Numbers, Fiscal Capacity, and Capacity-Building in China, 1500-1800

Ziang Liu, London School of Economics and Political Science

This research examines the fiscal capacity in premodern China between the late 15th and early 19th century with a numerical logic on the capacity-building process. I focus on the roles of calculative practices in capacity-building, analysing the state’s capacity to obtain and use numbers for achieving financial goals. With new data on premodern China’s central and local finance, this research argues that the Chinese state developed a better capacity to mobilise and redistribute resources with constructions and manipulations of statistics. While the state’s interests in the use of numbers were largely biased towards the central finance, restraining and sacrificing the fiscal autonomy and flexibility in China’s local administration. With the fiscal monetisation re-emerged in China after the late 15th century, both central and local governments began to adopt a standard unit of measurement, the tael of silver, in fiscal administration. Between the 16th and mid-17th century, transitions in fiscal accounting and tax payments helped the central state to centralise revenue incomes in response to fiscal pressures brought by the growing military expenses, redistributing resources firstly between central departments and then central and local governments. After a dynastic change in the mid-17th century, the majority of fiscal incomes have been relocated to the central usages. Despite so, my new data find that the formal size of China’s local governments became too small in relation to the vast territory and population after the late 17th century, either in terms of the number of government employees or the administrative funding. Under China’s formal fiscal institutions, the high-level resource concentration was stably maintained over the late 17th century and early 19th century. Outside formal institutions, however, local agents commonly resorted to non-statutory incomes to fulfil their actual fiscal needs without fundamental changes in the state’s policies on resource distributions.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 68. Institutions and Elite in China