Chapter 5 discusses the entrenchment of fiscal conservatism in mid-Qing politics, covering the Yongzheng to Daoguang eras (1722-1850). A spirited attempt by the Yongzheng Emperor to expand formal agricultural tax quotas and rationalize fiscal institutions had some success, but quickly encountered widespread opposition. By the late 1730s, the Qing Court settled into a set of fiscal institutions that would remain largely unchanged for the next 170 years. Formal agricultural tax quotas were, with the exception of the grain tribute, fixed in absolute values of silver, and could no longer be increased.Furthermore, provincial and local land surveying was made illegal by imperial decree, depriving political elites of their primary, and perhaps only, source of reliable macroeconomic information. Soon after - and arguably as a direct result - a “Malthusian” worldview began to gain popularity among political elites, arguing that, because the population was rapidly growing while total agricultural output remained unchanged, the amount of taxable surplus that the state could safely extract before rural incomes fell below subsistence level was actually shrinking. Driven by this deepening sense of insecurity, the Qing Court came to view nearly any proposal to raise agricultural taxes with deep suspicion.By the late eighteenth century, such proposals met with almost automatic rejection, and often carried serious political consequences for their sponsors. Meanwhile, nonagricultural taxes continued their slow upward trend, and became the focal point for fiscal reform efforts in the early nineteenth century.

The Chinese economy demonstrated significant vigor from the eleventh century to the nineteenth. This period of nine centuries achieved remarkable progress in implementing the imperial examination system, improving literacy, establishing private landownership, developing market institutions, adopting new crops and improved farming technology, strengthening the lineage order, and lifting ordinary people’s capacity to deal with risks. According to the optimistic view, this is also the period during which two economic revolutions, the Tang–Song and Ming–Qing transitions, took place, marked by continuous economic growth and improvement in living standards for the population.1 To other scholars, however, this long period of quantitative growth was largely achieved through population increase, preventing China from escaping the “Malthusian trap.” That is, while the total size of the Chinese economy may have grown due to the rising population, per capita living standards failed to rise above historical norms and might have even declined during the long period. This period’s achievement and impact were nothing comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution which started in eighteenth-century Britain.