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2 results

  • 2 - Economic Transition in the Nineteenth Century

  • from Part I - 1800–1950
  • Edited by Debin Ma, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Richard von Glahn, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of China
    Published online:
    07 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022, pp 48-86

  • Summary

    The Great Qing Empire (1644–1912) was the most populous political entity that had yet existed on the landmass that we now refer to as “China,” and its economy was possibly one of the most developed. But by the first several decades of the nineteenth century, the Jiaqing and early Daoguang reigns, there had emerged a general consensus among elites both in and out of government that the empire was facing a multifaceted and potentially catastrophic crisis of the economy, polity, and society. By this point the Qing had already begun to be significantly incorporated into the early modern world economy, although it had not yet experienced, as it very shortly would, military conflict with the West and the invasion by Western agents of economic and cultural change that would follow in its wake.

  • 3 - The foreign presence in China

  • Edited by John K. Fairbank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of China
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 September 1983, pp 128-207

  • Summary

    The foreign establishment in early republican China had many facets: territory, people, rights established by treaty or unilaterally asserted, armed force, diplomacy, religion, commerce, journalism, freebooting adventure, racial attitudes. This chapter describes briefly the dimensions of each of the principal guises in which the foreigner impinged upon the polity, economy, society and mind of China. In the absence of modern financial institutions in China, the early foreign merchant houses undertook to provide for themselves many of the auxiliary services such as banking, foreign exchange and insurance essential to their import-export businesses. However, by the second decade of the twentieth century, 12 foreign banks were operating in China. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, 85 to 90 per cent of China's foreign trade by value was carried in foreign flag vessels. The foreign presence was highly visible in three departments of the central government: the Maritime Customs Service, the Post Office and the Salt Administration.