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

that provisions for cash redemption of
servile status were in fact meaningless, for they were well beyond the
resources of tenant farmers, and in any case "redemption" would
leave them without it livelihood."'
    Surely the underlying fact about "free labor" in the eighteenthcentury economy is that it was sold in a buyer's market. In an increasingly crowded region like Kiangnan, "freedom" for the wage laborer
meant the liberty to harness one's family to the kind of regime I have
just described in the Kiangnan cotton industry. It meant the option to leave an oppressive landlord and take one's chances elsewhere.
Liberty could also be found, presumably, in the labor gangs hired to
work on government dredging projects, or on the docks of the maritime trading ports. But how many people could not find buyers for
their labor in the growing economy of the age-and what happened
to them?

    Popular Consciousness of the Prosperous Age
    Here indeed was a bustling economy. Its effects on social consciousness, however, are virtually unexplored. Take, for instance, social
communication. The dense commercial networks so prominent in the
eighteenth-century landscape put nearly everybody in a regular relationship to a market. Knowledge of regional and national events
flowed with goods and people along the trade routes between villages
and market towns, between local markets and regional entrepots.
The "back-alley news" (hsiao-tao hsiao-hsi) that Chinese of our day find
so essential to supplement the government-controlled press was
already well developed in late imperial times-and there is plenty of
evidence that China's "back alleys" were, even then, linked to regional
and national networks of information. News of opportunities elsewhere, as well as of dangers flowing from elsewhere, were the daily
fare of the Chinese villager (to say nothing of the city dweller).
    Hardest to estimate is what the Prosperous Age really meant to
ordinary people. Attitudes about where liLfe was leading, whether
toward better conditions or worse, whether toward greater security
or less, may have been rather different from what we would expect
in a growing economy. From the standpoint of an eighteenth-century
Chinese commoner, commercial growth may have meant, not the
prospect of riches or security, but a scant margin of survival in a
competitive and crowded society. Commerce and manufacturing
enabled hard-pressed rural families to hang on, but only through
maximum employment of everyone's labor. This scramble for existence in an uncertain environment may have been a more vivid reality
in most people's lives than the commercial dynamism that so
impresses us in hindsight.
    Two large questions bear upon this late eighteenth-century consciousness: first, whether China's economic growth, however impressive in absolute terms, was able to offset the great increase of her
population; and second, how the unevenness of that growth from region to region may have affected how people viewed the security
of their lives.

    Population, Prices, and Money
    A steep rise in rice prices in 1748 set off alarm bells throughout the
national bureaucracy. The effect on public order was immediate and
disturbing: riots in Soochow and other lower Yangtze cities, which
had become dependent upon rice imports from provinces upstream.
But officials all around the empire were aware of the inflation in rice
prices and its connection to population pressure. Ch'en Hung-mou,
governor of Shensi Province, wrote that the inflation resulted from a
long-term shift in the ratio between population and land. "It is certainly a result of population pressure . . . In all the provinces, the
fertile land has already been brought under cultivation. Although
there are still large areas of mountainous or marshy wasteland, the
soil is so poor that it must be left fallow for two years after one year's
cultivation." 17 An experienced official, Wang Hui-tsu, commented on
what