Money and Future in Late Ming China

Abstract

Chinese imperial dynastic time represented the cyclical change of regimes with a naturalized moral order. A linear lineage time and synchronic communal time were often eclipsed by the more ritually visible and well-documented cyclical imperial time. The dawn of China’s “silver century” (1550–1650,) however, disrupted the cyclical temporality of the dynasties and revealed other time-orders that had been usually subsumed under the dynastic time. Late Ming China (fifteenth to early seventeenth century), like many parts of Europe in the early modern period, experienced commercial accumulation, competitive consumption, desire for capital, reformulation of norms and traditions, bringing China into a globalized world historical process. This change in economy brought to the fore the many layers between imperial dynastic time and that of the individual. Money also influenced existing philosophies of past and future, as well as techniques of prognostication. Manipulation of the future often took the form of calculation of good deeds inspired by accounting. In short, money transformed what we can call “the practice of future” in two ways. First, it reemphasized the importance of linear lineage time instead of dynastic time through emphasizing the longevity of descendants and fortunes in the afterlife. Second, through the discussion of capital acquisition and the popularization of accounting, it also introduced “balance” into temporality through the discourse of just and unjust accumulation, allowing a synchronized and more egalitarian communal time to disrupt lineage time.