The Cambridge Economic History of China, Volume 1: To 1800.

As examples of what might be termed a "self-denying" fiscal regime, in 1713 the Qing emperor Kangxi froze land tax quotas at 1711 levels; the Qing state halted household registration in 1772; and it came close to privatizing the ever-normal granary system in the 1740s, opting in the end to pare down unachievable storage targets instead (Dunstan, 413-15). 9) focus their conclusions: the Qing court's decisions to forgo key levers of fiscal power - by minimizing its land-tax quotas, rejecting the use of public debt in times of crisis, and allowing population registration to lapse - all left the Qing state "with an immobile fiscal system with diminished capacity to capture or generate new revenues." Concomitantly, because handicraft production remained ensconced within the rural household economy, the urbanization rate of 7.3 percent that Cao calculates for China as a whole in 1776 was less than the roughly 9 percent average for the Ming, and well below an estimated 12 percent for the Southern Song. As they conclude, "In the pre-Industrial Revolution world, no other society managed to deal with the challenges of sustaining a population of several hundred million as well as China did in the late Ming and the Qing periods" (708). [Extracted from the article]