We Must be Taxed": A Case of Populist Urban Fiscal Reform In Ming Nanjing (1368–1644)

"We Must be Taxed":

A Case of Populist Urban Fiscal Reform in Ming Nanjing (1368–1644)

It was a momentous day for Nanjing residents in the year 1609, when the city streets were flooded with people registering tax information. For decades, locals had petitioned the government to launch urban fiscal reform that would rescue many people from bankruptcy and jail, but nothing had happened. Finally, Nanjing residents decided to take matters into their own hands. Since the main problem that the government had cited as impeding the implementation of reform was the lack of an urban tax registry, community leaders proposed that each neighborhood volunteer to supply a registry for the government. Over a period of several days, more than one thousand tax registers were compiled and submitted. Soon afterward, a town hall meeting was convened and more than one thousand Nanjing residents pledged their support for tax reform in front of Nanjing officials. The people's persistent efforts had at last led to the implementation of a new urban property tax system.

The scale of popular participation and the key role it played in the success of the reform demonstrates an extraordinarily high level of civic solidarity and political activism. Yet, rather than reduce taxes, this so-called "tax reform" sought to create a new tax. From our present-day perspective, when "tax-cuts" work wonders in popular politics, this episode indeed seems bewildering. Why were Nanjing residents so eager to be taxed?

With this question in mind, this article begins with a close reading of the Nanjing Reform. We find that the puzzling call for taxes was driven by the prevailing desire to be rid of corvée conscription, a demand that resulted from the dual-track design of the Ming fiscal system that was composed of fu (land tax) and yi (labor service). Since the middle of the fifteenth century, troubling problems with the corvée conscription began to show and soon occupied a central place on the political stage. The subsequent waves of reform gradually converted certain elements of labor conscription into fixed tax payments, eventually leading up to the creation of the Single Whip Reform. This empire-wide reform aimed to fundamentally restructure the fiscal system around a uniform silver tax payment, a radical change that was generally considered the final triumph of the flourishing silver economy.¹

Yet the goal was not only economic. Driven by mounting social tensions over tax evasion and corruption, the late Ming fiscal reforms not only sought to devise a new tax scheme of higher fiscal efficiency but, more importantly, new procedures for tax allocation, collection, and transportation that would enhance accountability and transparency during the process of fiscal transactions. Both goals, as demonstrated in the first section of the article, proved to be central to the motivation behind the Nanjing Reform.

However, in addition to the well-documented economic and social impulses of the Single Whip Reform, a close reading of the Nanjing Reform also brings into focus a novel element that has received little attention from the field, that is, the central role that popular participation played in the success of tax reform. Besides volunteering to produce a tax registry, the opinions of city residents were repeatedly polled and their support and collaboration were aggressively solicited throughout the Nanjing Reform project. Why did the reform rely so heavily upon grassroots support instead of bureaucratic implementation?

To answer this question, we need to place the late Ming fiscal reforms against the background of the overall transformation of the Ming Empire. After centuries of division and alien rule, the founding of the Ming Dynasty marked the return to Chinese native rule. The political rhetoric of "the native turn" found its institutional expression under the founding emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, who envisioned an empire based on the construction of self-governing village communities. The ideal rural communities not only assumed substantial moral and legal authority...