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Presidential Address: Questions About China's Early Modern Economic History That I Wish I Could Answer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Albert Feuerwerker
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Extract

I am greatly honored to have had the opportunity to serve as president of the Association for Asian Studies during the past year, and I am cognizant of the distinction of this afternoon's occasion. This being Washington, where everything is “political”—even more so perhaps than in Beijing—my original thought was to deliver a political sermon on a theme something like “Bush in China.” In fact, I found a possible text for my homily: a book published in Philadelphia in 1865 by a Presbyterian minister, Charles P. Bush, entitled Five Years in China; or, The Factory Boy Made a Missionary: The Life and Observations of Rev. W. Aitchison. But the Reverend Mr. Bush's hagiographical account of the life of William Aitchison, once a missionary to heathen China, was of little help; and I quickly decided that my talents as a fabulist of this variety were exceedingly limited. Hence the quite different fables to which I shall expose you today.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , November 1992 , pp. 757 - 769
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1992

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References

1 Evelyn Rawski's excellent review of the literature leaves no question about the dynamism of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. See , Rawski, “Research Themes in Ming-Qing Socioeconomic History—The State of the Field,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 50.1 (February 1991), 84–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Feuerwerker, Albert, ed., History in Communist China (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1968)Google Scholar includes essays on the first (and best before 1979) decade of history-writing in the PRC. Three recent publications are useful in establishing a perspective on PRC historiography. Yude, Wang and Weijun, Yao, Xin shiqi Zhongguo shi yanjiu zhengming ji [Contending inter pretations of China's history in the new era] (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue, 1988)Google Scholar, provides a catechism of explications of hundreds of issues from the oracle bones to the early twentieth century (heavily weighted to pingjia, i.e., evaluations of historical personages) in 1979–87 publications. Chaomin, Zhou, Huiming, Zhuang, and Xiangping, Li, eds., Zhong-guo shixue sishi n'tan [Forty years of Chinese historiography] (Nanning: Guangxi renmin, 1989)Google Scholar, by three scholars at Shanghai Huadong University, serviceably discusses the main developments in four periods: 1949–66, 1966–76, 1976–79, and 1979–89. And Zhongguo jindai jingji shi lunzhu mulu tiyao [Abstracts and catalog of articles and books on China's modern economic history] (Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, 1989)Google Scholar covers 1949–85 with 298 abstracts a page or two in length and a bibliography of 2,393 items.

3 Will, Pierre-Etienne & Wong, R. Bin, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is a major reassessment, and exemplifies a growing literature that more positively appraises China's late imperial administration.

4 See Feuerwerker, Albert, “A White Horse May or May Not Be a Horse, but Megahistory is not Economic History,” Modern China, 4.3 (July 1978), 331–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kamachi, Noriko, “Feudalism or Absolute Monarchism? Japanese Discourse on the Nature of State and Society in Late Imperial China,” Modern China, 16.3 (July 1990), 330–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Jones, E. L., Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)Google Scholar, is a bold (even if inevitably flawed) effort to consider world-wide the limited instances of “the conversion of whatever precedes income growth (I think expansion and not simple stagnation) … into growth in the sense of rising average per capita incomes” (p. 5). Jones's cardinal message—turning on its head a more widespread assumption—is that there is no special source of economic growth other than individual striving and ingenuity. The authentic issue is to understand how the several constraints on the propensity for growth were at times in the past removed or modulated, so that impulse could assert and reassert itself. Jones considers Song China a major historical instance of the kind of gradualist but intensive economic progress realized when the rent-seeking obstacles to growth are removed. But he finds no comparable examples following the Song before the “real growth” in Japan from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and, of course, the premier case of Western Europe.

6 Myers, Ramon H., “How Did the Modern Chinese Economy Develop?—A Review Article,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 50.3 (August 1991), 604–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Huang, Philip C. C., The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and “A Reply to Ramon Myers,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 50.3 (August 1991), 629–33.Google Scholar

8 See Feuerwerker, Albert, “An Old Question Revisited: Was the Glass Half-full or Half-empty for China's Agriculture Before 1949?,” Peasant Studies, 17.3 (Spring 1990), 207–16Google Scholar.

9 For the development of a “normal” foreign trade, see Hao, Yen-p'ing, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China: The Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

10 See Clarkson, L. A., Proto-lndustrialization: The First Phase of Industrialization? (Hounds-mills and London: Macmillan, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a very good introduction. The title ends with a question mark. Albert Feuerwerker, “Handicraft Industry in Ming and Ch'ing China: ‘Proto-industrialization’ ca. 1550–1850” (unpublished ms. 1991; originally prepared for 1984 Bellagio Conference on Spatial and Temporal Trends and Cycles in Chinese Economic History, 980–1980) suggests that the Chinese experience both overlaps with and differs significantly from European pre-industry.

11 See Islamoglu-Inan, Huri, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 101–28.Google Scholar

12 Chengming, Wu, Zhongguo zibenzhuyi yu guonei shichang [Chinese capitalism and the domestic market] (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1985), 217–65Google Scholar. These two articles were originally published in 1983.

13 Wong, R. Bin, “The Development of China's Peasant Economy: A New Formulation of Old Problems,” Peasant Studies, 18.1 (Fall 1990), 5–26Google Scholar, effectively questions the validity of a distinctly Chinese type of “involuntary growth” advanced by Huang in Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350—1988. Huang's formulation is so close to that of Kang Chao, Man and Land in Chinese History (1986), also published by the Stanford University Press, that one is surprised to find no reference at all to Chao in Huang's volume.

14 This second assumption is spelled out in Huang, Philip C. C., “The Paradigmatic Crisis n i Chinese Studies: Paradoxes in Social and Economic History,” Modern China, 17.3 (July 1991), 299–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here, for example, the politically orthodox (and therefore unanimous) attachment of PRC scholars to a “feudalism” cum “capitalist sprouts” paradigm as a key to China's premodern history is equated with the multi-centered world of scholarship outside of China in which some number of scholars, but by no means all, promote a version of the “early modern” paradigm prominent in current scholarship on Western European history.

15 See, of course, Kuznets, Simon, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), especially pp. 34–85Google Scholar.

16 Bozhong, Li, Tangdai Jiangnan nongye de fazhan [The development of agriculture in Tang era Jiangnan] (Beijing: Nongye Chubanshe, 1990)Google Scholar argues that basic changes occurred first in the Tang dynasty and were further elaborated in the Song. Yoshinobu, Shiba, Sōdai Kōnan keizaishi no kenkyū [“Studies in the economy of the Lower Yangtze in the Sung”] (Tōkyō: Kyūko shoin, 1988)Google Scholar takes the end of the Northern Song as the turning point. Robert Hart-well has shown that Song China manufactured more iron per head than Europe managed to produce in A.D. 1700. See his “A Revolution in the Chinese Iron and Coal Industries During the Northern Sung, 960–1126 A.D.,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 21 (1962), 153–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Markets, Technology, and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh-century Chinese Iron and Steel Industries,” Journal of Economic History, 26 (1966), 29–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See John C. H. Fei and Ts'ui-jung Liu, “Economic Development of Traditional China,” Economic Growth Center, Yale University, Center Discussion Paper No. 252, September 1976; and Fei, John C. H., “The ‘Standard Market’ of Traditional China,” in Perkins, Dwight H., ed., China's Modern Economy in Historical Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 235–59Google Scholar.

18 See inter alia Faure, David, The Rural Economy of F're-Liberation China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Brandt, Loren, Commercialization and Agricultural Development in East-Central China, 1870–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Reardon-Anderson, James, The Study of Change: Chemistry in China, 1840–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 177–257Google Scholar. Rawski, Thomas G., Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar suggests that total output grew about 2 percent yearly from 1914/18 to 1931/36 while the rate of population increase was 1 percent, thus achieving a per capita annual growth of 1 percent. Rawski is probably correct overall about the qualitative and quantitative changes from the 1890s to the 1930s, but there is a false precision (similar to the traditional Chinese use of conventional numbers, e.g., “ten thousand, “to denote a large quantity?) in all global estimates such as those that I have just cited.

19 See Kirby, William C., “Technocratic Organization and Technological Development in China: The Nationalist Experience and Legacy, 1928–1953,” in Simon, Denis Fred and Goldman, Merle, eds., Science and Technology in Post-Mao China (Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1989), 23–43Google Scholar.

20 On PRC economic performance, see Dernberger, Robert F., “The Chinese Economy in the New Era: Continuity and Change,” in Reynolds, Bruce L., ed., Chinese Economic Policy: Economic Reform at Midstream (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 89–135Google Scholar; and Perkins, Dwight H., “The Lasting Effect of China's Economic Reforms, 1979–1989,” in Lieberthal, Kenneth et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 341–63Google Scholar.

21 See Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 151–269Google Scholar; and Higonnet, Patrice, Landes, David S., and Rosovsky, Henry, eds., Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth, and Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 159–200Google Scholar.