Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (review)

In this innovative study, Si-yen Fei proposes two distinct interpretations of urbanism in Ming Nanjing: one in which the neglect of urban society in the regulatory order established by the Ming founder (the Hongwu emperor, r. 1368-1398) compelled constant negotiation between local officials and town dwellers over the terms of urban governance; and a second in which Nanjing literati undertook a cultural reimagining of their city's landscape amid rapid economic and cultural change. Neither of these interpretative threads speaks to the city as a matrix of social life and economic activity. Instead, Fei's analysis focuses on the tension between the Ming founder's bucolic vision of an empire of self-governing village communities and the dominance of specifically urban elites in the political, economic, and cultural life of the empire during the last century of Ming rule. As the original capital laid out by Hongwu and as one of the principal incubators—along with Suzhou and Hangzhou—of the distinctive urban culture of the late Ming, Nanjing provides an excellent template for tracing the arc of this historical change.

Fei devotes two chapters to each of the two main themes—the institutional and the cultural—of her analysis. Chapter 1 revisits the municipal reform movement of the late Ming period—the subject of earlier studies by Fuma Susumu 夫馬進 and myself—in order to distinguish the unique character of this movement within the context of Ming governance in general and the municipal service reforms in particular.¹ In contrast to the emphasis in my study (and to a lesser extent in that of Fuma) on the class conflicts exposed by the municipal reform campaigns, Fei identifies a process of consensus building between local officials and community leaders. This emphasis on negotiation rather than confrontation is repeated in Chapter 2, which examines the successes and failures of grassroots protests against the building of city walls in two of Nanjing prefecture's outlying county seats. In Chapters 3 and 4, Fei shifts her focus to the emerging new breed of late Ming literati whose cultural vision was shaped by Nanjing's urban milieu. In Chapter 3 she explores the reconfiguration of Nanjing's urban space in atlases and cultural guidebooks. In Chapter 4 she examines the representations of city life in two late Ming collections of occasional jottings (biji 筆記) that are principally devoted to Nanjing's denizens and environs. Although these forms of cultural production were not entirely novel, Fei finds in them a distinctive cultural imagination that reflected the quintessentially urban social identity of their authors.

Fei begins her analysis of the municipal reform movement in Nanjing with the important observation that Hongwu's administrative and fiscal infrastructure (specifically, the lijia 里甲 system of village self-government) was premised on a universe of homogeneous village communities. Taxation and labor services were based on landholding. In contrast to the preceding Song and Yuan dynasties, which regarded cities and commerce as crucial sources of revenue, the early Ming state lacked any mechanism for taxing urban residents. As a result, local officials resorted to a variety of irregular requisitions and ad hoc levies to raise the revenues needed to defray government expenses and the costs of urban services such as fire and police protection. As these costs soared with the rapid growth of cities during the sixteenth century, ordinary urban residents increasingly shouldered the burden of requisitions for goods and labor services. After the demise of the lijia system in the fifteenth century, the Ming state bowed to the inevitable growth of the money economy by condoning—in gradual, piecemeal fashion—silver payments for a variety of taxes and labor services. As Fei rightly notes, the so-called Single Whip (yitiao bian 一條鞭) reform movement of the late sixteenth century, which was aimed at consolidating the panoply of irregular levies and labor services to a single tax paid in silver, was not a uniform government mandate but rather a set of guidelines that required...