Expanding Possibilities 359
Formation of Rural-Urban Systems
The process of commercialization at work in rural areas since the
sixteenth century had paved the way for a lively economy in the
economically central places and their hinterlands. In his enlightening
regional-systems model, G. William Skinner classiβies the central places
in an eight-level hierarchy, beginning with the low-level market places,
“which met the week-to-week marketing needs of peasant households”,
moving to upper-level towns and cities of different sizes and importance.^32
The peasants learned about the outside world from the market places
serving the village settlements. Here they built up their social contacts
and accumulated information capital. Local and regional networks
provided the information and economic linkages between the village and
the local township and further with their nearest large city or seaport.
Production and Maritime Trade
The commercialization of agriculture and the handicraft industry had
the effect of connecting the village, town and port city in an economic
chain. It also functioned as a dynamic force that propelled the
development of the port city. Together the village, town and port city
formed a regional economic entity that linked production and market.
Thanks to the development of the commodity economy from the sixteenth
century and the expanding coastal shipping from the late seventeenth
century, agricultural and handicraft products were streaming in bulk to
other provinces. The increasingly bustling international trade in Canton
and the outward-bound junks sailing to the Nanyang from southern
Fujian and eastern Guangdong took the products to foreign markets.
Since late Ming times, the Canton and the Chaozhou subregions
and southern Fujian had already been developing large-scale sugar
production.^33 Taiwan followed suit to become another important sugar-
producing region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As early
as the sixteenth century, sugar from Guangdong and Fujian was known
to have attracted the great interest of the Portuguese. In the seventeenth
century, English merchants reaped great proβit by exporting sugar
- G. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems”, in The City in
Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1977), pp. 285‒7. For more information, refer to G. William Skinner, “Marketing
and Social Structure in Rural China”, Journal of Asian Studies 24, 1 (Nov. 1964):
3 ‒34; 24, 2 (Feb. 1965): 195‒228; and 24, 3 (May 1965): 363‒99. - In his travel accounts, Ibn Battuta mentions that “there is abundant sugar-cane
[in the land of China], equal, nay superior, in quality to that of Egypt”. See Ibn
Battuta Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 282.