Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (7 page)

Popular Consciousness of the Prosperous Age

Here indeed was a bustling economy. Its effects on social consciousness, however, are virtually unexplored. Take, for instance, social
communication. The dense commercial networks so prominent in the
eighteenth-century landscape put nearly everybody in a regular relationship to a market. Knowledge of regional and national events
flowed with goods and people along the trade routes between villages
and market towns, between local markets and regional entrepots.
The "back-alley news" (hsiao-tao hsiao-hsi) that Chinese of our day find
so essential to supplement the government-controlled press was
already well developed in late imperial times-and there is plenty of
evidence that China's "back alleys" were, even then, linked to regional
and national networks of information. News of opportunities elsewhere, as well as of dangers flowing from elsewhere, were the daily
fare of the Chinese villager (to say nothing of the city dweller).

Hardest to estimate is what the Prosperous Age really meant to
ordinary people. Attitudes about where liLfe was leading, whether
toward better conditions or worse, whether toward greater security
or less, may have been rather different from what we would expect
in a growing economy. From the standpoint of an eighteenth-century
Chinese commoner, commercial growth may have meant, not the
prospect of riches or security, but a scant margin of survival in a
competitive and crowded society. Commerce and manufacturing
enabled hard-pressed rural families to hang on, but only through
maximum employment of everyone's labor. This scramble for existence in an uncertain environment may have been a more vivid reality
in most people's lives than the commercial dynamism that so
impresses us in hindsight.

Two large questions bear upon this late eighteenth-century consciousness: first, whether China's economic growth, however impressive in absolute terms, was able to offset the great increase of her
population; and second, how the unevenness of that growth from region to region may have affected how people viewed the security
of their lives.

Population, Prices, and Money

A steep rise in rice prices in 1748 set off alarm bells throughout the
national bureaucracy. The effect on public order was immediate and
disturbing: riots in Soochow and other lower Yangtze cities, which
had become dependent upon rice imports from provinces upstream.
But officials all around the empire were aware of the inflation in rice
prices and its connection to population pressure. Ch'en Hung-mou,
governor of Shensi Province, wrote that the inflation resulted from a
long-term shift in the ratio between population and land. "It is certainly a result of population pressure . . . In all the provinces, the
fertile land has already been brought under cultivation. Although
there are still large areas of mountainous or marshy wasteland, the
soil is so poor that it must be left fallow for two years after one year's
cultivation." 17 An experienced official, Wang Hui-tsu, commented on
what these conditions meant for his home county of Hsiao-shan
(adjacent to Hangchow, and a scene of soulstealing panic twenty years
later): "When the rice price was up to 16o copper cash for one peck,
all the grass roots and tree bark were eaten. In places where there
was powdery sand, people unearthed it to eat and called it `Buddha's
Sand,' though some died of it.""

This was no short-term problem; rice prices continued to rise
during the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet their effect on
local society was apparently buffered by a rise in the money supply.
Beginning in the 176os, the opening of silver mines in Annam by
Chinese entrepreneurs, as well as a quickening influx of Mexican
silver coins in payment for Chinese goods, swelled the supply of
silver. One authority estimates that China's silver supply rose by some
274 million Mexican dollars in the period 1752-18oo.'9 But it was
after the 176os that the silver influx was most profuse, as can be seen
in the record of silver imports:LO

The decreasing availability of silver in the early Ch'ien-lung period
may have made it harder to sustain living standards in the face of
population growth. The marked increase beginning in the 176os and
gathering force in the 1780s probably made it possible, for a time,
to realize prosperity despite intense crowding. Yet the benefits of
silver trickled only slowly into local society. For the lower Yangtze,
the turnabout seems to have occurred around 1780. For that crucial
region, at least, qualitative evidence suggests that the celebrated eighteenth-century "prosperity" cannot have begun much earlier than that
date. Our Hsiao-shan informant, Wang Hui-tsu, goes on to say, "For
more than a decade before 1792, rice prices stayed high. [Yet] when
one peck cost 200 copper cash, people thought it was cheap. In 1792,
when one peck cost 330-340 copper cash, people still enjoyed life."
How could this be explained? Wang believed that it was because the
inflation after about 1780 was not confined to population-sensitive
rice prices, but extended to all commodities: when rice prices had
been high in the past, other commodities were not affected, "while
today 117941, everything including fish, shrimp, and fruit, is expensive. Therefore, even small peddlers and rural laborers can make
ends meet."21 One explanation for this turnaround is an increase in
the supply of money in general. With more money in everyone's
hands, sellers could charge more for goods of all kinds.22 Though
the evidence is still sparse, Wang's account adds convincing local
substance to inferences from silver-supply data.

More research will be needed before we can understand fully how men's awareness of their social surroundings was shaped by eighteenth-century economic change, particularly population growth and
the availability of money. We must get the periodization right: what
temporal shifts made people aware of changes in their life chances?
If Wang Hui-tsu's sense of the timing turns out to be right, then what
we are seeing after 178o is but a brief felicity. The real prosperity of
the Prosperous Age extended from the 178os until the mid-i8ios
(when a worldwide shortage of silver decreased foreign capacity to
buy Chinese goods-at about the same time that opium imports
created a catastrophic outflow of silver, causing the nationwide distress that we have always associated with the beginning of the modern
period).23 If so, then the soulstealing crisis occurred just before the
increased money supply had begun to relieve the burden of population pressure in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century. Rice
prices in the lower Yangtze were still weighing heavily on commoners'
lives in an overcrowded society. In 1768, the outer world had only
just begun to pay the bill for China's population boom.

Uneven Development

If the highly developed Hangchow region saw some hard times
before the 178os, what of the outlying mountainous areas? One did
not have to travel far from the commercialized cores to find abject
poverty, unemployment, and disorder. Two adjacent jurisdictions
illustrate the contrasts that lay just outside the Soochow-Hangchow
core of the lower Yangtze, some forty miles from Te-ch'ing, the origin
of the soulstealing panic. Kuang-te, an independent department in
Anhwei, lies about thirty miles from the western shore of Lake T'ai.24
The neighboring district to the east, An-chi in Chekiang, which was
connected by water to the (,rand Canal, had a flourishing silk
industry that had pushed mulberry cultivation even into its hilly
districts. Yet economic development had passed Kuang-te by-save
for the influx of population that was common to counties of the
Yangtze highlands. In 1739 Magistrate Li asked that the Throne
remit the grain-tribute tax so that he could use it to fill the local relief
granaries: "There is little arable land, and because very little water is
retained in [irrigation] ponds, the soil is unproductive. The cultivators have almost no carts and draft animals with which to engage in
commerce. The people also lack handicraft skills with which to eke
out a living. To survive, they simply hope for a good harvest. But with long internal peace, the population has increased, and an abundant harvest barely furnishes one year's subsistence. "21 Transport
routes were inadequate to permit timely purchase of grain from other
areas, and the people would be in great difficulty if officials bought
grain locally to stock the relief granaries. Just that summer, people
were panicked by the threat of floods, and grain was being hoarded.
No jurisdiction in the Kiangnan area had such difficulty feeding its
people, Magistrate Li concluded. Elsewhere we learn that Kuang-te
had ("despite repeated prohibitions") unusually high levels of female
infanticide.21'

How unusual was this chronic disaster area? Though it may have
been a particularly bad case, the ecology of Kuang-te was not unique.
This little Appalachia formed the northern anchor of a 18o-mile
chain of hilly counties running from northeast (near Lake T'ai) to
southwest (at the Kiangsi border). Ironically, the vigor of Ch'ing
commercial life has been symbolized for social historians by the
empirewide success of merchants from Hui-chou, which lies toward
the southwestern end of this region. But Hui-chou's local economy
accords rather closely with the picture of Kuang-te just sketched: a
hilly region with poor land, a settlement area for landless peasants
crowded out of coastal regions, and a relatively uncommercialized
agriculture. In Hui-chou, agricultural relations among long-settled
folk rested on a system of virtual serfdom, in vivid contrast to the
free-wheeling farm economy of the flatland.21 The population of this
region as a whole was swollen by a tide of immigration that continued
well into the next century.28

The scholar Wang Shih-to, who lived as a refugee in this region
during the 1850s (Chi-ch'i County, part of Hui-thou Prefecture),
described the area as chronically poor, overpopulated, and short of
basic commodities. Despite high rates of female infanticide, population expansion was sustained by extremely early marriage, to the
extent that "a man could become a grandfather at the age of thirty."29
The county he was describing exported tea, forest products, and
(sporadically) precious metals and lead. Yer the bottom line was abject
misery: "The county is everywhere mountainous, and the peasants
toil upward, level by level, to plant a foot or reap an inch. If it is dry,
they fear their crops will wither; if it rains, they fear they will be
washed away. Though they labor ceaselessly all year, their clothing is
fit only for oxen and horses, their food only for dogs and swine."10
Though Chi-ch'i participated in the regional market (indeed, the commercialization of the core areas was what made its few exports
salable), this county and those around it present a stark contrast to
the world of Soochow and Hangchow. When hard times hit those
metropolises, what of hinterland counties like this one?

No account of the eighteenth-century economy, then, can omit the
gulf between core and periphery, between fertile river deltas and
hardscrabble mountain uplands. What went along with this gradient
in the economic map was an unceasing flow of people: migrants and
sojourners, merchants and mountebanks, monks and pilgrims, cutpurses and beggars thronged the eighteenth-century roadways. The
stream of travelers-some moved by enterprise, some by devotion,
and some by desperation-had its effects on men's consciousness.;'

Migration, Out and Down

Suspicion of soulstealing focused on wanderers: strangers, people
without roots, people of obscure origins and uncertain purpose,
people lacking social connections, people out of control. The victims
of lynch mobs and of torture chambers were mostly wandering monks
and beggars; and if we consider monks a species of beggars, then the
suspected soulstealers were all beggars. Where did they come from,
and why were they feared?

Population growth and ecological change. The population of China
roughly doubled during the eighteenth century, from around 150
million in 1700 to around 313 million in 1794.32 The precondition
for this expansion was China's capacity to develop new ways-and
new places-for people to make a living. These ways and places
included New World crops, such as maize and sweet potatoes, which
made the hills yield a living to immigrants. They included massive
internal movement of population, particularly to Szechwan, which
had been depopulated by the internal wars of the conquest period;
to the highlands of the Yangtze and Han river systems; to Manchuria;
to largely aboriginal Taiwan; and to lands overseas. All over China,
people were moving upward as well as outward: forested hills became
flourishing sweet potato and maize farms, until their soil eroded and
became barely cultivable. The expansion of cultivated land area
during the eighteenth century cannot be measured, but (taking the
nation as a whole) is thought to have kept pace with population
growth until around 18oo. All this can be seen as a triumph of will and work-and an ecological disaster, as China's mountain soil gradually washed into her rivers.33