Hu Lin-i's Reform of the Grain Tribute System in Hupeh, 1855-1858

33 Hu Lin-i's Reform of the Grain Tribute System in Hupeh, 1855-1858 William T. P.owe* The Johns Hopkins university It has become increasingly clear as the result of recent scholarship that changes in China's structure of political and military authority, fiscal administration, and local society, initiated in the decades of the 1850s and 60s in response to the great mid-century rebellions, had a direct bearing on the ultimate fate of the Ch'ing dynasty and of the imperial system itself. One position holds, for example, that devolution of real power from the central to the provincial level during these years began the process of political fragmentation that reached its height only under the warlord regimes of the 1910s and 20s. Another line of argument has emphasized that the emasculation of centrally-appointed local administrations as a result of fiscal and military reallignments greatly strengthened the position of indigenous local elites, elites over which the dynasty eventually lost all effective 2 control. A third position sees the increase in state fiscal reliance upon commercial activity as a step that gave added stimulus to the rise of the merchant class, its eventual merger with other types of elites, and the creation of China's first true — potentially revolutionary — bourgeoisie. * The author wishes to thank K. C. Liu, Susan Naquin, and James Cole for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 34 In all of these changes important direction seems to have been provided by the government itself, especially by reforms carried out at the provincial level. The earliest comprehensive set of provincial reforms , and one that exerted a wide influence elsewhere, was that developed by Hu Lin-i¿H kk % (1812-1861) during his tenure as governor of Hupeh province from 1855 to 1861. Hu' s innovations in military organization and in commercial taxation have already 4 received considerable scholarly attention. Less well studied, although intimately related to these other policies, is Hu's reform of aspects of the agrarian tax system. In this article I present a detailed analysis of this latter program, based primarily on Hu's own writings and other contemporary bureaucratic correspondence. This material, it seems to me, reveals a great deal about structures of potential conflict both within local society and between levels of bureaucratic administration. The Grain Tribute System Hu Lin-i's efforts at reform of the agrarian tax system in Hupeh were confined primarily to the grain tribute (ts 'aoliang ;*| %^_ ) , as distinguished from the regular land tax (ti-ting -pH ~X ) . While ti-ting and grain tribute were assessed separately and were allocated for different purposes, collection procedures from the county level down were hardly distinguishable. The ti-ting was collected in two semiannual installments, a "first harrassment" (shang-mang V^ 'ft in the spring and a "second harrassment" (hsia-mang -Ç i|--¿-_ ) following the fall harvest; a taxpayer's entire yearly grain 35 tribute assessment was incorporated into his larger hsiamang payment. Thus, a reduction in the grain tribute would likely have been perceived essentially as a reduction in the overall agrarian tax rate, which undoubtedly was Hu Lin-i's general intention. The grain tribute had not been included in the K'ang-hsi emperor's famous 1713 pledge never to raise the ti-ting, and so remained ideologically more open to flexible readjustment. Not all areas of China were subject to grain tribute assessments, however, and even within Hupeh only thirty-three of the province's sixty-seven counties and departments - those with the largest rice yield — were assessed. Moreover assessments varied tremendously, based not only on the county's presumed fertility, but also on historic political factors (the most famous example in the empire being, of course, the Su-Sung-T'ai ä>£_ ¿;^S -^C area of Kiangnan, whose disproportionately high assessment derived in part from the area's having served as immediate hinterland of the early Ming imperial capital, Nanking). At the time of Hu Lin-i's reforms, quotas assigned to individual Hupeh counties ranged from a few hundred to well over twenty thousand shih Z^ of rice; assessment for the province as a whole totalled approximately 150,000...