Chapter 44 The decline in the rate of urbanization

Chinese cities have never belonged to the people.Zhang Guangzhi's research proves that from "China's oldest city" to "modern Chinese city", they are all political centers and necessary tools to maintain power. This feature has never been changed.However, the function of the city in the economy changed after the Ming Dynasty.In the more than 1,500 years after the pre-Qin period, China's economic operation center was placed in several metropolises, and the population and business activities were also quite concentrated. In the Tang Dynasty, there were laws and regulations restricting commercial markets below the county level. develop.However, after the Ming Dynasty, millions of household textile machines in rural areas were accompanied by China's great degeneration from urbanization to urbanization.

With the prosperity of the household textile industry, large-scale trading markets naturally appeared around these farmers.The biggest difference between these new types of towns and traditional towns is that their rising function is not to serve farmers’ consumption, but to serve agricultural production, and the participants in trade are not small farmers who “barter” but big merchants And huge amounts of money, their benefits come from large-scale operations and long-distance trafficking.Some people counted the changes in the number of cities and towns in the six prefectures of Suzhou, Songjiang, Changzhou, Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and Huzhou in the Jiangnan area and found that in the Song Dynasty, there were 71 cities and towns, and in the Ming Dynasty, it increased to 316.Although the number of county-level institutions in China has not changed much since the Tang Dynasty, generally ranging from 2,000 to 2,300, the number of towns has increased exponentially. By the middle of the Qing Dynasty, there were about 30,000 towns across the country. They replaced the previous Two thousand central counties have become the driving force of China's economy.

We might as well attribute this change to the "centrifugal phenomenon" of China's urbanization—in other countries, the proportion of urban population is getting higher and higher, and it is also becoming more concentrated, small cities are getting bigger, and big cities are getting bigger; but in other countries, In China, after the Song Dynasty, the concentration of the urban population gradually weakened, and the expansion of large and medium-sized cities and counties stopped. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the population and urban area of ​​several metropolises were much smaller than those in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and the population moved closer to the countryside. Jiangnan The region forms numerous towns.

During the more than 500 years from the early Ming Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty, China's urbanization process stagnated, and the absolute number of the total urban population hardly increased, but the total population of the country continued to increase—from 70 million in the early Ming Dynasty to 16 million in the 16th century. From 100 million to 130 million, it was nearly 300 million during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. The proportion of urban population gradually decreased, and fell to the bottom in the middle of the 19th century.Compared with the West, the dramatic contrast is even more obvious: China's urbanization rate peaked in the Southern Song Dynasty in the 13th century, and then turned downwards, while the West began to increase its urbanization rate in the 13th century.In 1800, 70% of the world's large cities were located in Asia, and Beijing was the largest in scale for a long time. However, by 1900, only one world-class large city was located in Asia, and the rest were located in Europe and America. It is the result of the "Industrial Revolution".

This shift of population and economic center of gravity to the countryside is the most true indication of the flattening and fragmentation of Chinese society.It is not only the objective result of population growth and industrial economic development, but also the inevitable guidance of the centralization system. Under the general trend of urban centrifugalization, a social scene of "separation of oil and water" has emerged: political power is concentrated in the city and fully controlled by the government and the powerful. Manufacturing Center.The economic power is concentrated in tens of thousands of towns, which are controlled by folk forces, and a large number of handicrafts are scattered in a larger number of villages, which makes it impossible for the agglomeration effect of capital, talents and resources to be exerted.

The socio-economic structure of men farming and women weaving, flat and scattered town development, coupled with a household registration management system aimed at opposing population movements, an "ultra-stable structure" that meets the requirements of centralization and maintains low efficiency. It was formed.In this sense, "men farming and women weaving" is indeed a Chinese-style "curse of aestheticism".