Thread
Ok, the book is finally available (after numerous logistical delays since August). So here’s a thread about its main thesis. The central puzzle is tries to solve is why late imperial Chinese taxation (specifically, Qing taxation) was so unbelievably low. 1 www.amazon.com/Ideological-Foundations-Qing-Taxation-Institutions/dp/131651868X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?...
The put this in perspective, here are some rough numbers: most early modern European states taxed some 7 to 10 percent of their GDP, Asiatic empires (including previous chinese dynasties) usually 5 percent or so, England and Japan around 20. The Qing fell below 1-2 percent in the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623679916595093505
Moreover there was an internal divergence in Qing taxation: non-agricultural taxes more or less kept pace with population and economic growth (thereby keeping a somewhat stable rate), but agricultural taxes were essentially locked into a fixed absolute volume from around 1680… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623680534986489856
The core argument of the book is that these fiscal phenomena cannot be fully explained through what I can “economic rationalism”—if you assume that means self-interested materialistic rationality. Instead, it was fundamentally an ideological story: the unique ideological… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623681223099838465
The Qing, unlike previous major dynasties in China, fell under an extreme small-state ideology in the decades after the Ming-Qing transition, and never quite extracted itself from that until its final couple of years. In this worldview, peasants simply couldn’t shoulder any… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623682086140882944
How this ideological worldview came into existence and was maintained over the course of 250 years was an exceedingly complex issue that the book goes into great detail on, but in short: it started in the intellectual trauma of the Ming-Qing transition, when elites were… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623683028227694594
This is an account that involves large doses of cognitive theory and informational theory: the idea is that major political shocks tend to fashion new empirical worldviews that cohere with old normative biases, and that ideologies gain political force only when that empirical… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623683966111711233
Specifically, you can’t reject a politically dominant ideology until you’ve rejected its empirical premises (the way it empirically explains the outside world), but you can’t do *that* if the state manipulates authoritative information in such a way to make empirical… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623684672348647426
In any case, the ideological refusal to raise agricultural taxes ultimately had ruinous consequences for the dynasty: by the 19th century, it was constantly on the verge of fiscal collapse (especially after the Taiping Rebellion), and therefore didn’t have the resources to fund… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623685743997513735
After 1900, the Qing state finally came to its senses, and raised agricultural taxes significantly for the first time in two centuries. Wonder of wonders, peasants did not rebel. This finally broke the spell, and every Chinese regime after that raised agricultural taxes… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623686496375955459
This suggests that the rampant “statism” that we now see in China (which has been a primary theme of Chinese political economy since 1912) is a direct reaction to the perceived failures of the Qing: the Qing state was too weak to compete in the modern world, and its successors… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623686925000245250
So we’ve come full circle now: just as the Qing political paradigm of low taxes and governments abstention was a direct reaction to the trauma of Ming collapse, 20th century Chinese politics of state building and national strengthening were also reactions to the trauma of Qing… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623687625654603777
So there a couple of broader theoretical and historical takeaways from this account: first, the popular idea (see, e.g., anything that Daron Acemoglu has written about China) that the Qing state was despotic and oppressive is just wrong. Quite the opposite, it was usually… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623688099753562115
Second, we really should never lose sight of ideological paradigms when trying to understand Chinese history (or probably any history, for that matter). The internal logic of ideological change simply doesn’t conform to crude materialism or economic rationalism, but it shapes the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623688543355764736
Finally, we really need to fully appreciate how much of our empirical worldviews and basic understanding of the outside world can be manufactured by political institutions. The very economic data that we use to build those understandings are themselves subject to institutional… twitter.com/i/web/status/1623689456178851841
So, if you’ve read this far, thanks for the interest! I hope you read the book, and I’d love to hear anyone’s feedback. I’ll be giving more book talks this Spring (at UMich, Duke, Cornell, Stanford, and through a few online events) if you’d like to have a conversation. 16
(I do wish my father could have lived long enough to see the book’s publication—he would have enjoyed reading it, I think—but life is often not so accommodating.)
