Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

• Economic revolution
• An Lushan rebellion (755)
• Tang (618 – 960 AD)
• 5 dynasties (907 – 960)
• Changes in Taxation

• 2 million registered households in 760
• 9 million in 755

Sui – early Tang centralization

Post An Lushan:  local power increases

Important news about the Quiz scheduled for 2 weeks from now.  There will be no quiz.  There’s a reason for this—most of you are doing well, but in recognition of the TAs hard work, we’re sparing them grading another round of quizzes.  That quiz will be treated as an extra 5 points on your grade.  This is the last good news, ever.

The medieval economic revolution!  We will see this topic appear over and over again, this chunk of Tang / Song time during which everything goes from whatever it was to whatever it’s going to become.

Improvements in irrigation, terraforming, economic changes, southern migration, and the change to rice all come together in this period and allow us and look back to say that the revenues in the Song available are dramatically higher than any previous time.  Strangely, the government doesn’t become richer; China becomes wealthier.  This will be true into the late imperial period.

By the Tang/Song period, the south is unified with north under a regular system.  A 20^th century scholar (Skinner) looking back tried to trace back various economic markets and networks.  He came up with a set of macro regions.  These overlap with the geographic people groups of the Neolithic and all of Chinese historical group categorizations.  These also delineate linguistic and cultural boundaries.  We can observe two kinds of trends:  increasing complexity of networks (religious, markets, transportation), and the founding of Tang infrastructure in these regions.  Then, what’s going on everywhere else?

The simple answer is they are hilly and remote.  When you get above cultivated land, you find a different ethnic group.  There was a constant encroachment on their territory by Chinese over the centuries.  However, it’s hard to distinguish them from Chinese after slow assimilation, because they pay taxes and serve the king, but sinification/sinicization isn’t total and they speak different languages than most of the Chinese.  So, there’s a long process of chipping away at diversity inside China.

Pre-sui taxation was done by equal-land share, where all land was divided into equal plots and lend by the government to your family.  You were taxed based on the number of plots you held.  This creates a predictable tax base for the early Sui and Tang.  To do so, they require annual census, a huge administrative process.  This changes in the An Lushan rebellion.

The Tang manage to survive the rebellion by allying with a handful of remaining groups to come together to prop that Tang back up, but the nature of the Tang state is radically changed.  At this point, the administration decides to offer the power to emperor in exchange for local autonomy and taxation.  The government also abandons artificial control over the markets.  Thus, there is a process of federalization.  However, the exam and value systems remained the same, even though the national elite lost their power base, because they are popular and useful.  A new set of players have come to the same game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 5:38 pm and is tagged with southern migration, religious markets, economic revolution, song period, historical group, economic markets, imperial period, song time, economic changes, local power, government doesn, centralization, neolithic, dynasties, simple answer, ethnic group, important news, two kinds, tang, rebellion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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