State making and state terror

Conclusion

The interesting question, therefore, is this: why have we seldom heard about the destabilizing consequences of Central government policy in the pre-1949 Chinese countryside? Surely one reason has to do with the fact that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government. Up until the time Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions there were, generally speaking, three such models. In the first of these models, the Central government was said to have been a “state blown apart” by military separatism. Advocates of a second model acknowledged that Chiang Kai-shek led the Central government to defeat most of the aristocratic warlord armies of the 1927–30 period, but nonetheless portrayed the center as lacking the bureaucratic machinery necessary to penetrate the vast rural interior and halt the devolution of state power. According to Philip Kuhn, William Wei, and Philip C. C. Huang, this devolutionary process played into the hands of entrenched local elites who were against state building, or who, as Prasenjit Duara has brilliantly shown, acted as brokers to alter Central government claims in order to serve their own interests. Yet a third model was sketched out in the insightful historical studies of Lloyd E. Eastman. According to Eastman, the Republican center was real enough, but the plans of its policymakers to create economic wealth and expand their controls over rural society were confounded by factional infighting and cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

To be sure, each of the preceding models has enriched our understanding of the relation of the Republican polity to rural society within a given time frame and in a given place. William Wei's study, which shows that Chiang Kai-shek's Central government was more or less compelled to compromise with local strongmen in order to pacify Jiangxi province in the mid-1930s, is but one convincing example of the warlord devolution of state power thesis. Thus Wei strikes a familiar Skocpolian note — that of a Republican state permeated by rival social interests — when he concludes that “the inescapable irony of it all was that by restoring the rural elite to power, the Guomindang had actually undermined its long-sought goal of placing the countryside fully under Central government control.”

By way of contrast, the formation of collective protest among the peasant salt producers of North China cannot be explained by merely evoking one of the well-established models of the Republican polity. That the Central government and its political interest is missing in most scholarly accounts of the coming of the Chinese Revolution is not surprising, for as Bruce Cumings wisely has pointed out, scholars of agrarian political systems have not developed a sufficient understanding of what prompts rural people to rebel largely because they seldom “know what the politics of particular state structures are.” I suspect that the precepts of the past, in combination with the current preoccupations with social history, have blinded us to the larger questions about the Republican state and its role in inciting rural disorder. Yet by following Tilly, and by exploring the macrohistory of the Republican state, we can see that there was a Central government, and that Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Song, H. H. Kong, and other state makers made up the core of a ruling national clique bent on developing a political economy that would serve its own political interest. Having grasped this piece of the puzzle, we are in a better position to comprehend the political origins of collective protest in the countryside. Clearly, the Chiang Kai-shek center did have a major interest in salt revenue, and just as clearly the grievances and gatherings of the country people were linked to the revenue demands of the reconditioned gabelle. The emergence of popular collective action thus can be explained by the fact that China's country people could not adapt their lives to the Central government attempt to establish a political economy based on state monopoly and state-organized violence.

Clearly, also, the Central government under Chiang Kai-shek did attempt to build its own state apparatus - its army, police forces, and bureaucracy — by developing new sources of revenue. By detailing the Republican state interest in taxing, or taking over, trade in rural products such as timber, salt, and coal we can begin to explore the process whereby the center reached deep into the countryside, and thereby advance our understanding of the progress made by the state in imposing its claims in the face of competition from provincial warlord regimes, county level actors, and village society. Few if any of the authors of the well-established models of the Republican polity have in fact looked systematically at the Central government quest for one specific type of revenue, or traced the development and extension of state revenue machinery within a given region, province, or county - let alone a village - over the long duree of modern Chinese history. My challenge to Skocpol, and the literature upon which her thesis is based, rests on just such a research strategy, that is, on evidence that the Central government was expanding its control over salt trade and over revenue from salt taxes in the North China interior during the Nationalist decade, 1927–37. By surveying the politics of salt, we have seen that the Central government Ministry of Finance was making some measure of progress in overcoming warlord controls, overriding the objections of local elites, and obliterating the structures of everyday peasant resistance.

What does all of this suggest about the “weakness” of the Nanjing Central government? When Central government fiscal policy is placed firmly in the context of evolving state power, the Chiang Kai-shek center appears less anemic than is usually assumed - at least in this one issue area. To make this case, we need not deny that a condition of multiple sovereignty persisted in Republican China, or that Chiang Kaishek's Republic was not fully effective in its attempted expansion. But neither should we neglect the fact that the Chiang Kai-shek center was attempting to build a state in China, and that its state strengthening policies misfired and triggered collective protest. Such ill-conceived policies, along with the popular resistance to police efforts to enforce them, combined to place a major constraint on the state-building experiment.

Thus, the fiscal claims of the Republican Central government itself combined with microlevel factors to produce this particular episode of collective protest. Gabelle-based income was one of the main pillars of Central government revenue from Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek. The center's attempt to transform China's long-established system of salt tax collection into a big profitable business was of course undertaken to pay off war indemnities and foreign debts and to underwrite state development. The problem was that progress in this sphere came at the expense of thousands upon thousands of village dwellers who shared an interest in the old earth salt economies of inland China. Understandably, the revved-up revenue collection machinery of the Central government's Salt Bureau - specifically the efforts of its tax police to seize the earth salt produced in peasant villages, which historically had been opposed to the official monopoly - drew the country people into confrontations and clashes with the agents of the state. Hence at the heart of this little known story is the resistance of China's salt land villages to a system of bureaucratic police controls supportive of the expansion of central state power. Of course for a more searchingly nuanced and complex explanation, we could factor in warlord politics, local elite inputs, and the factional intrigues of the Chiang Kaishek clique, but the important point is that the problem facing the country people was systemic, that is, the state-making process itself.

Finally, the spirit of this episode of collective protest was not anti-capitalist. Rather, China's country people turned to collective action in order to preserve their longstanding rights to produce for the free market. The struggles of the peasant salt makers thus underscore the prevalence of the deeply structured market forces of which G. William Skinner has written, and remind us that rural protest sometimes took the form of a broad popular statement against state market controls. At the lower rungs of the rural marketing hierarchy, the peasant salt producers joined other pro-market groups, including local merchants and lower gentry, to prevent the Central government police from subordinating their communities to the state drive for revenue. Whether the Republican state was on the verge of winning this war on the popular market before World War II remains to be seen. But one point is clear: Central government interference in the popular market prerogatives produced a cast of angry characters who gained experience in organizing collective actions that transcended village politics, and their actions attracted the attention of Chinese Communist Party cadres who also were suffering from the repression of the protostate.