淸代内蒙古の地商經濟

Abstract

From the period of the latter half of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, a highly commercialized agricultural system called Dishang Jingji was developed in Houtao 後套 district in Inner Mongolia. This system entailed private cultivation by Chinese merchants who were grouped in an internal colony. These merchants produced commercial grain via the cultivation of creeks to provide surplus value. That is to say, the Dishang Jingji system of production combined agriculture with trade by utilizing capital investment in land development. Agricultural production under the Dishang Jingji system was based on extensive farming carried out by the participants themselves, with commercial grain cultivated by small tenant farmers, shared-profit tenant cultivators, and hired-labour agricultural workers cultivating on and around their individual farms. The unique nature of the Dishang Jingji system lay in its combination of what came to be the modern landlord system of agricultural production and the management of early capitalism. Commercial agricultural production carried out under this system expanded the scope of local production to become part of a national market and made possible expanded trade with Inner and Outer Mongolia. This latter was based on the supply of hides and furs from Mongolia, which were in turn marketed internationally as world-wide commodities. Thus, the Dishang Jingji system of production can be said to have played an important role in allowing Mongolia to enter the periphery of the modern international economy through its process of distribution. This paper argues that the Dishang Jingji system was the production of native-born bourgeoisie located in the western part of Inner Mongolia, who were responding to the national and international conditions of the late-nineteenth century. Thus, the Dishang Jingji system can be said to have had a hand in preparing "from below" modernized systems of production in China. Ultimately, however, governmental attempts to impose modern reform from above could not be realized, and the merchant-cultivators who took parts in the Dishang Jingji system were forced to return to the role of traditional landlords levying rental payments. However, it is particularly important to note that China was to retain this seed of an indigenous attempt to develop a modern system of agricultural production in a late nineteenth-century internal periphery.