Editing Qing dynasty (section)

==Economy==
{{Main|Economy of the Qing dynasty}}
[[File:Xián Fēng Tōng Bǎo (咸豐通寶) 1850–1861 Qing Dynasty cash coin.png|thumb|upright=0.8|A Qing-era copper cash coin]]
[[File:Yantai (Chefoo), Qing Dynasty postage stamp.gif|thumb|upright=0.8|A Qing postage stamp from [[Yantai]]]]
By the end of the 17th century, the Chinese economy had recovered from the devastation caused by the wars in which the [[Ming dynasty]] were overthrown.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|pp=564, 566}} In the following century, markets continued to expand, but with more trade between regions, a greater dependence on overseas markets and a greatly increased population.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|p=564}} By the end of the 18th century the population had risen to 300&nbsp;million from approximately 150&nbsp;million during the late Ming dynasty. The dramatic rise in population was due to several reasons, including the long period of peace and stability in the 18th century and the import of new crops China received from the Americas, including peanuts, sweet potatoes and maize. New species of rice from Southeast Asia led to a huge increase in production. Merchant guilds proliferated in all of the growing Chinese cities and often acquired great social and even political influence. Rich merchants with official connections built up huge fortunes and patronised literature, theater and the arts. Textile and handicraft production boomed.{{sfnp|Murphey|2007|p=151}}

The government broadened land ownership by returning land that had been sold to large landowners in the late Ming period by families unable to pay the land tax.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|p=593}} To give people more incentives to participate in the market, they reduced the tax burden in comparison with the late Ming, and replaced the [[corvée]] system with a head tax used to hire laborers.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|pp=593, 595}} The administration of the [[Grand Canal (China)|Grand Canal]] was made more efficient, and transport opened to private merchants.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|p=598}} A system of monitoring grain prices eliminated severe shortages, and enabled the price of rice to rise slowly and smoothly through the 18th century.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|pp=572–573, 599–600}} Wary of the power of wealthy merchants, Qing rulers limited their trading licenses and usually refused them permission to open new mines, except in poor areas.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|pp=606, 609}} These restrictions on domestic resource exploration, as well as on foreign trade, are [[Criticism of Qing dynasty's economic performance|critiqued by some scholars]] as a cause of the [[Great Divergence]], by which the West overtook China economically.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Xu |first=Suming |script-title=zh:人学史观视阈下的中西大分流——对"为什么江南不是英国"之新思考 |trans-title=The Great Divergence from a humanist perspective: Why was Jiangnan not England?) |title=Tianjin Social Science |volume=6 |year=2005 |url=http://www.jylw.com/guest/wzhtml/27/wz128130.htm |language=zh |ref=none}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last1=Li |first1=Bo |title=5000 years of Chinese history |year=2001 |publisher=Inner Mongolian People's publishing corp |language=zh |isbn=978-7-204-04420-7 |last2=Zheng |first2=Yin}}</ref>

During the Ming–Qing period (1368–1911) the biggest development in the Chinese economy was its transition from a command to a market economy, the latter becoming increasingly more pervasive throughout the Qing's rule.{{sfnp|Porter|2016|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}} Between roughly 1550 and 1800, China proper experienced a second commercial revolution, developing naturally from the first commercial revolution during the Song, which saw the emergence of long-distance inter-regional trade of luxury goods. During the second commercial revolution, for the first time, a large percentage of farming households began producing crops for sale in the local and national markets rather than for their own consumption or barter in the traditional economy. Surplus crops were placed onto the national market for sale, integrating farmers into the commercial economy from the ground up. This naturally led to regions specialising in certain cash-crops for export as China's economy became increasingly reliant on inter-regional trade of bulk staple goods such as cotton, grain, beans, vegetable oils, forest products, animal products, and fertiliser.{{sfnp|Rowe|2009|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}}

===Silver===
[[File:1 dragon dollar Qing dynasty - 1911.png|thumb|upright=1.2|[[Silver coin]]: 1 yuan/dollar [[Xuantong]] 3rd year – 1911 [[Chop marks on coins|Chopmark]]]]
Silver entered in large quantities from mines in the [[New World]] after the Spanish conquered the Philippines in the 1570s. The re-opening of the southeast coast, which had been closed in the late 17th century, quickly revived trade, which expanded at 4% per annum throughout the latter part of the 18th century.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|p=587}} China continued to export tea, silk and manufactures, creating a large, favorable [[trade balance]] with the West.{{sfnp|Murphey|2007|p=151}} The resulting expansion of the money supply supported competitive and stable markets.{{sfnp|Myers|Wang|2002|pp=587, 590}} During the mid-Ming China had gradually shifted to silver as the standard currency for large scale transactions and by the late Kangxi period, the assessment and collection of the land tax was done in silver. Landlords began only accepting rent payments in silver rather than in crops themselves, which in turn incentivized farmers to produce crops for sale in local and national markets rather than for their own personal consumption or barter.{{sfnp|Rowe|2009|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}} Unlike the copper coins, ''qian'' or cash, used mainly for smaller transactions, silver was not reliably minted into a coin but rather was traded in units of weight: the ''liang'' or ''tael'', which equaled roughly 1.3 ounces of silver. A third-party had to be brought in to assess the weight and purity of the silver, resulting in an extra "meltage fee" added on to the price of transaction. Furthermore, since the "meltage fee" was unregulated it was the source of corruption. The Yongzheng emperor cracked down on the corrupt "meltage fees", legalizing and regulating them so that they could be collected as a tax. From this newly increased public coffer, the Yongzheng emperor increased the salaries of the officials who collected them, further legitimising silver as the standard currency of the Qing economy.{{sfnp|Porter|2016|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}}

===Urbanisation and the proliferation of market-towns===
The second commercial revolution also had a profound effect on the dispersion of the Qing populace. Up until the late Ming there existed a stark contrast between the rural countryside and cities because extraction of surplus crops from the countryside was traditionally done by the state. However, as commercialisation expanded in the late-Ming and early-Qing, mid-sized cities began popping up to direct the flow of domestic, commercial trade. Some towns of this nature had such a large volume of trade and merchants flowing through them that they developed into full-fledged market-towns. Some of these more active market-towns even developed into small cities and became home to the new rising merchant class.{{sfnp|Rowe|2009|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}} The proliferation of these mid-sized cities was only made possible by advancements in long-distance transportation and communication. As more and more Chinese citizens were travelling the country conducting trade they increasingly found themselves in a far-away place needing a place to stay; in response the market saw the expansion of guild halls to house these merchants.{{sfnp|Porter|2016|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}}

Full-fledged trade guilds emerged, which, among other things, issued regulatory codes and price schedules, and provided a place for travelling merchants to stay and conduct their business. Along with the ''huiguan'' trade guilds, guild halls dedicated to more specific professions, ''gongsuo'', began to appear and to control commercial craft or artisanal industries such as carpentry, weaving, banking, and medicine.{{sfnp|Porter|2016|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}} By the nineteenth century guild halls worked to transform urban areas into cosmopolitan, multi-cultural hubs, staged theatre performances open to general public, developed real estate by pooling funds together in the style of a trust, and some even facilitated the development of social services such as maintaining streets, water supply, and sewage facilities.{{sfnp|Rowe|2009|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}}

===Trade with the West===
{{Continental Asia in 1700 CE}}
[[File:Puankhequa_oil_painting_on_a_mirror.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Puankhequa]], Chinese merchant and member of a [[Cohong]] family]]
In 1685, the Kangxi emperor legalised private maritime trade along the coast, establishing a series of customs stations in major port cities. The customs station at Guangzhou became by far the most active in foreign trade; by the late Kangxi reign, more than forty mercantile houses specialising in trade with the West had appeared. The Yongzheng emperor made a parent corporation comprising those forty individual houses in 1725 known as the [[Cohong]] system. Firmly established by 1757, the [[Cohong|Canton Cohong]] was an association of thirteen business firms that had been awarded exclusive rights to conduct trade with Western merchants in Canton. Until its abolition after the Opium War in 1842, the Canton Cohong system was the only permitted avenue of Western trade into China, and thus became a booming hub of international trade.{{sfnp|Porter|2016|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}} By the eighteenth century, the most significant export China had was tea. British demand for tea increased exponentially up until they figured out how to grow it for themselves in the hills of northern India in the 1880s. By the end of the eighteenth century, tea exports going through the Canton Cohong system amounted to one-tenth of the revenue from taxes collected from the British and nearly the entire revenue of the British East India Company; in fact, until the early nineteenth century tea comprised ninety percent of exports leaving Canton.{{sfnp|Porter|2016|p={{page needed|date=May 2020}}}}

=== Revenue ===

The recorded revenues of the central Qing government increased little over the course of the 18th and early 19th century from 36,106,483 taels in 1725 to 43,343,978 taels in 1812 before declining to 38,600,570 taels in 1841, the land tax was the principal source of revenue for the central government with the salt, customs and poll taxes being important secondary sources.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|p=61}} Following the Opium Wars and the opening of China to foreign trade and the mid-century rebellions, two further important sources of revenue were added: the foreign maritime customs revenue and the ''[[Likin (taxation)|likin]]'' revenue though only 20% of the likin revenue was actually given by the provinces to Hu Pu ([[Ministry of Revenue (imperial China)|board of revenue]]) in Beijing the rest remaining in provincial hands, the Hu Pu also managed to raise some miscellaneous taxes and increased the rate of the salt tax these measures doubled revenue by the late 19th century, this however was insufficient for the central government which was facing numerous crises and wars during the period and 9 foreign loans amounting to 40mil taels were contracted by the Qing government prior to 1890.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|pp=61–62}}

It was estimated in the 1850s that wages around the capital of Beijing and the Yangtze delta region for a farmer was between 0.99 and 1.02 taels a month; assuming every day was worked, this would amount to roughly 12 taels a year with over 400,000,000 citizens in 1890 the level of taxation was extremely low.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Peng |first=Linan |year=2021 |title=The last guardian of the throne: the regional army in the late Qing dynasty |journal=Journal of Institutional Economics |volume=17 |issue=2 |pages=328–329 |doi=10.1017/S1744137420000430 |s2cid=225162563}}</ref>

The Financial Reorganisation bureau of the Dynasty (established in 1909) estimated total revenue to be 292,000,000 taels. H.B. Morse estimated in the early 1900s a total of 284,150,000 taels of which 99,062,000 taels was spent by the Central government, 142,374,000 taels by the provincial governments and the remainder by the local government. In 1911 the Consultative assembly estimated total revenue to be 301,910,297 taels. Included in this figure was over 44,000,000 taels from the Likin of which only 13,000,000 was reported to Beijing.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|pp=63–66}}

The Qing government during and following the First Sino-Japanese war increasingly took on loans to meet its expenditure requirements a total of 746,220,453 taels of which slightly over 330,000,000 taels was for Railway construction and the repayment to come from the revenues of the railways themselves thus these loans did not burden the central government finances. A relatively small sum of just over 25,500,000 taels was borrowed for industrial projects, over 5,000,000 taels for Telegraph lines with less than 1,000,000 taels for miscellaneous purposes. The remainder was primarily for the costs of the Sino-Japanese war and the indemnity in the Treaty of Shimonoseki amounting to over 382,000,000 taels.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|pp=63–66}}

Taizu noted that these figures for formal taxation only amounted to half of the total taxation and therefore revenue of the government with these surcharges being levied at a local level by local officials who found the level of taxation far too low to support even basic governance, despite the ability to levy surcharges belonging solely to the central government.<ref>{{Cite book |first=Taizu |last=Zhang |title=The ideological foundations of Qing taxation:Belief systems, Politics, and institutions |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2023 |isbn=978-1108995955 |pages=46, 69, 99}}</ref>