The Historical Evolution and Limits of Chinese Commercial Capital

This chapter examines commercial capital as a necessary socioeconomic form whose movement cannot be judged by moral indignation alone. Merchants may appear to command their capital, yet in reality they are often driven by the overall trend of social commercial capital, much like a horse that pulls a carriage uphill but is pushed by it downhill. Hence, condemning commerce without grasping its causality only disturbs our minds and cannot resolve fundamental problems. I then argue that, in Chinese history, the rise and fall of dynasties repeatedly coincided with the rise and fall of commercial capital: new regimes, in restoring order and production, inadvertently create conditions for commerce to prosper, while commercial and usurious capital, together with land capital, form a “trinity” that ultimately erodes the agrarian foundation. After the Opium War, foreign trade and imperialist penetration expanded the objects, scope, and dependence of commercial capital, yet did not fundamentally alter its underlying laws of movement. Finally, I discuss wartime distortions, the limits of coercive controls, and the historical prerequisite for transforming commercial capital toward industrial capital—above all, severing its route into land and usury through land reform.