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Military Expenditures and their Economic Impact in Qing China - Part 1: Zuo Zongtang's Western campaign 1866-1878

Applicant Professor Dr. Hans Ulrich Vogel, since 3/2007
Subject Area Asian Studies
Term from 2005 to 2010
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 13020509
 
Final Report Year 2015

Final Report Abstract

The results of the research shed new light on the question whether the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735 – 1795) spent extravagantly on needless military campaigns. It could be shown that the costly and long second Jinchuan campaign (1771 – 1776) was a justified war seen from the perspective of the construction of a coherent, homogenous and “modern” empire. Concerning the cost of the war it became evident that the Qianlong emperor on average did not spend more for wars than his predecessors or successors. The total cost of the four years long war (53 million liang) did not surpass one annual budget of the central government treasury (ca. 70 million liang) and are therefore nearly insignificant in comparison to war expenditure in contemporary Europe. The height of the cost for the second Jinchuan war was to the greatest part due to the difficulties in the transport in a mountainous region. Tax cuts in the war-waging province of Sichuan likewise show that the emperor tried to relieve actors that were heavily burdened with financial duties. Similar measures to balance financial and labour duties can be seen in the replacement of recruited peasants by entrusting the transport of grain and material to private entrepreneurs. On the other hand the funds needed to finance the supply system were directly provided by the provinces, inspection circuits and salt administration zones, and only a minor part from the funds of the Ministry of Revenue. About one tenth of the cost was financed by so-called contributions (juanshu) mainly delivered by salt merchant associations. Their contributions can be seen as a kind of taxation and were regularly accepted in cases of natural disasters, large-scale construction projects, and to co-finance military campaigns. It was demonstrated that these contributions were regularly made use of during wars, and because the official rhetoric condemned them as undesirable they were defined as “voluntary contributions”. A comparison between theoretical costs, based on the rules of the War Expenditures Code that was only compiled after the end of the campaign, and the real costs showed that for many items the second Jinchuan wars was cheaper than it would have been, say, twenty years later. There were no direct tax increases, but only a grain transport surcharge (pingyu) of 1.5 per cent. The Confucian concept of a “benevolent government” forbade raising taxes, so that the land tax quota had already been frozen in 1713. It is all the more astonishing that even then, the funds available were sufficient to finance a war involving 120,000 troops and many more civilian labourers without relying on credit. The financial model of government debt was wholly unknown in traditional China. The consequence of this was that the traditional state had to wage war or to undergo larger projects with a relatively slender budget. The budget could only be increased by shifting costs to the lower levels of the bureaucracy, and then farther on to the private sphere. This could particularly be seen in the field of logistics, where local owners of transport animals or vehicles were recruited to transport the troops’ baggage, and peasants were recruited as porters. Both groups of persons were paid, but their pay was subject to strict rules. Yet the Jinchuan case shows that labourers were not underpaid, but quite contrary, were granted reasonable market prices up to the seven-fold of the codified price, and therefore brought the logistics managers into a precarious financial situation. The local bureaucracy was used to organize the supply network, besides their daily business. Any additional pay was not given to them, unlike the soldiers who profited from large extra-incomes during periods of war. In many instances, unpaid expectant civilian officials or dismissed officials served in the logistics, both groups without being paid a salary. War expenditure was subject to a strict code of rules. In case of overspending the responsible official had to make do with his private capital for the money the government was not willing to pay. All these findings show that the expensive second Jinchuan war had no negative financial impact on the state treasury, but that the strict rules for expenditure forced the logistics managers to pay for part of the expenditure from their private purse which in turn led to their search for other income, partially by corruption or abuse of funds, and partially by the exploitation of their subordinates and the population under their jurisdiction. It was this practice of having the civilian bureaucracy organize the administration and funding of military campaigns (besides other large-scale government projects) that aggravated the social disintegration in the late eighteenth century, and not the extravagant spending for unnecessary wars.

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