322 economy: Asia and the Pacific newly invented printing presses), and exotic imports from the other regions of Asia China’s prosperity was a potential burden on peasant producers; those who were less productive become tenant farmers who were dependent on landed gentry Severe debt led to debt bondage, wherein the husband might sell his wife and children or himself into slavery to pay family debts China’s economic transformation provided both opportunity and pressure on the Chinese government Government tax revenues soared, but so did government expenses The Tang government tried to ensure their rural public’s well-being by implementing an “equal field system,” which provided roughly 19 acres of land to each farming family This innovation was also a way to remove the economic resources of the state’s two opponents, the landed gentry and the Buddhist Church, which at that time had vast wealth based in their extensive landholdings Locally powerful gentry used their influence with local officials to maintain their families’ continued land control, and they were the beneficiaries when peasant families lapsed into debt To ensure the availability of key commodities against merchant hoarding, the state held monopolies over such supplies as rice, cotton, salt, and iron The Tang implemented “ever normal granaries,” which were filled with annual tax assessments at the time of harvest, to guard against periods of famine The statesman Wang Anshih (1021–86) of the Song unsuccessfully tried to implement a broad social welfare program that included guaranteed loans to farmers (to allow them to avoid debt), fixed commodity prices, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions The Song tried to moderate the revenue-collection systems that had traditionally applied to northern China, which were based in annual household assessments The Song system taxed the acreage cultivated in the newly developed wet-rice regions of central and southern China In search of additional revenues, to be more efficient and fair in the assessments of taxes on peasant production, to insure food for the imperial court and the army, and to divest control over the milling of grains from merchants and local nobles, Song monarchs made the milling of grains a state monopoly during the late 10th and 11th centuries A new water mill agency, staffed by state eunuchs (castrated men), took direct control over mill construction and their operations at the strategic intersections of the state’s waterways Song-era art and literature portrays the efficient management of mills as symbolic of the orderly Song state By 12th century, however, subsequent Song monarchs had privatized the mills, to the advantage of local merchants, Buddhist temples, and landed aristocrats, and later dynasties could not or were disinterested in reestablishing this monopoly With similar objectives, early Song monarchs created new bureaucratic agencies to manage the import of foreign commodities at China’s coastal ports, but by the 12th century they had relinquished this further state initiative to better manage China’s economic affairs When the Mongols took control at the end of the 13th century, they initially implemented a decentralized system of land grants Their military commanders, nobles, and army units received revenue collection and exploitation rights over a designated territory However, because the Mongol warrior-commander assignees had military responsibilities elsewhere, they were often unable to collect their entitlements In their absence bandits, rebels, and local militia fought to take control The Mongol rulers eventually reappointed Chinese administrators but extracted taxes by licensing tax collectors, called tax farmers, most of whom were Muslim merchants from central Asia who had bid against each other for these entitlements Former Chinese officials in part agreed to cooperate with the Mongol rulers so they could use their administrative posts to shield Chinese society, and especially their own landed wealth, from Mongol rule When the Ming (1368–1644) deposed the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty and restored Chinese authority, they avoided the ruinous experiences of the Mongol tax collectors Ming authorities incorporated gentry in their lijia system, in which the local elite took responsibility for equitably assessing, collecting, and transporting local taxes, paid mostly in grain, in theory to support the community But when these local collections fell short of what the Ming bureaucrats needed to cover their basic government services, they levied additional local tax assessments that impoverished local peasants Eventually the Ming implemented an inclusive monetary tax to achieve some degree of equity In their attempts to survive the severe Ming tax initiatives, new lineage associations formed These local associations held designated land in common and supported cooperative ventures to provide emergency support for those in need and to fund joint ancestral rites, ancestral temples, and schools In time these hierarchical lineage associations became major economic and political forces and a vital local institutional means of protecting local interests against those of the imperial government Temples as Economic Centers India and Elsewhere in In contrast to China, where government regulation beginning in the Tang era prevented religious centers from having enough economic resources to challenge the authority of the state, in India and elsewhere temple complexes were alternatives to political centers in their support of economic activity Temples were also major consumers of goods and in various ways stimulated trade Well-endowed temples accumulated