31 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan SpenceThe Death of Woman Wang
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Land”
T’an-ch’eng was a very small, poor area. It was mostly agricultural, with very little manufacturing or trade. Like every county in China, it paid two taxes: a land tax and a tax on certain individual men (36). These taxes were paid through money, through corvée (labor for the state), or through objects and produce sent to the government or bought by the government at a low price. Registration for tax purposes was thorough: “[T]he population of T’an-ch’eng county was registered in ascending circles—from the individual household, to the group of ten households, to ten groups of ten, and on to each district within the county” (38). Households had to include every member of the family and each servant and laborer. Nevertheless, T’an-ch’eng failed to fulfill its tax quota to the central government for 13 consecutive years (39). Its financial problems came mainly from the fact that T’an-ch’eng sat on one of the main roads south, so it had to spend a lot of its own money to provide road maintenance and services for traveling officials (40).
The catastrophes that struck T’an-ch’eng also reduced the number of people who could provide the corvée. Much of the land in T’an-ch’eng was either abandoned or purposefully removed from the tax registers by landlords (42).
In 1671, Huang prayed to the God of T’an-ch’eng City, the most important of the local gods, to prevent locusts from again striking the area (49-50). P’u wrote a story about a woman, Hsiao-erh, who tricked a local bandit chief into giving her money, which she used to enrich an impoverished community much like T’an-ch’eng (50-56). Huang tried to bring charges against a corrupt landlord, Liu T’ing-yüan, who lied to the government about his land holdings. However, Liu intimidated witnesses and had the two men bringing charges against him beaten, forcing one out of T’an-ch’eng and causing the charges to be dropped (57-58).
Chapter 2 Analysis
This chapter provides further information about the history of T’an-ch’eng during this era. T’an-ch’eng faced a heavy and unfair tax burden and corruption that even the magistrates were mostly powerless to fight. Once again, these problems exacerbated one another, as the high taxes encouraged landlords to seek unscrupulous workarounds.
Importantly, Spence establishes that his sources were aware of the problems facing T’an-ch’eng. This is especially true of Huang, who presided over T’an-ch’eng as a magistrate and knew firsthand how dire its situation was. However, even P’u’s fictional story is inspired by the social and economic conditions of the region: “P’u Sung-ling did not believe that local officials could handle these problems of tax collection and natural disasters any better than they could control local banditry; if anything, his skepticism here was even greater” (50).
The fictional solution P’u provides instead bypasses official channels and shows the bandits losing to someone who turns their own underhanded tactics against them. The fact that the protagonist is a woman is also significant since the average woman in T’an-ch’eng had even less power than the average man. Like the idealized accounts of widows Spence later discusses, P’u’s story does not reflect the material reality of poor women in 17th-century China, but it does provide hope that the underdog might sometimes prevail.
