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Looking into the compiled works on statecraft and Ming
officials’ transcripts and
memorials to the emperors, the paper aims to derive the
cultural logics and counter
logics in the state finance, taxation and tributary trade
policies of the Ming China
(c. 1370-1600). It illustrates how cultural values, motives
and way of thought may play
a significant role in affecting the Chinese political economy.
It is the position of this
paper that there is a delicate intersubjectivity between
culture and political economy.
This is important in the sense that it provides an alternative,
a more complicated
theoretical outlet for the often one-sided narrative of
either cultural or materia linstitutional
determinist interpretation of history. Cultural values are
expressed through
the function of institutions (here the state and officialdom).
And culture influences the
practice of policymakers by saturating their way of thinking
and by containing them
within certain value systems, within which a political and
economic policy is set in
cultural debates. In order to appeal to their colleagues
and subjects, the Ming politicians
had to negotiate under an overpowering cultural framework,
which was characterized
by its moral-ethical-commonsensical oriented cultural logics.
Such a dialogic mode
shifts the focus of historical interpretation from the oppositional
tensions between culture
and economy to the integrative and interconnective relations
between them.
Economic historians, dissatisfied with such determinist
simplicity, on the other hand, bring
up contradictory arguments. For instance, the recent reappraisal
of those same qualities of
Confucian values, such as loyalty to one’s family,
harmony and concern with shame and
“face”, had made historians, social scientists
and Chinese intellectuals in the past regard
Confucianism as an impediment in the modern transformation
of the Chinese economy.
The same virtues are also responsible for both the economic
failure and success of East Asian
countries in the 1950s and 1980s respectively. They thus
put forward the question that how
can cultural attitudes simultaneously hinder and promote
economic changes?2 How do we
determine empirically that one culture has a better ethic
than another? And how do we
measure thrift on a society-wide scale?3 Questions like
these are certainly stimulating and
worth thinking, but still they are at some risks of oversimplifying
the intriguing nature of
culture when treating the delicate interactivity between
culture and economy.
The paper does not pretend to have all the answers to questions
listed above. By looking
into the compiled works on statecraft and Ming officials’
transcripts and memorials to the
emperors, the paper aims merely to derive the documented
cultural logics and counter
logics in the state finance, taxation, coastal and tributary
trade policies of the Ming China
(c. 1370-1600). By analyzing the rationale behind the Ming
officers’ policy debates, it puts
China’s cultural logics into a direct “consistency
test”, especially in cases that involve
explicit or implicit conflicts between cultural ideals and
material interests in the processes
of decision-making in state economic policies (i.e., what
values would be prioritized over
others during the Ming). Putting it in another way, would
the idealistic concept of virtuous
or benevolent rule still play an upper hand when they were
in direct contradiction with the
state’s physical profits and interests? We intend to
show not the “determining nature”
of culture in the development of political economy, but
culture did condition the practice
of Ming policymakers in its own “logical” way.
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