秦･漢 시기 國有 人力 유지의 재정적 부담과 그 영향 ― 도예 노동과 고용 노동의 비용 지출을 중심으로 ―

Abstract

This paper compared the economic feasibility of the penal labor force with that of the employed labor force to show how the introduction of the employed labor force after the penal reforms in Year 13 of the reign of Emperor Wen(文帝) was closely related to the financial burden of maintaining the penal labor. The Qin peasants were relieved of the burden of providing compulsory labor due to the massive penal labor force, and the Qin government was able to use penal labor in conducting various national projects. However, a mass labor force without any economic foundations resulted in an exponential amount of expense. Even kept to a minimum, the costs for maintaining each penal worker, which would have included the costs for food, clothing, shelter, and other miscellaneous expense, would have amounted to 900 to 1,100 qian(錢) for a single male worker and 700 to 1,000 qian for a female worker every year. Since they were forced to engage in compulsory labor, the convicts were prone to fleeing or even dying and required maintenance costs even when there was no work at all, which could have led to a fiscal deficit. The state would have continued to use the penal labor force if the considerable maintenance costs had guaranteed high productivity. However, the penal labor force’s productivity remained low because there was no compensation for the workers. The low productivity of the Tun-tians(屯田) in China’s Juyan region(居延) exemplified the weakness of forced labor. The Qin government was thus at a position of having to maintain the penal labor force and regulate its numbers simultaneously. The Qin government consequently began to rent its labor force to civilians or to sell or release the workers regularly. The subsequent Han dynasty also regulated the number of its penal workers. The Han government issued decrees of amnesty whenever a drastic cut in the number of penal workers was necessary, which changed the workers’ status to Shuren and also mitigated the punishments to limit the reproduction of the penal labor force. After the penal labor force disappeared, the state employed workers to complement its demand for labor. Compensation was naturally required for employed workers, which made employed labor to appear more costly than penal labor or slave labor. However, by employing the workers, the state was able to save the fixed costs of maintaining penal workers or slaves (including the costs for food, clothing, and shelter, along with various managing expenses). The state was also able to cut costs by hiring personnel only when necessary, thereby eliminating the possibility of idle labor. The “Yongzuo Wenshu(傭作文書, statement of employment),” which is currently housed at Peking University in China, also shows that the daily wage of an employee in the 32nd year of QinShiHuang(秦始皇)’s reign was 3.66qian, which was lower than the daily labor value of a penal worker. In other words, the employment wages would likely have been kept lower than the standard costs of working for government offices. The low employment wages at the end of the Qin dynasty and the early Han dynasty would have affected the state’s decision to renounce the costly penal labor force.