Yingyung Shengxi : Military Entrepreneurship in the High Qing Period, 1700-1800

The Qing dynasty impresses historians not just with its extraordinary military prowess displayed before 1800, but also with its effective ways of keeping its enormous military forces fed until the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804). When the Qing replaced the Ming dynasty (1638–1644) in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Qing inherited many institutions and systems from the Ming. Nevertheless, it was also determined to avoid one mistake that the Ming had made—namely, the failure to keep its military well financed. The Qing dynasty did away with the military colony system of the Ming dynasty and, instead, allocated a considerable portion of its financial resources to satisfy the military's ever-expanding expenditures.² At times, the Qing state did find it difficult to meet the immense financial needs of its military. It had to explore new ways. This article will explore one experiment of the Qing state in this regard, the "yingyun shengxi" (procuring profits through entrepreneurial operation) policy, which authorized the military, including both Manchu garrisons and the Green Standard Army, to involve itself in commercial activities in order to obtain extra funding for soldiers' non-essential needs. Even though this policy did not become a permanent institution, its rise and fall in the eighteenth century testifies to the efforts the Qing state made in the direction of rationalizing the mechanism of military finances, and reveals a rarely noticed aspect of Qing politics.

Past scholarship has explored at length the Qing financial systems and new policies in general in its efforts to establish legitimacy for the nascent dynasty, but seldom has serious consideration been given to the Qing military financial system, which had been another hallmark distinguishing Qing politics from that of the fallen Ming. More specifically, the phenomenon of Qing military involvement in commercial activities has only been noted fleetingly in literature in English. The only thorough study of the yingyun shengxi policy has remained a series of articles written by the renowned Qing historian in China, Wei Qingyuan, in the 1980s. Based mainly upon Qing archives housed in the First Archives of China in Beijing, Wei delineates the origin, development, and demise of the practice which he refers to as "shengxi yinliang" (silver for profits, or investment silver) in the Kangxi (1662–1722), Yongzheng (1723–1735), and Qianlong (1736–1795) periods, which include the funds the Qing state gave to the military for investment.³ While Wei's articles first revealed this noteworthy phenomenon to the scholarly world, providing a solid foundation for further research,⁴ he, however, does not differentiate between two kinds of shengxi yinliang, one of which was implemented mainly through the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu), and which had been prevalent throughout the entire Qing dynasty as an ad hoc favor to officials and governmental agencies which had certain special ties to the emperor, and the other being the one carried out in the military, which had clearly defined beginning and ending points, and which was under the superintendence of the Board of War. As Wei's angle is to view all commercial activities in the Qing bureaucracy, both civil and military, as the forerunner of the so-called "bureaucratic capital" (guanliao ziben), a term used by Marxian historians in mainland China to label one of the sources of capitalist development in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he does not give special attention to the context in which the yingyun shengxi policy was applied to the Qing military. As this article will argue, the military involvement in commerce was a separate practice, executed for a different purpose and through a different conduit. Only by making such a distinction can the significance of the yingyun shengxi practice in the military be correctly appraised.

To be sure, this study of mine has benefited considerably from Wei's pioneering works, especially his exhaustive archival research at the First Archives in Beijing. Besides drawing on...