Characteristics of Natural Economy in Feudal China

The natural economy was based on self-sufficiency, with the emergence of capitalism in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. Throughout the feudal society China has been practicing the policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, economically it was mainly a self-sufficient small peasant economy, practicing natural economy, during this period there was the sprout of capitalism, but from the middle and late Ming Dynasty when it began to appear in the south of the country to the end of the feudal society, capitalism never developed into a strictly independent economic system, especially after the Western invasion of 1840, the road of China's independent development of capitalism was cut off, showing a deformed state of development, as follows. After the Western invasion in 1840, the path of independent development of capitalism in China was truncated and became a deformed state of development as follows: \x0d The development of China's feudal economic form can be roughly divided into two stages. The first stage is the stage of lordship economy, from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the end of the Spring and Autumn Period; the second stage is the stage of landlord economy, from the Warring States Period to the Qing Dynasty. The stage of landlord economy can be divided into two periods with the mid-Tang Dynasty as the boundary, the first period is dominated by noble landlord economy with more remnants of serfdom, and the second period is the more typical mature form of landlord economy. The difference between China and the feudal states in Europe and other places is mainly referred to this second stage, i.e., the main features of the Chinese landlord economy compared with the medieval lordship economy in Europe are the three aspects of land purchase and sale, peasant operation and rent in kind. Compared with the mature landlord economy which is more typical of China, the feudal countries in general either did not go through this stage of development (e.g. Germany and Russia) or this stage arose at the same time as the capitalist relationship (or may be slightly sequential) in the period of the collapse of the lordship economy, and therefore did not have a full development, that is, it was gradually rejected and replaced by the capitalist mode of production (Britain and France can be regarded as the typical of this kind of countries), and experienced the second stage of development (i.e. the landlord economy of China). The longest period was only about 300 years. Only in China this stage lasted for more than 2,000 years, which was fully developed without being rejected by the new mode of production and achieved a typical independent form. We will focus on analyzing the basic features of the socio-economic structure of this stage. \x0dUnder the feudal form of economy, agriculture was the main productive sector of the society, so the land system was, of course, the basic element of the socio-economic structure. The land system in the second stage of Chinese feudal society, i.e., under the landlord economy, was more complex, and it had the following characteristics. \x0d(a) Private land ownership and state ownership of land coexisted, with private land ownership dominating; landlord land ownership and peasant small plot land ownership coexisted, with landlord land ownership dominating. There is also a big difference between the early and late stages of this phase, specifically, the situation in the early stage is that the noble landowner ownership, the common landowner ownership, the state landownership, peasant ownership coexisted, the noble landowner ownership occupies a relative superiority, as a complementary form of landowner ownership of the state ownership and peasant ownership is also still on a certain scale; while in the late stage is the landowner ownership, the state ownership, peasant ownership, but the landowner landownership, state ownership, peasant ownership coexisted, but the landowner landownership, state ownership, peasant ownership and peasant ownership coexisted, but the landowner landownership, state ownership, peasant ownership coexisted. In the later period, landlord ownership, state ownership, and peasant ownership coexisted, but the relative reduction of state-owned land, a large number of peasants were converted into tenant farmers, and the landlord ownership system had an absolute advantage. \x0d(ii) Because of the diversity of land systems, the conditions for the decentralization and mobility of land rights were in place, and land could be bought and sold freely within a considerable range[4]. On the other hand, China's feudal land ownership system lacked a strict hierarchical structure [5], the economic status and economic identity of all classes and strata of society could be variable [6], and land was used as the main symbol of social wealth and class identity, which gave rise to the preference of industrialists and businessmen, usurers and even bureaucratic aristocrats to invest in land. The above two points make the combination of land rent, profit and interest, forming a trinity of economic ties between landlords, merchants and usurers, intensifying land annexation, and promoting the continuous bankruptcy of the small peasant economy and the development of large land ownership. \x0d(3) The state and landlords generally do not operate agriculture directly, but rent land to tenant farmers for decentralized operation. This situation was particularly evident in the middle and late stages of China's landlord economy. Chinese sharecroppers had relative freedom compared with serfs under the lordship system (of course, they still retained personal dependence on the state and landlords to varying degrees, and the more in the early period, the more serious this dependence was), but sharecroppers had an unstable bond with the land, lacked economic security, and were in the midst of competition, which, on the one hand, raised the productivity of social labor, but on the other hand, also intensified the brutality of the landlords' exploitation. The landlord class and its state domination were strengthened by the rent and taxization of land surplus production, which worsened the economic status of small farmers, and the decentralized small-scale agriculture was basically a structure of simple reproduction. However, under such an economic environment, some sharecroppers had the possibility of rising to become homesteaders,[7] and even individual sharecroppers would enter the ranks of small and medium-sized landowners through long-term efforts, which was quite attractive to the majority of sharecroppers. \x0dThe inevitable result of the diversity of the land system and the decentralization of land management, as well as the universality of land mobility is that China's feudal landlord ownership system could not be formed under the lord's economic system of the kind of complete economic system of the manor, a family of individual production of small peasants not only to produce their own agricultural products, but also to produce a part of the daily needs of the industrial goods, this self-sufficient small-scale agriculture and cottage industry combination of production structure became China's feudal economy. This kind of self-sufficient small agriculture and cottage industry combined with the production structure became the cellular organization of the Chinese feudal economy and the special expression of the natural economy in the second stage of the Chinese feudal society. On the other hand, the combination of agriculture and industry in the Chinese small peasant economy was basically characterized by the "combination of farming and weaving" (or "male farming and female weaving" or "sunny farming and rainy weaving"), and the scope of self-sufficiency was mainly limited to food and clothing, and a considerable part of the means of production (such as the food and clothing) was used for the production of food and clothing. A considerable part of the supply of means of production (such as tools of production, etc.) and means of living (such as salt, building materials, etc.) to rely on the exchange and the market, while the feudal landlords possessed the surplus labor is mainly grain rent, very few industrial and agricultural products, their consumption is more dependent on the market, if you take into account the raw materials for textiles, and regional and seasonal production of spatial and temporal limitations, then the incomplete nature of the economy is even more obvious. The incompleteness of this natural economy is even more obvious. Therefore, as a necessary supplement to the natural economy of feudal landlord system, small commodity production in urban and rural areas not only existed but also highly developed in the second stage of Chinese feudal society. At the same time, commerce, especially the transit trade, based on the scattered and small but very large base of small farmers' economy and small commodity production, also prospered and developed, constituting a unique phenomenon in the second stage of Chinese feudal society after the natural economy lost its pure form. Of course, this kind of commodity economy, which was accompanied by the landlord class, was developed in the shell of natural economy, and its independence was very limited, and it always maintained the status of dependence and subordination to the natural economy. However, the development of the commodity economy was the result of the action of the productive forces of society, the product of the expansion of the social division of labor and the expansion of exchange. The landlord economic system, which represented a higher labor productivity than the lord economic system, mutated the typical natural economic form and needed the development of small commodity production and commerce as its complement. The natural economy and commodity economy were dependent on each other, and the two complemented each other, enlarging the economic base of the second stage of the Chinese feudal society. The centralized state of Chinese feudal society was established and developed on such a basis.