A Reply to Ramon Myers

Extract

The central theme of my book, reviewed in the previous article by Ramon Myers, is that, contrary to the expectations of the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, commercialization does not necessarily bring modern development to the countryside. China before 1950 saw six centuries of vigorous and protracted commercialization, but rural underdevelopment persisted, so that the great majority of the population remained tied to the land and to bare-subsistence food production (down to the 1980s). In spite of fairly vigorous expansion of urban industrial production after the 1890s (and accelerated development after 1950), the countryside remained poor, with per capita incomes hovering around subsistence. The classical vision of market-driven capitalist development, with mutually reinforcing and spiraling urban and rural development, simply did not occur in China. What happened instead were commercialization without rural development and urban industrialization without rural development—combinations of empirical phenomena that appear paradoxical to us from the standpoint of Western-derived expectations.