16 RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
ex∣cnd to the hundreds of villages under his immediate jurisdiction. Thus a
symbiotic relationship developed between officials and gentry. Gentry
members in rural areas helped maintain local order and acted as buffers
between the peasantry and officialdom, while urban-based bureaucrats
helped to further gentry interests through direct patronage and official
access to higher provincial authority.40 Tension did exist between the two
groups, but their common interests and similar backgrounds generally over-
shadowed differences in outlook.
Contrary to stereotype, the gentry class was not simply a landed elite,
although most of the gentry lived in rural areas, and many were indeed
landlords, comfortably ensconced in country villas. By the early eighteenth
century, income derived from local managerial services, such as the
mediation of legal disputes, supervision of schools and academies,
management of public works and welfare projects, militia organization,
and proxy remittance (pao-lan) of peasant land and labor taxes to the
district yamen clerks, began to replace landed wealth as the key economic
underpinning of the gentry class—especially at the lower levels.41 And for
those gentry who were primarily landlords, collusion with officialdom
usually enabled them to pay taxes at much lower rates than middle or poor
peasants.42
The Ch’ing system of land tenure, based on a general freedom to buy
and sell land, varied from place to place, depending primarily on
productivity. Landlordism was much more prevalent in south China than in
the north, not only because the land there was more productive, but also
because so much property was corporately owned by wealthy clans ft,ung∙
tsung). In the absence of primogeniture in China, private landholdings were
often quickly broken up,4’ but wealth derived from corporately-owned
property permitted many clans to undertake welfare and other social ser-
vices on behalf of their members—services which might otherwise not have
been provided. Hard-pressed individuals without clan affiliations were
often out of luck in Ch’ing China.44
Although most peasants lived on the margin of subsistence, either as
tenant farmers or as small independent landowners, they were part of a
larger social and economic community. This was not simply one of China’s
million or so rural villages, but also one of approximately 45,000 cellular
market systems, each organized around a market town (chen). These basic
“cells,” which typically included between fifteen and twenty-five villages,
were autonomous economic systems: “transport, trade, artisan industry,
and credit were all structured . . . spatially [within the cell] according to the
principle of centrality, and temporally by the periodicity of its market
days.” Such inιervillage systems were, again to quote G. William Skinner,
“the chief tradition-creating and culture-bearing units of rural China.”
Every few days “the periodically convened local market drew to the center