The Management Form Of The Official And Private Handicraft Industry In The Warring States Period

The Warring States Period is "a major revolution time" in ancient history of China, and such revolution has been represented in politics, economy, cultures and many other aspects. On the economic aspect, people focused the discussions on agriculture and businesses, without paying enough attention to handicrafts industry, which resulted in non-sufficient understanding of the business conditions of official and private handicrafts industry in the Warring States Period.The purpose of this paper is to make a comparatively comprehensive discussion on the managing modality of official and private handicrafts industry in the Warring States Period through combing historical records with various ancient writing documents in the Warring States Period.In this paper, we discussed the following four major issues:first, the gongshangshiguan(????)system and its evolution in the Western Zhou Dynasty and the Spring and Autumn period; second, the managing modality of handicrafts industry in the Warring States Period; third, the managing modality of civil private handicrafts industry; fourth, the control and management on civil private handicrafts by the state.Through investigation and examination we can see that the official and private handicrafts industry in the Warring States Period wasn't born out of the gongshangshiguan(????)system in the Spring and Autumn Period. From literatures, ancient writing documents and archaeological discoveries, we can see that the official handicrafts industry in the Warring States Period is relatively prosperous which has many handicrafts organs controlling a large number of handicraftsmen for production. In official handicrafts industry production, the slavery production relations played a leading role.The proliferation of private handicraftsmen and the rise of private handicraft industry is a great change in the handicraft industrial economy in the Warring States Period. In accordance with the scale of private handicraft businesses and whether the property owners participate in the labor or not, it has been divided into two categories:family or Family-based small-scale private handicraft production with owners participating in the labor; large-scale private handicraft production through servitude large number of labors. These two kinds of handicraftsman have different managing modality, and also make a great difference in living conditions.State control of private handicraftsman mainly includes five aspects:practitioner's registration, production control, taxation collection, social status, apprentices and labors numbers. All of these show that the state control over the private handicraftsman is very strict in the Warring States Period, which is in consistent with valuing agriculture, establishing and safeguarding agriculture-based social order.