Dear Ming history experts: What are your understanding and thoughts about the social economy in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. . . Share your thoughts

The period from the 16th century to the mid-17th century, generally known as the middle and late Ming Dynasty, was an important turning point in the development of Chinese history. The Ming Dynasty was the last dynasty in China established by the Han landlord class. It pushed the authoritarian centralized bureaucracy to a new height. The social and economic development exceeded the highest level in the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and the impulse to replace the old with the new was brewing from it. With the rise and fall of the Ming Dynasty, all areas of social life showed signs of disintegration, and China's feudal society, which had lasted for thousands of years, entered an advanced stage of development. It was during this period that medieval Europe underwent revolutionary changes and began to transform into a capitalist society. The encounter between early Western colonialist forces and Chinese maritime forces in Southeast Asia and the southeastern coast of China meant that China's historical development process could no longer be isolated from the development of world history. These different situations from previous dynasties created the unique historical status and rich and changeable style of the times in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.

At the beginning of the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, with his traditional small-scale peasant cultural thinking, tried to restore and construct a complete and tightly controlled socio-economic pattern with small-scale peasant economy as the core. The yellow registration system, the Lijia management system, the tax collection method, and the grassroots social education system, etc., all strive to enable farmers to settle on the land and the four people to settle down in their own occupations, forming a super-stable top-down feudal society. rule. However, from the Zhengtong to Zhengde years of the Ming Dynasty (1436-1521), the political rule of the Ming Dynasty did not proceed along the route designed by Zhu Yuanzhang as always, but various drawbacks appeared. Eunuch dictatorship, political corruption; economic disorder, financial constraints. The Tatars and Waci rose up, repeatedly knocked on the border, and broke into the Great Wall. The Ming Dynasty lost its strong power to stabilize the country and the border areas, and was in trouble internally and externally. The economic situation of farmers deteriorated, a large number of people moved to border areas and mountainous areas, and protests and riots broke out one after another. On the contrary, refugees and shantytown dwellers developed mountainous and border areas, which promoted the economic status of Huguang District; tribute trade declined, coastal powerful people, merchants and even dead people "pretended to pass the ban", and private maritime trade rose. Political corruption has formed a new conflict with economic development, and anti-traditional calls have also appeared in the ideological and cultural circles. The "Xinxue" founded by Wang Yangming soon became popular among academic circles, and "dislike the usual and rejoice in the new" became a fashion.

During the Jiajing and Wanli years (1522-1620) of the Ming Dynasty, the political decline of the Ming Dynasty appeared. The emperor was corrupted, the chief and assistant government and the eunuch's power were alternately changed, and cliques were established among the courtiers. , coastal areas are frequently in crisis. In addition to the historical threat of northern nomads moving south, there are also challenges from Japanese pirates from the East and early colonialists from the West. Contrary to the decline of the dynasty, the decline of feudal rule provided a good environment for civil society to break through the original ruling pattern and advance the independent economy to a certain extent. The social economy developed towards the commodity economy, and the degree of agricultural commercialization increased. Both the landlord economy and the peasant economy have become more closely related to the market. Contract tenancy relations have developed, fixed land rents are common, land rights have become fiercely differentiated, and permanent tenant rights and "one field with two owners" have emerged. The regional division of labor and specialization of the handicraft industry have developed, the circulation market has expanded, regional merchant groups have been active, industrial and commercial towns have emerged in advanced economic regions such as Jiangnan, and both rural handicrafts and town handicrafts have some germination of capitalist production relations. Economic and cultural exchanges and conflicts between China and the West began. Chinese pirates and merchants competed with Portuguese and Dutch pirate merchants in the East and West. The connection of the Pacific route from Yuegang to Luzon to the Americas has brought China closer to overseas markets. China's overseas trade surplus has brought a large amount of silver currency (Spanish silver dollars) imports, which has had a certain impact on social and economic life. Town residents began to show their strength, pursuing profits and worshiping money, and becoming extravagant and wasteful. They focus on profits and neglect justice, they bully the weak by relying on strength, the rich and the poor rise and fall irregularly, and the order of superiority and inferiority is chaotic or even reversed. In the ideological and cultural fields, a wave of "reflecting emotion on reason" and attacking tradition has formed. Businessmen, common people, actors, etc. who have always been despised by people have begun to give lectures, advocating contempt for etiquette, the pursuit of personal temperament, instant gratification, and other heretical theories. Chen, scientific masterpieces and popular literature and art compete with each other. Many aspects of social life reveal a lively, cheerful and fresh atmosphere of the times, showing signs of conflicts and changes between the old and the new. In short, against the background of the new changes in the rural economy, the prosperity of domestic and foreign trade, the development of the urban economy, the expansion of commodity currency circulation, the expansion of social industries and their division of labor, the development of handicraft production and changes in its management methods, the social and economic It has embarked on a historical process with a certain "pre-modern industrialization" that has never appeared in any previous historical period, which has triggered a series of changes in social customs and even ideological and cultural fields. This is the socio-economic changes in the Jiajing and Wanli periods of the Ming Dynasty. main features.

By the time of Ming Qi and Chongzhen (1621-1644), the rule of the Ming Dynasty came to an end. The party struggle was fierce and the eunuch Wei Zhongxian took power, exacerbating the political chaos. The Manchu nobles established the "Later Jin" (later renamed the "Qing") regime in the northeast and moved south to compete for supremacy. Dutch and Spanish colonists invaded and occupied Taiwan. In order to deal with internal and external troubles, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty consumed national power and then brutally exploited the people. Disasters such as floods, droughts, locusts, and wars have made things worse, and farmers in the north and south have revolted. The Ming court was unable to resist and retreated steadily, and was finally overthrown by the peasant army led by Li Zicheng.

In the process of great turmoil, great differentiation and great combination, the emerging Manchu aristocracy defeated the peasant army and established the Qing Dynasty. The Nanming landlord forces and the maritime forces represented by Zheng Chenggong also failed in the struggle. Social and economic accumulation was consumed in civil strife, and the conflict between the old and the new was replaced by a historical event that changed dynasties.

From the perspective of comparative world history, the peak period of China’s feudal dynasty’s national power in the early Ming Dynasty was the “dark” Middle Ages in Europe. The dawn of capitalism revealed in the West was almost at the same time as the impulse to change the old from the new in Chinese society since the mid-Ming Dynasty. The rise of the West and the success of the British bourgeois revolution coincided with the Ming and Qing Dynasties in China. It was during this period that Western civilization caught up with Eastern civilization, and China went from advanced to lagging behind.

Objectively speaking, in the Ming Dynasty, especially in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, China's social economy experienced development and lag. The new things that emerged with the rise of the West had similar manifestations in the Ming Dynasty. Marx pointed out: Capitalism’s “‘historical necessity’ of this movement is clearly limited to Western European countries” [1] (p430). Although the sprouts of capitalism and other new factors that existed sparsely in the Ming Dynasty did not show the development prospects of capitalism, they were a Chinese-style "proto-industrialization" (industrialization before modern industrialization) and a change within the traditional system. In the late Ming Dynasty, with the promotion of cash crops and the growth of commercial agriculture, the cottage industry shifted from serving the local market to providing products for other places and even foreign markets. Merchant capital penetrated into the handicraft industry. Under the circumstances of limited progress in productivity, commodity production declined in quantity. A lot of growth. This was the beginning of "proto-industrialization". As a result of "proto-industrialization", China's handmade goods have the competitive advantage of being cheap and high-quality in the emerging world market. The export of a large number of Chinese handmade goods also prepared the conditions for the rise of the West. At that time, South China did have a "marine commercial culture" style.

It is debatable to understand "primitive industrialization" and subsequent "modernization" in traditional Chinese society from the standard of "Westernization". Moreover, commentators often exaggerate the hindering effect of the Ming Dynasty rulers’ maritime ban policy. In fact, private maritime trade developed by breaking through the strict maritime ban policy imposed by the rulers, and "proto-industrialization" coincided with this. With the Ming Dynasty, if we look at issues not from the perspective of policy formulation and implementation, but from the perspective of actual social life, the late Ming Dynasty should be more open than the early Ming Dynasty. In the early Ming Dynasty, it was unimaginable for Chinese people to go overseas to trade privately, and for foreigners to do private trade with China. However, in the later Ming Dynasty, it became a common practice and was banned repeatedly. Until the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Zheng Chenggong's maritime power dominated the maritime trade between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. It is a universally recognized fact that he recovered Taiwan and withstood the eastward advance of the Dutch and other Western colonists. The Ming Dynasty's maritime ban policy had an impact on the process of "proto-industrialization", but it was by no means a decisive factor.

Taking maritime trade as the decisive factor in the rise of the West and thus summarizing capitalist culture as "maritime culture" is a biased theory even in the eyes of today's Western scholars. It is wrong to describe Chinese traditional culture as agricultural culture, deny its diversity, or even blame traditional culture for China's backwardness in modern times. In fact, the socio-economic form in the middle and late Ming Dynasty has shown the world a prototype rich in socio-economic diversity.

So, why did the "primitive industrialization" that began after the middle of the Ming Dynasty fail to succeed and quickly recede? Fundamentally speaking, this is closely related to the influence and constraints of the diverse structure of traditional Chinese society. China's traditional social structure has the dual characteristics of being both premature and immature. It accommodates a variety of ethnic groups and regions with different ecological environments, historical development backgrounds, economic and cultural development levels, etc., and complements and restrains each other. It has adaptability and flexibility that no other society can match. On the one hand, it can flexibly change its surface structure to adapt to various changes; on the other hand, it is good at resisting various changes and keeping its deep structure unchanged. In this way, new social and economic factors are often resolved or absorbed when they grow to a certain limit, and anti-tradition is eventually directed to strengthening and perfecting the tradition [2]. The "proto-industrialization" carried out within this social structure, if not interrupted, might have developed on its own into a "modernization" that was completely different from the Western European capitalist development model. However, the dissolving power of the traditional social structure in the late Ming Dynasty was quite powerful, causing this process to be distorted. New things may die quickly or change the direction of development. Especially in the late Ming Dynasty, China had serious "institutional" deficiencies. The national system and social system None of them can provide a strong guarantee for the new factors of economic and social development. In contrast, the European colonialists of the same period basically received recognition and support from their own governments for their overseas activities. On the one hand, the Chinese maritime business groups in the late Ming Dynasty had to compete with foreign forces for maritime trade rights in the East; , and must resist oppression and suppression from their own governments. Under such circumstances, the difficult and tortuous development of new social and economic factors in China has become an inevitable trend.

From the perspective of the development opportunities of this "primitive industrialization", it lacks the cooperation of social and environmental conditions. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty had exceeded the limit of extraction, sustained and widespread attacks of catastrophic disasters, large-scale civil wars and turmoil, causing huge damage to social wealth and social productivity.

The sudden change in the environmental conditions necessary for "primitive industrialization", coupled with the conservative tenacity of China's traditional political system and cultural consciousness, cannot guarantee the growth of new socio-economic factors from the social system level. As a result, the development opportunities of "primitive industrialization" that emerged in the middle and late Ming Dynasty had to be gradually lost due to direct and indirect destruction from all aspects. With the fall of the Ming Dynasty and the disappearance of Zheng Chenggong's maritime power, this process was also interrupted. Compared with the rise of the West, quite similar events led to completely different results. The social and economic changes in the middle and late Ming Dynasty not only revealed the vitality of China's historical progress, but also left regrets for future generations. It is undoubtedly meaningful to review and learn from the experiences and lessons of this period of history.

The interruption of the social and economic changes and the development of new factors in the middle and late Ming Dynasty is certainly regrettable, but we cannot but be optimistic that the social and economic changes and development in the middle and late Ming Dynasty will continue to a certain extent. To a certain extent, it has changed and fostered people's re-examination of China's traditional social and economic model. In particular, the impact of social and economic changes and development in the middle and late Ming Dynasty on the ideological culture and civil society customs of the time has cultivated and cultivated in the cultural consciousness of the Chinese people. It has developed a value concept that accommodates diverse economic components, especially the complementary nature of the commodity economy and the traditional agricultural economy. When we study traditional Chinese society, especially the social and economic history of the Ming Dynasty, we often ignore the importance of this value. In fact, the formation of a social value concept often has more historical and long-term significance than the update of a social economic production model. Because once this kind of value concept that accommodates a diverse economy exists and has a suitable social environment and social system to match, the value concept will quickly exert its potential social functions and play an extremely strong role in the transformation of the social economy. Promoting effect. Since entering the Qing Dynasty, China's social environment and social system have become more conservative. Although a new peak of economic development has emerged in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, from the perspective of the socio-economic structural pattern, the socio-economic development model during this period has not There was no breakthrough in the economic development model in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. Therefore, it was bound to be difficult for the Qing Dynasty's social economy to find a more effective way to develop, and its gradual decline was inevitable. In modern times, China has gone through many hardships, and the values ??of the diversified economy developed in the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty still cannot be brought into full play. Despite this, it is not difficult to see from the economic development trajectory over the past hundreds of years that the Chinese people have never stopped pursuing and practicing a diversified economy, especially a commodity market economy. Until the 1980s and 1990s, China implemented the policy of reform and opening up, which provided increasingly beneficial conditions for the development of a diversified economy, especially a market economy, both in terms of social environment and institutional guarantees. China's potential Values ??that accommodate a diverse economy have been unleashed as never before. For this reason, when we discuss the evolution of China's social and economic development, we must not ignore the role of multiple economic values ??contained in traditional Chinese culture, especially those developed in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. Otherwise, if the implementation of any kind of economic policy cannot be echoed by the universal values ??of society, then the implementation of this policy will inevitably be difficult.