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5.6: The Rise of the Clans

  • Page ID
    135225
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    The Han government had understood from the beginning the danger of wealth. In 64 BC, officials who wanted more grain in government storehouses proposed that some criminals be permitted to commute physical punishment to a fine in grain. But other officials objected: The rich would be able to pay and the poor would not, so punishment for the same crime would be unequal, violating a fundamental Legalist principle. If poor people ate less themselves, scrimping to rescue a relative from a beating, in effect more people would be punished. The relationship of mutual support between the emperor and the people would be damaged.18 Over the course of Former Han the court constantly reconfigured policies on taxation, mercantile activity, state production and so on, trying to find the right balance.

    Finding the right balance was hard, probably impossible, and in the end, the smallholding class was destroyed. Free trade, including the long-distance trade in luxuries, meant that some smart or lucky merchants and farmers made vast profits, which some used to distort the legal process and buy influence. It was harder to tax merchants’ property (land cannot be hidden, but bales of silk can), and so Han efforts to mitigate the great wealth of a few merchant families failed. Within each county, some families outcompeted others in farming, in free trade, and in the competition to hold government office. A small initial advantage could become much larger over time.

    The fundamental vulnerability of farmers everywhere is that they live on a yearly cycle: the harvest comes in fall, and is eaten up over the winter. In spring, grain is needed for planting, and if it has been a long winter, farmers may need to borrow seed grain. In Han times, if the state did not provide seed, poor farmers borrowed it at exorbitant rates of interest from wealthier neighbors. That could lead to a spiraling cycle of debt. A family that was too deep in debt, or whose crucial worker had suffered an injury or died, would be unable to meet its tax obligations or pay its creditors, and might have to sell its land to a wealthier neighbor. Family members – their land gone – became share-cropping tenants, servants, house-slaves, or outlaws. The free market meant opportunity and success for some and disaster for many.

    In each county, the families who bought up their neighbors’ land translated that wealth into local power. They hired thugs. They made loans to neighbors in trouble and took their land when they couldn’t pay them back. Demanding other kinds of service from neighbors they undermined equality, turned them into servile dependents. Some these clans could muster a thousand kinsmen and retainers for a fight, even two or three thousand. How could small families maintain their independence? Next, power over neighbors translated into influence over local government. In order to keep taxes low, the Han tried to avoid paying too many officials. That meant that county magistrates and their staffs had to work with people in the locality to collect taxes, maintain roads and granaries, raise troops, etc. Naturally, they worked with those who had influence locally to get things done, and naturally those people asked for favors in return – including illegal tax breaks. If a county’s wealthy families did not pay their taxes, the magistrate had no choice but to impose the tax burden on their poorer, weaker neighbors. The wealth gap increased again.

    Finally, local political power could translate into national political power. The normal route into office in Han times was a meritocratic one. Magistrates had to recommend a certain number of men as officials. A magistrate would of course recommend the men he had been working with: members of the big clans. That put more clan sons in office, earning more salaries, but more importantly it gave them power over policy at the central level. Any reformer hoping to mitigate the wealth and influence of the big clans now faced members of those clans at court. The clans also married daughters into the imperial family, so they came to include wives and mothers, fathers-in-law and grandfathers of emperors.

    A small initial advantage could translate into a big difference in wealth and power in the local area over time. An estate of a thousand mou or more, worked by tenants, would produce not only pigs, chickens, and sheep; millet, wheat and barley; but also pickles, vinegar, and sauces, and ale. It might have its own mill to grind wheat, and family members, servants, and slaves also made silk and hemp cloth and clothing, candles, and other items to be used or sold for cash to buy speciality goods. Compared with feudal domains, or the estates of lesser Zhou nobility, or the estates of the great European nobility later, the Han clans’ holdings were not very large. Any one family could not raise an army, make allies, and threaten the throne. But a clan or group of intermarrying clans could dominate a local area, and the clans working together as a class (class is based on ownership of the means of production), holding office in the imperial state, could block policies that threatened their wealth. So it proved with the unlucky nephew whose father missed the handouts of the Empress Dowager Wang.


    This page titled 5.6: The Rise of the Clans is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sarah Schneewind (eScholarship) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.