7 - The state and the economy

Summary

The traditional function of the state was to provide and ensure economic stability and it was a function which was fulfilled successfully during the early Qing expansion of the eighteenth century. By the end of the next century the same role was no longer tenable. Internationally, governments were accepting, or were being forced to accept, the responsibility not for maintaining economic equilibrium but for the promotion of change through industrialisation. It was a role which the Qing government was reluctant to accept and, according to Feuerwerker, one that it was incapable of playing since its ‘ideology, traditional fiscal practices, and patterns of behaviour were all obstacles to suitable action’ [43: 59]. In this view the backward-looking, exploitative and corrupt practices of the state constituted the major barriers to rational economic development [25: 1; 144; 153]. The government neither took the promotional role itself nor did it create the context within which private entrepreneurs were able to respond effectively and this deficiency clearly contributed to China's slow progress towards modernisation.

Yet, as our understanding of the activities of the Qing state has deepened it has become clear that any simple characterisation of the state as the rigid defender of conservatism opposing all change on principle is misleading. Studies of the early Qing have demonstrated that the state was capable of generating patterns of behaviour and institutions which were by no means inimical to economic expansion and change.