On The Administration Of Bufu In Jiangnan Region During Ming Dynasty

Bufu, the defaulted tax, is a special noun often seen in China’s ancient historical books, the basic meaning of which is the part of the land tax not submitted to the government in time or in the required quantity and the extended meaning of which is the action of being in arrears with the land tax or evading the land tax. Compared with the modern fianancial and economic concepts, Bufu is similar to the combination of putting off the submission of the land tax and the evasion of it. Bufu is a frequently seen financial phenomenon, economic behavior and social problem in the traditional Chinese society and the successive governers discussed a lot about it and made many concerned policies and measures. By combining the arrangement of the historical materials and the analysis of the financial data, this dissertation mainly studies the conditions of Bufu in the Jiangnan Area, whose scope in this dissertation includes the districts of Suzhou, Songjiang, Changshu,Zhenjiang,Hangzhou, Jiading and Huzhou, and the government’s administrative policies in the Ming Dynasty, which were taken as the point of view to see the big transmissions of the financial system in the Ming Dynasty, such as the financial administrative system, the tax-collecting system and so on.One of the biggest characteristics of the basic structure of the fianancial income in the Ming Dynasty was that it had serious imbalance, the detailed manifestation of which was that its revenue lelied too heavily on the land tax. From the beginning to the end of the Ming Dynasty, the land tax covered more than 70 to 80 percent of the whole revenue and although its financial system experienced great transformation, the above-mentioned out-of-balance feature remained somehow.One big feature of the land tax in the Ming Dynasty was the big imbance existed in the territorial distribution of its income resources. In the respect of the land tax rate, more than one fifth of the whole country’s land tax came from the eight districts of Jiangnan, which covered only one sixteenth of the whole country’s land. In other words, 15 percent of the whole country’s financial revenue came from Jiangnan’s land tax, which consisted another feature of the financial revenue of the Ming Dynasty. Hence, how to efficiently administrate the problem of Bufu in Jiangnan Area and to guarantee the country’s financial supply meant significantly to the controllers of the Ming Dynasy.According to the analysis of the data of the Ming Dynasy’s Bufu, its whole developing trend, can be divided into four periods:the one from Hongwu to middle of Yongle ,the one from the middle of Yongle to the middle of Xuande, the one from Zhengtong to Chenghua and Hongzhi, the one from Zhengde and Jiajing to the end of the Ming Dynasy, among whih the second and fourth periods reached the peak no matter in the quantity of Bufu or in the rate of Bufu and thus were called the peak of Yongle and Xuande and late Ming peak. From the content of Bufu, the peak of Yongle and Xuande was mainly the default of kind tax and after Chenghua, the default of land tax in currency appeared and after Zhengde and Jiajing, the default of land tax was mainly in silver. On base of the above-mentioned feature, this dissertation focuses on the two peaks and studies respectively Bufu’s manifestation, reason and the government’s corresponding administrative methods and their enforcing result.The Bufu’s peak of Yongle and Xuande in the Jiangnan Area began in the period between the opening up of the water transportation of grain in the thirteenth reign of Yongle and the change of the Capital in the nineteenth reign of Yongle and persisted after the seventh year of Xuande. For example, in the District of Suzhou the quantity of Bufu reached 100 million Dan and the rate of Bufu reached more than 40 percent. Besides the huge and heavy official land tax born by the Jiangnan Area in the Ming Dynasy, there were three other reasons. First, the change of the Capital caused the political center and the economic center separated again, which made the efficient administration of the Jiangnan Area since Hongwu inefficient; Secod, the water transportation of the grain from the south to the north increased the tax cost in the society of the Jiangnan Area; Third, the previou kind tax collecting system, which were operated by the peasants, showed more and more drawbacks. Under the comprehensive actions of these reasons, the Bufu’s peak of Yongle and Xuande appeared .The administration of the early Ming can be divided in two parts. The first part was the clearing and relieving methods directed against the problem of Bufu itself, which was to decrease the tax burden in the folk society by subtracting the quantity of the tax for six times from Hongwu to Zhengtong and cutting down the average tax numer per unit of area ,to remove the social pressure and the threat to the country’s security coming from the huge quantities of Bufu and to reduce the tax costs in the folk society by reforming the water transportation of grain. The second part was to strengthen the administration and the government’s insertion, which was to remedy the inefficiency of the administration in the Jiangnan Area caused by the change of the Capital and the latent danger of Bufu brought by the liangzhang system in which the peasants were responsible for the collection and transportation of the grain tax.Seen as a whole, the results of the reforming measures concerned with the Bufu problem in the early Ming was good enough to make the Bufu peak of Yongle and Xuande fall down substantially to the end of Xuande and not appear until Zhengtong and the early Zhengde. Of course, seen from the realistic situation, the Bufu peak of Yongle and Xuande did not mean a real financial crisis to the Ming Dynasty, which was directly related with the fact that the conten of this Bufu was mainly in kind apart from the proper treatment of the Ming governors. It was the simple and steady features of the kind financial system in the early Ming that greatly relieved the damage caused by the huge quantities of Bufu to the country’s finances and regime, which formed a distinctive comparison with the Bufu peak in the late Ming under the currency financial system.The second Bufu peak in the Jiangnan Area in the Ming Dynasty began in the middle and latter period of Zhengde, continued going up to the middle of Jiajing and this increasing trend kept from Jiajing, Longqing and Wanli up to the end of Ming and even became more and more serious. Besides, this turn of Bufu had two more different features, one of which was Bufu had become a trait of the society in the Jiangnan Area and it was too difficult to control and the other of which was that the conten of Bufu changed from the kind default in the early Ming into the silver default. The Jinhua Silver, which was used to clear and relieve the Bufu problem, now became the new and main content of Bufu in the late Ming.For example, the default of Jinhua silver appeared almost every year since the middle and latter Jiajing, and it became more serious after Wanli, during which it was common to have tens of thousands and even millions of Jinhua silver delayed. Jinhau silver, called‘special provision to the emperor’and‘no way of exemption’, broke the rule again and again after Wanli. The Ming people attributed this phenomenon to the mixture of exemption, the resistence of the local big families and the erosion and the appropriation of the local authority. Besides these , some‘financial experts’or‘economic capable officials’also began to notice the relationship between the more and more serious problem of the lack of silver and the low price of grains and the default of silver tax paid instead of the kind land tax, which to a certain degree revealed the important reason of the tax default----the negative effects of the process of the kind land tax and corvèe’s changing into silver.Facing the Bufu peak of Yongle and Xuande, the controllers in the early Ming took a series of efficient solving measures to relieve the proble; However, after the reigns of Zhengde and Jiajing,facing the new-round Bufu peak, what the controllers did was to continue the previous measures, only developing it in the degrees of depth and width. For example, the main measures to solve the tax default problem were still to exempt the defaulted tax or to change the kind defaulted tax into silver tax. The difference was that, on one hand, the exempting conditions were much more strict and the pure exemption of the defaulted tax were taken placed of by the strengthening of changing the kind tax into silver tax, on the other hand, and that the frequency and quantity of the exemption were increased so as to eliminate the defaulted tax impossible to collect.In the collection of the defaulted tax, by setting up the Si-level and Dao-level grain-controlling officials, the controllers in the late Ming improved further the collecting and supervising system of the local grain tax of the Jiangnan Area constructed in Xuande. At the same time, the Ming government strengthened its insertion into supervising the local recollection of the defaulted tax. Furthermore, the central high officials such as Zhang Juzheng and Bi ziyan regarded the resolution of the seriously defaulted tax as the key to relieve the financial crisis of the late Ming and tried to give a cusion to the financial damages caused by the defaulted tax.In general, the result of the administration of the Jiangna Area’s Bufu problem was not ideal and its best part was that it only put off the problem a little. It can be said that the reform of the system structure aiming to solving the Bufu problem had reached its own capacity and the traditional solving methods became less and less efficient. The basic reasons firstly lied in the fact that the authoritarian system could not completely solve the problem of its own supervisor control and secondly lied in the lagging feature of the solving methods of Bufu in the currency financial system. The problem of Bufu persisted even after the end of the Ming Dynasty and became a hot financial and social patato to the Qing Dynasty.