MERCHANTS, PEASANTS, AND THE STATE: THE ORGANIZATION AND POLITICS OF CHINESE SILK PRODUCTION, WUXI COUNTY, 1870-1937 (JIANGSU)

In the period 1870 to 1937, Wuxi county in southern Jiangsu became one of China's three major centers for the mechanized production of silk yarn for export. This study explores Wuxi's new silk industry, concentrating on the relationship between economic development and sociopolitical change. Part One presents the foundations of silk industry growth, including ecological and social factors contributing to the start of sericulture and cocoon marketing in Wuxi. Although a variety of source materials are used, ranging from gazetteers to rural investigations made at the time of Land Reform, a survey study of peasant households in three Wuxi villages conducted in 1940 by Japanese researchers of the South Manchurian Railway Company supplies the main data. Part Two explores the origins and activities of three merchant groups--cocoon merchants, silkworm egg breeders, and owners and managers of silk filatures--using three types of sources: newspaper and journal accounts of industry and commerce; archival materials on the same topics; and interviews conducted in Wuxi in 1980-81 with former participants in silk industry development. The major findings of this study are two-fold. First, the agrarian system in Wuxi was suffering from "economic involution," characterized by scarce resources relative to population, a high degree of class differentiation, and little propensity for dynamic growth. By the 1930s, a majority of Wuxi peasants living in this system were dependent upon cash income from cocoon sales to maintain subsistence. As a result, a new merchant/peasant nexus emerged in Wuxi, causing problems for raw material supply and capital formation, but giving enormous power to members of the new merchant elite. Secondly, contrary to prevailing analyses of local elites and their relationship to state power, there was great potential for cooperation between silk industry merchants in Wuxi and new governments at all levels. Modern governments were interested in collecting commercial tax levies and in promoting economic development, and they bureaucratized local merchants to assist them in these matters. Periodic merchant resistance at the county level to provincial demands for increased taxation and control must thus be seen as the result of intra-government competition for scarce fiscal resources in a period of rapid state growth.