The continuous flow of Likin taxes arrives like the endless Yangtze River—waging economic warfare across its basin resembles flood control, where success lies in the delicate balance between diversion and blockage. Just as hydraulic strategy hinges on channeling and damming, the management of finances and military forces also relies on this duality to generate and safeguard wealth. In military command, Zeng Guofan was slightly inferior to Shi Dakai. Yet in fiscal administration, he far surpassed him, ingeniously creating revenue streams through Likin—much like Du Fu’s poetic line, “The endless Yangtze River rolls in ceaselessly.” Likin, first introduced in 1853 by Lei Yixian, then Vice Minister of Justice, originated at Xiannümiao in Yangzhou to combat the Taiping Rebellion, where checkpoints levied a “one-percent tax” on rice traders. This gave birth to a wartime taxation system, which Zeng Guofan expanded across Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and Anhui—regions controlled by the Hunan Army—establishing a symbiotic “Likin-Hunan Army” framework. The Hunan Army and Likin represented a revolution in modern Chinese military-financial history. This extra-systemic force, through innovative fiscal restructuring, upended the Qing central government’s financial apparatus, spawning a military-Likin complex where “taxes funded troops, and troops protected tax collection.”
As a commodity tax, Likin was categorized by its collecting authority into two types: official Likin and Hunan Army Likin, with the latter comprising the bulk. Official Likin, levied by local governments, had a nominal rate of 1% but an actual rate of 5%–10%. Its tax base included staples like rice and cloth, with revenue directed toward local finances. In contrast, Hunan Army Likin bypassed official channels, controlled directly by the army’s supply depots, with rates soaring to 20%—as seen with Jiangxi tea. The tax base expanded to daily necessities, creating an extensive network dedicated solely to funding the Hunan Army’s payroll and supplies, accounting for over 70% of revenue and pioneering a new “commerce-fed military” model. Yet its original intent, as Zeng Guofan memorialized, was to “extract trifles from merchants to rescue the nation from crisis.” Thus, Emperor Xianfeng authorized Zeng to “establish Likin checkpoints to support the army.” Accordingly, Zeng appointed Hunanese gentry to manage taxation—operating Likin stations. These stations funneled 300,000 taels of silver monthly to the Hunan Army, enabling Zeng to expand his forces to 120,000 men and achieve fiscal independence from the Qing court.
The Hunan Army’s Likin administration established a “three-tier checkpoint network.” The first tier, at production areas, levied a 1% “origin Likin”; the second, along transit routes, imposed a 2% “transport Likin”; and the third, at sales destinations, collected a 1.5% “destination Likin.” This formed a military-tax symbiosis, integrating tax collection with military control—manifested spatially as checkpoints doubling as barracks,移动 with the army. In 1858, after capturing Jiujiang, 12 riverside checkpoints were set up; in 1861, upon taking Anqing, 23 new stations were added in southern Anhui. Armed protection accompanied each station, garrisoned by 30–100 soldiers who both collected taxes and defended against Taiping raids—exemplified by the Hunan Eastern Expedition Bureau, which deployed 2,000 troops to guard checkpoints. Military-commercial interests were further entwined through merchant contracting, where prominent merchants承包 regional Likin collection rights, paying a fixed sum to the Hunan Army and keeping the surplus, creating a “military-merchant profit-sharing” structure. Generals were permitted commercial involvement, investing in salt transport for annual profits reaching hundreds of thousands of taels.
Likin’s impact on merchant guilds fostered a畸形共生 relationship, with the Jiangyou Merchants affected most severely. Guilds faced varying exploitation rates based on geography: Huizhou Merchants at 23%, Jiangyou Merchants at 35%, and Shanxi Merchants at 18%. Consequently, survival strategies diverged locally—Huizhou Merchants shifted to salt trading due to lighter Huai River salt taxes, while Jiangyou Merchants leveraged foreign firms’ “Likin-exemption flags” to evade taxes, accelerating their compradorization. This triggered a重构 of Jiangnan’s economic geography, distorting trade routes: not only did the Gan River trade corridor atrophy, but the Yangtze River became studded with checkpoints, making Shanghai’s concessions a tax haven. Likin, a fiscal tool intended to prolong the dynasty, instead hastened the disintegration of traditional economic structures and semi-colonialization by warping commercial ecosystems.
Statistical disparities in exploitation rates sparked chain reactions. Asymmetric Likin burdens forced guilds into畸形求生 adaptations, ultimately重构 economic geography. These variations depended on geopolitics and commercial structures. Shanxi Merchants, backed by political power, focused on draft banking and northern border trade. Their close ties to the Qing court, including quasi-state treasury functions, afforded rent-seeking advantages; being distant from Likin’s epicenter, they suffered less. Huizhou Merchants, historically “scholarly merchants,” maintained strong bureaucratic connections. Confronting Likin, they used political capital to pivot toward protected salt monopolies, where Huai River salt taxes were relatively fixed and controllable—a “legal” exploitation under特许经营, preferable to arbitrary transit tolls. Jiangyou Merchants, however, faced a “silent majority” dilemma. Their core artery—the Gan River-Dayuling route traversing Jiangxi—was a golden waterway linking the Yangtze and Pearl Rivers, North China and Lingnan, making it a Likin hotspot. Lacking high-level patronage like Shanxi or Huizhou peers, they became ideal Likin targets; a 35% rate devoured most profits, pushing them toward desperation.
In extremis, guilds’ survival instincts triggered unforeseen macro-consequences—“economic geography reconstruction”—reshaping Jiangnan’s economic landscape. Jiangyou Merchants lacked Shanxi’s geographic luck (being in peaceful Shanxi而非 war-torn Jiangxi) or business model (relying on credit-based banking而非 tangible goods, making checkpoints irrelevant). Unlike Huizhou Merchants, they couldn’t retreat to “light-tax salt” monopolies. Thus,他们向死而生, adopting the most radical approach: heading to Shanghai under “Likin-exemption flags.” Surprisingly, the earliest compradorized guild wasn’t coastal Jiangsu-Zhejiang or Fujian-Guangdong, but Jiangyou Merchants—Jiangxi traders connecting the Yangtze and Pearl River basins via the Gan River. This insight颠覆 traditional understanding of modern Chinese business history and comprador classes, highlighting an overlooked paradox: inland-driven modernization.
Flying exemption flags—going to Shanghai—epitomized Jiangyou Merchants’ “three-dimensional”绝境. A geographic “curse”: their golden waterway became a tax-ambush zone in turmoil, with no escape. A fragile business model: Shanxi Merchants’ core assets (drafts and notes) were highly liquid, concealable, and power-dependent, easily bypassing physical checkpoints, while Jiangyou Merchants dealt in bulk goods like Jingdezhen porcelain, tea, timber, and grass cloth—conspicuous, bulky “moving targets” ideal for Likin extortion. A broken path dependency: Huizhou Merchants could retreat to salt, leveraging official特许, whereas Jiangyou Merchants’ core commodities lacked state monopolies, being fully marketized and helpless against military-financial predation. Yet fate offered a “glimmer of hope”—Shanghai—directing the desperate toward a “post-crisis recovery”: go to Shanghai, fly “Likin-exemption flags.” When all exits closed, turning to foreign firms became the only light. Exemption flags were lifelines; the 2.5% transit tax (zilkou shui) provided a loophole to escape 35%+ Likin. Shanghai was the sole ark—concession extraterritoriality created a “lawless zone” beyond Qing reach, concentrating tax evasion, safety, and new opportunities.
Who were the “earliest compradorized” guild? Conventional narratives point to Guangzhou, Shanghai, or Ningbo—early treaty ports. Yet systematic compradorization emerged most profoundly among inland guilds crushed by internal institutional oppression. This indicates that modern China’s economic restructuring derived not merely from external maritime冲击, but also from internal institutional驱离—the Qing state, via Likin, pushed its economic pillars (inland guilds) toward external forces (foreign firms). Jiangyou Merchants’ radical转型 was a tragic “institutional exodus.” Compradorization had another face: not just “profit-seeking” agency but “harm-avoidance” coercion. It wasn’t solely coastal “sugar-coated bullets” but inland “lifelines.” Economic geography重构 was brutal: shifting from the Gan River to the Huangpu River meant not just trade route relocation but economic hegemony transfer—from inland gentry-merchant economies to coastal colonial-commercial hybrids. Jiangxi’s decline and Shanghai’s rise were two sides of the same coin.
The Jiangyou Merchants’ saga is an epic of merchant survival amid “state failure”—unlikely modernization pioneers driven into vanguard roles by the old regime. Their compradorization and route shift had dual effects: for merchants, independence yielded to foreign agency, accelerating compradorization; for economic geography, goods bypassed the Gan River corridor, converging directly on treaty ports to access exemption flags. This caused “Gan River trade atrophy.” Shanghai became a “tax haven”—concession privileges made it the ultimate “Likin-free” enclave. Even domestic goods flowed there, rebranded as foreign, for redistribution inland, catapulting Shanghai from a普通港口 to an international trade-finance hub. Its prosperity rested significantly on Likin’s drainage of the hinterland. The Qing state viewed the Yangtze as Likin’s lifeline, peppering it with checkpoints that “clogged” the economic artery, illustrating late Qing collapse micro-dynamics: Likin (internal cause) → asymmetric exploitation (phenomenon) → guild strategy alienation (response) → traditional route atrophy + treaty port畸形繁荣 (result) → deepened semi-colonialization (impact).
The Jiangyou guild’s tragedy wasn’t just regional decline but a microcosm of China’s economic veins being twisted and dismembered. Economic geography isn’t merely mountains and rivers but institutions, power, and capital co-writing territory. Jiangxi’s Likin density led the nation—checkpoints every five li, stations every ten li—shattering traditional routes. The Gan River-Dayuling corridor, a north-south trade backbone, became a Likin disaster zone, hosting over 80 checkpoints (nearly 10% nationally). At its peak, China had 3,000+ stations; during 1860–1864, Jiangxi’s Likin alone contributed 38.5 million taels to the Hunan Army—half its wartime funds. Excessive taxation erased Jiangxi’s price advantages: Yanshan paper cost 15% more than Zhejiang equivalents due to taxes. Meanwhile, Huizhou and Shanxi Merchants, with lower burdens, encroached on Jiangyou markets. By the late Qing, Jiangyou Merchants collapsed utterly: Jingdezhen porcelain exports fell below one-third of previous levels; Hekou paper workshops saw >70% closures; Zhangshu medicinal markets were carved up by Shaanxi traders. Thus, a guild that “dominated Chinese industry-commerce for 900 years” declined.
Zeng Guofan’s “Confucian façade, Legalist core” underpinned Jiangxi’s Likin system—transforming temporary taxes into systemic fiscal tools. In 1855, he established the first interprovincial checkpoint at Nanchang, ostensibly “implementing imperial decrees” but actually bypassing the Jiangxi governor—a “cross-border taxation” move that provoked Shen Baozhen’s fierce opposition. Jiangyou Merchants’ responses were dramatic: Zhangshu medicine traders staged a 1862 strike against high Likin, yet three months later donated 100,000 taels for tax exemptions; Yichun hemp cloth merchants forged “Guangdong merchant” identities to exploit Hunan Army’s preferential rates for foreign goods. More戏剧性 than the merchants was Zeng himself: publicly praising Jiangyou Merchants as “public-spirited,” privately cursing them as “more cunning than Taiping bandits.” Does this reflect Laozi’s “when wisdom appears, hypocrisy follows”? What of Neo-Confucianism or School of Mind? Before economics, they yielded. This query plunges us into a historical scene of human and political calculation—a drama of late Qing state-merchant博弈. There was no “yielding”; rather, “Legalist rationality” crushed “Confucian morality,”赤裸裸 birthing a new “economics of state behavior” under survival logic.
In this drama, Zeng performed his “two faces”: donning a Neo-Confucian mask to veil a Legalist soul, using “public good” rhetoric—“public-spirited”—as discursive cover to frame near-extortion as loyal patriotism. Yet his private words—“more cunning than bandits”—revealed Legalist冷酷. As frontline commander, he faced stark fiscal pressures: how to feed the army? Merchant resistance (strikes) and schemes (rent-seeking, fraud) were, like the Taiping, “obstacles” to pacification. His “cunning” epithets reflected not moral outrage but frustration over losing control variables. Neo-Confucianism was Zeng’s “flag”; Legalist tactics—creating the Likin system—were his “gun.” Before the gun barrel of “suppressing rebellion,” all moral and fiscal norms yielded to primitive, brutal “wartime fiscal economics.” Thus, Jiangyou Merchants’ “wisdom”—strikes, rent-seeking, fraud—annotated Laozi’s “hypocrisy.” Zhangshu traders shifted from “true” collective action (strikes, a “real” market-power resistance) to “false” rent-seeking cooperation after three months of failure proved economic resistance futile against state violence. Donating 100,000 taels was essentially a “protection fee” for local monopoly, marking independent merchants’蜕变为依附于 Likin’s rent-seeking interests—institutionalized “falsehood.” Yichun hemp merchants’ “wisdom” exploited systemic loopholes—identity-based privileges—for arbitrage. Their ingenuity shifted from production/market innovation to identity fraud and institutional gaming—a system-induced outcome.
The root lay in Likin’s inherent “falsehood”: Zeng’s nominal “imperial mandate” masked “cross-border taxation” annexing Jiangxi’s finances; he claimed to save the nation while destroying private commerce. Thus, Neo-Confucianism “failed”—offering no feasible solutions to “raising war funds quickly,” limited to post-hoc rhetorical包装 like “public-spirited.” The School of Mind’s “conscience” varied by perspective: Zeng’s “conscience” justified ruthless statecraft for national order; merchants’ “conscience” defended property rights via flexibility. The result: “all can pursue conscience” yet “all can practice hypocrisy,” as the School of Mind rationalized opportunism. Whether Neo-Confucianism sought “cosmic principle” or the School of Mind sought “innate conscience,” neither provided moral solutions to concrete fiscal crises like feeding an army. When “upholding principle” relied on Likin’s “merchant-persecuting” methods, when “conscience” confronted fund shortages, their moral idealism shattered against reality’s wall. Their frameworks couldn’t salvage the Qing’s structural collapse. It wasn’t moral philosophy yielding to practical economics, but an entire旧 political philosophy—“Confucian surface, Legalist core”—imploding under unprecedented crisis through its own contradictions.
The retreat of Neo-Confucianism and School of Mind signaled traditional values’ impotence before real-world crises, while China’s merchant class and national orientation advanced along a path of institutional distortion—toward enslavement yet yearning for freedom. The Jiangyou Merchants’ tragedy reveals a “paradox of inland-driven Chinese modernization” and its corollary史论: the “earliest compradorized guild.” This thesis points to internal institutional failure as the primary modernizing动力, showing that China’s modern transformation key feature—its earliest, strongest impetus—came not solely from external冲击-反应 but from internal institutional压迫-反应. It doesn’t replace the impact-response model with a “squeeze model” to negate Western冲击’s dominance, but presents a more complex “internal squeeze-external escape” hybrid. Late Qing Likin was a fiscal pressure cooker on Chinese merchants; treaty ports and exemption flags acted as “safety valves.” When internal pressure became unbearable, compradorization provided an escape. “Institutional competition” failure led merchants to vote with their feet, choosing生存 environments—less “treason” than rational flight from misgovernance. Thus, Shanghai’s concessions rose by absorbing failed institutions.
As “passive pioneers,” Jiangyou Merchants’ “earliest compradorization” altered the linear “coastal priority” historiography of modernization, prioritizing “profit-seeking/harm-avoidance” motives and institutional escape as转型 criteria. Coastal compradors were often “intermediaries” accompanying international trade—their compradorization was outward-looking, expansive, and mutualistic. Jiangyou Merchants’ compradorization was inward-looking, rupturous, and refugee-like—they依附洋行 not for extra profit but to avoid Likin’s扼杀. This绝望-driven依附 likely induced deeper cultural-psychological alienation. Once the “blood vessels and nerves” of China’s internal market, Jiangyou Merchants became “fragmented elites” under Likin’s onslaught. Their disintegration was a forced, large-scale attempt at “bourgeoisification” among民间社会 elites. Yet this “bourgeoisification” was constrained by colonial order, costing autonomy—they became “fragmented elites,” failing to transform into a national bourgeoisie, instead becoming sacrifices and intermediaries in the old system’s dissolution.
Beyond social stratification, economic geography重构 occurred: unprepared inland merchants—Jiangyou Merchants—were struck by autocratic power, tumbling “into the sea” in a惊险 leap from “river age” to “ocean age,” reversing China’s core from inland-river to coastal-marine orientation. The Dayuling-Gan River corridor, once the Ming-Qing internal economy’s “governing vessels” linking the Yangtze and Pearl River systems, atrophied, symbolizing the end of “continental empire” logic based on tributary systems and domestic markets. Shanghai’s explosive “enclave” growth reflected not just globalized Western commerce but also China’s主权破碎化. As an “enclave,” its prosperity coexisted with hinterland decline—a “core-periphery” duality still shaping China’s regional development. Likin severed inland provinces’ water-based “path dependency”—cutting wealth channels, leaving merchants “holding gold, gazing bewildered.” Shanghai seized this chance to build new paths integrating with global capitalism. This destruction and construction dictated China’s trajectory for over a century. Thus, Jiangyou Merchants’ compradorization isn’t just commercial history—it’s a tale of state “self-deconstruction” through misgovernance, teaching that institutional quality determines civilizational resilience, and historical costs are paid unevenly. Jiangxi and other inland provinces’ decline was a heavy price for national transformation—scars still visible today. Shifting modernity’s视角 inland, and comprador criticism to institutional context, deepens understanding of modern China’s complexity, provoking renewed “intellectual collision.”
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