China

Population

Ming China’s northward orientation in foreign relations was accompanied by a flow of Chinese migrants from the crowded south back into the vast North China Plain and by a concomitant shift in emphasis from an urban and commercial way of life back to a rural and agrarian pattern. Thus, demographic and economic trends that had characterized China for centuries—the southward movement of population and the urbanization and commercialization of life—were arrested or even reversed.

The North China Plain had been neglected since early Song times, and its rehabilitation became a high-priority project of the early Ming emperors. The Ming founder’s ancestral home was in northern China, and his son, the Yongle emperor, won the throne from a personal power base in the newly recovered north at Beijing. Securing the northern frontier was the major political goal of both these emperors, and both had reasons for being somewhat suspicious of southerners and hostile toward them. In consequence, both emperors regularly moved well-to-do city dwellers of the Yangtze delta region to northern towns for their cultural adornment, resettled peasants from the overpopulated southeast into the vacant lands of the north for their agrarian redevelopment, and instituted water-control projects to restore the productivity of the Huang and Huai river basins. (Notable among these is the rehabilitation and extension of the Grand Canal, which reopened in 1415.) Colonists were normally provided with seeds, tools, and animals and were exempted from taxes for three years. The numerous army garrisons that were stationed in the north for defense of the frontier and of the post-1420 capital at Beijing were also given vacant lands to develop and were encouraged to become self-supporting. Such government measures were supplemented, following political reunification, by popular migration into the relatively frontierlike and open north. Rehabilitation of northern China was no doubt also facilitated by the new availability of sorghum for dry farming. All these elements produced a substantial revival of the north. In Yuan times, censuses credited the northern provinces with only one-tenth of the total Chinese population, but by the late 16th century they claimed some two-fifths of the registered total. Suspension of government incentives late in the 15th century caused the northwest to enter into agrarian decline, and Shaanxi eventually became impoverished and bandit-infested. Support of the frontier defenses became an increasing burden on the central government.

During the migrations back to northern China, the registered populations of the largest urban centres of the southeast declined. For example, between 1393 and 1578, Nanjing declined from 1,193,000 to 790,000, Zhejiang province from 10,487,000 to 5,153,000, and Jiangxi province from 8,982,000 to 5,859,000. (It should be mentioned, however, that the actual population in cities typically was greater than what was registered.) Despite this leveling trend in the regional distribution of population, southern China—especially the southeast—remained the most populous, the wealthiest, and the most cultured area of China in Ming times. Great southeastern cities such as Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou remained the major centres of trade and manufacturing, entertainment, and scholarship and the arts. Beijing was their only rival in the north—solely because of its being the centre of political power.

Although official census figures suggest that China’s overall population remained remarkably stable in Ming times at a total of about 60 million, modern scholars have estimated that there was in fact substantial growth, probably to a total well in excess of 100 million and perhaps almost as high as 150 million in the early 17th century. Domestic peace and political stability in the 15th century clearly set the stage for great general prosperity in the 16th century. This can be accounted for in part as the cumulative result of the continuing spread of early ripening rice and of cotton production—new elements that had been introduced into the Chinese economy in Song and Yuan times. The introduction in the 16th century of food crops originating in America—peanuts (groundnuts), corn (maize), and sweet potatoes—created an even stronger agrarian basis for rapidly escalating population growth in the Qing period.