response to weddings, funerals, or illness. Less than 5 percent of the debts were for productive purposes such as irrigation improvement or the purchase of seeds, tools, or draft animals. Borrowing from relatives was common, since such loans might carry a more favorable rate of interest.⁶

Besides borrowing from creditors to tide themselves over in immediate crises, peasants organized loan associations as a means of insurance against hard times in the future. Although often based on kinship, such groups involved a level of cooperation higher than the nuclear family, bringing together friends and relatives in a collective strategy for coping with economic insecurity. “Old people societies” were formed to help with the burden of funeral expenses. Dues were pooled and then used to defray the cost of mourning clothes, coffins, and funeral arrangements as the need arose. “Fur garment societies” were organized to provide participating peasants with warm winter coats, which were beyond their individual means. Members paid annual dues that were used to purchase one or more coats each year. The group disbanded when all participants had been duly provided for. In addition to these specialized societies, groups created to provide more general types of loans were also common. These associations, or yaohui, typically met once a year, at which time members drank wine and threw dice to determine the precedence for borrowing.⁷ Only a thin line separated the yaohui from the huahui, or illegal gambling societies, which were also prevalent in the area. Gambling had long been a favorite pastime for peasants during the slack season. As the gazetteer of Bo County commented, “Gambling constitutes the most serious and harmful vice of the local people.”⁸ Those who engaged in this practice usually did so with very little capital, so that losers often had no means of making good their debts. In the case of the Nian, losses at the gambling table were a potent motivation for the move to open banditry.

Incurring debts was obviously only a temporary palliative, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Predators and Protectors: Strategies of Peasant Survival
• 2 Protective Rebellion: Tax Protest in Late Qing China
• 3 Heterodox Rebellion? The Mystery of Yellow Cliff
• 4 Predatory Rebellion: Bai Lang and Social Banditry
• 5 Skilled Workers and the Chinese Revolution: Strikes Among Shanghai Silk Weavers, 1927-1937
• 6 Labor Divided: Sources of State Formation in Modern China
• 7 Contradictions under Socialism: Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957
• 8 Working at Cross-Purposes: Shanghai Labor in the Cultural Revolution
• 9 Rural Violence in Socialist China
• 10 Casting a Chinese "Democracy" Movement: Legacies of Social Fragmentation
• Index