Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 by Philip A. Kuhn Read Free Book Online

in labor. Land tenancy tended toward
long-term, contractual relations between landlord and tenant. In
some areas, permanent tenancy rights (under a kind of dual-ownership system, in which surface and subsurface rights were held by
different persons) had emerged by the eighteenth century. The
hereditary status system of the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), in
which millions of people were enrolled in special registers and compelled to work for the state in specialized occupations, was formally
abolished soon after the Ch'ing conquest. Most important, the obligatory labor-service of all commoners (the corvee) was swept away in
the tax reforms that began in the sixteenth century, by which land
and labor taxes were merged and assessed on the basis of land.
Instead, the state hired laborers to do its work. Indeed, by the eighteenth century, labor-for-cash was the obvious and necessary basis of
a commercializing economy."
    The spirit of formal equality-already so forcefully impelled by
economics-was symbolized by the Ch'ing government's emancipation of small groups of servile people in the 172os and the enunciation of a general policy of commoner equality. I emphasize this last
phrase because eighteenth-century China remained a steeply hierarchical society, with towering heights separating the governing elite
from the rest of the population. But though the numbers freed were
very small, the symbolic achievement must have seemed worth the
effort. By sweeping away "mean" (chien) status among the commoners, the emancipation decrees apparently were meant to create
a subject population uncluttered by specially disadvantaged groups.
The proximate reasons for the decrees of the i 72os are still obscure.
Nevertheless, the more general reason must have been related to the
Manchus' distrust of the Han landlord elite (whose dependents these servile groups were) as well as a desire to express a kind of conqueror's "benevolence" in which the Manchu regime stood above a relatively undifferentiated mass of commoners-a scornful gesture at
some long-standing Han social distinctions. Formal commoner
equality was right in line with the despotic and rationalizing style of
Injen, the third Ch'ing emperor and Hungli's father. The language
of the emancipation decrees implied that lacking specific historicallegal reasons for servile status (such as penal servitude or a contract
of indenture), all commoners were of equal standing before the
mighty Ch'ing state. Writing about the despised Tanka (boat people)
of Kwangtung, Injen pronounced that "they were originally ordinary
subjects (hang-min, lit. "good [i.e., not polluted] commoners"), and
there is no reason (li) to despise them."12 Concludes a recent study:
"Best of all," freedmen could now "take advantage of the expanded
labor market and change employers if they wished."13

    A free-wheeling labor market, the decline of personal dependency
and servile status: these have great appeal to a twentieth-century
Westerner, who associates them with Freedom and Progress. Yet their
effect on the mentality of an eighteenth-century Chinese may have
been somewhat different. No doubt they were appreciated by families
struggling to survive on small parcels of land, who urgently needed
to sell their excess labor power to fend off starvation. Landless men
could hope to survive in a free market for hired farm labor. A few
able and lucky outcasts might now rise from pariah status into the
examination system (barred to "mean" groups) and thence into elite
status. (A decree of 1771 dealt with such upstarts by ruling that only
in the fourth generation after formal emancipation might a man
legally sit for the examinations.)'' With respect to servile groups,
however, it may be wondered whether much "freeing up" actually
occurred. Even half 'a century later, the serflike tenants in I4ui-chou
were having trouble asserting their imperially mandated freedom.15
And one historian points out