Shuang Chen's first book is clearly based in the tradition of quantitative “big data” scholarship on the social and demographic history of Qing Manchuria of which James Lee and Cameron Campbell have been the most important practitioners. The source base for the book draws heavily on the same sorts of material that Campbell and Lee have used repeatedly, particularly the detailed household and land registers maintained by the Qing state in administering people registered in the Eight Banner system. Yet, though Chen's quantitative work certainly demonstrates the persistence of economic inequalities that originated with social categories created by the Qing state, some of the most compelling portions of State-Sponsored Inequality are those which depart from the big data approach to show how community and social identity developed in a unique Northeastern locale.
The agricultural settlement area of Shuangcheng 雙城, now a southwestern district of Harbin in Heilongjiang, but under the command of the Jilin general during the Qing, was founded during the Jiaqing period to relieve pressure on the ever-expanding banner population of Beijing. Though the purpose of creating Shuangcheng was to use it as a home for metropolitan banner people, banner authorities in Manchuria also recruited rural banner migrants from elsewhere in the region to serve as a first wave of settlers who would clear the land to be granted to the migrants from Beijing in exchange for receiving their own allotments. The legal, social, and economic inequalities that divided rural banner people and metropolitan banner people in Shuangcheng over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the focus of Chen's book. She argues that these two categories, though created by the Qing state, transformed from “registration categories into socially constructed groups” (19). Chen's argument for the occurrence of this transformation is convincing, and her story of how it came about is fascinating.
Chapters 2 and 3 argue that as part of the process of settling Shuangcheng, the Qing state swept away the pre-existing social structures, including categories like ethnicity, kinship, and banner affiliation, of the migrants who moved there. Instead, residents were categorized on the basis of three criteria: whether they were banner people, whether they had moved to Shuangcheng under official auspices, and, for those who were both banner people and official migrants, whether they had come from the capital or from elsewhere in Manchuria. As officials attempted to deal with both the official migrant population and others, including banner people and civilians, who moved to Shuangcheng of their own accord, they created a system of “haves,” the official banner migrants, who were entitled to land provided to them by the state, and “have-nots,” unofficial migrants lacking land entitlements. Among the “haves” were metropolitan banner people from Beijing and Rehe who the Qing state privileged over rural banner people from elsewhere in Manchuria, endowing them with larger land entitlements than it offered the rural banner people who cleared that land for them. At times, Chen suggests that the Qing state's goal for Shuangcheng was in part to “build a new social hierarchy on the site” (53). But though she provides a complete and convincing account of how state-imposed social hierarchies worked in Shuangcheng, she gives no real explanation for why the state emphasized certain categories and de-emphasized others. One might suspect, though Chen never says so herself, that privileges for metropolitan banner people were simply an incentive to get them to move away from the capital. But, if so, why did the Qing authorities work so hard to maintain the place of metropolitan bannermen at the top of Shuangcheng society even after it had given up on recruiting new migrants? Chen's argument would likely benefit from considering the extent to which the hierarchies that characterized Shuangcheng were not purely innovative, but rather built on already existing institutional hierarchies, both within the banner system and between banner people and commoners. Preferences for metropolitan banner people over banner people from provincial garrisons, for instance, were long established by the time of the Shuangcheng settlement. Moreover, the more rural nature and lower reliance on military employment of banner people in Manchuria suggest that they may have fallen even lower in the banner hierarchy than did their colleagues from provincial garrisons in China proper. Chen's case for the continuing impact of the social categories she describes in later decades is welcome, but additional consideration for continuities backward in time as well would strengthen her narrative.
Beginning in Chapter 4, migrants to Shuangcheng acquire real agency in Chen's story, with the appearance of tensions between metropolitan and rural bannermen as well as between banner migrants and the officials responsible for governing them. By examining a series of impeachment and corruption cases, Chen shows that local people drew on state authority as a tool in conflicts over control of land, rent-payments, and state extraction. Broadly speaking, in the early years of Shuangcheng's history, rural banner people gained control over local administration, while metropolitan banner people made appeals to the central state, which intended to establish them at the top of the Shuangcheng hierarchy. In the end, around 1850, in order to re-establish the settlement's prescribed social order, provincial and central government officials collaborated to reform local administration to take it out of the hands of the rural banner population. Chen argues that the imperial state was able to reestablish control, in part because all parties to conflicts relied on its authority to get what they wanted. But, she suggests, the categories that the Qing state used to manage the people of Shuangcheng had begun to take on “a life of their own” as “social organizations” (125).
In Chapter 5, one of the strongest chapters in the book, Chen shifts from focusing on state policy toward looking at the lives of Shuangcheng's residents. In it, Chen explores how migrants to Shuangcheng came to form functioning communities as well as how they worked within the strictures imposed by political authorities to achieve their goals. Chen shows that villages, initially laid out by Qing bureaucrats, acquired communal characteristics like village temples and communal lands, which became shared spaces that marked “the emergence of the notion of common welfare among villagers” (140). Because land sales were legally forbidden in Shuangcheng—land was a grant from the state designed to support the household that received it—residents were forced to find other ways to transfer land and secure property rights. Chen demonstrates that the people of Shuangcheng were able to use a state-approved process of “returning land” and “selecting a replacement” to engage in de facto land sales, using the role that villagers played in selecting replacements to their advantage. There are clear parallels between the process that Chen describes here and much of what appears in Michael Szonyi's recent book on Fujian military households in the Ming, The Art of Being Governed. In both cases we see households whose terms of landownership were defined by their status within the ruling dynasty's military system successfully working within legal structures to engineer outcomes desired by the actors, but in conflict with the underlying premises of the legal system.
Chapter 6 revolves around the compelling story of a single banner lineage, that of a metropolitan bannerman named Hualiantai. His family history offers a clear sense of how the Qing state's rules regarding landholding and the inheritance of land in Shuangcheng functioned in practice, with family fortunes rising and falling with the number of living men who were able to form legal households and thus make claims on state-owned land. On this basis, Chen suggests that fertility was linked to the community's land system, with the production of sons taking on extra significance under a regime that frequently awarded free land to metropolitan bannermen who formed their own households, but limited each household to a single plot of state-assigned land. Greater fertility thus brought lineages more land and more wealth, rather than impoverishing them through repeated divisions of family land, and those families that could manage to produce the most sons were destined for success.
The most data-heavy chapter of the book is Chapter 7, which provides corroborating evidence for some of the claims of the rest of the book, establishing in particular the persistence of inequality among different categories of the population, as well as the role of high fertility in permitting wealth accumulation. Some of the material in the chapter is perhaps gratuitous; the extremely low level of inequality in ownership of state-assigned land within particular official categories, for instance, was a necessary consequence of laws surrounding the ownership of that land. The official land records on which Chen relies were not likely to show many households owning two state-assigned plots when doing so was legally impermissible. Some charts are also presented confusingly; in a graph (Figure 7.2) purporting to show “the composition of each population category, by landholding status,” the percentage of households in the bottom 60% of landholders overall does not exceed 43.4% for any individual category.
In the final chapter, Chen makes one of her most important contributions, by showing that the categories of metropolitan and rural bannerman, created by the Qing state, continued to have real social and political significance even in the Republican period, after they ceased to have any official standing. Because metropolitan bannermen owned large amounts of land that were actually farmed by rural bannermen, the latter engaged in repeated movements of rent-resistance directed against the former. In the course of their political activism, rural bannermen expressed an understanding of themselves as possessing a particular identity, and they urged the new Jilin provincial assembly to eliminate the discrepancy in status that persisted between them and the metropolitan bannermen, just as it was supposedly doing for the difference between Manchus and Han.
Chen links her narrative to a few larger themes. The book is most successful in its exploration of the question of how state-imposed legal and institutional regimes affect the long-term development of community, identity, and economic structure. She has ably demonstrated how a set of political choices made by one regime can have lasting impact on a particular place and group of people. Her choice in the book's epilogue to draw comparisons between Qing Shuangcheng and the contemporary hukou 户口 system is convincing, and she does not take the parallel farther than it can hold up. Somewhat less satisfying are her occasional suggestions that Shuangcheng serves as a case study for understanding local community in China writ-large, or even community on the Chinese frontier alone. The vastly expanded role of the state in the lives of banner communities in general, and Shuangcheng specifically, make it difficult to see Shuangcheng as anything like a “normal” Chinese village. In all, though, this book is a valuable addition to the literature on Chinese historical demography, the banner system, and community development.
