Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (6 page)

Yet fear of sorcery remained deeply embedded in the public mind.
Was there no protection against this scourge? How little the public
had been reassured! By June 21 the panic had broken out of the
lower Yangtze provinces and had spread five hundred miles upriver
to the prefectural city of Hanyang: there a large crowd at a street
opera seized a suspected soulstealer, beat him to death, and burned
his corpse.26

Sorcery panic struck China's last imperial dynasty, not during its
waning days, but at the height of its celebrated "Prosperous Age"
(sheng-shih, a conventional slogan that often adorned official documents as a talisman of benign rule). Sorcery's dread image was
refracted through every social stratum. It overspread provinces with
a total population much larger than the entire population of Europe
at the time, and cost many lives and careers. Altogether, though, the
damage to human life was slight compared to the great witch scares
of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Why the damage was
so limited is as curious a question as why the scare arose in the first
place.

That a whole society could envisage the threat, that lowly and lofty
could sense the same emergency, suggests a cultural network densely
twined. But the vision struck peasant, bureaucrat, and emperor in
different ways, according to the preoccupations that ruled their several ways of life. The case suggests both unity and diversity: a nation
in which events at the highest and lowest levels affected each other
intimately, but in which society's prism refracted the soulstealing idea
in various hues.

The Gilded Age of Hungli

The economic triumphs of the eighteenth century were founded on
domestic peace. The last major fighting within China proper had ended in 1681 when emperor Hungli's imperial grandfather crushed
the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. The coastal frontier was
secured in 1683 when Ch'ing forces conquered Taiwan. Peace nourished China's greatest period of demographic and commercial expansion, but the roots of this expansion dated from before the Manchu
conquest. By the seventeenth century, new crops from the Americas
(maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and tobacco, crops that could be
grown on dry uplands) were already sown on the nonirrigable hillsides by settlers flocking to China's internal frontiers. By the late
seventeenth century, the aggregate depopulation of the conquest
years was already made good, and the stage was set for the population
explosion of modern times. In the course of the eighteenth century,
the population is thought to have doubled. To serve these growing
masses, there emerged a dense network of rural markets. Not urbanization, but a proliferation of dusty (or muddy) local market towns
put virtually every Chinese peasant in touch with regional systems of
trade. Money was everywhere: silver from Spanish America promoted the free sale of land and labor. Commercial energy and population growth were creating a society that contemporary Westerners
(whose industrial revolution was still in its cradle) considered vigorous
and stable.' This is the society over which spread, in the early spring
of 1768, the shadow of sorcery.

An Encouraging Story

Writing about eighteenth-century society has been a buoyant experience for Chinese historians, more inspiring than relating the decline
and disruption, futility and weakness, of the period after 18oo.2
Eighteenth-century Chinese, whose genius for commerce and enterprise was sustained by firm and effective government, were admired
by the world. The tone of social historical writing has been bright,
even celebratory. Western historians too have caught the enthusiasm
as they have explored this "new and higher form of economic
activity."'

Researchers have indeed painted a flourishing economic landscape.
The bustling eighteenth-century commerce had roots before the
Ch'ing conquest: an expanded money supply, in both the silver and
copper components of China's bimetallic currency, nourished an
expanding domestic trade that overflowed the boundaries of China's
major economic regions. Monetary expansion benefited from imports of precious metals and from their increased domestic production.
Silver and copper streamed into China in exchange for her silk, tea,
porcelains, and other products desired by the outer world. Exchange
grew more efficient, farmers could specialize in cash crops, and handicraft industries grew rapidly. The government took advantage of all
this liquidity to carry out major tax reforms.4 This expansive scene,
already visible in the late sixteenth century, was redrawn on an even
grander scale as the nation recovered from the turmoil of the Ming
collapse and Manchu conquest. The mild but persistent rise in prices
that accompanied the influx of silver was generally good for economic
growth: farmers could sell their grain more profitably and could pay
their taxes more easily. Investors flourished in the long period of
eighteenth-century inflation.5 Such is our picture of a vigorous, bustling age. To understand the background of the i 768 crisis, however,
it will be important to explore its effects on social attitudes, a subject
we still know very little about. The place to begin is the region of the
lower Yangtze, where the soulstealing crisis began.

The Society of the Lower Yangtze

The area known as Kiangnan ("south of the river") in east-central
China formed the prosperous core of what we now call the lower
Yangtze macroregion. On the provincial map, this core included
southern Kiangsu, a corner of eastern Anhwei, and northern Che-
kiang.6 It is in this setting, the most highly developed of China's
economic regions, that the eighteenth-century commercial expansion
is most often described. For three-quarters of a millennium it had
been China's most prosperous regional economy. There most conspicuously were found the cash-cropping and the specialized markets
so characteristic of China's late imperial economy. So specialized were
these local economies, in fact, that grain production was much too
low to sustain the population. As a result, a vast interregional grain
entrepot sprang up in Kiangnan cities and market towns. By the
eighteenth century rice imports sufficient to feed between three and
four million people a year were flowing from the upper- and midYangtze provinces to the market towns around Soochow, Sungchiang, and T'ai-ts'ang.7 This rice made its way to grain-deficit areas
all around east China. According to an early eighteenth-century
observer,

Fukien rice has long been insufficient to supply the demands of Fukien.
Even in years of abundant harvest much has been imported from
Kiangsu and Chekiang. What is more, Kiangsu and Chekiang rice has
long been insufficient to supply Kiangsu and Chekiang, so that even in
abundant years they have looked to Hunan and Hupei. For several
decades, rice from Hunan-Hupei has collected at the market town of
Feng-ch'iao in Soochow Prefecture [just west of Soochow city]. By way
of Shanghai and Hsu-p'u, this Feng-ch'iao rice makes its way to Fukien.
Therefore, even though a year's harvest may be blighted, there will be
no inflation of rice prices.,,

In manufacturing, the basis of Kiangnan's wealth was textiles.
Cotton products of the lower Yangtze reached a national market. Silk
was the leading export product and clad the increasingly luxurious
bureaucratic, scholarly, and commercial elites. These huge industries
were built on the handicraft labor of millions of peasant families. So
tightly was the peasant household bound to the marketing network
in Kiangnan's highly commercialized society that no "isolated" or
"cellular" local economies were conceivable (to cite an old misconception about village China). In its extreme form, this integration of
village with market town meant a kind of slavery to handicraft work.
For a swelling population to survive in this densely populated region
on ever-smaller parcels of farmland, every family member was mobilized to produce for some niche of the market. As early as the
fifteenth century, we find an account of such lives in the cotton
industry:

Cotton-cloth production is not limited to the villages, but also is done
in the cities. At dawn the country women carry yarn they have spun
into the city, where they exchange it for raw cotton; the next morning
they come in with another load, without any respite. A [peasant] weaver
can produce about a roll (p'i) of cloth a day, and some work all through
the night without going to bed. After payments of taxes and interest, a
farming family's resources are exhausted before the end of the year,
and they rely for living expenses entirely on the cotton industry.9

Not only in highly commercialized Kiangnan but in less developed
areas as well, intimate connections between village and market town
formed the texture of late imperial society.1' The suffusion of the
late imperial economy by monetized silver and copper made possible-and in fact required-a constant flow of people to and from
urban centers. Virtually every peasant household traded in a local
market, and through it was linked to regional and even national
markets. What this meant for China's premodern industry was that extensive, highly rationalized production could proceed without
large-scale urbanization. Although large factories and urbanized
work forces did exist in some regional metropolises such as Nanking,
the more general pattern was of an intricate putting-out system, based
on handicraft labor by the wives and children of land-poor farmers,
who could participate in large production systems while still living in
villages.

The Emancipation of ' Labor

The growth of commerce since the sixteenth century had been
accompanied by a freer market in labor. Land tenancy tended toward
long-term, contractual relations between landlord and tenant. In
some areas, permanent tenancy rights (under a kind of dual-ownership system, in which surface and subsurface rights were held by
different persons) had emerged by the eighteenth century. The
hereditary status system of the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), in
which millions of people were enrolled in special registers and compelled to work for the state in specialized occupations, was formally
abolished soon after the Ch'ing conquest. Most important, the obligatory labor-service of all commoners (the corvee) was swept away in
the tax reforms that began in the sixteenth century, by which land
and labor taxes were merged and assessed on the basis of land.
Instead, the state hired laborers to do its work. Indeed, by the eighteenth century, labor-for-cash was the obvious and necessary basis of
a commercializing economy."

The spirit of formal equality-already so forcefully impelled by
economics-was symbolized by the Ch'ing government's emancipation of small groups of servile people in the 172os and the enunciation of a general policy of commoner equality. I emphasize this last
phrase because eighteenth-century China remained a steeply hierarchical society, with towering heights separating the governing elite
from the rest of the population. But though the numbers freed were
very small, the symbolic achievement must have seemed worth the
effort. By sweeping away "mean" (chien) status among the commoners, the emancipation decrees apparently were meant to create
a subject population uncluttered by specially disadvantaged groups.
The proximate reasons for the decrees of the i 72os are still obscure.
Nevertheless, the more general reason must have been related to the
Manchus' distrust of the Han landlord elite (whose dependents these servile groups were) as well as a desire to express a kind of conqueror's "benevolence" in which the Manchu regime stood above a relatively undifferentiated mass of commoners-a scornful gesture at
some long-standing Han social distinctions. Formal commoner
equality was right in line with the despotic and rationalizing style of
Injen, the third Ch'ing emperor and Hungli's father. The language
of the emancipation decrees implied that lacking specific historicallegal reasons for servile status (such as penal servitude or a contract
of indenture), all commoners were of equal standing before the
mighty Ch'ing state. Writing about the despised Tanka (boat people)
of Kwangtung, Injen pronounced that "they were originally ordinary
subjects (hang-min, lit. "good [i.e., not polluted] commoners"), and
there is no reason (li) to despise them."12 Concludes a recent study:
"Best of all," freedmen could now "take advantage of the expanded
labor market and change employers if they wished."13

A free-wheeling labor market, the decline of personal dependency
and servile status: these have great appeal to a twentieth-century
Westerner, who associates them with Freedom and Progress. Yet their
effect on the mentality of an eighteenth-century Chinese may have
been somewhat different. No doubt they were appreciated by families
struggling to survive on small parcels of land, who urgently needed
to sell their excess labor power to fend off starvation. Landless men
could hope to survive in a free market for hired farm labor. A few
able and lucky outcasts might now rise from pariah status into the
examination system (barred to "mean" groups) and thence into elite
status. (A decree of 1771 dealt with such upstarts by ruling that only
in the fourth generation after formal emancipation might a man
legally sit for the examinations.)'' With respect to servile groups,
however, it may be wondered whether much "freeing up" actually
occurred. Even half 'a century later, the serflike tenants in I4ui-chou
were having trouble asserting their imperially mandated freedom.15
And one historian points out that provisions for cash redemption of
servile status were in fact meaningless, for they were well beyond the
resources of tenant farmers, and in any case "redemption" would
leave them without it livelihood."'

Surely the underlying fact about "free labor" in the eighteenthcentury economy is that it was sold in a buyer's market. In an increasingly crowded region like Kiangnan, "freedom" for the wage laborer
meant the liberty to harness one's family to the kind of regime I have
just described in the Kiangnan cotton industry. It meant the option to leave an oppressive landlord and take one's chances elsewhere.
Liberty could also be found, presumably, in the labor gangs hired to
work on government dredging projects, or on the docks of the maritime trading ports. But how many people could not find buyers for
their labor in the growing economy of the age-and what happened
to them?