Search

There is no such thing as a representative community. This is as true for China as elsewhere. Nevertheless, Daoyi was hardly unique. There were many similar military farming communities in late imperial China. Military state lands called qidi under the Eight Banner Armies, or tuntian under the Green Standard Armies, represent 5–10 percent of all registered land during the eighteenth century. Some of these lands were regular banner estates, similar to Daoyi, or military estates under similar military administration. Others were imperial or noble estates under imperial household or noble household control. While there are no aggregate population statistics for these state farm populations in Liaoning or for that matter any other province, their national proportions were probably roughly similar to that of the registered cultivated acreage, that is, 5–15 million people in the middle of the eighteenth century, i.e. somewhere between the national populations of England and France. Prospects Like the men and women of Daoyi, the social organization and population behavior of these state farm populations can be reconstructed in great detail. Thousands of household registers, similar to the twenty-five that provide the bulk of the data for this book, have been discovered in the historical archives of Beijing, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, and Liaoning (Finegan and Telford 1988). Others may survive elsewhere as well. In Liaoning alone, these registers record some 5 million observations for approximately 1 million individuals who lived during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other archival materials record a variety of other information on the institutional, legal, and social history of many of these communities, as do a number of elaborate lineage genealogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Chinese history, heredity and ability inevitably overlap. On the one hand, the Chinese state rewarded achievement with hereditary rights and privileges. On the other hand, Chinese parents rewarded what ability their children had, through a system of familial education and parental, especially maternal, dedication (Hsiung 1994). As a result, in late imperial China, as in contemporary China, nurture could supply what nature lacked. Privileged children consequently often did far better than other children their age. This was especially true in rural Liaoning, where position in the traditional household hierarchy was dictated largely by heredity. Bannermen followed a life course from one family relationship to another in a fixed progression determined at the time of their birth by their parentage and their birth order. The timing of relationship transitions depended on two events over which individuals had virtually no control: when household heads died, and when households divided. In consequence, within the household system there was little opportunity for social mobility. In contrast, there was considerable mobility outside the household in the banner hierarchies of occupation and organization. According to the rules and regulations of the banner system, bannermen could earn position in the occupational and organizational hierarchies through their ability, regardless of their position in the household hierarchy. Under ideal circumstances, talented men fated by the circumstances of their birth to a life at the bottom of the household hierarchy could still rise in social mobility. In rural Liaoning, the Eight Banners, in other words, could have been the rural equivalent of the elite “ladder of success” (Ho 1959). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All relations between the family members are regulated in detail by custom. The seniors occupy honorable places and exercise great influence until they fall into senility or complete physical debility. They are always honored by the expression of general attention. They are served at the tables with the best pieces of food, sometimes even separate tables are put up for them and special dishes are prepared. In Liaoning the myth of the large peasant household was a reality. The vast majority of the rural population lived in complex households with more than one conjugal family unit. The hierarchical nature of such households defined the social and economic context of their daily life. Household structure determined the composition of the family work force. Household position determined access to family rights and resources. Household parentage determined the probability of rising to headship in their own right. All decisions from the commonplace—when they could eat, what they could wear—to the extraordinary—who they could marry, when they could have children—had to be negotiated within the household. And yet with the exception of Arthur Wolfs pioneering analysis of nuptiality and fertility in Taiwan there has been little attempt to differentiate demographic patterns by specific family relationships. In this chapter we reconstruct such patterns for the 2,000 unique peasant households (10,000 household observations) in our population. The chapter is divided into three sections. In section I, we summarize the formal structure and hierarchy of family relationships and outline the theoretical lines of authority within these multiple-family households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Daoyi, all together 1,400 men rose in the banner hierarchy: 400 in the occupational hierarchy and 1000 in the organizational hierarchy. These men in theory were the elite of rural banner society. They were assumed to be the most capable. They were stipulated to be the best paid. And they were supposed to be the most powerful. If they were as privileged in fact as they were in theory, this should be apparent in their demographic behavior. We have already seen in Chapter 7 how marriage, fertility, and even mortality were related to position in the domestic hierarchy. In this chapter we explore how they were also related to position in the banner hierarchies. We divide our chapter into two sections, each with its own methodology. In section I, we follow the arithmetic methodology used in Chapter 7 to analyze the distribution of privilege within the household, calculating measures of demographic performance—the proportion married, and the number and sex ratio of children “born”—according to the various categories of banner service. In section II, we introduce logistic regression to compare the effects of position in the banner and household hierarchies on demographic behavior and determine their relative importance. In so doing, we differentiate not only the degree of demographic privilege enjoyed by the household and banner hierarchies over ordinary men, but also the degree of privilege within these hierarchies. Thus we see whether artisans were above soldiers, and whether civil officials were on equal footing with military officials. While we have a clear understanding of the normative ordering of position within the household, our knowledge of the banner hierarchy is much less complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Daoyi, the most important organization above the level of the household was the Eight Banner system, in particular its occupational and organizational hierarchies. These overlapping hierarchies were the principal link between individuals and households on the one hand and the state on the other. The occupational hierarchy supplied the state with skilled manpower. The organizational hierarchy provided the local civil, fiscal, judicial, and military leadership, and in fact was the lowest layer of formal government administration in rural Liaoning. The Eight Banner registers provide detailed information on the position of individuals within these two hierarchies, recording the obligations, occupations, and offices of every adult male every three years. These data are an important source not only for the study of the structure of rural social hierarchy, but also for the study of social mobility within that hierarchy. Furthermore, when combined with our knowledge of household relationships and household structure from previous chapters, they enable us to analyze the interactions between the occupational, organizational, and household hierarchies in our population. In this chapter we describe both Eight Banner hierarchies. We do this because no similar study yet exists and because our understanding of rural banner society is consequently extremely rudimentary. In section I, we focus on the age pattern of entry to and exit from banner service, and the relationship with such life course events as marriage and headship. In sections II and III, we describe the occupational and organizational hierarchies. Finally in section IV, we provide some measures of career mobility within and between these two overlapping hierarchies. Banner service The basic unit of the Eight Banner occupational hierarchy in Daoyi was the adult male, or ding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big brother, though born of the same mother and living in the same house [as his brothers], his position was entirely different from theirs. In the large Gao household, he was the eldest son of an eldest son, and for that reason his destiny was fixed from the moment he came into the world. In rural Liaoning, household structure, household position, and the rules of household formation combined to determine individual fate. Demographic decisions were decided by family strategy more than by personal preference. The family as a whole allocated labor and redistributed wealth; nurtured the young and cared for the aged. Family members who wanted to marry or bear children accordingly vied for a finite cache of rights and resources, distributed unequally by gender, by family relationship, and by seniority. The Liaoning peasant household was therefore not only a locus of affect and socialization, but also an arena of negotiation and conflict. Household organization is a product of such negotiation. But just as these decisions can change household structure, so the arrangement of relationships within the household, in turn, influences individual opportunities and expectations to marry, to bear children, to retire, and to depart. Thus, each step along the household progression is the product of two reflexive forces: group strategy and individual will. The domestic cycle reflects the common resolution of tensions within the domestic group. Rules of household formation show how people normatively resolved their competing claims. From them we can deduce the relationships between household members, and understand how authority was transmitted and transmuted within the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fate and fortune in rural Liaoning were subject not only to the broad organizational constraints of the Chinese household and the Manchu banner, but also to the specific ecological setting of the local climate and land. In Chapter 3, we locate the spatial and temporal setting of our population and show how three such ecological circumstances–the seasonal harvest cycle, the annual fluctuation in climate and prices, and a secular trend of rising demographic pressure–defined the boundary conditions of demographic and social behavior in Daoyi and surrounding communities. The demographic response to seasonal cycles and short-term fluctuations consisted of variations in vital rates. The response to the secular trend of rising Malthusian pressure, however, was not just a sum of individual demographic responses, but rather a fundamental transformation of the household and banner systems that radically changed the domestic context of daily life. In Daoyi, in other words, organizational constraints such as the household and banner systems were in turn shaped by ecological conditions. The harvest cycle Throughout the world, rural life is dominated by the passing of the seasons. Daoyi is no exception. Its extreme northern location guarantees a short, intense, agricultural season with only one harvest. Spring does not arrive until May, which brings little rain, but more sunlight than any other month of the year. The transition in the weather is rapid. Farmers accordingly have to rush to prepare their fields and plant their crops before the rainy season in July and August. This concentration of activity during the spring planting renews with the autumn harvest in September. Like the spring, the fall is quite brief–often no more than one month long. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]